What’s been YOUR favourite stupid this week? SO MUCH TO CHOOSE FROM! It’s nice of the powers that be to ensure that the ‘Brexit’ box set we’ve all been enjoying for the past couple of years doesn’t peter out towards its denouement – though does anyone else get the feeling that, muchlike in Lost, the scriptwriters aren’t entirely sure of how to wrap it up?

Anyway, whilst in the real world everyone has once again been a CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT, the virtual world continues to deliver – exactly what it’s delivering is, fine, perhaps a matter of conjecture, but nonetheless it keeps on churning ‘it’ out and I keep collecting it, like an increasingly weary chef continually skimming the ever-gathering scum from the everbubbling pot of murky stew and then feeding it in ladlefuls to the starving masses clamouring for the faintest scraps of infonourishment, the ghostly taste of entertainments past long since boiled beyond recognition.

Wow, that was unusually bleak, nonsensical and convoluted, even by my standards. I must be tired. OF COURSE I AM TIRED IT IS 2019 AND THE WORLD KEEPS HAPPENING AT ME AND I HAVE BEEN UP SINCE 6 AND TYPING SINCE 645 AND HONESTLY I THINK MY FINGERS MIGHT FALL OFF.

Anyway, it’s another Friday, this is another Web Curios, that was another week. Maybe the next will be better! TRY AND ENJOY WHAT FOLLOWS.

(NB – gentle occasional reminder that Imperica (the publisher, NOT ME, to be clear, I promise this isn’t me trying to monetise this thing aahahahahahaha oh god chance would be a fine thing) has a Patreon that you can contribute to if you think Curios is ok and you would like to say a small thank you and cover some of the website costs – be like the lovely, callipygian Matthew Laws, who unaccountably decided to hitch his wagon to our truck and offer financial assistance, and who I imagine hasn’t regretted it AT ALL since! Hi Matt! How are you? Are you in fact callipygian? Is it weird that I’m speculating about your buttocks in public? Ought I stop? This…this isn’t going to help with the Patreon, is it? Sorry Paul).

By Claire Boscher

FIRST UP MUSICALLY, WHY NOT TRY THE NEW RECORD FROM UK MC LOSKI?

THE SECTION WHICH IS GLAD THAT THAT NICE MR ZUCKERBERG HAS LAID THIS PESKY ‘PRIVACY’ STUFF TO REST ONCE AND FOR ALL:

• A New Privacy Focused Vision for Social Networking: I’m sure you all read this yesterday morning with your coffee and cereal, but on the offchance that you’ve somehow forgotten its SEISMIC IMPORTANCE since then, let me refresh your memory. Facebook is CHANGING! It’s going to be all about MESSAGING and ENCRYPTION and EPHEMERALITY instead of the neverending cavalcade of horrors of the newsfeed and the cacophonously stupid racism and sexism and hatred and cruelty displayed by all the billions of great unwashed in the grand public square that sits at the heart of the Big Blue Misery Factory! Or, er, is it? This is a classic bit of Zuckerbergese, in that it makes vague philosophical burblings and talks at length about stuff that’s already actually been announced without actually saying anything new – the actual meat of the statement can be summarised as a) all Facebook’s different properties will eventually be linked on a back-end level to enable seamless interplatform interaction (which we knew); b) everything will be end-to-end encrypted (which we knew); c) people are in the future are going to use Messaging products more than s*c**l m*d** features (well, yes); and, eventually, if you read between the lines, d) Facebook basically wants to be a fundamental infrastructural layer across everyone’s interpersonal digital interactions, social and financial, in the same was as WeChat in China. Anyway, this stuff is all a bit of a while away so, you know, IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER (nothing matters). If you want even MORE of Mark’s thrilling utterances, he also did an interview with WIRED in which he elaborates on all this (very) slightly; the piece makes the WeChat slightly clearer (or at least it does to me), but overall this is another masterclass in ‘if we make this really boring then noone will notice that we’ve basically disguised a massive land-grab for the future as a gesture of concern for the well-being of humanity’-style comms.
• Events Can Now Be Shared on Facebook Stories: For all those of you living and working in those parts of the world in which people in fact use Facebook Stories. When you visit the Page for an Event, you’ll now be able to share that to your Facebook Story, or add links to said Event as stickers. Excited? No! Of course not!
• Facebook Adds ‘Tribute’ Feature to Memorialised Accounts: The slightly weird and yet hugely useful Facebook feature whereby the accounts of the dead can be ‘memorialised’, keeping them active but locking them from being hacked or edited, effectively preserving them in digital amber, has been slightly updated. Now you can add a ‘Tributes’ to a memorialised Page: “Depending on a memorialized account’s privacy settings, friends can currently still post on its timeline, including in the comments of posts the person made before they died. If a memorialized account has a Tributes section, however, posts made after the day it was memorialized (which prevents anyone else from logging in) will be placed there.” Death and Facebook (and digital legacy) is still weird and alternately sad and quite creepy, and the cynical part of me (such a small part, so miniscule, like a tiny black gland dripping poison deep within my throat) does wonder whether this is another cynical ploy to up engagement rates (they wouldn’t) (they would).
• YouTube Rolling out Fact Checks: This is interesting. Starting in India, but one would presume set to become a global feature, YouTube will start offering fact-checking information from third-party sources when users search for topics that are “prone to misinformation” – so if you search for ‘vaccinations’, say, you might be faced with an external link suggesting that perhaps this whole autism thing is unscientific rubbish (before proceeding merrily down the horrorrabbithole of idiot parents shouting that THEY KNOW THEIR KIDS BEST DON’T YOU TELL ME HOW TO RAISE MY CHILD I’VE READ ABOUT THIS IT’S A BIG PHARMA CONSPIRACY). I don’t mean to be a downer about this – after all, it’s early on in this week’s Curios and there’s plenty of time for the misery to kick in later on – but I do rather wonder whether the best response to the sorts of mad conspiracy theories which are explicitly based on the fundamental belief that THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW THE TRUTH is to place big, official-looking signs everywhere saying “OFFICIAL: THIS IS NOT TRUE”. We’ll see.
• LinkedIn Expands Trending Section: It’s now even easier than ever to see what people are talking about most on LinkedIn, as the platform has just updated its trending content section so you can better observe the themes that are DRIVING THE CONVERSATION and ADJUST YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY accordingly. Except obviously this is all pointless as we all know that all people on LinkedIn talk about is themselves, how much they are CRUSHING IT, and whether Oleg is performance art (niche joke for the LI crowd there).
• Excel Photo Import: I ordinarily don’t cover MS Office updates because, in the main, I care even less about them than I do about this stuff, but I’ll make an exception here because this is SO useful. The Excel mobile app now lets you take a photo of any tabulated data and will then MAGICALLY turn that into an editable spreadsheet – this is wizardry.
• Bobcat Agogo: Other things I don’t ordinarily feature include ‘kooky ads from yesteryear’, but I will make an exception for this ad for Bobcat – a company which makes diggers and the like, and which in 1967 felt its best advertising strategy was to produce a short film featuring the twin dancing talents of a Mary Quant-wearing female dancer, looking a touch on the rumpled and lascivious side, and a man doing, er, rudimentary dancing in a bulldozer. 52 years was a very long time ago.
• Free Dominos: Brands interacting with each other in ‘humorous’ fashion is one of the things that most grinds my teeth about modern digital marketing – I look forward to meeting the person who invented the term ‘brandter’ in hell at some point in the future and ‘enjoying’ a couple of eternities with them – but occasionally I have to concede that it can be done well. Kudos to (presumably tiny) US pizza chain &Pizza for this excellent bit of gentle trolling at the expense of Domino’s, which recently launched one of its semi-regular digital gimmicks whereby app users could get reward points if they uploaded a photo of ANY pizza. Yes, mad as that sounds (and really, how did this ever sound like a good idea?), that’s how it works – except it doesn’t, as the internet rapidly discovered. The app’s image-recognition software seemingly recognises ANY pizza – photos, screengrabs from the internet, slightly crap kids’ drawings…so &Pizza set up this site, explaining the loophole and inviting the web to cost Domino’s actual cashmoney by exploiting it at scale. Really cute, though this being American advermarketingpr it will probably escalate towards some sort of sickeningly self-congratulatory Twitter brand love-in, with Wendy’s quoting Foucault and the official Oreo’s account livetweeting its own Salvia trip.
• All You Can Jet: This is, I am grudgingly forced to concede, really clever and I wish I had thought of it. Simple and effective giveway gimmick by US airline Jet Blue, which is offering the chance to win unlimited free flights for a year – the catch being that to enter, participants have to delete all the pics from their Insta feed and replace them with a single one which promotes Jet Blue and the contest as a whole. Bingo – instant visibility and (ugh) talkability and virality and stuff. I am annoyed by how neat this is.

By Anna Karenina

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS HOUR-LONG MIX WHICH TOE-CURLINGLY DESCRIBES ITSELF AS ‘TURNTABLISM’ BUT WHICH I WOULD MUCH PREFER TO CALL ‘HIPHOP WITH SOME SCRATCHING!’

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THERE ARE ANY POLITICIANS LEFT WHO CAN’T BE DESCRIBED AS EITHER RACIST, STUPID, INCOMPETENT, INSENSITIVE OR A HEADY COMBINATION OF ALL FOUR. PT.1:

• Leave A Message for Europe: Three weeks ahahahahahahahahahahahahaohgod. Still, don’t think about what’s ahead (is it a brick wall? Is it a cliff edge? WHO KNOWS, THE BLINDFOLD’S ON!), think about what we’re leaving behind! This is a piece of BREXIT ART, ladies and gentlemen, and not (to my mind) a particularly good or clever or imaginative one, but, still, it’s probably all we deserve. Leave A Message for Europe invites participants to…oh, look, you can work it out, can’t you? Here: “the artist will install a sculpture, inspired by a 90s phone box, on Dungeness beach. Located at UK’s most south-easterly point, the inactive phone box acts as a beacon. It is a nostalgic call to action – a reminder of the way we once communicated – with the nuance of the voice. Exposed to the elements, the sculpture also represents the UK, facing new challenges and an uncertain future. Visit the sculpture in person or view it streamed live here, 24-7, as it is altered daily by its environment – and as we count down to B-day.” The site offers anyone the opportunity to record a message about their feelings on the subject – it’s unclear what will happen to said messages, but I imagine they’ll be compiled in some way at the end of the piece’s lifespan. What would be better, though, were if the piece comprised a third element – a massive, barn-sized woofer SPEEKING ARE BRANES at those Europeans from the cliffs of Dover, spitting out the messages of farewell to a largely uncaring continent. Someone make that instead.
• Pictures of Paintings: Many years ago I was personally convinced that virtual art galleries were set to be the future, and that we’d all spend time at our computers navigating through the digitised corridors of imaginary spaces, looking at works collected from throughout time and space. I was wrong, obviously – it’s simply not a particularly great way to experience art, overall, and, weirdly, it’s not been improved drastically by free-moving VR-type stuff either. Nonetheless, I rather like this slightly throwbackish site (I think it’s someone’s hobby project, but I can’t immediately see who – sorry, nameless creator) – it presents a few collections of classic artworks, thematically arranged, in a classic gallery setting with fixed-point navigation; there’s some accompanying explanatory text, but in the main it’s a simple recreation of walking slowly round a gallery, except as if you’re in Myst. I think this guided viewing experience weirdly works better than free movement for this stuff, but see what you think.
• Cryptovoxels: “Cryptovoxels is a virtual world built on the ethereum block chain. The world has streets, that are owned by The Corporation, and properties, that are owned by individual people. If you have an ethereum wallet, you can buy a property. Property owners can build on their property. They can add and remove blocks (voxels), signs, posters and in the future, add 3d models for people to interact with.” Why? NO IDEA! However, if you want the slightly odd experience of wandering around a mostly empty 3d world built through people spending crypto on virtual building blocks – Minecraft, for HODLers, as far as I can understand – then, well, enjoy! Of all the crypto stuff I’ve seen this might honestly be the most baffling. The main link takes you straight into the 3d, but if you want to learn a bit more about it first then click here – I promise you it still makes no real sense, though.
• Women & The American Story: A wonderfully-curated website presenting a women’s history of the United States, designed for educators to shine a light on the diverse range of women who throughout America’s history have made significant contributions to the country’s evolution. Writers, entrepreneurs, artists, spanning the spectrum of race and gender, this is really well put together.
• Twimmage: The main reason I tend to tell clients not to bother with Instagram (other than the perennial favourite “look ffs you’re an industrial insurance provide what the fcuk do you think you’re doing?”) is that not everyone has access to all the AMAZING AND INSPIRATIONAL AND BEAUTIFUL AND FUNNY IMAGE-LED CONTENT the platform is famed for (and, yes, I know that there are other ways you can use the platform, but work with me here). Twimmage goes some way towards resolving that by letting you take any Tweet and turn it BY MAGIC into a beatiful…er…photo of a Tweet, specially formatted to pop on the Gram (as the kids have NEVER said). This is obviously a very silly idea indeed, but the fact that you can use anyone’s tweets makes it almost sort-of useful; there’s definitely a certain mood/aesthetic you can convey through populating your Insta with the very worst of Twitter presented on a slightly twee inspirational background.
• This Waifu Does Not Exist: Another week, ANOTHER website which throws up an infinite array of GAN-imagined somethings to amaze and delight. This time it’s an infinity of GAN-imagined anime faces, accompanied by a similarly-autogenerated plot summary of a nonexistent comic/cartoon series – these are, as ever, really impressive (except if you’re an illustrator who specialises in doing anime facial portraits, in which case you’re yet another person miserably staring down the barrel of an automated future in which you’re no longer required!), but, honestly, I find the online practice of referring to anime women as ‘waifus’ so horribly, creepily neckbeardy that it makes me shudder.
• The Iditarod: I am AMAZED that I have never featured this before! The Iditarod bills itself as ‘The Greatest Race on Earth’ and while I’m not really in any sort of position to judge (racing not really being my thing) it seems to have a pretty good claim. The Iditarod is a 1,000 mile race for man and dog across Alaska, with participants competing to reach the town of Nome, commemorating a trade route that has stretched across the country for centuries. The photos are the draw here – LOOK AT ALL THOSE GOOD BOYS! O RUFF! Also, some excellent sunsets and, overall, some superb use of the word ‘MUSH’.
• Bab: Are you unfortunate enough to know one of those people, usually on Facebook, who’s become involved in some sort of crappy pyramid-selling scheme and now spends all their time spamming their wall about ‘exciting business opportunities’ and ‘quick cash easy wins’? Would you like to become like them, but marginally more socially acceptable? Well have I got the app for YOU! Bab is BRAND NEW and is basically a shopping app with the gimmick that, as you browse, you can fire off what are effectively affiliate links to your friends and family and followers with the tap of a finger; for each sale attributed to you, you receive a 5% of the sale which you can either bank or send to charity. Except noone’s going to do the charity thing, are they? They’re just going to spend all day spamming their mates with messages like “think these earrings would look really good on you hun 100 emoji winky face dancing lady” in the hope that they’ll bite. Welcome to the future in which we have rendered the concept of ‘influence’ entirely meaningless through reductive overuse!
• Mingering Mike: I’ve always had a small obsession with outsider musicians – I remain fascinated by Jandek, a man who really ought to have had a proper big old documentary about him made by now – and this guy really is an outsider. Mingering Mike…oh, look, here: “Between 1968 and 1977 Mingering Mike recorded over fifty albums, managed thirty-five of his own record labels, and produced, directed and starred in nine of his own motion pictures. In 1972 alone he released fifteen LPs and over twenty singles, and his traveling revue played for sold out crowds the world over. How is it that such a prolific musician has gone under the radar for more than forty years? The answer is that all took place in Mike’s imagination, and in the vast collection of fake cardboard records and acapella home recordings that he made for himself as a teenager in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s.” This website collects EVERYTHING – the artwork, recordings, essays about the man…another film waiting to be made, this. Oh, and the music is scratchy and fuzzy and so lofi as to be morelike the skeletons of songs than songs themselves, but they’re also weirdly compelling; I’ve been listening to this stuff all morning and it’s good.
• Taliami E Te Fazzu Pietra: Photography by Salvatore di Gregorio of sexworkers in (I think) Catania in Sicily; GREAT faces.
• Slave Voyages: A huge database collecting information on the slave trade worldwide, and presenting maps, stories and data on the movement of enslaved Africans. Intended for students primarily, it’s not the most user-friendly site in terms of navigation, but you can get to maps and timelines from the homepage – the maps in particular do an excellent job of communicating the scale of the enterprise, though the real depth comes in the ‘essays’ section should you want to explore it fully.
• Puns.dev: This website does nothing other than serve up bad puns about web development – refresh for new ones. These are all horrible, but will give you something to annoy the people in IT with next time they take three weeks to update your laptop and manage to brick it in the process.
• Camelot: Because I am terrible at BUSINESS it haven’t even occurred to me that there might be a market in supplementary service layers sitting atop streaming platforms (at least in the short-term); it seems there might be, though, with stuff like this. Camelot is a platform which streamers can set up atop their YouTube or Twitch channel through which their viewers can set ‘bounties’ – that is, things that they want the streamer to do, in exchange for donations. Streamers can then accept these bounties and get paid once they perform the activity in question, with the app taking 5% of the cash. This is just systematising the sort of reward-led donations that lots of streamers are doing already, but it’s a smart idea – there are obvious safeguards in place to stop the more obviously unpleasant sort of ‘bounty’ requests, and overall this is a small step towards the seemingly-inevitable future in which we’re all working piecemeal for each other all the time, monetising every single tiny interaction as we struggle to stay above water, our incomes whittled wafer-thin by transaction fees as these peppercorn sums flit fleetingly from bank account to bank account via FaceBucks (oh God that is actually going to happen isn’t it oh god).
• Codecoven: Do you remember when we were all going to learn to make websites and that would save the economy? AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Accepting the fact that front-end development is perhaps less of an attractive career proposition than perhaps it was a decade or so ago, there’s still obviously GREAT careers in serious, non-website-based coding, not least the games industry – Code Coven is a new online course, in sort-of beta at the moment, designed for women to develop their skills for working in game development. At the moment they’re looking for people to join their initial courses – these are going to be paid-for sessions, but at discount initially – so if you’re an ‘intermediate’ female gamedev looking to upskill then, well, here!
• The Disneyfication Map: As a street in Paris becomes the latest place to rail against the Instagrammers – THERE’S A SIMPLE SOLUTION JUST STOP PAINTING YOUR HOUSES IN THOSE TWEE PASTEL SHADES FFS – it seems a timely moment to share this map, which shows those countries who have the most tourists per capita. Weirdly, on this basis Iceland seems more affected by tourism than Italy, which doesn’t seem intuitively right, but if you’re looking for holiday destinations where you’re more likely to be in the minority as a tourist then this might be of some vague sort of use.
• Modulate AI: This is interesting – a sort of realtime deepfake for your voice. Modulate AI is a service that provides what it calls ‘voice skins’, so that it provides a live reinterpretation of your speaking voice as you talk. Which on the one hand might be a genuinely useful – if depressing – tool for women playing games online, say, who might want to have an evening off having tedious gags made at them about sandwiches; on the other, of course, this feels like it could take prank calling to an exciting and unpleasant new level. Which is it to be? A nice tool for reducing prejudice, or the birth of a new wave of Steve Penks? What do YOU think?
• The Big Hedgehog Map: Please help map the UK’s hedgehogs! FIND THE HEDGEHOGS! If you have the sort of small children who are all enthusiastic and outdoorsy and who might like spending the day looking for hedgehogs then this will be GREAT, though if they’re normal kids then they will totally prefer Fortnite and will not thank you for making them search the undergrowth for spiky mammals.
• On Time Every Time: A nice kinetic visualisation of the Amsterdam train network; each dot on the map represents a station, with trains moving between them as the day passes; there’s a nice visual trick here whereby the stations sort of ‘vibrate’ as the trains move through them, meaning the busiest ones have this sort of crazy kinetic representation of how much traffic passes through them. Practically I can see no use for this at all, but aesthetically it’s GREAT.
• Coburg Villas: Nice Imperica editor Paul has a thing where he occasionally searches through property listings for WEIRD STUFF. He found this 3d tour of Coburg Villas in Ilfracombe – it seems…unlikely to be the sort of thing that’s going to persuade anyone to shell out money, but gustibus nil disputandum and all that jazz. It’s worth clicking the ‘dollhouse’ button in the bottom left so you can see the full extent of the property, by the way, it is QUITE the thing.
• Moviesyncs: You know those people at university who you met once or twice and who were ALWAYS men and who were obsessed with the fact that if you started Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz at exactly the sa…OH FFS JUST GO AWAY AND LET ME MISERABLY SMOKE WEED AND FAIL MY FIRST YEAR IN PEACE, I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THIS OR ABOUT STAR WARS? Yes, them. Anyway, if you are one of them, or if you know one, or if you would like to briefly experiment with becoming one, then this site might be of use – it presents an exhaustive list of all those movie syncing theories with explanations of what they MEAN. Apparently Definitely Maybe works with This is Spinal Tap, which sounds weirdly apposite tbh.
• All of Trump’s Gifts: The ones from 2017, at least. This is the official published list of gifts presented to the White House by foreign dignitaries that year – SO MUCH STUFF. Could we maybe ditch the gift-giving protocol when the recipient is a self-described billionaire? Does Melania really need all those handbags? Fair play to whoever it was who gave her a portrait of herself on mother of pearl, though – I feel you really got to the heart of the First Lady’s brand, there, lads.

By Philotheus Nisch

NEXT, ENJOY THIS VAGUELY BRAZILIAN-INFLECTED MIX BY MIKE WHO!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THERE ARE ANY POLITICIANS LEFT WHO CAN’T BE DESCRIBED AS EITHER RACIST, STUPID, INCOMPETENT, INSENSITIVE OR A HEADY COMBINATION OF ALL FOUR. PT.2:

• Sea Creature Bot: It’s a bot, on Twitter, which posts pictures of sea creatures. They’re good sea creatures, in the main, if occasionally a bit toothy.
• Can You Pet The Dog?: Another Twitter account, this time with the sole purpose of looking at dogs in videogames and informing you, the reader, whether you can in fact pet said dog in the game. Red Dead Redemption 2? You can very much pet the dog (though not the cats, which did puzzle me rather). GTAV? Not so much. Essential reading if ‘dog petting y/n’ is one of the main question in your ‘shall I buy this game?’ checklist.
• Lines: This is a truly beautiful artwork by Finnish artist Pekka Niittyvirta – they have installed LED lights in the village of Lochmaddy in the Outer Hebrides which rise and fall along with the tides and provide a stark evocation of the projected sea levels should climate change continue at its current and predicted pace. The contrast between the space and the sky and the light here is just beautiful, and the pictures really are haunting (and yes, I know it’s an overused and slightly crap word, but I promise it fits here).
• Libby: Annoyingly it’s incredibly unclear whether this is US only or international – I think it works outside the US, but apologies if I have this totally wrong. Anyway, Libby is an app which allows you to borrow books from the library straight onto your ‘phone – sign up with your library card and instead of having to go and pick up a title from the building, get it sent digitally to your device. SUCH a clever idea and a boon for people who maybe can’t get to a physical library with such ease. If this does turn out to be a US only thing, can someone let me know if there is a UK equivalent that I’ve somehow missed? PLEASE? Ok, fine, please yourselves.
• Wavelength: This has SEVEN HOURS LEFT at the time of writing on Kickstarter, so if you’re reading this after about 5pm GMT on 8 March 2019 then you are TOO LATE (but hello nonetheless, I still value your eyeballs) – still, it’s funded 10x already so you’ll be able to get hold of it eventually regardless. Wavelength is a really interesting-sounding party game – it’s quite hard to explain, so I’d advise you to read the description, but it’s the sort of thing that sounds like it would end up being a lovely shouty messy evening and which doesn’t rely on the sort of cheap laughs that CAH does.
• Postmake: This is CRIMINALLY dull, sorry, but equally the sort of thing that might end up being really useful – you want a bunch of online project management tools and software all organised into one place, most of which are free? GREAT!
• Trestle: This is an interesting idea – Trestle is an online shopping app, but one whose gimmick is that all the sellers have been vetted for their ethical standards; so the theory is that you won’t feel morally compromised by the knowledge that your £3 all-in-one party outfit was stitched by a blind child on the 22nd hour of their shift in a sweatshop somewhere (at that price point, well, WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN??). Obviously a service like this stands and falls on the quality of the suppliers, as well as the price point, but if you’re rich enough not to have to worry about paying a premium for ‘ethical’ goods then you might want to take a look at this. Ah, the future – an age in which morality is the preserve of the wealthy!
• The Binary Graffiti Club Choir: I have featured this before, but my friend Rina asked nicely and they are doing a THING next week so it’s in here again – the Binary Graffiti Club Choir is a sort of part-walk, part-choir, part-performance art THING and it’s happening on 14 March from 6-9pm in London and you can learn more at the link and by emailing your full name, age, and mobile number to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  and, actually, now I’ve written that down it does all sound VERY dodgy but I promise you that I know Rina in real life and I’m pretty sure she’s not a murderer and even if she is she’s only about 4’9″ tall and you can probably overpower her should she get stabby.
• Language Learning with Netflix: A Chrome extension which lets you watch anything on Netflix in the original language, with accompanying subtitles in your own language (and the original too) so as to help you learn while you watch. Simple, clever, and potentially hugely useful – the sort of thing that in a way means that you can actually justify leaving your child in front of a whole day’s worth of crap cartoons because ACTUALLY they are learning Mandarin and you are being a really good parent and you DESERVED that wine stop shouting Karen.
• The Smithsonian Photograph of the Year 2018: IT’S BEEN 2019 FOR THREE MONTHS FFS SMITHSONIAN PULL YOUR FINGERS OUT. Tardiness aside, though, these are typically beautiful and span a range of categories including examples of digital manipulation and images shot on mobile. My favourite’s the Italians at the funeral; what’s yours?
• Sold From Under You: In case the spectacle of our elected representatives spending yet another week demonstrating their fundamental dreadfulness wasn’t enough of a reason to be angry with politics this week, why not get stuck into this excellent piece of investigative work by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maps some 12,000 pieces of land and property which have been sold off by councils across the UK as a result of the austerity measures which have crippled local government over the past decade but which can IN NO WAY be blamed for or indeed linked to the parallel rise in disenfranchisement and violent crime amongst the young in some of the most marginalised communities, OH NO SIREE! “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has…used this data to map for the first time the community spaces that have been lost across the country, in a searchable resource that anyone can use. Our investigation also looked at what councils have done with the money made from selling assets. Some have used the proceeds to fund hundreds of redundancies.” This will make you furious, and not in an enjoyable or even particularly cathartic way, just fyi.
• City Icons of the World: Free vector icons representing a sizeable chunk of the world’s cities, should you find such a thing desirable or useful.
• The Past Is The Future: A wonderful selection of pictures of musicians of the now, drawn as though they were musicians of the 80s and being depicted in semi-cartoon fashion on a cassette-tape compilation you might have seen in Our Price after school one day. Featuring Rita Ora (a woman who I can honestly say I see in the free paper EVERY DAY and yet whose music I have never, ever knowingly heard), Drake, DJ Khaled, Bieber and, weirdly and creepily, Chris Brown, these are really very good indeed – Drake-as-Lioned-Richiealike is particularly great.
• Rambalac: You remember the Slow TV movement from a few years back, which championed such things as 9-hour long first person train journeys through the Swiss alsp? Well this is a bit like that, but Japanese and on YouTube – Rambalac is a channel which presents videos which show a first-person view of someone walking slowly and silently through Japanese streets, some urban, some rural, in different types of weather. Really rather lovely, though obviously NOTHING happens other than the occasional car.
• Spritestack: A 3d pixel art editor, in case you want to make voxel-style sprites for use in whatever game or digital art thingy you might be making. Or, you know, just to design a slightly blocky 3d penis instead of writing that email. You know you want to.
• Spotify Editor: This may well be very useful to those of you with a slavish devotion to compiling Spotify playlists – this site lets you easily categorise, sort, edit and prune them, in a manner far more intuitive than Spotify’s own (to my mind) slightly iffy UI.
• Leave Me Alone: I am wary of presenting stuff like this to you, gentle reader, lest you start GETTING IDEAS – still, in the spirit of utility and safe in the knowledge that you would NEVER leave me (would you?), here’s Leave Me Alone, a service that you plug into your inbox and which will find all the emails you’ve subscribed to over a given period, giving you the opportunity to quickly and easily unsub from them en masse; for a full 6-month scrape they’ll charge an $8 fee, which might sound steep but then means that they don’t have to sell your data back to the email bastards to keep going. DITCH ALL THE OTHER NEWSLETTERS AND KEEP ME!
• The Boat: The best storytelling site I’ve seen so far this year, hands-down – desktop only, I’m afraid (or at least significantly better on desktop) – The Boat is by SBS in Australia and is a brilliantly told story of immigration into the country after the Vietnam war. Honestly, this is SO GOOD – one of the best attempts at a digital comic book I’ve ever seen, with wonderful audio and really nicely done textual effects to give a degree of kinetic urgency to the narrative (/pseud). Really beautifully made – hats off to the team behind it, this is gorgeous.
• Speed Demon: This, though, is literally just a top-down scrolling shooter – switch between 4 lanes, shoot demons, avoid obstacles, try not to die. This is FUN and has a very real ‘one more go’ feel to it.
• Monocube: Finally this week, another game – this time a slow, methodical block-moving puzzler, which slowly builds to become very satisfying and very complex, and which involves attempting to navigate a small cube through a maze and which you can probably play in a really small window on one side of your monitor so that you can still pretend to be looking at Excel or whatever boring, pointless task you’re pretending to care about today in exchange for food tokens.

By Kelly Beeman

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS EXCELLENT DIRTY SET OF ELECTRONIC BREAKS AND…ER…STUFF MIXED BY MOXIE & IMOGEN!

THE (ONCE AGAIN SADLY TUMBLEWEEDY) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Thicc Tech: Lovely chunky devices for you to drool over if that’s your thing.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Halston Blake: Halston Blake doesn’t exist yet, but they already have an Insta account and a logo, because Halston Blake is the foetal progeny of some INFLUENCER or another in the states and said INFLUENCER hasn’t been shy about exploring the early monetisation potential of their unborn child. Before you slag the parents, it’s worth noting that the account of this yet-to-be-spawned kid has garnered 150k followers in the week or so since it’s been live – THIS IS OUR FAULT. WE ARE FEEDING THIS. Special shout out to all those US lawyers currently working to ensure that they’re first in the queue for the inaugural ‘child sues parents for use of their image rights to accrue income from sponsored posts on Insta’ case coming down the line in about 2025!
• Dildos on Photos: It’s not sophisticated, fine, but it is quite funny.
• For Dark Skin Girls: “A positive platform for black women. Interviews, news, memes, reposts, conversations, vids and cute sht!”
• Tiny Little Dioramas: Miniature scenes of violent death in largely suburban settings. Like Jake and Dinos Chapman by way of Margate.
• Damselfrau: Amazing weird masks that for some reason remind me really strongly of the Greek Orthodox priesthood.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Britain and Austerity Socialism: Really interesting look at the rise of the Momentum Left (sorry, appreciate that that’s probably a very un-nuanced way of referring to young socialists in the UK but, well, honestly the tedious ‘Judean People’s Front’-type nomenclature stuff is one of the main reasons I have always been massively put off engaging with party politics) in the UK in the New York Times, which is in part an interesting outsiders’ perspective and, equally, in part reads like the author’s been slightly taken for a ride by a few of the people involved. Not quite sure – what do YOU think? The description of Wetherspoons as a ‘British restaurant chain’ was quite special too.
• The Surveillance Economy: Or, “why Facebook and Google won’t change’ – this is particulary interesting in the light of Zuckerberg’s privacy Damascus yesterday, not least as it gives a reasonable explanation why on balance it won’t really mean very much at all. Surveillance capitalism, the now-accepted term for the data-based economy born out of the tracking of our wants and movements and dreams and contacts and EVERYTHING for commercial gain, isn’t going to stop – it might shift, fine, it might take different forms, but there’s no reason they are going to stop making money out of data because that is what they are for. It’s worth reading this and then going back to the Zuckerberg/WIRED interview right back up the top – all the stuff about encryption ‘not necessarily being a barrier to advertising’ makes more sense, eh?
• Status as a Service: This is VERY long, so be warned, but it’s hugely interesting and very engaging, and made me think quite a lot. This is by Eugene Wei, a very smart person who’s had a lot of quite big jobs, and has obviously thought a LOT about the web and how things on it work. This is about status and the idea of social capital, how social networks operate, and how they use social capital as both a hook and a retention mechanism. You don’t have to agree with it all to find it interesting – I was talking with Jay Owens about this who had some interesting counterarguments to a lot of Wei’s points (to whit (hope you don’t mind me quoting you here btw) “Any social network too strongly geared towards status-competition will fail, because 50% of people are always below average and people don’t like failing”) – but it will, I promise, make you think a bit more closely about why and how network models thrive or die (but, you know, more interestingly than that).
• Men Are Scum: Or, what it’s like to be a part of the team that determines what it is and isn’t OK to say on Facebook – or, if you want to position it another way, what it’s like to have a very real and significant role in shaping what is going to be considered to be the prevalent standard applied to online discourse for the majority of the world. Which, when you put it like that, is quite a big deal. This is a profile of Monika Bickert, and others, who head up Facebook’s attempts to codify and systematise what can and cannot be said on the platform, and of then ensuring it can be applied and enforced equitably across the site’s 2bn users. There are many reasons I would not be qualified to do this sort of job, but it’s one of the few I can think of where having two degrees in philosophy might be some sort of help rather than a massive hindrance as it appears to be in every other role I’ve ever had.
• Inside the Lives of the Child Insta Stars: A companion piece of sorts to that Kidfluencer insta account up there, this is less about the kids (who, let’s be clear, are FCUKING CHILDREN and therefore unlikely to have a particularly nuanced perspective on the fact that their parents are pimping out their image for those sweet, sweet brand dollars) and more about the parents who are facilitating (read: driving, hard) all this exciting stuff. This is less horrifying than these pieces tend to be, with no obviously dreadful parents on display, but looking at the photos here it’s impossible for me not to feel a bit uncomfortable about the fact that these people are basically making their kids dress up for the enjoyment of strangers around the world so as to earn (quite a lot of) money off the back of it. Perhaps it’s all the Jackson stuff about this week, but it doesn’t really feel hugely ok to me.
• American Socialists: Yes, it’s fair to say that ‘socialism’ is very much having its moment in the American media spotlight thanks to AOC – this NY Mag piece is deliciously catty, cocking a snook at the Brooklyn hipster socialists, a subspecies committed to activism but also really, really committed to a strong lumberjack aesthetic and some sooty needle tattoo work. Contains this reported quote from one featured kid which, fine, is mean and snarky but is too beautiful not to share: “Everybody looks fckin’ sexy as hell,” shouted Cunningham, NYC-DSA’s co-chair. “This is amazing to have everybody here looking beautiful in the same room, spreading the message of socialism. Give yourselves a round of applause.” Now, there’s no reason on earth why these people shouldn’t look sexy as hell – after all, nothing’s too good for the proletariat, Comrade – but, well, HA. Still, better this than Tories, eh?
• Top Songs: This is the third year that the NYT has done this now – its annual selection of 25 songs that define THE NOW, with accompanying essays on each. This is SUCH a good ‘state of the Western world’ piece as seen through the prism of music – not all the tracks they pick are brand new, but each of them speaks to a particular aspect of 2019 and the accompanying writing is REALLY good and covers a brilliant range of topics; worth clicking for the analysis of all the many, many people with a writing credit on ‘Sicko Mode’.
• The WWF Story: It never feels nice sharing links to reports about ostensibly good organisations doing bad things – the Buzzfeed story about WWF funding murder squads and militias, though, is astonishing and really worth reading in full as a reminder that investigative journalism is powerful and important and needs funding and is HARD. This is such impressive work, if a depressing reminder that massive organisations will often be really, really ropey when observed up close.
• How To Make Dope Sh1t: Thanks to Curios reader Soph (half of ad duo Rohit & Soph) for sending this in – perennial Curios favourites The Pudding have produced a series of guides on, er, how to make ‘dope sh1t’, of which this is the second part, on design. If you’ve any interest at all in visual design online, particularly as regards infoviz-type stuff, this is a must-read, particularly given it’s written by some of the best practitioners in the business right now.
• Why Straight Men Are Joining Masturbation Clubs: I mean, are we? Why…why has noone asked me yet? Are you all happily stroking your firmness in merry communal fashion and excluding me? CHRIST. I have to confess that I don’t think that this is really a thing – it does feel very much like a classic case of ‘two Craiglists posts equals A TREND!’ – but nonetheless it’s quite an interesting article touching on (sorry) why ostensibly straight men might now feel more comfortable and relaxed masturbating in front of other men (we are moving beyond an age of toxic masculinity, apparently, and we are detoxifying it by ejaculating together).
• Pokemon London: There was another trailer released recently for that weird and creepy lookink live-action Pokemon film starring Ryan Reynolds, and it turns out that loads of the film is set in London; this is a far-more-detailed-than-necessary look at all the shots of the city used in the video, analysis of how they’ve been manipulated, and a lot of idle speculation as to whether they’re going to turn the Tfl roundel into a Pokeball at some point (they are, obviously). Is it me, by the way, or does all the non-Pikachu CG work in this look desperately shonky? Did they spend all the money on his luxuriant golden hairs?
• Women Painters Overlooked by Art History: The Google Art Project presents profiles of 14 female artists who had previously gone unrecognised by the art establishment but who are now receiving their dues; my personal favourite is Suzanne Valadon, but pick your own.
• Leaving Neverland: You will, of course, have your own opinion about the Michael Jackson documentary and what it does to your memory of the artist and the legacy of his work; it’s quite hard to look at this stuff and not think ‘hm, yes, looks like you’re bang to rights there, Jacko, and wow doesn’t that make a lot of stuff from the early 90s look pretty bleak in retrospect’. This piece is by Wesley James, who had previously defended Jackson against allegations and who now says he has changed his mind – this line struck me and stayed with me, and gives you a sense of the style of the piece overall: “I’m staring at the coat rack looking for somewhere to suspend more disbelief, and there’s no more room. I have to hold this.”
• Face Tattoos, Soundcloud Rap and Bieber: An exploration of that most modern of phenomena, the face tattoo. I once went to Arsenal to see Chelsea lose to them in a cup a decade or so ago at Highbury; the man in front of me had “GOONER” in gothic script across the back of his (very thick, very pink) neck and, when he turned round to celebrate Arsenal’s second and I tried to pretend to be happy rather than miserable and terrified, an accompanying 2-inch picture of the Arsenal cannon across his left cheek, which I always thought was an incredibly brave commitment to staying within a very, very specific area of North London for the rest of your life.
• Fight the Ship: Thanks to Katie for sending me this – if you like thrillers or the sort of mid-90s action movie that might have starred Denzel Washington or Sean Connery then you will absolutely LOVE this, which feels like it might start a Wahlberg were it ever filmed. It’s all about a US Naval warship disaster and the struggle to save both the ships and the lives of those aboard, and whilst the writing’s not stellar it makes up for that with tension and pacing; this is properly cinematic.
• Pac Man – How We Played: An essay born out of a charming little detail – when you examine old Pac Man arcade cabinets, you’ll notice that they all exhibit the same pattern of wear made from players universally using their left hands to steady themselves against the cabinet’s architecture. I love these things, when small details tell you about how people used an object and how that in turn defines elements of the space within which said objects existed (again /pseud).
• Bate Bola: It’s carnival in Brazil! Another year, another procession of terrifyingly-full silicon extremities and extravagant headdresses! There is, though, another side to the Rio celebrations, in the shape of Bate Bola, a sort of people’s carnival which takes place in the suburbs of Rio and is the more gritty alternative to the mass-participation spectacle in the city’s centre. This tells you the history of the festival, shows you the costumes and gives you a feel for the way it intersects with the gangs which dominate much of Rio’s poor districts. Fascinating, and something I’d never heard of before.
• Nick Kyrgios: Tennis players are famously boring. Andy Murray’s ability to occasionally use sarcasm and irony, and the fact he’s Scottish, combine to make him DANGEROUSLY personable by the standards of the ATP tour, and Stefan Edberg was once described by other pros as a man so dull that they honestly believed one of his hobbies was ‘staring at walls’. Which makes Aussie enfant terrible Nick Kyrgios such a guilty pleasure – he’s been around for ages, being a prick, but he won a tournament the other day which prompted this piece about how he’s such an insufferable tool. This is HUGELY satisfying to read, and contained at least one sentence of which I was very, very jealous.
• Travels in Pornland: An essay in Granta in which Andrea Stewart remembers her experiences of pornography and her work in feminist publishing, and examines the idea of ‘feminist porn’ as a concept; this is really interesting on how and if porn can ever be said to be a feminist experiences (she doesn’t, unsurprisingly, solve that one) and whether it will always be an inherently male-owned domain. Really good writing.
• Unnameable Things: SO BEAUTIFUL. About butterflies and the Troubles, two subjects that oughtn’t work in tandem except here they really do. By Kerri ní Dochartaigh, who really is a very talented writer indeed. This really is very good, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
• The Greeter: Finally this week, a short piece of fiction by T Kira Madden about a teenager, her mother, her mother’s addiction, adolescence, secrets and sex and all the rest. Even better than the last piece, and I don’t say that lightly. If you only read two things in the longreads this week, make it these last two.

By Chloe Wise

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) I..I don’t understand this AT ALL. Is this from someone’s Twitch stream? What is happening? IS THIS WHAT THE CHILDREN LIKE THESE DAYS?? I don’t expect any of you will watch all 20m of this, but it’s worth scrubbing through at random as it gets VERY weird indeed:

2) This is by Matmos, and it sounds like it was cobbled together by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the late-70s and it is GREAT. Nice video, too:

3) You want some surprisingly melodic Mongolian metal? YES YOU DO! Thanks to Ged for the tip here, this is really quite good – it’s by Nine Treasures and it’s called ‘Boddhicitta’:

4) This is an animation by someone called Kadavre Esquis – I know NOTHING more than that. It’s odd, but it’s also really, really technically impressive, in the now-legendary pixelart style:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Curios favourite Elro is back with another freestyle on JDZ – he’s got an EP out soon and he’s been off the booze a bit and this is GOOD; some of the wordplay on here is very sharp, and fair play to him for sticking at this through what I get the impression has been a bit of a tricky few years:

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6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Papergood’ by closegood, and I LOVE IT and I want to hear more of them RIGHT NOW. Really very good:

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7) Last up this week, 17m of short film that I really would urge you to watch. Do it on your phone, and get a screen’s-eye view of a day in the life of an average white teenage boy. It’s not particularly comfortable viewing, and if you’ve got teen kids yourself then it’s liable to make you simultaneously really want to know lots more about their secret digital life and really not know – regardless, though, as a piece of mobile-first, vertically-shot storytelling (sorry) this really is excellent and it is an excellent way to round out this week’s MASSIVE selection of links and a great point for me to say BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE HAVE FUN TAKE CARE AND STAY SAFE AND HAVE A GOOD REST OF THE DAY AND A NICE WEEKEND AND A GOOD WEEK AND IT WON’T BE LONG UNTIL IT’S FRIDAY AGAIN SO BASICALLY LET’S JUST THINK OF THE REST OF THE YEAR AS A LONG SUCCESSION OF WEEKENDS STRETCHING OUT AHEAD OF US AND MAYBE THAT WILL MAKE IT ALL EASIER TO BEAR ANYWAY I PROBABLY OUGHT TO GET ON SO BYE TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

First up, an apology from me to you for screwing up the html quite so spectacularly last week; hopefully this week the links should work and the words should be readable and the only issues you ought to encounter are the ones born of authorial inadequacy rather than the peculiar strain of CMS-luddism I appear to be infected with.

ANYWAY! How are we all? Did we enjoy the Summer? Are we read for Autumn and Winter, which the weather forecast seems to suggest are about to come careening round the corner with chilly abandon? GREAT!

It doesn’t matter how cold it gets, anyway – WE CAN WARM OUR FINGERS ON THE BURNING EMBERS OF CIVILISATION! I jest, of course – this is the best of all possible worlds, as the Panglossion Pinker-disciples like to tell me on the reg, and anyone who doesn’t agree is a miserable enemy of progress! So, then, tell me why it doesn’t feel like that for anyone I or you know? IS THE PROBLEM INSIDE US?

Oh I don’t know. Neither do you. Noone knows ANYTHING, which is part of the problem – at the very least generations past were kept inured from the foibles and failings of those putatively in control, meaning they were able to maintain a blind faith in the illusory superiority of the people at the wheel; now, though, with not only the curtain peeled back but also the first few layers of epidermis, we get to see EVERYTHING and we can see that just like us they are scared and frightened and incompetent and unhappy, and that what we might once have mistaken for conviction and zeal in their eyes is instead the same glazed expression we see in each others’, fruit of late nights trying to drink the care away.

Still, no matter – we may be heading to hell, but the handcart’s roomy as you like! Snuggle in, settle down and allow me to set you careening on your way through the swiss-cheese passageways meandering through this weeks SOLID BLOCK of congealed webspaff like some sort of fetid and unpleasantly-suppurating equivalent of Space Mountain. This, as ever, is Web Curios – WHITE RABBITS, EVERYONE!

By Lola Gill

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A MIX OF TRULY UNDERGROUND UK HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH FULLY EXPECTS A TIMES/MAIL STORY ABOUT ‘SICK YOUTUBE ADVERTISERS TARGETING KIDS BASED ON THE MOMO CHALLENGE’ WITHIN THE WEEK:

• Facebook Introduces ‘Showcase’ For More Tellylike Ads: This is literally creating a TV-style ad-buying market for Facebook Watch – only in the US so far, but I imagine that the buying/targeting options here detailed, which involve buying inventory across a specific set of premium shows, the ability to reach viewers watching ‘contextually-relevant’ content, and single-show sponsorship, will eventually be rolled out to other major markets. Thrilling stuff.
• Instagram Planning Public Collections: I’m trying to avoid reporting on conjecture in this section, not least because if I do it means I have to write this tedious crap up twice when speculation becomes reality. This is interesting, though – indefatigable codedigger Jane Manchun Wong (the person single-handedly responsible for seemingly 90-odd% of all current ‘x social media platform is working on y’ scoops, which is hugely impressive) has discovered that there’s code within Instagram’s existing ‘Collections’ feature (where you can collect ‘grams into your own personal scrapbooks, a la Pinterest) to turn said Collections public, thereby meaning that any individual or brand could in theory use the platform for pulling together themed collections of stuff, just like on Pinterest. Of course, Insta doesn’t have all the nice shoppability stuff built in, but, well, it will, won’t it? Poor Pinterest.
• A Detailed TikTok Playbook for Creators: Or indeed for anyone else who wants to use the GLOBAL PHENOMENON (it passed 1bn downloads recently, and whilst downloads obviously aren’t necessarily users that’s still a hell of a number). If you’re still yet to give it a go then this is actually a very simple and straightforward guide to the app’s usage and features – equally, I find it hard to imagine anyone over the age of 20 feeling at home there (not for any Snapchat like reasons of interface horror, more to do with the fact that it’s hard not to feel a bit like that classic Steve Buscemi meme when surrounded by video of brilliantly-yet-bafflingly creative children doing dizzying quick-cut edits of in-jokes that you will never fully understand).
• Pandora Stories: Only in the US (again) – sorry. This is an interesting idea, though – streaming service Pandora is launching its own version of the Stories format, but this one’s moderately more interesting than the standard ‘chunked-down photos and videos stitched together with little or no skill’-type thing. The idea here is that creators can stitch together playlists of songs with their commentary or explanation stitched between the tracks – so you could have an artist talking you through their album track-by-track, say, or someone doing their own Desert Island Discs-type show. This is SUCH a nice idea and I would expect Spotify to thieve this very soon.
• Amazon Personalise: I don’t imagine this will be of any practical use to any of you, but it’s an interesting little bit of Amazon news regardless. Amazon Personalise is a new offering from MechaBezos, which offers app developers to use Amazon’s machine learning technology to build a layer of personalised recommendation within their apps. “With Amazon Personalize, you provide an activity stream from your application – page views, signups, purchases, and so forth – as well as an inventory of the items you want to recommend, such as articles, products, videos, or music. You can also choose to provide Amazon Personalize with additional demographic information from your users such as age, or geographic location. Amazon Personalize will process and examine the data, identify what is meaningful, select the right algorithms, and train and optimize a personalization model that is customized for your data.” This is potentially hugely powerful, and another example of why Amazon is eventually going to win advertising and possibly everything else.
• C’est Parti: It seems that 2019 is the year of the cutely-pixellated branded browsergame, and I am ok with that. This one’s French, again, and is a simple-but-diverting vertical scroller in whichyou climb ladders, collect coins and avoid peril. I think it’s made to promote the French equivalent of John Lewis but, frankly, who cares? We’re done with the tedious s*c**l m*d** stuff in record time, and YOU deserve a reward!

