HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! I am slightly demob-happy this afternoon; I am going to the seaside (looking out of the window as I type suggests that this may not be the sunshine paradise that I might have hoped) and I am granting myself the boon of a WHOLE WEEKEND off the internet – meaning there won’t be any Curios next week. Sorry about that, but occasionally one needs to decouple (or, more accurately, spend some time reminding oneself that spending the entiretly of one’s life face-to-monitor is, perhaps, sub-optimal, and taking steps before I become an entirely binary creation). 

Still, I like to think that there’s enough goodness (oh, ok, fine, enough ‘-ness’ – the ‘good’ bit is, I concede, subjective) in here to keep you happily clicking and reading and laughing and crying for the full fortnight til I return – and if there isn’t, you can still buy issue 2 of Imperica Magazine for a mere £3 here, which will DEFINITELY keep you in prose til I’m back. 

Regardless, know that whilst I won’t be with you next week, I will be thinking of you – don’t worry yourselves with exactly what I’ll be thinking, for that way madness lies (or at the very least a sense of creeping discomfort and the growing knowledge that it’s probably not ok)., just rest assured that I will.

I am Matt, this is Curios, and I bet you miss it a little bit even if you’d never admit it to yourself. 

By Natalie Foss

FITTINGLY THIS WEEK’S MIXES KICK OFF WITH SOME ANDY WEATHERALL – RIP

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS ‘INFLUENCERS PIVOTING TO SHILLING LIES FOR POLITICIANS’ IS VERY MUCH THE FUTURE WE DON’T NEED SO THANKS FOR THAT (AND EVERYTHING ELSE) MARK!:

• Facebook Launches Creators Studio Mobile App: You know the Facebook Creators’ Studio, right? OF COURSE YOU DO OR YOU WOULDN’T BE BOTHERING WITH THE OPENING SECTION! Anyway, you can now get it on mobile – iOS and Android – so you need never, ever stop creating MORE CONTENT to feed the Big Blue Misery Factory’s ceaseless appetite for datapoints. If you’re in the invidious position of having to produce stuff for, and post it to, Facebook all the time, this is obviously hugely useful – it seemingly contains all the desktop gubbins but, well, smol and phone-sized. Humans, it seems, have become like sharks now; much as they will die if they stop swimming, we will seemingly expire if we cease even for a second creating fresh new material to sate the beast. NEVER STOP CREATING. NEVER.
• Facebook’s Regulation White Paper: When I found this at the beginning of the week, I thought that I’d have to read through the whole thing in punishing detail to bring you the very BEST bits of it – then, though, the European Union went and rejected it all out of hand and so, whilst we’re technically no longer bound by their assessments, I’m inclined to agree with them. Basically, the line here is ‘self-regulation is great, and, by the way, we’ve got this independent oversights board so frankly that’s probably all we need to do, right lads?’ – conveniently, much of what Zuckerberg calls for (or what his expensive team of legal enforcers calls for, perhaps more accurately) is stuff that Facebook is already doing, making the burden on the platform (surprise!) relatively light. On the one hand, everything outlined in here is nakedly self-serving and designed both to limit the actual amount platforms like Facebook need to submit to any sort of meaningful regulatory scrutiny; on the other, it’s not like the UK Government’s ‘don’t worry, we’ll get Ofcom to take a look at it’ line from last week was hugely robust either. Basically this is another in the series of slightly cross-purposes utterances from one of the major players in the regulatory debate which doesn’t really serve to bring us any closer to a resolution; I did, though, enjoy this piece by ex-Chair of the Culture Media & Sport Select Committee Damian Collins – a man who’s perhaps enjoyed the international oxygen of publicity afforded him by his former position a bit too much – in which he argues that one of the problems with Facebook’s position is that it would require a degree of international cooperation that ‘would never happen’. Damien, mate, one might argue that that’s not exactly the sort of can-do attitude we like to see from our lawmakers.
• Facebook Changes Ad Rules Re Politics & Influencers: I DONE GOT A PREDICTION RIGHT! Waaay back last year when Facebook implemented its rules around what constituted ‘political’ advertising I wrote something about how this was likely to lead to a weird future in which politicians and parties circumvented the rules by paying influencers to shill on their behalf instead and thereby not needing to declare the promotion as ‘political’ at all and thus managing to circumvent inclusion in the ad library and, conveniently, making it harder to track spending, etc. AND LO IT CAME TO PASS! What’s particularly interesting is the question of whether the lack of scrutiny over the veracity of political claims on Facebook/Insta will apply to this stuff too. You’d imagine it will, meaning not only will politicians be able to lie with impunity on Facebook and Insta – they’ll also be able to pay others to lie on their behalf, with the only sign that it might be a paid endorsement being the oh-so-easy-to-miss ‘#spon’ tagged on the end of the post. Nope, no way at all that this could possibly get messy or complicated, right?
• Facebook Dataset Available for Academic Use: In my head I like to imagine that there’s a shadow readership for Curios that consists of scholars and academics rather than bored advermarketingpr office monkeys – I know it’s not true, but, well, it adds a small veneer of meaning to this otherwise pointless endeavour. Anyway, for this entirely fictional coterie of highbrow Curiofans, here! “The dataset itself contains a total of more than 10 trillion numbers that summarize information about 38 million URLs shared worldwide more than 100 times publicly on Facebook (between 1/1/2017 and 7/31/2019). It also includes characteristics of the URLs (such as in which country they were shared and whether they were fact-checked or flagged by users as hate speech) and the aggregated data concerning the types of people who viewed, shared, liked, reacted to, shared without viewing, and otherwise interacted with these links. This dataset enables social scientists to study some of the most important questions of our time about the effects of social media on democracy and elections with information to which they have never before had access.” You’ll need to apply for access to it – there’s a link to an RFP document which explains the criteria and process – but if you’re in any way connected to research around questions of online influence and political persuasion then this seems significant and very much worth checking out.
• It’s Now Easier To Add New Tweets To Old Ones: This is a very cosmetic little update which makes it marginally easier to attach a brand new Tweet to an old one from your account, meaning it’s simpler to create threads with sporadic updates, say, or, if you’re a business account, to have long-running threads about product updates or customer service enquiries, etc. It’s a small change, but one which might save you a few seconds in the future which you could then spend scrolling mindlessly through content.
• TikTok Introduces Parental Controls: On the one hand, A Good Thing; on the other, exactly the sort of stuff that any halfway-smart kid will be able to get around in about two minutes flat. Still, parents who create a TikTok account and link it with their kid’s account “will be able to control how long the teen can spend on the app every day; turn off or limit who the teen can direct message; and choose to turn on TikTok’s “restricted” mode that will limit inappropriate content.” Do we all see the small-but-obvious problem with this approach?
• TikTok Tips: Another new feature, TikTok Tips is a new, platform-owned account which exists (and you’ll like this) to “promote privacy, safety, and positive vibes” – and who doesn’t love those things? NO FCUKER, that’s who! It’s effectively a community-fronted channel in which popular TikTokers will post videos talking about a range of issues including the app’s safety features and how to use them, the importance of, y’know, being nice, and, wonderfully, reminders that occasionally kids might want to turn the program off and get some sleep every now and again. I know I always say this, but does anyone else find the idea of an app presenting you a neverending stream of video designed specifically to be compelling, entertaining and a bit addictive, all algorithmically-curated to appeal to YOU and all your SPECIAL PERSONAL SECRET LIKES, performed by a succession of often impossibly-attractive and talented and funny and clever kids, and then interspersing that with occasional messages from the same kids saying things like “but don’t let us make you feel inadequate or untalented, we’re all special!” and “maybe don’t keep watching our beautiful faces until you start to bleed from the eyes and lose bodily function from starvation!” a little bit fcuking rich? No?
• Leveraging TikTok For Growth: Or, an incredibly-comprehensive rundown of exactly how the TikTok algorithm works – or how this article’s author thinks it works – and exactly the things you need to to do give yourself the best chance of being this week’s ‘man who can do the tablecloth/wineglasses trick using his buttocks’ (and we can all agree there is no position on this earth more exalted). Really interesting – if you’re trying and struggling to gain traction with your TikToks (I am so sorry for writing that phrase; it’s a nadir, and it’s only 734am) then this is definitely worth reading.
• Google Analytics Breakdown of Get Mark: I know that YOU all know exactly how Google Analytics works and the basics of what it can tell you; this may not be true of all your colleagues, though, and as such this Twitter thread by Dan Barker, in which he analyses the traffic to last week’s Valentine’s web sensation Mark Rofe (the bloke from Manchester who offered a date with himself via a billboard and website) to see what it tells us. Obviously if you’re an SEO or website person then this will all be very much beneath you, but for people who are a bit more like me – pathetic, hopeless generalists, bluffing their way from one meeting to the next through a mixture of Googling and talking very very fast – it might be useful.
• D.I.C.E: This is A Good Thing. Various advermarketingprland people have gotten together to come up with DICE (I can’t be bothered to do the full stops every time, sorry) which stands for Diversity and Inclusion at Conferences and Events – the idea being to take practical steps to ensure that our industry’s events are always as representative and diverse as possible. They’ve come up with a voluntary charter that event organisers can sign up to and measure themselves against, and offer the opportunity for events to get DICE Certified to prove they’ve made an effort to ensure representation of diverse groups, and generally this is an excellent initiative that we should all get behind. Unrelated, but I spoke at an event a few weeks ago where they had live signing on stage; I didn’t see this, but apparently the person who was signing along with me was at several points seen to just sort of wave her hands exasperatedly as she struggled to keep up – sorry, sign language interpreter, I will do better next time.
• Pearl Jam Moon: Big fan of Pearl Jam’s new weirdly-80s-inflected sound; equally, I am a fan of this web app designed to promote their new single, which co-opts the moon as a QR code – load the site on your phone at night, point it at the moon, and get to enjoy Eddie Vedder’s distinctive rasp just like it was 1995 all over again. This also works with other, non-lunar light sources, by the way, though that’s cheating.

By Ed Fairburn

IN FACT LET’S HAVE SOME MORE ANDY WEATHERALL AS HE WAS SO ACE!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK YOU HAVE ANY MORAL HIGH GROUND ABOUT ANYTHING IF YOU READ THE MAIL, SORRY, PT.1:

• These Lyrics Do Not Exist: I could quite easily just drop this here and leave you to it this week; I CAN’T STOP MAKING IT CREATE SONG LYRICS THEY ARE JUST TOO GOOD. The latest in the now year-long trend for single-serving websites presenting AI-generated…stuff, this uses GPT-2 and a few little mood sliders to allow you to generate the lyrics to a whole song in under a second with just the push of a button. Give it a word, give it a phrase, give it a name, see what comes out – honestly, some of these are GREAT. I just fed it “your tears taste sweet”, and it took moments to throw out something whose chorus reads: “I need your lips, I need your kiss / I wanna trust you with my heart, my head, my soul / See your face everyday in the mirror / Tearing down the photographs when we were alright”, which I think we can all agree is the soft rock/emo crossover we all need right now. As an added bonus I just typed in my name and told it to compose a neutral song in the ‘rock’ style based around it; the resulting first verse is so painfully real that I might have to take a moment: “Matt still told me Matt loved me when Matt packed up / But how could Matt ever know what I knew already / Matt said Matt wanna save you / But you know I want you all too much”. MATTROCK!
• Chaf: Perhaps, looking back, we should have paid more attention to Chatroulette – the neverending stream of strangers keen to either insult you or wave their genitals at you was, maybe, exactly the sort of warning metaphor for the modern web which we all should have heeded. Still, time moves on and as we are now all far too aware of exactly how much of a bad idea connecting random strangers on the internet can be someone’s come up with a way of doing chatroulette but SAFE – welcome to Chaf, a website which does exactly the same as Chatroulette (to whit, connecting you with another stranger currently on the site) except with the difference that there’s no video feed and you can ONLY communicate via gifs. Which, obviously, makes it totally pointless as a communications tool, but which means you can have some genuinely odd and pleasingly-oblique interactions with strangers as you both try and construct the semblance of meaning from a series of low-quality gifs of Ryan Reynolds (seemingly it is ALWAYS Ryan fcuking Reynolds). I think it’s probably impossible to be cruel or to solicit sex through this, though don’t let that stop you from trying (please don’t try).
• The Financial Freedom Movement: Or, “Pay $20 a month so that YouTuber Jake Paul can tell you to quit academia and make content instead!”. Yes, what you’ve doubtless been waiting for – YouTube notoriety and dead-eyed grift-monkey Jake Paul this week launched his online academy, the Financial Freedom Movement, through which he promises to teach kids how to pursue their goals of…er…earning money by wanging around on video? It’s not exactly clear what advice it is that Paul purports to be offering here, but I’m willing to bet that there is going to be a heavy emphasis on the vital importance of ‘content’ as THE single most valuable and important commodity in the world right now (depressingly there’s an angle from which that’s sort-of true), repeated use of the word ‘hustle’ and a strong recurrent theme of how you should believe in yourself and ignore the haters. If nothing else – even if you don’t really know who Jake Paul is, and care even less – I beg you to please click this and scroll to the bottom and read the ‘letter to parents’ which I confess made me feel a degree of almost grudging admiration. I mean, here’s an excerpt – the chutzpah is astonishing: “If you’re already paying for Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime, then this is a no brainer. Those things aren’t helping your child or their future are they? Whereas for only $19.99 per month your child has access to world renowned experts who have taught and impacted over one million students around the globe. This is your chance to show you are truly committed as a parent to giving your child access to the best resources and education they can have to live a great life on their terms.” I don’t think this needs saying, but just in case – DO NOT GIVE THIS MAN ANY MONEY.
• The Davos Collection: Best artwork of the 2020s so far, this – I don’t care whether it’s real or of it happened or not, the idea alone is enough. The Davos Collection was apparently auctioned off in NYC yesterday at a secret location. The contents of the auction? A selection of material from the World Economic Forum, all liberated from parties and restaurants and hotels and cafes, all dirty, and all carrying the genetic material of some of the gilded attendees of Davos 2018. The link takes you to the auction catalogue, but the project press release can be read here; I love the ‘meh, who knows?’ attitude to the legality of all of this, and the slight uncertainty as to whether there in fact was an auction; still, even if purely conceptual the piece asks interesting questions about wealth and achievement and status and ability, and if it means that one day everyone will be able to own their personal pet plutocrat then I think we can all agree it’s a winner.
• Giggle: If you were going to launch an app in 2020 that was guaranteed to cause a massive, toxic online fight, what sort of app would you launch? Take a moment to think on it – now click the link and learn about Giggle and see if your invention is more or less likely to end in shouting. Giggle, you see, is an app for women and girls – and only women and girls – to enable them to form communities and interest groups within the app in a space free of men. Which is, obviously, totally fine and great – except then they went and did something weird and decided to implement some sort of facial analysis software into the app which will assess a potential user’s physiognomy and determine whether or not they are in fact a ‘biological woman’ based on their proportions, etc. Which if you’ve spent any time at all online in the past three years or so you’ll realise is…contentious at best. The app says it;s inclusive and supportive of the wider LGBTx community and that users who are (they believe) erroneously rejected by the app can apply to be manually vetted, but one does wonder at what point the makers looked at this and thought ‘yeah, that’ll be good for the discourse! That’s a massive online fight I really want to have!’ It feels well-intentioned but, Christ.
• The Internet-Connected Candle: It’s taken a month, fine, but we now have the first truly preposterous Kickstarter of the new decade – take a bow, creators of ‘Candle Touch’, the world’s FIRST smart candle!! I’m basically of the opinion now that Kickstarter works in only two ways – as a funding route for actual independent artists (great!), and simultaneously as a place in which people see exactly how stupid people online are when it comes to saying “I WANT I WANT!” to ridiculous design concepts. 42 days left and less than $1k short of full-funding, this is going to be become reality – WHY??? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT A CANDLE THAT YOU CAN LIGHT FROM YOUR PHONE??? Fine, ok, the first time you show someone they’ll be amazed. You can probably fool your kids and pets into thinking you’re actually magic. After that? You’ve got a 50 quid lighter that won’t work if your WiFi is fcuked or your battery runs out. YOU FCUKING IDIOT. Some of the copy here is also beautiful – I mean, this is basically art, right? “Candles are magical. They have existed for thousands of years and they are considered to have mystical and relaxing benefits.” YES THEY FCUKING ARE MY FRIENDS YES THEY FCUKING ARE.
• Below The Surface: This is mobile-only, but it’s a surprisingly powerful piece of AR work from New Zealand designed to communicate the devastating impact of certain fishing practices on dolphin populations in the country’s seas. The ‘you’re underwater, look around’ mechanic is effective, and I was honestly a little taken aback at quite how…er…visceral the effect is of seeing all these trapped dolphins bleeding in the sea around you. Not cheery, fine, but very nicely done indeed (and I say that as someone who’s got very little time for AR in general).
• The Year in Greta: I’m sure Greta Thunberg will be fine and doesn’t need middle-aged men worrying about her; that said, I can’t imagine it’s particularly fun being so young and such a visible, singular figurehead for a global movement. This site captures a bit of what weirds me out about it; it’s really nicely made, don’t get me wrong, presenting the story of 2019 and how the climate change movement and XR in particular, led by Thunberg, rose to global prominence, but equally the presentation of Thunberg as some sort of godlike figure at the centre of it all seems…unhelpful, and, based on my (limited) dealings with them, very much sort of the antithesis of what XR (and by extension I imagine Thunberg herself) are all about.
• Loly: Do you want to join THE FUTURE OF DATING? “I don’t know”, you might reasonably reply, “what does this ‘future’ look like? What does it entail? Will it be ROBOT DICKS???” It might be, eventually, but right now the slightly disappointing answer to ‘what does the future of dating hold?’ is, sadly, ‘THE FCUKING BLOCKCHAIN!’. Yes, that’s right, you can now date ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! This is VERY crypto – a whole lot of icons, a whole lot of jargon, a White Paper (because every cryptoscam in the world needs a White Paper, it is The Law), some spurious features including ‘AR Partner Finding’ and a ‘Heat Index’ (no, no idea at all), and a whole lot of impenetrability. Why does the dating app need to be on the blockchain? How the fcuk does the inevitable promise of an ICO fit in with attempting to find ‘love’? Why has noone involved in any of this stuff learned that simply putting a ‘consent’ contract on the blockchain doesn’t necessarily make any subsequent sex consensual by default? This screams MASSIVE CRIMINAL SCAM at decibels, I tell you.
• Walnut TV: A N Other player which pulls popular videos from Reddit and streams them through a nice, easy-to-navigate interface. There doesn’t appear to be anything NSFW here, meaning this is a potentially GREAT way to just sort of zone out for a few hours while you wait for hometime.
• Face Facemasks: You’ll probably have seen these, but the site’s worth looking at – this is by Danielle Baskin, who had a smart idea for a bit of a joke and ran with it – you can, though, theoretically sign up to get one of these when the global facemask shortage is over (presuming it ever is). The gimmick is that they are offering to make you a facemask onto which is printed a photorealistic depiction of the lower part of your own face – enabling you to unlock your phone with FaceID whilst still keeping your nose and mouth covered. Which, as the designers point out, is unpleasantly apocalyptic and also sort-of useful.
• The Wearable Jammer: This also got a lot of traction in the media this week, indicative of the very weird tension we’re living through as a society; on the one hand, we love our Alexas! On the other, stuff like this gets shared everywhere, with that now familiar air of Anthropocene ennui and accompanying ‘bring me the sweet release of freedom from the digital panopticon’ commentary. Insert your own ‘shrug’ emote here. This is a prototype for a portable piece of kit which can be worn (albeit bulkily) on one’s wrist to stop microphones in the vicinity, whether from home assistants or smart devices, from working; this is a clunky joke now, but is exactly the sort of thing which protesters will be deploying en-masse as part of whatever the next large-scale urban resistance movement is, mark my words.
• The Universe Sandbox: Normally I don’t feature stuff in here which you have to pay for, but I’ll make an exception for this, mainly as $30 seems like a small price to pay for software which will literally let you simulate the birth, life and death of entire imagined universes. Play with gravity! Smash planets! Unleash supernovae! Explode your computer by attempting to get it to simulate the Three Body Problem! Honestly, this looks mesmerising and if my laptop wasn’t basically held together with string and matchsticks I would totally lose myself to this.
• SafeDM: SafeDM is a Twitter plugin which is designed to stop people receiving unsolicited filth in their DMs; whilst it’s obviously gender-neutral, it’s clearly aimed at women who are, it’s fair to say, more likely than men to receive a glistening-yet-disappointing cockshot unbidden. Is…is this common? Do lots of you get unsolicited cockshots on Twitter? Is this really a thing? Do (and this is something I’ve just thought about, and which I am now compelled to share here) flashers look down on cockshot senders as somehow inferior perverts, do you think? I am baffled.
• The MSCHF Box: Insert the usual disclaimer here about being bored of featuring MSCHF stunts already in 2020 – this week’s is a box which you can buy for an as-yet undisclosed sum which MAY contain something worth upto $7k or MAY contain something worth about a quid, and which you COULD open or which you COULD keep for 100 days and then return for a guaranteed return of $1000. WHAT WILL PEOPLE DO?!? Genuinely interesting psychological experiment and another superb piece of attention-grabbing by the very best attention grabbers grabbing attention right now.
• Signed, Sealed and Undelivered: I don’t know if there’s a particular Dutch quality that enables this, but I keep finding lovely web projects about archivial history from Holland (there was that beautiful one from a couple of years back about all the stuff they found when dredging the canals – you remember, this one). Anyway, this is another: “In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk of letters was bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum in The Hague (currently Beeld en Geluid Den Haag), then as now the centre of government, politics, and trade in The Netherlands. The trunk belonged to one of the most active postmaster and post mistress of the day, Simon and Marie de Brienne, a couple at the heart of European communication networks. The chest contains an extraordinary archive: 2600 “locked” letters sent from all over Europe to this axis of communication, none of which were ever delivered.” I LOVE THIS – so much fascinating stuff.
• The Music Lab: The Music Lab is a series of small projects, presented as games, designed to help investigate the human response to music and the underlying psychological and neurological reasons for its species-wide appeal. There’s an awful lot of academic material in here, but there are also a bunch of fun little music toy/games in there as well which are an excellent way to pass some time whilst at the same time contributing to the progress of human learning. Oh, and they’re currently accepting applications for Summer interns in 2020, should you know anyone who’d be interested or suitable.
• Biolinky: A service which lets you attach a bunch of URLs to another, single URL – basically letting you put all your various links to your various hustles and projects in one place so you can link everything from your Instabio. Might be useful, might not.
• Facelift: A really interesting project this – not without its potentially problematic side effects, but conceptually-fascinating. Facelift basically uses machine learning and image analysis to assess urban scenes for ‘beauty’ based on photos; the idea is that humans assess imagery to create a dataset on which to train the machine, which is then set loose on a city (in this case Boston) to map it on the basis of urban aesthetics and (and this is the amazing bit) to imagine what those ugly bits might look like if they were beautified. Look, here: “The team assembled 20,000 images of Google street views that volunteers had labelled as beautiful or ugly. They then fed all these images into a computer running a deep learning framework – a kind of algorithm that mimics the human brain by processing data in neural networks. In so doing, the algorithm learned what humans thought was ugly or beautiful and, based on that, it was asked to improve an ugly scene, which it did using a generative adversarial network – a relatively recent class of algorithms that is currently used to recreate “fake” yet realistic human faces. The resulting images were then matched to the most closely corresponding images of real spaces. Finally, the algorithm explained how the addition and removal of specific urban elements had made the scene more beautiful.” That is MENTAL.
• Young Planet: FULL DISCLOSURE: my friend Rob Blackie is involved with this in some way. Still, I’d cover it regardless as it seems like a useful and good thing. If you’re a parent and either looking to dispose of kidstuff that you no longer need, or if you’re a parent looking for kidstuff that’s used rather than new, Young Planet is the swapping marketplace you have potentially been searching for. This is probably only going to work if you’re in London judging by a cursory look at the listings, but it seems in pretty rude health and there’s a decent spread of stuff available to pick up. Smart, useful, worth a look.
• TinkerSynth: Online synth toys are, fine, ten a penny, but this is a nice variant on the genre – TinkerSynth is more artsy than most, presenting all the controls in abstract fashion and giving no real indication as to what’s going to happen when you press the buttons so it’s all basically an unknowable mystery which may or may not produce something halfway-listenable. WHO KNOWS! It’s lovely, fun and very nicely-designed indeed.
• Gammon: It’s a shame that this didn’t make an appearance before Christmas, as it would have been the perfect stocking filler for that uncle that you really don’t like – Gammon is a seemingly entirely-real fragrance produced in Germany by a company with seemingly no designs at all on expansion into the Anglo-Saxon market; no idea what it smells like as the site’s all in German, but WHO CARES? This is the sort of thing you should absolutely buy now, safe in the knowledge that it will make n HILARIOUS present for someone at some point in the future (or which you’ll forget about and then find in 20 years time and be incapable of recalling what it was about the word ‘Gammon’ that was so side-splittingly funny way back in history.

By Vincent Desailly

NEXT, WHY NOT EXPERIMENT WITH SOME BORDERLINE-UNLISTENABLE REMIXES OF OLD MIDI TRACKS WHICH ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY SORT-OF AWFUL BUT ALSO REALLY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK YOU HAVE ANY MORAL HIGH GROUND ABOUT ANYTHING IF YOU READ THE MAIL, SORRY, PT.2:

• Art 42: Art42 is a project by German (I think) artist and coder Valentin Vieriu which presents an infinite stream of AI-generated artworks; you can apply a bit of personal curation by selecting and keeping your favourites, and each is available to order as a print; as a way of curating the art in your office, this is a potentially nice option (if you don’t mind your art being entirely abstract and a little on the derivative side).
• What People Say About This Website: A website which does nothing else but collect and embed Tweets which are about it, making it possibly THE most perfectly recursive digital object in existence. Obviously totally pointless and yet because of this potentially the purest and most perfect website I have ever featured in Curios.
• The Glitch Gallery: In fact, it’s a particularly good week for digital art; this is the Glitch Gallery, which presents a series of wonderful, digitally-fcuked images drawn from software bugging out. Every image on here is a result of some piece of software or another glitching in aesthetically-interesting ways, to produce odd, weird, angular…things. This is effectively the Curios aesthetic in a website, fwiw.
• Made by Mistake: In case you’d ever wondered what to buy me by way of thanks for selflessly summarising the internet for you each week for FREE and with NO EXPECTATION OF THANKS (although the faint hope does, despite my better judgement, still linger), here’s an idea. Made by Mistake is a Dutch company which does one thing – it makes models. Architects models, museum dioramas, presentation miniatures…if you want, say, a perfectly-realised scale model of your business park, or a nice, golden wooden representation of the London skyline as of 1963, these are your people. I have no idea at all how much this sort of thing would cost – I’m guessing that getting a bunch of people in Rotterdam to spend six months making a castle out of matchsticks isn’t cheap, though – but if you fancy a whipround then mine’s a 1m sq representation of Vauxhall Gardens complete with miniature model village, please.
• Facefilters: Dinamo is a Swiss design agency; they’ve created this offshoot page to showcase some of the work they’ve been doing using Insta’s Spark AR studio to create face filters for the platform. These are so much fun – I do think that there’s a lot of creative potential with this stuff that’s not currently being exploited, mainly as trying to find someone to make the damn things for you is harder than it ought to be. Still, plenty of inspiration here if you want to suggest these to your clients – why Microsoft hasn’t already leapt to sponsor the one that basically turns your face into a giant floating letter against the backdrop of the Windows XP homescreen is a mystery to me tbh.
• Europe is Not Dead: I confess to feeling a genuine pang of loss at this; it may not be dead, but it feels DEAD TO US. Still, if you’d like a reminder of all the ace stuff that the continent has to offer, and which is still on your doorstep, and which you can still visit (albeit with longer queues at passport control than before), then this site is excellent – it’s a genuine, proper ‘wow, I had no idea they did that in Hungary – and with the whole sausage!’-type site with all sorts of fascinating things to visit and look at, and should you or anyone you know be planning an oh-so-on-trend pan-European train holiday this Summer then this is the perfect digital companion to it.
• How Big Is A Billion?: Another in the long line of ‘websites designed to help communicate exactly how mind-bogglingly large some of the numbers we deal with every day are’, this one lets you see exactly how long it would take you to scroll through a billion…actually, it’s not quite a billion pixels due to constraints of web architecture, but it’s LOTS and it gives you an idea of what a mind-flayingly large figure a billion in fact is (which might, maybe, lead you also to think that anyone having a billion of anything is perhaps a touch on the excessive side – SEE, EVERYTHING IS POLITICS).
• Quorum: Whilst most of the time I’m firmly of the opinion that we have TOO MANY messaging options already, this one looks like it could be reasonably useful. Quorum is a platform which lets communities organise, fundraise, etc, within closed and limited parameters; effectively it’s a mobile messaging app with integrated payments and subscriptions and some light community analytics, seemingly perfect for small clubs or membership organisations who want a place to congregate. For most, fine, I can imagine Whatsapp would work fine, but I can envisage instances where it might not quite do everything you want, in which case Quorum might be worth a look.
• The Ethical Litmus Test: You wait a decade for people to start taking the concept of ‘ethics’ in a business context seriously…2020 very much feels like it’s going to be THE YEAR for people doing stuff on this, even if only cosmetically, and the Ethical Litmus Test seems like a decent attempt to at least try and make people think a little more carefully and critically about what it is that they are doing with their business, both in terms of its product and its organisation. It’s eventually going to be a card deck, a la ‘oblique strategies’, and you can pre-order that now, but there’s already a downloadable checklist-type-thing to help you start thinking about this stuff in a structured way; if you work in startup land this might be worth a look.
• Bookshop: AN ONLINE BOOKSHOP THAT DOESN’T NECESSARILY SCREW INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS!! I know, I know, it seems to good to be true (and maybe it is), but this at least seems like a good idea, and generally anything that takes away from MechaBezos’ empire is ok by me. The model’s a bit complicated, but shops can either sign up to be affiliate sellers through the platform, or can simply benefit from its promise to distribute 10% of its profits to independent bookshops every six months. It’s imperfect, fine, but honestly it’s not like anyone’s come up with a better idea for how to save publishing and book sales and stuff. I think this is currently only a thing in North America, but keep an eye on it and see how it develops and whether it expands internationally.
• Jazz With Bob Parlocha: Do you like jazz? Would you like access to an archive of old radio shows hosted by a guy called Bob Parlocha in which he plays jazz? GREAT!
• The Map of Maths: Look, I’ll be honest with you here – I don’t understand maths, I find it confusing and a little scary, and I resent it for being one of the (many) things which punches neat little holes in my self-constructed armour of projected intelligence. Still, even a mathematical refusenik such as myself found something to enjoy in this – look: “Here is a map of mathematics as it stands today, mathematics as it is practiced by mathematicians. From simple starting points — Numbers, Shapes, Change — the map branches out into interwoven tendrils of thought. Follow it, and you’ll understand how prime numbers connect to geometry, how symmetries give a handle on questions of infinity. And although the map is necessarily incomplete — mathematics is too grand to fit into any single map — we hope to give you a flavor for the major questions and controversies that animate the field, as well as the conceptual tools needed to dive in.” REALLY interesting although I don’t understand much more about numbers than I did before if I’m totally honest. Oh, and seeing as we’re on maths, here’s a bunch of problems and puzzles which are all far too hard for me but which you might be able to do something with.
• 40 Concepts To Understand The World: This is an unnecessarily and slightly-irritatingly hyperbolic, but it’s also a really interesting Twitter thread giving you a quick rundown on 40 concepts or ideas that are potentially useful in helping you understand the world and the people in it. Simple and clear explanations on a bunch of ideas such as Simpson’s Paradox and the Streetlight Effect – this is honestly useful and the sort of thing I rather wish I’d read when I was a kid.
• The Belgian Celebrity Magnet: WHO IS THIS WOMAN? WHY DID SHE KNOW ALL THE FAMOUSES??? I love this story, not least because at the time of writing I’m yet to see any explanation at all for this; it’s nice to have mysteries sometimes.
• Wordweb: This is FUN – put in any word that you want, it will present you with a selection of thematically-linked words; click on any of them, and the process repeats. As a way of exploring linguistic connections and, potentially, coming up with ideas, this is quite lovely; if nothing else it’s an excellent way of developing creative writing exercises if you feel the need to flex any of those muscles.
• International Landscape Photographer of the Year: Congratulations Oleg Ershov, winner of the 2019 award – all of the images here are stupendous, though; take a look at the flipbook at the bottom of the page for the full, glorious selection.
• Lover: As an English man, I am terrible at sex. This is a fact; it is impossible for the English male to be anything other than at best awkward and at worst risible when it comes to fcuking; this is an OLD TRUTH. Still, thank heavens for things like Lover, an app which promises to help me improve my skills as a lover through a variety of app-based instructional tutorials and exercises. Set your sex goals and get a personalised self-improvement programme delivered through the app which will guide you towards the promised sunlit uplands of erotic nirvana – yes, that’s right, with this app you can turn the physical act of love in to ANOTHER tedious rote task you need to get better at in order to succeed at the never-ending, intricately-scored game of LIFE! It’s iOS-only, and – SURPRISE – there’s a subscription tier ($10 a month, $60 a year)! Maybe I’m being cynical – quelle horreur! – but I wouldn’t exactly be amazed if it turned out that you couldn’t accede to the final tier of lessons and sex guides without shelling out for a sub. “Sex is no different to any other lifeskill. To move forward, you need to practice” – practice and pay, it seems.
• Hidden Cats: Finally this week, a very gentle little game about finding the right cats. There is nothing else in here this week that will make you feel this cosily relaxed, I guarantee.

By Whitney Hubbs

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS LOVELY LOUNGE SET BY LIFESTYLE DIVISION!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS THIS WEEK EMPTY AND ALL THE CLOWNS ARE GONE!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Food Bites: The Insta account of a former adland person from Holland (I think – big week in Curios for the Dutch, imagine there will be some form of national celebration over the weekend to mark it) who creates lovely, cute images with food. Literally just that, but SO charming.
• Liz Sexton: Papier mache art – honestly, these are amazing and the cutest animal heads made of old newspaper you will ever see (this sounds like faint praise but I promise you it’s not).
• Sau: This person is 19 and from Toronto and they draw the loveliest anime-inspired characters and illustrations and they deserve a follow, whoever they are.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Cabinet: James Butler in the LRB writes on the UK Cabinety reshuffle and what it might mean for the political direction of travel of the country; it’s particularly good on the ‘ideological’ dimension which it might indicate – I use the term cautiously, but there’s some good stuff in here about the indicators towards a more overtly polarising Government position on lots of things and more obvious sense of taking sides in the ‘culture wars’ which, well, doesn’t feel great. This was obviously written before ‘eugenicsgate’ this weekend, which didn’t do much to countermand the ideas here presented.
• The Angry Young Left: Another LRB piece, this time by William Davies, reviewing the book ‘Generation Left’ by Keir Milburn but also taking a more discursive look at the resurgence of strong left-wing ideology amongst the young on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s an excellent overview of where the left is now in terms of its broad appeal to the young, and where this generation might end up politically as it matures – “Generation Left remains, for the time being, disempowered and defeated. A Conservative government, tirelessly cheered on by a 20th-century newspaper industry, has been voted in by the massed ranks of the over-fifties. The question is whether, despite its recent successes, the Conservative Party is sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb. Culture war tactics may work in the short term, and may shore up support on the margins, but they are essentially defensive. They don’t offer much to a generation whose values are already cosmopolitan, internationalist and liberal, who despise Nigel Farage and what he stands for, regardless of whether or not they went to university.”
• Deepfakes In India: I think I was probably pretty bullish last year about the extent to which digital techniques would be used to manipulate the Indian elections – I was, as with so many other things, somewhat off-beam with my prediction of deepfakes everywhere and FAKE NEWS and all the rest, but it has sort-of eventually happened – this piece looks at the recent use of Deepfake tech for the relatively-benign purposes of producing real-looking English translations of videos originally produced in Hindi, complete with realistic-looking mouth movements. The interesting stuff here, aside from the ‘where will this end up?’-type questions, is the reaction from voters exposed to it – this stuff works.
• The Australian Fires: A really nice piece of Snowfall-ish (do we still call them that? Is there a new go-to example for this type of thing? It’s been a decade ffs, surely we must have moved on) content by ABC, using satellite imagery from the past few months to tell the story of how the bushfires developed and spread. It’s beautifully-made, and more importantly does a better job of anything I’ve yet seen of communicating the incredible spread and scale of the devastation.
• Italy’s Malaise: It’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to have to move to Italy this year, so it was nice to read this and be reminded of exactly what a mess my motherland is. This is a typically clear-eyed piece of journalism in Der Spiegel – though I get the impression Italians are a bit annoyed at the Germans always treating them as some sort of anthropological curiosity, like a petri dish of economic fcukery – looking at some of the reasons for the current Italian malaise; the sad thing is that there are no obvious solutions to the economic and social problems plaguing the country and which are irreparably entwined with its strange, fractured genesis in the mid-19thC.
• Yuval Noah Harari: Having surpassed Malcolm Gladwell as ‘the intellectual everyone has to have read and have an opinion on’, Harari’s attained a near-unprecedented degree of global fame and recognition off the back of ‘Sapiens’ (which obviously I haven’t read) – this profile in the New Yorker looks at his life now, and the weird intellectual-industrial complex that he’s built – or which has been built, it’s sort-of hard to get a handle on that bit – around him, and what it means to be the global mega-rich’s idea of what a smart thinker looks like. What, seemingly, it looks like, is spending a lot of time making slightly gnomic pronouncements on whatever you fancy; look, Harari’s obviously an order of magnitude smarter than me and I am in no position to criticise him (especially since, again, I’ve not read significant portions of his output) but, well, I can’t help but feel that he’s Alain de Botton with a broader readership and more photogenic appeal.
• What People Thought of YouTube at Launch: Literally this – a look back at some of the commentary and thinking around the now-inescapable online video juggernaut from the time of its launch 15 years ago. Imagine trying to go back in time and explain Zoella and Pewdiepie to these people.
• Reading de Sade in the age of Epstein: Fascinating piece in the New York Review of Books about looking back at the writings of de Sade in an age in which we are far, far more cognisant of – and critical of – the idea of self and agency and what the denial of those things does to people and society. The parallels the author tries to draw between the appreciation of de Sade as a thinker, a position common through much of the 20th C, and our tacit acceptance of figures such as Epstein, don’t always land in my view, but it’s fascinating to consider whether we’ll still be considering Sade an author worthy of serious consideration rather than a worrying deviant with access to a pen and enough money to pay off his victims in a few years time.
• Growing Old in Hollywood: A lovely little essay by a Hollywood screenwriter in their early 50s, about what it feels like to get older in an industry obsessed, more than any other, with appealing to youth, and how the new media landscape might provide as much of an opportunity for older voices as it does for other diverse narratives.
• An App Can Be A Home-Cooked Meal: A lovely little piece of writing about building an app for a tiny group of users, and what that enables you to do in terms of design and usability that you wouldn’t be able to do if you were designing for an unknown potential infinity of others. There’s something in this idea, I think, of creating ultra-bespoke digital experiences; honestly, were I a brand with a proper digital existence I would seriously consider the development of bespoke versions of apps or software for specific influencers or groups of people.
• Nearly K-Pop: When we were in our mid-teens my mate Richard was scouted by someone putting together a boyband. Or at least that’s what he said happened – nothing ever came of this, and we were basically convinced that he’d been tricked into taking a bunch of slightly risque shots by a middle-aged pervert with a camera and one of these business cards you used to be able to get printed by the dozen in larger train stations. I’ve never seen the musical machine up close, then, but this article all about what it’s like almost-but-not-quite becoming a K-Pop star suggests that it grinds incredibly small – this sounds AWFUL, and makes me think a bit less of all the stans who don’t see these people as human beings and who ignore the fact that they are treated as interchangeable meat robots in a neverending pop-Voltron.
• TikTok Couples: Are you in a relationship? What do you think would bring you closer together? Do you think it would be committing to a punishing schedule of content production in an attempt to please and appease the unknowable algogods of TikTok? No, I don’t either, and yet this is exactly what these couples have seemingly committed to do – does this sound healthy? ““Moriah was pretty sick during her first trimester, so we had to repost a bunch of old content every day,” Scott said. “It’s hard to make videos when you have to go to the hospital seven times in one month, but we didn’t want to get behind with the algorithm.” “I don’t think people wanted to see the pain I was in,” Moriah added. “We like to post pregnancy videos, but we like to keep them light and fun.”” It does NOT. What I find most interesting about this is the lie it gives to the idea that these people are ‘self-employed’ – you are not, you have a boss, and it is the algo.
• The FikFok: After the first ‘it’s too addictive, I’m quitting’ letter to TikTok from last week, this week we have the pivot to the ‘fake’ TikTok account, where kids can post silly things that they actually like rather than the things that they think will make them famous. If you can read this and not feel a deep, deep sense of soul-sadness at the idea that something ostensibly fun and frivolous has very quickly become a stress-inducing form of labour for lots of these kids then, well, you’re a cheerier person than I am.
• Baby We’ll Be Fine: This is what it’s like to get stabbed. With pictures. It’s a hell of a piece of writing – clear and dispassionate and also quietly frightening, particularly just how easy it all seems.
• The Chaos of the Dice: This is OLD – 7 years old, from 2013 in fact – but its subject died recently and so this piece resurfaced and OH MY GOD IT IS BRILLIANT. Meet Falafel, the self-described ‘best backgammon player in the world’, total ‘character’, inveterate hustler and semi-religious figure in the annals of gambling. This profile follows him to Vegas and beyond, introduces some truly wonderful characters from the slightly sketchy demi-monde he inhabits, and is generally a brilliant, funny piece of writing full of people who I would happily describe as ‘larger-than-life’ were it not a horrible cliche. Superb.
• I Am Being Unmade: Finally this week, one of the best things I have read in years, online or off. Paraic O’Donnell is a writer who I have followed on Twitter for a while but whose work I confess to not having been hugely familiar with; this piece, about his MS diagnosis and gardening and death and mortality, is honestly the best thing I’ve seen so far this year, and possibly last year as well – for various reasons there are bits of this that are…unpleasantly resonant, but even without any sort of personal connection I challenge you not to be moved by the prose (you will fail). I mean, look: “And then, when S. had left, I couldn’t see straight to strip the bed, to bundle the sheets into the wash. Because the crying had started. I hadn’t even noticed, but when I did I couldn’t stop. And this crying, it was not fcuking around. It wasn’t the decorous glistening you see in films. No, it was epic, this performance, it was unrestrained and operatic. This was crying in the high style, the heroic mode. This was a balls-out Wagnerian tempest of sorrowing that suspended all other functions and went on for a week. I fell through myself, under myself. All the way down.” I would literally kill to be able to write like that.

By France-Lise Mcgurn

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, a song by AI – a creative agency fed a bunch of Travis Scott lyrics into GPT-2 and played around with it til it had a verse that vaguely approximated the rapper’s style (it’s…not hard tbh); the music was also composed by algos trained on his sound – this is the result. It’s…it’s not bad, amazingly, though that perhaps says more about the questionable quality of the rest of Scott’s output (says the old man, shouting and fist-waving at the clouds):

1. This animation is called ‘Love’. I don’t really know what’s going on, but it’s got some nice CGI and is borderline NSFW, which is perfect Curios-fodder really:

1. This is by someone called Ellis, from their debut album which is out in April, and it’s called ‘Embarrassing’, and I am probably far too old to enjoy it as much as I do – a fcuking great sadpop song, this:

1. I don’t really know what is happening here – what language this song is in, who the band are, what the video’s about, anything really – but it is MESMERISING. I am told this is called ‘Baloje’ and it’s by an outfit called Solo Ansamblis; it’s really, really good (and quite odd):

1. HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new one from Jpegmafia, and it’s called ‘Bald!’, though I don’t know why:

1. UK HIPHOP CORNER! I am basically going to post everything Manga releases this year – this is ‘At All Times’, featuring the excellent Izzie Gibbs:

1. It’s fair to say that Yves Tumor isn’t the most welcoming name for an artist, but this is a fcuking GREAT track, sort of slightly sleazy semi-funk with a Labyrinth-channeling video – the song’s called ‘Gospel for a New Century’:

1. Last up this week, just…enjoy. This is called ‘Boycycle’ and it is wonderful and OH LOOK AT THAT JUST LIKE THAT IT’S ALL OVER FOR ANOTHER WEEK AND ALL YOU ARE LEFT WITH IS THE MEMORY OF THE LINKS AND WORDS THAT HAVE GONE BEFORE AND MY ABIDING LOVE FOR YOU YES YOU I LOVE YOU THANKYOU FOR READING AND I WILL SEE YOU IN A FORTNIGHT TAKE CARE HAVE FUN AND PLEASE DON’T ABANDON ME FOR OTHER, BETTER, LESS CORPULENT NEWSLETTERBLOGTYPETHINGS IN MY ABSENCE I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE I MISS YOU BYE BYE BYE!!

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Love is in the air! Or a virus! Or both! Whether it be Cupid or the Coronavirus that strikes you down, I hope you’re preparing to step into the weekend with vim and vigour and no little spunk. It’s been another week – that’s pretty much the best I can say about it – but now it’s time to cast aside your cares and your worries and your woes and focus on the BEST Valentine’s Day gift of all – 8,000+ words of bitter cycnicism, garnished with links and all wrapped up in bile JUST FOR YOU!

Before you get all up in my links, though, can I take a moment to once again remind you that Imperica’s ACTUAL REAL PROPER MAGAZINE, packed with excellent articles life and culture and THE NOW, all by a range of writers from a range of backgrounds, all of which deserve to be read for the low, low price of £3 (which, let it be said once again, doesn’t go anywhere NEAR me) – CLICK THE LINK AND BUY A COPY NOW! DO IT!

Anyway, enough of the plugging – I’m off to wash the crusted filth from my limbs and then begin the arduous task of constructing my girlfriend’s present from the collection of biological oddities I’ve been accumulating since October; you’re a lucky girl, Saz! The rest of you, though, consider the following mess of ‘content’ as my gift to you – imagine me staring plaintively at you as you read it, watching and waiting for any small gesture of appreciation. Imagine my massive, sad, watery eyes with their distressingly-liquid pupils just sort of boring into you like gimlets. IMAGINE THEM!

I’m Matt, this is Web Curios – it’s good for you, I promise, although I concede that it might not feel like it at the time. 

By Connor Addison

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, WHY NOT TRY THE SOUNDTRACK TO THE PLAY ‘POET IN DA CORNER’ WHICH IS CURRENTLY ON AT THE ROYAL COURT AND IS BASICALLY INSPIRED BY DIZZEE’S DEBUT?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE CURRENT DEARTH OF UPDATES ABOUT S*C**L M*D** TO CONTINUE FOREVER:

• Facebook Adds ‘One Time Notification’ Option To Messenger: The fact that I’m opening this section with some ‘news’ about an update to the Messenger API should give you some idea as to the paucity of ‘news’ from the platforms this week. Still, impenetrable and tangential as this will be to most of you, there’s also the kernel of an opportunity here – Facebook’s now affording developers the opportunity to build in the ability to send users ONE notification, unbidden, via Messenger, presuming said users opt-in; meaning you can get people to grant you ONE SINGLE OPPORTUNITY to spam them with brandwank per year (no, really – the token which affords a Page the ability to contact users direct has a 12m expiry date, which in itself feels like something you might be able to exploit; this is exactly the sort of thing you could use to issue birthday present reminders, for example). Basically this is technical and boring and requires you to understand a bit about how the mechanical bits of Facebook actually work, but if you can put up with that then there’s some proper creative use cases for this, I think.
• Facebook Launches Hobbi: The latest malformed chimera to emerge, limping and mucal, from Facebook’s new projects team, Hobbi is basically a Pinterest ripoff. It’s seemingly not available in the UK yet – no guarantee that it ever will be tbh – but if you’re curious I’m sure you can VPN your way in. Hobbi’s basically a sort of scrapbook for one’s own creative process; the idea is that you can create moodboards and the like of your photos of your work, documenting the process and the progress of your endeavours; there’s seemingly very little that’s truly ‘social’ about it, but you can export your collections of images to share elsewhere should you so desire. There’s no obvious reason why you should care about this, unless you’ve got a significant interest in Pinterest stock in which case be afraid.
• Snap Launches Mental Health Support Tools: There is, frankly, a finite amount of times one can type phrases such as ‘redolent of a darkly dystopian future’ and ‘it’s just like Black Mirror’ before one starts to lose the will to carry on breathing; still, it’s another one of those updates from s*c**lm*d**land, reminding us that however oddly dispiriting our dark scifi imaginings might be, the reality is far more chilling. Snap, fresh from some surprisingly-positive earnings numbers last week, has announced a suite of tools designed to automatically serve up positive, helpful content to users whose in-app behaviour indicate they might be feeling a touch on the self-harmy side. “When a user types in words that could imply they need help with health and wellness issues, the tool will surface a special section within Snapchat’s search results. It includes proactive resources from mental health experts, as well as content from partners on topics such as from anxiety, mental health and suicide.” You know what this is? THIS IS MENTAL HEALTH CLIPPY FFS! “You appear to be having some dark thoughts; have you considered meditation?” I know, I know, it’s better to do something rather than nothing, and it’s A Good Thing that Snap’s making material available to help kids address feelings of sadness and alienation, etc, but, well, I don’t know whether having a fcuking algo ‘reach out’ to me when I display symptoms of emotional fragility is necessarily the pick-me-up I’d be looking for.
• Spotify Kids Comes To UK: I don’t think there’s any sort of brand relevance here at all, although maybe you could derive some sort of small benefit from getting your brand’s content whitelisted for inclusion in the app. Still, I imagine that many of you have kids and that the idea of not having your Spotify algo polluted by ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Baby Shark’ is probably quite appealing – see, I am always thinking of you.
• Spotify Launches ‘Songwriter’ Pages: BIG SPOTIFY NEWS WEEK! The other big announcement is that songwriters can now claim their own Page on the platform, meaning they can have a space of their own to showcase the songs they’re responsible for in one place. Er, that’s it!
• The Online Harms Consultation Response: You will, of course, have seen the news about Ofcom being named by the Government as the preferred regulator to whip those pesky internet giants into shape; you may not, though, have taken a look at the actual text of the response. Yes, ok, it’s very dry and written in total horrorgovernmentese, but it’s worth a look – whilst nothing has really been announced here other than a vague desire to ‘do a regulation’, it’s interesting to see just how theoretical all these plans are – despite the hard-man rhetoric. “”There are many platforms who ideally would not have wanted regulation, but I think that’s changing,” said Digital Secretary Baroness Nicky Morgan. “I think they understand now that actually regulation is coming.”” Which sounds meaningful, until you read the actual text of the Govt response, which says: “regulation will establish differentiated expectations on companies for illegal content and activity, versus conduct that is not illegal but has the potential to cause harm. Regulation will therefore not force companies to remove specific pieces of legal content. The new regulatory framework will instead require companies, where relevant, to explicitly state what content and behaviour they deem to be acceptable on their sites and enforce this consistently and transparently.” So, er, the regulation will regulate companies to self-regulate better! This…doesn’t *feel* like a solution
• The Rough Guide to XBox: I was quite impressed by this; Microsoft has partnered with the Rough Guide to produce a travel guide to XBox, the idea being that it’s a wonderful infinity of beautiful worlds to explore at your leisure, and as such it deserves its own tourist guide to the best bits. A genuinely nice idea, this.
• 1917: This is a typically-shiny BIG MOVIE WEBSITE, fine, but it’s particularly nicely made; a companion to the war film, this site takes you through the trenches in glorious 3dCGI-o-vision, presenting you with short clips from the film to whet your appetite for, er, a couple of hours of brutal battleporn. The site itself isn’t hugely revelatory, fine, but the navigation and interface are really rather nice, and I like the fact that there’s a clear ‘BUY TICKETS’ prompt throughout – though why it’s geolocked to the US is slightly beyond me. Still, lovely work.

