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

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

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

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

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

By Subhelic

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

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

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

By Espen Kluge

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

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

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

By Ina Jang

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

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

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

By Irini Karayannapoulou

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

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By JC Gotting

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Ahn Jun

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

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

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

By Fitacola

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

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

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

By Miriam Tolke 

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

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

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

By Vicki Ling

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Gideon Rubin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Salman Khoshroo

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

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

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

By Gabriel Alcala

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

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

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

By Helena Hauss

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

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

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

By Jordana Kalman

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

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

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

By Lorenzo Gritti

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Haruhiko Kawaguchi

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi everyone! Hi! How are we all?

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

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

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

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

By Bertjan Pot

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

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

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

By Mathery Studio

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

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

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

By Pawel Bajew

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

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

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

By Miles Johnston

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

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

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

By Cynthia Karalla

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By me

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

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

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

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

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

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

Oh Christ, I’ve gone long again. 

Look, there are too many words coming up, so I’ll keep the intro short. Everything’s still weird, we’re still mostly inside, neither the girfriend or the cat have so-far attempted to kill me (or if they have they’ve been spectacularly subtle about it)…it is what it is. 

I hope you’re ok and not too bored – and if you are, THANK FCUK FOR WEB CURIOS! Literally like ‘Why Don’t You?’, except instead of unrealistically asking that you step away from the screens I am instead suggesting you sink even deeper into your codependent relationship with the glowing rectangles. 

I am still Matt; this is still Web Curios; we are still in quarantine. Everything else is basically in flux, as far as I can tell. 

***BRIEF MOMENT OF SINCERITY WHICH YOU ARE WELCOME TO SKIP*** Honestly, I’ve found writing this a huge comfort in the past few weeks (thereby confirming suspicions that I do it solely for myself and couldn’t really give a fcuk what anyone else thinks of it), and so thankyou SO MUCH to all of you who read even the tiniest bit, it really does mean a lot. Now, er, fcuk off.

By Mr Kism

LET’S KICK RIGHT OFF WITH AN HOUR OF CUT CHEMIST!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHEN ADVERMARKETINGPR DRONES WILL BEGIN TO BE CONSIDERED AS ‘KEY WORKERS’:

• You Can Now Officially ‘Care’ On Facebook: There’s a new ‘I give a fcuk about this through the prism of the pandemic!’ emoji on Facebook! You can now ‘care’ as well as be happy, sad, amused, enraged, etc! Isn’t that nice? One would, of course, have to be a cynic of the very worst sort to speculate about the possible benefit to Facebook of having a discrete ‘was a bit emo about the ‘rona’ datatag to apply to a subset of its users, wouldn’t one? Quite.
• Facebook Launches Gaming App: Not so much breathing down Twitch and YouTube’s necks as knocking firmly on their door with an axe hidden behind its back, Facebook continues to look covetously at all those sweet, sweet gamer numbers and the concomitant massive wedge of user engagement and hence ad money they grant access to; this week it launched Facebook Gaming, an app which effectively grants single-app access to a bunch of FB gaming features which more-or-less existed already but weren’t bundled quite so neatly. It also makes it (apparently) super-simple to stream gameplay live from one’s mobile, something which (equally apparently) it’s previously not been hugely simple to achieve. I don’t 100% know whether the featureset FB’s building out here – to whit, streaming and community and highlights reels and the rest – is necessarily a great fit with a demographic which is more likely to be playing Candy Crush (HOW are people still playing Candy Crush?) than something spectator-friendly, but time will tell.
• Slightly Better Transparency on Where FB Pages & Insta Accounts Are From: I mean, I’ve sort of told you evetrything there is to know here, but wevs; as of, er, soon (in the US, and then presumably internationally), accounts on FB and Insta with ‘high reach’ (no, me neither) will carry an accompanying label showing users where said accounts originate from, presumably to help people to have a vague idea whether that story about the muslamic 5g rayguns is being made up by a North American mouthbreather or one of our own. I think if the past few years have shown us anything it’s that giving social media users the tools with which to flex their critical thinking muscles solves almost everything, right kids?
• FB Messenger for Kids Expands to 70 More Countries: Except still not the UK, so not hugely relevant to most of you.
• Twitter Announces New 5G Disinfo Rules: STOP POSTING LIES ABOUT THE MUSLAMIC 5G RAYGUNS! That’s not me saying that, by the way, that’s Twitter – the platform announced this week that it was explicitly taking steps to limit what it terms “Unverified claims that incite people to action, could lead to the destruction or damage of critical infrastructure, or could lead to widespread panic, social unrest, or large-scale disorder”. So, stuff like “coronavirus is a coverup to hide the fact that 5G is turning us into a nation of government-controlled zombies in service to the intradimensional archon lizard people, SMASH THE MASTS!”, for example. Not, I am sure, that any of this applies to any of you (A small digression, if I may (you try stopping me): a lot of these mad theories all seem to coalesce around the idea that there’s a hugely powerful cabal of people at the top of the theoretical pyramid (the one with an eye in it, no doubt) who are all working to make stuff like COVID happen so as to drive the masses further into scared, terrified penury and so cement their hold over the world…I mean, look, does what’s happening now look like the sort of situation designed to result in a world worth ruling over? If you were Peter Thiel and the rest of the billionaire lizard overlords, would you really want to end up in charge of a planet in which you, even as a fcuking billionaire, had to live in a New Zealand bunker and were forced to watch dad videos on TikTok for entertainment? I’m not convinced, personally).
• Google To Require Full Advertiser Disclosure on All Ads: This is really big news, I think; Google announced yesterday that as of…some point in the near future it is going to require ALL advertisers, not just the ‘political’ ones, to register themselves with the advertiser, either with “personal identification, business incorporation documents or other information that proves who they are and the country in which they operate”; this information will be visible to users when they are served ads from said advertisers. This is a huge step, imho, and I’d imagine if this experiment works (and doesn’t, I presume, slow takeup of ads by small business or impact revenue) we’ll see it at least being considered by FB et al. Coming to the US later this year, and then one would presume being rolled out internationally in 2021.
• You Can Now Add V/O To TikToks: I would like someone to use this to invent a new genre – the elaborate meme dance which is accompanied by a coldly-descriptive voice over of the sort used on TV audio descriptions: “…the slightly-awkward teenager is now attempting a piece of popular choreography; they are marginally out-of-time…”, etc.
• The Snap Results: The latest quarterlies from Snap shows another good quarter, with user numbers up (as one might expect from lockdown). Smarter analysts than me have pointed out that it’s probably more sensible to wait for next quarter to get a proper handle on how COVID’s impacting the platform, as this set of results doesn’t yet reflect the adpocalypse currently cutting swathes through the industry.
• Spotify Launches Fundraising Feature for Artists: If you’re an artist on Spotify, you can now run fundraising efforts through the platform for charities of your choice, much as you can on Facebook. It’s available in the US and the UK, and seems like a nice way for people with a popular platform to promote charitable initiatives.
• Quibi In Fortnite: REALLY interesting idea, this (also, REALLY expensive – I can only imagine the figures Quibi paid for this) – Quibi, that new mobile short TV thingy that launched in the US the other week, made a play to attract younger audiences by partnering with Fortnite to run screenings of its reboot of the old MTV show Punk’d (now starring Chance the Rapper, because Ashton Kutcher is too busy imagining he’s a VC these days) in-game. It’s not the most imaginative thing in the world – it’s literally a buy-in – but it’s interesting to see how Fortnite can be used as a canvas, and how the odd, cartoony, largely-incoherent gameworld means that stuff like this sort of just fits into the general multimedia oddity of the experience.
• Mary Meeker’s Coronavirus Trends Report: Unlike her legendary report on the state of all things digital in the world, this isn’t 400-odd slides of eye-bleedingly ugly PPT; instead, it’s 29 points of slightly-dry but actually pretty useful commentary analysis on STUFF WHAT MEEKER DONE AN OBSERVE UP over the past month or so; if you’ve been paying attention there shouldn’t be anything in here that you’re not broadly aware of, and the ‘predictions’ and analysis are, whilst simple, not revelatory; still, it’s MARY FCUKING MEEKER EVERYONE, which means that you can now say all this stuff in confidence now that you can give it an authoritative footnote.
• Work From Home Live: I have always slightly resented AKQA as an agency, largely as they always seemed to do quite cool and interesting work, the sort of stuff that I could never really work out how I might have contributed to. This is another example – a great idea that I could have done literally nothing to bring to life. As part of their efforts to keep their offices worldwide connected, they have created this site – Work From Home Live, which lets AKQA offices around the world stream on this 24/7. At the time of writing, someone called Shaun in Australia is playing what sounds like some sort of uptempo Kylie remix – O STRAYA! – but who knows who or what will be online when you chance to click. Not only a really fun idea, it’s beautifully-executed too; bstards.
• Not Furlong: SUCH a lovely idea this – please do share it far and wide. Not Furlong is an initiative set up by agency people who’ve been furloughed and can’t work for their employer but feel like offering their services to businesses that need it, for free. You can either offer to help if you’re an agencymong with time on your hands, or if you’re a business which could need some hands-on advermarketingpr support then you can apply for it on the site. Honestly, compare this to the agency w4nkers I mentioned the other week who were self-pleasuring at the fact that they had made a ‘clap the carers’ sticker for TikTok – this is a really good initiative and I applaud everyone involved.

By Matt Crump

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY A SELECTION OF ARTISTS’ ATTEMPTS TO FINISH WHAT SUFJAN STEVENS STARTED AND MAKE AN ALBUM FOR EVERY STATE IN THE US?

THE SECTION WHICH RECKONS YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO MAKE A FEW QUID OUT OF A NEW NEWS OUTLET CALLED ‘NORONA’ WHICH TRANSMITS ONLY INFORMATION UNRELATED TO THE PANDEMIC, PT.1:

• Get The Fcuk Away From Me (via Airdrop): That’s not technically the name of the project, fine, but mine is more descriptive. The other week when I went out for my sanctioned stroll I became so angry at people’s inability to do simple, considerate things like ‘walk on opposite sides of the pavement’ that I made my phone display a big, block-caps message which simply read “YOU ARE WALKING LIKE A CNUT” which I held up at people who were, well, doing just that; it’s a miracle noone hit me, on reflection. This is a bit like that, except less obviously confrontational and more technologically-savvy; it lets you use Apple’s Airdrop file transfer system to send people messages about the fact they are perhaps not being quite as considerate as they might be in their movements. All the message options are variations on “you’re close enough to infect me YOU FCUKER!”, but they’re delivered less confrontationally and might be a nice, gentle way of informing people to perhaps think a bit more carefully. Or they won’t see it til a few weeks later and get a bit scared and confused; either’s a decent outcome tbh.
• Coronatasks: Those of you who read this tend to work in white-collar advermarketingpr jobs and so I sort-of assume you’re mostly ok-ish financially at present, either still employed or furloughed; if you’re not, though, or you know others who need to find ways of earning cash during lockdown, this site collects a bunch of ways of making money online through various websites (no, not like that). This is a whole load of different places to do the odd bit of piecework, or to earn a few for watching ads, that sort of thing – none of them will make anyone rich, and Web Curios advises that you read the fine print of these quite carefully before you embark, but in extremis some of them could be a decent way of topping up the kitty over the coming weeks (months) (let’s not speculate beyond that, eh?).
• Tracking ‘R’ In The US: This is a project developed in part by Instagram, which is tracking the value of ‘R’ (you know, that OTHER thing that everyone has become an expert on in the past week or so – R, as I’m sure you are all experts on, is the rate of infectiousness of the condition: it “represents the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale. It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.”) across the US, state-by-state. It’s interesting not only as an(other) example of how social media companies are using data in interesting and helpful ways (and, coincidentally, in ways which are likely to make us feel a little better about the fact that they track everything), but also as a slightly-sobering indication of quite how much of the US is still quite infectious. The fcuk are you up to, Kansas?!
• The Six Feet Office: This week has seen the first big wave of ‘so, when are we all going back to work properly, then?’ conversations, to which the only realistic response is ‘me? Never, if I can help it; also, if you think this is going back to the way it was 3 months ago anytime in 2020 you are probably wrong’. I don’t think I’m marking myself down as some sort of visionary here when I say that it’s unlikely we’ll see a full workforce return to daily office life this side of Christmas, if at all. This is a fascinating piece of speculative thinking and design theory by property people Cushman & Wakefield on what the ‘6ft Office’ might look like – that is, how firms might reshape their office space to accommodate the new demands of social distancing, and how you could reconfigure your existing facilities to allow for at least a partial reentry to the workplace for limited numbers of employees. Really, really interesting – although, if my experience in supermarkets over the past few weeks is anything to go by, doomed to failure; if we can’t follow the one-way guidance arrows on the floor of Tesco, like fcuk are we going to remember to walk anticlockwise around Sandra from Accounts.
• Appalling Novelty Facemasks: I wrote quite a bit last year about how I thought 2020 was when we’d finally see anti-surveillance clothing making a bow in the mainstream, with tshirts designed to fritz facial recognition software appearing on the racks at TopShop. Obviously that’s less of an issue now we’re never leaving the house again meaning there will never be any more CCTV footage to track; still, we can instead look forward to CORONACHIC! It’s already here in part, thanks to those enterprising dropshippers and their easily-customisable products – marvel, then, at this wonderful Twitter thread capturing some of the very worst facemask designs seen (I can’t confirm, but I’d be willing to bet that almost all of these were snapped from North American websites). So many to love, but my personal favourites include “…but her emails!” and the frankly astonishing “Cum Whore”.
• The Bluetooth Energy Atlas: This may or may not be working when you click on it; I think it’s turned off overnight in the US to save energy / bandwidth. Still, it’s a fascinating visualisation of the way in which most of the proposed COVID infection trackers are set to work, by identifying individual phones via bluetooth and using that information to subsequently monitor which devices have passed within a specific radius of each other so as to be able to issue alerts as to a potentially-elevated risk of infection. The site tracks the bluetooth signals picked by a single antenna located…somewhere, and when it’s live you can see in realtime all the signals passing around it and how they intersect with each other, and it’s dizzying to see how easy it is to map the movements of real people (admittedly anonymous) in real time in real space. Don’t get me wrong, I think this sort of tracking is broadly-speaking exactly the right thing to do, it’s just…sobering to watch.
• Surf City: Surf City is a wonderful project. A web-TV site, with 20 channels you can select from and which will, 24/7, provide you with streamed entertainments. From relaxing nature to cartoons to Kpop, there’s enough stuff here to keep you going for a good old while; if you’re the sort of person who likes having a screen on at all times streaming some sort of entertainment as a kind of ambient backing track, this will be near-perfect for you.
• Sidewalk Widths: As the name would suggest, this is a US project – the site shows you a map of NYC with a colour-coded overlay to show you which streets in the city are safe to walk along in terms of the pavement’s width, and those which aren’t (based on publicly-available data about road and pavement dimensions). This is a great idea and would be hugely welcome in London in terms of being able to find places to walk from my house that a) aren’t going to involve me playing too much street chicken; and b) don’t involve me accidentally ending up in cul-de-sacs, inadvertently trespassing (this has happened more often than I an wholly comfortable with). Also, while we’re here, can Google Maps start offering Waze-style pedestrian footfall info, even if only projected, so I can time my walk for a moment when not every other person in South London has also decided to leave the house? And the moon on a stick while you’re there, please.
• Joan Home: This is…I don’t know, maybe this sort of stuff is the secret to maintaining a BUSINESS attitude at home and not succumbing to wfh laziness. Joan Home will be familiar to you if you work in an office that’s big and fancy enough to have those meeting room booking screens, which show you who’s got the room next, for how long, etc, and which syncs with calendars and all that jazz – it’s that, but for your house. So you can put up a little screen outside the door of your home office which you can programme with your schedule so your loved ones can see how BUSY and IMPORTANT you are with your MEETINGS and your VIDEOCALLS. No, I’m calling it, if you want one of these things then you are a twat, and you have too much money – YOU COULD DO THE SAME WITH A SHEET OF A4 YOU IDIOTS! THIS COSTS £250! Still, this is probably why these people are all CRUSHING IT and I am not – but, then again, it doesn’t matter! Nothing matters! HAHAHA I WIN! Except we all lose.
• Zoomer Backgrounds: MORE ZOOM BACKGROUNDS! Are we bored of these yet? Yes, in short (although I do enjoy the ‘This Is Fine’ backdrop, if I’m honest). Prediction (destined to be wrong) – we’ll soon pivot away from all this frivolity and there will be a rise in the appeal of simple, sober backgrounds. I would be AMAZED if Pantone didn’t make a ‘Zoom Background Creator’ enabling you to make your own from your favourite Pantone shade – look, there you go, that’s a legitimate tactic there for you, Pantone people, be grateful.
• Lockdown Haircut: Remember a few weeks ago I featured that US site that let you book a slot with a proper hairdresser who would talk you through the process of cutting your own hair over Zoom? Well someone’s ripped that off wholesale and done it in the UK, with the additional gimmick that £5 from each haircut gets donated to the NHS. Well done to the people behind this, both for seeing an opportunity to duplicate a good initiative and for adding the charitable angle, and for their skill in ripping off the aesthetic of the original site so successfully, even down to the bearded barber used on the homepage.
• Pop To The Shop: An excellent charitable / volunteering initiative that I would encourage you all to sign up for if you can and to share widely (especially on Facebook, given the likely demographics of people who may find it helpful); Pop To The Shop does the simple job of pairing people who need help getting to the shops with people to willing to go for them; you can request assistance or volunteer yourself, and it’s such a simple, easy idea that we should all get involved if we can.
• Your Local, Delivered: Actually, this is another one I’d encourage you to share, especially with people living in rural or more remote areas; there’s understandably been a lot of talk about shops and restaurants offering lockdown delivery services in urban areas, but if you live in the country there’s less infrastructure on offer and less information available about what you can and can’t access via delivery; this site is designed to collect delivery offerings outside of London, and is exactly the sort of thing that people living in the countryside and small towns might find helpful, particularly if they can’t get a supermarket delivery for love nor money.
• Colour To Connect: A project soliciting and sharing black-and-white drawings to colour in. Hundreds to download, and they take submissions if you fancy making something to share on the site. Possibly a nice project to do with your kids, getting them to design something you can upload for other people to eventually colour (although, honestly, no judgment whatsoever if your current approach to parenting is ‘feral in the garden from 7-5’).
• Netflix Docmentaries For Free: Have you gotten to the end of Netflix yet? It does rather feel like, whilst this is going to be a GREAT year for the streaming platforms, 2021 might be something of a struggle as everyone either realises that there is nothing left to watch or we all decide that we’ve watched enough telly to last us a lifetime (should we ever be allowed out again). Still, til that point, REJOICE FOR THE STREAMERS! Also, thanks Netflix for putting a whole bunch of its nature documentaries and other factual content on YouTube for free, including all the Attenborough docs from last year and a bunch of other stuff besides. Really, really good, these.
• Seinfeld, The Game: Seinfeld, famously, was a TV show about nothing – which makes it the perfect subject for a videogame, not least because you can do pretty much anything you like with that as a starting point. This is a site presenting the vague concept for a point-and-click-style Seinfeld videogame, starring Jerry and George and the Soup Nazi and all those other characters that I know only by name because I don’t think I have ever watched an episode – the people behind it are basically trying to drum up enough noise to get the attention of the people who hold the rights to the show, without which the creation of a tie-in game would be forever ruined by lawyers. It’s a really good idea, and the creators obviously have a lot of love for the material; would be nice to see this get made one day.
• Quarantine Jokes: A website which will take any ‘A man walked into a bar…’ joke you care to feed it, and turn it into a COVID-friendly variant which conforms to social distancing norms. “A ghost joins a zoom call; the moderator says, Sorry, we don’t serve spirits” is the calibre of gag you can expect from this, which given how many of you I know to be dads is probably pretty-much perfect.
• 98 CSS: I imagine, as we’re a month intro quarantine, you’ll all have finished at least three self-improvement projects and will be champing at the bit for a new challenge. Now that you’ve doubtless taught yourselves to code to a competent standard, why not use this CSS library to build an entire website interface in the style of Windows 98? Why? WHAT THE FCUK ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO BETWEEN NOW AND YOUR INEVITABLE, ALMOST-CERTAINLY-DOMESTIC DEATH FFS???
• The Sony World Photography Awards 2020: I was vaguely, tangentially-involved in doing the PR for the inaugural one of these about 15 years ago; whodathunk it would have ended up lasting so long. This year’s category winners were announced this (last?) week, and as you’d expect there are some quite good photos in here; this is my personal favourite, not least for its Hopper-esque qualities in a very Hopper-esque year so far.
• Don’t Quote Me: A Twitter bot which automatically quotes any Twitter user specifically asking not to be quoted. Childish, but I like the idea that there are a lot of people getting slightly-but-significantly annoyed by it.
• The World Cups Of The Past: I might have mentioned here before that I am mostly incapable of enjoying major international football tournaments, for the twin reasons of fearing Italian defeat and fearing even more the potential for an English victory. Which makes that the fact that FIFA has started putting classic World Cup matches from The Past on its YouTube channel a wonderful opportunity for me to enjoy some games that I simply couldn’t appreciate previously due to tension and dread and horror and all those lovely emotions we all love to experience during a major sporting event. This weekend, for example, I get to enjoy Italy beating Germany in 2006’s semi-final and then Argentina doing for the plucky little Brits way back in 98. Honestly, STRAIGHT INTO MY VEINS.
• Name of the Year 2020: Even in these dark times it’sgood to know that some important traditions maintain – so it is with the Name of the Year contest, featured regularly in here for about 10 years now, and once again shining a light on some of the most astonishing examples of verified names appearing in news reports over the past 12 months. Honestly, I don’t know who to root for this year – from the sheer badassery of ‘Decoldest Crawford’, to the ‘surely this was on the Simpsons?’-wtfery of ‘Gimadiah Scrogum’, to the potentially-unbeatable ‘Nazareth Pantaloni III’. I am in actual tears at some of these; I promise you, they cannot fail to cheer you up (and possibly, should you be pregnant, to give inspiration).

By Molly Bounds

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS PLEASINGLY MELODIC-IF-SLIGHTLY-WONKY ELECTRONICA COURTESY OF THIS NEW EP BY FAH!

THE SECTION WHICH RECKONS YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO MAKE A FEW QUID OUT OF A NEW NEWS OUTLET CALLED ‘NORONA’ WHICH TRANSMITS ONLY INFORMATION UNRELATED TO THE PANDEMIC, PT.2:

• Drive and Listen: I think this might be my favourite website of the week, but it also made me feel a lot sadder than I expected it to, so, well, you take care now. Drive & Listen is a simple site that lets you select from a range of cities worldwide (London isn’ included, sadly, but don’t let that put you off) and then offers you the experience of being driven around said city in a taxi, with a local radio station streaming in the background (you can select from a range in each city). It may not sound like much, but I spent 20m being ‘driven’ around Rome on Monday listening to the radio and I did a bit of a cry at certain points, I’m not ashamed to say. I think it’s possibly the very visible life on display – the traffic and passers-by all cheek-by-jowl and uncaring of maintaining a medically-advised 6ft distance from each other – and the very air of normality that feels so distant right now. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
• Getty Images in Animal Crossing: It’s sort-of a clever piece of marketing, this, so technically it should be in the top section, but I decided about 10 days ago that I really don’t give a sh1t about brands or what they do any more (ha! Like I ever did!), and probably never will again, so, well, fcuk it (actually, another aside; I was having a chat with friends the other day and the subject of work came up, and we had a disagreement about whether it’s possible to do a job well and simultaneously not care about it AT ALL; I very much think it is, they very much think it isn’t. What do YOU think, webmongs? Genuinely curious). Getty has used the inbuilt feature that lets you import pictures of stuff into your Animal Crossing game to make it simple and easy for players to choose images owned by Getty to adorn the walls of their virtual hovels in-game – which is SUCH a clever way of bringing the brand to a (probably) totally new audience and doing so in a fun, playful and organic way. Kudos to whoever made this happen, it’s really smart.
• Twisters: Tongue twisters for you to practice. Which, fine, might not sound like loads of fun, but try changing the language and realise that you can practice tongue twisters in Kazakh and see what sort of wild and crazy world of fun opens up to you.
• Chess In Schools: As far as I can tell, Chess in Schools is some sort of subscription service for kids who really like chess to practice with other kids who really like chess, aged between 5-11. For the next few months, the site is waiving its subs fee and so if your child is spending lockdown training themselves up to wipe the floor with Magnus Carlsen this could be the perfect gladiatorial arena for them (although I imagine the standard is probably pretty good, so maybe don’t offer them up as a sacrificial pawn if they’re a bit, well, fragile).
• Regional TV Zoom Backgrounds: I am probably not going to bother with Zoom backgrounds in here any more unless they’re hugely inventive or interesting, but these are a good selection to finish on – you can now get backgrounds which make you look like you’re reading the news for whichever regional ITN-variant you grew up with, so you can pretend you’re HEAD NEWS MONKEY at HTV or something. Obviously this will mean nothing to you if you’re much under 40, but for the rest of you it should provide a nice hit of televisual nostalgia.
• This Website Will Self-Destruct: Nice bit of webart (ish), this – the site exists only for as long as at least one user per 24h posts a message to it. Messages are all anonymous and aren’t displayed, but anyone visiting the site can cycle through a random selection of previously-submitted messages from visitors past (I presume there’s some light moderation, as I’m yet to see anything foul or racist – perhaps this has all made us better people???) – so far this morning I’ve seen one from someone claiming that they are a furloughed FBI agent, another…oh, no, hang on, I was clicking through to get material and landed on something basically denying the holocaust, so, no, everything is still terrible, sorry everyone.
• The 2020 Skyscraper Competition: Given we’re all wildly speculating about how we might all adapt our lifestyles to a post-viral future, it’s timely that eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of the latest edition of its annual theoretical skyscraper design competition – “The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.” The overall winning entry is designed in response to the COVID outbreak, and is designed to be a modular structure which could be erected in as few as five days to provide secure, easy, cheap additional infrastructure for medical or support services to make use of. All of this is fascinating, but perhaps less sci-fi than I might like.
• Size Link: This is almost magic – a web-based AR tool that lets you create an AR model of any cuboid of any dimensions you choose, so that you can get a real idea of the physical dimensions of an object within the context of whatever space you choose to place it. This is all done using ARKit and ARCore in-browser, and is hugely impressive – you’ll need a reasonably-recent phone to make it work, but it’s very smart and potentially helpful for planning phase 2 of ‘the great domestic renovation project which will eventually break us’.
• Fact Trek: Are any of you Trekkies? Or Trekkers? I know there’s a difference but I can never remember which is which – basically, though, I think the distinction is between ‘the sort of people who quite like a bit of Star Trek’ and ‘the sort of people who think learning Klingon is a viable hobby’. Anyway, this is basically some sort of Trek Truthers site, seeking to debunk all the myths that apparently surround the show. “Our mission: to cut through the gossip, half-truths, and outright lies, and get to the bottom of what really happened behind-the-scenes. Join us, as we uncover rarely seen primary sources, critically examine secondary ones, and present brand-new interviews.” I can’t, honestly, pretend I’ve delved too deeply into this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s maybe one person reading this who will have their week made by its inclusion.
• The Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets: PEAK CURIOS (and thanks to Editor Paul who found this – I didn’t ask how, it felt rude somehow). This is an eleven year old site celebrating the wonder and beauty of international plug and socket standards, maintained in beautifully-serious fashion by a Dutch person (no information is given, but as ever with these sorts of projects I am confident surmising that it’s probably a bloke). “Over the last 10 years the website has grown from 27 to 134 pages, showing six times more plugs and sockets. Moreover, much background information on technical details, history of standards, manufacturers etc. has been added. The growth of collection and information would not have been possible without the input of museum visitors from all over the world. A lot of material has been donated.” SO MUCH MATERIAL! You will quickly come to learn that ‘a standardised global system of electrical wiring’ is on a par with ‘world peace’ on a list of ‘hoped-for things that will never materialise’ – maybe THE CURRENT EXTRAORDINARY TIMES will see someone solve this once and for all. We can but hope.
• The News Reporters Club: This looks like a really fun project for your kids to do next week, if you’re stuck for ways to arrest the slow descent towards Lord of the Flies. “The News News News Reporters Club is a five-day project for children to complete in their own homes. It involves them making their own radio news show about the world they can see around them using only a pen and paper and a mobile phone. It is designed as a fun way to empower children to be creative and tell their own stories about the strange moment in time we are all living through.” The project is from the US, so there may be a few linguistic or cultural idiosyncracies, but it’s a fascinating idea and is being offered on a ‘pay what you can’ basis, meaning you can get a whole week’s worth of improving kidproject for a few quid if you’re skint. Lovely.
• Fix My Quarantine: This is a webpage updated each day with a new selection of links to stuff to do, watch, read and listen to online – the idea is that you bookmark it or make it your homepage, and each 24h you’ll be presented with another load of entertainments to handhold you through the next slice of lockdown ennui. It’s all a bit TV pop culture for my (intensely pretentious, pseudy) tastes, but I’m a d1ck when it comes to stuff like this and you should probably just click and make up your own minds.
• All The TikTok Dads: Dads and their apparent cuteness is very much a thing on TikTok these days, driven (I suppose) by the fact that so much of the userbase is young teen girls who (I am told) think their dads are ace. This is a LOOOOONG thread of wholesome Dad TikToks, in which the fathers are all lovely and dumb and dad-like and where they are basically the butt of the joke but in a really nice way; ‘adorkable dad’ is 100% going to be a tedious, hard-to-avoid advertising meme for the next 6m if this is anything to go by.
• The Infinite Monkey Experiment: Pudding, again, being excellent – this is low-key such an interesting project. Taking as its starting point the classic ‘a roomful of monkeys and typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare’ probability classic, the site is using brute force to see how long it will take a random note generator to accurately-reproduce the opening bars of a series of popular compositions; it’s been running for 11 days at the time of writing, and, according to their calculations, should spit out the Nokia ringtone in approximately 30,000 centuries’ time. SO interesting, and a really clear explanation of the maths of probability to boot.
• Aglet: Or, ‘Pokemon Go but trainers’. Aglet is a slightly-bizarre (to me at least) idea that I think is the brainchild of an ex-Adidas person who obviously knows significantly more about trainer culture than I do; the gimmick is that it’s an AR walking game, which challenges you to wander around in the real world to collect virtual trainers to add to your virtual trainer collection (no, me neither, but); there are LOADS to collect, all of them digital versions of real kicks, along with some SUPER limited-edition drops where there will only ever be one version in existence; I suppose that the long game here is the idea of a sort of exchange for virtual sneakerheads where they’ll be able to trade in virtual goods for real-world cash with the site taking a cut, but, honestly, it’s all a bit baffling to me. It’s interesting though – I remember having conversations with people 15 years ago about how the digital property rights arena was going to be such an interesting and lucrative place to be (I was thrilling even then, you WISH you had known me), and we’re still only just scratching the surface of how it all works.
• All The Questlove Prince Tribute Shows: Roots drummer, Kimmel bandleader and seemingly one of the most-loved people in music, Questlove this week has been doing a series of Prince tribute gigs on livestream; this link compiles all four (I think) shows to date, and will give you an excellent few hours listening this weekend.
• Safari, LIVE!: I would imagine that safaris are one of the few touristy things that might come back relatively quickly – they have the combination of ‘done in massive areas where social distancing is relatively simple’, ‘take place in countries that really need the cash’ and ‘largely the preserve of the very, very rich’, qualities which I reckon will largely determine the quickest things to come back online. Anyway, while you’re waiting for the veldt to open up to tourists again, why not enjoy this YouTube channel – every day at morning and evening they lifestream a safari tour, archiving them for later viewing, and, honestly, this stuff is quite amazing. Worth chucking up on a second screen so you can look up and gaze at the buffalo every now and again for psychic relief.
• Interfaces in Games: Primarily designed for people in the industry, this site…oh, here: “Explore a collection of video games interfaces, screenshots, and clips. Take a look at all the fragments that make up a video game, and find inspiration for your designs.” If you’re interested in the mechanics of videogame design, this is fascinating.
• Rooster: Given that we’re all sort of ignoring the amount of time we’re spending online at the moment, this isn’t perhaps the best time for me to feature this plugin; still, if you want another reason to maybe feel a bit crap and inadequate, why not install Rooster? It’s a Chrome plugin which every time you open a new tab presents you with a breakdown of your browser usage that day, showing a chart of which sites have been the grateful recipients of most of your attention; beautifully, it will also start to scold you when you navigate to sites on which it knows you already spend too much time. The sort of thing it would be momentarily-funny to install on your w4nk-obsessed teen’s laptop so they get a vaguely-admonishing squawk every time they log onto a tubesite.
• Zero Replies: A great idea – this account finds old tweets (like really old – it’s currently looking at 2008 as far as I can tell) that noone has replied to and replies to them, bafflingly, at a distance of over a decade. The only point to this is, I presume, to give the recipient of the reply a slight ‘why the fcuk is this stranger replying to this Tweet from 2008?’ reaction – there is, though, a side-effect with the way it’s being used at the moment which hints at a darker motive. It seems that whoever’s running the account is searching for content from 2008 from verified accounts that mention dogs to source the Tweets to reply to; what that also means, though, is that it’s replying to people Tweeting about their dogs 12 years ago, which equally means that it’s pretty certain to just be reminding a lot of people that their dogs are dead. WAY TO GO, ANONYMOUS TWITTER ACCOUNT!
• Particles: A webcam toy which turns you into a beautiful, ghostly, particulate version of yourself. Spookily gorgeous – combine with screen recording software to create some genuinely terrifying footage of your weirdly smokelike features appearing and disappearing from the ether, or alternatively set up a screen in your kids’ room that does nothing but show your odd, beyond-the-veil features, watching them at all times (don’t do that).
• Octolab TV: Regular readers will know that I am big fan of the octopus – sadly I am also a big fan of the taste of octopus, which causes me no little conflict when dining out – and subsequently I am a big fan of this YouTube channel; should you also enjoy cephalopod fun, you will be too! Loads of clips of octopi doing cool things – changing colour, being clever, dressing as Santa, delivering a message of hope to humanity…ENJOY!
• The Kontrapunkt Type Exhibition: Kontrapunkt is a typography design studio in Japan – it opened an exhibition of its work and the history of typographic design in Ginza, Tokyo last year, but has now made the whole thing digital as a response to the pandemic. This is SUCH a lovely bit of webwork, down to the genuinely-soothing backing music, and if you have any interest at all in design and type then you will lose yourself in this for hours. ‘
• Eat Some Pasta: One of the major challenges for any Italian in lockdown with non-Italians is how to explain exactly how much pasta we feel compelled to eat at times like this; it’s like some sort of primal callback to the mothercountry where every meal simply has to feature 300g of carbs in soss. If you feel much the same but are struggling with how to make the process of pasta-ingestion compelling at length, you might enjoy this website which offers a VAST selection of recipes for pasta – it’s American, which means there are some UNGODLY combinations of ingredients and the sort of calorific load which would cause someone of my build to have a literal coronary within three days of this sort of diet, but there’s equally some quite interesting stuff here. On which note, should any of you want a bona-fide EXCELLENT pasta recipe, get in touch and it’s yours.