By Lizzie Gill

NEXT, ENJOY AN EXCELLENT 20-TRACK CAREER RETROSPECTIVE OF ELECTROHIPHOPGRAFFITIPIONEER REQ!

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE WANTS TO SPEND THE REST OF TODAY RUNNING ROUND SHOUTING “ONE MONTH TO GO! ONE MONTH TO GO!” IN THE MANNER OF CORPORAL JONES FROM BLACKADDER HAVING WHAT IS COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS ‘A ROUGH ONE’, PT.1:

• Play With GPT2: A full two weeks since OpenAI’s scaremongering press release about how AI writing was going to DESTROY our last remaining scraps of faith in the integrity of journalism with its magical fake news generation properties (congratulations to the UK press for noble work in reminding us that, occasionally, the media can do quite well without any AI help at all, thankyou very much), we can now ALL play around with it (or at least a dumbed-down version of it). Chuck in a fragment of seed text, set the output length, crank the lever and see what results. It’s…patchy – I read somewhere that this was rather like linguistic impressionism, doing an excellent job of communicating the rough vibe of sensical (is that a word? Fcuk it, it ought to be) prose at a glance whilst without on close inspection really meaning much at all – but doubtless impressive. See what it makes of your last Whatsapp message for a creepy glimpse into how easy it is to mimic your writing ‘style’.
• This Startup Does Not Exist: ANOTHER machine learning toy, this time using ML to generate an infinity of webpages for nonexistent startups; refresh the page for a new company. I just got ‘Circumer – Using the blockchain to create AI chatbots’, which were this 2017 would be pretty plausible; admittedly it does fall apart as you scroll down the page, though I would personally invest in any real-life company which listed one of its qualities as ‘jocundity’, but overall this is a nice addition to the pantheon of sites which show us quite how well the machines will be able to fool us in about 2 years.
• Drivetime: Ok, you won’t be able to use this unless you’re in the US, but it’s still interesting, promise. Drivetime is a REALLY clever idea – an app designed for car commuters which every day will pair you with another player, driving to or from work (or anywhere really), and present you with a series of questions across 7 categories; the doubtless cheery and HYPER-AMERICAN hosts ask the questions, the app uses voice recognition to register your answers and, er, that’s it! You answer questions, you win / lose, and come back the next day to do it all again. The game will match you with contacts or strangers, but as far as I can tell there’s no person-to-person interaction so you don’t have to worry about people being pricks (small mercies), and overall this just seems like a great idea (ignoring any potential road safety implications – I don’t drive, so have no idea whether concentrating REALLY HARD on trivia is the sort of thing that might prove dangerous).
• NoClip: Many of you I know read this while at work in what I presume is a sort of minor act of rebellion which you deep-down know you might sort-of be able to pass off as ‘general internet trend research’ if noone looks too closely at the timesheets; presuming you ARE at work, and presuming you wish you weren’t, then enjoy this amazing site which lets you select from a range of old-school Nintendo games (and a few other titles), load up the game maps and then navigate weightlessly in three dimensions, floating around through the virtual space in weirdly-relaxing fashion. You can spend the rest of the day floating through MarioKart64’s courses or you can spend it pretending to care about yet ANOTHER pitch for a client who will make your life a living hell before sacking you unceremoniously when you yet again failed to make a ‘viral’ (honestly, in the past month I have seen at least three briefs that are basically just that – we’re regressing, I swear) – which do YOU prefer? Well, quite.
• European Tree of the Year 2019: It”s the most wonderful time of the year – when we get to choose Europe’s BEST TREE!!! This year’s field is pretty strong, and whilst part of me feels a patriotic duty to tell you to cast your vote for ‘Nellie’s Tree’ (could our entry be any more stereotypically British? You can just imagine that being read out in a wavering, paper-thin voice which then goes on to ask you if you’d like ‘a nice cup of milky tea from the little shop next door’) it’s clear that the standout arboreal contender here is France’s Bird Tree. Look at it, it’s MAGNIFICENT. Oh, and seeing as you’re here, have some BONUS TREE ENTHUSIAST CONTENT in the shape of this charming site which collects loads of stories an anecdotes about trees.
• Kanopy: How did I not know about this?! Kanopy is an AMAZING service which offers literally thousands of films to stream, for free, if you’re a member of select libraries or academic institutions worldwide. It’s got a truly insane selection of international films, covering all the bases that you wish Netflix would but which it never will – international cinema, arthouse stuff, old movies…honestly, this is wonderful. As far as I can tell, in the UK you need to be a University student to access it – but, well, if you know anyone who’s at University then maybe they could lend you their ID…NB WEB CURIOS IN NO WAY ENDORSES IDENTITY FRAUD.
• The Gyllenhaal Experiment: Blah blah blah The Pudding excellent dataviz and interactive blah blah blah. Yes, that’s right, it’s ANOTHER great piece of interactive datawonkery from The Pudding, which for its latest hit interactive exploration of numbers and stuff decided to build a site to track the most popular misspellings of the names of famouses. It’s really nicely built – it shows you a series of famouses, asks you to type what you think they are called, and as you type shows you how many people offered the same spelling as you, along with visual details of the various spell-splits along the way. Which, I’ve just realised, is an awful description. Anyway, try it! It’s fun! Though I have to admit I didn’t recognise about ⅓ of the people as I am crap at famouses and they are all American.
• Glass Leaves: Oh this is lovely. Glass Leaves is a small text toy which lets you plug in any copy you want and then manipulate it in a variety of ways; cutting up the text, removing adjectives, etc. You can stack manipulations, reverse them, and generally mess with the text in all sorts of fun ways; as a means of doing literary experimentation it’s not bad, and you can probably add an entertaining layer of inefficiency to your working day if you decide to run all your emails through several layers of this before sending them.
• The Music Burner Archive: Burning Man’s done a quite spectacular job of turning from ‘genuinely interesting-looking cultural/artistic experiment, albeit one populated by people who I’d probably cross mountain ranges to avoid’ to ‘literally THE worst example of the ridiculousness of Valley VC faux-hippy wankery’, which is pretty impressive in a way. Still, they’re making noises this year about attempting to take it back to its roots and remove some of the ‘founders on safari’ vibe from the whole thing, so good luck to them. This site collects seemingly every single musical set from the festival from each of the past 20 years – if you dig through there’s a pretty incredible and eclectic range of mixes, though there’s a slight tendency towards what I like to term ‘dog on string music’ (which, I now realise, will mean next to nothing to you – oh well).
• Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator: Another excellent and fun little wordtoy, this one letting you plug in a couple of words of your choosing and then spitting out attempted puns and portmanteau words based on what you gave it. It’s interestingly oblique – I just entered ‘car’ and ‘sheep’ and it responded with, amongst other things, ‘yakcident’ which I am slightly in awe of. This is really rather magical, if you’re the sort of person who likes wordplay and linguistics at least.
• Politiscope: This is a really clever idea. A US app, Politiscope exists to offer a quick, easy to access and clear database of elected officials in the US, offering you an at-a-glance look at their voting record, stance of specific issues, etc. through a simple and clear interface. SO useful, this – wouldn’t it be helpful to have something similar in the UK, with the ability to do your own quick and easy checking on this stuff rather than having to take the partisan infoslices fed to you on Twitter as gospel (obviously you can check this stuff already, I know, but presenting it like this seems to me like a genuinely sensible idea).
• King Charles I Return: Thanks Dan for this BEAUTIFUL piece of webwork – I don’t pretend to fully understand what’s going on here, but I’ll just leave the description here and suggest that you ensure that you visit this on a desktop and with the volume up: “Welcome to the website of King Charles I Return—the definitive character re-enactment of the 17th Century Stuart Monarchy faithfully brought to you by Daniel Williams. Join Daniel as he follow [sic] in the footsteps of Charles from his time.” This is sort-of lovely.
• Killiii: Beautiful photography of Inuit people and the landscape they live in, by native photographer Killiii Yuyan. Regardless of how much you think you might not be interested in this, I promise you that these are glorious and you will absolutely fall in love with the polar bears.
• Hypercard Adventures: If you had an old-school Mac (one of the grey boxes, pre the Steve Jobs pastel revolution) then you might well feel a strange pang of almost erotic nostalgia at this – if you weren’t, though, this will probably mean nothing to you. Sorry. “HyperCard was a piece of application software and a programming tool for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. HyperCard combined a flat-file database with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface.HyperCard also included a built-in programming language called HyperTalk for manipulating data and the user interface.” This is an emulator for that. Literally no idea what you might want it for but, well, not my problem.
• Goatse: This is sad – Goatse, classic internet shock site which I am going to presume I really don’t need to explain at this point in March 2019 but which if you’re unfamiliar with used to contain nothing more than a large and violently technicolour image of a man opening his anus to startling dimensions from an angle that can best be described as ‘photographic colonoscopy’, has PIVOTED TO BITCOIN. I think it’s safe to say that the time to HODL might have passed, lads.
• Expensive Chat: Fair play to the kid behind this, who’s managed to put a new spin on what I thought was a played-out idea – to whit, the ‘pay small amounts to promote something on a briefly trendy url’ thing. Expensive Chat is a chatroom platform – you go there, you type, stuff appears onscreen, lots of users can use it simultaneously – with the gimmick that each character posted on the platform costs $0.01 and you have to pay to post. At the time of writing it’s raised over $130 – if it reaches $1,000 I am giving up and going to live in a bin because, honestly, it’s NOT FAIR.
• The Improv Map of the World: A Google Map listing known improv opportunities everywhere in the world, for all you globetrotting comedians out there (I can number two known globetrotting comedians amongst Curios’ readership – Hi Alex! Hi Rina! – but there may be others) – not sure quite how up-to-date it is, but if you’re going to, say, Panama and want to see a man struggling through the realisation that he’s not as funny as his mates think he is then, well, here you are!
• Google 3d Search: Oh this is a wonderful goldmine of odd! This is a beta Google search tool that lets you search speficically for 3d models uploaded to Sketchfab. Honestly, just plug in whatever odd words and phrases spring to mind, and when you’ve defaulted to ‘penis’ (I KNOW YOU) enjoy some of the excellent rendering work on display (along with the inexplicable model of a small cartoony mouse called, for no discernible reason, “Big Gay”).
• Is Britain Great Again?: Just, you know, in case you were wondering. Has anyone checked who the first journalist was waaaay back in the early days of this mess to speculate, even in jocular ‘it’ll never happen!’ fashion, what it would be like were we to be a month away from March 29th with no sign of a deal whatsoever? There will have been one – go on, someone do the digging and make them feel smug.
• Oscar Photos: In case you didn’t get enough hi-res photos of beautiful people in fancy, silly clothes on Monday, here are some more. As ever, the Atlantic’s picture selection is fantastic, credit where it’s due.
• Underwater Photographer of the Year 2019: Yeah, it definitely feels like these are happening more often than once a year – still, once again, LOOK AT THESE AQUATIC LADS! Many of these are sublime, though I do feel they ought to strip out the very specific ‘beautiful woman photographed underwater in a way meant to look deeply artistic but which instead just invokes Jack Vettriano’ pictures into their own comedy category (special shout out to the Italian photo of that ilk which is entitled simply “Italian Beauty”, which is the most Italian name it could possibly have been given).
• Cursed Putters: Do you play golf? WHY? Still, you don’t need to be a golfer to enjoy this Twitter thread which glories in the over-the-top idiosyncracy of modern putter design – these are SO ugly.
• Tokyo Livestream: A webcam, capturing the live view of a few busy flyovers and a rail track in Tokyo. Obviously NOTHING HAPPENS, but it’s strangely soothing nonetheless and, per all of these things, seems to have a very dedicated community of a few hundred souls who gather to watch nothing at all happen in Japan and have a very civilised groupchat in the sidebar. Join them! Make friends! Discuss the peculiar majesty of Japanese rail transport!
• Cambridge Digital Library: You want an incredible library of digitised archive material from the University of Cambridge? YES YOU DO! Regardless of whether you have any interest in in-depth exploration of the materials, just clicking through is fascinating; you get a small impression of the incredible depth of the University’s archive and a vague, dizzying sense of years of scholarship. Can’t BELIEVE the bastards rejected me.
• The Interactive Typography Cheatsheet: Ever wanted to know what the little horizontal bit on a lowercase ‘e’ is called? No, I can’t imagine you have, and yet now you have the opportunity to learn something you NEVER knew you cared about, all thanks to Web Curios? Isn’t it great? WHY DON’T MORE PEOPLE CARE?!?! Ahem. Anyway, this is a nice little site which presents various letters and tells you what various parts of the character are called from a typographical point of view. Did you know that the letter ‘g’ has an ear? NO YOU DIDN’T DID YOU YOU INGRATES.
• Vai’s Guitars: If you’re the sort of person who’s really into guitars you probably have at least a passing knowledge of who Steve Vai is – if not, know only that he’s the sort of guitarist whose solos go on for about three years and who, to my mind at least, always struck me as looking like a very selfish lover (no idea why that is – sorry Steve). Anyway, this site collects photos of his guitar collection, which will basically be the musical equivalent of actual bongo for some of you.

By Leva Slizuite

NOW, TRY THIS 80sISH ELECTRO MIX BY GIANGO!

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE WANTS TO SPEND THE REST OF TODAY RUNNING ROUND SHOUTING “ONE MONTH TO GO! ONE MONTH TO GO!” IN THE MANNER OF CORPORAL JONES FROM BLACKADDER HAVING WHAT IS COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS ‘A ROUGH ONE’, PT.2:

• The Weather on Mars: The fact that you can visit this page and see what the weather is like on Mars – fine, ok, so there’s a few day’s delay, but STOP with your churlish complaining – is quite amazing. It was a balmy 10 degrees on Tuesday – HOTTER THAN BENIDORM, in classic tabloid fashion, which makes me wonder whether Martian tabloids were full of bikini-clad ‘lovelies’ frolicking in the unseasonably warm Mare Erythraeum.
• Names from Films: A datal-led exploration by Mary Zam of whether or not popular names in real life mapped onto popular names used in hit films in each decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. Fine, the data isn’t HUGELY exciting but the overall design and interface is lovely, and it’s very clearly a post-Pudding project, showing quite how much of an influence the site has had on prevailing dataviz and online interactive aesthetics in a few short years.
• Goat or Throat: Unsurprisingly this is one of several links nicked from last week’s B3ta newsletter – riding the coattails of old-school rhyming guessing game ‘man milk or moo milk‘ (click the link if you like, but it’s not HUGELY SFW), this presents a simple challenge – listen to the audio and decide whether the scream you hear is produced by a human throat or by a goat. WHICH IS IT? I keep getting this wrong, suggesting I neither listen to enough death metal or spend enough time at Vauxhall City Farm.
• The Crappy Games Wiki: This is a bit of a bugger to navigate, fine, but if you’re into games and fancy spending a couple of hours delving through a series of slightly-too-exasperated writeups of some of the crappest ones ever made then, well, this will be a godsend. The writing is…not good, in the main, but the games are so bad that that doesn’t really matter, and there are usually helpful links to YT let’s plays of the titles in question so you can enjoy video evidence of their jankiness should you so desire.
• An Amazing Thread of Public Transport Upholstery: THIS is what Twitter is for – Feargus O’Sullivan recently asked Twitter users from around the world to share photos of the upholstery used on public transport in their city – these are GLORIOUS, from the predictably adorable Japanese ones featuring illustrations about cartoon mascots and how great it is to be polite and respectful to the elderly, to the incredibly on-brand 70s Scandi brown of Stockholm. Just lovely.
• Should This Exist: Further proof that the lazily-termed ‘techlash’ is maturing into something a touch more considered is this podcast, which explores whether there are certain technologies and inventions that are objectively bad and ought not to exist at all. “”Should This Exist?” invites the creators of radical new technologies to set aside their business plan, and think through the human side: What is the invention’s greatest promise? And what could possibly go wrong? Show host Caterina Fake (Partner, Yes VC; Cofounder Flickr) is a celebrated tech pioneer and one of Silicon Valley’s most eloquent commentators on technology and the human condition. Joined by a roster of all-star expert guests who have a knack for looking around corners, Caterina drops listeners into the minds of today’s ingenious entrepreneurs and guides them through the journey of foreseeing what their technology might do to us, and for us.” Interesting, speculative and philosophical, and worth a listen.
• Things Found In Books: A Flickr pool collecting 118 photographs of things that have been found inside books. Doesn’t, on my limited perusal contain the all-time classic entry in this canon (a raw rasher of bacon), but nonetheless this is a pleasingly curious collection – WHO is the person who left a card with a short musical phrase scribbled on it along with the legend ‘Sadness & Death Theme’? Might start doing that to every book I give to charity shops from hereon in.
• Byrne’s Euclid: To be clear about this upfront, I don’t really understand this. It’s LOVELY though, and makes me wish I knew the first thing about hard maths, and the design and colours throughout put me in mind of Mondrian, which can’t be an accident given the mathematical nature of his work. Anyway, here’s the explainer: “Euclid’s Elements was a collection of 13 books about geometry originally written circa 300 BC. Shortly after the advent of the printing press, many editions and translations have been created over the centuries. Byrne’s 1847 edition of the first six books stands out for its unique use of colorful illustrations to demonstrate proofs rather than using letters to label angles, edges, and shapes. His edition was one of the first books to be published with such detailed use of colors and combined with its detailed diagrams makes it an impressive feat of publishing for the times and it stands out even today as a work of art. This site is a reproduction of Byrne’s Euclid by Oliver Byrne from 1847 that pays tribute to the beautiful original design and includes enhancements such as interactive diagrams, cross references, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.”
• Tap My Data: Are you paranoid that THEY are gathering data on you? Are you worried that THEY are compiling all the information into some sort of weird digital puppet ‘you’ that can be manipulated through the byways of the online and made to perform unspeakable digital acts? Or are you just worried that you’ll get crap ads everywhere you go? Whichever of those best describes you, Tap My Data might be of interest – it’s an app that claims to offer you an overview of the data that a company holds about you, and a one-stop interface to manage that. Or at least it does that for those companies that are signed up to it, which at the moment isn’t many – for organisations that DO deal with data and want to be transparent about it, though, signing up to something like this as part of a ‘transparency charter’ might not be a bad idea. Whilst it’s not quite working perfectly in this incarnation, and whilst it may never, it feels like this sort of thing is where we might end up sooner rather than later w/r/t the relationship between individuals and their data.
• The Climate Data Explorer: Would you like to spend a bit of time exploring country-by-country projections as to exactly how fcuked we’re all going to be in a few short years, and to explore the plaster-on-an-axewound commitments to ameliorating this sh1tshow that have been promised? No, I don’t imagine you would, and I don’t blame you – it’s quite miserable tbh.
• Nicky Tesla: The first genuinely novel portfolio site I’ve seen this year, Nicky Tesla’s made theirs in a Google sheet – fine, I can’t understand a damn thing and I have no idea how you’re supposed to read it, but for that very reason it’s almost certainly SUPER COOL and has got him loads of work. That’s how cool works, isn’t it? It’s basically ‘anything that I don’t understand’ at this point.
• Latchel: Disrupting landlords! Not, sad as though many of you will be to hear this, with a baseball bat to the face, but instead by offering an additional layer between tenant and landlord; effectively a remote and decentralised response service to tenants, meaning landlords pay Latchel money so they don’t have to worry about troublesome things like, I don’t know, the living standards of the human beings they’re making money from. As is par for the course in 2019, there is OBVIOUSLY a machine learning component – in this case, it’s used to parse requests as they come in with the promise that this will ensure that emergency requests are prioritised. Which is fine, but you just know that this will only work if statements are phrased in a certain way and as soon as someone writes a panicky email using non-standard English that the software will get all confused and the message will get lost and the fire will spread and the children will die. Fine, ok, that was perhaps a BIT apocalyptic, but I don’t think we’re quite ready to entrust this sort of thing to automated services yet.
• I Love Shelling: Pleasingly this isn’t a celebration of aerial mortar bombardment; instead, it’s a site all about how much its creator loves shells. Particular fan of her ‘Shell of the Year’ roundup posts, though 2018 seems to be missing (this is not ironic appreciation – shells are ace, and I will fight you if you say otherwise).
• The Cock Camera: You might read the title of this link and think “Ooh, Matt, how interesting! A GoPro for fowl! What an opportunity to get a cock’s eye view of the hencoop and to observe avian behaviour without the interference of human observation!”. You might think that, but then I would have to take you to one side and tell you that in fact it’s the other meaning of the word ‘cock’. Sorry about that. Yes, there is now a camera designed specifically to be attached to the penile shaft so as to allow for the sort of ultra-close-up filming that, honestly, I can’t even BEGIN to imagine anyone finding attractive; I mean, seriously, at that sort of zoom isn’t sex just like watching various cuts of offal sliding wetly across each other whilst wearing someone else’s glasses? Still, if this is your bag then I won’t judge you (I might). So much to love here – the fact that (of course!) it’s internet enabled; the fact that there’s an infra-red setting (WHY????); the INCREDIBLE promo video (honestly, please do watch it, it’s practically SFW) – honestly, this is a treat.
• The Amazon Workers’ Race Game: Finally this week, as Australian media got round to doing the ‘hey, working conditions in Amazon warehouses really blow, don’t they?’ story, ABC made this game to accompany their report; it takes you through the daily routine of a worker in a fulfilment centre, complete with motivational morning star jumps and the terrifying fear that you’re not fulfilling quickly enough. This achieves the excellent balance of being sort-of fun and at the same time making you feel slightly guilty about the fact it’s sort of fun – really well-made, and effective in communicating the slightly breathless permahorror of warehouse-based contract working.

By Kevin Peterson By Kevin Peterson

FINALLY THIS WEEK LET’S END THE MIXES WITH 50 MINUTES OF HAPPY HARDCORE – IT’S AWFUL, TRUE, BUT YOU WILL ENJOY IT MORE THAN YOU THINK, PLUS IT WILL CONFUSE ALL THE CHILDREN IN YOUR OFFICE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (WHICH THIS WEEK CONTAINS ONLY ONE THING AND EVEN THAT ISN’T ACTUALLY A TUMBLR!):

• Oscars & I: The owner of this blog, which isn’t a Tumblr but ought to be as far as I’m concerned, is going through every single Best Picture nominee ever. They are up to 1962 (Laurence of Arabia), and it’s interesting to read reviews or appreciations of these films through modern eyes, being appraised by someone who in the main has never seen them before.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Strange Planet: Life on earth as seen through alien eyes, in this breakout 4-panel Instacomic by Nathan Pyle. Funny, although if I’m being hypercritical it feels a BIT like the sort of thing that might have been designed be a supercomputer tasked with designing a comic specifically to appeal to millennial Instagram.
• Juan Delican: Truly amazing CG animations featuring little matchstick people. Literally, matchstick people. These are WONDERFUL
• Plants at the Window: THE TRIFFIDS WANT OUT.
• Gaku Carving: I am so cack-handed that the mere act of carving small, 1970s-style rose patterns into radishes renders me speechless with awe. This is mental.
• Daily Overview: Aerial shots of planet earth.
• The AIDS Memorial: Towards the end of last year I read ‘The Great Believers‘, a novel about the AIDS epidemic and how it affected Chicago specifically in the 80s – I recommend it unreservedly, it’s a beautiful book – and this Insta feed, remembering some of the people who were taken during the disease’s peak. Heartbreaking.
• Oli Krolik: Olga Kamenetskaya modifies dolls – she REALLY modifies dolls. Some of these look like a cross between Barbie and some of Schiele’s more skaggy adventures; VERY unsettling.
• Himaalaya Studio: A clothing brand’s Insta feed, featuring loads of promo photography taken in the Himalayas. Just a rather cool and different aesthetic to that I normally see in fashion photography – thanks to Curios’ Man in China Alex Wilson for the tip.
• Raf Grassetti: Grassetti is a designer who works in videogames, and who did a lot of character design for last year’s God of War reboot; his Insta feed presents sketches, works in progress, models and other gubbins from his work, and it’s GLORIOUS – obviously helps if you know and like videogames, but this is generally hugely impressive.
• Chiuso Di Domenica: Shuttered Italian shops – as the name suggests, this only posts on Sundays.
• Ghazaraza: Yoni-ish art, with an excellent Indian-inspired style to the work.
• This Much I Know: This, apparently, is THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM! Or at least it is according to the VC people at Guardian Media Group, who have decided to throw money at this EXCITING NEW MEDIA VENTURE,which seems to consist solely of poorly-constructed Insta stories done in the same sort of manner as you saw news orgs on Snap doing 3 years ago. Who is this for? What value is it adding? Where is the market for it? WHAT IS THE BUSINESS MODEL?? All questions you can seemingly swerve if you’re David Cameron’s sister-in-law, whose venture this is. Christ.
• Haiku for Millennials: Closing out this week’s bumper crop of troughs, this is a project by Biz Govindji – Instapomes crossed with millennial angst and ennui, like Rupi Kaur crossed with Bojack Horseman. These are great but also, Christ, this particular caricature is becoming a touch prisonlike, no?

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

• The Trauma Floor: First up this week, that report about how – whodathunkit? – working as a moderator in Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory is actually an AWFUL job that makes you mad and miserable in equal measure. The oppressive surveillance of employee productivity, the ceaseless procession of horrible images being dangled before your eyes, the knowledge that it’s ALL real and all being posted up by actual human being somewhere…it would, it’s fair to say, get you down. This piece in the Verge is well-reported and well-written and yet is very light on solutions – the problem isn’t just that the companies don’t want to risk profit by throwing money at this stuff, but also that, because of the limits of current technology, throwing more money at this means, basically, throwing more people at it. If we want massive, free networks but also want them to be policed, then we have to accept that there are actual people doing the policing, and that it is going to be HORRIBLE for them. As an aside, it’s worth reading Facebook’s slightly oblique non-response to this – WHO writes these and why are they so bad at them?
• Village Facebook: I thought this piece was a really good companion to the one above – it looks at the peculiar stress of being a local community FB Group moderator, and the very weird sort of behaviours that people indulge in within these networks. The point I wanted to make by juxtaposing these two is that there is a level of interpersonal connectivity above which people will start acting strangely and communities with start to warp; no idea WHAT that size is, but you can see it happening in the village Groups gere presented; now multiply that across THE WHOLE WORLD. I know I keep saying this, but I will keep banging this drum – WE ARE THE PROBLEM AND WE WERE NOT MEANT TO BE NETWORKED LIKE THIS.
• RIP The Culture War Thread: The final piece on the oddities of community and moderation this week, this is an excellent and interesting essay by the person who for years has been maintaining the Slate Star Codex blog, one of the most consistently interesting sites on the web for years now. He talks about his experiences attempting to moderate a long, meandering, very active thread about ‘The Culture Wars’ and what it has taught him about said wars and the very particular nature of comment and community online. The bits at the end were most interesting to me – the psychic toll that the work has taken on him is hugely evident in the final few bullets, and you leave the piece thinking that, well, it probably wasn’t really worth it.
• AI Future Crime: On the offchance that any of you are novelists or planning to become one, and that you’re in the market for some writing prompt ideas for the sort of things that could go wrong with AI in the future, then WOW is this for you. A paper by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Turing Centre, “this article offers the first systematic, interdisciplinary literature analysis of the foreseeable threats of AIC, providing ethicists, policy-makers, and law enforcement organisations with a synthesis of the current problems, and a possible solution space.” Dense and scholarly, fine, but it’s worth reading for the chilling section about AI and torture which ought to lead you very quickly to the conclusion that we must never, ever allow AI systems the opportunity to interrogate prisoners.
• Ditching The Phone: I know, I know, articles describing the author’s performative abandomnent of technology and how GREAT it made them feel are a) old hat; and b) largely INCREDIBLY smug and annoying. Given this one’s in the NYT it falls pretty hard against the smug/annoying hurdle, but overall it’s actually quite interesting as an overall examination of what it is that we lose through the constant interaction with information delivered by screen. I realised the other day that one of the few times I’m not directly consuming information during the day is when I walk (I don’t have headphones) – the rest of the time I am always ingesting stuff, which is terrifying and feels like it ought to be unhealthy. Is it? Who knows, I’m an ADDICT AND CANNOT STOP.
• Mr Wolfram’s Personal Infrastructure: Steven Wolfram is an idiosyncratic genius, no question – he’s invented programming languages and a search engine that despite being a decade or so old I still have no idea how to use, and I’ve featured his writing on here before – for such a brilliant mind he’s got a really engaging writing style, which is again in evidence in this (LONG) piece all about his personal daily productivity hacks and routines. If you ever worry that you’re perhaps a bit obsessional about productivity min/maxing and the like, this will make you feel LOADS better.
• How Microsoft, Google et al Support Big Oil: Not surprising in the slightest – after all, business is business and why wouldn’t these companies sell their services to others in the energy and industrials sector – but a useful reminder of the fact that, despite the nice talk about renewables and sustainability, the dirty old world of fossil fuels and mining and BIG MACHINES is still very much where the money is, and Don’t Be Evil stopped being a thing quite a long time ago now.
• Why Bohemian Rhapsody’s Win Was Bullsh1t: I have no particular interest in or care for the Oscars and who won, but this VERY ANGRY piece on Pitchfork does a good job of skewering Bohemian Rhapsody and explaining why it wasn’t a good or even fair choice for Best Picture. I was fascinated to learn exactly how nakedly commercial Queen had been – proper KISS-levels of monetisation – and the extent of the corporate tie-ins in BoRap (for that is what it is now called) and how that effectively acted as additional promo budget for the film above and beyond what other contenders had. Hollywood is SNEAKY and Queen, the remaining ones at least, are Tories.
• The 50 Best Movie Soundtracks Ever: Either something to argue about or something to remind you to listen to Trainspotting again (it’s a GREAT soundtrack, I don’t care that it’s a cliche).
• Russian Doll, Bandersnatch and Games: In a departure from habit I actually happened to watch an EXCITING NEW AND MUCH-HYPED SHOW! Russian Doll was…fine, clever and beautifully-shot and it treated the audience with a reasonable degree of respect, and I hope they NEVER make any more as there’s no way in which they could extend the premise without ruining an otherwise tightly-packaged and self-contained narrative. This piece looks at what it takes from videogames (LOTS) and how it does a better and more interesting job of replicating the game experience than Bandersnatch did. Intellectually interesting about the ‘gameyness’ of games, and how that can be captured and communicated by television.
• Fortnite and Mental Health: Another good piece about how Fortnite is less about the game and more about the community – I wonder whether we’ll look back at Fortnite as the very first babysteps of mass-adoption of avatar-led digitised social interaction (we won’t if you keep writing about it like that – Jesus, that’s an abortion of a phrase and I am sorry). Anyway, this is about how young men in particular are finding space in-game to talk about their feelings in a manner in which they might not be able to face to face, and how the digital environment provides mental breathing room. You could, of course, if you wanted, read this as a depressing indictment of the modern world that people need to take refuge in imaginary spaces to make the headvoices stop, but, well, let’s not dwell on that.
• The Rise of the 4-Panel Webcomic: Featuring one of the ones from this week’s Instas, I enjoyed this investigation into the rise of the 4-panel comic and what that tells us about the impact Instagram is having on all sorts of slightly unexpected areas of life. I think we’re massively underestimating the way that the ‘square’ and ‘rectangle’ as a unit of information consumption/transmission are changing how we communicate and what with, which is without a doubt THE pseudiest thing I am going to type this week, so you can now read on in the knowledge that it’s unlikely to get any worse.
• Star Wars in Real Life: As I say whenever I am forced to write about it, I do not care about Star Wars at all and therefore I am presenting this because it is FASCINATING and not because I dream of one day visiting the ice planet of Hoth (you don’t need to like the films to know stuff like this – if you’re in your 30s it’s literally in you, like a slight fear of strangers in vans and the faint pain memory of the feeling of a ridged plastic football hitting your cold, exposed inner thigh at speed on a freezing Tuesday). This is a preview of a new Star Wars attraction set to open up at one of Disney’s US parks later this year – the detail they go into in terms of the development process here is insane, and I found myself genuinely interested in the stuff about how VR and 3d modelling and AR were all used to effectively create a parallel digital version of the park on which all construction and changes were modelled first. The rest of you, though, will probably be more excited by the ride descriptions which sound honestly BRILLIANT.
• Dollars on the Margins: An excellent essay on the myriad benefits of the minimum wage, and how small incremental increases in base-level pay can make significant differences to the overall quality of life of those affected and, as a result, have significant positive knock-on effects in other areas, from social services to healthcare. How someone can read this and still think “Nah, it’s a terrible idea” is honestly beyond me. Nothing in this that you won’t be familiar with if you’ve ever read ‘Nickel and Dimed’ or similar, but if you want a decent suite of arguments to take to your employer when you tell them why they ought to pay the living wage rather than the minimum wage (and you ought to tell them) then this might be helpful.
• The Shrink Who Believed People Could Predict The Future: I don’t want to tell you too much about this – here’s the sub-heading: “After a national disaster, a British doctor began collecting foreboding visions. Soon, they closed in on him.” Good, eh? Now have this detail: “In the hospital, Barker was best known for his work on aversion therapy, a technique that involved the use of electric shocks and nausea-inducing drugs to treat addictions and other behaviors. He had a slot machine installed outside his office which gave a seventy-volt shock when the lever was pulled.” That gives you a reasonable idea of the sort of English eccentricity that this piece channels – this feels very much like the sort of thing that were it filmed would give someone a decent shot at a Best Supporting Actor gong, if you know what I mean.
• The Universal Language of Football: Sam Diss gets sent to Brazil to cover a 5-a-side tournament sponsored by a world-famous brand of energy drink, and writes quite beautifully about the melting pot of internationally minor-level superstars and footballing geniuses he met out there. Diss is a really good writer – casual but still technically excellent, and capable of the occasional beautiful turn of phrase, and this is a wonderful read.
• Ong’s Hat: On a day where internet conspiracies are all over the news, this harks back to a simpler, gentler time, when someone could create a massive, weird conspiracy rabbithole about phsyics and psychedelia and the paranormal, and it would just be a bit of harmless fun…sort of. Turns out, even back in the day before the internet was such a massive thing people STILL got a bit overexcited by this sort of stuff; still, it’s great to read about and is very reminiscent of (and in fact tangentially linked to) that time traveler hoax piece I linked to a couple of years ago and which, obviously, noone other than me is going to remember honestly I don’t know why I bother sometimes really I don’t.
• There Are No Winners in the Culture War: Subject to a great online hoo-ha on publication due to its accompanying illustration (since removed), it’s unfortunate that what was a (typically) great piece by Clive Martin got somewhat overshadowed. Whilst I think he’s perhaps a bit glib about elements of this, the overall description – of serried ranks of combatants across on line battlefields wearing cobbled-together cultural uniforms they don’t really know how they acquired – is a good one. I happened to see Lionel Shriver on Question Time last night and whilst she’s obviously been a dick for a while now it was staggering the extent to which she has literally just become an avatar for a specific sort of thought rather than being a ‘thinker’ herself in any real sense (the same can be said about many on the left too, fwiw).
• Do Things Matter: No, they don’t. If I were to get a tattoo – unlikely – it would say “It Doesn’t Matter” and it would be on the inside of my wrist and it would be a permanent reminder that anything that happens is almost certainly of little or no significance in the grand scheme of things and, anyway, we’re all going to die. You might think it’s nihilistic, I find it largely comforting. Anyway, this is a great little essay about how nothing really matters, really, and how that’s totally fine and you should just relax about it, ok? Good.
• The Language of What Happened To Us: Looking back at decades of being a woman and how one comes to terms with the memories of those years with the revised perspective of modernity, when you realise that you only now have words and vocabulary to talk about things you felt and experienced years ago. Beautifully written but very sad.
• How To Bury Your Dead Pet Monkey: Sandra Newman reminisces about her childhood friend Ted, who was always different. This is WONDERFUL – such a good portrait of difference in youth.
• Bandit: Last up in this week’s longreads, Molly Brodak’s story about her crook father and her memories of growing up with, and without, him. There’s something about stories that bridge the gap between the world viewed through child’s eyes and the retrospective revisiting of that view as an adult that I find hugely compelling, and this is a superb example of that – make a big cup of tea and enjoy.

By Maren Morstad

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdCrnBLchro)

1. This is by Radical Face and it’s called ‘Hard of Hearing’ and it’s a rather lovely and twee and gentle bit of slightly stripped down Flaming Lips-y indiepop:

2) Next, have the slightly terrifyingly NOW Suzie Wu with ‘Error 404’ – this is short of shonkily great and I am weirdly obsessed with it:

3) Now have THIS – by Paws, it’s called ‘Not Enough’ and it’s another jangly indiepop number which is fine by me, particularly given it’s slightly Death Cab-ish vibe:

4) This is Korean, and as a result I have no idea what they are singing about – hopefully it’s nothing awful, but even if it is it sounds SO NICE! I think these people normally do pop punk, so this is obviously them doing an end-of-album semi-acoustic closer; anyway, this is called ‘Let Me Lost’ and it’s by the fabulously-named ‘Drinking Boys and Girls Choir’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is JPEGMAFIA x HEALTH with ‘HATE YOU’:

6) IRISH HIPHOP CORNER! I had no idea Limerick was a hotbed of rap talent, but this is ACE – skip a minute in to get past the skit rubbish, but from that point this is ace. Not really sure what it’s called, but it’s the 4th part of something described on YouTube as ‘Citrus, Strange Boy, Hazey – Hindsight’ so, er, there you go!:

7) Finally this week, Modeselector feat. Tommy Cash. This is possibly a TOUCH intense but I like it very much – turn it up LOUD and watch the video and try not to look away and, above all, TAKE CARE HAVE FUN I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE HAPPY FRIDAY HAPPY WEEKEND IT WILL ALL BE OK AND IF IT WON’T BE OK THEN IT WILL AT LEAST SOON BE OVER OH HANG ON THAT WASN’T QUITE AS UPBEAT AS I’D INTENDED DAMMIT OH WELL NEVERMIND I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

A NEW PARTY! JUST WHAT WE ALL WANTED! Except it’s not the good sort of party, the type with party rings and sausage rolls and a secret stash of uppers that you find at 3am in the host’s sock drawer and which you know will add a whole new spin to the gathering – no, sadly it’s the other sort of party, all halitosis and misery and hastily-cobbled-together alliances of convenience. Not wishing to dwell on this, but do you think that maybe using a point just over a month from THE BAD THING to launch a new political vehicle might be construed, maybe, just a touch, as frantically wanking at yourself in the mirror whilst Rome merrily blazes around you?

Anyway, a plague on EVERYONE’s house, dear reader, except yours and possibly mine. It’s Friday, I once again have totally failed to ensure I have the afternoon off after this and as such I ought to CRACK ON. You, though, sit back! Relax! Feel my nimble wordfingers massaging pure OIL OF WEBSPAFF into your every mental crevice! Enjoy their lubricious tracing over your cerebellum! LET ME IN TO YOUR HEADS! This, as ever, is Web Curios, and I, as ever, am sorry.

By Pol Kuruscz

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A RATHER WONDERFUL PLAYLIST OF JAPANESE AMBIENT MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS THAT, REALLY, UNLESS YOU HAVE A VERY STRONG PROFESSIONAL REASON FOR READING STUFF ABOUT LARGELY INSIGNIFICANT TECHNICAL CHANGES TO S*C**L M*D** PLATFORMS, YOU SKIP THIS BIT IN FAVOUR OF THE NEXT SECTIONS WHICH HAVE GOOD LINKS IN THEM AND WHICH IN THE MAIN DON’T INVOLVE THE SOULLESS, HORRID DISCIPLINE THAT IS ADVERMARKETINGPR:

• Twitter Expands Political Ad Transparency Stuff: This is Twitter’s Political Campaigning Policy (you remember that! How could you? It was such a special time in our lives!), which stipulates that ads deemed ‘political’ be ‘transparent’, with details about who’s paying for them and who they are targeting – and now it’s being extended to all EU states, Australia and India! What a time to be alive!
• Twitter Opens Beta Testing Of New Conversation Tools: I mean, literally just that – you may recall that there have been rumblings in the past few weeks about Twitter introducing new features to improve users’ ability to follow conversations and better-determine which participants have interjected where; well, now those are in Beta and YOU can apply to participate in the test! That’s right! You can help a massive corporation improve its product set FOR FREE! You lucky, lucky kids! Anyway, this stuff is all almost certainly being added to the feature set reasonably soon, so worth taking a look to know exactly what minor alterations are going to be made instead of banning Nazis.
• YouTube Tweaks ‘Strikes’ System For Creators: Bad week, this, for YouTube, which found itself being blamed not only for flat-earthers and other lunatic conspiracy theorists, but also for a not-insignificant amount of in-comments paedoing. Anyway, this isn’t about that – this is about how its system of issuing warnings and first-strike censure against channel owners is changing slightly. Unless you’re some sort of sub-Pewds edgelord vlogger, this is unlikely to be of any interest or import to you at all, but why not read it anyway seeing as I’ve bothered to write it up for you. What? WHAT? Oh fine, you ingrates. Jesus.
• Reddit Ads Better Ad Performance Tools: You can now do app install ads on Reddit! That’s right! Oh, and the Reddit Pixel now offers improved conversion tracking! Look! “Reddit’s pixel can track eight conversion events, breaks out view-through and click-through conversions and allows for attribution windows of 1, 7 or 28 days.” Sometimes, you know, I write this stuff and feel a little bit as though I’m working for some sort of niche interest specialist publication, like Steam Enthusiast or Swarfega Monthly. Then, though, I remember that the circulation of Curios is even smaller than that. This is less-popular than a magazine devoted to the creation and maintenance of miniature railway dioramas – WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT YOU, GENTLE READER? No, hang on, don’t leave.
• TikTok Is Testing Native Ads: Not actually ‘news’ per se, but I’m telling you so that you can drop this futurenugget into the next meeting you have about flogging things to children and thereby look like some sort of seer (to be specific, a dreadful Cassandra-type whose visions of tomorrow consist solely of dead-eyed BRANDED MOMENTS OF TRUTH (I don’t know why, but every now and again I am reminded of the fact that there exists in London an agency – owned by Chime, who you will obviously remember also owned cuddly coup-enablers Bell Pottinger – whose name (honestly I am not making this up) is in fact Branded Moments of Truth. That’s right – that is an ACTUAL COMPANY NAME. They have in recent years attempted to hide their (vile, pestilential) namelight under an abbreviationbushel, renaming themselves BMT, but Curios never forgets.))
• Smart Speakers and Hype: Rob Blackie writing for The Drum about all the reasons why Alexa and the like might be the victims of a LITTLE bit too much hype; Rob’s contention is that, whilst the sales numbers are obviously massive the actual use-cases for the devices are in fact very narrow, and there’s no evidence at all to suggest that anyone’s using the damn things as anything other than radios and kitchen timers (aside from children, who to the best of my knowledge are using them as incredibly sophisticated Guantanamo-style psychological torture devices against their parents). Maybe hold off on spunking all that budget on an Alexa Skill, eh?
• Urban Scrawl: Incredibly slim pickings in advermarketingprland this week, so I’ll close out with this – it’s not hugely exciting, but it’s a cute piece of ‘content’ (sorry) which nails the ‘this will do the rounds of all the slightly whimsical linkdumpy blogs’ tone perfectly. The company behind it – Traveloka, no idea who the fcuk they are but I’d guess, er, travel – asked a bunch of people to sketch the one thing that most reminded them of each of 10 different cities, now presented on this site. Special shout out to whoever it was who drew a Goatse as the Underground roundel.