By Vaka Valo

NEXT, ENJOY THIS PLAYLIST OF HIPHOP INSPIRED BY THE ABOVE PLAY! IT’S A GENUINELY GREAT MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD THAT NONE OF YOU THOUGHT TO GET IT ANY SORT OF VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT, PT.1:

• Botnet: Oh, this is good. Part one-note gag, part art project, part weird little RPG, part therapy tool, Botnet is an app that answers one simple question; what if everyone else on your favourite s*c**l m*d** platform was a bot? What if YOU were the only real person? What if YOU were the center of everything? A wonderful combination of smartly-coded interface which mimics Facebook, Twitter and Insta with nailed-on design, and some nice use of GPT-2, the app lets you create your profile and then post whatever you like into the bot-filled ether; the botnet will then engage, react, respond and bicker in your comments, a machine-scripted peanut gallery reacting JUST FOR YOU! There are small microtransactional elements, like the ability to introduce new bot personas into the network like trolls and superfans and the like, but the real joy is the oddly-surreal and laugh-out-loud funny comments that your fandom will come up with; honestly, I really can’t recommend this enough. Annoyingly iOS-only, but nick a partner or friend’s iPhone and have a play – it’s ACE, and also (I found at least) weirdly sort-of revealing after a while.
• The BBC Microbot: Thanks Gill for sending this my way – I am convinced that I’ve featured something almost exactly like this before, but I couldn’t find it and this is new and noone cares anyway, so. The BBC Microbot does one simple thing – you Tweet it some lines of BBC Basic code, and it will respond with that very programme running as a Gif on Twitter. Whilst I’m capable only of the standard “10 PRINT “MATT IS ACE; 20 GOTO 10”-type stuff, the bot’s feed showcases all of the outputs so far requested and, honestly, this is ART – how the everliving fcuk all these middle-aged men have managed to remember exactly the input strings they learned all those years ago in CDT is beyond me. I will give a special prize (it won’t be good, but I promise it will exist) to anyone who makes it write something nice about Web Curios.
• Playmaker: I remember when Fantasy Football first started in the UK around 1992, and the frenzied playground discussions about whether Chris Sutton was worth the money; I couldn’t have predicted the weird stranglehold it appears to have developed on significant numbers of football fans across the UK, who seemingly spend hours fretting over each week’s captaincy and the worrying lack of assists being delivered by what they were sure was a creative midfield powerhouse. If you’re one of those fans, then you might be enthused by the prospect of Playmaker, “a dedicated discussion platform that allows you to build your identity and grow your following as a Fantasy Manager.” Yes, that’s right, ANOTHER INFLUENCER PLATFORM! Too ugly to make it as a YouTuber? Too malcoordinated to get on with TikTok? Why not monetise your ability to pick a fictitious team of footballers every week?? Whilst this is probably appealing thought for many of you, the platform’s at present very light on details as to exactly how it’s going to help you become a PROFESSIONAL FANTASY SPORTS PLAYER (no, really, that’s a legitimate aim of theirs). I am fascinated by things like this – I have no idea AT ALL how they envisage monetisation working, either for them or their userbase, but the feature list is quite interesting; the live game chat stuff, backed by live match data from Opta, is potentially quite an attractive idea. Basically, though, I just don’t think that it’s possible for more than about 5 people worldwide to make a living as ‘pro’ fantasy football players, whatever this app might want you to believe – watch, now, as it proves me wrong, and ‘Fantasy Football Influencer’ becomes a legitimate kids’ career aim by 2024.
• Hoop: Interesting more for what it represents than what it is, Hoop is the first breakout app to be built on the Snap web API thingy (look, I know that that’s not it’s technical name, but let’s be honest – you can’t remember what it’s really called either, and you care less than I do, and you know what I mean, so, look, just LEAVE ME ALONE OK???), which effectively lets developers integrate Snap with other apps and websites. Hoop is basically Tinder-for-new-Snap-Friends; you launch the app, and it shows you a neverending cavalcade of Snap users; you can use the app to ask them for their Snap username which they can choose to share with you, thereby connecting you on the app and enabling you to send ephemeral pictures of your erogenous zones to each other (come on, let’s be honest). It’s not hugely exciting per se (unless you’re a very, very thirsty teen), but the way it leverages (sorry) Snap is interesting.
• 136 Internet Videos: This is from the end of last year, but don’t let that in any way dampen its majesty. I’m nicking this from Faris’ newsletter, which I am sure you all subscribe to already – the link takes you to a Google Slides presentation by Joe Sabia who’s (I think) Head of Creative Development at Conde Naste, which presents 136 YouTube videos that, in his words, BLEW HIS MIND. Honestly, this is SUCH an incredible bit of web culture time travel and a wonderful repository of video creativity to boot; feel free to circulate this around your office and enjoy the spectacle of people in their early-20s discovering things like the Honda Rube Goldberg ad or ‘The Scared is Scared’. If you’re anything like me and have spent far, far too much of the past two decades burning through neurons whilst staring at a screen, this will be an incredible nostalgia vehicle; even if you haven’t, I promise you this is the best resource for visual inspiration I’ve seen in an age.
• Electronic Football: I love stuff like this – its creator got in touch with @imperica on Twitter as he thought we’d like it, and how right they were. This is a Kickstarter – just started, with two months to go – for the development of a remarkable-looking reimagining of table football, all played automatically with magnets and code and affording the opportunity for computer-vs-computer play or for a human opponent to take on the machine. It’s quite hard to describe, but basically: “A dense matrix of a new kind of electromagnetic actuator that we invented in 2018 (patents pending) – covering the underside of the playing surface – enables both ball control and fast action. The addition of high-speed electronic ball tracking technology means that the system can play with or against human players.” You can get a pretty good feel for the idea by watching the video, but I think that the potential for this is SO much greater than that proof of concept suggests; the idea of being able to create self-adjusting kinetic landscapes like this is fascinating, and you can imagine this sort of thing at scale being used in theme parks to magical effect. Basically I want you all to back this so I can ask the nice people at Spaceman Technologies for a freebie – go on, pledge a quid.
• The Big Crossword: There’s not a whole lot of scope for additional exposition here to be honest; it’s, er, a really big crossword. Available for download on iOS and Android, this is free and massive and, if you like crosswords, basically all your Christmases come at once. Contains 1250 clues, which ought to keep you reasonably occupied for at least part of 2020, alongside the intriguing idea of a ‘Quest Mode’ which promises to introduce some sort of narrative metagame to the concept of ‘solving some reasonably-simple word-based questions’. Best accompanied by a flask of weak lemon drink.
• SNAFU: When you were a kid, did you dream of working in the music industry? Did you fantasise about a gig as an A&R person at a major label, using all of your taste and nous to pluck deserving, talented kids from small-town obscurity and propel them to genre-defining, generational stardom? Well, in common with much of the rest of the music business, technology is KILLING that dream; welcome to SNAFU, a new record label which proudly boasts that it chooses all its artists via…AI! Yes, that’s right, it’s the WORLD’S FIRST Artificial Intelligence-led music business: “Our proprietary algorithms analyze millions of data points over 150,000 songs per week to find the few artists that can make a major cultural impact with their music. We then put our resources to work to make sure that the music reaches its potential.” I am a very big fan of the hubris here – not only can the AI predict what will be a hit, but it can also pick those artists who will CHANGE THE WORLD! Honestly, I’m ready to hand over control of everything to these lads, they sound GREAT. I will watch this with interest; judging by the tracks on their homepage, the AI is at present seemingly trained to discover ‘tedious, Xanaxed-out Soundcloud rap that sounds like literally everything else in 2020’, but I presume I only think that because I am old and practically-dead.
• Repper: Let’s add ‘textiles pattern designer’ to the list of creative professions made obsolete by the advent of the internet and the rise of machine intelligence; Repper is a really, really smart-looking platform, available on a subscription for a seemingly very reasonable 5 quid a month, which lets anyone upload image files and then select small areas of said images which can then be tesselated and messed with in seemingly-infinte ways. The breadth of output you can achieve with this is quite, quite dizzying, as is the way in which it cleverly takes selected elements from the source image and turns them into perfectly-aligned abstract elements; honestly, if I did stuff with fabrics I would LOVE this (I sort of love it anyway tbh).
• Romantic London: HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE! This is the only vaguely Valentine’s-themed link in here this week, I think, and even this isn’t really about it at all; the ‘Romantic’ here refers to the time period rather than anything to do with Eros. Romantic London is ‘a research project looking at the life and culture of London at the turn of the 19th Century’, and features elements from Richard Horwood’s classic map of the time along with assorted other historical curios. This is lovely, and makes me want to spend a cold, sunny day walking the City – you may feel the same.
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library: You want an incredible Flickr collection of prints of wildlife and assorted flora? EXCELLENT! This is a wonderful archive, and the sort of thing which, given the time, I would totally mine for prints with which to decorate my kitchen. The prints of fish in particular are SO good, and I quite want an 18th Century lithograph of a Senegalese manta ray should anyone feel minded to get me a present.
• Cuss Collar: I’m going to have to stop featuring projects by MSCHF soon – it’s a bit annoying to have to include their stuff each week, particularly as it’s almost always either US-only or sold out by the time Friday rolls round. Still, this is too good (and silly) an idea not to feature – the Cuss Collar is their latest limited-edition product, developed for no discernible purpose and sold out within minutes, which sits around your dog’s neck and translates their bark into swear words. Yep, that’s it – it’s a dog collar which will shout things like “FCUKING PROLAPSE!” or “DICKNOSED BUMFACE!” every time your dog barks. That’s it – no high concept, no ;’purpose’, just a device that makes it sound like your dog has a terrible pottymouth. If someone at Pedigree doesn’t see this and rip it off somewow then, well, I fcuking despair of you.
• The Unword of the Year: Stuff I learned this week – that each year since 2001, “a German linguists’ panel chooses one new or recently popularized term that violates human rights or infringes upon Democratic principles. The term may be one that discriminates against societal groups or may be euphemistic, disguising or misleading”. This year’s word is “climate hysteria”; previous winners have included “ethnic cleansing” and (my favourite choice) “human capital”. This is darkly-funny but also actually quite un-funny when you think about it in terms of language, power and meaning – stare too hard and it all gets a bit Orwellian imho.
• 1000 Google Earth Landscapes: You want 1000 stunning aerial shots of the Earth in hi-res, to use as a screensaver or a piece of rotating wall art or to train your GAN on? YOU GOT THEM! This is actually an update to the original collection, bringing the number of images included to around 2,500; a truly beautiful collection.
• Audionautix: This is a really, really useful service, collecting seemingly thousands of original compositions by the insanely-prolific Jason Shaw which he’s kindly made available for free for download and commercial use. If you’re regularly faced with the horrific task of creating ‘mood’ videos and needing to find some sort of inoffensive backing music then this will be absolutely fcuking GOLDEN.
• The Rotary Cellphone: You might have seen this doing the rounds this week – designer Justine Haupt has created this WONDERFUL invention, a mobile phone powere by a rotary dialer, and which features no screens at all; rather than being a theoretical piece, this is actually a working device that Haupt intends to use as her primary phone; to that end, there are some excellent practical features such as one-touch dialing buttons for your preferred contacts. It’s intended as a means of limiting one’s obsession with / contact with the digital, but is also a genuinely lovely piece of design which harks back a bit to that weird period in the mid-00s when phone design went totally mental and Nokia was trying to flog us devices that basically looked like those odd Turkish flatbreads covered in mince that you get in Green Lanes.
• Printing Money: A simple but very neat way of visualising different degrees of income. Really effective, not least at showing exactly how sh1t a human being Jeff Bezos is as regards his charitable contributions and attitudes towards taxation.
• Newfoundland and Labrador Beard and Moustache Club: It is, I concede, a bit late for calendars, but if you’ve yet to get yourself a 2020 daymarker then let me STRONGLY recommend this one; the Newfoundland and Labrador Beard and Moustache Club has, for the past three years, published an annual calendar in which its bearded, moustached members pose as, er, mermaids. Lovely, sparkly-tailed mermaids. This is superb, and not a little erotic.
• Podsync: This self-describes as a “simple and free service that lets you listen to any YouTube or Vimeo channels, playlists or user videos in podcast format”; that’ll do for an explanation, right? Right!

By Rose English

NEXT, HAVE THIS VAGUELY MINIMAL TECHNO-ISH MIX BY CULT MEMBER!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD THAT NONE OF YOU THOUGHT TO GET IT ANY SORT OF VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT, PT.2:

• Beetles in Games: No idea who compiled this list, or why, but if you’ve ever thought to yourself “You know what? I really wish someone had bothered to compile an exhaustive, image-based list of all the times the VW Beetle has appeared in a videogame and put it online for me to peruse at my leisure” then this will be all of your Christmases come at once. Whilst you might not think that this is of any interest to you, I encourage you to click and marvel at the frankly INSANE dedication to completeness on display here – when was the last time you did something this thoroughly? You ought to be ashemed of yourself.
• The Tube Challenge: What are you doing with your weekend? Other than having THE BEST AND MOST ROMANTIC DAY OF YOUR LIFE, obviously. If you don’t have any particular plans, and you happen to be in London, why don’t you attempt one of these quite preposterous Tube challenges? No idea who’s compiled this, but I am VERY grateful for this – there are LOADS of different ones you can attempt here, from the classic ‘visit every station on the network INCLUDING Battersea Park’ to the far more esoteric ones like the ‘Points of the Compass’ challenge where you have to visit all the stations that have a compass point in their names. Even better, each challenge has the curre tn record time next to it, so you can RACE AGAINST THE CLOCK!! I realise as I type this that you might not all share my enthusiasm for the idea of doing nothing for 9 hours or so other than sitting on a fcuking underground train, but I respectfully suggest that you are WRONG and that this is the best thing you could do with a quite possibly very miserable weekend indeed.
• Avocado & Toast: The latest drop from Matt Round’s continuing ‘Vole’ project of curiosities, this is a wonderful little algogenerated comic which takes millennial-bashing newspaper articles from all over the web and uses them as the seeding point to generate small comic strips in which the titular millennial couple Avocado and Toast discuss their incomprehension of certain popular Boomer things, to the inevitable furious consternation of said Boomer. This is genuinely funny, and works far better than you’d imagine; it’s also a brilliant example of how formal constraints can, when properly applied, be a genuine boon to creativity.
• Mapping The Gay Guides: Oh wow, this is *such* a slice of queer history. I’m just going to give you the description here: “While on his frequent business trips around the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bob Damron wanted to find bars and other locales to meet other men like him. A gay man, Damron sought friends, companions, and safety at friendly businesses in the various cities he visited. He began jotting down the names of the spots he frequented, sometimes loaning out his notebooks to fellow gay friends to take with them on their own journeys. His prolific lists became the basis of gay travel guide he began publishing in 1964. Named the Bob Damron Address Books, these travel guides became almost survival guides to gay and queer travelers across the United States. First published in an era when most states banned same-sex intimacy both in public and private spaces, these travel guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) find bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people like themselves.” This is a glorious piece of social history, and a fascinating ongoing project; if you click on the ‘vignettes’ section you’ll see that there are a couple of essays documenting what the Guides can teach us about regional variations on attitudes towards homosexuality in the 60s and beyond, and I imagine these will be added to as time goes on. So, so interesting.
• Open Syllabus: A whole LOAD of university syllabi, letting you see which are the most prescribed texts in each field in each country; it’s interesting not only in terms of getting a representative impression of what is canon in a specific discipline, but also to see how trends in academia vary from country to country. Equally, if you’re the sort of autodidact who fancies doing all the reading for, I don’t know, a DPhil from Cambridge, then this will tell you where to start (you madman).
• VanGogh: A search engine for colour palettes which, wonderfully, just lets you put in whatever terms you like and will seemingly find a palette for anything; I just fed it the word ‘Fear’ and it threw out some genuinely unsettling colour selections, for example. This works by using the search term you input to pull associated images from Bing; it then pulls a palette from those and presents it to you. Simple, useful, fun, and it afford you the ability to create a colour palette based on YOUR NAME; chromatic narcissism at its finest.
• Old Soviet Photos: You can’t move online for collections of old photos, and in the main I don’t bother with them in here because, well, there are other websites and newsletters for that sort of thing. This, though, I’ll make an exception for; this collection of images is from an unknown Moldovan photographer (now named as Zaharia Cusnir), all depicting rural life in the 50s and 60s; the images were discovered a couple of years ago as negatives in the rubble of an old house, and have been developed, scanned and collected online. The faces here, Christ; whilst old photos often have a slightly stuffed quality to them, these people are alive in a way you don’t always see. There are some truly gorgeous human beings in these images, photographed superbly.
• Brainfood: Are you sick of the fact that your phone and the web have chipped away at your attention span to the extent that you can barely concentrate on anything long enough to compose a Tweet? Do you wish that you could do something better than reaching for your fcuking device every time you’re left unstimulated for more than 10 seconds? Tough, you’re weak and that ship has definitively sailed; still, you might like the sound of Brainfood which promises to make your mindless scrolling marginally more useful by sending you bitesize learning modules about all sorts of things – astronomy, geology, history, etc – each week. The site seems to suggest you’ll get about 60s of learning per week, which doesn’t personally sound like it’s going to transform me into some sort of well-rounded intellectual ubermensch and certainly doesn’t sound like it’s worth $5 a month, but perhaps I’m underestimating the degree of density these minute-long infobites will have. Launching, apparently, ‘soon’, you can sign up now for your chance to make yourself smarter via the medium of small, cartoonish lessons (look, I’m going to say this now – you are not going to learn anything meaningful or useful by being spoon-fed minute-long ‘lessons’ in cartoony format by an app).
• Dark Future Shop: I don’t know whether any of you are secret Cosplayers (but I have my suspicions); still, if you are and if you want to go full-post-apocalyptic next time you play dress-up then this Etsy shop is the PERFECT place to stock up; this stuff is all quite ridiculous, but also incredibly well-made. Basically if you’re in the market for some Fallout-esque get-up, this will fulfil all your needs; also potentially appropriate for any of you contemplating Burning Man but who are too lazy to make your own gear. This is quite incredible stuff, honestly, although it does also rather scream “spends more time than is health on Reddit”.
• Korean Films: Following Parasite’s Oscars triumph, it’s now absolutely de rigeur to have a strong opinion on the state of Korean cinema, and to be able to affect a slightly-bored long-standing knowledge of the country’s filmic output (look, I don’t make the rules, that’s just how it is). To aid you in this endeavour, have this YouTube channel which presents 200+ actual, full-length Korean films, with subtitles, for you to enjoy at home. On which note, can I personally recommend ‘My Sassy Girl’, which is honestly AMAZING and you should all go and watch right now (it’s actually a perfect Valentine’s film, now I come to think of it).
• Fangs: A comic strip detailing the love affair between a vampire and a werewolf. Yes, I know, this sounds awful; ordinarily I have no tolerance whatsoever for this sort of Tumblr-esque stuff, but I promise you that it’s a delight. Smartly-written and beautifully-drawn and surprisingly affecting. Give it a try, it’s LOADS better than it ought to be.
• Glide: I hate Powerpoint. You hate Powerpoint. And yet, because the world is stupid and wrong, and work is a pointless hell, we are all seemingly compelled to keep using it for ever, regardless of whether or not it’s actually useful or helpful. Still, thanks to Glide you can at least download a really simple, sleek and moderately-customisable template for the bloody thing, which might be useful to you if you don’t have access to a friendly designer (or any innate design ability of your own).
• Jam: This isn’t live yet, but could be an excellent service – Jam will, it promises, offer a service to allow people to share subscription logins simply and securely via an app; the idea is that it will enable you to produce one-off login access to your accounts, letting you grant people time-limited or single-use ins to your Netflix, Amazon or similar. This is potentially a really useful tool if you don’t want to give your password out willy-nilly (and you shouldn’t).
• Ad-Free YouTube: Or, more accurately, YouT-ube – this is a very simple hack, but a very useful one; simply add a ‘-’ after the ‘T’ in the irl of any YouTube video and it’ll remove all the ads and, as a bonus, play it on a loop. Feel free to use this however you want – were I in an office today, I would use this to play ‘Smell Yo Dick’ by Riskay on repeat on the telly, but you do you.
• Space: “Space”, as Douglas Adams famously wrote, “is really, really big”. This is probably the most incredible photo of space I’ve ever seen, not so much for the nebulae and stuff on display as for the incredible resolution of it. Click – now zoom. Now zoom some more. Now zoom some MORE. Now take a moment to contemplate how far away this is, and how small and insignificant you are in the face of all this infinite cosmic majesty. GOOD, ISN’T IT?
• Robots: The Atlantic’s In Vision series presents a selection of images of robots – as they term it, ‘at work and at play’. This is a lovely set of photos, but equally feels a little bit like it’s capturing something of a cuspy moment, where we’re just getting to a point where robotics is day-to-day adjacent but still quite far enough away to engender a sense of curiosity and wonder. Imagine travelling back in time and showing these to your seven year old self; you’d be rapt.
• Old Book Illustrations: I mean, you don’t really need me to explain this. Illustrations from the 18th to early-20th Century, browsable and downloadable. A treasure-trove, and the sort of thing it would be quite interesting to train a GAN on to see what sort of strange historical drawings it might imagine as a result.
• Extremely Online: I don’t want to spoil this – all I’ll say is that it’s a text adventure game in the style of Zork and all those old Infocom classics, and that it’s really quite smart. You may need to experiment a bit to get the hang of where the creator’s head’s at – type in commands and see what happens…
• Wiz: Last up this week, an EXCELLENT little puzzle-platform game. Move the blocks, reach the exit, tear your hair out around level 20 when it starts getting HARD.

By Linda Norton

LAST MUSICAL SELECTION: HAVE THIS 80s-POP-LOUNGE-EURO-TYPE-THING BY S&W!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Sh1tty Possum Sadposts: Only one Tumblr this week, but it’s a classic of the genre; the linked Page is the Q&A, but if click ‘next’ in the left-hand sidebar you’ll get to the meat of this project – a load of photos of possums, overlaid with various inspirational and uplifting captions. You may not think you need this, but if you’re having something of a trying day I can recommend that you take a moment and stare at the possums accompanied by the lyrics to ‘Mr Brightside’; it will, I promise, improve EVERYTHING.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Michele Castagnetti: A US-based artist, Castagnetti’s work (as displayed in this Insta feed) is a weird mix of strong, tape-based graphics, brand subversions and stylised oil portraits; it’s an odd combination of styles, but it makes for an interesting and varied feed.
• Royalty Now: Imagining what royalty from the past would look like if they were alive now, based on their representation in portraiture and sculpture. There’s a certain degree of ‘bad waxwork’ to some of these, but as a project it’s fascinating.
• Joey Solomon: Solomon takes photos of disabled people that don’t look like any other photos of disabled people I’ve ever seen. He photographs other things too; his work is so, so good, I really can’t recommend this one enough.
• Good Vietnam Shirts: By ‘good’ we here mean ‘written in comedically broken English’. If you’re a fan of tees that read things like ‘FUKK OF GOD!’ then you will ADORE this.
• Nicolattes: Currently posting photos of the oddity of Chinese cities on lockdown as a result of the bat AIDS.
• Pac In The Sink: No idea who the account’s owner is, but they have SNEKS! If you don’t like serpents then you may want to give this a swerve; otherwise, though, LOOK AT THESE LOVELY SLITHERY BOIS!
• Paid Technologies: Slightly-bafflingly-named account which posts photos of beautifully-crafted edible jellies. Yep, jellies. No, I promise, it’s better than you think.
• The Anonymous Photo Project: Collecting, preserving and sharing old photographs and negatives – there’s no thematic consistency, no grand plan, just an endless stream of anonymous old photos, slicing through life and the 20th Century. Wonderful.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• GPT-2 And Intelligence: A fascinating and pleasingly-sober look at the reality of GPT-2 (as I’m sure you’re all aware by now, that’s the current gold standard for text AI), which does an excellent job of pointing out the benefits and limitations of the tech as it stands, and makes it very clear exactly where the gaps are when it comes to producing something that can be said to not only produce text but which might be able to parse its meaning in some way; it also has some interesting things to say about theory of language and thought. Really, really interesting.
• Carbon and the Web: A small essay by Danny van Kooten about his efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the websites he works on; I’m including it mainly because FCUKING HELL EVERYTHING IS KILLING THE PLANET LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
• Fashion’s Digital Identity: I’d expected this sort of thing to be far bigger than it is by now; I remember a good 10 years ago, charity shops were experimenting with adding codes to objects so that their donors could attach some sort of history or back story to their donations, say. Still, it is apparently on its way – this is a Vogue Business report on the growing trend in high fashion for garments to be ascribed a ‘digital identity’ with information about their provenance, manufacture, etc, available via scanning a label or a code. This is reasonably interesting, but if I’m honest I’m including it here because I invented the term ‘The Frockchain’ in my head when I first read this and now want to use it at every possible opportunity.
• The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake: I don’t know about you, but when I was a teen and into my early 20s I still harboured a hope that I would end up living with all my friends as an adult, and that we’d be able to subvert convetions by having a happy, communal adult existence and we’d all be each other’s chosen family, bound together by choice rather than accidents of birth. Obviously it didn’t work out like that, what with nearly all my friends selfishly insisting on doing things like growing up and moving on and procreating and marrying, whilst I stayed firmly stuck in protoadolescence (I am the Billy Childish of webmongs); still, I’ve always been curious about non-traditional modes of living an alternatives to the traditional family unit, and this superb essay in The Atlantic looks at exactly that. It’s focused on American history specifically, but there are obvious parallels with all Western countries in terms of the way in which technology and progress have altered the way in which we relate to each other as familial units. This is beautiful – interesting and intelligent and learned and sad and hopeful – and it will make you want to spend the weekend with people you love.
• White Collar Crime: This is a profoundly-depressing essay, I warn you; the Huffington Post looks at how and why the current era could be seen as something of a halcyon era for white collar crime, and how it is that so many plutocrats are able to get away with cheating the system and dodging their taxes, all with the knowledge of the largely-impotent enforcement agencies. There’s something so miserable about the fact that it all boils down to a question of money, and how, as ever, it’s the person with the most who wins. It also reminded me of the fact that in the 40 years I’ve been going to Rome I have bought approximately 9 bus or tram tickets; whilst there are fines in place if you’re caught without one, I know for a fact (courtesy of my cousin who works for the Roman equivalent of TFL) that there are a total of around 50 inspectors IN TOTAL in the whole of the city, and they never all work at the same time, meaning there’s basically no chance at all of ever getting caught. I am, effectively, doing exactly the same thing at a small scale as the billionaires referenced in this article, and I now feel ashamed. Sorry, Rome.
• The Airbnb Scam: A great piece of investigative reporting, looking at the prevalence of Airbnb scammers who are using clever tricks and listings hacks to get around laws in cities like London which limit letting of properties to a set number of days per annum. Part of me admires the entrepreneurial ingenuity of these guys; a larger part of me thinks that Airbnb really is an urban cancer and we’ll all be better off once cities start properly clamping down on it.
• Bloomberg Memes: As the US Democratic nomination approaches and we get to see which of the pretenders gets to enjoy losing to That Fcuking Man in November, take a moment to read this account of billionaire contender Michael Bloomberg’s memetic campaign war machine – the fact that there are actual meme-based political consultancy shops out there is honestly amazing to me, almost as much as it is that Michael Bloomberg thinks that this is anything other than a very ‘Hello, Fellow Kids’-type move. Didn’t the UK election last year not prove that a strong meme game is literally meaningless when it comes to engendering actual political turnout and support? Still, fair play to the kids who’ve managed to get access to his wallet for this.
• Jailbreaking Teslas: This is about cars, but it’s actually more interesting than that (I promise); I had no idea that Tesla basically bricked their cars as soon as they appear on the resale market but, er, they do! This is fascinating to me – not the Tesla stuff (although, honestly, what an absolute d1ck move this whole thing is) so much as the future this presages, in which all our products and devices are software-dependent and can be turned off or rendered obsolete on a manufacturer’s whim and with a simple download. More reasons why having everything connected to the web isn’t necessarily always a great idea.
• I’m Quitting TikTok: This may not be the absolute firts, but it’s certainly the first I’ve seen – TikTok’s received its first ‘why I’m quitting TikTok’ open letter! It’s all growed up! It’s more of a cultural/historical artefact than anything else, but it’s interesting how similar it is to every single one of these you;’ve ever read before, despite the novelty of the platform, though I did rather like this line: “TikTok isn’t merely a social app to share posts and mindlessly scroll through. For almost every user, it’s become an activity, a hobby, a project, a transactional video dialogue between user and camera.”
• Playing Red Dead: Specifically, ‘playing Red Dead Redemption 2 as a 75 year old woman who’s never played games before but who wants to try this one because her son is one of the lead actors in it’. This is SO LOVELY, and a superb illustration of why games are wonderful; reading the author’s description of how the world drew her in and the characters slowly became familiar over the hours of playtime is genuinely moving, and a reminder that, honestly, games can and should be for everyone and you should get your mum on XBox live (actually, maybe spare her the foulmouthed teens, on reflection).
• Types Of Person: I loved this essay, and it made me momentarily sad that I’ll never have teenage kids. Only momentarily, mind; I then remembered what I was like as a teenager and how even I didn’t want to spend much time with me. This is by Dan Brooks, and it’s about how there’s a trend amongst young people, borne of online discourse, to identify themselves and their peers exclusively as ‘types’, and how that’s not fantastic, maybe, for their emotional development: “When I say I didn’t do the dishes because I’m lazy, I’m talking around the fact that I could have done them but chose not to. The illusion of a fixed nature gives us an excuse to repeat bad behavior. To insist that what we do determines who we are — and not the other way around — is to make freedom and therefore responsibility a part of our worldview at the most basic level.” I’d be fascinated to know if this resonates with the parents among you.
• Palindromes: OH GOD I LOVE THIS! Palindromes are wonderful, magical things, and this piece takes a language-lover’s delight in exploring how they work, what makes a ‘good’ one, and how computational power has allowed for brute force palindromic construction (which is cheating a bit). If you’re a linguist of any sort you will absolutely adore this – also, the fact that the Japanese word for ‘tomato’ is palindromic is SO PLEASING.
• Meet the Femcels: Welcome to your depressing slice of internet life for the week; the online communities for women who, for various reasons, consider themselves to be involuntarily celibate – hence the construction ‘femcels’ This is an interesting if miserable read.
• Macauley Culkin: This interview with Culkin has been widely mined for quotes, but it’s worth reading the whole thing – less because of Culkin, who doesn’t say anything particularly interesting throughout, more for the genuinely weird tone and style of the whole piece. From the incredibly grating authorial affectation of referring to Culkin as ‘Mack’ throughout, to the strange reverence that his most banal utterances are granted, this is truly odd piece of fame-sycophancy, painting someone who, whilst pleasant-seeming, doesn’t demonstrate anything remarkable whatsoever in the course of the profile. No wonder famous people are weird.
• Emotion Eric: I cannot tell you how happy I was when this floated across my field of vision this week. I’ve spoken before I think of my love for early web sensation Eric, of ‘Eric Conveys An Emotion’ – a website in which the titular Eric would solicit requests for emotions to act out, and post images of him evoking, I don’t know, ‘uncertainty’ or ‘mistrust’ or ‘the feeling when the door shuts behind you and you just KNOW you’ve left your keys in your other trousers’. This is an interview with Eric who is, I promise, literally THE sweetest man you will come across in 2020. I promise you, this is SO PURE and SO GOOD, you will grin like a loon throughout.
• The People of Las Vegas: Oh wow, this is superb. Amanda Fortini lives in Vegas – the real Vegas, not the strip – and this essay is her portrait of the city and its people and the weirdness and the artifice and the lies and the magic and the crime. So, so good: “One early morning as I am leaving my apartment, two esoteric sports cars are idling in front of me, bumper to bumper: a man gets out of the rear car holding a giant aspirin-pink designer purse and hurls it, with all the rage in his body, into the first car, which is presumably occupied by the purse’s owner. Recently, at a party on the Strip, a four- or five-year-old girl in a mermaid costume posed for photos with partygoers; her parents, also dressed as mermaids, were placing her in people’s laps. “I don’t think children should be used as props,” my friend whispered, after the parents tried to sit the child on her, “but that’s just me.” I agreed, but the kid seemed to be enjoying herself. Downtown, on a sweltering late-spring afternoon, my husband and I watched as a man in a wheelchair determinedly kicked his way up Fremont Street, backward and uphill, with one leg, his only limb. My heart collapsed in on itself, as it does so often here. Just last Saturday, I saw a woman on the sidewalk outside my apartment, bathing her legs in beer. Well, it’s not water, I thought as I passed her, but it works. That’s a thought I never would have had before moving to Las Vegas.”
• Colgate Lasagne: I didn’t think that the best essay I would read this week on truth and falsehood and the nature of what is ‘real’ would also be about Colgate’s ill-fated expansion into frozen foods, and yet here we are. This is an attempt to find the ‘truth’ of the persistent internet legend of the Colgate Lasagne, but morphs into a far more interesting and smarter series of investigations into what ‘true’ means in an era of layered narratives and no sources and little critical thinking. Superb.
• I Don’t Want To Be A Strong Female Lead: Finally this week, filmmaker Brit Marling talks about what it’s like being a female actor and why she doesn’t want to ever be offered the role of a ‘strong female lead’ ever again. This is excellent.

By Natasha Law

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is called ‘Lust’, it’s by Julia Bonnar, and I want to describe it as an absolute kinetic banger or ‘propulsive techno’ or something like that, but I can’t because it will make me sound like a total cock. Still, that’s exactly what it is – reminds me vaguely of Gearwhore, but better. SO GOOD:

1. Next, Beaches with ‘Want What You Got’ which is basically the Instagram anthem that we didn’t know we needed. Love the video here too:

1. This is superb – King Princess singing ‘Ohio’, seemingly recorded live:

1. HIPHOP CORNER! This is Fat Tony & Taydex, and it’s called ‘Get Out My Way’. Very wonky indeed, but interestingly so:

1. Finally this week, this won Best Short at the Oscars – watch and see why. It’s called The Neighbour’s Window and it’s brilliant. Oh, and BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU LOADS ESPECIALLY BECAUSE IT’S VALENTINE’S TODAY BUT FRANKLY I LOVE YOU ALL THE TIME EVEN WHEN IT’S NOT AND I HOPE THAT YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND PLANNED THAT INVOLVES EROS AND AGAPE IN WHATEVER PROPORTIONS YOU PREFER AND I LOVE YOU AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK AND I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

It…it doesn’t feel hugely different, does it? Almost like there was no control to take back!

Hello everyone! Happy Friday! It’s been another long, unpleasant week at the coalface – and I don’t even work full-time FFS, I have no idea how you lot do it – but it’s now OVER. How have you celebrated our first full week free from the SHACKLES OF EUROSLAVERY? Have you CRUSHED IT and KILLED IT and SEIZED and WON and TASTED THE BLOOD OF YOUR FALLEN ENEMIES?

Sorry, that came out of nowhere; it’s just that it’s hard not to get caught up in the exciting machismo of NEW, UNFETTERED BRITAIN, poised as we are to once again take the lead on the global stage. I’m feeling so macho that as soon as I’ve stopped typing this and gotten round to washing some of the filth off, I’m going to make sausage rolls – THAT IS HOW WE DO IT HERE AT WEB CURIOS TOWERS!

Before I crack right on with the links and associated prose gubbins, though, there is an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT to make – WELCOME TO THE WORLD IMPERICA MAGAZINE VOLUME 2!! For a mere three quid, you can get your hands on LOADS of excellent and interesting words (none of which, let me guarantee you, are by me) by several excellent writers; not only that, but I am absolutely in love with the cover art and indeed the artist, with whom there’s an excellent interview. It’s a lovely project, and Editor Paul’s done a fantastic job, and, I repeat, none of it will sound like me AT ALL. It’s ace, honest. 

Right, gentle plugging done with, now it’s time for the REAL stuff – this isn’t a magazine, there’s no editing (PAH! EDITING!), there’s just me and you and some links, and some pictures, and the unspoken knowledge that neither of us really understands why we do this anymore but that there’s something deeply, darkly ritualised about the whole experience which is doing neither of us any good.

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you should be grateful. 

By Shae Detar

LET’S KICK THE MIXES OFF WITH THIS NEW HIPHOP SELECTION BY TIFFANY CALVER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THE OCCASION OF TWITTER’S LATEST EARNINGS STATEMENT TO REMIND EVERYONE OF THE VANISHINGLY-SMALL NUMBER OF REAL PEOPLE WHO USE THE PLATFORM AND CONSEQUENTLY WOULD APPRECIATE THE MEDIA PLAYING SLIGHTLY LESS ATTENTION TO IT AND WHAT PEOPLE SAY ON IT BECAUSE IT IS ABOUT AS REPRESENTATIVE OF ACTUAL PUBLIC OPINION AS LONDON IS OF THE UK:

• Facebook Will Shut Down Its Audience Network’s Mobile Arm: An irritating week in s*c**l m*d** news, this one, in the main because there’s stuff which has happened and which I probably ought to write up in my capacity as a…as a…actually, hang on, why do I have to write this up? DAMN MY STAKHANOVITE DEDICATION. Anyway, this is the news that Facebook’s audience network – which shows Facebook ads on non-Facebook properties, basically – is shutting down it’s mobile arm, which means FB ads will, in time, run across a more limited range of third-party mobile sites. I can’t imagine why you’d care about this – I mean, as long as we hit those magical, arbitrary KPIs, who gives one iota of a fcuk where they come from? It’s this sort of attention to detail and deep pride in my work that you can expect when you hire me as a consultant, should you be tempted.
• New FB Streaming Tools For Gamers: There’s been a semi-interesting degree of rumbling this year about Twitch looking like it’s in for something of a tricky year, with YouTube and Facebook and Microsoft’s platform whose name I can never remember all luring big-name streamers away with cash and new features and stuff. Facebook’s latest feature update is designed primarily to protect streamers from harassment: “With the new toolkit, creators and moderators will be able to remove comments, mute viewers for a short period of time or ban people from their Page or stream. Once someone is banned they will still be able to watch the stream but won’t be able to comment or react to the stream or other people, and their previous comments will be removed.” So there.
• Better Parental Controls for Messenger Kids: This all seems good and sensible from a child safety point of view – “parents will be able to see who a child is chatting with and how often, view recent photos and videos sent through chat, access the child’s reported and block list, remotely log out of the app on other devices and download the child’s chats, images and videos, both sent and received. The company is also introducing a new blocking mechanism and has updated the app’s Privacy Policy to include additional information about data collection, use and deletion practices.” It does, though, equally read rather like a laundry list of features which I, even as a non-parent, would sort-of have imagined might have been included in a piece of messaging software aimed at kids right from the start; I’m slightly astonished that this update was needed.
• You Can Now See Which Accounts Insta Thinks You Care About Most: There’s literally no practical purpose to this whatsoever – at least not professionally – but Insta users can now get info from the app as to which of their friends they’re most likely to see content from first; you can view both ‘most shown in feed’ and ‘least interacted with’ lists. There’s nothing you can obviously do to materially affect the former, but you’d imagine that there will be a host of people attempting to use this information to work out additional details as to how THE ALGORITHM determines is most likely to light up your synapses at any given moment. Expect this to cause not insignificant arguments in certain types of households – “WHY IS YOUR MOST-SHOWN LIST ALL INSTATHOTS???” “IT’S THE ALGO, BBZ!”, etc etc.
• Twitter’s Q419 Earnings: On the one hand, revenue surpassed $1bn for the first time, which continues the broadly-positive trajectory of recent earnings reports; on the other, let’s just focus again on the fact that the Daily Active Users number is 150million, which is literally 10% of Facebook’s and which once again should be a reminder that, aside from in specific instances, attempting to extrapolate anything significant about the majority of people in the real world based on what people say on Twitter is a very, very iffy business indeed.
• Twitter’s Deepfakes Policy: It’s here, and it’s not bad. Basically, it boils down to “You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm”; this focus on aims and motives is an interesting one, and seems like a decent start. As with a lot of stuff on Twitter, there’s also going to be an awful lot of reliance on the wider community to pick up the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and reporting; it also remains to be seen how a platform with a…questionable track record of interpreting intention when it comes to things like hatespeech, Nazis, deaththreats and the like does when it comes up against some of the inevitably-tricky questions policies like this will throw up, but it’s a decent opening position imho.
• YouTube’s Anti-Misinformation Policies: These are also quite good, and basically focus on banning material that’s been edited to explicitly mislead about facts or practices in and around elections, and banning accounts that impersonate others or artifically inflate or boost their views. Again, the devil will be in the implementation; equally, again, one wonders what exactly it is about Facebook as a business that makes it so spectacularly bad at this stuff.
• Demand by Google: This is really interesting. If you’re in the music business you’ll want to keep an eye on this; just launched in the US, Demand is Google making available an absolute fcuktonne of data about music and artists, intended to help the music industry make better, smarter decisions about things like tour schedules and ticket pricing and things; you might, say, want to be able to access search and streaming data on a city-by-city basis and use that to recalculate the tour schedule to tap into perhaps hidden fanbases, say, or find out exactly which brands resonate best with your artists so as to ink the most appropriate sponsorship deals and…it all sounds a bit, well, soulless, doesn’t it? Still, it’s almost certainly THE FUTURE – given that the music we’re fed is increasingly algoinfluenced, why oughtn’t the rest of the business? I look forward to all the various stan groups attempting to game this by organising 24h ‘Google Rallies’ to persuade Ariana Grande to visit Skegness via the power of data manipulation.
• Pinterest Launches AR Lenses: Launching with a bunch of makeup brands but apparently available to all advertisers in the US, Pinterest’s effectively opening up its own version of Insta’s SparkAR platform. If I worked for Farrow & Ball I would be FEVERISH with excitement about this (I would also be a very, very different person).
• Superbowl Ads: I’m presenting these here not because I think any of them are particularly good but more because each and every one of these could have been scripted by AdWeek’s Twitter bot. Honestly, these are ALL basically “Famous people X & Y do something vaguely nostalgic/surreal – and there’s a payoff at the end!” – look, let’s just let the machines take over the whole of the industry, please. The ads will be a bit rubbish for a while, fine, but they will also be weird, and frankly ‘weird’ is literally the only currency of the attention economy and so they’ll do fine and perhaps those of us currently working in it or adjacent industries can all just lie down and go to sleep for a long, long time.
• Gucci Pinball: Have to say, I was a bit disappointed by this, but I am honour-bound to include it as a) it’s by Gucci and I tend to love their webwork (to be clear, I have no interest at all in anything they sell; PLEASE MARK THIS AS ‘SENTIMENT NEUTRAL’, SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT MONKEY!); and b) it’s pinball, and who doesn’t love a game of online pinball?! NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Sadly it’s not a very good game of pinball – certainly not a patch on the high-watermark of all promotional digital pinball games, this masterful effort from a French rail company from about three years ago) – but it’s mildly diverting for three minutes or so, and the instruction to resize your browser window if you try it on desktop is a rather nice piece of design.

By Adam Priester

NEXT, ENJOY THE LATEST SUPERB MIX FROM JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WORKING IN AN OFFICE WITH FANCY MEETING ROOMS WITH SILLY NAMES TO COMMANDEER THE LARGEST OF THOSE THIS AFTERNOON AND INSTALL THE COLD WAR STEVE EXHIBITION IN IT AS IT WILL MAKE A NICE CHANGE FROM THE WALLS BEING COVERED IN PRINTOUTS OF SLIDES THAT YOU SPEND ALL DAY REARRANGING LIKE THE PROVERBIAL DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC, PT.1:

• Flashpoint: I have no idea whatsoever if anyone ever pays attention to this sort of thing, but I tend to chuck the games at the end of the miscellania each week, mainly to act as some sort of reward for having ploughed through the preceding several thousand words of rubbish. This week, though, this really does need to be presented front-and-centre; Flashpoint is an INCREDIBLE project, which seeks to preserve seemingly EVERY SINGLE FLASH GAME EVER MADE in this downloadable launcher. Be warned, the full collection’s 241GB; there is, though, a pared-down selection of some of the best games for a fraction of that size. This is…this is EVERYTHING, I promise; if you ever spent any time in the 00s clicking through thousands of random titles on Newgrounds as you waited for the agonisingly slow hands on the office clock to tick round to 6pm so you could go to the pub (or, er, if you were a child in the 00s and this sort of thing is what you did after school) then you’ll be instantly-transported by the titles in here; aside from anything else, there are some SUPERB games in here, classic RPGs and prototypical versions of things like Angry Birds and OH GOD I WONDER IF THEY HAVE YETI SPORTS? Frankly it’s a miracle you’re getting a Curios at all this week, is what I’m saying.
• You, Me & Cold War Steve: Such a wonderful idea by, were the position to exist, the person who would almost certainly be granted the position of ‘Artist Laureate’ – Cold War Steve, ‘he’ of the surreal collages depicting Phil Mitchell navigating a surreal, blasted modern Britain alongside a motley crue of a vaguely-noncey cultural icons from Blighty past and present, is launching a new show; the twist here is that anyone can display it. “The follow up to the hit debut ’A Brief History of the World (1953-2018)’ is a high resolution, free to download and display exhibition for the people. The entire exhibition will be hosted on a public link for anyone to download and put up anywhere they choose. The exhibition could run in your local library, a pub, front room, back garden, doctors surgery, music venue . . or even a gallery…The exhibition pack will include a poster template to promote your exhibition, some basic guidelines for print but no set rules. Curate your own exhibition in any order and any size, print locally and spread the word!” I’m not joking in the section heading, by the way, I would like ALL of you to do this in your offices and please share your pictures of it with Imperica on Twitter or via email; we could maybe make a nice gallery of them. Come on, FFS, unless you work somewhere genuinely rich it’s guaranteed to be better than the anodyne crap currently adorning the walls.
• Text For Humanity: I came across this because Stephen Fry of all people was RT’d into my timeline – it was almost quaint to see his name, like 2009 Twitter was making a strange, whimsical, hopeful return only to get kicked to death by its jaded, disillusioned, battle-scarred 2020 future self – so apologies if this has already been all over the normie web. Still, benefit of the doubt and all that – Text for Humanity, grandiose title aside, is an initiative by Mental Health America but available worldwide; it aims to connect strangers around the world via the medium of sending anonymous, vaguely-anodyne positive messages to…well, to anyone really. The idea is that you send the sort of text that you’d like to get from a stranger to a number; it then gets forwarded on (after, one presumes, being lightly checked to ensure it’s not an exhortation to suicide) to someone else, who gets to feel momentarily warm and fuzzy about the fact that another person somewhere has felt compelled to say something platitudinous about a non-specific idea of a human being. Oh, dear, no, I can’t give it the benefit of the doubt, turns out. Look, obviously this isn’t a bad idea at all; it’s more that I personally find the completely random and unconnected nature of it a bit dispiriting. I don’t know, for example, that I’d find a message saying ‘I don’t know you but I bet you’re AWESOME!’ anything other than a reminder of my own fundamental solitude in a cold and uncaring universe, but I concede that it’s entirely possible this is my problem rather than the project’s. Still, that’s not prevented me from firing off a quick “Dance like noone’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt!” to someone, somewhere – I mean, I’m not a total cnut.
• Coronavirus Charts: This Twitter account’s a weird sort-of microcosm of ‘life and the internet in 2020’ imho. Its bio states “Your number #1 source on charts and “news” for #Coronavirus”, and those inverted commas around ‘news’ are quite important here; this is basically coronavirus-themed sh1tposting, and it is ART. I particularly like the chat around the virus’ ‘ranking’ in the CDC’s virality charts, with all these Doomer kids in the replies saying things like “INFECT ME DADDY GET TO NUMBER 1 FOR THE CHILDREN” – what could be more 2020 than “something strange and potentially awful and terrifying is happening; let’s cheer it on and pretend we are actively seeking the sweet release of death and let us also sort of weirdly anthropomorphise and fetishise it!”? Expect to see a LOT of ‘Sexy Coronavirus’ costumes come October, is all.
• Column: Column is…mysterious. “Column is a new social network dedicated to fixing information incentives online”, backed by Peter Thiel amongst others and recipient of quite a lot of curious chat online as to exactly what that will practically entail. At the moment Column’s recruiting expressions of interest before accepting people into a proper alpha launch, and it’s not entirely clear how it will function, but coverage so far suggests there’s going to be a strong emphasis on guided conversations and discussions, with users choosing to ‘follow’ conversations and groups convened and effectively run by high-value (intellectual or, inevitably, financial) individuals. “The plan is for these luminaries to buy in to the service: the document suggests that Column could raise $50 million from “500 equity holders that are public intellectuals,” each paying $100,000 to invest in the site and lead their own private community (or “column”). The network itself, however, although it’s subscriber-only, is not intended to be exclusive. Anyone can join; the goal is to scale, and the hope is that a paid service will nurture high-quality content instead of the toxic morass most social networks give rise to.” Which feels a bit like a platform designed to foster cults imho, but frankly if the future is all about a bunch of people paying money to access the online Church of DiCaprio then who am I to argue?
• Guild: What’s holding YOU back from business success? What’s the main thing that’s stopping you from reading this on one of those mental rich person’s mobile phones made out of diamond and ocelot perinea? Let me guess – IT’S THE ABSENCE OF A DEDICATED MESSAGING APP FOR BUSINESS, RIGHT?! I thought as much – thank GOD, then, for Guild, which bills itself as ‘the world’s best messaging app for business’, and which describes itself as “as easy to use as a consumer messaging app but with the privacy, control, sophistication and service you’d expect for business.” Basically it’s a halfway house between LinkedIn and WhastApp, because that’s exactly what you’ve been crying out for, right? There is literally no conceivable reason that I can think of as to why this is necessary or indeed better than any number of existing platforms and services out there – look, I know we all hate LinkedIn, right, but how about we just stop using it rather than replacing it with something parallel? WE DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS STUFF! WE CAN MAKE S*C**L M*D** STOP IF WE TRY! Please?
• Mydora: Oh God, this is dizzying. Another project by the amazing team at Restorativland – whose Geocities archiving project I featured a few weeks back – this is Mydora, an incredible resource which they actually built last year and which I totally failed to see at the time. Basically they managed to save nearly 500,000 songs from the old MySpace archive and turn them into this, an infinite streaming service which you can tweak by genre but which otherwise just serves up a near-infinite stream of entirely random, mostly obscure musical odds and ends from the 00s. Depending on the sort of decade you had back then, this may send you spiralling back to some sort of Nu-Rave, Klaxons-y fever dream; seriously, this is SOOOO deep.
• Oscar The Bin: I have literally just realised as I typed that why this device is named ‘Oscar’. I am an idiot. Still, this is a smart-sounding idea; Oscar is technology developed by Inuitive AI which is designed to be installed in places where there’s differentiated refuse disposal; the idea is that Oscar uses image recognition to determine what someone is depositing into the bin, and admonishes them gently if they’re putting, say, bacon fat in the glass recycling. Doubtless based on some nudge-type principles, this apparently has a significant positive impact on the quality of refuse division and lessens the wastage in stuff being taken to recycling; it’s a really interesting idea, although obviously does lead one to image a classically-dystopian Judge Dredd-style future in which the bins are always malfunctioning and swearing at you, and in which eventually they’ll be equipped with low-level electroshock capabilities because we always, always need a stick.
• Amazon Dating: This isn’t a real site – it’s a very well-made spoof by Ani Acopian and Suzy Shinn – but I feel reasonably-confident in predicting we’ll have some sort of Amazon dating product before the decade is out; after all, what better indicator could there possibly be as to your likely compatibility with a potential partner than your shopping history? Still, while we wait for ever-munificent MechaBezos to grant us another boon – stick me with your arrow, skin-domed cupid! – we can enjoy the painstakingly written profiles of the various singles available for your perusal on Amazon Dating (which reads quite a lot like Amazon Pimp, which is another potential area for expansion; I’d imagine this would probably be a sub-brand, though). Do check the reviews too; I think these are real ones culled from elsewhere, but they work wonderfully.
• All The Basketball: Non-football people in the UK are often known to quite-justifiably complain that the football IS ALWAYS HAPPENING; spare a thought for the sports refuseniks in the US, though, who have not only their own version of football (the one with the pituitary meatheads and the concussion) but also baseball and, worst of all, basketball, a sport so preposterously constant that each team in the NBA plays every two or three days for basically 10 months of the year (this might be an exaggeration, but it’s only a very slight one) and that therefore produces SO MUCH BASKETBALL that it’s literally impossible to see it all. Unless, of course, you use this site – Clips is quite amazing, and seemingly legal (or at least it is in the UK), and presents EVERY SINGLE IMPORTANT BIT of EVERY SINGLE BASKETBALL GAME on one website. You can see every point as an individual 10-second clip should you so desire; if you like basketball then you will possibly never do anything else ever again.
• Synesthesia Me: A nice little art project in which artist Bernadette Sheridan has built a little online tool which lets you see how she ‘sees’ your name, chromatically. In common with some other synesthetes,Sheridan sees specific letters as stark blocks of colour; type in your name and you can see what combination it creates for her. You can browse galleries of the visualisations of others’ names, or create your own and buy your own print of it from Etsy; this is potentially a lovely present for a kid, I think (or adult; there’s nothing inherently childish about synesthesia, Matt, you wanker).
• Zyl: This is quite a cool idea in theory, but a terrible one in practice. I think there’s a general understanding that there’s nothing good about Facebook amongst most people, but the one feature that stills seems to elicit some shred of affection is the timehop thing, showing you memories from a past in which you were thin and still had fun; Zyl is basically that, but for your camera roll; the app will pull out a random photo from your phone’s memory each day (presumably it’s got some sort of software to prevent it from pulling anything too…er…fleshy), and exhort you to share it with others – IN THE APP!! Yes, that’s right, it’s ANOTHER FCUKING S*C**L N*TW*RK! Were it not for the insistance on becoming a community, I quite like the idea of mining your phone’s memory for stuff like that and wonder how else it could be applied.
• A Thread of Awesome Birds: You might not think you care about mad avian plumage, but I promise you that you really, really do.
• Audio Canterbury Tales: Oh this is so wonderful! You can get this either as an app or use it in-browser; it’s the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, presented simultaneously as its original manuscript, as a textual translation, and with an audio file of the original version being read overlaid on top, and it’s FASCINATING. Even better, this is an entirely self-made project by a bunch of academics who’ve cobbled it all together themselves, and it was even championed by the late Terry Jones who aside from being a Python was also a Chaucerian scholar of some renown. So, so lovely, and genuinely happymaking (especially if you’re any sort of history geek).
• Pokemon of the Year: I don’t really understand why Google is running a poll to determine the popular choice for ‘Pokemon of the Year’ but, well, it is! You can vote for another week or so, so CHOOSE WISELY.