By David Kirscher

NEXT, HERE’S EVERYTHING JONI MITCHELL EVER RECORDED, PRESENTED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER FOR YOUR EDIFICATION AND ENTERTAINMENT!

THE SECTION WHICH RECKONS YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO MAKE A FEW QUID OUT OF A NEW NEWS OUTLET CALLED ‘NORONA’ WHICH TRANSMITS ONLY INFORMATION UNRELATED TO THE PANDEMIC, PT.3:

• The Online Museum of Modern Art: I featured an earlier iteration of this a few weeks ago, but it’s been updated – previously this was a virtual gallery space that you could wonder round to see and play small webgames; now, each room is its own little work of art that you can explore, experience and play with. Honestly, this is SO smart and small and clever and cute and moderately-twee and slightly-hipster, and every single room is a surprising, delightful little piece of webart, and the way you can enjoy light interactions with other visitors in realtime is far more affecting than I would have expected.
• Hackasat: I don’t mean to be rude about my readership – it’s not like there’s enough of you for me to start slagging you off, let’s be honest – but I don’t think that there will be that many of you rushing to join in with this. Still, if you reckon your a L337 H4XX0R (oh god, SO OLD) then you might enjoy this – “The United States Air Force, in conjunction with the Defense Digital Service, presents this year’s Space Security Challenge, Hack-A-Sat. This challenge asks hackers from around the world to focus their skills and creativity on solving cybersecurity challenges on space systems. Pull together a team for our Hack-A-Sat Capture The Flag. Participants who successfully complete a set of qualification challenges on cybersecurity and space this spring will be invited to the ultimate challenge: to (ethically) hack a satellite.” I mean, that sounds quite cool, doesn’t it? Even if you know that the reality will be 48h coding sprints conducted in overly-hot rooms that smell of pizza and feet.
• Movebank: Would you like a map to help you track animal migrations happening RIGHT NOW all around the globe? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! “Movebank’s database is designed for locations of individual animals over time, commonly referred to as tracking data, and of measurements collected by other bio-logging sensors attached to animals, as well as information about animals, tags and deployments” – want to track the caribou? Want to check the progress of the swallows’ return from Africa? Enjoy.
• The A to Z of AI: A really useful reseource from Google, presenting a simple, easy-to-understand guide to 26 of the most important or significant terms used when discussing AI and what they in fact mean. Tell you what, here’s an idea – while you’re all wfh and everyone’s basically trying to invent things to do as most white-collar jobs have been rendered pointless by the slowdown of the global capitalist machine, why not compile a list of things which you expect all your staff to have learned by the time *all this* is over and which they will absolutely get the sack for if they don’t. Like, for example, what is and isn’t ‘AI’, and what ‘machine learning’ actually means. Oh, and when and when not to use the term ‘insight’ (honestly, I will fcuking kill someone I swear). Thanks!
• Geekprank: There has never been a less-appropriate time for you to use this site on your IT-unsavvy coinhabitant during lockdown, but if you’re feeling sadistic or brave you might want to log onto their laptop next time they’re in the bathroom and put this on and wait.
• Less Shot: Or, to give this Twitter account its full name, ‘One Less Than Perfect Shot’ – presenting poorly-framed or cursed-looking shots from famous films, one at a time.
• Nemonet: A new use for your iPad!! “NeMO-Net is a single player iPad game where players help NASA classify coral reefs by painting 3D and 2D images of coral. Players can rate the classifications of other players and level up in the food chain as they explore and classify coral reefs and other shallow marine environments and creatures from locations all over the world!” It’s by NASA and looks like it might be quite fun, in a gently-educative sort of way.
• Quarantine Maps: Gareth Fuller is an artist, whose works “investigate the identity of places with the artist depicting topographies and cultures through urban and rural exploration, extensive research, local knowledge, and lived experience.” He was trapped in quarantine in Beijing for a while, and has been drawing maps as a way of keeping busy and documenting the experience; they’re available as free downloads on the site if you want to download and print them for your own home, or there are prints available for sale if you’d like a proper print. I rather like these – they’re reasonably densely-annotated, slightly wordy expressions of his feelings and thoughts on each day of his lockdown, and have that slightly obsessional Keith Tyson-esque quality that I enjoy.
• World Press Photo of the Year 2020: Another remarkable collection of pictures, made even more remarkable when you imagine what next year’s will look like. Lots of these are recognisably famous, but there are equally some incredible shots that were new to me; the cheery ‘Nazis on a seaboat jaunt’ is a particularly brilliant/horrifying example.
• Channel 101: Oh WHAT a good idea this is! Channel 101 is an US film industry thing, where each month they run a screening of pilot episodes for potential shows which get eviscerated live in front of an audience, with the best ones being invited back to present actual show episodes in the future. Now, under lockdown, they are inviting anyone in the world to submit a pilot video for a TV show of their own imagining – the pilots have to be between 5s and 5m long, and there are a few other rules and conditions, but otherwise ANYTHING GOES. If I had one ounce of visual creativity in my body (and the sort of kit that would let me film half-decently) I would be all over this – I bet LOADS of you could make something great, though (or at least amusingly-awful), so give it a go.
• Kidalist: Ideas of stuff to do with your kids, crowdsourced from the world. You may want to submit your own or you may find some helpful suggestions – there’s not loads of stuff on there at present, but hopefully it will grow over time as it’s a nice concept.
• Weird 3d Browsermaze Thing: I have no idea at all what this is or why it exists, but you can use it to pretend you’re flying a spaceship through some sort of weird network of alien tunnels and frankly I’m bored enough with life at the moment to find that momentarily-diverting.
• NSFW: Not that that designation means anything anymore, but still, NSFW is a sex club in New York which ordinarily runs presumably high-end and exclusive fcuking parties and which has now pivoted to doing much the same but on Zoom. So if you fancy the idea of attending a sex party where noone touches you and you feel just a bit disconnected and awkward and alone – JUST LIKE NORMAL, EH??? – then this is probably PERFECT! It’s membership-by-application, there’s almost certainly a wait-list, and the criteria on which selection is determined is…opaque (and, honestly, surely there must be easier ways of w4nking at strangers, no?), but if you’re willing to put the effort in (and, doubtless, pony up the cash), then this might be the virtual kinkpalace you’ve always dreamed of.
• Social Spacing – The Game: Whoever made this has basically ripped off the Google Jumping Dinosaur game, but I don’t care because it’s strangely compelling.
• Spooky Mountain: This is a really nicely-made digital recreation of a choose your own adventure-type game, complete with a bit of light roleplaying (stats, inventory, etc) and a rather fun storyline about your attempts to scale the titular sinister peak. A great way of passing twenty minutes while you wait for everyone else to do stuff so your part of the great, pointless work machine can start moving again (literally ALL my time at the moment is spent waiting for things to happen elsewhere so I can do something and then wait some more; god I love my professional life).
• If We Were Allowed To Visit: This is beautiful artgamewank of the highest order – a sort-of ASCII FPS which presents you with a topography made up of words which denote what it is that the view is displaying…oh, look, this is impossible, I literally cannot describe this at all – just click and play.
• Ludum Dare: Finally this week in the miscellania, the entrants to the latest Ludum Dare game jam – for those of you who forget, “Ludum Dare is an event where you create a game from scratch in a weekend based on a theme” – this Jam’s theme was ‘Keep It Alive’, and clicking on the link will let you download and play ALL the entries, which range from action games to puzzlers to text adventures to everything else inbetween, and which as ever showcase some quite astonishing creativity. I promise you, if you like games at all you will easily find a few things in here to keep you occupied over the weekend.

By Laurent Durieux

LAST IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, SOME EXCELLENT WEEKEND-ISH HOUSE IN A BRAND NEW MIX BY SAM RANKIN!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Zeghere Van Male: Animated illustrations from Belgian antiquity! “The Songbook of Zeghere van Male – This outstanding manuscript from Bruges contains local and international 500 years old songs and motets. The 1200-page long book in four volumes is rich in illuminations depicting ornamental and historiated initials and interlinear drawings not necessarily related to its content. It is truly an infinite source of joy and inspiration. Here animated initials are rather an artistic collaboration between 21th century animator and 16th century illuminator than a faithful re-animation of the original decorations.” Really rather excellent and pleasingly-grotesque in parts.
• Due to Covid: Not technically a Tumblr, but very much one in spirit: “During the coronavirus pandemic, daily life has come to a sudden standstill and businesses have had to respond. Signs on storefronts announce operational changes but these messages are also brimming over with solidarity, shared responsibility, and cautious optimism. This project attempts to document the temporary signs that have gone up across our communities.” They’re actively collecting new entries, and the UK’s relatively sparsely-covered, so something for you to photograph this weekend while you’re skulking from safe-space to safe-space.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• The Artist Support Pledge: Thanks to Dan for sending this to me; the Artist Support Pledge is a project being coordinated by various artists across Insta, the idea being to support each other through promoting each others’ work and committing to spend upto £200 of every £1000 they earn through art sales on the work of other artists. A really nice initiative, and the Insta feed gives details of how it works and how to keep track of the art being discussed and shared and displayed and sold.
• Uglybites: Really, really ugly photos of food, deliberately-taken. This only has 4 followers so literally no idea how I found it, but I am glad I did.
• Shrtctting: This is a nice idea; Shrtcttng is about sharing short talks from experts via Insta, aimed at people working in advermarketingpr. I haven’t listened to any, mainly as the idea of listening to anyone (sorry), however brilliant, talk to me about advermarketingpr while I am not getting paid for it is literally anathema to me, but your mileage may vary.
• The South London Review: Thanks to Anna for sending this to me; this is the South London Review of Hand Sanitiser, presenting reviews and musings and art about, well, hand sanitiser (and other things). This is basically the most artschool/student thing I have seen all year – that’s a compliment, in case you weren’t sure.

OH HANG ON EDITOR PAUL JUST POSTED THIS IN SLACK AND FCUK ME IT IS GOOD HAVE AN EXTRA SPECIAL ADDITIONAL MIX OF D’N’B BY EATS EVERYTHING!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Black Plague: This is a New Yorker article but that doesn’t mean that everything it says about the US isn’t broadly-applicable here. The piece examines the fact that black Americans are significantly more at risk of infection and death from COVID than non-black Americans, and looks at some of the reasons as to why. You know the reasons already – poverty, long-standing inequality, inbuilt racism, the disproproportionate number of ‘essential services’ that are provided at minimum wage by black workers – and by extension you should also know why it is that the story is similar (if at smaller scale) in the UK and elsewhere. I know I keep hammering this point like the tedious, one-note liberal fcuk I am, but if you don’t come to the end of this with a better understanding and appreciation of how structurally unfair society is, and the very specific fault lines along which that unfairness is concentrated, you are at best stupid and at worst a cnut.
• Disposable People: Consider this a companion piece to the above; this looks at the different experiences of quarantine currently being ‘enjoyed’ by the professional managerial classes (aka me, and, probably, you) and that being experienced by the workers whose roles exist in ensuring the continued levels of comfort of the aforementioned professional managerial class. I have been saying for ages that if we’re going to sort climate change at all we need to start addressing modern capitalism and the ‘want’ impulse; this applies to social issues as much as environmental ones. Every time you ‘want’ something now, fast, hot, cheap, physically here, an army of other people you never see or consider or think about is paid a relative pittance to ensure that that happens for you – and you (ok, we, I) never give it a thought. It feels very much like this set of circumstances ought to force us to think about this; it also feels very much like it won’t, because like fcuk are we giving up Amazon deliveries and effortless access to whatever we like, screw the human cost (because we will never have to see it).
• It’s Time To Build: This did the rounds of Tech Twitter last weekend; I didn’t see the commentary it attracted, but I worry that it will widely have been laudatory, which…troubles me. This is a piece by Marc Andreessen, head of famed VC fcukers Andreessen Horowitz, in which he sets out his vision for a post-COVID recovery, which is all going to be led by BUILDING STUFF. Andreessen, pace Keynes, goes full supply-side here, suggesting that large-scale infrastructure projects to reflect ‘the new normal’ are economically advantageous for both the world as a whole and (more importantly) for the markets and the moneymen. Except whereas Keynes believed that it was the public sector which should undertake these projects as part of a managed, command-style economy, Andreessen instead advocates for…wait for it…you’ll NEVER guess…that’s right, he advocates for the Venture Capitalists! Who’d have thought that one of the world’s foremost VCs – let’s remember, a coterie of people not necessarily renowned for their humility – would advocate for people JUST LIKE HIM to be the architects of the new world to come (and reap the massive, multi-zero rewards that will doubtless accrue). I hope I don’t need to explain too much about ‘why it is a bad idea to allow people whose literal sole motive is profit to undertake the recalibration of society after an event of species-level significance’ – but why not pause for a moment and think about all the really, really great things that VC has done for the world over the past decade. Yes, all of them. Please, please, please, can we not let this happen, please?
• How You Could Have Made A Killing This Week: On Wednesday (or was it Tuesday – SO HARD TO KNOW) the world briefly stopped cosplaying as epidemiology experts and instead decided to master the markets instead; as oil prices plummeted, so we all started feverishly Googling ‘how to buy oil futures’ and ‘what is an oil future, anyway?’ and ‘what’s the big deal with pork bellies as a tradeable commodity, I’ve never understood that?’. This article in VICE does a really good job of not only explaining exactly what happened to the price and why, but also of how you could have made an absolute KILLING if you were very quick off the mark.
• Hiring A Private Chef During Covid: I am including this purely for the ‘look at how the other half lockdown; don’t you hate them?’ schadenfreude; this is from the NY Post and looks at how high-rollers in the city are basically just booking high-end chefs whose restaurants are temporarily closed to act as their personal domestic deliverycooks. On the one hand, I hate these people; on the other, I guess the chefs need to earn too. Maybe I’m just jealous.
• Tinder Dates in Animal Crossing: Because everything in human life will have its AC equivalent by June (I am half expecting the UK Parliament to consider adopting it as a means of conducting virtual democracy), here’s a piece about people doing Tinder dates on the platform; honestly, I can’t think of anything that would make my penis retract into my body faster than a message reading “hi, would you like to come on a date to my videogame island and we can harvest imaginary fruit together?”, but then again I’m an old, ugly misanthrope so I should probably wind my neck in.
• Models In A Time Of COVID: Vogue Business really is a surprisingly good read; this is a great piece on how various brands (fashion and tech) are working together to enable the fashion industry to keep shooting clotheshorses and flogging garms despite quarantine, and is really interesting as a general ‘how to find creative solutions to shooting dilemmas when you can’t travel anywhere’ primer as much as it is an insight into the specific world of high-end couture).
• The UK TikTok Hype House: This is the inevitable UK equivalent of the LA thing I mentioned in here at the top of the year – which means it’s exactly like the US one but smaller, the weather’s worse, and all the kids are significantly less good-looking (what? It’s true!). It’s interesting that this lot have already been coopted by the Government to make ‘stay at home, make memes!’-type content to persuade the kids that perhaps they don’t want to catch the ‘rona; it’s also interesting that it’s been set up by a guy (whose name I forget) who set up the first UK Snapchat-focused agency about 5-6 years ago when he was 19. Smart kid.
• Astral Projection: I feel like I ought to reproduce the headline in full here to give you the gist: “Meet The Redditors Using Astral Projection to Escape Quarantine – Paranormal enthusiasts say they’re using out-of-body experiences to infiltrate forbidden spaces—including the Pentagon.” If you don’t want to read this as a result of that tease, there’s something wrong with you. Also, imagine how fcuking amazing it would be to, I don’t know, astrally project yourself into Dominic Raab’s house to see his collection of highly-polished mail order replica Samurai swords, say, or to wander round the Tate. Read the piece – you may need to suspend a little disbelief here – and then try escaping THE PRISON OF YOUR SKULL for a bit.
• Betting In The Time Of The ‘Rona: With live sports off the menu for the foreseeable, gamblers are having to turn to alternative things to place a wager on – esports matchups, who celebrities are going to be livestreaming with next, that sort of thing. This is an interesting look at how those more esoteric markets work, although I’m disappointed that there’s no exploration of darker books – I mean, if someone’s not running a simple over/under game on the daily death-toll numbers I’ll be AMAZED (and, er, can someone play me in?).
• Design and Health: This is a fascinating history of some of the ways in which design of buildings and spaces has changed to reflect prevailing wisdom of the era in terms of health and wellness – and how, conversely, the history of health and wellness has in some ways been shaped by the design decisions made by individuals at certain points in history. SO much good trivia in here, quite a lot of which is vaguely-troubling if you think about it too hard (SO much 20th century racism in urban planning, turns out).
• Holovista: Holovista is a game coming out ‘at some point’ and which has received a decent amount of hype to date – this is the first proper ‘in development’ writeup of it that I’ve seen, and whilst it’s a touch hagiographic as these things tend to be, it also paints a picture of something which could turn out to be revolutionary. The game’s gimmick is that it takes place entirely through a ‘window’ into another world afforded by your phone’s screen; you pan round your real-world environment to pan round the virtual one in-game, and the game’s narrative reinforces this ‘phone as central component of life’ idea with plot in which social media and interpersonal digital interactions play a key role. Really interesting read, and the game sounds like it’s one to look forward to.
• Competitive Oyster Shucking: Did you know this was a thing? I did not know. Anyway, this is a great, entertaining read, all about the professional oyster shucking world, its visit to Shanghai, the personalities that make the scene, and, most of all, about the very, very weird world of expat, rich life in China (and the odd sort of notoriety that people can get in small, closed communities like the shuckers’).
• Three Colours: Red: Nothing to do with the film (and White was better anyway); this, instead, is an essay exploring the history of red pigment in art and history. Honestly, I know you don’t think this will be interesting but you are WRONG – it contains at least three legitimately-brilliant historical-etymological facts, and you will be at least 3% smarter after reading it (this is approximate). I promise, the fact about ‘miniatures’ alone is worth the time.
• There Are Only Three Memes: Richard Cook has written literally THE best breakdown of the semiotics of memes I have read in ages. No sh1t, I promise, this is funny but also DEADLY serious – the conclusion – that there is basically only one memetic format which underpins all others – may well shake you to your very core, but once you know this truth you can never unknow it.
• Everyone You Meet Is God In Drag: On being in drag, and what drag is, and why – this is a wonderful piece of writing which intercuts personal reminiscence and history with an account of two friends putting on drag in preparation for a night out. A wonderful piece of writing (and I don’t even watch Drag Race fwiw).
• Closing A Restaurant: This is written by a New York chef about her restaurant, Prune, which even I know is famous and very much a chef’s-type place. Its founder and owner Gabrielle Hamilton had to shut the place just before lockdown was announced, sacking her staff, and this piece is her meditation on how it felt and why she had to do it and how, if, whether, maybe, the industry will ever be the same. Hamilton is an exceptional writer – it’s not fair that someone can cook well and write like this, dammit – and whilst it’s a story about an NYC place, the themes are applicable anywhere (especially London, especially the sections about the economics of the industry). I loved reading this, even though it made me sad in parts.
• Shirley Valentine Changed My Life: Finally in this week’s selecition of longreads, this piece about falling in love with someone when you’re a kid, and how that can change your life. This is SO LOVELY – I promise, you will feel wonderful after reading it and it will cheer you like few other things this week, so treat yourself and spend 10 minutes savouring it; YOU ARE WORTH IT!!

By Stephen Baker

AND NOW, (THE STILL CURTAILED AS UNDERSTANDABLY THE WHOLE MUSIC VIDEO THING IS A BIT TRICKY ATM) MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Only two vids this week – this is called ‘Delivered’ and it’s about deliverypeople in NYC and if you live in a city and use delivery services you should watch this please:

1. Last up, this is a song called ‘Storm Boy’ by Xavier Rudd; I’m not mad about the track, though it’s pleasant enough, but I found the accompanying video, animated by one Gianluca Maruotti, absolutely charming and I hope you will too. Til next week, that’s all we’ve got time for (also, my fingers HURT) – BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE BYE KEEP YOUR SPIRITS UP AND TRY AND RELAX AND REMEMBER THAT I LOVE YOU AND WEB CURIOS LOVES YOU AND WE WISH THE BEST FOR YOU AND WE ARE CHEERING YOU ON ALL THE WAY IN YOUR ENDEAVOURS I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK WITH MORE LINKS TO KEEP YOU GOING BUT TIL THEN I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!:

This is all quite long, isn’t it?

HELLO EVERYONE ARE WE STILL HAVING FUN? Ready for another three (ahahahaha) weeks of this? GREAT! I know that obviously it’s not possible to gain any sort of accurate impression of This Fcuking World We Live In via the medium of spending all one’s waking time on the web, but, if I were attempt to offer you some sort of capsule take on ‘wot i done a learn up’ online this week it would probably be along the lines of ‘you know all that creative, we’re all in it together, heartwarming energy that was wafting around a month or so ago? Sort of…gone, hasn’t it?’

It does rather feel like we’re approaching the metaphorical Wednesday of this incarceration, where everything seems neverending and a bit, well, much (and even better the joke’s on us; it’s barely teatime on Monday if we’re doing that sort of temporal scale!). Don’t worry, though, WEB CURIOS IS HERE! Feel like you’re approaching the ‘hump’ of your personal inceratory marathon? LET ME DRAG YOU OVER IT WITH WORDS AND LINKS!

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and frankly I’m going to struggle to keep finding interesting or even varied ways of saying “what the fcuk else have you got to do other than click the links?”.

Oh, and your quick weekly reminder that ISSUE 3 OF IMPERICA MAGAZINE IS OUT NOW – a mere £3, and this week one of the articles featured within it got an actual, real-life endorsement from ACTUAL BRITISH NATIONAL TREASURE KATHY BURKE! Which, frankly, ought to be all the inducement you need to get right on an snap one up while you can (it will never run out, it’s a digital publication, but I wondered whether the introduction of illusory scarcity might make some of you click out of some sort of residual capitalist impulse)!

By Bradley Theodore

FIRST IN THE MIXES, THIS CAME TO ME VIA SADEAGLE AND IS FCUKING GREAT – NO IDEA HOW TO CLASSIFY IT BUT IT’S ALL FUNK AND SOUL AND BEATS AND BREAKS AND STUFF, MIXED BY WILL PAGE!

THE SECTION WHICH EXPECTS THAT BY THE TIME THIS IS ALL OVER LITERALLY EVERY FCUKER IN THE WORLD WILL BE STREAMING THEMSELVES LIVE AT ALL TIMES:

• Facebook To Alert Users Who Interact With COVID-19 Misinfo: On the one hand, a simple and seemingly-sensible initiative, whereby Facebook will alert users who have commented, shared or ‘liked’ a post on the site which subsequently gets fact-checked into oblivion, letting them know that something that they engaged with was a bit iffy, truthwise, and directing them to more authoritative sources of news that perhaps don’t bang the 5g drum quite so hard. On the other, there are a couple of caveats to this – first, you may (or may not – I forget that the rest of you don’t have the same pointless compulsion to recall all this crap) remember that Facebook trialed something very similar around FAKE NEWS, labelling posts that contained links to rubbish with a FAKE NEWS label and linking to Snopes entries debunking the lies; that experiment lasted only a few months, as it turned out that Facebook’s own studies showed that this made literally no difference at all to the opinions of those people targeted, and in some cases merely reinforced their belief in the previously-peddled lies. Secondly, if you’re sharing information that you believe is being kept from the herdlike masses (DO NOT WAKE THE SHEEPLE!) and which The Powers That Be don’t want you to spread, there’s nothing like getting ‘censored’ by the world’s largest communications network to make you think ‘Hm, hang on, maybe Ickey’s onto something here!’. Still, here’s hoping this stops some of the stupid (but it probably won’t).
• Insta Tries To Make IGTV Happen, Again: Maybe this is the event that finally makes IGTV a thing? I mean, if this drags on too much longer there will be some people who finally reach The End Of Telly and will therefore be forced to turn to Insta’s ‘Creators’ for entertainment, meaning perhaps all of these updates will be worthwhile. Look, it’s not very interesting, but here’s the story: “[Insta]’s completely redesigned the homepage to feature a creator up top, tailored to each user based on who they follow and whose content the app thinks might be interesting to them. The app is also getting a Discover tab to surface new and relevant IGTV content as well as a hands-free recording mode…The company’s also issuing a small but likely impactful update to the Instagram app; users can post their IGTV content in their Stories, and instead of a freeze-frame, 15 seconds of content will play. This could get people to click through and watch the full video, thereby giving creators more views.” See? You thought lockdown was rubbish and now there’s this AMAZING NEWS to cheer you up!
• You Can Now Send DMs On Insta Via The Web Interface: Nothing to say here beyond the headline, other than that I saw several sites report this this week with a variant gag about ‘sliding into your DMs’ and, well, I know times are hard, but really.
• You Can Now Livestream On Insta Via The Web Too!: Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a bored human in possession of camera equipment must be in want of an opportunity to broadcast that boredom to an audience, we now have the ability to livestream to Insta from the web interface, meaning it’s marginally easier to rig together a lighting setup that doesn’t make you look like a weird, thumb-faced novelty-gonk puppet, or to concentrate on something other than the exact angle of your hand/wrist as you hold your phone. It won’t make anything you have to say more compelling, but, well, let’s celebrate the small things.
• YouTube Offers Easy Video Ad Creation Services: I confess that I was sort-of convinced that this was already a thing, but turns out not. You know that feature that Facebook’s had for years and which will create a slightly-shonky ‘video’ ad for you out of a series of short clips and still photos, all lightly-manipulated to make them look like a semi-coherent video ad? Well, now you can do the same on YouTube. I know I sound like a terrible agency shill typing stuff like this – and two days a week, that’s exactly what I am! Terrible! At my job! – but it’s a really good time to persuade your clients to enjoy some of the comparatively-dirt-cheap ad inventory out there right now, if only to give you something to do with all these looming hours between now and a future in which you may one day be allowed outside again. Anyway, for small businesses this is a useful thing; for the sort of people who used to make a living cutting short YT ads for local companies, probably less-so.
• TikTok Rolls Out Parental Controls: Pretty sure that these were trailed a few months back and that this is just the secondary ‘and now it’s live!’ announcement, but wevs. Oh, hang on, I just checked and this is a global rollout of something that was launched in the UK about 6 weeks ago – still, if you are worried about what your kids are getting up to on TikTok then you might be reassured by the following: “The suite of features includes screen-time management controls, limits on direct messages and a restricted mode that limits the appearance of inappropriate content. According to TikTok, parents who want to enable Family Safety Mode must first create their own account on the app, which is then linked to the teen’s account. Once enabled, parents will be able to control how long the teen can spend on the app every day; turn off or limit who the teen can direct message; and choose to turn on TikTok’s “restricted” mode that will limit inappropriate content.” Obviously if you’re kid’s a standard, moderately-devious teen then it will have a secret account that you don’t know about where all the filth happens (HELLO MISS GOVE! Ooh, that’s interesting – that story really wasn’t been picked up at all by the press, wonder why?), but why not pretend that that’s not the case? Great!
• Reddit Updates Political Ad Rules and Transparency: Small tweaks to the way political ads work on Reddit – advertisers now need to leave comments on for 24h, which, well, oh dear – and you can now see records of all political ads posted on Reddit since 2018, which will be maintained into the future. I wonder whether this will see the site expand political advertising outside of the US – would make a lot of sense. I am personally amazed that Governments aren’t working with the site to use it to distribute official information, but I’m sure the smart people in No.10 comms know what they are doing.
• The COVID Retail Dashboard: Sort-of interesting, this collects data from the global fashion industry since the pandemic – it’s only relevant if you work in fashion, but I found the sales trend stuff it has access to really interesting (if limited). Including this mainly as I’d be fascinated to see this sort of thing for other sectors if anyone knows of similar dashboards; the fact that sales of bras are actually going up globally blew my tiny little mind just now.
• Airbnb Experiences: Annoyingly this landed last week and I only saw it post=Curios, which means it’s a whole seven days late and you’ve all already seen it. Still, Airbnb’s pivoted to VIRTUAL EXPERIENCES, attempting to stay relevant as its business gets eviscerated by the fact that noone’s staying anywhere that isn’t their own actual house right now. The idea’s just an extension of the pivot that it has been trying for a year or so now – to lifestyle brand and entertainment company rather than just a place for the rich to rent out their second and third homes and to help landlords gouge out the heart of a city in exchange for a better return on their buy-to-let – but done virtually; some of the stuff on offer is genuinely fascinating, like ‘spend an hour learning about the life of an Olympic bobsledder’ (though I think she’s short-changing herself at $21 per hour, personally). Good luck, though, to the person offering ‘podcast training’.
• UFC Staredown: I imagine UFC is one of those things that’s not really enjoying a great time right now, what with the idea of getting sweatily-grapply with someone and potentially covered in their blood being something of a health no-no at present (unless you’re the WWE); still, if you’re missing your fix of unpleasantly-brutal violence delivered with all the pomp and bombast of a dictator’s coronation ceremony, you might like this site, which invites you to attempt to STARE DOWN other UFC fighters to show them how hard you are. Er, from the comfort of your own home. I would personally like someone to make a variant on a site like this that actually records the facial expressions of all participants and then releases them in a gigantic “you look like a fcuking moron, mate!” supercut about a month after the campaign’s finished, so can someone sort that for me please?