By Jamie Diamond

NEXT, DID YOU KNOW THAT MICHAEL CAINE, THE ACTOR, ONCE RELEASED A COMPILATION ALBUM OF HIS FAVOURITE CHILLOUT MUSIC? WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR IT? IT’S ACTUALLY VERY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO STATE VERY CLEARLY THAT, WHILST IT HONESTLY COULDN’T GIVE TOO MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT YOUR POLITICAL ORIENTATION (NO NAZIS, THOUGH, OBVS), IF ANY OF YOU WOULD SERIOUSLY CONSIDER REFERRING TO YOURSELVES AS ‘TIGGERS’ YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY FCUK OFF, PT.1:

• Mash: This is a really fun idea, at least in theory, adding a degree of creativity and play to the seemingly unstoppable narcissism-fest that are Stories. Mash is an app which takes the standard Stories format – discrete content blocks of image, text or video, strung together as a number of ‘cuts’ or scenes (yes, I know full well that you know exactly what they are and didn’t need the explanation, but Curios is a broad church and I have to expect that your mum might stumble in one day and need a few primers) – and turns it into a fun little toy. Users make a ‘Story’, filling in however many of the content blocks they want, and then share it with others, asking them to fill in the gaps however they choose. Whether or not this particular app ever takes off – and chances are it won’t – the premise is really quite clever and can totally be ripped off to a certain extent. If you’re looking for an ORIGINAL BRAND CAMPAIGN EXECUTION that in fact isn’t original at all, then, well, this could be PERFECT!
• Google Earth Black History: For Black History Month in the US, Google has created this simple interactive tour of the US, experienced via Google Maps, taking you on a trip across the country over the years and introducing people and places of particular significance to the history of black Americans. It’s not the most technically groundbreaking thing you’ll see this week, but it’s well-made and contains an absolute wealth of information about black American history and achievement.
• Prince GIFs: Prince’s estate have put the OFFICIAL selection of gifs of the late artist on Giphy. You want a HUGE selection of gifs featuring Prince being Prince? GREAT! The man was so preposterously sexy and charismatic that you can basically get pregnant just by looking at some of these, and that’s regardless of whether you’ve got any ovaries or not.
• This Airbnb Does Not Exist: Following on from last week’s ‘none of these are in fact real people’ GAN-generated digifacefakery, the internet this week has coughed up a bunch of analogues – this, the first of the bunch, is a site which will present you with a computer-generated Airbnb listing each time you refresh. All the images are processor-imagined, based on a GAN trained on existing listings images, and the copy’s derived from stuff stripped from the site; the words are a mess, fine, but the images have a really quite interesting creepiness to them; turns out that it’s harder to identify exactly why these photos of living spaces look wrong, but that they definitely do and that that makes them really unsettling in ways that I for one can’t adequately explain.
• This Cat Does Not Exist: As above, but this time with computer-generated MAOWs. An infinite number of SPECIAL LITTLE GUYS here for your viewing pleasure, although bear in mind that this will occasionally throw up a feline so wonky that it will give you nightmares.
• Which Face Is Real?: So what with all the fakery we’re confronted with, do YOU think you can tell the GANfaces from the goodfaces, the real from the rendered? Test yourself with this site, offering up two faces at a time and asking YOU, gentle human, to decide which is that of a real homo sapiens and which is a FILTHY COMPUTER-GENERATED IMPOSTER! This is momentarily diverting but in the main most interesting for the reassuring fact that you very quickly realise how, well, off the vast majority of the GAN-made stuff looks; whilst there’s a fleeting plausibility at first glance, any more serious scrutiny reveals all sorts of janky details around the edges; the software’s not capable of rendering backgrounds very well, and the hair almost always looks janky around the edges. Of course, while I sit here all smug about the fact that I am still just about capable of distinguishing real from fake, it’s worth remembering, again, that this sort of stuff is only about a year old and at this rate we are all going to be watching entirely GAN-generated bongo by Christmas.
• Some More Amazing GAN Stuff: See, this is why. This is the Github repository for code that uses ML to let you do some pretty incredible photo editing on human faces, in realtime, with very simple MS Paint-style tools; scroll down to see some gifs of it in action, but basically imagine that you can take a picture of someone with sunglasses on, ‘erase’ the sunglasses by scribbling over them with an ‘eraser’ tool, and watch as the sunglasses are magically removed from the photo and instead replaced with reasonably realistic eyes of appropriate colour, shape and placement. I know I keep saying this, but we really are VERY close to a situation where you can digitally manipulate anyone you like into doing anything you want them to, which doesn’t sound…great.
• Thread: I’m sure I’ve featured something very similar to this before, but this is NEW (and UK-based, part of our economy’s EXCITING RESURGENCE now that we are set to be unshackled from the albatross-like Europeans oh god it’s only a month away what the fcuk is happening). Threads is a service which offers the UK’s men and women the opportunity to get AI (not in fact AI)-powered assistance with their wardrobe – you answer some simple questions about yourself, select some looks you like from their proffered preselects and away you go. It matches you with a ‘stylist’ (or, more accurately, a particular algorithm which fits most closely with your choices) which will pick out items of clothing which vaguely work within the parameters you’ve defined, presented as part of ‘outfits’ which in theory means that even the most Helen Keller-ish of dressers (ie me) can look like Edward Enninful. I’ve not spent enough time with it yet to tell whether it’s any good – and, honestly, its recommendations so far look fine but also pretty generic highstreet menswear – but I really hope this can make me into the grownup I probably ought to dress as as I hurtle towards 40.
• St Beryl’s: If you ever read Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman then this, the OFFICIAL WEBSITE of the Chattering Order of St Beryl’s, will please you immeasurably. If not, then, er, not quite sure what you’ll get out of this, sorry.
• Rembo: This sounds VERY much like the sort of insult that children in the playgrounds of the 1980s might have hurled at each other across the pitter tarmacadam with their tongues lodged firmly into their bottom lips. It’s not, though – it’s actually FAR more irritating, being as it is an app which lets you put a list of chores in and which will then ACTIVELY NAG YOU til you’ve done them. Listen to this, it sounds ghastly: “With just a simple chat message you can stay organized and set alarms, reminders, medicine and even exercise notifications. Rembo is an AI digital assistant that is a To-do reminder with alarm and notification that will personally call you at the designated time so that you too can become a task ninja and never forget a thing. He is also very funny and is always up for sharing jokes and motivational quotes.” GOSH DOESN’T REMBO SOUND LIKE A FUN, HELPFUL GUY? No. No he doesn’t. He sounds like a wanker that you will grow to despise within a week.
• Medal: A gameclipping tool for PC – press your selected hotkey and the software exports a clip of the last 15s of gameplay. Look, I have no idea how many of you are avid PC gamers but based on the balance of probabilities there are probably about three of you who will find this useful and, well, I like to think that Curios contains something for everyone (except, of course, you).
• pray for Peach, while we’re here – and whilst this isn’t really a fully-fledged new attempt at a network it’s still a fun-looking timesink (thanks to Ben for the heads-up); Screenhole is basically a place where people can share screengrabs, nothing else, with the idea being that you experience a weird sort of disjointed visual stream of oddities. It’s invite-only at the moment, so no guarantee you’ll get in, but it’s an interesting idea to play around with and at the moment at least appears to be blissfully free from any horror or bongo or Nazis.
• Url Render: Look, here’s their description: “Url render allows you to browse on websites without opening new tabs. You can now search with google engine and navigate through sites without opening hundreds of tabs. As usual search something on google.com, “Paris”. The google search engine shows you 10 or more links. If something looks intersting you’ll click on it and the website opens in new tab. Now, with url render, just mouseover the link, a frame is opening and show you the real website without opening new tab. You can browse on the website.” I think this is French, hence the charmingly idiosyncratic written style here – as an idea it is GREAT and would work perfectly for Curios imho.
• Visualist: Of this is SUCH a clever idea; Visualist is an app specifically designed for creating visual instructions for devices or processes; it takes you through a simple series of processes to create a step-by-step instructional guide to, well, anything really. It’s an obvious idea, but now that I think of it I’ve never seen anything that makes the process of doing this simple or intuitive – honestly, ANY brand that has any vague tangential connection to, er, DOING THINGS ought to check this out and take liberal inspiration from it; as to the rest of you, this will honestly be a godsend should you have parents who regularly call you up to ask you questions about resetting the router.
• Endless Jeopardy: This is SUCH a great idea – you know Jeopardy, right? That US quiz in which the host hands you the answer and you, the contestant, have to formulate the correct question in the endlessly irritating formula ‘What is….X?’? Of course you do! This is a Twitter bot which plays the game through procedurally-generated clues; every hour it spits out a new one, with anyone invited to reply with their best guess or funniest offering, and the one with the most ‘Likes’ at the end of the 15m cycle wins points. There’s no actual money involved – obviously – but this is SUPER fun and weirdly addictive and will, once again, show you that there are lots of very funny people on the web and that you aren’t one of them.
• The American Archive of Public Broadcasting: WOW there’s a lot of public telly (and radio) in here. A touch overwhelming at first glance, but if you scroll down a bit you can see a list of categories through which you can browse the shows by theme; the ‘humour’ category alone has over 8,000 pieces of content associated with it, so if you have a weird and specific fetish for 20thC US public television (and radio) then, well, aren’t YOU in for a treat! If nothing else, there is an absolute sampler’s GOLDMINE here for you to explore if you’re into audiocollage-type stuff.
• ILLEGAL LEGO: Did you know that when OFFICIAL LEGO displays are set up there are certain configurations of bricks that are absolutely verboten and that will NOT be sanctioned by LEGO HQ? Well, you do now – this is the offical (no idea if it’s actually official, but wevs) PDF guide to what is proscribed in LEGOland; it’s obviously ridiculous, but in no way surprising from a brand which gets really pissy if you pluralise it. I suggest you spend the weekend policing all your kids’ LEGO builds based on these guidelines so as to educate them on how real fun can only happen within strictly-defined and enforced parameters.
• Dance Your Phd: One of the year’s highlights rolls around again, in which the world’s academic doctors compete to see which of them is best capable of rendering their original research as a piece of performative dance. The winning one here – an interpretation of “Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance” – is SO good and properly heartwarming; although I just had a sudden realisation that these people are not only brilliant minds, they’re also actually pretty good cinematographers and choreographers, which just seems incredibly fcuking unfair frankly.
• Vintage CGI: This subReddit does exactly what it says it does, presenting old clips of CGI work from games, TV and films of yesteryear (and elsewhere besides). As a place to glory in the blocky aesthetics of old school computing this is pretty much unparalleled.
• The Original Browser: MEMORY LANE! “In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as “the web” today. In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.” This is obviously shonky as you like, but it’s worth playing with just to see what an austere experience the web used to be – amuse yourself by showing it to your teenage kids and giving them another reason to believe that the past was a terrible monochrome prison of tedium.

By Peter Lindbergh

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY THIS VERY OLD SCHOOL SOUL MIX?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO STATE VERY CLEARLY THAT, WHILST IT HONESTLY COULDN’T GIVE TOO MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT YOUR POLITICAL ORIENTATION (NO NAZIS, THOUGH, OBVS), IF ANY OF YOU WOULD SERIOUSLY CONSIDER REFERRING TO YOURSELVES AS ‘TIGGERS’ YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY FCUK OFF, PT.2:

• Letters In The Mail: It’s lovely receiving letters, isn’t it? I mean actual letters from actual people rather than the computer-generated missives telling you that you will owe the bank everything forever, obviously, though they are rarer than hen’s teeth in this electronic age. Do you think you would still find it lovely to receive them when you know you’ve paid a tenner for the privilege? I’m not so sure. Still, if you want to pay $11 for the experience of receiving three hand-written letters through the post (no idea if this delivers to the UK, on reflection, but if it does it will probably be more than that), topics unknown and unspecified, then, well, go for it! This makes me quite incredibly sad, I have to say, but maybe it will be a beautiful and lovely thing. Go on, try it and let me know.
• Stories Set in a Future Now Past: Literally just that; HUNDREDS of stories, told in writing and film, which were at the time of their writing set in the future and which future has now become the past – this lists not only the titles and when they were set, but also some of the predictions they’d made about what this imagined future was going to look like. Big fan of this Twilight Zone plot synopsis set in the year 2000 which basically feels a bit like Instagram in 2019: “Set in a world in which people can purchase their adult bodies, but everyone goes for a small number of popular options.”
• The Satan Tapes: I follow this person on Twitter but know nothing about who they are or what they do. This week they Tweeted a VERY long thread featuring the covers of a host of old VHS movies with ‘Satan’ in the title – this is that thread. My personal favourite is ‘Sin-agogue of Satan’, but pick your own!
• The Peter Hook Auction: A truly HUGE collection of Peter Hook’s memorabilia is being auctioned off for charity next month; this is the catalogue. They’re taking online bids, so if you want to be the proud owner of, I don’t know, an unfeasibly-long guitar strap then this will be RIGHT up your street.
• The Frontiers of Design: Design people! This is for YOU! Frontiers of Design is a short film featuring 20 design luminaries from around the world talking about their practice – “As part of the 20th anniversary of the design firm Doberman, The Frontiers of Design is a short film interviewing 20 influential organizations and designers about what’s next for Design. Together they form a diverse patchwork of perspectives across industries, disciplines and markets. This is not a quest for The Answer. Because there is no holy grail. On the contrary, this is the beginning of a journey to uncover clues and spark an industry-wide dialogue about the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities at the Frontiers of Design.” On the one hand this sounds almost unbearably wanky; on the other, if you’re a designer this is probably really interesting and worth the 40m of your time that it will take to watch.
• Sphero RVR: 3x backed with nearly a month to go, this is doing great numbers on Kickstarter; Sphero is a rugged-looking all-terrain remote control buggy thing, which can be programmed and customised and which basically looks like what your childhood 1980s self imagined Big-Track to be (this is why not getting these things for Christmas was a blessing, is what I tell myself). It’s compatible with Raspberry Pi and Arduinos and all those gubbins, and basically looks like EXACTLY the sort of thing that a certain type of dad will buy for their kid in the knowledge that their kid will not give one solitary fcuk about it and that it will become theirs after approximately three days of desultory play.
• TikTok Divorce Vids: As previously mentioned on here, TikTok is a bit of a mystery to me – I know what it is, obviously, and how it works, but I can’t spend any time on there as, well, it just feels weird and wrong looking at all these videos of children, basically. Still, thankfully other collectors of oddities are doing their bit and surfacing wonderful cultural gems such as THIS trend, for breakup videos in which one party soulfully tosses their wedding/engagement/promise/friendship ring at their phones camera in a rueful ‘it’s over!’-type gesture. Honestly, there are about a dozen collected in this Twitter thread and they are ALL golden; expect to see this on Facebook next Summer.
• YourNote: A note-taking app which promises not to store any of your stuff anywhere, should you care about that sort of thing.
• Litho: This is interesting, though I’m not sure quite how useful / necessary it is. Litho is a wearable gestural interface for your phone or tablet; you clip it to your fingers and it allows for gestural controls in 3d, letting you wave and gesture and generally act like some sort of weird ‘Tom Cruise in Minority Report’ future infogod, mastering all the windows and the software with nothing but your fingers. Almost certainly a gimmick that doesn’t work quite as well as it needs to, but quite a cool-looking gimmick so, you know, there’s that.
• Metronaut: One for the musicians amongst you, this is a really interesting idea. Metronaut is an app which offers a full orchestral accompaniment to the solo player, the idea being that you tootle away on your violin or piano or whatever, and the app fills in the gaps where the rest of the ensemble would be, providing you with the full sound of a 30-piece philharmonic or similar. It sounds VERY clever, and purports to do all sorts of automatic things like adjusting its tempo to match you – I can’t play anything at all and so this is utterly wasted on me, but any of you with some actual musical ability might find it a fun thing to play around with.
• Mixed: Does anyone actually ever use collaborative creative online tools? Honestly, I have no idea. Still, if you DO do remote working and if you DO use collaborative creative online tools then, er, here’s another one! Mixer is basically a multi-user moodboard creator, with an additional layer of voice chat so you can all shout at each other for putting the picture of the cat in the wrong place (that’s how collaborative creative working functions, right?).
• The Moon in 81 Megapixels: This combines 50,000 individual images into one and is VERY detailed and, if you’re anything like me, will make you feel VERY smol indeed.
• Photopea: This is basically A N Other online version of Photoshop (NO I WILL NOT PUT THE ™ THERE ADOBE YOU HUMOURLESS FCUKS WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?) which, if you want to do photo editing but don’t want to pay the inflated market rates for the software and don’t want a cracked copy and don’t fancy dealing with the free-but-horrible-to-use-and-ridiculously-named GIMP, might be useful.
• The Beijing Silver Mine: “Since 2009, the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin has embarked on an unusual adventure: salvaging discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing that were destined to destruction. Undertaking one of the largest and most important archival projects in China, he buys by the kilo, taking away rice bags filled with thousands or rolls of slobbery, dusty and scratched negative film. Once closely examined, images are consistently selected, digitized, and classified. Today it encompasses over half a million of anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, reconstructing then a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in China.“ This is a remarkable archive of photography and a wonderful snapshot of late 20/early 21C Chinese life; there’s an Instagram account too, if you prefer to experience it that way.
• Astrobin: As far as I can tell this is basically Imgur but for photos of space, You want a repository of literally thousands of photos of stars, planets, moons, distant galaxies and the like? Of course you do!
• Mr Breakfast: This site is devoted to the MIRACLE OF BREAKFAST. I don’t know who Mr Breakfast is, but judging by this site he REALLY loves the first meal of the day. There is a LOT of very ugly breakfast-related content here, including 192 recipes for omelettes which seems like overkill to me, but there you go.
• Nomadic Tribe: I don’t really have the faintest idea of what this is – I think it’s some sort of new year ‘look how clever we are and what beautiful things we can make!’-type showoffy site from an agency but, honestly, it’s quite hard to tell. Still, it’s SO pretty and so nicely designed, and takes you through a slightly hippyish new age watercolour series of gently interactive vignettes, and I generally adore the art style here so WELL DONE whoever made it.
• Ancient Greek Punishment: UI Edition: Another in the series of ‘punishments from Greek mythology as small games’, this time themed around slightly arch UI jokes. More clever and funny than this slightly p1ss-poor description has made it sound, I promise.

By Christiane Lyons

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS HUGELY ECLECTIC NUMBER FROM REZA ATHAR!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Ad Teachings: A genuinely useful-seeming Tumblr about things in advertising, written by Suzanne Pope whos a Canadian advertising person and lecturer at the University of Toronto; really worth a read if you work in the industry, imho.
• Ryan Putnam: Quite possibly not in fact a Tumblr! Still, Ryan Putnam’s portfolio site where he also sells prints is really rather nice and his work is awesome and CHEAP, should you be in the market for some original prints for $15.
• outside the cinema then, well., ENJOY!
• Low Budget Milky Whites: Crap props from amateur theatrical productions. I think I featured this about 8 years ago back in the H+K days, but I rediscovered it this week and it made me laugh and all those blogs are LONG dead now which means there’s no evidence of my shameful link recycling and, well, there’s NOTHING you can do about it.
• Keanu Reeves Imagines: A Tumblr inviting you to imagine a variety of surreal scenarios featuring Mr Reeves.
• The Peter Tork Beard Appreciation Blog: RIP, Monkee.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Positively Present: An Insta feed which presents nicely illustrated little positive affirmations about LIFE and stuff – the sort of thing which personally makes my eyes bleed and makes me want to drink heavily and self-harm, but which some of you may like and for which, I promise, I do not judge you AT ALL.
• Mr Doodle: An artist who works almost exclusively in thick marker and who, judging by their Insta feed, very much…er…appreciated the work of Keith Haring.
• Bootscrapers of Dublin: THIS is the sort of niche use of Instagram that I am here for.
• Breeze Blockhead: Photographs of breeze blocks and assorted other concrete construction elements, for all you Brutalism fans out there.
• They Didn’t Die: Euphemisms for death taken from the obituary pages. If anyone ever describes me post-mortum as ‘passing through the universe’, know that whatever passes for my immortal soul is at that moment cursing them as hard as possible.
• Suru Denise: Beautiful and VERY vaporwave-y illustrations in the most millennial of colour palettes.
• Ofir Shoham: SUCH amazing animation, using neon lines overlaid onto video to quite wonderful effect; beautifully creative and about to be used in a MASSIVE ad campaign by someone (will it be you? WILL IT?).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Damien Collins vs Facebook: The very funniest thing about this week was Damien Collins’ BIG MOMENT being absolutely spiked by Chuka et al on Monday morning; SORRY DAMO! This Time profile of Collins and his very particular anti-Facebook crusade is interesting not least as it offers a pretty clear picture of a man who seems to be enjoying the personal profile this is granting him rather more than might be entirely decorous. Obviously I’m not suggesting that scrutiny of Facebook and others’ behaviour is anything other than A Good Thing – more that Collins seems to have decided that it’s far more important to paint himself as The One MP Prepared To Make A Stand rather than actually doing anything so tedious as sticking to the actual terms of the enquiry his Committee announced; to be clear, it was an enquiry into ‘fake news and misinformation’ online, not into ‘why everything is Facebook’s fault’. Lots of stuff is, don’t get me wrong, and it’s a largely hateful company which I wish didn’t exist, but to pretend that, well, all this stuff isn’t a little more complicated than ‘BAD FACEBOOK!’ strikes me as pretty reductive and not a little stupid – see this thread by Mat Morrison for more on this.
• Covington and the Media Landscape: We’ve all moved on and forgotten about the MAGA kids vs the Native American guy from a few weeks ago, but this is a really good essay from a few weeks back which examines what that whole sorry week-long period in the US media tells us about the way in which stories develop in 2019 and what we ought to do – as consumers and producers of media – to try and get better at dealing with the swirling horrorhurricane of modern news and the seemingly 27-hour-a-day infocycle.
• A Speech on Socialism: Andover is apparently a very posh school in the US – this is the text of a speech given there by Nathan J Robinson, editor of Current Affairs magazine, on why socialism is actually quite good. I was hugely impressed with this as a piece of rhetoric – it gently takes the audience through some serious thinking (Rawls et al) to set up with a socialist stance is fair and equitable and just, and why socialism doesn’t crumble in the face of shouts of “BUT VENEZUELA!” from the right. If you’ve got kids of 11/12+ this might be an interesting read for them (especially if you’re worried they might be going, well, a bit Tory).
• The OpenAI Text Generator: The OpenAI text generating thingy was announced last Friday as I was writing Curios and I couldn’t honestly be bothered to read up on it and include it in the last edition. Instead, you get it a week later with the CONSIDERED ANALYSIS that a week’s sober cogitation has afforded me time to develop (HA!). Basically my take on this is a) it is impressive but not THAT impressive; b) OpenAI are very good at PR – that ‘we are not releasing this FOR THE GOOD OF THE WORLD!’ is a tried-and-tested tactic that ALWAYS works; c) this will be used on content farms within honestly, if you can wrangle enough code to make it work then I recommend giving it a go here, but LOOK at what it throws out when you feed it some bongo:

OH GOD THERE IS A NEW NEWSLETTER CMS AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT AND I AM LATE AND HAVE A MEETING IN 90 MINUTES AND I AM STILL IN MY PANTS (little peek behind the authorial curtain for you there, you’re welcome).

I have to run – you take care of all the links and stuff, and please shut the door behind you on your way out; this, as ever, is the overlong, overwritten, overwrought and frankly overwhelmed Web Curios – click, share and if you can’t enjoy then at least, please, try and tolerate.

By Lin Yung Chen

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE SOUNDTRACK TO THAT SKITTLES MUSICAL WHICH – LET’S BE CLEAR – IS EXACTLY AS BAD AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT A PROMOTIONAL VEHICLE FOR SWEETS PENNED BY AD EXECUTIVES TO BE!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN PERSUADE MECHABEZOS TO BLESS LONDON WITH HIS TAX-AVOIDING AMAZONIAN MUNIFICENCE:

●      Facebook To Remove Ad Set Budgets: I’m starting this with what I hope will be the dullest entry of the week; whilst I can’t guarantee that the only way is up, one would hope that this represents a nadir. Come September, FB ad buyers will no longer be able to amend total ad budgets at an ad set level, instead needing to do so on a per-campaign basis. “Facebook says that advertisers will set one central campaign budget for all ad sets, and it will “automatically and continuously” distribute budgets in real-time to top performing ads.” Why is this happening? I, honestly, don’t know or care; you ought simply to know that it is.

●      Facebook Pages Can Now Interact With Groups: It’s FINALLY HERE – the ability for brands to extend the awkward anthropomorphisation of their online presence with participation in Facebook Groups, so now Sunny D can drop seamlessly into, I don’t know, ‘Halloumi Memes for Sad-Eyed Teens’ and drop some BRANDED TRUTH about the ultimate futility of existence in order to flog some more dayglo sugarwater.

●      FB/Insta Message Integration Comes To The US & Brazil: Brands on Facebook/Insta in Brazil and the US will now be able to respond to messages on Insta from their Facebook interface. It’s the very first inkling of the great unified platform future promised to us by lovely, benevolent Mr Zuckerberg and, frankly, from here it looks like all I could possibly have dreamed of and more besides.

●      Facebook Updates Features for ‘Creators’: This is sort-of maybe interesting, or at the very least UK-relevant; Facebook has rolled out its Patreon-like ‘subscription’ service to ‘Creators’, meaning they can now acquire paying subs to sustain them (GET A REAL JOB FFS), and it’s also launching its Brand Partnerships feature here and in Germany too, meaning if you want to find an ‘influencer’ to shill for you on Facebook then you needn’t waste money on a bunch of children in ripped jeans peddling themselves as an influencer agency and acting as pointless middlemen between you and the ‘talent’. Which is probably a good thing, no?

●      Instagram Adding IGTV Previews to the Insta Feed: Despite this, it is still a near-certainty that no real people will want to watch anything on InstaTV. It is a fact. Still, it might ‘aid content discovery’ for the three people currently persisting in trying to make InstaTV a thing.

●      Periscope Launches Group Streaming: This seems like a nifty little feature unsuited to the platform, but wevs. Periscope, the live-streaming platform owned by Twitter, is launching the ability for multiple users to jump on a simultaneous stream together, in the same way as you’ve been able to do on FB and other platforms for a while now. Except it’s audio-only at present, which seems a bit, well, crap really, and you sort of wondered why they didn’t wait for the full video shebang to be ready. The quotes in the linked article (Mashable, sorry) suggest that they are pitching this as allowing for talk radio phone-in style content, which is a nice idea but, well, like fcuk am I going to pause mid-scroll through the TL to tune into some strangers chatting about…something; this is what I get the 155 for.

●      LinkedIn Begins To Roll Out Livestreaming: A feature literally noone asked for and which noone wants is finally here after months of slightly sweaty-palmed anticipation! Truly, it is a new dawn! Or at least it is if a) you’re in the US; and b) they accept your application to be part of the pilot. Otherwise it’s the same old crappy dawn you’re used to, except one in which you know someone somewhere is livestreaming some BUSINESS on LinkedIn and thus one which deep down you know is fundamentally worse.

●      Pinterest Launches Automated ‘Shop The Look’ Pins: This is interesting, and further proof that Pinterest is quietly developing a roster of really quite impressive tech under its weddings-and-cupcakes-festooned hood. This is the news that its ‘Shop the Look’ feature – whereby brands can tag individual items within a Pinned image to make them shoppable for eCommerce benefit and joy – is being made available to all, and that it will be partially automated through image recognition. “Businesses will still be able to link their products to relevant objects, but Pinterest will also be able to do much of the work without intervention….”Shop the Look will tag organic Pins that have not been linked to a business account. For those brands who’d rather not have their Pins tagged, they can claim their domains.”” It’s not specified, but I presume that this isn’t live everywhere yet – still, it’s another reason to remember that Pinterest is VERY USEFUL if you’re flogging actual stuff to actual people.

●      Amazon Live: This is…bizarre. Amazon appears to have launched its own version of QVC – apologies if you’re all aware of this and have been enjoying this stream of unfettered quality retail content for months (why didn’t you TELL me?), but to me this was a joyous surprise. There is SO MUCH terrible, terrible shopping-related video on here, featuring a roster of varyingly-committed jobbing actors feigning interest in a range of low-end stuff; when I opened this a minute ago I was blessed with two guys in baseball caps in what looked like a mid-sized insurance office in the midwest having some low-key BANTER about screen-cleaning spray, but who knows what you’ll get. Quick, CLICK! Literally no actual relevance to you or your clients (though this is the app through which you can stream your shows to the platform, should you want to VPN it and have a play), but I wanted to include this because, well, it’s the best proof yet that we should all STOP commissioning new video because, really, NOONE IS EVER GOING TO WATCH ANY OF THIS STUFF. We’re about a year away from every single human who is ever born having a fcuking IMDB page.

●      Snapchat Launches Black History Month Gallery: This is a really nice use of Snapchat’s deeper AR functionality; to celebrate Black History Month, Snapchat has launched this feature whereby users can choose to apply a BHM banner to their snaps when the camera is in selfie mode; flipping the camera, though, lets them explore a virtual art gallery which features the work of various young black US artists. Simple, and a lovely illustration of some of the clever things you can do with Snap’s tech.

●      Fred Perry x Raf Simons: Is Fred Perry cool in 2019? Christ alone knows. Still, this is a rather neat twist on the traditional ‘oh look here’s a limited edition streetwear collab’ website; the collection here is presented as through Google Street View, with models wearing the gear scattered throughout the streets of a seaside town somewhere European (where is it? Anyone know? The pastel houses give it a weirdly Dutch feel, to my mind, but I honestly have no idea), and overall it’s a pleasingly frivolous way of showing the clothes in a real-world(ish) environment.

●      Refrigerdating: I was in an office on Tuesday and saw a Valentine’s promo from some supermarket in which they were offering FREE DATES to any singles who showed up at their shop in Chorlton on the 14th (the area has the highest concentration of singles in the country, DO YOU SEE????) and, honestly, gentle reader, I fucking LOST it; I had a proper, out-loud shouty moment in which I decried the PR industry and its advermarketing siblings and might even have had some uncharitable words for anyone working therein who has the temerity to call themselves ‘creative’ whilst churning out infopollution like this. I then realised that I was sitting slap bang in the middle of the consumer PR team, who really didn’t deserve that and who now think I’m a prick, quite rightly. Anyway, that wasn’t even the worst Valentine’s thing I saw this week – it was THIS aberration, an ‘idea’ which obviously started with the pun and worked backwards, an ‘idea’ which Samsung almost certainly paid money for, an ‘idea’ whose concept can neatly be summarised as ‘dating, with fridges’. Yes, that’s right, it’s a ‘dating service’ (not a dating service at all) whereby you upload a photo of the inside of your fridge and the platform matches you with a partner with a compatible arrangement of peppers in their salad crisper or something. Except it doesn’t – it is not a real thing, it’s a crap shell fronting up a skeletal concept, the privacy policy is iffy as you like and, generally, it’s an early contender for crappest and most-phoned-in PR gubbins of the year. WELL DONE EVERYONE WELL DONE I HOPE YOU FEEL PROUD.

●      Captain Marvel: The second-best film promo website of the week is this self-consciously 90s site promoting the new Marvel film. It’s nicely done and it’s a pretty comprehensive pastiche, even down to the comments, though if I’m honest I think that while the actual Space Jam site is still live it’s almost pointless to try and out-90s the very best.

●      The Miu Miu Twist: The second-best branded game of the week, this effort by the Prada perfume brand is basically one of those ‘click, jump and try and get as high as you can’ mobile games with a nice 16-bit aesthetic and a generally pleasing look-and-feel. Simple, quick, and the way the avatar’s outfits change at each stage is a nice little touch.

●      Black Snake: THE best film site and THE best branded game of the week, though, are the same thing – this is the promo site for French action film (at least I presume that’s what it is – I, er, couldn’t really be bothered to do the research, sorry) and it’s basically a browser-based Streets of Rage clone, meaning you select your character and then beat the everliving crap out of millions of generic thugs. It’s ace and oddly therapeutic and generally an excellent if obvious way of wasting 10 minutes at work, which, frankly, you deserve after having your mind polluted with that awful fridge dating thing.

By Sara Silks

NEXT, ENJOY THIS RATHER EXCELLENT 8-BIT ALBUM BY SHIRU!

THE SECTION WHICH, HONESTLY, SUGGESTS YOU JUST FOCUS ON THE EMOTION SOUND MAP BECAUSE IT’S THE MOST AMAZING THING HERE BY FAR (BUT WHICH OBVIOUSLY LOVES ALL THE LINKS EQUALLY AND ABSOLUTELY DOESN’T HAVE FAVOURITES), PT.1:

●      The Amazing Emotional Sound Map: Not, fine, it’s technical title, but it’s the best descriptor I have. This is…incredible. It’s a ‘map’ of human emotions – fear, disgust, etc – with associated sounds; you mouse over the various named emotions and the sounds people make when feeling those emotions play. It’s the fruit of a project from the University of Berkeley (the academic paper on which you can see here) where they recorded a variety of volunteers vocalising 24 different emotions in an attempt to derive a sonic taxonomy of feeling (yes, that’s right, A SONIC TAXONOMY OF FEELING. It’s my blognewsletterthing and if I want to be appallingly pretentious in my descriptions then I SHALL so THERE). Honestly, when I first found this yesterday I had some sort of genuine, weird physical reaction to this, part amazement and part revulsion; it is SO STRANGE to hear all these feelings all smooshed together, and there’s an honest-to-goodness physical reaction I get from the sensation of feeling someone (some people?) going through all these feelings so quickly. It’s honestly incredible, and there is SO MUCH you can do with this – from the idea of creating short audioclips giving an audioemotive version of famous novels or songs or artworks (what emotional journey in sound best describes the plot of Wuthering Heights, for example, and could you recognise it from the sound of the feelings?) to the possibility of creating a maze out of sounds (navigate your way through a space by following the happy sounds and avoiding the horrid ones), this is hugely exciting (to me). If nothing else, PLEASE put your headphones in and have a play – and then whack your volume up, take the headphones out and give your entire office a symphonic tour of the hinterlands between ‘anger’ and ‘desire’. They’ll (probably) thank you for it.

●      This Person Does Not Exist: Click the link. Look at the face. Click refresh. Look at the face. Repeat. Repeat. None of the faces you see are real. None of them are people. None of them have ever lived. None of them were ‘shopped by hand. They are all GAN-generated computer imaginings of faces, generated through computation and machine learning and what might as well be ACTUAL MAJICK. No practical application I can think of, other than perhaps to give you an infinite selection of faces to put to to the bullsh1t, made-up ‘personas’ you put in your next pitch, but this is quite incredible – it feels important to point out that this would literally have been impossible a year ago, should you need a gentle reminder of the pace at which this stuff is developing.

●      Kubrik: You want a website presenting the life and work of Stanley Kubrik, a celebration of his films and work? OH GOOD! This is a very nice collection of photos and information and footage, all presented as a beautifully-designed single-scroller; there is a LOT of information here, and the site design really is rather beautiful.

●      Tender: Ah, ARGs! Remember I Love Bees? No, of course you don’t, you’re all CHILDREN. Still, back in the day ARGs and the concept of TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING were all the rage and were considered to be a BIG THING; then we all realised that the number of people actually willing to solve problems and follow you down your meticulously-designed promotional rabbithole of mystery was a significant order of magnitude smaller than that required to render the expense and effort of setting these things up worthwhile. Still, people are still trying them out – witness Tender, which whilst pretending to be a dating app for vampires is almost certainly not that as, well, vampires don’t exist. Some digging suggests that it’s a promo for a new Vampire: Masquerade game, but, whether or not you care about that, this is a rather fun and nicely made portal into a MYSTERIOUS REAL LIFE WORLD OF POINTY TEETH.

●      Super Uplifting Friendship Simulator: Sometimes you need a friend to tell you it’s all going to be ok. Sadly the fragmented and atomised nature of modern society means that you might not have any friends, so why not outsource that job to this simple, reassuring and ultimately heartbreaking little game? Honestly, I just clicked through one of the vignettes (there are 8 or so) and the lonely emptiness of a small piece of code telling me it’s all going to be ok and that I am amazing and should value myself more is, well, making me a touch more moist-eyed than I might have expected.

●      MIDI City: “This is an interactive art experiment where MIDI songs become cities. Each row of buildings is an instrument in the song; each building is a note: the position is the time, the height is the pitch. You control the density of buildings and rows. When you change it, you make a new city and a new song. It might not be a good song.” The site is not lying when it questions the quality of its own output, but I do rather like the cityscape-style viz it’s doing here.

●      Since Parkland: You want a sobering statistic? Since the Parkland shootings last year, 1,200 American children (defined as under-18s) have been killed by guns. 100 a month. That’s…astonishing. This site, a memorial both to the Parkland victims and the 1200 others who’ve died as a result of gun violence since – it presents a small story for each of the dead, written by teenage reporters from around the country, a quite remarkable feat and a poignant tribute to the lives lost. Heartbreaking, but such a wonderful project.

●      Sh1t Solidarity: Buy a small pin badge to support workers rights and simultaneously celebrate your own occasional acts of fecal workplace rebellion – the badges bear the delightful legend ‘Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, That’s why I shit, on company time’, which is exactly the sort of classy workplace humour that we ALL appreciate, and proceeds go to an organisation called ‘Jobs With Justice’ which ought to be all the reason you need to buy one.  

●      Edit My Ex: A service which, for a fee, will digitally remove your ex (or indeed anyone else, I imagine) from a photo of your choosing. On the one hand, fine; on the other, you can probably ask Reddit to do it for you to FAR funnier effect, or use a pair of scissors, or learn Photoshop, or just THROW THE PHOTO AWAY; I’m struggling to imagine being so attached to a photograph but not the people in it (“God, I always LOVED the way my knees looked in that shot, such a shame Sharon’s in there ruining it with her STUPID FAT FACE”), but then again I am so pathologically disgusted by the way I look that I was last knowingly photographed in 2013 so, well, what do I know?

●      OK Video: This basically works like Vine, except without the 6-second limit. OK Video is an app which has a single, simple gimmick; it records when you have your finger on the screen, and stops recording when you don’t, lending itself to that dizzying speed of cut that characterised much of the output from Vine bitd. Obviously because it’s 2019 and there can be no more new social platforms ever this doesn’t publish itself; rather, you can export the resultant clips to whichever of the dopamine-dispensing Skinner boxes you like best. Worth a play – you can make some rather fun stuff with this, and there’s a pleasingly retro feel to some of the output (ridiculous as it sounds to refer to Vine’s edit aesthetic as ‘retro’, but, well, SUCH IS THE PACE OF MODERN LIFE).

●      144 Blocks: However self-important and deluded your employer or clients are, it’s a reasonably safe bet that they’ve never done anything quite so hubristic as what Swatch attempted in 1998 when they attempted to REINVENT TIME by introducing ‘Swatch Time’ or ‘beats’ – a global decimal clock which was intended to revolutionise the way global time measurement worked by placing everyone on a single timezone measured in 1000 ‘beats’ per day. You may note that as we jaunt gaily through the last days of the second decade of the 21st Century we are still stubbornly wedded to the 24h diurnal clock and timezones and stuff; Swatch Time was not, sad to say, the rampant success its megolomaniacal Swiss time obsessives might have hoped. Still, its spirit lives on it 144 Blocks, a time management system that attempts to help you make sense of your day by splitting it into 144 ten minute blocks – exactly why this is better than it being split into 24 hours of 60 minutes, or 72 units of 20 minutes, is never adequately explained, but if you have a violent and inexplicable revulsion for the conventions of temporal measurement then, well, go for your life. You weirdo.

●      PewdiePie vs T-Series Live Stream Counter: This is a YouTube livestream, started a week or so ago, that does NOTHING but stream a live counter of the relative subscriber numbers of YouTube’s two largest channels, owned by charming white supremacist-endorsing idiot manchild PewDiePie and the incredibly prolific Indian CG content factory T-Series. It does NOTHING ELSE, and yet, as I type this at 855 am, there are just shy of 3000 people ‘watching’ it and chatting absolute razz in the comments. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US ALL? How is it possible that there are 3000 people alive right now who can think of NOTHING better to do with this precious gift of life bestowed upon us by an unknown force? I don’t understand anything any more.

●      The Royal Society Collection: ‘Turning the Pages’ is the Royal Society’s scanned archive of old scientific papers from its archive. If you want to peruse a whole load of old papers detailing scientific enquiry from throughout the past few hundred years then WOW will you enjoy this. The illustrations in particular are worth a look – there’s some lovely anatomical sketching in here if you dig a bit.

●      The Banana Label Museum: God love the obsessive German who administers this site, though I can’t for the life of me fathom why.

●      Lisa Hietanen: Lisa Hietanen is an artist who works in wool and yarn, and makes knitted work including a life-sized collection of knitted people. I now want very little else in the world besides a life-sized knitted replica of me, to send to work in my stead and to stare stoical and uncomplaining into the middle-distance.

●      The Amazon Brand Database: Your weekly reminder that Amazon has won the future and that we just haven’t quite realised that yet – this is a database listing all the brands that Amazon is currently flogging which it secretly owns, all the own-brand stuff which isn’t in fact branded ‘Amazon’ but instead is given some sort of slightly folksy identity to make it feel less like MechaBezos is now basically taking 30% of your salary directly.

●      Gail: I am genuinely happy that this exists. Gail.com was bought for its owner as a birthday present over 20 years ago; it gets a…surprising amount of traffic from people misspelling ‘Gmail’, and its entire, slightly recursive raison d’etre is to explain exactly these two facts in a slightly frustrated-sounding FAQ. Gail, you are an indefatigable heroine of the modern internet.

●      Achewood Tarot: You either know Achewood or you don’t (if you don’t, honestly, LEARN); this is Achewood Tarot, presenting you with a series of panels drawn at random from the archives for you to scry whatever meaning you can from. Each is assigned a role in the traditional tarot, so you can make a PROPER reading from it should you choose. It feels like this is tapping into the hitherto-unimagined intersection of millennial girl occultism and millennial boy hipster ennui; go on, someone coin a name for it and write a 1500-word piece proclaiming it a new trend.

●      Live Transcribe: Potentially HUGELY useful new (I think) app from Google which, as the name suggests, will attempt to take a live transcript of any audio it picks up, in realtime. Whilst obviously it’s not going to be perfect, as a way of slightly shortcutting the transcription process this could be hugely useful.

●      The 2019 Westminster Dog Show: Photos of some VERY fancy canines. O ROFF!

●      Tinnitus Tracker: Rob Weychart is a music enthusiast and goes to a lot of gigs, so he’s made this site which tracks (almost) EVERY SINGLE ONE. “This is my live music diary, with information about nearly every show I’ve attended, dating back to 1992. There are currently 385 shows, browsable by genre, artist, venue, city, state, and year”, writes Rob, and crikey he’s not lying – this is a really interesting experiment in datavisualisation, a bit reminiscent of that guy whose name I forget who did an annual recap of his own personal life data each year for a decade or so; anyway, worth a look if you’re into dataviz or alternatively if you want to take a creepily intimate look at a stranger’s gig-going habits.

By Nguan

NEXT, ENJOY THIS PUNCH TECH-HOUSE SET BY LILY PALMER!

THE SECTION WHICH, HONESTLY, SUGGESTS YOU JUST FOCUS ON THE EMOTION SOUND MAP BECAUSE IT’S THE MOST AMAZING THING HERE BY FAR (BUT WHICH OBVIOUSLY LOVES ALL THE LINKS EQUALLY AND ABSOLUTELY DOESN’T HAVE FAVOURITES), PT.2:

●      Postscript: Fine, this isn’t hugely exciting, but the prospect of ‘Mailchimp but for text messaging’ is, whilst admittedly tedious, a useful one; the idea is that you can apply all the same sorts of targeting and ‘if this then that’-type actions to your text message marketing as you can to your email marketing. Worth a look if this is your thing.

●      50 Years Ago In Photos: A wonderful selection of pictures from around the world, all taken in 1969. Some genuinely great shots here – you’ll recognise some of the more ‘iconic’ (sorry) images, like the Queen on the tube, but some of these are entirely new to me – I have a particular soft spot for the photo of the kids playing on the fire engine, but pick your own.

●      Bread Clip Neue: You know those little plastic clips that keep plastic-wrapped bread closed – the ones that literally NOONE uses after you’ve opened the bread for the first time, choosing instead to do that sort of weird, ineffectual, twist-and-wrap manoeuver to try and keep the mould at bay? Well this is a font made entirely out of those. No idea why, but, well, why not?

●      HORG: Or, “The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group : A Database of Synthetic Taxonomy”, or, in language you might be more familiar with, a bizarrely comprehensive database of different designs of those little plastic clips that keep plastic-wrapped bread closed – the ones that literally NOONE uses after you’ve opened the bread for the first time, choosing instead to do that sort of weird, ineffectual, twist-and-wrap manoeuver to try and keep the mould at bay. THAT’S RIGHT! An actual, proper, honest-to-goodness thematically-linked segue there! These two sites cropped up independently of each other this week, leading me to believe that there is in fact some sort of higher power looking over my webmongery as I browse and occasionally moving invisible levers to grant a degree of coherence to these otherwise inchoate webspaffings (I don’t believe that, obviously; there is no higher power behind Curios at all, there is just ME and I am as base as it gets).

●      41 Strange: A Twitter feed posting…strange images. Sometimes a bit horrid, sometimes oddly cute, the general theme here is ‘stuff that will make you pause on the TL and do something of a ‘hmm, how queer’-type eyebrow’, basically.

●      Time Since Launch: Create a persistent timer for anything you like. You can enter whatever text you like to commemorate the time since something last happened –  a cigarette, say, or the last time you cried (ha!). The site creates a unique url for each timer so you can keep checking back on it for reassurance or whatever else; PERFECT for office lols (ie gentle bullying) – why not make one to commemorate ‘the time since X fcuked something up’ and then share it with the office so that you can all quietly enjoy the ratcheting pressure as ‘X’ strives to maintain perfection? GO ON.

●      The Unko Museum: The Unko Museum is in Japan and celebrates comedy faeces. No, really, it’s a museum that seemingly serves only to laud and commemorate the role of the ‘funny’ little swirly turd image that is universally acknowledged as the symbol for a brown. The site’s all in Japanese, and to be honest I don’t find this sort of thing particularly funny, but it’s worth linking to for some of the onsite imagery which, with no grasp of what the accompanying copy says, are honestly absolutely baffling. Try and work out what the copy says, go on – “POO MICHELIN MAN CARRIES OWN COFFIN” is where I ended up, but see what you think.

●      Death Generator: A little webtoy that lets you create bespoke copy for a pretty wide range of old videogame speech bubble-type things. Which, I realise, is an APPALLING description – let me try again. You know how at the end of a bout in Streetfighter you get a picture of both characters post-stramash, one all victorious and the other all pulped, with one gloating and delivering some sort of poorly-translated guff about Shen Long? Yes, well that but you can edit the text, and there are about 100 different old games whose styles you can replicate. Based on the number of you likely to click this one I probably oughtn’t have bothered with that explanation, eh? FFS.

●      The Spitting Image Auction: OH MY GOD A LOAD OF PUPPETS FROM SPITTING IMAGE ARE GOING UP FOR AUCTION! I imagine the opening prices here are ridiculously low – I can’t see any of this stuff for going for less than multiples of 1000 – but, well, THERE IS A FULL THATCHER PUPPET FOR SALE! Also, the Claire Rayner one looks a LOT like Poor Trees, so it might be worth putting a bit in on that one too. If any of you work in political consultancy then this will be RIGHT up your street (as an aside, it’s remarkable how obscure some of the people they chose to satirise now seem – sic transit Gloria Mundi and all that jazz, eh?).

●      The Period Game: A great week for the celebration of menses, this one, what with the announcement of the period emoji and now this Kickstarter, seeking another 9 grand over the next three weeks in order to be able to put the Period Game into production; the idea is that it will provide a relaxed way in which to talk to children about periods and associated issues, normalise the language around menstruation and the like. As someone who’s never had a period and is probably never going to I can’t really offer an opinion on its necessity or otherwise, but it seems like a nice idea and I like the fact that you can pledge to donate a copy to a school so all in all I’ll say this is A Good Thing.

●      Glide: This lets you create simple mobile apps from a Google Sheet, which seems like witchcraft and probably is. This isn’t for anything you could conceivably want to sell so much as for the sort of quick, single use app you might want to knock up for a company awayday or similar; you can get a reasonable feel for what’s possible from the website, and if you’re interested in fiddling with code and app development this could be a rather nice place to start.

●      How The Brain Works: A simple explainer site about how the brain works – which you could probably have ascertained from the title, and which I almost certainly didn’t need to type. FFS MATT! Anyway, I quite like the copy here which is the main reason I’m featuring it.

●      The Tiny Type Museum: Another Kickstarter, this one £18k shy of its target with a fortnight left – if any of you are hacks past or present then I think you’ll enjoy this. The Tiny Type Museum will, if funded, give backers a, er, tiny museum of type and printing artifacts. “Each custom, handmade wood museum case holds a couple dozen genuine artifacts from the past, including a paper mold for casting newspaper ads in metal, individual pieces of wood and metal type, a phototype “font,” and a Linotype “slug” (set with your own message), along with original commissioned art and a letterpress-printed book and a few replicas of items found in printing shops. Ingredients for the museum will be sourced from active letterpress printers, type foundries, artists, and nooks and crannies where people stashed the past in the hopes of someone showing interest in preserving it.” This is LOVELY, though possibly a bit on the pricey side.

●      Hot Pod News: The innocent days of podcasting are now officially OVER, with the Spotify/Gimlet deal earlier this week – Hot Pod News is a site collecting all the, er, hot podcast news (sorry, I appear to have fallen into something of a prose slump, I will try and snap out of it) that’s fit to print; if you’re interested in podcasting as a serious gig then this is worth a look.

●      Bite: Toothpaste…as a subscription service! Yes, you may not have asked for it but IT’S HERE ANYWAY! Isn’t it ANNOYING having to remember to buy toothpaste all the time? Don’t you wish you could have your toothpaste delivered to you in weirdly chalky-looking capsule form on a monthly basis? No, you don’t, do you, and yet nonetheless here is a service offering to fulfil that very non-desire! The best thing about this is that the packages (delivered every 4 months, turns out) work out as costing $7.50 per month – PER MONTH! WHO SPENDS £7.50 ON TOOTHPASTE A MONTH! ARE YOU MAD? You could totally do toilet paper as a service I reckon, on a £1 per roll basis. WHO’S IN?

●      Recordit: A really, really good screen recording tool. Not exciting, just useful.

●      International Garden Photographer of the Year: LOOK AT THE FLORA! So lush, so verdant, so impressive; I find the abstract shots particularly beautiful, but, honestly, these are universally spectacular and will make you want to give your nana a call (or maybe it’s just me).

●      Colourise: This is a great tool which uses ML to attempt to apply a realistic(ish) colourisation to black and white photos. I think it was built by the Singapore Government, though the site goes to great pains to reassure you that the photos are in no way stored anywhere – still, if you’ve got any B&W images you fancy playing with, give this a go.

