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

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

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

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

(happy christmas, everyone)

By Tim Schutsky 

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

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

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

By Roberto Ferri

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

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

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

By Xuebing Du

Is it all going to be over on Tuesday night? Is it? CAN WE FINALLY STOP TALKING ABOUT THE FCUKING B WORD ON TUESDAY NIGHT???

‘No’ is the short answer, but let’s pretend we didn’t hear it and instead envisage a glorious future where I open next week’s final Curios of 2018 with some sort of heartwarming and genuinely optimistic shortform essay about how the year, whilst looking like an absolute sh1tshow throughout, managed to salvage itself at the last and the whole Br*x*t debacle, whilst painful, has in fact shown us how well we can rally together as a nation when we really have to. 

Imagining that? Good. Hold that image.

What I imagine will happen though is that in exactly 7 days time I’ll be wrapping up the year in Curios with some sort of ‘AND AT THE END OF IT ALL IT’S LIKE THE PAST 12 MONTHS NEVER OCCURRED’. Still, while we wait for that to happen – it’s nearly over! we’ve nearly done it! – let’s crack on with this week’s edition, the last into which I’m going to put anything resembling any effort (I plan on phoning next week’s in even more than usual). Pick a friend, grab one end each, close your eyes, grimace and PULL! – who knows what sort of tempting gewgaws and hackneyed gags and ‘comedy’ accessories will be released? And who’s going to clean up the mess? This, as ever, is Web Curios! 

By Adam Birkan

SHALL WE KICK OFF THE MIXES WITH THIS EXCELLENT RECENT SET ON SOLID STEEL RADIO? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO RAISE A SYMPATHETIC GLASS TO ANY OF YOU WHO WORK FOR O2:

• Facebook Becomes QVC: You mean always-on, tedious, a bit common, and the sort of thing that noone outside of communities of rural shut-ins in the Midwest would ever admit to engaging with? AHAHAHAHAHAHA. SATIRE! Leaving aside my EXCELLENT ZINGER at the expense of po’Facebook, this is…odd. Look, here’s the summary: “Facebook is testing a new element in its slowly evolving eCommerce tools with a dedicated Facebook Live mode that enables Pages to showcase products in their stream, which viewers can then easily purchase via screenshots.” This is…weird. I mean, I can’t for the life of me imagine this being the sort of thing anyone will ever actually want to engage with, but then again that’s exactly what I think of QVC and yet here we are. I don’t doubt there will be at least one big brand using this to SURPRISE AND DELIGHT (sorry) customers in the next year, and I can totally see how you could use the right sort of ambassador to do something fun and visible around one of the next big orgies of popular consumption (“The Cards Against Humanity Black Friday 24h Facebook Telethon ft. Gary Busey” – you read it here first, kids!).
• Facebook Becomes Pinterest: You mean a weird digital fantasy world where people can construct a version of reality which suits them b…no, this wasn’t funny the first time. This is an extension of the Facebook feature letting users create ‘collections of stuff on the platform – it launched last year, keep UP – which now makes said collections shareable, meaning you can now spend hours pulling together your ultimate ‘trashy wedding inspiration lookbook’ from all your childhood friends’ photos and then share it for LOLs with your new, sophisticated, big city crowd (they can all see through you, you know, you don’t fit in and you’ll ALWAYS be that weird, smelly kid in the playground).  
• You Can Now Watch A Bunch of Old TV Shows on Facebook Watch: Or at least, you can if you’re in the US; not quite clear whether it’s region-locked, but worth a go if you’re inexplicably into Angel.
• Facebook Stories Coming to Groups: I’m running out of ways to whinge about Stories, so I’m going to embrace this instead. Look! Stories coming to Facebook Groups! The possibility to create collaborative content in the Stories format, sourced from all members and moderated / approved by Group admins! There’s actually quite a lot of stuff you could do with this, if you’re the sort of brand with actual, weird ‘fans’ – drop a bunch of clips in a closed group and invite members to collaborate to build the best Stories ‘remix’ of them, for example, with the community voting on the best ones for points and prizes! Invite Group members to make Stories as fan tributes for talent and then share the resulting output with famouses and record their reactions for community love-in joy! Come on, you get the idea.
• Facebook Subscriptions Test Expands to More Publishers: Literally just this, but the whole ‘get people to sign up for a paid content stream via FB’ for publishers continues apace. There’s nothing you can do about it – it’s all invitation-only as far as I can see – but, well, now you know.
• FB Changes App Rules: Worth being aware of, this, in terms of stuff you can build on/around Facebook: “Facebook  will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.”” This suddenly, potentially, lets you build much more interesting stuff on Facebook again – not back to the Wild West days of 2010, fine (oh the THINGS we did with your data!), but still better than the rather limited options currently available.
• Instagram Introduces ‘Cliques’: Oh, ok, FINE, that’s not technically what this update is called, but it’s EXACTLY what this is. In a move almost explicitly designed to undermine or contradict much of its recent ‘no! Ours is not a platform that encourages bullying and let us demonstrate why!’ rhetoric, Insta’s now letting users create lists of ‘close friends’ who will then exist as a discrete sub-audience to whom one can grant privileged access to certain content. So, for example, you could set some stories to ‘public’ and others to ‘close friends only’, thereby gating access to your most intimate thoughts and automatically creating playground drama for DAYS. Obviously there’s lots you can do with this from a SURPRISE AND DELIGHT (again, sorry) point of view, but the main impact will be in schools and colleges and universities, where it will be used by young, popular people to further cement their place in the rigidly-enforced and brutal social hierarchy that shapes and warps their lives. GREAT!
• Insta Lets You Share Multiple Photos and Videos In Stories: It does! All at once! Without having to go through and add them individually one-by-one! Progress! Death is once more kept at bay!
• Pretty Caption: Look, I found this and thought it might be useful to some of you – I don’t judge, I just present. Pretty Caption is a little web service that lets you add decent formatting to Insta captions; yes, I know that that seems entirely pointless but I guarantee that for at least one person reading this the slight differentiator that is ‘a nicely laid out caption on my ‘Gram’ will be the best thing they see in here this week.
• The Social Media Manager’s Guide To LinkedIn: I know that YOU are obviously all masters at LinkedIn, CRUSHING IT and KILLING IT and waking up at 4am to do two hours of hot yoga whilst simultaneously baking award-winning breads and reading the morning papers in seven languages and having a tantric brown and blogging the whole thing incessantly to your legions of content-hungry businessmongs, but in case you’re not, or in case you know someone who could use some pointers, this is a simple-but-honestly-quite-useful 101-type primer to the world’s worst social network.
• How To Get All The Bongo Off Your Tumblr Before 17 December: Web Curios does not judge. Web Curios is here to help.
• Bacardi Instant Jam: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a really good ‘made for adland, no real people have EVER seen this’ digital case study, so a big round of applause here for Bacardi who made what looks like a WONDERFULLY smart Insta hack, using some rather clever coding to turn their US Insta feed into a looping drumpad which you could use to make music alone or collaboratively. This is SO slick and, I guarantee, will have been seen and appreciated by literally noone not working in advermarketingpr because real people have never and will never use Instagram in this way. Still, one for the showreel, lads!
• Nordy Portrait: Nordstrom is a US chain of luxury department stores (isn’t ‘luxury chain’ sort of fundamentally an oxymoron?) and this is some sort of promo thingy for a loyalty scheme they’re running – look, I don’t care, the only reason I’m featuring it is that it does one of those rather nice ‘upload a photo and we’ll turn it into a stylised line drawing’ things, and you can download the image and do with it what you will; if you’re in the market for a new, slightly minimalist avi for the festive season (you are dreadful) then this might do the trick.
• YouTube Rewind: I am including this not as an endorsement and more instead as a sort of appalled nod to what passes for global youth entertainment culture in 2018 (STOP PASSING, TIME!) – this is YouTube’s annual jamboree video celebrating the memes and stars and cultural tropes that have characterised the past 12 months in the vlogosphere (sorry). So, look, you’ve got Fortnite and Drake and Casey Neistat and Will Smith and K-Pop and, oh look, no Logan Paul or Jake Paul because that’s not YouTube, is it, oh no, and LOOK there’s a little segment in the middle about how great it is when people talk openly about depression and marginalised communities WHERE ARE THE FCUKING NAZIS AND MAD RIGHT-WINGERS AND ALEX JONES AND THE KKK AND THE KEKISTANIS AND THE INCELS AND THE DIET-PILL PEDDLERS AND THE ESSAY FLOGGERS AND AND AND AND. Thanks, YouTube! Thanks for 2018! Thanks!
• How Long Left?: The Christmas advert tradition here in the UK is now well-known; a bunch of retailers attempt to gloss over the fact that their business models aren’t 100% adapted to the digital age by spending an inordinate amount of money trying to elicit a flicker of emotion from Britain’s jaded consumers in the hope that it will induce said consumers to spend their last remaining food tokens in their shops. We, though, are AMATUERS when compared to this effort from Spain, in which booze brand Rua Vieja take what is I imagine a fairly standard ‘insight’ (‘Christmas is reuniting us with loved ones!’) and takes it to its logical, CRY YOU BASTARDS ending with an advert that reminds us that we are all going to die and that every moment we share with the people closest to us might be the last. What could be more Christmassy than thinking of the inevitable death of everyone you love? NOTHING! Even better, the accompanying website lets you put in a bunch of data about yourself and a particular loved one and calculates how long you’re likely to have left together based on a bunch of third-party data (if you dig around you can find the hilariously serious-sounding methodology behind it) – is this some sort of joke? I LOVE IT.
• The Best Advert of the Year: Josh sent me this as I was writing a later bit, and I have had to come back and insert it in here. SO GOOD YOU MUST WATCH IT HOW CAN A RAP ABOUT KITCHENS BE THIS LEGITIMATELY EXCELLENT?!
• The State of European Tech: I did a TINY bit of work on this (really, miniscule), but I’m still quite proud of it – this is VC firm Atomico’s annual investigation into the tech sector in Europe – exits, investments, talent, that sort of thing. We turned it into a website last year, and this is the 2018 iteration. It is, honestly, a hell of a piece of work and a quite incredible resource, and credit should go to the immensely-brained Tom Wehmeier of Atomico, honestly one of the smartest men I’ve ever worked with, and the nice people at Studio Lovelock who designed and built the thing and whose work I can recommend unreservedly. Aw, wasn’t that a nice love-in?
• The Predictions Bucket: Finally in the PENULTIMATE s*c**l m*d** bit of 2018, the return of the semi-regular Imperica Predictions Bucket; do us a favour and email / Tweet to any and all 2019 predictions documents that you find to Lovely Imperica Publisher/Editor Paul and he’ll compile them all into an easily-digestible…thing documenting the trends within the trends. We’re basically rooting around in the scryer’s entrails so that you don’t have to. Be grateful.

By Maya Goded

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF SUPERB GUITAR MUSIC FROM NIGER!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS ALL THIS 2018 SH1T TO BE DONE WITH NOW TBQHWY, PT.1:

• The Beat Bot: This is excellent, silly fun. A fairly standard browser-based web/beats toy which does the whole ‘programme a series of inputs which the synth will then cycle through rhythmically’ thing, but with the twist that rather than setting the inputs as, I don’t know, ‘kickdrum 1’ or ‘synth 3’ you instead type in letters or, even better, words, which are then text-to-speeched into existence by the software. So, basically, you can create weirdly complex, multi-layered, vocoder-voiced looping synth raps; I lost a good five minutes on Wednesday building quite a complex loop of disembodied voices saying “take the pain away, bruce” and I can vouch for this entirely.
• Ganvas Studio: Ah, the speed of the web! A couple of weeks ago I feature that site which let you mess around with image evolution through GAN-led image-’breeding’; now, a shop which lets you buy some of the resulting images as prints. They ship from the US so there’s no guarantee of Christmas delivery, and the options for the prints (satin finish or canvas-over-wood) sound a bit shonky to my mind, but the images themselves are sort of weirdly awesome if you’re into computer-imagined angular oddities (and who isn’t?).
• AICan: Of course, if that’s a bit too mainstream and publicly accessible for you then you could always go a level up and buy an original work from AICan. “AICAN is an Artificial Intelligence Artist and a Collaborative Creative Partner. Each artwork AICAN makes is an answer to the question “If we teach the machine about art and styles and push it to generate novel images that do not follow established styles, what would it generate?” This is the software which created the ‘First AI-generated Artwork’ sold at Christie’s the other month, and you can now buy your very own AICan piece for just $20,000 (in fairness there are cheaper options but come on! Go big!) – you too can have your own ‘modern art? EVEN MACHINES CAN MAKE IT!’ conversation piece from a mere $500!
• The First AI-rendered Interactive Virtual World: Add ‘designed who crafts meticulously-designed virtual environments from scratch’ to the list of ‘jobs soon to be rendered obsolete by the inexorable rise of brute-strength machine computation’! This is quite incredible footage, a proof-of-concept by Nvidia, showing not only a streetscape being generated by AI on the fly but also how that streetscape can be rendered navigable in realtime. I can’t wait for Red Dead Redemption 3 where the Old West is built entirely by neural nets trained on the Spaghetti Western canon.
• CreepBay: Would you like a storefront pointing you towards all the weirdly creepy and unpleasant stuff you can find to buy on eBay? Do you know anyone who’d like, say, a necklace in the shape of a strange pink maggot-baby? Or a necklace featuring massive, stainless steel hanging spiders all over it? I hope not, for your sake, but have the link just in case.
• Friends With Secrets: This is honestly wonderful; I love this project, and think it’s such a good idea. “Three friends with different backgrounds participated in online text therapy sessions from January to April 2018. Friends With Secrets captures a slice of their lives — the good, the bad, the heartbreaking — and how they try to process the world around them. The sessions have been refined. The identities of the therapists have been protected.” As a window into what it’s like having therapy, and to how other people think and feel, this is unparalleled; there’s a rawness to seeing the text logs and a vulnerability in the way that each interlocutor expresses themselves that make this feel authentic in a way much of this stuff often doesn’t (I wonder whether due to the fact it’s all text rather than being recorded audio or video). Do have a read, it’s honestly beautiful.
• 10×18: I’ve been doing this so long now that there are certain seasonal web projects that are slightly like old friends each time they come around – so it is with 10×18, “an annual ritual in which a select group of artists create visual interpretations of their favorite albums of the year.” Some of the work is lovely, the links between the album and their visualisation are often fascinating, and you can discover superb work that you would never have stumbled across otherwise (I am now obsessed with the work of Mark Weaver, for example). Wonderful, again.
• The Wigan Pier Project: Slightly surprised that I’ve not seen this before, seeing as I think it’s been around for a few months. This is an historical documentary project, taking the journey travelled by Orwell on his ‘Road to Wigan Pier’ and presenting the modern stories of residents in a selection of the towns and cities in the area; put together by The Mirror and others, it presents a portrait of a region devastated by years of austerity to the point whereby the links between Orwell’s own experience and modernity are bleakly apparent. This is a lovely piece of interactive documentarymaking, combining writing, photography and video into an emotionally resonant piece of social anthropology – this ought to be more famous than it is imho.
• Top Nine: The second of the recurring seasonal projects in this week’s Curios, Top Nine offers you your annual opportunity to see which nine of your MILLIONS of Insta posts gained the most traction this year – you too can get a miserable totting-up of the total ‘Likes’ you gleaned in 2018, in case you want yet another metric against which to judge yourself and find yourself inadequate. Tell you what, everyone, why not not do this this year? OK? Good!
• Projected Capital: Ooh, this is cool. Projected Capital is effectively a combative, artworld version of the Million Dollar Homepage – the gimmick is that, much as per the MDH, anyone can bid to occupy digital real estate within the project, and that said digital real estate will be projected into the physical space at a Zurich art gallery, offering (so goes the high-concept blurb) a democratised alternative to the curatorial tyranny of Big Gallery. Even better, anyone can bid to cover over anyone else’s work whenever the way want; equally, anyone who’s work has been covered over can pay a fee to bring their stuff to the front of the image again – but they can only do it 10 times. SO much to love about this, not least the way in which (wittingly or otherwise) it skewers the ever-so-slightly bloody competitiveness of artland itself. Anyone want to pay to project Curios on there? No, thought not, you fcukers.
• A Tribute to YouTube Annotations: They’re turning off YouTube annotations soon. This is an EXCELLENT post pulling together a bunch of examples of some of the most fun creative applications of the feature – all the slightly shonky CYOA-type hacks, all of the amazing creativity. YouTube Stop-Motion Playable StreetFighter, we will NEVER see your like again. Honestly, this is slightly sad-making; all the times I featured these things in Curios with a hopeful ‘brands! You could do something really cool with this!’ and yet noone ever did. Brands, you cnuts.
• Project Vermeer: Google Arts & Culture’s latest big thing, this is a wonderful way to explore the works of Johannes Vermeer; as with all these things there’s some beautiful stuff in here, but I’m a particular fan of both the virtual gallery (available in-browser or in the app) and the guide that takes you through a guided tour of the Pearl Earring painting in minute, brushstroke-level detail. Whatever you might think of Google, you don’t see Facebook doing this sort of stuff.
• The Al Lowe eBay Sale: One pretty much exclusively for the over-40s men here (yes, I know it’s a stereotype, but if there are any women reading this with a deep and abiding affection for Infocom text adventures then I’ll eat my hat) – (in)famous creator of the Leisure Suit Larry game franchise, and so many other things besides, Al Lowe is putting a bunch of his old memorabilia up for sale on eBay – if you want to bid on the original source code for the first Larry game then you have THREE DAYS.
• Humaans: A lovely, diverse and useful library of vector-based templates for illustrations of people; you can mix and match elements to easily create your own icon or character set, and it’s all free.
• Fishure Price: This couldn’t be any more perfectly aimed at the very core of the ‘muso dad who used to DJ in the 90s and still has a massive vinyl collection and who secretly thinks that playing his small child a bunch of really obscure white-label 7”s will guarantee that they have amazing taste and all the other parents will secretly think that it’s all down to their father’s amazing musical tutelage’ demographic, this. Fishure Price is a project by Daniel Barassi whereby he’s taken those Fisher Price wind-up ‘My First Turntable’ kids’ toys and turned them into actual working decks. There are videos on the site of him scratching with them. PEAK DAD.
• Tiny Follow: Want to keep up with Twitter but don’t actually want to be on Twitter at all because it makes you sad and anxious and nervy? TOUGH. Ha! Only joking! Not actually tough at all! Thanks to Tiny Follow you can keep up-to-date with the HILARIOUS antics of all your favourite follows – the beefs, the shade, the in-jokes, the thirsty pics – via the medium of a daily newsletter; Tiny Follow lets you plug in an account and will email you the highlights of their day on Twitter; the fact that it seemingly only lets you do one at a time basically kills its utility, but there’s the kernel of an idea in here. Maybe.
• The Cube Rule of Food Identification: Honestly, this is REVELATORY. Click the link and prepare to have your whole concept of food taxonomy shaken to its very foundations.
• The LEGO Holiday Building Guides: Would you like a whole bunch of guides to building festive things – models of Santa! Reindeer-faced baubles! – out of some of the three million pieces of LEGO which you just know will otherwise hide all over your house and ambush the soles of your feet in those vulnerable, late-night moments when you’re popping to the fridge for leftover snacking? YES YOU WOULD! This has been going for a while now, so there’s a decent enough archive of designs if you fancy spending the weekend turning your kids into a cheapo festive decorations production line.
• Artie: I’ve seen stuff a bit like this before, I think, but not quite presented in this way. Artie is effectively seeking to become a persistent AR companion – effectively like a Tamagotchi with knobs on. Or at least that’s one potential application for the technology, though one could equally imagine some sort of equivalent to the persistent virtual butler found in early Gibson novels. Anyway, the concept’s interesting and the idea of all the software being low-latency and hyperlink-accessible makes it potentially worth a look.
• Freedom on the Move: “Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitives from North American slavery. With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property.” This is slightly jaw-dropping; it oughtn’t be, of course, but there’s something still shocking about the treatment of humans as livestock which is presented here. The way this is set up – as an open-source archive for students and academics – is nicely done, and the content is fascinating, but it’s also really quite startling and unpleasant.
• Attention You Are Wonderful: A Kickstarter Project, funded with 12 days to go, which will sell unexpected, emotional messages done in the style of those tin roadsigns you see affixed to fences or atop poles. On the one hand, in their original incarnation as pieces of impromptu street art, I rather like these; on the other, as things that you can buy and do with as you will, all I can imagine is the INCREDIBLY stalky and emotionally heavy idea of sending someone a tin sign reading “NOTICE: I never stopped loving you and I never will. I hope you’re happy”. Can you IMAGINE how much you could fcuk someone up by sending this stuff? Please don’t.
• Lost Heritage: “Lost Heritage is a personal project which aims to create an authoratitive and comprehensive list of the many significant English country houses which have been demolished or severely reduced.” You want a database of old stately homes that are now either vanished or in ruins? YOU GOT IT! If you’re the sort of person who likes making historical pilgrimages  around the country to look at old bits of stone in the middle of a field and then enjoys a slightly soggy cheese sandwich in a fusty, condensation-misted Ford then, well, this is ALL YOU.
• Me, Myself and Microbes: “Professor Elaine Hsiao heads the Hsiao Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology at UCLA where she teaches the class “Me, Myself, and Microbes”. Her lab researches how microbes affect our brains and behavior.” Her husband, Leon, works for Google and is part of the team that does the Doodles. He made this website to accompany one of her lectures about gyt microfauna and it is CHARMING – look what you can accomplish when you’re part of a ridiculously smart and capable couple! Why aren’t you and your partner not doing stuff like this instead of sitting on the couch getting gout and smoking too much weed? Eh? What?
• Old YouTube: I can’t believe this is new, but it seems to be new to me – Old YouTube is a simple layer of search that sits atop YouTube and lets you run chronological searches on a year-by-year basis; so you can, say, search ‘redpill’ way back in 2009 and see that it didn’t mean anything at all, and then fast forward to 2017 and marvel / cry at the startling 4chanisation of everything. Potentially quite a useful tool if you’re trying to mine seams of historical trend-type content, I think.
• Optician Sans: A whole typeface made from the letters used by opticians; I didn’t know this, but traditionally there are only a limited set of letters used in opthalmology. Did you know? Why did noone tell me?
• Recomendo: A weekly newsletter which will send you six recommendations of good stuff on the internet every seven days. God, six recommendations is a nice, manageable number, isn’t it? Maybe I ought to try that?

By Lola Alvarez Bravo

I BET YOU DIDN’T REALISE THAT THE  BEST ACCOMPANIMENT TO A WINTER’S AFTERNOON IS SMOOTH JAZZ, DID YOU? WELL IT IS!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS ALL THIS 2018 SH1T TO BE DONE WITH NOW TBQHWY, PT.1:

• The United States of Wonder: Simple-but-fun, this – an interactive map of the US, divided by state; hover over each one and it will throw up a bunch of the most popular suggestions for the state in question drawn from Google, showing you all the innate prejudices and buried hatreds people have towards them. I particularly like that the top result for ‘why is alabama’ is ‘why is alabama so good?’ – strong sense of self-worth there, people. I would like to see this for the UK by county, please.
• Beale HipHop: A bunch of hiphop album covers reimagined with Ian Beale of EastEnders infamy as a central protagonist. Cold War Steve has an awful lot to answer for.
• Reuters Photo of the Year: Reuters’ picks of the year – their best, most powerful 100 photographs from the past 12 months. There is not one duff selection in here.
• The Top 25 News Photos of the Year: Whereas this is the parallel pic from the Atlantic – there’s a bit of overlap, but this is also very much worth a scroll; I had forgotten about Melania’s staggering jacket, but I think that that one wins for me as a microscopic portrait of so much that this year was about.
• Win A Banksy for £2: I have no time for Banksy; I think his work is banal and obvious, and I am bored of him. That said, I would totally like to win an original work of his for a £2 stake for charity and I imagine you would too – this is a raffle in aid of Choose Love, a refugee charity which provides assistance to migrants across Europe, in which you can win a…er…slighly crap Banksy-designed remote control boatload of refugees! Look, you can sell it and give the proceeds to charity, it’s worthwhile.
• Something About Maps: Daniel Huffman likes maps: “It seems to me that maps are as much about art as data, and creating connections between people and stories that happen to have a geography. I worry that the speed and ease of the computer has made it too easy to leave the humanity out of maps — that creative spark that people bring to their unfeeling tools. I am not sure I have yet managed to humanize my own work enough to satisfy me, but it’s something I’m working on.” These are some of the maps he has designed – they are lovely, and I want all of them on my walls.
• More LA: This is a really interesting idea; Los Angeles is currently exploring ideas around urban regeneration and renewal, and this is a website by…er…architecturedesigndigitalstudio (sorry, I have no idea what they actually do) Superspace which asks people to explore different land-use cases in different regions of LA, see what options might be available and what their impact could be, and then vote on their preferred usage based on the modelling. As a way of canvassing public opinion around major public infrastructure projects this is rather good I think.
• Elowan: Elowan is a plant/robot hybrid; basically a plantpot on wheels which can wander around under its own steam to get the optimal conditions for its growth; so it can chase sunlight and rain around, for example, or follow you around all day plaintively reminding you that it hasn’t been watered for weeks and have you noticed how brown its leaftips are lately? Obviously it can’t actually do that, but I look forward to the near future in which all plants are equipped with the ability to make us feel fcuking guilty for letting them die.
• Level: Are we all agreed that Slack is basically only useful if you treat it as a chatroom rather than anything work-related? Good! Level is basically a bit like Slack but promises to be less annoying – realistically, though, you’ll still end up using email, won’t you?
• Who’s She?: Just-funded on Kickstarter and now available to pre-order, this is an excellent idea – a version of Guess Who?, except instead of being a collection of 1970s sexpests (you know all the men in the original game are, well, a bit handsy) all the faces are of notable women from history – so you can not only play a fun game with your kids but also teach them about some of the women who have changed history. Not only a great present, but a wonderful link to share on Facebook in the run-up to Christmas to weed out the sexist pricks in your life who will be infuriated by this.
• Airport Codes: A website collecting all of the airports in the US, arranged by their three-letter code and all accompanied by a photo. There is literally no reason for this site to exist, which is exactly the way we like it.
• The London Medieval Murder Map: You want an interactive map showing all the murders documented in 14thC London? YES YOU DO! Sadly what with it being 1000 years ago South London didn’t exist yet – still, if you work in the City this is an excellent resource which will let you find out exactly how many tradesmen were bludgeoned to death beneath your offices a few centuries ago. As an added bonus, the case notes are reasonably extensive and give some decent colour, included some excellent snatches of murdery medieval dialogue.  
• Animations by Ondrej Zunka: A selection of CG animations – excellent, surreal, technicolour work by Mr Zunka, who looks worth a commission if you ask me.
• Plot Diagrams: These, by Jake Berman, are just wonderful; the plots of a whole bunch of stories (they tend towards the pop cultural, so you’ve got Hamilton, Star Wars, etc…) with their plots mapped out diagrammatically, in the manner of tube maps. I would love to be able to commission one of these, should Mr Berman be reading this.
• The Advent of Code: For any of you who’ve been experimenting with coding this year, or who fancy a small, seasonal challenge, the Advent of Code is a project which presents “an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other. You don’t need a computer science background to participate – just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware.” Worth a look for the codewranglers amongst you.
• Earn a Living: This is GREAT. An interactive documentary series exploring the world of work – like Disneyland, but horrid! – Earn a Living is a 7-part interactive documentary series which aims to use basic income as a lens through which to interrogate our relationship to work, wealth and worth in the 21st century.The series tackles the larger themes and questions related to basic income. Can people be trusted with “free money?” Who should pay to support society’s most vulnerable members? And what might the future of work look like (if such a thing as “work” will even exist)? Really, really nicely made, and I personally love the tone of the voice-over. Take a look – if nothing else, the webwork here is rather lovely.
  • Betamaxmas: I think that this might be 10 years old. 10 years! Flick through a seemingly infinite number of channels streaming random, Christmas-related crap on YouTube, presented as though being screened on a crappy old television because, well, why not?
• All of the Bongo: I don’t ordinarily just straight-up link to bongo on here – I sort of presume you all know where to get it by now should you so desire – but this week I feel I must make an exception. In advance of Tumblr removing ALL THE PR0N from its servers in 10 short days time, a bunch of enterprising Reddit users have scraped the urls of all the Turmblrs in the network containing NSFW content in order to archive them; some 47,000 urls in total. This is all of them, in a list. 47,000 links to MYSTERY BONGO – fine, some of them will be reasonably self-explanatory, but others…? What’s The Physalis Project? An enquiry into Chinese gooseberries? DEAR GOD NO! This is in here less because of all the links to images of people fcuking and more because of its status as a sort of archive of human sexuality – I think there’s honestly something hugely sad about the fact that all of this is going to be deleted (archiving projects aside), and I wish that it weren’t. THIS is the sort of thing that deserves its own museum imho (did I say that out loud?).
• Chat With Me: Last up in the miscellanea this week is this lovely, poignant, beautiful little IF-type game about being in a long-distance relationship. It’s gorgeous, have a play.