By Barbara Peacock

NEXT UP, TRY THIS SURPRISINGLY GREAT PLAYLIST CURATED BY SKIN OUT OF SKUNK ANANSIE AND WHICH IS GREAT IF YOU FANCY SOMETHING A BIT SHOUTY!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR GOVE’S KID BECAUSE, REALLY, IMAGINE HAVING THOSE PARENTS, PT.1:

• A Lovely 3d COVID-19 Tracker: Haven’t you just been crying out for a nicely-presented, 3d modeled little webpage that presents the most up-to-date information about infection rates and associated data in a pleasingly-designed manner? Would you like to see global and national numbers around deaths and recoveries and stuff shown you slightly-fancy style, as you might imagine from a sort of Government datavisualisation designed for the KS5 schools programme? GREAT! It won’t make any of the information contained in the numbers any less troubling, but it will give a pleasingly-molecular sheen to the way you consume it.
• COVID-19 World In Data: This does much the same job as the above link, except in far more prosaic and far more useful fashion. Each day at midday BST the data in this presentation will be updated, meaning it’s always reasonably current; it’s your standard tracker covering relative rates of infection per country per capita, death rates, that sort of thing, but if you’re after a resource that collects all this stuff in one place and which is easy to find, read and clip, then it’s potentially very useful. It is though, equally, a rolling tracker of horror, so perhaps don’t stare at this too long lest you start to go a bit apocalyptically ‘funny’.
• The COVID-19 Dreams Survey: I was speaking to some friends this week and one of them mentioned she’d been having very odd dreams of late; this isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone mention their unusually-active REM-time since this all started, and made me wonder whether there’s any sort of subconscious commonality of response to the species-level threat we’re all coping with. OR, if you’re feeling a bit fruitier and want to speculate more wildly, MAYBE THE ARCHONS ARE TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH US THROUGH SHARED DREAM MESSAGES???? Thing is, we’ll never know the answers to either of those questions (oh, ok, fine, perhaps the second one’s a bit obvious) unless you all fill in this survey, which is tracking people’s dream states around the world during the pandemic. I forget where I found this, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere moderately-reputable, and it doesn’t seem to be collecting anything other than non-personal information so feel free to fill it in if you’ve been having coronamares (I hope you haven’t). If you are struggling with bad dreams, by the way, can I suggest annihilating your subconscious with weed every night? It kills mine stone dead, and can’t possibly be having any sort of negative effect on my brain at all, no sirree.
• Culture Fix: I’ve featured LOADS of cultural online stuff over the past three weeks of LockdownCurios – this is a great site which is seeking to act as a searchable portal of Stuff That Is Happening On The Web from a culture point of view; honestly, it’s GREAT and there are literally hundreds of things on here, from art to music to museums to poetry. Even better, it’s not hideously US-centric, meaning there are links to live events actually happening in your timezone and when they say ‘football’ they actually mean ‘football’. It’s such a good resource – they invite cultural institutions to flag their events to the site owners, so if you’re involved with something coming up and want help getting the word out, this is a good place to start. Please, if you work in the arts or adjacent to it, do share this with everyone you know; it’s so useful, and the more people populate it with things to do, the better it gets.
• Everywhere School: Similar to the previous entry, this site collects online educational resources happening around the world, day-by-day, arranged by time. So for example I can see that at 10am Myleene Klass is doing some sort of classical music thing on Insta, whilst at 3pm there’s an Animal Learning-type thing being done by a zoo at 3pm. If you’re struggling a bit for how the fcuk to keep the kids doing something vaguely improving, this could prove an excellent and useful helping hand.
• Online Town: Oh SO GOOD. Here’s the site’s official spiel: “Online Town is a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and walk in, out and around those conversations just as easily as they would in real life.” What this means in practice is a near-perfect example of how videochat and chatrooms could work better than they currently do – users enter into a virtual ‘town’ (there’s a public version which at the time of writing is offline but which should come back soon; you can also create private ‘towns’ which you can share with friends so you can have a closed-off area of the web in which to interact), which is presented to them as a simple, top-downish space in which their avatar, and that of other users, move around as though in a videogame. This allows you to experience conversations in a far more natural and human way – rather than seeing and hearing the feeds of everyone in ‘town’, you instead get clearer connections with people who are closer to you in virtual space, meaning that conversations can cluster, splinter and merge in a far more organic way than with a more standard videochat interface. THIS IS SO INTERESTING – it’s not 100% unshonky, fine, and the interface would, I imagine, give off far too much of a whiff of geek for some, but the interaction possibilities it affords are really very cool. Not only that, but this is the first videocalling platform that allows you to literally walk away from someone as they are talking to you – and which makes it perfectly clear that that is what you’re doing – which I think is something of a watershed moment in online interactions and ought to be baked into EVERYTHING from hereon in (in fact, can someone add some sort of ‘flounce’ emote into this? Ta).
• The NHS Charity Auction at Bonhams: This closes in 12 days from the time of writing, and OH MY GOD are there some amazing lots on here. Obviously the main thing here is raising money in support of our health services but, if I’m honest, that noble aim pales into insignificance when compared to the fact that someone is going to buy the right to have lunch with JOAN FCUKING COLLINS and CHRISTOPHER FCUKING BIGGINS (and, I think, Joan’s husband, but let’s ignore him) at Claridge’s, with a suite thrown in for you to continue the afterparty in. Just imagine the stories – now that would be a way to celebrate the end of lockdown, elbows-deep in the trough with Biggins. There’s loads of other stuff in here, though, if that for some reason doesn’t have you reaching for the remortgage button; it’s all towards the spenny side, but there’s some genuinely-interesting art that one wouldn’t ordinarily get the opportunity to bid on (few Kapoors, and one thing specifically that I am totally bidding on and which I am not telling you about in case you get any ideas), and some truly mind-boggling ‘offers’. I know he founded Carphone Warehouse and is VERY RICH, but lunch (and ‘business consultancy’) with John Caudwell for a starting bid of £10k? On the other hand, ‘get cnuted with Helen Lederer at the Groucho’ could, I think, be a lot of fun, and is currently only at £180. SO MANY GREAT (odd) THINGS IN HERE!
• 3d Reddit: This website turns Reddit into a 3d-navigable art gallery, with all the posts arranged like pictures on its pristine white walls. Which, when you click this link and it takes you to the default sub (/r/pics), is really rather soothing; you navigate with WASD and the mouse to look around, and I think that there’s VR support for the three of you who’ve invested in the tech. What’s even better (not better: odder, stranger, more unsettling) is when you select your own subreddit to browse in this style – add ‘/r/XXXXXXXXXXX’ to the end of the url, where XXXXXXXXXXXXX is the name of any subReddit of your choosing, and it will pull the images from said sub. Which means that browsing /r/monstercocks becomes a very different sort of experience and, to me, a very funny one (I perhaps need to leave the house).
• Goat 2 Meeting: This is a fcuking great idea and one that I am hugely annoyed didn’t even begin to speculate about the possibility of crossing my mind before I saw this site. Sweet Farm is a, er, farm – a non-profit ‘sanctuary’, apparently, designed to educate people as to the evils of factory farming and the like – which whilst the pandemic is on is offering a truly wonderful and unique service; to whit, for a small donation to the farm, they will get one of their goats to join one of your videomeetings. “Oh, hold on, someone’s trying to dial in; it’s probably Angelic-” “MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH” – I mean, what’s not to enjoy about that? Alternatively you can pay a bit of extra cash and get a guided Zoom tour around the farm to meet the animals – which is lovely, but, honestly, fcuk that and just book a goat to attend all your company meetings from here til this is over. Based on my professional interaction with colleagues over the past four weeks, there is no way that the caprine insights you’ll be privy to won’t put at least three of your co-workers to shame, intellectually-speaking.
• Avatarify: Unfortunately, my resident AI video wizardry expert Shardcore informs me that this requires access to some not-insignificant computing power to run, meaning that it will be out of the reach of most of you; for the few of you who have a Cray (guess my age!) vibrating noisily next to you, though, this will be the best thing to happen to you all week. Avatarify is software which lets you map a digital avatar to your face and then use that as a live ‘mask’ on videocalls – so you could dial into your next Teams call with, say, Elon Musk’s face rather than your own, with said face tracking your eye and mouth movements, and broad expressions, with a troubling degree of fidelity. This links to the Github repo for the code, but scroll down and you’ll see some examples of it in action – it’s jaw-dropping, honestly, and is another of those ‘hm, I wonder how long it will take til there’s a halfway-convincing browser-based version?’ things that make me simultaneously quite excited and quite miserable about the future. PREDICTION: in not-too-long there will be a blossoming market in the creation of bespoke avatars for videochat just like this, in the same way in which digital artists can now rake it in for creating depictions of people’s avatars, fursonas, etc, online, except this will be semi-mainstream and a lot more fashion. Digital masks designed by McQueen? A limited-edition SUPREME-themed white mask responsive face with the logo across the cheeks and forehead? You can see this coming too, right?
• Boomer.Email: MSCHF’s latest, this is a simple and only funny-ish gag, but I forgive them as they have brought me a LOT of joy this year already. Boomer.Email is a newsletter MSCHF will send out sporadically, featuring some hand-curated content shared by ACTUAL boomers on ACTUAL email threads. Which on the one hand is literally just laughing at old people, but on the other is basically the last thing that GenZ appear to have left so let’s not take that away from them too, eh? Oh, as an aside, I have heard three separate conversations this week about ‘The Corona Generation’ or ‘Generation C’ or ‘Corennials’ (no, really), so prepare yourself for this because.
• Secret Sofa: I don’t like Secret Cinema as a thing – it was a nice idea, if not my cup of tea, that over the past couple of years has become everything I hate about ‘formerly-cool-but-now-popular-in-Clapham’ stuff in London – overpriced, oversubscribed, unimaginative and grifty. Still, this – their LOCKDOWN PIVOT – is a cute idea (and the brand partnership is spot-on); sign up to the email list and get bombarded with spam til you d…no, hang on, that’s not it. Sign up to the email list and get alerted every Tuesday to that week’s ‘watch along at home’ movie classic; you’ll get suggestions for dress-up things you can do, games you can play, food and drink you could consume that’s suitably-themed, all that sort of jazz. I presume there’ll be some sort of ‘let’s all chat on this hashtag!’-type community gubbins too, or Discord chats, and if you like the idea of watching Withnail & I or something similarly ‘cult’ with a bunch of other people simultaneously then it might well be up your street.
• Quarantine Penpals: Lockdown letter-roulette! Except, sadly, this is a US-only thing at the moment, which momentarily bummed me out. Still, I don’t think there’s any reason why you can’t just sign up with a totally made-up US postal address and thereby send oblique, puzzling anonymous postcards to anyone else in the site’s database – whilst I’d hope that they do a moderate degree of moderation in order to prevent death threats winging their way across the country on cheery postcards, I reckon you can probably get away with quite a lot of boderline-unsettling prose. I was thinking of something along the lines of “The men have awoken; the time is now. Meet at the crossroads – you know the one – and bring the shovel. The Unearthing is upon us”, but you feel free to use your imagination and see where it takes you.
• Vemos: I think I put Netflix Party in here a month ago, but if for whatever reason you’re not a Netflix user but still fancy the idea of co-watching films with a friend over the web then this will be of use. VEMOS offers the ability to watch a film or show concurrently with another user on separate screens, with sidebar video chat and other gubbins. The site works with Netflix but also Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube, and as a way for people to watch stuff with kids especially sounds rather lovely.
• TeenTechCity of Tomorrow: Many, many years ago, when I was still allowed to speak to clients, I worked with the Tech City initiative in London; one of the things we did was a partnership with Teen Tech, which is an organisation designed to help get kids in the UK into STEM subjects and which is fronted by Maggie Philbin, who old people will remember as one of the hosts of Tomorrow’s World and who I was genuinely starstruck by and was LOVELY. Anway, this is by way of a sideline to Teen Tech – if you’ve got kids of between 8-13, and they are interested in building and making stuff, you might want to get involved: “Working to the brief of “smarter, kinder, safer” young people, individually or in small teams, have to design and construct architectural models of buildings to sit on the footprint of an A4 card – but buildings can go out as well as up. Together they develop ideas for the connected city and consider how to use technology and the internet of things to improve how we will live, work and play in the future. Once we’ve received your registration details, we will be in touch with a link to download the Parent Pack, along with details on how you can take part in one of our Live Build Days online!” Worth a look, could be fun.
• Zooooom: A screensaver which mimics Zoom, pulled together from lots of people who’ve submitted recordings of themselves as though on a work call for the collective lols. It’s moderately-amusing for a few minutes, though it’s amazing how quickly after that you realise that you are beginning to genuinely hate seeing people’s faces when arranged in a grid format. Still, potentially useful if you want to convince your family that you’re on work calls even when you’re not (no idea why you might want to do that, I’m sure you have your reasons).
• Grain: Other than the Zoom music video from last week, we’re (or, more accurately, I am) yet to see any hugely-interesting uses of videocalling as a medium; we can only be a few days or a week at most away from the first film which takes place entirely via a mass, at-home videocall, no? If you’re interested in perhaps exploring this sort of thing – or, maybe more accurately, you’re instead interested in piecing together a post-lockdown supercut of your colleagues looking and sounding like the remedial untermenschen you are increasingly certain they in fact are for when this is all over – then Grain might be worth a look; it’s early-access only right now, but it’s a Zoom plugin that lets you record, edit, share clips, etc; which, actually, if you’re planning a new career as a videocalling comedian or magician or something (please God no) and want to capture reactions to your ZINGERS, etc, then this could be hugely useful. If nothing else this could end up ushering in a whole new era of jump-scare pranks. Ooh, there’s an idea. If we’re still here in October, someone remember to credit me for this idea.
• Audiorooms: For those of you, like me, who find the prospect of being on video this much a calvary the like of which you’ve never before experienced, this service lets you create private ‘rooms’ for audio-only communication for upto 5 people. If you’re on a crap internet connection (or are just deeply body-dysmorphic) and want a lo-fi way to connect with people, this is potentially useful.
• Help Identify Spiral Galaxies: I’ve featured several projects on collaborative piecework website Zooniverse before – the idea is that they tend to collect projects that require a lot of repetitious image classification by humans to achieve a wider good. In this case, that image classification involves helping to identify and track the shape of spiral galaxies around the cosmos – the site shows you a succession of images of galaxies and you just have to trace around the shape of its spiral formations to help train an AI to better spot them using machine learning. Fine, it’s a bit dull, but it’s also a very soothing way to switch off your brain for an hour whilst probably doing some vague good, and that’s not to be sniffed at right now.
• XOXO Fest: I’ve mentioned XOXO Fest on here before – it’s run by occasional Curios reader Andy Baio, and it’s widely-considered one of the best festivals of ‘stuff about web culture and digital things’ out there. Under lockdown, the Festival has made its archive of talks freely available to everyone – if you’re after a selection of interesting, discursive, wide-ranging and genuinely smart lectures, delivered by a bunch of names which will tick a lot of your extremely-online boxes, you’re in luck. This is a really, really good selection of interesting and informative stuff, I promise, and very much worth exploring.
• Storytag: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is made by my friend Fritha (and some other people who I don’t know), but I promise I would have included it anyway as it’s such a lovely idea. The premise is hugely simple, and is basically an online version of exquisite corpse; you sign up, and will get occasional emails prompting you to contribuute a few hundred words to an existing story; when the stories are done, after 5 segments have been penned, you’ll get an email so you can read the final piece. It’s designed for kids – the idea is that parents sign up with their emails and then let their children know when it’s their turn to write a bit – and should be treated as such; honestly, though, it’s a great concept and the site, whilst simple, works perfectly. Give it a go, tell your friends.

By Laura Wächter

NEXT, HAVE THIS LOVELY, DREAMY, AMBIENT SELECTION COMPILED BY BRODER IBRAHIM!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR GOVE’S KID BECAUSE, REALLY, IMAGINE HAVING THOSE PARENTS, PT.2:

• Ghibli Zoompapers: Videocall backgrounds from Studio Ghibli – all official and stuff, from their actual website! Useful if you want to ensure that you are correctly identified as ‘the one who’s fcuking obssessed with Manga’ in all future workplace interactions.
• Vittles: I featured an essay from this a few weeks back without realising it was a newsletter – it is, and if you like food and food writing then it’s pretty much a must-subscribe. (I think) Run by self-described beef king of London food Jonathan Nunn, it’s not very old but is already one of my favourite places to read good, passionate, non-standard writing about food and food culture. Really interesting, regularly excellent (so far at least), and worth a click and a sub if you’re someone for whom the absence of restaurants and eating out is weighing heavy.
• The Webpage: This would be loads better were it customisable (says the entitled linkmonkey – FFS MATT YOU DON’T MAKE ANYTHING SHUT UP!), but as a proof-of-concept-type experiment it’s rather fun. It’s an RSS reader, essentially, but arranged to graphically reflect the design of a newspaper front page, with feeds arranged into columns, slightly grainy art style (the way it renders images is GREAT), and thematically-arranged sections. Honestly, I reckon there are people who would pay cashmoney for the ability to make their own version of these.
• The OpenAI Microscope: On the one hand, I don’t really understand what these are purporting to show me; on the other, they look cool and that’s basically the only criteria for inclusion in this sh1tshow, as if I limited myself to ‘stuff I actually understood’ this would be a very short newsletter. And, er, almost certainly a better one. Hang on, is that the secret?! Anyway, the OpenAI Microscope is a visualisation of a series of different machine learning models, seeking to graphically-demonstrate how neural networks, well, work. That’s about the point at which my brain starts to slide off the edges of this, like so much fried egg off hot car bonnet, but if you’re better at understanding the complex esotericism of machine ‘thinking’ then this is worth a look (as it is if you simply want to look at some quite-pretty visualisations of what a computer’s ‘brain’ looks like).
• Burning Man Is Going Virtual: Every year I mention Burning Man, and every year I say something like “it looks sort-of interesting, but the idea of being physically trapped and quite possibly on a lot of drugs for several days with those people makes my skin and teeth itch”; this year, though, Burning Man is going VIRTUAL, meaning perhaps I might try and check it out after all (that way I can overdose on mushrooms at home!). No clear details on how it’s going to happen, but here’s the spiel: “We are, however, going to build Black Rock City in The Multiverse. That’s the theme for 2020 so we’re going to lean into it. Who’d have believed it would come true? We look forward to welcoming you to Virtual Black Rock City 2020. We’re not sure how it’s going to come out; it will likely be messy and awkward with mistakes. It will also likely be engaging, connective, and fun.” Personally-speaking I can think of no more Burning Man place to host this than in Second Life, but let’s see.
• DJ 3dio: Another ‘watch this YouTube video – TOGETHER!’ service, but one which charmingly lets you and whoever you want to share the experience with exist as tiny little cutesy avatars in a 3d-navigable space in which whatever video you pick appears as a sort of giant floating screen you can run around in front of. There’s literally no practical benefit to this at all, but there’s something gently wonderful about seeing your little 3d person gazing up in (what I imagine to be) awe at whatever you play up there.
• False Signatures: Is there anything more irritating in the modern world than having to print, sign, scan and return documents? Yes, lots of stuff, but most of that can’t be fixed whereas with this specific problem someone’s managed to create a workaround! Here’s the code for a sneaky bit of script which just needs you to do the sign&scan thing once and which will then let you CHEAT THE SYSTEM forever by adding it electronically to PDFs. Obviously Web Curios bears no legal responsibility whatsoever for any long-term consequences of your legal documents being rendered invalid as a result of fraudulently-applied signatures (does my saying this make it legally true? Let’s hope so!).
• All of the Online Family Games: I have no idea who has compiled this, but they are a lovely person and deserve some sort of small reward – this is a GDoc with thematically-arranged links to all sorts of family-friendly games to play online, from chess and chequers and draughts, to trivia and word games, to puzzles and more videogamey-type things – honestly, this is a fcuking GODSEND if you feel like you or your family or your kids have reached the end of the internet, and for finding age-appropriate family entertainments to enjoy together (or to slowly raise the temperature under the simmering pot of boiling domestic rage, either/or).
• The Quarantine House Selector Randomiser: Given its prevalence this week, it’s entirely possible that this meme might well be dead by the time you read this; still, doesn’t mean you can’t rinse it on Facebook! This will automatically-generate a selection of quarantine houseshares full of famouses for you to choose between; sadly it’s American, and I am quite bad at famouses, meaning i recognise approximately 40% of these; someone ought to make a FIAT500-Twitter-friendly UK version of this – sample famouses to include Dean Gaffney, Jamila Jamil, Joe Suggs, Actual Suggs and Lindsay Dawn Mckenzie – for about a week of vague, traffic-related joy.
• Which Is The Best Thing?: This website presents you with two things – you have to decide which of them is the best. That’s it – the idea is that, eventually, as a result of millions and millions and billions of these choices, we’ll end up with a final, defined, once-and-for-all ranking of STUFF, from best to worst, and who can argue against that as a noble aim? NO FCUKER, that’s who! At the moment it’s asking me to choose between ‘thread’ and ‘coal mines’, to give you an idea of the sort of crazy dilemmas it places you in.
• Elevator Party: Do you miss small talk? No, of course you don’t, because we’re now forced to do it on every single fcuking call, while we wait for everyone to show up. Look, can we not just accept that we have no greater desire to talk to most of the rest of the world than we did a month ago, and that that includes our colleagues, and that, honestly, whilst I hope you and yours are doing ok that doesn’t mean I want to spend any more time discussing the weather or last night’s telly with you than I did when we were forced to share meatspace? CAN WE??? Ahem. Anyway, Elevator Party is billed as a ‘smalltalk simulator’, offering you the now-exotic-seeming experience of being stuck in a lift with someone and trying to engage them in inane chatter. It’s not particularly deep, but as a nice reminder of the things that we should perhaps be grateful not to have to experience it has its merits.
• The Pitt Rivers Museum: Absolutely my favourite museum in all of the world, the Pitt Rivers in Oxford is an absolute marvel and I recommend it unreservedly. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s effectively a massive, sprawling cabinet of curiosities, set over two floors, which includes everything from tribal masks to trepanned skulls, terrifying-looking weapons to Inuit snowshoes, drinking gourds to penis-sheathes; it is hands-down one of the most interesting and packed spaces in the UK, and this link lets you do a tour around it and WOW I could spend hours on this. Seriously, give it a go, you will be mesmerised (and find at least one thing that makes you think slightly less of humanity as a species; seriously, some of the weapons are so imaginatively horrible they boggle the mind rather).
• Apples and Snakes: Apples and Snakes is an organisation which organises and promotes spoken word around the UK; each Wednesday evening for the next few weeks they’re doing readings and performances by some of the UK’s best and brightest. A great company doing great work, there are some superb names coming up in the next few weeks; worth diarising if you’re into poetry or simply curious.
• Russians Recreate Classic Paintings: A whole (Russian) Facebook Group dedicated to people recreating classic artworks from the comfort of their own home (dacha); you will have seen some of these collected on roundup sites, but it seems like a friendly enough community should you wish to get involved yourself.
• The Quarantine Concerts: ESS is the Experimental Sound Studio, which has existed in Chicago since the mid-80s; it’s something of a storied institution, and every night for the foreseeable is putting on Quarantine Concerts by a range of artists which include a massively-eclectic range of people from singers and musicians I’ve never heard of to people like Thurston Moore. I know lockdown gigs are ten a penny, but this is one of the more interesting and musically-diverse setups I’ve seen in the past few weeks and looks like it might be worth a listen.
• Musicals On YouTube: I once wrote a musical, you know, with some friends; it was called ‘Payday!’, and it was set on a Friday night/Monday morning in an office not a million miles away from the PR company at which we all worked, and the songs were objectively pretty good (I had very little to do with those bits, apart from the lyrics to a few of them – you will never know what you’ve missed by not getting to hear ‘Sex in the Office’, you poor things). Despite this, I fcuking hate musical theatre as a rule – still, if you feel the opposite way to me, you might like this link – every Friday at 7pm GMT a new recording of a musical will be put online for 48h, for free. Tonight, it’s Phantom – if this is your sort of thing, go for your life.
• Pillweights: These are concrete paperweights, made and shipped from Australia, in the shape of a variety of different ecstasy pills, the idea being that you can pick your ‘favourite’ to have a permanent, stylish reminder of the days back when you used to be ‘cool’. Leaving aside the fact that the designs on pills were only representative of their composition and likely effect for about a week after launch, after which they could have been any old sh1t (see: my friend Dave, who always used to say things like ‘this batch of mitzos is really smacky’, as though a) he had ever done smack; or b) there was ever ANY consistency in what that week’s grab-bag of bottom-of-the-barrel chems might make you feel/do/think/vomit), or the fact that owning one of these is basically a ‘Take Me To Your Dealer’ poster for people with a Dezeen login, some of you might think they look nice. Gustibus non est disputandum, etc.
• Water: Finally this week, a small gametoyartthing in which prolific creator of artygamestuff Pippin Barr presents a gallery of different water effects as presented in a range of small 8-bit games created in the Pico engine which will be familiar to any of you who ever click the links at the end of the miscellaneous section of Curios (like where we are now); it’s soothing and oddly-meditative, and you can dip in and play the games in question if you want, and, honestly, if you need a bit of time to just sit and zone out, this is a really nice little way of so doing.