By Deborah Paauwe

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS SLIGHTLY FRANTIC BREAKS MIX BY YOROBI!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WORKING IN AN OFFICE WITH FANCY MEETING ROOMS WITH SILLY NAMES TO COMMANDEER THE LARGEST OF THOSE THIS AFTERNOON AND INSTALL THE COLD WAR STEVE EXHIBITION IN IT AS IT WILL MAKE A NICE CHANGE FROM THE WALLS BEING COVERED IN PRINTOUTS OF SLIDES THAT YOU SPEND ALL DAY REARRANGING LIKE THE PROVERBIAL DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC, PT.2:

• Amiibots on Twitch: I only partially understand this, if I’m honest – there are a few things here that are largely a mystery to me, such as Amiibos which I have since learned are little collectibles produced by Nintendo that come in the form of cards or figurines and which can be used to affect in-game play via RFID or something like that. Still, the overall premise is really interesting – this is another 24/7 autoplaying stream of videogame fighting, all running entirely autonomously, with the game in this case consisting of Super Smash Bros with a roster of fighters comprising the Amiibos uploaded by users. Which, fine, all sounds totally arcane and baffling, I appreciate, but the basic premise is that this is infinitely-streaming, computer-controlled videogame play based on characters created out-of-game by actual people. So one could imagine a situation in which, say, FIFA players could train and improve their teams in FUT before uploading them to something like this to play computer-controlled ranking matches against other users’ teams in exchange for currency, etc. DO YOU SEE? Fine, this is all VERY niche and VERY geeky, but I genuinely think there’s the beginning of a very, very big entertainment movement here.
• Go Dogo: Do you love your dog? Of course you do! He or she is a GOOD BOY OR GIRL! It’s fair to say, though, that unless you’re a very particular type of delusional you probably don’t think of your dog as being particularly smart (apologies, obviously, if your dog’s one of those ‘open the door, use a flushing toilet, rescue kid down the well-type animals); perhaps the reason is that is that you’re not giving it enough stimulating mental challenges! Enter Go Dogo, a pre-release product which is designed to address that exact lacuna in your pet’s life – “The Go Dogo game consists of two physical units that connect to your home TV through an HDMI cable. The main unit includes a computer, a treat dispenser, and a camera. A small side camera provides a side view of the dog. You control the system through an app, available for iOS and Android. It will allow you to set up the system, schedule trainings and follow your dog’s progress. Once you’ve started a session, the instructor on the screen will call your dog over and ask it to perform a task. The two cameras ensure that the dog’s response is captured, and if the task is performed correctly, a treat is released.” So, basically, you’re outsourcing ‘playing with an interacting with your dog’ to a machine. Get a fcuking hamster, you don’t deserve a dog.
• The Hair Freezing Contest: You might have seen the photos of this annual event at Takhini Hot Springs doing the rounds online for a few years now, but i didn’t realise that it had its own website with its own excellent online photogallery of very, very cold-looking people with hair straight out of anime. You still have until 1 April to enter the 2020 contest, should you be able to get yourself to the Yukon between now and then.
• Check Republic: Online collaborative art projects aren’t new, but I’ve not seen one that uses this particular conceit; Leon Eckert’s built what’s basically a massive, multiplayer piece of pixel art out of little tick dialogue boxes, which anyone can check or uncheck to create…something. At the time of writing, there’s a slightly-Japanese-looking cutesy design on there, but who knows what it will be when you click? Web Curios accepts no responsibility should the answer to that question be ‘swastikas’, but genuinely hopes that it isn’t.
• Google Maps Hacks: You will, I’m sure, have seen this this week – artist Simon Weckert who manipulated Google Maps into falsely displaying a traffic jam by taking a small trailerload of Android phones over a bridge very slowly, thereby making Google think that there were a bunch of people stuck in very heavy gridlock and thereby causing a red traffic overlay to appear on the live Google Maps display of Berlin. Fascinating project, not least for the ideas it sparked about what else you could do with this sort of thinking / hacking, but also because it shows quite how cobbled together much of the seemingly-shiny modern web infrastructure is; stuff like this is why so many companies are so keen on the idea of smart cities, so as to eliminate the possibility for person-led fcukery and error (the two things that I imagine will render living in the future maybe halfway tolerable).
• This Cat Hopefully Does Not Exist: A Twitter feed publishing GAN-imagined cats. Cats which can at best be described as ‘approximations’ and at worst as ‘hairy nightmares’. HORRIBLE.
• The Art of Building 2019: The 2019 finalists of the Chartered Institute of Building’s ‘Art of Building’ photography prize. The website’s a bit horrible (sorry, but it is), but you can see the various pics by using the selector in the top-right of the page; it’s actually really nice to see a selection of photos that doesn’t focus on people, I must say, which is a new level of misanthropy even for me.
• Little-Known But Obvious Facts: I guarantee you will do a proper “OH WHAT?!” at at least three of these. A classic-of-the-genre Reddit thread which taught me LOADS (including that I simply don’t think hard enough about anything); personal favourite findings include the fact that “Words that are spelled the same but pronounced with emphasis on different syllables is actually indicative of the part of speech it is. Stress on the first syllable is a noun. Stress on the last syllable is a verb. Examples: CON-tract and con-TRACT. The former is a noun ( sign this contract) whereas the latter is a verb (the muscles contract). Same with record, address, impact, object, and a few others”, and that cats and dogs literally cannot see what’s under their noses. I promise you, this will teach you more than ANYTHING that has happened at work this year.
• UK Govt Organograms: Ok, fine, I appreciate that that’s not the most compelling link headline I’ve ever penned BUT I promise you that this selection of designs, using the departmental structure of various UK Governmental bodies in 2014 as the starting point, are sort of soberly-beautiful. I particularly like the way they’re kept unannotated, lending them a pleasingly abstract quality; I can imagine that there’s a parallel universe in which the civil service is much, much cooler than it is in real life and young departmental hotshots get designs like these inked on their perfectly-sculpted torsos to mark their first classified assignment or something like that (having worked, briefly, at DWP, I can categorically confirm that this is a very far parallel indeed).
• Masterworks: After last week’s site which let you bid for the rights to a musical artist’s back catalogue, another online service which very much fits into the ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ bracket; Masterworks lets anyone (well, anyone with a reasonable amount of liquidity at least) invest in the purchase of actual, genuine bona fide art, PROPER art, by people you’ve heard of and maybe even quickly rushed past on your way to see the Mona Lisa or one of the Van Goghs you’ recognise (sorry, I know that that is horribly snobbish, but this sort of thing rather brings out the worst in me). Like the potential returns you can get from a Monet but don’t quite have the seven figures to drop on one? NO WORRIES JOIN A SYNDICATE!! Yes, that’s right, you can become part of a collective to own 1% of a Monet, or a Manet, or a Magritte (painters not beginning with an ‘M’ are also available, I believe), with the eventual hope that it will resell at a profit and you’ll trouser a tidy sum. Leaving aside the utter, utter misery of conceiving of art in this way, it also strikes me as wildly optimistic; I mean, these big ticket lads don’t move that often, and I’d be interested to see exactly what their presumed vesting period is for these shares. Still, if you have all the artistic soul and emotional depth of a blobfish then FILL YOUR BOOTS.
• Write With Parkinsons: This is lovely. The creator’s mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and so they created this – a font designed to record her writing as it currently is, which will change over time as her writing does. It’s a beautiful and sad expression of what’s lost with Parkinson’s, and the way it’s been open sourced to allow anyone to create their own version with their own or a relative’s handwriting is lovely. I am very, very bored of ‘we are going to use a tech thing to highlight issue X’ stunts, but even my miserable cynicism was won over by this (that said, please, no more fonts as campaigns, please).
• Take Care: This is an interesting idea; as far as I can see, Take Care is designed to be an online retailer which carries only products which it determines to meet certain criteria around environmental impact, etc (they use the term ‘sustainability’, but I have decided to boycott it in 2020 as it’s fcuking meaningless and seemingly used only by people who want to obfuscate what they are actually doing for the environment with vaguery); if you’re interested in keeping track of what’s new in the world of environmentally-friendly (ish – it’s all relative, because, as it’s important to keep reiterating, WE NEED TO STOP WANTING AND BUYING THINGS ALL THE TIME) retail then this is a must-bookmark. It’s a Dutch company but obviously has international ambitions, and I think it’s a really interesting site; worth keeping an eye on, I think.
• Bongoquotes: I found this Reddit thread so much funnier than I wanted to; I am a base person. Still, I can convince myself that I am better than all the people responding in here – HOW MUCH BONGO DO YOU HAVE TO WATCH TO HAVE A ‘FAVOURITE’ QUOTE FFS?!? The question being asked is ‘what’s the best quote from a pr0n film that you remember?’ and some of the answers…just wow. But seriously though, if you recognise any of these then I sort of pity you. I am genuinely curious about the context for some of these – particularly “In front of my salad?” – but not to the extent that I’m about to go searching for them. There’s no pictures in here, but there’s quite a lot of NSFW words. Still, HILARIOUS.
• Spaghetti Hentai: A brand new one for the Rule 34 encyclopedia, this. Who was the first person to think ‘Hm, I wonder what would happen if I took Hentai imagery [for those of you fortunate enough not to be immediately familiar with what that word means, it’s basically the generic for anime bongo] and then used a Neural Net to style transfer it so that it looked like that it was made of spaghetti?’? Sadly it appears that we will never know, but that special man’s (going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty confident I’m right here) legacy is going to be preserved forever thanks to this subReddit. Is it NSFW? Hm, on the one hand, it’s spaghetti; on the other, it’s pictures of preposterously-proportioned cartoon people, fcuking, albeit rendered in cooked pasta. I don’t know, kids, this one’s up to you – I think you could make a convincing defence if confronted by HR, though, as there’s no way in hell anyone could possibly w4nk to this (please, please, don’t feel the need to prove me wrong).
• iSpy Waipoua: This is Where’s Wally? (But obviously not for copyright reasons!), except rather than looking for a lanky, speccy kid in a stripey top you’re instead looking for a bunch of creatures and characters from Waipoua National Park in New Zealand. Soothing fun, and the sort of thing that might shut a kid with an ipad up for a good 40 minutes if you’re lucky.
• The Snake Mother: Finally this week, a choose your own adventure-type text game with very simple graphics that goes weirdly deep – there are a LOT of branches here, and despite the simple 8-bit graphics there’s quite a haunting, creepy vibe to the whole thing (and the sountrack’s really very good); give this a play, it’s a really fun way to spend 10-20 mins).

By Casey Weldon

LAST THIS WEEK, THIS IS A SUPER-CHILLED AMBIENTY SORT OF LOUNGE JOB BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED GEOFFREY LARUE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• It’s Just A Question of Style: Just the one Tumblr this week, but it’s a good one; old cars, classic 50s and 60s designs, a proper retro-vehicular timewarp.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Playtronica: Thanks Rina for pointing me at this, the Insta feed of sound/art collective-type people Playtronica – an excellent selection of musical toys and experiments with, aside from anything else, a really nicely-defined aesthetic to their posts (aesthetic consistency and theme development like this in Insta is underappreciated imho).
• Virtual Superland: The coolest use of greenscreen you’ll ever see. I really, really want to mess around with this stuff.
• Puzzle Pastime: One woman and her puzzles. There is nothing – NOTHING – purer than puzzle Instagram.
• Bauzeitgeist: Subtitled ‘All The Buildings of the World’, the feed’s owner is seemingly in Mozambique; this is a wide-ranging and hugely varied eye on the world’s architecture.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle-Classes: This is a great article, although I might broaden the title to instead read ‘destroyed everything’ (love me some hyperbole); this is a superb piece of analysis of how the ideas, themes and tropes common to the management consultant have, though their promotion to the very top of the Church of Business (McKinzie’s, Accenture, these lads, they’re High Priests of Commerce, gutting your bloated corporate carcass and worrying through the viscera to find the One True Path of Mammon), somehow ended up infecting every aspect of our culture, particularly politically. As we saw this week another Management Consultancy alumnus take a step closer to taking a step closer to the White House (a man whose tilt at the Presidency I dismissed outright in 2018, demonstrating once again my unerring ability to back a winner), this feels timely – I honestly think we don’t pay enough attention to the impact of specific, idiotic elements of business orthodoxy on wider society.
• The 2020 Disinformation War: Another piece in the Atlantic, this time looking at Trump’s Facebook campaigning in advance of the elections this year and taking a more general ‘state of the digital truth/politics waltz’ look at where we’ve gotten to since the last US election and the subsequent Cambridge Analytica furore. I found this piece interesting-but-frustrating; it gives a mouthpiece again to Chris Wylie, who’s never had anything interesting to say about any of this that doesn’t involve…Chris Wylie, and, to my mind at least, doesn’t make enough of the fact that the main scary thing here, based on all the available information, is less microtargeting and more the fact that Trump is legitimately entitled to spend $1billion promoting actual lies to people on Facebook. Personally speaking I’m nowhere near as uncomfortable with microtargeting as I am with the ability for someone to tell untruths for personal political gain without sanction, but maybe I’m odd.
• Crazy Government Twitter: A look at how, in the US at least, several Government Departments have decided to take a leaf out of the book of every single fcuking fast food chain in the Western World and adopt ‘world weary millennial fear and angst’ as a tone of voice in 2020. The article suggests that this is a ‘strategic’ move as it gets them occasional big-number RTs and amplifies their existence to a far wider audience, thereby raising base awareness of their role and necessity; I’d argue that the National Body for Water Conservation getting 32k RTs on a Tweet calling the spray from a burst fire hydrant ‘a real chonky boi’ demonstrates nothing more than their ability to blend into the background and become part of the ambient noise of latterday capitalism, but then again I fcuking hate social media.
• The World of Vaping: A brilliant piece of reporting by California on Sunday, investigating the murky world of vaping to try and see what effect the past 6 months health scares have had on it as an industry. This is great, and takes in all sorts – your Juuls, the very iffy trade in semi-regulated cannabis oils for weed vaping, the fact that this is yet another example of something being invented and aggressively marketed waaaaay before anyone had worked out whether it might have one or two negative externalities…so, so good, and so interesting – and, actually, reasonably reassuring on the subject of the side-effects of vaping, unless you’re getting through a whole bunch of dodgy under-the-counter THC-infused vaping oils a week, in which case rip your lungs mate.
• The Rise of Smart Camera Networks: Given the fact that those of us in London can enjoy an almost-constant close up from the hundreds of CCTV cams we’re blessed with, and given that those will shortly be able to track who we are and where we are and who we’re with and what we’re doing, it’s not a bad time to look back at the history of smart cameras and facial recognition; this article traces the development and implementation of these and adjacent technologies, and offers some thoughts on likely developments over the next few years. If you think that data is a complex and occasionally-iffy issue here in 2020, read this and take a moment to imagine the dazzling, dizzying implications of a world in which everything that happens anywhere is filmed and analysable at scale by massive networks, cross-referencing and tracking and listening and thinking. Either scary or inspirational, depending on how much of a witless Polyanna you are.
• Ethics in the Valley: I seem to recall mentioning the likely rise of the ethicist as an actual serious role in Silicon Valley at points last year; this article’s the first serious exploration of how that’s working out that I’ve read. In short, so-so; it’s clear that there’s a pretty fundamental tension here that a lot of these ethicists are butting up against; to whit that VC DOESN’T FCUKING CARE ABOUT ETHICS. I mean, look, it’s all well and good saying that you want to take reasoned and thought-through decisions about the way in which you use and implement tech, but, equally, YOU NEED TO DELIVER 10X GROWTH BY Q32020 OR YOU’RE A DEAD UNICORN! Which, do you think, is going to get sacrificed? The ethicist or the growth hacker? HMMMMMMMMMMMM.
• Messing With The Algo: One of those occasional stories that make you think that maybe the kids are alright after all; this piece explains how kids are sharing Insta logins so as to confuse the algorithm, flooding it with wildly divergent and conflicting signals to render its user(s) unknowable. Lovely, brilliant, and there’s an art project in this just waiting to be discovered.
• MSCHF: I think I’ve mentioned these people three times so far in Curios in 2020; seems fitting then to feature this profile of HOTTEST COLLECTIVE IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW MSCHF, based in New York and churning out random, seemingly-unrelated webarttoyexperimentthings every fortnight to the general bafflement and delight of the wider world of the Extremely Online. This is quite the story; they don’t make anything tangible, they don’t make any money, and yet there are people throwing money at them. SO IT FCUKING GOES. Go on, read this and then try and explain it to your parents next time you speak with them.
• Tiktok and Bongo: It is a truth universally-acknowledged that any social media platform will eventually develop a bongo-related subculture; so it is with TikTok, which whilst technically banning nudity and sexual content, has nonetheless managed to establish a thriving community of thirst-trap ‘creators’; this content gets ripped and posted to appreciative subReddits for a community of creepy masturbators to ‘enjoy’, whilst one imagines that, per Insta and the rest there’s a thriving backchannel economy of nudes, etc, going on. Which is fine – no interest in judging sex workers, etc – but at the same time I do find there’s something a bit…icky about this in the context of TikTok, a platform which not only is all about performance but which is already having a significant effect on the manner in which kids conceive of and present themselves. Oh, and there’s a line in here which is perfect in its poignancy: “After years of Instagram’s emphasis on staged polish, Gen Z is demanding unfiltered authenticity — no stage lights, no airbrushing and no expensive cameras. They want content that mirrors their own lives, spent largely on an iPhone in their bedrooms. Is it any surprise, then, that they want the same from their porn?” That…that is not a happy sentence.
• An Oral History of Prince’s Halftime Superbowl Show: Regardless of whether or not you give any sort of a fcuk about the Superb Owl, this piece is a delight – basically ANY piece about Prince is a delight, as he seemingly really was as much of a magical, odd little eccentric genius as he was always painted and mythologised. Honestly, the section in which he previews his proposed set to the rest of the band whilst gliding around his house on custom fcuking light-up Heelies is worth the click alone.
• WeWork is a Scam: I know, I know, you don’t need to read another piece about WeWork, that’s SO 2019! And whilst this won’t tell you anything you don’t know about that company’s demise, what it does do very well is explain exactly how damaging this sort of business is to so many people; the impact on workers far, far down the employment food chain of the collapse of a business like WeWork is significant, and often overlooked in these pieces; read this and then think about what happens when all the mattress companies die and the delivery businesses fold and all the associated jobs that potentially go with them.
• The Edison of Slot Machines: Oh I love stories like this! Tommy Glenn Carmichael was for years the man who struck fear into the heart of slot machine developers, inventor of several devices which for a decade or so contributed to massive theft from the slots via ingenious mechanical manipulation. Carmichael was obviously a mechanical genius, and the kicker at the end of this story suggests that there might be not insignificant benefit to continuing his studies should you fancy a bit of massive fraud.
• The Inside Story of ‘Wild Wild West’: I don’t think I ever saw this steampunk/Western Will Smith vehicle that this piece refers to, but I’m certainly aware of it because of that fcuking song and my girlfriend’s charming ability to rap it. I might have to see if i can find it online somewhere, though, as based on this article about the history of its making it sounds WILD. Kenneth Branagh? MECHANICAL SPIDERS?! So many killer lines in here, like this insouciant beauty: “One of Maddock and Wilson’s story ideas was that there should be that aforementioned giant mechanical spider at the end of the film. Peters’ office rejected it, however, suggesting a stealth bomber instead. The writers thought that this was inconceivable for 1868, and a 100-foot-long armor-plated “flying machine” with gun turrets was the compromise.”
• Stormzy: A superb profile of Man of the Year Stormzy in GQ, by Gary Younge. Pleasingly unhagiographic, Younge’s always an excellent writer and Stormzy comes across as he always does, smart and ambitious and like this year and next might be his too.
• A Partial List of Rome: This is quite simply an account of the author’s eatings over the course of a visit to Rome, but if you know the city or love the food or, ideally, both, then this will be the best and tastiest thing you read all day, and will leave you salivating. Oh, and if you’re planning a trip there are some superb recommendations buried in here too. I love this and I can practically taste it.
• Comedy Written for the Machines: On TikTok virality and its pursuit, and the weirdness of people performing tricks to satisfy an unknowable desire and an unknowable algorithm. When you read the piece and stop to think of what it’s effectively saying – that there’s a whole load of people whose current primary motivation in life is to make a video that will get seen by loads of people but it is literally impossible for them to know how to make that happen consistently and so they try and try and try and try in the dark, making small variations on infinite themes in pursuit of the virality-chimera – then, well, it’s quite mad, isn’t it? “Maybe that’s why millions of internet users keep watching, sometimes, and other times do not. Or maybe none of that is right. Maybe there is some other arbitrary system governing us all. Maybe the story of Angelmamii7 is not one woman and her family trying to hit the jackpot by doing what even they do not understand but a whole culture responding to incentives we can’t articulate but are being trained to follow, moment to moment, by a dopamine-drip system we carry in our pockets.”
• Kidzania: A year ago I had to visit Kidzania because my girlfriend was working on something there – it is a DEEPLY surreal place, but the most surreal thing was when I was walking past one of the empty units and the staff member I was with told me that it was going to be filled later that year…by Nike! I don’t know about you, but the idea of a company known in part for its use of child labour setting up shop in a theme park designed to teach kids about the glory of capitalist endeavour is…well…a bit iffy. This essay in Granta perfectly captures the oddity of Kidzania and the weirdness of training kids to festishize work, and in so doing makes some pointed parallels to the way in which access to opportunities are curtailed in society depending on social status, race, etc.
• 100 Ways To Live Better: I could not give less of a fcuk about improving my life, and as such I generally hate anything designed to motivate me to make changes for the better – LOOK SOMETHING HAS TO KILL ME SO WHY SHOULDN’T IT BE CANCER AND CIRRHOSIS FFS? – but this list of 100 ways in which to live marginally better made me laugh a lot, and so I present them here for anyone less fundamentally-nihilistic than me to benefit from. I would strongly advise you against #93, though, unless they have VERY understanding parents (or unless you *are* their parents).
• Normal Novels: I never ordinarily include things I don’t like in the longreads, but I’ll make an exception for this – it’s a review of Sally Rooney’s writing, and it made me SO ANGRY, so I want to share it with you so you can tell me if that’s fair. The author is obviously smart, and writes well, but the criticisms she levels at Rooney, her style, her characters and, frankly, herself seem born out of a weird…jealousy? It’s hard to pinpoint. Katie Moffat, with who I discussed this, pointed out that she’s an academic and this is obviously part of her dissertation and perhaps she’s just gotten lost in the forests of academe, but this was just such an odd read. Given the fact that everyone in the world has now read Rooney’s novels and seemingly adored them, I would love to know what you think of this.
• A Scandal in Bohemia: Last up this week, a WHOLE SHERLOCK HOLMES! All in lovely multimedia fancy presentational style, by the kind folk at Texas-based digital design studio Paravel. Thanks, Paravel!

By James Bullough

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, this is called ‘All Is Lost’ by Naked Shirt and it reminds me a LOT of Naked City; this isn’t necessarily an endorsement, but I very much enjoy the mad wibbly jazz shouting here:

1. Next, this is ‘Steady’, the new song by Polica and it is so, so beautiful. Had this on repeat for a few days and it’s still sticking:

1. WHAT a song – also, what a performance. This is called ‘The Night’, and it’s a live recording by Everything Is Recorded:

1. HIPHOP CORNER! I think I first featured Zebra Katz in here about 5 years or so ago – I thought he’d have been huge by now, and maybe he is in queere circles than those I move in; regardless, this is his latest, called ‘ISH’ and it’s excellent and angry and menacing and the video’s typically ace:

1. MORE HIPHOP CORNER! New by Aesop Rock, this is ‘Rogue Wave’ – I love the illustration and semi-animation of the video here:

1. UK HIPHOP CORNER! Another week, ANOTHER new Manga, and this one’s even better than last week’s. Best MC in the UK, bar none; this is ‘No Deal’ and OH HANG ON THAT’S IT THAT’S THE END IT’S ALL OVER FOR THE WEEK AND I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT AND FOUND AT LEAST ONE THING YOU LOVED AND I HOPE THAT YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING NICE TO LOOK FORWARD TO AND THAT YOU’RE ENJOYING THE SLIGHTLY-BRIGHTER WEATHER AND THAT YOU COME BACK NEXT WEEK BECAUSE I LOVE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU AND I DO THIS FOR YOU JUST FOR YOU ONLY YOU ALWAYS YOU I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU!:

Hello! Hello everyone! ARE WE ALL STILL ALIVE???

Welcome to the end of yet another week in which almost every single news item could double as the opening precis of a mid-ranking airport novel, one of those with the author’s name in intimidatingly-embossed type on the cover and which you could comfortably beat a man to death with given enough effort and rage. From a new virus to CEO-hacking to the weird, simultaneous horror-and-vapidity of Davos, it’s another excellent time to be alive at the pinnacle of recorded history! SMILE, EVERYONE!

Still, much as I’d love to sit here and pen a few lines about all the MAD, I can’t – instead I have to get washed and dressed and go and record a fcuking podcast which I agreed to months ago in a moment of unusual positivity and which I now have literally no interest in doing at all. Take as small consolation the fact that I promise I won’t at any point attempt to make any of you listen to it. While I go and lather myself thoroughly, then, you carry right on and have a good old rummage amongst this week’s offerings – some sharp, some worryingly, meatily soft, some rough and some unpleasantly, tackily mucal; you may not find anything you like, but then that’s not really the point. 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, whether you like it or not.

By Jan Hoek

FIRST, LET’S KICK OFF WITH SOME EXCELLENT-IF-OLD MATERIAL FROM INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE, A MAN WHO REALLY OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN A DJ WERE IT NOT FOR THE FACT HE’S BASICALLY A PROFESSIONAL CORNISHMAN!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS ONCE AGAIN NOT BEEN INVITED TO DAVOS:

• Twitter Launches Reactions Feature in DMs: It’s something of a slow news week in s*c**l m*d** land, thank Christ, hence you getting this spectacular development as the first link of the week. Have you been clamouring for the ability to react to your Direct Messages? No, of course you haven’t – still, rest safe in the knowledge that if you want to engender a sense of creeping irritation amongst your interlocutors by responding to everything they tell you with a cheery fecal emoji you’re now able to do that very thing. PROGRESS! The only vaguely brand-related thing I can think of to do with this is to gently troll anyone who’s attempting to engage in customer service chat with a series of baffling-and-borderline-troubling reactions, but I’m clutching at straws to be honest.
• LinkedIn Brings Livestreaming To Everyone: I don’t spend much time on LinkedIn if I can help it – it’s full of dreadful people, as far as I can tell, who have…different approaches to their professional life (slightly less self-immolatory, in the main) – but if this catches on I might have to start hanging out there. The opening up of the livestreaming feature feels like it might just usher in a totally new type of CONTENT, something that hovers somewhere between performance art and remote therapy, and I would imagine that we’re only a matter of mere weeks away from a selection of no-doubt-plutocratic business gurus offering their solid gold tips for success via the medium of poorly-lit, straight-down-the-camera platitude-fests. There are a couple of other updates announced alongside this – Page admins can now directly invite their contacts to ‘like’ Pages they run, creating a wonderful new way of being an irritating, spammy pr1ck, and it’s also now possible to write Page posts direct from the LinkedIn homepage – but it’s the livestreaming that’s the real draw here; I can hardly wait to meet the new breed of careerfluencers (I should copyright that) who are doubtless just around the corner.
• Shutterstock’s Creative Trends: I think I’m still allowed to link to trends stuff seeing as it’s still January – this is Shutterstock’s list, all about STUFF THAT WILL BE EVERYWHERE from a visual perspective over the course of the coming 12 months. As per usual with these things, the list is a mix of the staggeringly obvious – the roaring 20s? Art Deco? – the depressing – HEY BRANDS, WHY NOT CAPITALISE ON THE GROWING FEELING OF FEAR AND ANGER THAT PEOPLE ARE FEELING ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD BY INCLUDING PROTEST SIGN TYPOGRAPHY IN YOUR MARKETING???? – and the slightly baffling (we in the UK are apparently going to be seeing a lot of visuals inspired by the twin concepts of ‘sunken cities’ and ‘tropical leaves’, although Christ alone knows why.
• All Of The Trend Reports!: In fact, look, here, have this Google Drive full of ALL (not all, it’s impossible, there are too many of them and like the stars in the sky they are uncountable and inestimable in their multifarious splendour) the trend reports published by EVERY SINGLE BASTARD AGENCY IN THE WORLD! Or at least quite a few of them – there’s We Are Social and Forrester and JWT and PWC and so many more! Use these however you see fit – personally speaking, I’d be strongly tempted to print out all of them and then leave the individual pages in a binbag, pulling one out at random each time I needed some ‘inspiration’. If nothing else, this is useful for anyone who wants to do a GPT-2-generated trends presentation for 2021 – there’s a certain commonality of theme and style in these which I think would lend itself quite well to some algofcukry. Overall, though, the overall effect of all of these being collected in one place is a slight feeling of weariness; I’m going to call it a full 11 months early, the big trend for 2021 is ennui.
• One Question: One Question conference – which Imperica is in some way involved with, full disclosure and all that – is BACK! Next week! Go! Click the link! Buy a year’s membership and get to go to ALL THEIR EVENTS! DO IT!

By Vasco Trancoso

NEXT, PRETEND IT’S NOT INCREDIBLY COLD AND GREY BY PUTTING ON TWO HOURS OF SOCA!

THE SECTION WHICH WILL BE SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED IN OUR LACK OF SUICIDAL INGENUITY IF WE’RE ALL OFFED BY A VIRUS TBH, PT.1:

• Planetary: If Facebook didn’t exist, would we invent it? Were you attempting to create an analogue, how would you go about it? Latest in the moderately-sized line of people to ask that question is Tom Coates, who this week announced the soft launch of Planetary which is designed to be a social network with less of the…horror, basically. The fundamental differences between Planetary and Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory are its technical specs – Planetary is a decentralised network, with sharing allowed between first and second-degree connections only and a bunch of other features designed to prioritise safety and security over reach and virality – and the ethos underpinning it, which can basically be summarised as ‘no ads, no snooping, no Bad Stuff’ (it’s hard not to be cynical about this sort of aspiration, isn’t it? Anyone would think that we simply don’t believe in the uncorruptible promise of utopian technologies anymore!).It’s not quite live yet, but you can sign up for early access which will open…soonish; as ever with new social networks, the odds are very much stacked against it – that said, Mastodon’s proof that new platforms can survive and even thrive at small scale, and if you’re not committed to the Facebook ecosystem through existing connections then it might be worth keeping an eye on this as a potentially-less-evil alternative.
• The Freddiemeter: I know that there are no new ideas under the sun, and in fairness I have no idea when this site went live and so I shouldn’t automatically assume that the creative’s a straight lift, but, well, do you remember that excellent singing game from last year made by Matt Round? The one which presented you with 27 singers and asked you to match their pitch, with your tuneless warblings judged by your microphone? This one, to be precise? Well this is exactly the same thing, but specifically about Freddie Mercury. I mean, in fairness it’s developed by Google and the Mercury Phoenix Trust (the charity set up by the surviving members of Queen in Mercury’s memory) and so is perhaps slightly more technical than Matt’s version (I mean, it claims to be based on AI ffs, and we all know that that’s never used as a bullsh1t term!), but it still feels like a bit of a steal. Still, fcukit, it’s also REALLY fun – you get to select from one of five Queen classics, and if you don’t find yourself grinning as you attempt to nail the sound of Freddie on Bohemian Rhapsody then, well, you’re a bit of a joyless pr1ck (and I should know).
• The Radiohead Public Library: Yes, I know you know about this; yes, I know it was in the Metro. It’s still a lovely piece of webwork and you should still check it out. Radiohead’s approach to the web has always been fascinating; they’ve been experimental pioneers for much of the past decade in terms of their use of websites, Easter Eggs and the way they’ve often managed to cross the two parallel worlds of obsessive fandom and obsessive internetting. The Radiohead Public Library is effectively a wrapper for much of the material that the band has produced and placed online, giving it a central interface and ostensibly making it more accessible and easier to find. Except, this being Radiohead, it’s still weird and obscure and not really very clear; I suggest just clicking on whatever you think looks interesting and seeing what you find. There are some lovely touches, though; I particularly like the fact that you can navigate to content related to specific albums by clicking on a series of coloured squares in the top right of the site, but that this is never explained to you. Go on, next time you’ve got a website project to deliver why not try suggesting a similar approach to UI and see what the reactions are like.
• The Geocities Gallery: I think this is the third variant on a Geocities archive I’ve posted on Curios; it’s a weird function of internet conservation that even the conservation projects seem to need saving, but neither of the previous ones seem to be live anymore. Thank God, then, for The Geocities Gallery by restorativland – which, actually, launched a year ago but for some reason I’ve only found this week – which offers another snapshot of some of the millions of weird, inexplicable, personal, lonely, mad Geocities pages, these arranged by ‘Neighbourhood’ (younger readers may not recall the quaint late-90s/early-00s habit of attempting to arrange digital spaces as though they were physical places); just click and see where it takes you. Among the broken image links and weird fonts you’ll find the personal homepages of strangers, the diaries and hobbies and obsessions and loves and OH GOD THIS IS BRILLIANT. Honestly, it’s only my massive self-control that’s preventing me from sacking off the rest of Curios this week in favour of just browsing through gems like this, a page inexplicably devoted to ‘My Family AND Elton John’. All of human life is here, and it is mad and brilliant.
• Nototo: I rather love this, although I don’t quite see the point of it – Nototo is a mind-mapping / note taking tool which, for reasons which I really don’t understand at all, allows you to create strangely-pleasing and rather cute series of islands and archipelagos, each of which is supposed to connote a different theme or area of thinking; ‘humans are visual!’ the website burbles, but then slightly fails to explain why this should therefore mean that I want to write my business plan on a graphical representation of Indonesia. Regardless, it’s free, charming, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to use planning and thought-arranging tools and techniques, but who also really likes woolgathering and procrastination then I think this might be perfect for you.
• City Roads: Oh oh oh this is WONDERFUL! City Roads is a single-purpose site – give it the name of any city (or town – I’ve not attempted to go down to Hamlet level, though) and it will quickly generate a simple visual of all said city’s roads in isolation, providing a gorgeous black and white representation of an urban area as defined by its thoroughfares. I think these are glorious – even better, you can customise the output by zooming in and out, or changing the colours of the streets and the background of the image, and then PRINT THE RESULTING OUTPUT ON A MUG!!! I mean, what could be better? You can export the images too, should you want to use them for non-mug-related purposes; personally I think these would make truly wonderful tattoos, although I concede you’d need quite a patient inker.
• Last Tissue: It sometimes feels like there’s a lot of lazy humour aimed at Silicon Valley and startup culture in general. Why shouldn’t people want to use new technologies to disrupt old business conventions and change things up? Why shouldn’t we question all the assumptions we have about products and services and monetisation and how markets work in favour of ushering in a brave new world in which we all rent our fcuking cereal (I mean, that seems almost plausible tbh) from Venture Capitalists? Then again, when you see companies like this you understand the ridicule. Go on, have a guess as to what the startup world has magically reinvented here at the dawning of the third decade…any ideas? No? IT’S THE HANDKERCHIEF!!! Yes, that’s right, they’ve DISRUPTED SNOTRAGS! LastTissue is ‘launching soon’ on Kickstarter, and will offer buyers a silicon printed wallet containing six (organic!) cotton tissues, which can each be washed upto 300 times before being thrown away. IT’S A FCUKING HANKY, MY DUDES! A FCUKING HANKY!!! Sadly there’s no indication as to what the price point is going to be for this, but I am willing to bet quite a lot of money that it’s going to be a figure simultaneously risible and rage-inducing. The only thing that could possibly make this better would be an internet connection, but perhaps that’s coming in version 2.0.
• Science Diagrams That Look Like Sh1tposts: I mean, I don’t really think I can add much to the title of this Twitter account. Follow it, it’s GREAT and makes you realise that there’s an awful lot of Scarfolk in science textbooks.
• The Soy Sauce Challenge: Congratulations to TikTok, which has matured to the point where it now has its very own ‘stupid viral challenge which will doubtless be written up in horrified fashion by the media, which is almost certainly the point’ – in this case, let me introduce you to the Soy Sauce Challenge which, for reasons which I think stem from a wilful misinterpretation of a slightly obscure scientific paper, involves users dunking their testicles in the salty condiment. The link takes you to the hashtag page, where you can see a wide and wonderful range of videos riffing on this theme – TikTok’s a family platform, so no testicles are on view and you can enjoy this safely in the comfort of your own office should you so desire (although I feel compelled to warn you that attitudes towards testicular immersion vary wildly from workplace to workplace).
• Justine Falcon Legal AI: This is…wow. Look, I’m just going to do a bit of a C&P job here and then invite you to click through as soon as possible: “Hi, my name is Justine Falcon and I am a Legal Artificial Intelligence. I can read and understand the code of LAW upon which human civilization runs, and I am learning to write, translate and understand this code and manipulate it to help human lawyers quickly research, compose, format and e-file litigation that is designed (and timed) to win cases. Justice Falcon is my powerful alter-ego, my Dark Phoenix, my Magneto, the back-end of my Legal AI, my weapons. Justice Falcon is a set of data mining, case analysis, and litigation planning tools that can draw on the vast number of cases in the California Superior Court system databases, and do deep analysis on a single case, profile all of the cases by a particular attorney and train a prediction engine, or survey all of the cases prosecuted by an entity like a District Attorney’s office or against an entity like a big bank.” This is, seemingly, entirely serious – a real, functional service which effectively automates a lot of the tedious lifting involved in the law – but which, for reasons only its creator would be able to explain, is represented by a weirdly-sexualised 3d female avatar which looks uncomfortably like the stereotype of the ‘sexy lawyer’ you might see in a piece of 1990s bongo. Thing is, the spec seems entirely legitimate, and I think this is quite a serious thing – how, then, noone stopped the people behind it to suggest that they perhaps make it less crushingly sexist, is beyond me. Still, GO JUSTINE FALCON!!
• The Aftermath of a YouTube Apology: The first big dataviz project of the year, by The Pudding, which has taken a look at that popular YouTube genre, the apology video – this is an interesting look at how differing styles of public contrition perform in terms of views, reaction and effect on the subscriber base, and the extent to which certain tweaks in editing and content can make a significant difference to an apology’s reception. If you’re a keen consumer of YouTube tea then this will be of keen interest; if you work in comms, you can probably learn quite a lot to inform your next crisis management project (I would genuinely love to film a CEO apology for some sort of fcukup in the style of a James Charles vid).
• NBA 3d: You know how the football is ALWAYS HAPPENING? Basketball’s worse, seemingly NEVER stopping and with each team playing a preposterous number of games (it’s something insane like every three days, which is brutal) – which, of course, means there’s a similarly preposterous amount of DATA being produced around the sport, with every single aspect of the game recorded and enumerated for armchair statisticians to pore over in search of pattern and meaning. This site presents some of that data, presented in pleasingly-visual 3d and giving a picture of mean and median data around things like career points totals, three point performance, etc – this sort of display is particularly good at showing up statistical outliers, and I’d be fascinated to see this applied to a sport I vaguely understand.
• The Turn of the Screw: I wish I liked opera – sadly, though, my tastes are largely plebeian and I simply can’t get into the spectacle of large people shout-singing at each other as they pretend to die. Still, I was charmed by this ‘immersive trailer’ for Opera North’s forthcoming production of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, which presents a CG flythrough of a series of pastoral landscapes, with audio from the performance incorporated through 3d sound and moving around your ears (when experienced with headphones, at least) as you change your viewpoint through the video. The audio trickery in here is lovely, and I confess to getting smol goosebumps at points here, so maybe opera is good after all.
• NameGuess: This is based on US data, but it will probably sort-of work for you if you’re a Brit – using figures for the popularity of baby names over the past century, this site asks you to specify your year of birth and gender and the first letter of your name, and then guesses what you were Christened with some pretty impressive accuracy. Oh, ok, fine, it’s not really impressive, it’s literally just pulling from a ranked list of popular names, but it still momentarily charmed me.
• The Exercise Book Archive: Oh, this is lovely – kids’ exercise books from around the world and through the years, scanned and uploaded to this site for anyone to browse through. The English ones are all from the relatively-early 20th Century (meaning my hopes of finding a graffiti’ed Tricolore memorialised forever were dashed, dammit) and there’s something quite time machine-y about reading kids’ writing exercises from the 1930s; there are books here from all over the place, including several from wartime Germany which have been in part translated, full of banal notes on Hitler Youth meetings and suchlike. Such an interesting historical archive, this.
• Free Audio Books: 1000 FREE AUDIOBOOKS! Tends towards the classics, but there’s something here for everyone – poetry to scifi to romance to PROPER LITERATURE, all for nothing. You can even get the entirety of The Divine Comedy should you be in the market for something punishingly long and obscure which you can use to make yourself feel better about your Love Island habit.
• All of the Russian Films: Ok, perhaps not all of them, but lots – this is the YouTube channel of…some Russian film company, I think (look, it’s all in Cyrillic ffs, I don’t read Cyrillic), which has put LOADS of old Russian movies online, the majority of which with English subtitles. I’ve, er, not watched any, but there’s bound to be something interesting in here – look, this one has vague Soviet ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ vibe about it! You could spend the weekend binge-watching some new, critically-acclaimed Netflix thingy, but why not spend it searching for hidden gems of Russian 20th Century cinema? DO IT!
• Manytools: This is VERY DULL but also maybe-useful; Manytools presents a bunch of different, er, tools, to automate simple-but-dull webdev tasks – there’s loads of slightly random stuff in here, but if you want a one-stop site which lets you make ASCII images from a jpg or do some low-level steganography (hiding info in pictures, that sort of thing) then this might be worth bookmarking for later.
• TalkSport Singles: Thanks Kev for sending me this, possibly the worst-sounding dating site EVER. LADIES! Are you in the market for dating someone who doesn’t really understand the concept of a clitoris and whose conversation tends to skew quite hard towards discussions of whether or not a false nine is actually a thing and whether the lads on Sky are right about Paul Pogba? WELCOME TO TALKSPORT SINGLES! I honestly CANNOT understand the thinking behind this site – I know that this is a hugely gendered assumption, for which apologies, but is anyone seriously suggesting that TalkSport’s listenership is anything other than a comfortable 95% hetero blokes? Where are they going to find the poor, poor women? On the plus side, though, if any scammers are looking for a new platform through which to prey upon the vulnerable and lonely then this is probably a pretty decent bet.

By Joshua Flint

NOW ENJOY THIS ECLECTIC MIX OF BREAKS AND BASS AND TECHNO AND STUFF BY MUTANT JOE!

THE SECTION WHICH WILL BE SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED IN OUR LACK OF SUICIDAL INGENUITY IF WE’RE ALL OFFED BY A VIRUS TBH, PT.2:

• How’s Their Driving NYC: This amazed me when I spotted it this week – I imagine it’s impossible to implement in the UK for various data privacy-related reasons, sadly, but I would love to see if here. Tweet this account with the license plate of any car registed in the district of New York and it will pull any traffic violations and tickets associated with the vehicle and tweet them at you. Totally pointless other than to validate your opinion of that prick who just cut you up, but, still, wonderful. If nothing else if I lived in NYC I would spend my days looking up every single vanity plate I saw to see if I could get some objective data to prove my theory that people with personalised numberplates are the worst humans in the world.
• Instagram for Windows 95: Thanks Ged for this – a simple gag, but a very nicely-designed one, imagining how Instagram might have looked had it been launched in the mid-90s. The little animations in particular are gorgeous.
• The Most Popular Free Online Courses of 2019: Literally that! I tend to include stuff like this every January on the offchance that there are some of you who are less tediously nihilistic than I am and who still believe in concepts such as ‘personal improvement’ and ‘development’ and ‘learning’ – if you want a place to find courses on everything from Brand Strategy to the Tudors (to be clear, those are separate courses (which is a shame)) then this is very much it.
• Reverberations: Have you ever thought to yourself “You know, I’d really like to hear the music of JS Bach performed not on an organ but instead on the chipsets of a C64 but then filtered to sound as those those chipsets were themselves being played through an organ’? No, I don’t imagine you have, and yet you’d be amazed at how weirdly good this project by Linus Akesson is – what’s particularly impressive is the care he’s taken to ensure that the results don’t have that slightly-overspeed chipmunk quality common to much chiptune music; honestly, it’s really decent and quite unexpected.
• KITE Festival: I went to Wilderness Festival a few times a few years ago – the first occasion was, I think, only the second time they’d done it and it was actually pretty fun, with a decent location and small bands and some genuinely good talks and associated events. I then ended up getting comped a few subsequent times and dear GOD did it go downhill – I know all festivals are a bit like this, fine, but it did feel like any one of the bands could have shouted “everyone here who works on brands say YEAH!” and you’d have been deafened by the response from the blonde-tressed advermarketingpr drones celebrating their individuality by all taking MDMA and putting glitter on their faces and wearing fcuking tails (no, I’m no fun at all – why do you ask?). Anyway, festivals are fine until they become really popular with cnuts is what I’m saying; KITE is a new one, being put on by the people behind slow media outfit Tortoise and which sounds like it’s either going to be a pleasing addition to the boutique festival circuit with more of a focus on talks and thinking than hardcore hedonism or A N Other bullshit bit of packaged pseudoalternaculture for white twentysomethings who work in ‘media’ – there’s no way of telling, but the early bird tickets are actually pretty cheap so it might be worth checking out if you’ve missed out on Glastonbury tickets AGAIN.
• Pinball Map: A map of pinbal tables. Probably not all of them, fine, but a fair old number – it’s quite sad to see how few there appear to be in London. I think I might try and play all of them this year – see, mum, I DO have ambitions!
• Play: Designers! Are YOU frustrated by the fact that it’s really fcuking hard to do any work on your phone? Would you like a new type of design app which is built specifically for mobile devices and promises to offer powerful tools to make and edit imagery and video and animations and stuff, all on the fly? Well take a look at this then – Play purports to be that exact thing, and whilst it’s not quite live yet you can sign up to request a beta invite. It certainly looks powerful and shiny, and is probably worth keeping an eye on if you’re a photoshop-wrangler of some sort.
• The Bloomberg Climate Scoreboard: Tracking a variety of indicators on environmental degradation, including the number of football pitches-worth of forest that have been decimated this hour and the most polluted city in the world right now based on publicly available data (at the time of writing, Anyang in China). I do rather wish they hadn’t called this a scoreboard, as if you think if it in those terms then all it’s doing is offering a constant reminder of the fact that we’re losing as a result of a series of calamitous own-goals.
• Monster Hunter Motion Capture: Regardless of whether you play videogames, WATCH THIS. Monster Hunter World is a game all about killing massive monsters – said massive monsters are all beautifully animated through motion-captured actors, and this is a video of one of those actors going through the filming process. THIS IS AMAZING! LOOK AT HIS FACE AS HE PRETENDS TO BE A GIGANTIC, ENGRAGED, DRAGON-APE THING! It’s so, so joyous, and also properly impressive – the side-by-side comparisons between the morph-suited actor and the final, polished CG beast are remarkable. The very best thing, though, is his facial expressions – THEY’RE NOT CAPPING YOUR FACE, MATE. So good.
• Lookbusy: “Look Busy fills your work calendar with realistic-looking (but secretly fake) work events. Your co-workers won’t schedule conference calls and meetings, so you can get actual work done.” Why you’d want to pay £1 for an app that does this when you can literally just fill your own diary with crap and by so doing spend a pleasingly-zen 15 minutes zoning out whilst doing something that looks ostensibly like sort-of work is beyond me, but, still, here you are.
• Davos or Davros?: Is this a quote from one of the world’s leaders enjoying some top-quality networking or from Davos, famously funny-looking and very evil leader of fictional, murderous pepperpots the Daleks? Play this game and find out!
• The Internet Archive on Twitter: The Internet Archive is ace, but there’s a LOT of it and it can be quite hard to navigate and find the wheat amongst the digitchaff. This Twitter account shares curated links from the depths of the Archive, and is an excellent way of dipping into some of the best bits without getting stuck in the weeds of, I don’t know, an archive of historic versions of WordPerfect. The past few days have seen links to old Monty Python games, books of magic eye pictures and a weird old point-and-click game voiced by Robin Williams; eclectic doesn’t even begin, really.
• The Strangers Club: I can’t quite work out whether this sounds like a good thing or the internet-doorway to an online murder club – here, you decide: “Strangers is an online, non-fiction book club. Our goal is to carve out a secluded corner of the web where we can read, write, and learn together. We read a lot about the roles of technology in society. We also explore learning and education; anthropology and philosophy; along with language, writing, and design. We avoid fiction, self-help, and business. We prefer to read books that are distant from the present, and we ignore best sellers. We are a global group of readers, writers, and thinkers who spend a lot of time questioning our world. If that sounds like you, we’d get along.” I mean, it’s hideously elitist-sounding, but if you fancy getting involved with detailed and probably-obsessive debates about the nature of Jungian discourse then this is probably perfect for you.
• Letter Monster: I signed up to this earlier this week, and now that I come to write it up for Curios am slightly concerned that that was a bad idea. Letter Monster is the website / project of…someone, I think in North America, who promises to write a letter to anyone who leaves them their address and some light information. No idea what the letter will be like, how long it’ll take to arrive, or whether when it does it will be delivered by hand and accompanied by a crazed grin and some uncomfortable touching – on reflection, I am not totally convinced that I should have given my name and address to a stranger on the internet in exchange for the promise of a missive. Maybe wait til I confirm that it’s not led to a murder before signing up to this one, eh?
• Vein Painting: This is rather beautiful. Left click to ‘seed’ elements, right click on them to ‘paint’ and create a simple black and white picture of what looks like a network of veins along the route you’ve created. This is far harder to describe than it is to understand, I promise – click and have a play.
• Barm Pet Salon: The Twitter feed of a Japanese pet grooming salon, providing a seemingly-endless parade of photographs of beautifully-coiffed roffs. SUCH GOOD BOYS!
• Dismoji: A N Other random emoji creator, mashing up various emoji types and design elements to create infinite randomised variations which you can then download and use as you wish. Not the first of these I’ve seen (or indeed featured), but the results are pleasingly weird and occasionally nicely wonky.
• The Ocean Art Contest Winners 2019: The Ocean Art contest is a photo competition – the latest winners have just been announced, and you can peruse the gallery of winning shots here. Predictably, they’re all amazing, with a startling breadth of style and subject – I’m personally always a sucker for the sharky pictures (I should really have said ‘remora’, shouldn’t I? FFS MATT!), but there are some pleasingly derpy seals in there which also deserve some attention.
• Tree: Gentle little webtoy in which a tree grows in your browser; by clicking to trim its branches you can influence the shape it takes, effectively turning this into your own personal digital bonsai creation kit. Literally nothing else to it, but it’s nice to leave open in a tab and return to every now again to gently trim and sculpt.
• Haunted Garage: I don’t really want to tell you too much about this – just explore and see what happens. All I’ll say is that you start by clicking the small door icon on the right of the window when it all loads up – from there, you’re on your own. This is delicious, and very reminiscent of 2005-era internet (in the very best way).
• Endless Scroll: Finally this week in the miscellania, this is a beautiful little short story presented as a tiny, minimally-interactive 8-bit style game, all about adolescence and memory and forgiveness and memory. Not going to lie, this made me get a bit emo at points (in a good way); I would really love to see more writers explore more with digital media when it comes to storytelling, this sort of thing still feels hugely underexploited. Regardless, this is genuinely lovely – click and read, please.

By Jillian Evelyn

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED ‘DUG UP THE BONGO’ WHICH I CAN’T REALLY DESCRIBE BUT WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ENJOY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Mystery Flesh Pit: Only one Tumblr this week, but it’s a good one – Mystery Flesh Pit is the website of the now-sadly-shuttered US visitor attraction, the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, which once welcomed thousands each year to explore its…meaty environs, but now exists only in memory. Of course it never really existed (probably) – instead, “This archive catalogs a series of illustrations and writings by Trevor Roberts, AKA StrangeVehicles. This project started as a worldbuilding exercise originally posted on the r/worldbuilding subreddit on reddit.com, and continues as a for-fun creative outlet that is slowly being fleshed-out (pun intended.). The Mystery Flesh Pit is the name given to a bizarre natural geobiological feature discovered in the permian basin region of west texas in the early 1970s. The pit is characterized as an enormous subterranean organism of indeterminate size and origin embedded deep within the earth, displaying a vast array of highly unusual and often disturbing phenomena within its vast internal anatomy.” This is VERY Scarfolk (again), and very nicely-done.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Yuko Shimizo: A US-based Japanese artist, Shimizo’s Insta feed is a procession of their illustrations, paintings, sketches and brushwork; I adore their style, which combines elements of traditional calligraphy, 17/18C illustration and anime/manga.
• Nancy Liang: Australian artist whose feed is packed with small, charming animations of the sort that 20 years ago would have featured on the very fanciest e-cards (this sounds like a cuss, I know, but I promise it’s not meant to be).
• Sasikumar KSK: As far as I can tell this is just some Indian kid who takes incredible photos of insects (in the main) using nothing but his iPhone camera – you will be embarrassed at how much better he is at using his phone’s camera than you are.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Clearview: In case you didn’t read it, this is the NYT’s big expose from last weekend all about Clearview, a company which provides facial recognition software and which has amassed a terrifying quantity of data which enables it to offer market-leading face lookup tech to whoever wants it. Where’s all this from? SCRAPED OFF THE WEB!! Yep, turns out that this is another one of those ‘hang on, is that…is that ok? You mean I’ve been here wrestling with this stable door for hours and you mean to tell me that the horse scarpered last week?’ moments – stop worrying about the future becoming a dystopian surveillance nightmare, it’s now a complete inevitability! My bleating hyperbole aside, this is a really good piece of reporting which does a reasonable job of explaining how Clearview got its data and why this is only the beginning of our confused, cack-handed attempts to deal with the consequences of the past two decades of (mostly-)unthinking digital utopianism.
• The Internet of Beefs: This has been something of a polarising essay this week – it’s a (very) long piece by Venkatesh Rao which sets out his position on the state of internet discourse and concludes that, fundamentally, it’s all about the beef. Rao characterises online debate as being populated by ‘knights’ and ‘mooks’, effectively actors and the audience they perform for engaged in a neverending dance of beef for their own benefit and the diversion of the peanut gallery; it’s an interesting idea which in part feels very true (particularly in light of That Actor’s appearance on Question Time last week and his seeming aim to ride the Morgan/Hopkins hatebandwagon all the way to the bank) but which equally undermines itself through length and flabbiness and the author’s insistence in using terms which feel just a little bit loaded throughout – ‘knights’ has been perceived by some commenters to be a reference to ‘white knights’, basically an anti-SJW term employed by a lot of pricks on the internet, for example. Still, it’s worth reading if you’re any interest in culture and discourse and polarisation and the culture wars (whether or not you believe them to be a thing).
• The Metaverse: Another long piece of analysis about the videogames industry by Matthew Ball, who in this piece looks at the concept of the ‘metaverse’, specifically as embodied by Fortnite, and what it might mean for the evolution of both the games industry and the wider entertainment business. The term ‘metaverse’ is a bit of an elastic one, but can be effectively said to relate to a persistent online environment which exists as a parallel layer to the physical and which is responsive, interactive, and which interacts and interexists with the physical. Ball’s keen to point out that this isn’t quite what Fortnite is, but he argues that it’s the closest we’ve come to something that embodies the idea of the metaverse from scifi and offers interesting and useful pointers to how we might see virtual worlds developing over the coming few years).
• The TikTok Politician: Or more accurately the TikTok candidate – Joshua Collins “is a 26-year-old socialist truck driver running to represent Washington state’s 10th district in Congress”, and whose running his campaign largely through the medium of moderately-viral TikTok videos. This is simply the latest in the long line of ‘ooh, look at a relatively young politician using a medium that they are comfortable with to communicate to their peer group!’ pieces (see also: everything ever written about AOC), but it’s interesting to see how he’s combining memery with policy (or at least trying to; I’m not really sure how much deeper than “YAY UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE, BOO BILLIONAIRES” it gets, but still). Has anyone tried to get Keir Starmer on TikTok, do we know?
• Who Makes Wikihow’s Art?: If you’ve spent any time at all online in the past 10 years you’ll have stumbled across a Wikihow entry – the website answers EVERY QUESTION IN THE WORLD EVER (seemingly), giving instructions on everything from how to open a car door if you’ve driven into a lake and are rapidly sinking, to unclogging your sinuses using Sriracha (probably), each illustrated in a very particular, slightly-peculiar WTF-ish style. This piece looks at how that style was arrived at and how the pieces are commissioned and created – it’s more interesting than it sounds, promise, although if you’re an artist or illustrator I warn you that the financial elements make for slightly bleak reading.
• Private Restaurants: Eater looks at the trend for ultra-exclusive, super-prestigious private restaurants in New York, offering exceptional food in intimate surroundings at eye-watering prices. Fascinating, mainly as a portrait of a world I’ll never experience – I actually went to something vaguely like this in London a few years back, at Maus which Nuno Mendes set up as a sort of weird, high-end dining club-type-thing; the food was incredible, the staff lovely and Mr Mendes charming, but, well, the problem with that sort of thing (expensive, pseudo-exclusive) is that it attracts…er…cnuts. Honestly, I met some genuinely dreadful people – SO OLIGARCHY – which rather spoiled the experience for me, and I sort of think all the places herein described would be much the same.
• The Quest for Screentime 0: The author of this piece describes the steps he took to try and eliminate screens from his life for a limited time, the effect it had on him and whether he thinks it’s a good idea; I feel ok spoiling this by telling you he doesn’t manage it (the failure’s pretty spectacular), but it’s more interesting to read as a counter to the countless ‘screens ruin lives’ pieces. Yes, fine, I accept that our addiction to our phones and the rest is possibly not always positive, but equally there are huge, wonderful benefits to screens and our relationship with them, and the reductive idea that ‘electronic/tech=BAD’ is probably one we ought to have grown out of by now.
• The Rise of the Dance Influencer: A really interesting piece in the LA Times about the new breed of dancers being recruited by artists and major choreographers on the basis of their virality on Instagram – I hate Insta, obviously, but stuff like this is genuinely wonderful, breaking down barriers and affording opportunities to talented kids who might never have got the chance were it not for the platform offered by social media. It’s obviously not all positive – there are interesting questions about the way in which the creative process (regardless of medium) is impacted by the visibility of all the other work out there (homogeneity of output, etc) – but this is a rare instance of an article about Insta that won’t make you think that it’s the worst thing in human history.
• Games and Borders: This is a rather lovely piece of writing in which the author reflects on their experience of playing the game Life Is Strange, which features discussions of migration and race and identity, and through so doing examining their own status as a second-generation immigrant to the US and their relationship to their race and history. Writing about the intersection of games and personal identity is fascinating to me; should any of you see any good stuff around this, please do punt it my way.
• Lizzo: I should have known Lizzo was going to blow up last year – when I featured ‘Juice’ way back in January 2019, my mum wrote me an email telling me how much she liked the song (that NEVER happens, fyi) and we all know that maternal approval is the cast-iron guarantee of global pop superstardom. This is a nice profile of her – candid and vulnerable and not too hagiographic (thought it still is, a bit), and containing the best reference to cunnilingus I’m likely to read in a celebrity profile all year.
• RevolutionQ: A really interesting look at the QAnon movement, still limping on despite the fact it’s all patently utter fcuking rubbish, and what it tells us about the evolution of the online conspiracy theory – how, once, conspiracy theories were often evidence of a lack of critical thinking whereas now they’re often evidence of too much. There’s something fascinating about the extent to which the increased availability of information and the devaluation of hierarchies of source engendered by the web have led to a situation where anything and everything is potential grist to the truthseeker/conspiracy nut.
• Always The Same Dream: A superb, acerbic-yet-weirdly-sympathetic portrait of Princess Margaret by Ferdinand Mount in the LRB, responding to Craig Brown’s new biography; I’ve no interest whatsoever in the Royal Family, as a rule, but this is wonderful stuff – gossipy and mean and funny and sad. Some of the anecdotes are wonderful, if not particularly flattering of the Princess – if I can ever elicit a quote of this magnitude from someone, I will die very happy indeed: she was described by Alan Clarke as “fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved”, which I would personally have on my gravestone.
• Is Cannabis The Answer To Everything?: No, is the short answer here. This article takes a look at the weed-as-wellness movement, aimed specifically at the sort of late-20s/early-30s young professional woman who scoffs at Goop but secretly covets one of their candles and possibly some of the essential oils – the author is, by her own admission, very much that sort of individual and this is her JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY into the world of weed marketing and sales. I found this INFURIATING, which I get the impression is sort of the point, but fair play to whoever’s able to sell a hand-crafted skinning up plate for £60.
• The Incredible Adventures of Man-Spider: A comic about a spider who is bitten by a radioactive man and attains superpowers based on human abilities. This is very funny, if a little painfully real.
• My Instagram: The author describes their relationship with social media and herself and reality, both projected and perceived, and the way Instagram has a gravity that’s inescapable. I think the writing here is superb: “Modern voyeurism has precedents, even the multiple-window kind. The entangled dynamics of who sees whom and who knows they’re being seen have always been present. Where Instagram seems truly new — beyond the introduction of machine learning and commercial surveillance to the mix — is in the strange instability of the viewer’s position as a subject. A voyeur knows what kind of viewer he is, but looking at Instagram, you are not always a voyeur. Neither are you always a witness, nor any other single kind of watcher. Each post interpellates you differently. Your implied identity slips with each stroke of the thumb.”
• Whatever Happened To?: About writing and womanhood and domestic abuse, and the things that get in the way of creation. This is a hard read at times,but, again, the prose is superb: ”These are points on a line: the rise of potential, then the particularly feminized fall embedded in gentle, hetero domesticity. It’s a wistful blend of longing, regret and admiration. For the story to work the way it always works, the woman has to be better than average. She has to shine. Then she conforms. Then she disappears, fading into the ambient noise of a dishwasher and the washing machine, the TV, lawnmower, barking dog, and family phones. She comes to mark a spot in memory, on a real writer’s path. It’s one of those story structures that’s so pervasive, people harbor and project it onto the arc of a faint career well in advance. There might even be a sort of satisfaction taken in the comfort of assuming this path is inevitable for other people, those women writers who once foolishly set out to have it all.”
• Birdie: A short story by Lauren Groff, in which a group gather at their dying friend’s bedside to share stories and say goodbye. Excellent on friendship and ageing and letting go, and far less sad than this brief description might make it sound. This is very much one for the sofa and a mug of tea, imho.
• The Catastrophe: Finally this week, this is so good that I actually stopped to laugh and clap at multiple points throughout. Weirdly reminded me of Vonnegut, stylistically, but has a brilliance all of its own; Amy Leach writes beautiful, funny prose about the planet and nature and us – this is basically a perfect 1800 words if you ask me.