By Melissa Spitz

LAST UP, ENJOY ONE MY MY ALBUMS OF THE YEAR IN THE SHAPE OF ‘FUTURE ME HATES ME’ BY THE BETHS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Bonsai Empire: Tiny trees. Lots of tiny trees.
• Feels Like Christmas: Free Christmas music downloads! Almost entirely redundant in an age of streaming!
• Silent Locations: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, as a guide to places where silent movies were filmed – with some EXHAUSTIVE shot recreation around LA, this is rather good.
• Ryan Seaquest: I don’t really understand this.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Albert Chamillard:: Lovely notebook illustrations in a slightly scratchy, geometric pen-and-ink, fine-nibbed style. Does that give you ANY idea of what this will look like? It doesn’t, does it? FFS
• Eddie Argos: You might know Eddie Argos from Art Brut’s one near-hit ‘Emily Kane’, but when he’s not being an artpop frontman he also posts his album cover paintings to Instagram. He also does commissions should you fancy getting him to paint you, I don’t know, NOW 62.
• Gebelia: Slightly whimsical cartoony illustrations.
• Hayk Manukyan: Mr Manukyan is an animator working with Warner Bros. He posts animations, sketches and rough drawings to his Instagram and, honestly, these are so good; it’s like peeking through the window of an animation studio.
• I Am Puma: Yes, it’s the Instagram feed of someone’s pet puma. What of it?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 52 Things in 2018: The third piece of recurring seasonal content this week. We return, once again, to Tom Whitwell’s annual collection of 52 things he learned this year, which, once again, present the absolute best snapshot of the fast-moving future shock we’re all living through on an hourly basis. All of these are great, all of these will be quoted back at you more often than you want them to be in the coming months – pick your favourites! My personal one is “54 percent of Chinese born after 1995 chose “influencer” as their most desired occupation”, but there’s enough bleakly-dystopian goodness in there to go round, trust me.
• The Digital Maginot Line: I’m a week late with this one, apologies, so you might already have seen it; if not, though, I would urge you all to take the time to go through this piece; it’s a wonderfully-written synopsis of The State of Things in terms of the Culture Wars and digital discourse and platforms and prevention, and does the best job I’ve seen in an age of explaining exactly why things feel quite so fraught at the moment when it comes to the intersection of on- and offline power struggles. Possibly the smartest thing in here this week.
• The TM Landry Con: This is heartbreaking, and a quite remarkable piece of journalism. You may have heard of TM Landry, a school in Virginia in the US which in recent years had developed a reputation as the poster-child for poor black children achieving unprecedented academic success – you may have seen viral footage of kids discovering they’ve got into Harvard, say – and which, it turns out, has been a massive con trick for years, involving some quite remarkable intimidation and abuse of students who were bullied into perpetuating the fiction of the school as some sort of outlying bastion of miraculous excellence. Brilliant work by the reporters here, but I very much wish this weren’t true.
• The Palm Oil Catastrophe: A look at how US policy unwittingly led to the global boom in palm oil production and how as a result it set environmentalism back decades. The main takeaway from this – other than that palm oil’s a Bad Thing and that wow, we’re really screwed, aren’t we? – is the degree to which unwitting bad consequences are so often perpertuated by short-sighted or underinvestigated policy decisions which seemed like a good idea at the time OH HAI 2015 CONSERVATIVE PARTY MANIFESTO WITH YOUR COMMITMENT TO AN EU REFERENDUM!
• Prisoners of Memes: Whilst everyone is, unsurprisingly, focused on China as the most frightening ‘terrifying state using digital techniques to control the citizenry’ out there, one mustn’t forget the sterling work being done by Narendra Modi in India; this piece looks at half a dozen young Indians who’ve been jailed or sequestered by the state for posting material on social media critical of the government or local officials. That’s normal and fine, isn’t it? Isn’t it?  
• The State of UX 2019: Do you want a really long and involved investigation into coming trends in UX design? Do you? Unless you’re a webdesigner you almost certainly don’t, but, well, you can have this anyway.
• On Tumblr’s Bongo Ban: Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulous casts a fond, reminiscent eye back at the culture of pr0n on Tumblr – she’s not the only writer to have penned a eulogy for all the furry throbbers that are soon to disappear into the great digital oubliette, but this was my favourite piece. What was interesting about Tumblr, something I’ve seen mentioned by lots of commentors, was that its status as a slightly niche, marginal online community made it a safe and accommodating space for lots of people to explore niche, queer sexual identities for the first time in a way they might not have been able to do anywhere else; personally I think this is another step towards the dequeering of culture – and to all of you those who’ve penned pieces about how 2018 has been ‘the queerest year ever’, well, yes, but you could equally argue that it’s been the most mainstream queer year ever, and you ought to be able to see why that’s potentially problematic. Oh, and if you want an insight into why this is suddenly happening now, this is such a thing.
• Instagram Party Accounts: This week’s despatch from the frontlines of teen culture – apparently if you’re hosting a big party and your a teen, you might consider setting up a special Insta account for that party and using that as a means of creating a guestlist, setting parameters, etc. I love stuff like this, platforms getting bent to fit the shape that users need; I also feel we’re about a week away from a ‘Insta Party Account Highlights’ meta-Insta and this trend dies again.  
• The Best of What’s New: By way of a brief moment of respite from my standard, tired litany of complaint at the state of everything, this is Popular Science Magazine’s list ogf the 100 best innovations of 2018. Some you will have seen, some you will barely be able to believe, all will give you a brief moment of techno-utopian optimism before you realise that this stuff continues to be about as equally distributed as it ever was. Still, SHINY NEW TECH!
• TikTok Is Fun: This is someone else’s observation, but I forget whose (Jason Kottke, maybe?) – every few months, the mainstream media does a piece where they talk breathlessly about a NEW THING that is bringing the CAREFREE FUN back to social media. It’s Instagram, with it’s authenticity! It’s Snapchat, with its ephemerality! It’s TikTok, with its carefree frivolity! Proof that TikTok has BROKEN OUT, this is an NYT piece explaining it to confused 40somethings who still need to feel current and painting a picture of it as a fun, carefree playspace rather than an app which is already being reported as riddled with predators.
• Fifteen Unconventional Uses for Voice Tech: If you have a line item in your ‘2019 prep’ to-do list which says ‘think of some interesting stuff to say to clients around voice tech’ then you could do worse than read this; Nicole He recently taught a course in voice tech at NYU, and this is her writeup of the projects that her students came up with. The breadth of use cases here is superb, from a Google voice assistant with a personality, to a voice-controlled AR pet, and there’s loads in here that you can steal – or, if you’re a better person, hire one of Ms Ye’s students to work on for you.
• Albums of the Year: There are an infinity of these lists out there, as per, but I’m linking to The Quietus’ selection as it’s a wonderful publication with awesome writing and it’s one of the more eclectic lists out there, containing as it does Janelle Monae, Brockhampton, and Tropical Fcuk Storm. Lovely, and contains the added bonus of embedded tracks for each album.
• Bowel Movement: A Guardian longread on the science of sh1tting, inspired by the Squatty Potty, the crapping stool whose unicorn-and-rainbow-turds-featuring ads you’ll doubtless remember from a few years ago. Yes, fine, it’s all about defecation, but it’s interesting and contains the excellent fact that in the 20th Century German toilets used to feature small shelves where one could inspect one’s fecal deposit, which does rather make one wonder about the extent to which national identity is in fact really a thing after all.
• The Way Home: “Where do you feel most at home? Maybe you’re nostalgic for where you’re from. Maybe you couldn’t wait to leave. Maybe home is where you’ll sleep tonight. Maybe you’re still searching. In a year when migrant children have been sent to live in a tent city, rents for a San Francisco apartment reached an average of $3,750, and wildfires destroyed entire communities, the question of how people find and define “home” has never felt more urgent. We asked 34 photographers to travel across the West, capturing stories about home for our first all-photography issue. Look. And listen — audio footnotes invite you to hear from many of the people you’ll meet in these pages.” There’s an accompanying load of supplementary content on the paper’s Insta feed too, along with an accompanying physical exhibition taking place in SF; this is a superb piece of journalism.
• When Did The 90s End?: A forensic exploration as to exactly when the time period we can now look back on as the culturally distinct era ‘The 90s’ ended. Was it 9/11? Was it Sex and the City? This is a bit archly pomo, fine, but it makes some excellent points, not least the one about ‘cool’ being a term that has literally no meaning in 2018 and whose currency’s death can be mapped pretty much exactly against the day the 90s died.
• Overcelebrating Life Events: Hung off the ‘news’ story about that couple who wanted to do an elaborate baby reveal video and ended up setting fire to a large swathe of their State, this piece looks at the increasing trend towards lavish celebrations for events that would previously have gone unremarked. Finding out the sex of your child? CHECK! Getting divorced? CHECK! Baby showers and multiple stag and hen and STEN dos and proms and 21sts and 30ths and 40ths and menopauses? CHECK CHECK CHECK! It’s an interesting read, but can also equally be summarised as ‘because Instagram’ – basically if you work with a brand that can reasonably tie itself to a LIFE EVENT you can probably make a reasonable amount of money out of idiots who are willing to bankrupt themselves celebrating made-up events for the Likes.
• How To Recognise a Fake Image: The best thing about this is that, given the pace of technological improvement in this field, all the advice in here will be out-of-date by the time I finish typing this sentence. Still, if you want a quick primer on what to look out for when trying to spot an AI-generated fake this isn’t a bad place to start – the point about the hair is a genuinely useful one, seeing as I imagine that it will be one of the harder issues to fix.
• Chrissy Teigen’s Anti-Goop: I haven’t quite managed to work out how Chrissy Teigen managed to become one of the most famous people in the West – I mean, yes, she’s obviously funny and smart on Twitter, but what was she known for before that? Anyway, I could Google that and obviously haven’t, so ignore me; this piece is sort-pof about Teigan, but more about the manner in which a certain type of slightly sloppy, relatable ‘authenticity’ is now one of the most powerful brand signifiers you can have. Can we please, please retire the word ‘authentic’? It is so heavy with layered meaning that no sentence can carry its weight any longer.
• That Paltrow Interview: Here’s the contrast to the last piece – if you’ve not yet read it, that yoga quote is as bad as you think it is.
• Bra Theory: This is, fine, a corporate blogpost about the learnings from three years of trying to run a high-tec bra measurement and manufacturing business, but it’s ALSO one of the better ‘founder’s journey’-type pieces I’ve read in an age; it’s full of honestly useful and interesting notes on the mistakes the author made building their business, considerations they wish they’d made, all that sort of jazz, and it also contains all the insights you’d ever want about the customer journey people go through when looking to buy a brassiere.
• Don’t Pretend You Can’t See Us: The best piece I read this week about the Gilets Jaunes in France and what the movement means, to the extent it can be said to mean anything coherent at all. It paints a good picture of the weirdly incongruous political faultlines that exist within movements of this type, as oppositional politics of the traditional left and right find themselves allied together against the nebulous threat of ‘globalism’; it also contains a couple of excellent digs at Handsome Manu over in the Elysee. It works in decent contrast to pieces such as this one in Buzzfeed which have very much gone with the ‘It’s Facebook Wot Done It’ line, in a manner that fundamentally misunderstands the way Groups work on the platform. If you’re a member of a Facebook group then the content from that group is more likely to surface in your feed as of this year, so it’s perhaps likely to intensify group bonds and create more fertile breeding grounds for broader campaigning. On the other hand, the Buzzfeed article implies that stuff from groups – which in these cases are in the main closed – leaches into the newsfeed of others, which isn’t true. I mean, far be it from me to defend Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory, but let’s be fair about it.
• Token: This is a great piece, if depressing. The article looks back at black actors who had bit-part roles in some of the biggest shows of the 90s and hears their stories, of being a marginalised and often invisible part of the very, very white world of network TV in US America. The difference between the situation then and now is striking – and yet even now, representation isn’t what it could or ought to be.
• Remembering Bourdain: Anthony Bourdain feels like a resonant one this year; this is an oral history-style recollection of what it was like working on his TV show over all these years, along with scattered other reminiscences from other parts of his life; what shines through more than anything is the curiosity he expressed for almost every aspect of his life. Read this and then go and eat something tasty.
• Goodbye Rookie: I was honestly saddened by this. I didn’t imagine when I first came across Tavi Gevinson as the prematurely-old-looking precocious child in the frow sitting next to Anna Wintour at NYFW that a decade hence she’d be wrapping up a long-running and acclaimed editorial project she’d started at just 15. Shows what I know. This is Gevinson’s ‘Goodbye’ editorial, and I can’t stress what a good piece of writing it is; professional, personal, funny, sad, she touches on changing culture, the realities of business and online publishing, trends and ephemerality and self and, oh, all sorts of stuff. I am honestly in awe of this child; she writes SO well and SO smartly and everything she does makes me feel like some sort of knuckle-dragging troglodyte by contrast.
• A History of Dance Dance Revolution: I imagine there are some of you who have a degree of DDR expertise hard-wired into your muscle memory as a result of misspent teenage weekends in the arcade. I was just a little too old to catch the craze (and, er, too arryhthmic), but this is a lovely piece of nostalgia looking back at the era when no arcade was complete without an Asian kid with frosted tips making absolute mincemeat of the cabinet.
• Terrible Occult Detectives of the Victorian Era: I didn’t know this, but apparently there was a late-18C craze for oddly-named detectives coming to gribs with THE SUPERNATURAL, all seances and ghosts and ANCIENT RITUALS; this is an overview of some of the best (worst) ones, and contains some true gems. “Sometimes his enemy is the ghost of a jester, sometimes it’s Irish people, and sometimes he splits the difference and it turns out to be a crusty old sea captain hiding in a well and a naked ghost baby.” See? Who doesn’t want to read that?
• Trapped At Sea With The Crypto-Bros: Laurie Pennie does another very good observational hatchet job whilst again seemingly managing to centre herself in the narrative; I don’t know any other writer that can do the whole ‘these are awful people and yet I found myself weirdly at home with them because I too am a strange outsider living in the liminal spaces between accepted social norms and mores!’ thing in quite the way she does, and I’m not 100% sure I like it; still, she does write very well, and the portrait of the madness of the crypto pyramid sales world is sort of charming, although it feels rather as though she’s pulled some punches at various points for reasons I’d be interested to find more about…
• My Beautiful Death: An artist reflects on what her art has done to her. I don’t want to say much more than this; it’s beautiful, but you need to see for yourselves.
• Lunch With My First Love: Beautiful account of meeting up with a significant ex after 20 years of not seeing each other. I won’t spoil what happens, but this captures absolutely the peculiarly happysad feeling of meeting someone years down the line and realising, actually, we could have been happy together. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not sufficiently in the end, but a bit. Made me cry, just in case you were wondering.
• Slaughterhouse: There’s a peculiarly affectless quality, I find, to English prose translated from the Dutch, and so it is with this excellent essay from Granta in which the author Arnon Grunberg visits a number of slaughterhouses across the Netherlands, meeting the workers and killing the animals and all the while observing the mechanics and the process and the oddities. This is…cold, mostly, and yet pleasingly so, like a scalpel or sawblade.
• Favourite Quotations: This is a lovely exercise; Doug Warner has been collecting his favourite quotations for years, and here he arranges them into a roughly-thematically-ordered sequence, working almost as a conversation. SO MANY GREAT QUOTES, and the format makes them sing; this is ace.
• The Empathy Exams: What it’s like to play a medical patient. Except, obviously, it’s really not about that at all. This is a glorious piece of personal writing by Leslie Jamison.
• Dating in my 50s: Finally this week, you MUST read this – it’s funny, wry (yes it is, although I know that ‘wry’ is something very rarely seen in real life) and self-deprecating, and you can read London between every line, and it makes me wonder all sorts of things, about what it must be like being a former beauty, former rockstar, former someone, and what it’s like when all that goes and you tentatively look to see what’s left. Viv Albertine was guitarist in the Slits, and this is an extract from the second part of her memoir published in May this year. Exceptional.

By Frederic Martin

AND FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. This is a 10-minute megamix of the songs of the year, and, oddly, it’s not terrible! Contains 144 songs, so challenge your children to find all of them:

2) This is called ‘Dust on Trial’ and it’s by Shame, and it’s horrible and sinister and PERFECT for cold grey days with flat, low light:

3) Next, this is by Tessa Darling, it’s called ‘Bad Ideas’ and it’s absolutely adorable in a slightly cutesy indiepoplovesong kind of way:

4) Next up, fittingly in THE YEAR OF AI, the first song ever to feature on Curios with an AI vocalist. This is by Holly Herndon, it’s called ‘Godmother’, and the vocal is performed by an AI called ‘Spawn’, “a project two years in the making. The pair first showcased their creation this past April in Berlin, where the artificial neural network reproduced the voices of her parents and interacted with the sounds made by guests at the installation. Spawn improvised and learned from her environment. And now the rest of the world can hear Spawn sing.” It’s, unsurprisingly, HORRIFIC:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is Blaxploitation by Noname – SO, SO, SO GOOD, this:

6) Last up this week, have another AWE-INSPIRING collection of Duplo Thomas the Tank Engine trains doing stunts because, frankly, it’s soothing and we all need it. THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK GOODBYE EVERYONE HAVE A LOVELY COUPLE OF DAYS OFF AND TRY NOT TO GET TOO STRESSED ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING OR THE IMMINENT PROSPECT OF SPENDING TIME WITH YOUR FAMILY IT WILL, I PROMISE, ALL BE OK, SO WHY NOT TREAT YOURSELF TO A MINCE PIE OR MAYBE EVEN A SMALL GLASS OF SHERRY YOU’VE EARNED IT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE TIL NEXT WEEK BYE!:

Can we now officially call everyone who supports UKIP a racist, then? Is that OK? Good! 

I can’t be bothered to get angry about politics today, it seems (more) futile (than normal). I’m also in a hurry, so by way of preamble let me point out that it’s getting very cold, that this country is in the grip of an appalling, embarrassing housing crisis, and that seeing as it’s Bl*ck Fr*d*y and we’re all spending ourselves into penury anyway you might as well give some money to charity as well – Shelter, Crisis, St Mungo’s, take your pick. 

Anyway tedious preaching done with, let me once again lead you, stepping gingerly, towards this week’s looming thicket of prose and links and mystery and awe and, yes, on occasion horror. Careful not to snag on anything; the thorns are sharp and stick in the flesh rather. This, as ever, is Web Curios!

By Pascal Goet

What is it about politics that attracts the world’s worst people? I mean, it’s true isn’t it – look at them this week, plotting and preening and self-regarding and mindwanking themselves raw on the power fantasies whilst only-just-metaphorically sh1tting all over us. Thanks, Conservatives! Thanks! Thanks everyone! I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I spend a few days a week working for a firm of political consultants (I won’t mention them as, well, to be honest they probably don’t want the association) and this week even they – many of whom have worked in politics, and all of whom have an interest in the whole filthy mess that can at best be described as…unhealthy – even they have been wondering around with expressions of barely-concealed bafflement on their faces as they try and make sense of exactly why it would seem that the ruling classes appear to have decided that they once again want to play one of their occasional games of ‘let’s fcuk the electorate with knives, just because we can!.

Christ alive, these people. 

Anyway, you’ve had enough, I’ve had enough, we’ve all had enough. You are bruised and battered and wounded after a long week – I know, sweetheart, I know – and all you want is to rest your weary limbs. Come, then, take my hand and let me lower you gently into the warm, welcoming liquid bath that is this week’s Curios, like a Radox bath except, well, significantly more clotted. Read, relax, and try and forget – this, as ever, is Web Curios, and Jarvis Cocker really was right. 

By Carly Silverman

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Well thank GOD that’s all done with – the culture wars are over!

AHAHAHAHAHAHA NO THEY ARE NOT THEY WILL NEVER END! As we move into a new reality, one in which the ostensibly simple fact of a press conference can usher in a spittle flecked debate about the very nature of truth, it dawned on me this week that, more than anything else, it very much feels right now as though the whole world has a hangover. 

You know what I mean – those very particular hangovers where you’re not in any imminent danger of being sick, but your eyeballs vefy much have that ‘damp orbs rolled in sand and then replaced’ feel about them, and the lights are blinding and angled too low and the grouting in your mouth is coming loose and the sounds have sharp edges and everything is just colossal and jagged and simply TOO MUCH. Those. It feels like the world has one of those. 

So. Ready yourself to receive your weekly panacea, your bromide, the words and links which will once again convinvce you that the bad stuff is only online where in fact online is the only safe place there is, and meatspace is where The Bad Things happen; take this, all of you, and eat it, for these are my words which I have given up for YOU – TAKE MY SOOTHING, SACRAMENTAL CURIOS INSIDE YOURSELVES AND LIVE FOREVER (you will still all die). This, as ever, is WEB CURIOS!

(oh, and by the way, Imperica is launching a Patreon to fund its magazines and other gubbins – don’t worry, I won’t see a penny of this, this is about the website as a whole and not me, so feel free to contribute with impunity. If you’ve ever thought ‘gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to support an art and culture endeavour online with a couple of quid a month then, well, LOOK HERE!)