By Craig Oldham

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, A CHEERFUL, HOUSILY-DANCEABLE MIX BY JAN KRUEGER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Cinematic Literature: Only one Turmblr this week, but it’s a great one – Cinematic Literature celebrates the appearance of novels in cinema, screencapping shots of books in movies and sharing them here. If you fancy picking your next read based on how stylish it looked on celluloid, start here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Bichopalo: The Insta account of a Spanish museum who’s recording a new album using all sorts of wonderful, beautifully-constructed, home-engineered tape-and-wood-type instruments; I can’t do them justice at all, just click the link and look at how BEAUTIFUL this all is (and how great it all sounds).
• Tape Measures: Collecting photos of the ways in which tape is being used across the world to help enforce distancing measures. Weird, beautiful, and the first time I’ve realised what a potent visual signifier of These Times We Live In we will all see this sort of thing as in the future.
• Proyectos Ultravioleta: Proyectos Ultravioleta is a museum in Guatemala. Its Insta feed has gone full weird since lockdown, and I am very much enjoying it.’
• LEGO Lost At Sea: A weird example of how brand affinity manifests itself – whilst I will always and forever refuse to capitalise or ™ the term ‘photoshop’ (IN YOUR FACE ADOBE YOU PRICKS), I will simultaneously slavishly obey LEGO’s diktat that their brand need always be in block caps. WHY? Anyway, unrelated to questions of brand identity is this Insta feed which presents beautifully-composed shots of LEGO which washes up ashore, much of it thought lost from the wreck of a Japanese cargo ship which was struck by a rogue wave in the mid-90s. Lovely, beautiful pollution.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting: This has very much done the rounds this week, and I’ve seen it almost universally-lauded; I’m a little less stunned by its brilliance (the writing’s not totally my cup of tea, and it’s a bit too US-focused to feel universally-applicable), but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here about how, when/if we all eventually start to return to whatever version of ‘normal’ we aim for, we are likely to see a concerted effort among certain parts of the world to chivvy us back along to the pre-pandemic state of business as though nothing had happened. It’s interesting how this week I’ve started to feel the first stirrings of corporate impatience at how long *gestures* this is all taking, and how we probably need to start moving onto recovery and business as usual chat…not totally sure that that’s how things are going to play out.
• Supply Chains: Slightly-technical but broadly-interesting exploration of what the pandemic and its aftermath might mean for supplychains, and in particular the recent model of ‘get everything shipped from China as that’s where manufacturing is all centralised’; effectively it posits a shift from this sort of model as the standard go-to for the majority of goods production and distribution to a more ad-hoc, agile and small-scale model based on D2C commerce. Honestly, if you ignore all the actual horror and real-person dread that surrounds everything right now, there are so many questions to be asked about how we can, should and could tweak systems and processes to be better, fairer, kinder and cheaper; every single element of industry and business could stand to be interrogated right now. Why not?
• Spatial Software: Abslutely one of the most fascinating things i read this week, this article looks at the concept of ‘spatial’ software – that is, software which offers an element of (the illusion or impression of) physical space alongside other elements. So, for example, that chat website I linked to up there, which lets you move around in virtual space and use that to determine which user or groups of users you can chat to – or something like Minecraft, or Second Life – which I found as I was reading this was in fact referenced in the piece. Honestly, this isn’t hugely easy to get into, but is so conceptually-fascinating; do make the effort to get past the first section and it becomes genuinely interesting; this might well change the way in which you think about the utility and potential of virtual spaces (though, equally, it might not!).
• Why Do We Listen To New Music?: On the neuroscience of aural novelty; this piece, in Pitchfork, explores what it is that happens at a neurological level when we listen to music, and how that changes dependent on our familiarity with said music. Fascinating, not least on the concept of neuroplasticity and how the pandemic and lockdown are potentially hugely-valuable opportunities to maybe rewire a bit of your mental circuitboard should you be so minded (obviously this only applies to people like me who are living the ‘no kids in my prison’ lockdown dream; those of you with children to cope with, feel free to ignore all this self-optimisation w4nkery and focus on keeping yourself sane and them just the right side of feral).
• Animal Crossing Is Political: And so, the Animal Crossing thinkpieces began to roll in this week – evidently they’ve all wrung Tiger King dry and so are moving on to the next cultural juggernaut of lockdown. This piece is a look at how the game’s mechanics embody certain specific politico-economic ideologies or tropes; it’s not quite a ‘Tom Nook’s a fcuking capitalist cop pigdog’ hatchet-job, but it does raise a few interesting points about what it teaches younger people about economics and society. It also, though, feels rather like the author ends the piece desperately struggling to find some sort of broader societal relevance to the whole thing, which is, on reflection, perhaps why there haven’t yet been too many of these thinkpieces.
• I Am Not Relaxed by Animal Crossing: I found this piece in WIRED more interesting than the last one, mainly as it helped concretise something I find slightly weird and troubling about the AC phenomenon as expressed online and across social media; effectively the game is a small microcosm simulation in which the player completes tasks to unlock rewards and new gameplay experiences. That’s it. Except the game is built elegantly enough that it allows for strategy and tactical experimentation in order to optimise the completion of tasks in order to accrue the greatest number of rewards at pace; which then basically turns it into a min/maxing exercise, of the sort you might attempt during the automation of rote process in programming, say, or when you’re ploughing through a boring task at work and want to work out how to do so most efficiently. Much of what I see online around the game effectively takes the act of gameplay and attempts to spreadsheet it into efficiency oblivion, which I find a fascinating reflection of a certain type of younger person’s mindset at the end of the first quintile of the 21C – hustle? Grift? Life optimisation? Biotracking? Do you see? I don’t quite know where I’m getting with this, which perhaps suggests that the answer is ‘nowhere’, but it feels like there’s something in this.
• The Rise of the Virtual Gallery: An interesting article looking at which aspects of the museumgoing experience currently work better and worse in virtual space, from the presentation of works to their overall curation and everything inbetween. If you work in or around digital culture, this is a useful read on what’s currently considered ‘state of the art’.
• Corona and Arab Pop: This is JOYOUS – a wonderful article taking you on a tour through some of the Arab world’s musical responses to COVID-19, from the insanely-catchy Egyptian ‘wash your hands’ songs, through perfectly-coiffed Iraqis, all the way to some genuine bangers from Sudan, with a healthy selection of the referenced tracks embedded throughout. Honestly, tell me you don’t want to hear this number: “the story reaches a climax with the boy, who the singer explains wanted to travel and planned to come back and get married eventually and settle down, calls his dad and says, “Dad, I’m sorry to tell you that you won’t be hearing my voice ever again, I’m sorry to hurt you like this… I got Corona, and there’s no cure.” BRUTAL.
• The Etiquette of Videodating: This is all about the current, nascent do’s and don’ts of videodating – do you ‘lock’ the room on Houseparty or does that feel a bit weird? Do you have music on that you share? Who chooses the playlist? Is it rude to plaintively ask ‘look, all you need to do is help a bit, you don’t even need to look at the camera?’ towards the end when things start to get steamy? Oh, ok, fine, it doesn’t address the last of those, but if you want a brief primer on how people are attempting to bring dating kicking and screaming into the pandemic lyf, this is it.
• The Virtual Nightclubs of Zoom: If this article proves anything it’s that there will ALWAYS be people stupid enough to pay a premium for a good or service, however rubbish that good or service is, if you place it behind a big barrier that reads “VIP BOTTLE SERVICE”. This is a piece about nightclubs setting up parties in Zoom and charging people money for the access codes; the idea is that the clientele will be exclusive and beautiful, so you can pay $20 to spend an hour sitting in a virtual room typing “where the modelz at honeyz holla at me $$$$” to a roomfull of other similarly-desperate men while a procession of suspiciously-plastic-faced ‘models’ rotate in and out every 10 minutes. This is mental, and quite dispiriting (though not as dispiriting as virtual strip clubs, oh me oh my).
• When Chinese Streamers Fall In Love: Honestly, were this not from the generally-reputable South China Morning Post I would have thought it was made-up; I don’t think I have ever read something in a newspaper that read so much like something from a near-future-scifi novel (specifically Super Sad True Love Story – look, there’s a reason I always wang on about that book; it’s because it predicts the world we live in and which is just about to come with a degree of prescient accuracy that is legitimately terrifying). It’s the story of a female Chinese livestreamer, how she got in with the ‘in-crowd’ of fashionable young streamers, and how the web then chewed her up and spat her out, and it contains so many details that are just DIZZYING; I mean, read this: “With both their phones live streaming the evening, Jiang and Nai Nai cruised into the trendiest part of Shanghai, where they met up with another pair of live-streamers – who also arrived by white Ferrari – and ate dumplings. While Nai Nai was unmoved by Jiang, she was overwhelmed by the success he brought her. In a few short hours, her followers shot up to more than 12,000, a number that would generate enough income to pay her living expenses in China’s glittering city.” I have read this book, honestly.
• Movies Based On Articles: You want another 25 bits of bona-fide classic longform journalism? GREAT! Here’s a list of pieces from the past 30-40 years which have been adapted by Hollywood – so if you want to read the original writings that birthed Almost Famous, say, or Adaptation, or Boogie Nights, here they all are. SUCH a great collection, every single one of these that I’ve read has been superb.
• Confessions of an Obsolete Actor: An account by Becca Brown of what it’s like to be a minor part in a hit film when you’re a kid; not great, turns out! Brown’s an engaging writer, and her story of what happened after she was in School of Rock is pleasingly un-self-pitying and matter-of-fact.
• The Darien Gap: Superb journalism – both written and photographic – from California Sunday Magazine, telling the story of migrants attempting to arrive in America by crossing the Darien Gap, a jungle pass that covers the Colombia-Panama border. So much of this is striking, but the thing that most struck me was the international profile of migrants; South Americans are mentioned, but the main protagonists of the story are Cameroonian and Pakistani, which gives you some idea of the motivation these people feel to make a new life for themselves.
• What Happened To Lee?: Warning – this made me cry quite a bit, but I am possibly a bit closer to someone with a neurodegenerative illness than I hope you are so it might not do the same to you. Lee Holloway was by all accounts a genius-level coder and a generally nice guy, who was the main tech brain behind internet giant Cloudflare and who, following surgery on a heart issue, became a completely different person. This is about Lee, his wife and his colleagues, and the condition that has seen the bits of Lee that make him ‘him’ slowly being whittled away; it’s very, very well-written, but it’s also incredibly sad.
• The World’s Most Insane Coffee Drinker: This, by contrast, is very, very funny. I don’t normally feature stuff that can be filed under ‘hatchet job’, but I’ll make an exception for this; this essay by Dan Ozzi takes a frankly-obsessional look at the coffee drinking habits of the New York Times’ Jerry Staltz, the paper’s Senior Art Critic. It’s fair to say that Staltz’s habits make Ozzi…angry, but it’s the joy and forensic detail he takes in breaking down why Staltz’s coffee-drinking habits make him a bit of an ar$ehole that make this piece borderline-perfect.
• American Humbug: The New York Review of Books reviews a couple of biographies of celebrated circus impresario and massive fabulist PT Barnum (people who know him only from ‘The Greatest Showman’, WOW are you in for an unpleasant surprise!) – this is wildly entertaining, as any account of Barnum’s bound to be, but also offers a few interesting reflections on how Barnum in some respects can be said to have ushered in certain aspects of modernity, not least in his attitude and approach to the press. This paragraph in particular struck me as very apt right now, in an era of mast-burning and darkly-muttered conspiracies about the ‘msm’ and secret government cabals and DID BORIS REALLY DIE??: “The great danger to democracy today comes not from marks slow to spot a humbug but from a public made cynical to the point of believing that everything, and everyone, is a humbug, especially the humorless class of credentialed experts whom Barnum took such joy in ridiculing. In the end, though, it’s a distinction without a difference. Too credulous or too incredulous—you’re a sucker either way.”
• 10 Years of Miracles: Ten years ago, I was working at H+K and the great Pampers crisis that was about to ruin ¾ of my year was just starting, and I remember EXACTLY the day on which I first heard ICP’s ‘Miracles’ and how happy it made me – this is a look back at that STONE COLD CLASSIC a decade on, and, honestly, if you have any recollection of the track then you owe yourself to read this (there are some CHOICE quotes, too, including this absolutely truth-bomb: ““Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?” Violent J responded to Jones’s video in a fall 2010 profile in the Guardian. “A fcuking elephant is a miracle. If people can’t see a fcuking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fcuking miracle. So is a giraffe.” See? See the delivery? These people are legitimate geniuses.
• The Female Gays: A gorgeous short story by Ali Smith, whose writing I adore; I think in many respects this is perfect – short, sweet, tart and precision-wrought.
• So Much Cooking: Finally this week, this is five years old but resurfaced this week due to the fact that it feels, well, a bit uncanny. So Much Cooking is a short story from November 2015 by Naomi Kritzer, in which she writes from the point of view of a food blogger writing from a world in which a flu pandemic is just starting to look like a possibility…obviously if you’re feeling anxious about everything then this probably isn’t one for you to hunker down with, but otherwise the prescience here is jaw-dropping. Let’s…let’s hope that not everything in here comes true, though, eh?

By Vadim Solovyov

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK FEATURES ONLY TWO VIDEOS BECAUSE THERE WASN’T THAT MUCH THIS WEEK THAT GRABBED M TBH)!:

1. First up, the latest from Manga – as ever, it’s fcuking GREAT. This is ‘Not Around’. featuring P Money:

1. And last up, I couldn’t not feature this. Happy 10 years of miracles, everybody! Oh, and BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND, TRY NOT TO GO STIR CRAZY AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK FOR MORE LINKS AND WORDS AND STUFF BUT TIL THEN TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND I WANT THE BEST FOR YOU AND I WILL WORRY ABOUT YOU TIL YOU’RE BACK THANKS FOR READING AND CLICKING AND STAY SAFE AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE BYE BYE!

Ordinarily I don’t do these on Good Friday, what with the fact that, in my head at least, the only audience for Curios is people so terminally-bored at work that they’ll deign to read even this poorly-birthed mess of stuff if it means that the time in front of the Powerpoint will pass quicker. This year, though, given noone has any idea what date it is or what day it is, and given we are all desperately trying to pass the time in any way we can (NOT LIKE THAT THOUGH FFS), I thought I would make an exception.

BREAK OUT THE SIMNEL CAKE! NAIL THE SON OF GOD TO A TREE! IT’S THE SPECIAL, PASCAL EDITION OF WEB CURIOS!

Yes, that’s right, much like Jesus I too have spent this morning traipsing up my own personal calvary; fine, he might have been burdened with a massive wooden cross that was to be the final instrument of his mortal death, and, fine, he might also have been burdened with the not-insignificant psychic load of his simultaneous status as a tripartite deity and an actual human, but did HE have to wrangle over 100 links into some sort of semblance of order and coherence? DID HE FCUK! Also, I have outlived Jesus by seven years and counting, and therefore I am better. 

(NB – let me here briefly apologise for the blasphemy; to any of you of the Christian faith who might still be reading, I wish you a very happy Easter and intend no offense. Rest assured that my Italian grandfather is condemning my mortal soul to hell as I type). 

Anyway, here we are again. IT is still happening; we are all increasingly bored of IT, we will get through IT together. Now, though, find a quiet place, get comfortable and prepare to have a moment of transcendental joy as I once more attempt to fit all of the week’s internet into your head via the medium of what increasingly feels like some sort of word-sledgehammer. 

I, as ever, am Matt; this, as ever, is Web Curios; please take care and have a nice weekend and try not to behave like a total selfish cnut should you leave the house.

***OH AND ONE MORE THING PLEASE CLICK HERE AND SPEND THREE QUID TO PURCHASE A COPY OF THE EXCELLENT NEW IMPERICA MAGAZINE WHICH CONTAINS LOTS OF EXCELLENT WORDS, ABOUT ALL SORTS OF THINGS LIKE ART AND DESIGN AND MUSIC AND FEMINISM AND AI AND WHICH FRANKLY IS SUCH GOOD VALUE YOU’D BE MAD NOT TO***

By Nancy Fouts

FIRST UP, A TYPICALLY-MEANDERING AND ODDITY-PACKED NEW 80-MINUTE MIX FROM BERLIN-BASED VINYL-TICKLING INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH APPLAUDS JACK DORSEY FOR HIS CHARITABLE DONATION – NO, REALLY, IT IS A GOOD THING – BUT WHICH WOULD EQUALLY LIKE TO EXIST IN A WORLD WHERE IT’S NOT NECESSARILY IN ONE MAN’S GIFT TO DONATE $1BN AND THAT STILL BE ONLY 25% OF THEIR INCOME, OR WHERE THIS HAPPENS INSTEAD OF THEIR COMPANY PAYING, YOU KNOW, REASONABLE AMOUNTS OF TAX ON ITS GLOBAL OPERATIONS:

• Facebook Expands Data-for-Good Offering: It’s really hard on me, all this ‘write nice things about the companies you’ve spent the past decade slagging off’ stuff. Facebook, again, continues to behave like a big, responsible corporate, now expanding all the datastuff it makes available to include (anonymised, obvs) location change data from across the world, to help researchers analyse how factors such as human movement within defined geographical areas are contributing to the spread of COVID. Genuinely useful, although I would like to point out that this is just a benign application of the fact that YOUR PHONE AND EVERYTHING ON IT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF THE DAY, which is still creepy enough to be worth mentioning if you ask me. Still, anyone working in or around data will find this stuff interesting – I also wonder to what extent this sort of information is going to be used as a slight punitive/shaming mechanism in the washup, with countries or peoples which can be shown to have been less stringent in their adoption of travel restrictions and social distancing being somehow censured post-virus. SO many interesting things to look forward to and speculate on!
• FB Launches Quiet Mode: Odd in some ways that Facebook chooses to launch a ‘turn off notifications for a set period’ setting for its main app just as literally everyone earth has decided to stop caring about how long we’re staring at our screens for because the alternative is looking out of the window and that is simply too miserable to contemplate. Anyway, that’s what it’s done – perhaps worth looking at if you’re worried that your parents are getting a little bit too into that “5G COVID VAMPIRES STOLE MADDIE!” Facebook Group. It’s not necessarily new stuff – these are all features that have been more-or-less available in the general ‘time spent on Facebook’ settings of the app – but it’s had a refresh and a bit of a PR boost so, well, here it is.
• Facebook Launches Tuned, for Couples: Are YOU in a couple? Are you perhaps distant from each other? Do you want a channel where you can send each other messages and gifs and photos and lovenotes and those unpleasantly-sticky videos that you know it would be disastrous to ever allow to be seen by the eyes of another human? Quite possibly, and yet it’s unlikely that that you need another one, because this is what literally every single other chat or messaging app lets you do! Still, that hasn’t stopped Facebook’s experimental NEP skunkworks from punting this new product out of the door this week; I have literally no idea why anyone would choose to engage with this, unless they had a very specific desire to share literally all the data about their romantic interactions with Mark Zuckerberg, but perhaps that thought adds an extra frisson to your filthy exchanges. You perverts.
• Facebook Gaming Launches Tournaments: Another week, another feature added to Facebook which feels like an aggressive move towards one of its theoretical platform rivals; last week it added all that ‘series’-type autoplay collection gubbins to Watch in a play for some of YouTube’s creators; this time it’s a boost to its Gaming offering, with Facebook users now able to create eSports tournament infrastructure within Facebook, with all the associated assistance for seamless streaming of said competitions. The quality seems very good, though that might be because it’s currently massively undersubscribed vs Twitch; if you’re doing online gaming and want a seemingly-simple way of managing tourneys, you could do worse than this.
• WhatsApp Limits Message Forwarding: You will have heard about this, I presume, and it’s another move that can only be seen as A Good Thing; it is worth looking at it a bit closely, though, as a) it’s a pretty limited limit, kicking in only when an individual message has been forwarded 5 times previously, and even then only introducing a degree of friction to sharing rather than stopping it entirely; and b) that still allows for an awful lot of sharing of absolutely mad rubbish before any sort of slowing measures kick in. I’m personally waiting to see one which makes a spurious Corona/Koran link, at which point I might declare us done as a species and go and do a self-immolate or something.
• COVID-19 Mobility Data from Google: Not unlike Facebook’s data, linked above, but a bit more user-friendly from Google; you can download datasets by country and then get information about the change in movement over time among the populace on a city-by-city level. Might be useful for coming up with some reactive, tactical comms ideas to send to your clients to remind them that you exist but that they will probably ignore because, well, *all this*.
• Cannes We Not: I like this initiative. Cannes We Not is a simple idea – can all agencies doing stuff with clients around the current pandemic thing please all agree not to make awards season capital out of it when this is all over, please? I think this is a sensible and good thing – it doesn’t really feel quite right that work done in the face of a significant number of people doing quite a lot of a die should then be subsequently used as part of an inter-agency p1ssing contest or an excuse to get back on the gak again (“we deserve it”). Also, and I’m not going to name names because that would be VERY MEAN, but a special shout out to the agency which recently did quite a lot of proud boasting about the fact it had been using 20% of staff hours during ‘these exceptional times’ to develop little TikTok stickers about clapping for the NHS. It’s cute, it’s ‘nice’, but if you try and pretend to me that that’s anything other than a self-aggrandising bit of autofellatio basically showing off that you can MAKE A DIGITAL then, well, fcuk off mate and pull the other one.

By Christopher Espinosa Fernandez

NEXT, ENJOY THIS SUPERB FUNK AND BREAKS AND BEATS MIX BY MIKE ‘MARCELLUS’ WALLACE!

THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.1:

• The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: No apologies for featuring this again; it’s a growing and fabulous selection of resources now being collaborated on by people from literally across the world, and which this week got official endorsement from NESTA as being A Good Thing. Seriously, there’s stuff in here for almost everyone, from tips on homeworking, resources for parents and teachers, information about local initiatives around the globe, stuff on how to make masks, distractions and mental health tips…If you’ve yet to take a look at it, please do – whether or not it’s something you can add to, there’s almost certainly information linked to that will be of use to you or someone you know. Huge props to the team at Newspeak House for kicking it all off.
• Donate Your IT Equipment: This is a nice idea – a campaign to get people to donate old or unused IT to hospitals in London to help patients who might not have access to devices to be able to maintain contact with their families and loved ones. The link here’s to an online form to share details of what you’re able to donate – thanks to Kate Bevan at Which? who pointed out that donating iOS stuff is mostly fine, but old Android kit should be researched a bit based on the fact that it can constitute a not-insignificant security risk. This article gives you a bit of a rundown on stuff that is likely to be more or less safe to donate, should you have any to hand. Or you can put a sticker on a TikTok. It’s basically the same thing.
• CovidSounds: A research project being undertaken by Cambridge University which is asking people – both those with COVID-19 and those without – to record the sound of themselves coughing to help researchers develop better methodologies for determining infection from sound data. I mean, if you’re coughing anyway you may as well; I look forward to this not only helping to halt the spread of infection, but also being used to create ‘This Cough Does Not Exist’, a website which will generate realistic-but-totally-AI-imagined sounds of mucal distress.
• The COVID-19 Consumer Data Tracker: That SOUNDS pretty grandiose, doesn’t it? It’s probably not quite as fancy and all-encompassing as the name might suggest, but it is a really interesting overview of how consumer habits and interests are being impacted by virageddon. It’s by Glimpse, which is a data platform and is annoyingly opaque about exactly what signals its using to gauge its assessment of shifting levels of consumer interest (I imagine it’s slightly more complex than ‘we just pull in Google Trends’), and presents a selection of graphic visualisations of consumer interest (at a global level) in topics such as ‘paintbrushes’, ‘jigsaws’, ‘sourdough’ and ‘creative ways to masturbate once you have basically reached the end of w4nking’. You can filter it by stuff trending up or down, and by broad category, and frankly if your job involves making largely-spurious-yet-serious-and-analytical-sounding predictions about WHAT WILL HAPPEN and WHAT STUFF MEANS then you can probably get at least three hour-long webinars out of this. Oh, if you like this sort of stuff then you may also like this, very similar, dashboard thingy by Pulsar too, which offers the same type of information across a different set of topics.
• All The VirusNews From Google: Not from Google, fine, but aggregated by it. Probably won’t be too much use if people you know have gone full Icke about this sort of thing, but if you’d like to direct friends and family members to a reasonably-well-fact-checked source presenting verified information from a range of outlets then this probably isn’t too bad.
• Open Source Recipes: See, this is the collaborative effort I like to see – the COVID Cookbook! Ignore the slightly-weird, tie-dy psychedelia of the homepage – click the web link and it takes you to a Google Sheets document which anyone can contribute to via email; submissions are vetted by a central team and then added to the cookbook on approval. I think this is AMAZING and should one day be in libraries everywhere; there are about 80-odd recipes in there, up from 40-odd when I found it, and whilst they are VERY American (how many flavours? WHY???) they’re also a really interesting mix of styles and levels of complexity, and are nicely-divided by recipe type. Ooh, seeing as I’m here, have a cocktail recipe I sort-of invented last week: blend some (look, measurements are TOO HARD) coriander stalks with lime jiuce, lime zest and caster sugar til, smooth; pass through a sieve or muslin into a shaker with ice, vodka, st germain and a pinch of salt. Shake, strain & serve and imagine you are somewhere better. CHEERS YOU FCUKERS!
• LikeLike Online: Oh oh oh this is so lovely! LikeLike is, apparently, a sort-of arcade in Pittsburgh, specifically dedicated to indie and artgames; under lockdown, they have built this virtual version of their arcade, in which users pick an 8-bit avatar and a name and are then dropped into a smol, gamelike arcade world, with different rooms containing different – playable! – little games, and with the ability to see other people’s avatars wandering around, and chat to them if you like. It’s so simple, but perfectly-formed; it genuinely does feel a bit like stepping into a small, unfamiliar arcade in a new town (a sentence which I appreciate will mean nothing to people below a certain age), and is a properly charming way of passing an hour playing tiny games by some stars of indieworld (Porpentine’s got some stuff in there, for example).
• I Miss The Office: Do you? Do you really? I know that the whole chat about ‘HOW THE WORLD WILL CHANGE AFTER…ALL THIS’ is long and overblown and almost-entirely based on a series of personal biases and prejudices and fears and hopes rather than anything resembling rational analysis, but one thing I think we can all probably agree on is that, unless you’re fcuking someone you work with, going to work is crap (and even then it’s still not the best use of one’s time). It’s been fascinating watch people realise ‘hang on – if I don’t spend two hours a day travelling to a place where I dislike almost everyone and where there is no actual practical need for me to be, I actually have…quite a lot more free time!’, and I can’t see fulltime office attendance coming back in the same way. Still, if you find that the sepulchral silence of your own doubtless-beautifully-arranged home office is a bit lonely, and that you miss the aural smorgasbord of working like, you might like this site – a lovely, minimalist little audiotoy which lets you toggle various sounds of the workspace off and on at a whim. Special shoutout to the art style here, which is quite lovely, and kudos to agency The Kids who built it.
• Google Stadia Is Now Free: For a bit, at least. For those of you who don’t know, Stadia is Google’s VERY FUTURE videogames setup, which lets you stream console games to your TV using nothing but your phone or laptop and your internet connection. In theory, this is incredible; in practice, the experience hasn’t always been hugely whelming; I do wonder whether this is going to work at all given the increased strain on domestic bandwidth being caused by literally everyone now being online all the time at present. Still, if you or anyone you know has half-decent internet and isn’t able to permit themselves a fancy games machine, this is definitely worth a try – he might not thank me for saying this, but I know James Whatley has been using this for months and might be a useful person to ask if you want to know the pros and cons. GO ON, ASK HIM! (sorry James xxx).
• Digital Fashion: Of course, perhaps After All This Is Over we will no longer want to go outside into meatspace at all, preferring to stay within our hypoallergenic, hermetically-sealed bubbles and interacting only via the medium of haptics through fullbody suspension suits (or something). In which instance, we’ll become far more invested in the development of our digital avatars – which is where Leela (or Digital Fashion – the website’s a bit confusing) comes in! Let the site take a photo of your face – it’s a bit picky, you might need a few goes – and then watch as it creates a genuinely-hideous Lawnmower Man-style avatar for you, with a terrifying, early-00s videogame face, which you can dress in a series of very, very silly digital garments which all look rather too much like ‘what George Lucas seemed to think everyone in space would be wearing circa 1977’. Honestly, I can’t stress quite how unsettling the results are – please, do make one of these of yourself and let me know what you look like. This, for example, was me. I PROMISE I DON’T REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT.
• Integration Loop: A collaborative art project by Robin Sloane, itself based on the decade-old work ‘Disintegration Loops’ by William Basinski, which originally took a recording of a found piece of music and played through its gradual digital disintegration as a sort-of elegy. It’s worth reading the full text of Sloane’s explanation about his own interpretation of the work, but this version involves the collaborative recreation of the melody contained in the original loop by an anonymous choir of individuals from around the world. Anyone can contribute – just record the melody snippet and upload it, and your recording will eventually form part of the completed piece, which will layer the constructive voices of human collaboration over the original, degrading deconstruction of the melody brought about by digital decay. Which, I know, sounds w4nky as you like, but I promise it makes sense if you read the description. I think this is lovely.
• Modern Day Jobs: Or, HUSTLE HARDER! Sorry, maybe I’m being unfair, but there’s a piece in the longreads this week about the ‘hustle’ and how it’s going to become even more encoded as a way of life in a post-COVID landscape and how that’s actually quite sh1t, and this rather speaks to that. This site is ostensibly a good idea, offering a selection of ways in which individuals who might need income can earn money online; from research gigs to remote customer service jobs, freelancer portals to piecework sites, there’s a lot of stuff here, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is very much the bottom of the employment barrel and that even these jobs are going to go before too long because, honestly, there’s not a fat lot of work here that you imagine will still be a human gig in
• An Old French Guide To Drawing Animals: This is a whole kids illustration guide from (I think) 19th Century France; honestly this is superb, with clear guides on how to draw a vast range of animals, including peacocks and rhinos and monkeys…if you’ve got an artistically-inclined kid, there’s definitely an ‘animal a day’ drawing task you can eke out of this, with the added bonus of them learning how to say ‘anteater’ in French.
• The COVID Shopping List Generator: I can’t vouch for the measurements on here, so caveat emptor, but this site lets you input the number of mouths you have to feed, how long you have to keep them fed for, with toggles for specific elements that you may or may not want to include; it then spits out a series of quantities of stuff you might need to buy to be able to stay full of tum and clean of bum for the duration of your specified lockdown period.
• Dyson’s Challenge Cards: James Dyson – another talented man who’s seemingly revealed himself to be a bit of a prick over the course of the past few years. Still, this is a nice idea by the company that bears his name, with the Dyson website making available a bunch of STEM-y challenges for kids to complete whilst on lockdown and bored, using the sort of things that you probably have lying around the house (this is a guess – do people with kids just sort of randomly have balloons and pipe-cleaners knocking about?). “Dyson engineers have designed these challenges specifically for children. Ideal for home or in the classroom, they encourage inquisitive young minds to get excited about engineering” – whether or not your ‘inquisitive minds’ will pay a blind bit of notice to your exhortations to ‘put that fcuking phone down’ is, however, outwith my control.
• Paper Polyhedra: MAKE BEAUTIFUL POLYHEDRAL SHAPES OUT OF PAPER!! Perhaps one to save for Week 22, when the evenings are starting to draw in again.
• TableTopia: I know I featured another boardgame site on here a few weeks back, but that one’s been getting absolutely slammed with traffic and so you might want to check out this alternative instead; a slightly smaller collection of games, but the interface seems to work well and there’s a matchmaking facility so you can find games to join with strangers should you so desire. Also, there’s a game on there called ‘Secret Hitler’, which may well be famous and a classic of the genre but which also made me laugh quite a lot.
• The Other Art Fair: Art fairs – something else perhaps unlikely to survive after all this. At least not the smaller ones – you imagine Basel and Frieze will be fine, because money finds a way, but stuff like the sub-£500-a-piece Other Art Fair might struggle to make it. This year’s Fair was scheduled to be on in London soon-ish, but, for obvious reasons, isn’t – instead, the website offers a nice rundown of all the artists who were due to be featured, with examples of their work; you may not be in the market to spend money on art right now, but even to browse it’s a rather soothing experience. As ever with this Fair there’s a really nice range of styles on display here, and if you’re someone who’s put ‘get back into painting’ on their ‘list of improving activities to undertake whilst mouldering away indoors’ then this could be an excellent source of thematic or stylistic inspiration.
• Bookshlf: I can’t remember the number of variants on this particular idea I’ve seen over the years I’ve been doing Curios, but here’s the latest – curate your interests and your selections within specific categories on your VIRTUAL BOOKSH(E)LF and share these curations with your friends to demonstrate exactly how erudite you are! Why the fcuk you wouldn’t just use Pinterest or any number of other extant platforms which have actual, established userbases already is beyond me, but if you’d like a shiny new space online for you to use to showcase exactly how many of THE CLASSICS you’ve burned through whilst also perfecting your yoga and your ab curls and your startup idea then this may well be for you (now fcuk off).
• The Wildeverse: If you’ve got little-ish kids I reckon this looks ACE. The Wildeverse is an AR game-type-thing which basically lets you explore a jungle via your phone, and find and help wild apes within said jungle via the magic of augmented reality. It’s a project by not-for-profit organisation Internet of Elephants, and is designed to raise awareness of conservation efforts to protect endangered species, in this specific case simian ones, in jungle habitats, and it’s really very cute indeed. The AR is, as with all AR, a bit hit-and-miss, but the models of the apes themselves are charming, and the didactic stuff is very light-touch, and it works without needing to go traipsing around outside, If you’ve got kids who are familiar with Pokemon Go or Minecraft’s AR offering, this is worth a look.

By Rebecca Storm

NEXT, THIS MIX OF AMBIENT-Y, CHILLOUT-Y STUFF BY THIRD ATTEMPT IS JUST PERFECT FOR A SUNNY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND!

THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.2:

• Beautiful Photos of Jupiter: I confess that I am not 100% that these are real, so mind-screwingly gorgeous are they; is Jupiter’s surface really that iridescently-beautiful? Let’s, for the sake of this weekend at least, agree that yes it is.
• The Girl Museum: Got daughters? Try this! “Girl Museum is the first museum in the world dedicated to girlhood. We are a virtual museum for exhibitions, education, and raising awareness about girls and girlhood globally. We are also an information platform for social/cultural dialogue and investigation. We research and collect cross-cultural historic and contemporary images and stories from and about girlhood around the world. Through exhibitions, publications, and projects, we explore and document the unique experience of being born and growing up female.” This is less po-faced than that rather staid explanation might suggest; browse the collections and you’ll find lots of themed ‘exhibitions’ that take you through the achievements of women and girls across various fields, throughout history. If your kid(s) devoured that book about awesome female role models a few years back, they might well find this a nice place to deepen that knowledge.
• Dispatch: Thanks Jay for drawing this to my attention; Dishpatch is a service for Londoners which helps you find local restaurants which are still open for delivery or takeaway across the city; tell it where you are and it will tell you all the independents who are still delivering to you. You can search by category, and it’s a genuinely useful service – not least if you’re interested in helping to keep local restaurateurs in business. It’s hard, though, with these things; you can’t equally help but see this as a classic example of how money, as always, can buy you out of this. If you can afford to pay £20 for an organic chicken you can get one tomorrow; if you can only afford a 3-quid battery bird, see you next month. Turns out it’s not only the future that isn’t equally distributed, it’s the apocalypse too.
• You Probably Need a Haircut: I don’t – I let my girlfriend loose with the clippers, safe in the knowledge that with this face the aesthetic damage was done a long, long time ago – but you may do; if so, this is a GREAT idea. The website matches ‘world class barbers’ (their words) with people who need a haircut; for a fee, they’ll videochat you through how to cut your own hair (or perhaps more sensibly, they’ll videochat someone else through how to cut your hair). This is a US thing, so I’m not sure if there are any timezone-friendly hairdressers on this, but I quite like the idea of staying up til 4am just so I can get a slot with some bloke in LA telling me how to do my fade (NB I don’t actually know what a ‘fade’ is, I just know it’s a hair term).
• Laterdate: OH I LOVE THIS. Laterdate is sadly only available as a thing in LA or NYC, but the premise is so, so beautiful. I’m going to copy the whole statement thing here, as it’s a neater description than I’d probably manage: “I THINK ONE DAY WE WILL BE ABLE TO GO OUTSIDE AGAIN. HONESTLY, I AM FANTASIZING ABOUT THIS LATER DATE. SEEING YOU. REACHING OUT AND TOUCHING. SHARED SURFACES. BREATHING, TALKING, ANYTHING REALLY. THIS IS A PERFORMANCE IN TWO PARTS. IN THE FIRST, WE WILL CHAT ONLINE. WE WILL IMAGINE TOGETHER OUR FIRST MEETING. WHERE WE’LL GO, WHAT WE’LL SAY, WHAT WE’LL DO. THIS FUTURE PLAN WILL BE SAVED AS A SORT OF SCRIPT. ONE DAY, WHEN WE ARE ALLOWED OUT AGAIN, YOU WILL RECEIVE A REQUEST TO MEET AND WE’LL ENACT THIS SCRIPT. THAT WILL BE PART TWO OF THE PERFORMANCE.” Whilst obviously this could turn out to be a terminally-bad idea, I really hope it isn’t; I would watch the fcuk out of these meetings, and I think there’s a lovely, wider penpal-type project to be found in something like this; the idea of creating an anonymous connection with someone via writing or photography, with a commitment to meet, just once, when this is done, is quite, quite beautiful to me.
• How Low Can Your Logo?: Designers! Have you ever wondered ‘what is the sh1ttest logo I can design?’ WONDER NO MORE! This is a project – entirely legitimate and a real competition, it seems – inviting designers from around the world to present their worst-possible response to a design brief, to be assessed by a panel of actual, proper design professionals. There’s a Pinterest mood board, a creative brief, and the wonderful, terrible designs are already beginning to pile up. Glorious – if you know any designers, send this to them as I reckon it could be a fun thing to fcuk around with for a couple of hours. Also, you can buy all the designs on tshirts, which could be an interesting and bold direction to take your wardrobe in in 2020.
• Tapebooks: I featured a Kickstarter last year which involved pictures woven from discarded cassette tape; this is another one from the same team, this time selling notebooks whose covers are woven from old musical tapes. The poster I bought was genuinely great, and I have no hesitation in recommending this which is a charming way of reusing old plastic and might make a lovely present for someone should you be in the market for such a thing.
• Beepbox: I think ‘web-based synthtoys’ run at a rate of about one a month here on Curios – still, there always fun and this one’s a nice example of the genre, with your compositions saved in the URL meaning they’re easy to share – and, actually, which makes them perfect for a back-and-forth compositional game, where you send the track to each other with instructions to add 4 bars at a time and see what happens. LOOK I JUST INVENTED A GAME! Admittedly a bad one which will lead to the creation of a LOT of unlistenable music, but still. Everything comes out sounding chiptune, but if you’re ok with that then this is a reasonably-complex little soundtoy to play with.
• Whichbook: I barely know where to get book recommendations these days – I tend to just burn through the ‘books of the year’ lists from the Guardian, NYT and a few other places,supplementing this with whatever interesting-looking bits I can find from charity shops – but this website seems surprisingly good if you need a non-algorithmic or non-media recommendation. There are a selection of sliders on the left, letting you choose whether you want the recommendations to be more or less ‘funny’, ‘disturbing’, ‘romantic’, ‘bleak’, etc; adjust the sliders, hit ‘show me some books’ and VWALLAH! A host of recommendations based on your spec. I obviously turned all the dials all the way to ‘miserable, sad, violent and deviant’ just to see what would happen, and the resulting selection included some old favourites (hello, Stewart Home!) and some stuff that I had never heard of before, which is a reasonable sign that it works at least halfway-properly. Worth a look if you’re struggling to pick a new novel.
• Primer: Stuff you are probably doing now – hoping against hope that your partner doesn’t get it into their head that ‘now’s a really great opportunity for us to do that extensive remodelling work on the house that we’ve always talked about!’. Honestly, can you think of anything more miserable than embarking on a massive domestic renovation project when you’re stuck inside?! You’d be homicidal within hours. Still, Primer might be a way of pretending to do the work without actually having to do it – it’s a neat little interiors-AR-toy (if we didn’t have houses to redecorate virtually, would AR ever even have existed?) which allows you to see swatches of wall in different finishes and fabrics, all from actual, proper retailers like…er…actually I’ve only heard of Farrow & Ball, but I presume the other ones are real and posh too. Save yourselves the pain and keep it virtual, eh?
• Eating Utensils: Who doesn’t want an entire website dedicated to the unique and fascinating history of eating utensils throughout history? NO FCUKER, that’s who! Honestly, I know I am possibly feeling a bit fragile right now, but there’s something just heartbreakingly sincere about all of this, and the section on ‘facts and statistics from the world of utensils’ which I clicked on just now caused a very real lump in my throat for reasons that I don’t adequately understand (it may be because the syntax is oddly reminiscent of Latvian Jokes, possibly).
• CollabVM: This is, I’m sure, designed for a serious purpose, but I have no idea what it is. Click the page and you can choose from one of 5 actual computer desktops which you can control remotely via your browser; Christ alone knows why you would want to mess with a virtual desktop, but, should you desire, you now can. Users’ IP addresses are all logged, so please bear that in mind should you have a vague idea of using one of these machines to do something very illegal – you can, though, just do small, gentle things to improve the lives of future users, which I would very much encourage – when I checked it earlier, someone had added a gigantic Ainsley Harriot, peering malevolently from over the green hills of the Windows XP background – see, that’s what this is for!
• The Daily Mailer: Random comic panels from The New Yorker, combined with comments from below-the-line at the Daily Mail. These are almost entirely perfect, and surprisingly-unhateful (there’s also an excellent secondary game in trying to imagine the headline of the story that elicited the original comment in the first place).
• TV Too High: A beautifully-specific subReddit dedicated to photographs of wall-mounted televisions in people’s houses which are clearly mounted far, far too high for anyone to comfortably watch. What is the psychological explanation for all these men (look, of course it’s men here) wanting to be looked down on by their telly ffs?
• Nature Relaxation Films: I can’t promise that these will be the anxiety-removing panacea that you’re searching for, but it’s hard to imagine not feeling a bit better after putting on a 12-hour video of a beach in the Maldives. Two hours of lovely tropical turtles swimming? An hour-long panoramic fight over the fjords and coastlines of Norway? It beats trying to count your neighbours’ toilet roll mountains, I guarantee you.
• Impressions: Remember at the beginning of the year, when this Chinese app did the rounds which let you transform yourself into a limited number of famouses via some slightly-shonky GANfoolery? Well, that! Except this is by a different outfit – although as with all of these I wouldn’t particularly trust anyone making this sort of app with your face data – and features a different roster of famouses, with the app promising to add new people who you can morph yourself into every Monday. Your mileage with this will be limited, but they have Jennifer Aniston and Morgan Freeman and a bunch of other proper celebrities loaded in (which makes me wonder whether it will be legalled into oblivion within days, but still), which means that you can have ‘fun’ acting out sketches from Friends or Shawshank (ha!) to your heart’s content.
• Today’s Day Today: A Twitter bot which reminds you what day it is today, because that apparently is what we are reduced to.

By Antonio Lopez Garcia

NEXT, ENJOY AN EQUALLY BANK HOLIDAY-ISH MIX OF HOUSE AND TECHNO COURTESY OF ASH LAUREN!

THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.3:

• The Ninja Tune Thread of Online Concert Footage: There was about a five-year period during which I bought literally everything I could find put out on Ninja Tunes (which I imagine gives you a pretty good sense of exactly the flavour of ‘tedious w4nker’ I was for a good swathe of my late-teens/early-20s), and this Twitter thread reminded me of why I love the record label; there are a literally HUNDREDS of gigs linked to or embedded in here (not their own artists – ALL the artists!), featuring a huge range of musicians from Massive Attack to Kraftwerk to Nina Simone to Fila Brasilia…honestly, this is a fcuking treasure trove, and you should bookmark it NOW (and, er, maybe start ripping some of the YT vids in case they get copyright-fcuked).
• Cryptohack: On the one hand, this advertises itself as ‘a fun platform for learning modern cryptography’; on the other, there’s nothing to say that it’s not a secret kiddie recruitment portal for GCHQ. Still, whether you want to get a gentle introduction to the principles of codebreaking or whether you’d like to embark upon a superficially-exciting but fundamentally sedentary career as a government cryptowonk, this site should see you right; it’s quite hard and a little technical, and requires some small familiarity with coding concepts, but, equally, it’s approachable enough that even someone as code-inept and anti-mathematical as me can vaguely understand what’s meant to be going on (although, to be clear, I could not decrypt myself out of a paper bag).
• Better Zoom: Has there ever been a product arc like that enjoyed by Zoom over the past fortnight – from ‘hot new videochat sensation’ to ‘probably spyware’ in circa ~12 days! Still, the company’s response to all this has largely been pretty good – certainly faster and more responsive than, ooh, almost any instance of Facebook being called out for being a massive panopticon, for example – and there are now services such as this popping up around the platform. It’s called ZMurl, and offers a few different features including a nice invite card for your meetings and, most importantly, improved security which helps prevent anyone from jumping into your meeting with their wank a-swinging (amongst other potential pitfalls). Alternatively, if you prefer using Gchat (or Hangouts, or whatever the fcuk Google has decided to call its videochat software this week) then you might like this plugin which gives you the opportunity to use it in Zoom-style grid view.
• Towel Animals: A subReddit devoted to celebrating animals crafted from towels, in the manner of the sort of thing they do in a certain type of hotel. It’s a weird mix of high-end towel elephant design and some quite baffling collisions of towel art and obscure meme culture, but it’s not about virus or death and as a result is eminently-worthy of its place.
• Morse Typing Trainer: Stuff you can do with all this time on your hands – learn Morse Code so that you can leave helpful, mysterious or vaguely-erotic messages in coded language across your city to baffle, confuse or arouse other Morse-literate passers-by. Or, er, you could make your whole family learn it and move all domestic communications from now until the end of lockdown to a purely dots-and-dashes-based system; this last idea is improved immeasurably if you exclude one family member from the project, fyi.
• The Museum of Portable Sounds: God I love a single-interest online museum. Except this one exists in the real world too, and it is TINY, and in non-lockdown times you can go on one-on-one visits where someone will take you (ONLY YOU!) around the museum and explain it all to you, and now you can do the same online and OH GOD THIS IS SO CUTE I MIGHT DIE. “In these extraordinary days of social distancing and isolation, our original guidelines for visiting the Museum of Portable Sound – in person, listening to our sounds from a single shared mobile phone – are no longer feasible. Therefore, we have decided to rethink the way we engage with our audience and share our collections with the world. Beginning today, anyone in the world with access to an internet connection and a web browser will be able to visit our museum – via video chat. Simply fill out our Contact Form and we’ll get back to you to schedule your visit and provide you with info on exactly how it will work.” Fine, so they lose points for the use of ‘extraordinary times’, but, well, it’s a minor quibble. Go on, book yourself in for a guided tour of the history of portable sounds – this sounds like a truly lovely way of spending an hour, in exchange for a small donation to the museum.
• Routehuffle: I was totally convinced I’d featured this before, but Google suggests otherwise; even if I have, though, I can’t imagine it’s ever been more useful than this. It’s a really simple idea – tell it your starting point, what your method of transport is (walking, running, biking), and how long you want to travel for, and it will spit out a circular route for you to take that covers that specific distance. Even better, it will create a new route EVERY TIME, meaning you can maybe do a little bit to limit the crushing boredom of doing laps around your local park each day. I have to say, whilst my lack of physical exercise throughout my life will almost certainly condemn me to an earlier grave than I might otherwise expect (though, come on kids, does this currently look like an experience worth prolonging? I posit that it does NOT), it’s been a blessing over these past few weeks in terms of not now missing my 15k runs and my squat-thrusts and bench-pressing. I am obviously going to be fcuking jealous of everyone who emerges from this all hench though, obvs.
• Opera Vision: You might have ‘get into opera’ on your ‘list of improving activities’ – if so, try this out, which currently has 30 full operas available to view online, performed by different companies from across the world. Were it not for the fact that I genuinely can’t stand it (cloth-eared philistine that I am) I would absolutely check a few of these out, not least to see how production styles vary from nation to nation. The costumes in opera inevitably bang too, in my limited experience, should you want an additional reason to take a look. Oh, hang on, here’s MORE opera – honestly, I’m spoiling you.
• The Retro Learning Pack: SO GOOD! This is 667 old MS-DOS educational games, available to download via torrent, and including such classics as Oregon Trail (“You died of a snakebite”) and Carmen Sandiego and Mavis Beacon and OH MY! It’s not hugely user-friendly to set up, and it’s obviously designed for people who are already a bit familiar with torrents and stuff, but this could be a GREAT bundle of software if you’ve got kids with a high tolerance for shonky graphics and explicit didacticism (and WHO DOESN’T, right?).
• 60 Logic Puzzles: Everyone’s nana, and my friend Mo, loves puzzle books – so here’s one for lockdown. PDF’d and printable, this contains 60 logic puzzles and, ok, whilst I haven’t done any of them I am going to trust that that is exactly what they are, that they are benign and kind and not secretly hiding awful racism or scat-bongo or anything like that in the numbers. If you have access to a printer and a nana, this is pretty much a match made in heaven – they are all very much of the Su-Doku style, though, rather than verbal, just so’s you know.
• Chesses 2: Pippin Barr, Curios favourite, returns with a new series of small games riffing on the concept of chess – each of these is a tiny, lovely variant on the standard game, and each of them is worth trying out to see what the tweak or the joke is. My personal favourite is ‘Musical Chess’, in which the position of the pieces on the board determines the melody being played in the background which shifts and modifies based on the ebb and flow of the game, but all of these are inspired.
• Let’s Go Build A…: A daily LEGO building challenge on this website, which every day offers you a new building challenge – make a certain thing, as specified by the site, with a maximum of 20 LEGO blocks: GO! The idea is that people share screenshots of their creations with the community on social media each day – I don’t have the level of visual creativity required to be anything other than tediously-mediocre at this, but more artistically-minded people could find quite a lot to enjoy here.
• Strange Key World: Oh, this is very smart. A simple platformer, where on each screen you can only use the controls that are presented; you might be restricted to left and right, you may not be able to jump, and you have to work out how to navigate the obstacles and hazards. Very simple, very clever and very satisfying to work out.
• Crittermound: Finally this week, a clicker game! If you know what that means, you’ll know what to expect; if you don’t, then this is a simple, process-driven toy which will slowly progress without you needing to do much to it but which will, I promise, suck you in like few other things after about 30 minutes of having it on in the background. This one’s about breeding insects, except, as with all these games, it’s not actually about that at all. So, so good – now, let me get back to my hatchery.

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, MINIMAL TECHNO FOR OUR NEWLY-MINIMAL LIFESTYLES, COURTESY OF PACH!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS WHICH THIS WEEK IS IN FACT JUST TUMBLRS!:

• ArtStreetechture: Thanks to the lovely people at Present & Correct for sharing this Tumblr of Brutalist & Modernist architecture as seen through Google Streetview.
• Cozy: Tumblr is curating this specific new, er, Tumblr, pulling in all sorts of homely, ‘cosy’-type stuff to provide comfort and succour in these EXCEPTIONAL FCUKING TIMES DEAR GOD NO MORE. Ahem. Sorry. It’s fine, if very much at the Kinfolk/Airbnb-aesthetic end of the ‘cosy’ scale, but after three weeks of this I do rather wish that ‘twee’ wasn’t the prevalent coping aesthetic of much of the web.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Dave Towers: A London-based stencils-and-spray lettering artist, doing rather cool-looking work and also taking commissions.
• Manhattans Project: I think this is a cocktail bar in Margate – regardless, right now it’s a bloke doing cocktail recipes from his kitchen, and I love him immoderately. It’s not fancy at all, but it’s very charming nonetheless and frankly there are worse things to do with your time than getting into cocktail making.
• Piecework Puzzles: Jigsaw puzzles as Instagrammable lifestyle accessory. Presented not necessarily as an endorsement, but more to ask the question ‘is there anything that can’t be fitted in to the Insta aesthetic? Could I make photos of colostomy equipment *POP* with the right filter and a shot-from-above framing?
• Objects of my Isolation: Not an account but a hashtag – this is collecting people’s 3×3 Insta grids of nine objects that are defining their lockdown. A lovely project and something I think could be taken and reinterpreted and remixed in a variety of interesting ways.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• Year Zero for Britain: I’ve features lots of stuff by Clive Martin in here before – there was a time a few years back when I was convinced he was very much a ‘next big thing’ in British journalism, but it never quite transpired and he’s fallen slightly off my radar in recent years; he’s still a fantastic writer, though, and the way in which he writes about modern Britain and its culture and cultures is without peer. This is him looking at how the country is transforming, and may yet be transformed, by The Events – “Part of the reason we haven’t properly been able to grasp climate change in this country is because we don’t really know what it looks like, how it feels on our skin. But what the coronavirus has done in no time at all is give us a sneak preview of the end; of the language and aesthetic of disaster, of the formats we’ll use to call out the dead, of the technology, the uniforms, the tone used by HR directors as they cull the workforce and the made-up laws the police will use to keep us still.” Superb.
• Pandemic Stories: Another link to Jason Kottke after last week – this time, he collects emails he’s had from his readers across the world, sharing their experiences of the pandemic. As he points out, these necessarily skew to people who can read and write in English and who knew about his website already, meaning it’s a selection of stories dominated by middle-class experience, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful collection of stories, some more hopeful than others but all offering a unique perspective on what we are all going through. When this is all over (phrases I must ban myself from writing), I would love to see a narrative exhibition of the Corona stories, weaving fragments of story and audio and news and images and video together to paint an ever-changing picture of the world’s response to the crisis.
• How Coronavirus Misinformation Spreads: Or, more specifically, how it avoids moderation by social media platforms despite their apparent commitment to removing lies and deliberate untruths around the pandemic. More excellent explanatory reporting from Bellingcat, and an unwelcome reminder that just because I never see his crap on my Timeline it doesn’t mean that P*ul J*seph W*tson isn’t still peddling his unique brand of damp-lipped sub-Alex Jones lunacy to credulous millions worldwide.
• The White House Corona Briefings: David Eggers writes for McSweeney’s – I’m including this mainly as it’s very funny, but also because, from an anglo point of view, reading this does make one feel marginally better about the current situation over here. Until, that is, you pause and remember that whilst the language is Eggers’ own in this piece, the actual things that the principles are saying are all broadly based on actual transcripts of actual press conferences, which all of a sudden might make you feel a tiny bit worse.
• Gendered Domesticity and COVID-19: My girlfriend and I are lucky insofar as we both like cooking, are both about as good as each other at it, and are both reasonably tolerant of filth, meaning that, so far, the chores have mostly been shared equally (obviously that’s just my perspective; she might have a totally different opinion)(please don’t ask her). This piece suggests that the current domestic situations being experienced by families worldwide are serving in many respects to reinforce and entrench established gender roles when it comes to domesticity, and that in fact women are shouldering a disproportionate burden of labour when childcare, etc, is factored in. Obviously I’ve got no data to bring to this at all, but I can certainly imagine a lot of women I know nodding in stony-faced assent as they read this.
• This Was Supposed To Be An Introvert’s Paradise: I half-agreed with this article, but am also including it as part of my lockdown mission to collect articles by every single fcuking niche self-selecting group of people on the whole fcuking internet describing how this is particularly bad and painful for people like them (honestly, if this sort of event proves anything it’s that we must all stop characterising millennials as the age group obsessed with its own precious and privileged status – we are all like that, always). This is the introverts, complaining that actually there are now all these people filling up their calendars with VIRTUAL DRINKS and how it’s impossible to make up excuses so now you can’t refuse and and and and…look, on the one hand I am very much here for ‘the normies are ruining online for people like me’ chat; on the other, look, NOONE is enjoying this, just suck it up ffs. I did like the stuff in here about the edge-limitations of videochat, though, and how people will start to get frustrated with them sooner rather than later – I wonder whether this is going to see innovation in terms of low-latency emoting or similar as an adjunct to video?
• Musicians Flock To Twitch: Apologies, it’s a Kotaku piece and so not brilliantly-written; still, though, another interesting example of a new set of artists moving to Twitch as a potential avenue for digital versions of their real-life output. I particularly enjoyed the musicians’ frustration and bemusement at some of the odder community aspects of the platform – the baffled reference to foot fetishism in particular is lovely – but overall this does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that Twitch is the most interesting of the platforms to keep an eye on right now in a ‘future of entertainments’ sort of way.
• Coronart Virus: I’m really sorry, I couldn’t resist. This piece is about the pandemic’s likely impact on the art world – specifically, fine art – and how it will likely affect events and the market in the coming year or so. As I mentioned up top somewhere, it’s likely to kill art fairs; small galleries are likely to suffer too, whilst online portals will benefit from the removal of onsite sales. What’s harder to gauge is the extent to which this will be beneficial for smaller artists; I’ve never been clear, and artist friends of mine have never seemed certain, whether the ‘gallery, show, fair’ cycle actually works particularly well for them, so perhaps its dismantling or reimagining will prove a boon for the people who make work.
• Photographers, Inside: How some of the world’s top photographers are responding to the creative challenge of not being able to leave the house. For those interested in this sort of thing, Rankin’s running weekly simple photography challenges on Instagram at the moment, details of which you can find here if you fancy it.
• Hong Kong Protests Come to Animal Crossing: It’s fascinating to remember exactly how much stuff was still happening worldwide before we shut everything down; Hong Kong was still a city in the grip of popular protest, and whilst that’s obviously stopped in meatspace now the pandemic’s in effect, if we’ve learned one thing in the past month it’s that there’s nothing that you can’t do offline that you can do online. In this year’s most bizarre crossover event to date, Hong Kong kids are congregating inside popular cutesy-farm-type simulator game Animal Crossing to carry on their protests against the Chinese regime in digital space – as ever with this stuff, I am in awe of the lengths people go to to bend digital space to their will, and at the flexibility and malleability of said space to enable that to happen.
• Vittles 2.3: I am including this because I imagine there are possibly some of you for whom cooking is less a fun activity and more ‘something I need to do so I don’t die’; if you fall into that camp, and you are a regular, high-volume consumer of instant noodles, this article – all about how to pimp them to the nth degree – will basically be your new bible.
• Quibi Reviewed: Quibi, the new, mobile-only hyper-funded, Jeffrey Katzenberg-helmed entertainment platform launched in the US this week, with a star-studded roster of new programmes, each shot to be viewed on your phone in landscape or portrait and each clocking in at
• Eating Casu Marzu: If you’ve spent any time at all around listicle internet, you’ll be aware of Casu Marzu, the (in)famous Sardinian cheese which has all the maggots in it. This article is more interesting on the subject than most, delving a little more into the history of the cheese but, more compellingly, that of the island itself, speculating as to what it is that makes it the sort of place where people will still, even in 2020, break the law to produce a foodstuff that pullulates with larvae.
• Stone Age Life: You might have seen this one already this week – it’s had a viral moment, which was perhaps to be expected of a profile of a modern-day cavewoman shaman-type person called ‘Lynx’ – but, if not, it’s a really interesting read. Lynx, the protagonist, is a fascinating subject, obviously committed to the lifestyle she lives but equally not averse to getting on a plane to run ‘caveman retreats’ around the world, and not exactly un-self-aware about her image and, I get the impression, how to use it. Also (and I know that this makes me less of a good person – HA!! – but I couldn’t help it), I did rather get the whiff of ‘child of minor European aristocracy’ from her backstory, though that might just be me. Regardless, this is a really good read and an excellent piece of profile-writing.
• Imaginary Legal Systems: Far more interesting and thought-provoking than the title might suggest, this is Slate Star Codex, AKA Scott Alexander, writing about some alternative legal systems he has imagined. I promise you, this really is so, so interesting – each of these is plausible and sort-of logical, and yet leads to such interestingly divergent outcomes. It does rather force one into thinking about all of the radical and often-times unconsidered effects of the systems and strictures we’re used to – MAYBE IT’S TIME TO RIP EVERYTHING UP AND START AGAIN???
• The Wolves of Stanislav: I have read everything Paul Auster’s ever written, or at least I’ve tried to; there are a few missteps, but overall he’s a consistently beautiful writer and this article, written about a visit to Ukraine a few years ago to investigate his family history, is a wonderful example of his instantly-recognisable style, intimate and familiar and conversational and old and weirdly avuncular. I could have picked this out of a lineup within two sentences; obviously your tolerance for Auster will determine your response to this, but if you’re unfamiliar with his work I’d urge you to give this a go.
• We Are Living in Ballard’s World: If you know JG Ballard you can, probably, imagine what this piece has to say and can probably skip it (though being reminded of his work is always a pleasure); if, though, you’re not, then you owe it to yourself to read this piece, explaining exactly why he’s the most relevant author to RIGHT NOW other than perhaps Gibson or Chiang that there is (yes, I know, there are others). Honestly, there’s probably never been a better time to get right into late-period Ballard; this feels like the perfect weather and weird ambience to get right into Super Cannes, Cocaine Nights and Millennium People, if you’ve not already.
• Breaking Bread in Lyon: This is, on the one hand, an absolute grab-bag of ‘Anglo in rural, foodie France’ cliches (no matter that the anglo in question is on this occasion a yank) – the decision to ‘follow the dream’ and move to France (Lyon, in this case); the unfriendliness of the locals, the difficulty in assimilating, then one day the breakthrough, and the understanding, and the local acceptance…so far, so tediously-Mayle, but the piece is redeemed by truly excellent writing, a focus on cookery rather than the cliches of a certain type of imagined-Frenchness, and the final quarter of the piece which becomes something rather different, sadder and far better. Honestly, this is a beautiful piece of writing.
• The Prophylactic Life: Thanks to Katie for sending this to me; it’s a New Yorker short essay by Gary Shteyngart (by the way, if you’ve STILL not followed my recommendation and picked up a copy of Super Sad True Love Story then WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU WAITING FOR??) on his current pandemic experience in the US. Wonderful, mainly because of how he says what he says than what he says.
• The White Man’s Liberation Front: A superb short story by Bernadine Evaristo; imagining the poor frustrated male victim of a gender-switched society in which it’s the male academics who are bullied and passed over for tenure and whose achievements are ignored and deemed insignificant. Except, of course, for many men like the male lead in this story, this isn’t a satirical gender-switch at all, but instead a clear-eyed portrayal of How Things Really Are. Superb, and very funny.
• Nostalgia Is A permanent Condition: Finally in the longreads this week, a jaw-droppingly good piece of near-fiction writing, imagining a slightly changed (but still very recognisable) post-Corona world. It’s part of the Indoor Voices project for fiction writers which I featured last week, and it’s…honestly, it’s so, so good, and the most interesting and, oddly, sad thing I have read about all this all week. Which I appreciate might not appeal to you, but this does that very rare trick of managing to combine Transmetropolitan-style ‘that’s practically already here’-type future=imaginings with a poignancy that’s a slight punch in the gut. Read this, and then save it to read again in a few months’ time.

By Anna Maghradze

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Do you want an entirely fan-made recreation of Back to the Future 2 made by 88 different filming teams? YES YOU DO! I’ve only scrubbed through this at pace,but it looks like a lot of fun:

1. Perfume Genius is great. This is great. It’s called ‘On The Floor’:

1. This was sent to me by some strangers on the internet, called Little Hands of Asphalt, because my friend Ben has a very short cameo in it; it’s called ‘No Reception’, and it’s unexpectedly really rather lovely, in a slightly whimsical indiepop sort of way, and the video is lovely and made me wish I was spending this weekend in a field by a lake rather than in a flat in Oval:

1. THE INEVITABLE FIRST EVER MUSIC VIDEO FILMED ON ZOOM! The song’s not really to my taste, but all the kudos for the invention in the choreography here; this is called ‘Phenom’, and it’s by Thao and The Get Down Stay Down:

1. I don’t know if I 100% like this, but it feels oddly appropriate for now – it’s called ‘21st Century Failure’ and it’s by the Prefab Messiahs:

1. Last up this week, thanks to Shardcore for pointing me at this newly-unearthed Bill Hicks gig. NEW HICKS!!! Some of the material was familiar to me, other bits less so, but a newly-unearthed Hicks routine is always cause for celebration. Cue it up – it’s what Jesus would have wanted! Probably! Also, THAT’S IT WE HAVE MADE IT TO THE END AND WE ARE SAFE AND SOUND AND NOW ALL THAT IS LEFT FOR US TO DO IS ENJOY THE BOUNTY OF THE EASTER WEEKEND AND TO PLEASE TRY AND STAY SAFE AND TRY AND BE NICE AND CONSIDERATE TO OTHER PEOPLE ESPECIALLY THE ONES LIKE ME WHO DON’T HAVE GARDENS AND AS SUCH ARE LIKELY TO BE FEELING JUST A SMOL TOUCH OF MURDEROUS ENVY THIS WEEKEND ALTHOUGH I PROMISE NOT TO TAKE IT OUT ON YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE!

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

FIRST UP IN THE MIXES, ANOTHER BANGING SELECTION FROM BERLIN-BASED VINYL-MONKEY SADEAGLE AND WHICH THIS WEEK IS FULL OF EXCELLENT HIPHOP AND HIGH-QUALITY MIXING!

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

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS GENUINELY SUNSHINEY AND HAPPILY BOUNCY MIX OF ECLECTIC WORLD/JAZZ-TYPE CUTS BY JUPITER & JUNO!

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).
• 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???

By Brooke DiDonato

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.)”

By Ashley Kauschinger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. Mario Klingemann is an artist who does interesting work with GANs and faces and the odd bits that exist inbetween our imaginations and the theoretical imaginations of a machine. He’s made this video, which maps music to the facial expressions of imaginary people in realtime; it’s desperately sinister and very good:

1. This is all Aphex Twin songs played at once. I am consuming so much internet at the moment that this is literally what it sounds like between my ears right now:

1. This is called ‘Concatenation’, it’s by Donato Sansone, and if you see a better, smarter piece of video editing this year I will eat my hat:

1. This is called ‘Braindead’. Give it 30s or so – I promise you, it very much KICKS IN after that point, and it features Barry off Eastenders so, well, what’s not to love?:

1. CORONAHIPHOPCORNER! From Brazil! This is fcuking EXCELLENT; my Portuguese isn’t up to much, but it’s fairly clear rapper MV Bill isn’t hugely impressed with Bolsonaro’s handling of events so far. This makes me want to go and get VERY stoned, so I think that that’s exactly what I am going to do (after I’ve added the mixes and the images and written the intro and uploaded this into the CMS and written the social posts and christ it never stops) but not before I wish you a HAPPY WEEKEND BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE IT WILL BE OK I PROMISE AND THINGS WILL GET BETTER AND I HOPE YOU ARE WELL AND SO ARE YOUR LOVED ONES AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK, PROBABLY, DEPENDING ON WHETHER I CAN FACE DOING THIS ON GOOD FRIDAY OR NOT BUT TIL THEN BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE!!!

It’s…it’s ok, this quarantine lark. The only major downside so far was seeing a naked man performatively-masturbating for his phone the other day, but such is the packed-together nature of urban living in That London (it was almost touching how long he spent getting the angle exactly right) (look, you would have watched too, ok?); otherwise, though, it’s seemingly going ok! My girlfriend moved in, along with her cat, and neither of them have killed me or done a dirty protest yet, so I am counting that as a win.

How are YOU though? Are you ok? I do care, I promise, which is why I have once again prepared a care package stuffed to the very nines with LINKS AND GOODNESS, like some sort of intellectual pemmican to nourish you while you traverse the choppy waters of viral confinement (even by the low standards of Web Curios, that was a spectacularly-unsuccessful analogy; I can only apologise and explain to you that we’re living in straitened times and the simile aisle at the supermarket was empty. 

Anyway, enough – here’s this week’s Web Curios for you to maybe enjoy. I hope you like it and I hope you are ok and I hope the people you care about are doing alright. 

Er, you cnuts, etc etc. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and at least the clocks go forward this weekend so we lose an hour of this incarceration.