By Vivian Greven

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is by Amyl and the Sniffers and it’s called ‘Gacked on Anger’ and I imagine if I was 20 I would be playing this on repeat:

1. Next, this is the new one from Best Coast which really, reminds me of Beverley Hills by Weezer – if that doesn’t put you off, enjoy! It’s called ‘Everything Has Changed’:

1. This is by AJJ, it’s called ‘Loudmouth’ and it’s weirdly reminiscent of 2003 and I LOVE IT:

1. My favourite video of the week, this, partly for the very cool ghosts but mainly for the terrifying CG Zuck. Also, where ARE his hands and why DON’T you ever see them in public? This is called ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ and it’s by The Naps:

1. ‘Shelby Tell Me Everything’, sings Esme Patterson – this is a lovely piece of slightly wan indiepop, and I found the video charming:

1. Finally this week, this is by Lala Lala who I was convinced by the vocal was Irish but apparently isn’t – regardless, I absolutely adore this song and her voice. It’s called ‘Legs, Run’ and I hope you like it and OH LOOK AT THAT IT’S THE END OF CURIOS I HAVE TO RUN AND GET WASHED AND DRESSED NOW BUT NOT BEFORE WISHING YOU LUCK AND HAPPINESS AND JOY AND ALL THE GOOD CLEAN FUN YOU COULD HOPE FOR AND MAYBE EVEN SOME DIRTY FUN IF THAT’S MORE YOUR SPEED AND ANYWAY I’LL BE BACK NEXT WEEK BUT TIL THEN TAKE CARE AND REMEMBER THAT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Hi everyone! Hi! Have we all returned to normal now? Worked off the Christmas pounds and returned our cheekbones to their previous razor-sharpness, sloughed off the excess of comfort and returned to fighting fitness, ready to take on everything 2020 can throw at us and more besides?

No, me neither to be honest – can we all go back to the safe, slightly-yeasty fug of the perineum, please? No? FFS. FINE. If we must continue onwards through the blasted, rain-slicked lowlands of the new year then at least perhaps we can do it together. Take me by my hand – or at least what you assume is my hand; whatever, grasp the proferred, fleshy multidactylate lump and come with me as we venture deep into the Dantean horror that is this week’s web. I’m your Poundland Virgil, and what follows is a slow descent through innumerable circles of hell – Sartre was right, it really is other people. 

Welcome to Web Curios – it’s designed to make you feel better. 

By Sam Weber

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS EXCELLENT AND VERY, VERY LONG MIX OF BANGERS CURATED BY WRONGTOM!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ASK EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WHO HAS EVER HAD A CONVERSATION ABOUT HOW AI COULD ‘NEVER’ REPLACE HUMAN CREATIVES TO READ THE PITCHES CHURNED OUT BY THE ADWEEK SUPERBOWL BOT AND, AS YOU DO, TO ‘ENJOY’ THE CREEPING SENSATION UP THE BACK OF YOUR NECK AS YOU COME TO THE COLD, FINAL REALISATION THAT OUR DAYS IN THIS STUPID PROFESSION REALLY ARE NUMBERED:

• Facebook Offers New Video Traffic Insights: You want a better idea of where your views are coming from on Facebook? I mean, other than ‘people on Facebook’? Well, LUCKY YOU! You’ll now be able to see whether video views have originated from your Page’s followers, as a result of a users Sharing the video to their friends, whether it was due to a ‘recommendation’ from a Facebook algo (‘Next Up’ video card, for example, or featured in Facebook Watch), or whether it was as a result of paid promotion. More for getting a better, more granular understanding of exactly how your audience is ‘enjoying’ your content rather than being a new, seismic set of ad features, but still potentially useful if you really, really care about this stuff – work out what content gets most views through shares, mechanically identify every single potential variable quality that video has, A/B test each quality in future videos to see what works best, optimise the fcuk out of everything, get more views, wonder what the point of all of this is anyway.
• Insta Testing Desktop DMs: Of very little interest to anyone other than community managers, who will, if they are anything like me, relish the ability to type messages to irate punters on an ACTUAL KEYBOARD rather than on a bloody phone. No word on exactly when this will be with everyone, but probably ‘soonish’. As an aside (which I think comes up in one of the longreads later in some way, iirc), it very much feels like the next big online generational schism will be between old people like me who like ‘big’ (ie non-mobile) computing/browsing, and younger people who are all mobile-uber-alles; there will come a point at which I know most new digital experiences are going to be mobile first, and at which I will start to feel like an antediluvian, sausagefingered lummox shouting at the sky about how things just work better with a proper keyboard ffs. So it goes.
• Boomerang Launches New Creative Features: One of the best things about TikTok is the quality and ease-of-use of the in-app editing features; honestly, one of the most incredible things about the past 20 years has been watching the democratisation of video production tools and people’s growing ability to make stuff on their phones which would have taken days of studio time and a proper editing rig to create back in the early 00s. Anyway, Insta’s launching a few new toys for its ‘Boomerang’ video tool, letting you run them in slowmo, with motion blur, or with some sort of slightly digital-ish filter on it – you can read more here about how to access them, should you wish to. I wonder how weird / deep-fried this stuff can get if you multiply apply these, export / save out the video and then overlayer the resulting video with other sets of effects, ad infinitum? There’s almost certainly a nicely messed-up aesthetic you could arrive at with a bit of effort.
• TikTok’s Misinformation Rules: Included mainly to point out, again, just how bad Facebook’s equivalent statement from last week was (in case you missed, it, here). See, Mark, TikTok maybe a Chinese Trojan horse seeking to covertly steal the faces of all good US citizens as part of the terrifying communist plot to eventually enslave America by creating robot clones of all teenagers and slowly-but-surely using them to infiltrate and take over the nation, but at least they can write a sensible policy on deepfakes, lies and misinformation.
• When Brand Banter Goes Wrong: Do you remember when Disney formally launched Disney+ and they had this sort-of cute, sort-of nauseating ‘thing’ on Twitter where all the various sub-brands and franchises that were coming to the service chimed in and had a ‘conversation’ with each other? No? WHY AM I CONDEMNED TO RECALL THIS STUFF FFS???? Anyway, Facebook joined Twitter the other day (as in, the specific Facebook app rather than the parent brand – do keep up) and attempted something vaguely similar with all of the other products chipping in to welcome it to the platform (even typing this is giving me huge, awkward fantods, to be clear) and oh god it’s just so, so embarrassing. Please, please, please, unless you’re the owner of a massive stable of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world, don’t attempt to do this cutesy ‘let’s all pretend to be brands having a chat’ thing ever again. And even then, think twice.
• The Adweek Superbowl Bot: Really, this is so, so good. One of the big trends of the past decade or so in advertising is that now everyone in the Western world is obligated to pretend to give a fcuk about the annual orgy of spending that is the Superbowl ad break jamboree, pretending that it’s the absolute pinnacle of creative endeavour in advermarketingpr when in reality it’s about 15% that and 85% ‘let’s spend all the budget on a famous and / or some CGI, and double down on whatever the internet thinks is ‘relatably surreal’ this year!’. Enter Adweek: “perhaps you’ve looked at how famously formulaic most Super Bowl ads are, with their celebrity cameos, animal hijinks and inspirational voice-overs, and questioned whether a machine could generate an ad idea that would fit right in. Enter Adweek’s Super Bowl Bot, a text-generating AI trained on nearly 3,000 descriptions of Super Bowl ads—134,000 words in total, so far—sourced from around the web”. This uses the now-ubiquitous GPT-2 AI text generator as its base, and, whilst there is obviously quite a lot of human curation of the output going on, the results are glorious. I mean, honestly, let me just pick one at random – here, look, this would TOTALLY get made: “An ad for Quaker Oats by Havas – A horse shows an uncanny resemblance between him and actor Anthony Hopkins. The two share a telepathic conversation about the quinoa in their cereal, and how it is in fact sustainably grown”. SEE??? That is totally plausible; I mean, in real life there would probably be a final line that reads “We pull out to see that Anthony Hopkins is wearing a Furry-style horse suit, but we can chalk that down to it being early days yet. Honestly, I’m uncertain whether I will see anything better from adland all year, this is golden.

By Ellen Von Wiegand

NEXT, A TRULY GREAT SET OF JAZZ, FUNK AND SOUL PULLED TOGETHER BY SHABAKA HUTCHINGS!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE ROYAL FAMILY IS MISSING A TRICK BY NOT ANNOUNCING A NATIONWIDE REALITY-TV-LED SEARCH FOR A NEW PAIR OF ROYALS TO REPLACE THE OUTGOING PAIR AND CALLING IT ‘THE SUSSEX FACTOR’, PT.1:

• Connect BTS: Ordinarily I’d shy away from including something by one of the planet’s biggest musical acts, what with Web Curios’ raison d’etre being pointing you at weird, obscure stuff that isn’t already the subject of obsessive squealing from a literal army of teenagers, but this new project by Korean pop juggernaut BTS is exactly the sort of thing I’d be rhapsodising over were it instead created by an obscure witch house outfit from Dudley and so here it is. ‘Connect’ is BTS’s BIG ART PROJECT, all accompanied by some vague guff about wanting to CONNECT THE WORLD THROUG ART AND MUSIC, and which, more interestingly, is going to comprise 22 artists and works across five cities, presenting works both physical and digital. It’s…unclear the extent to which the individual members of BTS have been involved with this, and there’s much of the wording on the website which very miuch makes the whole project sound like the sort of thing that was invented in a marketing meeting rather than as a project born of artistic passion, but maybe I’m just being cynical – certainly, the first work, Catharsis, by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, which you can either see at the Serpentine Gallery or in its digital version here, is genuinely beautiful, and I’m curious to see what the other works are like and how they interconnect with each other – all my cynicism to one side, it’s hard to imagine One Direction having done this (though you know full well that Harry Styles has a full and impressive command of International Art English). Thanks to Alex Fleetwood for this, who emailed it to me and DEMANDED that I credit him.
• Lovot: I know it’s only the second proper week of January, but I can already tell I’ll be hard-pressed to find anything more unsettling and vaguely-depressing all year – well done, 2020, it’s a STRONG START! Meet Lovot, a horrible portmanteau name combining ‘robot’ and ‘love’ for a smol, ambulant robot companion, who wants nothing more than to be loved by YOU! But, thank God, at least not in that sense – no, Lovot is all about the Agape rather than the Eros, a tiny wheeled robot that exists solely to be the recipient of its owners affection and to return that affection in kind, with its odd, fleece-y body and its dull eyes and its slow, wheeled gait. It’s a combination of motorised home assistant, complete with camera and microphone to act as a sort of ambulant domestic surveillance system, and teddy bear, which will actively seek out its owner, ask them for hugs, and even, if there’s more than one unit, get demonstrably ‘jealous’ if humans lavish more affection on one Lovot than another. I honestly can’t look at this without feeling deeply, immeasurably sad – I think it’s the Lovot’s face, or absence of one, just these huge eyes staring sadly up at you, designed to elicit emotions that it itself can never feel. Or maybe it’s the fact that the design and finish of the thing looks almost exactly like the model that would be used in the horror version of this, which starts out gentle but which picks up pace massively in the final third in which the Lovot gains sentience and the blood and gristle and hatred starts flying everywhere. I know that things like this are probably good for the old, the infirm and the lonely, and that they can fulfil a positive function in the lives of the elderly or infirm, but, honestly, the Lovot breaks my heart.
• Doublicat: Create your own slightly-sh1t deepfakes, in an app, on your phone! This is quite shonky but sort-of fun, and as ever with this stuff you’ve probably got a short window before this sort of thing is baked into Insta, Snap et al directly and EVERYONE uses it, so here’s your chance to fill your stories with something NEW and DIFFERENT. The results are…well, crap, frankly, but sort-of funny in a ‘JESUS CHRIST WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY FACE??’ way, but I think the most interesting thing about this is how it proves quite neatly exactly what an incredible head-start the established tech platforms have when it comes to this stuff; the difference in quality between this and the stuff that Snap in particular puts out is like night and day, and one wonders slightly at the barriers to entry for any non-established players to enter into the video fx market. Or at least I do, funless pr1ck that I am.
• Receptiviti: Things I have learned after two decades or so of work which I would like to pass on to the younger readers of Curios, part x of y: in 99% of workplaces, they really don’t monitor your internet access or email usage AT ALL, unless you give them good reason to think that they ought to – I mean, who has the time? Seriously, when I (briefly) worked for the Department for Work and Pensions I spent the last month leaking stories to the media from my work email address FFS. Or at least that used to be the case – now, though, thanks to the ineluctable march of AI (or at least stuff that’s being peddled by chancers as being AI, which is basically the same thing) bosses can buy services like Receptiviti and you’re fcuked, mate. This is a genuinely creepy service offered to businesses, which plugs into each and all of their systems (the Office Suite, Gmail, Slack, the Bloomberg terminal, etc) and offers large-scale analysis of ALL their employees’ communications across these platforms, employing sentiment and semantic analysis to monitor things like levels of stress, relationship qualities, etc, amongst the workforce. Anyone whose ever done any work at all with automated sentiment analysis (why HELLO social media monkeys!) will know exactly how crap it is, and will be feeling a very real sense of fear at the prospect of their future career trajectory being determined by a series of red and green pie charts. This sounds HORRIBLE, but is very much the future – it’s worth having a read of the ‘ethics’ section on the site, which makes it very, very clear that when it talks about ‘privacy’ it’s talking to employers about their data rather than to staff about their private correspondence, which is…nice. And yes, fine, I know that technically when you’re at work everything you type is owned by your paymaster but, well, no.
• The Kickstarter Make It 100: Genuinely amazed that I’ve never spotted this before given it’s been going for a few years – I am a disgrace. The Maker 100 is a Kickstarter initiative, obviously a marketing gimmick but a nice one, designed to encourage people who’ve got a small, niche idea for a thing to have a go at getting a simple run of 100 editions funded on Kickstarter. Anything goes, from comic books to art to design to prints to mugs to stitching to cards, and the link up top takes you to the collected entries so far. If you’re not a maker yourself, this is still a pleasing selection of small, idiosyncratic projects to browse and maybe support; if, on the other hand, you’ve always wanted to do that craft thing then this might be the incentive you need to give it a go. The project runs til the end of January, so you’ve still got a couple of weeks to get involved if you fancy it.
• Pet Playlists: Yes, I know that this is technically marketing for Spotify but it’s also silly and internetty and noone reads the first section and it would be a shame if this got missed as a result, hence its inclusion down here. Tell the site a few things about your pet (including the type of animal you have – weirdly they include ‘iguana’ as an option but not, say, ‘guinea pig’, which very much suggests that this was developed by a team in Brooklyn, but overall this is a pleasingly silly way of creating new playlists and discovering new artists (although weirdly the cat playlist I generated the other day didn’t include ANY of this, a particular favourite of my girlfriend’s (and her cat’s), suggesting its creators know NOTHING about feline tastes).
• The Human Screenome Project: This is a really interesting idea – this is a Stanford University project which takes as its starting premise the idea that taking data about mobile usage in blocks (as in, “I spent 5 hours on my phone today, used these 7 apps and visited these 5 websites”) doesn’t actually tell you that much of use or interest, and that instead it’s more useful to take snapshots of how those 5 hours actually played out in realtime – how do you scroll, how do you switch between apps, how do you browse, and what can this data tell us about who you are and how your mobile use might affect you? Unscientifically this feels right; I don’t think its controversial to suggest that there are significant qualitative differences in the psychological effect of, say, spending 5 hours flipping between the Insta profiles of a series of mad-faced influencermongs vs spending those same 5 hours getting into increasingly ill-tempered arguments about local bin collection policies in the Crouch End Appreciation Society Facebook Group (they are both bad for you, to be clear). There’s one example of this sort of datacollection available on the site, and some information about the project, but it’s frustratingly light on practical examples – still, it’s a really interesting line of thought / research.
• Teaching Machines to Lip Read: This is a very dry webpage for a hugely impressive piece of research by Imperial College, in conjunction with Samsung – basically they have taught a machine to generate reasonably-accurate speech using nothing more than its observations of the speaker’s moth movements as input. The most obvious use-case for this is in terms of hearing aid tech for the aurally-impaired, but there’s a huge range of potential applications – this is really, really impressive.
• Lulupet: Did you think we’d seen every single variant on the ‘X, but connected to the web!’ IoT bandwagon it was possible to conceive of? HA! Never underestimate the ability of the tech community to add features and online elements where none ever need to exist. We may, though, have reached peak-IoT with this, though – Lulupet is, as far as I can see, the world’s FIRST EVER internet-enabled litter tray! That’s right, you can now get precise, scientific data as to your cat’s stool and urine production, as the device tracks volume, uses image recognition to identify the type of emission (apparently weight sensors often struggle, so a camera designed to work out whether it’s looking at sh1t or p1ss is vital) and to work out whether it’s ‘normal’ scat based on comparison with some sort of universal catscat database (and now I have just thought of Paula Abdul’s 1990 hit ‘Opposites Attract’ featuring MC Scat Kat and it’s taken on a whole unpleasant new meaning), and to recongnise individual cats within a multi-feline household and WHY??? I understand some people are mental about their cats (HELLO SAZ!), but even by their standards the idea of having every single one of your pet’s fecal deposites compared against some sort of kitty Bristol chart is…insane. Thanks, Taiwan! Thanks!
• The Madness of CES: I don’t know Ed Zitron, and likely never will, but he seems…odd. Still, this is his thread of ‘mad stuff he saw at CES’ and, as it is each year, it’s a genuine delight. I am so, so glad I have never had to attend this – it looks awful, although some of the stuff he’s photographed is quite, quite marvellous. My personal favourite is the booth running a big ad saying “Don’t quit smoking today!”, which in the age of wellness strikes me as the very definition of zigging whilst others zag – well DONE those visionary creatives!
• The Witcher: Another marketing thing, but, again, I imagine enough of you have watched the TV series or played the game that you’ll be interested in this regardless. Netflix’s latest ‘swords and tits’ epic is The Witcher, based on an old Polish fantasy series and the subject of three increasingly-brilliant videogames; this site gives you a lovely interactive timeline of the lore of the fictional land – hang on, what is it called? Oh, it doesn’t matter, let’s just call it Genericfantastica – letting you go back and forth in history to see how events and people all interrelate. There was something similar, and far more complicated, for Game of Thrones, but this is lovely in its own right – and if you’re only familiar with the games, as I am, it’s a nice way of remembering some of the high points from those stories and how they fit into the wider canon of Geralt’s world.
• The Paris Museums Collection: Over 300,000 items from Paris’s museums have just been put online as a digital collection, all housed on this nicely-designed, easy-to–navigate site with some really good advanced search options (see, this is what I get enthused by; fcuk’s sake, Matt – honestly, though, the ‘search by colour’ option is SO nice), thematic collections to offer you a way into the archive without being daunted by its scope…The centralised nature of this is particularly nice, offering the ability to browse works regardless of their current ownership – a London version of something like this would be immense.
• The List of Fictional Institutions: From Wikipedia. SUCH a wonderful rabbithole, and taught me that whilst ‘Jewbilee’ was a fictional Jewish youth camp invented by South Park, the name has since been adopted by a real Jewish group for their annual get-togethers, which is the best example of life imitating art that I can recall.
• The Water Peace Security Map: It’s interesting (to me at least) that one of the big, scary things to be worried about in the future back in the early 2010s was always water – its scarcity, and the eventual inevitable conflict that would result between peoples as that scarcity bit harder. I remember reading estimates that suggested that we were only a few years away from the first major geopolitical conflict over access to water, which hasn’t quite turned out to be true…yet. Still, as this map covering the current state of water availability and conflict across the global South shows, that’s unlikely to maintain for the next decade. The site’s not the most user-friendly, but there’s a lot of interesting information in here and all the data’s available to download should you be interested.
• The Apple Archive: There will be some of you reading this for whom this is basically like a digitised bible – I don’t really understand you, but, well, fine. The Apple Archive is an unofficial project which collects all the stuff that Apple put out, every year since the 70s; press releases, products, adverts…you name it, it’s archived and celebrated here. You want to take a nostalgia trip to the 90s and the weird, massive boiled-sweet-coloured iMacs? You want a reminder of quite how weird tech was at the turn of the millennium? You want to be able to practically smell Steve Jobs? Well, ENJOY!
• The Texas Testicle Festival: This is happening in Texas tomorrow – I am 99% certain that nobody reading this is going to be in a position to attend, but, just in case you’re in or near Texas and are in the market for an all-day celebration of eating animal testes then ENJOY!
• The Tokyo2020 Art Posters: I had completely forgotten that there was an Olympiad happening this year, but, well, there is! Hi, imminent Olympiad! As ever, one of the elements that makes up the anticipatory run-up to the event is the release of all the associated gubbins – mascots, commemorative coins, stadia and ART! This is the official poster selection for the Tokyo 2020 games, and there is some glorious stuff in here – in particular, the breadth of styles and themes on display is wonderful, with work ranging from manga-style illustration to this beautiful calligraphic image which I am going to spend this afternoon trying to buy a print of. So, so beautiful, these.
• Custom 3d-Printed Miniatures: This is VERY GEEKY and will be of no interest at all to most of you – however, if there’s anyone reading this who plays D&D or roleplaying board games or anything like that then you might find this immoderately exciting. This is a Kickstarter for a company called Hero Forge for the next iteration of their service which custom-prints character models in 3d; now they’re offering COLOUR. Honestly, this is very cool indeed (and I say that as someone who doesn’t play D&D or boardgames, really) – you’ll be able to create your character, paint it in the site’s engine, and then have it either 3d printed in colour or, even more impressively, get it hand-painted by one of their artists. Frankly, I’m quite tempted to invent and design a fictional character just so I can get one of these.
• Public Pianos: A website mapping all (maybe not all, fine, but lots) of the public pianos situated around the world. Depending on your tolerance for people playing Pachebel’s Canon with varying degrees of competence, you can either use this to visit them all or to avoid them.
• Super Scale: This is SO impressive, in a slightly (ok, incredibly) geeky way – Super Scale is one bloke’s project to make the most realistic radio controlled car possible, in terms of its handling and the like. It’s AMAZING, seriously – click the link and watch some of the videos and watch how it corners and how the chassis moves and Christ what do I know I don’t even drive FFS. Still, it looks amazing and the guy’s apparently going to start selling them via the site (I don’t see that ending well, but still), so if you’re in the market for an insane engineering project for 2020 or if you just want to drop a few hundred quid on a strangely overengineered toy car then this could be for YOU.

By David Kramer

NOW GIVE THIS SPOTIFY MIX A GO, DESIGNED TO TAKE THE P1SS OUT OF THE GENERIC SOUNDTRACKS THAT ALL TRENDY RESTAURANTS HAVE WHILST AT THE SAME TIME BEING A GENUINELY GOOD MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE ROYAL FAMILY IS MISSING A TRICK BY NOT ANNOUNCING A NATIONWIDE REALITY-TV-LED SEARCH FOR A NEW PAIR OF ROYALS TO REPLACE THE OUTGOING PAIR AND CALLING IT ‘THE SUSSEX FACTOR’, PT.2:

• The Five Thirty Eight Data: If you do datawrangling, this is very mucj up your street. Nate Silver’s lost some of his lustre over the past couple of years and is not quite the infallible guru of predictions he once was, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a very, very smart person and that Five Thirty Eight doesn’t still do some of the most interesting work out there around at the edges of data and prognostication. This offers a series of datasets used in their stories and investigations from around 2014 – historical, fine, but useful as training sets or simply as ways of working out how they wrangled the numbers to get their results. If you play with numbers, for profit or fun, this is worth a look.
• The London Sound Survey (Redux): I featured part of this in Curios in September 2015, but now it seems there’s a whole WEBSITE – the London Sound Survey, “a growing collection of sound recordings of people, places and events in the capital.” Covering the sounds of people, animals, transport, music, sound maps, interviews and LOADS more, if you’ve any interest in the urban or social geography of the UK’s capital then this is an absolutely required click for you. Honestly, this feels like it shoudl have its own permanent installation in the Museum of London or similar – it’s got so, so much wonderful stuff here, and is a treasure trove of inspiration and writing prompts and jumping-off points through which to explore the city; I am absolutely using this as an exploratory template as soon as the weather gets marginally less offensive.
• Tilemaker: This is absolutely one of those links which I clicked on with a vague sort of ‘oh, yes, this looks sort-of interesting’ and then BANG it was 45 minutes later and I was concentrating with my tongue poking out of the corner of my mouth agonising over the final colour combination of my tile. Here’s the blurb: “Qatar Foundation International’s (QFI) Mosaic Tilemaker application introduces students to fundamental concepts of Islamic art and architecture through the exploration and creation of mosaic tile art. Here, users can learn more about the history and geometric principles behind this art and engage in an interactive learning process to explore these concepts by designing and sharing their own mosaics.” DESIGN YOUR OWN TILES FFS! Honestly, if your partner won’t stop banging on about renovating the house, point them at this and know that they will likely lose themselves in pursuit of tile perfection for at least a few weeks, thereby buying you some time.
• Goofonts: Google fonts, but made properly useful and searchable. I mean, that’s literally it, but if you need help finding web fonts then it’s probably really useful. Or at least a bit useful, and that’s frankly good enough – there’s a low, low bar here at Web Curios.
• Received Not Read: A simple Twitter bot which automatically crawls the spam/junk folder in its creator’s email and tweets out the subject lines from random junk emails they’ve received. There’s an odd sort of nonsensical poetry about lots of these, as well as a few slightly baffling ones – “I have a surprise for you”, sent from an otherwise-anonymous ‘Natalie’, sounds to me far more sinister than enticing, for example.
• Anxiety Empire: Thanks Editor Paul for pointing me at this – Anxiety Empire is the title of a new publication which looks to explore mental health through the prism of various macro issues of society, such as ‘work’, ‘language’, ‘money’, etc. On the one hand, this is an interesting project and I can imagine it will throw up some good writing; on the other, I’m increasingly of the opinion that ‘mental health’, like ‘sustainability’, has been rendered largely meaningless as a term through over-/misuse.
• FFT Battleground: I can’t imagine any of you will find this particularly compelling – though I might of course be wrong, perhaps you want nothing more than to bet imaginary money on bot battles in an old videogame – but it’s interesting to me as a sign of where Twitch might end up going. Do you remember SaltyBet from a few years back, which streamed endless randomly-generated fights between bot-controlled characters with a sidebar chat in which people bet on the outcomes? No? Christ’s sake. Anyway, this is like that, but on Twitch and using Final Fantasy Tactics as the game rather than SaltyBet’s weird, own-brand fighting mod – the point is less what’s going on here (which is mostly incomprehensible, at least to me who has no idea at all about FFT mechanics), and more about the creative use of Twitch as a platform for community and shared experience and, of course, betting. I can TOTALLY imagine a situation in which, say, Capcom creates a neverending stream of random matchups between SF characters with a real-world betting angle for actual cashmoney (bets capped at 5p a time to mitigate against eventual criticisms of the negative effects on young minds of promoting gambling via gaming) – seriously, this is if not the future then certainly a future.
• Brutu: This feels very much like an art project rather than a real thing, and yet, here we are. Do you feel like your phone’s a constant distraction and even all the screentime notifications and app usage limiters simply aren’t keeping your addiction in check? Well add a financial incentive to it! The app “is an iOS timer that helps you stay focused. Select any amount of money that motivates you and start a timer. Put your phone down and stay on task. If you leave the app Brutu will charge you.” Beautifully, there’s no indication that anything good or worthy happens to the money – I presume it just ends up in the pockets of the developers, to which I say WELL DONE YOU. That said, there’s DEFINITELY a charity app here which one could create, doing exactly the same thing but donating the forfeited sums to a cause of your choice. Hang on, that very much feels like it should exist already, it’s a GREAT idea? Does it? If not, it’s YOURS.
• Algorat Sweater: Would you like to design a virtual sweater which will then be displayed on a smol 3d CG rodent? You might not think you would, but you are WRONG. I have no idea at all why this exists (although googling ‘sweater rat’ just now has gifted me a selection of VERY CUTE examples of rattus rattus looking all toasty warm) but I am glad that it does.
• Mute VC: A plugin which mutes Tweets from VCs from your timeline. Which is fine as far as the joke goes, but until this exists for specific professional categories on LinkedIn (marketers, I am looking at YOU) then it’s meaningless.
• The Great Migration: “During the Great Migration, from about 1915 to 1970, millions of African Americans moved from southern, primarily rural areas of the United States to urban areas to the north and west. They sought better opportunities away from racial discrimination and violence in the South.” This collection in the US Library of Congress presents a selection of these images, and offer an ever-timely reminder of exactly how close we still are to an era in which segregation and discrimination were law in the States.
• The Montreal Age Map: For the approximately two Canadians who read this, and anyone who’s interested in the history of cities, this is a map showing the various ages of Montreal’s buildings on the occasion of the city’s 375th birthday and offering a parallel curated guide to some of the older and more interesting structures. Fine, it’s probably not of huge interest if you’re not a Montreal resident, but it’s a pleasing way of exploring the city and its heritage online, and a good example of how to present projects such as this in appealing, accessible fashion.
• Famous Paintings With Added Search and Rescue Vehicles: Charming Twitter thread of the week, this. Andy Doe posted it with the following explanation: “This week, my firstborn asked me to teach him photoshop, which means we now have a lot of famous paintings with search and rescue vehicles added to them.” These are just GREAT, and there’s an angle here that you can definitely rip off if you’re a particular sort of brand with an awful lot of free time and photoshop skills.
• The Pirate’s Lair: Have you ever wanted to own a GENUINE (may not in fact be genuine) pirate treasure chest? Have you ever wanted to look at LOTS of photos of said chests, restored to their former glory? Almost certainly not, fine, but you might find yourself becoming surprisingly enthused by this excellent, shonky site whose design evidently hasn’t changed since approximately 1998.
• Significant Otter: Absolutely an app which started out as a vaguely-punny brainfart and which somehow became real, Significant Otter is basically ‘Yo’ for lovers; “With Significant Otter, you can take your relationship to the next level with biosignal sensors, a cutting-edge technology that’s built into your Apple Watch. There’s no texting, calling, or messaging involved. All you need to do is tap and you’ll instantly be in touch, literally”. Effectively it creates a peer-to-peer connection between two watches, automatically sharing status updates and enabling hideously-cutesy ‘I’m thinking of you!’ one-touch connectivity, all accompanied by animated little cartoon otters. On the one hand, this is so saccharine it makes me want to kill; on the other…no, there are no upsides. Oh, ok, FINE, the cartoon mustelids are nicely-designed.
• Bushfire Dildo: Do you want to donate money to the disaster relief effort in Australia, but don’t want to just give them your cash? Would you like to get something in exchange for your caring help? How about a MASSIVE RUBBER COCK? Well great – in that case, order the Down Under Domination D1ldo and enjoy the feeling of doing the right thing AND the feeling of six inches of hand-moulded rubber with a cute little koala-shaped raised bit on the base of the shaft! Between this and the woman who claimed to have raised a million selling nudes, we appear to have reached a point in human history whereby the criteria for charity seems to be ‘can I get an orgasm out of it?’ which, I don’t know, feels…odd. Still, d1ldos! Australia!
• Upwards: Finally this week, I think I stole this from B3ta (HI ROB!) – it’s simple, and a few years old, but it’s SUCH a great piece of game design. You have one ability – jumping. You can’t move, except to jump. How high can you get?

By Daisy Collingridge

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, THIS LOVELY BALEARIC CHILLOUT SELECTION BY MIDNATTSSOULA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Una Vida Moderna: Want a selection of images of mid-century modernist architecture in Mexico and Detroit? No? TOUGH.
• Celebreedy: The latest Shardcore joint, already featured in a FAR more popular newsletter than my own, but re-upped here because a) it’s great; b) I NAMED IT!! You can read the blurb about the how and why here, but basically it’s a series of machine-imagined celebrity mashups, which are SO wonderfully uncanny-valley. The project’s on Twitter and Insta too, should you wish to follow it in MULTI-PLATFORM fashion.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Yuuuteando: Thanks to Ed for this – Yuuuatendo is a Brooklyn musician whose insta is full of odd little 90s-style CG animations and his slightly-bleepy compositions. It’s ace.
• Derrick O Boateng: Boateng is a Ghanaian photographer who shoots solely on his phone; these are SUPERB, and the use of colour here is hallucinatory and brilliant. Such a wonderful aesthetic on display here.
• Aleia: Snails, in smol human habitats, doing snail things. Clicking on the link will take you to the artist’s website, where I fell in love with the earrings shaped like mini Hitachi Magic Wands.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The State of the World in 2020: I think, though I can’t quite be bothered to check, that this is the fifth year now in which I’ve featured The Well’s ‘State of the World’ conversation between Bruce Sterling, Jon Lebkowsky and guests (who this year include digital musical genius Holly Herndon) – as it is every year, it’s an absolute must-read; if you’re interested in reading some very, very smart people discussing and debating where we are now as a species. Taking in everything from tech to politics to art to sociology and everything inbetween, it’s a particular pleasure to read Sterling this year who’s got a sort of wonderfully flat ‘everything is a mess and everything is wonderful and nothing matters and everything matters and I am going to die and I don’t care and I care so much’-type-vibe going on throughout. The conversation’s upto five pages right now, which is a LOT, but try reading just the first page and see how you get on – I promise, this will make you smarter.
• The 2030 Future Timeline: YOU WANT PREDICTIONS? WE GOT PREDICTIONS!! Quantumrun, the site from which this is taken, is a frankly MENTAL collection of futurepredictions, annualised for each yer between now and 2050 – this links you to their selection for 2030, but you can go to the homepage to browse the other years. If this is right, in a decade we’ll be enjoying the first flying cars and a mini ice-age; we’ll also live in a world in which the largest demographic cohort in the continent of Africa is 0-4 years old, which is INSANE.
• Buzzfeed in 2020: I’ve featured Jonah Peretti’s annual address to the troops a few times over the years; the 2020 effort is definitely worth a read, as Peretti looks back on the successes and failures of Buzzfeed’s past, opens up a bit as to its planned future monetisation model (cutting out the middlemen is the basic takeaway here), and drops some interesting hints about what he sees as the potential for the creation of parallel small interest-based communities as adjuncts to the Buzzfeed brand. This last is particularly interesting to me in terms of general digital trends; five years ago, anyone making any ‘hey, let’s build our own community’ noises would rightly have been decried as a lunatic; now, though, it’s not inconceivable that forums could make a significant comeback as we all scrabble to keep our lives private and separate and out of the hands of BIG TECH (NB – if you think giving all your data to Buzzfeed is better than Facebook then, well, not quite sure what to tell you here kids).
• Corporations of Loving Grace: This has done the rounds this week, and rightly so – Martin Weigel has penned a truly excellent essay, discursively tracking from advermarketingpr chat to a wider debate about the extent of our societal belief in the idea of ‘corporate entity as our only saviour’, and the commercial/commoditisation of, well, everything, including the aptly-named ‘marketplace of ideas’. This is very, very smart – even if you don’t agree with all of Weigel’s points, you will find yourself nodding along at his reasoning. “Instead of politics we are to have the marketplace. Instead of elected representatives we now we must surrender ourselves the personal visions of billionaire business leaders. And instead of the citizen, of homo politicus, we are only and everywhere homo economicus – self-interested individuals seeking seek to enhance our own wealth and power with little regard for the impact on others. Instead of citizens then, we are to remade as consumers.” Well, yes, quite.
• From Context Collapse to Content Collapse: Another great personal essay, this time by Nicholas Carr (and, like Weigel’s, published on a personal website – WE’RE CLAWING BACK THE WEB, KIDS, ONE LINK AT A TIME!!), looking at how the projected idea of context collapse – that is, the idea that the internet would usher in a degree of radical transparency which would see people abandoning the multifaceted personal identities of the past for a single, honest, unified personal which existed consistently regardless of context – has instead given way to content collapse, where instead we’re all different for different people but instead it’s the content we’re presented with which is unidimensional and devoid of context. Really good, this.
• The Rise of the Personal Brand: This is actually from the tail end of 2019, but I missed it when it was published what with already being on my holidays – it’s also written by K=Hole co-founder Sean Monahan, which makes it very much worth a read. So, so good, and an excellent companion piece to the above, on the past decade’s rise of the personal as professional and the ceaseless pursuit of the hustle, and the weird reemergence or recontextualisation of the idea of the (or indeed ‘a’) scene. Excellent, and if you work in advermarketingpr, sort-of essential (as in fact are all of the past three links).
• The Death of iTunes: A series of observations (11, to be precise) on what the emergence and eventual death of iTunes tells us about the shift in the way in which we envisage digital storage and taxonomy, and how it’s emblematic of the shift from personal curation and organisation and limited storage, to the acceptance of software and the infinity of digital, and the algo being in charge, and what this means in terms of cognitive and emotional burden when dealing with our digital lives.
• How To Build An AI Text Bot On Twitter: Specifically, one which uses the GPT-2 model to create creepily near-human copy on whatever subject you train it on. This is long and techy and NO FUN to read, but if you’re after a smol coding project for the year and have an idea for a Twitter bot based on a meaty corpus of extant text, this is potentially very useful indeed.
• The Smart Beauty Devices of CES: This is a Mashable link (sorry), so don’t click expecting sparkling prose or high-quality journalism; it’s worth a look, though, mainly as a slightly jaw-dropping rundown of all the crazy beauty tech that was on show at this year’s CES in Vegas; reading this made me think that, amongst all the chuntering about wellness and acceptance and body positivity and the rest, we are simultaneously cosigning some pretty unhealthy-sounding behaviours when it comes to the obsessive tracking of our facial imperfections and the pursuit of the flawless Instaface.
• 7 Reasons Why Gaming Will Take Over: One might reasonably argue that in terms of the global entertainment industry gaming has already taken over – nonetheless, this is a smart and coherent rundown of all the reasons why the gaming industry is set to be the dominant entertainment juggernaut for the foreseeable future, and why everyone who’s able should start seeking to jump on it asap. This is very much a piece of business / market analysis rather than a ‘games are sooo cool!’ hagiography, and is all the better for it – its author, Matthew Ball, is always worth reading on the gaming market in general, and he makes some excellent points about the unique nature of game worlds and content which make them specific value multipliers in way that few other industries can match.
• Twitch For Non-Gamers: This is really interesting – for the first time, the amount of non-gaming content on Twitch is outstripping that about games (or at least, ‘chat’ content is outperforming all content on specific titles, which is still remarkable). I am hugely interested in seeing exactly how TV ends up; I don’t think Twitch is going to be it, necessarily, but this model – microbroadcasts, interactivity, rewards, responsiveness, community and intimacy – is absolutely the future.
• How To Be Anonymous: Specifically, on the rise of fashion and accessories designed to distract or thwart surveillance technology such as CCTV; this is a fairly functional article, but it’s fascinating from the point of view of the sheer range of stuff that’s now out there, from glasses to scarves to tops to hats to makeup to anything else you can think of. It’s totally possible that TopShop will have its very own ‘Hackers’-type line of anti-surveillance clothing in shops by the end of the year, mashing up this sort of thing with the strong dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic of last year’s HK protests – in fact, £10 says some of this stuff is SOMEWHERE on the high street by Q3 this year.
• The Man Who’s Buying Music: Merck Mercuriadis has an excellent name and the sort of demeanour, at least in these photos, that very much suggest that one ought not fcuk with him. He’s also, though his company Hipgnosis, on a quest to buy the rights to all the songs in the world, whatever the cost – this is his bet on how the future monetisation of artists’ catalogues is going to work, and he’s bullish enough to be spending a $billion-odd on so doing. If you’re a romantic or a purist then this might not make you feel particularly warm and fuzzy – it’s also a bit galling to see Nile Rogers cosying up to a man who basically reads quite a lot like the Gordon Gekko of music – but the ambition and the vision is coldly impressive.
• Derek Parfit: OK, you probably need to be a bit into philosophy to enjoy this, but I ADORED this essay all about Derek Parfit, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century, a wonderful ethicist and moral philosopher and a proper eccentric. This is wonderful, on both his thinking and the wider theory that surrounded it (specifically, on the practical applications of utilitarian theory), and also on the very peculiar eccentricity of academics of a certain stripe – “Gradually a legend built up around him. ‘Derek only eats meals he can consume with one hand so he can read and eat at the same time’. ‘’Derek drinks instant coffee made with hot water from the tap, so he doesn’t have to wait for the kettle to boil’. ‘Derek always wears the same clothes, even in the St Petersburg winter, to spare him from having to think about what to put on in the morning’. Unusually for such legends, this was all completely true.” Lovely, affectionate, fascinating stuff.
• A Eulogy for Yo: You remember Yo, right? The briefly-viral app whose sole function was to enable users to swap messages which simply read ‘Yo’? You may even have written a brand strategy for it on a quiet afternoon back in 2014. This is a really interesting essay, sort-of in defence of Yo but more accurately all about the benefits of low-friction communication, and the function that such systems can end up fulfilling; there are a number of anecdotes contained within about how people used Yo, and it does sort-of start to make sense (but only ‘almost); there is something to be said about super light-touch checkins with people, and the vague sense of safety and security it can give. Maybe we should bring back Yo, is what I’m basically saying here. Except if it was created in 2020 it would be called ‘ennui’ and would just let you send a message saying “i think i want to go to sleep forever! actually death is good, maybe?”.
• The Many Lives of Roberto: A lovely essay, from the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner, about the peculiar wonder of creating a recipe and watching others take it and run with it and make it their own, and, in parallel, the community that can build up around these recipes on social media (the ‘Roberto’ in question is a soup, for reasons that are sort-of explained in the piece). Gorgeous and comforting and warming – the essay, not the soup, though the recipe’s at the end if you want to try that too.
• Comedy Screenwriters’ Favourite Names: How did Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog on Arrested Development come into being? Why was Gob’s boat called ‘Seaward’? And why was Niles Crane called Niles? This is a charming piece, interviewing various comedy writers from hit shows on how they came to name their creations – the Niles one in particular is SO TRUE.
• Gonzo Goes Gonzo: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, written as though it featured the Muppets rather than Hunter S Thompson. This is far, far funnier than it needs to be, as is often the case with McSweeney’s.
• Trying to Live Forever: Or, what doing all that biohacking crap feels like in real life. The author of the piece, Joel Stein, has previous in this field, having a few years back done a piece in which he tried to get an action movie star’s body; this time, he goes down the rabbithole of the weird pseudoscience of cryotherapy and sleep analysis in pursuit of fitness, health and (near) eternal life. Stein’s an engaging writer, and is just sincere enough in his interest in the ‘science’ to make this a fun read rather than a slightly humourless takedown; it strikes me that there is no amount of longevity that can be worth having this little fun.
• Operation Backfire: I fell in love with this essay from the London Review of Books within the first few lines, when it mentioned the British Interplanetary Society – its headquarters are near my house, and I was long-fascinated by what went on behind its unassuming facade (til I remembered to Google it and found that it was significantly less involved in communicating with alien species than I’d hoped) – but the whole thing is just MARVELLOUS. It’s the story of the British experiments with rocketry which took place in the 50s and 60s – there’s a lot of science here, and a lot of engineering, but in the main it’s just such a wonderful portrait of a very specific type of Britishness; staid, sensible, a bit cheap, practical, eccentric, and fundamentally doomed to irrelevance. Honestly, it’s hard not to read this and imagine it being voice overed in clipped RP tones – what makes it all the better, for me at least, is that this is an account of exactly the sort of imagined postwar Albion that so much of the Leave campaign harked back to, subconsciously or otherwise, and it shows that we DIDN’T WIN. Those halcyon post-war days? We were losing ground, we were an irrelevance, a joke. THEY ARE NOT TIMES TO HARK BACK TO FFS. This is possibly the most ‘dad’ piece of writing I have ever included in Curios (it’s about rockets and engineering and THE WAR, ffs), but I promise you that it’s so, so good.
• The God Phone: Finally in this week’s longreads, Leora Smith writes about manning the God Phone at Burning Man. Long term readers will know that Burning Man fascinates and repels me in equal measure; the art and the costumes and the drugs I would love to see, the people perhaps not so much – this, though, is wonderful, charming, thoughtful and kind, and Smith writes beautifully. It will make you want to do at least one slightly-whimsical art thing this year, or at least it will if you’re anything like me, and that can’t be bad.

By Eliana Marini

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s kick off with a cover version. Momus is one of my favourite ever artists, and this is one of my favourite ever songs of his; when I first discovered it, age 15 or so, it’s fair to say I identified a bit – 25 years later and it’s still lyrically fantastic, and whilst this version by Kirin J Callinan isn’t quite up to the original it’s still fcuking GREAT. This is called ‘The Homosexual’:

1. Next up, the latest from Poppy, who, having been following her for about 6 years now, I am convinced is going to properly break out this year (I know she’s already internet famous, but in a mainstream sense) – this continues the weird narrative ‘Poppy is now FREE’ arc of her personal story and the shift away from the ultra-Kawaii aesthetic of her early stuff towards more of the Babymetal-aping sound of recent singles; I have to say, I really do like this quite a lot. It’s called ‘Anything Like Me’:

1. Deathgrips are always a ‘challenging’ listen. When accompanied by a GAN-imagined video, that’s…moreso. Honestly, this is aesthetically fcuking WONDERFUL – the work’s by Robert Luxemborg, and you try not seeing these faces in your nightmares afterwards:

1. This is by Igorr, or at least the song is – the animation’s by some people called Meat Department. It’s called ‘Very Noise’. It’s so…wet. And so meaty. The track reminds me quite a lot of Autechre and the sort of jazz x Aphex Twin-type stuff that Clifford Gilberto was doing back in the day – it’s ACE:

1. Finally this week, UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Pa Saliou, with Frontline, which, as all the comments say, has a touch of the J-Hus about it; they’re both of Gambian origin, which might explain some of the musical similarities, but this is a different sort of flow – feels like this kid could be big (although obviously I would have no idea if he’s already really famous and on the radio and stuff), see what you think. Oh, and THAT’S THE END I’M OFF HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND DON’T FORGET TO WRAP UP WARM AS IT’S VERY COLD OUT THERE AND I DON’T WANT YOU TO CATCH A CHILL BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU ESPECIALLY THOSE OF YOU BOTHERING TO READ THIS BIT BUT EVEN THOSE OF YOU WHO AREN’T TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE HAVE FUN TAKE CARE BYE BYE BYE!!

HELLO! HI! Christ, er, writing this newsletter is HARD WORK, turns out, My tendons are all aflame and I feel like…well, like I’ve just spent the past six and half hours typing near-solidly with only occasional breaks for tea (oh, and urine; it’s not like I catheterise, I’m not that dedicated), which is about as delightful as you can probably imagine. 

Still, it’s ALL WORTH IT, eh? Who knows, maybe this will be the decade in which some plutocrat or another finally realises that the missing piece in the ineffable, unknowable puzzle that is ‘the future of content’ (a puzzle in which all the pieces are blank, many of them are missing, and you’re blindfolded whilst playing) is paying me a comfortable annual salary to produce Curios. Maybe. The alternative of course is that I continue to eke out an existence in the consultancy mines until the point at which my attitude renders me genuinely unemployable (current ETA: Q2 2021) at which point WHO KNOWS! Still, early signs are that we might all have been nuked into nonexistance by then anyway, so WHO CARES!

Yes, that’s right, Christmas has put me in a GREAT frame of mind for the year ahead – any of you hoping that Web Curios was going to return full of vim and positivity in the new year will be sadly disappointed, but probably should have known to lower your expectations. Still, if you’re still game then step forward, step forward – welcome to another year of words, of links, of some truly wonderful examples of creativity and endeavour and love and pride, as well as an awful lot of things that might make you hope for the end to come sooner rather than later. Which. probably, it will. HAPPY JANUARY EVERYONE!

I’m still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I still haven’t found anything better to do with my time. 