●      Cone of Shame: Photos of dogs wearing cones of shame, except the cones have been jazzed up significantly. Included almost entirely because it NEEDS to be ‘borrowed’ as visual inspiration for a petcare campaign – it is TOO perfect.

●      The Yale School of Art: You know how when you’re a student there are certain other student groups who everyone has an opinion about – medics are all obnoxious alcoholics with a god complex, physics students smell so that blind people can hate them too, and art students can just fcuk off with their fashion and their hair and their cigarettes and opinions and talent (philosophy students, in case you were wondering, smoke cheap hash to the point of catatonia and attempt to become one with the sofa)? Well this website, the official one for Yale’s School of Art, is literally the digital embodiment of every art student you’ve ever hated. Quite spectacular really.

●      The Periodic Table: A lovely interactive visualisation of the periodic table and the history of its evolution, beautifully designed and the sort of thing that might be useful should you have a teenage child attemting to remember who the everliving fcuk Mendeleev was.

●      The British and Irish Dialect Quiz: The New York Times (bizarrely) has made this interactive quiz which reckons it can tell where you’re from based on how you pronounce things – SHOW IT YOU KNOW BEST (in fact it’s upsettingly accurate, but, well, maybe just lie to throw their data off a bit).

●      Lovesync: “This is a joke”, I thought when I found this on Monday, “and they’ve just knocked it out as a Valentine’s Day funny and will use the attention to, I don’t know, promote their creative design agency or something”. Fast forward a few days and it’s now a fully-funded thing, with nearly 250 people having pledged money to back a button designed to help couples with pretty serious communication issues agree when they can rub their mucous membranes together. The idea is that one half of a couple presses their button when they want to fcuk; there’s then a window of time within which if the other partner also presses their button they’ll both be alerted so they can indulge in sticky fun together. If the other party doesn’t press the button, the horny other can go back to seething in frustrated resentment without having had to suffer the overt rejection of their lover saying “no, I would rather do literally anything else right now than pursue an orgasm with you”. Life is really tiring, isn’t it, at times?

●      Strawberry Cake: The final miscellaneous link this week is a short, charming game about a picnic and baking. It’s lovely, and will wash away the memory of that horrid fcukbutton.

By Malte Jaeger

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY SOME GENTLY EUPHORIC AND SLIGHTLY SPARKLY BALEARIC-ISH STUFF MIXED BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED LOVE APE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

●      Sliplead: The slightly creepy, gothic and macabre art of Robin Isely.

●      Incorrect Labyrinth: Misquoting from the film Labyrinth. This isn’t a particularly exciting Tumblr, but it taught me that there are some people on the internet that spell ‘welcome’ as ‘whalecum’ and now I can never unsee it and I had to share it with someone and I am sorry.

●      Sad Chairs of Academia: You don’t need me to explain this, do you?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

●      Station 57 Cat: The Insta account belonging to a fire station cat in New York, featuring occasional canine guest apparances. What a SPECIAL GUY!

●      Accidental Icon: This woman might be HUGELY famous, apologies if this is very passe, but I found her account – in which she very much lives the influencer’s BEST LIFE whilst comfortably in her 60s – genuinely rather lovely.

●      Bird Freaks: Just some excellent birds really.

●      Apollon.Ru: Featured more because I like the concept than because I can understand anything it actually says – this is a Russian Insta account whose gimmick is that it only posts photographs of post-it notes on which are written descriptions of the most-liked and commented Insta photos of the day. I LOVE this idea and quite want someone to steal it in English please.

●      Pink Mitsubishis: The final Insta feed of the week is sort of a spritual successor to that poo flip video from last week; this consists solely of images and videos of Australians being utterly spangled, and if you’ve got a thing for slightly-mullety bogans gurning mightily whilst surrounded by stubbies then, well, are YOU in for a treat!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

●      The Ethical Dilemma of the Valley: Or, “will the next generation of Stanford grads spend rather more time thinking of the potential consequences of their brilliant innovations or will they simply do what this lot did and do what the VC tells them?”. The answer, unsurprisingly, is ‘noone knows’ – there’s a general sense throughout the article that students are at least on the surface more willing to consider and take into account moral questions when pursuing their careers, but there’s also a slight sense by the end that this is, to a degree, cosmetic, and that they would in fact fcuk the world with a rusty screwdriver if it meant a shot at Zuckerbergian wealth and immortality.

●      Mirrorworld: A BRILLIANT piece of thinking and writing about AR and the process of creating a persistent, universal connection between the real and digital worlds and the creation of a digital map of the physical which really is its territory. This is so, so interesting and I can’t stress enough how much is in here in terms of ideas – the general picture it paints is a slightly-overhyped one, fine, particularly in terms of the likely timescales (this stuff isn’t, I’d posit, quite as close as the author would like us to think it is), but overall this is all plausible and reasonably imminent, and as a way of getting yourself to think about some of the longer-term applications of AR and data layering it’s superb.

●      Money Machines: An interview with an anonymous algorithmic trader, in which they talk about the machines that rule the markets and exactly how this is warping the way in which trading works and markets move, and the associated risks that this can bring to global economies: “all quantitative models use historical data to train themselves. As these techniques become more widespread, the assumption that the world will behave in the future the way it has in the past is being hard-wired into the entire financial system.” That sounds…troubling?

●      Andy Warhol: The New York Review of Books reviews a new Warhol retrospective that’s on show in NYC at the moment; this is less of review than it is an assessment of Warhol’s artistic output overall, and is a pleasant surprise insofar as it’s significantly less interested in the Factory and Edie Sedgwick and Studio54 than it is the canvases and the techniques and the context within which Warhol existed in the early stages of his career. I sometimes think we’d all be better off for everyone just forgetting Warhol existed for a decade or so – I’d certainly like some of his influence to be scrubbed from the timeline – but this was fascinating and taught me a lot.

●      Netflix Is Too Horny: I confess to not having noticed this at all, but now that I’ve read this piece I can’t unsee it. WHY IS NETFLIX’S SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONA ONE OF NEAR-CONSTANT THIRST?? What is it trying to communicate? And will we one day be able to look back on these strange, brand-anthropomorphic times as a weird aberration that was never repeated? I fcuking hope so. Please, should any of you social strategist types be reading this, don’t let Sainsbury’s start tweeting about edging or anything like that.

●      The Loudness Wars: Absolutely designed with laser-guided precision to appeal to the middle-aged man, this article looks at this year’s Grammy winners and indeed recent trends in music to prove CATEGORICALLY that songs are getting…well, not ‘louder’ exactly, but sonically busier with less variation between the LOUD bits and the quieter bits. Basically this is all the grist you need for your ‘this isn’t music, it’s just noise’ mill.

●      The Thai Cave Rescue: This is an EXHAUSTIVE but very cinematically-written account of the Thai cave rescue from last year, and specifically the ragtag bunch of international divers brought together to effect the kids’ escape. This is properly exciting stuff – tense and nervewracking despite the fact you know how it turns out (THEY ALL SURVIVE DON’T WORRY) – and, even better, contains only one mention of El*n M*sk.

●      How YouTube Drives Conspiracy Content: Or, “This is the consequence of a platform that rewards people for giving viewers exactly what they want”. Of course YouTube is full of mad conspiracy videos – people love them! It’s an interesting read, though the central premise is neatly summarised in one paragraph: “Many YouTubers have realized that fringe content—like conspiracy theories and far right political beliefs—are successful on the site. Because they are rewarded with engagement and views, YouTubers are incentivized to create videos that edge further and further to the extreme. This phenomenon doesn’t have an easy fix because it’s built into the structure and model of YouTube as a platform.”

●      What The Crow Knows: Fascinating article about new research into animal consciousness, with a particular focus on corvids – the stuff about differential evolution of networked brain structures (cortex/non-cortex) is really interesting and just on the cusp of feeling properly breakthrough-ish; one does wonder reading stuff like this whether in 100 years our treatment of and relationship with animals will be completely redefined as we’re forced to confront the fact that they think and feel far more than we’ve traditionally thought.

●      How Sotheby’s Transformed the Art Market: If you, like me, have the misfortune to have worked in PR at all, you’ll know that a good ‘Index’ of something is a great way to get coverage. I bet your Indexes never literally changed an entire industry, though. This is the quite remarkable story of how Sothebys, though some very smart PR, managed to basically wrangle free press out of the Times for a few decades and simultaneously created the idea of ‘art as sensible financial investment’, thereby also ensuring that lots of rich people were all of a sudden more interested in dropping millions on fine art at auction through people like…Sothebys! Seriously, this is just brilliant – and a useful reminder of the importance of following ANY story you read as far back as you can to sniff out the sourcing.

●      An Interview with Temple Grandin: I confess to not really knowing who Temple Grandin was before reading this – now I know that they are on the autistic spectrum, a professor of animal science, an author of multiple books on multiple subjects, and a quite remarkable interviewee. It’s rare that you read a piece like this in which the interviewee’s voice is so incredibly strong and distinct – this is hugely wide-ranging, touching on autism and individuality and animals and farming and all sorts of other stuff, but more than anything you get a feel for a truly incredible and hungry mind. Honestly quite remarkable.

●      Ideophones: Are there certain words – sort of like onomatopoeia for feelings, I suppose – whose sound or shape can be said to convey specific emotions or feelings regardless of cultural background of the speaker and listener? If so, they’re what are called ‘Ideophones’ – this article examines the theory and some of the science which suggests that there very much are words of this ilk. It’s an interesting theoretical companion piece to the map of emotional sounds I linked to about 3 and a half hours ago (I have no idea how long it’s been since you read it, but I like to give you a realtime sense of my progress through this fcuking thing) and the concept really made me think quite a lot (to no apparent end, obviously, but, well, still).

●      Apex Legends: You may or may not be aware that Fortnite is OLD NEWS and that the new hotness is in fact Apex Legends, another Battle Royale shooter with cross-platform play which managed to hit 10million players in 3 days (Fortnite took, er, a fortnight to hit the same milestone); anyway, it is and it is. This is a piece about the new title – its real draw, though, is in its analysis of the systems that make the game a pleasure to play, and in particular its in-game interplayer comms setup – honestly, as an analysis of UX/UI design this is really smart and worth reading, regardless of your interest in games.

●      Bridesmaids – An Oral History: Bridesmaids is a bit of an odd film, insofar as for something so successful and, at the time, groundbreaking, it seems to have left no positive cultural impression whatsoever; if it’s recalled at all in popular culture it’s seemingly with disdain, which seems a bit weird (was it that awful? Was it problematic? I honestly forget). Anyway, this is a funny and nicely-collated oral history of the film’s genesis, timely given Melissa McCarthy’s Oscars tilt here in 2019.

●      Child ASMR: I feel very much as though the lovely underground shine of ASMR has worn off now, with adverts and mainstream appeal and now a whole generation of child stars being – frankly – exploited by adults for commercial gain. There’s something genuinely creepy about the fact that one of the best routes to YouTube wealth is to get kids to do stuff, and something VERY creepy about the idea of grown adults listening to kiddy voices as a relaxation technique – that said, as I’ve happily admitted here before, I like watching videos of women talking softly in Italian about cookery so, well, glass houses and all that.

●      Choose Your Own Corporate Adventure: McSweeney’s does ‘work’ in the time-honoured CYOA style. It’s funny! Except it’s not, because (as my mum said when I showed her the Office on TV for the first time around 1996) it’s not a joke, it’s our fcuking lives!

●      Reading in a Time of Distraction: A very good essay on a very modern phenomenon – to whit, the slow erosion of our collective ability to sit and focus on a text in deep and sustained fashion. I still read fcukloads – obviously, it’s not really possible not to when writing this bastard – but I am aware that I occasionally need to apply more discipline to keep from flicking my attention elsewhere every couple of pages. This is excellent on the switch from depth to breadth engendered by the web and its portals, and on what that might mean for thinking in general.

●      The Titan’s Shadow: A slightly frightening profile of Daniel Barenboim, a pretty incredible-sounding man by anyone’s standards – check this out: “a pianist and conductor, but also a diplomat, an entrepreneur, an advocate for peace and human rights. A child prodigy discovered by Wilhelm Furtwängler, he has served as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and La Scala in Milan, and has made some 500 recordings as a conductor and pianist. He has been awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale for music, and the insignia of commander of the French Legion of Honor.” (this paragraph carries on this vein for a while). He is also, by all accounts, a monstrous bully – the article asks to what extent this can or should be excused as a result of his brilliance and pursuit of artistic perfection. Great writing which presents a truly monstrous individual in every sense – for what it’s worth, the second-worst person I have ever experience professionally was the artist Hans Ulrich Obrist, now artisti director of the Serpentine Gallery and a man who made young women cry on an hourly basis and who I wish nothing but unhappiness on. YEAH, TAKE THAT HANS, YOU…YOU…IMMENSELY SUCCESSFUL PRICK!

●      Homecoming: Lagos: Part of VICE’s occasional series in which writers return to their home towns and document the experience – this is Diplo Faloyin writing about Lagos, and it’s a remarkable piece of writing; essays about Lagos tend to be fascinating (it’s hard to be boring about a city of 21million people), but this one’s superbly-written to boot. You have to read this one, seriously.

●      The Rise of the Tinder-themed Wedding: Not great writing, but I found this piece sort of brilliantly sadly hilarious; know that if you go to a Tinder-themed nuptials this year you will be BANG ON TREND (and know also that you are really not allowed to make the ‘love at first swipe’ joke because, well, really).

●      First Course: The story of the Native Haute Cuisine Team, who won gold at the culinary Olympics (yes, that’s a thing; no, I didn’t know either) in Frankfurt in 1992, and how that changed attitudes towards Native food and cookery across the country; the piece then segues to the present day, and how the skills and techniques of Native cooks are being preserved and passed on. Gorgeous food writing, and probably the first time you’ll be hungry for beaver tail stew.

●      Freedom: A wide-ranging, slightly rambling essay on the concept of ‘Freedom’ in the US in 2019 – what it means, how it’s sold, and how it changes depending on who you talk to and where they are, all presented as the author takes a similarly rambling road trip with a post-op friend across Trumpian America. Good travel writing, and excellent observations on the American national character.

●      How To Say I Love You: This is wonderful. Ostensibly an answer to a reader’s question ‘how can I find 100 ways to say ‘I love you’ to my girlfriend?’ this becomes something far, far better – just read it, it’s gorgeous.

●      Asleep At The Wheel: A chilling little bit of dystopian scifi from T Coraghessan Boyle. Excellent short fiction in the New Yorker.

●      The Communal Mind: Finally this week, Patricia Lockwood on what it’s like online. This is ASTONISHINGLY good – a prose poem about the specific feeling of being on the internet and of being EXTREMELY ONLINE which does a better job of just getting the feeling than anything else I’ve read in an age. I saw Lockwood read this piece last week and it has stayed with me ever since – this paragraph, about the experience of meeting someone you know solely on Twitter, made me angry it’s so good: “‘What was your name?’ she asked, and he told her, and a mundane ecstasy began to rush in her veins – his had been one of her very favourite lives. She remembered it in the minutest detail: the pints after work, the rides back and forth on the train, his search for ever spicier curries, the imagined dimness of his apartment with its crates of obscure records, the green waving gentleness of it all. She stood up and held him, she could not help it. He felt as breakable as a link in her arms.” I mean, ‘his had been one of her favourite lives’ is SO good it’s not really fcuking fair is it.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS WHICH IS REDUCED THIS WEEK DUE TO MY USUAL SOURCE FOR THIS BIT BEING MOSTLY OFFLINE BUT WHICH I WILL ENDEAVOUR TO RETURN TO ITS CUSTOMARY SPLENDOUR NEXT WEEK!:

1)    First, James Yorkstone remixed by the unlikely figure of Vince Clark of Erasure. I had no idea what to expect from this, but it’s BEAUTIFUL and the slightly stabby synthline works perfectly:

2) The second, and last, of the videos this week is this, by Aaron Taos, for his song ‘Communication’. Slightly 80s-ish with a lovely, simple animated accompaniment, this is a perfect song for a sunny Friday in February and with which to sign off and say BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE THANKS FOR READING AND TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND I HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD WEEK AND THAT YOU HAVE SOMEONE WITH WHOM YOU CAN GO ON SOME SORT OF CRISP SPRING WALK THIS WEEKEND OR FAILING THAT THAT YOU CAN SPEND IT HORIZONTAL AND COMFORTABLE AND THAT BASICALLY WHATEVER HAPPENS YOU HAVE A LOVELY TIME AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF I LOVE YOU THANKS FOR READING TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

They’re getting rid of all the self-harm stuff on Insta! That’ll sort out the growing feelings of fear, alienation, anxiety, rootlessness, despair, precariety, anomie, anhedonia, listlessness, loss and general fcuking confusion amongst the young, won’t it? I would make some sort of joke about bandaging an axewound but, well, I don’t want to give any of you any ideas. 

ANYWAY HELLO HI HELLO! Once again it’s Friday; once again it’s coming up on 12:30pm and once again I have bee typing more or less solidly since 645 am and once again I am close to 9k words in and, honestly, I know you don’t want it, and my publisher doesn’t want it, and, frankly even I don’t want it and yet here we are. I think I have a problem, webmongs. Does anyone know a prolixity specialist who can fix my logorrhoaea? Should I start breaking fingers to limit the output? OH GOD AND HERE WE ARE BACK AT SELF-HARM AGAIN THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET DOES TO PEOPLE.

Ahem. Anyway, prepare once again to apply the healing salve that is my words to the chapped, flayed, abraded surface of your mind, worn down to the very neurons by a whole week’s modernity and pace and NEWS; rest assured that this almost certainly won’t make it worse, and might even make it a little bit better (it will, and it most certainly won’t). This, as ever, is Web Curios – SUCKLE HUNGRILY AT MY INFOTEATS!

By Michal Chelbin

FIRST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HAVE THIS VERY ASTUTE PLAYLIST PURPORTING TO BE THE GENERIC SOUNDTRACK OF A TRENDY SMALL PLATES RESTAURANT WHICH IS BOTH ACCURATE AND ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SPENDING FAR MORE TIME THINKING ABOUT MECHABEZOS’ NAKED TUMESCENCE THAN IT WANTED TO WHEN IT WOKE UP:

• Mark Zuckerberg’s Birthday Letter: It’s happened, you know; I’m starting to feel a little bit sorry for Facebook. It’s not so much the constant stream of negative coverage – in the main it’s largely deserved, though I do want to grab all the normie journalists who have discovered that there’s something slightly sinister about Zucko’s social panopticon in the past 12 months (TAKE THE PULITZER NO PLEASE!) and shake them by the shoulders and point them in the direction of Amazon, Google and the rest – as the now-ubiquitous sneering and crowing tone of the headlines in the tech press who, as previously noted here, don’t really have all that much moral high ground to stand on (also, a near-ubiquitous sneering and crowing tone when writing about Facebook has been very much my thing for years and, well, I FOUND THE CONCH RALPH WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME SO HUNGRILY?). Then again, though, he goes ahead an publishes stuff like this, which is so spectacularly tone-deaf that you can’t really do much else than shake your head at his unshaking evangelism. Two things here particularly stand out – the opening, in which he seems to totally forget the incredibly well-known fact that Facebook begans as a stalkwanking tool for the bullied-at-school crowd, and the bits towards the end where he states with absolute conviction that the tools he has created (in the main, unwittingly) can only possibly be A Good Thing for us all. Mark, you know what? I don’t doubt you’re a fantastic engineer and a visionary software developer, but if the past 15 years has taught us anything is that you’re perhaps a less-successful ethicist or moral philosopher or indeed arbiter of what is ‘good’ for humanity. You know the famous thought experiment about the AI and the paperclips, where the monomaniacal intelligence destroys humanity with its single-minded dedication to maximising the number of paperclips in the world? You see where I’m going with this heavy-handed and unsuccessful analogy? Shall I move on before I get al overheated? Yes, yes I shall.
• FB To Launch Custom Audiences Transparency: I confess to thinking this was already a thing, but apparently it’s not – it’s a coming thing. As of the end of February, Facebook will add an additional layer to its ad transparency tools, allowing any user who can be bothered (so, a handful of enterprising journalists and any hungry lawyers looking to chase that GDPR ambulance) to see which ads they are being targeted by based on uploaded data, when that data was uploaded and who by. This is a pretty big thing, if only from the point of view of it now being REALLY QUITE IMPORTANT that you have a handle on where your data is from if you’re using Custom Audiences. I can only imagine the really exciting (not exciting) digging that’s going to happen around Brexit-related ads in the final month (ha!) before we leave the EU.
• Some Other Facebook Updates: Weirdly bundled up in a small, under-a-bushel announcement about how much Facebook cares about communities (Groups continue to be a big platform-wide focus, in case you care), Facebook just announced some tweaks. There’s some stuff related to Groups – including an annoyingly vague ‘partnerships with brands’ programme that I suggest you ask your rep about tout suite – which I will c&p here: “we’re adding new post formatting tools and ways to manage their group like how to inform a member when they violate a rule, filtering by date range in their admin activity log, and searching through membership requests by name. We’re also launching a pilot program that lets groups and brands collaborate, expanding subscription groups to more partners, and allowing relevant Pages to join their communities”, and then a bunch of other small things such as donations coming to Instagram Stories, which is a big thing for charities and influencers alike.
• The Facebook Transparency Report: You want all of the reports and information that shows Facebook is actually a totally transparent and benign business after all,in one handy place? YES YOU DO! This is where you now need to go to get up-to-date information on Government data requests to the platform, content guidelines, etc. Happy now? Hahahaha you work in advermarketingpr, happiness is an intangible and increasingly fuzzy memory you chase after with cheap cocaine.
• The Twitter Numbers: The headline in the linked article says it all really; Twitter has fewer daily active users than Snapchat. Twitter’s not going to die, and it will continue to be hugely, disproportionately influential because journalists and politicians, but, honestly, it’s not really where the real people hang out. Thank GOD, as real people are dreadful.
• The Snap Numbers: Not HUGELY interesting, but, well, when did that stop me? Snap’s user numbers have stabilised, and its latest earnings statement includes a lot of bullish chat about how great its ad penetration is amongst coveted demographics – they trumpet the statistic that they reach “70 percent of the total 13 to 34 year‐old U.S. population with premium mobile video ads on a monthly basis” which is both hugely impressive and almost totally bollocks-sounding. Anyway, don’t give up on it yet if you are peddling tat to kids.
• Reddit Launches Cost-per-Click Ads: I still think Reddit’s underexploited from an ad point of view (for the right brands, obviously; probably wouldn’t suggest it for, say, Shell *waves to pecten-loving readers*); the fact they’re now doing CPC ought to make you reconsider it as part of your paid-for mix.
• Kitamura: Finally in the awful section about s*c**l m*d** this week, this is a site promoting a Japanese manufacturer of luxury pillows. Just read the mission statement. Don’t you just want this man to tuck you in RIGHT NOW? Don’t you want to enjoy the ART OF SLEEP? Can you tell I am so tired I am practically crying as I type this? No, you can’t, can you? THAT’S HOW FCUKING PROFESSIONAL I AM.

By Cornelia Fitzroy

HAVE A MASSIVE AND SUPERBLY-CURATED BOWIE MIX NEXT! GO ON!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT A BUNCH OF SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS ROLEPLAYING AS BRANDS AND TALKING TO EACH OTHER IN CHARACTER ABOUT THEIR DEPRESSION AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES IS HONESTLY ONE OF THE MOST DARKLY FUNNY EXPRESSIONS OF THE MADNESS OF LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM IT HAS EVER SEEN, PT.1:

• The Night Watch Experience: I think I made some reference to Dutch arts and cultural organisations being really, really good at digital stuff – and lo, it came to pass that once again they prove me right, with this lovely interactive to celebrate the Year of Rembrandt. This is an audiovisual tour through a digitisation of his Night Watch painting, taking a super hi-res scan of the canvas, cracks and blisters and all, guiding the visitor through key elements and themes, from the historical context to the picture to the way in which the artist uses composition to guide the eye. As with everything the Rijksmuseum does online, this is wonderful and a genuinely great approach to digitised art – the addition of the curatorial audio layer in clearly guided fashion is a really nice alternative to the standard ‘here’s 3million hi-res images, fend for yourselves, you can Google for context’ approach.
• Tokimeki Unfollow: I’ve just checked and I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Marie Kondo at all on here so far, which I’m sort of proud of; sadly my resistance has now been breached, with this tool which offers you the chance to Kondo the everliving fcuk out of your Twitter feed. Attach your account to the site and let it show you the accounts you follow, one-by-one, each time asking you in brutal, flat fashion whether said account ‘sparks joy’ in you or whether in fact you should bin its digital clutter from your existence. This is nice, if a slightly silly gimmick, which would be immeasurably improved if you could add your own determinant criteria to the game – wouldn’t it be better if you could get given additional information on the accounts you follow to help you make your decision? How much do they tweet about football? How often do they participate in ‘funny’ meme games? Do they do the hilarious seasonal name change thing? Do they use twee compound swears? By the way, if any of you decide that Web Curios doesn’t ‘spark joy’ in your life then rest safe in the knowledge that I feel exactly the same way.
• Google Shadow Art: I was trying to think of a joke about shadow puppetry, but I got stuck on something about penises and naked molerats which I’m pretty sure none of you really want to think about very much. Sorry. Anyway, this is a new AI training tool-disguised-as-a-game from Google, in which it lures us into training its future sentient death machines by promising us some lightweight lols. This time we’re training the Googleplex to do something around interpretation of irregular shapes, I presume, via the medium of SHADOW PUPPETRY! The site will present a variety of shapes you have to contort your hands into to make a particular shadow puppet – it then tracks your hand/fingers and lets you know when you’ve sufficiently contorted your paws to match the original shape. The detection here is a bit iffy, and frankly I spent the majority of my time with it staring at my hands like someone on mushrooms who was very confused about their corporeal reality, but you may have more luck.
• Shout Against Violence: This is rather odd. The site’s designed to raise awareness of domestic violence and to raise money for organisations in support of sufferers and survivors; it does so by presenting a genuinely odd and VERY creepy couple of little CG interactive vignettes which, frankly, feel an awful lot more like some sort of slightly schlocky made-for-Netflix slasher flick than a charity appeal. Maybe that’s the point. Anyway, it’s an interesting approach that to my mind doesn’t quite work, but the site’s slickly-made and the cause is good. I don’t normally do TW-type stuff, but be aware that this is a) about domestic violence; and b) a bit creepy, so caveat emptor and all that.
• Emoji Mosaic: Long-term readers will be aware of the disdain I feel for the emoji as a THING; emoji are to nuanced, interesting communication what fingerpaints are to gouache (nice, early contender for ‘most pretentious line in Curios’ there at 8:12am) and frankly they can fcuk right off (apart from the sad smiley, which is perhaps perfect). This, though, is great; plug in any photo you like and it will make a version of it out of emoji, in the manner of those ‘close/far away’ Monet-type pointillist masterpieces but, y’know, of your face (or, if you’re feeling surreal, some bongo). This will make you your new, temporary avi, just accept it, embrace it and move on.
• Happiness Spells: Combining two things I don’t really believe in – podcasts and witchcraft – into one, occult audio bundle. Actually this isn’t really about witchcraft, despite the name; instead, the podcast, released twice weekly, consists of a five minute list of things that make people happy; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, that sort of thing. I was intrigued by this and so had a bit of a listen and, honestly, it’s really rather wonderful as a short, mental-palette-cleansing pick-me-up. Some of the things are funny, some rather too twee for my tastes, but it’s generally really cute. Oh, and it’s from the US, meaning that any UK brand wanting to rip this off (who ‘owns’ happy? God, that’s a bleak sentence to write) can do so with almost total impunity!
• sPoNGeCaSe: Do you spend a lot of your time online typing in mixed upper-and-lower case, you MASSIVE MEMEY EDGELORD? Well if so this keyboard download from iOS will make your life temporarily better – although I do question what the target audience for this will do with the additional few minutes of free time per week this will grant them. Nothing good, I’d wager.
• Can’t Unsee: This is GREAT, but will drive those of you with a slightly-OCD bent to distraction. It’s a simple game – you get shown a couple of different digital designs, two slightly varying versions of a Twitter-ish interface, say, and are asked which of the two is ‘correct’ from a design point of view. Actually a pretty good eye training tool, but equally the sort of thing which at least three of you will find annoying to the point of tears. Here’s an idea – design agencies, why not spend the afternoon playing this as an office, with the person who scores lowest getting the sack?
• Cignature Films: This is WONDERFUL, though I would imagine that copyright will mean it’s short-lived. Cignature Films is a new project looking to de-coolify (yes, what of it?) smoking in media. To do this, they’re planning on editing a load of famous films and TV series featuring lots of heavy smoking, so that all of the tabs are replaced with kazoos. You can see their first effort on the homepage, with a 20-second clip of Mad Men in which Don and…er…someone (sorry, never really watched it) have a bit of pillow talk whilst making occasional noisy toots on their plastic instruments. Reader, I cried – please, please, can whoever handles copyright for the studios just ignore this for a bit, as I need to see Goodfellas given this treatment.
• Deface: I’m possibly being a bit previous posting this – it’s not launched yet, but they’re interested in finding supporters or collaborators, so maybe one of you might be interested. Deface is a soon-to-be-launched (they say 2019) Chrome extension which its creators say will block Facebook from being able to read your messages, etc, as part of its ad targeting technology. I’m fascinated to see whether or not they manage to build this, and whether, if they do, it persists for longer than a week or so; regardless, if you’re interested in data and privacy and ads and STUFF then it’s probably worth keeping an eye on this.
• Track My Subs: This is a VERY useful site indeed. Tell this site every time you subscribe to a service and it will nudge you before your trial period ends so that you can swerve the charges, or at the end of each month so you can check if you want to keep it or not. Want to keep flipping your Netflix trial subscription so you never have to pay? YES YOU DO. Like Marie Kondo for subs, basically (she gets under your skin, that woman).
• Arrest Trends: The Vera Institute of Justice in the US has pulled together this website which lets you explore and examine US arrest data over the course of the past 35+ years; you can look at it cross-referenced by city,  demographic data, crime type, etc. It’s obviously an interesting dataset to explore, though equally obviously you’ll get more out of it if you’ve a particular interest in American social / economic issues, but it’s also worth looking at from a design/UX point of view and as an example of how you could go about cutting and displaying this sort of information.
• The Racial Injustice Calendar: Compiled by the American institution the Equal Justice Initiative, this is a deeply depressing but very impactful calendar which presents a separate, distinct example of significant past racial injustice that occurred on each day of the calendar year. Again, obviously everything on here occurred in the US, but as a visual reminder of the scale and recency of discrimination it’s hugely powerful.
• Bot of the Pops: B3ta dad and Friend of Curios Rob Manuel has been bothering his bots again, whipping up this delightful Twitter creation which will, when it launches (it’s currently locked but YOU can earn coveted ‘early adopter’ status by clicking the link RIGHT NOW!), post this week’s Top 40 from 30 years ago, with YouTube links and everything. This will be great, not least as a useful reminder to the older amongst us that popular music has, in the main, always been quite sh1t, and as such we should probably wind our necks in about how all this modern stuff is just noise and wouldn’t it be better with tunes and proper instruments and stuff.
• TankBall: The latest in a line of ‘videogames but using actual real things controlled over the web by faceless players by webcam’ (the name needs work), this is streaming through Mixer channel Other Ocean and is basically Rocket League but in real life with RC trucks. This looks a bit shonky but VERY fun – do you remember about 10 years ago when there were a variety of brand activation things involving shooting galleries and the like, controlled by the player through a FB app or similar? I reckon we’re about due a revival of that sort of thing, but better and higher-fidelity and without all the creepy datagathering stuff.
• Snapmail: Would you like a Chrome plugin that allows you to send certain emails as self-destructing messages that vanish after 60 seconds? WHY? WHY DO YOU WANT THIS? Anyway, here is such a thing, for all your nefarious needs – I honestly can’t think of a good reason for this to exist, but will nevertheless spend at least one afternoon next week responding to all professional emails with this feature enabled, just to make it impossible for anyone to hold me to any promises I might make (suggest you do the same and we compare the stories of our ruined ‘careers’ in due course).
• The Lonely Hour: The second podcast of the week – unprecedented! – this is a lovely idea; the premise of the Lonely Hour is that we all get lonely but that we don’t talk about it or acknowledge it enough, and so for an hour each week the pod will explore issues around loneliness and solitude and society and art and stuff, and will maybe be a salutory reminder that we’re all fundamentally alone in a godless universe and any sort of idea of human connection is basically a comforting illusion at best.
• Sketchnthecity: “In 2016 sketch artist Carl Lavia joined forces with photographer Lorna Le Bredonchel and together they formed the ambitious ’69 cities of the UK’ project. Which aims to create a portrait of the whole United Kingdom through large-scale sketches of its 69 cities.” This site collects their works to date and offers a selection for sale as (reasonably-priced) prints – the style here is GREAT, and though they’ve only done a dozen or so cities so far you get a real feel for the scale of the project. Beautiful work.
• Vampire Traits: A beautiful example of the weirdness of Wikipedia, this – a truly kilometric list of the traits vampires have been depicted as having in seemingly EVERY SINGLE WORK OF VAMPIRE FICTION EVER. You want to know whether the bloodsuckers in some obscure 1970s pulp Draculasploitation soft-bongo teeth-n-tits extravaganza were of the ‘no to garlic’ sort? This list has got you covered. You know how Wikipedia’s editors are, famously, about 90% male? One does wonder what the site would have looked like had there been more women involved from the outset. I reckon this entry would be MUCH shorter (though obviously if I’ve totally misgendered this – OBVIOUSLY women can be as obsessive about popular culture stuff as men, it’s just that, in the main, they tend to stop a few metres short of the ‘I know! I’m going to make it my life’s work to curate and maintain the global knowledge repository of vampire traits in fiction!’ insanity cliff).

By Sam Rodriguez

NEXT, TRY THIS 2015 LIVE SET BY FAMOUSLY ‘CHALLENGING’ ELECTRONOISE PURVEYORS AUTECHRE!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT A BUNCH OF SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS ROLEPLAYING AS BRANDS AND TALKING TO EACH OTHER IN CHARACTER ABOUT THEIR DEPRESSION AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES IS HONESTLY ONE OF THE MOST DARKLY FUNNY EXPRESSIONS OF THE MADNESS OF LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM IT HAS EVER SEEN, PT.2:

• Fabula: This is an interesting idea, though I was initially inclined to ignore it for its egregious use of the term ‘fake news’. Still, ignoring that, Fabula has potential promise – although it does use slightly wanky pseudo-AI language, which got my back up slightly. “To solve fake news, Fabula AI developed (and patented) Geometric Deep Learning – the first AI technology able to learn from social networks. This AI has been trained to deliver unbiased authenticity scores for any piece of news, in any language. The initial model has already proven its ability to quickly and accurately spot fake news. Fabula AI will deliver a better way to maintain trust in the world’s news: an independent, automated clearing house.” I’ve done a bit of research and, fine, Geometric Deep Learning does appear to be an actual thing with actual papers written about it so, well, fine, but I’m still a bit skeptical. Anyway, what’s interesting about this is their aim to make this an open API, so as to allow any third party to theoretically use the Fabula tech as an outsourced factchecker for their site. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Opsec and Beauty: I bet you didn’t know that what you needed this week to make it ALL BETTER was a YouTube channel combining the ostensibly-unrelated interests of online security and makeup tutorials and reviews. There’s something sort of brilliantly bleak about this – I can’t quite tell how much of this is performative ‘comedy’ and how much is just this woman being genuinely dry, but I watched all of these this week and my skincare regime is TRANSFORMED.
• The Norman Foster Collections: The Norman Foster Archive presents a LOAD of sketches and drawings from the architect’s studio, arranged by project – if you’re into architectural sketches and the like then this will make you VERY HAPPY, though it will also, if you go back far enough, make you do a bit of a nostalgic sigh and reminisce about those long-gone days in which throbbing verticality wasn’t the sole determining factor in an architect’s getting commissioned.
• Kofta: I really almost NEVER touch fashion here, mainly as I have only a passing acquaintance with what the word in fact means, but this site blew me away. Kofta makes bags and backpacks and these are AMAZING – sort of a bit like the sort of thing that a pleather trenchcoat-wearing industrial metal enthusiast might wear if they were also into nature or bodyhorror or, er, bricks. Look, you just sort of have to click the link to get a feel for these, but I promise you that they are incredible – were I a 6’6” albino cyberpunk I would TOTALLY buy the ‘leather backpack with screaming face looming out of it like the Prodigy cover from back in the day’, for starters.
• Save My News: Are you a journalist? Would you like a way of archiving all your published copy that ensures it’s safe from the vicissitudes of the media industry? GREAT! Save My News lets you put in the url of any article and makes a cached copy on the Internet Archive. That’s it – super simple, a great idea, and useful for loads of stuff besides its stated aim.
• Flight Simulator: An iOS app which replicates the best thing about being on a flight – to whit, being able to stare out of a plane window with nary a thought in your head for a few hours. Pick a flight path, turn on airplane mode, and stare at the virtual window as time passes and the light changes – honestly, this is a better idea and execution than 90% of the crap that passes for video art.
• On Being: I…I don’t know what this is. I mean, it’s a website, and it contains words and images in a sort of magaziney fashion, but, well, what is it? “The On Being Project is a media and public life initiative. We make a public radio show, podcasts, and tools for the art of living. Six grounding virtues guide everything we do. We explore the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, community, poetry, and the arts.” YES BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY DO? Still, this has apparently been going in various forms for 15 years and this is its new home online – as far as I can tell, it collects an awful lot of very nicely-presented, white-space-heavy content about MINDFULNESS and assorted gubbins; in fairness there are interviews with interesting people, including Maria Popova of Brain Pickings fame (where’s MY book deal, eh?), and the podcasts might be nice, but this basically feels like Goop for people who go to Art Basel (hang on, Goop is for people who go to Art Basel, I take it back).
• Iconary: Play pictionary – BUT WITH AI! You can choose to either draw the cluer to let the computer figure out the meaning or to be the guesser yourself. The software is VERY unimaginative in its parsing of the clues – in fairness, the clues are generally disappointingly literal – so it’s more fun to play as the setter of questions rather than the respondent. Works better on a tablet or phone due to the ‘sketch to search’ function for finding the icons you want to use – might be a fun thing to give your 7 year old to keep them quiet for 5 minutes (but obviously make them go on a 20k run afterwards to compensate).
• Dark Patterns: You all know what Dark Patterns are, right? Those little tricks of design that less-than-scrupulous designers and companies use to trick you into inadvertently doing something you perhaps didn’t want to do online? Yeah, you know. Anyway, this site collects examples of these – quite interesting from the point of view of UX/UI design, and of course an excellent and useful reminder of the fact that all online businesses basically want to fcuk all the money out of you all the time.
• Switching Social: As discussed last week, noone’s in fact actually leaving Facebook – in fact, I can’t see there being any sort of mass exodus from any of the major platforms any time soon, mainly because, well, we like the way they hurt us (god that’s a horrible truth, isn’t it? I LOVE MY SCABS THE SCRATCHY PAIN THEY AFFORD!). Still, if you or anyone you know would like a handy list of ‘services that are pretty much the same as those giant social platforms but are, at least at the time of writing, not quite as mercenary about the whole data privacy and monetisation thing, then, well, this is that list.
• Design 100: A project by Matthew Dunstan, in which each week he’ll post a different one-word question or provocation about game design and invite a bunch of industry luminaries to post their responses to that theme. It’s only one week in at the moment, but it’s worth bookmarking or following the accompanying Twitter account if you’ve any interest in games (or systems, frankly) design.
• The Music Lab: Are you tone deaf? PROVE IT! No, not by singing you sadistic fcuk, but instead by playing around in the new Harvard Music Lab, a beta project which compiles a bunch of online investigations into music being undertaken by the University’s department of psychology. There are several fun little games on the site, from one which asks you to guess whether a snippet of overheard conversation is being addressed to an adult or child, to one where you have to guess where a particular instrumental is from in the world, but the real fun is the tone deafness test, where you have to see if you can determine which of a series of sounds is loudest or quietest, whether tonal scales are going up or down, etc. Make the biggest music bore in your office do this so you can laugh at their tin ear forevermore.
• Draft: This is, I concede, VERY unsexy, but as a collaborative writing and draft-control tool this looks AMAZING. Draft lets you write in a simple, clean interface and then offers you a load of hugely useful tools to allow for collaborative editing, quick and simple edit approval/rejection, sensible versioning and so much more. Honestly, given how frustrating GDocs are for this sort of thing I can’t stress how good this sounds (caveat here being that I am yet to test it out properly so, er, sorry if my initial assessment is wrong and it’s a useless mess).
• Water Simulation: Feeling a big frazzled? WHY IS THAT ARE MY WORDS NOT RELAXING YOU WHAT DO YOU MEAN STOP SHOUTING. Take a moment to stare at this digital representation of a small tray of water, which you can mess with in gently pleasing colourful fashion. This really is properly soothing, honest.
• Pub: Really interesting idea, this – it’s intended as a means to make it easier for commercial users to license videos from creators, and for creators to monetise their output by easily being able to grant commercial use rights. It’s obviously very early days, and may well never take off, but as a concept – a button which can be installed next to any video anywhere online, much like ‘share’ functionality, which will let people apply to license a video in just a few clicks, wherever they find it. Clever, simple, and I rather hope this succeeds as part of the nascent drive to find new microtransactional monetisation models for content.
• Contact Sheets: A Pinterest collection of images of contact sheets from photoshoots from across the 20th Century. Some of these are great, and there are LOTS of them.
• Hire a Buzzfeeder: A database of some of the doubtless lovely and talented people who were laid off from Buzzfeed recently and who are looking for new jobs. Mostly North American, but there are a few London folk on there too; if you’re hiring for content-type stuff you could probably do worse than check this lot out (there’s a really mean-spirited gag I could make here along the lines of ‘but only if you don’t care about profitability!’, but a) that’s beneath me (ok, fine, it’s really not) and b) tbh if Buzzfeed were a normal business rather than a mental VC-funded rocketship then it probably would have been considered to be doing ok.
• Matchbox Restoration: I might have mentioned on here before that one of my online quirks is my deep and overriding passion for videos of soft-voiced women talking to me about their very, very mundane skincare routines (IT’S ASMR! IT’S NOT A SEX THING! WHY DOES NOONE BELIEVE ME?!), which send me into a proper eyerolling cat-having-its-ears-scratched-type-trance; I imagine that these videos of Mathbox toy cars being painstaking restored might well have the same sort of soothing effect on some of you.
• Simon’s Shoes: Very odd, this, seemingly having fallen through a timewarp from 2009 when the X Factor actually mattered and Simon Cowell was a genuine cultural trope rather than a slightly odd relic of a more innocent (yet significantly more handsy) era – it’s a Twitter account featuring photos depicting Cowell’s unique sartorial approach to the ‘jeans and scheux’ trope. Enjoy!
• Ryan Creamer: Yes, this is his real name. Yes, this is a link STRAIGHT TO PR0NHUB so BE CAREFUL. That said, it’s by far and away the most SFW page on the whole site, being as Ryan is the breakout star of such wholesome bongo hits as “I tuck you in after you cum” (I hate that spelling, but, well, I bow to the whims of the creator), or “I deliver you a pizza (and don’t put my wiener in it)” – basically Ryan is doing some sort of weird sex-free performance art thing on the world’s most popular bongobank and, well, it’s LOVELY! Just need to reiterate, though, that the link takes you straight to PH and, well, there’s a large chance that your HR and IT departments have some sort of loud alarm and flashing alert that fires up whenever anyone lands on that particular .com from the office IP so, well, BE CAREFUL!
• ASCII Game: A series of tiny little games made in ASCII, which are by turns baffling and brilliant and frustrating and which are SUCH good examples of imaginative game design within specific constraints.
• Linjat: Finally in this week’s selection of mostly frivolous webspaff, this is a GREAT little puzzle game which you will absolutely DESTROY for the first few levels and which will then proceed to beat you into submission with its difficulty while you sit and ask yourself whether you’re actually an idiot after all (you’re not, I promise, you’re VERY SPECIAL).

By Doan Ly

NOW ENJOY THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK, A TRIBUTE TO THE SLEAZY DAYS OF TIMES SQUARE AND A COMPANION PIECE TO ONE OF THE LONGREADS DOWN THERE!