By Lenz Geerk

LET’S START THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH SOME EXCELLENT DEEP CUTS AND RARITIES AND GENERAL ODD STUFF FROM SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS IT SHOULDN’T HAVE COME AS A SURPRISE TO ANYONE THAT FACEBOOK’S POLITICAL AD TRANSPARENCY STUFF DOESN’T REALLY WORK:

• Facebook Ads Now Support 1:1 Image Formats: It’s…a slow week in s*c**l m*d** news this week, so apologies in advance for leading with an even-more-underwhelming-than-usual story this time around. Still, from the point of view of being able to use the same image assets for your Insta and FB campaigns it’s…no, actually it’s still incredibly boring, isn’t it? Look, I promise it will get better, just bear with me ok?
• Facebook Launches ‘Test Event’ Tool: Have YOU ever suffered the crippling embarrassment of having set up a Facebook Event (NB – this is an ‘event’ in the Analytics sense, as in ‘tracking people who you send to your website from Facebook via the Pixel’, rather than in the ‘hi we might have a party if enough of you say you will attend so please God don’t just do the usual thing and hit ‘maybe’ as a matter of course as then we’ll all be in some sort of horrible party limbo’) and setting it live and then realising that you’ve fcuked something up and OH GOD THE SHAME? No, of course you haven’t, because of course everyone reading this is far too important to do the frivolous executional stuff and instead spends their days huffing on the heady glue of STRATEGY; still, though, you might find this useful to alert the poor Junior Account Executives or your caged code monkeys to this, as it could prove useful and might mean that you don’t have to beat the soles of their feet with the brambles again this week.
• Instagram Prototyping School Stories: On the one hand, Instagram is widely acknowledged as being a dreadful hotbed of bullying if you’re a kid, and Instagram’s attempting to address this through AI moderation and suggestions that maybe one ought to spend less time on one’s phone (see Curios passim); on the other hand, Instagram’s also attempting to get academic institutions on board with using Insta through a specific ‘Schools’ product. What do YOU think Facebook cares most about? HM. Anyway, Insta for Schools is a collaborative creation prototype, the idea being that schools could set up a Story which students could contribute to – security measures to prevent this becoming a total cesspit include only kids tagged as being students at a given school can contribute, and that all submissions would be moderated by a human eye to prevent the predictable series of videos mocking the unpopular kids which would otherwise result. Do you think this is going to be a good thing? Do you? Oh, and while we’re on Insta, it’s also recently launched Hindi language support. And it’s considering allowing Stories on the platform to have a deep-linkable URL for use off-platform. Now you know EVERYTHING!
• Facebook Portal Privacy: Facebook Portal is finally shipping, and Facebook have as a result seen fit to offer this clarification about the exact nature of the data it will collect on users and how it will tie into the ads ecosystem. Except, well, this post is still pretty obfuscatory – whilst it acknowledges that users’ specific Portal usage will be logged and used to tailor ads shown to them on other platforms, it makes literally NO MENTION AT ALL of the fact that the Ts&Cs, when you dig into them, clearly suggest that it will also track information about who you contact, and how, and for how long, to build out the knowledge graph of your connections and to then use that information to build a bigger advertising profile. Given the fact that it’s this specific element of it that various people flagged immediately at the product’s launch, it seems a touch remiss of them imho. Anyway, if you want another way for Facebook to know stuff about you in exchange for, er, a cameraphone in your house then WOW is this the product for you.
• Chrome To Block All Ads On Websites Running Crap Ads: Literally just that, and, as I always like to note, this won’t affect any of you fine folk.
• Tencent Launching Own Version of Snap Specs: It does rather feel like Snap is the small child in the playground, whose lunch money keeps getting stolen by the bigger kids and who’s growing increasingly slim and wan-looking as the malnutrition takes hold. Still, it’ll be interesting to see whether this move from Tencent, and the subsequent promotion of the hardware across China, makes wearable camera glasses any less creepy/ridiculous and any more of a mainstream thing (I don’t think it will, but I have long proven myself to be a know-nothing bozo).
• Data Reportal: Well THIS is useful. Bookmark this, send it your planner and data people, CELEBRATE ITS EXISTENCE. Data Reportal is a…er…portal which acts as a gateway to/repository of all the social media/digital use stats compiled by We Are Social, Hootsuite and Kepios; you know, the ones I occasionally link to in here with some sort of disparaging ‘copy and paste these numbers in order to help you make whatever point you’re trying to make’ line. Anyway, if you want to access numbers on, I don’t know, mobile phone usage in Guam then this is GOLDEN – honestly, so useful.
• Instagram Stories Research Report: It’s a piece of PR puffery, fine, but it’s also potentially helpful; this is compiled by Buffer, who analysed a whole load of branded Insta stories to compile this report which purports to tell you what works and what doesn’t; whilst there’s quite a lot of wooly / obvious stuff here (people look at Stories outside of work hours! Post to hit them on their commute!), my friend Fritha pointed out that this sort of stuff is often really useful to persuade senior people that they might want to try experimenting with A New Type of Thing, and she is right. Anyway, if you want some proof points to suggest that your client or employer might want to jump on the Stories bandwagon, this probably contains said proof-points.
• A Template App for Insta / Snap Stories: This one’s called ‘Unfold’, and it lets you make really pretty Stories really easily. iOS-only, as is…
• ANOTHER Template App for Insta / Snap Stories: This one, which is called Mojo. Seemingly does exactly the same stuff as Unfold, but with a slightly different aesthetic – try both! Try neither! But don’t think too hard about the weird inherent contradiction between the original idea of Stories as a personal, ephemeral communication medium being slowly professionalised and homogenised to the point where everyone’s stuff is going to look the same! Oh, and if you thought ‘hey, you know what, there’s probably a market in apps which help people make less sh1t Stories!’ then you were right and you are now TOO LATE.
• Mish Guru: This, though, is the SERIOUS Stories software – if you are a PROFESSIONAL CONTENT CREATION FACTORY and want a piece of desktop software which will allow you to Storyboard, schedule, edit, export, etc, whilst also offering you project management-type functionality to enable the collation of video from multiple sources, manage uploading and all the rest, then this is probably right up your street. It’s a paid thing, fine, but if you make a lot of this stuff and don’t really want to have to keep editing the bastard things on your phone then you might want to take a look.
• Who Cares?: Another in Web Curios’ occasional series of ‘research reports which have been turned into shiny websites with varying degrees of success’, Who Cares? is a ‘brand empathy report’, whatever that means (it’s all in Portuguese so, er, I’m not 100% certain), but I’m more interested in the website design; on the one hand, it’s stylistically well-defined and has a really strong look and feel, but on the other it’s VERY busy and it’s quite hard to work out what it’s saying, and then you click on the ‘Results’ section and the floaty score map appears and it’s almost lovely but then you realise that you can’t quite read it well enough…I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, is the upshot, but it’s still better than anything I could make so, well, I’ll fcuk off and shut up.
• Big Lavender: Finally in the boring section all about corporate wankery, have some frivolous light relief in the shape of the latest big budget digital webtoy by Old Spice; this time, to promote some new noseflavour of smellgel which apparently is perfumed with lavender (which apparently doesn’t have the same geriatric or queeny connotations in the US that it does here), they’ve created a first-person shooting gallery-type thing, where you have to shoot the lavender and avoid whatever other crap they tell you to avoid. Stupid, obviously, but really well-made; as ever with Old Spice, the production values are superb; it’s odd to think that this is the sort of thing which 20 years ago you would probably have to pay actual cashmoney for on the SNES. Anyway, SHOOT THE LAVENDER (but you might want to mute the slightly infuriatingly shouty sound).

By Ziyah Gaifk

NEXT, ENJOY THIS 25TH ANNIVERSARY BBC ESEENTIAL MIX BY PAUL OAKENFOLD!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD REALLY LIKE SOMEONE TO GET THE WORLD A BEROCCA, PT.1:

• Overexposed 1948: This is lovely and well-made and I LOVE the voice-over work. Overexposed 1948 is a site which tells the story of the B-29 Superfortress Overexposed, which, for those of you less familiar with aviation history than I am thanks to my cursory reading of the site, was a plane which was made famous for its work on the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll in the mid-1940s. In 1948, the plane crashed in Derbyshire leaving no survivors; the site presents a series of 360 photos, which you can navigate through and explore, while all the while giving you the first person account of one Serviceman Alsopp, who was first on the scene of the crash. This is simple but SO effective; the voice over work really makes it, and is an excellent reminder that a lack of decent audio is often one of the (fine, many) reasons why 360 work falls down. If you’re wondering how it works and what to do, just listen and look and you will eventually see interactive points in the images – click them to move around and see the site from different perspectives. I really, really like this.
• Byte: This isn’t launching til next year, but, well, it’s Vine 2.0! It’s going to be a new looping video app, and it’s made by one of the creators of Vine, and it was going to be called Vine2.0 back in the day but now it’s not, and, er, that’s literally all I know! Or all that anyone else knows! But! You can sign up and get alerts! This…isn’t that exciting! Sorry!
• Politics and Design: Thanks to Dan for sending this my way; this is filterable database of every single candidate logo from the recent US midterms campaign. Students of design will find a lot to love in here, but even those such as me with no aesthetic sense whatsoever should find this fascinating. There are…a lot of candidates, and as such a lot of logos, and a lot of really underwhelming graphic design. What’s notable is the extent to which there’s an orthodoxy in terms of palette and font throughout this, so much so that anything that doesn’t vaguely conform to that general template automatically stands out as a little bit mental. Special shout out to Elijah Cummings who ran for Congress in Maryland and thought, for reasons known only to him and his campaign manager, that this would be a suitable font in which to render his surname. Still, he’s doing God’s work, so, well, MORE POWER TO YOU, ELIJAH.
• Birthtube: The web, like the rest of the world, is a rich tapestry of interests, passions, wants and needs, and there are corners of it which, it may well surprise you to know, I have never been (or if I have, I have worn a disguise). The birthing web is one such corner – I’ve never had cause to investigate the world of birth videos and advice and doulas and waterbirths and all that jazz what with being utterly childless and what with the fact that, well, unless you have a very specific reason to watch videos of childbirth there would be something quite weird about watching videos of childbirth, I think. This week, though, all that changed when I stumbled across Birthtube – a site which, for all I know, might well be the go-to portal for anyone looking to get a bit more of a real-world look at the whole messy business, but which I had no idea existed. MY WORD the technicolour glory of the human reproductive experience!  The pinks, the purples, the yellows, the creams, the…the browns! I know all men say this – and if we don’t, we really should – but HOW DOES ANYONE DO THAT MORE THAN ONCE? Or even once, to be honest. This whole site is basically a front for birthing services, presumably in the US, but WHO CARES when you can enjoy the miracle of life happening right in front of you. I haven’t seen a birthing video since I was at school – going to Catholic state school in the 80s meant you got quite a lot of exposure to slightly…iffy things, like an actual video of very late-stage terminations which I don’t advise anyone ever seeing, and a full-on birth video featuring a woman with very 1970s pubic hair and, as I recall with pretty visceral horror, very full bowels. Does this sort of thing still happen in schools? I sort of feel it oughtn’t. Anyway, BIRTH! LIFE! MIRACULOUS!
• For The Web: I love the web. Honestly, it’s obviously a sort of terrible thing for all of use, and in many respects my addiction to online life has rendered me even more of a stumbling inadequate when it comes to interpersonal interaction in meatspace (dirty, smelly, inefficient meatspace) than I would have been otherwise, but at the same time I honestly cannot imagine what I would do with my life were it not for the fact that I was lucky enough to be born (white, male, cis, able-bodied, middle-class, fine) into a generation where ‘I sort of mong around online and I’m a bit better at Google than you’ was enough of a jobdsecription / skillset to get you a job (let’s not call it a ‘career’, for God’s sake, that’s just a job that’s gone on far too long). Anyway, I presume that at least some of you feel the same as me and as such you might be interested in this project; it’s part of the Open Web Project and is seeking contributions and thoughts on how ace it is and how it’s changed your life for the better – “We’re asking web lovers like you to tell us about their web: the good and the bad, in many languages, and from as many people as possible. On the web’s 30th birthday next March, we’ll be releasing a film which tells a wider story about how central the web is to our daily lives and why that makes it worth fighting for.Tell us your story today to help us write ours. Post your video on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to tell us why you are #ForTheWeb.” DO IT!
• More Imagined Famouses: 2018 has very much been the year in which the reality of our post-truth future has hit home and we’ve been forced to confront the fact that in all honesty we’re not going to be able to take anything we see on a screen at face value by 2020 (at the latest tbh). This video is the end result of this paper, all about training a GAN to invent faces out of nothing, having been trained on a massive corpus of famous people’s fizzogs. Just watch the video – it’s 30s long and jaw-dropping and you will be amazed that you recognise these people and yet don’t – and then go and read the paper which you won’t understand but which is worth a look because of the incredibly, almost comically, brief and cursory two-paragraph bit about ‘ethics’. HA! ETHICS! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
• No UFO: Have you ever wanted a website on which you can investigate the history of UFO sightings in New Zealand? Would you like it to be designed in startlingly current hipster minimalist fashion? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN! Sadly lacking in photographic evidence (there’s a shock), there are some wonderfully batshit reports in here of ‘cigar-shaped objects’ (which may or may not be solar sails, as we now know) and the like, though fewer than fans of stereotype might like of sheep abductions. Still, the design work here is really nice and far cooler than it needs to be.
• Notabilia: Another in the occasional series of ‘pleasing dataviz-type projects using Wikipedia data’ which I stumble across every now and again, this collects the longest discussions on Wikipedia which have led to article deletion, creating a beautiful visualisation of the ways in which discussions between editors branch and fork and lead to either a conclusion or a whole new branch of debate; the meat of this will, fine, be largely of interest to Wikipedians, but the viz stuff here is a really interesting way of presenting intellectual shifts and branching patterns of thought which might be useful in other areas or disciplines.
• The Time Machine Atlas: This is a bit slow, but bear with it – this site lets you look at Venice as a map (so far, so less good than Google), but allows you to visualise the manner in which the city’s architecture and layout has changed over the centuries, running you through the years and showing the changing face of the lagoon and surrounding area. When Google invent time travel and we can look at this for the entire world, what a day it will be.
• B-Laze: Do you like smoking weed? Of course you do, everyone likes smoking weed in 2018! Do you like it so much that you’d like to drop over £2k on a device to let you smoke it whilst looking like someone from the mid-90s? If so, GREAT – the B-Laze is a truly preposterous device, claiming to be the world’s first LASER BONG! Let’s take a moment to think about words that shouldn’t probably be concatenated for reasons of health and safety – ‘naked’ and ‘falconry’, for example, or ‘razorwire’ and ‘tightrope’, or ‘tabasco’ and ‘enema’ – and then let’s add ‘laser’ and ‘bong’ to that list. Baffling. Oh, and it’s internet-connected and can be controlled through an app. Just IMAGINE.
• The AI Anchor: One of the classic unfunny gags that people make about people in media is about newsreaders – “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GET PAID TO READ!”, I imagine people (taxi drivers) saying to them all the time, “ANYONE CAN DO THAT!”. Sadly that’s now absolutely true, except it’s not just ‘anyone’, it’s ‘a synthesised digital avatar’ – showcased this week by Xinhua, this is a virtual newsreader who, using what they call ‘AI’ but which isn’t, let’s be clear, AI at all, will read whatever is typed for him to read, with a totally simulated voice and realistic mouth movements; I’m sketchy on the exact detail, but I wonder whether the presumed ‘AI’ element is to do with an eventual ability for software to automate the writing of the digipuppet’s script from AP alerts or somesuch. Anyway, Huw Edwards, Riz Lateef, YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED.
• Public Interest Technology: This is serious and perhaps quite niche, but also the sort of thing that I imagine some of you might find useful; it’s a list of resources and thinking about the role of technology in civil society – to quote the site, ““public-interest technology refers to the study and application of technology expertise to advance the public interest/generate public beneits/promote the public good.” Campaigners, activists, anyone working in or around the intersection of government and tech, will all find it useful.
• Game Changers: This is a LOVELY site by ESPN, taking a series of individual elements from basketball – dunks, three pointers, etc – and charting how different players throughout the history of the sport have evolved and redefined said element, taking the sport in different evolutionary directions. Featuring a lovely interface, nice animations, and some great clips demonstrating each player’s unique take on each element, this is a really cool piece of webwork which I would LOVE to see done for football – imagine how cool this would be to use for analysis of players, say, or specific moves like the trivela or rabona or somesuch. DO IT SOMEONE PLEASE.
• The A-Z of the Designers Republic: In the late-90s, even if like me you could barely draw a circle let alone aspire to a career in graphic design, The Designers Republic was THE coolest graphic design shop in the world. OK, fine, it was also the ONLY graphic design shop you’d ever heard of and that was solely because of the fact that they designed the look and feel of Wipeout on the PS1 and as such you saw their logo every time you sat down at 6am to work through the comedown on a Sunday morning, but. Their influence on a certain type of aesthetic can’t be underestimated, though – that dense, hyperstylised look and feel, ‘borrowing’ so much from Japan and the far East and yet weirdly VERY English – and is still instantly recognisable even now at a distance of two decades. Anyway, this is a Kickstarter raising money for a full-on glossy retrospective book of their work, and I imagine if you work in advermarketingpr and are my age then this is probably the sort of thing you’ll be half-tempted to get. I guarantee that if you do you will end up doing coke off it at least once, BECAUSE THAT’S THE SORT OF PERSON YOU ARE.
• Air Freshener Club: I honestly don’t understand this site AT ALL, but it is fcuking massive and contains, amongst other things, a series of patterns to knit crocheted air freshener covers so, well, here you go!
• Popular Pups: My girlfriend complained that there were no cats in here last week which suggests that she doesn’t really get the vibe here. Still, by way of small compensation, have this Twitter feed of lovely dogs (sorry Saz, slow week for cats).
• Cartoon Collections: Do you want a place where you can browse and purchase cartoons by some of the most famous and successful strip cartoonists in the US, originals from the New Yorker, Esquire and the like? OH GOOD. For the right sort of person there’s probably some excellent present potential in here.
• The Film Reroll: Blah blah blah I don’t listen to podcasts blah blah blah. Anyway, I haven’t listened to this one either, but I heard the premise and fell slightly in love with the concept; the schtick is that each episode involves a classic film script being played out as a D&D-style roleplaying game, managed by a DM, with people playing through – effectively turning old films into slightly weird, geeky improv sessions. The description that REALLY sold me, though, was that of the latest episodes, in which the presenters roleplay Friday 13th – except the players think that they are in fact roleplaying an 80s frathouse comedy. SUCH a perfect idea, and so clever in terms of maintaining character for the horror movie – I could almost be tempted to listen to this (except, realistically, I probably won’t).
• Specification Gaming Examples In AI: Another one of these occasional lists of ‘mad stuff that AI has done which follows the letter of its goal-led programming but in a way that is genuinely surprising or creepy’. Some of the stuff in here is amazing – witness the note on the AI being trained to play Road Runner as successfully as possible, which simply reads: “Agent kills itself at end of level one to avoid dying in level two” which is basically some sort of dark nihilist philosophical credo right there, or the genuinely chilling “In an artificial life simulation which required energy to survive but giving birth had an energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle which consisted mostly of mating to have children which would then all be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children”. What was that we were saying about ‘ethics’?
• Invaderz: A game of Space Invaders in which each wave of aliens is an evolution of the previous wave, based on those types of alien which survive the longest taking their genes forward. It’s a bit crap as a game, but the premise is really interesting – it would be fascinating to see whether this sort of tech could be applied over the course of a proper game, with enemy civilisations developing based on how you fcuk them up over the course of the game. MAKE IT!

By Lucan Coutts

NEXT, HAVE A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF THE ORIGINAL VERSIONS OF FAMOUS COVER SONGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW WERE COVER SONGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD REALLY LIKE SOMEONE TO GET THE WORLD A BEROCCA, PT.2:

• Videogame Clocks: You know that ‘Clocks’ art installation that does the rounds every few years, turning up in a city and giving the inhabitants and tourists the opportunity to marvel at the artistic endeavour that led Christian Marklay to stitch together thousands of film clips into a seamless, second-by-second visual compilation? Yeah, well this is a Kickstarter for exactly that, but using clips from videogames instead. On the one hand, this doesn’t really need to exist; on the other, why not? The man behind it, Duncan Robson, acknowledges that it won’t really work as a clock, but, well, fcuk it, it’s ART. He only wants £1800-odd quid and there’s a month left, so this may well make it – GOOD LUCK, DUNCAN ROBSON!
• 19C Japanese Firework Catalogues: I can’t really tell you a whole lot more about this, largely as the site’s all in Japanese, but if you’d like to browse a selection of scanned catalogues of fireworks manufacturers from old Japan then, well, fill your boots. There’s such a lovely aesthetic to all of these, and they are all available to download as (huge) PDFs in case you want to.
• Women at the Midterms: In case you’re a pinko lefty liberal like me who needs to be reminded that there is a general move towards better representation for women and minorities in politics and public life and that in fact, by certain measures, stuff is getting better (honest guv, don’t cry) then this selection of photos of women winning seats in Congress for the first time will be a balm to your bruised soul. These are genuinely cheering after another bruising week in other people’s politics.
• Demobaza: I am, I think I’ve alluded to here before, a total fashion refusenik, a shambolic excuse for an adult, a man so scared of buying clothes that I basically buy the same stuff in the same sizes off the internet each year and hope noone notices I basically only have three outfits. Occasionally I see stuff like this and I imagine what it would be like to be beautiful and confident and stylish – or, in the specific case of Demobaza, what it would be like to be the sort of person who can get away with dressing almost exactly like what I imagine a future version protagonist of the Assassin’s Creed videogame series would dress like. This is MENTAL fashion, sort of a bit Mad Max-y, a bit Assassin’s-y, a bit…er…shroud-y, and obviously anyone wearing it in real life would probably look like they were trying too hard, but, er, does anyone think I could carry this stuff off? Tell me honestly.
• Bloqboard: Bored of all your cryptocurrency? Have you realised that your 400 Ethereum tokens are NEVER going to make you rich? No fear – now the blockchain has USURY! That’s right, thanks to Bloqboard you can now lend out your crypto at a terrifying vig, although why the everliving fcuk anyone would ever want to take out a loan in crypto – famously illiquid, and even more famously unstable – is absolutely beyond me. Still, CRYPTO!
• Kitchen Butterfly: I’m a sucker for a well-written cookery blog, and this one came across my field of vision this week and I then lost about 20 minutes reading back through the archives. Kitchen Butterfly deals specifically with Nigerian food, so if you want recipes and essays about the culinary classics, food culture, and the like, this will see you right.  
• Notable Changes in North Korea: North Korean photoessays have become somewhat passe in recent years, with access to the DPRK becoming slightly less difficult than it used to be; most typically focus on the weird, staged, empty nature of the cities as seen by tourists, but this collection instead focuses on depicting some of the more modern evolutions of North Korean society, and is as a result far more interesting than your typical ‘oh look at the Kim worshippers’ stuff. The KFC analogue in particular is interesting, as is the use of advertising hoardings to instead display inspirational sunset photography which – and this isn’t something I thought I’d say about Mr Jong-Un’s regime – is something we could do with copying here a bit, maybe.
• Adios: Are you one of these people who simply CAN’T COPE with emails and distraction and stuff, and who are CRIPPLED with anxiety every time that new mail sound/indicator pops up on your desktop (PROTIP: TURN OFF THE ALERTS YOU MORON)? You might, then, find this useful – Adios is a Gmail plugin which lets you set specified times during the day at which your new emails will come through, in theory granting you some respite from people’s tyrannical demands for your attention.
• Factcheck.me: An interesting project, launched last week, aiming to explore and examine manipulation of news and issues by third party actors. The initiative’s mission statement reads as follows: “Today, we’re launching launching Factcheck.me to empower those who check the facts. In the midst of a crisis, Factcheck.me can be deployed to start listening and give a birds eye view of the digital battlefield.As of today, Factcheck.me tracks bot activity, amplified images, and viral links.” Anyone can suggest a topic for them to track using their software and investigative techniques – it’s a US initiative and so their initial work has been focused there, but it’ll be interesting to see if this gains traction whether there’s demand for wider investigations. I do wonder whether they’ll reveal more about their methodologies as time goes on – regardless, if you’re interested in journalism and news and veracity and related issues (and, really, you probably ought to be a bit), then this is worth keeping an eye on.
• Funkis: Funkis is a font designed in 2015 which has been updated as a customisable webfont here in 2018 – “The most exciting aspect of this new version is the possibility to customise its design according to common principles found in geometric sans serifs. Funkis A references strict geometric designs with pronounced circular forms and closed apertures. Funkis B has softer curves and open forms that end at approximately 45°. Funkis C harkens back to architectural designs with straight, horizontal transitions and finials. Each of the three basic variants can be outfitted with sharp corners. Furthermore, you have the choice between circular and square dots for punctuation and diacritics. A final option is the possibility to add ink traps for using Funkis in smaller sizes.” Look, YOU might not think this is exciting but I guarantee that somewhere there is at least one designer who’s rubbing their hands across their thighs in barely-contained erotic reverie at the thought of this – I do this for THEM, not YOU.
• Learning To Dress: Another ‘wow, machine learning really is mad, isn’t it?’ moment – watch in this video as vageuly humanoid CG figures, equipped with arms and heads, ‘learn’ how to put on CG jumpers, just like real people. There’s something so hugely uncomfortable and uncanny-valley about watching these virtual entities develop skills; I think we’re probably about two or three years away from a version of The Sims in which all character development happens like this, with environmental learning – just IMAGINE how creepy and awful and brilliant that will be.
• The CG Society: This is, apparently, a networking platform for CG artists – if you want a showcase of some truly incredible examples of computer-generated art and design, this is the place to look (not least as you can contact them if you sign up for membership, making it a decent place to commission work if you’re into that sort of thing).
• Tweets Will Save Us: Silly/clever game which takes Tweets in realtime and places them into a simple browser version of Missile Command – you have to blast the tweets out of the air before they impact on the Earth’s surface and kill us all. The gimmick here is that different types of Tweets have different impact – Tweets from verified users cause more damage than Tweets from us normies, Tweets containing angry or violent language cause more damage than those without, etc. DO YOU SEE THE POINT IT’S TRYING TO MAKE?!? Not subtle, fine, but it’s fun for a few minutes and the point it makes is valid if not startlingly original or insightful.
• Chinese Whiskers: O LOOK IT’S LOTS OF PHOTOS OF CATS AND DOGS TAKEN IN AND AROUND HONG KONG OH RUFF OH MAOW!
• The New York Municipal Archives Gallery: Ahem. Let me defer to the site here: “Welcome to the New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery of over 900,000 images. Selected from the world-class historical collections of the Archives, most of these unique photographs, maps, motion picture and audio recordings are being made accessible for the first time. Visitors are invited to explore and search the collections individually, or across all collections by keyword or any of the advanced search criteria. The gallery includes many complete collections; for others, only representative samples are currently on display. Visitors are encouraged to return frequently as new content will be added on a regular basis. Patrons may order reproductions in the form of prints or digital files; most images can be licensed for commercial use.” A wonderful resource to get lost in, especially if you have any familiarity with NYC.
• Eve’s Robot Dreams: Last up in this week’s selection of miscellaneous weblinks is this Twitter feed, representing this quite incredible Indiegogo fundraiser. Let’s take a look at the copy: “Eve’s Robot Dreams is the first consent-focused robot brothel in the world. Guests can visit in the futuristic cafe where they can get to know the world’s first companion robots. After they have met, guests have the option to spend time with their favorite robot in a private room. Guests can begin building a relationship with their new companion by downloading the Realbotix app on their phone. When they visit Eve’s they can either interact with the companion bot that they have already started to get to know, or with one who they haven’t yet met. Founded by Unicole Unicron, a robot ethicist and writer for Realbotix’s Real Doll X product Harmony, Eve’s is a conscious endeavor. Eve’s interior will be designed by artist Marina Fini as a healing space.” There is…SO MUCH TO LOVE (and despair at) in here; the idea of a robot brothel as ‘a healing space’, the idea that this can in any accurate way be described as ‘consensual’, or that ‘consent’ is a meaningful concept for an inanimate object, or indeed that there’s a whole subset of men who, apparently, will only want to fcuk a robot if there’s a possibility that that robot might, in another world, have made the choice not to fcuk them…MY MIND, IT BOGGLES! Anyway, the Twitter feed is about as SFW as you’d imagine, but I’d advise you at the very least to click the Indiegogo fundraising link and see the thumbnail image they’ve chosen for the promo video. It…it really screams consent, doesn’t it?

By Guodong Zhao

FINALLY, WHY NOT GIVE THE NEW, ORCHESTRAL HANSON ALBUM A GO? YOU WILL BE PLEASANTLY SURPRISED!