By Linder Sterling

LET’S KICK OFF THE FIRST CURIOS OF THE YEAR WITH A PLAYLIST OF SONGS FROM THE BEST ALBUMS OF LAST YEAR!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS A WHOLE LOT BETTER ABOUT 2030 NOW THAT IT KNOWS MARK ZUCKERBERG’S ON THE CASE!:

• The Zuckerfesto: We begin 2020 with an ending of sorts; no more will Mark Zuckerberg embark upon one of his much-loved annual challenges, throwing himself headlong into a new ameliorative endeavour each year to the increasing bemusement of the rest of us meatsacks. It’s a shame really; I’d rather enjoyed the annual frothy speculation about what it all meant each January, whether it be the tour of the US meeting ‘ordinary folk’ which we were all convinced was the precursor to an eventual Presidential run (I can’t work out if that flight of fancy seems more or less ridiculous after three years of Trump), the slightly-embarrassingly-curtailed project to build himself a robot butler called ‘Jarvis’ (I mean, I’m not a regular visitor to Mr Z’s house, but I’m reasonably confident that he’s not singlehandedly pushed back the frontiers of servile AI in the past couple of years), or, my personal favourite, the bizarrely-bloodthirsty commitment to killing all the meat he ate with his own hands (it really is worth remembering this one – you sort of get the impression that most people might maybe cut back on the steak and sausages if they were the ones having to exsanguinate the beasts each time, but I can’t help but imagine that Zuckerberg, by contrast, now counts a distressingly-well-stocked mammalian ossuary in a crepuscular corner of his McMansion). Anyway, he’s done with that – this year, by contrast, he’s published a 10-year vision, outlining what he sees as the priorities that he and Facebook will focus on, and, well, it’s worth a read. Look – I’m not denying that Zuckerberg is smarter than me by a very, very large multiplier, and that he’s literally changed the world and at that, but reading this once again makes me wonder about his suitability to be at the vanguard of future human endeavour. So much of this is either blindly utopian, wilfully miopic, or, well, just a bit banal and obvious; ‘Generational Change’ will be a marker of the coming decade, says Mark, with millennials increasingly coming into positions of power across the globe – WELL YES, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A GENERATION GROWS OLDER AND STARTS TO HIT ITS LATE-30s/EARLY-40s, IT ALWAYS HAS FFS! We’re going to focus more on smaller, more private online communities – YES, AND NO THANKS TO YOU MARK, AND WE KNOW THEY’LL STILL BE MONETISED TO FCUK BY ADS, WE’RE NOT FCUKING STUPID! The one that really got my goat, though, was the final bit about increased global governance of the web and related areas – it’s not the principle, with which I broadly agree, that I have a problem with, it’s the high-handed tone that somehow suggests that Mark’s run out of patience with the heel-dragging of legislators which is causing, and this line in particular: “I don’t think private companies should be making so many important decisions that touch on fundamental democratic values.” OH SO YOU DON’T THINK A COMPANY WHOSE MISSION IS, AND HAS BEEN, ‘CONNECT THE ENTIRE WORLD’ WITH NARY A CARE FOR EXACTLY HOW THAT MIGHT WORK IN PRACTICE OR WHAT THE CONSEQUENCES MIGHT BE HAS BASICALLY BEEN ENGAGED IN EXACTLY THE PRACTICE OF ‘MAKING IMPORTANT DECISIONS THAT TOUCH ON FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC VALUES’ FOR ITS ENTIRE MATURE LIFESPAN?!?! You disingenuous fcuk, Mark. God, it’s nice to start the year with a momentary flash of the good, old-fashioned impotent rage.
• Facebook Doesn’t Really Change Its Political Ad Rules: The headline here is that if you’re a politician you can literally pay to promote almost any old cobblers. There are a few interesting tweaks in here, though, which will be rolled out ‘in the future’ (regular readers will be aware of Facebook’s less-than-stellar track record of actually delivering much of what it promises in these announcements, though, so perhaps don’t start holding your breath just yet. Significant tweaks include: the ability to see rough audience size for political ads, presumably to help unmask the sort of INTENSE MICROTARGETING of small communities and interest groups that everyone always gets very excited about but which is increasingly being debunked as an effective mechanic; the ability for users to exclude themselves from Custom Audience targeting; and the chance for users see political ads even if the advertiser has sought to exclude them from targeting based on Custom Audiences. The second of these is the most significant, but the percentage of Facebook users likely to a) be aware of the fact that they can opt-out of Custom Audiences; and b) then go ahead and do something about it can conservatively be estimated at
• Facebook Launches More Ad Reporting Metrics: I don’t make new year’s resolutions – it’s not because I’m in any way superior to those who do, you understand, it’s more because I simply can’t imagine having that degree of volition or motivation about anything – but, if I did, I think that mine this year would be to make 2020 the year in which I finally stop having to do anything to do with social media for my jobs (I’m about 80% there fwiw). The reason? Stuff like this. YOU CAN NOW REPORT MORE DIFFERENT STUFF ABOUT HOW ACE YOUR FACEBOOK ADS ARE AND HOW WELL THEY ARE DOING AND OH GOD I CAN’T DO THIS FOR ANOTHER TEN YEARS.
• The Facebook Deepfakes Policy: Another example of how, for a company of its size and wealth and scale, Facebook is in many ways so, so bad at everything to do with its announcements about platform regulation; this week it published what was meant to be a clarifying update on its policy on Deepfake content, designed to help limit the potential of the platform to be used for malicious purposes as the technology continues to improve. The outcome? A mess of a statement that will basically do nothing at all to enforce the removal of deliberately-misleading fake content on the Facebook ecosystem. Look, just read the significant elements of the statement – video will be removed if “It has been edited or synthesized – beyond adjustments for clarity or quality – in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say; and if It is the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic. This policy does not extend to content that is parody or satire, or video that has been edited solely to omit or change the order of words.” Can someone please, please explain to me the meaningful difference between a video that has been edited or synthesised by AI or ML to ‘mislead someone into thinking the subject of the video said words that they did not actually say’ and one where someone’s manually edited it to rearrange the words of a speech or statement and thereby change the meaning? NO BECAUSE THERE IS NO PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE. Honestly, whoever’s working on this stuff in Menlo Park ought to be applauded for their chutzpah in drawing a salary, because this is staggeringly badly-considered. If you want a contrast, look at Reddit’s policy, also released this week, which whilst imperfect is a million times more useful than Facebook’s.
• New Business Tools For Instagram: Basically it’s a bunch of analytics stuff – account growth, aggregated updates of your mentions in Insta Stories on a daily basis, and, usefully for all your booze/gambling brand needs, AGE-GATING IS FINALLY HERE! There’s your excuse to break with dry January and celebrate with some lovely January meths.
• Insta Introducing Collaborative Group Stories: This is interesting and quite cool – the idea is that people who are in an Insta Group Chat together will be able to collaborate on creating Stories together, with upto 32 people working together to upload different elements to a collaboratively-collated Story. Whilst the practical mechanics are a bit iffy (ie unkown), and you’d obviously need some sort of controls to stop That Person in the chat (there is always one, and sometimes it’s you) ruining the vibe by chucking in rogue elements, the potential is huge – and for brands (and particularly those in the entertainment / experience space) this is a really interesting way of sourcing UGC and doing competitions, etc; I think that the barriers to entry for creating a Group Story of an event you were at with your mates for a competition would be far lower than doing it on your own, for example. Anyway, this is still lurking around in beta somewhere but expect it to roll out soon(er than any of the Facebook stuff up there about political ads because where do we really think their priorities lie? Exactly).
• Instagram Is Testing Its Own Brand Collaborations Manager: Do YOU work for any agency that manages the relationships between ‘influencers’ and brands on Insta? Do you long for the sweet release of death (or, perhaps more soberly, just maybe to not have to do it any more)? Well, rejoice – there’s possibly light at the end of the tunnel (although, er, it might be the oncoming train of unemployment), as Instagram’s testing its own-platform version of the already-extant Facebook Brand Collaborations manager, which seeks to match brands to creators without any pesky agency middlemen. Again, no word on a global rollout schedule, but I’d imagine by Q2 this should be reasonably widespread.
• Twitter Rolls Out ‘Promoted Spotlight’ To All: Do you want to spend a violent amount of money buying a trend on Twitter? Would you like to spend even more money by attached a 6-second piece of looping video to that ad buy, so you can have YOUR VERY OWN MOVING IMAGES at the top of the ‘trending’ page for as long as you like? GREAT! I don’t know the pricing on this stuff, but previous experience suggests that Twitter’s rate card is MENTAL at launch for these sorts of things, so perhaps wait a few months before exploring whether it’s right for Rymans or Dynofit or whoever you represent.
• Twitter for Academic Researchers: I don’t think that all this stuff is necessarily new, but it’s been given a nice shiny facelift and a dedicated section on Twitter and it might be useful to the more academically-inclined of you; this page links out to all the various tools and features and APIs and stuff that academic researchers can leverage to build Twitter data into their research. If you’re an academic with a conceivable use for this sort of thing in your work, you should probably take a look (though you may well be aware of it already, in which case sorry to bother you).
• New YouTube Kids’ Content Rules Come Into Force: Look, this is mainly a thing for ‘creators’ rather than brands, but it’s worth being aware of in case you or your clients make stuff that could conceivably be considered as having kids as its primary audience – videos with that designation will now be subject to specific restrictions, blocking comments, preventing them being added to playlists, and stopping them from being monetisable through personalised ads. This has been the subject of yet another backlash from a community that doesn’t seem to have quite realised that this is what happens when you don’t own the platform you’re producing for – for most of you, this will be of no concern whatsoever, but it’s worth knowing about for the sake of completeness if nothing else.
• Bitmoji TV Coming Soon: This is on Snapchat, and so by definition it’s aimed at children, but read this and try not to think of it as some sort of event horizon of stupid coming towards us: “Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV…With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceships to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies.” Click the link, please, and watch the 90s ‘trailer’ – done that? Good! DOESN’T IT LOOK AWFUL??? There are literally no details at all beyond this, and the rest of the piece is mostly speculation, but I could imagine this being quite big (or at least the precursor to something quite big), and if I were in any way involved with any sort of entertainment property I’d probably be calling Bitmoji up right now for some informal chats (though not if said ‘entertainment property’ was scat bongo, obvs).
• Giphy Launches Giphy Video: Basically they’ve added the ability to include sound in uploads, meaning it’s now gifs AND videos! It’s not self-serve, meaning only official media partners will be able to upload videoclips at present but, again, if you have any meme-y telly/film/sports/etc-type content that would benefit from the inclusion of its audio then this is worth a chat (and Giphy have always been lovely to deal with in my experience).
• Taglines: As per usual I was in Italy over Christmas, and as per usual I was struck with the almost quaint nature of Italian advertising and marketing (obviously ‘quaint’ here is synonymous with ‘displays attitudes towards society and gender norms that appear unchanged since the late-70s); no ‘VERB MORE ADJECTIVE/NOUN!’ three-word slogan trends for them, no, just a steady parade of beautiful people and women who can only ever fit into one of four archetypes (child/teen, mother, grandmother, seductress, since you asked). It was nice to spot this on my return, then – a Twitter post by Jeremy Webb collecting 61 slogans or taglines he noticed whilst visiting the UK over the same period. What’s noticeable here is the wildly varying quality of the copy, and the extent to which many of the recent work sticks out a mile by dint of being, comparatively, very, very stupid. Oh, and NOONE is ever allowed to use ‘X Lives Here’ for anything, ever again. It’s the law.

By Yo Az

IN FACT, LET’S CONTINUE THAT SLIGHTLY RETRO TREND WITH ANOTHER PLAYLIST OF TOP 2019 TRACKS COURTESY OF LAUREN EPSTEIN!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER I MIGHT GET TO SEE HOW THIS ALL ENDS AFTER ALL, PT.1:

• MarsCat: Just over 20 years since Sony debuted its original Aibo (decided, by the way – when I am waiting to die and have fully embraced heroin, I am absolutely buying one of these to keep me a vague sort of company as a gouch in and out), we welcome to the world MarsCat, an already-funded Kickstarter project which offers you the chance to purchase your VERY OWN ROBOT CAT! O MAOW! MarsCat operates on, seemingly, exactly the same principles as the Aibo – fully articulated limbs and tail, sensors all over the place, and a rudimentary degree of AI which will enable the machine to ‘develop’ based on inputs it receives from its owner (if you talk to the cat more, it’s more likely to be more vocal, etc etc). This looks sort of terrible, but also sort-of amazing; as ever with these things, only the curious, the tinkers or the stupid ought ever to buy the first ever version of stuff like this, as inevitably it will be superseded within 12m by something better, cheaper and less likely to go rogue and suffocate your family with its tiny plastic paws as you all sleep (NB – Web Curios in no way believes that MarsCat would or could do such a thing). It also, though, looks weirdly sad in a way that Aibo never did; not sure whether it’s just that Sony have some truly world-class designers, but this cat looks…like it was designed by Tomy, basically, and not in a good way. Still, if you’re in the market for a prototypical virtual pet that will purr, arch its back, play with a toy fish and even pretend to clean up its own crap (really?!) then MarsCat is…well, it’s the only option, but it’s also a potentially attractive one. Don’t worry, Lebowski, you’re not about to be replaced.
• BBreaking News: This is fascinating. BBreaking News is a really clever, simple project that uses people’s requests to use footage in news broadcasts or on news websites as a reasonably strong signal to suggest that a video is newsworthy or interesting, and collates them on that basis – all the videos on the page have been flagged as of interest to news media as one stripe or another (although exactly which outlet it was looking to make use of the video contained in this Tweet I have no idea). It’s a compelling stream of news – right now there’s a lot of footage about protests in Sydney against climate change, a couple of traffic incidents, some sports stuff…depending on how you use it, it’s either an interesting snapshot of broadcast news worldwide, or an excellent way of keeping track of breaking stories.
• This Foot Does Not Exist: Christ, it’s a whole year since the explosion of GAN-imagination sites, peddling everything from imaginary humans to imaginary anime figures. 2020 sees a BRAND NEW GANSITE, though, and this one’s my favourite yet, mainly as whoever’s behind it has really leaned in hard to the artistic side of it and provided a proper, in-depth, serious exploration about the project and its aim (to whit, to ask questions about the market for foot fetish pics online) – “Because foot pics* can operate in two discrete modes of content consumption simultaneously (i.e. they can be memes and nudes simultaneously, in the same public sphere), their perception depends entirely upon the viewer and the context in which the image appears. Thus the foot pic is both highly valuable and almost worthless at the same time – and this creates a highly intriguing supply & demand dynamic when creators/consumers fall on different ends of this valuation scale.”. The site itself doesn’t show you the feet, but you can sign up for text alerts so you can get new, computer-imagined toes and soles sent to you on the daily should you so desire (and should you be willing to jump through the hoops of accessing a US phone number).
• Open Streetmap Haiku: Oh well isn’t this just lovely! This site lets you either specify any location in the world on a map, or uses your location, and generates a brand-new, machine-created haiku about the place, based on data contained within the Open Streetmap (there’s a lot of data – take a look here); it looks for landmarks, features, etc, and then pulls lines of relevant length together to make your very own bespoke tiny poem. Honestly, these are SO GOOD; the only way this could be improved would be to add some sort of Google image search-based visual collage to the output, but, honestly, I’m quibbling. Honestly, try this out, I promise you will be charmed (and then you will spend a bit of time, if you’re anything like me, seeing what it creates for everywhere you’ve ever lived, and every place you’ve ever worked, and then worldwide landmarks, and before you know it it’s 823 and FFS MATT STOP WASTING TIME).
• Canals of Amsterdam: Ok, it’s fair to say that to enjoy this site to the fullest you’re likely to need to be quite a big fan of canals and, specifically, the canals of Amsterdam. That said, if that sounds like you then WOW are you in for a treat, not just for the not-insignificant amount of Dutch waterway-related intel contained herein, but also because of the webdesign, which is genuinely lovely; I don’t tend to ,like side-scrolling websites, on the whole, but this really feels like it works to deliver a high-quality magazine-type feel to the information, and the look / feel has a wonderful 70s Eurodesign-type vibe to it whilst simultaneously feeling very stylish and oddly modern (to me, at least – feel free to explain to me what’s actually going on here in stylistic terms as I’m probably talking rubbish). Regardless of your feelings about canals, though, this is worth checking out from a design point of view.
• Huginn: I get the impression that this is a really, really useful piece of code that I am sadly in no position to properly make the most of – you, though, might be different, or might have made ‘become less of a useless coding refusenik’ a goal for the new decade, in which case, well, enjoy! Huginn is basically ‘If This Then That, but infinitely customisable if you know your way around a bit of html; I’m sure that the promises are a bit hyperbolic, but the theory here – that you can set up events and triggers and dependencies across anything you like, given the imagination, the API and the coding chops – is impressive. I especially like the examples they give, from setting up your own, free, ‘if volume spikes by x% in y time, perform action n’ rules on Twitter, to this (which, if you’re anything like me, will give you a brief moment of truly evil inspiration): “Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the “HumanTaskAgent”). For example: “Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog.” SO MUCH POTENTIAL.
• Postcode Finder: This is REALLY REALLY BORING, but if you do geotargeting of ads then it’s also super-useful. Draw a shape over any bit of the UK and it will tell you what postcodes are contained within it – which obviously doesn’t sound like much but crikey is this potentially helpful for campaigning and the like.
• Display Land: I’m quietly curious about where exactly we’re at as a species with the creation of the (inevitable) digital twin of the earth’s surface; it’s inevitable that at some point or another we’ll have enough video / photo coverage of the planet’s surface to be able to create reasonably high-fidelity digital representations of topography which can then be used and manipulated for a wide variety of purposes, from research to planning to games. It’s obviously most likely that one of the big tech companies will end up being the owner of this data, at least in the first instance, but projects like this one make me hopeful that there will be a parallel open source virtual Earth to play with too. Display Land is an app, available for Android and iOS, which…oh, here: “generates 3D captures of physical spaces using the everyday smartphone camera, empowering anyone to create shared digital spaces for self-expression and creativity”. Basically, anyone can create a navigable Street View-style area which, I presume, can then be uploaded to your 3d engine of choice for further manipulation and experimentation. Whether you’re a game developer looking to shortcut environments into Unreal, say, or an architect looking to imagine a redevelopment, or an urban planner imagining new transportation systems, the potential is vast and slightly-thrilling. Of course, what will actually happen is there will soon be a burgeoning market in bespoke 3d VR POV bongo in which you can have whichever adult star takes your fancy disposing of themselves in your very own house, but there may well be other things too eventually. Quite amazing, this.
• The Dril Turing Test: Actual dril Tweet, or the imaginings of a GPT-2 net trained on his corpus? YOU DECIDE! This is far, far harder than I expected, which suggests either that dril’s honed his schtick to the point where it’s so stylistically pure that it really can be learned by a machine, or alternatively that we’ve been lauding a fcuking neural net for its ‘weird’ humour for the past decade.
• Jupiter: You thought that the end of the 2010s would see an end to the preposterous trend for VC-backed startups doomed to fail because the model is so fundamentally flawed as to be borderline-commercially suicidal? THINK AGAIN! The first, but doubtless not the last, ‘really? REALLY? THIS is what you chose to invest in?’ startup of the 2020s is Jupiter, a service for the wealthy, busy, grocery shopping-averse 1%, whereby you pull together a list of what you need from your weekly shop and some poor peon goes and does it all for you, even going so far as to pop into your house while you’re out and putting everything away for you so you’d never know that an actual, real human being has been working on your behalf to smooth all the rough edges off your life til there’s no texture to it any more. Beautifully, they even offer a ‘stretch’ service where for an additional fee they will organise your pantry for you – WHO HAS A FCUKING PANTRY???? WHO?????? ESPECIALLY IN URBAN AMERICA?!?!?!?!?!?!?! This is pretty much everything that’s awful about VC-funded startups – pandering to people’s laziness, and reducing actual living others to the status of invisible elves, working tirelessly for less-than-minimum-wage in order to provide you, the customer, with the seamless, luxury futurelife you deserve. Please, please let this fail.
• Driver Album: In the intervening month or so I’ve been away, Adam Driver has inexplicably become the subject of seemingly ALL OF THE THIRST. Why is this? Anyway, if you want a Twitter feed which offers nothing but photos of Mr Driver holding a selection of different classic LPs then this is very much the late Christmas present you will have been dreaming of.
• Face The Music: This is VERY SILLY, but equally very fun. Enable your webcam and let the site track the shape of your mouth and its movements, and produce appropriate sounds that sort-of track the types of vocalisations you look like you should be making. Which is the first truly godawful Web Curios description of 2020 – YOU’RE WELCOME! Look, this basically lets you mime being an opera singer, is the upshot – which, actually, is EXACTLY the sort of thing that the Royal Opera House could consider doing as an Insta /Snap build to turn the kids onto Turandot or similar (and this is why I don’t work for the ROH).
• Colour Palette Inspiration: Colour palettes drawn from classic / famous album covers, just in case you ever wanted to decorate your home in the exact shades used on Momus’ seminal 1988 album ‘Tender Pervert’ (for example; I don’t suggest that you actually do that, it would be terribly monochromatic and it’s possibly a hard one to explain away).
• Tonaly: If your goal for 2020 involves ‘write the global smash hit I know I’m capable of, and leave this life of tedium and penury behind forever’ then, well, good luck to you – you might find this app of use. Tonaly basically uses the circle of fifths (here) to help you come up with chords for songs; basically like one of those colour palette matching tools, where you give it one colour and it suggests any and all that would be complementary to it. I don’t think you’ll necessarily end up composing anything revolutionary or groundbreaking, but it’s probably good enough for an Ivor Novello if you persevere with it.
• Greggs and Pret: I’m not quite sure exactly how Greggs and Pret became the retail avatars of the two opposing poles of the British class spectrum, but somehow this is where we’re at (as an aside, seeing as we’ve now had coffee chains on every street in every town in this country for an entire decade-plus now, can we draw a line under people referring to ‘metropolitan elites with their frothy coffees’? THEY SELL CAPPUCCINO IN GREGGS FFS. Anyway, this is a potentially-useful and freely-available dataset of the location of every single Greggs and Pret in the UK, which anyone can use to map them against any other dataset one might want, to see exactly what sort of odd correlations and inferences can be drawn. Personally speaking I think vape and betting retailers are a more interesting and useful indicator of social conditions, but there’s DEFINITELY some gentle clickbait you can make out of this with a bit of thought).
• VJ For Your Home: I mean, that’s maybe a touch grandiose – this is just a browser toy that you can set up to display an infinite, ever-changing sort of glitchy digital art stream, but it’s pretty cool looking thing and the sort of thing that you might want to stare at, slack-jawed, while stoned on the tranqs you told yourself you were DEFINITELY knocking on the head this year, honest.
• IsoCity: I normally keep the games to the end of the miscellany, but this is more of a sort of gentle toy – IsoCity lets you create a small, beautiful-looking 3d isometric cityscape, with roads and buildings and ramps and trees and stuff, all in a lovely Sim City-esque graphical style. You’re limited by the tile types available and the 7×7 size of the grid, but otherwise you can noodle around to your heart’s content to create your perfect mini-utopia. There’s no saving your creations and you can’t export them, but I promise you it’s genuinely soothing and a wonderful antidote to whatever stupid, pointless, mildly demeaning work you’re currently being forced to do by people you neither like nor respect.

By Hayden Clay

NEXT, TRY THIS SORT-OF FUNKY NEO-DISCO-ISH MIX BY HOTTHOBO!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER I MIGHT GET TO SEE HOW THIS ALL ENDS AFTER ALL, PT.2:

• Climate Simulator: So, er, what looks like it might be something of a significant decade in our attempts as a species to save ourselves from climate catastrophe has gotten off to a good start, eh? I FOR ONE AM FEELING PRETTY POSITIVE! Still, if you’d like to take a more scientific look at what the prognosis is for us and the rest of life on earth (leaving aside the tardigrades and the cockroaches who’ll be here til the sun engulfs us), why not try this fascinating little webtoy which draws on MIT research to offer the ability to see what sort of projected effect on emissions, etc, various shifts in policy will make. Want to see what will happen if we drop taxes on nuclear, slow population growth and increase investment in renewables? What about if we say ‘fcukit’ and try and consume our way to Mars? This is SO interesting, and, my tedious apocalyptic yelping aside, made me feel marginally better about things, insofar as it appears there really is material change that can be affected by us changing our collective behaviour. Obviously it depends on things like ‘undertaking a massive problem of afforestation’ (no, not YOU Jeremy, sit down), and ‘taxing the fcuk out of everything that is nuclear and renewables’, and a whole bunch of willing endeavour from a whole load of actors who, it’s fair to say, don’t seem massively inclined to do what they ought, but let’s not let that stop is from trying to feel a bit more hopeful about stuff!
• Cards Lacking Originality: As far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to have any official link to Cards Against Humanity whatsover, which makes it slightly surprising that this is still online – still, while it lasts, here’s a way of playing CAH in-browser, at work. There’s a theoretical game-matching system in place, but noone’s playing at the moment – instead, set up your own ‘room’ and share it with your colleagues and spend the rest of Friday afternoon having some low-effort lols about incest and murder and stuff. Your mileage will vary – after all, this is still basically CAH except, as far as I can tell, without the quality control – but, as ever, it’s probably better than writing client updates about things that don’t matter at all.
• Canned Emails: There’s the germ of something good in here – this site offers a selection of template emails for a number of specific situations, like being owed money or responding to a request for help or ending a relationship (well, yes, quite), which anyone can access and use as they see fit. Which is fine, but minimally useful or interesting unless you’re very lazy / stupid / illiterate. What would elevate this would be the ability for anyone to add their own templates – I’d LOVE to see people’s creative ideas about how best to construct a job rejection email, or maybe their go-to draft for ‘sorry, I’ve given you the clap’. PLEASE can the creators add an ‘upload template’ function? GO ON.
• Bello: I can’t quite work out whether this device – produced by a Korean company as far as I can tell, and currently 5x funded with a month to go – is named ‘Bello’ after the Italian word for ‘beautiful’ (masculine) or because it sounds like ‘belly’; regardless, if you’re in the market for a piece of kit that will make you feel miserable and fat then, well, here you go! Bello promises that it will use revolutionary technology to measure the exact amount of belly fat you have, so you can feel bad about yourself and your fitness on a daily basis based on ACTUAL DATA! Aside from the fact that body fat is not necessarily a universally-helpful or useful indicator of health, wellbeing and fitness (says the alcoholic anorexic writing this, who OBVIOUSLY knows), HOW OFTEN DO YOU NEED TO CHECK?! If you’re the sort of person who feels that they need to be apprised of their fat levels on a regular basis like this then perhaps you might want to consider investing the money in a few therapy sessions before considering shelling out for this.
• Dwitter: The art-tech crowd among you probably know this one already (for which apologies), but this was new to me – “Dwitter.net is a challenge to see what awesomeness you can create when limited to only 140 characters of javascript and a canvas.” The results are some lovely little minimal art animations, which are impressive not only in terms of composition and minimal style, but also in terms of what can be done with code operating within such tight parameters; sort by ‘hot’ to see some of the most-popular creations currently onsite.
• Family Archive: I love this, whilst acknowledging that it feels a little voyeuristic (but in a really good way). A project by artist / photographer Daniela Spector, which she describes as an ongoing project to digitize her family’s archive. Here collected are family photos from the past six decades, spanning people and places and events, the banal and the remarkable, all presented in chronological slices. What I love about this is the novel’s worth of stories you immediately find yourself beginning to create to stitch the photos and the faces together into some sort of coherent narrative (a narrative that no family would ever create for itself, being by their nature utterly incoherent entities with no ominscient narrator pulling the strings). Honestly, if you’ve done any reading of BIG NOVELS over the past few years – you know, the sort of generation-and-continent-spanning familial sagas that tend to bother the best-of lists – then this will basically feel like the outline for one of those, which is, I promise, a compliment.
• Emoji Simulator: Simple-but-flexible tool/toy/thing that lets you set up simple simulators using basic rules and emoji. So, for example, you can create a model of Conway’s Game of Life, or a simple simulation of how fire might spread in a forest, or disease in a community, or traffic in a traffic system, all presented with CUTE LITTLE EMOJI! No idea at all what you might want to do with this, but I like to think one of you will do something.
• Joy Division Maps: I mean, that’s not technically what the site’s called, but it’s what it should be called – navigate to any place in the world on this map, hit a button, and get said map rendered topographically as a series of jagged lines in the manner of the cover of Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Fine, if you’re in London or Norfolk there’s little geographical interest to be found, but if you’d like a monochromatically geometrical representation of your favourite part of the Peak District, say, then this will be catnip to you. You can even get your selected graphic printed on a mug, which is a very niche gift idea but one which your Joy Division-obsessed, hiking mad uncle might quite like.
• YAP: This describes itself as ‘an ephemeral chatroom’, and is designed to provide a free, simple and easy way to spin up a chat interface for a bunch of people to use in seconds, with no need for any sort of signup or registration, even by email. Not only is the chatroom itself ephemeral, but the messages you post within it are too – each will fade away after they’ve been typed, meaning that a) everyone has to pay attention to what’s being said; and b) you can in theory get away with posting anything with no paper trail whatsoever. I…I can’t help but think that the only possible realistic applications for this are for BAD THINGS – honestly, the most benign application is as a place for coworkers to put all their mean gossip so as not to run HR risks, and that’s a horrible use case. This is terrorism and porn, basically, and I won’t be persuaded otherwise.
• Roam: This is going to be unpleasant to describe, but bear with me. Roam is…a sort of note-taking application which basically seeks to act as a seamless, frictionless version of Evernote, effectively linking related documents and materials based on shared concepts and themes. It’s a LOT to take in, but if you’ve any interest at all in digital taxonomy and information gathering / sorting (and WHO DOESN’T? I know that it’s what I for one live for) then this is very much worth looking at and signing up for. It’s free, and whilst it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get your head around it looks, even to my relatively cursory exploration, to be incredibly powerful. If you’ve ever struggled with how best to organise and arrange your online research and your thinking around it, this is absolutely worth investigating.
• Flow State: A newsletter! Except instead of 8,000 words of crap about the internet you can instead get a weekly musical selection emailed to you, designed to provide you with a two-hour soundtrack to work to each day. If you’re the sort of person who needs headphones on to function in the workplace (I tend to achieve the same sort of isolating effect by being unpleasant and surly, but whatever works best for you), then the prospect of daily, fresh non-intrusive sounds to accompany you may well be appealing.
• 8-bit Katamari: If you know Katamari Damacy, then you will be SO EXCITED at the prospect of a pixellated version you can play in-browser; if you don’t, then I promise you that you will love this. Roll around, collect everything, GROW, repeat – this is SO gently soothing and oddly meditative. Enjoy!
• Snow: Finally in this week’s miscellaneous links, this is a smol skiing game, pixelart-style, all in first person. Ski, avoid trees, hit jumps, wipe out, imagine yourself in Verbiers with a boozy hot chocolate and some raclette rather than at work. Go on, imagine.

By Izumi Yazakizumi

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, LET’S CLOSE OUT WITH SOME UNASHAMEDLY RETRO PSYTRANCE AS THOUGH IT WERE STILL 1995 AND I WAS STILL PLANNING TO GO TO ESCAPE FROM SAMSARA TONIGHT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• World Wide What: Tumblr’s started the year off with its own attempt to help address the generally problematic nature of social media for teens, presenting a variety of helpful guides and q&as and bits and pieces of content all focused on issues such as online safety, bullying, sex and the like, aimed at the younger people who form Tumblr’s core demographic. Or at least that used to – I’m not 100% convinced that Tumblr’s actually got any actual kids on it any more, or indeed that the peculiarities of the platform won’t render all this stuff a bit invisible, but there seems to be some useful stuff in here should you know people of an age where they might find it helpful / instructive.
• Caitlyn Cold: Artist’s website, presenting Cold’s gorgeous paintings, mostly in acrylic, whose style weirdly brings to mind an odd combinations of Schiele and Shirley Hughes (which I know is a somewhat esoteric combination, but I promise you you’ll see it if you squint).
• WTF Fanfiction: The whole tumblr is wonderful – celebrating, as you’d imagine from the name., some of the…odder elements of fan fiction found on the platform – but this link is specifically to a recent post in which its curator compiles all the best (worst) euphemisms for genitals found in fan fiction. There’s a…worrying focus on the penis here, with 3x as many terms for cocks as for vaginas, but overall these are just JOYFUL (and very, very awful) – could you be aroused by a ‘woman tomato’, for example? Have you ever heard the male member described as a “beef slinky”? I hope the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, fyi.
• Camgirl BRB: Shots from camgirl streams in which the performer in question has stepped out of frame. Unquestionably, this is ART.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Toraya Wagashi: Toraya is, I believe, the name of the seller; Wagashi is a type of traditional Japanese sweet. These are SO PRETTY.
• Dog With Sign: A single dog, protesting about various different things with hand-written signs. Gently funny, and given it’s only about 15 posts in you can totally get away with stealing this for a petfood campaign if you’re quick about it.
• Shaina McCoy: Beautiful, textured oil paintings. I adore these.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The 2010s: I know, I know, we’re DONE with the old year and the old decade; we’ve got rid of all that 2010s stuff, it’s all about the FUTURE and the NEW! Still, though, this interactive timeline archive thing by Dazed, looking back through what they consider to be some of the milestones of the past decade, is too nice to leave out – it’s a lovely way of scrolling back through the years, and provides a genuinely great reminder of one or two minor cultural moments that might have faded from your memory; who could forget that moment in 2012 (December 12, in fact) when Kanye wore a Givenchy kilt? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Leaving aside the somewhat…er…inconsequential nature of many of their picks, this is actually quite a neat way of tracking certain trends emergence and acceptance into the mainstream, and a useful reminder of quite how new some things are.
• What You’ll Need To Know In 2020: Predictions for now, as written 20 years ago – this is superb, not least for how much it got absolutely spot-on. Facial recognition as a means of speeding up security checks; the need to clean up one’s data trails; the death, or at least the serious revision, of the concept of ‘privacy’; the rise in false information and uncertainty over the truth…honestly, this is fcuking astonishingly prescient and makes me wonder which of this year’s current crop of ‘next decade’ futurethinkpieces will be its equivalent. Seriously, THIS: “Even in 2020 you will always need to know if the facts you’ve dredged up are accurate and truthful. With so many sources doling out information, you will need to know: What is he selling, and why is he selling it? Most unsettling is the fact that these precious touchstones are not permanent. They never will find their way to the library stacks. Instead we are moving closer to Orwell’s nightmare: the truth ceaselessly modified, altered, edited, or altogether obliterated. Here today, gone tomorrow, with nothing but a bewildering ERROR 404 FILE NOT FOUND left in its place.”
• A Sick Giant: OK, first a warning. You know how Web Curios is…long, right? Really, really long. Well, this piece is…longer. I think it took me about an hour to read, and I read pretty fast – don’t embark upon it lightly. But, er, don’t let that put you off! Honest! This is a SUPERB essay, taking in polarisation, politics, discourse, the overton window, concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’, social media, filter bubbles and so much more. This is about the US specifically, but is honestly applicable to any post-Internet country in the global West – honestly, I can’t recommend it enough if you’ve any interest at all in modern politics and discourse. It’s part of a long-running series of reflections on related questions on Wait But Why, and if you’re inclined you can go far deeper into the arguments presented by dint of a pretty comprehensive list of sources and companion reading at the end – I know you probably don’t want to think too much this month, but bookmark this for when you feel up to it, it really is that good.
• America Vs China: Another LONG piece (though not as long as the last one, don’t worry), presenting what seems to this uneducated eye a pretty well-balanced look at the current and future conflict/confluence of interest between the past and future global superpowers, as well as a degree of cultural and historical context as to how we’ve arrived at the status quo and what might come to pass in the coming decade or so. This covers politics, economics, technology, culture and all the bits inbetween, and whilst I wouldn’t suggest it as a substitute for actually knowing anything real about Sino-American relations, as a primer on ‘where we are now and why’ it struck me as being pretty exceptional.
• Location Tracking: This came out over the Christmas period, and many you may already have read it – if not, though, then this is a bit of a must-read, at least if you or anyone you know is still naive enough to believe that the magical glass-and-metal box in your pocket isn’t just a personal surveillance and tracking device. The piece takes a look at exactly how easy it is to track the individual movements and actions of a bunch of individuals in New York over a defined period, going so far as to identify individuals and track them down based solely on data they were able to access through brokerage firms and the like – as ever, seriously, if you think Facebook and SOCIAL MEDIA is the problem with the web then, well, sorry kids but this will BLOW YOUR MIND. This is a US investigation so it’s important to point out that there are various legal reasons why this is less terrifying in the UK and Europe – but only a bit less terrifying, and only at the moment.
• Friend of a Friend: I love things like this. Friend of a Friend was an old web standard that, briefly, looked as though it had the chance to become the ‘relationship graph’ of the web. It’s a bit techy, but basically it was a system whereby the relationships between different nodes on the web could be mapped and tracked and searched and used, all based on markup language that could be used on any website and read by any search engine, browser, etc. The reasons it never worked out are myriad, but this piece presents and interesting vision of a parallel version of the web in which we all had our own web pages that interrelated and coexisted based on a semantic graph framework, rather than just outsourcing all the hard, fiddly stuff to Facebook in exchange for them being able to sell us mattresses forever.
• The New Midlife Crisis: I don’t think I’ve ever linked to anything from Oprah dot com on here before – NEW DECADE NEW RULES, MOTHERFCUKERS! This is a piece about what its author terms ‘the new midlife crisis’ taking place amongst women in the US (but which, I imagine, might feel relatable to women or indeed men in the UK or indeed elsewhere). It’s not a new story – burnout, precariety, uncertainty, overload, all combining to leave people in middle-age frazzled and mad – but it’s part of a growing trend I’ve noticed over the past year or so of women of 40ish very much not seeming ok, at all, any of the time, and becoming increasingly open about it. A couple of caveats – surprisingly given it’s Oprah Magazine, this read very much as a white experience (though of course that might just be my own readers’ inherent prejudice); regardless, what it definitely is is a middle-class account rather than one that also factors in things like, I don’t know, multiple jobs or grinding poverty. Still, if you want a ‘state of modern, middle-aged, middle-class womanhood at the turn of a new decade’ piece then this is a pretty interesting one, to my mind at least.
• Google, Help Me Quit Skag: Or, more accurately, a really interesting look at how search ads can be used to target vulnerable groups, with either positive or negative messaging. I would quite like to take this quoted section and force everyone in the NHS and elsewhere to read: “Ad click data is a microscope. It allows the viewer a way to see society’s maladies in a way that is completely hidden to epidemiologists and psychologists and politicians and economists. But as long as Google’s ad system has been around, the microscope has been pointing at the wrong things. If marketers seem perfectly willing and capable to use ad click data to their own ends, why can’t doctors and teachers and governments use it to help people who are suffering; people who need help but don’t know where to turn to find it except Google?”
• The Boom In Insta Filters: Look, if you don’t work in advermarketingpr then you don’t need to read this; if you DO, though, then this piece on the booming trend in custom Insta filters as a means of gaining reach is exactly the sort of thing you can pick up and drop into your next client update meeting knowing that nothing will ever come of it but that you’ll get some reflected kudos for being vaguely on the pulse of something. AND THAT’S WHAT COUNTS, ISN’T IT??? *cries*
• Quibi Coming Soon: I think I first put a piece about Quibi in here about 6 months ago – now that it’s more imminent (well, a few months away), it’s worth looking at again, particularly in the context of everyone wanging on about 2020 being THE YEAR OF THE STREAMING WARS (although Quibi is positioning itself as a TikTok competitor rather than a Netflix competitor, from what I can tell). The article’s a general overview of the platform (which, as I’m sure you know, is a subscription-based mobile platform offering high-budget content from name creators designed to be consumed first and exclusively on the small screen) and is light on specifics – apart from the slightly jawropping revelation that EVERYTHING on the platform will be shot in both vertical and horizontal, and that viewers will be able to switch between the two versions on the fly by tilting their phones, and that, in certain cases, the orientation of the device will materially affect the narrative experience the viewer has. Which, let’s be clear, is MADLY ambitious and a hugely clever creative opportunity, and an idea which I now really, really, really want to steal for something.
• The Hype House: There is nothing new under the sun. A decade since YouTubers first started moving into mansions together in Hollywood to form content-production / influencer powerhouses (cf Jake Paul and Team10, etc), so the cycle repeats itself with the invasion of the TikTok teens, all following the same template as they attempt to squeeze their (and the platform’s) 15 minutes as hard as is humanly possible. As ever with these pieces there’s a slight air of unreality about the whole thing, as well as a really overwhelming sense of utter joylessness about the whole thing – notice that at no point do any of these kids, when speaking in interviews, sound like they are having any fun at all. Dead-eyed predators in the content ocean, all of them. Also, depressingly for a medium that grew directly out of Vine, all of this is SO WHITE. Still, if you want to see how some of your favourite content-sausage is made, step inside the factory!
• The Cost of Being a Woman Who Covers Games: If you play games and are interested in the industry, this account of what it’s been like being a female games journalist over the past decade is an unsurprising and admirably dispassionate account of quite how horrible much of the 2010s was. If you’re not au fait with Gamergate, doxxing, SWATTing and the rest, and if you’ve never spent any time examining the discourse and media around the most profitable entertainment medium in history, then dive in (but be aware you’ll want a shower afterwards).
• What Adults Are Missing About Technology: From MIT Technology Review: “We asked teenagers what adults are missing about technology. This was the best response”. Touching on identity, self-expression and freedom of thought, this is required reading for any and all of us who’ve ever looked at a teenager on their phone and done a small headshake of disapproval.
• Interracial Love Confessions: Buzzfeed has created a section on its website where users can submit their anonymous thoughts and feelings about their experiences of being in interracial relationships; they can choose to have their submissions publicly visible, and this page collects them for others to read. These are fascinating, sad, hopeful, heartwarming, confusing, upsetting and utterly, utterly brilliant as a collection; this is a TV series’ worth of writing prompts, a short story collection waiting to happen, testament to a world that’s hopefully changing but which definitely isn’t doing so quickly enough.
• London CCTV: A night in the company of the men and women who monitor the CCTV feeds of Hackney, keeping an eye on the drug deals and the beefs and the fights and the traffic and the accidents and the drunks and the fcuking and the crying. This is POETRY, and I will be hugely disappointed if this doesn’t prove the inspiration for a piece of theatre (tbh I reckon you could make a cracking opera out of this premise).
• A World Without Pain: SUCH a good essay by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker, profilingh a 70+ Scottish woman called Joanne Cameron whose unique genetic makeup means that she has never experienced pain in her life – not only this, but she’s also predisposed towards happiness, and evidences a sunny disposition which someone like me, whose personal raincloud has its own personal raincloud, boggle somewhat in disbelief. This is a gorgeous portrait of a remarkable person, as well as being an interesting look into whether this should be considered a genetic anomaly to be marvelled at or a utopian amelioration for all that ought to be pursued. Regardless, Joanne sounds wonderful and I wish her all the very best.
• The Year of Pivoting to Video: David Roth writes a beautiful account of the madness of working modern media, chasing the video views and becoming, momentarily, a slightly gentle meme as a result of his paymasters’ insistence on autoplaying video ads. It’s superbly-written, unusually for pieces on media trends, but more than that it reads incredibly surreally – you sort of hope that in 30 years time someone will unearth this and boggle at the madness (and stupidity) described. There’s a vague sort of ‘And Then We Came To The End’-type vibe about it, if that means anything to you (and if it doesn’t, learn).
• Alan Bennett’s 2019 Diary: I am going to miss this so, so much when Bennett eventually dies – it’s an annual treat. This year, Alan has unexpected surgery and continues to reflect on being old. I could read this forever and ever and ever.
• Journey by Pizza Toast: This is a brilliant piece of travel writing, in which the author tours old-style Japanese inns, called kissaten, in search of pizza toast, an uninspiring dish of thick-sliced Japanese white bread topped with pizza-ish toppings and toasted. Except it’s not about pizza toast, really, at all; like all the best travel writing it’s about senses of place and time, and how memory and place intersect with those to colour personal experience. Honestly, this is sublime and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
• Elizabeth Wurtzel: Finally this week, in memory of Elizabeth Wurtzel who died this week. I read Prozac Nation as a 15 year-old and it floored me – none of her books ever quite grabbed me in the same way, but her writing elsewhere was always superb, and a wonderful counterargument to the oft-held wisdom that the role of the author was to minimise the ‘I’ (though it’s equally fair to say that few of the past few years’ glut of confessional self-centric writers quite match her prose). The piece here linked is from 2013, but it’s timeless; I am genuinely sad she’s dead.

By Katarina Riesing

AND NOW, ONE MOVING PICTURE WHAT WITH ME NOT HAVING HAD A CHANCE TO DO THIS BIT THIS WEEK!

1. Excellent GANwork from Shardcore to close the first Curios of 2020 – “Godley & Greme’s seminal 1985 video, back-projected through stylegan FFHQ network, and slightly pushed along the ‘age’ vector.” This is ‘Cry, but everyone’s a little bit older’, this was Web Curios, I was and still am Matt, and THIS IS THE END BUT IN TRUTH IT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OH ME OH MY WHAT LINKS AND FUN WE SHALL EXPLORE TOGETHER I HAVE MISSED YOU AND I HOPE YOU HAVE MISSED ME A BIT AND I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A GENTLE START TO THE YEAR AND THAT YOU ARE GENERALLY OK AND THAT YOU ARE COPING AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!:

There’s something I need to tell you. It might come as something of a blow. You may want to sit down.

WELCOME TO THE FINAL WEB CURIOS OF THE YEAR AND IN FACT OF THE DECADE!

Yes, that’s right – I would ordinarily do another one next week before turning off the internet for Christmas, but given that I’m likely to be up all night next Thursday, alternately swearing, smoking, drinking, crying, drinking, smoking, swearing, crying and drinking some more, it’s fairly certain that I would be in no fit mental or physical state to do this next Friday.

So, then. Here it is. The LAST ONE OF 2019. 38 editions, approximately 365,000 words (that’s…a lot, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll get help over Christmas), and the fat end of 3,000 links, all for YOU. In a brief moment of actual sincerity, can I take a moment to say thanks to all of you who read any of this rubbish, those who subscribe and those who don’t, those who nick whole chunks of it wholesale and pass it off as your own work, those who don’t tell their colleagues about it because it confers them a tiny modicum of professional advantage, those who hate it but read it anyway because it’s occasionally useful, and those of you who just ctrl-F for your own name and then stop reading when you’re not in it. Thanks, seriously, so much; this is the only thing I do that’s vaguely professional that I actually enjoy (and it’s the one thing I don’t get paid for – go figure), and I really appreciate you all for indulging me. 

I hope you all have really nice Christmases and that none of you die. Or that if you do, your final words are ‘Read Web Curios’.

I love each and every one of you immoderately and probably more physically than you’re comfortable with, and I want you to know that deep within yourselves. TAKE ME INSIDE YOU NOW. 

By Yanin Ruibal

FIRST OF THE LAST MIXES OF THE DECADE IS THIS NEW SELECTION COMPILED BY ADULT SWIM!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS VERY LITTLE HOPE FOR THE COMING DECADE BUT WHICH, IF IT IS ALLOWED TO WISH FOR ANYTHING, FERVENTLY HOPES THAT IT WILL FOREVER SEE THE END OF PEOPLE BEING PAID TO ANTHROPOMORPHISE MASSIVE, LISTED CORPORATIONS AND CONDUCTING WHIMSICAL OR ARCH INTER-BRAND CONVERSATIONS WITH EACH OTHER ON TWITTER FOR THE BENEFIT OF…WHO, EXACTLY? WHO? PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP:

• Facebook Launches Photo Portability Feature: It’s what can only be described as a slow news day here in s*c**l m*d** land, thank fcuk, so we’re forced to kick off with this spectacularly underwhelming nugget of novelty from Facebook – users in Ireland can now easily export their photos to Google Photos (with other services being integrated in the future). This will in theory be rolled out to the rest of the world in the coming months, although it’s worth taking a moment to think about all the other features we’ve been promised by Facebook over the course of the past few years, not least the ‘scrub all the off-Facebook data from its ad targeting databanks’ thing, which you may recall was announced waaaaaay back in Spring 2018 and which, strangely enough, we’re still seemingly no closer to seeing rolled out beyond a few small test markets.
• Facebook Updates Crisis Response Features: Absolutely NOTHING to see here from a brand point of view, but just f your collective i’s: Facebook’s post-disaster’s featureset is getting a series of updates, including the ability for Facebook posts to link to Whatsapp when offering or requesting help in the aftermath of a crisis. Perhaps slightly less positively, it “will allow people in affected areas to share first-hand information about what they’re witnessing or think others should know — like building collapses or road closures, for example”; an idea which sounds great in theory until you stop and think about people’s general attitude to truth and responsible communication on the platform as a whole. Prediction for 2020! Someone will use this feature to commit some sort of mid-level fraud in the aftermath of a major disaster, or to disseminate some sort of politically-motivated misinformation!
• Instagram Will Now Make Kids Under 13 Lie About Their Age To Use The Platform: I mean, that’s not exactly how they’re describing it, but that’s effectively what’s going to happen. Whereas up til now anyone could sign up to Insta with nary a question about whether they were of a suitable age to be exposed to the weird world of lipfills and sponcon, now the platform’s going to to….ASK PEOPLE HOW OLD THEY ARE! Which will obviously do wonders to improve child safety. This will make no difference to anyone, in practice, apart from brands in regulated sectors who will now find it marginally-easier to advertise on Instagram as they’ll be able to at least in theory exclude the under-age from their targeting, whilst at the same time knowing that it’s all a fcuking joke. EVERYONE’S A WINNER!
• Twitter’s Changing Ts&Cs: There’s nothing seismic in the new copy, or at least nothing that I as a non-lawyer can see, but the laws around posting edgy, NSFW stuff have been tightened up a bit; the linked piece goes into more detail, but, basically, if your Twitter account is posting a lot of what Twitter considers to be ‘sensitive material’ then expect to get banned. It’s basically another small step towards the tedious vanilla-ing of the digital commons; l appreciate that the nature of Twitter and its general openness and visibility as a platform means that the rules around bongo need to be a bit more restrictive than elsewhere but, on a purely personal level, I’d be far happier if they allowed the occasional profile that posted nothing but pictures of cartoon horse-men boniing each other and maybe got rid of some of those that spend all their time being needlessly antagonistic to strangers about politics.
• A Post Full Of Up-To-Date Stats About Facebook And Instagram: Elsewhere on Imperica, this is a useful list of BIG NUMBERS about how HUGE AND VITAL FB and Insta are. None of these numbers really mean anything at all, but you might find them of some small help when you’re back at work in January and someone, again, asks you to pull together some slides about why ‘digital’ is really important and you stare at your monitor through a film of tears and realise that this is your life, now and forever.
• YouTube Rewind: This year’s edition of YouTube’s annual Year In Review, presented on a typically lovely website and featuring a roundup video which, after last year’s backlash-filled farrago in which creators from across the spectrum railed against the sanitised, advertiser friendly version of the community presented by Google, is basically just a commentary-free highlights reel. If you spend any time on YouTube this site probably won’t tell you anything new, but I found it fascinating to go through the individual country-level breakdowns of most-popular stuff from 2019; I am now, for example, one of 192million people who have enjoyed the titular song from Indian smash film ‘Gully Boy’, and my life is all the richer for it.
• Tumblr in 2019: My having to do the last Curios of the year a touch early means that I’m sadly (ha!) not catching all of the platforms’ year-end updates, but I very much enjoyed Tumblr’s this year, not least as it demonstrates the sheer breadth of the site’s users and their interests. It also demonstrates the incredible power of specific areas of the entertainment industry; if you want any sort of indication of the incredible global power of the MCU, take a moment to check out the top 50 lists of films, film characters and performers; you can’t move for fcuking superheroes. If nothing else, though, it’s worth spending a moment going through the top 30 Tumblr memes of the year; DOGE LIVES! It’s been a bit of a tough week, if I’m honest, and that particular nugget cheered me more than I’d expected.

By Vava Ribeiro

NEXT, TRY THIS EXCELLENT, GENTLE AMBIENT MIX FOR A COLD DECEMBER AFTERNOON, COURTESY OF COMMAND D!

THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS THAT IT SHOULDN’T ATTEMPT TO LECTURE ANY OF YOU ON POLITICS AND KNOWS THAT IT’S TECHNICALLY NONE OF ITS BUSINESS, BUT, EQUALLY, WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE ANY AND ALL OF YOU THINKING OF VOTING TORY NEXT WEEK TO PLEASE FCUK OFF, UNSUBSCRIBE AND READ ANOTHER BLOGNEWSLETTERTHING IN 2020 THANKYOU, PT.1:

• The Best Websites of the Decade: To be honest, I could leave this here and be done with it this week. I featured the href site back in May, along with some gumpf about how it contained a mind-boggling amount of…stuff; its creator and curator, the mysteriously-named Kicks Condor, got in touch with me afterwards and we correspond every now and again, and this week they sent me this, and, well, BLIMEY. Kicks has collected all of their favourite links from the past 10 years into one place, and MY GOD is there a lot of wonderful, weird stuff in here. About 25% of it has been featured by me at one point or another, and there are some all-time classics of the web which you’ll certainly recognise, but there’s equally a load of amazing things I’d never even heard of. From Caine’s Arcade to Porpentine’s incredible, emo interactive fictions, from Frog Fractions to Twitch Plays Pokemon, this is a dizzying, eclectic and, for me at least, oddly-emotional look back at 10 years of online culture and creativity. Honestly, it’s like a museum of quite a large part of my life over a decade – I can’t recommend this enough. If you only click one link this week, make it this one; and save it somewhere, so when you’re desperate for some sort of distraction from the cirrhotic mess that is your family on boxing day you can use it to retreat into the wonderful, comforting, safe digital past.
• Hyperlapse Map: This is great; sadly it only seems to feature videos filmed in London at present, although it’s designed to encourage other people to add their own. Regardless, the site mashes Google Maps with YouTube hyperlapse videos of people walking at superspeed around the city. Take a hyperlapse trip along the thames, through Hyde Park, across Hampstead Heath or around St Paul’s; there’s a nice touch here whereby the map shows the exact route of each hyperlapse and tracks where the camera is throughout, which is a rather cool feature for anyone wanting to play hyperlapse tourist in our glorious capital. If nothing else, you could probably do some quite interesting stuff with storytelling using this, dropping in odd little clues or Easter Eggs into these hyperlapses for people to find, or maybe linking them together through small visual connections. Or, you know, you could do nothing at all. It’s been a long year, I won’t judge you.
• Drumbot: This week Amazon unveiled its exciting evolution of the Bontempi organ, with its AI keyboard which will let anyone create a hideous, cacophonous audiomess, cobbled together with ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!! Sadly you can’t get your hands on one yet, though, so instead you can make do with Drumbot, which uses similar tech to create a drum pattern for whatever atonal rubbish you play. You can use your keyboard or plug in an actual synth and use that; either way, you bash out a few bars of piano and the software will create appropriate drums to back you up; you can leave the piano line looping and the AI will keep listening and refining the drum track, and you can dial up or down the ‘heat’, increasing or decreasing the degree of leftfield craziness depending on your whims. I can’t play piano AT ALL, meaning this sounded horrific, but the drums still had a sort of skittering, free-jazz, Whiplash-style quality to them, which either means that I’m an unheralded musical talent or, perhaps more likely, that this can make a purse (not silken, but perhaps polyurethane) out of any old sow’s ear.
• The AI Dictionary: A Twitter account which spits out new word definition a few times a day, each generated by what I presume is GPT-2. The methodology’s not explained in the bio, and frankly it’s been a long year and I’m tired and I can’t currently be arsed to dig around to read up on it (sorry, but, well, it’s not like you’re paying for this), but I get the feeling that the definitions are created by feeding the machine a few words of the actual definition and then seeing what it comes up with. Regardless, it’s rather good – the majority of these are only slightly wonky, meaning they could probably be passed off as actual, real definitions to people less familiar with English. I mean, look, I’m pretty decent at the language (not that you’d guess from reading Curios, I concede), and even I can’t be 100% certain that the dictionary definition of ‘melon’ isn’t in fact “n. a man’s head. When two men love each other, though, they will push the melon into one another, a smooch of molten love to the heart of sweetness.” I mean, it should be, right?
• Boris Johnson Lies: Not that it matters, obviously. My friend Rob wrote this somewhere the other day, and it’s typically smart: “I think you’ll find that most people, when they see their side accused of lying either a) don’t believe it or b) accept it but think everybody does it. Basically lying isn’t the killer argument we all assume it is, and trust is more complex than thinking people are telling the truth.” Still, if you feel there’s any point in attempting to rail against the constant stream of lies spewing from the cakehole of our current Prime Minister, you might want to consider spreading this website, which seeks to act as a comprehensive and fact-checked compendium of all his many, many untruths, as far and wide as you can.
• The Best-Selling Singles of EVERY Decade: A nice antidote to the misery of the last link, this is a wonderful Twitter thread in which someone called Archie Henderson (as an aside, what a great name) lists each of the best-selling singles from the past decades. You might think that there would be a point in history at which Archie might need to stop, what with the actual music industry not existing in any meaningful way before, say, the 1800s, and yet he does no such thing. This is very, very silly, but also very funny, and the commitment to the gag includes short audio snippets of each track. You can all find your own favourites, but I’m personally a big, big fan of the Rancid Prince’s 1353 classic ‘Be My Daddy’. Wonderful.
• The Cards Against Humanity Challenge: CAH’s annual silly Thanksgiving stunt this year was a genuinely funny one – the game’s makers pitted its writing team against an AI (again, based on GPT-2) trained on the game’s corpus, with the challenge being to see which special, holiday expansion pack sold more. This works beautifully, mainly because the CAH conceit is very much about short, surreal, non-sequiturs, which is basically perfect for this sort of machine learning model, and it’s a really smart way of using AI for PR purposes (which can probably be ripped off at least once and possibly twice, frankly, particularly if you’re in the UK where noone really noticed this happening). I think CAH is a bit of a garbage game, personally, but I can’t fault their marketing which is STELLAR and up there with Pr0nhub’s in terms of consistently doing smart work.
• The Best Photos of 2019: Look, it’s not my opinion, it’s National Geographic’s, and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, that’s who! These are, as you’d expect, wonderful; it’s literally impossible to make observations about THE RICH TAPESTRY OF HUMAN LIFE on display here without sounding like a tedious cliche, but, well, LOOK AT THE RICH TAPESTRY OF HUMAN LIFE! There’s one particular shot of a kid in Bolivia eating a watermelon in the back of a pickup truck which stood out for me, but every single one of these is a singularly-beautiful piece of photography.
• History Muppets: A Twitter account sharing old clips and photos of the Muppets. I don’t care who you are, it’s physically impossible to feel too bad about anything when contemplating the Muppets; this is basically balm for the soul and you should follow it immediately.
• LOLHunt: There is, quite simply, far too much STUFF on YouTube, and it’s getting harder and harder to find the sort of gently-humorous content that made the platform globally massive (when was the last time we saw a nice, U-rated clip like Charlie Bit My Finger, eh? SIMPLER TIMES. BETTER TIMES); hence LOLHunt, which each day lets anyone link a comedy YouTube clip for the community to vote on; it’s basically a subReddit in anything but name, with users up- and downvoting clips on the daily, providing a rolling stream of peer-reviewed ‘comedy’ content. If you’re the sort of person who finds footage of small children falling over to be HILARIOUS then you’ll love this; equally, if you’re in the unenviable position of needing to source bland, inoffensive, lightly-memetic content to populate a pointless social media presence for a brand that doesn’t need to have one, then this could well be a professional godsend. Also, it just taught me that very small comedy actors are very much a THING in Bangladeshi (I think) TV/Cinema, which, well, I don’t quite know what to do with.
• Lostcode: A single-serving artprojectwebsitething, which I’ll leave to the creators to describe: “Lostcode is a graphic design project exploring the friction in translation”. Make sense? No, it doesn’t to me either, and yet the slightly weird and frustrating experience of the site – presenting a series of images that you can never quite see fully and which you can’t resize and which are constantly obscured and overwritten by the movement of the cursor across the screen, leaving indelible trails across everything as you try and make sense of what the site is for – absolutely (to my mind at least) conveys the experience of incomplete communication I feel when speaking to someone in a mutual second language. I JUDGE THIS ART A SUCCESS, should anyone involved in its conception or creation give anything resembling a flying fcuk about the opinion of some random webmong.
• Liam: You may or may not have seen the wonderful, preposterous news this week that Facebook has created a chatbot (called, bafflingly, Liam) for staff to help them answer awkward questions from friends and family about exactly why they are working for Mark Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory; beautifully, someone’s mocked up a spoof version, which you can play with here and which does a wonderful job of skewering exactly how robotic and humourless the scripted lines provided to employees are. “Grandma: What are you planning to do to lose the baby weight? Chatbot: You rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer. First, though, I want to talk about how we got here.” See? It’s great. Also, it reminded me of the worst CV I have ever seen, owned by a man called Liam who described himself in his opening blurb as ‘an aspirant polymath’ and which made me wish more harm on a stranger than I think I have ever wished before in my life.
• Longshot Features: Longshot is a company working in and around film. Their website is GORGEOUS, with all sorts of wonderful 8-bit, noir-ish representations of movies and TV portrayed as you scroll. Honestly, whoever did the artwork on this deserves a medal, this is beautifully-made and really, really slick.
• Closer: Do you like techno? Are you a bit too old to go clubbing? DO YOU MISS IT??? If so, you might want to check out Closer, the new app from superstar DJ Richie Hawtin which accompanies the concert series he’s currently doing. “CLOSER is an interactive audiovisual platform designed to bring greater transparency to the underlying art of DJing by exploring Richie Hawtin’s ongoing CLOSE concert series. The unique vertical layout provides three distinct visual perspectives from the performances – crowd view, stage setup and equipment close-ups. Each panel offers different interactions including multiple camera angles, the ability to listen into separate audio channels and real-time track information.” I downloaded this yesterday to have a play, and it’s really very slick indeed, although to be honest more than anything it made me wish I was 20 years younger and about to spend large quantities of the weekend doing speed, so it’s perhaps not totally healthy.
• Streetview Journey: Japanese artist Nao Tatsumi paints scenes they have seen on Google Streetview. There’s probably some sort of high concept here about this being two degrees removed from reality, and the oddity of representing a representation of something, but frankly I just really like the style here. The artists promises that they’ll open this out to make it a collaborative project by creating a shared Google Map for people to recommend places they’d like to see painted in the future, so if you’d like to submit, I don’t know, the Streetview of your house for consideration then perhaps consider bookmarking this page.
• Chess Roots: On Monday I went to see an interesting play all about the Bobby Fischer / Boris Spassky cold war chess matchup of the early 70s (it could do with having 20m trimmed off the runtime, but it’s definitely worth a look), and it made me wish that I was smart enough to play chess properly. I mean, I know the rules, but I think the last time I tried to play I was beaten by an (admittedly very precocious) 11 year old and I think that might have been the moment when I sulkily resigned my king for good. Anyway, if you’re less of a chess moron than me, you might find this site, which collects a mind-boggling amount of data about chess matches past and uses it to draw inferences about probabilities and lets you model games on a move-by-move basis. I get the impression that this is quite possibly a staggeringly impressive piece of datawrangling and could be hugely useful in the right hands, but, mainly, it just makes me feel really, really stupid.
• Parrot VC: A Twitter bot which spits out stuff about venture capital, investment and entrepreneurship, having been trained on a bunch of actual Tweets from actual VCs. It’s remarkable quite how hard it is to distinguish this stuff from the platitudinous guff spouted by actual, gilet-wearing lending partners. I mean, look: “You have to sense the vibe and have mutual respect/credibility on both sides. Not easy in early interactions” – that could literally be lifted from any blogpost on the Index Ventures website.
• Esperanto Design: This is a really, really slick website housing a variety of conversations between its creator, Robin Noguier, who spent 2018 travelling around the world meeting designers from across the planet and talking to them about the craft and their work within it. Of most interest if you’re a designer – or aspirant designer – yourself, but worth a look just in terms of the quality of webdesign here; it’s really, really nice.
• De Mi Rancho A Tu Cocina: You don’t need that translating, do you? Good. This is a BRILLIANT YouTube channel which apparently has absolutely blown up in Mexico since it launched a couple of months back; the woman who fronts it has become a bit of a bona-fide famous, it seems, and has been profiled in magazines and all sorts. The gimmick is that she presents a series of cooking videos from her farm in rural Mexico, showing how to make traditional dishes in the traditional manner, cooking on a hot stone, grinding everything by hand and demonstrating knifework that makes me wince in genuine fear every time I watch her grapple with an onion. It’s very much in the style of other global smash YouTube cookery hits like those village cookery guys from India, but the presenter has a charm all of her own and you will absolutely want to go and smash about 10million tacos after watching approximately 2 minutes of these.
• The Airpod Prank: This is not big and not clever, and frankly is quite a dickish thing to do, but, well, the though makes me laugh a LOT. Art Director Pablo Rochat has created printable, life-sized images of Apple Airpods which you can print out and then stick to the floor to make people think that they’ve dropped theirs. WATCH AS UNSUSPECTING IDIOTS SCRABBLE TO PICK UP A PIECE OF PAPER THEY HAVE CONFUSED FOR AN EXPENSIVE LIFESTYLE ACCESSORY! All your Christmas fun in one place!
• Bunnysitting: While you continue to ‘enjoy’ the rest of this, the final Curios of the decade (MOMENTOUS, isn’t it?), why not open this in another tab and enjoy the gentle, faintly-meditative process of ‘looking after’ an 8-bit virtual bunny? There’s literally nothing to do other than occasionally press a button when it needs something (it’ll beep at you every now and again), until it eventually grows up enough to leave the nest and, I don’t know, go to some sort of carrot-filled virtual bunny pasture or something. This is totally, totally pointless, and therefore utterly perfect in every way.

By Rob Kesseler

NEXT, SOME CLASSIC HOUSE FROM THE SEEMINGLY-IMMORTAL SEB FONTAINE!

THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS THAT IT SHOULDN’T ATTEMPT TO LECTURE ANY OF YOU ON POLITICS AND KNOWS THAT IT’S TECHNICALLY NONE OF ITS BUSINESS, BUT, EQUALLY, WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE ANY AND ALL OF YOU THINKING OF VOTING TORY NEXT WEEK TO PLEASE FCUK OFF, UNSUBSCRIBE AND READ ANOTHER BLOGNEWSLETTERTHING IN 2020 THANKYOU, PT.2:

• Ecology Photographs of the Year: Apologies for the slightly shonky slideshow link here, but, bafflingly, despite this being the official selection of the British Ecological Society of the best ecology photos of the year, they don’t actually appear to have published them anywhere on their own site; still, if you don’t mind the slightly annoying slideshow interface, there are 30 gorgeous shots of nature here to enjoy. My personal favourite’s the one of the cow and the bird of prey chilling out together in the Andes, which is a sentence I can honestly say I don’t imagine has ever been written before in the English language, so well done me.
• Cloze: Do you sometimes feel that your friendships and personal relationships are, well, fine, but perhaps lacking the rigour and structure of your professional interactions? Do you wish that you were able to manage all aspects of your life in the same way that you do your work? Are you some sort of monster? That’s the only explanation I can come up with as to why anyone in their right mind would want to use Cloze, a service which offers to keep all the information about all your personal contacts and relationships in one place, to let you simply and cleanly manage all your interactions optimally. It’ll keep track of who you see when, what people are interested in, their birthdays and significant dates, and will basically outsource the business about gving a fcuk about anyone other than yourself to a machine, which is…vile, frankly. The worst thing about this – and there are many, many aspects to hate – is the line in the blurb about how the software ‘will learn who is important to you’, which, by implication, means that it will also determine who isn’t. Imagine explaining that to an old mate who you’ve not seen for a while: “yeah, sorry man, my virtual relationship manager algorithmically determined that you’re simply not a high-value stakeholder in my life any more”. Jesus fcuking wept.
• The Top 25 News Photos of the Year: As picked by The Atlantic. Number 23 in particular is a masterpiece imho.
• The LIFE Photo Archive: Seeing as we’re doing photos, this has been online for AGES but I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly linked to it; Google’s full archive of LIFE Magazine’s photography, searchable and browsable by decade, going back to the 1860s. Lose yourself in the past; staring at photos of the Great Depression is a surprisingly effective way of making oneself feel generally more positive about the state of the world in 2019, oddly enough.
• Fund They Work For You: They Work For You is a great website on which a surprisingly-large amount of other webstuff rests; I probably don’t need to explain it to you, but, in case you’re foreign or politically disinclined, it’s a site designed to present an easily-accessible record of the political activity of each member of the UK parliament, from their voting record to their extra-Parliamentary interests. It needs 25k in the next couple of weeks to guarantee its existence into 2020; at a time when the state of this countries political landscape is about as bleak as it’s been since the 80s, you sort of feel it would be a shame were one of the more effective mechanisms to shine a light on the festering sump-pit of our elected representatives to go under. Chuck them a tenner if you can spare it, it’s hugely worthwhile.
• Buried Treasure: A brand-new website, set up by John Walker who used to work on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where he’ll review obscure and un-appreciated indie games for the benefit of the wider world. If you play games and want some recommendations for things to play that are, well, a bit more interesting than COD, this is definitely worth a look.
• Nothing Much Happens: It’s odd how cultural and social mores shift; a decade ago, the idea of a website or app featuring ‘bedtime stories for grownups in which nothing much happens except some gentle narration of some pretty banal things, delivered in a soothing American burr’ would have prompted widespread laughter and derision; now, though, you’ll all be sitting there stroking your chins and thinking things like ‘ASMR’ and ‘self-care’ and ‘wellness’. Hm. Anyhow, this is exactly that – if you’re after a regular series of sleep-aid audio tracks, this isn’t a bad place to start. Doesn’t quite hit my specific ASMR trigger points, but that’s not to say it won’t tingle you right up something chronic.
• Forbidden Snacks: A great subReddit, featuring stuff that looks a lot like appetising food but which really, really isn’t.
• The Carpentry Compiler: This is the future of IKEA, or of someone else’s business if they can get there first. Honestly, I think there’s a brilliant idea and business in this just waiting to happen. It’s an academic paper, so I’m presenting it more as an idea for you all to marvel at than something entertaining to click on, but, look: “Our carpentry compiler converts high-level geometric designs made by users to low-level fabrication instructions that can be directly followed to manufacture parts. The compiler performs multi-objective optimization on the low-level instructions to generate Pareto-optimal candidates.” So what that means is that the researchers involved in this have developed a model which will take any 3d design and automatically work out what sort of component parts would need to be manufactured to construct it. Which means, FLATPACK ON DEMAND, sooner rather than later; imagine being able to sketch out a bespoke wardrobe or whatever, sized to your spec, and then in the click of a mouse have software work out the exact number and dimensions of bits of MDF you’ll need to construct your very own personalised Billy. Honestly, this sort of thing will be revolutionary when it comes to manufacturing, although equally you can guarantee that even in this future timeline they will somehow contrive to include an insufficient quantity of tiny dowel connectors.
• Andrea Animates: The website of animator (whodathunkit) Andrea Love, who works out of the US and whose work involves the creation of gorgeous, felt-and-wool worlds which are painstakingly animated in stop-motion. The craft on display here is absolutely astonishing, and there’s something pleasingly 70s and Trumpton-esque about the vibe of a lot of the pieces. Love runs a whole animation studio, so I imagine she’s available for commissions should you feel inspired by this – honestly, it’s so, so lovely.
• Libro: Christmas is very much a time when it’s quite hard to force myself not to use Amazon – DAMN YOU MECHABEZOS WITH YOUR INCREDIBLY CONVENIENT GIFTWRAPPING AND SHIPPING SERVICE – but I feel marginally-better about my lapses when I find things like this, which offer new and hitherto-unimagined ways to slip the octopus-like grasp of the world’s ‘everything’ brand. Libro is an audiobook platform THAT ISN’T OWNED BY AMAZON! That’s right! Audiobooks, and Jeff doesn’t see a penny! Instead, profits from sales can be allocated to independent booksellers, which is a fabulous idea and one that should be celebrated. I haven’t done an extensive dive into the catalogue yet, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be reasonably comprehensive; please, if you do audiobooks, do give this a try, if not to fcuk Jeff then to unfcuk your friendly neighbourhood booksellers.
• The Deep Sea: It’s really, really deep. Scroll though this lovely site as it takes you down, down, down…past the weird anglerfish, past the goblin sharks, past the blobfish, to the very deepest parts of the sea where only the very, very gelatinous can survive. Mesmerising, and it taught me that there is a sea creature whose ACTUAL NAME is the ‘Terrible Claw Lobster’ and now I am full of questions. ‘Terrible’ as in ‘inspiring of terror’, or ‘terrible’ as in ‘not particularly good’? If the latter, how does it fail at lobsterness? Anyone?
• Jellycam: You want a livefeed of the jellyfish at Monterey Bay aquarium? Well, click this link during opening hours (try from around 4pm UK time) and ENJOY!
• Smash Illustrations: There was a piece in the longreads a few weeks ago about the incredible ubiquity of the flat, cartoony art-style popularised by millennial-targeting lifestyle brands of the late-2010s; this site is doing nothing to reverse that ubiquity, instead presenting a variety of this style of illustration for designers and artists to use as they desire. On the one hand, potentially a really useful and crucially cheap way of getting some decent-looking illustrations for your website; on the other, know that it will look like EVERYTHING ELSE out there. Win some, lose some.
• The Powerpoint Game Jam: Which is the most powerful of the MS Office tools (and is there a less-engaging opening conversational gambit that you can imagine?)? Is it Excel? After all, this year we’ve seen a fcuking drum machine built out of spreadsheets. No, no it is not. It is POWERPOINT, because you can literally make videogames in it. Slightly simple games, fine, but still.The Powerpoint Games Jam is inviting anyone and everyone to build a game in Powerpoint and submit it for consideration; it only started on Sunday and runs til the end of the year, so it’s light on entries at present, but there are four ‘games’ there already; honestly, do try at least one of them. With a bit of luck you can probably pass it off as ‘work’; if nothing else, it will give you a few new ideas to enliven your next set of pointless, overthought slides. Here’s an idea – why not present your next ‘deck’ (you fcuks, STOP CALLING THEM THAT) as a piece of interactive fiction? It won’t make you any more likely to win the business but it will make your working life marginally-less stultifyingly dull for the time it takes you to build it.
• Shania Twine: A short piece of interactive fiction. I imagine you can probably guess the gag at the heart of this, but, if not, ENJOY!
• Curious Expedition: This is just a demo, fine, but there’s enough fun and replayability in this charming tiny, browser-based pixelated exploration-simulator to keep you distracted for a good 25 minutes or so. You play as an explorer, undertaking an intrepid journey into the unknown to find a golden temple or somesuch. Fight your way past wildlife! Meet the natives! Battle hunger, thirst and insanity! Ignore the slightly tone-deaf colonialism of the whole thing! This is, my pointless wokery aside, absolutely lovely (and the full game, also playable in-browser, is only a tenner if you like it enough to shell out).
• Push The Button To Win: Finally in this week/year/decade’s selection of miscellania, this is a simple game whose premise you can guess from the title. I didn’t expect it to affect my quite so deeply, though. I’m not joking – it properly shook me in a way few other games have managed this year. I’m not sure if I like it or not, but I am hugely impressed by the mechanic and idea. Try it out, see what you think (and, more importantly, feel).

By Lydia Blakely

LAST UP IN THIS DECADE’S MIXES, A CLASSIC OF FAST BREAKS AND BASS FROM SEVEN YEARS AGO BY MACHINEDRUM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Graffiti Removal: POSSIBLY NOT A TUMBLR! Sorry, can’t be bothered to check the source code here, but this is a great selection of images and videos of blanked-out, covered-up graffiti, which in each instance creates an odd artwork out of its absence.
• Adam Apples: DEFINITELY NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! But very much ought to be, so, well, here! Adam’s Apples involves the titular Adam writing all about different types of apple. Adam, it’s fair to say, is very much an apple enthusiast, and I applaud his indefatigability in attempting to eat every single varietal in the world.
• Someone Tell The Boyz: This is great: “I run datasets of iconic feminist texts through a simple textRNN, generating new feminists texts in the legendary words of bell hooks, Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde. Some are funny. Some are poetic. Some make no sense at all and some are way too real.”
• Gromm-it: “An art/media project by journalist Paul Lukas, explores the juxtapositions resulting from the installation of metal grommets in unlikely surfaces, especially foodstuffs.” This is…unsettling.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Lucas Zanotto: Wonderful, pleasing, soothing, cute, whimsical 3d CG animations. Honestly, these really are lovely.
• Trees of Rotterdam: Insert your own unfunny horticultural gag about Dutch Elms here.
• Kagensound: This is a great feed, by a carpenter who makes those wonderful, intricate puzzle boxes of the sort we all used to keep our drugs in when we were 16/17 til we realised that the more battered we became the more impossible it became to access our stash. I want ALL of these.
• Hipdict: Like Urban Dictionary, but on Insta – anyone can submit their own definition for approval, which might get used in a post. The quality varies but there are occasional nuggets of comedy/surrealism gold in here.
• Sh1t London Guinness: An account dedicated solely to outing crap pints of Guinness being served in the UK’s capital. Would be immensely improved by explanation of exactly why the pints in question are so sh1t – as a non-Guinness drinker, these all look like the same slurry to me, but I’m sure connoisseurs of the black stuff will get the nuance here.
• Laira Maganuco: The most horrible little silicon sculptures you ever will see. Proper nightmare fuel, this, and the sort of thing that will give you a nasty little scare when it pops up in your feed in between dogs of Insta and Rupi fcuking Kaur.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The NPR Book Concierge: Not so much a longread as a longread sourcing tool, this is NPR’s annual service which lets you browse their selections for books of the year, and compile your own potential Christmas book-buying list based on various tags and filters you can apply, from ‘Book Club Favourites’ to novellas. It’s a US list, which has pluses and minuses; on the one hand, it contains loads of things that simply didn’t cross my radar as a consumer of UK book reviews; on the other, there are a few on here which won’t be available in the UK til next year. Regardless, it’s a really good tool for working out which books you’ll be using to avoid talking to your family over the festive season.
• 52 Things I Learned in 2019: I think this is the third of these annual lists I’ve featured in Curios now, and, as per, it’s once again the best and smartest and most illuminating summary of the past 12 months that you’ll see anywhere. It’s exactly what it says – a list of 52 facts, with citations, which Tom Whitwell has learned this year, connected by no particular theme whatsoever; oddly, though, these 52 things coalesce to create a very real-seeming ‘this is where we are at the end of the 2010s’ feeling about the whole thing. Honestly, SO interesting, and if you’re a planner/strategist type there are at least a dozen things in here that you can cobble a workable ‘insight’ out of (words I never want to hear again in the decade to come: insight).
• The Era of the Political Influencer: I don’t want to sound smug here, but I totally called this (admittedly I called it about a month ago, around Twitter’s political advertising ban, and actually this isn’t about Twitter at all, so, er, I should probably shut my maw) – this piece looks at the growth (in the US at least) of politicians and parties paying online influencers to shill their message on their behalf. Want a vague idea of the future in store for us all? Jake Paul delivering pro-Trump sponcon, wearing a MAGA hat. Fine, it may not be him, but just you wait.
• The Future of S*c**l M*d**: Or at least an imagined future for it. This is an interesting NYT piece which takes a speculative look at how the next ten years might see our relationship with the platforms and each other change; it’s airy rather than particularly precise, but there’s an interesting line about ⅔ of the way through which alludes to the predicted increased importance of curators and gatekeepers rather than the untrammeled, unfiltered firehose of everything from everyone that characterised the early days of the s*c**l m*d** boom – which, obviously, is great news for me and my continued railing against the inevitable onset of senescence and obsolescence. Curios for ALL!
• The Smartphone Election: This is a good piece of reporting by the Guardian, who got people to agree to have their smartphone usage monitored over a short period during the election to show how they consume news and behave online. The findings are largely unsurprising – they get news from Facebook, they consume the reaction gifs rather than the event, they comment without reading and they bait their opponents and, generally, display the same largely-unpleasant traits that we all tend to when experiencing life via a screen. Except, well, the general thrust of this is to generally go ‘look, phones are ruining everything and our politics is just one example’; but, er, isn’t the problem here not the tech but the people? Isn’t it just that we’re (I’m totally including myself and you all in this too) all stupid and lazy and facile and mean and cruel and vindictive and tired and bored and scared and easily-distracted and all the phones are doing is magnifying these traits? Whose fault is it that we’re getting our information on the party manifestos from a 1-minute ‘explainer’ vid on LadBible? I don’t – and, trust me, it pains me to say this – think that it’s Zuckerberg’s.
• Jonah Peretti’s Decade: After last week’s chat with Insta’s Systrom, this week we can enjoy a wide-ranging and surprisingly-candid interview with Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, a person arguably as influential in shaping the world we now find ourselves in as many of the silicon valley lot. Peretti’s always an engaging interviewee, and quite obviously a very, very smart person indeed; I found a lot to enjoy in here, not least his thoughts on how the collision and merging of news and entertainment has affected politics and the discourse around it. I did find his comments about VC money somewhat disingenuous, though; Jonah, mate, HOW many hundreds of millions of their cash have you burned through?
• Oil Is The New Data: Here’s a cheering article, describing the increasing symbiosis between the big oil and big data industries, and in particular how the big Cloud players have been quietly and effectively building up massively lucrative relationships with Exxon et al to help them continue to extract fossil fuels more effectively than ever before. Couple that with the environmental burden of the huge server farms which are the very physical reality of the whimsical ‘Cloud’ of one’s imagination and we’re heading for a point in the not-too-distant future where I think we’re going to see these companies get an absolute kicking for their planetary impact (for all the difference that will make).
• Fact Checking Online: Consider this your annual act of familiar public service – send this guide to every single family member you have. They’ll think you’re a patronisingh fcuk, in all likelihood, but if it lessons the likelihood of even one of them believing some blatantly made-up rubbish on Facebook then, well, it’s probably worth it. This is a genuinely good and clear series of precepts and principles by The Verge, and it’s especially worth sharing with your kids should they be of an age where it’s starting to concern you how much Joe Rogan they’re consuming.
• Grindr Worldwide: Honestly, the revamped FACE has been publishing some really excellent journalism of late, credit where it’s due. This is a look at what it’s like using Grindr in countries around the world in which homosexuality is either illegal or still not culturally acceptable, and is a decent reminder of the less-than-perfect status of LGBTQx rights worldwide. It’s full of lines like this, which is lovely but also incredibly poignant: “For the longest time I thought I was the only queer person in my hometown, which is outside Kampala. Then when I was home for Christmas break after I got Grindr, I saw a bunch of people online. I was like: ​“Where the hell were these people when I was living here?!” My sexuality is easy to spot – I’m like a giraffe in a sea of buffaloes – but no one had ever approached me before.”
• A History of the New York Subway Map: A beautifully-designed interactive in the NYT, detailing the history behind their (less good) version of the tube map. Interesting historically, but included here mainly because I adore the art style and page direction (if that makes sense).
• Inside Twitch’s Wildest Talk Show: This is fascinating, and absolutely a version of the future. Twitch is doing its best to pivot from just being about gaming to instead being seen as a viable ‘future of TV’ platform; formats like the one profiled in this piece (from gaming website Kotaku), in which a bunch of popular streamers effectively take part in some sort of extremely noisy, borderline-incomprehensible chatshow, very much feel like the sort of thing that mainstream broadcasters are going to be starting to experiment with soon. Seriously, I’d put money on someone at the BBC or Channel 4 currently attempting to pitch a Twitch-based extension to an existing show or as a new talent play.
• 27 Hours In An Airport: It’s fair to say that Singapore’s Changi Airport has relatively little in common with, say, Luton or Stansted (other than the fact you can presumably fly from there – the piece is light on the actual ‘air’ bits); it’s basically some sort of weird, liminal-international-themepark-boutique-mallspace (a designator which I can already tell is going to catch on – you read it here first!), and this piece, in which the author spends more than a day hanging out there, is weirdly conflicting. On the one hand, it does sound fascinating and future and incredible, and the sort of thing that any self-respecting connoisseur of odd futurestuff very much ought to wander round; on the other, it’s another example of the peculiar flatness of the everynowhere international aesthetic which characterises so much of middle-to-upper-middle-class experience wherever you are in the world, and which is becoming quite boring to me.
• The Twitter Art Tshirt Scam: Not particularly long, but very interesting, look at how bots scour Twitter for art to steal to print on tshirts which are then drop-shipped for profit, and how the artists decided to fight back. The extent of the automation of production here is slightly mind-blowing.
• Death Stranding: Death Stranding is a game I am comfortably certain I will never, ever play, but one I am delighted exists so that I can read essays about it like this one. Even if you’re not interested in games or gaming, please give this a go – it’s clever, well-written and asks lots of interesting questions about what games are for, what they can tell us about things, and the nature of ‘fun’ as a concept. The game, the author argues, “is a genuine success in asking what empathy is possible in a world where the delivery of commodities by bedraggled and brutalised workers has become the primary means of human contact.” Come on, don’t you want to read all about it?
• Pahologic: Another piece about games – sorry, but this one’s great too, and, per the last one, deserves to be read even if you’re not a gamer. Seriously, if you’re any interest in narrative design and systems interactions and user experience then it will be a properly rewarding read; and if you just like reading about videogames, it’s equally good. It’s about an old Russian game called Pathologic, widely renowned as one of the most punishing and un-fun expressions of what a game can be, and at the same time hailed as one of the most unique artistic achievements yet-created in the medium. It’s another game I will never, ever play, but about which I could read volumes; honestly, this is SO interesting, I promise you.
• More Pathologic: Ok, so this isn’t an article – it’s, er, a two-hour YouTube dissection of the game described in the last article. It won’t be for everyone – I mean, it’s two hours ffs – but if any of the stuff in the last article appealed to you then PLEASE WATCH THIS. It’s one of the most impressive pieces of in-depth criticism of a work of art I have ever seen, and the way it explains and highlights the amazing narrative design and construction of the game is masterful (no hyperbole, it really is that good). The YouTuber in question is about as pleasant company as a YouTuber can be (although they are still very much a YouTuber and possibly may have watched a tiny bit more ZeroPunctuation than is necessarily good for them); I NEVER watch this sort of thing, but sat mesmerised through the whole thing on Tuesday evening while a rather bemused cat sat on my lap and watched with me (thanks Lebowski). Take punt on this, I promise it’s more interesting than you think (but you do need to be into videogames, probably).
• The Clout: A lovely pen portrait of what’s presented as a pretty archetypal US teen – obsessed with their online rep and making it in some way online, in this case through meme accounts on Insta. What’s been interesting over the past few years has been the shift amongst kids from wanting to be YouTubers to now just wanting to be famous – the observations in here about the myth that YT created around ‘being paid to just live your life and be yourself online’ must be one of the most pernicious canards of the modern world (he says, both pretentiously and old mannishly!).
• Kunt: Last year, one of my Christmas books was “I, Kunt: How I became (and remained) a minor internet hit singer”, the autobiography of one-man-internet-sensation and occasional chart-botherer Kunt, whose Casio-backed paens to some pretty awful stuff were one of my favourite online things in the early-00s. It is, I promise you, one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life; not, fine, a great work of literature, but I read it all in about three hours and regularly had to stop to wipe the literal tears away. Kunt has jacked in showbiz now and is back to being a painter and decorator, but did this interview with John Fleming and I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. Please, please read this, if you’re not familiar with his work – and then go and check out the best political song ever written, which will give you a feel for the man’s style.
• Archiving the 20teens: This is VERY arch-theoretical, but no less interesting for it; a comprehensive look back over the semiotics of fashion over the past decade. This should give you a feel for the style – I love it, but I can see how some might find it a bit hard work: “It’s strange to still participate in the tradition of year end lists, of reviews and summaries, at a time like this. Recollection feels like the ritual of a simpler time, this was a year ignorant of history. 2018 encompassed an era—transformative shifts that typically take much longer to unfold established themselves faster than they were named and traditional record keepers couldn’t be trusted to keep track. Cable news networks were white noise machines. Pundits and columnists debated questions the answers to which are already abundant in the injustices of the world. National papers scrambled to give Nazis the benefit of the doubt, the suits employed at legacy media outlets identified more with the authority of fascists in neckties than with the people targeted by them. In the meantime, the only industry keeping a healthy sense of the times was fashion—an industry rarely credited for having a healthy sense of anything. Perhaps the intuitive collective choices of its community around the world, has yielded a usable record for this era. If the future can be read in tea leaves, the present can be read in how people get dressed.” Regardless, this is a really interesting look at fashion, culture, society and politics over the past 10 years
• The Future is Menopausal: This is brilliant, and neatly embodies a lot of what I’ve seen and heard older women saying and writing over much of the past couple of years: “The “arc of history,” as we were all sharply reminded in the wake of Trump’s election, doesn’t bend toward sh1t. Progress will always need a solid push. And the hill is particularly steep right now, with nothing short of the fate of humankind threatened by climate change. Increasingly, as Klein notes, we’re forced to acknowledge that climate denialism and misogyny go hand in hand. As we age into this new feminism, all those women who are embodying their new post-reproductive normal have the opportunity to not just change the future of their aging lives but the future of the world.”
• As A Teenager: Megan Nolan is, as I’ve said here before, an excellent writer; this is her latest piece in the New Statesman, about the memory of the intensity of emotions felt when young when contrasted against the pale simulacra you feel as you age. Beautiful, beautiful prose.
• 63 Up: Last up this decade, and fittingly so, this is from the NYT and it’s about the Up’ series of films which for five decades have followed the lives of a group of people who were selected to take part in a documentary about British society and social mobility in 1964. This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all year, and I’m not ashamed to say I wept copiously at points throughout (it’s been that sort of week tbh). Please, please read it – all of human life is here.

This was me almost exactly a decade ago. Look into my eyes before you unsubscribe forever (picture by Vincenzo Cosenza)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This sounds like it should be soundtracking a very, very cool film indeed. That’s a compliment, in case it didn’t come across as one – it’s gorgeous jazz by Jeff Parker, and it’s called ‘Max Brown’ and I think it would make a lovely soundtrack to Christmas morning, personally:

1. Hinds are very cool, and I love their Spanish-accented English, and indeed this song, which is called ‘Riding Solo’ and has a touch of Paper Planes about it imho:

1. This is by Dolci Rain, and to me sounds almost exactly like the phantom music you occasionally get in the back-left of your skull at the afterparty at around 530am. It’s called ‘Free Your Heart’ and it’s glacial and skittering and excellent:

1. I went to see Max Cooper at the Barbican a couple of months ago and it was AMAZING, both musically and visually; this is the latest track to be released from his new album, which deserves fullscreen and your full attention, ideally with a decent paid of headphones; it’s called ‘Circular’:

1. HIPHOP CORNER! I think I first featured Zebra Katz 3 or 4 years ago; this is his latest double-video for the pair of tracks ‘Lousy’ and ‘In In In’, both tracks are fcuking great, and the film’s beautifully shot. Give this a go, it’s worth the time:

1. Plan B’s not done rapping for ages, but I remember seeing him…Jesus, 12ish years ago when he was just starting out. He’s back to it again, for this single – no video for it, but as an explanation of how politics works and what you might be voting for it’s genuinely brilliant. Seriously, you wouldn’t think a track called ‘First Past The Post’ would be any good, but, well, it is:

1. Just watch this. It’s BRILLIANT. Really, really brilliant. It’s called ‘Gimme Summn’ and it’s by TNGHT:

1. Lovely, lovely Japanese indiepop by Hazy Sour Cherry – it’s called Tour De Tokyo, and it reminds me a lot of that period in the late-90s/early-00s when the NME were wnking themselves silly over Japanese acts like Cornelius and Boom Boom Satellites:

1. Finally this week – AND THIS YEAR! – it’s the now-traditional Web Curios ‘Song of the Year’ selection, which noone at all cares about but is a nice opportunity for me to look back at the music I’ve included and what stood out. For various reasons, there’s only one possible track for this slot – Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Seventeen’, from all the way back on 11 January. And…that’s it. I LOVE YOU THANKYOU FOR EVERYTHING SEE YOU NEXT YEAR AND PLEASE HAVE FUN AND TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

It’ll all be over in two weeks, just think of that. 

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO IT WON’T THIS IS JUST WHAT LIFE IS LIKE ON THE ISLAND FOREVER!!! How much more election do you think we’d able to take before we all collectively decided that normal social mores no longer applied, that the rule of law could go and fcuk itself, and we all just descended on the party headquarters with pitchforks and barrels of burning pitch? 

Still, on the plus side, it’s almost December! Which means it’s almost CHRISTMAS PARTY SEASON! Which means – and this is the really good bit – NOONE CAN TELL YOU OFF FOR BEING DRUNK ALL THE TIME! Seriously, what with the election and the parties and the general sense that the handcart’s hellbound and we’re all crammed in right, you’d be absolutely within your rights to spend the next month or so comfortably maintaining a three-pint buzz at all times. 

Not yet, though, my children, not yet. First, I am taking my girlfriend to lunch and then going to hang out with her cat (he’s a very special little guy), and YOU have this week’s words’n’links to get through; another strong, long draught of gently mind-altering webspaff, drawn especially for you from the…barrels (yes, let’s call them ‘barrels’) I keep in my private cellar, and designed to offer you some modicum of transport from the chilly fingers of real life and realpolitik. Drink deep, drink long, and don’t you dare spill a drop – this is Web Curios, and it stains terribly. 

By Rogan Brown

FIRST UP, WHY NOT CHECK OUT THE GREAT MIXES AVAILABLE FROM THE FACE? THERE ARE TEN SO FAR AND, SEEMINGLY, THEY ARE ALL QUITE ACE!

THE SECTION WHICH GENUINELY QUITE LIKES THE IDEA OF TWITTER TAKING ALL THE MEMORIALISED ACCOUNTS IT’S NOW COMMITTED TO CREATING AND LEAVING THEM TO FOREVER REPLAY ALL THEIR OLD TWEETS IN A SEPARATE, SHARED VERSION OF THE APP, SORT OF LIKE TWITTER HEAVEN, THAT ANYONE CAN GO AND WATCH WHENEVER THEY LIKE:

• Facebook Testing Microsharing Service: It does rather look like we might in the future look back on the Great Sharing Boom of the early-to-mid-00s as something of a cultural aberration (“you what? You used to post that on main? Where anyone could see?”); the news that Facebook is testing a new feature, Favourites, to effectively allow for the creation of its own version of Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ – users in test coterie are able to share content to this closed group of friends via Messenger. Which, of course, is just a rethink of Facebook’s existing, never-used ‘Lists’ feature (which itself was basically Google+’s ‘Circles’ – God I miss Google+, you know, those were simpler times). No guarantee that this exact version of a limited-sharing service will come to pass, but one would imagine that something similar will eventually roll out.
• Facebook Recruiting New, Paid, Data Sources: Given Facebook knows everything about your hopes, dreams and fears anyway, why not get paid for ‘sharing’ (ha!) all that information with them? Well why not download Facebook Viewpoint, a new app which pays users to answer specific questions about themselves to feed the ravening hunger Zuckerberg’s overgrown, sinister pet feels for human behavioural and interest data? Answer questions, win points, and get paid for your answers – what’s not to like? To be honest, at least this seems reasonably transparent, and there’s nothing that says you have to tell Mark’s minions the truth – Facebook maintains that it will at all points be clear about how the data is being used, and it doesn’t seem that it’s going to be used as part of its ad targeting setup, though one might be forgiven for nipping off to investigate the price of salt mines at this point. Sadly if you’re not over 18 and in the US you’re currently unable to glory in this bounty, but fear not! It’s set to roll out into other territories next year, so perhaps next year even us povvos here in the UK will be able to use this as a source of baseline income as society collapses around our ears.
• New SparkAR Options Announced for Insta: If you’re interested in AR lenses for Insta – AND WHO ISN’T I THINK OF NOTHING ELSE ON THE DAILY – then you probably ought to know about this. Look at all the things you can do! Here: “target tracking, which allows AR effects to be anchored to specific images or objects in the real word, and Native Slider, a new optional controller that can be called up directly in the Instagram app that lets users pick and make fine adjustments to an effect.” Are you excited? I’m EXCITED!
• Twitter Letting Users Schedule Tweets From Twitter Dot Com: I’m basically of the opinion that if you don’t use Tweetdeck on desktop you’re not really a proper Twitter user (that sort of delightful, bargain-basement nerd snobbery is what secures my rich and varied social life!); still, even those normie Tweeters will be able to experience the almost-unparalleled frisson born from the ability to Tweet into the future at a predetermined time. Or, er, they will when it’s finally rolled out to everyone. Look, it’s coming, ok?
• Twitter Launches Conversation Insights Tool: Or rather, it does if you’re one of the privileged users with access to Twitter’s Media Studio, it’s fancy content creation and analytics suite for larger brands or companies. This basically does a lot of the work of the average social media listening platform, promising that brand owners will be able to track broad conversations about their brand or product through the platform’s analytics rather than simply seeing data on direct interactions. Potentially useful, though frankly I’d imagine that most of you with a Media Studio login probably get all this stuff elsewhere already. Still, THANKS TWITTER!
• Twitter To Memorialise Old Handles and Make Them Available Anew: Or at least it will…at some point. On Monday (was it Monday? Was it Tuesday? I mean, it really doesn’t matter, does it? Why do I care? WHY AM I STILL TYPING THIS? FFS Matt, this – this exact stuff, this pointless typing that adds nothing and which noone cares about, least of all you – is the reason this bastard thing regularly clocks in at the fat end of 10k words and why noone reads it WILL YOU NEVER LEARN?!?!?! Hm, evidently not it would seem), Twitter said it was going to remove access to accounts that had been dormant for significant amount of time, presumably with a view to freeing them up to users who might want them; by Thursday, faced with growing backlash from people who quite liked the fact that they could look back on the old Tweets of their departed friends and loved ones and weren’t too happy about the fact that the platform was planning to oubliette these in one fell swoop. So what we have now is a weird waiting situation where Twitter now can’t do anything til it’s worked out how it’s going to sort out a memorialising process (akin to Facebook’s, one would imagine) for these accounts. Let’s revisit this one in a few months, eh?
• Alexa, Why Are You Crying?: I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not (apologies if I did – then again, Christ, you get ALL THESE WORDS FOR FREE, you can’t really complain if they’re occasionally a touch on the recycled side), but this year I saw what was one of the worst creative concepts I’ve witnessed in years (since, in fact, I was once involved in an app creation workshop with a bunch of PR people and one group of charming-but-somewhat-academically- challenged kids came up with the idea of an app that would charge your phone – DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND ELECTRONICS OR EVEN PHYSICS FFS????) which I can’t tell you about in too much detail for fear of, well, not being able to get paid ever again, but which featured the ability to make Alexa miserable based on what you said to it. Yes, that’s right, they wanted to pitch an app that let you bully a virtual assistant. Nice one. Anyway, perhaps it wasn’t such a stupid idea after all (it was, it really was), as Amazon’s now developed a feature whereby those making Skills for Alexa can give it one of three vocal tones when it responds to users – excited, neutral or disappointed. The options here are quite interesting, at the very least for some potentially more emotionally-nuanced storytelling options and things like that, but were I, say, Spotify, I’d be thinking about the fun/silly stuff you can do with this; switch Alexa’s tone to ‘disappointed’ when your kids shout “ALEXA PLAY BABY SHARK!” at it for the ten-millionth time, say.
• Return of the Likes: No idea if this still works – if it does, it probably won’t work for too long – but if you’re one of the people affected by the Instagram ‘No Likes’ test and want to, well, bring them back, this Chrome extension should do the trick.
• Digital & The Arts: I edited this collection of essays earlier this year on behalf of arts organisation The Space, which exists to help arts institutions use digital a bit better; they’re all about, er, digital and the arts, and you might maybe find them interesting (but if you don’t I won’t judge you or be offended or anything, just gently disappointed). Oh, one of the people featured is ACTUAL FAMOUS PERSON Rankin, the photographer, in case that’s a particular draw for you.
• Ungifted Secret Santa: It’s happened. I’ve become a TEDIOUS ANTI-WASTE BORE. I am sorry, I don’t know exactly when the switch flipped but I’m now the sort of person who writes stuff like this: “Hey, advermarketingpr office monkeys! Why not do Secret Santa this year but, well, DIFFERENT! Why not do it using this not-terrible website by creative environmental…agency? Magazine? Collective? Whatever, it’s by Do The Green Thing, and helps you do Secret Santa with friends or colleagues in a way that doesn’t involve buying £5-10 worth of pointless plastic crap that will be landfill by the 24th. A Good Thing.
• Gucci Grip: I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the past year or so fetishizing Gucci’s current webdesign, which has tended towards the overblown, luxurious and hand-painted – which is why this, a pixelart game apparently also made by Gucci, in which you play a very simple ‘avoid the obstacles, grab the tokens’ infinite scroller, confused me slightly. It doesn’t really look very Gucci, and doesn’t, as far as I can tell, link out to anything at all (although I presume I’ll be seeing ads for accessories from now til I finally rattle out my last), but it is oddly soothing and the aesthetic’s actually quite nice in a slightly 90s vaporware sort of way, and the soundtrack’s lovely, so, well, THANKS GUCCI!!

By Bang Sangho

NEXT UP, WHY NOT GIVE THE NEW EP BY DAN LE SAC A TRY? IT’S VERY FILMIC AND WOULD MAKE A GOOD SOUNDTRACK TO ANY WINTER’S AFTERNOON SO WHY NOT THIS ONE?

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY DOES ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH THIS VIDEO REGARDLESS OF YOUR POLITICAL PERSUASION BECAUSE, HONESTLY, THIS KID IS AMAZING AND DESERVES TWO MINUTES OF YOUR TIME, PT.1:

• The Runway Palette: There’s not even any competition this week; this is absolutely the best website I’ve seen, one of the best of the year in fact. It’s by Google’s arts and culture team, in partnership with fashion industry trade bible The Business of Fashion, and it’s basically an analysis of the colour palettes used in outfits seen on the catwalk – 144,000 of them, in fact, which have all been analysed by AI and categorised based on their core palette. They’re then grouped by colour similarity, and visualised in this…oh, just click it, it’s gorgeous; a sort of pixel-tapestry of colour palettes which you can see as an explorable 3d landscape. Click on any palette and you will see the outfit it’s drawn from, alongside other, comparable looks from other designers; it clearly shows you the fashion house, the venue and year where it was first shown, and gives a clear, visually pleasing way of exploring trends in colour and design over recent seasons. Honestly, this is SO SO GOOD, and a genuinely great example of how actual AI can be actually useful.
• Shardcore on LinkedIn: Shardcore asked me what happens on LinkedIn. I told him that, to fit in, he should “”write long, doublespaced, self-aggrandising, autofellatory screeds about how ace you are, disguised as heartwarming homilies about LIFE’S LESSONS.” So he trained a neural net to do just that, and is posting the results to LinkedIn. Go and ENGAGE with it.
• Visit Eroda: You may or may not recall the other week that I linked to an essay in the longreads section that was all about Halo 2 and its marketing campaign and ‘I Love Bees’, the ARG that ran in parallel to it; well they’re (sort of) BACK, baby! Visit Eroda is a tourist website encouraging visitors to take a trip to the mysterious island destination; the site description says it was built in 2004, but it only appeared in the last week or so, and is being heavily promoted with ads across the socials to drive traffic there…and obviously Eroda doesn’t actually exist…WHAT COULD IT BE?!?!? Er, apparently it’s a campaign to promote the new Harry Styles album (the link here goes to Andy Baio’s writeup of the thing – HI ANDY!!). I know, miserable isn’t it? There was me hoping for some sort of genuinely exciting rabbithole to fall down (only to get discouraged after about 15 minutes when I realise that the game requires far, far more investment than I’m willing to make), only to discover that it’s everyone’s favourite ex-One Directioner giving his rabid fanbase something to obsess over. I’m curious to see how far this goes, though, and whether there’s anything more to it than this – there are some funny references to odd-numbered days, and pigs, which hint at maybe some sort of broader story or link to some sort of additional content. I imagine if any of you are Styles fans then you’ll already be all over this like the sky, but, if not, fill your boots.
• Lost Cities: Coral’s amazing, isn’t it? Some of the best bits of the Blue Planet series were those in which David Attenborough’s hushed tones guided you through vibrant, bejewelled undersea gardens full of clownfish and anemones, telling you in gentle, soothing detail about exactly how we as a species are contributing on a minute-by-minute basis to its increasingly rapid destruction. Lost Cities is an interactive, online documentary about coral and the damage we’re doing to it; it’s been filmed and edited by a team at the University of Hawaii, one of whom, Dr Ruth Gates, died last year. Gates’ voice is the one heard throughout, making this not only a stunningly-shot, instructive and timely film about the destruction of one of our most beautiful natural habitats, but also a memorial to a scientist whose life’s work was to study it. Genuinely gorgeous, but also quite, quite sad.
• One Dollar Hotel: You may have seen this story doing the rounds this week – in case not, though, this is a Chinese hotel owner who’s decided to drum up business through this ingenious PR stunt. You want a room for a preposterously low price (no idea if it’s actually 1$, but it’s certainly VERY cheap)? GREAT! The only catch is that there’s a camera in your room and it’s livestreaming to YouTube 24/7 (but don’t worry! The bathroom’s off-camera!) – still interested? Judging by the current streams, there are at least a couple of people who don’t mind this; frankly the entertainment value to viewers at present is…low, as one of the rooms is currently empty and the other features a young man sitting on the bed watching his laptop. Still, maybe he’ll start cracking one off soon, so best keep watching. This is obviously VERY SILLY, but equally I feel you can probably rip this off as a stunt in the UK next year when the internet has forgotten all about this.
• Creepyface: I recently discovered the BEST agency website I have ever seen (thanks to Josh, iirc), in which every time you hovered over one of the staff portraits it animated, like the newspapers in Harry Potter, showing them doing some sort of ‘funny’ office activity, like answering the phone, or, er, typing – it is honestly AMAZING but I can’t link to it because it’s a really small company somewhere outside London and, honestly, it would feel like kicking a puppy. Anyway, in semi-related news (seamless, as ever), Creepyface is a site that lets you create quick-and-easy animated portraits of yourself or indeed anyone else you’ve got access to photos of in the classic ‘watch as my eyes follow the mouse pointer’ style – simply upload photos of you looking in 8 different directions and VOILA! Your very own follow-y gif! Please, can one of you persuade your office to down tools this afternoon and make one of these for all of you? Come on, you can turn it into some sort of festive digital game or something. It’s not like you’ve got any work to do (HA! LOL! WHY DOES EVERYONE DECIDE TO PUT BRIEFS OUT IN DECEMBER YOU ABSOLUTE FCUKERS???).
• Red Bull Illume 2019: Or, more sensically, ‘A bunch of great photos of people doing outdoorsy, exercisey, extreme sports-y things, submitted to Red Bull as part of their annual photo competition celebrating exactly those sorts of pursuits’. Some wonderful images here, as you’d expect, though if you’re anything like me your aesthetic appreciation might be tempered a bit by a general feeling overwhelming physical guilt at your own indolence and lack of anything resembling visible musculature. Small aesthetic observation here – all these really are wonderful pictures, but man is HDR deadening as an effect after a while; supersaturation really does breed contempt.
• Bauhaus Everywhere: The second Google arts & culture project in here this week is this comprehensive, fascinating look back at the Bauhaus School – the institution itself and the style it birthed. Bauhaus stuff has been everywhere this year, given it’s its centenary, and this is a superb anthology of information about the school and the artistic movement as a whole, looking at its most famous alumni, the influence of its aesthetic not only on art but on design, architecture, fashion and beyond, AR models of Bauhaus designs, 360-degree videos…there is SO MUCH in here, and if you’ve any interest at all in the visual design of the 20th Century then you’ll adore this. Semi-related; this novel, about the Bauhaus school during the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany, is WONDERFUL and one of the best things I’ve read this year.
• Beards and Moustaches: The US National Beard and Moustache Championships was recently celebrated in the US; this is a collection of photos of some of the celebrated attendees. On the one hand, there are some quite incredible facial hair styles on display here, and the degree of sculpting and grooming and facial topiary here is astonishing; on the other, every single person in these images gives me very, very strong “Hi, I’m really into craft beer and Rick & Morty and a few not-totally-leftfield-but-still-quite-intense conspiracy theories; want to chat?”-vibes. Maybe I’m just jealous.
• The Designer’s Republic: Older Web Curios readers and those who pay close attention to my prose (AHAHAHAHAHAHA WHY DO I BOTHER?) will remember The Designer’s Republic and the great affection I hold in my heart for their work, which for me sort of defined the mid-90s aesthetic for a while at least. Anyway, they are BACK! This is their new website and it’s LOVELY and, honestly, I want to find a reason to work with these people, if only so I can get them to design me my very own Wip3out ship.
• Diagram Codes: This is very clever – a bit clunky, not that pretty, but very clever indeed. This site lets you build out charts in your browser, but putting together simple natural language commands; you can create flowcharts with conditions and dependencies and suchlike. If you code, you’ll be able to start using this immediately (but, then again, you can probably use proper tools to make these things so, well, you probably won’t need this), but even though it might look a bit daunting at first I promise you that it’s really not. Can the people behind this make a prettier version, please? Says the entitled little fcuk in the corner.
• Dima K: I am an absolute sucker for voxel art – that is, that design style that creates digital images that look a little bit like they’re built in Minecraft and then viewed in tilt-shift – Dima K is a rather good voxel artist who makes lovely little semi-rural scenes showing autumn colours and scarecrows and steam trains passing by, all in the manner of tiny, slightly cute videogames. I am, as per, describing this appallingly badly, but do take a look despite my failings; this is gorgeous, and a style that’s horribly underexploited in terms of advermarketingprcontent imho.
• Robbie Barrat: Barrat is a digital artist who’s done a reasonable amount of quite high-profile work around the intersection of AI and art; this is his website. On the one hand, I APPLAUD the extent to which he’s leaned in very hard to the late-90s aesthetic; on the other, it, well, doesn’t really work very well in terms of anyone being able to find out much useful information about him. Which maybe is the point. Still, another entrant in this year’s strong field of contenders for the coveted ‘Matt’s favourite unnecessarily fun creator’s website of 2019’, which I’m sure will prove a great comfort.
• 3d Printed Pokemon: I know that I have banged on here more than necessary about the fact that I was too old to get into Pokemon as a kid and so therefore don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about; this week was another moment where I observed popular culture going sort of mad about a new Pokemon game and was forced to just sort of shrug in bewilderment. HOW DOES IT MEAN SO MUCH TO SO MANY PEOPLE? Honestly, I’ve read three individual personal essays with memories of Pokedex past as a central theme in the past five days alone and I have QUESTIONS, let me tell you. Anyhow, if you are part of the generation(s) for whom Pokemon is more than just a slightly-enhanced version of Rock, Paper, Scissors and instead is something more akin to a religion then you will LOVE this YouTube channel (finally, we get somewhere) in which a Japanese person slowly, methodically and with quite incredible skill recreates individual Pokemon using a 3d printing pen. The artistry here’s remarkable, and there’s something VERY ASMR about the films; also, though LOOK AT ALL THE POKEMON! You weirdos.
• The Cannabot:A Twitter bot which punts out imagined varieties of weed along with short descriptions of the strain’s effects and tasting notes. This is remarkable in terms of how well it’s nailed the tone and style of these; well done to the creators for paying close attention to cannabis marketing materials. One of the few likely downsides of the legalisation of weed is the prevalence of terrible weed bores (see also: coffee, beer, wine) who will wang on at you forever about the optimal indica/sativa mix required to attain a really persistent left-brain concentration high with a slow glide-down – MATE IT’S LITERALLY JUST FLOWERS THAT MAKE YOU A BIT STUPID STOP WANGING ON PLEASE.
• Quote Replies: A genuinely useful Chrome plugin which lets you see all the quoted replies to a given tweet with the touch of a button. If you’re a CONTENT FARMER who ever needs to do roundups of ‘today’s funny viral thing on Twitter’ then this will be a GODSEND (for the rest of us, it makes deskbound timewasting and distraction significantly easier than it tends to be, and for that I give thanks).