By Loribelle Spirovski

LET’S START THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH QUESTLOVE’S 7-HOUR DJ SET FROM EARLIER THIS WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT AFTER LAST WEEK’S TEMPORARY HIATUS THE S*C**L M*D** NEWS SEEMS TO HAVE RETURNED WITH A VENGEANCE BUT WHICH ENCOURAGES THOSE OF YOU WITH BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN MINOR TWEAKS TO PLATFORM FUNCTIONALITY TO SKIP RIGHT ON TO THE NEXT SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GOOD AND HAS SOME GENUINELY INTERESTING THINGS IN IT:

• Instagram Now Lets Users Share Insta Posts In Video Chat: You’re…you’re bored, aren’t you? Look, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. You’ve secretly made peace with the fact that, honestly, you don’t want to learn another language, or master the secret of a really open-crumbed sourdough, or master the floss, or read Ulysses (honestly, it’s not worth the trouble), or have that looming conversation about where the relationship is really going. Web Curios does not judge, remember – it only sees and silently logs. Anyway, for all those of you who see this quarantine as nothing more than an opportunity to go REALLY DEEP into the ‘Gram, then you’ll enjoy this new feature – you can now share Insta posts with your interlocutors over video chat, meaning you can all get together and absolutely roast that one person that you love to hate. Yes, I know that that’s not the stated aim of this, but, well, look, that’s what it’s going to be used for. I don’t make the rules.
• Culture and Conversation on Twitter: This feels very much like a relic from a pre-Corona era; this is a bit of datacrunching by Twitter based on BILLIONS of Tweets from between 2016 and the end of last year, broken down into themes and presenting trends as to what we all really care about and how that’s changed over the years. I’m including this mainly as I have had several conversations with people in a work context where there’s been a general ask along the lines of ‘what can social listening data tell us about global themes and trends around Coronavirus and what it means for brands and businesses?’ and, reader, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This bit of Twitter work shows exactly how bad social data is at helping you understand ANYTHING about big global trends and themes outside of the most banal generalisations; LOOK, EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT THE FCUKING VIRUS, WHAT DO YOU FCUKING EXPECT??? Also, social data is ONLY EVER TWITTER FFS, and so about as representative of the wider world as the Guardian newsroom is of the UK as a whole. A message to Directors of agencies – STOP THINKING THAT SOCIAL LISTENING DATA IS A FCUKING SCRYING GLASS INTO THE MINDS OF THE POPULACE, YOU ONLY THINK THIS BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT FCUKING WORKS, AND JUST BECAUSE YOU EARN 100K DOESN’T MAKE YOU A FCUKING EXPERT ON STUFF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, HOWEVER MUCH YOU SPEAK WITH CONFIDENCE AND AUTHORITY. Ahem. Anyway, if you want some social trends stuff that’s largely meaningless, here it is!
• A Guide To Hosting Virtual Events on YouTube: Seeing as I’m on a roll here, another annoying series of conversations I’ve had this week: “Matt, do you know of any creative ways in which we can host a webinar?”. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO BE ‘CREATIVE’? IS ‘FUNCTIONAL’ NOT IMPORTANT? FFS!! I mean, I could make everyone install a bespoke piece of conferencing software which places everyone in a VIRTUAL EVENTS SPACE in which you can navigate in 3d space and visiting individual rooms to see different speakers, or maybe we could do it in Minecraft…or you could just set up a couple of streams on YouTube, or Teams, or any number of FUNCTIONAL platforms that won’t eat all of everyone’s bandwidth and which are designed to work at scale. You morons. Anyway, this is a helpful guide to doing live stuff on YouTube, should you require one.
• WhatsApp As A Chatbot Service: This links to the announcement of the WHO WhatsApp Coronabot, but there have been local versions set up all over the place, including India and the UK (where it wasn’t working at launch). A useful reminder that, whilst the great Chatbot boom of 2017 seems like the very distant past, they can still be hugely useful in situations like this when there’s a clear series of potential questions and answers that you can predict people will need. Personally speaking I’d like to see HMT instituting some of this stuff on WhatsApp and Messenger to help triage all the people trying to make sense of their eligibility for financial support, not least to ease the burden on phonelines, but what do I know? Rhetorical, obvs.
• #Happyathome With TikTok: TikTok cares about you and your wellbeing! Especially if you’re attractive and middle-class and definitely not ugly or disabled (see this story from the other week if these references don’t make sense to you)! Which is why it this week announced daily themed content on the platform, made in conjunction with various influencers, to promote positivity and mental health and all those lovely words that large, VC-backed companies use to pretend that they see us as anything more than numbers of a hopefully hockey stick-shaped curve. Motivation Monday, Kickback Tuesday…you can imagine the bromides. Look, this isn’t a bad idea per se, but as ever with these things there’s a large part of me that questions whether watching Arnold Schwarzenegger or AN Other shiny-haired, glow-toothed teen broadcast themselves being all fcuking #namaste about life from their palatial manse is really going to be the happymaking pick-me-up that these people think it is.
• Snap Launches Coronavirus Mythbusting Game: I like this a lot – simple and smart, Snap’s created a simple quiz that asks users a series of yes or no questions using a Snap Filter, showing your face and a little animated Corona particle, which you can play along or with friends. Really nice execution, although it does weird me out slightly that I have to look at my own face whilst playing this. Look, can I not learn without looking at my hideous, sagging epidermis? WHY MUST THE FUTURE REQUIRE ME TO LOOK AT MY OWN FACE ALL THE TIME FFS???
• Pinterest Launches ‘Today’ Tab: Pinterest is doing hugely well at the moment, as users flock to do imaginary home improvements and dream of what they could achieve were it not for the fact that they secretly hate DIY; it’s now launched a ‘Today’ tab, showcasing popular content each day. “The Today tab will feature curated topics and trending Pins, making it easier to explore timely ideas, Pinterest explains. That means, right now, you might find something like “Inspiring Work from Home Workspaces” rather than one focused on vacation ideas, for instance.At launch, the Today section is pulling from trending searches — like kid-friendly baking ideas, self-care tips, family-favorite movies and comfort food recipes, among other things. These recommendations will be curated by Pinterest’s team, but further down the road, some may come from guest editors. The company will also soon use the Today tab to offer expert information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on topics like hand washing, mask usage and other safety tips during the coronavirus pandemic.” This should be live now in the UK and US, so take a look should you be so minded.
• Reddit Introduces Polls: A new post type for Reddit! Polls! It’s quite rudimentary in terms of functionality, but as a way of gauging a community’s support for particular products or features or courses of action, it’s a useful one – particularly if you have the sort of brand which has its own little niche area of Reddit to call its own. Have to say, though, I would be fascinated to see under the hood of this and get a picture of some of the questions that are being asked here – I imagine quite a few of them would make my hair curl somewhat.
• Spotify Introduces Podcast API: This is techy and of limited interest to most of you, but if you’re interested in building anything that uses Spotify’s podcast data to surface or analyse content then, well, you’re in luck!
• Connected TV Market Analysis: This is slightly out of my comfort zone – I am not a media buyer (I may be scum but, well…), and I don’t do BIG AD BUYING CAMPAIGNS (what do I do? What is the point of me? It’s questions like this that assail one during this early period of churning out Curios, a sort of long, dark breakfast of the soul, if you will) – but it seems useful; it’s also a LinkedIn post, and I never link to those. The STUPENDOUSLY-NAMED Paul Gubbins (honestly, what a name) has written a very comprehensive post about the market for ad buying on connected TV, how it all works, etc – it’s very in-depth, and, at least for someone like me who really doesn’t know anything about this stuff, really quite interesting. I think there’s a real opportunity here to make some quite fun stuff based on the captive audiences we’ll all have to play with in the coming weeks and months.
• What Businesses Are Doing About Corona: A Google Sheet containing what seems like a pretty comprehensive list of Stuff That Companies Are Doing In The Time Of Corona, both good and bad. Useful if you are one of the seemingly-infinite number of advermarketingprdrones who has been tasked with creating a rundown of WHAT THIS ALL MEANS AND HOW BRANDS MUST RESPOND – who knew that this crisis would be such a catalyst for so much strategic thinking? Honestly, if I read one more poorly-paraphrased reworking of Muir’s Laws of the Internet – here they are again, for those of you with poor memories.

By Jason Limon

IN FACT, WHY NOT ENJOY AN ADDITIONAL THREE HOURS OF QUESTLOVE? MAN THAT WAS A LONG SET!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.1:

• The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: As long as this keeps being useful and updated, I’ll keep linking to it here. It’s growing exponentially each day, as thousands of people around the world contribute to adding new resources and helpful information, and now contains information to help parents with homeschooling, people working from home, and various helpful materials on churches, worship, online deliveries, worker’s cooperatives and unions that might offer assistance and support…look, this is just a superb resource and a proper reminder of what the open web can and should be. Kudos to everyone involved, it’s a hell of an undertaking.
• Help With Covid: I tried to sign up to be an NHS volunteer this week, only to find that as I can’t drive I am largely useless (to be expected, frankly); I’ve offered myself up as a telephone person but quite fervently hope that noone’s unfortunate enough to be diverted towards me as a source of emotional support. Links, I can do; emotional support, perhaps less so. Anyway, this site is a list of projects that are currently live which people can assist with in various ways; they’re in the main online projects, so perfect for wherever you are, although there’s a slight US focus with much of the content. From design to coding to manufacturing and loads inbetween, if you feel you have skills that you could be using to help then this is a good place to start finding out how.
• Covid Global Hackathon: Anyone who’s worked anywhere adjacent to tech in the past decade will hear the word ‘hackathon’ and breathe a small sigh of despair; it’s come to be shorthand for ‘look, some big business needs to look like it ‘gets’ tech and is all agile and stuff, so can we get a bunch of people with stickers on their laptops to sit in a gym with some whiteboards and pizza for a day attempting to solve a spurious challenge while we take photos for LinkedIn and then never speak of this again?’ Still, this looks like it might be rather more meaningful; it’s scheduled to take place on 30 March, so at the time of writing you’ve a few days left to register; “an opportunity for developers to build software solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic…The hackathon welcomes locally and globally focused solutions, and is open to all developers – with support from technology companies and platforms including AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat, who will be sharing resources to support participants throughout the submission period.” Worth a look if you do codestuff.
• Covid Tracker: I am trying to steer clear of scary or doomy links in here at the moment – this one’s a BIT scary, so, if you’re feeling a bit fragile and the numbers are all a bit worrying, DON’T CLICK. The rest of you, though, this is the best and clearest site for seeing how the relative spread of the virus over time differs from country-to-country, and how relative progressions compare. Clear, well-designed and updated daily from public datasources, this is fascinating. But, er, it’s also quite a scary graph, so, well, caveat emptor.
• The Remote Work Survival Kit: To be honest this may well be linked to within the larger Corona Tech Handbook up there, but if you want a useful bunch of links and resources to help you setup homeworking for yourself, colleagues or a small business then this could be hugely helpful.
• The Coronavirus Shop: This site is selling virus-themed merch. You want a ‘Coronavirus World Tour 2020’ hoodie? NO YOU DO NOT FFS THAT IS GOING TO AGE VERY POORLY. It purports to be a charitable venture, but I can’t help but feel that the statement ‘A % of every sale is donated to charity’ isn’t quite the level of clarity I’d want from something like this – also, the charity it donates to is US-specific. Still, if you’d like a poorly-printed, very of-its-time souvenir of a major global disaster then, er, you do you, friend! NB – we are not friends, and I would like you to stop reading my newsletterblogthing right now, please. Go on, fcuk off.
• How Is The World?: I mean, I think we can hazard a guess, right kids? Still, if you want a global tracking snapshot of how we’re all doing right now then you might like this site, which tracks what I presume is Twitter sentiment data from across the world to attempt to present a snapshot of how the world’s coping with STUFF. Obviously all the usual caveats apply – sentiment analysis is largely bunkum, no real people use Twitter, the sample size and geolocation are very iffy (Twitter’s fault, not the website’s)…still, it’s kind of interesting to look at, even if I question the veracity of a site which currently claims that the happiest people online right now are in Saudi, Iran and Pakistan. I mean, Saudi maybe – I shudder to think about what might happen to your thumbs if you were to type how you really felt about life – but not sure that Iran has that much to smile about now.
• Zenly Launches Stay At Home Leaderboards: This feels like it should go in the top section, now I come to think of it. Oh well. Zenly is a Snap-owned app which effectively lets you track where all your friends are all the time, a la Snap Map; it’s introduced a really cute little gamification mechanic to encourage people to stay put, creating ‘streaks’ based on how long since you left your house. Such a nice way of making it a fun challenge rather than a chore; maybe something that might be helpful for your household. I’m slightly surprised that more apps aren’t doing this; after all, our phone knows exactly where we are at all times, and whether we’re leaving the house, so I’d have expected everyone to jump on the ‘let’s gamify this’ bandwagon.
• Immersive Online Experiences: Thanks so much for Paul Drury-Bradley for pointing me at this; it’s an AMAZING resource and I encourage you all to click the link and have an explore. I’ll let them explain: “Here at No Proscenium, we’re dedicated to searching out the best in immersive & experiential work. Traditionally that has meant tracking the immersive theatre renaissance, putting a spotlight on narrative & performance driven escape rooms, and covering the growth of location based entertainment (LBE), with the occasional foray into at-home VR, alternate reality games, and the odd Escape Room in a Box. Because of the ongoing fight against the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, not only are we left without a lot of new live performance and LBE based work to cover it wouldn’t be responsible of us to encourage people to go out at this time even if many of our readers were not facing curfews and other measures. So we turn to that which can be done INDOORS and ONLINE, and instead of looking at this as a bad thing, we’re embracing the idea of IMMERSIVE FOR INDOOR KIDS.” THIS IS SO GOOD!! You want interactive online experiences? You got them! You want games that can be played on the phone, using calls? You got them! You want podcasts as plays, online text games, ARGs, interactive livestreams, video-on-demand…you got them! SUCH a wonderful resource full of creative play and fun, this is probably the richest funlink in all of Curios this week and I cannot recommend enough that you explore it.
• The National Emergency Library: The Internet Archive has for years run a slightly-peculiar sort of digital lending library, whereby it had one digital copy of a huge selection of texts which could be lent out to one user worldwide at a time (for reasons of copyright, I presume); now, though, because of these ‘extraordinary times we live in’ (dear God, I really need a new term for this – could we try ‘virageddon’? I might see if I can make it catch on, feel free to help), that restriction has been lifted and anyone, anywhere, can now access a dizzying number of texts, digitally, for free. There are 1.5million texts in here – the tagging options you can use to search them run to 50 pages. There are nearly 20,000 works labeled ‘fiction’ ffs – honestly, this is one of the most amazing online resources I think there has ever been, and I am awed at its scale and scope. I’ve just scrolled right to the end of the tags and discovered that there are 120 books dealing with the behaviour of dogs, so basically what I am saying is that whatever you’re into there’s something here for you.
• The Boardgame Remix Kit: The experience that got me into immersive theatre play stuff was called ‘Journey to the End of the Night’, and it involved being chased across London by 100 people in weird period costume including a terrifying man on spring-stilts, culminating on the Southbank at about 2am and which involved me getting VERY scared and rather too stoned in Hyde Park whilst trying to evade a capture squad. It was great, and honestly changed my life in a few small ways; it was organised by Gideon Reeling, which was an early offshoot of Punchdrunk (you see what they did there, right?), and was run by Alex Fleetwood who went on to found Hide & Seek who, while they existed, were a BRILLIANT company exploring ways to ‘hack’ games and play in interesting and fun ways. One such project was the Boardgame Remix Kit, which they released as a product a few years back but which they’ve now made free – the idea behind the kit is that it provides a bunch of new rulesets and ways to play for existing games and toys you might have at home but which might need a refresh. Want to turn Cluedo into a zombie survival game? Want to turn Scrabble into a gambing game using your Monopoly money? SO many excellent and fun ways of tweaking stuff you already own to keep it interesting, and a wonderful resource for week three when you’ve played as many games of Settlers of Catan as any single household can reasonably be expected to.
• Makeway: One the one hand, I came across this via an aggressive campaign of digital advertising (I have no idea what audience I am in, but MAN does this company want me to see its ads) and I am suspicious of Kickstarters that can afford that sort of ad spend as, well, couldn’t you fund yourselves in that case? On the other, this looks really fun – it’s raised a staggering £1.5m at the time of writing, off a goal of £8k, which may be the largest over-funding I’ve ever seen – and is basically a real-life physical version of the classic Rube Goldberg machine simulator ‘The Incredible Machine’ (which you can play here). The idea is that you’re buying a bunch of rails, magnets, spinners, trapdoors and the rest, which you affix to a wall in whichever configuration you desire to make wall-mounted, ceiling-to-floor marble runs of potentially crazy complexity. If you’ve ever watched one of those YouTube videos in which a ball-bearing takes a painful-but-impressive six minutes to travel around a house before finally filling a glass with lemonade and thought “I could make one of those, but I can’t be fcuked to raid the kids’ meccano box” then this is absolutely for you (though given it’s still got 20 days to run, you may well not receive this til 2021 by which point, God willing, we may be allowed to go outside again).
• The Films of SXSW: For all those of you who were going to go to SXSW (the film and music bit, not the advermarketingpr bit) and who are sad about missing all the short films from the festival, FEAR NOT – Mailchimp is hosting them all to view for free on this site. I confess to not having watched any of these, but the cinephiles among you might find some good material in here should you wish.
• Colourpush: A nice, seemingly-utterly-frivolous, little project by WeTransfer, which lets users spend 90s playing with a few buttons and a limited canvas to create a small, pastel-ish, slightly abstract, multicolour artwork, which you can then download and use however you wish, as well as adding it to the digital gallery of other people’s compositions. There are worse ways of making a new Zoom background, tbh, and the slightly fingerpaintish nature of the interface means that I think it could be quite a fun distraction for small kids (for about three minutes, til they start demanding more Peppa).

By Alex Schaefer

NEXT, TRY OUT DJ TWITCH’S ‘TRANQUILITY’ MIX WHICH IS ALL AMBIENT AND LOVELY!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.2:

• United We Stream: I can’t work out whether being a rabid clubber would be bad right now – on the one hand, you obviously can’t go clubbing; on the other, with the right connections you can keep yourself in medical-quality speed, ket and pills for months; with a few cheap lighting rigs from Amazon and a decent pair of speakers, you can probably create your own sweaty khole experience in the comfort of your own home (and you’re literally only metres away from the comedown couch). More seriously, the virus is obviously ruinous for many, many music scenes, not least Berlin’s infamous techno clubs; United We Stream is collecting a variety of live sets from clubs across the city, from 7-12 each night (at least at weekends), and also features a fundraising effort to keep the whole thing going. Sadly doesn’t seem to include anyone playing Thunderdome IV in its entirety, but one can always dream.
• Online Dance Classes: New York’s Mark Morris Dance Group is putting daily live classes streaming online, and available to watch back later on its website. I am not, it may shock you to learn, necessarily an aficionado of dance; I get the impression the stuff here is probably quite serious, and it might help if you know what a plie is (I don’t, to be clear). That said, if you think Joe wossname is a bit too amateur for you and you want a workout that could quite feasibly result in a badly-torn hamstring, then some of these will be perfect for you. Alternatively, if your kid does dance and is bouncing off the walls, this could be a perfect way of exhausting the fcuker. Up to you really.
• Six Feet of Separation: I am not, in the main, a sentimental man (unless that sentiment is ‘sneering self-regard’), but this is SUCH a lovely project and something that might be lovely for those of you with kids to try. Six Feet of Separation is a newspaper made collaboratively online by a bunch of kids aged between 2 and 19 in…oh, I have just checked and they’re in San Francisco. That figures. Still, it’s a collection of drawings and essays and games and recipes and even horoscopes, and, honestly, even though my cute threshold is VERY low, this warmed even my frozen, warty cockles. I would love to see a collection of these sorts of things in a year’s time; aside from anything else, I think they could become really interesting historical documents of kids’ responses to the…*gestures, futilely*…thing.
• Snag Films: Another niche website for free streaming of video that I had never heard of before – the deal with Snag is that all the content is…well, it’s mainly stuff you’ll never have heard of before, leaning heavily on documentary content with a bit of an inspirational bent. Films about surfing culture, the Cuban-American diaspora, and lesbian bar owners (not the same film, to be clear) – there are 2000-odd, it’s all totally free, and whilst it’s not, it’s safe to say, ever going to trouble Netflix, if you’re after something a little more niche and you’re sick of being told to watch that show about that bloke and the fcuking tigers then this might be worth a look.
• Reply All on Twitch: Reply All is a very popular and apparently very good podcast that I know lots of you probably like. They are now doing it on Twitch. This may be of interest to some of you (and, more broadly, I’m quite interested to see how they translate the show from one medium to another; if this works in any reasonable way, expect to see the rise of ‘Zoo TV’ as every single fcuking bloke who has a podcast with his mates where they ‘just kind of talk about random stuff and weird sh1t, you know?’ decides the it would be immeasurably better if you could see all their beards and their slightly-going-to-fat-in-your-early-30s physiques.
• Escape The Document: I am in awe of this, both in terms of scope and execution. Did you know that you could use Google Docs to make an ‘Escape The Room’-type interactive fiction game, with fiendish puzzles and some really rather good writing? I certainly didn’t, and yet here we are. Kudos to writer and creator Anthony BL Smith, this is a quite astonishing bit of work – it does rather beg the question ‘why?’, but then again so does most of the best stuff.
• Theme Park Rides: One of the WORST things about this – not in any way one of the worst things, but forgive me a touch of authorial hyperbole – is that I’m unlikely to get to a theme park anytime soon, meaning I am JONESING FOR ROLLERCOASTERS. If you too are finding yourself getting centrifugal force withdrawal, you might want to check out this YouTube playlist of videos of rollercoasters in first person view; most of these are Disney and not all of them are thrill rides, with various monorail videos and footage of kid-friendly rides like ‘It’s a Small World’ for those of you with particularly masochistic tendencies. Honestly these are ace and it’s amazing quite how much of an effect watching them fullscreen can have. BONUS GAME – if you’re the sort of person with a really big telly or a wall-mounted projector, get everyone in your house to stand in front of the telly and watch a few of these, and then watch as they all get jellylegs and fall over when they try and move (this works BRILLIANTLY with small children, fwiw, though there’s an outside chance they will vomit in the immediate aftermath).
• Scratch: Scratch is a free, browser-based tool by MIT that lets users program their own games, animations and lightly-interactive stories to share with others. This could be quite an interesting way of augmenting storybuilding with your kids, or alternatively of making simple-yet-vicious animated vignettes of your quarantined life which you can share with the wider world (until your partner finds out and your life becomes very, very uncomfortable). It’s designed to be a learning tool as much as a creative one, is available in LOADS of languages, and is designed for ages 6 up; this looks like a really, really good platform to play with imho.
• Find My Pasta: A nice idea, though only as good as its uptake and the quality of data submitted; Find My Pasta’s an app designed to help users track and report food shortages in their local area, with the idea being that you use it to flag shops that are either locust-ravaged or stocked to the nines. Might be worth a look if you’re concerned about access to supplies where you live, though I’d caveat this by saying that there’s no guarantee that enough people will be using it for it to be functional.
• Google Learning: All of Google’s learning resources in one place. SO MUCH LEARNING! SO MANY SUBJECTS! Honestly, if you can’t find something in here that you’re interested in learning about then you may well be dead, or at the very least terminally uncurious.
• Connected Camps: Despite my somewhat-snarky reference up top to using Minecraft as a place to do events, this is a super-smart idea; Connected Camps runs educational classes in Minecraft, specifically in adjacent disciplines such as digital object design and coding – it’s SUCH a good idea, and another example of how existing, built digital worlds can be used for pretty much anything with enough ingenuity and care. Oh, and this announcement by Minecraft from this week, about how it’s making Minecraft Education Edition (the stripped-back version that lets you do shared virtual world stuff with a lot of the more obviously ludic elements stripped out) is now free til the Summer for anyone with an Educator’s version of Office365 – which might be worth a look if, er, you are such an educator.
• Krisp: Software that works to mute or eliminate background noise from your videocalls. Your colleagues and friends will thank you, I promise.
• Walkie Talkie: There are a bunch of these available, but this one’s widely said to be the ‘best’ – why not turn your daily conversations with friends and colleagues into FAR more interesting walkie talkie conversations? Pick a frequency, get everyone to tune in, and enjoy the crackly goodness of faux-radio communication! Bonus points if you all invent a preposterous and overelaborate system of signoffs and callsigns to frame the experience; the temptation to refer to everyone as ‘Good Buddy’ in the manner of a US long-distance trucker will be very, very strong, I warn you.
• Anchor Makes Podcasting Easier: Coupled with the boom in terrible novels being written RIGHT NOW, I am pretty certain there will be a parallel boom in people deciding that what the world really needs is to hear them on a podcast. It is now even easier to do co-recording and editing and all sorts of other things remotely – “with Record With Friends 2.0, currently in beta, up to 4 people can join your podcast recording from any device, on desktop or mobile, with or without an Anchor account. In order to join your recording, all your guest has to do is click an invitation link and type in their name. Like the rest of Anchor’s podcasting platform, Record With Friends is free to use and available globally.” Let me be clear – I don’t want you to do this, I don’t think it’s likely to result in anything good, but I like and care about you SO MUCH that I am including this link in here regardless of my own feelings. Fcuking hell, I deserve some sort of award for this ffs.
• Bingo Deal: Poor the Nanas – deprived of their main social focal point (to whit: sitting on rural bus routes all day, where they always all seem to know each other), they’ve also been deprived of the bingo. Thankfully, though, this site lets you print out bingo cards which you can distribute to run games online over whatever videocalling platform you like. Why not try livening this up by creating new, Corona-appropriate caller slang? “Cupboard’s Empty – Number 20! Hungry Tum – 41!’. Or, on reflection, maybe don’t.

By Oriane Safre-Proust

NOW ENJOY SOME DOWNTEMPO BALEARIC-TYPE STUFF COURTESY OF CLASSIC LOVER!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.3:

• Wrestling: WWE is weird. We’ve spoken at length here before – or, er, I have; look, I know this is a monologue but it’s weirdly helpful to imagine it as a dialogue because, well, the alternative’s a bit bleak – about how it has generated kayfabe, the most important and culturally-significant concept of our times, but less so about the fact that at its heart it is basically The Bold and the Beautiful or Days of Our Lives with smaller pants, bigger muscles and approximately the same hair. I don’t know if you’ve seen the footage of them doing WWE in audience-free arenas because of quarantine, but if not do dig it out – it turns the whole spectacle into nothing more than a slightly camp series of over-the-top shouting matches between very, very orange wardrobes. Anyway, that’s by way of unnecessarily-long preamble to the fact that WWE has now made a bunch of its matches available to stream for free. Great!
• Arrange Meetups Easily For many people it seems that this…situation (no, I can’t use that either, it reminds me of Jersey Shore and makes me think of the virus as a slightly-going-to-fat guido with vertiginous hair) is leading to the reinvigoration of their social lives as they do virtual hangouts every night with people they haven’t spoken to for ages (not wishing to p1ss on your parades here, kids, but this might not be quite the same when we all stop having this one thing in common again). If that’s you, and you’re finding it tricky for you and your friends to find a slot in your respective jam-packed diaries for virtual pub time, this webapp – called ‘Lettuce’, for no good reason that I can discern – might be useful; it’s basically like Doodle, but less annoying (Doodle used to be ace, but it’s UI’s gone down the toilet in recent years imho).
• Some Good Internet Rabbitholes: Reddit doing God’s work here in this thread, which brings together various users’ favourite internet rabbitholes from over the years – in this context, ‘rabbitholes’ refers to stories which are weird and deep and strange and which investigating will potentially consume you. Examples referenced in here include the Voynich Manuscript, John Titor the time traveller, TimeCube and SO MANY MORE. Honestly, this is FULL of interesting oddness – it’s worth it for the story of the Death Valley Germans if nothing else.
• Abandoned Tourism: Photoagrapher Noah Kalina is posting images to this Twitter thread that he’s capturing from the world’s webcams, which, per recent Curios, are a wonderful window into the empty world outside (by the way, if your kid’s 11ish and reasonably robust, this is a CRACKING book about the aftermath of an event much worse than this one); see Rome bereft of tourists, Times Square silent…eerie, but not unpleasant; things…things are just sort of nicer without us cluttering them up, aren’t they?
• The Great Empty: More of the same – images of empty public spaces worldwide, though this time snapped by in-situ photographers rather than webcam shots. A glorious collection by the NYT; the shot of the empty restaurant by night in Myanmar is a personal favourite.
• Taco Cat: Taco Cat is a new card game, playable with a standard deck. I don’t know if it’s any good, if I’m honest; I just really liked the name, and the fact that there’s actually a game based on a relatively minor meme from a few years back. You’ll need a printer and post-it notes to play, but WHO doesn’t have those at home? Apart from me.
• Who Has Your Face?: It’s amazing how quickly we all stop worrying or caring about issues around digital privacy. Not surprising, I suppose, more faster than I expected – turns out that we’re actually absolutely fine with our data and privacy being compromised if it means we get streaming video and the ability to chat to our mates. WE HAVE FINALLY FOUND THE PRICE OF OUR DATA! Still, doesn’t mean that it’s not still something we should keep an eye on, as this US project shows rather neatly – facial recognition tech is more widespread over there than over here, and the laws governing the use of the data it collects are far looser, but that’s not to say that we’re not heading in the same direction ourselves. This site asks users a series of questions (based on the assumption that they’re US-based) to determine which companies and organisations are likely to have access to their facial data, based on previous behaviour and signups; genuinely a little chilling, and absolutely coming to a country near you within a few years (it’s not really the time tbh, but there’s reason to be a little wary of creeping encroachment on civil liberties buried in some of the legislation that’s been rattling through Parliament at a rate of knots).
• Plylst: Better Spotify playlists, apparently. I barely use Spotify, but if you do there may be some good reasons to give this a try.
• A Thread of Animal Live Cams: I bought a Google Chromecast thingy the other day, mainly so that I can throw streaming theatre onto my telly (/pseud) but also so I can put some of these webcams up there so my girlfriend can imagine she’s in some sort of critter heaven all day. This is a womnderful Twitter thread collecting links to all sorts of live animal cams from zoos around the world; LOOK AT THE PANDAS! LOOK AT THE ORANGUTANS! LOOK AT THE NAKED MOLERATS Actually, maybe don’t look at them, they might make you feel funny.
• Quarantine Gone Wild: Ordinarily I’d have to start this description off with something like THIS IS A LINK TO ACTUAL PHOTOS OF NAKED PEOPLE, SOME OF THEM BONING, DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE AT WORK! Now, though, no need! Who cares if you’re at work? Literally NOONE WILL KNOW if you have a whole separate monitor full of scud on the go as you type! Anyway, Reddit has responded to quarantine as only Reddit knows how – with a new sub featuring people getting their kit off whilst stuck at home! This is mostly cis-, mostly-straight, and mostly-white afaics, but if you want a seemingly never-ending procession of random naked strangers to distract you from…*gestures again, more floridly* that, then maybe this will do the trick. Side note: there’s an awful lot of people showing their faces in these pics ‘because the world is ending’; Web Curios would like to cautiously advise readers that, should they choose to get involved in all this naked fun, they possibly take a slightly longer-term view of things, just in case.
• Stock Jumper: Take any share price from any market in the world, and turn it into a very smol ski-jumping game so that you can have fun at the expense of the crashing global economy. SILVER LININGS!
• Skynet Simulator: Finally in this week’s miscellania, a BRAND NEW and really rather good clicker game, in which you attempt to raise a world-destroying AI from a twinkle in a C64’s eye to the Terminator-birthing death-mind of the imagined future. This is suprisingly tricky – you can and will lose – and it helps to have a vague sort-of understanding of basic tech/programming principles (honestly, VERY vague is fine I know fcuk all, and still basically managed to get the hang of it), but it rewards patient experimentation and is surprisingly involving if you persist. Even better, it looks REALLY boring so this is something you can totally play whilst pretending to the kids or whoever else that it’s ‘actually a work thing and I really need to concentrate, can you maybe just shut the door for an hour?’.