THE (VERY EMPTY) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Somenerv: Digital art, illustration, and motion design by Nataniel E. Rodriguez-Vera. Nice work in here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Dennis Muragari: Muragari is a Kenyan artist, working in woodcut and depicting contemporary scenes with traditional techniques. He’s ace, and this is a genuinely cheering feed.
• Tinyhat Skatelife: So apparently this is a ‘thing’ in skater culture – that is, the habit of wearing a tiny beanie perched on top of your head – and this Insta feed takes that and effectively uses it as a starting point to parody some of the more basic skating tropes. Basically a lot of skateboarding jokes, which you may or may not find funny depending on whether you in fact know anything about skateboarding.
• Chris Henry: This feels a bit influencer-y, and I don’t normally feature stuff like this, but LOOK how well-curated Henry’s grid is here. It’s an aesthetic marvel, damn him; sit back and admire the consistency of colourpalette in play here.
• Julian Baumgartner: An AWESOME feed, this, by Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration – apparently “the oldest and now second generation fine art conservation studio in Chicago, established in 1978.” A perfect use of the medium, this posts slow demonstrations of the restorer’s art, which are SO satisfying to watch that I might do nothing else for the rest of the day.
• VICE Reports: This is interesting – a new feed from the VICE stable, which as far as I can tell is set up as a new reporting vertical purely on Insta, focused on getting young people’s opinions and thoughts on issues of the day. Launched just over a week ago, it’s light on content at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see if they keep it up and if they do anything interesting with the format.
• Tattooed Face Squad: People with tattooed faces. Man, there are a LOT of people with tattooed faces.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Underrated Websites: An EXCELLENT and kilometric Reddit thread featuring people’s recommendations for the most underrated and yet essential websites out there. Aside from my genuine baffled hurt at the fact that NOONE saw fit to mention Imperica and Curios – IT’S LIKE NOONE READS THIS STUFF OR CARES, AT ALL! – this is a great resource of new, classic and weird stuff, some useful, some not, but definitely worth a browse if all these links aren’t ENOUGH for you, you INGRATES.
• Fascism Is Not An Idea To Be Debated: It does feel rather that we ought to have come to the end of this debate by now – and yet, here we are. Still, if you want a reasonable, well-written and cogently argued antidote to ‘we must give these views exposure so we can vanquish them in the marketplace of ideas!’ rhetoric then this might serve you well; take a moment to think back at the past week, month, whatever, in global or local politics, and then read this: “It is frightening to think we could be entering the civil war mode, wherein none of the differences and disagreements can be hashed out in discussion. It is quite possible that there is no resolution to the present situation until one side is thoroughly destroyed as an ideological power and political entity. If that is the case, the inescapable struggle requires that anti-fascist forces clearly identify the enemy and commit to defeating them, whoever they are, whatever it takes.”
• Orban and Press Freedom: Another piece pointing out what a genuinely terrifying regime Hungary is currently labouring under – you don’t think we’re seeing a very real resurgence in actual, proper fascism? Honestly? Take a close look at this, and at Salvini, and then have a close read of this article and read the lines that talk about how it’s not that journalists are afraid they’re going to be shot, just that they are going to lose their jobs, and then look at the way Trump tries to treat the press, and join the dots a bit. Crikey.
• How We Got To Yemen: Seeing as we’re at the top end of the longreads, where I tend to concentrate on the serious and real-life stuff, it’s worth also linking to this superb overview of how the Yemeni conflict arrived at the point we’re currently at; it’s…not a cheering read, obviously, and it’s very long, but as an explainer as to the nature of the proxy conflict it’s a comprehensive one. In common with much else this week, it doesn’t feel like this is going to stop anytime soon.
• The Right on LinkedIn: To be honest I don’t really believe this – it feels like a bit of a reach – but I despise LinkedIn with a passion and as such the idea of its self-publicising GaryVee fans being overrun by Trumpian rhetoric makes me very happy indeed. Apparently – according to this piece, at least – Trump supporters are struggling to find traction on Facebook and as such are turning to LinkedIn to share their MAGA memes and their pro-Donald guff, thereby discomfiting all those who are only there to CRUSH IT and SUCCEED and stuff. I might start experimenting with some Ickeian conspiracy theory stuff on there to supplement my ceaseless self-promotion; I’ll let you know how I get on.
• How Hiphop Learned to Pose: Not so much of an essay as a photoessay, this is nonetheless a lovely exploration of photography in hiphop, presenting contact sheets from some iconic (sorry) photoshoots from artists past – from the full series of shots from which the infamous ‘Biggie wearing a crown’ cover was taken, to the various version of the Stankonia cover that OutKast took, these are wonderful.
• New Apple Maps: I’ve featured a previous entry in this essay series before, but this is a new, in-depth look at the differences between Apple and Google’s mapping technology, based on analysis of the latest edition of Apple Maps which was recently released. Whilst on the one hand I can imagine that the thought of reading a few thousand words about different mapping methodologies doesn’t appeal all that much, on the other this is a genuinely interesting series of explanations about how the two companies are both doing the mapping and then using AI to turn it into digitally viable product, and contains some smart observations based on this on who’s likely to win the mapping race.
• The Decivilising Process: This is SUCH a wonderfully English, snobbish, curmudgeonly piece of writing, by Adrian Wooldridge who writes Bagehot in the FT and who, in this column for 1843 Magazine, laments the decline of civilised society. It’s obviously massively tongue-in-cheek, except that it isn’t, at all; this is pretty representative of the tone, so if you can’t laugh at/with it then I suggest you skip this one: “I recently had the misfortune to sit next to a quivering man-mountain on a train who proceeded to slurp a Coke, demolish a Big Mac, munch fries and spill ketchup onto his beard while giggling at a film on his super-sized iPad. His only concession to the fact that he wasn’t in his own sitting room was to wear headphones.” BRING BACK THE CANE!!
• The Rise of Voice Texting: About three years ago I featured a Motherboard piece in here about the popularity of WhatsApp voice messages as an alternative to texting in Brazil (this one, in fact! Except it was Argentina, dammit); this piece looks at the rising global popularity of ‘voice texting’ something which, let’s be clear, if anyone ever tries to do to me results in them getting a 24 communications block because WHAT SORT OF PERVERT DOES THAT?! Unless there’s a very specific reason that requires you to speak to me, there is no way in hell I want to have to listen to a meandering recording of you um-ing and ah-ing your way towards NOTHING WORTH COMMUNICATING WHATSOEVER. I’m right about this, aren’t I? I know I am.
• The Tech Gap of Internet-Connected Schooling: This is obvious when you come to think of it – I just hadn’t thought of it. This article looks at the growing problem of the tech divide along class/poverty lines resulting from the increased reliance on digital technology for homework – when you’re expecting kids to have internet and computer access to complete homework, you’re making automatic assumptions about access to these services which vary massively across economic lines, and even though everyone has a phone with reasonable internet access these days, not everyone has limitless data and not everyone has access to a keyboard-enabled device to write on…I’m slightly ashamed that I hadn’t thought of any of this before.
• Can You Curate A Town: God, this is SO New York Times – a profile of the people who are taking it upon themselves to ‘curate’ the regeneration of a dying town in upstate New York. Artists, the idle rich, cultural influencers, all banding together to inject money and a defined aesthetic to an otherwise unremarkable and faded small suburban community, much to the bemusement of the local residents. It’s so PERFECTLY rich Manhattan, this – the slightly patronising ‘but we’re helping!’ wide-eyed incomprehension at criticism, the tone-deaf lack of understanding of the invasory nature of their actions, the fact that you just know that this is going to become a rich person’s THING in coming years…Amazing.
• Where Do Sex Bots Go When We Die?: I feel reasonably safe in my assumption that most of you won’t have given too much thought about what might happen to someone’s sexy robotic companion when the type-2 diabetes finally overcomes them. Well, it depends, is the answer – this (actually very sensitive and fairly-written) article interviews various sex doll owners about their plans for care of their significant other after they’re gone; I started reading this doing the usual sniggering-behind-the-hand that tends to come with this sort of article but, honestly, it’s surprisingly affecting (but obviously still very, very odd).
• You Are A Goddamn Adult: YES TO THIS PIECE. A scathing review of internet sensation Jonny Sun’s latest ‘book’, written in collaboration with Lin Manuel Miranda, which is nothing more than a collection of twee life affirmations repurposed from Sun’s Twitter feed and which, as the article points out, continues the seemingly neverending and exceeedingly patronising trend of famous, rich and successful people telling us ordinary peons how important it is to PRACTICE SELF-CARE and MINDFULNESS and TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT and FCUK OFF YOU FCUKING CNUTS LEAVE ME ALONE AND STOP PRESUMING THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE ATTAINED A DEGREE OF WEALTH AND INFLUENCE IN ONE SPECIFIC AREA OF YOUR LIFE THAT YOU THEREFORE HAVE INFINITE WISDOM TO IMPART TO THE REST OF US. This, basically: “It’s difficult for me not to identify a heaping dose of cynical smarminess in media that infantilizes the reader to this extent, particularly when it adopts the same cloying tone that Zoloft commercials and millennial-targeted ads have been using for years. Increasing openness about mental-health struggles in media and entertainment has had the unfortunate side effect of creating an opening for marketers to superficially “raise awareness” about depression on branded fast food Twitter accounts while maintaining plausible deniability that their sole intent isn’t to manipulate and exploit. Miranda and Sun’s foray into self-help stretches this plausible deniability to its absolute limit; when a book’s lesser-known co-author’s biography includes the phrase “currently a doctoral candidate at MIT, an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a creative researcher at the Harvard metaLAB,” and they are trying to sell you eight-word tweets and shaky line drawings of children tying their shoes, how can you not feel pandered to?”
• The Skimm: An interesting profile of violently successful daily news digest email newsletter lifestyle brand thing The Skimm, which if you’re an under-30s woman you are probably already a fan of already. If you’re not aware, The Skimm is a daily digest email presenting the things you NEED to know that day to present the normal, functioning adult’s facade you’d like people to think came naturally to you, all packaged in hyper-millennial language and with a healthy dose of brand/lifestyle selling woven in to boot. It’s a VERY smart operation, and I can’t begrudge its creators their success, but there is a line in this piece about it being aimed at a generation who treat their lives as an exercise in successful project management which ran very true and depressed me no end.
• Death of a Bookman: This is a fabulous portrait of a London that no longer exists, a publishing industry that no longer exists, an arts landscape that no longer exists…Philip Dosse was the owner and publisher of dozens of art industry magazines, from Books & Bookmen to Plays and Players, and a true eccentric, and this is a beautifully-written memory piece about him and his life and London publishing in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and how it all fell apart. Beautiful and elegiac and sad and weird, this is a perfect piece of history.
• James Mclean and the Poppy: A profile of Northern Irish footballer James Mclean and his refusal to wear a poppy on his kit for personal, religious, political reasons, and how that has led to him being the most vilified man in the Eglish game for a few weeks each year. Every year around Remembrance Sunday, and increasingly as we get further away from the great wars of the 20th Century, I become convinced that we have a deeply unhealthy relationship with the conflicts we’ve been involved with; this piece does nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Seriously, imagine reading this as an outsider and thinking anything other than ‘this is MAD’.
• One Month In The LA Betterness Cult: A brilliant piece on the oddity of the LA wellness scene, in which the author finds himself being initiated into a rebranded health cult from the 1970s and meets some genuinely mad people. Last time I saw my friend Adam I asked him in passing whether he’d seen any weird, dark stuff up in the Hollywood hills and he said in somewhat blase fashion that he’d been at this party once where people kept on popping to the basement and NEVER COMING BACK and there was a definite The Informers-style vibe about the anecdote is all I’m saying. This is funny but also very, very odd.
• Joel on Red Dead Redemption 2: Do you want to know what I have been experiencing in my journey into the life and world of the virtual cowboy? Joel explains it better than I ever could – if you don’t understand how or why videogames exert this pull on people, this is one of the better explanations.
• On The Edge of 17: An essay in which the female author remembers her teenage tearaway boyfriend, and all the things she didn’t tell herself, or let herself know, about him. Superb writing about being young and stupid and in love and how sometimes you only realise things about the person you were and the things you were doing with a distance of decades.
• Psychopaths and the Rest of Us: You have, I am sure, read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson – imagine if that book had had a better editor and a sensible word cap and you’ll have an idea about this article, describing the author’s encounters with psychopaths online, in a specific psycho chatroom (I am genuinely devastated that he doesn’t reveal the url at any point), and then subsequently on prison visits. Per everything ever written about psychopaths, expect to interrogate yourself quite hard after this one.
• My Posessions: Lee Randall, friend of Curios, and I were discussing last week’s piece all about the Museum of Human Memory on Twitter the other day, and she mentioned that she’d written this for Aeon about possessions and identity and memory, and I love it and you should all read it to. A gorgeous piece of writing about the extent to which stuff defines us, and, by contrast, about how without stuff we can occasionally appear somewhat inchoate, to others and to a degree to ourselves.
• I’m Black So You Don’t Have To Be: On blackness, and code-switching, and the differences in the concept of blackness and black identity across generations in the UK. I am, obviously, not black, so can’t speak to the the veracity or otherwise of the experiences here outlined, but it’s a superbly-written essay by Colin Grant.
• The Crisis of Intimacy: Superb, on the web and who we are and how we relate to each other: “The crisis of intimacy is not some accident, some coincidence with the rise of smartphones and social media. It is so hard to see the specific outlines of the relation, and not just because of the standard difficulties of establishing the true meaning of statistics. Who can see their own distortion clearly? Amara’s Law, which states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run, is true of human fate in general. In history, as in our intimate lives, the decisions we don’t consider are the ones with the most profound consequences. A mother’s off-handed remark. A party attended at the last minute. These shape us in ways paralyzing to contemplate. Kranzberg’s Law — “Technology is neither good nor bad, neither is it neutral” — has the good sense to acknowledge the inevitability of misunderstanding. It’s why time is the ultimate twist ending. It’s why the consequences of technology are never what anyone thinks they are.”
• Waugh: Finally this week, a long short story by Bryan Washington, about a group of male prostitutes living and working together in New York. This is so good, and a perfect way to spend 30 minutes this afternoon with a cup of tea. Go on, you deserve it.

By Maisie Cousins

AND FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s start with something old but which I have only just found. Long-term readers may recall my slight obsession with some VERY old-school internet content in the form of a series of stories about one man’s obsession with the idea of Roy Orbison being wrapped in clingfilm. There is now a short film on the same subject. WATCH IT:

2) Next, have a 90-minute film of the Earth, shot from orbit, in realtime. Put this on a big screen, get the laser bong out and, y’know, EXPAND YOUR MIND:

3) Next, this is the most incredible Rube Goldberg machine I have ever seen. No hyperbole, this is INSANE – watch and marvel:

4) Hiphop corner! Atmosphere’s album ‘When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint That Sh1t Gold’ is still one of my favourites of the 00s, as well as being one of my top 10 titles; this is his latest single – bit of a slow burn, but give it a minute or so and you’ll get the vibe I think. I am very much a fan of this man’s style – this is called ‘Graffiti’:

5) UK GRIME CORNER! MORE MANGA! This is a whole 37 minutes of him all over the RinseFM grime show and he is, as ever, superb:

6) Last up this week, a hymn and an exhortation and an excellent lesbian pop love song – this is by King Princess and it’s called ‘Pussy is God’ and BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK AND IN THE MEANTIME YOU TAKE CARE AND WRAP UP WARM AS IT’S STARTING TO GET COLD OUT AND MAYBE YOU COULD SPEND THIS WEEKEND MAKING A BIG VAT OF NOURISHING STEW AND PERHAPS STARTING TO MAP OUT YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING OR WHATEVER IT IS THAT WILL MAKE YOU HAPPIEST HERE IN EARLY NOVEMBER, BECAUSE THE MAIN THING IS THAT YOU FEEL OK AND RELAXED, OK? OK! I LOVE YOU! BYE!:

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I know this has been a tricky week, with all sorts of stress and pain and difficulty and quite a lot of general ‘wow, everything seems really quite messy and terrible, doesn’t it?’-type vibes knocking about, but, well, I have spent much of it being a digital cowboy and frankly that’s been enough to ensure that I’ve not really spent too much time thinking about it. It turns out that THIS is how to cope with the massive centrifuge of horror that is 2018 – simply hunker down and pretend that you’re in fact living an outlaw’s life in the late-19th century.

So sadly I have little to say about America’s racist President and his continued attempts to disfigure the US political landscape to the point of permanent scarring, or Comedy Phil Hammond’s largely theoretical Budget, or poor old ‘Handsy’ Sitwell and his swordfalling, or indeed much else – I have a supermarket trip to do (I know that you live for these occasional insights into my life) and then I am getting RIGHT back in the saddle. 

While I do that, why don’t you take a deep breath, travel to that special safe place within yourselves where you keep your reserves of courage and pluck and spunk, and prepare to take a walk back through the week online; the seemingly inexorable word inflation that seems to be afflicting Curios at the moment means that this one’s touching just shy of 10k words which means that probability suggests at least some of them ought to please you. Take my kilometric musings and let them inside you – THIS, AS EVER, IS WEB CURIOS!

By Chen Fei

LET’S KICK THINGS OFF WITH AN EPIC 40 MINUTE GRIME SET BY MANGA AND A BUNCH OF OTHER MCS!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERED BRIEFLY WHETHER THE ABILITY TO PROMO INSTA STORIES WILL LEAD US TO A POINT AT WHICH ORDINARY PUNTERS WITH A THIRST FOR INSTAFAME START BOOSTING THEIR STORIES IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT OF GETTING CAST ON LOVE ISLAND NEXT YEAR AND THEN REALISED THAT OF COURSE IT FCUKING WILL:

• The Facebook Numbers: Another set of quarterlies and another reminder that despite what we all might think of Facebook and its impact on our lives it remains a terrifyingly successful product which is nowhere near done insinuating itself into every single corner of the world. User numbers rose again (though once more stayed stagnant in the US and Europe), and there was lots of exciting (not exciting) talk about how Whatsapp and Stories are the next frontier in the great drive to full monetisation; a Facebook exec was quoted in Indian media this week as saying that ads were coming to Whatsapp’s ‘Status’ updates soonish, so, well, look forward to that one! The upshot here is that Facebook isn’t looking like it will stop being horribly ubiquitous anytime soon, basically.
• New, Better Instagram Analytics (and Promoted Stories!): Currently in beta and being tested with various usergroups worldwide (you can request access via the page here), this will nonetheless be rolled out all over the place SOON. This is big stuff, and presaging the imminent rollout of promotion for Stories – there are full details in the piece, but the information available to Page owners will include Story view numbers, swipe-ups, etc, for full conversion tracking, etc. They’re also making some tweaks to Facebook Analytics, though slightly less seismic ones. You can read more about the changes in this piece, but it leads with the FAR more exciting news that Instagram is currently running limited tests of the ability to PROMOTE YOUR STORIES! Effectively offering a similar functionality to the ‘Boost Post’ button on a FB Page, this is obviously VERY much aimed at the ‘normies’ market, with a high degree of automation in the targeting options, from simple lookalikes of your existing followers to basic geotargeting. So get ready for the parade of local ‘celebrities’ boosting themselves into your consciousness as they attempt to parlay being ‘big in Chelmsford’ to a slot on next year’s reality TV fleshfest.
• Share InstaTV Videos To Insta Stories: Insta continues to attempt to make its TV offering fly, this time by introducing the ability to cross-promote content from IGTV into your Instagram Story; although, bizarrely, it’s not a particularly well-realised integration and means (like the Soundcloud integration from last week) that you will simply be able to insert a still image of the InstaTV video into your Story which will then link to the full content on InstaTV rather then presenting it as a native part of your story. Which is significantly less good than one might have hoped, and makes me wonder why they bothered. (also, semi-related but I am really sorry about how ugly the writing here is, but I promise you that descriptions of products from the Facebook stable really don’t lend themselves to sparkling prose).
• Facebook Offers a Bunch of New Ad Formats In Advance of Black Friday: This is actually OLD NEWS, but I only saw it this week (and even then only courtesy of the even-more-complete-than-Web-Curios news roundup by We Are Social, which you ought to keep an eye on if you care about this stuff as they pick up the stuff that I miss or which, quite often, I am simply too bored or underwhelmed by to write up) – anyway, if you have actual physical products to flog and you want to do so on Facebook with a selection of EXCITING NEW AD UNIT TYPES then, well, it’s like all your Christmases have come at once. There’s some quite interesting stuff buried in here about automatic video creation too, should you care about being able to make mediocre product showreels from existing stock imagery.
• Facebook ‘Breaking News’ Expands to UK and Elsewhere: Facebook’s ‘Breaking News’ functionality (whereby select publishers have the opportunity to tag posts as ‘breaking news’ a couple of times per week, thereby giving their post a special designation within FB and, from what I can tell, granting it a small in-feed signal boost to boot) is now rolling out to a range of other countries including the UK. Which will only be of relevance if you work for a news org (although I wonder how loosely they’ll apply this – will ‘Closer’ make the cut? Love It? One can but hope).
• Snap Launches Desktop AR Camera: Following some…slightly iffy numbers in the latest earnings report, Snap’s latest announcement seems another step on the path to ceasing being a messaging platform and instead being the de facto AR layer in other companies’ tech stacks. “Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom and more, plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can browse through Snapchat’s Lens Explorer to try on AR face filters. And through its easily equipped new Twitch extension, streamers can trigger different masks with hotkeys.” So there. This is potentially a really interesting development.
• You Can Now Integrate LinkedIn Ads With Google Campaign Manager: A perfect headline; I literally don’t have to write anything else, thank fcuk.
• Promoted Carousel Comes To Pinterest: Has your professional existence been rendered awful by the lack of sufficient ad units on Pinterest? Have you been lying awake of a night wishing that there was a way that you could promote five images at once to your eager audience of cake fetishists and West Elm fans and wedding planners? YOUR PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED.
• Twitch Launching Karaoke Product: They’re launching this in beta to a ‘select’ number of creators, but I will be fascinated to see how this works and whether it takes off; for certain types of artists/streamers, the prospect of offering your fans a direct, in-broswer singalong opportunity is HUGE, and there has to be some sort of ‘world’s biggest singalong’ or ‘largest online choir ever’ stunt that you could pull…basically I think this is a MASSIVE PR opportunity for the right brand / streamer, so, er, go and do it! There’s a bigger, more in-depth dissection of how it works here should you desire one.
• New Google Docs Shortcuts: Fine, it’s not really about s*c**l m*d**, but it is work-ish and so it sort of fits here. You can now create new GDocs, sheets, etc, directly in-browser simply by typing ‘new.doc’ or ‘new.form’ or ‘new.sheet’ or whatever. Which is nice.
• Moon AR: I really, really like this idea; I had quite a few conversations this year with people about using large-scale environmental points as AR markers, but at no point did I think ‘hm, you could actually use the moon as a marker, couldn’t you, wouldn’t that be interesting and fun?’ which is why I am not doing some sort of highly-paid and exciting marketing gig for a film studio and instead am wild-haired and baggy of face in a South London kitchen at 7:26am on a Friday morning. Anyway, this is a promo for the newish film about the moon landings, which will show you COOL STUFF via in-browser AR if you visit the site on your phone and then point it at the moon. DO IT.
• The World’s First FB Messenger Novel: On the one hand, innovation! On the other, unnecessary and awful! This is the latest book by one-man thriller production line James Patterson, the sort of author whose heavily-embossed surname you have almost certainly noticed in passing as you stride purposefully past WH Smith towards the Wetherspoons at the airport, and you can ‘enjoy’ it through FB Messenger, which gives you all sorts of exclusive content and features which basically take the BORING old concept of the novel and make it shiny and exciting – video and audio clips! Photos! An exclusive FB discussion Group! An Instagram profile for the main character (imagine how sad that will look in about a month when they get to the end of the planned content calendar and the budget runs out)! This is…unnecessary, I think.
• The 2008 Pepsi Rebrand: A decade ago, Pepsi did a rebrand. This week, the design document setting out the branding agency’s thinking did the rounds online; this is, as far as I can tell, genuine; it’s also an absolutely mental, Brass Eye-level, beyond parody example of brandwankery which I urge you all to look at and try and make sense of; honestly, by the time you get to the end this has basically become the PDF version of the ‘Galaxy Brain’ meme.