THE (LONELY, SMALL, DYING) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• John Bercow’s Ties: A Tumblr celebrating the neckwear choices of everyone’s favourite walking, talking example of short man syndrome.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Porg: Or, to give it its full name, ‘Porg the Glass Kitten’ – Porg is a found cat who has a rare skin condition meaning it needs to wear a little sweater at all times to protect its sensitive dermis and, well, O MAOW! O MAOW!
• Ard Gelinck: This got on my tits rather this week – outlets all over the web ran photogalleries featuring images of famouses posing with younger versions of themselves, done in (pretty good) photoshop; very few of them made it clear who they were by, or linked to the artist’s Insta where the images originally appeared. Look, I know that all ‘curators’ online are essentially thieves but the very least we can do is acknowledge creators wherever possible. Credit where it’s due – we’re the parasites here and we ought to acknowledge that fact wherever possible.
• Picoworm: TINY MINIATURE MODELS OF THINGS! SO KAWAII!
• California Tom Cruise: The Instagram account of a Tom Cruise impersonator. I imagine this guy has a reasonably fun life, all thing considered.
• Thread Stories: An Insta account presenting knitted thread mask artwork type things – these are brilliant and sinister and, weirdly, really remind me of webseries ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’.
• Trashfashionshit: Last in the Instas, this feed compiles some genuinely amazing wtfery from fashion past and present. SO MUCH ODD.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

• The Economics of Airbnb: This is VERY long and VERY involved and pretty much SERIOUS BUSINESS, but it’s also an incredibly clear and well-argued assessment of why Airbnb is in many ways a toxic business that ruins the communities in which it gains a foothold and which affords only relatively small marginal gains to its users. As a sort of kilometre-high overview of modern capitalism and the service economy, this is pretty much superb; honestly, even if this description makes you come out in hives, make an effort and give this a skim, I promise it’s more interesting than you’d think.
• Your Algos Are Sh1t: Interesting, slightly contrarian piece asking why, given all the data brands and databrokers have on us, the ads we see and the personalised services we avail ourselves of aren’t, well, better. Lots of interesting food for thought in here, and I very much liked the subtext about how everyone wants to collect data – WE NEED THE DATA! – but noone really likes the hard and messy and unfun job of actually analysing the bastard stuff. The observation at the end about Netflix rang very true indeed and I think is an interesting side-point about the increased flattening of taste being the real, hidden effect of almost infinite choice.
• The Superbowl Commercials Sucked: If you’re one of those rare people who reads all the way through Curios you might have noticed that this year the section at the top (the bit most of you skip because, well, it’s boring and miserable) contained nary a mention of the Superbowl and its ads; this piece does a reasonable job of explaining why. As it notes, memery and kitchen sink-ing seems to have replaced creativity in big-ticket advertising at the moment, and the vast majority of this year’s Superbowl ads (notable, heartstring-tugging Microsoft work aside) was just a general cacophony of pop cultural tropes smooshed together with little art. As an aside, I felt much the same way about M&S’s ‘Love Sausage’ Valentine’s Day tweet this week – for one, is every single lazy answer to a brief now either ‘annoy Piers Morgan’ or ‘make some sort of crap ‘did they mean it?!’ innuendo’; for two, every single person who responded to that Tweet with some sort of ‘THEY SAID LOVE SAUSAGE BUT I THINK THEY MEANT COCK LOL!’ message is, honestly, the reason this country’s fcuked. HAVE SOME SELF-RESPECT YOU BASIC BITCHES.
• China and Kazakhstan: This is actually about the whole Belt & Road initiative, taking a particular look at a small, remote part of Kazakhstan that’s being developed as part of that and using it as a lens into the global ambitions underpinning all this investment. The sheer scale of this is fascinating; on the one hand, you read this and think “crikey, China really is the future and is going to be in charge of basically half the world within a century”; on the other, you read it and think “crikey, if China’s economy really is as fcuked as some commentators are speculating then, well, we’re all pretty screwed”. Tangential observation – read this, note the scale and the sums involved, and then take a moment to reflect upon some of the more hubristic rhetoric being spouted around Britain’s future post-Brexit. Major world power is it then, lads? Big player on the world stage? Someone with a seat at the big table? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAohgodohgodohgod.
• Failing to Build a Billion-Dollar Company: I ordinarily have very little time for founder stories and startup rhetoric, but this post on Medium (of COURSE) by Pinterest employee #2 and founder of Gumroad Sahil Lavingia is a genuinely interesting read; it does a nice job of explaining how, in many instances, VC funding is RUINOUS for startups, founders and staff, and how perhaps not shooting for unicorn status and instead just making something good that people like and use and which can employ and sustain a workforce is quite good enough thankyou very much.
• Marshmello in Fortnite: I don’t think this got anywhere near as much media attention as it warranted, but perhaps the big outlets still remember their breathless coverage of Duran Duran doing a gig in Second Life all those many years ago. Which serves to prove that ‘virtual gig by real band’ is by no means a new phenomenon; the difference is that Fortnite is a mainstream global phenomenon, and that the idea of a virtual shared experience is now normalised for millions of kids. Will be really interested to see which brands jump on this first – will cost loads, but there’s a LOT of early adopter/first mover advantage in this I think.
• LARPing AI: I don’t think I could have made that title less appealing to a mainstream reader. Wait! Come back! Yes, fine, LARP does stand for ‘Live Action Role Playing’ – that said, this is a really interesting piece about the odd subset of LARPing in which people roleplay as sentient AIs; the idea being that through this they can explore certain ethical questions that arise when we consider treating ostensibly human-level consciousnesses as somehow differently deserving of rights, etc. VERY high-concept, but the questions raised throughout are really interesting.
• I Was Bougie Literary London Woman: A N Other account of the weirdness of virality, this time looking at the oh-so-London-meeja obsession with the Bougie Literary London Woman Twitter feed, which exploded late-2018. A gently amusing read, though possibly a bit more smug than its author intended, which makes some good points about the unpredictability of how a joke will land with its intended audience, and the powerlessness of the creator when it takes on a life of its own.
• Book Covers of Instagram: The Grammification (yes, WHAT OF IT? You can have it for FREE, that’s how generous I’m feeling) of everything continues with crushing inexorability – this is about how its affecting the world of publishing, and in particular cover design, with cover art now being selected based on its aesthetic appeal on a  phone screen rather than on a shelf. Really looking forward to the first publishing house that decides it’s going zag hard against this and make covers designed to look fcuking awful in your feed just for the aesthetoterrorist lols.
• The Language of Development: An interview with the founder and curator of now-classic Tumblr ‘Development Aesthetics’, which captures the copy and tone used to describe new building projects in London, in which Crystal Bennes talks about the weird linguistic aesthetic that maintains and the strange homogeneity of aspiration and purpose that engenders in these constructions. There’s a lot to love here, but I would take issue with Crystal’s statement that “I’ve met people who work in the marketing departments at one of London’s bigger luxury apartment developers and does PR for huge commercial developers and they all talk about how much time they spend agonising over every word, every image used on the hoardings. I mean everybody thinks they’re the “good guy”, right?” Crystal, I worked on at least one of the developments namechecked in here and I can assure you that a) I spent the square root of fcuk-all time agonising about any of it; and b) I am under no illusion about what sort of “guy” I am.
• How Long Could My Murderer Pretend To Be Me Online?: It’s not really about getting murdered – it’s about the very weird ubiquity of ‘millennial affect’ as a tone (look, that’s what I’m calling it and YOU CAN’T STOP ME) and how it flattens everyone into a sort of homogenous mass of performative sadness: “Instagram stories are easily imitable; if you did a video zooming in on any plant and wrote “she’s doing it,” it could be mistaken for my work. If I were vague or AWOL with the people I message with, I think they’d really take it on the chin and assume I’m busy, because the rhythms of modern communication via technology deem it deeply unchill to demand a prompt answer from anyone about anything. My work Slack needs mostly only affirmations and a statement of what I’m going to be working on for the day (“Editing a piece,” “lol,” “lol,” “yes,” “sounds good,” “lol,” [link to some inscrutable local viral tweet]). My “mildly antisocial” state would be extremely easy for a murderer to replicate to make me look still alive, which raises the somewhat chilling question of how alive I even am in the first place.” I think this is INTERESTING and worth a deeper exploration, personally.
• The Poo Flip Story: Let’s be clear – this is a story about a viral video in which a man is shown jumping naked off a pier, doing a backflip, whilst defecating massively – seriously, a huge, fibrous buttload, parabolically exiting his sphincter like a proud fecal serpent – all of which is presented to you, the viewer, backwards, so that he first emerges from the water and then as he rises you see what’s happening and oh god is tha – fcuk, it is – WOW. That is what it is about. It’s features a link to the video in question so you can see it for yourself, but it’s actually a story about content thieving and virality. SPOILER: The lads in the original video were Australian. You’re not surprised, are you?
• Meet Lizzo: I featured Lizzo’s latest track in the first Curios of the year and since then she has been EVERYWHERE, which I wish I could say was testament to my starmaking power but in fact is a result of the fact she’s awesomely talented, has been doing the circuit for a few years now, and is pretty much THE perfect pop icon for 2019; body positive, nonconformist in terms of beauty ideals, that weird young person’s combination of extremely fierce and incredibly vulnerable, an avatar for anyone from your queer outsider in high school to suburban office workers getting ready for a night out…anyway, this is a great interview, she sounds awesome and she’s only going to get bigger (and do click the flute videos if you’ve not seen them, they are IMMENSE).
• Secrets and Wives: You know how at the end of Goodfellas the Ray Liotta characters does some sort of breezy signoff about living in Witness Protection and how dull it is? Did you ever wonder how that worked out for him? Well, wonder no more. This is VERY LONG, but often very funny – it’s a shame the writing’s a bit convoluted in parts, but if you’re interested in a post-Mob mobster’s attempts (not particularly strong attempts, it’s fair to say) to go straight then this is a great read. Also, ‘died of natural causes’ – truly, there is NO justice.
• The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer: What do you think it’s like being the sort of person who spends all their time sharing photos of yachts and yacht parties and massive, wrist-snapping watches in Insta? Fcuking miserable, it seems. I know we all know this but please can we make an effort to tell all the normies ALL INFLUENCERS ARE LIARS AND CHARLATANS. This is the point where I would have posted that massive influencer takedown piece that went up on Wednesday, but even the cache appears to have vanished, suggesting that influencers may well be liars and charlatans but it’s important to remember that they are often reasonably wealthy and litigious liars and charlatans, so perhaps best not to mention them by name.
• Sex Censorship Killed The Internet: Or at least some specific bits of it. Violet Blue has been writing about sex and online and the intersection of the two for years now, consistently well, and this is an excellent and weirdly very sad essay, reminiscing about the communities she found and, over time, lost as they were shut down by media companies who subscribe to the weird puritanical ideal that suggests that it’s a lot more dangerous for people to be exposed to, I don’t know, a photo of an engorged glans than it is for them to be subjected to seemingly endless streams of hatespeech and propaganda. A very good look at the weirdness that that puritanism has engendered and what we lost along the way.
• Orwell on British Cookery: This was commissioned by the British Council in 1946, but never published til this week – it’s fair to say that it’s not the most sparkling piece of prose Eric Blair ever penned (“it is very much bitterer”? Really?), but as a curiosity it’s great, and it will make you VERY GLAD that you are living in an era in which we have embraced such radical culinary ingredients such as olive oil and spices other than salt and pepper.
• Who Is Dan Mallory?: This is LONG, but SUCH a great story – add this to the list of ‘great grifters of late capitalism’, along with that woman last year who scammed half of New York’s high society. Dan Mallory is a published novelist, whose debut was acclaimed and optioned and made him very famous indeed. That, though, might be the only certainty in this piece – you will very much enjoy the increasingly astonishing levels of deception Mallory engages in, but there are a few interesting questions about this below the surface; does it really matter, in terms of his status as a novelist? How much of his ability to do this was a result of his whiteness and maleness? And how should we relate to him now? Really wonderful.
• Dishwasher Confidential: An Italian chef, working in Paris, writing in English about the role of the dishwasher in the modern kitchen. Brilliant writing which manages to touch upon issues of race, class, globalisation, cultural appropriation, food and much more without you even really realising.
• Elegy in Times Square: A former worker at a peep show revisits her old workplace; this is wonderful, on memory and youth and sex and freedom and all sorts of associated things.
• In the Prison of Your Skin: Finally in this week’s longreads, a piece I first read in the author’s collection of essays called ‘Sexographies’ but which is now reprinted in Guernica Magazine – Gabriela Wiener is a SUPERB writer, and this account of her visit to one of Peru’s toughest jails is just wonderful. Tattoos and hooch and love and lifers and gangsters and molls and, honestly, you won’t read a better thing all week.

By Moon Chanpil

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First, this is a newt (NOT A LIZARD! Thanks, everyone, for telling me that; no, really, thanks) coming into being, from the first cell to full growth. THIS IS AMAZING WATCH IT NOW LIFE IS A MIRACLE OH MY DAYS!:

2) Next, The Specials have a new album out – this is the lead track off it, called ‘10 Commandments’ and featuring a vocal from Saffiyah Khan who you might recall as the smiling woman facing down the EDL guy from that photo a few years back; this is a decent track but it’s her that makes it – hugely magnetic presence on record:

3) FRENCH POP! This is called ‘Mojo’ and it’s by Claire Laffut and, fine, I find her almost cripplingly attractive but this is also a great song so that makes it ok, right? Right!:

4) This is by Wand, it’s called ‘Scarecrow’ and I like it very much indeed; it’s sort of weirdly sparse without being in any way minimalist, and this is, again, why I am not a music journalist:

5) If you’re my age, you’ll remember a brief week-long window in which James Lavelle was actually cool as opposed to be an achingly-twattish poseur. This new track from UNKLE is a flashback to those times – genuinely great song, this. Still doesn’t excuse the popularity of BAPE, though:

6) Next, a short film about faceswap tech and what we might use it for. This, I feel free saying without fear of too many spoilers, doesn’t end well. Pleasingly horrible:

7) Finally this week, THE RETURN OF SALAD FINGERS! You’ll either know what that means and will already have clicked, or you won’t and will be reading this confusedly wondering what I am on about. CLICK THE LINK! IT’S HORRIBLE! Honestly the ability of this thing to give me the fantods a full 15 years since I first saw it online is amazing; see how it makes YOU feel! Oh, and, well, BYE! BYE! I LOVE YOU! BYE! IT’S BEEN WONDERFUL! I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY REST OF THE DAY AND WEEKEND AND TRY NOT TO SPEND ANY OF IT INTERACTING WITH BRANDS OR ADVERTISING UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ALTHOUGH OF COURSE I WOULDN’T PRESUME TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO AND, WELL, I WILL MISS YOU WHILE YOU ARE GONE AND I WILL BE THINKING OF YOU BUT ONLY IN A TOTALLY BENIGN AND POSITIVE WAY I PROMISE BYE I LOVE YOU THANKS FOR READING BYE!:

SO COLD. SO COLD. But no, it is not cold enough to go home from work, IT IS NEVER COLD ENOUGH TO STOP. 

I’m late with this today, what with…well, what with having been a bit slow, in the main. Anyway, as a result you’re getting little in the way of preamble; instead, enjoy this WARM AND SOOTHING bath of links I have prepared especially for you. Disrobe – MENTALLY AND METAPHORICALLY YOU SICKO, PUT IT AWAY – and slide yourself into my warm, soapy miasma. This is Web Curios – click ALL the links and watch your computer overheat, thereby providing you with something on which to warm your hands.

By Maxime Mouysset

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH A MIX BY CUT CHEMIST? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY AMUSED BY THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN THE MEDIA-SAVVY CLASSES’ OPINION OF BIG TECH AND THE VERY OBVIOUS ‘YEAH, WELL, WE DON’T GIVE A FCUK, GIVE US OUR CONVENIENCE CAPITALISM AND DIGITAL DISTRACTIONS BECAUSE, FRANKLY, PRIVACY IS THE LEAST OF OUR WORRIES’ ATTITUDE DISPLAYED BY SEEMINGLY EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD:

• Those Facebook Results: So these are the Q418 numbers and, well, seems we got over #deletefacebook pretty quickly (what’s that? Performative hashtag activism isn’t necessarily a good barometer of practical action? HEAVEN FORFEND!). You can interrogate the data yourself should you desire, but the headline numbers are that FB is making more money than ever, user numbers continue to rise in the developing world, even Europe added 6m MAU despite our being at near-saturation point, and, though the US is stagnant, the overall outlook is seemingly pretty good. Too big to fail? No, but it’s pretty clear that we are too apathetic to care. There’s an interesting analysis of WHAT THIS ALL MEANS here – the take is that Facebook will focus on innovation and new product in the next 12m after its focus on housekeeping over the past 18. HOW EXCITING!
• That Facebook Messenger Services Integration Thing: Obviously now this is OLD NEWS (I do hate it when stuff drops on a Friday just as I finish writing this; you’d have expected that the major press offices would take Curios into account and yet, well, unaccountably not), but I mention it for completeness. Yes, they want to do back-end integration between all the messaging apps that Facebook owns; yes, this will mean encryption on all platforms as standard. No, this doesn’t mean Insta and Messanger and WhatsApp will all be rebranded as one thing. Anyway, this isn’t going to be a thing til next year, earliest, so don’t worry about it – or at least it is unless some plucky little regulator attempts to point out the ever so slightly monopolistic nature of all of this.
• Data Privacy Day: This really isn’t important at all, but it’s worth pointing out Facebook’s statement for Data Privacy Day on Monday, in which its Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan (a person whose job I very much do not envy, I must say) charmingly tells us that it’s really important ‘for people to periodically review their privacy choices to be sure they’re still the right ones’. In a week in which Facebook’s been censured by Apple for being less-than-transparent in its research and datagathering practices, and just as a general mood, this requires some not insignificant chutzpah.
• FB Expanding Electoral Ad Transparency To More Countries: I mean, literally that, along with some additional information on what Facebook will do to prevent people from using its platforms and services to fcuk up democracy. Let’s be clear – WHATEVER IT DOES WILL NOT BE ENOUGH.
• FB Making Crowdtangle Data Available To Academics: Or at least, it will eventually – this is only of interest to a small subset of you, I’m sure, but those of you in research or academia should probably keep an eye on this – Crowdtangle is the software that basically shows users what is being shared on Facebook, and how much, and by whom, and is used by Editors to drive online content policy amongst other things; as a means of developing insight into information flow, etc, it’s potentially very useful indeed to researchers.
• You Can Now Use Insta Story Filters on Old Photos: On the one hand, I can’t get excited about this at all (and the link is to Mashable, sorry about that); on the other, if you’re the sort of person who relentlessly filters their selfies to perfect the no-texture skinfeel so beloved of the life-through-a-lens generation then know that you can now go back and revise your personal aesthetic history. This is the sort of thing that is a GODSEND for brands – you can basically reuse every single photo you’ve ever posted, but filtered for a ‘2019 aesthetic remix’ look. You’re welcome.
• Hulu Pause Ads: Not available in the UK – in fact, do we all know what Hulu is? It’s a US streaming service, is what – but SUCH a clever idea that I can’t believe noone else has done it already; Hulu’s introducing an ad unit that will display when users pause a video. Simple, and, as they rightly point out, static so as to minimise intrusion, the targeting options here mean you could be wonderfully creative with the image and copyrighting using this inventory. I realise that it’s pathetic to get moderately enthused about an ad unit, but, well, there’s not enough snow here for me to go sledging so I’m slightly clutching at straws for positives this morning.
• The Amazon Numbers: There is a LOT of stuff to unpack in these, not least the jaw-dropping stat that says that Amazon’s Operating Income was $3.8 billion for the quarter, up 81 percent year over year and almost as much as they made in all of 2017. Which is, frankly, insane. Other things that are worth noting – Amazon’s ad revenue is now 20% of Facebook’s, which is also insane given it’s still a nascent ad platform, and the earning’s call was a LOT about Alexa (despite the fact people only use it to listen to the radio, in the main). Basically MechaBezos is probably going to be able to afford a new robosuit made entirely of platinum, diamonds and the One True Cross within the next year or so.
• The Amazon Chronicles: As an aside, this is a new newsletter which will focus on news and analysis of Amazon as a business – I got the first one yesterday and it is EXCELLENT; if you’re the sort of person who needs to know about this stuff, or if you’re simply the sort of person who likes to keep up-to-date with the inexorable process of the apex predator of the capitalist anthropocene, this is a very useful resource indeed.
• A Guide To TikTok: Here at Web Curios, we’re not afraid to admit when we know nothing about something (a lie – I’ve built an entire ‘career’ out of talking quickly and with an air of authority about things I know literally nothing about), and I know next to nothing about TikTok – I downloaded it a year or so ago but just felt weirdly uncomfortable looking at it, like some sort of weird uncle (basically if everyone you see using an app is <20 and you are ~40, it very much feels like it is NOT OK), and, thankfully, very little of the work I do includes ‘REACH OUT TO THE BARELY PUBESCENT’ as an element. This guide, then – ostensibly for parents, but, well, wevs – is hugely useful; it explains the premise of the app, the interface, some of the memes, the culture and the controversy. Obviously if you’re familiar with it already this is probably laughable facile, but as a primer for people like me who will inevitably be asked about this by someone in a meeting, who will say ‘my daughter loves it should we be on TikTok ahahaha’, just like in 2007 with myspace and 2009 with Facebook and 2014 with Snap and OH GOD IT NEVER ENDS, this is helpful.  
• 2019 Shutterstock Trends: It’s February now (PINCH! PUNCH!) so this is the last trend thing I’ll put in here til we get to the 2020 predictions in 10 short months’ time (dear god the creaking of the sh1tty merrygoround really is ceaseless, isn’t it?), but this is worth a look – it’s based on data on downloads, searches, etc, from Shutterstock’s millions of members, and whilst obviously this is a silly and slightly bullsh1t statement a lot of these just feel right. Anyway, feel free to point at these to make whatever point you want in your meetings this month.
• Google Dataset Search: “Dataset Search enables users to find data sets stored across the web by way of a simple keyword search. The tool surfaces information about data sets hosted in thousands of repositories across the web, making these data sets universally accessible and useful.” Hugely useful if you need to find numbers for professional purposes.
• The Dulux Visualiser: I can count on the fingers of…er…possibly no hands the number of times I’ve included something here which has featured the words ‘AR’ and ‘useful’ in the same sentence, and yet here in the year of our lord 2019 I have finally found a genuinely smart application of it, by Dulux. Use the app to select the shade of paint you’re thinking of using, and then check out what your walls would look like in, say, Dowager’s Tears via the magic of Augmented Reality. Simple and solves a real-world need. CAN WE STOP WITH THE DANCING AR HOMUNCULI NOW PLEASE? PLEASE?
• All The Digital Stats: It’s that time of year when We Are Social and their various data partners drop their massive ‘ALL OF THE STATS ABOUT DIGITAL IN THE WORLD’ presentation – bookmark it and leech off their hard work for the next 12 months. They don’t mind, they want you to do it. Contains data on Alexa takeup by country and a few other new datapoints besides; equally, it makes clear exactly how meaningless the term ‘social media’ has become in 2019, and how silly it is to bundle usage of stuff like Messenger et al in with Insta / FB / Twitter; can we please start thinking about how we split out one-to-many networks vs closed networks when we talk about this stuff, because they are fundamentally different. THANKS!

By Alma Haser

NEXT, WHY NOT EXPERIENCE THE JOY OF MALLWAVE IN THIS TWO-HOUR MIX OF ODDLY-SOOTHING AMBIENT MUZAK?

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE ENJOYS THIS WEATHER AS IT RENDERS THE OTHERWISE DREADFUL MINEFIELD OF PROFESSIONAL SMALL TALK MOMENTARILY NAVIGABLE, PT.1:

• The Net Art Anthology: Let’s kick off with something BIG and CHUNKY and VERY INTERNET – this is a wonderful project, where over a two-year period will present 100 projects from the history of net art, one each week. “The series takes on the complex task of identifying, preserving, and presenting exemplary works in a field characterized by broad participation, diverse practices, promiscuous collaboration, and rapidly shifting formal and aesthetic standards, sketching a possible net art canon.” So there. If you’re interested in the idea of art as an internet thing, then this will obviously be up your street, but even if you think that the vast majority of what’s commonly called ‘net art’ is self-indulgent wank there is a LOT of it here and there will be at least one thing which you’ll look at and go “yep, I can totally rip off the base concept there and the client will think I’m a leftfield genius”. Also, thanks to this I have just learned that Brazil had email in the 80s, basically, which is MIND-BLOWING: “Videotexto, a pre-internet telecommunications network in Brazil was implemented in 1982, offering public information and a user-to-user messaging system via special terminals. Because a phone line was a rare and valuable commodity in Brazil at that time, these were mostly available in public spaces such as libraries or stores.” WHO KNEW?
• The Recursive Painting Tree Diagram: You’ve all read the story about the recursive Reddit painting this week, right? No? Fine, read it, I’ll wait. Done? Sweet, isn’t it? Anyway, someone built a little website showing the evolution of the meme from the original artwork through all the various baroque reworkings the community has churned out, all presented as a little family tree; the creator’s apparently going to keep updating this as new artworks are created, so expect the Louvre to be devoting its entire West wing to this stuff by 2021 if my maths is right.
• The News Lifespan: This is an EXCELLENT site and a really interesting project, seeking to map how the news enters, spreads within and then leaves the public consciousness, based on tracking Google search data. The project only takes data from US searches, but nonetheless it’s fascinating to see the commonalities in half-life amongst all the stories – they tend to follow a similar pattern of interest, in the main, though in certain cases the pattern extends over a far greater length of time than others. I would be fascinated to see how this applies to UK news; I wonder whether any of the big UK publishers would use their own traffic data to run something similar?
• Loop: This is a really interesting idea that I can’t imagine working at all, but I’m almost certainly wrong about that so perhaps go and invest in this RIGHT NOW. Loop is a yet-to-launch but seemingly-imminent service which will let consumers in the US shop for a selection of products from ACTUAL REAL BRANDS (Haagen Dazs and a few P&G/Unilever-type things, for example) which will be delivered to their home – so far, so standard. The gimmick here is that Loop will deliver the goods in their own durable, washable, reusable containers – so your icecream will come in some sort of metal tiffin tin, your detergent in a reusable squeezy bottle, that sort of thing. You use the stuff, you return the containers (free collection and shipping, obvs) and then you get a load of new containers full of stuff to replace the old ones. No packaging waste! So clean! So green! Let’s be charitable and assume that the whole supply chain here – deliveries and container-washing and the like – is carbon neutral here; even given that, do people want to get their stuff (even consumables) in packaging scuffed from repeat usage and high-pressure dishwashing? I’m going to say the sort of people who are rich enough to afford this are also the people least likely to to want to eat icecream out of a scratched metal tub which has been touched by STRANGE, GERMY OTHERS, personally, but then again I’m just a know-nothing digimong and these people have presumably got a fcukload of VC funding so, well, don’t listen to me.
• Phishing Quiz: A ‘fun’ little quiz from Google, which sets you a series of little tests to see how good you are at spotting when someone’s trying to trick you into giving up all your data through a scam website. Send this to your parents to scare the everliving sh1t out of them (don’t do that, it would be MEAN) – honestly, this is HARD (or, er, I am a moron and have very much been pwned by every single script kiddie out there, either/or).
• The B3ta Dictionary: B3ta’s been home to many projects, not least the no-longer-B3ta affiliated Sickipedia, the offensive gags website which really is the best example I can think of of how popular culture has changed in the last 10 years (1999: Let’s make a site collecting all the nonce jokes people can think of! 2019: Let’s never, ever make nonce jokes again, please don’t come round to our houses and burn us for our lapse in taste). This is another of those – the B3ta dictionary is a small lexicon of terms and phrases popularised on the board, and is a lovely reminisce if you ever spent any time on there. If you didn’t it may be in large part incomprehensible, but it could provide you with a whole load of obscure, rude-sounding phrases with which to baffle (and, eventually, irritate to the point of violence) your colleagues.
• PPT App: Having noted the ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD Dulux AR activation up there, we now return very much to the AR terra firma with this Canadian app – ANOTHER attempt to make ‘persistent AR tags in the real world’ a THING. “Be in the know and bring positive change to your community through localized augmented reality videos straight from your phone.Our mission is simple. We want to reconnect you with the people, places and things that make your neighborhood awesome.” So, to be clear, the idea here is that you will see stuff near where you live, use the app to add an AR tag to it – the developers’ suggestions include such helpful notes as ‘New!’ and ‘Yum’ and, incredibly, “Curb!”, a note that wouldn’t be necessary UNLESS YOU WERE STARING AT YOUR FCUKING PHONE RATHER THAN LOOKING WHERE YOU WERE GOING – and then wait for others to ‘discover’ your notes. HOW? HOW WILL THEY DO THIS? Do the developers expect everyone to wander round the streets staring through their phone in case they spot an AR love heart? Is there some sort of push notification when you stumble across a tag which tells you to launch the app to see it, and if so won’t that get a little old the 99th time you’re instructed to get your phone out to look at some idiot who typed an AR ‘Lol!’ over a real-world dog poo? THIS SOUNDS TERRIBLE. Bafflingly, this has seemingly been at least part-funded by the Canadian state – truly, they are so NICE.
• Pro Stories Video Editor: Do YOU make Stories? Of course you do! We love Stories! WATCH THE POORLY-SHOT-AND-EDITED-SUB-MADE-IN-CHELSEA REALITY-SHOW-THAT-IS-MY-LIFE! Ahem. Anyway, if you love Stories as much as we do here at Curios then you might find this web editing tool for video rather useful; it lets you crop and stitch them for the Stories format and then export them to the platform of your choice. As a free tool, this is probably worth a look. Be aware, though, that it won’t make people care.
• Google Talk To Books: This is a really interesting if not entirely successful idea – Google’s taken the huge corpus of literature its digitised and indexed and is running it through its natural language processing brains with a view to creating a searchable, conversational database that will let one draw from the wisdom of literature; the idea is that you can ask the interface anything you like, and it will try and make sense of your question and spit out a suitable bit of book that fits with your query. It doesn’t QUITE work, but there’s definitely a sort of ‘magic 8-ball’-type toy you could hack together with this. I just asked it “why am I so scared?” and it replied with “You’re surrounded on all sides by enemies bigger and stronger than yourself.Why wouldn’t you be scared? “But I’m here to tell each and every one of you that YOU AREA WINNER!” which, frankly, was just the motivational fillip I need at 845 on a snow Friday morning. See what it tells YOU.
• Black 3.0: I’ve featured Stuart Semple and his work in here quite a lot over the past few years; this is the latest in his gloriously petty (but also actually sort of serious) one-man project to annoy Anish Kapoor by creating a paint as-black as Kapoor’s famously VERY black Vantablack (if you want the background to the story you can read it all here, but basically Semple thinks that Kapoor is a pompous, self-important arsehole and, by all accounts, Semple is absolutely 100% right). Anyway, if you want the chance to own some of the blackest paint EVER MADE, here’s your chance – the Kickstarter for it is 3x funded with over a month left to go, so this is definitely happening, and it’s worth backing it purely to have the chance to draw ACME-style Wil E Coyote-esque fake tunnels on walls all over London.
• Bassoon Tracker: Sadly nothing to do with Shatner’s Bassoon – this is instead a seemingly-perfect replica of an old-style Amiga synth programme, lovingly recreated in your browser. Want to go back to 1993 and make the sort of track that could happily be used as the backing music on a pre-load crack screen? YES YOU DO! You can export your creations, in case you want to spend the day making slightly bleepy synth tracks and then uploading them to Soundcloud to an audience of literally noone.
• Buy Music Club: This is a lovely way of discovering new music – Bandcamp’s long been an excellent place to discover new, obscure, leftfield stuff, and this site lets anyone pull together a playlist of tracks from the site, give it a name and leave it here for anyone to stream, with the added bonus that all Bandcamp links are shoppable, meaning that (in theory at least) the creators have a chance of being paid. A Good Thing, and there are some really rather good mixes/playlists on there already.
• Blendle: Is 2019 the year in which someone finally nails micropayments as the solution to the CRISIS IN MEDIA? No, probably not – I am pretty much convinced that this is something that will eventually come, but when it does it will be one of the usual suspects who makes it work (it’ll be Amazon, won’t it? Everything’s going to be fcuking Amazon). Anyway, Blendle is an in-Beta service which promises that all sorts of major outlets are already signed up and which promises to finally fulful the promise of micropayments for news – you’ll pay a per-article price, though it’s not clear exactly what that is, and can get refunds if you click on something by accident. Actually, digging a bit more, this is already live in the Netherlands and Germany; it’s just in Beta in the US. Maybe it will succeed? It’s slightly depressing to note that the service covers features-y journalism rather than news, though – proof positive, again, that whilst we’re increasingly willing to pay for ‘journalism’ in its widest sense, we’re far less inclined to pony up for the hard business of news reporting. Doesn’t necessarily bode well.
• BIG Meals: Would you like a website featuring HUNDREDS of recipes for EXTREMELY LARGE AMOUNTS OF FOOD? Would you like to know how you might go about making a Waldorf Salad that feeds 100? Meatloaf for 1000? You wouldn’t want to eat ANY of this stuff, it’s fair to say, but it’s all sort of grimly fascinating.
• PUBG Report: OK, this is perhaps a bit niche but I think it’s potentially an interesting bellwether. PUBG refers to Player Unknown Battlegrounds, the shooting game that made the ‘Battle Royale’ genre popular before Fortnite sent it stratospheric. PUBG is a slightly more serious game, much less popular and played mostly on PC – this is an incredible website that lets you search for the username of any PUBG player (PC users only) and which will pull up footage of any kills they have made or suffered in-game in the past two weeks, presuming it was streamed on Twitch. This is HUGE – fine, you might not care about the current application, but as a window into how esports will work when they get BIG it’s fascinating. Imagine being able to quickly pull together a highlights reel of your favourite streamer with a few short clicks, or quickly get all the headshots from a particular map over the past week to analyse…honestly, however shonky this is right now, the theory behind it is VERY future.
• Vile and Awful Conservative Art: A Twitter account sharing the excellent, awful memery from the weird Conservative internet. It’s a US account and, well, it’s not exactly non-partisan, but neither am I and I find all this quite funny in a miserable, ‘really? Jesus’ sort of way.
• Along The Mekong: A beautiful travelogue on National Geographic, in which Christopher Niemann travels the river through Cambodia and Vietnam – the photographs are beautiful, and, in a lovely touch, they’re embellished with Niemann’s illustrations, adding his own personal observations to each seen. Just a really beautiful series of images, presented wonderfully.
• The Secret Dunny Box: SO AUSTRALIAN! An excellent, silly little arty project in which Nicole He set up a small Raspberry Pi-powered recording and playback device in a toilet, creating “a bathroom installation that lets you listen to a secret message left for you by the previous visitor, but only if you leave a message for the next person”. Literally just that, but if someone doesn’t attempt to pitch a variant at this to Andrex then, well, you’re MAD – look, pin it on the spurious insight that 34% of people feel like they only really get time alone on the toilet (I have made this up but you could totally get away with it, plausible as it sounds) and have their best thoughts there, I bet you they go for it. Here’s a list of all the messages people left, by the way – fair play to the multiple people who, bafflingly, chose to leave a message saying ‘drink more p1ss’.
• Occult Voices: You want a collection of creepy, occult audio recordings, with titles like ‘Jack Sutton contacts dead airmen’ and ‘Voices of possessed children’? No, I can’t imagine you do, but why not use your imagination and maybe set these to play quietly from a cupboard in the corner of the office all week and see how long it takes for people to start to worry?
• Codeblog: This is a nice idea. Yet to launch, but Codeblog is a project by Jarred (no surname) which aims to bring back the nice, free days of the earlier web in which people were encouraged to mess around with code on webpages – the idea is that codeblog will be a blogging platform which also allows for simple html, so you can type your copy and drop in <tags> which will all work properly when published. Here’s the less shabby description: “posts are written in a flavor of Markdown that renders React components inline. This makes writing words feel natural and writing JavaScript feel like HTML. You can write and publish posts directly on codeblog.app without downloading anything, or you can use your text editor. Host your codeblog for free on codeblog.app, or you can host it yourself.” Worth signing up for if this sounds like your thing.
• This Is Our Art: “Startling, strange and obscure paintings from the UK National Collection” – this is a GREAT Twitter feed collecting images of artworks currently in storage; this year it’s presenting pictures which depict the Thames, from the source to its mouth, and the whole account is generally a delight.

By Lucy Dyson

NEXT, TRY THIS EXCELLENT ALBUM BY CANNIBALE WHICH IS A PLEASINGLY JAZZY ANTIDOTE TO THE SNOW!

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE ENJOYS THIS WEATHER AS IT RENDERS THE OTHERWISE DREADFUL MINEFIELD OF PROFESSIONAL SMALL TALK MOMENTARILY NAVIGABLE, PT.2:

• Buttondown: There are a million-and-one newsletter solutions out there at the moment, but this looks like a particularly neat one. Free and seemingly simple to use, the idea here is that you can just paste some HTML or Markdown and then hit send, confident that it will all work ok and look nice and stuff. Which is generally A Good Thing – I say that as someone who somehow manages to fcuk up the formatting of this bastard newsletterblogthing every single week, despite having been writing it on this platform for the best part of 6 years. Oh, and as an additional point, we don’t need any more newsletters. Stop it. Noone reads mine as it is, I don’t want the competition. OK? Thanks.
• OMG A Girl: A slightly depressing, eye-opening and yet unsurprising YouTube channel, in which the creator, streamer Spawntaneous Gaming, posts compilations showing exactly what it’s like being a girl playing online. It’s no so much the sexism (and the racism, my GOD the racism) that’s upsetting so much as the crushing banality of it – it’s just air – and the fact that (and I know this isn’t an original observation, but I spend very little time with teenage boys and so it was new to me) how stupid teenage boys are. No wonder noone wanted to kiss me when I was 14.
• 80s Anti-Game Propaganda: EXCELLENT examples of the sort of scaremongering that was everywhere in the 80s, and which, if you choose to see it as such, is eerily analogous to some of the more breathless ‘TECH IS KILLING OUR CHILDREN’ screaming we’ve seen a lot of so far in 2019. I particularly love the ‘Pacman Eye’, with the pupil replaced with a gobbling sprite to connote the MAD ADDICTION of the gamer.
• Instaset: I shouldn’t be surprised that this is a business, and yet, well, I am. Instaset offers you, an INFLUENCER, the opportunity to buy some, er, slightly crap-looking vinyl backgrounds on which you can photograph your latest lifestyle or shoot or product haul, with a huge variety of colours, shades and textures available so as to ensure that your acai porridge quinoa breakfast prolapse really *pops*. On the one hand, I can totally understand the purpose of this and the market for it; on the other, welcome to a world in which you’re not effectively setting up a professional quality shoot for your artfully-posed makeup regime snapshot then you may as well be DEAD in Insta terms. Nothing is real, everything is faked and everyone thinks they are David fcuking Bailey. GREAT!
• Ceave Gaming: Think you’re good at videogames?You’re not. This person is, though – watch as they complete a bunch of Mario games increasingly weird and unfeasable ways. Did you know that you could complete the entirety of a Mario game without ever pressing ‘right’? No, of course you didn’t, nor indeed did you care, and yet now that you’ve read that there’s part of you that’s slightly curious as to how, isn’t there? God, I can read you like a book (30pp, £3.99, Usborn Slow Readers Series).
• Mascot Silence: Football mascots, observing minute’s silences, on Twitter. Genuinely wonderful.
• Headliner: ANOTHER video creation app – this one’s basically witchcraft, though, given you can just plug in a bunch of audio and it will, apparently, generate appropriate video (in the aspect ratio you specify) on the fly. THIS IS AMAZING. OK, fine, the outputs aren’t the most polished, but if you need to churn out a proof of concept or similar this is a GREAT idea – also, it’s free. I know I keep saying this, but 2019 is a very, very bad time to be a low-margin video editor.
• Photos Of Cold: IT’S REALLY COLD EVERYWHERE! Look at it!
• Weird Science: “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done for science? For me, it was giving nicotine enemas to caterpillars” So did Jason Rasgon kick off this WONDERFUL Twitter thread, in which scientists vie with each other to claim the crown of ‘oddest activity performed in the name of scientific enquiry’. You’ll find your own favourite, but I find it hard to look beyond: “slit the spine of a mouse at the top and bottom, insert a syringe and pop the spinal cord out like it was silly string”. Scientists, you are MONSTERS.
• Descript: ANOTHER piece of tech voodoo, this is probably magic. Descript describes itself as a visual audio editor, and it lets you do lots of cool things with regard to isolating words in an audio file and easily move them around…the main draw here, though, is the text-based audio editor; upload an audio file, it will spit out a transcript, which you can then edit in a text editor – those edits get automatically applied to the audio file. I KNOW, RIGHT? MAGIC! It’s a paid-for service, but, honestly, you can’t put a price on MAGIC.
• Queer Archive Work: I’m going to let them describe this – if you’ve any interest in contemporary art practive, queer theory, postmodernism or any of that jazz, this is very much worth a read / explore, but be aware that those of you with less of a background in artwank might find it a bit tricky to parse: “QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK is an urgent act of publishing that’s radical, messy, and future-looking. It’s a signal sent out into muddy waters, the start of a speculative practice emerging from (and moving towards) the undercommons—a collective place for subversive artists and writers who reject normative narratives.” Take a look.
• Autopo: Thanks to Ed for pointing this out to me – Autopo is an interesting tool designed to help people organise ‘gatherings’, whether parties, festivals or conferences; you can set up teams, manage workloads and workflows, take payments, and generally do any of the myriad things you’ll need if you’re the sort of lunatic who does events stuff rather than avoiding them like the plague.
• SeaTube: Would you like a YouTube channel devoted solely to very slow, very relaxing, VERY dull videos of shipping containers? YES YOU WOULD! Make a playlist of these and soundtrack it with Brian Eno and you’ve basically got a 7-figure art installation. You’re welcome!
• Squiggle: I give it literally a week before a YouTuber features these and they become a THING. ‘Artists’ the Bendel Brothers have made these ‘sunglasses’ – except their not sunglesses, they’re literally a perspex squiggle that sits across your nose and obscures your vision, looking a little bit like the sort of vapourwave stencil overlay you see on Insta stickers. There’s some high-concept here about ‘seeing’ or somesuch crap but, well, look at these and tell me they’re not going to be a desirable fashion item before the Summer comes round. Anyone working for TopShop or ASOS? Here’s your next thieving opportunity.
• Missing: This is a wonderful piece of digital storytelling by SBS Australia, about Wendy Jane Pfeiffer who was abducted in the mid-60s in Australia and who was subsequently found by a pair of aboriginal trackers. Presenting the story through photos and audio with a little bit of dynamic web interface gubbins on the side, I love the aesthetic of this – the way they use perspective and collage in many of the elements is lovely, and the voice work is wonderful. Really, really nice, and a great example of what you can do when you don’t have video but you have a good art director and some animation.
• Drawer Simulator: CAN YOU GET THE DRAWER OPEN? CAN YOU? Honestly, this game is GRIPPING (also, it’s very short and the multiple perspectives at once thing is a nice touch).
• Ancient Greek Punishment – Inversion Edition: I think I featured the original version og this – a series of small browser games in which you play through some of the Greek gods’ greatest punishment hits, like Sisyphus and his boulder and Prometheus and his eagle. This is the same game, except reversed – so instead of being Sisyphus, you’re the boulder. Short, clever, and funnier than it ought to be for a reasonably one-note gag.
• Wake Word: Finally in this week’s miscellanea, The Verge has commissioned an interactive fiction piece about the dystopian near-future we can all see just around the corner if we squint hard enough – I won’t spoil the details, but this is VERY good and the observations are painfully spot-on. All I’ll say is that it takes 5 minutes or so to get going, but after that, well, ENJOY.

By Igor Skaletsky

LAST UP, TRY THIS ECLECTIC ELECTRONICA MIX BY RESOM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (NEITHER OF WHICH THIS WEEK ARE TUMBLRS, THEREBY MAKING A MOCKERY OF MY CAREFULLY-CONSTRUCTED TAXONOMICAL STYLINGS ONCE AGAIN!)!:

• An Accumulation of Things: A Tumblr-ish website collecting the writings of…someone? No idea who the author is, but I *love* their work – honestly, take 5 minutes to have a peruse, there are some beautiful words in here.

• Brooklyn Stereography: You like 3d photos? I mean 3d in the old, left eye / right eye sense? OH GOOD! “Ian Ference’s blog on all things stereographic, from classic scopes & stereoviews to historical context & modern analysis”

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• TinTin: His creator may have been a dreadful man, TinTin himself might have some…questionable elements in his past, but he still has many fans, including whichever Brazilian enthusiast it is who runs this Insta account. You want TinTin? YOU GOT TINTIN!

• Nice Nails: A reasonably standard nail art account, but which is elevated to brilliance in my mind by the occcasional customer who seemingly comes in and says ‘hi, can you draw a whole bunch of crudely-drawn cocks on my nails, please?’.
• KJ Cardigan: Some genuinely remarkable knitting. The sausage rolls look good enough to eat.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Facts About Facebook: Or at least some of the facts, in the main the bad ones. This is a TechCrunch piece recapping all the BAD THINGS that Facebook, and Zuckerberg, has done in the past 15 years, and it is a HUGELY irritating article. You may be aware from Curios past and present that I am no fan of the Big Blue Misery Factory, but, equally, TechCrunch sitting here and talking about HOW EVIL IT IS whilst at the same time being part of exactly the same coterie of the uncritical tech press which for a decade gave the platforms an absolute free ride, talking up GROWTH and INNOVATION and how COOL AND FUN it all was, never asking any of the questions about data and privacy and intention and influence and impact that any proper journalist might perhaps have thought of…I mean, look, Facebook has lots to answer for, but the chummy smugness of this piece really boiled my p1ss.
• Steve Jobs Never Wanted This: An interesting look back at the launch of the original iPhone, and specifically the manner in which Jobs presented what Apple saw as the manner in which it would be used. No app store, ‘it’s killer feature is it’s a phone’…seems quaint, doesn’t it? A useful reminder to anyone and everyone involved in product design that you can never, ever accurately predict user behaviour in the wild.
• The Truth About The Techlash: Excellent piece of writing about the current backlash against tech companies, which suggests that part of the reason is that private companies have never been in a position of having so much public impact before, and that as such they are in uncharted territory when it comes to dealing with the issues raised by their products; as the author puts it, “Inventing new technology is easy; creating new kinds of organisations with novel governance arrangements is much more difficult.”
• The Emotional Support Dogs of Buzzfeed: There is nothing funny about a bunch of people losing their jobs, and there’s nothing funny per se about this piece which shares some of the conversations from the ‘Ask Jonah’ Slack channel at Buzzfeed, where staff waiting to find out whether the sword of Damocles was about to fall on them asked beleaguered boss Jonah Peretti for clarification on what the fcuk was going on. However, there’s something very now about the way in which the conversation pivots halfway through to a conversation about how everyone should be provided with emotional support puppies to cuddle as a means of dealing with the stress of all the job losses. Witness Peretti leaping on it as a convenient salve for the ills the VCs have wrought! Watch staff get distracted by the promise of PUPPY CUDDLES to the point where they seem to forget entirely about things like worker rights! This is so very, very NOW – but also, kids, if anyone suggests that you maybe have a doggy cuddle when they sack you, maybe you ask them about union representation, yes?
• Down From The Mountain: This is very long, but (at least for me, who is FAR from an expert on South American politics) it’s a hugely useful primer on the recent history of Venezuela and how, from an outside perspective, it’s arrived at its current, messy impasse. From the LRB, so as well-written as you’d expect, this is a review of a new biography of Chavez, offering a fascinating precis of ‘Chavezismo’ – reading this makes it all the more miserable that the country’s currently so utterly banjaxed.
• The Bulletproof Biohacker: Do you remember Bulletproof Coffee from a few years back, when people were momentarily convinced that adding half a pack of Lurpak to your latte would magically make you live forever? It sounded like bollocks then and sounds like bollocks now – and I was convinced it and everyone associated with it had vanished, but it turns out that the guy who ‘founded’ it is in fact still around and still rich and…er…undertaking an insane-sounding healthcare regime involving having axolotl jizz injected into his eyelids or something. Read this and realise that if this is what it is going to take to live to 150 then it sounds AWFUL. As an aside, just click the link and look at the guy’s photo and guess how old he is without reading any of the copy. What do you think? How old you reckon he is? A good looking 50? A really good looking 60? NO HE IS 45! FFS mate, YOU DON’T LOOK THAT GOOD.
• Can Computers See Bongo?: A fascinating look at how one could train machines to ‘know’ what bongo is – not just based on a percentage of fleshtone pixels within a certain area, but based on an actual ‘understanding’ of what bongo is. There’s a fascinating wider question here about how much of the web is made up of images of naked people fcuking and how odd it is that none of the bots and spiders and the rest are really doing anything with it; with a bit of luck, I will be able to bring you some GENUINELY EXCITING AND SEMI-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT all about this a little later in the year. Maybe.
• The Route of a Text Message: Do you know how text messages get sent? You don’t, do you? In fairness there’s every possibility that you don’t care either, which is obviously fine, but aren’t you even a bit curious? No? FFS. For those of you who do care, this is a very long and technical but surprisingly readable explanation of exactly how all the tech works when you send a message to someone else – from the touchscreen you input on to the phone that spits it out at the other end. You will learn something (or at least I presume you will, but then again I also tend to assume that everyone else is as bad at tech as I am).
• The Art of Eyeball Harvesting: Not actual eyeball harvesting, obviously, that would be SICK (also, is not art! Is science!), but instead the practice of delivering eyeballs to advertisers through EXCITING DIGITAL MEANS. This is a very, very useful primer on how ad buying works in 2019, explaining how the difference between various types of ad sales models and how they all work. To those of you who work in ad sales this might all be second nature, but I found it genuinely useful as a guide to the techy business of how ad servers determine who gets fed what.
• How Bots Ruined Buying Sneakers: Or ‘trainers’ to us non-obsessive normies. As per lots of other high-competition markets, the world of compulsive trainer purchasing has been transformed by tech, with all sorts of bots being developed to help the ‘heads get their hands on the latest ish (this is how they talk, isn’t it, the trainer people?) ahead of the competition. It’s interesting in part because of the specific intersection between tech and street culture this represents, but also because of the clear explanation it gives of how pretty much any market for any good where scarcity and high demand are in play can be effectively turned upside down using variations on this sort of approach. I am off to absolutely DISRUPT the high-end Koi carp market, brb.
• When Diderot Met Voltaire: It’s not often you can describe the account of a meeting between two intellectual giants of the late-18th century as ‘deliciously salty’, but that absolutely applies here. SO GOOD – I do love these pieces that remind you of the essentially crappy, human nature of even the greatest minds. Also, this description (of Voltaire, by Diderot) is just lovely: an “enchanted castle whose various parts are falling apart,” but whose corridors were “still inhabited by an old sorcerer.”
• Kingdom Hearts III: Might need to explain this one a bit, bear with me. Kingdom Hearts is a videogame series, whose third iteration launched this week, in which you play as some weird little anime kid fighting his way through a series of worlds all officially licensed from Disney properties; the game features literally EVERY Disney character you can imagine and a baffling, nonsensical plot and it is all VERY Japanese and VERY Disney and VERY weird. I have no interest in the games in particular, but this review is written by Tim Rogers (see Curios passim for how much I love Tim’s writing) and contains some truly BRILLIANT writing. If you’re interested in games at all, regardless of your interest in this particular one, you ought to read this piece. I mean, just LOOK: “It is a museum exhibiting its own architecture. Its decadent spectacle is the closest games have come yet to giving me the catharsis of walking into a Louis Vuitton store and neither buying anything nor being asked to leave. I challenge Metacritic to extract a number from that last paragraph.” See?
• Marlon James: A truly fascinating profile of Marlon James in the New Yorker, in advance of the publication of his next novel which the piece characterises as being like ‘an African Game of Thrones’. The stuff about the current book, and even about ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ is less interesting than the stuff about James himself, who comes across as a fascinating, contrary, stubborn and brilliant man; I particularly liked this quote, about James: “This is one of the things that’s always fascinated me about him. I don’t know that he always realizes how inventive he is, or how subversive. I think, in his mind, he’s always written this highly commercial thing.”
• Remembering The Day Today: You all know The Day Today, right? You must do. If not, you can find all the episodes on YouTube – here’s the first one, and don’t come back until you’ve watched them all (and yes, I am acutely aware of how incredibly fcuking annoying it is to have ANOTHER middle-aged white man tell you that HIS favourite thing is the BEST and MOST IMPORTANT thing, but, honestly, it really is the best and most important thing). Back? Good, we can continue. As you now know, The Day Today was a fake news show put together by Armando Ianucci (before The Thick of It was even thought of) and Chris Morris (pre-Brass Eye); it launched Alan Partridge (and basically Coogan’s mainstream career) and a bunch of other people, and if you watch it back now you realise that, well, it could literally be the news today, except then it was ridiculous and now it’s just, well, today. Just watch the opening credits – that was a JOKE in 1992, whereas now that’s every single fcuking news channel in the world. Anyway, this is an oral history of the programme – god it was good.
• The Race for the Egg: You remember The Egg, don’t you? Come on, it was only a few weeks ago! That’s right, the egg that became the most followed thing on Instagram ever and thereby attained a degree of cultural significance – this is a piece all about how various people are attempting to exploit its fame for personal fortune. Yes, that’s right, an Instagram account owned by a person pretending to be an egg is being seriously discussed as a viable means through which someone might launch their bid to be the next President of the United States. Hi, month two of 2019, you’ve got a lot to live up to!
• How Alts Went Mainstream: Sarah Manavis and Amelia Tate continue to do some of the most interesting writing about online culture in the UK, although it’s always a bit weird to see them bylined in the New Statesman of all places. Anyway, this is Manavis writing about how the ‘alt’ account is now a mainstream thing for everyone, or at least those people who feel the need to share and emote online but don’t necessarily want the public vulnerability that that can lead to. Are we moving towards a position where our online identities are nested like matryoshka dolls, getting smaller and denser as we descend, finstas all the way down? What do you think?
• Amazon Vine: I was honestly fascinated by this – I honestly did not know that Amazon Vine was a thing. If you’re similarly ignorant, then know that Vine is Amazon’s Super Reviewer programme, where people get sent LOADS of free stuff by Amazon in exchange for posting honest reviews of said stuff. This is REALLY interesting – in part because of the weirdly murky ethics of it, but also because of the repeated sense from the Viners interviewed that there was something quite psychologically odd about getting all this free stuff all the time, and that it warps your relationship with consumer capitalism in quite a strange way. This feels very much like there is a novel in here somewhere (which observation may well be why I am not, as yet, a bestselling – or indeed any sort of – novelist).
• The Oral History of Mark E Smith: The Fall’s lead singer died last year – he was a, er, problematic individual and there was a lot of quite reasonable debate around his death about whether it was ok to lionise someone who it’s pretty clear was at best ‘a bit of a cnut’ and at worst ‘a likely abuser’ – that said, this oral history of the man, pieced together for former bandmates, girlfriends, journalists and others who crossed his path, is BRILLIANT. Almost every line is gold – I mean, look: “Some trendy French promoters took us for a meal in this swanky restaurant. Mark decided he was going to horrify everyone by being as outrageous as possible. He ordered a steak with no vegetables or anything else, just steak. Then he proceeded to eat it without any cutlery, just eating it with his hands and mouth and tearing chunks off it like a starved wolf, and then spitting it out. You should have seen the looks on their faces. I was in hysterics. He was a wind up merchant.”
• Who Was Lil Tay?: I think I featured Lil Tay last year, in a sort of horrified ‘oh look what social media has wrought’ way – if you don’t recall, Lil Tay got some pretty hefty viral notoriety last year when videos appeared of a cute-looking 10 year old saying some very un-cute and un-10y/o things; fame quickly followed, and hookups with Bhad Bhabie and other such luminaries. Then, Lil Tay disappeared. Welcome to another story in which it seems a little kid is getting royally screwed by a bunch of adults who see marketing dollars where a small child should be – can we all agree that we’ll stop making these kids famous when it looks this dodgy? No? No, we can’t, can we? FFS.
• The Dons of Disco: Italodisco! Nylon! Polyester! SO MUCH COCAINE AND SYNTH! This is a brilliant yarn, about the prince of Italodisco and the slightly Milli Vanilli truth behind it all. It’s accompanying a documentary on the same subject, which frankly sounds like a bit of a must-watch.
• The High School Basketball Fraud: One of two proper WTAF stories in here this week, this is the tale of Sidney Gilstrap-Portley who decided to give himself a second chance of being somebody thanks to being a high school basketball prodigy; the only issue with this was that Sidney was in his mid-20s by the time he made this decision, and that pretending to be 17 so you can play high school basketball REALLY REALLY WELL is a bit, well, odd. This is a very, very strange story, and you feel pretty sorry for Sidney by the end of it, whilst at the same time really not wanting him to hang around your kids very much.
• The Bicycle Bank Robber: The second WTAF story of the week, this takes in bank robberies, Olympic cycling, the French Foreign Legion and crack cocaine – and that’s all just one man. This HAS to be a film one day – honestly, enjoy this one, it’s a cracking yarn.
• Thoughts and Prayers: Finally this week, near-future fiction by Ken Liu – the premise of the short is ‘how bad can trolling get?’, but the story itself is far more nuanced and interesting than the sort of schlocky scenario that conjures up. Eminently plausible, and like all the best scifi this is very much about the now rather than tomorrow.