By Giovanni Castell

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS GENUINELY-CHEERING SELECTION OF J-POP MIXED WAAAAAAAY BACK IN 2009!

THE CIRCUS OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT TUMBLRS AND IN FACT ARE BASICALLY JUST BLOGS – ARE THEY MAKING A COMEBACK? SHOULD I RENAME THIS SECTION NOW?:

• Passport To Dreams: An actual, proper, honest-to-goodness blog, like what they had in the old days! This is lovely – passionate and informed and all about a VERY niche topic, to whit Disney amusement parks and their design, their rides, and the way they’ve evolved over the years. A perfect companion for those of you who decided to take on the ‘learn to design a themepark’ education challenge from last week’s Curios.
• Apocalypse Pizza: The worst sort of pizza, I think we can all agree. Another actual blog(!), this one’s written by someone living in East London who, at least a week or so ago, worked in a pizza joint. It’s very quiet, and very small, and I like it a lot; I would love to know of anyone else doing these sorts of personal diaries right now; I know everyone’s sort-of doing this via Stories, but the problem with those is the ephemerality; I do wonder how much of the long-term record of These Times We Live In, or at least the in-the-moment experience of them, will end up vanishing as a side-effect of built-in digital ephemerality.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Darian Mederos: Superb, photo-real painting which for some reason features lots and lots of bubble-wrap. Superb.
• The Social Distance Project: I LOVE THIS. Sharing short stories about how people are getting on with each other – or not – during quarantine. Small, human, happy, sad, intimate, impersonal and universal, this is maybe my favourite project to come out of all this so far – like PostSecret in a time of Corona, basically.
• Ivenoven: Really cute cakemaking. Which, fine, is a bit basic, but basic is comforting and comforting is good.
• Massimo Bottura: Bottura is chef patron of Osteria Francescana in Italy, a super-starred restaurant with a kilometric waiting list. This is his Insta feed, which is in some respects the antithesis to Jack Monroe and Jamie Oliver’s laudable ‘cook with your storecupboard ingredients’ cookalongs – Massimo, I DON’T HAVE EASY ACCESS TO FRESH ARTICHOKES YOU BSTARD – but which is SO lovely to watch in a kind of gently-escapist ‘one day I will eat in a restaurant again, but til then let me just melt at the beauty of your knifework’ sort-of way. Not sure how much practical help you’ll get with your lockdown cooking here, but it’s rather good regardless.
• Crayola The Queen: Crayola is a drag artist from London who’s brought their act onto Insta for lockdown. Drag makeup tutorials, cabaret performances, audience interaction…Crayola is just one of many creatives finding new ways to make and engage despite physical distance, and I wholeheartedly approve.
• Handsome Devil Puppets: Because regardless of what may or may not be going on outside, I am always a sucker for sinister, vaguely-satanic-looking puppetry.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT YOU AT THIS SELECTION OF 10 BOOKS FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM HAYMARKET AND WHICH ARE PERHAPS A BIT HEAVY FOR CASUAL READING BUT WHICH EQUALLY ARE SOME PRETTY DECENT LEFT-LEANING TEXTS SHOULD YOU BE IN THE MARKET FOR PLOTTING THE POST-VIRUS REVOLUTION!

• Stop Making Points: Not you, you understand, everyone else. This is a wonderful essay which neatly-encapsulates much of what I feel about the online experience right now. The author is Italian (I think this is written directly in English, which, if so, kudos to them as I wish my Italian were this good), living in Italy, and describes their experience of quarantine and the virus and their family and the world and the country and my God this is full of superb vignettes and observations and very, very real moments of interfamilial hatred and honestly, were this not about The Bad Thing I’d have considered putting this last as my favourite piece of the week. I promise you it’s not sad or depressing – it’s just a wonderful bit of prose about This Fcuking World We Live In. “As it turns out, even in the midst of dystopia you can still want to kill your mother” is my line-of-the-crisis so far.
• Some People: Jason Kottke’s one of the originals of the small web (by which I mean, bloggers and creators ploughing relatively small furrows on their own platforms for love not money (though Jason now makes a living through his website, which, wow) – this series of observations did the rounds this week, but if you’ve not seen it yet it’s worth a look. Some People is a list of the types of experiences that people around you might be having, and a perfect reminder of the fact that you have no idea about other people’s circumstances and conditions and, as such, it possibly behooves you to be charitable about their presumed motivations. I normally abhor stuff like this; the virus is making me soft, I tell you.
• Things I Learned in Solitary: Here, advermarketingprdrones, you can have this for free – do any of your clients have any links to prisoner rehabilitation? Get a bunch of ex-lags to do a ‘coping with lockdown’ video series; instant hit. That’s the premise of this essay, by Shaka Senghor who spent a chilling five years in solitary from 1999-2004. Their observations on how to deal with the experience are frankly the sort of things that one could reasonably apply to the general business of Coping With Life, but are particularly germane right now; if you’re finding it hard to find a light at the end of the tunnel, some of these might be useful.
• The Black Death: I know, I know, you might not think that reading all about the greastest known plague to afflict our species would be a happymaking thing to do right now, but I promise you that it will give you a real ‘dear Christ, thank fcuk that I am alive now and not (inevitably, briefly) alive then instead’. WOW was the Black Death a bad time! I appreciate that that’s the sort of phrase that will make all right-thinking, educated people roll their eyes and mutter about extended exposure to the internet making everyone dumb, but, honestly, I had very little knowledge of the exact facts around the plague til reading this. LISTEN UP EVERYONE – IT COULD BE SO MUCH WORSE. Which, ok, might not exactly feel like a pick-me-up right now, but let’s clutch at whatever straws we can see poking out of the dungheap.
• Quarantine Socialising: You will, I guarantee, get bored both of reading and talking about ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH THIS IS CHANGING SOCIETY – while you’re still able to contemplate such questions without your eyes rolling fully back in your head, though, this is a decent precis in the NYT of some of the different ways people are choosing to adapt their social lives to an online-only existence. Nothing in here should be revelatory to you, but there’s a slightly-wider lens than the usual ‘exercise! Cookery! The pub!’-type lists; there’s almost certainly three things in here you can use with clients, whilst knowing in your heart of hearts that literally noone right now wants to interact with a brand unless they absolutely have to (and even then, frankly).
• Quarantine Influencers: Specifically, quarantine fashion influencers, who now that they can’t go outside and snap themselves against their favourite urban backdrops are having tyo pivot to a new, more domestic aesthetic. The crux of the piece is the question of whether this shift will persist post-lockdown, presuming there is such a post-, or whether instead there will come a backlash and a reversion to hyper-stylised, pro-looking irreality. Not, I concede, questions that ought to be keeping us up all night right now, but Curios has always been a whiplash switchback between the trivial, the even more trivial and the occasionally-consequential.
• Corona Comes to Sing-Sing: Sing Sing, as I’m sure you all know, is a New York prison; this is a piece in Esquire, written by an inmate, about what it felt like to have Corona looming as part of the inmate population. It’s wonderfully-written piece, and if you enjoy this I recommend clicking the author profile at the top and checking out the rest of John J Lennon’s work for the magazine; he’s hugely talented and still incarcerated.
• The Self-Quarantine Adult Activity Book: McSweeney’s does lockdown. This is funny, but also quite bleak – I did like the ‘cards to hold up at your partner in lieu of talking’ cut-outs, though (“Enough about Idris Elba now”).
• Second Life for Crypto Bros: It was this week announced that Linden Labs, the people who made Second Life and had for years been working on their follow-up virtual world Sansar, had decided to call it quits; odd timing considering the potential boom in appetite for virtual spaces these circumstances might engender, but that does mean that the field is now clear for Decentraland to make a play to be THE virtual 3d world of choice for the future. Decentraland is a very, very odd concept – I don’t think I’ve featured it on here before, but there are other, similar projects I’ve definitely linked to – which combines the 3d virtual environment of Second Life with a real-life economy linked to the Blockchain (of COURSE), which means that real ownership of digital assets is not only possible but also encouraged as part of the fabric of the ‘world’. The knock-on effects of this mean that it’s a world with a functioning labour market, a loans market, rough market rules, and exactly the sort of pro-capitalist worldview that underpins a lot of the ‘well, if people have to die to keep the markets afloat then that’s a risk we just have to take’ madness that’s coming out of Trumpland right now. This article’s not the best-written you’ll read all week, but it does a very good job of explaining the mechanics of the world and how…odd it is. What is it about crypto that attracts all these…these…people (you can infer whatever you like from my italics here)?
• Sim Racing: I’ve had various chats about whether eSports is going to take off in a mainstream way now that all sport is cancelled forever; I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, there is a LOT of time to fill in people’s sporting calendars, and videogames are more popular than ever, and the infrastructure’s there to support streaming as a thing; on the other, watching other people play videogames is still quite a niche pursuit, and watching other people play fast-paced FPS-type games, or MOBAs, is pretty hard to follow even for people who play the things. Also, watching other people play FIFA is boring, I don’t care if the players in question are famouses. The one exception to this, perhaps, is motor racing, a sport so tedious (look, I don’t care, I will die on this hill – I’ll make an exception for rally, but F1 is mogadon) that it could perhaps be improved by the digital gubbins streaming would bring. This is an interesting look at how the F1 circuit is seeking to use streaming to replace some of the grand prix, and how this might perhaps be the future of the sport; certainly, if this picks up traction amongst fans it’s hard to see how we can really justify the great, petrol-burning, globetrotting F1 circus in the future.
• Half-Life: Alyx: This is a videogame review – albeit one on RPS, so it’s very well-written – so probably not of interest to everyone; I’m including it, though, from the point of view of VR and its potential tyo have something of a breakthrough moment this year. I was on a podcast in January in which I said, laughingly, that “no, this was NOT going to be the year in which people suddenly started wanting VR headsets at home” and then obviously the virus happened and Facebook started selling out of Oculus units worldwide, and now I look like a d1ck, basically. Anyway, this game is the other reason VR might get a breakout in 2020 – by all accounts it’s the first genuinely-good ‘proper’ game in in the medium. Worth a read if you’re interested in what the cutting edge of VR experiences look/sound like right now.
• DJs on Twitch: I’m going to keep posting these articles of ‘industry X realises that it can reach fans really easily and engage them for a decent amount of time by just using Twitch’ for as long as they keep cropping up; there’s nothing specifically interesting about the way in which producers and DJs are using the streaming service to play to fans, debut new tracks and do virtual live shows, but it’s a further indication that Twitch has everything you need to pull together a reasonably-interesting livestream/tvshow/gig/lecture/talk hybrid, and that it’s only going to get bigger. Such a shame it’s owned by Amazon.
• I, Backpack: I really enjoyed this – very smart, well-thought out, and nicely written by Andrew Kortina, the piece looks at the peculiarities of modern manufacture and supply that means that it is almost never easier or cheaper for a supplier to repair a good than it is for them to replace it, and whether or not this is something that will change for both social and environmental reasons. I reckon this is the sort of thing that really will change – I would be surprised if the next couple of years didn’t see a distinct shift towards manufacturers offering the ability to fix-rather-than-replace, a la Patagonia, and of parallel small local businesses springing up to patch-and-mend your goods. YOU READ IT HERE…probably fifteenth if I’m honest, but wevs.
• Quarantine Gone Wild: The explainer piece to the bongo link above, this is Mel Magazine exploring what compels people to share pictures of their junk with the world in times of crisis. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!!
• Mary Beard on Asterix: Uderzo’s death this week means that the plucky little Gaul is now an oprhan – poor Asterix (and also Obelix, though he’s probably less bothered); this is Mary Beard from a few year’s back, writing in the LRB about the Asterix books, their history, their depiction of the Roman empire and so many other things. This is delightful – Beard is never anything but a pleasure to read – and it will make you want to dig out old copies of the books and read them again. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me until well into my late teens to make sense of the embedded gag in the druid named ‘Getafix’, which shame I was reminded of upon reading this piece and which I now fear will never leave me.
• Wounded Soldiers: A moving and sensitively-written piece which will nevertheless have you wincing on occasion (possibly even moreso if you’re in possession of a penis) as it describes the efforts made to perfect penile reconstructive surgery for soldiers wounded by landmines and shrapnel. There’s a lot of slightly, er, meaty description of war and wound, but what’s most poignant is the portraits of the soldiers themselves; there’s one anecdote in there about a veteran who has a habit of whipping out his reconstructed member in provincial nightclubs and playing helicopters with it, which on the one hand is eye-rollingly stereotypical but then also serves to remind you that these are mostly just idiot kids who’ve been blown up in faraway wars.
• The Beach: An extract from Laura Cummings prize-nominated novel ‘On Chapel Sands’ – I read this and it made me ache for space and outside and the sea, but in a surprisingly unsad way. Such wonderful writing about nature and people and place.
• Small Breeds: Last up this week, this essay by Jackie Connelly is about dogs and isolation and poverty, and contained so many lines that made me stop and read them back just for the joy of the prose – this paragraph, for example: “I was feeling permanent. I was anorexic and suicidal, lonely and furious, stuck in a massive concrete slab of a city, living in a centipede-infested basement the size of a Chrysler Town & Country. Everything I could want was blocks away: the Smithsonian, the café–bookstore that hosted queer open mics, the quirky bakery that sold me a honey-steeped Kouign-Amann croissant every morning, the Metro that would plummet deep into the city’s bowels before ejecting me up, up, up, over the Potomac, into deferent, cobblestoned Virginia, then backwards over the same forty-five minute course, with all its peaks and descents, eleven hours later.” Superb.

By my girlfriend (it’s her cat, Lebowski, who is currently quarantining with me)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s kick off this week’s videos with Bard of the Apocalypse Shardcore’s little ditty about being stuck inside. You will particularly enjoy the faces, until you start seeing them too around week three:

1. I know this sort of stuff is ten-a-penny at the moment, but this one really pleased me for some reason. This is a bunch of friends in Houston who all sang bits of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ from home and clipped it together into this video. It’s not spectacular, but it’s lovely and sort-of perfect:

1. This is the latest one from Poppy, who seems to have completed the characters’ evolution into full technogoth with this latest one, which is all 303s and slightly industrial beats with a Manson-esque androgyne in the video. This is sort-of awful, but oddly-compelling:

1. This is over an hour of all the old MTV ident animations, which as a piece of comforting background nostalgia (for those of us of a certain vintage) is basically a direct time capsule to happytime:

1. UK HIPHOP (WELL, GRIME) CORNER! We have the first official Coronabanger! This is Psychs, with ‘Spreadin’ – it’s actually quite a lot better than it needs to be, and the Mourinho line in there is nicely delivered:

1. Last up in this week’s videos, the latest (I think) in NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ series features Chika, a young US rapper who blew up on Twitter early last year and whose career has quietly been going from strength to strength – honestly, she is SO GOOD and one of the most impressive new MCs I’ve seen in an age, and this is an almost effortless-looking performance. Enjoy your new favourite female rapper, and, er, TAKE CARE THAT’S IT TAKE CARE NO MORE LINKS THIS WEEK I WILL BE BACK IN SEVEN DAYS BUT PLEASE BE NICE TO YOURSELVES AND EACH OTHER AND TRY AND KEEP POSITIVE AND MAKE SURE YOU GET FRESH AIR AND STUFF AND DEAR GOD I APPEAR TO HAVE TURNED INTO YOUR FCUKING MOTHER BUT IT’S ONLY BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND I CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND I WILL MISS YOU AND SEE YOU IN A WEEK BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, and one thing all of us content monkeys have in common is we all hate writing this upfront bit. This week it’s…uniquely hard.

Obviously Web Curios is a deeply cynical, miserable and ennui-soaked mess of my own neuroses and deficiencies as a human, but, just for once, let me try and be positive here. This is awful and hard and will hurt so many people, some physically, some not, but, if you’re looking for a silver lining, at least it’s happening now. We – I know, I know that this isn’t evenly distributed, and my privilege is based on another’s pain, I know – live in a world in which we can have entertainments piped to our hands, the sum-total of human knowledge accessible at a few clicks, an accumulated couple of millennia of culture and learning and art to draw on, accessible to us in literally seconds, on demand…look, all I’m saying is that this had happened at almost any other point in human history this would have been immeasurably worse. 

Anyway, this week’s Curios is slightly different, with the miscellania divided into three sections rather than 2, and no videos at the end as, well, I couldn’t find any interesting ones and frankly I imagine you’re all consuming quite enough as it is, what with Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and stuff. Think of Web Curios, then, as the fibre in your digital diet as a shut-in, the chewy stuff that you may not enjoy quite as much as TikTok but which will give you a slightly easier ride next time you’re trying to sh1t some ideas out of your mouth. As it were. 

I am Matt, and as usual I am at home in my pants – the only difference is that this week, so are you. Please take care.

NB – A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM EDITOR PAUL WHO RUNS THIS WEBSITE CAN BE READ HERE, AND SHOULD BE OF PARTICULAR INTEREST TO ARTISTS AND MAKERS!

By Rishi Dastidar, whose new book, Saffron Jack, you can pre-order here. 

LET’S KICK THE MUSICAL SELECTIONS OFF THIS WEEK WITH ONE OF TWO SPECIAL ISOLATION MIXES RECORDED LIVE IN BERLIN FOR YOU BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE – HE REALLY IS AN EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD DJ, YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS ONE AS IT IS ACE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE MERCIFULLY SHORT THIS WEEK WHAT WITH LITERALLY NOONE GIVING MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT S*C**L M*D** PLATFORM UPDATES THIS WEEK:

• The Facebook Small Business Grants Programme: I think it’s fair to say I’ve been…critical of Facebook in the past, but its response to all this has been genuinely good in the past week or so (I’ve read a bit of analysis which suggests it’s a result of this being an unambiguous problem and therefore easier for a data/science-leaning founder (and by extension corporate culture) to parse, which seems plausible), from its efforts to stem disinformation (see, Mark, it is possible to be better at that!) to its efforts to secure staff. This is another initiative that it’s hard to see as anything other than positive – “Facebook is offering $100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses in over 30 countries where we operate.” There are limited details about which countries, or how to go about applying, but you can sign up for updates which will emerge in due course; it won’t be a lot of money per business, but every little helps. Brief moment of sincerity here – I know several people who run businesses and are staring down the barrel at the moment, with responsibility for wages and staff and suppliers; good luck, and, if you can, try and support small companies where possible while we’re all stuck.
• Brand Communications in the Age of Corona: Ordinarily a header like that would make my teeth itch something chronic, but this is an actually not-terrible series of principles, posted by Twitter’s comms team, which is all sensible and, based on some of the fcuking calls I’ve had to sit on this week, the sort of thing we might all want to remind our clients of on a regular basis. No, I’m sorry, this isn’t a good time to go on an aggressive customer acquisition programme for your online casino (I mean, fine, from a certain (cnuty) angle it obviously very much is, but come on ffs).
• Reddit Metrics: Super-useful tool showing which bits of Reddit are trending hardest at any give moment. Depending on what you or your clients do, Reddit is SO worth a look as a way gauging how your customer base feel and what they might need from you right now (apologies in advance, but I’m going to try not to mention the C-word too much this week; this may well lead to some fairly unpleasant linguistic contortions but, well, you’re used to that).

By Marc Burckhardt

HERE, HAVE THIS SECOND EXCELLENT BIT OF CRATEDIGGING, ALSO LIVE FROM BERLIN, ALSO BY SADEAGLE – THIS IS ALSO EXCELLENT AND VERY MUCH DESERVES YOUR EARS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FOCUSED SOLELY ON PROVIDING YOU WITH AS MANY HELPFUL AND INTERESTING LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO HELP YOU PASS THE TIME AND STAY INTELLECTUALLY EXERCISED AND WOULD LIKE TO EXHORT READERS TO PLEASE SHARE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY GREAT THAT YOU FIND FOR INCLUSION IN FUTURE WEEKS’ EDITIONS BECAUSE, REALLY, IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN LINKS WERE BASICALLY A CURRENCY, THIS IS IT, PT.1:

• The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: I’ll continue to plug this this week – Ed’s done a truly incredible job coordinating this, and in many respects it’s an object lesson in how to do quite difficult, decentralised information coordination at scale. It contains links and information and data about the spread of the virus, but also to lists of volunteering organisations and support groups worldwide, tips for educators and medical staff on what online resources are available to help them, and loads more besides, and it’s being added to all the time from all around the world. It’s the absolute BEST of the web, this, and the sort of thing people in the ivory towers of academe dreamed of in the early days of bulletin boards and before the normies came in and ruined everything with the cats and the bongo and the nazism.
• Tech Support for Old People: FULL DISCLOSURE: I know Mike, one of the people behind this initiative, a little bit. But only a little. Regardless, this is a great idea and something you might want to get involved with if you’re in the UK – a project seeking volunteers to act as free tech support for older people who might need a little help navigating this exciting new reality of webcams and screensharing and NO GRANDDAD THERE ARE NO SINGLES IN YOUR AREA LOOKING FOR FUN DOWN’T DOWNLOAD THAT .EXE FILE FFS (both my male grandparents are dead and so incapable of embarrassing bongo-related fcukups, but yours might need the assistance).
• Handmirror: There is SO MUCH I am excited to see in the coming weeks and months, not least how social attitudes around certain mores are going to shift. How will our perception of human aesthetics change as we slowly drop all standards and start appearing on conference calls in three-day pants? Is this the first step in the WALL-E-fication of our species? Will we all slowly, imperceptibly, start to drop a shade in skintone as Vitamin E withdrawal kicks in? Anyway, while we still care about things like ‘do I have a cornflake on my cheek?’ when videocalling people, this is potentially a godsend – Handmirror is a Mac-only app which puts a button on your taskbar which, with one click, lets you check on how hideous you currently are via your webcam. It seems like a small thing, but the ability to start a conference call without the initial 2s of fear when your face shows up and you see that, no, you really couldn’t get away with not coming your hair, has significant quality-of-life benefits. Oh, on this, it’s always worth remembering DFW’s riff on videocalling from Infinite Jest.
• The Social Distancing Festival: We’ll be seeing LOTS of this in the coming weeks – I know for example that people are talking variously about 24h streaming comedy marathons with comedians doing sets from their houses across the world – but this was the first to cross my path this week; The Social Distancing Festival launched this week, and is a project by Nick Green in Toronto. Green had a new musical opening cancelled as a result of all this, and so decided to source as much upcoming artistic performance and put it on virtually through this hub – this is now a hugely-useful hub to find a huge selection of arts content, from theatres and opera houses and art galleries and people’s bedrooms – each day, with links to streams, details of timings, and basically everything you could need to enjoy a certain type of cultural life despite lockdown. So, so good, and worth sharing with anyone who’s less into YouTube videos and more into, I don’t know, Dvorak.
• Get Vibey: Sanderson Jones founded The Sunday Assembly a few years ago – I know Sanderson a bit, and he’s a genuinely remarkable man, whose positivity and energy make me occasionally think he’s a different species from me. His latest project is this, Get Vibey, which takes the hugely popular ‘Secular Singalong’ bit of the Assembly mornings and takes it into quarantine. Starting Monday at 5pm GMT, Sanderson hopes to start a global singalong, with anyone anywhere invited to log on and belt along with whatever tune they’re singing that day. On the one hand, you might think you’d feel a bit weird sitting in your kitchen with the second wine of the day belting out “I Will Survive”, but, trust me, this will be literally only the very tip of the veritable iceberg of weird you will discover within yourself as time passes.
• Last Year’s Rent: A hardship fund for the arts in the UK. I appreciate obviously that not everyone has any cash to spare right now, but, just in case you do, this mightn’t be a bad place to chuck a few quid.
• The Quarantine Book Club: I think this is a lovely idea, though I can equally imagine that perhaps it might be a touch stressful for authors. Quarantine Book Club affords authors the opportunity to chat with fans over chat in Zoom – there’s a reasonable selection coming up, and whilst they’re all US and I’ve not heard of any of them, they cover a lot of bases in terms of themes of their work and diversity / representation. The individual chats are ticketed, which is an interesting approach; I suppose limiting numbers for something like this keeps it workable, and authors’ have to eat, but, equally, in the midst of lots of people doing and giving stuff away for free, this jars slightly. I do wonder how the economics of this sort of thing will develop – will we see small cottage industries of individual experts in specific things offering piecemeal training and instruction in small, closed groups like this? I obviously have no fcuking idea.
• Become A Theme Park Designer: This…this is it! This is the moment! THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!! Look, we’re all going to be at home for ages, and after a while you’re going to complete Netflix and run out of cookery hacks to watch on Facebook and you’ll need something to stimulate your brain again – why not make it learning a new profession? WHY NOT LEARN TO DESIGN THEME PARKS??? Fine, there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever be able to actually visit theme parks again – I don’t mean this, by the way, I am fairly confident I will get to go to Alton Towers – or indeed that this course, called ‘Imagineering in a Box’ and offered by Khan Academy, will necessarily mean that you’ll be the architect of the inevitable Quarantine Studios Experience, but you’ll get a grounding in the principles of ride design, character design and the rest. If you’ve got a certain type of kid, I can think of worse projects to undertake in isolation than this tbh.
• Virtual AI: I hadn’t considered AT ALL the impact of lockdown on people who are used to attending meetings; if you or anyone you know is in AA, NA or any of the other As, you might find this useful – this site gives you a searchable database of virtual meetings happening worldwide, along with timings and the main language used by participants, so people can take the steps (no pun intended) needed to maintain their sobriety in what I can only imagine must be pretty challenging circumstances.
• Run Your Own Social: I like to think I’m OK at social media, at least in terms of making it do what I need it to – as a result, my Twitter feed’s largely free of rage and hatred, and I only use Facebook for Groups (and to publish a link to this once a week to almost universal silence). I would imagine, though, that that might not be the same for everyone. Whilst isolation is amply demonstrating the huge benefits the web brings in terms of being able to maintain specific, discrete conversations and contacts, it’s also perhaps demonstrating that what works at small-scale doesn’t always work at large scale; if you and yours are finding that the socials are all just TOO MUCH at the moment, why not take this opportunity to spin up your own, local social platform for you and whoever you want to use as you see fit? I featured this in July last year, but it seems germane to link to it again – there’s no technical reason why you’d need to do this, unless you’re very much a big-tech refusenik, but, well, you probably need a hobby, right?
• The Virtual Background Awards: At the time of writing you have 23h to enter (that’ll be 18 by the time you’re reading this, HURRY UP!), but if you think you can design the BEST ZOOM BACKGROUND EVER then, well, you go girl! There’s going to be a public vote to decide the winner once entries close – I for one am tumescent with excitement!
• Talkbeat: If you’re still exploring communications options for the new world order, and you don’t have access to Teams, and you don’t like Slack (noone likes Slack – it’s tolerated, at best – although, actually, the Slack I’m in with friends now has a !covid command which pulls the latest figures on the outbreak from public data sources and is the most terrifyingly-brilliant future thing I’ve seen all week tbh) then you might want to try Talkbeat. It is, I think, free, and seems to operate like Slack but with the wonderful addition of built-in ephemerality, thereby neatly eliminating the awful Slack fomo you get when you see that you’ve got 612 messages from the past 24h to read – in Talkbeat, all content vanishes after 24. This might be a nice, easy way of getting lots of family members together in one place to communicate textually, maybe.
• The Great Coronavirus Meme Survey: There are, I’m sure, more immediately-important-seeming pieces of academic work happening at the moment, but please let’s all take a moment to acknowledge the University of Amsterdam’s diligence in making sure that we properly track the memes that are spewing out of the culture faster than you can say “please, stop with the distracted boyfriend now”. You can’t see any of the memes here, sadly, but you can upload whatever you deem worthy of recording and analysis on this Page; fine, I know it seems silly, but I honestly think this is a really important piece of cultural work to document the creation and emergence of cultural ephemera around this. Lots of the most interesting commentary on historical events is through personal accounts and marginalia, and the famously-flaky nature of the idea of ‘permanence’ online means it’s vital to save this stuff while we can.
• Around: Yes, we’re ALL Zoomers now! Except, well, the software’s a bit iffy (I keep hearing the word ‘spyware’ being bandied about) and it does have some slightly annoying and creepy features (did you know that bosses using it can turn on an ‘attention tracking’ feature to monitor your attentiveness during calls? LOVELY!), and you might want to look at this new calling platform called Around as an alternative. It does all the things you’d expect, but does some clever stuff with face tracking to just isolate your fizzog to display rather than showing everyone how sh1t your kitchen is (stuff I have learned this week – my colleagues seemingly have nicer houses than I do) and uses AI to, so they claim, clean up all the audio. Might be worth a look.
• VOIP Cards: I LOVE THESE. As I wrote on Twitter: “Slightly pass-agg little notes you can load onto your phone and hold up when muted on a conference call. Please can we make this a thing? “Your complete failure to ever use the word ‘strategy’ correctly is making me murderous, Alan”. Honestly, as someone who has had to keep video off most of the week so that various people couldn’t see me mouthing “dear God you are so, so stupid” at them on calls (if you are reading this, by the way, I am definitely not talking about you), I am very much hear for this. Even if this site doesn’t have exactly what you want to communicate as an option, remember you can always use sites like BigAssMessage to create whatever you like – honestly, I am absolutely doing this later on and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop me.
• Netflix Party: You almost certainly know about this already, but in case not – LOOK! An official, sanctioned-by-Netflix way of doing shared viewing on laptops! It’s a Chrome-only plugin, but given that’s what 99% of the world uses you should basically be fine – it lets you watch something in-sync with other users anywhere, adds groupchat, and basically turns watching films at home into a social experience. Combine with Zoom or the video chat app of your choice to absolutely ruin the filmwatching experience for yourself and everyone else involved!
• Jqbx: Spotifysharing! Anyone can be a DJ! Jqbx lets you basically set up a stream of your Spotify, allowing anyone else to listen in and experience whatever you’re listening to as you listen to it. Perfect for listening to albums with friends while you chat, say, or for pretending that you’re running your own postapocalyptic radio station out there in the wastelands (YOU ARE NOT THREE-DOG) (hello to the three people who got that reference). Interestingly, you can also get data on what the most-streamed tracks were each week using the app – nice way of seeing how we’re all choosing to soundtrack a species-level incident.
• Popcorn Time Is Back!!!: Obviously I never want anyone to stop reading Curios halfway through – I like to imagine that you open all the tabs as you read in a game of chicken with your computer; who’ll expire first, the CPU or your attention span? – but I would very much encourage you to take a break now, click the link, download the software and GET DOWNLOADING; Popcorn Time, the service that made torrenting easy enough that any normie can do it, is BACK (first featured in Curios way back in March 2014 – man, that is a LONG six years; why not travel back in time and experience it for a moment?)! And it’s still very illegal, and will get shut down quite quickly I think, so get it while you can. Using this you will be able to download basically any film you can think of (it skews heavily hollywood and modern, fine, but still) – yes, lots of these are on Netflix or other platforms, but for those who perhaps can’t afford 30+ quid a month on subscription entertainment this is potentially a godsend. GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT.
• Free Audiobooks For Kids: You may have noticed over the years that I don’t like Amazon very much as a company and that I try and avoid linking to their works insofar as is humanly possible (not that far, turns out). Sometimes, though, they do good things – like now, when they’ve made a whole load of stories for children on their audiobooks platform Audible free to stream. This, honestly, is a total godsend if you’ve got kids but maybe need a break from storytime for a bit (or, er, if you want to listen to the Harry Potter series; I don’t judge, I just report).