By Thomas Hart Benton

NEXT, TRY STREAMING THE NEW RECORD BY OPEN MIKE EAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS SO MUCH LIKE A COWBOY THAT IT’S BEEN WRITING THIS WHILST WEARING NOTHING MORE THAN A PAIR OF BACKLESS CHAPS, PT.1:

• The Facebook Junk News Aggregator: A prpoject by Oxford University which is looking to track and measure the quantity of what it terms ‘junk news’ being shared on Facebook, specifically in the runup to the US midterms; the study defines ‘junk news’ as being “various forms of propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, or conspiratorial political news and information. The term includes news publications that present verifiably false content as factual news. This content includes propagandistic, ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, or conspiracy-oriented news and information. Frequently, attention-grabbing techniques are used, such as lots of pictures, moving images, excessive capitalization, personal attacks, emotionally charged words and pictures, populist generalizations, and logical fallacies. It presents commentary as news. The term refers to a publisher overall, i.e. based on content that is typically published by a publisher, rather than referring to an individual article.” This is…sort of staggering, really. I mean, obviously anyone who’s spent longer than 30s online in the past 3-4 years is reasonably aware of what an incredible cesspit of idiocy Facebook can be, but looking down this list (which in its default view presents ‘junk news’ in reverse-chronological order, showing you the newest links first) you get an impression of the sheer volume of this stuff, and the range of weird, shonky ‘news’ sites punting it out. There’s a better and more comprehensive look at the study and how it works here, but do have a poke around for yourself (just be careful what you click on, there is a LOT of frothy-mouthed lunacy here).
• Voiceroulette: Have you ever thought ‘you know, what I really want is a service exactly like Chatroulette which connects me with random strangers online at the press of a button, but one which drops the ‘video’ part of the experience to prevent me from having to see a succession of overweight men masturbating tenaciously into their webcam’s eye with the sort of steely determination ordinarily reserved for endurance athletes’? No, you probably haven’t, and yet Voiceroulette STILL exists! I rather like this actually; when I played with it earlier this week I had a really nice chat with an English tutor in Warsaw who was using it to help his clients learn conversational English and he didn’t attempt to talk to me about his penis even once, so, well, RESULT!
• Guns In America: In another week in which Americans once again sadly trotted out that Onion article which stopped being funny about twenty mass shootings ago, Time Magazine published this superb interactive profiling a variety of Americans and their relationship with guns. The webwork is really nice, interactive and shiny without being showy for its own sake.
• Plink (Redux): This is a VERY RARE Web Curios moment in which I feature a link for the SECOND TIME EVER (quick everyone, the internet is running out!). I have just checked, and I first wrote up Plink in March 2014 (in which edition of Curios I opened by making some weak gag about George Osborn’s budget and wow don’t those look like innocent, halcyon days by contrast) – that’s 4.5 WHOLE YEARS, webmongs, that I’ve been doing this . Anyway, for those of you without the encyclopaedic recall of all the links I have ever featured that I seemingly have, Plink is a webtoy which lets you make surprisingly good musical compositions in collaboration with other strangers online, simply bly clicking and wiggling your mouse a bit. It’s super simple, and they have just revamped the interface meaning that it looks all shiny and nice, and, well, go and have a play, it’s a lot of fun.
• Gluckauf: There’s meant to be an umlaut in this word but, well, life’s too short. Have YOU ever wanted to take a (surprisingly shiny) 360 video pseudo-VR interactive tour around a German mine? No, you probably haven’t, but why not take one anyway? “At the end of 2018, the last coal mine in the Rhine-Ruhr region will close. An era that shaped the whole country economically and socially will be over forever. But, even after the last pit is closed, you can still experience this impressive underground world, with your own eyes in our Virtual Mine.”  You can experience this in-browser or with a VR headset, and the production values are really very high indeed, although, well, it’s….oh God, I feel bad saying this, but, well, it’s really dull – I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, fine, but after about 5 minutes of looking round at damp walls and industrial boring machinery I was about ready to escape. I can imagine if I did this in full VR I would get quite claustrophobic quite quickly; on reflection, there’s probably some quite fun horror stuff you can do playing on that specific feeling (although, er, totally unrelated to German mines).  
• Gifaanisqatsi: Jesus, I’m not typing that again. You might have seen this this week – either in B3ta or elsewhere as it’s done the rounds – but in case not, it is GREAT. I can’t explain it any better than its creator, Monkeon, so in their words: “Koyaanisqatsi is a 1983 wordless documentary primarily made up of slow motion and time-lapse footage. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the trailer here. I wondered how easy it would be to make an internet version using random Giphy ‘gifs’ which have been tagged as slow motion or time-lapse, playing them along with the Philip Glass soundtrack.” The random juxtapositions it throws up are genuinely wonderful, and I could see a version of this being taken absolutely seriously as a piece of generative art.
• 1150 Free Films: I mean, you can’t say fairer than that, can you? Open Culture presents this INCREDIBLE selection of links to freely available films online; most of them old, many of them classics, subdivided by category. Seriously, if you’re a fan of crap kung fu movies then MY GOD will you be happy with the selection laid out here, but enthusiasts of any genre should be pretty well served. Look, who doesn’t want to watch ‘Vegetarian World’, a 1982 documentary in which”William Shatner walks us through the history, benefits, and misconceptions of adhering to a vegetarian diet.” NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO (apart, perhaps, from Handsy Sitwell (topical!)).
• Turtle Audio: This is a fun toy. You know that ‘Turtle’ thing that so many people learned to do basic coding with back in the day? You remember – that programmable drawing toy which you could instruct to move in simple patterns with the base commands of forward, turn left, turn right, etc? This is that, except a) it’s virtual; and b) you can ascribe different notes to various points on the route you program, turning the whole thing into a music making game. It looks very simple, but if you click on the tutorial explaining how to make more interesting patterns you can see that with a bit of work you can create reasonably complex, multi-layered compositions. Fine, it’s not the most efficient way of composing your next symphonic masterpiece, but it’s an excellent way of somehow filling all these empty, dragging hours between birth and death.
• Feedfilter: This really annoyed me when I found it, not least because some friends and I came up with this EXACT idea about 9 months ago and then obviously did nothing with it because we are a) lazy; b) incapable of coding; c) but mostly lazy. Feedfilter is a service into which you can plug your Twitter feed in order for it to show you all the ones that could be considered ‘offensive’; it also gives you the opportunity to go through and prune all the ones it picks up from your feed. Which is…fine, but it only seems to pick up on the major swears, and it’s all a bit po-faced. Look, OUR version was going to be called ‘milkshakeduck.me’ and it was going to tell you exactly how likely it was on a percentage scale to get Milkshake Ducked in the future based on your Twitter history, and we were going to use the full BBC moderation list of banned words as part of the analysis, with different terms given different badness weightings and GOD IT WAS SUCH A GOOD IDEA. I am now in an AWFUL sulk, sorry, will try and snap out of it.
• Time Traveler: I was CERTAIN I’d done this one already, but seems not – Time Traveler is a lovely idea from US dictionary publishers Merriam-Webster which lets you select a year from a drop-down and then presents you with a list of all the words which were first introduced to the dictionary in that year; so, on checking the year of my birth, I can discover that 1979 was the year in which ‘first world problems’ was first granted official ‘real term’ status, and the year in which ‘hip hop’ first earned a place (which absolutely backs up the lie I most like to tell my friends’ small children, to whit that I invented hiphop). Fascinating linguistic history, well-presented.
• Soul Machines: I was pretty much convinced that this was a promo site for a fictional corporation from a new film or game when I first found this, part of some sort of transmedia marketing effort, and yet it seems to be entirely sincere and REALLY COLDLY CREEPY (although they are Kiwis so probably not all bad). “We use neural networks that combine biologically inspired models of the human brain and key sensory networks to create a virtual central nervous system that we call our Human Computing Engine™. When you ‘plug’ our engaging and interactive artificial humans into our cloud-based Human Computing Engine™, we can transform modern life for the better by revolutionizing the way AI, robots and machines interact with people.” It’s not 100% certain what the company actually, practically does, but a look at the website with all its photorealistic CGI renders of eerily perfect human faces does rather suggest that they’re helping usher in a future full of smooth-faced, dead-eyed AI companions. Great!
• Fridge Detective: a subReddit dedicated entirely to people posting photographs of the content of their fridges, for other people to use to guess what sort of person they are. “Show me a man’s fridge and I will tell you the very essence of his soul”, as the old saying goes, this is oddly and perversely fascinating – there’s something weirdly intimate about seeing these, though I’m at a loss as to why I feel that, and even BETTER is the chance to look at the madly calorific fridges of North America, where it’s not unusual to see a selection of food which contains NO natural ingredients whatsoever.
• Glyph Drawing Club: A very involved glyph-based image creator, which lets upi pick from upto 100-odd elements which you can combine on a grid to compose fonts, images, etc, to your heart’s content. Fiddly, but if you’re a design-y type person then you might find quite a lot to enjoy in here.
• The Art Institute Chicago Collection: Another wonderful museum archived digitised for the enjoyment of the curious, this is a really nicely-done piece of digital curation, offering the ability to search by a wide and flexible range of criteria and presenting the works in a clean, easy-to-browse manner. The variety of work on display here, from an extensive pop-art collection to a significant body of work from the African diaspora, is impressive, and you could happily spend a few hours disappearing down rabbitholes; why not do that instead of working on that Powerpoint thing you’re supposed to be doing, the one that you know deep down is a total waste of time and exactly the sort of crushing busywork that we all know robs us of our dignity and eats away at what remains of our ‘souls’? Go on.
• Picular: This describes itself as ‘Google, for colours’, which, frankly, I can’t really improve upon. You type in your colour palette inspiration (say, vomit, or pustule, or wound) and it will present you with a series of colours which it associates with that keyword, based on (as far as I can tell) running a hex analysis on the Google Image results for that term. Potentially helpful if you’re looking for A N Other site to assist when pulling palettes together.
• Request A Woman Scientist: Do YOU have a need for a speaker, panellist, board member or similar? Do YOU need that person to be a scientist? Would YOU like to ensure that you at least pay lip service to diversity by ensuring that you book a woman? GREAT! This is a smart and useful tool created as part of the 500 Woman Scientists initiative which lets you either sign up to a database of female scientists worldwide or to search said database, by discipline, interest, degree status and geography to ensure that you never again have an excuse for having a scientific debate undertaken entirely by middle-aged men.
• Naked Mole Rat Cam: Naked mole rats – creatures once memorably described by someone who I can’t for the life of me recall as looking not unlike flaccid caucasian penises with teeth, which I defy you to ever forget – are REALLY odd looking little buggers, but apparently they’re also quite interesting for a variety of zoological reasons, which is why the Smithsonian has set up this webcam letting you observe these tiny, penile creatures going about their daily business. At the time of writing there is literally NOTHING going on, but I guarantee that if you check in around about now (does this attempt at reaching forward into the future in which you’re reading this work as an authorial device? I’m not sure it does) then you’ll see all sorts of writhing pink fun happening. If that’s your thing.
• Art Connoisseur: An excellent Twitter bot which Tweets out images of old art and offers up its own critique of the pieces in question; you can read about how it works here, should you so desire, but it’s good, clean, silly, artwanky fun.
• Aqua Dew: The lovely thing about the now and the coming future is that, thanks to our phones and digital tracking and voice assistants and smart homes and the like, there are very few places and times in our lives when we’re not intimately connected and communicating with one of the tech behemoths. One of the few times, in fact, is when we’re in the shower – or at least that used to be the case, but now, thanks to the just-funded miracle of Aqua Dew on Kickstarter (I don’t know why, but the weirdly low and very specifi funding target makes me a little suspicious here), you can take Jeff Bezos, or at the very least his omnipresent digital avatar, into the shower with you! Aqua Dew is a shower-mountable, waterproof, voice-activated Alexa unit which you can use to…er…well, almost certainly just listen to music, but who knows? Maybe you’ll want to dictate your novel or your shopping list or just ask Alexa what the news is today, or do some shopping….you know, I feel I ought to write something vaguely ‘WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO?!’-ish about this, but why bother? This is what the world is coming to; it just feels clunky because we still need the boxes, but fast forward 15-20 years when voice assistant tech is just ambient reality and we will think nothing of chatting to Alexa v.4.0 whilst voiding our bowels or ‘making love’. So it goes.
• Magic UX: Ooh, this is very interesting. Magic UX is a project by…er…Special Projects Studio which prototypes a really novel and rather smart user interface based on navigating between browser windows via the physical movement of your handset. It’s hard to explain, but imagine that all the windows you have open on your phone are arrayed as an invisible row, left to right, and you can switch between them by physically moving your phone along said virtual row, copy and paste between them with ease, etc. You sort of have to watch the promo video to get a feel for it, but the opportunities seem huge – take a look and see what you think.
• Make Yourself Great: God this site made me miserable. It’s all part of the SELF-IMPROVEMENT and PERSONAL GROWTH movement, and asks you to tell it how much time you spend doing ‘distracting’ things (social media, gaming, watching TV, ‘going out’, etc) vs how much you spend doing ‘productive’ things (by ‘productive’ it means learning, making stuff, etc etc); it then shows you how much more time you could have to do GOOD THINGS if you cut out some of the distractions, and how that would enable you, over time, to be more productive and successful and stuff. This is, at its core, exactly the same sort of horrific, LinkedIn-friendly, GaryVee-style strugglepornwank that I despise so much; such a pathetically narrow definition of what is ‘good’, such a total lack of understanding of the mental space afforded by doing certain ‘distracting’ things, such a pathetic and miserable obsession with SUCCESS and ACHIEVEMENT and GOALS and QUANTIFICATION and dear God you awful people just relax for fcuk’s sake.

By Charlotte Abramov

NEXT UP, TRY A VERY NON-WINTERY SET BY MOVE D FROM LAST YEAR’S SONAR!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS SO MUCH LIKE A COWBOY THAT IT’S BEEN WRITING THIS WHILST WEARING NOTHING MORE THAN A PAIR OF BACKLESS CHAPS, PT.1:

• Dark Studio: There’s nothing wrong with this at all, to be clear – a new darkroom in East London which will help you learn to shoot and develop your own prints – but the absolute (post-?)hipster fetishisation of ANALOGUE all over this site did make me laugh rather. Still, if you fancy spending some money on learning how to do your own photo prints in the company of the sort of people who I am fairly confident in predicting will get into this because of the fakeness of Insta (“it use to be so much more real back in the day, yeah, but now it’s all influencers and it’s just, well, so artificial,, you know?”) and yet then go on to take photographs of their eventual prints to put on that very platform. The twats.
• Giant Poppy Watch: A Twitter account tracking the annual madness around Remembrance Sunday and the culture wars around the poppy / no poppy / white poppy debate. If you ever momentarily let it slip your mind that there is something very, very odd and not entirely healthy about this country’s relationship to the World Wars, this will very much remind you.
• Hundreds of Thousands of Copyright-Free Vintage Graphics: I’ve done that thing where as a result of writing a very comprehensive and descriptive title here I’ve not really got anything else to say about the link in question. Erm, onwards!
• Chroma: This bills itself as an AR Piano tutor, and in theory this is a very smart idea indeed – you fire up the app, select the piece you want to play, then point your phone at your piano keyboard to see an AR representation of the notes flying off the relevant keys in time, giving you a visual cue as to where your fingers are meant to be and when. Except, and this is the kicker, HOW ARE YOU MEANT TO PLAY THE PIANO IF YOU ARE HOLDING YOUR PHONE TO LOOK AT IT THROUGH THE CAMERA? IS NOT POSSIBLE! Either I am being an idiot here and not really understanding how this is supposed to work, or someone here has dropped something of a ricket.
• 190 Free Online University Courses: Look, despite what I often write here about being avowedly anti-effort I’m not against self-improvement and stuff – you want to better yourselves academically? GREAT! More power to you! Look, here’s a whole bunch of free online courses from a load of Universities around the world, meaning you can start thinking about which of them you’re going to start in a burst of optimism in January before giving up disillusioned in March! These skew towards engineering and computer science, but there are a dozen or so arts courses which might be of interest, amongst other things.
• Macbook Alarm: Simple-and-clever, this is tool for Macs designed for people who ‘work’ in cafes and who want to be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that someone’s going to half-inch their computer; you set up the alarm and it will SHRIEK if someone unplugs it or closes the lid, along with sending you a message on Telegram. Clever, this.
• Great Minds Auction: There is currently an auction taking place at Christie’s in London, in which you can bid on the papers and ephemera of some of the greatest scientific minds ever produced; Darwin, Newton, Einstein and Hawking. You want a signed note from Newton repaying a loan? Christ knows why, but OK! You want a letter from Darwin saying he can’t attend an event due to ill-health? Fine, you weirdo. You want…er…one of Hawking’s electric wheelchairs? WHY DO YOU WANT THAT? I sort of feel whoever buys that ought to be on some sort of list somewhere, but perhaps I am being unfair (when I Tweeted about this, Internet Oddity Sadeagle asked me whether it had been washed, which suggested that he ought to be on a list somewhere).
• Book Errata: Fabulously pedantic site collating book errata – those mistakes that make it to publication despite the best efforts of editors – and offering a classification of books based on how many mistakes they contain (it’s wonderfully sniffy, with ratings veering between, ‘Sloppy’, ‘Very Sloppy’ and ‘Horrendous’). I am very, very glad that this site exists, but simultaneously I wouldn’t really want to spend too much time with the people who contribute to it.
• Word Mine: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is made by Sensible Object, the games company that make Beasts of Balance, whose founder Alex I know a bit; regardless NO MONEY HAS CHANGED HANDS in exchange for me featuring this link (although if anyone wants to discuss the possibility of SPONSORED CONTENT in Curios then, well, I can’t say we wouldn’t consider it). Anyway, Word Mine is a fun free game for Alexa which merges anagrams and puzzles and light discovery – “Crack the anagram by digging deep into the Word Mine. Your handy canary will help you discover the letters needed to master the mines. You are an explorer on a mission to piece together the forgotten words of the world. Your canary assistant guides and helps you navigate the mines, she looks out for your safety and helps you read the letters, but it’s up to you to solve the anagram in time before the mine collapses in on you” – into a cute experience which might appeal to those of you with linguistically-curious kids. Worth a look imho.
• Blloc: You already have a phone. You almost certainly don’t want to buy this, a model specially designed to minimise distractions and intrusions by making the interface monochromatic and generally unappealing, and splitting apps and notifications into a separate part of the interface to minimise their ability to mess with your focus. There are, though, a few rather nice design features to this – the toggle for colour vs monochromatic view at the touch of a button is really quite clever I think, and the way in which the UI works so as to minimise the number of times you’ll have to actually open apps rather than just browsing their information via the homescreen is neat; if you’re the sort of wilfully obscurantist weirdo who would rather have a phone that NOONE ELSE uses (ie me, who even had a bloody Windows Phone for a couple of years because, well, it was different (and really, really sh1t, turns out)) then this could be of interest.
• Poetryscript: Creating sonnets from individual lines taken from the 57,000 novels available as part of the Gutenburg project. Silly, but the outputs are surprisingly good and it has a decent ear for rhyme and meter which a lot of these toys don’t always possess.
• The Caselaw Access Project: This is a SPECTACULAR resource – “CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States. Our scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Our earliest case is from 1658, and our most recent cases are from 2018.Each volume has been converted into structured, case-level data broken out by majority and dissenting opinion, with human-checked metadata for party names, docket number, citation, and date.” So basically the entire recorded history of US law, made available for you to mess with – just THINK of what you could do with this stuff with access to a decent RNN and some computational heft; I reckon we’re going to see some really interesting analyses of how race and gender have played out in the courts, for a start, along with some fascinating stuff about the changing language of the law, but for starters here’s a toy which turns fragments of case law from the archive into limericks because, well, why not?
• Miniature Calendar: A truly astonishing labour of love which has, incredibly, been going on for nearly 8 years(!) – since 2011, this calendar presents one photo per day of tiny little dioramas. Why? WHY NOT? “Everyone must have had thoughts like these before: Broccoli and parsley may sometimes look like a forest of trees, and tree leaves floating on the surface of water may sometimes look like little boats. Everyday occurrences seen from a miniature perspective can bring us lots of fun thoughts. I wanted to take this way of thinking and express it through photographs, so I started to put together a “MINIATURE CALENDAR.” These photographs primarily depict diorama-style figures surrounded by daily necessities.” So cute I might die.
• Maquette: This is potentially interesting for those of you who work in VR or who want to work in VR – Maquette is a free set of tools launched recently by Microsoft and currently in Beta which are designed to let anyone create assets for VR in reasonably simple fashion; far more practical than the rather more arty Tiltbrush and the like, this feels a lot more like the sort of thing that engineers rather than artists might enjoy (a neat encapsulation of the difference between Microsoft and Google there). I haven’t tried it, but the videos give a reasonable degree of clarity as to what it can do, and as a flexible tool to model for VR environments it seems pretty powerful and intuitive. At least one of you will use this to make a big, geometric VR penis, and I am probably ok with that.
• Walpurgis: There is nothing about women’s footwear that doesn’t strike me as part of a cruel and unusual punishment – look, now that fashion and footwear design is no longer the preserve of men, why aren’t shops flooded with women’s shoes that aren’t mad and murderous to wear? Are you all secretly footwear masochists? I demand to be told. Anyway, of all the mad and horrifying footwear things I have seen, these potentially take the metaphorical biscuit – you want clogs designed to look like hooves, angled so vertiginously that you almost expect them to have the red soles of Louboutin? GREAT! These are really, really sinister, and frankly the rest of the site – Japanese, obvs, and which seems to sell…odd silken Elvish ears? – gives me a touch of the fantods.
• Websites In 2018: Very well observed, but will make you immediately notice exactly how incredibly fcuking annoying almost all websites are right now.
• Amazing Mazes: This site features hand-drawn (and computer-generated, but it’s the hand-drawn ones that are the real…er…draw) mazes of a degree of brow-furrowing complexity so great that you wonder as to the creator’s sanity. These are all available as hi-res JPEGs, so why not print a selection out on A3 paper and spend the afternoon getting increasingly frustrated and cross-eyed as you try and solve them sitting on the floor by your desk (ideally with your tongue poking out of the corner of your mouth, for the full ‘concentrating idiot’ look).
• The Autoblow AI: You may recall that several years ago I featured the Autoblow on Kickstarter – a weirdly R2D2-reminiscent machine into which men would, it was assumed, push their erections in order to experience a sad, lonely and almost certainly unrealistic representation of fellatio. Those were good times, weren’t they? Anyway, now times have moved on and so has the Autoblow – now they’re crowdfunding a version with AI TECHNOLOGY! Yes, that’s right, the power of artificial intelligence (not, in fact, AI or anything like it) will allow you to receive 10 different types of sad, lonely and almost certainly unrealistic representations of fellatio! If you want a brief glimpse of just how bleak this is, can I just quote from the campaign site – “FLUIDS REMAIN INSIDE THE SLEEVE! Because your penis naturally plugs the opening of the sleeve, all fluids remain inside. Ejaculte freely without messy consequences!” SO BLEAK. However, if you want a (slightly dark) laugh, I can’t recommend this enough – there’s even a pseudo-academic paper about the science of the blowjob that they use to underpin their wankmachine’s tech. You don’t need to read it all – in fairness, it is actually a proper paper with proper maths and stuff – just click the link and scroll a bit til you get to the animated gif (you’ll know the one I mean) and take a moment to realise that, yes, men really ARE this obsessed with their penises.  
• Sorry: Finally this week, a powerful little ‘game’ made by Dan Hett which details the his experiences of media intrusion in the wake of his brother’s death as a victim of the Manchester bombings. All the messages from media you see here are real, which makes it all the bleaker – it’s not a ‘fun’ game, but it’s an excellent example of using ludic mechanics to make a point hit home, hard.