By Kai Wai Wong

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, I have no idea what this is but the video unsettled me something chronic and so, well, here you are! It’s called ‘Compliance’ by Preoccupations and it’s a sort of droney industrial thing with a very weird pagan video and, well, er, enjoy!:

2) Next, give this a go from Stella Donnelly – it’s called ‘Lunch’, and I love her voice:

3) This is Balthazar, the song is called ‘Wrong Vibration’, and it’s a GREAT pop song with a slightly 60s vibe to it – also, the line ‘don’t let your morality / affect your imagination girl’ is beautifully sleazy:

4) Would you like a punk track where the video imagines a sleazy, techy future not unlike our own present while the singer screams about being on the brink of calamity? YES YOU WOULD! This is Pup with ‘Kids’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is brilliantly wonky – J.E.T.S. ft. Mykki Blanco with ‘PLAY’. This is really very good imho:

6) I have no idea at all what this is. It seems to feature a sentient soup can, but if any of you can explain it to me then, well, great. It’s fcuking unsettling, though, so fits right in with the accepted Curios aesthetic:

7) Finally in the videos this week, have this track by Japanese boyband World Order, which is a charming autotuned pop song with an equally charming video all about the Orwellian nature of the now – THIS IS AMAZINGLY GOOD! Enjoy, take care, have fun, and BYE BYE BYE WRAP UP WARM NOW IT’S VERY COLD OUTSIDE AND TAKE CARE NOT TO SLIP ON THE ICE LATER ON WHEN YOU’RE ALL DRUNK AND WOBBLY YOU KNOW HOW I WORRY ABOUT YOU SO WHY NOT DO THE SENSIBLE THING AND JUST STAY AT HOME AND MULL SOME WINE OR SOMETHING GO ON YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO ANYWAY TAKE CARE HAVE FUN AND MAKE A SNOWMAN I LOVE YOU BYE BYE!:

Welcome to a week in which it appears that literally everything that happens in the world now is the news equivalent of ‘The Dress’ or ‘Yanny vs Laurel’ – EVERYTHING IS BINARY AND NOTHING EXISTS BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES. 

Or at least it is if you live on the internet – so, er, why not stop it? After you’ve choked down this week’s particularly appetising link granola, that is – please, though, do chew as I don’t want to be responsible for any perforated infobowels amongst you (NB – I appreciate that there may be a few new people reading this this week due to a nice recommendation from Jay Owens; to those of you who’ve not experienced it before, I’m afraid that Curios is basically sort of all like this, so if the overwritten prose is an issue I’d probably step away now before your confusion and disdain mature into actual hatred. Anyway, the first section below is for people who have to care about advermarketingpr, so please feel free to skip that if that doesn’t apply to you; oh, and please don’t feel you need to click all the links. Though know that if you DO I will love you forever). 

Anyway! Welcome one, welcome all into my enticingly-adorned tent of web-related fun! Except increasingly it’s not fun at all! It’s nervous and anxious and all-consuming and makes us ill! Wevs, THIS IS WEB CURIOS, CLICK THE LINKS.

Photo by ME. This was parked outside the office where I sometimes work yesterday – it is not, apparently, a joke.  

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS IS A BIT OF AN EMOTIONAL ONE FOR ME AS IT’S MY MATE’S KID’S FIRST ALBUM AND SHE IS 18 FFS THIS IS MENTAL I REMEMBER MEETING HER WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT A WEEK OLD AND GIVING HER A TEDDY BEAR CALLED ‘MR SCHNOOKUMS’ AND NOW SHE’S GONE AND MADE A GENUINELY EXCELLENT ELECTRO-Y, BEATS-Y ALBUM AND ANYWAY SHE’S CALLED IZZY FIELDING AND I PROMISE YOU THIS IS MUCH, MUCH BETTER THAN IT OUGHT TO BE SO GIVE IT A LISTEN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD BE GENUINELY FASCINATED TO HEAR EXACTLY HOW FACEBOOK ATTEMPTS TO SPIN THE ADDITION OF A ‘PETITIONS’ FUNCTION AS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A BRAND NEW TUMOUR ON THE ALREADY UNPLEASANTLY LUMPY BODY OF THE BODY POLITIC:

• Facebook Petitions: Sorry, not petitions – COMMUNITY ACTIONS! That…that sounds worse, doesn’t it, in a way, like some sort of horrible, double-figure-IQ pitchfork mob. Which, funnily enough, is almost certainly what this will end up being! Only launched in the US in the moment, so there’s an outside chance that the platform will see the error of its ways and mothball this before it spreads (let’s be honest, though, it’s not exactly a platform with a great track record on knowing when it’s dropped a massive, society-fcuking ricket). Anyway, the detail: “Users can add a title, description, and image to their Community Action, and tag relevant government agencies and officials who’ll be notified. The goal is to make the Community Action go viral and get people to hit the “Support” button. Community Actions have their own discussion feed where people can leave comments, create fundraisers, and organize Facebook Events or Call Your Rep campaigns. Facebook displays the numbers of supporters behind a Community Action, but you’ll only be able to see the names of those you’re friends with or that are Pages or public figures.” Take a moment to parse those sentences – a system which gives any idiot, or bunch of idiots, the tools to actively bother and harass government institutions and employees, all allied to the now-infamous ‘reasoned and well-informed debate’ that Facebook fosters every single day amongst its billions of users. Take a moment to read the whole piece, which does a reasonable job of outlining all the many, many ways in which this is, at best, a potentially tricky move, and then think about exactly how much this suggests Facebook has learnt from the past 12 months.
• More Accountability for FB Pages: Another one of those updates that won’t affect you, obviously, but you probably ought to know about just in case – this is basically going to start telling Page owners if their content gets removed or depreciated, and why, which seems like a sensible move. Here’s the blurb to save you a click: “people who manage a Page will see a new tab that shows when we remove certain content that goes against our Community Standards and when we reduce the distribution of posts that have been rated false by a third-party fact-checker. Second, we are updating our recidivism policy to better prevent those who have had Pages removed for violating our Community Standards from using duplicate Pages to continue the same activity. We’ll begin enforcing this policy in the weeks ahead.” That makes everything better, doesn’t it? Eh? Oh.
• Facebook Introduces Kite Mark-type Thing For Marketing Partners: Long story short, FB’s introducing a sort of quality certification for third party businesses that work closely with it on the advermarketingpr side, a designation which “recognizes companies offering proprietary solutions that can help Facebook advertisers review content options and control where their ads will appear.” God, I don’t care about this at all.
• Facebook Testing Option To Add Events to Stories: Hugely useful if you’re trying to shill an event using influencer endorsement. Or, er, I don’t know, invite people to your birthday party or something.
• Whatsapp Business Gets Better Customer Service Features on Desktop: This basically brings a whole host of features that were already available to Whatsapp Business users on mobile to the desktop / web experience, such as ‘Quick Replies’, chat filters and labels for users. I think Whatsapp is still hugely underexploited by most businesses for this sort of thing – updates like this might go some way towards changing that. Also, well done Whatsapp (ok, Facebook) for realising and acting on the fact that switching between your mobile and your desktop whilst working is, quite honestly, the greatest travail of the modern age and doing something about it.
• Some Largely Tedious LinkedIn Updates: As part of last year’s thrilling updates to LinkedIn Pages, this latest round up tweaks makes it easier for users to keep up with information from Company Pages – so you can now get information about a company’s staff more easily, and (this is exciting!) find out the most relevant hashtags for any business on their LinkedIn Page (I know, I’m tumescent at this too!). This is, in the main, individual-focused rather than business, but there is probably something you can do with the hashtag stuff if you care about LinkedIn and the dreadful people that spend time on there.
• Google Launching Political Ads Centre: So, India is having a general election later this year (April/May, to be precise) – in advance of what one can confidently predict is going to be a pretty spectacular shtshow of digital misinformation, Google is following in Facebook and Twitter’s footsteps by releasing information about political ads bought on its platform, showing who paid for them and how much was spent – this will inevitably be rolled out globally in due course, so, you know, BE READY.
• Social Media Guidelines For Influencers: So this week a bunch of famouses admitted what we’d all known forever – to whit, they were getting paid by brands to shill tat for them on the socials without going through the tedious and unappealing process of actually disclosing the payment. But! Now they are NEVER GOING TO DO THAT AGAIN, and they are pledging to abide by these guidelines instead! Once again, I feel the need to point out that none of this stuff will be relevant to you, you lovely, ASA-compliant advermarketingprdrones, but, just in case you’re wondering, the meatiest bit of this is as follows: “unclear use of hashtags, for example: using #sp; #spon; #client; #collab; etc; adding #ad directly after the name of the brand or business (for example #[BRANDNAME]ad); when the disclosure (for example #ad, #advert) is not prominent because it is hidden at the end of or among other text and/or hashtags”. Interestingly there doesn’t appear to mention the practice of social media agencies using multiple meme-type accounts that they own to boost posts featuring brands that are paying them without actually disclosing that payment – I do wonder what The Social Chain make of all this.
• Google Advanced Search Operators: A useful, up-to-date and pleasingly practical guide to all the stuff you can do using Google search. Read it – as I never tire of pointing out to people (they tire of it quite a lot, though), my entire working life is built on being marginally better at using Google than most of the people who employ me. You too could be a shiftless webmong with no drive, ambition or even ‘career’ to speak of!
• James Whatley’s 2019 Trend Gubbins: James Whatley and Marshall Manson used to write Ogilvy’s annual trend report – which I featured on here a couple of times, as it was less eye-gougingly stupid than most trend things written by agencies. They have now both left the agency, but James has written up some of his trend predictions/observations on LinkedIn (yes, I know, he’s a thought leader!) – this links to the first of them (you can find the others at the bottom). Covering Stories, Audio and Regulation, and a lot of other stuff besides, this is sensible and well-informed stuff.

By Shaun Tan

NEXT UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE A PRETTY INCREDIBLE MIX WHICH COLLATES THE SOUNDS OF 2017 IN A FRANKLY ASTONISHING COLLAGE!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IT WOULD BE AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THE QUALITY OF REPORTING WERE NEWS ORGANISATIONS TO BAN THEIR REPORTERS FROM USING TWITTER FOR A WEEK, PT.1:

• Dreams: So it’s 7:48am as I type this, and as per usual I have opened up 40-odd tabs to write this next section, and clicked on ‘Dreams’ to remind me of what it was and BLIMEY is it a somewhat psychedelic kick in the frontal cortex with which to start the day. A new webproject by Web Curios favourites the National Film Board of Canada, Dream is basically a…no, hang on, here: “Dream is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Edouard Benoit-Lanctôt. You can navigate the animated dreamscapes created by artists Caroline Robert and Vincent Lambert. You might also stumble across the illustrated dreams of people who participated in our live draw-in events. Each visual memory is there to be morphed and transformed into another memory, creating a unique journey for each dreamer. To interact with Dream, you can click anywhere, drag, release or even do nothing. As in dreamtime, you cannot “control” the dream but you can influence its content.” This is VERY TRIPPY, but also rather beautiful – that said, I can honestly say that my dreams are NEVER like this.
• 40075: I think that this is a student project by a class at France’s Gobelins school of digital design – regardless, it’s a beautiful little website that invites you to explore it to discover a selection of tracks by six different artists; it’s simple, but the visuals are lovely and it helps that I genuinely like all of the music they’ve picked. Have a play.
• What Do You Genuinely Not Understand?: A prime example of why Reddit is a brilliant website – this thread features a load of people admitting to things that they simply don’t get (what would yours be? Mine range from ‘anything in physics beyond GCSE level’ and ‘why people buy magazines about soap operas that tell them exactly what is going to happen in the soap operas they are about to watch that week’, fyi), with often INCREDIBLY helpful explainers posted by other Reddit users in the comments. Honestly, this is a SUPERB resource for finding out in simple terms stuff like ‘how wifi actually works’ or, er, ‘electricity’. It’s what ‘Explain it like I’m 5’ ought to be, but most of the time isn’t, and it has the added bonus of making you think you’re less stupid than you in fact are for 5 minutes or so.
• Hang The DJ: Communal playlist apps aren’t new, but this is a neat twist on the genre. You hook up your (paid only) Spotify account and the software lets you (and anyone else who logs into your playlist session) add songs, upvote them, downvote them, etc, for the classic ‘illusion of democracy’ party vibe. The clever bit is its use of software to then carry on playing music that feels like the rest of the playlist when people get too drunk / bored to bother adding new stuff – obviously there’s no guarantee that the AI (not actually AI) will do a decent job, but the idea is a decent one.
• Who Owns England?: Let’s be clear – the answer to this question is unlikely to make you feel good about the world (unless said answer happens to be ‘you’). The orange bits on this map are unregistered land – as the site points out, usually, this land has been owned by the same family or institution for many decades. There are some obvious bits – roads, for example, are unregistered but probably owned by the Highways Agency – but having a bit of a zoom around makes you realise how much territory in this country is in the hands of the Church or the Crown or the aristos, in whose hands it’s been forever and who have never had to register it because it’s never been sold. Want some light class-based anger on a Friday (or whenever you happen to be reading this)? You’re welcome!
• Script 8: This is a bit tricky to describe, but bear with me. Script 8 is basically a virtual 8-bit computer, in-browser, which anyone can code on to make simple games in Javascript; whilst initially quite complicated-seeming, there are a wealth of instructions and tutorials on there for anyone wanting to give it a go, along with examples of stuff that other people have made (click ‘cassettes’ in the top nav to check them out). The outputs are very small and very pixel-y, but there’s something rather wonderful about the DIY nature of this, and the live-coding nature of the way it works.
• The Map of the Brain: Friend of Web Curios and oddball digital artist Shardcore was recently commissioned by the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre to do an art about the brain – he turned it into a 17C-style map, which “uses a wide range of conceptual groupings to indicate the functions of the different areas, highlighting the metaphorical chasm between our linguistically bound representations of the mind and the actual functions of the kilo or so of fatty tissue which sits inside our skulls.” What this means in practice is he’s made this LOVELY old-school map featuring a whole load of things which map onto the way we understand different bits of our brain to work – I can’t stress enough how lovely this is, and, whilst the website is a nice way of exploring it, the real draw here is the limited edition run of prints he’s doing of this. Honestly, I could stare at this for HOURS (and no, he’s not paying me for this endorsement, the tight-fisted, silver-fingernailed pervert).
• The Paris Dakar Rally: Or, more accurately, photographs of said rally. You like dusty cars and sand dunes? OH GOOD!
• The Fable Cottage: Such a nice idea, this – Fable Cottage presents a variety of fairy tales, translated by native language speakers into a variety of languages, with the idea that you can use familiar stories in a foreign tongue to help you learn. The site covers English, French, Spanish, German and Italian, and features 5 or 6 tales in each language (so far – they plan on adding lots more), and the functionality is lovely – you can listen to an audio recording of each story as you read along, and each paragraph can be toggled between languages independently so it’s easy to look up words and meanings if you get stuck. This is ace.
• Uncover Harassers: A Chrome extension which will highlight the names of any known harassers on any webpage you navigate to. Which on the one hand is a sort-of nice idea in terms of being able to have a quick and easy visual guide to when a site or individual is discussing someone known to be a sexpest or worse, but on the other is the sort of slightly problematic mob rule-type thing that  characterises the very worst of modern online discourse. At what point does whoever updates the script decide that someone is a ‘verified’ harasser? Still, given the fact that we’ve all collectively decided as a society that nuance is hard and we probably shouldn’t bother with it as a result, this is fine!
• Shodan Safari: This is a link to a TechCrunch article, but I promise it’s interesting – the ‘Shodan Safari’ is the name given to the game that hackery-types play using Shodan, the search engine that surfaces internet-connected devices, in which they find the worst examples of insecure Internet-of-Things-type stuff. Scroll through these and realise that a) wow, there is a LOT of stuff connected to the internet that really doesn’t need to be; b) wow, lots of this stuff is really, really vulnerable; and c) wow, you really, really oughtn’t link your entire physical life to the web unless you know what you’re doing as regards security. On the other hand, though, just scroll through the list and imagine the sort of excellent gentle terrorism you could undertake by remotely taking control of, say, the video displays at Phil’s BBQ Restaurant in Texas and making them all play the party political broadcast for the Natural Law Party on a loop.
• Intern Magazine: An online magazine aimed at “the creative youth, empowering the next generation through content, support and training”. Which, obviously, is appalling, meaningless spaff – I thought everyone was creative these days?! And STOP SAYING CONTENT – but on the other hand might be genuinely useful to any CHILDREN reading this; there’s a lot of genuinely useful practical advice about legal stuff and how to charge for your work, and profiles of interesting (and, to me at least, largely unknown) creatives, and it’s pleasingly non-US centric too. Artydesigny youngsters (or, you know, anyone really, AGE IS JUST A NUMBER oh god I am 40 this year please god take this withered husk to your welcoming bosom and cease the fleshy torment of decay).
• The Baccy Papers: Now this is an interesting repository of stuff – “An archive of 14 million documents created by tobacco companies about their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, scientific research and political activities, hosted by the UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management.” Honestly, as a means of examining exactly how an industry did its dirty work over a 60-odd year period, this is unparalleled – you’ve got internal positioning documents and web materials and basically every bit of propaganda churned out by Big Tobacco in the latter part of the 20th Century. Students of communications and business will find a lot of interesting stuff here – as will any of the rest of you who work for…er…ethically questionable clients and who want a useful primer on how The Bad People go about their Bad Business.
• Magnet Fingers: Charlotte Dan has magnets in her fingertips. This is her little FAQ site, detailing the why and how and what of the project, and as with all homebrew cyborgery (yes, that’s right, CYBORGERY. It is now a word, fcuk off) it’s simultaneously deeply queasy and quite amazing. Don’t try this at home, kids.
• The 2018 Ocean Art Photography Contest: It seems that there is now a different underwater photography award announced each month – still, I personally LOVE pictures of weird fish and creepy marinescapes, so I’m quite happy to keep featuring them. This is a typically excellent selection, with the added bonus of each being accompanied by a short ‘story of the shot’ explanation of when and how it was taken – ctrl+f “face to face” for my favourite, but, honestly, there’s not a duff shot in here.
• Pokemon Shirts: There was a time when wearing an actual dress shirt which had tiny Pokemon integrated into the fabric design would have guaranteed you being the butt of some spirited ribbing, but now, as we live in an era in which even elected political representatives have grown up with videogames as a significant part of their lives and culture, you can probably get away with it. Is that a good thing? Is it? I mean, yes, probably it is, fine, but know that I will still judge you if I see that what looks like a sober pointillist pattern on your collar is in fact a tesselated infinity of Magikarp. This is all in Japanese, by the way, meaning I have literally NO idea whether it’s possible to get your hands on this stuff internationally – knowing the global nostalgiaobsession with Pokemon, though, I don’t doubt that someone enterprising is making a killing with these on eBay.
• Pocket Sprite: Do you want a miniature handheld console running emulation software which can play Gameboy, Game Gear and Master System titles on a piece of kit which you can also use as a keyring? Do you? WHY? Honestly, I think that this is so small as to be unplayable, but the kit does at least seem solid, and the open source nature of the whole thing is interesting and possibly appealing if you’re feeling a bit hackerish. Trust me, though, nothing you play on this will be as good as stuff you can now get on your phone.
• Swish: Swsh describes itself as a ‘social video maker’, and looks like a very, very useful thing indeed if you’re the sort of person who makes a lot of CONTENT for your SOCIALS; basically it’s a suite of tools for video editing, all in one place, which also does all the tedious gubbins of resizing and reframing content for different formats – so you can quickly make stuff that will work on Insta, Stories and Twitter, say, without having to do three separate edits. No word on how good the quality of the output is, but, regardless, this is the future and if you make a living doing video editing for this sort of thing then, well, good luck mate.
• Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts: Fonts that are also mathematical puzzles. I honestly felt so, so stupid looking at many of these that I am including them almost solely so that you will (hopefully) feel the same.
• Console Variations: Do YOU collect videogame and videogame systems? Would YOU like a website dedicated to tracking all the different variations of various consoles throughout history that were ever released? GREAT! You’ll love this site, in that case, which is an insanely comprehensive guide to every single games machine ever released (and it’s about to get a shiny new relaunch too, apparently, should you care about such aesthetic considerations).
• Liquid Cats: So as far as I can tell from other people’s writeups, this is a Twitter thread in which a bunch of people and Japan discuss the age-old internet question “are cats liquid?” and post photos of cats in various poses to prove their point. This is, basically, just a massive thread of floppy felines with the added bonus of the weird formality of the Japanese language – I recommend translating the odd tweet, as the images are improved immeasurably by such sober captions as “Only the one with a high viscosity was found, but we support verification”.
• InCoWriMo: You all know National Novel Writing Month, in which people around the world talk incessantly about the fact they are spending 31 days writing an unpublishable novel that noone will ever, ever read; this is a better, more socially-acceptable variant on that, in which participants will commit to writing one handwritten letter a day throughout the month of February. Think how HAPPY it would make people to receive a bunch of actual proper letters – even if you don’t commit to the whole thing, this is an excellent reason to dust off your Basildon Bond (just typing that made me realise that it’s entirely possible that noone under 30 has the faintest idea of what I mean by that, ffs) and write something to an old friend or relative. GO ON DO SOMETHING NICE FOR A CHANGE INSTEAD OF JUST FCUKING POSTING PHOTOS OF YOUR FCUKING AMAZING PLASTIC LIFE ON INSTAGRAM YOU PATHETIC WHELP.
• The Rappers’ Vocab Project, Updated: The Pudding has updated its iconic ‘Rappers’ Vocabulary Analysis’ thingy with a whole bunch of new artists, many of whom are from the ‘Soundcloud Rap’ end of the hiphop spectrum; feel free to use this as proof of why your younger colleagues’ favourite facially-tattood Xanax-guzzler is in fact a talentless hack compared to THE GOOD OLD DAYS.
• Punpedia: An exhaustive – and at times exhausting – guide to all the possible puns you might ever want to make, organised by theme. You want hundreds of potential balloon-related puns? WHY??? Still, you can find them here. Now I think of it, this is an absolute GOLDMINE for crap PR ideas which need a punny title – or, frankly, for any TV development executives who need a ‘funny’ title from which to work back and extrapolate a format (we all know that this is how it works).

By Jolene Lai

NEXT, TRY THIS SELECTION OF ELECTRO-PSYCHEDELIA WHICH I FOUND ON REDDIT AND IS SURPRISINGLY RATHER GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IT WOULD BE AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THE QUALITY OF REPORTING WERE NEWS ORGANISATIONS TO BAN THEIR REPORTERS FROM USING TWITTER FOR A WEEK, PT.2:

• Psychological ‘Tricks’: Another stupendous Reddit thread, this one listing all the great techniques people have for manipulating each other. Some of these are genuinely amazing and practically witchcraft – honestly, I read this one and did a proper forehead slap of astonishment: “To avoid workplace drama and be well liked is to just compliment people behind their back.” GENIUS. So, er, know that if you ever hear that I’ve said something nice about you I am doing it solely for the long-term social benefit!
• Qlearly: This is a rather nice idea; Qlearly is a Chrome extension which presents a customisable selection of bookmarks, arranged thematically per your preferences, each time you open a new tab; I’ve been using it this week and if, like me, you’re a pathetic creature of habit who looks at the same 60 websites in the same order every day (honest, I’m really fun at parties, promise), it’s will save you literally MINUTES each week.
• 1923 Zine: You may have read that this year a whole bunch of previously copyrighted materials from 1923 became public domain for the first time – this is a truly lovely project by Parker Higgins, who’s crowdfunded a run of monthly zines which will present a different selection of old, perhaps forgotten, culture from the past in each issue. Each one will highlight a work, an artist, a genre, or a medium, and will be sent to a limited list of subscribers – this is such a nice idea, and though all the physical subscriptions are gone, you can still get 12 PDF editions for under a tenner which strikes me as a pretty good deal.
• Seat 61: This is a VERY obsessional but equally hugely useful site, presenting incredibly comprehensive information about train travel all over the world. You want to know how to do a train journey from, say, Stevenage to Magnetogorsk? This site has you covered. Honestly, there is seemingly NOTHING it doesn’t know about travelling by train – the fact it’s maintained by just one bloke is slightly intimidating, frankly.
• Faces of Naples: Sam Gregg is a photographer who spend several years living in Naples and photographing its residents. As he puts it, he wanted to show a different side to the city than that depicted in the classic black and white shots of aspirant mafiosi, smoking aggressively in front of the tower blocks of Scampia. These are some AMAZING faces, several of which are weirdly reminiscent of my granddad. Beautiful.
• 400 Free Ivy League Courses To Take Online: Updated for 2019, this is a wonderful list of online learning resources by America’s most storied academic institutions, covering topics as diverse as Computer Science, Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, Art & Design, Science, Health & Medicine, Data Science, Education & Teaching, Mathematics, Science, Engineering, Personal Development, and Programming. You want to make that resolution to ‘learn something’ concrete? You could do worse than starting here.
• The Beef and Dairy Network: All of the links in Web Curios are RIGOROUSLY VETTED, as I hope you all know and appreciate – except for the podcast ones, because, well, life’s too short, frankly. As such I have NO IDEA whether any of the ones I stick in here are good – I select them based solely on whether they sound interesting. This one very much does, and has been recommended by several people who I think are smart, so here I pass it onto you – The Beef and Dairy Network is a comedy podcast about, er, beef and dairy farming. It’s apparently quite famous and has won awards and stuff. I don’t know, just listen. FFS.
• Van Gogh’s Japanese Prints: I had no idea whatsoever that Vincent Van Gogh was a passionate collector of Japanese art, or indeed that this passion informed and infliuenced his own work over the course of his life. I do now, though, thanks to this new section of the Van Gogh museum’s website which showcases his collection of Japanese art and the manner in which it affected his output. This is a really nice presentation of both the work and associated ideas – is it just me, or do Dutch art institutions do digital stuff so much better than most other places?
• Sphoon Phork: We’re all now wise to the fact that ‘make people angry on the internet’ is now a legitimate PR tactic in 2019, right? Good. Now look at this Kickstarter through that prism. These people are OBVIOUSLY going to launch a podcast or comedy show or a career as digital strategists or something off the back of this, right? That’s the only potential explanation for this idea – turning your phone into an eating utensil via the medium of  plug-in fork and spoon attachments so that you can…no, actually there’s no conceivable point to this at all, which is why it fails as a gag imho; it’s just too obviously stupid. God, what a joyless pr1ck I appear to have become (ha!); sorry, I will try and be more FUN.
• Domain Price Game: Simple and yet weirdly addictive – you’re presented with two domain names, and asked to guess which of them is more expensive. Not only sort-of fun, but an excellent source of ‘wow, I would NEVER have thought of that but I can totally imagine what I would do with it given the opportunity’ business ideas – go on, someone buy ‘iSprayer.com’ for the knockdown price of $3k and make the tubgirl 3.0 website the world needs.
• Cuddleclones: The most creepy thing about this is the name – honestly, doesn’t it put you in mind of some sort of awful ‘preemies-but-actual-cloned-children’-type futurehorrrobusiness? No? – but the whole business is quite weird. The site allows you to commission realistic replicas of your pets – you want a stuffed toy of your dog that looks exactly like your dog? You want a pair of slippers that look like your cat? You want to confuse the everliving fcuk out of your actual, living pets? GREAT! How would your cat react were you to take delivery of a lifesize replica of it? If it’s anything like my girlfriend’s SPECIAL LITTLE GUY he would almost immediately try to fcuk it, but why not buy one and find out for yourself?
• Bury Me My Love: Part game, part interactive fiction, this is the demo version of the recently-released full game which puts you in the shoes of a Syrian refugee. Playing out through simulated messages and texts – and as such, MUCH better when played on a phone – this is a beautifully-written and very much atypical representation of the refugee story, and a wonderful example of how you can use conventions of form and design in interesting ways when telling stories.
• Soft Earth: Finally this week, another beautiful, narrative, literary, mysterious game which is part ghost story, part reminiscence and part something else entirely. Due to certain themes it contains it’s also startlingly contemporary – I don’t want to spoil anything in here, but it very much supports the view that Graham Linehan is wrong about quite a lot of stuff, if you see what I mean.  I think this is lovely – do have a play, it takes under an hour and is better than anything else you’re likely to do in the office today.

By Stas Kalasnikov

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, SOME VERY LISTENABLE D’N’B TO CLOSE OUT THE AFTERNOON!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Cats On Synthesisers In Space: File under ‘self-explanatory’.
• Dogg: I mean, this one too, really.
• Optically Addicted: A very pleasingly-curated selection of odd and interesting visual bits and pieces, by Andrew Davidson.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Erika Lee Sears: An artist from the US (I think) who paints still-life-type scenes and whose style I really find rather lovely.
• Imma.gram: I’m not entirely sure why the concept of the ‘virtual influencer’ is getting another runout in the media now, a full year after Lil Miquela and the other, problematic one whose name I forget came to prominence. Anyway, here’s another one! This is ‘Imma’ and, well, Jesus, the CG here is pretty astonishing. Can someone make a male one soon, though, please, as I’m getting slightly sick of the weirdly fetishy uncannyvalleyness of all the female CG.
• 56 Black Men: An Instagram account accompanying the project of the same name, in which Cephas Williams is presenting representations of young British black men to seek to counter the misrepresentation of them so prevalent in the media and elsewhere. A really nice idea, and the portraits on Insta here are awesome.
• Collectors Weekly: Do you like weird or unusual old stuff? Would you like to see some of it in your Insta feed? GREAT!
• Ocean Ramsey: You may have seen photos and footage in the past week or so of that MASSIVE great white shark, and those frankly mental people swimming next to it, as though it wasn’t several tonnes of tooth and imminent death. This is the Insta account of one of the divers, the spectacularly-named Ocean Ramsey – a woman far braver than I (or you, stop being smug) will ever be, and whose feed will make you want to spend two months in the Cayman Islands learning to freedive (or avoiding tax).
• Turn Studio: By way of an antidote to the sharky terror, this is SUCH beautiful and soothing pottery. Honestly, you will watch some of these videos on a loop, I promise.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Digital Pollution: We’re not, it’s fair to say, short of ‘wow, hasn’t the web sort of ruined everything, eh?’ takes at the moment – Web Curios obviously doesn’t subscribe to this point of view, as, well, without the web its author would almost certainly be resentfully chafing against middle management in a dead-end white collar job somewhere instead of, er, typing thousands of words into the void every week for no personal gain whatsoever – but I rather liked the detail in this one. The basic premise is that the manner in which online systems and services have evolved have led to a point where there is an overwhelming and near-infinite amount of stuff, and the scale of it is damaging in a number of different ways which, really, we need to do something about. “Human society now faces a critical choice: Will we treat the effects of digital technology and digital experience as something to be managed collectively? Right now, the answer being provided by those with the greatest concentration of power is no.”
• Secrecy and Facebook Paranoia: This, on the questions which still surround the effect that Facebook has had, and can have, on the democratic process, is a fascinating piece – not so much for the content as the questions it raises. If we accept that there’s a degree to which we cannot ever really understand exactly how FB works (partly because of economic imperatives to secrecy on their part, partly because of the inherent ineffability of black-box algorithms), and if we also accept that questions about tracking and privacy mean it’s increasingly hard to track the actual effects of online content on secondary online behaviour (how often do users who see certain content on FB go on to perform other, defined actions, for example), then we also have to accept that we’re never going to be able to know exactly what they fcuk systems and platforms like this are actually doing to people and society. Which is, when you think about it, perhaps sub-optimal.
• The Purpose Paradigm: 2018 was the year in which purpose-led marketing became a huge and widespread thing, and 2019 kicked off with more of the same with the Gillette ad. Of course, as this piece rightly points out, it’s all rubbish – a publicly-traded company has its primary duty towards its shareholders, not some amorphous idea of ‘society’, and as such will only ever consider doing the ‘right’ thing if it has some likely bottom-line benefit. Meanwhile, the procession of platitudinous commitments to ‘initiatives’ and ‘pledges’ of support for causes are doing an excellent job of making it look as though actual, practical action is being taken when, in fact, it’s often nothing more than surface-deep. I’m not for a second suggesting that brand’s shouldn’t stand for something – and obviously as a pinko lefty snowflake, I’m all for them saying ‘feminism good, racism and ignorance bad’ and suchlike, but, please, let’s not pretend that a) brands care; or b) that brands are going to be the ones fixing the world. They really aren’t.
• You Can’t Escape Amazon: Gizmodo is running a series of articles this week in which its staff attempt to avoid the big 5 tech firms entirely and write up their experiences; this kicked off with Kashmir Hill trying to not use Amazon for a week and, well, you can guess how that went. This piece does an excellent job of demonstrating how deeply Amazon is plugged in to literally every aspect of modern life – not through its retail services but through AWS, which basically seems to be involved on some level with 80+% of the world’s web pages. Which is, honestly, insane. Out of interest, any journalists want to look into the number of sites hosting BAD STUFF are on AWS or related servers? I reckon there’s something in that if you want to p1ss off Amazon’s PR team for a few days.
• The Soros Conspiracy: A fascinating explanation of the various forces that have spent the past few years using George Soros as shorthand for ‘everything that’s bad about a globalised world’, and how the Hungarian has been been demonised by ‘populist’ (or, if you prefer, racist) politicians in Italy, Hungary and elsewhere. Most depressing of all is the fact that it’s basically some fcuking political consultants behind all of this – imagine being so removed from humanity that you see elections as nothing more than interesting machines for you to play with rather than, you know, important mechanisms for human self determination that aren’t designed for you to fiddle with ‘just to see if you can’.
• Masa World: Brilliant profile of Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, the man who’s intuition is seemingly providing a large part of the direction for the world’s business and economy. The numbers in this are astonishing – HOW many billions does Softbank have?! There’s not much in the way of hard questions being asked here, fine, and the lack of any sort of enquiry into the ethics of this all basically being Saudi cash is depressingly predictable, but as a look at what is possibly the most influential organisation in the world right now it’s certainly eye-opening.
• The AOC Phenomenon: Is she the Messiah? Is she a good long bet for President in 2032? Or is she an intelligent young woman who it’s too early to judge, but who’s a welcome breath of fresh air in the otherwise fetid world of US politics? This is a good Rolling Stone piece which mainly takes the latter point of view, but does an excellent job of pointing out quite how discomfiting the establishment on both sides of the divide have found her.
• The Young Left’s Anti-Capitalism Manifesto: The above is an excellent companion piece to this, which is a broader look at the ‘new anticapitalism’ of which AOC herself is a part. Focusing on a few activists and organisers across the US, this presents a picture of an interesting and distinct and vocal cadre of young Americans who genuinely believe they can stop ‘socialism’ being quite the dirty word it’s been for so long in the US. It’s interesting to read this with one eye on the UK; part of me think it’s almost a shame that the parallel conversation here has been so totally coopted by Momentum which is in many ways a tricky and unpopular and offputting vehicle for lots of ideas which one feels ought to have broader appeal here at the pointy end of late-period capitalism.
• Killing a Goat With a Stun Gun: You read that other Jack Dorsey article, right? The one in which he once again comes across so badly that you wonder whether he’s doing it on purpose, but then realise that it’s because he long ago stopped ever hanging out with anyone who’s not a super-rich, self-proclaimed genius and therefore noone’s said ‘hey, Jack, you sound like an absolute tool and, as it happens, not actually very bright’? Anyway, this is a wonderfully baffled piece about how WEIRD everything is now and I think you will find it very relatable.
• Geocities and the Internet Suburbs: A lovely bit of internet nostalgia, looking back at the Geocities era – the nice thing about this piece is that it doesn’t focus on the aesthetics of the time as they usually do, but instead the very odd early-web habit of attempting to make virtual space somehow mimic physical space through the use of terms like ‘neighbourhoods’ and the like. The section on the original Amsterdam website – which was arranged as ‘flats’ within which people could have their own webpages – was honestly fascinating, and the way in which digital architecture impacts the evolution of content is a really interesting area of enquiry.
• Recording The Stradivarius: In Cremona, they are working to preserve the sounds of Stradivarius violins. This is a lovely little piece about the challenges inherent in capturing such deep and layered sounds in the modern world; honestly, it feels a bit like reading a short documentary film, in the best way.
• Clean Musicians: This piece combines interviews with a selection of musicians who once weren’t sober but now are; it covers their addictions, their rock bottoms, the oddity of creating sober when once you would only ever create whilst fcuked, and some truly great anecdotes. Steven Tyler is a man who I imagine could keep this schtick up for literally weeks, but the standout quote in here is the one from the Eagles’ Joe Walsh: “When I stopped doing cocaine, it was amazing to me that I didn’t need to carry a gun anymore. I just didn’t need one!”. Life lesson right there, kids.
• Caroline Calloway, Redux: You may recall Caroline Calloway and her influencer workshop ‘scam’ from last week – this week this piece dropped, in which a reporter from New York Magazine attended one of said workshops and wrote up the experience. This is just delicious – the evident antipathy between Calloway and the attendant media, the correction at the end…it’s all just perfect. It’s also worth noting, though, that the non-media attendees seemed to think that the $170-odd that they spent on a day of listening to some Instaperson’s life anecdotes in what was essentially a really, really expensive meet-and-greet was money well spent so, well, more fool us.
• Meme and Theme Accounts: The latest in a long line of articles about ‘things that kids are doing on Insta which you will see brands co-opt in a few weeks’ time and which won’t be cool in two months’, this is about the rising phenomenon of ‘meme and theme’ accounts (which, honestly, I can’t be bothered to explain – just read the piece) and, more interestingly, the ways in which young people are twisting Insta’s features to make them work for them. The idea of using a ‘Cover’ image on an Insta post with a bunch of subsequent images for ‘depth’ is a really smart one, and I can think of LOADS of genuinely quite good brand-ish applications (SOMEONE PAY ME FOR THEM PLEASE).
• An Oral History of Office Space: I love the film Office Space, which contains the single line which most-effectively encapsulates my personal attitude to working life – to whit, “I don’t like it…I’m not going to go any more”. If you’re a fan of the film, this will be a great reminder of why you ought to watch it again; if you’re not, LEARN.
• Hagfish Slime: You wouldn’t necessarily think that an article about the inauspiciously-named hagfish would be this interesting, but you would be WRONG. MARVEL at the fact that hagfish slime is 10,000 softer than Jello-O! RECOIL at the video of what happens to the slime when it’s removed from water! IMAGINE the fun you’d have if you could get your mitts on a bucket of this stuff! Anyone know a friendly aquarium?
• Super Patriotic Anime Youth Wars!: Thanks to Wilson, Curios’ China Correspondent, for sending me this, a brilliantly odd story about how the historical rivalry/conflict between Japan and China is now being played out through Manga, an increasingly popular medium in the People’s Republic and one which is causing a degree of consternation at its potential to erode or subvert ‘traditional’ values. I just vanished into a pleasing 90-second reverie about a parallel universe in which we enact soft war with Europe through our smuggling of The Beano into their schools, which tells you a little about how INCREDIBLY tired I am right now. 11:26. One hour left. ONWARDS!
• An Interview With Leigh Alexander: This accompanies a scifi short story she wrote for VICE, which is linked to in the piece – I found the interview more interesting than the fiction, though, not least for observations such as this one: “I think the social media environment creates a compulsion to be connected, and I think it is gradually training some of us to expect more stimulation, more interaction, and more “reward” than we once would have been comfortable with in a similar period of time. It often feels like I’m frying circuits or something by going through so many things, with so many people.”
• Does Journalism Have a Future?: A question which will raise a miserable smile from Buzzfeed and Huffington Post staffers this week. This essay in the New Yorker covers a couple of books on the topic published recently, including Rusbridger’s, and serves as a decent overview of the past 40 years in news. I did particularly like its slightly sniffy observation that The Guardian, whilst having done an excellent job of refinancing itself through donations, doesn’t actually contain very much actual reporting any more so much as a series of impassioned op-eds along predictable political lines (and I say that as someone who likes and backs the Guardian).
• Maze: I had NEVER heard of this puzzlebook, but I absolutely adored this piece about it – go in cold, it really is beautifully-written.
• Precocious Puberty: Puberty is HARD. I imagine it’s even harder when it happens to you when you’re two. This is the incredible story of Patrick Burleigh, whose early life was dominated and defined by his condition, which meant he was a tall, muscular teen with all the expected and attendant sexual urges at the age of about 5. The writing is brilliant, and Burleigh does an excellent job of conveying the guilt and confusion that he must have felt throughout his extended adolescence. Honestly amazing.
• Deliverooing: Laura Seaton in the LRB on being a Deliveroo driver. Such wonderful writing, about “a future in which people sit alone in tall apartment blocks, eating homogenous food prepared by workers in black boxes scattered through public spaces made ghostly by disuse.”
• Sad By Design: This is a bit of a hard read – the writing’s in (poor) translation, I think, or the author’s not writing in their native language (I think they are Dutch) – but the ideas in here make it worth persevering with. “Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way. As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore.” Well quite.
• The Body That Says I’m Here: Finally in this week’s longreads, Carmen Maria Machado writes about her body and all the things she feels about it as a large woman. I loved this – brutal, unsentimental, unrepentant, this is worth a million ‘love my curves’ posts on Insta. Superb.