By Jordyn Mcgeachin

NEXT, WHY NOT IMAGINE THAT YOU’RE LISTENING TO THE SOUNDTRACK OF AN AMERICAN MALL IN THE LATE-80s WITH THE LATEST INSTALMENT (#4) OF THE SUPERB ‘CVS BANGERS’ MIX SERIES!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FOCUSED SOLELY ON PROVIDING YOU WITH AS MANY HELPFUL AND INTERESTING LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO HELP YOU PASS THE TIME AND STAY INTELLECTUALLY EXERCISED AND WOULD LIKE TO EXHORT READERS TO PLEASE SHARE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY GREAT THAT YOU FIND FOR INCLUSION IN FUTURE WEEKS’ EDITIONS BECAUSE, REALLY, IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN LINKS WERE BASICALLY A CURRENCY, THIS IS IT, PT.2:

• The Berlin Philharmonic: Another institution which has made all its output free, you can, for the next month, access the entire digital archive of all the orchestra’s recordings, complete with video and all sorts of in-depth stuff if you’re into…er…orchestral music (I, as you may be able to tell, am not into orchestral music and so struggle to describe it better than this. Sorry). Oh, and if this is your thing, here’s a list of other streams and shows being put on for free in the classical music world over the coming weeks – there’s a LOT of stuff.
• Visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites: God, Google Earth is amazing – this link takes you to the ‘overview’ page, where you can see all of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites on the global map, and select which one you want to go on a virtual tour of. From the pyramids to Pompeii to Kew Gardens, get out of the house and stretch your virtual legs and try not to think too hard about the fact that your likelihood of ever visiting a lot of these in person is dropping by the day.
• Google’s Museums: One of the other things that Google’s been quietly getting on with over the past decade or so has been creating virtual equivalents of some of the world’s best and most significant museums and art galleries, meaning that, lockdown be damned, if I want to nip down the road to the Tate and look at my beloved Epstein, I can! Fine, it’s not quite the same – I don’t get to experience the peculiar joy of the Vauxhall gyratory, or the view of all the cranes down by Battersea that always elicits the same question in my mind (to paraphrase John Lanchester in the LRB a few years ago, who the fcuk is going to pay £6m to live in Vauxhall?) – but it’s the best we’re likely to get. So, so much to see in here, honestly.
• Artland: It’s not quite as impressive as the Google work, but from a more nakedly-commercial perspective Artland does a similar job, allowing you to take small, 3d tours of exhibitions currently going on at a range of small commercial galleries across the world (but mainly in the US, as far as I can tell). A perfect website to accompany a dry Martini as you sit, fag in hand, polo neck on, and decry the shameless dilettanteism of whatever concept-monkey’s currently showing at Tribeca Gallery. Just because we’re on lockdown doesn’t mean we should let standards slip, after all.
• Quarantinechat: I got curious yesterday and checked Google Trends to see how Chatroulette is doing – there’s been an uptick in interest over the past few weeks, but what really puzzled me is that there are spikes in searches every morning – do people wake up thinking “Christ, I wonder whether that service that let me be w4nked at by strange men still exists?” Anyway, this isn’t Chatroulette, it;s QUARANTINECHAT! Actually it’s far more benign, pairing you with strangers over your phone on a voice-only basis: “Once you sign up, you’ll be subscribed to periodic calls. Your caller ID will always say “QuarantineChat” when your phone rings. After a brief moment on hold, you’ll match with another random person. You don’t have to pick up if you’re busy—your partner will be automatically matched with someone else. And you can join and leave the line whenever you’d like. It’s private. You use your phone number to sign up for Dialup, but your matches will only ever see your username.” It’s open to people all over the world – I confess not having not tried it, as I enjoy talking on the phone almost exactly as much as someone who hides behind the written word as me might be expected to, but it seems like a fun idea with only one or two VERY SMOL potential side-effects. Who knows, maybe you will FIND LOVE?
• How Much Toilet Paper?: HOW LONG WILL YOUR STOCKS LAST??? This needs more dietary variables, to my mind, but if you want to assuage any creeping sense of bum-tissue panic then, well, great! Just as an aside, I wonder whether this will usher in the bidet revolution in the UK? It…probably won’t, will it?
• Island Generator: All this website does is generate sweet little names for imaginary places, designed to tie in with Animal Crossing (the idea being that it will create a cutesy name for your island) but which I reckon could be repurposed for some imaginative play with your kids if you were so inclined. By the way, I realise that I am doing a lot of ‘hey, here’s a thing that you can do with your kids!’-type links this week, and I also realise that I, er, don’t have any kids, or indeed know the first thing about what it would be like to have to take care of one or more of them in these sorts of circumstances, so forgive me if I appear to have some sort of weird, rose-tinted, Swallows And Amazons-type view of what it’s like, at odds with the stark, snotty, ADHD reality.
• Amazing Educational Resources: There is a LOT on here. Far too much to list, but, honestly, if you want an online learning resource than this website probably contains a link to it. Being updated on a regular basis, so worth bookmarking.
• Isolated Magazine: This is an interesting idea, though I’m not 100% certain it will ever work – as far as I can tell, it’s an initiative designed to crowdsource a ‘magazine’ for isolated living, written by people all over the place from the comfort of their own isolation crawlspace; this links to a Google Doc, containing ideas for articles and details for getting in touch if you’d like to participate. Obviously projects like this are difficult because…well…people, and I have a slight fear that the community around this might end up getting a bit Mumsnet (you know what I mean – nothing to do with mothers or women, more than there’s a certain type of online community can get a bit…spiky). Still, it’s a fascinating idea and if you like the idea of trying your hand at article-writing for a magazine of the new era.
• Photos of Shopping Carts: I popped to the shop the other day to get some milk and it was, as doubtless your local shops are too, something of a wasteland, with locust-ravaged shelves and, amazingly, a couple of people wandering about in what looked like shellshock, muttering (I am not making this up, I promise) “nah man, I thought they was joking”. I mean, WOW. Anyway, this is a series of photos of people’s grocery carts from around the world, showing the different purchases that people are prioritising as we all prepare for the Big Global Hunker of 2020 (that sounds SO much nicer than quarantine or lockdown, can we change the wording please?).
• Flatter Me: If you’re in the market for a card game to play to while away the hours but think Cards Against Humanity might not be the best thing for your general mood and demeanour over the coming months of NO OUTSIDE, you might want to consider backing this little project called ‘Flatter Me’, which is basically a card game that involves players attempting to agree on what positive words could best be used to describe other players. Which, fine, might sound twee, but I promise you that by mid-May the idea of someone describing you as, I don’t know, ‘elegant’ will reduce you to fcuking floods.
• Multiverse: Another Kickstarter, this one for an RPG system and ruleset which is designed to make super-flexible games playable by anyone, using videogame tech. It’s hugely ambitious in scope, but the target seems eminently reachable with a month to go – the idea is that it will combine editable game mechanics and graphics with a robust game engine and video/voice chat, to bring collaborative tabletop roleplaying to a digital age; if you’re into roleplaying, this is potentially very exciting indeed.
• The Steam Games Festival: If you have a PC or laptop, you can download 30 indie game demos from Steam this weekend for free, which seems like a fun thing to do.
• Boardgame Arena: This site’s struggling to cope with the traffic at the moment, but persist – it’s SUPERB, and, honestly, one of the most useful things I’ve seen this week; it’s basically EVERY SINGLE BOARDGAME EVER (well, 175 of them which is practically the same thing) available to play online, either with local or online competition, for FREE. These are all modern boardgames, or seem to be, so it’s more ‘Carcassone’ than ‘Game of Life’, but, honestly, there’s SO MUCH in here. This is family-friendly fun at its finest, and just a wonderfully-pure piece of internet.

By Marinel Sheu

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS RATHER GORGEOUS MIX OF MODERN CLASSICAL/AMBIENT TRACKS WHICH IS VERY, VERY CALMING AND PROBABLY QUITE A GOOD SOUNDTRACK TO READING A BOOK ON YOUR BED WHILST LOOKING OUT OF THE WINDOW?

THE SECTION

• Pixelart: A rather lovely Pixelart drawing tool, letting you easily create…well, in my case it let me easily create a classic cocknballs, but, presuming you have slightly more artistic ability and less of a gutter mindset than I do, this might be something fun to play around with. Why not make a pixelart version of your own face to act as your new avatar for all conference calls? GO ON FFS FOLLOW ONE OF MY SUGGESTIONS FOR ONCE JESUS CHRIST.
• The Colour Dot Font: A font where each letter is represented by a circular dot of different colours, rendering whatever you write a beautiful symphony of colour slightly reminiscent of mid-00s Hirst but also rendering it entirely unreadable. Please implement this on your website and ‘enjoy’ the reaction.
• Ultra-Abridged Books: A selection of books, abridged ‘beyond the point of usefulness’ by Zach Weinersmith (I have no idea if that is in fact Mr Weinersmith’s real name, but I do hope so). These are a particular type of humour, but, to give you a flavour, the Bible’s Genesis is cut down to: “God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time.” – if that vaguely amuses you then you will very much enjoy all of these.
• The Cheeseman: Look, we’re all going to be spending a LOT of time at home, and we’re going to need to broaden our horizons a bit and EXPAND OUR INTERESTS. Why not try getting into cheese? Why not let Gavin Webber take you on a journey through casein? WHY NOT?? Gavin is a cheery Australian with a very soothing manner and a recurring catchphrase (‘G’day, curd nerds’) which basically makes it seem like everything is ok in the world. You want to learn how to make cheddar in your kitchen? You want to learn how to make parmesan (also, it’s worth clicking that particular link for all the violently-irate Italians in there; honestly, my people, SO PROUD!)? Gavin has the knowledge. If this all goes much further south, planet-wise, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gavin engendering some pretty strong feelings of worship among a certain sort of person, tbh.
• AR Coworking: Does this look fun? Or does it look awful? YOU DECIDE!
• Power Slides: It’s PECHA KUCHA, THE GAME! Actually, this sounds sort-of fun, in a very specific sort of way: “During a round of Power Slides one player gives an improvised 5 minute pitch for an imaginary app using a series of randomly selected slides. The app concept will be on the first slide. Slides will advance automatically. On the last slide, the presenter must come up with a name for their app, and the audience must applaud!” – I can imagine that for many of you this is literally the least-fun-sounding thing I have ever put in here, but there are others who’ll read that and think ‘that sounds like a really satisfying way to spend a virtual hour in the groupchat with some homebrew’. Pays money, takes choice, innit.
• Markup: A really smart way of annotating any webpage for collaborative editing and design feedback – plug in any url and it turns it into a canvas that you can add notes, to, enabling anyone to easily leave notes and feedback on specific elements of design. Clever and useful, particularly right now.
• Concentricon: This is literally just a clock on a webpage, but it is SUCH a beautiful clock that I could happily throw it onto a screen and watch it until the end times arrive.
• De-Mainstream: USE THIS WITH CAUTION. Demainstream is a plugin for YouTube which claims to remove ‘mainstream’ media from search results on the platform (as an aside, along with the terms ‘virtue signalling’, ‘cultural marxism’ and ‘political correctness’, I find references to the ‘mainstream media’ in anyone’s output a pretty reliable red flag of borderline nuttiness); which is great for, as the site’s makers claim, finding the REAL creators on the platform rather than the big businesses which have also made it their home. It’s also, though, great for suddenly turning YouTube into a roiling mass of mad, with swivel-eyed Coronaloons EVERYWHERE and a surprising number of people advocating the ingestion of chlorine as the ONLY WAY of staying safe. Can I suggest that you be careful when using this and not leave it installed, maybe?
• Means TV: A really interesting project which I fear will be a casualty of The Times We Live In, MeansTV is meant to be a socially-conscious alternative to Netflix, committed to delivering quality content with a conscience. “Means TV is the world’s first worker-owned, post-capitalist streaming service. Means TV has a library of films, documentaries, and shows with new programming added all the time. We also have live weekly shows covering news, the working class, gaming and sports. All available to subscribers for $10/month across desktop, mobile and smart TV devices like Roku, Fire and Apple TV. No advertisements or product placements. No corporate backers or VC cash ever.” It’s admirable, and important, to attempt to extract the production of art from the moneymaking machine, but I’m not 100% certain it’s sustainable; still, it’s a project that very much deserves a look and perhaps a subscribe – look, I’m not going to lie, there’s a certain ‘knitted hemp’ quality to much of what’s on offer, and I know that an eleven minute, vaguely-Brooklyn-hipsterish account of the history of serfdom isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but equally you can’t only consume TikToks ffs.
• The TV News App: News channels, from around the world, for free, on an app. Although it’s fair to say that this may not be the most appealing time to scan the world’s bulletins for cheering updates and regional curiosities.
• Married To Betty Boop: This is BRILLIANT. A very long-running webcomic, ongoing and collected on this Twitter thread, about what it’s like to be a very anxious man married to the famously-pulchritudinous cartoon character Betty Boop. It features a murderous Bugs Bunny, some therapy sessions, an awful lot of uxoriousness, and is honestly one of the strangest things I have seen for a long, long time. I think, more than anything else, it’s the commitment – this goes DEEP.
• Isolated Vocals: A subReddit featuring, er, loads of isolated vocals from popular songs. I can’t remember if I chucked this in here the other week, but this is where that frankly insane Cyndi Lauper vocal came from – SO GOOD.
• Extinguished Countries: Kickstarting for a series of books about countries, states and principalities that no longer exist; the first book in the planned series is on the Republic of Venice. I think this is a beautiful idea for a series of books, a feeling only slightly tempered by the concern that we may well be an appropriate subject before too long (JOKES WE’LL BE FINE KIDS I PROMISE).
• Medicine On Screen: I’m fairly confident most of you really, really don’t to immerse yourself in medical literature and CONTENT given current circumstances, but, nonetheless, here you are! Web Curios – bringing you stuff you didn’t know you wanted and which in all probability you really don’t want AT ALL, since approximately 2010/11! Listen: “NLM holds a world-renowned historical audiovisual collection of nearly 10,000 titles from the silent era to the present. These films cover a broad range of medical and health-related topics, from public health, surgery, and nursing to mental health, cancer, tuberculosis, child development, tropical medicine, genetics, and substance abuse.” I mean, who DOESN’T want to watch some videos about TB while we’re all locked down? NO FCUKER, that’s who!
• Coloring Book: Oh this is fabulous. “This coloring book is both digital and on paper. The paper copy is where the coloring is done – color through the concepts to explore symmetry and the beauty of math. The digital copy brings the concepts and illustrations to life in interactive animations.” Seriously, click through and get to the meat of the book and all the patterns and tesselations animate so delightfully – I could honestly stare at this for hours, and perhaps you might want to do that too.
• The Bird Museum: Frivolous art/game poroject of the week #1 – download the ‘game’ and get the ability to wander around a giant virtual art gallery full of pictures of birds drawn by people across the world – some good, some bad, all remarkably cheering. Each bird was drawn by someone on Twitter, and there are over 1000 of them to browse, the museum refreshes and rearranges every time you visit, guaranteeing you a unique, bird-art experience each time you open it up. So, so lovely, totally silly, near-perfect.
• The Library of Babble: Another one you need to download, but this is also a glorious mix of artwank and words and gentle game mechanic – navigate the topographically-marked landscape and as you do you will come across short stories left there by people across the world; from a few words to a few sentences, these fragments of narrative create a sort of patchwork of stories and feelings across this imagined landscape, and you can add your own at certain points. Honestly, this is a really nice thing to just drop into every now and again – highly recommended.
• Football Manager: I don’t leave this link here lightly – I know what this game has done to marriages, careers, relationships – but, well, it is time Football Manager – what old people used to call Champ Man back in the day – is available for free for another couple of days. FREE. YOU CAN LITERALLY SPEND THE ENTIRETY OF QUARANTINE HELPING STRANRAER BECOME THE EUROPEAN SUPERPOWER THEY WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO BE!! When we finally emerge, blinking, into the post-lockdown sunshine, molelike and pale, there will be a certain coterie of men (it is always men) who will be desperate to get back inside to carry on with the Brazilian third-tier playoffs of 2039.

By Jenny Morgan

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS EXCELLENT ‘BEST OF THE PAST MONTH’ SELECTION BY NO DEPRESSION?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Archimaps: Architecture and maps. But really interesting examples of both, I promise.
• Art For Housewives: Not in fact a Tumblr, but instead a slightly old-school blog, this is maintained by an artist living in Italy and details her thoughts, her practice and her work. I really hope that the next few months sees a return to this style of personal documentation; video’s fine, yes, but sometimes written words are just better.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Logofonts: Want to know what fonts are being used in which logos? No, I can’t imagine you do, and yet still I persist in thrusting this, unbidden, into your face.
• Soap Journal: Old soaps, in their packaging. More interesting than you might think, I promise.
• 24h Plays: This used to be about time-limited theatre, but has seemingly pivoted to sharing videos of actors delivering monologues from plays, which, if I’m honest, is a pleasing contrast to the amateur-hour entertainment being produced by the rest of Insta. I wonder whether we’ll all sort of lose the love for lo-fi UGC after we’re forced to spend three months or more watching ordinary people being ordinary, BRING BACK HOLLYWOOD AND AIRBRUSHING!
• Etn.co_man: I don’t ordinarily feature cutesy food stuff but, honestly, this Japanese person’s food art is fcuking astonishing.
• Electricalgram: An instagram feed that is solely about electrical engineering. It shares photos of wires and junction boxes ffs. I include the for the following reasons: 1) it is boring, niche and largely-inexplicable, making it near-perfect Web Curios content; 2) it is proof that, whatever your community, if you make something that is of use to it you will get numbers – there are over 165k people following this account ffs; 3) there is, inexplicably, exactly ONE slightly-creepy photo of two young women in black dresses standing next to a slightly-grubby-looking circuitbox – WHY??? WHO ARE THE ELECTRICITY GIRLS???
• Love Is Quarantine: I mentioned to someone that one of the interesting things I think will happen as a result of this is a boom in new entertainment formats – this sort of thing, for example. Love is Quarantine is a riff on insanely-popular dating show ‘Love Is Blind’; it’s been set up this week by two guys who share a flat in the US, and the gimmick is that each day people apply to be set up on dates via a Google sheet; they’re then matched with a date by the showrunners, which then happens over chat later that day. Participants then share their feedback on the date, which is broadcast over Insta as part of the ‘show’, and the whole thing is SO charming (very American, but) and fun, and there is the seed of a really strong show in here imho.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG (AND WHICH THIS WEEK INCLUDES THIS SELECTION OF 30 FREE eBOOKS FROM ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS)!:

• A Short Note About This Week’s Longreads: Ok, so I’ve tried to keep the longreads largely misery-and-horror free – I imagine you all know where to find SERIOUS NEWS and THINKING about THE PANDEMIC and THE RESPONSE, and, frankly, as previously stated I have no expertise in or around any of the issues affecting us at the moment; as such, I’ve tried to keep this week’s selection, insofar as it touches on WHAT’S GOING ON, on the side of cultural observations, which feel less…well, potentially-terrifying, frankly. Basically, though, there’s lots of stuff to read in here this week which has NOTHING to do with the news and so I encourage you to scroll down a bit and pick some pleasing prose distractions of your choosing.
• Our Self-Isolating Future: This piece asks the question which I’ve seen several people grappling with this week, to whit ‘will we ever work in the same way ever again?’. This is mainly focused on the practical realities of coworking and collaboration being now proven to…sort-of work, for most white-collar gigs at least, and whether that this, coupled with a potentially more-virally-compromised future, might lead to this, or a version of this, becoming The Norm in the medium-term. The thinking gets interesting towards the end where it begins to consider the societal implications of this sort of shift; this isn’t a miserable piece, per se, but it might make you think slightly scifi thoughts, so, well, caveat emptor. If you’re interested, this piece in Technology Review looks at the same topic from a slightly more technical perspective, coming to many of the same broad conclusions.
• Delivery In An Age of Pandemic: This is a every angry, slightly shouty, piece in VICE which asks the quite reasonable question of all of us: “Are we stopping to think about the poor fcuks who are the human pieces in the logistics operation ensuring we can order whatever the fcuk we want from the internet and still expect to find it on our doorstep within 24h, pandemic be damned?” No, of course we’re not, and there’s nothing we can do about it – fine, it’s nice to say to people “Don’t buy stuff from places that do delivery”, but not everyone has that privilege; simultaneously, the precarious nature of this sort of supplychain work means there’s a legitimate argument to suggest that we’ve sort of got an obligation to support workers in these jobs who will likely have no security whatsoever. Basically this is a cast-iron example of the magic of the modern capitalist machine, in which whatever you do someone, somewhere is in essence getting fcuked with knives. I know that this is perhaps a bit pinko-utopian of me, but I do rather hope that we come out of this with rather more of a ‘no, these systems are not OK’-type view than we do at present. The central message, though – that in times like these we shouldn’t be buying frivolous sh1t online, or pretending that doing so doesn’t have very real consequences – is one we should all get behind.
• “I’m Not An Epidemiologist, But…”: Excellent reporting by Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed, focusing on the author of a certain post on Medium that has apparently gone EVERYWHERE this week (I didn’t see it as I am trying not to read stuff about this that I have no hope of understanding) and which opens with that exact line – because it was written by some bloke in marketing! If you can read this piece and not get small shudders of horror at the revelation (deliciously, just left there without comment) that said marketing bloke has employed a content promotion agency to help get even more attention and fame as a result of having written something viral, you’re a stronger person than I am. USING YOUR PANDEMIC SPECULATIONS FOR THE CLOUT, IS IT??? My days. Honestly.
• Our Boring Instagram Lives: Or, alternatively, The Great Content Boom of 2020. This piece positions the sharing of quotidian mundanity on the socials as being effectively a form of ‘self care’, a kind of ‘we’re all in it together’ sort of boring shared experience that will start to see people becoming more and more comfortable sharing streams, audio, images and the rest of the every day. Which is almost certainly true, but which doesn’t fill me with joy; I know that sharing’s good and all that jazz, but I’m also increasingly aware that it will be entirely possible to Soma oneself through the next XX weeks of this simply by staring at your tiny screen at other human beings doing nothing and, well, it doesn’t feel like that’s a great idea tbh.
• The World of Zoom: Three weeks ago, you’d never heard of Zoom; now you’ve got a favourite background, you know the jokes, you call yourself a ‘Zoomer’ (please, don’t do that, even if you’re a kid)…this is a really interesting NYT piece (whose web culture team, Taylor Lorenz in particular, are SO good at the moment) on how people (mainly kids) are using the platform, how it might birth new entertainment formats (see the dating Insta thing above, eg) and how its use may persist the CRISIS into everyday life. I can’t speak for everyone, fine, but I fcuking despise phonecalls AND video chat, and yet even I can see myself doing it over the next few months. Maybe I’ll learn to stop hating my face.
• The Virtual Happy Hour: You don’t need me to describe what this article is about. A prediction, though – within a month, someone will go viral for getting VERY drunk and behaving disgracefully in one of these groupchats. Actually, maybe I should amend that to ‘within a week’; things are moving awfully fast.
• Cash App Friday: Cash App is a money transfer app in the US, like Venmo but less famous. Every week, the company behind it gives away money to random users – the only catch is, you need to have the app. BOOM! Instant user-acquisition strategy and a viral moment on social media every week as people across Twitter and Insta start BEGGING Cash App to choose them for the drop. UK BRANDS – there is a MASSIVE opportunity around something like this right now, if you can afford to do big giveaway things; hard to get tonally right, fine, but I reckon we’ll see a couple of people create weekly competition/quiz-type giveaway things in the next few weeks that will do very, very well indeed.
• TikTok’s Africa Play: TikTok continues to be a fascinating case study in terms of social media 2.0 rollout (sorry for the 2.0 thing, but you know what I mean; post-Insta, basically); this piece looks at how it’s effectively paying African YouTubers to make content for TikTok in the hope that their fans will follow them across and drive adoption. Smart, and also nakedly cynical – it’s rather impressive in a bleak sort of way.
• TikTok’s Invisible Censorship: Ever wonder why TikTok is so MIDDLE-CLASS and BEAUTIFUL? By design, turns out, as moderation was in place to weed out users who looked ugly or ‘ghetto’ (yes, really – parse that however you will) in favour of more visually-appealing kids who were more likely to keep viewers watching. “Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose. Videos in which “the shooting environment is shabby and dilapidated,” including but “not limited to … slums, rural fields” and “dilapidated housing” were also systematically hidden from new users, though “rural beautiful natural scenery could be exempted”” On the one hand, this is vile; on the other, the public gets what the public wants, etc etc etc.
• Folding City: Toyota has very quietly created a hugely-interesting experiment in AI, with the development of the very-Resident Evil-sounding ‘Folding City’ at the base of Mount Fuji, which in 2021 is scheduled to become the world’s first robotic city, in which robotics and AI are integrated into every aspect of civic and social planning. Reading this in the context of the past week is a genuinely-fascinating look at how a post-Corona society might look, with an increased in automated delivery systems and more spaced out housing, etc – obviously, this is very much ‘how a post-Corona society might look for the rich’, but it’s a rare piece of futurology that feels as contemporary as this currently does.
• From Pr0n to YouTube: Another piece about platform stars pivoting to new formats in an attempt to expand their audiences – after last week’s piece on Twitch streamers trying to make it on TikTok, now it’s the stars of bongo trying to get some of that mainstream appeal by posting wholesome, relatable content on the Tube. Why? Well, audience is money, and I would imagine that bongo really isn’t that lucrative for most performers these days; if you can command an audience of hundreds of thousands for your home workout videos, maybe one day you’ll get to stop having to play ‘P1sspig Granddad’ in “Urinal Chuggers XII”. It’s interesting how as the online entertainment industry matures a bit we’re seeing a similar move from its stars toward becoming ‘entertainers’ and wanting to capture as many demographics as possible, just like back in the day.
• 25 Songs That Matter Now: This is, I think, the third year the NYT has done that, and as ever it’s a superb overview of the current state of the music scene, taking you from Lizzo to Swift to del Rey to Styles to…oh, just click the link. Really beautiful webwork, too, although personally were I some of these artists I might feel a little bit like the artist had something of a grudge against some of these poor famouses. I mean, Lana del Rey, what DID you do to this person?
• The Perks of Being a Weirdo: On how oddity and outsider-ness at a young age can help with creativity in later life. Which obviously I agree with, as someone who was very much in the ‘only not picked last for games because there were at least two kids in his class with genuine disabilities’ camp, although part of me does slightly wonder whether it’s b0llocks and the jocks are just as creative as we are, it’s just that they don’t have to bother because they enjoy life just as it is and don’t have to waste their time making up imagined worlds in which they’re the special stars.
• Cottagecore: I feel like this is coming like a tidal wave. Cottagecore is the aesthetic trend towards the sort of ‘I live in the country and raise chickens and my daily existence is simply a long line of domestic activities which I complete with an air of zenlike calm and without getting even a bit of cupcake batter on my immaculate vintage polkadot Amish dress”; which, basically, is absolutely the Pinterest-version of social isolation that we’re all going to be subjected to.
• From Bongo To Oscar: Will Pr0nhub ever win an Oscar? Why not? This is an interesting look at the entertainment industry, which posits that on the basis of numbers alone there’s no reason why Pr0nhub won’t be able to expand upon its recent foray into non-bongo content and perhaps become a proper production company a la Netflix.
• Cameo: I featured Cameo on here a few years back – or certainly something very similar to it – as you will doubtless-recall; it’s a platform that lets you pay ‘celebrities’ a set fee to record a message for you, and its popularity is BOOMING. You want to get Dave Benson Philips to wish your gran a happy birthday? JOB DONE! You want to get Darren Bent to tell your mate he’s got no tekkers? YES MATE! This is a really entertaining look at the site and how it works, and the weird economy of celebrity that means people really are willing to pay a Tom Cruise lookalike to perform a small reaction video that they can use as their signature sign-off in Stories for evermore.
• Charm With Menaces: I imagine many of you are planning on getting cosy with the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy; this is a (no spoilers: laudatory) review of it in the LRB, which whilst being, obviously, incredibly positive, does a good job of not just being a total hagiography. If you enjoyed Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies, and even if you’re yet to read the final novel, this is a superb piece of literary criticism and a pleasure to read.
• Naked & Afraid: In the US, there’s a TV show in which two people get dumped, naked, into the wilderness, and have to survive for four weeks with no assistance. This article is the story of a female contestant on the show; it’s a brilliant behind-the-curtain peek at how the sausage is made, and you will be amazed at just how little artifice is used in production of this quite insane-sounding show.
• On Motherhood and Money: A superb essay – one of a few on the topic I’ve included in here in the past few years, but it does seem to produce excellent writing – on the burdens of art and motherhood and production and getting paid and parenting and guilt on writing women. So, so well-written and well-observed.
• Broken Country: Or, sexuality and disability. Molly McCully Brown writes wryly (I know, I know, ‘wry’ is one of those qualities that noone actually ever exhibits outside of fiction, but I promise it fits here) and movingly about being a sexually active, interested, curios adult in a body which, during adolescence, is widely seen as nothing but asexual, and how her life is defined, sexually or otherwise, by her experience of a body which fights her. “Just as I hit adolescence, my body abruptly began to break down. I grew, and so did my physical instability. My tendons tightened, and my pain increased. The doctors scheduled another set of medical procedures: a surgery, a summer in a set of full-leg plaster casts and then a pair of heavy, bulky metal braces. Just as I began to learn I could feel sexual desire, I was splintered and in pain again, and the fact of it demanded most of my attention. My earliest experiences with lust feel shrunken by the trauma, vague and distanced, as if I watched through a scratched viewfinder while they happened to someone else. I can’t identify them for you except as strange, dark shapes at an unreachable horizon line.” Beautiful.
• My Gchat Affair: An office ‘romance’, never consummated, conducted over Gchat, recalled in painfully-clear detail by Eleanor Thomas. If you’ve ever had a workplace relationship of any sort, there will be elements of this that are so painfully familiar that you will wince with recognition.
• Absolution:The story of a former child soldier who served in Joseph Kony’s (remember him? Wow, where does the time go) army in the late 90s and early-00s, told mostly in his own words, as told to Adriana Carranca. An incredible piece of writing, which manages to present its subject as victim and perpetrator, as the poor man surely was; be warned, there is a LOT of very unpleasant violence in this piece, alluded to if not always explicitly described, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
• What Do We Do With Feelings Now That They Don’t Matter Anymore?: WARNING: this will not make you feel happy if you read it. That said, I thought it a superb piece of writing, on what we are supposed to do with the feeling that feeling sad is just what we do now, and how we are going to feel forever. Look, here’s a flavour of it: “We’re in a moment now where we have had these lives that we’ve lived, things we have said, things we have achieved, people we love, but in the end, the stuff that matters is whether or not we can survive, and who else we can help to survive. You may have been told all your life that there were certain things you needed and certain things you needed to do, but it turns out that you don’t need most of those things and you don’t really need to do anything. In fact, nothing would be better for the world right now than if we all stopped trying to achieve things and said, “We no longer believe work will set us free, it is the opposite, in fact,” and behaved accordingly.” I thought this was beautiful but, really, take care with it.
• The Knowledge: Finally this week, a longread about cabbies doing the knowledge. There was an EXCELLENT New York Times piece about exactly this which I included in Curios about 5 years ago – this treads similar ground, obviously, but is far, far better at asking questions about the intangible qualities of specific types of knowledge or information which mean we perhaps ought to value them differently or separately to their utility. Regardless, this is a superb, entertaining, warm piece of writing which made me forget about everything for five minutes while I read it; I hope it does the same for you too.

Weirdly enough, I didn’t see ANY interesting music videos this week so this week’s Curios ends here, with me wishing you a safe week til I write one of these fcukers again. Take care of yourselves, and thanks for reading. I love each and every one of you with a troubling intensity that I am almost ashamed to admit.

By Miki Kim