By Catrin Welz-Stein

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS AMBIENTY, NOODLEY ONE BY LEONID NEVERMIND!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Mere Pseud: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a really interesting project; a fictionalised autobiography, in diary form, of a young man in early-80s England. SO evocative of a certain time and place, so much so that you can almost see the dogsh1t-brown Datsun Cherry parked outside.
• Angular Merkel: In honour of Mutti.
• Sherlock Topz: Absoolutely no idea why the person behind this Tumblr – which celebrates the Sherlock/Foster ship in very explicit fashion (the drawing at the bottom is…remarkable, and very NSFW) – decided to start it this week, but damn fandoms are odd and wonderful things.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Japanese Sandwich Bags: Sharing photos of the plastic bags in which Japanese people keep sandwiches. WHY NOT EH?
• Sandwich Monsters: Making monsters out of food, primarily sandwiches; if you want to feel inadequate about the amount of effort you put into amusing your kids at mealtimes then this will do it.
• Subway Ads: Collecting examples of subway advertisements in New York which have been modified by the public; these prove, much as it pains me, that commuters in NYC are funnier than those in London.
• Subway Creatures: On the one hand, I think that taking photos of people in public without their knowledge and then posting said pictures to the web for the numbers is a crappy thing to do; on the other hand, these are REALLY funny and tbh if you’re going to actually urinate on the tracks then, well, perhaps you deserve to be shamed.
• Please Hate These Things: Collecting appalling examples of interior decoration from the world of US property adverts. Some of these are just ASTONISHING.
• Mediugh: I imagine that this is made by one of you, seeing as the associated Twitter account started following me at launch – in any case, Mediugh offers up beautifully-illustrated examples of the small things that annoy journalists and PRs (if you’re a journalist, the existence of PRs; if you’re a PR, the fact that your job is a joke and noone respects you).
• Spongenuity: An artist working on algorithmically-generated portraits which are drawn by a doodline machine. These are BEAUTIFUL and there are prints for sale which I am totally going to buy one of right now.
• Sarah Sitkin: There is quite a lot of body horror here, including full skinsuits. You have been warned.
• Fecal Matter: But I promise you it’s nowhere near as unpleasant as this, which honestly creeps me out something chronic and is basically what I think would happen if someone crossed the aesthetic of Hellraiser with Vogue.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How We Radicalised The World: It’s not been a great week for those of us increasingly concerned that we’ve spent the past decade effectively creating conditions designed specifically to facilitate the rise of extremist views, it’s fair to say, what with shootings and racism on the campaign trail and Italy and Germany and Brazil…this Buzzfeed piece is a general sort of ‘look how we’ve messed this all up’ piece, but presents an interesting chronology of the past few years and all the ways in which online activity has bled into real life politics and, well, WOW when you set it out like this is there a compelling argument to be made that perhaps we ought to just turn off the internet and maybe hibernate for a few decades.
• Bolsonaro In His Own Words: Obviously it’s unfair to judge a politician until they take office, and obviously it’s impossible to assess the likely impact of any leader until you see how they behave once power is in their hands, but, well, reading through this list of official quotes from Brazil’s lovable new leader, it’s fair to say that I’m not hugely convinced that he’s going to be a force for good in the world.
• Screens and Kids in Silicon Valley: You may not be hugely surprised on reading this piece to discover that Silicon Valley’s elites are somewhat disinclined to allow their kids to binge on screentime ,instead being of the opinion that it’s, well, not very good for them. Leaving aside the bleak ‘comedy’ of this, the piece paints a somewhat worrying picture of an additional potential divide developing between the rich and poor – of course if you don’t have any money and limited time you’ll be more likely to default to parenting-by-screen based on the near-infinite degree of mostly-free distraction it provides vs the expensive and finite (by contrast) pleasures afforded by books or travel or whatever. Welcome to a future in which people at the lower end of the income scale eat worse food, have worse health and consume more infojunk than people at the top, and in which the chances of doing anything about the poverty gap start to look significantly more remote the harder you squint.
• Self-Driving Ethics: You may recall that a year or so ago a link did the rounds online which presented a series of dilemmas based on the idea of a self-driving car; you were asked to choose, in a variety of differing scenarios with different actors, whether you would prefer a vehicle under AI control to risk the lives of driver and passenger or of pedestrians, given a range of different variables. Millions of people worldwide participated in the experiment, meaning MIT is now able to publish the findings which throw up some fascinating variations in morality around the world, particularly related to the relative value placed on young and old lives in different parts of the world. This is a genuinely interesting read, not least on the extent to which we can be said to share a moral perspective as a culture.
• Online Hate in the Real World: A sort of companion piece to the first article linked to here, this is another Buzzfeed writeup looking at the way in which online vitriol is increasingly translating to real-world action, from pipebombs to synagogue shootings, and which argues that part of the problem is the extent to which we’re now so inured to people saying awful, extreme things online that we aren’t able to accurately predict which of the hate-spewing nutjobs on 4chan is actually going to grab the automatic and which is just going to continue rubbing themselves insensible to tentacle hentai. Not cheering.
• School Shooting Survivors: A wonderful piece of photojournalism / interviewing by New York Magazine, which profiles 27 Americans who have survived high school shootings since 1946; beautiful photos, brave people, very sad stories. The first recorded instance of a high school shooting in the US was in 1840, by the way.
• Making Money From Mindfulness: I’ve spoken before about how irritated I am by tech people who spend much of the late-00s/early-10s exploiting the Skinner Box-like design principles of social media for commercial gain before pivoting into mindfulness apps in later life as they discovered that it was SO STRESSFUL being really rich and, actually, maybe all this tech isn’t that good for us after all, hey? Not to mention the specific London ones who spent much of their time making cost with Milo (O HAI MICHAEL ACTON SMITH). Anyway, this is about how people are monetising mindfulness – the numbers here are staggering, and there’s obviously a market for it, but there’s something unpleasantly surface level (ironically) about it all, and there’s a good point buried in here about how perhaps this is all just, well, keeping us compliant: “That meditation and mindfulness have entered the repertoire of global capitalism isn’t surprising: In the face of stagnant wages and an ever-deteriorating boundary between work and whatever we do outside it, why not shift the responsibility of finding peace to the individual? Put another way: Next time work makes you feel less than human, should you gently speak truth to power, or should you use mindfulness to self-regulate and maintain function in an oppressive system? And should you choose to self-regulate, are you tacitly thanking the oppressive system for giving you the tools of self-regulation to begin with? “
• All Magazines Go To Heaven: A profile of James Hyman and his remarkable Hyman Archive, something which I featured in one of the very first Web Curios back in the H+K days and which I am delighted to find is still very much a thing. For those of you unfamiliar, James Hyman used to work at MTV and started collecting magazines for professional purposes; this soon grew into an obsession, to the point where he now owns and administers the largest collection of magazines from around the world. If you’ve never had a poke around it, can I suggest you take a moment to visit the website because, honestly, it’s an incredible feat.
• Memory of Mankind: This is, honestly, one of the more oddly beautiful and touching things I read this week – I found myself thinking about it far more than I would have expected. Martin Kunze is a 50 year old Austrian man who has established the Memory of Mankind in a salt mine near his home; the project involves taking information about people, their lives, their hobbies, their learnings, about science and art and maths and medicine, and etching it on ceramic tablets to be kept, forever, in a cave in the salt mine where, over aeons, the levels of salt will rise and eventually expose them to the outside world again. This is SUCH an incredible project, effectively seeking to provide a snapshot, microcosmic as it will necessarily be, of the human experience for future civilisations. The wonderfully postmodern flattening of context this engenders is particularly wonderful – the juxtaposition of personal blogs and scientific journals and photos and…look, just read the piece and then go and visit the museum’s website; for a relatively small cost you can submit your own data to be etched and stored, which personally I would LOVE – I might submit a few Curios, as I feel certain that future civilisations will be THRILLED to bathe in my webspaff.
• Boyscouts in a Warzone: I read this and I confess did a little bit of a weep at how INCREDIBLY sweet it is – the Boy Scouts of the Central African Republic fulfil a particular and unique function in the country, riven as it is by warring factions, corruption and a barely-functioning infrastructure, taking the idea of ‘doing good’ to pretty significant conclusions. A fascinating portrait of a very, very fcuked country.
• The Petty Hall of Fame: A BRILLIANT list of the 60 pettiest moments in human history – obviously incomplete, as I personally have witnessed at least three instances that deserve to be on here – including such gems as Lord Byron’s insistence in keeping a domesticated bear as a pet in order to thumb his nose at his College’s rules against keeping dogs, and the brilliant story of the Iran-Turkey conflict sparked by a piece of furniture. A truly wonderful compendium of people being, well, just a bit dickish.
• Robert Drury’s Diary: The London Review of Books has a regular ‘Diary’ column, with various writers sharing details of their lives, however mundane. This is Robert Drury, who writes about his trip to investigate corruption in the oil industry in Kazakhstan. It’s ostensibly quite dull – he goes to Kazakhstan, he investigates a bit, he leaves Kazakhstan – but the writing is just perfect; it’s spare and cold and precise and, I don’t know, engineered, almost, and it made me quite jealous of how good it is.
• On The Nose: A profile of a quite remarkable-sounding woman; Sissel Tolaas  is one of the world’s foremost authorities on scent and the science of smell, a ‘nose’ who preserves an archive of scents and who regularly works with large companies and brands to help them solve olfactory problems (and, honestly, this is just her third-stage career; the section at the beginning of this piece which blithely recounts her life to date doesn’t quite display enough awe for her achievements in my opinion; this woman is INCREDIBLE); the article does a  very good job of describing the very particular world in which she operates, and the fascinating business of analysing and preserving scents.
• Post Malone: I don’t like the music of Post Malone; I find it facile and stupid and it all sounds the same. Then again, I’m a nearly 40-year-old man, so perhaps I shouldn’t like the music of Post Malone. Regardless, this is a review of his recent ‘homecoming’ gig in Dallas combined with a profile of the artist – it is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most savage takedowns of a musician I think I’ve ever read, a really enjoyable brutalising not only of him but of the culture that he embodies. Fine, maybe its alternative headline could be ‘out-of-touch critic doesn’t understand kids’ but this paragraph encapsulates the thesis rather nicely: “It is true, after all. Post Malone has won. He’s received wealth and fame with little accountability. He’s reaped the extreme benefits of a system that allowed him to flourish yet asserts his privilege to remain purposefully ignorant. He knows he won the lottery but doesn’t understand that it was rigged in his favor. This is what the zeitgeist demanded as the latest whole-milk hip-hop avatar: a proud non-voter, a nonreader of books, the type of person who gets a JFK tattoo without knowing about Kennedy’s role in the Voting Rights Act while bizarrely claiming that he was “the only president to speak out against the crazy corruption stuff that’s going on in our government nowadays.””
• Making Hot Sauce At Scale: A really interesting series of observations from the author about what she learned trying to build her hot sauce startup; honestly, it’s far more interesting than you’d think, even if you have no desire to read about someone’s entrepreneurial struggle; just the breadth of considerations involved here was an eye-opening detail.
• Colony Collapse Disorder: An essay comparing the manner in which colonies of bees react to stress and adversity, and how said colonies can simply fall apart under too great a degree of strain, and how one might argue that we can see that replicated within human communities too and how, perhaps, we ought to think of the rise in child suicide and self-harm as a potential indicator a a significant societal malaise. I mean, it’s not a cheery read but it’s a well-written and necessary one.
• A Diary of Life, One Day in 2018, For My Future Self: Author Tom Cox has a rather good personal blog, and this essay, published a couple of weeks ago, is a delight; a sort of free-form, disconnected diary entry taking a snapshot of his life right now for an imagined time capsule into the future. I think when people talk about the death of blogging in nostalgic terms it’s stuff like this that they mean; it meanders, it doesn’t exist to make big points or to get clicks, it’s just a snapshot of a mind in a place in a moment and it’s all the better for it.
• Six Glimpses of the Past: This is GLORIOUS. Janet Malcolm takes 6 photographs from her past and uses those to frame this six-part essay, part personal memoir, part family history, which throughout explores (both explicitly and not) the peculiar relationship between photography and memory, the pavlovian way in which images can evoke past events and the gaps that necessarily remain…honestly, this is a superb piece of writing and a genuine slow pleasure to read.
• New Words for the New World: I just want to give you the first three paragraphs and then hopefully you’ll be tempted to click. This is superb: “When your sleeves bunch up while putting on your coat it’s called a scrauntlet, or malsleevance. Gripping the shirt sleeve to keep it from bunching is called cuffling. Saying the same word at the same time as somebody else is a jinxing; trying to get past someone at the elevator door is a juggling, a side-step, a beshuffling. Not getting enough likes on social media is being screenied, and when a less important post than yours gets more shares it’s an inter-rage.” Like ‘The Meaning of Liff’ but beautifully, poignantly written.
• Late Life Love: Finally this week, I wept like a child as I read this account of the author’s home life with her ageing husband – as a depiction of what love is at heart, , and what it evolves into, and ageing and senescence, it’s unparalleled. It’s an extract from a book of the same name which is set to be published next year and which I am now massively anticipating – this is, honestly, so gorgeous.  

By Fia Cielen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. Excellent animated geometric book covers:

2) This is by Haelos, it’s called ‘Buried in the Sand’ and it sort of reminds me of Gus Gus in a way. Anyway, it’s great and the video is shot WONDERFULLY:

3) This is called ‘Claudion’, it’s by Helena Deland, and it’s a lovely slice of synthpop with a stupendously retro-tinted video to accompany it:

4) I can’t work out if I like the song particularly or not – I mean, it’s not bad, it just leaves me a bit cold – but WOW the video is EXCELLENT and SO INTERNET. Watch it – I promise you won’t be disappointed, it’s really very clever. This is called ‘Material’ by Flesher:

5) I used to have a very loved Pedro the Lion tshirt. I wonder where that is. Anyway, this is said band Pedro the Lion and their new song ‘Yellow Bike’, a typically excellent slice of indiepop Americana:

6) Finally this week, this is apparently the first time a band commissioned a Line Rider artist to do them an official music video. This is SO GOOD – honestly, every part of it is perfect, not least the way they depict the pitch shifts through the changing track. Practically perfect – this is called ‘Hard Times’ and it’s by Guster and OH THAT’S IT ISN’T IT I AM DONE WITH THE VIDEOS AND THUS WITH THIS WEEK’S CURIOS BYE THEN BYE I LOVE YOU BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND AND TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER AND TRY NOT TO SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ONLINE IF YOU CAN AND MAYBE GO FOR A WALK OR CALL A FRIEND OR ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT JUST DO WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY AS YOU PROBABLY DESERVE IT ANYHOW I AM OFF NOW TAKE CARE AND SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE BYE!:

Does this mean we now have to stop lauding the Saudi regime for its incredibly progressive decision to let women drive cars? Does this mean that they’re the bad guys again? What? They were always the bad guys? GOD IT’S ALL JUST SO HARD.

Welcome to yet another week in which once again we have been shown that if you’re rich enough you really can seemingly get away with anything, because said wealth means that you are ‘strategically important’ to others. Cheering, isn’t it? At least the disappearance of poor Mr Khashoggi has given us a fresh new horror to distract from this week’s idiocy Olympics in Brussels, so his (probable – let’s give those lovely guys in Riadh the benefit of the doubt, eh?) death hasn’t been totally in vain. 

Anyway, I need to brace myself physically and spiritually for the prospect of spending 45 minutes in a confined space with a naked performer later, so I’m off to deodorise my nooks in preparation – while I make with the cotton buds, you make yourselves comfortable and let me gently lube you up with this week’s steaming, fresh, slightly gelatinous helping of webspaff. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and YOU ASKED FOR THIS. 

By Robin Cerutti

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE INSTRUMENTAL VERSION OF TYLER’S CHERRYBOMB ALBUM!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURPRISED THAT YOU’RE SURPRISED ABOUT FACEBOOK’S METRICS FOR AD SUCCESS BEING ANYTHING LESS THAN 100% ACCURATE:

• Facebook Expands Lead Gen Forms: To be honest, there are probably more interesting stories I could have led with in this section, but this is just the way that the links have fallen this week and I know noone really cares. Anyhow, this is the FASCINATING news that Facebook has now expanded its Lead Gen ad functionality (you know, those ads that let you harvest emails from willing idiots direct from Facebook) to include ad types focused on brand awareness, reach and traffic rather than only allowing it as a discrete unit type. Oh, and the feature’s now called ‘Instant Forms’. That…that was underwhelming, wasn’t it?
• Facebook Launching Creative Compass: This is COMING SOON, or at least at some point in 2019 – this is a service which will analyse your FB ads and tell you how effective they’re likely to be, based on the system’s analysis of your image, copy, etc, though obviously it won’t tell you exactly how much Facebook is inflating your ad’s performance to make its platform look more effective than it in fact is (TOPICAL!).
• ‘Scraped’ Content To Be Downranked On FB: Links to crap content will be downgraded on FB, with the platform suggesting that links will be less likely to travel on the platform “if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait headlines or landing pages overflowing with low-quality ads”. Which obviously doesn’t affect you, with your high-quality content, but, you know, might be useful to know nonetheless.
• Facebook Expands Retention Optimisation To All Advertisers: Do you advertise apps? No? WELL MOVE ON THEN. For those of you that do, though, this might be interesting – FB is expanding the ability to target users most likely to return to your app after two or seven days with ads, to lure them back to the siren call of your generic shovelware. What a time to be alive!
• Facebook Updates Branded Content Policy: A couple of minimally interesting updates to FB’s ‘Branded Content’ partnership functionality (you know, that bit of Facebook which lets Pages tag individuals in their updates and mark them as a paid partner shilling tat for money) – this is BIG NEWS: “Today we are adding more clarity and context to branded content posts, updating the language on the label from “Paid” to “Paid Partnership.” While the creator or publisher will continue to tag “with” the brand, people can now also learn more about the two tagged Pages and the partnership by clicking on a new informational “About this Partnership” icon.” Seismic, eh? Oh, and Pages will now be able to comment on / tag other Pages as Pages – just think of all the exciting brandter opportunities (I know you haven’t thought about that word since 2015, but it’s important to occasionally resurrect the horrors of the past as a salutary lesson for all our futures).
• Political Ad Transparency Comes to the UK: It’s been live in the US for nearly a year now, and here it is in the UK – us Brits will now also have the opportunity to explore the ad buys and targeting of ads deemed to be ‘political’, with any organisation wanting to run promotions of this type required to provide additional information about their location and identity in an attempt to prevent BAD ACTORS from messing with the purity of our democratic process. Although, in a departure from the US model, this only applies to ads which are explicitly promoting a specific individual or political party rather than being extended to a broader range of issues which could be deemed ‘political’, which does rather de-fang the system imho. Still, it’s a step in the right direction (albeit a small, slightly uncertain one).  
• IGTV Academy: It’s no secret that literally not one person actually cares about Instagram TV or believes that it’s a good thing with a reason to exist. Still, Facebook have punted hundreds of millions into attempting to make it happen, meaning that they’re not going to let it sink without a fight – witness their latest attempt to make it cool, the IGTV ACADEMY! Snark aside, if you’re a ‘creator’ (don’t worry, I’m not going to rant spastically about how much I hate that term, that was last week) then this is perhaps worth looking at – it’s happening in Shoreditch (like it’s 2005!) next week, and places are available on application, so if you want to learn how to shoot vertical and make BETTER MORE ENGAGING CONTENT then you could probably do worse than take a look.
• Instagram Story School: Or, alternatively, you can check out this suite of instructions direct from Insta on how to optimise your Story creation – it’s VERY basic, but if you need to explain to your grandfather what Stories are and how he can use them to create thirst traps for all the Instagroupies out there then this will be INVALUABLE.
• Twitter Testing Annotations for Moments: It’s slightly unclear whether this is a feature available to anyone who creates ‘Moments’ on Twitter or whether it’s only something that those created by Twitter will feature (actually I have just reread the article and that’s exactly what it is – Christ, but I’m a p1ss-poor ‘journalist’), but the opportunity to add ‘annotations’ (that is, little explainer text between featured Tweets in a Moment) is being experimented by Twitter, the idea being that it will offer context and a degree of fact-checking to the feature. Although given that Moments have gone desktop-only there’s no guarantee that they’ll even be a thing in a few months time – nor, frankly, do I care.
• Snapchat Launches Lenses for Cats: This is, apparently, news. Look, if you work for Pedigree then perhaps this of interest to you; otherwise, you and your special little guy can carry on largely as before.
• YT Changes ‘Engagement’ Criteria For Action Ads: Literally this: “YouTube will now count an ‘Engagement’ whenever a user clicks or watches 10 seconds or more of a TrueView for action ad when using maximize conversions or target CPA bidding. That’s a change from 30 seconds.” It’s…it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for this.
• YT Launches New Ad Targeting Option: You’ll now be able to target YouTube viewers based on where they’re watching YT – users casting the service to a TV will now be a discrete targeting group, which is potentially hugely useful; I don’t wish to make sweeping generalisations here, but I think you can infer a reasonable amount about the sort of person someone is based on their propensity to watch old TV series thrown onto their telly from their phone, for example.
• If This Then Domino’s: Domino’s continues its policy of making digital innovations which, at best, three actual people will ever use but which act as excellent little pieces of PR because idiots like me write them up as though they are ‘news’. This is a very smart – and simultaneously very, very silly – idea which applies the basic principle of IFTTT to pizza ordering; the service lets you set up some simple conditional parameters which, if met, will trigger the ordering of your favourite pizza, for example if your GE dishwasher starts leaking, or if it’s snowing outside. As an extension of Domino’s overall ‘we are the pizza brand that owns silly tech gimmicks’ this is absolutely perfect, and the integration of multiple brands’ IoT functionality is smart, and the breadth of pre-scripted recipes is pretty staggering. I am grudgingly impressed.
• Adidas Yung: I promise, I’m not picking on Adidas (like the brand would care if I was, obvs), but this is another marketing initiative that I can’t help but get slightly annoyed by; this site for it’s Yung range is, for reasons known only to Adi’s marketing team, designed to look like an exact replica of a Geocities-era late-90s site, complete with tiled backgrounds and 90s slang and…look, WHO IS THIS AIMED AT? Are they finally acknowledging that the only people who care enough about trainers to visit this webpage are old people who can remember when the web actually looked like this? Are any young people actually nostalgic for an era of web design that they are too young to actually practically remember? They’re not, are they? This absolutely feels like the sort of project which was greenlit because a bunch of middle-aged blokes fell into a memoryhole and spent a drunk hour shouting ‘WAZZZZZZUUUUUUUUP?!’ at each other. Still, the rhythm game on here is quite fun so, you know, points for that.

By Jeanie Tomanek

NEXT UP, AN OLD-BUT-EXCELLENT JAZZ MIX BY DJ WRONGTOM!

THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME A UK BUSINESS OR POLITICIAN MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ‘SHARED VALUES’ WE HAVE WITH SAUDI, PT.1:

• Who Paid $0.99?: The latest in the near-infinite parade of ‘ideas on the web that I am genuinely angry I didn’t think of myself’, this is so simple and so brilliant that it makes me a bit sick. There is only one gimmick to this site – you pay 99 cents to its owner to find out who else has been stupid enough to pay 99 cents to find out who else has been stupid enough to pay 99 cents to find out who else has…you get the idea. It’s an almost perfect piece of pointless webart, and I bet it’s already made hundreds.
• Building Hopes: This is cute, and in its AR incarnation reasonably impressive as a piece of dataviz, but I am sort of baffled as to why it exists (WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED A REASON? Christ, Matt, can’t you just uncritically enjoy something for a change without having to scry for meaning and purpose in EVERYTHING you joyless prick? This sort of rhetorical, fourth wall-breaking flourish is exactly the sort of authorial device which really elevates Web Curios above other weekly linkdump newsletters, I find). Building Hopes is a Google News Initiative artproject which exists as this website and an associated AR app – users pick from a selection of issues, choosing four or more, and indicate how hopeful they are about those issues seeing ameliorative change in the future; this creates a sort of virtual balancing stone sculpture which exists in perpetuity, either on the website or in the AR app. The ‘sculptures’ are a datavisualisation of your picks – there are a variety of indicators on each of the ‘stones’ which show how the general public feel about it, using data taken from Google search trends and the like, and when viewing it in AR there’s a really nice UI to the whole thing allowing you to explore the general direction of feeling around, say, renewable energy. Overall it’s a really well-made digitoy, as you’d expect from Google, though it does an even worse job of explaining itself than I have just done. Just fire it up and have a play.
• Skills From Videos: This is AMAZING – this YouTube video offers a short demonstration of how these researchers have created software which can ‘learn’ movement from ‘watching’ videos. So, for example, they can train a virtual figure in a simulated environment to do backflips by showing it a bunch of YouTube videos of people doing backflips. This is, seriously, quite remarkable – the idea that we have managed to create software that can apply learned skills to a virtual puppet and refine said skills based on repeated viewership is insane, and presages a future in which we’ll basically be able to train our robots to do anything they can watch us doing. I give it less than two months before we see the first application of this to bongo – honestly, combine this with Deep Fakes and we’ll have the first entirely computer generated pr0n movie before you can say ‘is it weird that I’m masturbating to something that is entirely machine-generated?’.
• Tortoise Media: YOu’ll have read about this already this week, I’m certain, but here’s the Kickstarter that EVERYONE (or at least everyone vaguely connected with the media in the UK) is talking about; Tortoise has smashed its funding target with a month to go, suggesting that there really is appetite for some sort of SLOW NEWS organisation. To be honest, the interview in the Standard yesterday will tell you more than I possibly could about this, but the idea is that Tortoise will offer a smaller number of in-depth articles per day, eschewing the churn and pace of the modern newsroom in favour of a more considered and less click-hungry approach to news. The idea of the ‘collaborative conference’ as a forum for discussion and to shape the agenda is fascinating, although imho perhaps a touch utopian, and it will be interesting to see whether or not it can sustain readership once the initial hype has died down; whilst there’s obviously a market for longform, quality journalism online (*ahem*), I’m curious as to whether there’s going to be enough output to keep this moving. Still, the people behind it seem a lot smarter than I am and I’m sure they’ve thought this through.
• Wearspace: You will, I’m sure, have seen a visual of these doing the rounds this week – Panasonic’s prototypical concentration visor, designed to ensure that you, worker drone, are deprived of your peripheral vision so as to be able to better focus on the glowing, flickering screen in front of you. NO! DO NOT LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW! DO NOT BECOME TEMPORARILY DISTRACTED BY THE LOVELY HUMAN COUNTENANCE OF YOUR CO-WORKER! YOU ARE HERE TO PRODUCE! YOU ARE ON OUR CLOCK! WORK FOR US!  Anyway, this is the Crowdfunding page for said prototypical design – it’s all in Japanese and so may well say that it’s all an elaborate joke, but why not chuck them a few hundred Yen in any case? This is set to become a must-have niche fashion item in 2019, mark my words.
• Oobah: You’ll recall moon-faced peroxide prankster Oobah Butler’s viral restaurant prank from last year, in which he managed to get a totally fictitious restaurant, called ‘Shed’ (because it was his shed), to #1 in the London Tripadvisor rankings – as a result of the scam, Oobah has spent the past 12 months being bombarded with interview requests by the world’s media and understandably got a bit fatigued by the whole thing. He decided to see whether he could get away with outsourcing his media duties to a succession of slightly iffy lookalikes – you can read the (excellent) writeup here, but the upshot is that he totally managed it. He has now launched ‘Oobah’, a service which purports to allow anyone to enjoy the same sort of liberating doppelganger army effect on demand; it’s a joke, fine, but I also get the impression that there’s probably some sort of deeper gag at play here – you can sign up, say what you want the lookalikes for, and….well, we will see. I’ve asked for a lookalike to help me achieve stratospheric Instagram fame, so if I abandon Curios for a career as a speedy lollipop-flogger you’ll know why.
• MAKERPhone: There’s a line in Houllebecq’s ‘Atomised’ in which one of the protagonists launches into a fairly typical miserabilist riff about how they are an entirely useless example of parasitic humanity because they exist in a world that they simply don’t understand surrounded by objects and artifacts that they couldn’t possible recreate themselves. If you too are afflicted by this peculiarly anthropocene malaise you might want to invest in the MAKERPhone, now 10x funded on Kickstarter, which will deliver to you all the components you will need to make your very own smartphone. This sounds BRILLIANT, for the right type of person – you’ll be able to hack it together, customising the look and the software and the like, and you’ll learn loads about electronics while you’re about it. This is the sort of thing that the slightly whimsical part of me likes to envision parents and kids doing together, while I cry imagining the sort of childhood I never had.
• Seven Square Miles: Aerial photographs, culled from Google Maps, showing areas of seven square miles from around the world. A truly beautiful reminder of the wonderful diversity of the planet and the weird beauty of semi-abstract landscapes.
• Sociality: An online art project focused on the ways in which technology is increasingly being used to control and manipulate in covert, concealed ways. “Paolo Cirio identified classes of patents, then collected, aggregated and sorted the data on the website https://Sociality.today where thousands of patents of problematic technologies are exposed. On Sociality’s website everyone is able to browse, search, submit, and rate patents by their titles, images of flowcharts, and the companies that created them. Both the artist and the online participants perform oversight of invasive inventions designed to target demographics, push content, coerce interactions, and monitor people.” Interesting and incredibly bleak once you dig into it – you can read a proper writeup elsewhere on Imperica, but it’s worth a delve around inside the archive; it will take you about 3-4 minutes to find something that makes you feel uncomfortable.
• Big Mac Data: The Economisty is making the data underpinning its famous Big Mac Index – its regular tracker of the price of McDonald’s most famous product as a measure of global economies – freely available. You can do ANYTHING YOU LIKE with it, so I look forward to seeing all sorts of excellent data projects mapping the cost of a Big Mac against, say, the volume of Pr0nhub searches for ‘Vore’ or similar. Whilst correlation doesn’t equal causation, I bet you can show some VERY odd things with this stuff.
• Personas: A simple, lightweight cartoon avatar generator, letting you create an easily customisable digital…er…persona for yourself to download and use as you please. You can probably spend an enjoyable few hours this afternoon creating your entire office out of these and then replacing their photos on the company website (this is a GREAT idea, please can someone give this a go? You almost certainly won’t get sacked).
• Colourblindly: A Chrome extension which enables you to see what a webpage would look like if you suffered from colour blindness. Not only really useful from an accessibility and design point of view, but also the sort of thing which you could use to really mess with someone’s head – try setting it to run on your deskmate’s computer and see whether you can convince them they’ve got some sort of unexpected and inexplicable ocular degenerative disorder!
• Maniac Pumpkin Carvers: Carving pumpkins is HARD, or at least it is if you’re me and have all the artistic elan of Helen Keller. Maniac Pumpkins are apparently something of a New York institution, and make the whole process look incredibly easy – these people will, for a fee, provide you with professionally-carved gourds depicting whatever you prefer, from faces to abstract designs to everything inbetween. Obviously this is of no use to you whatsoever unless you happen to be in New York, but the gallery of work on the site is astonishing and worth a look and, who knows, maybe one of you reading this will be motivated to start your very own ripoff pumpkin carving business. I feel so inspirational.
• Piano Genie: Another project which is sort of akin to magic. This is a bit tricky to explain, but imagine a system which would let you improvise on a piano using 8 simple buttons rather than the 88 keys which you’d usually have to use, and which would allow you to do this with literally no musical talent whatsoever. You imagining? GOOD. This is exactly that – you can see the whole site here, which details how the tech works in proper detail and lets you see the code and the rest, but the main link here takes you to the webtoy version which, honestly, is incredible. It looks like crap, fine, but you will be amazed at the oddly melodious tunes you’ll be able to spaff out just by mashing your keyboard. I’m going to add ‘Jingle Composer’ to the list of ‘jobs that the robots are going to steal’.
• Macaw: Macaw’s an interesting idea, designed to make your Twitter feed a little more interesting – it basically tracks the things that people in your network ‘like’, and presents you with a daily curated roundup of said things; the idea being that it will surface content and Tweets which are considered ‘good’ by people whose opinions you presumably respect but which wouldn’t necessarily have been surfaced by the algo. Of course, this could simply expose all of your Twitter network as people with appalling opinions and taste, but that’s part of the fun!
• Asaro: This is one of those occasional things one stumbles across online which makes you realise quite how mad the lives of the super rich must be. Do you own a yacht? Are you bored with the endless sailing and discovery and exploration and diving and eating and sealife and sunsets and booze and the like? Of course you are – who wouldn’t be jaded? Why not employ Asaro – as far as I can tell, basically the Punchdrunk of the superyacht community – to create a bespoke theatrical interactive EXPERIENCE for you and your guests? Whether that be a Pirates of the Caribbean-style adventure, some sort of zombie-themed island escape or maybe something involving Atlantean aliens or suchlike, they will do it for you (for a doubtless eye-watering price). I would LOVE to see the sort of thing they can do, so if any Curios readers happen to have access to a yacht and 5-6 figures disposable income then, well, I am ALL YOURS.
• Fold’n’Fly: I think it’s half term next week – I imagine those of you with kids are practically FRANTIC wondering how in the name of Christ you’re going to keep your progeny occupied in the schoolless downtime (look, just accept the fact that you’re going to leave them in front of Fortnite for a week and be done with it – it’s ok, they’re probably beyond saving), so I offer this as some sort of potential solution. This website presents schema for a bewildering variety of paper planes to fold and fly – there’s at least a morning’s entertainment in this. For those of you reading this at work, go and raid the printer RIGHT NOW and start folding.
• Slowly: This is a lovely idea. Slowly is an app which connects strangers from around the world to be penpals – the gimmick here is that your messages get delivered…er…slowly, with the length of time it takes to deliver a missive dependent on the real-world distance between two correspondents, mimicking the time taken for a letter to make its way around the world back when people actually sent physical letters to each other. Honestly, this is so, so cute.
• Vidometer: A potentially neat little app which lets you record video and export it with a small dynamic map in the corner; the idea being that if you’re a cyclist or motorist or whatever, you can record your first-person video and combine it with a routemap, showing exactly where you are at any point in the film. Look, this might be useful, it might not, you decide.
• Times New Romance: Beautiful embroidery. Not really got much else to say here, this is gorgeous work with a lovely, fourth-wall-breaking side to it.