By Oriana Ingber

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Take 5 minutes to watch this short animation. I promise you it is worth your time, and you will feel better about everything by the end of it. It’s called ‘One Small Step’:

2) Meet Barry Beats. Introduced to me by Internet Oddity Sadeagle, this is a Cornish man who likes making beats. This is his £1 Beat Challenge – he has £1 to spend in the charity shops of Cornwall to make into an excellent beat – and it is UTTERLY CHARMING; Barry is lovely and gentle and obviously an absolute fcuking expert when it comes to cratedigging, and the whole thing is made immeasurably better by his gentle West Country burr and, honestly, if the BBC can keep making Doctors then surely they can chuck £50k at making a series out of this for BBC3 ffs:

3) This is an animation done entirely in Google Earth (it makes more sense when you watch it, promise) and it is AMAZING:

4) ‘Popular song remade with clips cut together from films’ is not a new thing, but I think this version of MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’ is the most impressive I’ve ever seen – they absolutely nail the cadence of some of these lines, and I can’t begin to imagine the work that went into this., Enjoy:

5) Finally this week, have a truly wonderful piece of verse by Mikael Techane – if you only watch one of these, please make it this one; it’s beautiful, and not a little heartbreaking, and is called ‘Boys Like Us’. THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK BYE BYE BYE HAVE FUN BYE I HOPE THAT YOU HAVE A LOVELY FEW DAYS OFF AND THAT IT’S NOT TOO COLD BUT JUST COLD ENOUGH IN THAT NICE, CRISP WAY THAT’S SO PLEASANT IF THE SUN SHINES AND THAT YOU GET TO GO ON A NICE WALK OR EAT A GOOD MEAL OR GET ABSOLUTELY BANJAXED ON WHATEVER COMBINATION OF SUBSTANCES YOU LIKE BEST, BASICALLY WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY IS THAT I WANT YOU TO HAVE A NICE TIME AND BE HAPPY BECAUSE I LOVE YOU THANKS FOR READING BYE BYE!:

You want a summary of the past week? Here you go. Listen, IT’S ALL TRUE. 

 Yes, whatever the opposite of perpetual motion is we in the UK seem to have invented and perfected it. What’s going to happen next week? What? Nothing meaningful, but an awful lot of pointless hot air and rhetoric? Nah, thanks mate, I’m alright actually. 

Thank God, then, for the neverending torrent of content that the web provides – hold your breath as I raise you by the ankle and dunk you bodily into this murky, digital Styx, imbuing you forever with the power of webspaff like some sort of Poundland Achilles of modernity. WATCH OUT FOR YOUR HEELS! This, as ever, is Web Curios!

By Edoardo Ramon

ANOTHER WEEK AND ANOTHER FANTASTIC MIX BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE, WHO REALLY IS RATHER GOOD AT THIS DJING THING!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T REALLY CONTAIN ANY ACTUAL NEWS THIS WEEK AND WHICH YOU CAN PROBABLY SKIP UNLESS YOU HAVE A VERY, VERY STRONG PROFESSIONAL DESIRE TO KNOW ABOUT SOME FRANKLY VERY MINOR PLATFORM CHANGES:

• FB Allows Live VR Streaming: Do you know anyone with a VR headset? An actual person, I mean, not one of us? No, of course you don’t, and nor does anyone else. Still, in the unlikely event that you or one of your friends is one of the seven people who’s actually bought the kit, you’ll now be able to stream whatever underwhelming VR experience you’re having straight to your Facebook feed, for the enjoyment of all your normie friends! I have spent a good minute or so trying to think of an application for this and I am coming up with nothing, but if anyone has any ideas I am ALL EARS.  
• You Can Now Schedule Insta Videos: Well, you can if you’re using an approved third party Insta management tool, like Buffer or Hootsuite. If those words mean nothing to you, please, spare yourself the pain and skip straight to the next section and forget you ever read this.
• Twitter Set To Launch Marginally-Improved Analytics: This is what I’m reduced to writing up, FFS. This is a ‘coming soon’ announcement – basically Twitter will, at some point in the future, start giving users better data on post engagement and the like (although detail on exactly how this is likely to manifest is…patchy at best – as per usual with this stuff, I am slightly in awe at how TechCrunch have managed to spin this into 500 words of deathly prose), as well as creating an ‘events dashboard’ where users will be able to see major events happening that day, or in the future, and see Tweets and additional information about said events in one place through the app; part of the platform’s continuing mission to make itself the default “What’s going on?” app worldwide. “The thinking behind the events dashboard will allow the publishers to figure out — in advance — how they want to participate in that conversation on Twitter — either in terms of the content they publish, or (more hopefully, perhaps) through advertising and promoting content.” Good, eh?
• YouTube Now Lets Users Swipe Through Videos: There is nothing interesting about this ‘news’ at all, but it is a nice example of the ridiculously hypocritical nature of all these companies. Do you remember that time way back in 2018 when all the platforms started adding in features designed, at least ostensibly, to address their inherently addictive nature and to help users track how much time they were spending on pointless digital timesinks? How does that square, do you think, with the development of a feature designed solely to make it easier for users to skip mindlessly through an infinite number of videos? It doesn’t, does it? Anyone would think that these companies don’t care about us at all!
• YouTube Updates Rules On ‘Dangerous Challenges and Pranks’: ‘Pranks that can cause or have caused deaths have no place on YouTube’. GOOD TO KNOW! Obviously this is directed at idiot YouTubers rather than you, you loyal brand custodians, but it’s worth knowing just in case you fancy attempting to create some sort of VIRAL YOUTUBE CHALLENGE SENSATION as part of your next marketing campaign – be VERY CAREFUL not to make it fatal.
• Unproductive Social Year: I do LOVE a pointless agency site, and this is very much a pointless agency site. Grand Bain is a French ‘Creative Design Studio’ based in Paris – this is their showcase site for all the work they did last year, presented month-by-month. It’s very slick and shiny, though simultaneously a touch on the incomprehensible side – I have many favourite bits, including the fact that they seemingly went on holiday for the entirety of February and choose to illustrate this with a bunch of photographs of practically-naked Instagram exhibitionists. The very BEST thing, though, is their actual ‘official’ website which you can find here. Click on it, take a look – what do you notice? That’s right! NO CONTACT INFORMATION. Such a bold, powerful move that I think I might start advising all clients to follow suit – in fact, all websites I consult on from hereon in will be hyperminimalist white-on-white, because form must NEVER be subservient to function!
• Skittles: The Musical: Are YOU a frustrated artist, only working in advermarketingpr because the cruel vicissitudes of fate denied you the chance to pursue your real vocation? Do you feel you have SO MUCH MORE TO CREATE than pointless ads for biscuits, or campaigns to flog more sugarwater? OF COURSE YOU DO! All of us advermarketingprdrones like to think that we’re better than this and that we could do proper creativity given half the chance – in the case of the team doing Skittles, though, they’ve backed themselves fully by deciding to put on an actual musical, about, er, Skittles, instead of buying a Superbowl ad this year. Proceeds will be donated to an anti-AIDS charity, which is A Good Thing, and one would imagine that they will turn it into EXCITING ONLINE CONTENT in some way. But, well, this just sort of smacks of massive agency hubris, doesn’t it?
• Microsoft By The Numbers: Noe hugely exciting, fine, but a decent example of a shiny ‘LOOK AT OUR CORPORATE STORY’ website – this presents a whole bunch of statistics and information about Microsoft’s business, delivered through simple, chunky design; as a way of potentially presenting a corporate report, say, this is rather nice.
• Pinterests Trends for 2019: By way of contrast to the p1ss-poor effort from Snap last week, Pinterest’s trend predictions for the year are really rather good – 100 things that the platform predicts we’re going to see more of, based on search data from the site. So expect to see ‘godparent proposals’ as the latest performative wankery clogging up your socials, and dig out the corduroy from your wardrobe as that’s what you’ll be sporting as the 2019 rolls by. Just accept it, THE DATA HAS SPOKEN.
• The Imperica Predictions Bucket: Lovely Editor Paul (to give him his full, official title) has once again gone through a whole bunch of 2019 predictions documents to see what the common themes are. Apparently EVERYONE thinks that personal data is going to be a big thing this year – can you believe that people get paid for this?  

By Joka

NEXT, TRY THIS SLIGHTLY ODD AND ANGULAR AND MODERATELY SPIKY SLICE OF…ER…HARD-TO-CLASSIFY BUT STILL RATHER GOOD MUSIC BY CASIMIR!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE THAT GILLETTE ADVERT A LOT MORE IF IT DIDN’T LOOK SO MUCH LIKE A GILLETTE ADVERT, PT.1:

• Google’s Game Of The Year: Three weeks into 2019, and already I’m looking back at last year with the sort of wistful nostalgia normally reserved for treasured childhood memories. Come back, with your deepfakes and bum implants and Fyre Festival! If you, too, are scared and unnerved by all the ceaseless, unending novelty of 2019, why not wallow in the comforting funk of the past, courtesy of Google’s Game of the Year, which asks you a bunch of questions about the past 12 months based on Google search trends. What did people search for more, or less, in 2018 than in years past? This is totally pointless, obviously, but it’s sort-of fun.
• Ambrosia: Reasons why 2018 was better than 2019, part x of a series of y – last year, I didn’t know that Ambrosia was a thing. Reader, take a moment to imagine what you might dream up were someone to challenge you to invent a service or product which best encapsulated the dreadful inequalities and perverse power dynamics that maintain here at the pointy end of late-stage capitalism. Done that? Good, now click the link and discover that even your imagination probably couldn’t match up to the creepy, wrong oddness of Ambrosia, a service which – and please, take a moment to savour the horror of this – is offering rich people the opportunity to inject themselves with the blood of the under-30s for $8,000 a litre. That’s right! The ACTUAL BLOOD (well, fine, plasma, but still) of a young person, transfused into you for a few paltry grand so that you can NEVER DIE. Obviously the ‘science’ behind this is iffy at best – this is the very definition of fools being parted from their money – but the whole concept is so cripplingly, staggeringly awful. You know who else liked messing with the blood of young people? The charming Countess Bathory. Is that really whose memory you want to be channelling, rich people? Oh, by the way, if anyone from the creamy Devonian dessert business of the same name is reading this, PLEASE can you make a comic riff on this offering people the opportunity to replace their blood with rice pudding? Weirdly, the Ambrosia website is a lot less sinister if you imagine all the copy being spoken aloud in a West Country accent.
• The Best Subreddits: A EXCELLENT and very useful (if by ‘useful’ you mean ‘procrastination facilitating’) Reddit thread in which a bunch of the site’s admins share their favourite subReddits. There are a HUGE number listed here, many of which I’d never heard of before, and (whilst I’ve not clicked on all of them) as far as I can tell they’re all SFW, meaning you can basically spend the rest of your afternoon clicking happily through a random and varied selection of webspaff on topics as diverse as Black Labradors, satisfying lathework and reflective cake decoration. My personal favourites are all the ones that used to be devoted to bongo but have now been repurposed to feature wholesome cat content, but you will doubtless find your own.
• The Year in Band Names 2018: Once again, the AV Club pulls together its list of the best band names it came across in the course of 2018, and once again there are some truly titanic efforts. Special mentions to Nelson Bandela, Adolf Shitter (it’s not big, it’s not clever, but it is quite funny) and Cave Bastard, but I think my personal favourite is probably Fcuk Face Ricky and the Motherfcuking Cnutpounders for their fairly clear decision to eschew commercial success in favour of maintaining their artistic integrity. Well done Ricky! Never sell out!
• There Is A Bot For That: A bot database. But, er, a good one! This effectively functions as a search engine for bots across platforms – it covers FB, Telegram, Twitter, Slack and a few other platforms, and whilst the search function is a bit iffy it’s a useful way of seeing what others have built around a particular theme. Are we going to attempt to make bots a thing again in 2019, now we’ve all accepted that this still isn’t the year of VR? No? Oh well.
• Security Checklist: Per the Predictions Bucket up there, issues around personal data and security are going to continue to be BIG this year. Given that, this is possibly a useful website to take a look at and maybe share with people – it’s a list of things that one can do to ensure one’s online security, such as installing a password manager, or using a VPN, with links to helpful services and free products and explanations of what all the terms mean and why they are important. It’s the sort of thing you could usefully send to relatives who maybe aren’t quite as good at this stuff as you are, basically, though be aware that there’s an outside chance that it will freak them out to the point that they just unplug the internet forever and go full luddite (which, look on the bright side, will probably stem the tide of appalling, unfunny memes they send you on Whatsapp).
• Project Alias: Did you get an Amazon Echo thingy for Christmas? Are you now one of the millions of homes worldwide being surveilled by MechaBezos and his evil empire? Do you, well, rather wish you weren’t? You’ll like Project Alias, in that case, an art project by Bjørn Karmann which offers you the instructions to make your very own home assistant blocking device. Effectively Project Alias is a small box that sits atop your Alexa or Google Home device and confuses it with white noise to ensure that it can only pick up audio inputs at the point you tell it to and not before. “Alias acts as a middle-man device that is designed to appropriate any voice activated device. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant when placed on top of it. The speakers of Alias are used to interrupt the assistance with a constant low noise/sound that feeds directly into the microphone of the assistant. First when Alias recognises the user created wake-word, it stops the noise and quietly activates the assistant with a sound recording of the original wake-word. From here the assistant operates normally”. One the one hand, it’s a very good idea; on the other, it really oughtn’t need to exist. STOP LISTENING TO ME, JEFF! STOP IT!
• Infinite Frustration: Modernity, in a Twitter account. You will feel very, very seen by this feed.
• The Startup Playbook: If I’m perfectly honest with myself, I don’t imagine for a second that any entrepreneurs read this – they’re all too busy GRINDING and HUSTLING and LIVING THE STARTUP LIFE and drinking coffee and working out exactly how much of their souls they’re willing to sell to the VC to waste time on webspaff. Still, should you be contemplating the personal pivot from ‘webmong’ to ‘startup businessmong’, you might find this a useful resource; it’s compiled by Sam Altman of Y Combinator, and is a starting guide for entrepreneurs and founders to some of the things that they might want to consider, particularly from the point of view of securing investment. Should you take inspiration from this and end up starting a business which ends up floating for a billion then, well, please remember where you found the link, eh?
• An Amazing SmartMirror: I was slightly disappointed by the cavalcade of pointless tech emerging from CES this year – aside from the neon smart toilet, there was a general absence of truly preposterous stuff, and I didn’t see anyone attempting to persuade the public that their fridge really needs an internet connection. This is by far and away the most impressive thing I saw online over the course of the show – a smart mirror set up to allow the user to experiment with different hair colours on the fly. Obviously it’s a very specific single use case, but the tech is VERY slick – the first transition made me do an actual, proper little gasp, and the whole effect is very much Hollywood SFX-level. If you’re a younger person than me and your entire cultural frame of reference is Harry fcuking Potter, this may remind you slightly of something from the series.

By Jesse Mockrin

NEXT, ENJOY A NEW YEAR HIPHOP MIX BY DJ CHERRYSTONES!

• Inspirat.io: Have we reached peak newsletter? It does rather feel like it (and not just to you reading this crapzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) – I subscribe to about 40 of the damn things (you honestly have NO IDEA of the amount of stuff I consume, honestly – I know it doesn’t feel like there’s any selection process applied at all to the stuff in here, but, really, you should see the stuff I leave out) and it seems like there are a dozen new ones being announced every week and, look, can someone just do a newsletter of newsletters and save me the time, please? Anyway, Inspirat.io is another app which does the whole ‘create a separate inbox for your newsletter intake so that you can free up your main email and stop being guilted out when you see all those unread editions of Web Curios’ thing; you might find it useful (thanks to whoever it was who pointed this out to me earlier this week – I have unaccountably totally forgotten who it was but, well, know that I love you immoderately).
• Design Camera: Are you a graphic designer? Do you often have to create mocked-up images and videos of websites or apps seen on phones? Are you BORED STIFF of doing that? Would you like some software that makes it really easy to create a 3d model of a phone that you can manipulate and export as images or video and integrate into a website or keynote or whatever? No? You fcuking ingrates.
• World’s Writing Systems: This is honestly fascinating. “This web site presents one glyph for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 146 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode.” If you’ve ever wanted to obscure the written form of some pretty obscure languages then MY WORD are you going to enjoy this – my personal favourite’s probably proto-Elamite (the hipster’s choice) but pick your own! Oh, and you can even buy a poster of all the languages if you’re a proper enthusiast.
• Mirrors for Sale: Come for the mirrors, stay for all the people who seemingly don’t know how reflections work.
• A Collection of Tights: One of those webthings which really does throw up more questions than answers. Do you have £30k burning a hole in your pocket? Do you have an obsession with hosiery? Do you have space to store an entire shipping container of assorted tights, stockings and suspenders? Well aren’t you in luck? This is a truly bizarre eBay listing – “Everything is either a small or medium. Collected over 15 years from various sources”. WHY THOUGH?! WHAT SOURCES?!  “What isn’t clear from the photo is how many there are here. This is a 50sqft container and they take up most of the space in there. The pile is almost 6 feet tall. The photo doesn’t do it justice – the collection has to be seen to be believed.” I quite want to see AND believe. Can we organise a trip to Salford to see the tights? I want to see the tights. But, and I mean this with no malice, I probably don’t want to meet the seller.
• Heads of Psychopaths: Sebastian Onufszak is a German designer and illustrator – he’s created a series of film posters for movies featuring psychopaths (Taxi Driver, Eraserhead, etc) with a particular, unsettling and rather effective collage/head-type aesthetic. These are gorgeously sinister, and I would rather like one as a print.
• The Diss List: Thanks to Dan for the tip – this websites collects BEEFS and keeps a running vote open about who’s winning. Special props to XXXTentacion, who despite being dead appears to still be in running beefs with half a dozen different people, which is some strong dedication to the thug life.
• Play.ht: We’re all so busy, aren’t we, and so short of time, and there’s so much to know and digest and learn. One solution is to just accept that you’re pretty much guaranteed to just exist in a state of perennial perplexed confusion for the rest of your days and so you may as well just accept it and retreat into a world of videogames and reality TV; the other might be to OPTIMISE YOUR TIME by using something like Play, which is another text-to-speech app which will take whatever articles you feed it and convert them to audio files which you can then listen to through the app. As is now essential, you can listen back to the pieces at 2x or 3x speed, meaning you can cram War and Peace-length content into your lunchbreak. Whether or not you’ll understand, learn or remember anything this way is moot – YOU ARE CONSUMING INFORMATION AND THAT’S WHAT COUNTS.
• Papier: A note-taking app as a Chrome extension – open a new tab and you can take notes right in the browser, which will be saved and persistent across browsing sessions. Which, obviously, you can just do with an open Gdoc, but if you’re some sort of Google refusenik PERVERT then you might find it useful.
• Square Off: This is quite amazing, but I almost didn’t feature it due to being made unconscionably furious by the site’s tagline: “It’s Alive. Literally!” NO NO NO FFS THAT ITS LITERALLY WHAT IT IS NOT – THIS IS NOT ALIVE. IT IS A CHESS SET. Still, it’s a very remarkable chess set, with a proper wooden board and carved pieces and a 20-level opponent for solo play, and FCUKING MAGNETS in it which makes the pieces move on their own (seriously, this is basically magic as far as I’m concerned), and you can play with an actual other person through a variety of popular chess apps and, basically, if you know someone who’s an enthusiast this is potentially the best present you will ever get them.
• Industry Secrets: This is a GREAT Twitter thread, compiling all the industry secrets that @girlziplocked received when she asked people to DM her ‘things that you know of in your line of work that the general public would be scandalised by’. Who do you think the Guardian columnists who don’t get anywhere near as much traffic as you’d expect are? Who’s that MENDACIOUS LIAR suggesting that all the metrics in advertising are made up? Alternately scary, depressing and very funny, there are revelations in here that will shock you to your very core. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE DOMINO’S PIZZA TRACKER IS A LIE?!
• Bad Movies: This is an OLD website, and all the better for it – a wonderful repository of writing about genuinely bad cinema, featuring reviews of literally hundreds of appalling trash cinema. If you can click on this and not find at least half a dozen films you HAVE to watch then, well, I’m not sure I like you; can someone please help me track down a copy of ‘Count Chockula’ (a vampire who hates blood but loves chocolate), please? Have any of you seen ‘Please Don’t Eat My Mother’? I reckon at least half of these will be on YouTube somewhere, should you want an idea of what to do with the rest of your afternoon.
• Cooking By Ear: This is a genuinely excellent idea and one I’m sort of annoyed I didn’t think of; Cooking By Ear is a cook-as-you listen podcast, in which the host and a guest chef presenter talk you through the preparation of a dish, in realtime – the idea being that you can listen to prep instructions and general cheffy chat while you prep your dinner. For the right brand this is SUCH an easily stealable concept, so, er, get stealing – this is crying out for a version that doesn’t use the infuriating and STUPID (yes, STUPID, I’m standing by this) ‘cups’ measurement system which America persists with in perverse and pigheaded fashion.
• Gofukuyasan: This site is, selfishly, all in Japanese, but use Google’s ‘translate’ feature and then dive blissfully into the world of Japanese fabric – this shop sells kimonos and other Japanese textile products with over 4,000 different designs. You want a kimono featuring cats who all look a bit like your SPECIAL LITTLE GUY (o hai Leboswki!)? No problem! You want one featuring a variety of, er, vaguely anthropomorphised Samurai fruitbats? I mean, why not? Honestly, were it not for the fact that I would look unpleasantly like a very, very seedy skaghead in a kimono I would buy the fcuk out of some of these things.
• A Collection of Truly Awful B-Movies: Full versions of some genuinely appalling ‘classics’ of mid-20thC cinema here, from the fabulously-named Hyperspace Gremloids (seriously, HOW have we never heard of this before?) to the lost Harvey Keitel ‘masterpiece’ ‘Star Knight’. Wobbly scenery, rubbery monsters, and scenery-chewing performances abound – go on, head to a meeting room with a pot of coffee and some biscuits and pretend you’ve got a pitch rehearsal on or something, I won’t tell.
• Whores of Yore: Genuinely amazed that I’ve not featured this before, but anyway. Whores of Yore “aims to give voice to the voiceless, to start a much-needed conversation on the history of sexuality, the plight of modern sex workers, and, ultimately, to extract the prudish stick from the arse of society. The archive provides a platform for academics, activists, sex workers, and archivists to share their experience, research and stories around sexuality and sex work. The purpose of this archive is not to create a goldfish bowl for others to stare into, but to provide a platform and invite academics, activists, sex workers, and archivists to share their experience, research and stories around sexuality and sex work. The history of sexuality will be placed side by side with sexuality today in the hope we can join up some of those conversations.” Hugely interesting on the history of sex work, with a wonderful archive of vintage erotica to boot -SFW in the main, though probably avoid the pinup galleries unless you want to have a full and frank conversation with the nice people in HR.
• Teletext Babez: A collection of pages from German and Dutch Teletext, advertising sex lines, strip clubs and the like, complete with BEAUTIFUL blocky 8-bit representations of STUNNAHS and HUNKS – weirdly, it seems like the clone/leather daddy look works far better in Teletext than your standard Page3-type pinup. Technically sort-of NSFW, but, really, the idea that anyone could become in any way titillated by the imagery on this page is sort of ridiculous to me (though if any of you should feel a sudden tumescence on perusing the garish pixelflesh then, well, know that I don’t judge you).
• Asciipr0n: In a similar vein, this is a whole website devoted to bongo rendered in ASCII. On the one hand, yes, much of this is technically pr0nography. On the other hand, well, look at the standard (I promise you, this one is ENTIRELY SFW). I know that it’s not right or nice or kind to look at this sort of thing and make assessments about the people who make it but, really, WHO is dedicating themselves to making smut out of keyboard characters? How does one discover that this is one’s particular kink?
• Handulum: This is simple, addictive and INFURIATING – Handulum’s a little game on Newgrounds in which you have to get a ball from one end of the map to the other, by swinging. If you can get beyond level 7 you have my admiration and respect (and, I guarantee, you will have wasted a good hour of your employer’s time).
• Cleaning House: Finally this week, this is a tiny little short storygame about cleaning a house of a former inhabitant’s belongings. You have no context, you have no backstory, just the observations of you character as it moves around the environment, and it is BEAUTIFULLY done; I’m not ashamed to admit that this made me FEEL quite a lot, but in a quietly beautiful and sad way. I think this is a gorgeous piece of work, give it a quick go.

By Janna Yotte

LET’S FINISH UP THE MIXES WITH THIS PLAYLIST OF EVERY SONG THAT JOEY COSCO, WHO I HAVE NEVER MET, GOT STUCK IN HIS HEAD LAST YEAR!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Burgers in Anime: Lovely, beautiful, tasty cartoon hamburgers.
• Stairs in Anime: Lovely, beautiful, tasty cartoon stairs.
• Exonauts: A lovely retroscifi moodboard.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Only one this week, weirdly, as about 99% of the insta stuff I came across was incredibly tedious travel influencer tat
• If You High: Still, the sole Insta here is a good one this week – If You High is a feed sharing a variety of weird, cool, odd video clips, some of which you might have seen before but the majority of which are new to me. Big fan of the space shuttle bong here, fyi.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class: Yes, I know, and I’m bored of it too. I know you’ve probably told yourself that you don’t need to read anything else about Br*x*t this week – and, really, you don’t; there’s NOTHING ELSE INTERESTING TO SAY – but make an exception for this NYT piece which is the best articulation of the general sense of angry bafflement that I like to think most people are experiencing right now, and makes a series of comparisons between the current situation and Britain’s disastrous exit from India which you may find pleasing – if anyone writes a better sentence about this whole sh1tshow than “an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers” I’ll be impressed.
• Traditional Masculinity Hurts: I don’t want to talk about the Gillette ad (other than to reiterate the point that it’s so HORRIBLY shiny and P&Gified that it’s hard to take it very seriously), but this piece in the Washington Post, about the idea of ‘traditional’ masculinity as a potentially damaging concept does rather get to the heart of a lot of the masculinist whinging about the brand’s pivot – as the author points out, “in a society in which gender roles have historically been rigid — and that rigidity has placed the lion’s share of power in the hands of one of the genders — it’s possible for the rulers to be harmed right along with the ruled. But that’s what bad systems do. They mess up everyone.” Worth sharing with anyone you know who’s been made irrationally annoyed by a multimillion dollar brand trying to sell more overpriced plastic razors.
• The Public Media Stack: Very much one for those interested in publishing theory or FUTURE OF MEDIA stuff, this is a smart essay by Matt Locke looking at how one might go about building an ecosystem for public media projects, and what infrastructural layers and elements are necessary to create a sustainable public media ecosystem.
• In The Shadow of the CMS: Another slightly techwonky publishing-type piece, this looks at the way in which CMSs impact published content, and how the consolidation of these systems actively affects the way in which the web is presented and structured and, to an extent, what it comprises. Works a bit as a companion piece to the above, touching as it does on the need for a more diverse and less monopolised infrastructure.
• That Jack Dorsey Interview: This came out overnight and, well, WOW is it a zinger. It’s a truly remarkable interview, one which makes its subject look, simultaneously, stupid, blinkered, selfish, out of touch, myopic, ignorant, closed-minded, petty…There are a lot of great quotes in here (if by ‘great’ you mean ‘the sort of thing that you read through your fingers’), but my personal favourite comes in the opening paragraph: “A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound like they should probably mean something, too. Dorsey is just hard enough to follow that it’s easy to assume that any confusion is your own fault, and that if you just listen a little more or think a little harder, whatever he’s saying will finally start to make sense. Whether Dorsey does this all deliberately or not, the reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.” Is everyone running a tech business a total fcuking cnut? They are, aren’t they? Christ.
• Amazon Stands for Nothing: From one colossally unappealing tech bro to another! This piece contrasts the prevailing Silicon Valley orthodoxy of companies with a MISSION or a VISION to IMPROVE THE WORLD (Facebook’s ‘better connected’, Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ and indexing all the world’s information, etc) with Amazon’s fairly simple “we just want to be in charge of every single sale that happens in the world, ever, and want to become violently, preposterously wealthy in the process’ worldview. The observation that Amazon’s end goal is in many respects to disappear is an interesting one – you can see it with Prime, AWS and various other elements of its service, that exist solely to remove friction from the customer experience; Amazon doesn’t so much exist as embody an idea of ease, and, as the article points out, “There’s no backlash if there’s nothing to really think about.”
• Dropgang: On the rise of the dead drop in online marketplaces – that is, rather than getting your drugs mailed to you taped into a cassette box or something, it’s now more likely that you’ll be told to go and look under the third park bench on the left to find a package. This is fascinating – I had no idea that you could integrate beacon technology into this stuff for relatively little cost, but the ability to create fairly complex networks of drop points that can be activated and deactivated remotely depending on circumstances is really quite cool, and there is a LOT of stuff that you can learn from this for fun, non-nefarious activities, even if you’re not planning on setting up your own powderflogging business on Telegram.
• A Strange Argument for the Commonplace: I’ve mentioned Peter Singer quite a lot in here, I think, and my weird obsession with the consequences of utilitarian theory (sorry about that) – this is a discussion of Tyler Cowen’s recent essay ‘Strange Attachments’, in which they argue for a form of utilitarianism unconstrained by temporal difference – that is, a system whereby one should act to achieve the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, regardless of how far in the future those people may live, which by extension means we ought always prioritise the needs of future generations over our own as there will, as a matter of mathematical certainty, be more of them than us. Fascinating stuff and genuinely one of the more interesting expansions of Singer’s original premises I’ve read in years.
• Ultimate Millennial Marketing: A new drink has been launched in the US. It’s called ‘Recess’ and its fizzy and nonalcoholic and has vague connotations of wellness, and its marketing is basically every single millennial touchpoint you’ve ever heard of, from the flavours to the colour of the can to the slight air of ironically-detached sincerity and mild anxiety inherent in the copy…You might want to bookmark this just to see how many of the tropes it covers off you see in other, parallel product launches over the remainder of 2019.
• Pre-Raphaelites and the Wombat: I can honestly say that I had no idea whatsoever of the pre-Raphaelites obsession with the wombat. Did you? This is a GREAT article, full of wonderfully silly detail and presenting Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the rest as, well, really quite daft people. I would like to see more of this, please – historical greats recontextualised as kooky oddballs with obscure mammal fetishes. One does rather feel for the pet wombats, though.
• A Flower For Your Thoughts: A brief history of floriography – that is, the practice of delivering coded messages in bunches of flowers as a means of secret communication. Such a wonderful concept, and it reminded me of this website which my friend Ed made back in the day and which offers you the opportunity to buy coded bouquets from selected florists. Send someone a coded message of hate TODAY!
• The True Story of Brainstorm: Brainstorm was going to be a big film – starring Natalie Wood, Christopher Walken and others, it had big studio backing and big names and technical innovation, and all the signs suggested it was going to be a hit…until Wood went on a sailing weekend with her husband Robert Wagner and Walken towards the end of filming, and died. This is one of those crazy Hollywood stories that crop up every now and again and on which Walken has, unsurprisingly, remained tight-lipped – the article deals not only with the story of Woods’ death, but also with what happened to the film in its aftermath; this is a genuinely odd and slightly creepy tale.
• The Nike Smart Shoe: So Nike have announced they’ve made a smart self-tightening trainer controlled by your phone – which, frankly, I’m not hugely interested in. This WIRED piece as part of the promotion is, however, an object lesson in how to do this sort of comms; you can see the thinking behind it all the way (or at least you can if you have the misfortune to do PR for a living at all), and the access they granted to talent shapes the piece perfectly. It’s basically a 3,000 word puff piece on the brilliance of Nike and its design team, which I imagine is exactly what the brand was going for – oh, and if you’re interested in magic, self-lacing trainers there’s a lot about those in there too.
• Academic Freedom: A superb essay in the LRB by Sophie Smith, an Oxford Fellow at the same college as John Finnis, emeritus professor of law and legal philosophy. Finnis, you may be aware, has been the subject of a petition by students to remove him from his position as a result of his public-stated views on homosexuality which he considers immoral and ‘akin to bestiality’. Smith, who is herself gay, writes clearly and cogently about the arguments for allowing free expression, and quashes them equally cogently by the end: “Academic freedom is a principle worth defending, but it is foolish to ignore its costs, and who (disproportionately, quietly) bears them.”
• How PUAs Morphed Into The Far Right: Finally, someone’s done an essay (well, a comic in this case) detailing the intellectual links between the PUA (pick up artist) movement and the Far Right. Loses points for not giving Neil Strauss the shoeing he deserves in terms of the normalisation of a lot of this stuff, but in general this is a strong explainer of how the ‘hey, we’re just trying to get laid!’ lads of the early-00s ended up swapping the fedoras for swastikas.
• Instagram Husbands Are No Longer Ashamed: Aren’t they? Really? WHY NOT? The Insta husband is a long-standing trope, but this piece suggests that they are willing to BREAK OUT and CLAIM THEIR RIGHTFUL POSITION as, er…well actually it’s not really that clear, but there’s lots of talk about them being business partners rather than ‘just’ camerapeople, and about the importance for influencers to have a strong presence in their life to keep them GROUNDED and CENTRED and REAL and oh god a plague on all their houses. I mean, really “In September, Ramirez launched The Instagram Husband Podcast, which is focused on telling the stories of the men behind the camera and redefining what it means to be an Instagram husband. Despite the fact that more partners are taking on this role, Ramirez worried that no one was examining the people who play the more behind-the-scenes role in an influencer’s life.” OH GOD HEAVEN FORFEND THAT ANYONE NOT GIVE THE POOR MEN ENOUGH ATTENTION. Mate, NOONE CARES ABOUT YOU. GIVE IT UP.
• When Cat Person Went Viral: I can’t believe it’s been a whole ye…actually, no, I can, Cat Person already feels like an age ago – can you imagine people having serious conversations about that now? No, it would be shouting and firebombs within 5 minutes. Anyway, its author Kristen Roupinian has her debut short story collection coming out soon, and so revisits her memories of her breakout moment in this New Yorker article. There are some interesting observations here on the odd nature of something so personal being so widely discussed, and the sense of ‘self splayed on the slab’ that this inevitably engenders, although I bridled slightly at this line: “Here’s the catch: when you read a story I’ve written, you’re not thinking about me—you’re thinking as me. I’ve wormed my way inside your head (hi!) and briefly taken over your mind.” Hubris, sweetheart, hubris – please don’t tell me how I am thinking when I read, and please don’t presume that your voice and vision are so unique and powerful that they can displace my pretty well-entrenched id.  
• Caroline Calloway and the Influencer Workshop: The first, but certainly not the last, ‘influencers wow wtf’ story of the year – Caroline Calloway is an odd character, a bit Walter Mittyish by all accounts, having secured and then lost a book deal whilst at university based on her Insta feed and then pivoted into wellness bullsh1t as befits her ilk. This is the story of her attempting to flog ‘Influencer Workshops’ – on the one hand, this woman is obviously grifting really hard; on the other, if you’re stupid enough to believe that anyone who does this a) has a SPECIAL SECRET to their success that anyone can replicate; and b) if that SPECIAL SECRET exists they would share it with you, then, frankly, you deserve everything you get. As a coda to this piece, it turns out that as of yesterday the workshops are BACK ON, proving that you can’t keep a good scammer down.
• What It’s Like To Be A Woman Online: Hopefully not all women get their identity stolen by a weirdo fantasist creep. This is a proper, jaw-dropping WTF-er of a tale, which thankfully has a happy ending – read and be amazed.
• How Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job To Them: McSweeney’s, painfully on the nose as ever. I was at a funeral this week and gave up attempting to explain the precise definition of ‘nonspecific webmong’ to my confused relatives reasonably early on (unrelated, but I also realised that the main people have children must be so that they have something to talk to extended family about in situations such as these).
• The Weight I Carry: This did the rounds last weekend, but if you’ve yet to read it then I recommend it unreservedly. The author, Tommy Tomlinson, weighed 460lbs in 2014; he has written a book documenting his efforts to save his life through weight loss, of which this is a chapter. It’s honest and painful about the practical realities of being a man of that size, and Tomlinson is sanguine about the cause of his condition, but at the same time I can’t help but be slightly angered by this section: “Losing weight is a fcuking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides: The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends, who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve. On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of donuts couldn’t fill.” Mate, I will take the final two explanations at face value, and consider economic factors too, but to attempt to pass responsibility for one’s diet onto the marketing machine feels like a bit of a stretch. Still, a very well-written piece.
• Bees: The story of how the author turned to beekeeping in the wake of postpartum depression and divorce. Excellent – by turns emotional and practical, on apiaries and hives and heartbreak. I don’t normally say this about the subjects of these sorts of pieces – and I am not really in a position to take huge moral high ground on a lot of this sort of stuff, to be clear – but this woman’s ex sounds like a genuinely awful piece of work.
• Fighting for your Father: A gorgeous piece of writing in which the author takes her dying father to a balloon festival for an outing. I’ve been thinking a lot about old age and death this week – it’s a cheery way to spend my time! – and this has nagged at me repeatedly; I think this is beautiful, and if you’re dealing with ageing relatives yourself then it may prove some small comfort.
• Meet Doctor Rapp: Finally this week, the brilliant, happy, heartwarming tale of Dr Rapp, the man who had a stroke and realised that he could rhyme. From a career as a physician to hanging out with KRS-One, this is a BRILLIANT story; Dr Rapp died a few years ago, but the obvious warmth, affection and respect everyone in this piece still feels for him is palpable. You will, I promise, not read a nicer story all week.

By Zack Oldenkamp

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. First up, a short pixelart scifi animation called ‘A Theory of Flight’ – part of a wider series of scifi shorts commissioned by The Verge, which you can see the rest of here:

2) Next, enjoy Laibach doing John Cage’s “4’33” – because, well, WHY NOT?

3) This is called ‘Feet’, and it’s the new one from the fabulously scuzzy Fat White Family, The video here is ACE:

4) Strand of Oak is a genuinely appalling name for a band, but this is a very lovely song indeed and it almost compensates:

5) DEUTSCHE HIPHOP CORNER! I have no idea what this song is saying, but I checked with my internet friend Marcus who lives in Germany and he assured me it’s not fashy or anything so, well, enjoy! Oh, and, well, BYE! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK! BYE! I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND OR INDEED WEEK DEPENDING ON WHEN YOU ARE READING THIS, AND THAT THERE IS SOMETHING FOR YOU TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN THE SHORT TO MEDIUM TERM AND THAT THERE IS SOMEONE WHO YOU CAN ASK FOR A HUG AND THAT THEY WILL GIVE IT TO YOU AND THAT IT WILL BE A GOOD HUG BECAUSE IT DOES RATHER FEEL LIKE WE COULD ALL DO WITH ONE ANYWAY IT’S TIME FOR ME TO DO ALL THE TEDIOUS END-OF-CURIOS GUBBINS LIKE SORTING THE MIXES AND ADDING THE PHOTOS AND WRITING THE OPENING AND OH GOD IT’S MIDDAY I OUGHT TO HURRY UP BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!

AND SO IT COMMENCES ANEW! The days and the nights and the work and the fear and the grind and the…

NO! No more! ENOUGH! You don’t need this! It’s hard enough for you, isn’t it, with the glow of the holidays naught but a distant memory and the unwelcome return to wageslavery, without me wanging on about how dreadful everything is. 

Consider this, then, a gentle reintroduction to the world of the web as seen through my jaded, myopic, tear-clogged eyes; I promise I’ll go easy on you as, well, this is all probably going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Prepare to take me inside you once again for the first time in 2019 – here’s hoping you’ve not become allergic or anything. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and, honestly, it’s nice to have you back.

[SMALL BIT OF OFFICIAL BUSINESS: The nice people (well, person) who publishes Imperica has a Patreon. If you think that websites that feature stuff like Web Curios are A Good Thing, if you want to read more stuff about digital and tech and culture and things, and perhaps fancy an actual printed magazine of that sort of stuff, you could possibly consider bunging them a quid or two. THANKS EVERYONE]

By Alejandro Cartagena

LET’S KICK THIS YEAR OFF WITH A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST COMPILED FROM ALL MY PICKS FROM THE NOW-DEFUNCT WEBSITE ‘THIS IS MY JAM’ WHICH I WAS REMINDED OF THIS WEEK – HONESTLY, THERE IS SOME GREAT STUFF HERE EVEN IF I DO SAY SO MYSELF!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS COBBLED TOGETHER THE SECTION OF ‘NEWS’ FROM A WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF FROM THE PAST MONTH, MUCH OF WHICH YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN BEFORE AND WHICH, AS A RESULT, IS EVEN MORE PHONED IN THAN USUAL:

• Facebook Launches Additional CTA Functionality For Stories: Well that’s an underwhelming bulletpoint to open 2019 with. Still, the only way is up. This is the ‘news’ (don’t worry, I’ll settle down soon and stop with the tedious truculence) that Stories posted by Pages on Facebook will now allow for the inclusion of a load of additional ‘Call to Action’-type features, such as ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Book Now’ stickers. Which, obviously, makes them more useful from the point of view of tatflogging. Happy? No.
• Facebook Canvas Renamed to ‘Instant Experiences’: Even less interesting than the last point, but a useful reminder that a) Canvas exists; and b) that you can do loads of stuff with it as a format, if you have the high-quality assets at your disposal. Anyway, the revamped guide to Cana- sorry, ‘Instant Experiences’ is now quite useful in terms of explaining how they work and what you can do with them; this is, as I’m sure you’ll recall, ONLY available as a paid-for type of content, but it’s definitely worth a look as a refresher.
• New Features for Messenger: These are pretty dull tbh – native Boomerangs, background blurring and, more interestingly, AR stickers – but I felt it was something that you needed to know about. Was I right?
• Insta Now Lets You Post To Multiple Accounts Simultaneously: Instagram is “adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling them on within the composer screen”. Which, let me remind you, is exactly the functionality that Twitter disabled last year in an attempt to clamp down on content being spammed onto the platform by bot farms – now, given Instagram’s well-publicised travails with ‘authenticity’ in the past year, given the revelations about Russian propaganda getting more traction on Insta than Facebook, and given the increasing move towards Insta as the platform for shilling to impressionable idiots, does this look like a good or sensible move? Reader, I would posit that it does not. Anyway, I honestly can’t see the benefit of this to anyone other than peddlers of virality like The Social Chain, with their sockpuppet accounts and Tweetdecking practices and all the rest. Someone explain to me why I’m wrong.
• You Can Now Do Stories on WeChat Too: Here’s a guide to how the format works there – insert your own comment about the importance of thinking about Stories as a content format, as I am bored of doing so.
• Snapchat Launches Lens Challenges: In an attempt to stop children migrating to TikTok, Snap’s launched Lens Challenges – this was from before Christmas, but is worth being aware of as I’m pretty sure that they would bend over backwards to make these for the right brand (with deep enough pockets), and as such this could be worth thinking of (if you think that there’s anyone still using Snapchat). To quote: “Lens Challenges are exactly what they sound like: themed challenges that incorporate a special Snapchat Lens, which can then be featured for the app’s community. The first challenge [was] tied into the holiday season. Snapchat users could select a specific Lens that allowed them to sing a version of “Jingle Bells” performed by Gwen Stefani.” God, it sounds GREAT, doesn’t it?
• Snap’s Trends Document: To qualify my slightly snarky comment about Snapchat just now, let me just show you this – their ‘trends report’ based on what users of the platform are going to be most into in 2019. What do they reckon THE KIDS will be clamouring for? What bandwagons ought brands jump on to secure the attention of the YOUTH? Why, Mincraft! And Fortnite! And, er, Airpods! And memes! Look, lads, if this sort of fatuous non-insight is the sum total of everything you have learned about the kids using your platform then, well, you’ve just demonstrated that your value to advertisers is round about 0! This has me feeling somewhat bearish about Snap’s 2019’s prospects, if I’m honest.
• Building A Handy Data Pipeline With (mostly) Free Tools: If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to become better at knowing how stuff works, and making more digital things yourself rather than just passively consuming other people’s work like some sort of lazy, fat, parasitic slob then, well, you’re a better person than I am. You might also find this post by Mat Morrison useful / interesting – Mat is good at wrangling data, and this is a really useful beginner’s guide to setting up some simple-but-useful datascraping and cleaning mechanisms. Which obviously sounds criminally dull, but hang in there – the frivolous stuff is just round the corner, honest.
• Tools: I’ve got a strange feeling this was also via Mat – anyway, you might want to bookmark this selection of social media data tools as they are potentially VERY USEFUL; there’s stuff here to track meme growth, the spread of hoax news…much of it, fine, can be done with paid-for stuff, but there are elements here which I’ve not seen elsewhere.
• Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2019: The latest edition of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s annual report into THE STATE OF THE MEDIA AND TECH is, as ever, worth a read – if you’re too lazy to read all of it (or, er, if you’re a busy person with multiple competing commitments and finite time, either or) then it’s worth just checking out the first section around predictions and trends. Note that even these people say that Stories are everywhere and will become increasingly ubiquitous – SEE, THEY AGREE WITH ME! Why won’t anyone pay me for my ‘insights’? What’s that? Because I give them all away for free in this stupid blognewsletterthing? Oh.