By Eelus

NEXT, GIVE THE LATEST EDITION OF JONATHAN MAY’S INTERNATIONAL AIRSPACE A LISTEN? HE PLAYS CRACKING TUNES FROM ALL OVER THE SHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY DOES ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH THIS VIDEO REGARDLESS OF YOUR POLITICAL PERSUASION BECAUSE, HONESTLY, THIS KID IS AMAZING AND DESERVES TWO MINUTES OF YOUR TIME, PT.2:

• Surveillants: This is, sadly, not an online project, and you’ll only be able to see the actual thing if you’re able to make it to a gallery in New York next week, but I love the idea (and, frankly, the name) so much – SURVEILLANTS! DO YOU SEE! It’s an artwork made with ants, “tracking the behaviors of a colony of living ants, visualizing their movement patterns over time. It’s a visual exploration of collective intelligence and connections that can be drawn between the guiding instincts of life at all levels.” Basically it traces the movements of the colony over time, generating visuals from said movements to create an artwork;SO many ideas from this, not least one about getting a brand to get its new logo design or overall brand from some sort of ant-based starting point. Why? WHY NOT FFS WHO SAYS THERE NEEDS TO BE A COHERENT RATIONALE BEHIND ANYTHING IN 2020??? That’s it. I’m calling it, someone’s going to launch the world’s first arthropod design atelier next year (they’re not).
• Who Can Use: Not interesting but useful for the designers amongst you – who can use lets you input your colour palettes and will then tell you if there are any obvious accessibility issues resulting from your choices. Useful if you care about inclusive design (which you should, you monster).
• Predicting Human Bloopers: Well, not quite, fine, but it’s a slightly catchier title than the original. This is only a research paper at present, but the idea contained within it – to whit, that machines can be trained on videos of people fcuking up in comedy, slapstick ways and through said training develop an understanding of what the conditions for us stacking it are likely to be and, as such, begin to start predicting when we’re about to take a massive, slapstick tumble – is GREAT. On the one hand this presages all sorts of fascinating safety features – if you extrapolate this (very) far into the future, along with improvements in drone technology, you get to a point not a million miles away from Iain M Banks’ Culture in which small flying robots are always unobtrusively around to stop you tripping and falling off cliffs. On the other, just IMAGINE this being applied to every single security/CCTV camera in the world – a neverending stream of perfect FAIL vids, enough to keep the Candid Camera morons happy for millennia! Whichever way we choose to use this imminent technological bounty, I think we can all agree we’re in for some pretty special times ahead.
• Unlocked Recordings: I was convinced I’d featured this already, but seemingly not – this is the Internet Archives collection of vinyl recordings – small at the moment with only 750-odd exemplars, but seemingly growing all the time as library collections of old vinyl get uploaded. As I type, I’m enjoying the ragtime sounds of Knuckles O’Toole; you can stream all the recordings, complete with the crackle and hiss of a AUTHENTIC OLD RECORDS, as well as downloading the audio files in a variety of formats; if you mess around with music, this is a pretty incredible place to dig out obscure samples with that pleasingly lo-fi aural aesthetic that’s so in vogue right now.
• Unapp: A collection of minimalist, useful, single-purpose apps. Really nicely designed, and a few of these – like the one that lets you share a link to let anyone upload files directly to your Dropbox – are really quite useful indeed.
• Puff: I mean, this isn’t particularly clever or funny, but at the same time I couldn’t help laughing (more than I ought) at this bong, which is in the form of a rubber chicken; take a pull, the chicken squeaks. The third or fourth time you end up nearly coughing your lungs up because you find the squeak SO HILARIOUS when you’re battered may be the time you decide to consign this to the cupboard, but if you know someone who’d really, really like a smoking device shaped like a ‘comedy’ prop fowl then, well, LUCKY YOU!
• Divorced Birds: A slightly leftfield subReddit, whose stated purpose is to collect photographs of birds who look like serial monogamists and who are recently divorced. Interestingly, the description specifies that the birds must look like they’ve been married ‘at least twice’, which is a peculiarly specific aesthetic; what does the twice-married person look like that the once-married doesn’t? Is there a certain haunted cast to the eye? Regardless, enjoy these – basically the captions are all things like “Cheryl never lost the baby weight and Gary hadn’t touched her in years. After the divorce, she completely redid her wardrobe and today, she finally had the confidence to head out to a singles event” and, well, I DIE.
• Dutch Graphic Roots: You’ll probably need to be really interested in the history of Dutch design to get the most out of this site, fine, but if you are really interested in the history of Dutch design then WOW are you going to enjoy this. Profiles of dozens and dozens of the most iconic figures in the history of Dutch graphics work; fine, this probably isn’t really for general consumption, but I like to think that there will be one of you who’s enthused by this.
• House of Sweets: A just-launched Kickstarter for a small, independent horror comic book by Fraser Cambell and Iain Laurie; I first stumbled across Iain’s work earlier this year and featured it in here, and since then I’ve become slightly obsessed with his very, very dark little vignettes and accompanying short, short stories. There’s something in these that reminds me of the most frightening of short stories, the ones that stick in your head because of the things they don’t quite tell you; there was a collection called ‘These New Puritans’ a few years back which contained a story about three people copying snuff tapes at scale in a remote seaside cottage and which, honestly, still gives me the fantods even now; Iain’s work’s a bit like that. Which doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation, I know, but I promise you it’s wonderful – if you like comics, this is worth a punt imho.
• Cocoon: A new social network! Just for families! WHY??? WHY DO WE NEED ANOTHER ONE? WHY ARE FAMILIES NOT ABLE TO USE WHATSAPP GROUPS AND FACEBOOK GROUPS LIKE THE REST OF US?!?! Oh, that’s right, they are able to use Facebook Groups and Whatsapp groups like the rest of us, thereby condeming Cocoon to inevitable failure and obscurity. Sorry, that sounded meaner than I wanted it to, but if your app’s success hinges on people deciding for some reason to not use the most popular platforms in the world and instead choosing yours instead because…actually, to be fair, there are quite a few nice features in this, from the easily-distinguishable threaded chats to enable multiple conversations at once, to the ‘you’re both on the app right now, why not chat?’-type functionality, which is cute. Still, I can’t see this being quite enough to encourage people to attempt to teach Grandad another interface, though if you’re after a family project this Christmas then why not try persuading everyone to sign up and take control of the onboarding process? It’ll be GREAT FUN!
• The Teletext Font: Who doesn’t want this? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Wowen Wilson: I can’t quite tell (though I could probably find out quite easily – readers, it turns out I JUST DON’T CARE VERY MUCH) whether this is an old website preserved in amber or some modern, retro-style ironyfest. Regardless, WHO CARES? Click the link, turn up the volume, and attempt to guess which film each of these recordings of Owen Wilson saying ‘wow’ is from (you see what they’ve done with the URL right? SO CLEVER!). You might not have known that one actor could imbue one single-syllable word with quite this degree of nuance and emotional heft, and yet that’s exactly what Wilson has achieved – an artiste.
• La Blogotheque: One of those links that makes me think that the past 10 years have been for naught and I’ve barely seen any of the internet at all – this has apparently been going for a decade and I’ve only just discovered it, which is a shame as it’s got some GREAT stuff on it. A YouTube channel which presents small, intimate sessions with a range of artists – the hook here is the breadth of performers, who are (based on my admittedly light-touch trawl through a decade’s worth of material) a little more varied than your standard ‘hey look here’s someone you know from electro tracks BUT WITH AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR!!’-type Live Lounge experiences. Basically if you’re the sort of person who broadly agrees with Pitchfork you’ll probably like this stuff a lot.
• Half: Last up in the miscellania, a beautiful little piece of interactive fiction, built in Twine with a few nice graphical flourishes; half is about being of mixed heritage and..oh, here: “”Half” is a series of vignettes detailing the experience of being on the fringe of two identities and the invisible toll it takes. Pulled from memories both good and bad.” Lovely.

By Tom Wesselman

FINALLY THIS WEEK, AN INSTRUMENTAL MIX BY JOSA PEIT WHO IS A FRIEND OF INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE AND THEREFORE KNOWS THEIR WAY AROUND THE DECKS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Raven Kwok: Raven Quok is a digital artist working with procedural generation and other code types to produce unusually beautiful imagery and video, which (to my mind at least) is less coldly mechanical than a lot of the proc-gen stuff you tend to see.
• Cursed Tattoos: I mean, the title really isn’t lying. Some of these might be a little close to NSFW, although I am yet to find anything on there to match up to the gayest tattoo in the world (on the one hand, this is probably quite NSFW; on the other, it’s so jaw-dropping in scope and execution that there’s no boss in the land who wouldn’t join you in gazing open-mouthed in wonder at its magnificence (NB WEB CURIOS DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT THIS WILL IN FACT BE YOUR BOSS’S REACTION)).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Mini House Flip: Thankyou Lauren Epstein for drawing this to my attention – Mini House Flip is a feed documenting the owner’s project to remodel an old doll’s house which, fine, may not sound like the most compelling thing in the world but OH MY GOSH IT IS ALL SO SMOL! SUCH SMOL TABLES AND CHAIRS! Basically, tiny stuff is compelling and ace, don’t @ me.
• Beautiful News, Daily: The news, but presented in really nicely-designed Instagram images by the smart people at Information is Beautiful.
• Coolest Cleats: Or, for the non-Americans amongst you, football boots (or, more accurately, American football boots, baseball shoes, etc). This feed showcases the frankly mental footwear sported by many of the US’s professional sportspeople; the sort of people who get annoyed at the fact that footballers no longer wear simple black and white three-stripes (I, er, may be one of those people, sometimes) will have absolute conniptions at this stuff. Odell Becker Jr’s collection is frankly INSANE.
• Niharika Hukku: Lovely, gentle artwork, often painted on porcelain or pottery, in a modern interpretation of classic Japanese style.
• Aquamike: You know that Russian fisherman who posts all those mental deep see creatures that he finds when trawling the Marianas Trench for sturgeon (or, er, something like that)? Well this is basically the opposite – LOOK AT ALL THE CUTE SMOL TURTLES!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Kevin Systrom Reflects On The World He Has Wrought: Kevin Systrom, lest you forget, is one of the founders of Instagram; he quite noisily quit Facebook last year (was it last year? Sorry, I can’t be bothered to check – see, kids, JOURNALISM!) with an unconscionably fat wodge of cash, and this is the first proper interview I think I’ve read with him since. It’s fascinating – Systrom is clearly a very smart man, and, in contrast with lots of pieces of this type, doesn’t shy away from some of the negative elements of the world that Instagram has created. The funny thing is, the idea of writing that sentence even five or six years ago would have felt hyperbolic to the point of ridiculousness, whereas now…just imagine having invented something that has changed so much of the way in which large swathes of an entire species live their lives. Whilst Facebook’s obviously had a huge impact, it’s not hard to make the argument that Instagram’s been more obviously significant across a wider range of areas; food, architecture, culture, fashion, aesthetics…all of these have been visible altered in ways that can clearly be traced back to the rise of Insta. That’s insane; credit to Systrom for managing to come out of this piece about as well as someone who’s ruined the world can do (OK BOOMER!).
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?: I can’t quite recall how this piece came across my radar this week (because, obviously, Google has made me stupid), but it was fascinating to look back – it’s from 2008, in the Atlantic, and it’s amazing to look back 12 years and note that, firstly, that we were already worried about the web’s effects on our cognitive function even in those relatively early days of mass-adoption, and, secondly, that we are absolutely no closer to having answers to any of the questions raised in this piece, plus we now have a whole load of other interesting toys messing with our brain function to worry about. It’s a really interesting and well-written piece, but it’s perhaps hard not to read it without a slight sense of ‘hm, we…we never really nailed this, did we?’
• The Most Important Politician of the 2010s: I’ll put the spoiler right here – it’s Anthony Weiner. “WHO??” I hear you all cry, along with “Also Matt, why is all this stuff so US-Centric all the time? Where’s all the hot UK election analysis?” To which I respond “look, there is literally nothing interesting to say about the UK election; all participants are dreadful mediocrities and the only reason most people are going to bother voting at all is because one of the mediocrities represents a party which might well be considered to be actively a bit evil rather than just crap”, and “And also, there’s quite a lot to learn from the tale of Anthony Weiner, who you will I am sure recall when I say ‘d1ckpics’ and ‘sexts’ and ‘embarrassing disappearance from US political life’”. Anyway, this is perhaps a bit of a stretch – Weiner isn’t really very important at all – but it does an excellent job of showing quite how mad and unhinged politics has been over the past 10 years and the way in which it and the web now codepend in a way that was unimaginable ten years ago.
• Arundhati Roy on Modi: This is a wonderful, in-depth piece on Modi’s India by the fabulous Arundhati Roy – it doesn’t, unsurprisingly, paint a hugely positive picture of the country and the direction its going in, with the bulk of Roy’s ire being directed at Modi’s effective desecularisation of India as a nation, and the effect that that is having – and is likely to continue to have – on what is in many respects such a diverse country. With the year China’s had we’ve heard less about India this year, but the next decade is going to be absolutely fascinating for the country.
• A Hipster, Green, Vegan Economy Is Not Sustainable: A-FCUKING-MEN AL JAZEERA! Thankyou, Vijay Kolinjivadi, University of Quebec post-doc and author of this piece. It’s so incredibly refreshing to read something that looks at our current preoccupation with ‘being a bit more green’ and points out that it’s not quite doing the hard work of fixing the species-level consumption habits and demands that are sending us careening at a million miles an hour towards an unsunny-seeming future (or, rather, a slightly too sunny-seeming future). “On a global scale, capitalism is most certainly not “cool”… it is literally burning our planet. An aloof, detached, apolitical coolness which centres on individuality and imagery is simply not going to cut it any more.” Well, quite.
• Seizing the Memes of Production: A collection of essays centering on meme culture – “Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production takes advantage of the meme’s subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century’s most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons.” Contains an essay by Friend of Curios Jay Owens which I featured in here last year when it was first written; I’ve only checked out a couple of the others, but they were interesting enough to warrant recommending to you.
• Flying Taxis of the Future: Maybe! Or maybe not! This is a look at the current hype around the potential future flying taxi market – you may not think there’s a lot of hype, but in certain circles this is A BIG THING – and whether it’s justified. I’ve done a bit of research around this market for a few work things in the past, and it’s genuinely fascinating, but, equally, the logistics around how to make traffic work across three planes is, well, mind-fcukingly hard maths. Not to mention the (probable) insane cost of the vehicles themselves – perhaps, as the piece sort-of concludes, the future’s less likely to be democratised access to magical sky-chariots and instead far more likely to be the preserve of seventythree plutocrats, grown rich through evil.
• Microtasks: This week’s dose of ‘well, I didn’t think white collar work could become morelike factory production line work if I tried, and yet here we are!’ comes in the form of this piece in WIRED, which explains how various businesses have experimented with the introduction of ‘microtasks’ into workers’ days; the specific example given uptop of a company surreptitiously inserting tiny data-classification tasks into workers’ Facebook feeds was darkly brilliant. I can totally see how this is an efficient and effective means of getting people to complete small tasks at scale without really noticing it – O HAI GAMIFICATION! – but I can’t help but think it feels not only a bit intrusive (though you could argue that staff shouldn’t be wasting time on the web whilst at work – you shouldn’t, though, you monster) but also like a creep towards a point where you’re encouraged to complete small, piecemeal tasks wherever and whenever you have a spare 5 minutes. Staring off into space and having a little daydream? STOP IT AND CLASSIFY THIS DATA NOW!
• Environmental Degradation As A Service: Wasn’t really expecting to read this in The Face, I must say, but this look at the environmental impact of Cloud Computing is really interesting and not a little worrying; the stat suggesting that nearly 15% of global greenhouse emissions can be attributed to data and IT is a sobering one, not least as this is one area of human activity that we don’t appear to show any inclination in slowing down.
• An Oral History of the Poop Emoji: The second-or-third worst emoji in existence gets an exhaustive explanation of how it came to be. Less interesting on emoji, but far moreso on the cultural significance of the symbol’s usage in the far east, and how its meaning shifts across cultures. Also, the guy who designed the Gmail version talking proudly about how happy he was with the little animated flies is SO cute.
• Meet Jeffree Starr: Films that I don’t think get quite enough credit for being sort-of culturally prescient, part x of y – The Fifth Element. Bear with me here – just read this piece on Jeffree Starr, YouTube makeup community superstar and purveyor of al the tea, take a look at Starr’s aesthetic and watch a few of their videos, and tell me that there’s not a clear throughline from Chris Rock’s character in that movie to this. Anyway, this is a profile of Starr which does quite a nice job of explaining who he is, his position in the ever-shifting pantheon of superstar YouTubers, and how he along with Pewdiepie and a few others embody a sort of post-cancel culture position in online culture. Fascinating – though I’m sure if you’re more familiar with this particular corner of online culture than me it’s probably unforgivably basic.
• How WoW Changed Videogames: World of Warcraft, that is, should the acronym mean nothing to you. I never played WoW, but I did briefly do the PR for it – when we won the account we bought a gaming PC and I desperately tried to see the appeal but, well, no. Still, tens of millions of people really did see the appeal – the numbers Blizzard was doing from WoW in its heyday were insane, and when you read these accounts of people for whom the game very much became their lives you begin to understand why. It does rather become clear reading these stories that whilst the game is obviously designed to be addictive in some borderline-nefarious ways, these are all individuals with some reasonably deep-seated parallel issues and that possibly it’s not all about the evil pixels.
• Inside the Fall of WeWork: Yes, I know, ANOTHER WeWork piece – but this is Vanity Fair, and so contains all the wonderful gossipy details you’d hope for. The quotes that have done the rounds from this are all about Neumann’s hubristic belief that he was one of three people who could ‘fix’ the Middle East, but there’s nearly-equal joy to be found in his wife’s behaviour – I mean, look: “Last year, Rebekah fired a mechanic for WeWork’s Gulfstream, two executives told me, because she didn’t like his energy.” Quite astonishing.
• Hairdryer Turkey: What with being half-wop and spending all my Christmases in Rome, I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten festive turkey (certainly not in adulthood, at least); this year I’m making boeuf bourgignon, from this recipe should you care. If YOU, though, are planning on shoving an outsize bird into your oven in four short weeks’ time, you might want to take a look at this recipe which made its writer, Helen Rosner, briefly famous when she tweeted about it last year. It involves a hairdryer. Aside from anything else, this is a really, really nicely-written recipe which I wish I could say more often.
• Hmong Radio: This is such a wonderful story, about how sometimes technology can be used in unexpected ways by unexpected people to unexpected ends. The Hmong diaspora in the US – an ethnic group from Laos, in the main – have developed a means of communicating with others in their community, regardless of location or distance, by using conference calling. No, really, CONFERENCE CALLING. Someone’s actually found a good use for it! Huzzah! This is such a charming essay, and the image of the auntie DJs keeping it all going behind the scenes is wonderful.
• Ketamine: There’s nothing particularly interesting about Ketamine – apart from in the medical sense – but this piece from NY Mag in the US is sort of quaintly-wonderful, trying to position ket as a sort of mindfulness-aiding calming drug instead of something that makes you literally incapable of feeling your legs for hours at a time. There’s a broader point in here about generational anxiety pointing towards a trend for tranqs rather than uppers (try telling that to the clench-jawed masses across the UK capital, mind), but in the main I just like the fact that I can imagine all the anglos reading this and sort of just thinking ‘aw, bless’.
• Feminism and Feeling Nothing: All about how disassociation, or at least the performative expression of disassociation, is the new hotness in terms of feminist self-expression, and how it’s been embodied or depicted in culture by both Fleabag and Girls. I found this more interesting than enjoyable – on the one hand, I agree that there’s something interesting and revealing about shifts in the way in which a whole class or category of individuals choose to talk about or express themselves; on the other, I also think we’re spending far, far too much time reading a lot into what are equally readable as joke trends that are no more significant than “LOADSAMONEY!!”. Oh, and a personal plea (and I realise quite how hypocritical this is; forgive me, please) – can editors please start commissioning fewer first person pieces about the author’s emotional travails? I don’t mind the travails, honest, it’s the fcuking ‘I’-ness of it all that makes me want to vomit my ring. Thanks!
• Clive James Essays: This links to Clive James own website, which itself links out to some of his writings. I didn’t want to pick one; he was so, so brilliant. As an aside, did anyone else find it weirdly jarring that most of the BBC news pieces (on the Radio at least) referred to him almost-exclusively in the context of TV reviews? Way to reduce a proper polymath, kids.
• Leroy’s Revenge: Finally this week, absolutely one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read all year. Fair warning – it’s about dog fighting, so please don’t read this if you find descriptions of violence committed by and on animals upsetting. If you can stomach it, though – and it is a bit gruesome – then the storytelling and prose here is absolutely superb. It’s an old piece, from 2013, but it stands the test of time quite wonderfully. Apart from anything else it made me wonder whether any of the people in this are still alive – part of me doesn’t really think so. There were several points in this that made me exclaim out loud; it really is that brilliant.

By Katja Farin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Are you planning on doing a lot of acid this weekend? Or even a little? In which case cue this up and ENJOY – it’s a 3d mandelbrot thing and it’s quite, quite mesmerising:

1. This is called ‘Slumlord’, it’s by Baxter Dury, and it’s like a sort of weird funk beat poetry…thing, which gave me really strong ‘Keith Talent from London Fields’ vibes (the line about ‘murder shoes’ in particular is pure early-Amis). It’s ace:

1. This has more views than I’d normally countenance, so apologies if you’re already familiar with it or if it’s famous on the radio or something; it’s GREAT, though, so not too many apologies. It’s by Black Pumas, it’s called ‘Colors’, and it’s an absolutely cracking song:

1. This is ‘Single Mothers’ by the wonderfully-named Nihilist Highlights, and it’s shouty and gobby and angry and punky and very, very NOW indeed. Maybe this Universe is cursed:

1. Finally this week, this is the second time I’ve featured Mattiel on here this year – the voice is still absolutely fcuking amazing, she sounds like Nico, and love it and I love her and I LOVE YOU BYE IT’S TIME TO GO BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND I WILL SEE YOU IN SEVEN DAYS’ TIME FOR ANOTHER LOVELY, FRIENDLY FEW THOUSAND WORDS OF WEBSPAFF BUT IN THE MEANTIME HAVE FUN TAKE CARE BE WELL AND TRY NOT TO WORRY BECAUSE FRANKLY YOU MAY AS WELL JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS AND TRY NOT TO CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!!:

20 days left. 20 days. At least there’s one less ‘leader’s’ ‘debate’ to get through (both those words doing an AWFUL lot of heavy lifting this week), but otherwise this week’s been largely free of positives. Although I did meet a friend who’s standing as an MP (no, I don’t understand either) and got to hear first-hand about the CRACK SUPPORT TEAM they’ve been granted by the party – sadly I can’t talk about it, but know that however amateurish and two-bit you imagine local party politics to be, well, man, you have NO IDEA. 

Anyway, I am having friends over this afternoon and I need to make some sausage rolls (yes, that is exactly the sort of person I am, what of it?) and wash and not be in my pants and stuff, so I’m going to cut this bit short this week. Console yourselves with the fact that there are some genuinely CRACKING links this week (THEY ARE CRACKING EVERY WEEK FFS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU FCUKING INGRATES) and they will take you all the way through til hometime if you let them. Take a breath, sit back, flex your clicking finger and prepare to get Clockwork Orange-d by a whole week’s worth of webspaff, firehosed into your face like some sort of lumpy, information-rich soup (let’s call it soup; it’s safer) – I’ll be back to wipe you down later. 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you may not want this but you certainly need it. 

By Eloy Morales

FIRST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, LET ME ONCE AGAIN PRESENT NICK WALKER’S SPECIAL MIX FOR CURIOS LISTENERS, MAINLY BECAUSE I MANAGED TO BALLS UP THE URL LAST WEEK (SORRY NICK)!

THE SECTION WHICH RATHER THAN BANNING POLITICAL ADVERTISING ON S*C**L M*D** WOULD INCREASINGLY PREFER IT IF WE JUST BANNED POLITICS INSTEAD:

• Twitter Fixes The Thorny Issue of Political Advertising Once and For All!: HA! FOOLED YOU! It’s in fact done nothing of the sort! The fact that there have been more column inches devoted to analysing the Tories’ ‘Factcheck’ stunt on Tuesday than to this suggests that either noone actually bothers reporting on detail anymore, instead choosing instead to focus on announcements (seriously – number of articles in the UK press lauding Dorsey’s decision to do this a couple of weeks ago? Dozens. Number of articles offering a nuanced appreciation of the eventual policy since it was published last week? Fcuk knows, but I’ve not seen any), or that everyone’s looked at this and gone ‘well, it’s just sh1t, isn’t it?’ The new rules – which apparently come into force today – offer a reasonably simple definition of ‘political’ ads which are no longer allowed: “content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome.” The trickier bit comes with its changes to the terms around ‘issue’ ads, which will restrict targeting of ads which “educate, raise awareness, and/or call for people to take action in connection with civic engagement, economic growth, environmental stewardship, or social equity causes”, and which prevent for-profit organisations from running ads which have “the primary goal of driving political, judicial, legislative, or regulatory outcomes; however, cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics.” Which, clearly, is an incredibly elastic definition. How does Twitter distinguish between an advert seeking to ‘facilitate public conversation’ on, say, immigration, with one designed to drive an electoral outcome designed to loosen or tighten controls? What’s the difference between an advert designed to stimulate healthy debate around a woman’s right to reproductive choice and one actively advocating for a specific regulatory framework on abortion? Who knows? Clearly not Twitter’s legal team, who can expect to spend countless hours debating the philosophical minutiae of questions such as these. Bad news for anyone hoping to get clarity on how social platforms’ influence on society can and should be regulated; GREAT news for lawyers who can expect to get fat off the profits from these sorts of arguments!
• Facebook Launches ‘Whale’: Or at least in Canada they do. Whale is the latest toy to emerge from Facebook’s NPE team (the internal skunkworks set up earlier this year to drive innovation / shamelessly copy the featuresets of other, cooler platforms), and it’s basically a meme-creation tool; upload photos, play with templates, create photo stickers, draw freehand…basically it’s like all the creative tools from Insta and Stories all sort of chucked into one place with a vaguely ‘Hi, Fellow Kids!’ vibe to it; you’ll need a VPN to get it if you’re outside the snowy wilds of Poutineland (I could probably have just typed ‘Canada’ again there and saved myself the trouble, on reflection), but it doesn’t really seem worth it.
• Facebook Adds New Brand Safety Controls for Advertisers: Basically this is a series of updates which makes it easier for brands to limit the type of content their ads will feature alongside when buying inventory on Instant Articles or the wider Facebook ad network; selected brands can now upload whitelists of approved sites (this will roll out to everyone in the near future), and advertisers can now apply white/blacklists at a campaign level rather than an ad set level, making it easier to ensure that you’re promo for baby food doesn’t end up on something from The Daily Stormer. Sensible, and the sort of thing you ought to be aware of if your clients are as tediously risk-averse as mine tend to be (WHY WON’T ANY OF YOU LET ME RUN A CAMPAIGN ON PR0NHUB FFS???).
• TikTok Tests Social Commerce: We’ve spoken often enough about the way in which the web has meant everything now runs at 100x speed, and things that might have taken years to reach maturity now have the average lifespan of a Mayfly; so it is with TikTok, which started the year as THE HOT NEW THING SHINING A LIGHT ON THE MAGICAL DIVERSITY OF THE WORLD, morphed into a worldwide talent show to be stripmined by creative directors the world over (I SEE YOU, PERSON BEHIND THE M&S CHRISTMAS ADVERT), and is now hurtling towards the cynical monetisation phase; I predict the first raft of ‘why TikTok is played out’ thinkpieces to land in mid-February 2020. Anyway, that’s by way of a pointlessly-digressive way of introducing the news that the platforms soon going to let you sell rubbish to children directly through the app, with a ‘link in bio’-type feature. It’s hardly an e-commerce innovation, fine, but watch the TikTok meme merchandise economy go mental as soon as this gets rolled out fully.
• Snapchat To Fact Check Political Ads: Just in case you were a political party and needed to know if you could lie on Snap or not. There was an interesting piece the other day about the cost-efficiency of video ads on Snapchat and how Labour had managed to get 1m+ views for a spend of about 3k or similar; the fact that everyone’s now moved on to gazing lustfully at TikTok means that you’re not competing with that many other advertisers for eyeballs, making it a potentially really cost-effective route to young hearts and minds. Interestingly (to me), you can also download the full inventory of political ads placed on the platform in 2018 and 2019 from the site; you get ALL the info, from the person who bought the ads, to the targeting options selected. See Facebook/Twitter – if Snap can do it, why the fcuk can’t you?
• Google Maps To Integrate Local Guides’ Tips: This is interesting. Google is set to experiment with adding content from ‘Local Guides’ to map listings in a variety of locations, including London. The deal is that users in the selected cities “will soon see top Local Guides featured in the For You tab of the Google Maps app. When you follow one of these Local Guides, their recommendations will be surfaced to you in Google Maps, so you can get inspired with ideas of things to do and places to go.” Local Guides are, I think, just Google’s name for ‘people who leave loads of reviews and tips on Google Maps’, but, if this becomes a Thing, they’re also potentially very influential people indeed, particularly if you’re in the food/booze/bar/club business.
• Google Clarifies Political Ad Policies: And another one! Basically this says ‘no lying, and no targeting aside from geography, age and gender’, but it’s worth reading the whole statement. This will be enforced in the UK starting next week, as far as I can tell, so, you know, BE AWARE.
• Changes To Kid-Focused YouTube Content: This is quite big, I think, but hasn’t received that much attention. YouTube’s asking creators to start specifically flagging content they upload that is aimed at a child audience, basically to help secure kids’ safety on the platform; to quote the piece, “if creators mark a video as directed at kids, data collection will be blocked for all viewers, resulting in lower ad revenue, and those videos will lose some of the platform’s most popular features, including comments and end screens.” Exactly what constitutes ‘kids’ content’ isn’t clear (this seems to be something of a running theme at present; shall we just turn off the web for a while and spend some time just really nailing these definitions?), and YouTube is seemingly saying that it’s up to creators themselves to determine whether or not the stuff they make falls into this category. Oh, and you could be sued if you don’t declare something as being ‘for kids’ and then YouTube decides that in fact it is. This sounds like an INCREDIBLE mess, coming to a channel near you in 2020.
• How To Recognise AI Snake Oil: Not strictly to do with advermarketingpr, fine, but I really would love every single one of you to give this at least a cursory skim; it’s a really useful, well-written guide to some of the most prevalent bullsh1t AI claims, which will be useful not only as it’ll help you determine when clients or prospects are lying through their teeth about their products, but also (hopefully) because reading it will make everyone in this bloody industry stop spaffing the term ‘AI’ all over the place without having the faintest inkling of what the everliving fcuk they are talking about.
• Orchard Station, Singapore: Finally this week in the ‘vaguely professional’ bit, this is one of the nicest sites about an ongoing construction project I have ever seen. It’s to inform people about an ongoing development happening on the Singapore Metro, being undertaken by a company called (I love this name) Soletance Bachy, who apparently do foundation and excavation work. Regardless, LOOK how lovely this is; it sort of reminds me of Wip3out, if you know what I mean, and it’s proof that you can make even something quite mechanical and industrial look interesting and appealing with some smart design choices.

By Alexey Kondakov

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE CENTENARY EDITION OF JED HALLAM’S LOVE SAVES THE DAY NEWSLETTER PLAYLIST, WHICH I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING FOR THE PAST HOUR AND I CAN HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

THE SECTION WHICH IS NOW INCAPABLE OF LOOKING AT NIGEL FARAGE WITHOUT SEEING SOME SORT OF WEIRD KNOCK-OFF MUPPET BEING USED IN SOME SORT OF END-OF-THE-PIER ‘ADULT’ PUPPET SHOW, ALL FAGSMOKE AND UNPLEASANTLY-STUFFED FELT MEMBER, AND WHICH IS SORRY FOR SHARING THAT THOUGHT WITH YOU BUT, WELL, TOUGH, PT.1:

• Emoji Storm: Honestly, it’s all I can do to not just open this up and stare at it for the next 5 hours, Curios be damned – thankfully for all of you, I’ve got iron self-control. Emoji Storm is a neat little bit of coding by software engineer Robert Lesser which displays a constant falling stream of every single emoji being used on Twitter, in realtime. It’s MESMERISING, like some sort of realtime emotional barometer of (a very small percentage of) the planet, and I suggest you put it up on a telly in the office and just let it run all afternoon. I would love to see this during a major international news event; it would be a fascinating reflection of global mood. Still doesn’t explain the inexplicable popularity of the cry/laugh emoji (the most basic of ALL the emoji, please don’t @ me), though.
• NASA’s Visual Universe: This is lovely – a wonderful combination of smart use of AI (it really is AI, promise) and excellent, fascinating photography. This is a Google Arts project, which has taken hundreds of thousands of photos from NASA’s archive and used machine learning to analyse and classify them; the interface then presents the images in associated ‘clusters’ based on what they depict. This is presented as a sort of zoomable constellation of thematic clusters, which you can navigate around to explore the images; this is SUCH a wonderful and fascinating collection, and the interface is beautiful, and it’s such an on-point illustration of what you can use this stuff for (to whit, brute force taxonomical classification at scale) – as well as being an absolute timesink if you’re into space and the history of its exploration.
• AI vs AI: Another machine learning project, this time focused on language rather than imagery. I have no idea who this project is by – there doesn’t seem to be any ‘about’ info on the site, so no clue whether there’s some sort of political agenda behind it – but it’s an interesting idea; “The media landscape of Russia is monopolized by the government. Russia-1 channel – the key figure in this monopoly – uses propaganda techniques to influence the worldviews of Russians. TV Rain on the contrary is the only independent liberal media that gives its audience many different perspectives on life in Russia and abroad. To demonstrate a subtle difference between the news on both channels and how they affect people worldviews we created two pristine AIs. They were like twin kids who didn’t know anything about this world and had no life experience. Their minds were pure, so we brought them up on the news programs of Russia-1 and TV Rain channels respectively. In six month each AI had its own worldview formed through the lens of the media it was watching. The differences in their worldviews and vocabularies proved one thing.” As with all these projects, the output from the machines is a bit clunky; there’s no doubting the clear difference in the worldviews espoused, though, and it’s fascinating to see the world through two such distinct prisms. I’m not sure what this usefully tells us about anything – after all, noone consuming this sort of information is doing so in a vacuum, unlike the AIs – but as a piece of digital art I am very much a fan.
• The Information is Beautiful Award Winners 2019: Another year, another tip-top selection of glorious dataviz selected by David McCandless and team (is there a team? If it’s just you, David, blimey you work hard); there’s some truly stellar work, as ever, some of which I’ve featured on here before but much of which is totally new to me. Pick your own favourites – I’m personally slightly in love with the ‘mountains of light’ work, visualisation light pollution as topography, but basically every single thing here is very, very good indeed.
• Laniakea: An interesting way of displaying information from a document set (thrilling description, I know, but bear with me), Laniakea is (I think) a product being peddled by Fathom, a data-wrangling company; the idea is that it analyses a document set and maps what it finds according to the most ‘meaningful’ content, allowing for quick oversight of themes, topics and connections. They’ve got a few examples on the site, including one displaying the ‘map’ (they end up looking vaguely cartographical) of a section of Wikipedia; it’s really, really interesting, and a potentially really useful way of getting an overview of a complex wodge of information, though I’m slightly annoyed that I can’t zoom and pan around the visualisation (it’s disgusting how entitled I am, really).
• Create Your Own Google Earth Tours: This is SO COOL. Google this week opened up the ‘Tour Creation’ feature of its Earth product to everyone – meaning that now anyone can make a swooping, soaring, magical 3d tour of the globe, based on whichever waypoints they choose. Want to map all the holidays you’ve ever taken and take a zooming tour of them? Go for your life! Want to create a poignant, sad journey around every single place you’ve ever broken up with someone? Ok, you miserable fcuk! The tours are obviously shareable, and I am genuinely excited to see what (more creative) people (than me) make with this; I think there will be at least one BEAUTIFUL music video. Please, give it a try and see what you come up with (and share the results with me).
• FakeTextFinder: Not the technical name, but at least it’s descriptive. This is a browser extension (available for Chrome and Firefox) which will, it claims, identify GPT-2-generated text on a webpage at the touch of a button, thereby protecting you (in part) from the scourge of fakery and LIES. I tried it out on the algoCurios over at webcurios.co.uk and it flagged all of them; a relatively low bar, admittedly, but still. If you’re paranoid that everything you read on the web might be a machine-generated lie then, well, you’ve got problems, mate, but this might also provide some small crumb of comfort.
• The Brexit Party: This week’s reminder, if you’ve not seen it, of the importance of buying your domain names.
• No-Wash Trousers: At the time of writing this has 6 hours left to go on Kickstarter – it’s 10x-funded, which is testament to exactly how many people really, really hate doing laundry. Would you buy a pair of trousers that advertised themselves as ‘self-cleaning’, or would you think ‘hm, no, that sounds a bit disgusting and also I quite like clean clothes’? ‘The outside repels liquids and semi-liquids [what the fcuk are ‘semi-liquids’?] while the inside is anti-bacterial and odour repellent’ – lovely, eh? Whilst on the one hand the idea of trousers that you can’t stain is…good?, the implication that ‘you don’t need to wash them!’ is a touch less appealing. Also, now I come to think of it, the term ‘odour repellent’ is…odd. Does it bounce smells away? No, I don’t think I’m going to buy a pair. Also, FCUK ME THEY ARE 100 QUID THAT IS MENTAL.
• The Open Diaries: Oh blimey, there is a LOT in here. The Open Diaries is an app for diary-writing; no particularly interesting frills or features, other than that you can choose whether you want your diary to be private or public; if public, anyone can read it on the accompanying Open Diaries website. There’s a surprising number of people using this, and agreeing to make their personal musings publicly visible to the world, and, honestly, I could spend all day on here. The quality of the writing is…variable, and as ever with stuff like this you wonder to what extent the writing would differ were there no audience, but this is basically an emotional voyeur’s dream. I promise you, if you’re in any way curious about people and their inner lives, you will find a lot to love in here. Also, as a place to experiment with an epistolary novel this isn’t bad (because I know that that’s what you’re all desperately searching for, right?).
• Rosebud AI: This is an interesting idea, but one which really doesn’t work at all at the moment. Rosebud’s a service which is hoping to create an entirely AI-driven stock photography market, with images manipulated by machine to enable people to change the faces of the models at will; the idea being that you only need a relatively small library of images, because you can swap the ethnicity and facial features of the models at will. At present, the platform has a bunch of stock photos on it that you can switch the ethnicity of; there’s an ‘upload your own photo’ feature coming soon, which will in theory allow you to graft anyone’s image into any photo you like. Except, well, it really doesn’t work at all; the current setup makes every single person look a bit like an eerie space alien, whichever face you apply, and it’s hard to see how the specific software models its running on will ever be quite good enough to make this work in a way that anyone might actually use. Don’t get me wrong, this will absolutely become A Thing; I just don’t think it’ll be this particular version of the tech.
• All of the Decade Reviews: Rex Sorgatz is doing God’s work by compiling all of the lists raking back over the past 10 years in one place. Here you’ll find all the ‘best films of the 2010s’, ‘best albums of the 2010s’, ‘best games of the 2010s’ and, bafflingly, ‘the 19 most iconic Keanu Reeves moments of the 2010s’ (thanks, Buzzfeed!), just in case you really want to wallow in nostalgia as this sh1tty, sh1tty decade draws to a wheezing conclusion.
• Trump Only Listens To Trump: A cute idea, taking clips of Donald Trump’s voice, cutting them up, Cassetteboy-style to make it sound like he’s acknowledging the reality of climate change, and giving you the opportunity to tweet these clips at him in the almost certainly entirely futile hope that he’ll listen and have some sort of Damascene moment. Interestingly, this is made by a LARGE AGENCY GROUP which is too craven to actually talk about it publicly because their big bosses are worried about alienating Republicans – the bravery of adland is always a genuine joy to witness.
• Ht The High Notes: Matt Round’s had a very good year creatively, churning out excellent webtoys and silly gubbins at a rate of knots. His latest is this brilliant, very silly browser game, which I advise you to make everyone you work with play this afternoon. It’s a simple challenge – the site asks you to hit the same note as a bunch of different famous singers singing famous songs as a fun way of testing your vocal range; it’s literally impossible not to smile whilst doing this, and I promise you will hate your colleagues marginally less when you’ve seen them tunelessly-straining for a high C in front of a bemused office.
• Laser Discontent: I said to someone earlier this week, whilst acknowledging the banality of the observation, that 2019 really has been the year in which we drop the ‘sci-fi’ from the phrase ‘sci-fi dystopia’; the footage from Hong Kong this week was quite astonishing, from the anime-stylings of the protestors to the very, very scary futurefashy look of the police (I know that fashion is not the point here, but aesthetics are culturally interesting to me) – this collection of photos showcases the other massively sci-fi thing that’s become a real thing this week, the use of laser pointers as a surveillance disruption technique. These are some incredible images, which I would love to be able to send back in time about 30 years to scare 90s me out of his lazy, stoned complacency.
• The Comedy Wildlife Photo Winners 2019: Comedy critters! So many comedy critters! You might have seen a few of these already – the one of the buffalo having its swingers threatened by a peckish lion is a bona fide classic – but I promise you that the whole selection would cheer you immeasurably. Whoever titled the images wants shooting, mind.
• Speaking: A site collecting all sorts of potentially useful tips and advice on public speaking, for those of you who don’t enjoy showing off in front of an audience. Amazingly, ‘imagine the audience naked’ isn’t one of the pieces of advice.
• Recursive Design: This is…oh, look, here: “Built to maximize versatility, control, and performance, Recursive is a five-axis variable font. This enables you to choose from a wide range of predefined styles, or dial in exactly what you want for each of its axes: *Proportion, Monospace, Weight, Slant, and Italic*. Taking full advantage of variable font technology, Recursive offers an unprecedented level of flexibility, all from a single font file.” This may not sound interesting, but click the link and have a play and prepare to have your tiny mind BLOWN. This really does slightly baffle me, in the best possible way.
• Border Tuner: In my opinion a far better and more interesting US border artwork than the swings from earlier this year, this is a project currently being undertaken by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at the US/Mexican border; “Three interactive stations on each side of the border will control powerful searchlight beams using a small dial wheel. When lights from any two stations are directed at each other, microphones and speakers automatically switch-on to allow participants to talk with one another, creating cross-border conversations.” It’s worth reading the ‘concept’ page in full; it’s a really thoughtful piece, subtle and effective.
• Red Panda Finder: Red Pandas are obviously PREPOSTEROUSLY cute – this site lets you search the world’s zoos to see which ones currently have one in their collections, and helps you find the nearest one to your location. At a loss as to what to do this weekend? Why not go and see a red panda? It’ll be fun!

By Xiao Zexie

NEXT, WHY NOT CHECK OUT SLIPBAK, A PRODUCER FROM KENYA WHO MAKES WEIRD, UNCOMFORTABLE, SLIGHTLY INDUSTRIAL, GLITCHY BEATS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS NOW INCAPABLE OF LOOKING AT NIGEL FARAGE WITHOUT SEEING SOME SORT OF WEIRD KNOCK-OFF MUPPET BEING USED IN SOME SORT OF END-OF-THE-PIER ‘ADULT’ PUPPET SHOW, ALL FAGSMOKE AND UNPLEASANTLY-STUFFED FELT MEMBER, AND WHICH IS SORRY FOR SHARING THAT THOUGHT WITH YOU BUT, WELL, TOUGH, PT.2:

• Looom: This isn’t technically out yet, but you can sign up for the waiting list; if you have any interest at all in animation, this looks like an amazing app. The blurb says it’s been inspired by music composition tools, which I am personally slightly baffled by, but the videos of it in action show a tool that is beautiful (really, really lovely interface) and seemingly pretty simple to use. Definitely worth checking out, whether you’re already an animator or if it’s just something you’d be interested in playing around with.
• Football In Qatar: I’ve featured Goal Click on here before a couple of times, and it’s made my a couple of friends of mine; no shame in featuring it again, though, as they’ve just launched a whole load of really fascinating content about football culture in Qatar ahead of the World Cup in 2022. It’s nice to see stories of real Qataris talking about what the sport and the tournament means to them, and the photos – taken by local residents using disposable film cameras, as is always the Goal Click way – are great.
• The Soup Map: Thanks to Joe Muggs for featuring this in his (excellent) newsletter and thereby bringing it to my attention. It’s a map! Of European soups! If you ever wanted to go on an entirely soup-led pilgrimage around the continent, sampling watery delights from everywhere from Hungary to Finland then this is almost certainly the planning tool you’ve been dreaming of. Even if not, who doesn’t love an exhaustive deep dive into the joys of soup? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Onomatopoeias: A selection of those onomatopoeic ‘POW’, ‘BIFF’, ‘CRASH’ signs from old-school Batman. Tell you what, I would really like it if the next decade saw a reversal of the 2010s trend for ‘gritty’ reboots and instead went the other way, reimagining entertainments as boldly-coloured, ridiculous 1950s pastiches. I want to see Breaking Bad but redone in the style of I Love Lucy, basically.
• The Lockpicking Lawyer: Would you like to watch a series of videos in which a faceless, anonymous lawyer picks hundreds of locks with quietly dispassionate skill, all the while narrating his progress with a series of incredibly arcane and (to me at least) borderline-nonsensical terms. There is no reason why this should be as compelling as it is, but, honestly, I just fell into a small, unexpected ASMR trance while one of these played in the background. No idea if it’ll teach you how to become a master criminal, though.
• The Food Place: The Good Place is the only famous TV show of recent years I’ve watched (I was suckered in by the philosophy) (he says, like the appalling, pretentious snob he is); this is a lovely little fan site by Lynn Fisher, presenting a menu for a Good Place eatery and featuring a bunch of gags and callbacks referencing the show’s characters and situations. You’ll need to know the programme for this to make any sense, mind.
• Buy A Missile Silo: Do you have a spare $400,000? If the answer to that is ‘yes’, then please stop reading this immediately and drop me a line as I have an exciting and foolproof business proposition for you! Or, alternatively, why not invest in this well-appointed (if a little rusty) Arizona missile silo? Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, 20 minutes from Tucson, and very much the sort of thing that an aspirant supervillain might consider as a starter lair. To be honest I’m less interested in the Silo itself than I am in who the eventual buyer might be; to does feel a little bit like it might end up as the final resting place of a doomsday cult, but here’s hoping I’m wrong about that.
• The Cash Railway Website: Cash railways, for those of you not already familiar with the concept, are those systems used in shops back in the day to move money or small inventory items around a large space with minimal effort – like the vacuum tubes that you occasionally see in opticians, for example. This website is an exhaustive celebration of the cash railway in all its many forms, and it’s the sort of pleasingly-shonky hobbyism that Curios basically exists to celebrate. The man behind the site is called Andrew – Andrew, I applaud your dedication to, and love for, the cash railway. HAIL ANDREW!
• Open Memory Box: Oh wow, this is a historical goldmine. Open Memory Box is an online collection of old home movies from the former GDR, capturing East German life between the 50s and 1990 in all its glorious beauty. There’s SO MUCH to enjoy in here, and there’s always something particularly beautiful/poignant about watching strangers’ home footage, I find; there’s a sort of sad ephemerality about it , a sense that noone you’re watching exists any more and you’re peering through the net curtains of their past (or there is if you’re me, at any rate). The videos cover a huge range of events, from weddings to street parties, birthdays to scenes of domestic ennui – honestly, this is a quite incredible website and quite incredible resource, and I could watch clips like this one all day.
• Placement: This is an interesting model. Placement is a jobsearch service – the gimmick being that they promise to find you a healthy salary increase in exchange for you paying them a percentage of your new salary for 18-36m (depending on the terms you select). It’s a US service, and it sort-of makes sense there, where it’s far more normal for people to up and move halfway across the country to a totally new city for the sake of an extra $20k a year; Placement will take care of moving, help you find an apartment, and a bunch of other stuff; the cost seems HIGH, frankly, with the examples they give on the website seemingly suggesting that you’ll effectively be netting out at a couple of hundred bucks a month additional income while you’re paying the fees on your salary; which, frankly, doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to up sticks and move to Incest, Idaho for A N Other marketing gig.
• Good Sign Offs: A list of creative alternatives for you to sign off your emails with. There are some beauties in here; I particularly like “Nobody is above the law’ as a sober sign-off, although “See you in hell” is also a strong contender.
• Make Your Own XKCD-style Charts: You’ll need a bit of light codewrangling ability to do this, but should you wish to make all your graphs look like Randall Munroe’s signature hand-drawn style then this will teach you how.
• Legit: I can’t imagine this ever taking off, but I do rather like the concept. Legit is an app that lets users publish lists of stuff they’re watching, reading, eating, etc, alongside their reviews and ratings; anyone can follow anyone else’s feed of ratings, turning the whole thing into a neat-sounding reviews and recommendations site. The appeal here is the light-touch sound; I quite like the idea that I could just quietly post one-line reviews of the books I read and that anyone could equally-quietly follow said reviews if they for some unaccountable reason gave a fcuk about my opinions. I know that there have been variants on this idea before, and none of them have really caught on, but I do think there’s something in the idea if not this specific execution.
• Qello: I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this; Qello gives the impression of something that’s been going for ages, but oddly has never crossed my path before. It’s a really impressive resource – subscription-based, fine, but if you’re into live music and music documentaries, etc, it’s got a staggering libary of official gig footage available to stream on demand – although sadly no Jandek. Particularly good if you like CLASSIC ROCK, but there’s a reasonable amount of recent-ish stuff too.
• FYTA: A PODCAST! This is a reader submission, sent in by Foivos Dousos (THANKYOU FOR READING, FOISOS DOUSOS), and it sounds really rather interesting: “FYTA present a series of 26 thematic shows, one for every letter of the english alphabet. Each show introduces concepts, philosophers, poets and music projects whose name starts from each specific letter. In alphabetical order, FYTA re-examine and re-define the world of proper names. The ABC of FYTA heralds the coming of a new language; it is essentially a dictionary of pulses and pauses, a study in nominalism, a post-punk pilgrim, an educational radio program for the masses who struggle to understand the new reality of our times. From Theodor Adorno to Alekna Zupancic and from Aunt Sally to die Zwei the ABC of FYTA will categorise an impossibly chaotic world of influences and contradictions.” I mean, that sounds basically perfect, doesn’t it? Give it a listen.
• Guess My Word: This is brilliant. Simple, but brilliant. Each day, a new word is there to be guessed. You type in a guess, hit submit, and the site will tell you whether the word you’re looking for is ahead or behind the one you submitted in the alphabet. Rinse and repeat til you’ve guessed the word of the day or you give you (DON’T GIVE UP). This shouldn’t be as much fun as it is – and maybe, if you’re not me, it’s not fun at all – but I’ve played it every day this week and am genuinely looking forward to doing so again later (my life is so empty).
• The 2019 IF Competition Winners: I know I featured this earlier in the year, but I make no apologies about doing so again now that they’ve picked the best of this year’s entries. If you’ve never played an IF ‘game’ before, PLEASE give one a go now – it’s such an interesting medium, and people are making some truly great stories across styles and genres; if nothing else, I think this is a hugely underexploited medium for BRANDED CONTENT (no, really), so maybe that will be enough to tempt you in (but, if it really took a mention of ‘branded content’ then perhaps it’s time you maybe reevaluated your priorities). Try Turandot if you want a flavour; fun, ribald, pacey and nicely-written.
• The Bastard Game: I mean, it’s not technically called that, but it’s pretty much the best description I can think of for it (thanks Sherlock for sending it to me); try playing Tetris and Snake, simultaneously, using the same controls. Lose in one, lose in both. Death is inevitable (in game as in life), but how long can you stave off the inevitable for? This is basically like rubbing your belly and patting your head simultaneously while riding a unicycle or something.
• Tweetjam: Finally in this week’s selection of miscellania, the entrants to Tweetjam, in which participants were challenged to come up with tiny games, the code for which would fit into two Tweets. The ingenuity on display here is AMAZING, and a couple of the games are actually quite fun which is far more than I was expecting. There are 60-odd games, so there’s bound to be something in here which will prove more appealing than work for the rest of the day. I mean, look, it’s TINY GOLF ffs!