By Devan Shimoyama

NEXT, HAVE SOME MORE JAZZY STYLINGS COURTESY OF THIS PLAYLIST CURATED BY HARUKI MURAKAMI!

THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME A UK BUSINESS OR POLITICIAN MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ‘SHARED VALUES’ WE HAVE WITH SAUDI, PT.2:

• Journey to the End of the Cast List: Kickstarting an artbook celebrating and commemorating the unsung actors who fill such small-but-vital roles in films like ‘Puking Girl’ or ‘Man with Teeth’; “From ‘Exuberant Mourner’ (Analyze This) to ‘Arthritic Cowboy’ (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), ‘Sad Woman with Horns’ (Guardians of the Galaxy) to ‘Man Shot in Head 3’ (The ABCs of Death), movie history is replete with curiously named characters bringing up the rear of the cast list. And Introducing is a survey of those bit-part and background character credits, organising them into almost 100 categories—some predictable (men, women, bystanders, henchmen) and some more surprising (screaming characters, toothless characters, characters whose names are simply their one line of dialogue).” Awesome.
• Books For The Visually Impaired: The Internet Archive really is a superb resource – not just for things like last week’s archive of C64 games, but also for stuff like this, an incredible selection of digital books designed specifically for people with degrees of visual impairment, available for free.
• Dress Code Shirts: I can’t quite work out whether these are sort of cool or the naffest things ever (probably the latter, based on that) – Dress Code make shirts which are, as the name suggests, designed around code; so you’ll have patterns based on cursors or binary or whatever else. If you want to advertise the fact that you’re a massive nerd via the medium of tailoring, then this is perhaps a marginally less embarrassing way of doing so than that faded Star Wars tshirt with the curry stains on it (THROW IT OUT).
• Shoe for Virtual Feet: An offshoot of the Virtual Reality Photo Project, which takes high-res arty photos from within videogame worlds, this is a photo series depicting videogame characters’ footwear. No more,no less, just digital shoes from a wide range of titles. As an aside, if you can name more than about 5-6 of the games featured here just by looking at the characters’ shoes, you have a very real problem and probably need to get out more (I got 5).
• Insta Story Templates: This is a clever idea, and I think we’ll see more of these sort of template-y creativity-facilitating hacks for Story production as they move ever-closer to being the only way in which people are allowed to communicate with each other online. These are a useful series of template formats into which you can drop images, gifs, video, etc, and stitch them together into a Story which you can then export to Insta (or, one would imagine, Snap or FB or WhatsApp or whatever else you choose). It won’t, let’s be clear, instantly make your content interesting, but it will mean that you can combine a bunch of crap images from your camera roll in marginally more innovative ways than your other basic friends.
• The NPC Snap Filter: This is apparently being co-opted by lefties as a joke reaction to the ‘SJWs are NPCs’ trope (see last week’s Curios, or this article, if that means nothing to you) – this filter replaces people’s faces in Snap with the blank, 2d NPC avatar for ‘comic’ effect (your mileage may vary).
• Butterfly Wings: Quite incredible macro photography of butterfly wings – these are AMAZING and beautiful and sort of awe-inspiring, whilst at the same time putting me very strongly in mind of really, really bad velvet print artworks (honestly, you will know exactly what I mean, just click).
• Anigay: Included in no small part because the name made me giggle childishly, this is a website exploring queer issues in anime – “Our mission at AniGay is simple: To let you in on our conversations about queer anime! We have a ton of thoughts, and we want to present them in a slightly more polished form than is possible on Twitter. So AniGay will host our interpretations, analyses, and theories as well as glimpses into our adjacent research, and anything else we feel like writing and publishing, as long as it’s related to queerness in anime.”. It’s all actually quite serious in a gender studies academian sort of way, but, well, ANIGAY!
• Destination Reads: Such a good idea, this, to the point that I’m amazed that I’ve not featured it before (Google says I haven’t and that’s good enough for me). A really simple premise, the site lets you tell it where you are travelling and then suggests novels for you to read which are set in your holiday destination. That’s literally it, fine, but it’s a hugely useful service for people who like a bit of literary immersion along with their travels. There are only 8 cities served so far, which is a crying shame – it feels like this needs some sort of Wiki element to allow for the crowdsourcing of a proper list; they are actively soliciting contributions and suggestions, though, so perhaps it will grow over time.
• The LGBTQ Game Archive: This week’s ‘you saw it last week on B3ta, now get it on Curios!’ link, this is “a resource for researchers, journalists, critics, game designers/developers/publishers, students, gamers and/or people who play games and anyone else who is interested in learning more about the history of LGBTQ content in video games.” Honestly fascinating to see how the depiction and representation of non-cis gender identities has developed through four decades of videogames, as well as the ways in which the queer community has seen and embodied itself through the medium of games.
• All The Games of IGF: All of the trailers from all of the games at this year’s Independent Games Festival. There are over 200 videos here, which will take you through to hometime seamlessly if you start watching them now.
• Birds Aren’t Real: This is excellent, and SO well done. Birds Aren’t Real is a spoof truther movement, perfectly mimicking many of the more rabid conspiracy theories of the web, which seeks to expose the fact that birds are, er, NOT REAL. Yes, that’s right, we’ve all been tricked into thinking that these flying things are organic creatures whereas in fact they are specially designed covert surveillance machines. THE BIRDS ARE A LIE! There is so much to love about this, not least the tone which oscillates between concerned and informative to absolutely screaming batsh1t, and were they not sold out I would absolutely purchase a ‘Birds Are A Lie’ tshirt.
• O-Face or Ow-Face: I have been waiting to write that for 6 whole days now, it’s been a struggle to keep it in I tell you. This is wonderfully bizarre – a video accompanying an academic research project seeking to examine the differences in facial expression produced when people feel pain versus when they feel pleasure. Have you ever wanted to see an animated representation of exactly how someone’s orgasm face differs from the face they pull when they smack themselves with a hammer? OH GOOD!
• Updated Public Service Announcements: “Between 1936 and 1943, artists working for the Works Progress Administration designed more than 35,000 posters—of which the government printed over 2 million copies—promoting local and national programs, travel and tourism, and WPA-funded cultural programming, as well as doling out health-and-safety advice.” – this site presents a selection of new posters, updated for modernity. These are wonderful and I would buy them all in an instant.
• The Andy Warhol Photography Archive: 3,600+ photos from the Warhol photo archive, free to browse online. Absolutely wonderful (the site logs you out after about 15 minutes, which is annoying, but you can browse freely outside of that small restriction).
• Hallowe’en Whimsey Mask: Do you have a Hallowe’en costume yet? No? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN (this is a *bit* NSFW, but, honestly, live a little!).
• The Greatest Bear: Finally in this week’s miscellania, absolutely the gayest game you will play all week. A Streets of Rage-style side-scrolling beat em up, The Greatest Bear puts you in the shoes of Joe, a repressed, beaten-down office drone who one night after work stumbles into a mysterious (and VERY GAY) bar – cue you fighting your way through several levels representing various areas of Joe’s subconscious, complete with muscle daddies, massive cocks and an awful lot of…well, not to put too fine a point on it, an awful lot of jizz. This is VERY funny, hugely stylised and an awful lot of fun – it’s also hugely NSFW, although to be honest if you can get away with playing a very obvious 90s-style videogame on your work computer then I don’t imagine anyone will care too much if said videogame includes a large number of massive, veiny throbbers.

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS CELEBRATION OF 70 YEARS OF BLACK MUSIC IN THE UK!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Loko: Gorgeous, glorious geometric baking by the hugely talented Lauren Ko.
• Isabel Peppard: :Peppard is a sculptor and animator whose work tends heavily towards the grotesque and macabre, and her Insta feed is a lovely (not that lovely on reflection) collection of slightly horrifying models in progress.
• Matti Varga: The feed of photographer Matti Varga, whose work has a particular millennial-palette-aesthetic to it, and a wonderful feeling of distance (he said, pseudily).
• Watching Mr Bingo: Cartoonist, artist, animator and adland escapee Mr Bingo curates this Insta feed, where he posts photos of him taken by other people spotted in the wild. Proof that he really does seemingly only ever wear shorts.
• Kazu Studios: Feed of the work of Kazuhiro Tsuji, who makes Ron Mueck-style giant, hyperrealistic heads. These are UNCANNY.
• The Cheeky Blog: The Insta feed of the website of the same name, this shares illustrations and observations about being a woman. No idea how relatable or whatever these are what with my being a man, but the latest one, about leaving your bra in the fruitbowl, made me laugh.
• Conservatory Archives: Photos of conservatories and greenhouses across East London, because plants ALWAYS make things better.
• Cams Dins: Submitted by Curios reader Tom Lawrence (THANKS TOM, WHO I HAVE NEVER MET! It’s always nice when I get reminded that people other than my immediate relatives occasionally read this), this is a feed documenting the meals of one Cameron Sharpe. I have no idea who he is, or who runs this feed, but the quality of the food photography here is…upsetting.

By Joon Lee

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Other Blog: A collection of experiments with Deep Dream tech, in the main, often using it on videogames to trippy effect.

• The Blog That Celebrates Itself: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a collection of albums of cover versions – no idea who compiles these, or where they are sourced from, and some of them are DREADFUL (I am listening to a very odd, slightly shoegazy cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Disarm’ right now and rather wishing I wasn’t), but, hey, it’s weird and it’s on the the internet and so I present it here for your ‘pleasure’.
• She Said I’m A Robot: LOTS of drawings, illustrations, renders, etc, of mech-type robotics.
• Joel Remy: Arty gifs. Lovely, lovely arty gifs.
• The Styles Gifs: Lots – too many? – gifs of Harry Styles. Look at his lovely hair!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• What Happens Next?: Confession – I haven’t read all 50 of these essays, exploring the potential future of a variety of different sectors and industries, but I have read some of them, and the ones I have read were fascinating and thought provoking. As we hurtle towards the annual predictions season, this is a smarter roundup of some coming trends than we usually see.
• Escape From Fantasy: If you work in advermarketingpr you might well have seen this this week, but in case not it’s very much worth a look – Martin Weigel here presents a talk (it’s in slides, in the main, but perfectly comprehensible) about the terrible problem that the ad industry has – to whit, we only talk to ourselves and we know the square root of fcuk-all about anyone outside of London media land, whatever we might try and tell ourselves. Compellingly argued – if nothing else, this is a masterclass in how to structure and present an argument.
• Why Isn’t InstaTV Working?: Fine, it’s a bit premature to call it a flop, but it’s clear that InstaTV hasn’t exactly been a rip-roaring success either (when was the last time you opened the app? I just did, for the first time in about three months, and immediately wished I hadn’t – man there’s some dross on there). This piece presents a reasonably clear-eyed look at how it’s doing so far, some of the reasons it might not quite have taken off (indeterminate format is an issue – there’s no evidence that there’s a market for vertical video longer than 2-3 minutes, for a start), and what it might need to do to fix its issues (discovery being the big, screaming, obvious thing). Obviously we’ll all look back on this with quaint disbelief when we all have IGTV streaming direct into our frontal cortex in 2027.
• //medium.com/@MSF_USA/creating-a-comic-at-one-of-the-busiest-maternity-wards-in-the-world-7d255a9f393c“>Hila: This is superb. A comic created on behalf of Medecins Sans Frontieres by Aurelie Neyret from her illustrations sketched during a nine-day stay in an Afghan hospital,  Hila is about the war and recovery and womanhood and birth and death, and is absolutely superb. Do have a read.
• Male Coworkers: A Reddit thread in which women detail some of the things that their coworkers do which creep them out a bit – MAN there are some examples of some incredibly sketchy behaviour here. Who thinks its ok to spontaneously give their colleagues back rubs, ffs? And, er, why is noone offering them to me? Seriously though, this is bleak.
• Reflecting on Reddit: A revealing, and depressing, interview with former Reddit product head Dan McComas, who talks about his time at the platform in less than glowing terms – his statement that his work there made the world a worse place is unusually clear-headed for someone in tech, and his assessment of the fundamental problems facing social media platforms (that is, the VC-driven obsession with growth as the single most important metric of success) is a smart one. He’s also interesting on the dominance of Facebook and its likely continuation – it’s sobering to see someone who knows about community building at scale basically suggest that Facebook’s scale means that anyone else out to basically give up. Er, don’t give up!
• Instagram’s Harassment Problem: Following on from a piece last week, another article focusing on the fact that – SURPRISE! – Instagram is an undermoderated hole of people being mean to each other! It follows on rather perfectly from the above piece – the problems here described are absolutely a function of prioritising user growth above all else, and not stopping to think about scaling a service to deliver a decent experience for said swelling mass of users. Obviously AI is going to solve all of this – OBVIOUSLY – but til it does you might as well get used to everywhere on the web being an absolute horrorshow in terms of abuse. Great!
• Palm: This very much feels like a joke, but seemingly isn’t one – Verizon is launching a new product in the US next month, a mini-phone called ‘Palm’. The idea is that it’s a smaller smartphone with fewer apps and features which you can take out with you at times when you don’t want the distraction or hassle of your full-featured beast. WHAT??? THIS IS MENTAL. People are going to spend $350 on an additional phone that doesn’t do as much stuff as their existing phone because they don’t have the strength of will not to fiddle with New Star Manager throughout dinner? ARE WE ALL UTTERLY MAD?! This is possibly the most pathetic thing I’ve read all week.
• This Is How Amazon Loses: Obviously it’s not really about that at all – Amazon, and by extension MechaBezos, will never lose – but instead an interesting explanation of some of the UX/UI tricks that Amazon uses to promote its own products and encourage buy-in to Prime and other subscription categories. Diabolically smart, damn them.
• The Google Pixel 3: A review of a new phone that really isn’t a review of a new phone at all, this is a surprisingly brilliant piece of writing and a weirdly accurate representation of where our relationship to technology feels like it’s at here in Q318.
• Meet The Steak-Umms Twitter Guy: And so after the Tweetstorm and the analyses, we get the inevitable interview with the mid-20s bloke who writes Tweets for a processed meat products brand. What, as they like to say, a time to be alive. The very BEST thing about this – the thing which will cause ulcers in a lot of brand and social media people – is the whole ‘yeah, there’s no real tone of voice or coherent strategy here. I just write stuff’. IN YOUR FACE, OVERPAID SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY W4NKERS! Oh, er, hang on, that’s me.
• Dallas at 40: Dallas! Shoulderpads! J.R.! The dream series! Hair! Oil! Shooting! Hats! You may or may not be old enough to remember Dallas – I have fond memories of the theme tune, and watching the show with my mum despite not really having any interest in the power-hungry machinations of a fictitious family of Texan oil barons – but this is, regardless, a fascinating oral history of the programme’s genesis and rise to become one of the most famous entertainment properties in the world. Lots of lovely details here, but the bit that most struck me is the really rather poignant line from Larry Hagman’s daughter where she reflects on her dad’s character: “At least in his conversations with the press, Dad would distance himself from the J. R. character. He wanted everybody to know that he was a nice guy. But in truth, it wasn’t all that different. Dad loved secrets, and he was very good at deals. Only after his death did I realize that he had had multiple affairs. That’s a very J. R. kind of thing.”
• Depression Diagnosis By App: There have been a spate of articles this past week about patents for Alexa and other platforms which will, it’s hoped, assist in the diagnosis of depression and other mental conditions; this piece specifically looks at an app called Mindstrong which claims to be able to assess users’ mental states based on factors such as their typing speed, the amount of time they spend on certain apps and pages, scroll speed and the like. This…doesn’t sound great, does it? I mean, fine, the theoretical idea of being able to better diagnose people who are sad is positive, but the idea that your devices are constantly monitoring you for the slightest sign of emotional instability is…well…troubling. I’d want to give the Ts&Cs of anything like this a fairly thorough frisking before trying them out, in summary.
• Extreme Haunts: Last weekend I found myself at an ‘Immersive Horror Experience’ in Brentwood – I went because I thought it would be theatre-ish and because I am a sucker for immersive, interactive stuff (I will be doing this in a few hours, which may or may not be good), not because I particularly wanted to be waterboarded – and spent an evening being forcefed maggots, shouted at by large, intimidating men, locked in a small cupboard with a very worried stranger, subjected to some sort of ‘I’m a Celebrity’-style ‘head in a perspex box of critters’ experience, dragged along a concrete floor by my ankles, doused in ice-cold water and, finally, having electrodes attached to my neck, nipples, hips and scalp. It was….it was horrid, to be honest, and I don’t really ever want to do it again (and to compound my humiliation I was forced to tap out in pain right at the end and so didn’t even get the celebratory photo which you win for butching out the whole thing. My girlfriend did, though, and was smugly unbearable about it for the rest of the night, although I note that at no point did they attempt to put a few thousand volts through her tits. Anyway, this piece is all about the growth of the haunted house experience in the US – frankly some of the experiences detailed here make my Saturday sound like an afternoon at soft play; does this sound like fun to you? You weirdo.
• The Wasteland Weekend: An incredible photo essay, this, about the Wasteland Weekend, which is a Burning Man-style weekend festival in the California desert, with the gimmick here being that everyone dresses up like some sort of post-apocalyptic warrior and roleplays some sort of Fallout/Mad Max-style world for a couple of days. This sounds SO much better than Burning Man, not least as you get the feeling that Sir Martin Sorrell wouldn’t be welcome here; the cage fighting sounds a touch brutal, mind. Amazing photos.
• The Magic Leap Con: A brilliant and brutal takedown of the Magic Leap, whose technology is pretty far away from what its creator promised throughout its development process and whose software is seemingly little more than a tiny collection of mediocre games and cutesy toy experiences, all for £3k. This gives you a taste of the arguments: “I met one developer who’d flown from Singapore to retrieve his goggles and attend the event, and another who said he’d scrimped and saved before managing to buy the device, which left him broke. “I made the Leap, I guess,” laughed Brian Wong, a 30-year-old who says he is self-funding a brain-computer interface project. “I’m still paying it back. I had to really scrape every penny I got to come up with $2,400, you know. But honestly, no regrets.” The thing about the first iPhone analogy is that while, sure, it was imperfect, there was a UI paradigm and several elements that were immediately gripping, that “just worked” as a certain late turtlenecked guru might have said. It was immediately clear why a touch-based Google Maps app or a graphics-rich mobile web browser was something you’d want to have in your pocket all the time, or that scrolling through an address book with the flick of a finger made sense—Magic Leap One’s appeal beyond entertainment is almost entirely abstract. Cuteness and whimsy only go so far.”
• Every Building in the US: More of an interactive than a longread, if I’m being taxonomically picky, this is a staggering piece of work by the New York Times, mapping almost every man-made structure across the United States. Honestly, this is AMAZING – read, play, and marvel at the oddly beautiful, semi-abstract aesthetic of the stripped back landscapes.
• Eartha Kitt in Istanbul: For reasons I’ve never adequately understood I was sort of obsessed with Eartha Kitt when I was a kid (pretty sure I was one of only a couple of 7 year olds in Swindon who knew who she was); I hadn’t given her any thought for years til I stumbled across this article this week, which tells of Kitt’s trip to Istanbul as a young woman and how she came to record the album of Turkish music which first broke her internationally. This is a beautiful portrait of an era and a city – Istanbul’s always had a magical appeal for me, and this piece very much evokes the wonder of an era when the foreign was even moreso by dint of being unknowable.
• Stet: My friend Katie found this a bit coldly performative when I sent it to her this week, and I can see what she means, but I am an absolute sucker for writing that plays with form and convention like this, and the use of annotations and footnotes in this short story pleased me greatly. It’s about autonomous vehicles and morality and agency, but more than anything it’s a (to my mind) fantastically realised stylistic experiment.
• The Life and Death of a Mexican Hitman: A profile of a hitman for Mexican Narcos which manages to tell his story dispassionately whilst at the same time presenting its subject as a real person rather than some sort of soulless gunman. I honestly didn’t expect to find this quality of writing on the website of the charity International Crisis Group – this is superb, particularly when you consider it’s not technically journalism.
• The Franz Kafka Marriage Manual: Finally in this week’s longreads, an essay about Franz Kafka and marriage and arsehole men; this is a wonderful, personal essay with a lovely subtext about art and the author, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

By Oregon Zoo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. You may know They Might Be Giants from ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ – this is their new song, and it’s ACE and literary and smart and wordy and lefty, and it’s called ‘The Communists Have The Music’ and the video is AWESOME:

2) Weirdly, despite this having 30million views, it doesn’ appear to have crossed over into my bit of the internet at all – this is VIRAL SENSATION Skibidi with ‘Little Big’ and it is basically a 2018 Macarena:

3) This is called ‘Rat Kid’, it’s by Suzie True and it’s a lovely jangly piece of indiepop that is just perfect for a cold, Sunny October afternoon:

4) Bands I had forgotten about until this week – The Ting Tings. Turns out their new song is REALLY GOOD and makes me almost forgive them for ‘That’s Not My Name’. This is called ‘Estranged’, and, honestly, it’s lovely:

5) UK HIPHOP (GRIME) CORNER! New track and visuals from Manga featuring guest verses from JME and Frisco – this is called ‘True to Me’:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is odd, in a good way, and sort of reminds me a bit of CLOUDDead and similar stuff. It’s by Planet B, and it’s called ‘Crustfund’ and it features Kool Keith and it’s very good indeed:

7) Last up this week, this is bratty pop punk and I love it. It’s by Antarctigo Vespucci, it’s called ‘Freaking U Out’ and BYE BYE HAPPY FRIDAY I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK UNLESS SOMETHING VERY WEIRD HAPPENS AT THIS THEATRE THINGY THIS AFTERNOON IN WHICH CASE LET ME SAY THANKS SO MUCH FOR SHARING WEB CURIOS WITH ME IT HAS BEEN A PLEASURE AND I HAVE LOVED EVERY SINGLE WORD I HAVE WRITTEN FOR YOU AND PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THEY ARE ALL WRITTEN FOR YOU, EVERY SINGLE ONE, AND YOU SHOULD FEEL SPECIAL AND LOVED AND OK THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK AS I SAID HOPEFULLY SEE YOU AGAIN SAME TIME AND PLACE NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Can we all agree that noone is ever allowed to use the term ‘4-dimensional chess’ ever again, even ironically? Good, at least we can agree on something. 

You know, one of the worst things about writing this godawful newsletterblogthing is the fact that I painted myself into a corner a few years ago by creating a sort of editorial policy whereby I would always open with some sort of vaguely topical reference to what a mess everything was, meaning that each week I have to come up with new and different ways of, effectively, screaming in prose (I appreciate that this pales into insignificance when compared to the tooth-rattling horror of having to read the damn stuff, but I’m sort of expecting that most of you just skip past this bit by now and just Ctrl+F5 for ‘bongo’). 

This week though, I have nothing – yesterday’s TrumpYe meeting of minds has rendered me incapable. So instead, let’s focus on the good things in this opening – it’s not (presently) raining! We’ve not yet entered the horror that is Christmas advert season! Er…nope, sorry, that’s pretty much it in the credit column. You’re on your own here. 

So in the absence of anything good to say here, I’m going to take a leaf from Ronan Keating’s book and say nothing at all; except, that is, to invite you to close your eyes and lift your tongue as I gently place the soluble infocapsule full of bitter, bitter webspaff underneath; let it dissolve, and when you raise your lids you’ll have been magically transported to a world in which everything is…well, largely exactly the same, frankly, except full of more useless rubbish off the internet. This, as ever, is WEB CURIOS. 