By Audun Grimstad

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT TIME-TRAVELLING A DECADE OR SO INTO THE PAST AND ENJOYING AN HOUR-LONG MASHUP OF THE GREATEST HITS OF 2008? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO MAKE A CONCERTED EFFORT TO KEEP A TIGHTER REIN ON THE LINK CURATION IN CURIOS THIS YEAR, OR AT LEAST IT WAS BEFORE IT STARTED COMPILING THIS WEEK’S LIST BUT WHICH AT THE TIME OF WRITING NOW REALISES THAT IT IS LOOKING AT AROUND 100 OF THE BASTARD THINGS AND OH GOD I HAVE A PROBLEM, PT.1:

• 2018 In Pictures: I know that we’ve moved on and that 2018 is all played out and that now shiny, exciting 2019 is the new hotness, but let’s be clear – the demarcation between years is an entirely arbitrary one, and 2019 is, so far, exactly the same as 2018 (but perhaps already marginally more frantic). It’s therefore an excellent time to peruse this selection of images, posted without comment on Medium by Joel Veix and titled, simply, ‘Some Images I Saved On My Laptop in 2018’. They’re not all images from 2018, but as a snapshot of what being alive and extremely online feels like then, well, it’s hard to top. TAG YOURSELF, as the kids used to say.
• Meditation Games: By way of absolute contrast to the above link, Meditation Games is a new project for 2019 by a collective of over 350 artists and game makers; the idea is that each day in 2019, the project will post a new ‘game’ to play, each designed as a small, meditative exercise – the blurb reads as follows: “What if every day, there was a small message from the past with a small game or toy to play with? Meditations is a launcher that, every day, loads a small game and an accompanying text as a meditation, distraction, lesson, or inspiration for that day.” It’s a lovely idea – it requires a download, but then it just gently reminds you each day to take a minute or two to experience the latest meditation and it’s very unintrusive – each day’s experience takes a couple of minutes at most. It may not surprise you to know that I have little or no interest in practices of meditative self-improvement (YOU CAN’T FIX ME), but even through my cataracts of cynicism this is clearly a rather lovely endeavour. The games are only ‘games’ in the most abstract of senses, but the ones I’ve tried have been thought-provoking and well-constructed; this is worth doing, I think.
• Year of Colour: Hobby project by Stef Lewandoski which takes your Insta feed and derives from it the most-featured colour from the past month or year (or any date range you choose). It’s very neatly done – the only downside is that you can only use it with Insta accounts you own, meaning I’m unable to go through the cast of current reality TV to ascribe each of them their own shade of teak based on their selfie compulsion. If you think you use Insta too much, that maybe it’s taking over your life and making you a narcissistic obsessive shell of a human, then plug your account into this – if the dominant colour is a skintone then, well, maybe stop taking so many fcuking self portraits. Or don’t! Live your best life! Let’s see how long I can keep up this non-judgmental facade.
• Play 2019: This is by Mazarine, which is apparently ‘a creative platform for luxury, the arts and culture’ (no, me neither) – as a promo, they’ve built this selection of small, simple, nicely-designed games to play with to usher in the new year. What any of this has to do with 2019 is beyond me, but the webwork is neat and the games will distract you from that presentation for approximately three minutes or so.
• Babeyes: Well, this is the first ‘Christ, really?’ thing of the year, and we’re only a few links in. Do you somehow worry that your newborn child isn’t really, well, pulling its weight when it comes to content creation? Do you feel that you’re not managing to fully and authentically capture the joy and genuine wonder of the experience of young life for your followers and fans? WORRY NO MORE! Babeyes is basically a bodycam for your infant child – now they can start their own YouTube channel! It’s technically nothing more than a clip-on camera, recording 20s of video at a time which gets Bluetoothed to a paired device for editing, saving and (inevitably) uploading. “Babeyes records, analyzes, classifies and saves forever the first moments of a baby’s life (from the baby’s point of view). How did my mother look at me? What was the emotion of my father when he saw me for the first time? With what tenderness did my grandparents welcome me? Thanks to Babeyes, all these moments, filled with love, will be watched later by the grown child, as if he remembered the scene.” Take a moment to digest all that, and then think of the inevitable therapy bills that would result from the child watching the footage back in adolescence. This is basically a lowtech version of one of last season’s episodes of Black Mirror, which is a sentence I confidently predict I’ll be writing again before the year’s out. Anyway, watch as some dreadful person turns first-person videos of their toddler’s development into a $1m+ YouTube brand within the next 12 months.
• David Bowie Is: The David Bowie app, released on the anniversary of his death last week, is an interesting artefact. It’s a digital companion to the V&A’s exhibition on his life, work and art, and it’s undeniably technically fantastic – the AR works well, in the main, and there is SO MUCH stuff in here; I’m by no means a Bowie obsessive and to be honest found it a touch overwhelming, but more committed fans and enthusiasts will find an awful lot of brilliant stuff in here. The nagging issue I have with it, though, is one that’s common to all of this stuff – the simple truth is that this is yet another example of AR not really being necessary, or indeed really making anything better. Still, if you want to be able to see  bunch of Bowie memorabilia floating on your desk whilst Gary Oldman talks at you, this is nigh-on perfect.
• Mystery Brand: Hot on the heels of Babeyes comes the second of this year’s ‘FFS modernity’ moments – Mystery Brand is, basically, lootboxes IRL. Lootboxes (for those unfamiliar) is the term given to the videogame grift whereby users are invited to spend real money for virtual rewards in a ‘box’ – the grift here being that the contents of the box is random and as such you’re basically playing a fruit machine, which as any amateur behavioural psychologist can tell you is exactly the sort of Skinner Box mechanic which gets people addicted. Anyway, Mystery Box is exactly that, made physical – you pay them money and they will ‘open’ a ‘box’ and you will win…something, guaranteed! The boxes are themed – some will offer the promise of techy rewards, others Supreme gear, others makeup – but the constant in all of this is the promise that you might win something AMAZING for 0 outlay. Add the fact that this is being shilled by charmingly toxic YouTubers like Jake Paul and you have a Daily Mail moral panic waiting to happen – it’s worth having a dig through the site, as whilst it’s obviously evil it’s also brilliantly so, with options to customise your own boxes (setting your own desired rewards), share your boxes with others (so you get a tiny cut every time someone buys one of your ‘creations’), and sell back unwanted rewards to the site for a fraction of your outlay (see? You’re making your money back!). Honestly, this is EVIL.
• UBeBot: This looks interesting, but the app was so shonky when I downloaded it that I couldn’t get it to work at all – you might be luckier, though. Anyway, the idea is really interesting and the sort of thing which SOMEONE this year will doubtless nail – the app creates a 3d animated avatar of YOU, based on photos of your face, which you can clothe and animate however you desire, and which you can then use in your Stories and elsewhere. It looks shonky, a bit like the Sims from two generations back, and it’s obviously pretty janky all round, but the principle is interesting and I can totally see the appeal. Beautifully – and, obviously, appallingly – the app also advertises that you can make and animate avatars of other people too, just upload some photos! So, er, be aware that we are now at a point when anyone can create a little digital puppet with your face and make it do whatever they want – don’t imagine for a second that we’re any further than about 18 months away from some sort of really unpleasant miniature digital bongo puppetry (a sentence I was hoping not to have to write this year, but, well, here we are).
• Penistrator: Draw anything on this site – literally anything – and it will magically be transformed by the power of software into a simple, two-dimensional cock. WHY NOT, EH?
• Special Relationships: The Pudding finished 2018 with another wonderful piece of dataviz – this is their analysis of the world as seen from the US, taking foreign countries mentioned on the front page of the New York Times and seeing which garnered the most namechecks each months since 1900. The site lets you see the context of the mentions, but the main pleasure comes in seeing how the focus of American interest (at least, as defined by the NYT) shifted from being almost entirely UK-centric at the turn of the 20th Century to being dominated by the Far and Middle East in the past decade or so. This is a wonderful example of visual communications, as it seemingly always is with these people. Oh, on a semi-related tip, this visualisation of shifting power across recorded human history is old but equally wonderful.

• Hexbot: WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE! Witness this, a just-funded Kickstarter which looks like it’ll break the £1m mark before it expires in two months and which promises to deliver AN ACTUAL ROBOT ARM to your home for the piddling sum of about £270. Which, honestly, is amazing – obviously all sorts of caveats apply, per all Kickstarter projects, but the theoretical power of this thing is mind-boggling. Obviously the promised 3d printing, self-sufficient maker future never really came to pass, but if you’re looking at improving your home workshop in advance of us going full Mad Max then this might be worth your time.

• Rainbrow: You remember how Snap launched games last year, with a range of slightly crap distractions where you could do things like, I don’t know, play keepy-uppy by wiggling your eyebrows or somesuch? Well this is that, but for iPhone. Certainly not any good, but worth knowing that you can do this stuff off-Snap.
• Black Women Too: “Lifetime’s ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ shows what happens when being Black and a woman and working class render our truths inconsequential. This interactive site—created by and for Black women and allies—visualizes the systems that put our minds and bodies at risk.” This is a US site and as such the issues it addresses – cutting across politics, the media, the law, girlhood, the justice system and the rest – are presented through the prism of modern America, but as a systematic deconstruction of structural racism within society it’s pretty universal. Worth reading, particularly as a demonstration of exactly how widely and deeply racism impacts the lives of those it affects, in ways those fortunate enough not to experience often can’t even imagine.
• Lovot: Love isn’t dead, it’s just been outsourced! Say hello to ‘Lovot’, the latest in the long line of ‘technological innovations that make me want to cry just thinking about them’ – Lovot is a small, wheeled, soft, huggable robot companion, designed to be loved. Read that back to yourself again, go on. Designed to be loved. If that doesn’t make you have a weird sort of rushing reverse-zoom moment about how incredibly, spectacularly lonely the future looks for many billions of people then, well, I envy you because that’s exactly what I got from this. Here’s their schtick: “Our goal is simple: create a robot that makes you happy. When you touch your LOVOT, embrace it, even just watch it, you’ll find yourself relaxing, feeling better. It’s a little like feeling love toward another person. That’s because we have used technology not to improve convenience or efficiency, but to enhance levels of comfort and feelings of love. LOVOT will react to your moods, and do all it can to fill you with joy and re-energize you. It may not be living a creature, but LOVOT will warm your heart. LOVOT was born for just one reason – to be loved by you.” Now obviously this isn’t a bad thing per se – the design is rather nice, the principle is sort-of laudable, and you can imagine people for whom this sort of thing is useful and genuinely helpful. There are a few things, though, that give me pause – the range of clothing and accessories they suggest they’ll offer, and the ‘dress up’ mode that you can put the robot into, made me think a little of Michael Ende’s ‘Momo’, in which children are enslaved into consumerism by talking dolls who substitute the acquisition of accessories for imaginative play. LOVE THE ROBOT! BUY MORE THINGS FOR THE ROBOT! FEEL HAPPIER! Erm, look lads, I’d sort of made a mental promise to myself that I was going to try and be more upbeat this year but, well, it doesn’t seem to be going so well as of 8:49am; I’ll give it another go.
• Remove: This is simple but HUGELY useful – a web-based tool that will remove the background from any image you give it. This works really, really well and is practically indistinguishable from magic (or, er, decent photoshop).
• Generation 1 Pokemon Cry Generator: Would you like a website that lets you generate the horrible sounds made by the original Pokemon on the first Gameboy? Are you sure? They sound fcuking horrible on a PC speaker in 2019, but ok!
• The Magic Sketchpad: This is basically exactly the same thing as that ‘this webpage turns whatever you draw into a crudely-drawn cock’ site up there, except it’s the more serious and grown-up version – tell it whether you want it to create cats or tigers or ladders or whatever, start drawing, and it will try and complete your drawing in such a way that it looks like whatever you tell it to draw. If that makes sense. Look, just click it, it’s a lot simpler than that ham-fisted description might suggest.
• Japanese Adult Video Titles: A Twitter account which simply shares the titles of Japanese bongo films. Not really NSFW, although the account’s header image may give the more prudish amongst your employers pause (I’m not saying it’s an image of anilingus, but I’m equally not not saying it’s an image of anilingus). Still, if you occasionally want the joy of titles like “Getting Punished By My Voluptuous Mom Made Me Hard – Right In Front Of My Dad!” popping up on your timeline (and WHO DOESN’T?) then follow away.
• DOOMBA: Niche, this, but sort of brilliantly clever/geeky – DOOMBA is a hack that lets you take spatial data from your Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and export it as a .wad file (that’s the in-game maps, for those of you whose early teenage years weren’t spent shooting demons in a virtual hellscape), meaning you can turn your house into an in-game map. Sort of totally pointless, and all the better for it.
• Interesting Esoterica: An almost-perfect Curios website, this one – Interesting Esoterica is a wonderful personal collection of odd and interesting academic papers, found and compiled by the fabulously-named Christian Lawson-Perfect (really, what a name). If you want to lose yourself in such mongraphs as ‘Factoring the Chicken Nugget monoid’ (no, really) then this will be right up your street (this is, quite often, hard maths and science, so your mileage might vary depending on your facility with, and ability to laugh at jokes about, Euclidian geometry).
• Music For Nothing: Musician and composer Joel Corelitz has made a whole load of his music available for free, for commercial use – if you’re after some backing tracks or ambient music this is a LOT better than the majority of stuff you’d find in music libraries.
• Mapping and Visualisation: Scott Reinhard is a graphic designer based in Brooklyn (of course they are!); this site collects some of his work around maps and cartography, and it is BEAUTIFUL. Honestly, these are glorious and quite unlike most other map-ish stuff I see online, in the main.
• Our Number One Album: A podcast! Which I will never listen to! Still, the premise of this one sounds rather fun, if you’re into music or comedy or both (is there anyone who dislikes both music and comedy? WHO ARE YOU, JOYLESS HUSKS?) – “What do “Losing my Religion” by R.E.M., “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and “Chandelier” by Sia have in common? They were all written in under an hour, and so were tons of other classic songs. Have you ever wondered what would it be like to be a fly on the wall during one of these songwriting sprints? Well, what if the songwriters weren’t quite as talented, but they were really funny? Our Debut Album is the podcast where two comedians have one hour to write a hit song. Once a month, Dave Shumka and Graham Clark of Stop Podcasting Yourself get together and write a song they hope will be a hit. After 12 months, they’ll have a debut album.” This is an excellent idea.
• Compass: Are you one of those people who buys their Christmas presents in the January sales (these people do exist, trust me)? Or do you just LOVE online shopping and BARGAINS? Either way, this Chrome extension might be of interest – the idea is that it provides you with realtime price comparisons as you browse – it’ll detect product names and prices and run searches in the background to pull price comparison data from other vendors as you shop, offering you click-to-buy links to cheaper options. Super smart idea, though I’ve not had a chance to test how it works in practice.
• Basepaws: Do you have a SPECIAL LITTLE GUY in your life? Would you like to get to know them better? Are you a mad enough cat person to spend $100 on giving your pet a DNA test to ‘get to know it better’? Well LUCKY YOU! Basepaws is a service which lets you submit a sample or swab from your feline companion, analyses their DNA and sends you a report about, er, I don’t know, whether they have any Siamese in them or something. There’s a lot of guff in here about disease prediction and the like, but very little about exactly how or why knowing any of this stuff will make your, or your pet’s, life better. Still, if you’d like a whole host of new reasons to worry for the long-term health of your furbaby (I know, it’s awful isn’t it?) then perhaps this is for you.

By Oleg Vdovenko

IT’S 2019 AND INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE IS BACK WITH A NEW MIX OF EXCELLENT RARITIES FROM HIS LITERALLY KILOMETRIC RECORD COLLECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO MAKE A CONCERTED EFFORT TO KEEP A TIGHTER REIN ON THE LINK CURATION IN CURIOS THIS YEAR, OR AT LEAST IT WAS BEFORE IT STARTED COMPILING THIS WEEK’S LIST BUT WHICH AT THE TIME OF WRITING NOW REALISES THAT IT IS LOOKING AT AROUND 100 OF THE BASTARD THINGS AND OH GOD I HAVE A PROBLEM, PT.2:

• The Harbin Ice and Snow Festival: The annual Festival of Ice and Snow in Harbin, China, has just been on – this is a beautiful gallery of photos of some quite incredible ice palaces and sculptures, though I can’t help but think that the Instagramification of the aesthetic has rather lessened the impact of some of the work here (/pseud).
• Gamequitters: This is interesting – Gamequitters is a site designed to offer support to people who are addicted to videogames, or to their family members. It asks you to answer some questions about your gaming habits (using fairly standard addiction measurement metrics, as far as I can tell), and then presents a range of literature and resources designed to help people take steps towards getting treatment. I’m pretty sure that anyone aged between 10-16 (certainly any boys) will pretty much tick every addiction box here, but this is an increasingly problematic issue and all resources to address it are probably A Good Thing.
• Dartboards of Film & TV: A Twitter feed. What do you think it posts photos of? THAT’S RIGHT!
• Evernote Design: If you’re a designer, bookmark this NOW – a huge, seemingly free, repository of design resources – vectors, graphics, icons, UX guidelines, all sorts of collections of inspirational materials from newsletters to UI…it’s honestly a GOLDMINE if you do this sort of stuff for a living (or even for fun).
• The Yellowstone Park Sound Library: As America’s National Parks suffer under the Government shutdown – it’s testament to the dark Satanic power of that man that he manages to make the degradation of thousands of square miles of some of the most beautiful natural land on earth a minor side-effect of his sh1tty administration – it’s nice to be reminded of how lovely they are. This is a wonderful collection of sounds recorded in Yellowstone Park – if you want to hear the frankly terrifying huffing of a Grizzly Bear, say, or the screech of a Bald Eagle, or just some soothing waterfalls, then here you go fill your boots.
• Jeffsum: Lorem Ipsum, but all about Jeff Goldblum, in case you didn’t think we’d taken his online fetishisation quite far enough yet.
• 40 Favourite History Objects: A TOP QUALITY Twitter thread compiled by Dr Lindsay Fitzharris, all about her favourite 40 historical objects. Come for the weirdly macabre exploded skulls, stay for the utterly terrifying ‘dental phantom’. There is so much interesting in here, and the thread branches into some very cool tangents at points; this is a goldmine for anyone vaguely interested in odd ephemera (which, I would hope, is most of you, otherwise what the shuddering fcuk are you doing here?).
• Stoop: Do you find newsletters an annoyance, clogging up your inbox and presenting you with a threatening and seemingly-insurmountable volume of links and words and STUFF to get through each week? I mean the other newsletters, obviously, not the perfectly-sized and easily-digestible Web Curios, no siree. Anyway, if you do then you might like Stoop, which basically pulls your newsletter subscriptions into an app for ease of reading. The only caveat is that the newsletter needs to be added to the app, which limits the range you can experience – still, if it grows this might develop into something quite useful.
• Etienne Jacob: Mesmerising, black-and-white gif work. Geometric, abstract, particulate…all sorts of types of animation here, but the constant is the quality – these are sort-of perfect.
• Very Sharp Knives: As we prepare for the Mad Max-esque reality of the post-March 29th future, stuff like this is worth knowing. This YouTube channel presents an incredible range of videos on one, single, solitary subject – how to make the sharpest knife possible from unusual materials such as resin, cardboard, glass and, er, milk. You may laugh, but when we’re all desperate for the sweet release of death as the food shortages bite and the Traitor Punishment Squads roam the countryside (well, fine, maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic) you’ll be grateful for something that shows you how to turn your cat’s femur into a passable shiv.
• A Map of US Gun Violence: Mapping recorded instances of gun crime in the US, over the past 5 years – this takes in over 150,000 individual crime reports, and is a fairly sobering reminder of exactly what it looks like when any old nutter can have access to a firearm. Atlanta and Chicago look like particularly fun places to be, based on this evidence.
• The Terrible Camera Club: This is a lovely idea, and sort of the antithesis of Insta culture. The Terrible Camera club is a Twitter thing, where each week the account will present a crap photography challenge and ask for submissions – the inaugural one was “a picture of the most miserable, LEAST instagram-friendly meal/food possible please! So a dirty fry-up with a fag stubbed out in the egg, a bean on toast, microwave porridge that’s exploded, a cold pot noodle in the rain – that kinda thing.” Worth a follow for the inevitably glorious results.  
• Recipe Filter: A Chrome extension which automatically looks for recipes on a webpage and presents them at the top, so as to save you scrolling through 700 words of appallingly-written food blogger self-aggrandisement and faux-influencer rubbish. This is HUGELY useful, I promise you.
• Record Them: A WONDERFUL idea, this, and a truly great present for a grandparent or ageing relative or, frankly, anyone interesting – this basically lets you buy the Desert Island Discs experience for anyone you like, with the subject of your choice being interviewed by the team and the resulting audio being recut with their favourite songs, archive audio to illustrate whatever they’re talking about, etc. One of my great regrets is that by the time I was old enough to understand that my grandfather had had an incredible and fascinating life, he was in no position to tell me about it; I would have LOVED to have something like this about him (although quite what they would have made of an irascible old fascist incapable of speaking English is another thing entirely).
• Bandito: The first ‘immersive interactive musical experience’ website of the year is this one, for the song ‘Bandito’ by Twenty One Pilots – you ‘fly’ through a 3d landscape, looking for SECRET GLYPHS and stuff like that; it’s all quite pretty, but, well, a bit pointless – I quite want someone to do something different with the ‘single serving music promo website’ thing this year, although obviously like the pathetically demanding value-sponge I am, I can’t for the life of me think what that might be. The song’s ok, if you want a reason to click.
• Coding is Fun!: Because it’s the end of the first full week back at work and I know how bad that feels, the end of this section of Curios is going to be filled with FUN, TIMEWASTING GAMES! The first is this simple but VERY CUTE proto-coding toy – it’s a very basic initial primer on how code is effectively a series of stacked commands, in which your job is to get a small, winsome robot to its destination by inputting a series of commands. The levels slowly become more complex but they’re never exactly challenging; for you, this is probably a bit easy (but did I mention how CUTE?), but for your kid/nephew/godchild/whatever it’s probably a really nice 20 minutes.
• Isotopium: This, though, is AMAZING. Imagine a game in which you could pilot little buggies around a real-life 1:20 scale model of Chernobyl, picking up radioactive materials and discovering EXCITING MUTANT SECRETS – sounds good, doesn’t it, a bit Crystal Maze-ish. That is EXACTLY what this is, and you can do it through your browser and, honestly, it works SO WELL; you might have to queue a bit to get in, and obviously you need reasonable bandwidth for it to work well, but the fact that this works so perfectly is a bit magical to me. Inexplicably, this seems to be a prototype for an actual game that they want people to pay for – no idea how that would work, but this is honestly brilliant and you must try it.
• Hatetris: Tetris, but where it only ever gives you the worst possible pieces. As you’d expect, this is AWFUL but sort of compelling at the same time.
• Smooch: This is honestly lovely – a short piece of interactive fiction, exploring kisses. You play as someone who is going to kiss another someone (gender is very fluid throughout here); as you play through, the story can branch in hugely varied ways, with the eventual kisses being happy, sad, short, long, regretful, joyous, creepy, transcendent…there’s a wonderful poetry to this, and I’ve played through it about a dozen times now and will happily do so again. Please give it a go.
• Paper: An excellent little ‘capture the territory’ Snake-ish game with a rather pleasing paper-type aesthetic. Infuriating and incredibly addictive, you will find yourself rapidly developing some fairly strong feelings of hate and resentment towards the other players which is basically what this is all about, isn’t it?
• The Treasure: Finally this week, an exquisite ‘escape the room’ game in the style of Myst or similar – this is slow, simple and yet fiendishly hard (to me at least), with crisply beautiful graphics that very much remind me of early-00s game aesthetic. Depending on your patience, you can happily get a good hour out of this I think – go on, finish the first working week of 2019 with a bold challenge to your employers by just playing this brazenly for the rest of the afternoon and challenging them to sack you!

By Can Pekdemir

LET’S FINISH THE MIXES WITH THIS WRAPUP OF SOME OF 2018’S BEST HIPHOP!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Marion Tapes: Marion Stokes taped thousands of hours of US television during her lifetime. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today. This Tumblr shares screenshots from a different video each day, presenting a rather wonderful snapshot of the 20th Century as seen through the CRT.
• The 1959 Project: The history of jazz, one post at a time. Very much one for the jazz enthusiasts, but if you’re into the music then you will learn LOTS here.
• The Obscuritory: Probably not a Tumblr! Still, this is a blog-ish site dedicated to playing and writing up obscure games from the past, and if you’re a veteran of the 90s/00s gaming scene then you’ll probably find a lot to interest you in here.
• A Thread of Tumblr Threads: A collection of Twitter threads highlighting some of the best stuff from Tumblr over the past year or so – these cut across the arts, history, cats, memes and much more, and if you want a one-stop-primer as to why Tumblr continues to be one of the most interesting online communities anywhere then this is an excellent place to begin.

The Trough of (Insta) Feeds!:

• Vincenzo Spina: Infra-red photography, which looks pretty cool almost regardless of what is actually being snapped.
• Doors of London: Not pictured – the increasing numbers of homeless people seeking refuge in said doorways.
• Pomme Queen: You want an Insta feed packed with photos of REALLY FANCY APPLES? Yes you do!
• Naohiro Yako: Excellent photos of Japan, although perhaps a touch heavy on the HDR for my tastes.
• James Hetfield’s Mustache: One of the blokes out of Metallica, and his mustache. Over and over and over again.
• Terrible Maps: You probably don’t need me to explain this one.
• Film Tourism US: Sharing photos of famous film locations from around the States, but in real life. If you ever wanted to see a photo featuring a parking lot from American Graffiti then, well, you’re going to love this.
• Icarus Mid-air: You think you know origami birds? I promise you, you know NOTHING. These are astonishing and make my head hurt slightly thinking of how they’re made.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The State of the World 2019: I try and remember to link to this every year – this is Bruce Sterling and friends’ annual discussion about What The Fcuk Is Going On, which they’ve been doing at the start of January for years and which, this year as every year, is one of the best and clearest-headed conversations about What The Fcuk Is Going On you’ll read anywhere. As ever, it’s hugely wide ranging and covers tech and politics and economics and the environment and society and, well, everything, and this year one of the contributors is James Bridle which makes the whole thing exponentially more interesting. There is a LOT of thinking here, and it’s not presented in the most user-friendly way, but it’s absolutely worth your time to read it. The stuff around P3 about ‘The New Dark’ captured my imagination in particular.
• Millennial Burnout: You’ve all read this one, right? The big ‘Why does everyone between about 20-40 just feel so utterly fcuked by life all the time?’ piece that’s had everyone talking? No? Well go and read it then, I’ll wait. *waits* Done? God, that was overlong, wasn’t it (yes, I know, pottle, etc)? The overall point it makes – that everyone feels burnt out and exhausted and dissatisfied and tired – feels broadly correct, but simultaneously not anything specific to ‘millennials’; I’d argue that this is a post-internet feeling, and that it’s another example of anomie, a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals” and which “evolves from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community”, and which is prevalent in societies in which “there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life.” Sound familiar? You can be anything! You’ve never had it so good! The world has never been a better place for humanity (and to any Pinker acolytes reading this, the fact that you can derive data from human experience does not therefore automatically mean that the reverse is true and that you can define the human experience via data)!  So why aren’t you crushing it? Why haven’t you written that novel? Started that business? Gotten that degree? Found the perfect work/life balance? See what I mean?
• The Dark Future of Advertising: Jamie Bartlett writes about how advertising is likely to become even more creep, intrusive and personal as we move into the glorious algorithmically-determined future – as he points out, the fact that we’re all already embedded with datagathering systems that we simply don’t understand added to the growth in language processing and associated/semi-related tech makes it very likely that regardless of our attempts to claw back control of our data and keep it out of the hands of advertisers we’re going to be more surveilled and sold to than ever. This theme’s also explored by Charlie Warzel over at Buzzfeed in this piece – still, #deletefacebook!
• Noone Is At The Controls: On the subject of algos, here’s another cheering look at the fact that we’re increasingly controlled and managed by software that we simply don’t understand, and that we’re at the point whereby it’s perfectly possible that we will never understand it, or indeed that it’s actually impossible for us to understand it. Which is…lovely. I was talking to someone the other day who described San Francisco as “a sad and fairly brutal segregation between people who tell computers what to do (generally all clad in those thin body-warmers) and people desperately chasing round the place bringing the first group take-aways, packages and dry-cleaning, all being told what to do by computers” – now imagine that as the future of the whole Western world, and one in which noone really seems to understand why the computers are telling us to do stuff; HELLO SUNLIT UPLANDS OF TOMORROW!
• AOC and the New Political Reality: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a bona-fide political phenomenon, a welcome breath of fresh air in US politics and, as this piece astutely points out, a master at social media communication. The article looks at the way in which she communicates using Insta, and the way she’s been able to draw back the curtain around some of the more obscure elements of US politics to explain and expose how it works – it also points out that this is rapidly going to become the new normal, and we should look forward to seeing literally every single politician in the world pursue the holy grail of ‘relatability’ via the medium of Stories. You’ve seen it a bit already in the UK, with the increasing use of Insta by politicians on both sides of the House to attempt to present themselves as anything other than barely-competent dullards; I predict we will soon pine for the good old days of WebCameron (god, that seems positively quaint, doesn’t it?).
• The Scourge of ‘Relatable’: On which note, a timely piece of invective against the trope of ‘relatability’, that bland, catch-all quality that the article beautifully summarises as “quirky but smart, introverted but friendly, shaded with a charmingly pathetic love of spreadable cheese.” ‘Relatable’ is the tedious ubiquity of the lower-case social media register, the ‘I’m an ordinary person and one of the PEOPLE’ fetishisation of Greggs and Spoons, and the piece closes with this glorious line which sums it all up better than I ever could: “Not only the social value of something but also its economic viability depends on how shareable it is. And if what we share is a reflection of our identity, then the greatest value comes from sharing something that could validate our existence to as many people as possible, to constellate ourselves across the sky so that others may gaze up at the stars and whisper, “It me.””
• The Oscar Season Screenplays: The annual collection of award-baiting scripts, this years selection includes Colette, Black Panther, Green Room and a bunch more.
• The Future Book Is Not What We Expected: A really interesting exploration of why the book has remained largely unchanged in the past three decades of technological upheaval – despite the advent of the e-reader, other than digitisation there’s not been any sort of qualitative shift in the way in which books are written or consumed – but the way in which the term ‘book’ now comes to perhaps cover a range of media that wouldn’t previously have been considered, from a range of people who would never previously had access to the means of production.
• How To Lose Thousands of Dollars on Amazon: Or, “Look, really, there honestly is NO WAY to earn $10,000 a month without actually doing any work, however much that shiny-suited man with the nice hair wants to persuade you otherwise”. Another exploration of the weird ecosystem of ‘how to’ sales, in which people can get rich at a thing solely by selling other people really inadequate guides on how to get rich at the thing. You won’t believe that people can be this stupid, and then all of a sudden you really will believe it after all.
• On A Black King Kong Heroine: I had no idea that there was a stage adaptation of King Kong currently playing on Broadway, nor indeed that the role of the damsel in distress/heroine is for the first time being played by a black actress; this piece examines why that is slightly weird and problematic, and looks at the broader question as to whether it’s ok to recast every single role in drama or whether there are some that are male, female, cis, het, black or white for specific narrative reasons and therefore that these roles must remain as such if the work isn’t to be robbed of something intrinsic to it. I can’t pretend to have anything resembling an answer by the end of the piece, but it made me think a lot, not least about the massively racist tropes at the heart of Kong.
• What It’s Like To Deliver Packages for Amazon: Not a journalist slumming it for a piece; instead, this is a journalist who’s employment prospects have become reduced to the point where ‘Amazon Courier’ is now their job. A spare, honest and clear-eyed evocation of what it’s like to be a slave to the little navigational device in your hand, and the particular difficulties that this sort of service work can present, and what it feels like when the job that conferred you social and economic status isn’t your job any more. Superbly written.
• Kids & Emoji: This piece looks at studies into how children use emoji at different stages in their development, and how this potentially maps onto existing theories of linguistic development. There’s nothing hugely conclusive in here, but I’d honestly never even considered emoji as part of the language-learning process, or as a communications bridge in the pre-linguistic phase. Which is unsurprising given I don’t have kids or work in pediatrics, but still.
• Birdwatching in Red Dead Redemption 2: I finally finished RDR2 this week, and I’m not ashamed to say I shed a small tear at a couple of points in the endgame. This is a wonderful article that shows quite what a remarkable achievement it is – Audubon, a magazine by the US society of the same name which promotes the appreciation of birds and the science and ecology around them, has written a whole article about how amazing it is to go virtual birdwatching in the game. This is basically the North American equivalent of getting props from the RSPB, and the whole piece is just sort of wonderfully appreciative and yet gently baffled by the whole thing. Glorious.
• An Oral History of the Hamster Dance: This is long, but WONDERFUL – take yourself back to the early days of the web, and one of the first global memetic sensations, the HAMSTER DANCE (if you don’t know what that is then, well, WHY ARE YOU SO YOUNG DAMN YOU? And, er, it’s all explained in the link). This is fascinating and wonderfully bonkers, and a reminder of those wild west days of the old web in which it was possible to make serious money from literally any old crap (see also, Million Dollar Homepage) – the bit where they start talking about film rights and stuff is just mental.
• Gorbachev: A truly fascinating profile of Mikhail Gorbachev in the years since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – this is wonderful, both as a reminder of the immediate aftermath of his resignation and the weirdly chaotic feeling of the time, and of the even weirder Yeltsin years. The stuff about his wife will make you well up if you have any sort of sentimental bone in your body; this is a wonderful portrait of one of the last major figures of the post-Communist era.
• Sally Rooney Gets In Your Head: A profile of Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends and last year’s LITERARY SMASH HIT (oxymoronic, but) Normal People, in which she discusses her work, the style of her writing, the web, Ireland and more. I found Conversations with Friends spectacularly irritating for the first 50 pages and then spent the rest seething with jealousy at what a spectacular writer Rooney is; Normal People confirms that, and this piece is threaded with exactly the sort of clear observation that characterises her novels.
• Rockstar Cooks: A piece in praise of the ‘Rockstar’ short-order cooks of US chain Waffle House, specifically one of them, called Charles. This is a great piece of (food) writing, and remarkably clear-eyed about the author’s own privilege and prejudices in regard to his subject. There’s something so wonderful about reading an account of people performing tasks skillfully and with precision, and this has that in spades.
• Intimacy Coordinators: In the wake of Me Too last year, there was a brief flurry of stories about how theatre companies and film studios were beginning to employ ‘intimacy coordinators’ to assist actors in preparing intimate scenes in a manner which all participants were comfortable with; this article looks at the practical work involved in doing the job, and why it’s necessary, and once you’ve read it you will be amazed and astounded and not a little disgusted that this wasn’t standard practice in the past.
• Father Time: David Sedaris, being David Sedaris, on his father’s ageing and inevitable eventual senescence and death. As per with Sedaris, this is very, very funny (though it is obviously very much a David Sedaris piece and as such you need to quite like David Sedaris), but it’s also incredibly poignant about dealing with the weakening and vanishing of one’s loved ones.
• A Woman’s Work: “Carolita Johnson catalogues her efforts to maintain her appearance from about 1970 to 2018.” Brilliant – as an account of inhabiting one’s physicality and watching it change, it’s superb, but it works equally well as a piece of feminist writing about the labour demanded of women by the aesthetic demands of the 20th and 21st Century. Very good indeed.
• I Was A Cable Guy: Finally this week, a superb first person essay about the author’s experience being a cable repair person in the US and what it taught them about blue collar work and society in modern America. Funny, dry, angry and brilliantly-written, this really is very good indeed.

By Ole Marius Joergensen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, if I see a better piece of stop motion work in 2019 I will be very impressed. This is called ‘In a Nutshell’ and it is MESMERISING:

2) This one’s called ‘I Know’, and it’s by The High Curbs and it reminds me a little bit of early Titus Andronicus or weirdly early Weezer and I love the video and I hope you like it too:

3) Lovely, simple, catchy-as-you-like indiepop from The Coathangers next, with ‘Bimbo’:

4) This is called ‘Juice’, and it’s by Lizzo, and ordinarily it’s not my sort of thing at all but it’s infectiously happy and upbeat and the sort of thing I reckon might do you all good given it’s January and work has started again and everything appears to be made out of kale:

5) Why? have been one of my favourite bands for years – this is a collaboration between none-more-hipster lead singer Yoni Wolf and Lillie West, and it’s called ‘Siren 042’, and it’s distantly beautiful and unexpectedly reminds me rather a lot of the song ‘Boss DJ’ by Sublime, which may not mean anything to you but, well, I don’t care:

6) I don’t know what is happening AT ALL in this song by Japanese noise metal outfit Otoboke Beaver, but if someone could maybe explain it to me that would be ace thanks:

7) Finally this week, this is an ASTONISHINGLY good song. It’s by Sharon van Etten and it’s called ‘Seventeen’ and I adore it unreservedly and I hope you do too and OH LOOK IT’S THE END OF CURIOS YOU’VE MADE IT SEE THAT WASN’T TOO PAINFUL IT’S SO GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK I HAVE MISSED YOU AND MY LIFE HAS BEEN EMPTY AND DEVOID OF MEANING WITHOUT YOU SO LET US PLEASE NOT SPEND SO LONG APART AGAIN I LOVE YOU HAPPY FRIDAY AND HERE’S TO A LOVELY GENTLE WEEKEND SAFE FROM THE COLD AND THE WIND AND THE BREXIT AND THE POLITICS AND THE PAIN I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!:

 YOU HAVE TO LAUGH, DON’T YOU, EH? EH???

You know what? Fcuk it, neither you nor I want to read anything about the news or the state of the world right now. It’s almost Christmas, and I am tired. I imagine you are too. 

This is the last Web Curios of 2018 – in a rare moment of genuine sincerity, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who subscribes and reads and shares it, to everyone who sends me tips, and to everyone who’s work I’ve featured on here in the past 12 months and without which there wouldn’t really be much on which to hang this appalling prose. 

It’s been an incredibly long and jagged and grinding year, and the likelihood is that it’s now always going to be like this, til we all die. Still, while you’re all waiting to fall victim to the terminal illness that is MODERN LIFE, get right into the festive spirit with this, THE FINAL WEB CURIOS OF 2019! 

(happy christmas, everyone)

By Tim Schutsky 

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A CELEBRATION OF 30 YEARS OF NINJA TUNES’ SOLID STEEL SESSIONS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO VERY MUCH ENJOY IGNORING ANYTHING TO DO WITH S*CI**L FCUKING M*D** UNTIL JANUARY:

• Instagram Testing ‘Creator’ Accounts: Facebook wants Instagram to be YouTube. It’s not going to be YouTube, at least not anytime soon, but that’s sort of immaterial – MARK WANT! So it is that it continues in its almost certainly doomed attempt to persuade all those floppy-haired, blindingly-toothed children to migrate from Google’s platform to its own. Basically this is the introduction of the sort of simple features for serious ‘creators’ (honestly, I don’t know how many times I can keep typing that word in this context) that YouTube’s offered them forever – “growth insights such as data around follows and unfollows; direct messaging tools that allow users to filter notes from, for example, brand partners and friends; and flexible labels that allow users to designate how they want to be contacted.” Thrilling, eh?
• Insta Introduces Voice Messaging: You know how there’s nothing worse than someone sending you a voicenote on Whatsapp? Yes, well, those deviants will now be able to ruin your life on Instagram as well. Another reason to stop using this stuff, frankly.
• Google + Now Shutting Down Even Earlier: I know, I’m upset too, but it turns out that G+ is even more of a security nightmare than was previously thought – thank GOD noone’s ever used it, eh? – and as such is going to be shutting its virtual doors in April of next year. I will, honestly, be sad when it finally dies; it’s never served any purpose to me whatsoever, but I will always fondly remember my abortive attempts to troll pseudo-fancy pizza chain Firezza into giving me free food in exchange for boosting their engagement numbers on G+. Raise a toast in its memory this festive season.
• 360 iFly: On the one hand, this is a really nice and shiny website by KLM which presents a series of travelogues (or it will when the campaign’s done – there’s only one live at the moment) hosted by…er…some bloke who I presume is an ‘influencer’, in which he goes to interesting and picturesque places around the world to EXPERIENCE THINGS, which experiences are captured in 360 video for the edification and entertainment of viewers. On the other hand, let’s be realistic, there is no way in hell that any actual, real people are going to spend 6-10 minutes of their lives watching a slightly banal piece of travel journalism which is pretty much identical in tone, style and feel to the sort of thing you might see on BBC2 at 8pm. I mean, look, this obviously cost an reasonable amount, what with the location shoots and the talent and the webdev and the 360 gubbins and yet there is no discernible reason for it to exist whatsoever, other than to give the production team and the marketing people and the presenter an income. Look, can we make a pact? Can we agree something together? Can we MAKE CONTENT STOP in 2019? THERE IS TOO MUCH STUFF AND NEARLY ALL OF IT IS MEDIOCRE.
• Gift Rapper: Having said all that, of course, this is a totally frivolous piece of disposable non-culture and I think it’s ace. Ticketing company StubHub have partnered with (excellent) rapper Murs to produce this site which encourages you to buy tickets to an event for a friend or loved one and then accompany it with a ‘bespoke’ (not actually bespoke) rap song. It’s a slick piece of digital sleight of hand – you go through a series of questions about the type of tickets you’re giving, who you’re giving them to, etc, and at the end you get a personalised rap track which reflects your choices, frankensteined together in pretty seamless fashion, to send to the recipient. Cute.
• The Year in Bongo: We’ll close out the ‘professional’ section of Curios for 2018 with the now-traditional look at the globe’s bongo consumption over the past year, which gets a nod in this section due to the fact that they just do this sort of thing really, really well. You can scoff and titter all you want, but the level of detail and granularity they go into with this information is why it always does so well for them; from the point of view of data-led comms, this is sort of an object lesson in how to do it. Of course, it’s also a whole bunch of statistics about what people like to wank to, and as such is utterly compelling – there’s nothing in here to rival the sheer weirdness of Giantess Porn being the big breakout hit of 2016 (please tell me I’m not the only person who remembers that), but it’s still a fascinating read. Shame on the 34million+ of you who searched for ‘Bowsette’-related smut (if that means nothing to you then I envy you) and all of you who attempted to crack one off to ‘Sexy Fortnite’); you could spend an eternity attempting to derive some sort of significant insight from all of this, but my main takeaways are: 1) the fetishisation of Asian bodies is a genuinely global phenomenon; and 2) there was an essay I linked to a few weeks back about how we’re all having less sex and how there’s an argument to suggest that porn consumption backs that up, based on the increased interest in non-human (videogame/cartoon) bongo, and this data absolutely backs that up; honestly, there’s something genuinely interesting about the near-global rise in the popularity of videogame-themed smut, hentai, futanari and all the rest although I’ve no idea what it all means. Anyway, have a read – if nothing else it will give you ample fodder for Christmas lunch conversation.

By Roberto Ferri

NEXT, HAVE A SEEMINGLY INFINITE MIX OF AMBIENT NOODLINGS BY SIGUR ROS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD HONESTLY LIKE TO SAY THANKS FOR READING ALL OF THIS AND WHICH HOPES YOU ALL HAVE NICE HOLIDAYS AND STUFF, PT.1:

• The Most Future Thing I Have Ever Seen: It’s fitting, I think, that the final Curios of 2018 opens with something that left me honestly agog when I saw it last night. I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but I seem to recall that way back in January I made some sort of prediction about fake video becoming a problematic thing by the end of the year in terms of our ability to discern truth from fiction; whilst we’ve not yet seen the first ‘world’s media fooled by GAN-generated footage’, the pace of technological improvement over the past 12 months has been spectacular, and this is the most impressive implementation of ‘imagined’ video I’ve seen. Honestly, just click the link; I’ll wait here *waits* OK good, you back? OH MY GOD WASN’T THAT AMAZING?!?! Fine, Christ only knows what sort of computational power it’s using to generate all that stuff, but you take this and multiply it by Moore’s Law and you’ve got tech which will let anyone create near-photorealistic video of fake people and things, outputting at a quality good enough to easily fool a cursory glance. You remember last week there was a longread about some of the ways you can spot GAN-generated faces? Yeah, well this tech has already outpaced that. This honestly feels watershed-ish, like the first talkie or colour film, and like it’s going to presage a very, very interesting time indeed (perhaps in the Chinese sense, fine, but still).
• Fake Face Recognition Test: You think you can tell real from fake? You reckon you know what a real person looks like? GREAT! Take this test, being run by MIT researchers, which assesses one’s ability to identify fake faces generated by GAN software; there are a series of different ‘games’ which ask you to determine whether the face you’ve just been shown belongs to a real person or whether it’s a computer-generated fizzog. Each round of the quiz asks you to make the call after being shown the faces for less time – what’s immediately apparent is that it’s already very, very hard to tell the real humans from the CG renders when you’re only exposed to them for half a second or so. Welcome to the future, in which we’re simply not biologically equipped to distinguish fact from fiction any more!
• Christmas Experiments: A sort of advent calendar of WebGL toys, each vaguely Christmas-themed. I am pretty sure I’ve featured this in previous years, but the work for 2018 is generally great and in a few specific instances honestly incredible; there are a couple of these that are truly beautiful, and if you only play with one of them can I recommend ‘Plume’? Thanks.
• Towwwwwwwwwer: Utterly frivolous websitetoything, which lets you take a photo of yourself and turns it into an image which it adds to the INFINITE TOWER OF SCROLL on the site; the ‘about’ section suggests it’s a meditation or reflection on the disposable nature of online content and ART, but to my mind it’s just a pleasingly-designed Geocities-ish piece of webwork. See what you think.
• The AI Art Gallery: A curated collection of AI-generated artworks, collated by Luba Elliott. This is a genuinely great site if you’re interested in the intersection of computation and art; the works featured are collected by general theme, so there are standard (ha! The very fact I can refer to machine-imagined artworks as ‘standard’ in any way is honestly boggling to me) GAN pictures but there are also AI music experiments and design experiments, and there’s a whole host of stuff collected here that I’d never seen before. If you’re looking for a convenient primer on who’s doing what with all this tech this is a decent place to start finding out.
• Lensa: I’m featuring this with a very heavy caveat that it is A Bad Thing and you oughtn’t use it, but, well, who am I kidding? Lensa is made by the same people who developed Prisma, that style transfer app that was all the rage a couple of years ago and led to a weird spate of people having Picasso-tinged interpretations of themselves as their avatar; this new app, though, is basically an incredibly powerful auto-Photoshop analogue which can do frankly incredible things to your face with a couple of taps. You want an instant unblemishing? You got it! You want to make your eyes stand out more, or give yourself a contoured face without the need to paint weird panda stripes all over your actual countenance? All yours! We’ve seen auto-retouching apps before, but nothing quite this impressive – it’s honestly staggering how good the finish is on the effects, which on the one hand is just an impressive technical achievement but on the other is yet another nail in the coffin of our ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Yet another reason to never, ever believe that someone looks anything like the photos they put on the internet.
• The Worst Things On The Internet in 2018: Buzzfeed have been running these for 6 years now, and looking back through the 2012 edition just now gave me a genuinely warm sense of nostalgia for a time in which ‘echidna penis’ had even a chance of being named one of the 50 most cursed online things of the year. 2018 has, it’s fair to say, been another year that’s felt not unlike being placed in a tumble drier with a load of rocks – relive some of the best (really not the best) things that have done a bit of a viral, and try and unsee the mousemat (you will never, ever be able to unsee it).
• Eyezon: Bafflingly described as an “Аll-new on-demand LIVE streaming tool for tailor made peer-to-peer reviews for shopping and lifestyle decisions in real-time” (catchy, eh?), Eyezon is the sort of thing which you can sort of half-see the point of but which you know is literally never going to take off (sorry, but). The idea – based on my interpretation of the slightly garbled descriptions onsite – is that it’s a platform which connects people who want to know about a place with people who are in that place, so that the physically present can share their view with others who want to see it. That’s an AWFUL description, I know, but you click on that link and try and see if you can make head or tail of it. Basically, imagine a situation when you’re in a restaurant; you take a photo of said restaurant and upload it to the app; the backend tech analyses what’s in the photo and adds searchable tags to it, along with your location, etc, meaning anyone who’s looking for information on restaurants of a particular type or in a particular area can in theory find your pic and (and here’s the gimmick) request that you share a livestream of the place so you can see it. You can interact with the person streaming (and they with you) with text, voice or on-screen scrawls, and you earn virtual currency for interacting with others, which currency can be redeemed for…er…no, there’s no indication of that. It’s not a terrible idea, but it does rather seem to have forgotten that there’s a really very good visual search engine called Google Images, and that literally the least efficient way possible to find out about a place is to ask a stranger to stream you grainy footage of it over an iffy 4g connection.
• Moodify: A nice little Spotify hack which lets you login to your account and then generate a mood-based playlist simply by moving a few sliders around to denote what sort of vibe you’re after. Simple, but nicely made.
• The NYT Year in Review 2018: Want to remember all the GREAT THINGS that happened in the news over the past 12 months? Of course not, it was mostly terrible! Still, the New York Times has put together this cheery jaunt down memory lane, so the least you ingrates can do is click on the link. This site presents a succession of news stories, presented in pairs, which does an excellent job of showcasing exactly how mad and schizophrenic 2018 has been. Someone on Twitter this week observed that this is the first December in a few years which hasn’t been characterised by people giving a general ‘well thank God that one’s over’ sigh of relief, and that’s because we’ve all come to the realisation that this is just what it’s going to be like all the time. Merry Christmas!
• Make Your Own Die-Hard Christmas Ornament: Is it a Christmas film? I don’t care! It can be if you like! Anyway, if you want instructions on how to make your own tediously pomo pop-culture-referencing John McClane bauble then consider this my gift to you.
• Mikhail Larionov: Larionov, I learned this week, was a Russian artist born in the late-19th Century and who is credited with founding Russia’s avant garde movement in the early 1900s. I’d never heard of him before, but I very much like the style of his work and the site, which accompanies an exhibition of his work in Moscow, is lovely and a beautiful showcase for his paintings.
• Old Apps: This is a fascinating time machine – Old Apps is a site that collects old Windows software for download, so if you want to fiddle around with an antediluvian version of Firefox then, well, you’re a strange and lonely-sounding person but you’re also one of us and you are welcome here.
• HTTPBey: Beyonce gifs representing HTTP status codes. Unless you’re a developer there’s a large chance that the only part of that that made any sense to you is ‘Beyonce gifs’, but there’s no shame in that. Those of you who do get it, though, please can you start employing these on every site you build from hereon in, please? Thanks.
• Rocky Bergen: The fabulously-named Mx Bergen makes very, very impressive papercraft models of stuff like ghetto blasters and old computers, and if you’re likely to need some sort of simple, meditative pursuit to help you get through the coming weeks of familial ‘joy’ then this may well be the thing that keeps you from murder.

By Xuebing Du