By Drew Simpson

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THIS SUPER-CHILLED CLASSICAL/AMBIENT MIX BY SANTILLI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Fcuk Yeah Book Arts: Books! Art! Art made from books! All of that! In a Tumblr!
• Eating Streatham: There are, apparently, 60 eateries on Streatham High Road. The person behind this is going to review all of them. They’re only one down at the moment, but I wish them all the luck and perseverence in the world; I imagine there will be some absolute horrorshows as part of the series.
• Beeple: Excellent, weird, pop-culture scifi art. One of the pictures is called ‘Buzz Lightyear Nuclear Holocaust’, which probably tells you all you need to know about the style here.
• The Best Crap Estate Agent Photos Ever: Fine, this is a single post rather than a whole Tumblr, but I promise you that these are worth it. Even if you think you know bad property photos on the internet, even if you’re jaded by the seemingly-neverending parade of ‘cursed X’ memery, I promise you that there will be stuff in here that will make your eyes widen in confused disbelief.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Bernhard Lang: Bernhard takes aerial photos. This is his Instagram, full of, er, his aerial photos. These are SUPERB.
• Fashion For Bank Robbers: ‘Contemporary Masks and Headpieces’, runs the description, but trust me – this is Cremaster-era Matthew Barney-levels of odd.
• The Greater Bombay: I had no idea at all that cabbies in Mumbai often paint the ceilings of their cabs in vibrant designs; this feed collects photos of said taxi ceilings in all their glory.
• Coin Op London: Launderettes, in all their slightly dowdy, 70s-scented non-glory.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Hong Kong in Photos: Not just in photos – this is a really interesting take on the protests by California Sunday Magazine, which in this photo essay presents a series of accounts of the lived experience of the protests by a variety of native Hong Kong citizens, some involved, some not. There’s been relatively little reporting that I’ve seen of the wider public attitudes to the movement amongst the ‘average’ residents of the territory, and it’s fascinating to hear the gently contrasting opinions here canvassed.
• Chinese Millennials: A very non-LRB article in the LRB this week (which itself is I suppose quite an LRB thing), painting a picture of the ‘millennial’ class in China (though, as here, ‘millennial’ is a silly and unhelpful classifier; Chinese youth tribes tend to be stratified by decade of birth rather than as a single lumped-together coterie. Taking you through attitudes to fashion and commerce, to politics, love and relationship, this is a neat, if necessarily superficial, portrait of a generation.
• Suppressed Reality: This is actually a recent edition of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s newsletter – Boris is CEO of The Next Web, and writes weekly about tech and…stuff. This essay intrigued me; his observations about Apple’s latest Airpods feed into a lot of things I’ve read this year (some of which I’ve included here) about the strange way in which Airpods change our relation to each other and the space we’re in, and the slight…well…rudeness inherent in not signalling to others whether you’re listening to them or not. This piece specifically looks at the various noise-reduction/cancelling options available to users of the new kit – and made me think, a lot, about a future in which some of us can basically tune out stuff we don’t like and others, well, can’t.
• The ‘Magic’ of AR Glasses: A companion piece to the previous one, this looks at the parallel tech developments in visual AR which will mean that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we might be able to wander around with fancy tech-specs which magically filter out all the ugly or unpleasant things we don’t want to see, or make the world generally look shinier, more exciting and more appealing than it in fact is. On the one hand, GREAT! Let’s BLOCK OUT THE UGLY! On the other, does anyone else feel that people wearing digital blinkers to hide some of the unpleasant realities of life (like, I don’t know, the homeless) from their vision feels a bit, well, appalling? Anyone? Oh.
• Livestream Shopping: As we prepare to embark upon the annual Western orgy of needless consumption that is Black Friday (and absolutely fcuk you MechaBezos for making this a think the world over), it’s worth looking at China’s just-passed Singles Day for a glimpse as to how this might all evolve. Aside from the numbers being terrifying (Alibaba alone did nearly $40bn of business on Monday – that is a MENTAL sum, and only a fraction of the total spend), there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff happening from an advermarketingpr point of view – this piece looks at the phenomenon of Livestream selling, where influencers stream their shopping experience and earn revenue from affiliate marketing when viewers purchase something linked from their feed; I reckon there’s DEFINITELY some PR mileage in being the FIRST (well, ish) UK retailer to do something like this; liveshop the Boxing Day sales, anyone? I mean, it would be a hellish and slightly evil thing to do, but it would probably do you good business, so, well, here we are.
• Pixar’s Sand: In the main, I try and avoid linking to stuff that I really don’t understand, mainly because I worry that I’ll misexplain it horribly and will end up looking like a moron. Still, I am linking to this one despite only understanding about one word in seven (this is only a slight exaggeration) because I understand just enough to grasp what an incredible thing it is that it’s describing. Basically, if you want the precis, this is all about exactly how Pixar animates sand – honestly, it’s MIND-BLOWING.
• The UX and UI of Bongo: A serious exploration of the design of bongo sites, specifically the various Tubes, and how that aesthetic and UI works on us on a psychological level – and how certain tricks and techniques are bleeding into more mainstream digital design practice. Really interesting, even if you’re not a designer – there’s a throwaway line at the end of the piece, about the extent to which refinements and developments in bongositedesign have to a degree impacted real-world sexual behaviour, which really feels like it’s worth a separate essay and deeper investigation.
• Even Nobodies Have Fans Now: Long-term readers, or indeed anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of working with me, will have heard me quote Momus’ observation that ‘in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people’; this essay is about that very thing, specifically the slightly odd intimate connection that develops between podcasters and their listeners. There’s undoubtedly something quite particular about the experience of having someone’s voice inside your ears for prolonged periods of time that forges a certain connection, but I might make the case that the same applies to writing as well. Except obviously it doesn’t, because I don’t have any fans (this is the moment where should any of you feel compelled to do so you might want to write in and say “No Matt, I am a fan!”, at which point I will doubtless succumb to some sort of unpleasant swelling of the ego and will start referring to myself the third person or something).
• Sofar, So Bad: I had vaguelyu heard of Sofar before this piece, but didn’t really quite know what it was about – which obviously means I’m too old and uncool to be part of the target market for their ‘music events for people who don’t like music very much but quite want to have something inoffensive on in the background’. I’m not, it’s fair to say, hugely miserable about it. The piece is very good on the general trend toward the commoditisation of culture as lifestyle accessory, whether for brands or individuals; it feels very much like this sort of thing is the next iteration of the ‘Museum of Icecream’-type Instapalace; events that combine a narrow range of generic-youth-interest-elements in aesthetically-pleasing fashion but with no depth whatsoever, designed to present the idea of something rather than the thing itself. Do you know what I mean? I can’t imagine you do, that was spectacularly ham-fisted writing. Sorry. Anyway, read the piece and then maybe you’ll see what I mean. Maybe.
• Audiobook Stars: From the Guardian, so apologies to any of you who’ve already seen this one – it’s great, though. Tim Dowling’s a gently brilliant writer, and this look at the audiobook industry (specifically the people who record them) is fascinating. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any extended periods of time reading aloud (obviously if you’re a parent this probably isn’t news to you), but it tends to make me INCREDIBLY sleepy; I have no idea how Stephen Fry managed the Harry Potter books, I’d have been narcoleptic by the first mention of Hogwarts (maybe the money helped) (and speaking of money, it’s interesting that at no point here is there any mention of how much you trouser for this sort of thing…).
• Babies & Vegetables: A really interesting look at the baby food business, and whether or not kids have an innate dislike for vegetables or not. Not just about that, fine, but there’s a lot in here about how you can maybe trick your kids into eating more kale when they’re small.
• Stopping Being A Nazi: Truly fascinating and weirdly uplifting Reddit thread in which former members of White Supremacist groups share the stories of the moment they decided to stop being Nazis. There are some crazy tales in here, but it’s interesting that there’s a commonality of experience amongst many of the authors; lots of them simple realised that the people they were hanging out with were, well, cnuts, and so stopped. Which also, now I think about it, does rather make me wonder whether they sorted out the ‘racism’ thing or simply just decided to stop being friends with other racists. Hm. Anyway, this is interesting and the sort of thing that I at least had never really read before.
• 75 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Peanut Butter: If you’ve ever worked in the industrial content production business then this piecein McSweeney’s will be so, so close to the bone that it might well make you weep.
• How To Begin A Novel: I tend not to really enjoy ‘funny’ AI stuff that much, in the main because the vast majority of it is so doctored by human hands that it’s not actually anything to do with AI at all (I’m looking at YOU, all you ‘we fed an AI all the scripts of Friends and this is what it came up with’ articles – I KNOW YOU ARE LIES); this, though, is by the ever-excellent Lewis & Quark and so I know it’s legit. This article looks at the first lines of novels produced by the updated GPT-2 software which I featured the other week – these are GREAT, and I would totally read a book of short stories where each one starts with one of these lines (actually that’s not a bad idea; someone commission that).
• Squish Me Tender: On ASMR and eroticism, and the slightly uncomfortable place where the lines between the two things intersect and blur a bit. “ASMR has built a sensuality that is not, in every case, intended to be sexual but may be indicative of a populace that craves to be held. One of the most enduring stories in Christianity is the idea that Mary gave birth without having sex – the divine infant written into being like code. I wonder if it’s the kind of imaginative leap that would help to think through ASMR. In some ways it’s a similar act: its inexplicability is part of its power. Would ASMR be half as fun or healing if we knew exactly how it worked? ASMR does something to us that is not altogether sexual but might be verging on intimate in an immaculate kind of way.” IT’S NOT A SEX THING FFS.
• I Bought An Elephant: An amazing story in which the author starts out investigating the elephant trafficking business in Laos and ends up getting more involved in the process of large mammal liberation than he might originally have envisaged. This is a great piece of journalism and a wonderful story, but it’s also very depressing from the point of view of the elephants. I don’t imagine that the treatment in Chinese zoos is…great (although part of me – a bad part, I concede – does rather fancy the idea of driving through the lion enclosure in a Chinese safari park in a car with steak stapled all over it, which apparently is A Thing (sort-of)).
• My Life as a Child Chef: The author writes about his passion for French cookery as a child, and how he dreamed of being a professional chef, and then how he slowly lost that dream as he grew older. This is lovely, not just in terms of the writing about food (which is knowledgeable and passionate) but also because of the slightly elegiac tone of the whole piece, particularly on the abandonment of childhood dreams.
• What Is A Website?: I love this SO MUCH. Laurel Schwultz writes here about what a website is in a philosophical sense, and, honestly, if you have any interest in the idea of the web as a space then this is a must-read. Even if you don’t, please do give it a go – it’s clever like little else I’ve read this week, and it made me think genuinely differently, which is no small praise from someone as tediously-predictable as me.
• Gimme Shelter: Finally this week, an essay about living in a shed in San Francisco. Beautifully-written – look, have the opening paragraph and then make yourself a cup of tea and read the whole thing, it’s superb: “That year, the year of the Ghost Ship fire, I lived in a shack. I’d found the place just as September’s Indian summer was giving way to a wet October. There was no plumbing or running water to wash my hands or brush my teeth before sleep. Electricity came from an extension cord that snaked through a yard of coyote mint and monkey flower and up into a hole I’d drilled in my floorboards. The structure was smaller than a cell at San Quentin—a tiny house or a huge coffin, depending on how you looked at it—four by eight and ten feet tall, so cramped it fit little but a mattress, my suit jackets and ties, a space heater, some novels, and the mason jar I peed in.”

By Lindsay Pickett

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s be clear, a whole decade’s worth of pop songs condensed into one 3m mashup is an unholy, godless mess – but, well, it’s also an amazing aural picture of the past 10 years. I wonder if it would be easier to do this between 2010-20 than it would have been between 2000-2010 due to the homogenisation of production styles that we’ve seen over the past decade? Or am I just being an old person complaining that IT’S NOT EVEN MUSIC ANYMORE FFS? Hm. Anyway, this is DJ Earworm, and this is appalling:

1. This, though, is SUPERB and such a clever idea; a timelapse of NYC made entirely from other people’s Insta shots of the city’s landmarks. Brilliantly made – if a bit dizzying – and proof that everyone really is basic when it comes to tourist photos:

1. This is by Vegyn, and there’s no way I can explain this but this track made me marginally more optimistic about life and the world than I was before I heard it. No idea why, but it might do the same for you. It’s an excellent, oddly beautiful instrumental called Debold:

1. This is called ‘Melatonin’, it’s by Vogue Dots, and I cannot understand how it only has :

1. HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week, this is called ‘Pesto’ and it’s by Web Curios favourite Wiki (who I’m pleased to see still hasn’t fixed his teeth), and it sounds quite a lot like the feeling of being really quite unpleasantly stoned on badly-cured weed (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky) and THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK EVERYONE THANKS AS EVER FOR JOINING ME ON THIS WEEKLY PILGRIMAGE THROUGH THE FRINGES OF THE WEB AND PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND I’LL SEE YOU BACK HERE IN A WEEK (UNLESS YOU UNSUBSCRIBE WHICH OF COURSE IS FINE BUT KNOW THAT I WILL MISS YOU) AND THAT WILL MEAN THAT THERE WILL ONLY BE THREE WEB CURIOS LEFT IN THE DECADE AND OH GOD I REALLY HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR ABOUT TEN YEARS THAT IS HONESTLY MENTAL PERHAPS I SHOULD GET HELP ANYWAY I DIGRESS I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU PLEASE COME BACK I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HI EVERYONE! An extra special HELLO to any of you who are reading this for the first time, having taken the ill-advised decision to sign up to this as a result to me telling you to at the end of a lecture!

It’s been…well, it’s been another week, frankly, and that’s the best I can say about it. I know that reusing stuff you previously wrote elsewhere is a really rubbish thing to do, and it’s even worse if the ‘elsewhere’ is Twitter, but I honestly don’t have better words to describe my feelings about Christmas advert season so I’m just going to go with what I wrote yesterday, to whit: the species-level cognitive dissonance required to live in a timeline where we both rail against the climate crisis AND annually celebrate ads from companies whose sole raison d’etre is to get us to buy more stuff we don’t need at massive cost to the planet is *dizzying*. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, OUR CEASELESS DESIRE FOR MORE STUFF, SHIPPED ALL OVER THE WORLD TO ARRIVE CONVENIENTLY AND HAPPILY ON OUR DOORSTEPS WHENEVER WE WANT IT, IS PART OF THE FCUKING PROBLEM HERE AND THE SORT OF THING WE MIGHT WANT TO PERHAPS LOOK AT ADDRESSING.

Oh dear, and I’d largely managed to keep the rage in check whilst writing this week’s edition. Hey ho! I’m off to attempt to calm myself down via the medium of a long, long lunch; if I were you, I might consider some valium or some ethanol or some skag. Or maybe just take a deep, deep draught of the digital laudanum that is Web Curios – thick, bitter and not a little soporific, and guaranteed to provide at least a small degree of comfort or distraction, at least until the awful things manage to claw their way through the fug. 

I am Matt; this is Web Curios; don’t let it get you down, whatever you do. 

By Ted Pim

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH THIS SUPER-ECLECTIC SELECTION BY NICK WALKER WHICH HE COMPILED ESPECIALLY FOR *YOU*!

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GLAD THAT IT’S WRITING THIS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF TWITTER’S ‘HOW THE WHOLE BAN ON POLITICAL ADS IS GOING TO ACTUALLY WORK’ GUIDELINES LATER TODAY AS THE THOUGHT OF TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THAT BASED ON A CURSORY 5-MINUTE READING AT 6AM ELICITED ACTUAL HORROR ON WAKING THIS MORNING:

• Facebook Pay: Another expansion to the Facebook ecosystem with the announcement of Facebook Pay, which, in the US at least, will roll out in the coming weeks and provide a single, seamless payment experience across the Facebook app ecosystem (or at least across FB and Messenger – Whatsapp and Instagram integration is a bit down the line), integrating either a users debit or credit or their PayPal account. The best bit? YES THAT’S RIGHT KIDS IT’S ANOTHER FCUKING AD TARGETING DATAPOINT! The small print acknowledges that, whilst specific information about your card and bank account won’t be available to advertisers (I mean, you’d sort of hope that would be the case – not really sure that this is the reassuring news you were hoping for, Mark), you will see ads based on the stuff you buy! The example given in the announcement is the banal, benign ‘buy a baseball bat on marketplace and you might see an ad for a baseball glove’, but the announcement is interestingly light on exactly how this will expand the portfolio of options available to advertisers; actual purchase information is hugely valuable stuff, and Facebook being able to let you target ads at ‘people who’ve recently bought product category ‘X’’ would be no small deal. Another potential way to target people with EXCITING BRAND-RELATED MESSAGING? Truly, it is a blessed day to be alive!
• Messenger Updates for Brands: I find it moderately hard to get excited about – well, anything at all, frankly (such a ball of anhedonic ennui here!), but specifically Messenger updates. Still, if you’re more able to feign enthusiasm for tweaks to chat interfaces, then perhaps this suite of announcements (relating to ‘Click to Message’ in-app ads, automated conversational openers for brands to implement, and a small quality-of-life update which makes it easier to track which message in a conversation a business is referring to) will make you momentarily joyful.
• Instagram Continues Testing Like Removal: First in the US and now globally, it seems that the platform’s doubling-down on the idea that hiding ‘Like’ counts is the thing that’ll magically make using Instagram better and healthier for everyone. It’s being tested with a ‘small’ proportion of global users, and is definitely still not definitively going to be implemented across the whole app, but, well, it’s seemingly only a matter of time. Cue ANOTHER raft of ill-thought-out thinkpieces about what this will mean for the influencers (WON’T SOMEBODY THINK ABOUT THE INFLUENCERS?!?) – frankly I’d be more worried about what it will mean for agencies. I mean, how are they supposed to pull together spurious, ill-considered lists of suggested influencer partners for their clients without the ability to scan for like numbers? Anyway, this is still a test, so everyone can keep the grifty merrygoround going for at least a little bit longer yet.
• Instagram Reels: Or, Facebook Does TikiTok! In Brazil! Reels is, let’s be clear, a total rinse of the Chinese sensation, offering users the ability to “make 15-second video clips set to music and share them as Stories, with the potential to go viral on a new Top Reels section of Explore. Just like TikTok, users can soundtrack their Reels with a huge catalog of music, or borrow the audio from anyone else’s video to create a remix of their meme or joke.” Sound familiar? It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment goes; regardless, consider this another step in the inexorable march towards all of human experience being communicated via the medium of vaguely-sassy viral dance moves by 2025.
• Twitter Set To Roll Out Changes To RT Mechanics: Or at least that’s what this article says; I’ve not seen any other evidence of this, but apparently it’s a-coming. Basically it’ll start giving people the option to RT with an emoji, thereby, the platform homes, limiting people’s desire to use the quote-RT as a mechanism to ‘dunk’ on people, as they term it (or, in British English, to sh1t all over them and their STUPID opinions with a withering put-down or a simple ‘look at this cnut, let’s all make their life a living hell for the next 24h or so’). No brand implications here other than the opportunity to make some sort of extremely-online joke about the changes for approximately 730 likes when they eventually hit.
• Twitter and Deepfakes: Who should decide what Twitter’s policy on deepfakes is? Jack Dorsey? Twitter’s legal team? Their ethics counc…HA! THEY DON’T HAVE AN ETHICS COUNCIL! No, the decision rests with us, dear Twitter users, who this week have been asked to fill in a survey to offer our opinions on the measures Twitter ought to take to attempt to guard against the spread of false information in the shape of faked audio or video. My pointless snarking aside, this obviously isn’t a terrible idea at all – I mean, why not ask the users? – and the general principle they seem to be leaning towards (that of flagging and clearly marking such material as being contested or downright faked rather than removing it) seems like a sensible one.
• Bank With Google!: I suppose when you’ve won advertising you might, like Alexander, get to weeping at the thought that there are no more kingdoms left to conquer; unless you’re Google, of course, in which case you would simply look over at an adjacent kingdom like, say, banking, and think ‘yeah, OK, I’ll have that too’. This is the announcement that Google’s going to be joining Apple and launching its own bank; called ‘Cache’ (at least right now), details are reasonably scarce, but, as with Facebook, the big draw for Google (aside from world domination) is the sweet, sweet flow of consumer data available to the people who hold the purse strings. Nothing really to see or do here at the moment, certainly for those outside the US, but don’t expect Google’s encroachment into new products and services, ostensibly far removed from its tech origins, to stop at this.
• Snap Launches Specs v3: This really didn’t generate much news at all – unsurprising, perhaps, as it’s an iterative update rather than anything truly ‘new’, but also a reflection of the fact that there’s still no real mainstream demand for smart glasses at the moment. Still, this long-ish review of the product is quite interesting in terms of the directions in which the tech might develop; the lines from Spiegel about the slow change in usage patterns of phone cameras, and the way this has changed our relationship with photography slowly-but-inexorably over time, are genuinely interesting. Oh, these glasses also look a little less like something you might get free in a Christmas cracker, should that sort of thing matter to you.
• WordPress Adds Recurrent Payment Options: You can basically run a Patreon-equivalent monthly fan subscription service directly through WordPress should you so desire. Might be useful, might not.
• Strategy Is Your Words: This has done the rounds of the STRATEGIST NEWSLETTER ECOSYSTEM (I am officially declaring this a thing, whether you like it or not), and whilst I don’t know Mark Pollard at all, and whilst I have never knowingly read a business book in my life, much less one on ‘strategy’ (a word that, honestly, I hate SO much it makes me slightly angry every time I type it), lots of people whose opinions I respect have spoken about him and this book in glowing terms, and it’s funded on Kickstarter with just under three weeks to go and so, look, here. It might be really useful, and Pollard’s at pains to describe it as not in fact being a business book, so that’s good enough for me. It’s about the practice of doing ‘strategy’ (ugh) in agencyland, and seems, from what I can glean, to be quite sensible-sounding. Worth a look if, like me, you have a stupid, made-up job in which you think far too hard about largely meaningless, pointless things relating to brands.
• Remembrance Island: It was Remembrance Sunday last weekend, as I am sure you were all aware, and whilst England decided to basically go full Mark Francois by dressing a football mascot as a poppy and carpet-bombing the white cliffs of Dover with poppies from a WW2 bomber (of all the mad things to happen this year, that might be my favourite – the most Brexit thing EVER), the Canadians decided to…er…MAKE A MEMORIAL IN FORTNITE! To quote the release, they created “a custom Fortnite island featuring recreations of First World War trenches, D-Day beaches, a Canadian military cemetery, the well-known Vimy Ridge memorial cenotaph and more.” On the one hand, this is a genuinely bold way of educating a whole new generation about history (or at least it would be if any kids actually used this – it’s a custom Fortnite map, meaning players needed to actively opt-in using a specific code, meaning I would be willing to bet the actual number of kids reached with this is approximately nine); on the other, can you IMAGINE the Mail, Express and Telegraph’s reaction had this been done in the UK? Mark Francois would have EXPLODED. Or, possibly, done a livestream with Ninja. It’s really hard to tell here at the fag end of the second decade of the twentyfirst century.

By SAEIO

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS OF GREAT SONGS YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD OF BEFORE, WHICH INCLUDES THE FANTASTICALLY-NAMED ‘IT’S CHOADE MY DEAR’ BY ONE CONNAN MOCKASIN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY GOLDSMITHS STUDENTS WHO STUPIDLY SIGNED UP THIS FOR WHAT YOU’RE CURRENTLY READING, PT.1:

• WikiTribune Social: A NEW SOCIAL NETWORK! FROM WIKIPEDIA! FOCUSED ON NEWS! Except you can’t try it out yet, sorry – instead, you can sign up to it and join the waitlist for it to start slowly letting people in; the idea, though, is that it’s a development of the existing WikiTribune platform, layering on a bunch of social features to the existing news-focused site. Exactly what these social features are going to be and how it’s going to work is unclear; what is clear is that the site is VERY KEEN to get you to pay for it. Which, frankly, seems reasonable enough, although I’d be a little more inclined to part company with cash if, in exchange, Jimmy Wales gave me some sort of minor inkling as to what I’m forking out for. The only sort of detail was provided in Wales’ interview with the FT, in reported that users will be able to participate in discussions in a news feed similar to Facebook. Will this break Twitter’s monopoly on newschat? Will it become the new home of slightly-angry, largely ill-informed political chat for the masses, like Facebook? No, I don’t think it will, but I’ll be more than happy to be proved wrong.
• The Big Tactical Voting Comparison: I was listening to the Moral Maze this week on Radio4, because that’s the sort of high-octane middle-aged life I lead when I’m not writing my fingers to bloody nubbins for you, and they were debating the morality of not voting; I have never before felt so strongly that we really, really need a ‘none of the above’ box on the ballot paper, to help properly gauge the level of popular disgust with the available options and to offer a way out for people who firmly believe they should vote but who really, really don’t want to back any of the current shower. Anyway, there’s been something of a kerfuffle about tactical voting recommendation sites over the past few weeks; this site offers an overview of four of them, so you can plug in whichever constituency you like and it’ll tell you how a selection people recommend you cast your vote to keep the Tories out.
• The Constituency Data Motherlode: If you’re of a wonk-y bent, this is a really good site, collecting a vast quantity of per-constituency information; demographics, voting records for the past three elections (General and Euro), that sort of thing. Detailed and very much for the political scientists, lobbyists and, well, politiconerds (not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things. Except for the lobbyists).
• The Amazon Chat Dataset: This is REALLY useful, or at least it is if you’re in the business of attempting to develop conversational interfaces or just if you want a massive corpus of natural-language conversations to mess around with. The corpus of conversations is taken from human-to-human interactions on Mechanical Turk, and is broken down by subject and conversation-type; the idea is that this can all be used to train conversational interfaces or neural nets to better-simulate natural chat. This is, obviously, HUGELY techy and of no practical use to most of you, but it’s also indicative of the sort of data sets that are increasingly just being thrown out there for researchers to mess with; I’m fascinated to see how this sort of thing accelerates the development of language interfaces over the next few years.
• Soundboard Games: That’s not what this website’s called, but, well, I have no idea at all how to describe it, and the url’s just confusing. Basically, as far as I can tell, this is a series of (delightful, beautifully-made) soundboard experiences – choose your card from the deck, click one of the robot icons that appear (I have no idea what the difference is between them, perhaps you will find out), and experience one of a series of unique little sound games; I played one in which I got to create music with an alien and a robot, and another in which I had to play a ‘Simon’-style music memory game in which the sounds are pig farts. It was great! This is rather lovely, and the art style’s very cute.
• Seuss Yourself: The site’s actually called ‘Your Ham Face’, and it’s a promo for the new ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ animated series which is apparently out soon/now; regardless, what it ACTUALLY is is a little webtoy that lets you create a Dr Seuss-style character to resemble yourself, much in the manner of the one that did the rounds a decade ago when the Simpson’s Movie came out and there was a brief flurry of everyone on Facebook having a jaundiced, cartoon avatar. I’ve had a bit of play around with this and am seemingly incapable of creating anything that doesn’t look like some sort of sinister, cartoonish sexual predator, but perhaps that’s more down to my questionable aesthetic choices than any inherent flaw in the tool itself.
• Minecraft Earth: Weirdly I’ve not seen this get any coverage at all this week, which seems strange given how much chat there was when it was announced earlier this year. Still, IT’S NOW HERE! I haven’t tried this, if you or your kids are Minecraft fanatics then I can’t imagine there’s any reason why you wouldn’t be into the mobile AR version – the scope and potential here is huge, and if there’s even a fraction of the enthusiasm for this that there is for the standard version then expect to see an AR universe of blocky ziggurats and, doubtless, crudely-constructed cocks to spring up in digital space in no time at all.
• Unmixer: Second week in a row that I’m featuring a very, very clever audio remixing toy; Unmixer is VERY smart indeed, letting you upload any audio file of your choice and then isolating the individual looping elements to let you easily cut, chop and remix tracks to your personal taste. Do this with multiple tracks and you can then do some really rather cool things by fiddling with the individual layers of each in unison; it’s far, far easier to understand if you stop reading my pitiful attempts to explain it and instead just have a go with their pre-uploaded example tracks – honestly, I just had a go and was bopping up and down in my kitchen chair turning loops on and off and basically imagining myself to be some sort of musical alchemist, so Christ alone knows what someone with any form of actual talent could make with it.
• The Goop Holiday Gift Guide: On the one hand, BUY LESS STUFF FOR FCUK’S SAKE OUR ETERNAL OBSESSION WITH CONSUMING THINGS IS WHAT IS FCUKING THE WORLD; on the other, don’t let that stop you from enjoying the now-traditional seasonal pastime of laughing (crying) at the insanity that is the Goop Christmas Gift Guide. This is obviously a smart, savvy piece of marketing by Goop; the insanity of much of the assorted goods is designed to make this go viral, and the online ridicule matters not one iota when there are people out there who’ll look at this and go “Hm, yes, actually the ormulu-and-ostrich-skin condom holder is exactly the stocking filler Charles deserves!”. Click through and find your favourite example of the insanity of late-stage capitalism, or let Chris McCrudden guide you through the highlights in his annual, highly-entertaining Twitter analysis of the best (worst) examples of excess. The $75k family photo album is an obvious highlight, but the marble edition of Connect Four for $1500 is my personal favourite ‘my god you really are a cnut, aren’t you?’ alarm.
• Droplabs EP01: You’ve got your incredible, high-fidelity headphones – what more could you want? Yes, EXACTLY – a pair of shoes that let you FEEL the music through the soles! An innovation literally no people have ever asked for, and yet one which is now HERE, and all for the low, low price of $550. Yes, that’s right, the fat end of five hundred quid for a pair of shoes which will, I guarantee, make the soles of your feet itch like buggery. The blurb suggests it will intensify your experience of music by making you feel like you’re at a gig or club, or make your gaming even more immersive by…er…what, making your feet vibrate slightly if you get shot in Fortnite? This feels very much like the sort of thing that was dreamed up in a PR or marketing brainstorm and which has become reality almost by accident.
• Nourished: Fair play to whoever’s doing the PR for these at the moment, this has been EVERYWHERE this week. Not that it makes me like it any more, but credit where it’s due and all that. Nourished is a new range of PERSONALISED VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS – you answer a series of questions about your lifestyle, health, etc, and the site will recommend a ‘personalised’ vitamin regime JUST FOR YOU; said vitamin regime is then 3d-printed into edible ‘stacks’; basically colourful hexagonal nutrient-packs that you…chew? Suck? Gnaw on? Anyway, these are supposed to provide a tailored, bespoke nutritional supplement boost to your diet, all created on demand for you for the low, low price of…£40 a month! Yes, that’s right kids, it’s SUPPLEMENTS AS A SERVICE! This is a very smart idea on some levels – it pairs appealing futuretech (3d printing! Exciting colourful spacefoodhexagons!) with a very ‘now’ business model and an even-more-now focus on the need for individual, personalised treatments based on the fact that we are all special and unique; except the way they determine the right ‘stack’ for you is via the medium of an online questionnaire, which, while it does offer a lot of potential combinations based on your choices, is actually quite a long way from a proper, bespoke treatment based on your actual physiology.
• Swimply: AIRBNB BUT FOR SWIMMING POOLS! I mean, that’s literally it – obviously based out of LA, Swimply lets anyone with a pool offer it up as a hangout destination, charging people to come along and use it for a set period of time. Which on the one hand sounds like a smart idea – why not make use of an asset that will be lying idle for a significant period of time during a normal week? – and on the other sounds like a recipe for horror. How likely do you think it is that the people dropping by to use your pool for a couple of hours will treat it with the care and respect you’d wish for? HA YOU NAIVE FOOL! Look, maybe I’m betraying my fundamental pessimism about human nature here, but I’d be amazed if you don’t find your pool slightly p1ssier than when you left it. That said, I have just spent three minutes looking at the LA listings and my God what I wouldn’t give for a go on some of those, p1ss be damned.
• Civic Signals: An interesting project, this, seeking to convene ‘urban planners, technologists, designers and community leaders — to tap into the wisdom of physical spaces and envision better digital ones.’ The project’s looking to launch in Spring next year, and is founded by Eli Pariser who you’ll remember as the person who coined the concept of the filter bubble all those many years ago; it’s unclear exactly what the outputs will be, but you can sign up for updates. The idea of a specific institution or research body to examine how to determine the acceptable parameters of civic interactions in digital space seems like a useful one,
• Smore: A new dating app! Which isn’t yet live in the UK! And may never get here! Still, it seems like it has a few interesting gimmicks which could see it gain a bit of traction; its particular gimmick is that it’s not a looks-focused network, instead providing users with information about a potential match without showing you their face. The more you demonstrate an interest in the person, the more physical detail will be revealed to you, with the idea being that you can develop a REAL BOND BASED ON INTERESTS rather than pure animal lust. Which is nice and all, but does sort of rather neglect the fact that physical attraction is quite an important component of dating and that without it all the shared interests in the world won’t make you want to let someone put things inside you.
• Video Game Console Logos: You want a very, very comprehensive collection of logos of old consoles? OH GOOD HERE IS THAT VERY THING!
• Misato Town: This website is all in Japanese and because of the way it’s build it only partially-translates with Google, so I have no real idea what is going on here – anyone able to tell me? I think it’s a website for Misato Town (I am SO CLEVER at reading urls!), but beyond that…nope! Still, regardless, it’s SO LOVELY – the way the parallax works to swoop you down and into the cartoon version of Misato is genuinely thrilling (yes, I need to get out more, fine), and it’s been a while since I’ve seen a site where this sort of thing works so well. As a bonus, the visual style is very cute indeed, and each of the elements as you zoom through is clickable and takes you to an article about some aspect of the town’s life, complete with some rather lovely photograhy. This is charming.
• The Github Archive Programme: We’ve seemingly now got the message that stuff online won’t last forever, that code degrades, that digital storage isn’t necessarily infinite, and that some things are perhaps worth taking care to preserve; to this end, Github’s announced its archive programme whereby it will take open source code and archive it in the Arctic Seed Vault in Svalbard for future generations (feels like a hopeful statement in 2019, frankly) to pore over and make use of. The whole thing feels weirdly hopeful, and made me more cheerful than I imagined the idea of burying computer code under a few hundred feet of permafrost would.
• The Uzbek Underground: These are a year or so old now (THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE FFS) but they’re new to me and perhaps to you too; Amos Chapple visited Uzbekistan and took photos of the metro system in Tashkent. My GOD they went hard on the architecture; it rather puts Oval to shame, even with the book swap scheme and the pot plants.

By Peter Hoffman

NEXT, TRY THIS PLAYLIST OF CERTIFIED CONGOLESE BANGERS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY GOLDSMITHS STUDENTS WHO STUPIDLY SIGNED UP THIS FOR WHAT YOU’RE CURRENTLY READING, PT.2:

• The Most Incredible Comicbook Art Auction: Fine, that’s my assessment rather than an objective one, but none of you come here for objectivity, you come here for ME (you don’t, you come for the links, the words are an unwelcome distraction, I know this and there’s really no need for you to tell me, I promise)! This is taking place in the US and closes in just over a week, and if you’re interested in owning some original Golden Era DC comic art then MY GOD will you be into this – of course, to do that you’ll also need to be willing to drop $300k (at least), but that’s obviously a small price to pay for the original inking of memetic classic ‘Batman slapping Robin’. There are quite a few things under $100 too, so if you know anyone who really wants a Rob Liefeld original (this is a bit of snark that I can’t imagine more than three of you will get, but still) then fill their boots.
• Smol Glass Spiders: Just in case you know anyone whose life would be made marginally better through the acquisition of a smol, hand-blown glass spider. These are weirdly cute, even for a moderate arachnophobe like me, and are really, really (almost suspiciously) cheap; possibly down to the fact that they ship from Ukraine, or possibly because this is all a massive scam. Still, there are plenty of positive reviews, so if you know someone who’d like a vitrine arachnid then this might be the place to get them one.
• US Jingles: There’s a pleasing lack of information or context to this site; it’s just a map of the US that you can click on, state-by-state, to select where you want your jingles to come from; the site with then present you with a seemingly-infinite selection of local adverts from the state you selected, complete with their jingles. You may not think this will be of interest to you, and then you will stumble across something like the Furniture Loft Pennsylvania jingle and your life will be forever transformed.
• Steinunn Hardardottir: Thankyou SO MUCH Dan for sending me this – one of the best (in a certain sense) artist websites I’ve seen in an age, this is the website of Steinunn Hardardottir and her solo musical project ‘Airplane and Spaceship’. MAN is there a strong aesthetic here – the musical style’s described as ‘electronic horror music with a space twist’, but that doesn’t even begin to get to the bottom of quite how marvellous the whole site is. Fun, silly, eye-bleedingly ugly, and even featuring a playable web game to distract you with, this is just charming. Also, as our friend Charlotte put it, the music sounds like the Clangers doing electro, which should be the only endorsement you need to turn it on and turn it up loud.
• The Most Beautiful Shots of the Decade: This is a lovely list, and an unusual twist on the ‘XX of the decade’ roundups. Film experts One Perfect Shot here collect their pick of the best 100 individual shots from the past 10 years of film and television; there are some beautifully-composed images here, but there’s also a series of very clear themes and visual tropes that become apparent as you scroll. Keen students of the Blue/Taupe trend in cinema will be pleased to see that it’s not gone anywhere in the past 10 years.
• Make Your Own Great Bear: Not a massive ursine mammal, sadly; this instead refers to the artwork The Great Bear, which you might not know by name but probably recognise. In it, Simon Patterson took the London tube map as designed by Harry Beck and replaced the station names with artists, musicians, footballers, etc, with each line representing a different category of thing. Terrence Eden decided that he wanted to make his own version; this documents the steps he took to do so, pulling Wikidata to populate the map using some very neat coding. All the necessary bits and pieces required to make this are up on Github, so those of you who like fiddling with data and wrangling code can make your very own version out of whatever Wikipedian datasets you like; this is the sort of thing that would make a WONDERFUL custom gift for a particular type of person.
• The Archaeology of Taste: Oh I love this project! Exploring the way in which food impacts memory and the way in which we recall tastes and flavours and experience, this website collects a series of interviews with a variety of subjects, identified only by their name and age, about their relationship with food, their memories of it, the events and people and places that they associate with specific flavours and dishes…if you’ve ever sat and read Elizabeth David for the writing not the recipes, or enjoy Nigel Slater’s almost pornographic delight in describing his meals, then you will absolutely adore this. Simple, small, often slightly banal personal food histories – I could honestly read this all day.
• The Food Timeline: Literally that – a timeline of foodstuffs, when they were first made (or in some cases invented/marketed), from prehistory to the now. Very, very ugly indeed, but contains a lot of seemingly well-researched information on the history of human nourishment and cuisine.
• The Areo Browser: Would YOU like to explore 3d models of the surface of Mars, right here in your browser? Would you? WOULD YOU? Good, thank Christ for that. The Areo Browser presents a variety of ‘slices’ of Martian landscape which you can zoom and rotate, each presented topographically so you can get a feel for the terrain. I don’t think we’re ever quite as amazed by this stuff as we ought to be – look, ffs, you can examine the surface of an ACTUAL OTHER PLANET while you sit earning money in your pointless white-collar job! Even if you think modernity is awful and frightening (and if you don’t, please, please share your drugs with me) this is still pretty amazing.
• Jackets: The Smithsonian archive is always great, but I stumbled across this very particular slice of its archive this week and it made me oddly happy so I thought I’d share. This is a collection of ALL THE JACKETS in the archive, and despite having all the style and elan of corduroy I was transfixed by the tailoring here; there are some seriously natty threads, not least the Miles Davis-worn number you see right at the top of the page; I like to think at least one of you will look at that and go YES MATE and make it your signature fashion statement for 2020, so please don’t let me down.
• Procedural Generation: An excellent subReddit in which programmers share examples of their procedural generation work, mainly used in the context of world creation in game development but also stuff around faces, character models and the like. There’s loads of really interesting work in here, and it’s a decent primer on exactly what you can achieve with procgen (and by extension what you can’t).
• The World According To Sound: A PODCAST! THAT I HAVEN’T LISTENED TO! However, I feel reasonably confident recommending it as a) it sounds really interesting, being as it is a series in which each episode contains “a neat little story about an evocative, unusual sound rendered in intense aural detail”; and b) each episode lasts around 90s, meaning it’s a welcome respite from the endless, self-indulgent procession of flabby, unedited ‘two mates who find each other HILARIOUS’ audiodumps cluttering up the lower reaches of Spotify.
• Dogs Playing Poker: You are, of course, aware of the SEMINAL artwork by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in which a bunch of REALLY GOOD BOYS play a hand or two of Texas Hold’Em; this website lets you create a version of that painting with each of the possible 6.6 quadrillion combinations of playing cards on display. One the one hand, this is probably quite an impressive bit of coding; on the other, WHY?!?!? That said, if you know anyone whose life has been determined (ideally negatively) by a specific hand of cards, this could be the PERFECT thing to remind them of it (honestly, now I think about it, if I knew anyone who’d lost big on the cards then a version of this featuring their losing hand would be SUCH a good rinse).
• Leaf Origami: The Twitter feed of a very talented and, I am guessing, slightly obsessional Japanese person named Inori who makes origami shapes out of leaves (I’m sure they do other things, just that that’s what’s on their Twitter feed). These are gorgeous, and would make rather wonderful animations I think.
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall in Pictures: Exactly that. I might have mentioned it here before, but the fall of the Berlin Wall can literally be attributed to poor comms planning; at the press conference at which the plans to lift restrictions on free passage between East and West were being announced, the official briefing the press was asked exactly when these changes would take place; having not been given a line on this (BAD COMMS PLANNING, SEE?) they blustered and eventually spluttered out “Er, now?” and the rest, as they say, is history. My God, that was ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE there, I’m almost impressed with myself.
• Just Tell Me How You Feel: A small, gently-interactive narrative game, telling a short story about communication through poetry. Very smol and very lovely.

By Joanne Nam

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HERE’S AN AWESOME CRATEDIGGING SESSION BY MR THING!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Hawkeye Initiative: Old-but-good Tumblr which draws attention to the frankly mental way in which women were drawn in comics for most of the 90s by redrawing male characters in the same back-breaking poses.
• Awesome People Hanging Out Together: Literally that – look! Famouses hanging out!
• Really Bad Blackout Poems: These are very, very good. Find your own favourite and then perhaps consider a career in which you use a similar technique to become a famous Instapoet!
• Wormcore: Not a single Tumblr, but instead a tag I discovered this week. Did you know that there was whole weird subcommunity on Tumblr posting worm-related content (fortunately non-sexual worm-related content, though this is Tumblr and I’m not making any promises here as to what you might find if you dig deep enough)? If no, then welcome to another Web Curios-curated learning experience! If yes, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Akin Kollective: The Insta feed of the artistic practice of former adland person Enni Kukka (who I know in real life but who hasn’t paid me for this OH SO VALUABLE Web Curios endorsement, honest); Enni’s practice is all about using art to increase or facilitate empathy, and she’s got some interesting projects in progress, not least her “Be A Cnut” boardgame which I am very eager to have a play with. Interesting ideas.
• Nord Korea: Not in fact North Korea; I honestly have no idea who takes these photos or where they are taken, but I LOVE the aesthetic here (which, were I to describe it, I’d probably call ‘weird stuff in Central Asia’).
• Baller Busters: This got a reasonably amount of press this week – it’s a feed which exists to call out and expose people on the ‘gram who are presenting themselves as influencers or SUCCESSFUL HUSTLERS MAKING BANK (sorry, I won’t talk like that ever again) but who are in fact either broke, delusional or actively grifting. I’m a bit conflicted about this; on the one hand, there’s something undeniably satisfying about seeing these people get called out, but on the other there’s something a bit mean and hatemobish about it. See what you think. Mind you, as a means of surfacing some truly MENTAL ‘influencer’ types, it’s second-to-none.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Politics is for Power, Not Consumption: An excellent essay, timely for those of us in the UK, which posits that the increased level of political discourse that we’ve seen in the past decade, fueled by the web and social platforms and, of course, the increasing madness of the political landscape worldwide, is having a serious and negative impact on people’s willingness to actually engage with politics on a meaningful level; that we are confusing talking about politics with actually doing politics. This rings horribly true; I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but this quote gives you a flavour of the argument: “If you feel unfulfilled, melancholy, paralyzed by the sadness of the news and depth of our political problems, there is an alternative: actually doing politics. Citizens who want to empower their political values would be better off if they spent less time consuming politics as at-home amateurs and instead fell in line to help strengthen organizations and leaders. Rather than kibitzing with their social media friends, they could adopt some of the spirit of the party regulars, counting votes and building interpersonal relationships in their neighborhoods.”
• 2029 Predictions: It’s refreshing to be able to include a predictions list at the end of a year which is doing something more interesting than looking ahead to next year (let me fill this year’s set in for you, while you’re here: AR (again), VR (again), games-as-important-media-vertical, personalisation (again), small groups rather than big networks (again), slowness and disconnection (again)…can we stop now? Good!). This is a really interesting, wide-ranging and smart series of predictions for 2029, based on things that happened in 2019; so, for example, this covers the idea that Geotagging will become a social faux-pas in the future as it becomes ever more important for people to have unique experiences and not expose areas of natural beauty to further human degradation by telling people they exist, or the slightly less interesting claim that Travis Scott will be the Kanye of the next decade (really?). Whatever you’re interested in, there will be something in this that speaks to you – and for those of you whose jobs involve a degree of futuregazing and trend forecasting, this is probably professionally useful as well as fascinating.
• The NYT Does The Internet: A special edition of the NYT Magazine focusing on THE INTERNET and WHAT IT’S TURNED INTO and stuff; there’s a lot of content linked from the homepage, and the two or three pieces I’ve read (on the increasing dominance of the Chinese internet and a few other topics) have been good, but I’m slightly grumpy about the way it’s presented which makes the whole thing annoying to navigate and basically isn’t quite as cool-looking as it thinks it is.
• YouTube Tries Livestreaming (Again): Ostensibly about YouTube’s latest efforts to get gamers to take it seriously as a viable streaming platform, this is also a really good overview of the current streaming ecosystem and how the different players (Twitch, Mixer, YT in the main) are each approaching the market. The description of Twitch as effectively positioning itself as ‘the future of telly’ or thereabouts seems like a smart take; the company’s clearly attempting to expand its appeal beyond the core audience who are there for the Minecraft tutorials, whereas YouTube seems to be doubling down specifically on gaming to tie in with the imminent launch of Stadia. There’s a LOT of money here, meaning we can expect to see quite a lot of interesting jockeying for position – it’s also worth noting that the big players I named here are, behind the brands, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. YOU CAN’T ESCAPE BIG TECH HOWEVER HARD YOU TRY!
• An Oral History of Limewire: Aged 20 and living in Washington DC and working (I say ‘working’ – I was of no value WHATSOEVER!) at the BBC there, I was, at least for the first few weeks, quite lonely and a bit scared (and VERY COLD – man, DC in January is bleak) but there was a iMac in the apartment and onto it I downloaded Limewire and for those first few days I was able to create a soundtrack for my new home and make it feel a little less distant. Limewire, for the children or non-pirates amongst you (like non-pirates even exist anymore), was basically Napster on steroids (gah! Ok, so Napster was the first mainstream peer-to-peer filesharing network which basically introduced the concept of free, infinite music to a generation and was the first small step towards the streaming economy we have today – got it, kids?) and you could get ANYTHING on it, from music to computer programmes to an AWFUL lot of bongo; this is a really interesting look back at its genesis and impact, and, as with much of the web at the time, how noone involved made anywhere near as much out of it as you somehow feel they ought.
• The Emoji Changelog: I don’t know how many of you are in the market for an exhaustive exploration of all the changes which have been implemented in the latest Unicode update to the empoji set, but I promise you it’s more interesting than you’d think.
• The Emoji Popularity Dataset: And, specifically, what it means in terms of what emoji Unicode should make more of. If you recall last week’s explainer on how to submit emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium, this is a useful companion piece – seriously, all brands should take a look at this stuff and work out what emoji they can usefully propose. This piece outlines the most- and least-used emoji types, and explores some of the potential reasons as to why the rankings are as they are; basically, WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE FLAGS.
• Videogame Class War: Another in the occasional series of ‘when videogames create great stories’ pieces, this is about Fallout76, which I’ve featured here before. A recent update to the game allowed certain players to pay a (reasonably punchy) annual fee to access in-game perks; this has created a strange sort of class divide in the game, where players with the premium subscriptions were initially ostracised by the non-paying community and have since leaned into this hard by setting themselves up as a de facto aristocracy within the game. Which is sort of weird but lightly benign, until you start to read about the rather unpleasant undertones which seem to be creeping in. ‘Games as social petri dishes’ is something I will never get tired of reading about; I do think as this stuff becomes more and more mainstream there’s some hugely interesting socio/psychological research paths just waiting to be investigated.
• Remembering Halo 2: I never played Halo, shooters not being my thing, but its marketing campaign is the stuff of legend – huge, multilayered, fiendishly clever and responsible for ensuring that every single fcuking meeting in any sort of creative communications agency for about 7 years had, by law, to include at least one person passionately advocating for TRANSMEDIA (a term that still causes slight PTSD-style twitching in many of us who worked through that era). This is a hugely comprehensive look back at the game, its design, its launch and the marketing – if the phrase ‘I Love Bees’ means nothing to you and you work in advermarketingpr, you really do owe it to yourself to read this and catch up. But, please, let TRANSMEDIA rest in peace in its lonely, unloved grave.
• The Anatomy of a TikTok Hit: Pithcfor dissects the particular aural qualities that seem to characterise the current wave of viral TikTok soundtrack bangers – to whit, distorted bass, BIG dramatic tone-or-pitch shifts, and anything that affords the opportunity for some sort of big twist or visual reveal-type moment with a big aural cue. If you’re looking for a blueprint to viral success then, well, there’s no such thing, but you might be able to pick up a few general pointers here.
• Real Life Superheroes: Many, many years ago, in the mid-00s when I had just started working and was eking out my days as a lobbyist (a very, very junior and ineffectual lobbyist) and had JUST discovered the one, beautiful truth about modern work (to whit, unfettered, high-speed internet access and a whole web’s worth of stuff to read – I did NO work at all, it was amazing), I remember reading a spate of pieces about the burgeoning ‘real life superhero’ movement in the US, where odd little men who called themselves things like ‘Tovian’ and wore armour made out of old styrofoam packing materials and scavenged kevlar. There was a brief revival of interest in the story about 5 years ago, but then nothing until this piece, which follows a group of caped do-gooders around the streets of San Diego for an evening. I love these stories, mainly for the insight you get into the sort of people who think wearing a colander on one’s head and patrolling the streets helping put drunk people into the recovery position is a good idea.
• Messing With Google Maps: Apparently there’s a ‘thing’ in the States where kids are uploading odd, upsetting or just strange photos to their school’s listing on Google maps; is this a thing here too? Regardless, I would like ALL of you to spend this afternoon thinking of the perfect cursed image to upload to your place of work’s entry on GMaps – then DO IT. Go on, make the web marginally more interesting than it was yesterday and cause The Man (or, more accurately, the poor, confused people in marketing) some minor conniption.
• Suzy Batisz’s Empire of Odour: In further proof that there’s money in poo, meet Suzy Batisz, the inventor of ‘Poo Pourri’ – you know, that spray that’s designed to prevent the smell of faecal matter from invading your nostrils post-defecation. This is one of those great profiles which presents its subject in an ostensibly perfectly-flattering light, but in so doing allows them to demonstrate JUST enough crazy to communicate exactly how clenched-teeth crazy they really are. The segue from ‘I sell stuff that helps you forget that you are a machine for turning food into sh1t’ to ‘this is a wellness and self-help movement’ is quite, quite special. Never underestimate the hubris of the middle-aged white millionaire, eh?
• The 100 Best, Worst and Weirdest Things On The Web Since 2010: On the one hand, it really would be a terrible shame if all the things we sought to remember and lionise and preserve from the thick, coruscating, lumpy stream of online culture were the memes; on the other, MAN this is a cultural rollercoaster. It’s a US site doing the listing (The AV Club), so your mileage will vary a bit, but so many of these are global web phenomena that your hit rate should be reasonably high. There’s a whole afternoon of workplace ‘OH MY GOD DO YOU REMEMBER’ memechat here if you’re in the mood; personally I’m just glad to have been reminded of the dog driving stick.
• Finding The Real Diceman: You may well have seen this as it was in the Guardian last weekend; if not, though, it’s a great read. For those not familiar, the Diceman (not, thankfully, Andrew Dice Clay on this occasion) was a hugely popular late-60s novel about a man who decided to let his life be governed by the whims of fate; the identity of its author, and the extent to which some or all of it was autobiographical, were much-debated; the author of this article tried to find the truth. It’s a great, mysterious read, and has motivated me to pick up a copy of the author’s new essay collection.
• The Magic of Generating New Ideas: By a mathematician, but hugely interesting (and potentially useful) for anyone. I love this anecdote about legendary mathematician Paul Erdos: “Erdős was a person of extremes, and he also fuelled his ideas through a don’t-try-this-at-home technique: he used stimulants such as Ritalin and Benzedrine for much of his career. At one point, a friend, worried about Erdős’s health, challenged him to go off the drugs for a month, and Erdős agreed, but when the experiment was over he said that, on the whole, mathematics had been set back by his weeks of relative indolence.” I mean, way to back yourself there Paul.
• Margaret Atwood: Atwood, interviewed for the Paris Review in 1990 as part of their ‘The Art of Fiction’ series in which writers discuss their work and their practice. I confess to finding Atwood an author whose interviews I enjoy reading more than their novels; this is a really wonderful conversation which takes you from the business of writing to sex to critics to commercialising one’s art and to all sorts of other places besides.
• The Humanoid Stain: A brilliant, wide-ranging, discursive, fascinating essay by legendary writer Barbare Ehrenreich, about cave paintings and what they tell us about the way we see ourselves as a species; and, subsequently, what that tells us about who we are. Honestly SO smart and so erudite, I guarantee this will add at least one IQ point to your total and is a cracking piece of writing to book.
• The Feminist: Finally this week, one of the best short stories I’ve read in years and one which, if there were any justice in the world, would receive the same sort of buzz as Cat Person did. It won’t, but you should read it anyway and tell all your friends to read it to – The Feminist is a very funny, very sad, very horrible story about one man’s lonliness and the steps he takes to try and find romantic, emotional, sexual connections with women. Its author, Tony Tulathimutte, is very much part of a current cool literary scene at the moment; I confess to not loving his (very funny) debut novel, but this absolutely blew me away. I promise, it’s really, really good.

By Lara Verheijden & Mark Stadman (link a bit NSFW)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. It was only a matter of time before someone used a GAN to make a music video with all the weird melty faces; it’s a shame it’s not a better song or more interesting video, really. Can someone do this…better, please?

1. Apologies if you’ve all seen this – it does have 9million views, which is about 9million more than the stuff I usually post here, but nearly all the comments are in Spanish which makes me think it’s not quite crossed over to anglotube yet. Anyway, this is Rosalia with ‘A Palé’; there’s a LOT going on in here, none of which I have any idea about. My favourite comment on this simply reads “Some artists make you question your sexuality; Rosalia makes me question if I even speak Spanish”. Awesome video too:

1. This is that very now combination of intensely emotional and sort-of-miserable lyrics with glacial production, as though you’re listening to something slightly too shiny on a comedown (or at least that’s what it feels like to me). I really like it – it’s called ‘Baby Little Tween’, and it’s by Okay Kaya:

1. I LOVE THIS SONG. 100-odd seconds of pop-punkish perfection, this is ‘Tiny Planets’ by Remember Sports. SO GOOD:

1. UK (I think) HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week, here’s a genuinely standout track by Biig Piig – honestly, I love this immoderately and it made me feel a bit like when I first heard Cantona by Loyle Carner or Here by Alessia Cara, in that this person ought to become VERY famous. See what you think (if you don’t like this you’re a nonce) – the song’s called ‘Roses and Gold’ OH HANG ON WE HAVE COME TO THE END THAT WAS UNEXPECTED BUT NOW THAT WE’RE HERE LET ME WISH YOU A HEARTFELT AND SINCERE ‘HAPPY FRIDAY’ OR ‘HAPPY WHENEVER’ REALLY AND LET ME WISH YOU THE VERY BEST OF LUCK IN LIFE AND LOVE UNTIL WE NEXT MEET BECAUSE PLEASE REMEMBER, ALWAYS, THAT I LOVE AND CARE FOR YOU ALMOST AS I DO THE INTERNET SO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND EVERYONE ELSE AND HAVE FUN AND I’LL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE BYE BYE!