By Simon Schubert 

LET’S START THE MUSIC WITH THIS MIX SELECTED BY THE GLOBAL 18 YEAR OLDS REFERENCED IN THAT LONGREAD WAY DOWN THERE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS AS THOUGH THE FACEBOOK PORTAL THING IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT THE TERM ‘CAVEAT EMPTOR’ WAS CREATED FOR:

• Facebook Portal: Sounds EXCITING, doesn’t it? Or sinister, in the manner of portals in horror/scifi films, which grant the momentarily excited and hopeful protagonists access to a dark and eldritch dimension where, it’s pretty strongly implied, there’s going to be some flaying and screaming happening pretty soon. No word as yet on exactly how much flaying and screaming Facebook’s planning on ushering in with its latest big announcement, but it’s probably safe to say the answer will be ‘some’ (and now I’m incapable of thinking of Zuckerberg and his Big Blue Misery Factory as some sort of weird digital Cenobytes which is…punchy, at 655am). Anyway, that unnecessarily wordy and unclear digression was by way of introducing Facebook Portal, the FB Home Assistant which was announced the other day and which will ship in November and which, let’s be honest, noone in their right mind is going to buy because Facebook is creepy – and, because it’s got Alexa built-in, you’re also inviting MechaBezos into your home too, which is a lovely additional corporate surveillance bonus. Anyway, the device will let you chat to people via Messenger voice chat, do Livestreams and video calling, and there’s some interest for brands here – the site alludes to ‘Partners’ such as Spotify et al who have already built integrations into the platform, so we await to see what sort of opportunity there is for the creation of Portal-specific experiences, leveraging the Facebook AR Lens which is also built in. Seriously, though, WHO IS GOING TO BUY THIS?
• Messenger Voice Control: In parallel, FB also announced that it was testing voice controls for Messenger. Oh, and some AR sticker effects. That’s it really.
• A Bunch of Updates to Facebook Workplace: None of these strike me as hugely interesting, I must say – the main ones are to do with the development of a more Slack-like chat functionality (don’t want it) and an algorithmic newsfeed within Workplace to better surface relevant stuff for staff (really, don’t want it) – there’s a slightly broader writeup of the features here, should you want one.
• Facebook Adds 250-person Group Chat: Oh, look, here you go: “Starting today, Facebook will gradually roll out the ability for members of Facebook Groups to launch group chats about specific sub-topics that up to 250 members can join. They can also start audio or video calls with up to 50 members. A dog owners’ Group could spawn threads for discussing spontaneous park meetups, grooming tips or sharing photos as their puppies grow up.” Is there any way in which that sounds good? 250 strangers connected through a shared interest / passion / worrying obsession, now able to engage in synchronous multi-user shouting matches online? 50 person video chat? WHO WANTS THIS? Still, they’re BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER and FOSTERING REAL CONNECTIONS and…no, sorry, this still sounds honestly awful.
• FB Adds 3d Photos: These are not, let’s be clear, 3d photos in any real sense; they’re photos that do that very gentle ‘tilt to slightly pan’ effect, which gives you a slight illusion of limited depth – still, these are now ALL OVER Facebook and available to anyone whose phone has 2+ cameras on the back; with a little bit of thinking and a decent photographer you might just about be able to parlay this into a decent one-off brand thing (find hidden details around the edge of photos, some sort of light visual gag based on stuff happening slightly out of frame…Jesus, I don’t know, do your own fcuking jobs), but you’ve got about three days to execute it before everyone realises that the feature’s not actually all that fun or interesting.
• Insta Introduces New Anti-Bullying Tools: Absolutely A Good Thing in theory, this – Instagram’s introducing a suite of new measures to attempt to clamp down on bullying on the platform, specifically using machine learning to seek to ‘detect’ bullying in individual photos or captions and flag them for review. The captions thing I can understand, but I am genuinely fascinated as to what signals within a photo they’ll be looking for; oh, and they’ll be adding the comment filter to Live videos on Insta too, to limit the ability of people to hatebomb other users’ streams; oh, and they’ve added a…uh…’kindness filter’ in honour of US National Bullying Prevention Month which, once you’ve read this piece about some of the lovely ways teenagers are using Insta to make each others’ lives a misery, might strike you as, well, as bit fcuking pointless. Still, cosmetic gimmicks aside, it’s hard to argue with the bulk of this.
• Twitter Institutes Emoji Equality: In possibly the most seismic announcement of the week, Twitter will no longer apply different character counts to different emoji – til now, certain emoji (ones using anything other than the default colourset, for example) counted as more characters than others (there’s an interesting side-note here about another instance of unintended racism in code, should anyone want to think about it for a moment), but this distinction has now been eliminated. Huzzah!
• You Can Now Access Podcasts on Spotify: This is useful. “Spotify For Podcasters works as an RSS submission, allowing podcasts hosted elsewhere to be added to Spotify’s catalog once users provide the streaming service with their podcast feed. It will also provide access to performance analytics which will let podcasters know how many people are listening, where they’re listening from and insight into the demographics of their listeners.” If you do podcasts it seems like it would be stupid not to put them through Spotify, no? Am I being a moron? Are YOU? I feel quite uncertain today for reasons I don’t adequately understand.
• Byebye G+ (at least the consumer version, anyway): And lo, it finally came to pass that, due to a security issue that noone had noticed because noone uses the bloody thing, Google finally took G+ out back and did the thing with the nailgun that to be honest it ought to have done many years ago. Have you ever used Google+? I mean actually used it, not just the brief three-day period in…2011(?) when it launched and you made an account and got briefly excited by the prospect of a FACEBOOK KILLER? I tried, I honestly did, even to the point of harassing the poor person doing social media for Firezza pizzas on there for a while in the hope that being their only active friend on the platform would get me free pizzas (it didn’t. Damn you, Firezza social media person), and even now I still post a link to this on G+ every week, but it’s always been a slightly pointless, embarrassing place (unless you’re a gamer or photographer, some of whom I am reliably informed did use it rather a lot, or, apparently (and weirdly) Daniel Radcliffe) and I can’t imagine anyone at all is going to be sad to see it go. Although they are announcing a few new features for the commercial version, as apparently there are some businesses that use it – WHO?
• YouTube Clamping Down on Algo/Duplicate Content: Mainly of interest to people on YT’s Partner programme – the platform’s clamping down on content that it deems to be ‘duplicate’, and, interestingly, content that it believes has been generated algorithmically. I have nothing to add. Do you care?
• Google Slides Now Does Autocaptioning: OK, fine, this is of limited interest to many of you I’m sure but I am SO IMPRESSED; you can now run a presentation off Google Slides, turn on captioning, and Google will magically use its speech-to-text software to provide autocaptioning of your slides on the fly. SO FUTURE.
• Vimeo Now Powers Those Holographic Video Projection Things: This is LONG and quite technical and, look, let’s be honest, I really don’t understand the tech here very much or in fact at all if I’m being honest, but if you do INNOVATIVE VIDEO AND TELLY or anything related then you probably want to know about this; with the right sort of camera, Vimeo will now support filming in a way which allows you to output as a live 3d stream – as they put it, “what can you do with it? A telepresence virtual reality experience? An augmented reality concert? A mixed reality news broadcast?” 99.9% of you will get nothing from this, but for the 0.1% it could be genuinely fascinating.
• Adidas Creators Club: WE ARE ALL CREATORS NOW! THE MERE ACT OF EXISTING IS A CREATIVE ENDEAVOUR! I MAKE, THEREFORE I AM! In the continual rush for brands to EMPOWER us to LIVE THE BEST LIVES WE CAN and EXPRESS OUR UNIQUENESS, so Adidas has made ‘for the creators’ (or somesuch massive w4nk) part of its brand positioning; the latest expression of this is the Creators Club, a grandly-named loyalty scheme which just launched in the US but which feels like it will be global eventually. You sign up to the scheme, download the app, and then DO STUFF in exchange for points – and points, as we all know, mean PRIZES! Sign up to the programme – 50 points! Spend $1 on Adi products – that’s 10 points! Write a review of some gear – another 50 points! Acquire points to ascend through the tiers of creatorhood, earning yourself early access to new ish, special events, free customisation of Adidas tat, that sort of thing. Which is all literally fine, and in no way innovative, and has – let me be clear – NOTHING TO DO WITH ‘CREATING’. NOONE IS MAKING ANYTHING HERE (writing a review of a product so as to get paid in magic beans by the maker of that product is not, I would submit, a creative endeavour). I don’t mean to nitpick here, but I am sick to fcuking death of being sold this idea that simply interacting with capitalism is an act of creation on the part of anyone; look, I get that democratising the idea of creativity is A Good Thing, and the ready availability of the means of creative production is positive and good and opens up doorways to new voices and styles and stories and whatever, and that the fact that anyone can make things whenever they want (in theory) on this magical device in their pocket is, honestly, brilliant…but STOP CALLING EVERYONE A FCUKING CREATOR BECAUSE IT IS AN INCREASINGLY MEANINGLESS TERM. Ahem. Anyway, this has put me in a rubbish mood now, damnation, I will try and snap out of it while I try and think up a heading for the next section.

By Georgy Kurasov

NEXT UP, TRY THIS TECHHOUSEDISCOTYPEMIX BY VOLVOX FOR BOILEROOM!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU’RE STRAPPED FOR TIME THIS WEEK YOU SCROLL STRAIGHT TO THE C64 EMULATOR AND KISS GOODBYE TO THE AFTERNOON, PT.1:

• Brett Kavanaugh: There is nothing good to say about the Kavanaugh situation and what it means for US politics and gender relations and the Culture Wars and the rest; the one, small thing that pleased me about it was the realisation that Mr Kavanaugh and his team had never thought to buy his own doman name, meaning that www.brettkavanaugh.com now hosts a banner reading “We Believe Survivors” and linking to support organisations for victims of assault. It’s still, however, all really quite sh1t.
• Romeo Hearts Juliet: Another year, another (potentially doomed) attempt to make Transmedia storytelling happen. One might have thought that post-SKAM (see Curios passim) this might have been the year in which someone managed to nail a multi-character narrative delivered through social media, though on the basis of this I’m not convinced – Romeo Hearts Juliet is, as the Shakespeare scholars amongst you will doubtless have guessed, a Buzzfeed retelling of the love story with the gimmick being that it’s all done through Instagram. The link above takes you to Romeo’s feed – other players are, obviously, Juliet, Tybalt, and Mercutio, with a sort of Greek chorus effect being provided with a daily ‘wrap up’ show on Insta TV presented by Paris and Rosaline in the guise of a sort of magazine by the students of Verona High. It’s…it’s bad, I’m sad to say – the acting’s poor, the content (as it is so far, we’re only a few days in) thin, and there’s no sense that this is going to work as an Insta-only endeavour. You can get links to all the different accounts on this page – see what you think, but the fact that Mercutio’s Insta handle is Mercutie_yo made me momentarily taste blood and pine for Baz Luhrmann, which is never a good sign.
• The Bellingcat Investigative Journalism Toolkit: I featured Bellingcat on here 4 years ago when they ran a Kickstarter to fund their work – it’s fair to say they’ve come a long way since, as the past week’s journalism attests. This is an INCREDIBLE resource, housed in a freely accessible GDoc, collecting a truly awesome collection of online research tools, ostensibly for investigative journalists but just generally fascinating to anyone with any degree of curiosity about what, and how, you can find out online. From online maps of EVERYTHING to a bunch of interesting tools leveraging the Facebook Graph, flight tracking, domain info…seriously, if you ever need to do any online snooping, this is a pretty incredible resource.
• Lena Lisa Wurstendorfer: Apologies to Ms Wurstendorfer for my inability to work out how to type umlauts on a UK keyboard and thereby butchering here name here. Anway, she is a famous and highly-regarded young conductor, and this is her website – there might be loads of other great stuff in here, but I was transfixed by the homepage which presents abstract representations of the movements of the conductors’ baton as she…er…conducts orchestras playing a variety of different pieces; click and hold to toggle between the visualisation of her baton and the video of her conducting. It’s simple but beautiful, and a practical reason to use that ‘click to switch the viewpoint’ trick that was so popular three years ago and which we are now sadly all a bit bored of.
• The Dermestid Cam: I warn you – depending on when you click this, it might be a touch macabre (well, it’s always a touch macabre, fine, but it could be more macabre). Do you know what Dermestids are? If so, congratulations, you are a better entomologist than I; for the rest of you, they are (I learned this week) a type of FLESH EATING BEETLE. This is a live webcam trained on FLESH EATING BEETLES. You get to watch them EATING FLESH. At the time of writing they are chowing down on a fresh Groundhog, but at the rate these little lads get through stuff I’d imagine that this is going to be little more than clean skeleton in about 6 hours’ time. This is a weird combination of utterly, skin-crawlingly horrid and ‘don’t know why but must keep watching’ compelling – suggest you send it round the office and see what sort of spurious judgments about your colleagues’ characters you can make based on their reactions.
• Weighing Animals: A Twitter thread of photographs of all the different ways in which professionals weigh animals. Ever wondered how you assess the mass of a tapir? WONDER NO MORE! I warn you, there is an almost violent amount of cute in this thread and you may well fall into some sort of critter-based coma as a result (you know who you are).
• Parallel Text: This is a really clever idea and, potentially, a really useful service. Parallel text is a language learning app/site which presents a bunch of texts (old fiction, presumably out of copyright, like Three Men in a Boat or the Three Musketeers) in a variety of languages for you to read – it lets you display the text in a variety of ways, including side-by-side in your native tongue and the one you’re hoping to get better at, you can click individual sentences or phrases to hear how they are meant to be pronounced, and, frankly, as a way of improving my French I think I’d prefer to read Journey to the Centre of the Earth than attempt to maneuver my way through a variety of “the goat has eaten my passport”-type Duolingowank.
• TFL Jam Cams: Weird voyeuristic link of the week! This site collects feeds from every single TFL traffic cam in London for you to peruse at your leisure – I mean, I have literally no idea what sort of benefit you could derive from this, other then potentially giving really useful traffic updates to people attempting to plan a smash-and-grab Hatton Garden raid, but there’s something weirdly cool (in a very, very uncool sense) about being able to…er…look at traffic. I’m not selling this, am I?
• The East London Group: A Twitter feed promoting work by the East London Group, a pre-WWII East London art collective – “Although the East London Group of artists is now almost forgotten, even by art historians, it was one of the most innovative and productive to have flourished in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. The East London Group stemmed from classes by the inspirational teacher John Cooper at the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute in East London from the mid-1920s and comprised two basic groups: first, aspiring East Enders; secondly, a smaller contingent who were Slade School of Fine Art-trained, like Cooper himself. An early mentor was Walter Sickert, who addressed the Bow classes and showed with the Group for a short time.” A lovely, gentle, beautiful follow, this.
• Leave Me Alone: I hate LinkedIn, and I make no secret of this fact – particularly on LinkedIn, where each week I post a link to this with some accompanying rubbish attempting to parody the type of person on LinkedIn who gets up at 4am to do an hour of cardio whilst listening to two business audiobooks simultaneously, each at 2x speed, so as to MAXIMISE THEIR WINNING or somesuch w4nk. I like to think that it’s this aggressive networking strategy that is driving my non-stop professional success. Anyway, Leave Me Alone is a Chrome extension which lets you filter and bulk-reject connection requests on LinkedIn, meaning that you can, with one click, eliminate all the recruitment cockroaches from your inbox – a small but not insignificant victory for good.
• Transcribe: Look, I know that this is boring but if any of you do any journalising then you will also know that transcription is one of the worst jobs in the world – not only is it tedious, but it forces one to undergo the cruel and unusual punishment that is listening to one’s own voice (WHY DO I SOUND LIKE AN ACCOUNTANT I AM A FUN AND VIBRANT MAN WHOSE LIFE IS FULL OF JOY). Transcribe is a GREAT service – it’s cheap, quick and can do multiple voices AND IT LABELS THEM PROPERLY. Honestly, a godsend.
• Tactical Mapping: This is a really interesting idea, and the sort of thing that a few of you – the ones who have STRATEGY in their job titles, possibly, or those of you interested in systems theories and stuff (God, I make you all sound fascinating, don’t I? Sorry about this). Tactical Mapping is ostensibly created for people working in human rights – to quote their description, “The Tactical Mapping tool equips activists to collaboratively expand their understanding of relationships and develop strategic and effective action. By diagramming the relationships that surround human rights abuses we can see an interactive overview of where we are and the pathway toward change.” What this means in practice is that it gives you the tools to define a system, the actors within it, the interactions between them and the outcomes that these interactions engender – you can then see how the ecosystem you’ve mapped operates as a whole, with the idea being that this will enable to you to better assess how you can act to alter the ecosystem as a whole, or the role of specific actors within in. If that meant anything to you then I suggest you click the link; if not, I promise that there will be NOTHING else like this in here this week so, you know, give me a break.
• Voice Access For Google: Really useful Android app which enables voice commands for your phone – switch apps, screens, type using voice commands…if you or anyone you know has physical issues which make using a small touchscreen hard, this could be an absolute godsend.
• Strip Together: IT IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE THINKING (I know you, with your GUTTER MINDS). Instead, this is Exquisite Corpse for comic book artists – anyone can start, or continue, a strip, the idea being that it’s a way for artists to flex their creative muscles and to explore scenarios that they wouldn’t necessarily come up with themselves. Obviously the quality of the work varies wildly, and there’s rather more…er…’adult’ content on there than I personally would have expected (it’s like I don’t know the internet AT ALL), but if you like drawing comics then there might be an interesting community here for you.
• Taku Inoue: Taku Inoue is a model maker from Japan, whose Twitter feed features some of his creations; he’s got a pretty incredible series of Tom & Jerry models depicting, in the main, Tom after he’s had some reasonably unpleasant stuff done to him, and they are GREAT. Quite want some of these if you’re reading, Taku.
• Bread Stapled to Trees: Don’t try and explain this to yourself. Don’t think too hard about the fact that there is an entire subReddit devoted to photographs of slices of bread – in the main white sliced, although there are occasional artisanal offshoots from the more creatively-minded contributors, alongside a few bagels. I went through a phase of being obsessed with leaving cucumbers in inexplicable places when I was about 15, so I can TOTALLY get behind it as a thing.

By Andy Gilmore

NEXT, TRY SOME REASONABLY HARD TECHNO BY HENRY VENGEANCE!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU’RE STRAPPED FOR TIME THIS WEEK YOU SCROLL STRAIGHT TO THE C64 EMULATOR AND KISS GOODBYE TO THE AFTERNOON, PT.2:

• Food Hype: I know that we’re supposed to be done with hipsterism, and we sort of are, thank God, except for when it comes to food – there’s still a slightly awful whiff of the trend-chasing about eating, certainly in London at least, which is why this food hype generator (churning out headlines in the style of Eater or similar) is so satisfying. It’s not an original gag, but I laughed a lot at some of these whilst others are just too believable – I am sure I have seen the headline “Have You Tried The Mushroom Banana Pop Tart Yet? Is The Hype Real?” on Buzzfeed already.
• The Button: Again, not a new concept, but the fact that this is a new-ish variant on an old theme and that it’s seemingly managing to make some cash despite being the nth one I’ve seen makes me think that there’s maybe still something in the concept. The Button is a simple site with a single premise – log on, hit the button, and it will take you to a different site, which site being determined by whoever has paid the most-recent highest bid for the privilege of setting the url. At the time of writing it’s been bought by some legal firm in the US (of COURSE), but prior to that it’s some people peddling crypto (imagine my shocked face) – it could, for the measly sum of $46.03, be YOUR website receiving that sweet traffic goodness. Feel free to pay to promote Curios on there by way of thanks to me for all the many years of work I have put in, why don’t you? Rhetorical, btw, I have no desire whatsoever to know why you don’t.
• Flagstories: The most comprehensive resource exploring flag design around the world that you ever will find. “Yes, we like flags. We like them a lot. Actually, we are so fascinated by flags that we decided to explore them in every possible way in order to share our fascination with you. Sure, there are a lot of books and websites covering the different aspects of flags like history, demography and culture, through heavy text, but we wanted to add new aspects to this field by only looking at the graphics and telling the story visually. So we started this Flag Stories project to discover the hidden stories behind the graphics.” Really very nicely done, and the visualisation work here is lovely.
• Shared BPM: You will, I am sure, have seen this by now – in case not, though, this is an EXCELLENT subReddit which collects examples of two songs whose BPMs match so perfectly that you can layer the audio of one over the video of the other to uncanny effect – SO many good ones, my personal favourite being the Drake/Darude combination which is actually incredible (no, seriously, look!).
• Blink: Do you like making lists? Do you consider the making of lists to be not just a helpful pursuit but also a genuinely fun thing to do with your time, to the point whereby you often have ‘make a list’ as a line item on another list you are writing, simply so that you can maximise your listmaking time? You need help, Saz, is my main takeaway, but then you might also like this app which is, fine, just A N Other listmaking app for iOS but which has a lovely interface and one or two really gorgeous bits of UX/UI (the slideup/hold/release interface beats to clear individual items is just gorgeous).
• Arcades of Tokyo: A photoessay exploring some of Tokyo’s videogame arcades. Look, I know it’s not cool, but oh for 24h and a LOT of change – these look wonderful.
• The Architectural Photography Awards 2018: Photos of buildings! But, you know, really good photos of buildings. Each and every single one of these would look fantastic as a large-scale print, though they don’t seem to sell reproductions which is a crying shame. Still, these are universally wonderful photos, as you’d expect.
• Pixel Speech Bubble: Have you ever wanted a little webtoything which lets you create a pixellated, animated speech bubble saying anything you like which you can export as a gif and, potentially, use as a sort of snarky comeback-type-rejoinder-thing to anyone who sasses you online? OH GOOD. Make one that says “shut up i disdain you and everything you stand for” and use it to respond to all work requests for the remainder of the day. GO!
• Chromebook Data Science Course: I’ve realised that there are a few more ‘serious’ links than usual in Curios this week – I’m sorry, and I will endeavour to make next week’s edition more full of, I don’t know, sexy anthropomorphised bonsai-based Hentai or something. Still, if you or anyone you know is interested in undertaking a fully accredited course on Data Science from Johns Hopkins University, delivered in 12 parts entirely online and on a pay-what-you-can basis, starting at $0.00, then this is GREAT. Such a wonderful idea to make this foundational instruction available to all – fine, it’s sponsored by Google Chromebook (hence the name, and, presumably, how it’s able to be made available on this basis), but even if you think Google is Satan it’s hard to look at this as anything other than A Good Thing.
• 100 Hours and Counting: A film review and criticism site focused primarily on ‘wrong’ films – to quote the owner, “ This isn’t strictly a B-movie site, nor is it strictly a horror movie site, although the great bulk of the movies reviewed here will be B-horror films. My instinct is to say that my business is exploitation movies, but recent years have seen the definition of that term contract to the point that it no longer gets the job done either. So instead, I’ll simply say this: For the most part, if a particular movie played or would have played at a drive-in or an old Times Square grindhouse, you can reasonably expect a review of it to show up here one of these days.” What this means is that there’s a really eclectic mix of reviews, from the predictable Bubba Ho-Tep to the slightly unexpected Attack the Block, to undiscovered gems like 1951’s ‘The Giant Gila Monster’. You want to read about weird, obscure, cultish and quite often terrible films? Good, you’ll like this then.
• The US Geographic Names Interface System: Have you ever wanted to be able to access a database of every named civic location in the US? No, I can’t imagine you have, but just on the offchance that you’d like to organise a roadtrip to the States in which you visit every town named after you, or one which takes you through each individual place with a slightly juvenile name (Cougar Butte, Oregon, I am looking squarely at YOU) then this might prove invaluable.
• Sans Forgetica: A clever idea, this, certainly from a PR point of view as it’s been everywhere this week – Sans Forgetica is a font designed specifically to be memorable, so as to assist with the retention of information. A product of RMIT’s Behavioural Business Lab, “Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The ‘desirable difficulty’ you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.” Aside from anything else, it looks quite cool AND THAT’S THE MAIN THING RIGHT KIDS?
• Tattoo Ideas: Regardless of your thoughts on tattoos – and, seriously, we must be on the cusp of a backlash now, right? Given that everyone and their mum has got some degree of ink, and given that we’re JUST at the cusp of a whole generation who got big ink in the early 90s starting to sag in quite significant an aesthetically compromising fashion, surely we’re about due a NO MORE TATTS PLEASE backlash? – this site collects some truly incredible work across a wide range of styles; if you’re considering one, you could do worse than check the selection for inspiration (before settling for a star on your inside wrist because THAT’S JUST WHO YOU ARE, RIGHT?).
• The C64 Emulator Library: You might have seen this last weekend when Rob put it in the B3ta newsletter, but for those of you who don’t subscribe to both then ENJOY – this is a collection of over 15,000(!) pieces of Commodore 64 software, mostly games, playable in-browser on the Internet Archive and OH MY GOD this is a proper time capsule to when I use to go to my friend Jim’s house and play Pirates! and Christ are there some great (terrible) games on here. I am going to finish writing this and then, quite possibly, lose the rest of the day to The Last Ninja like it’s 1991 all over again. I suggest you do too. Be warned, just like original C64 games these take a fcuking age to load.
• <13k Browser Games: Each year there are a variety of coding competitions which challenge people to build stuff within specific limits of memory, etc – this is a writeup of some of the best entries into this year’s js13kGames competition, where developers were given a month to build a browser game no bigger than 13KB. These are INSANE – if you play only one, make it the shooter called ‘Underrun’ – the music alone makes it worth a go, but the whole thing is hugely fun and an incredible achievement when you consider the constraints within which it was built.
• Grow Comeback: Finally this week, a slight internet throwback – Eyemaze, makers of the ‘Grow’ series of browser games, quietly released a small new one over the Summer which I totally missed. This is called ‘Comeback’, it works in exactly the way the ‘Grow’ titles have always worked (select the objects in the right order to win) and features the standard cute animations and surprisingly tricky combinations you (fine, I) have come to love. This is SO soothing, and a lovely way to pass 10 minutes before you head into the longreads and get all sad and miserable about life and the world.

By Catherine Hyland

LAST UP, A FULL FIVE HOURS OF J DILLA INSTRUMENTALS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Bees & Bombs: Dave lives in Dublin, and makes black and white animated geomatric gifs which he puts on this confusingly-named Tumblr. I know nothing else about Dave, but which him the best.

• Hexeosis: Psychedelic kaleidoscopic animations seemingly inspired by every single flyer ever made for a psytrance party.
• Doctor Beth: An EXCELLENT Tumblr written by the titlar Doctor Beth who tends to stuffed animals at a doll’s hospital, and who here documents the LIFE-SAVING INTERVENTIONS undertaken on a whole bunch of stuffed toys. Even I, a person who it’s fair to say is, perhaps, on the bitter, twisted and cynical end of the emotive spectrum (ha! ‘emotions’!) couldn’t fail to be moved by this, it is ADORABLE.
• Videogame Skies: Literally just those – lots and lots of them. Feels like this ought to be an art exhibition somewhere (on which note, if you’re yet to see the videogames show at the V&A then GO, it is ace).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Guy Fieri: Every day the same picture of Guy Fieri, except every day it gets more and more fcuked – combining the ‘every day the same’ trend from last week with deep-fried memery, just TRY explaining why this is a thing to someone who is not of the internet (or, actually, don’t, it’s a waste of all your lives).

• One Year, 365 Cities: Thanks Dan for the tip = this is one of those ‘every day a thing’ accounts, but which each day is sketching a rough design for a city in no more than 10 minutes. Lovely stuff, not least because it’s obviously sticking within the rules – these are rough and choppy and all the better for it.
• Noah Deledda: Art from aluminium cans. WHY NOT?
• Bird Graveyard: Capturing photos and videos of people fcuking up those Bird electric scooters that have been all over SF and LA for the past few months – the compilation of people stacking it on the vehicles is honestly worth the follow on its own here.
• The Worst Insta Ads Ever: WHY ARE THESE BEING PROMOTED? HOW IS THE TARGETING WORKING? WHAT HAS THIS POOR WOMAN DONE TO GET THESE?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Digital Strategy of the Library of Congress: Not, I concede, the sort of high quality prose you’re possibly used to me picking for this section, but if you do ‘strategy’-type w4nk (a word I am so uncomfortable with, strategy, that I need to put it in inverted commas to stop myself feeling like a fraud) then this is an excellent example of how an institution might go about writing a digital one – this is clear, it’s well-written, and it MAKES SENSE – honestly, it’s really impressive and the sort of thing which you might be minded to email to people you know with the subject line: “LEARN”.
• What Is A Neural Network?: Do YOU work in an industry that has nothing whatsoever to do with AI or machine learning but which, despite this fact, seems incapable of going through the week without one or more of your peers and colleagues making a tooth-clenchingly ignorant reference to technologies they simply do not understand even the most basic principles of? Yes, yes of course you do! This guide to what a neural network is, what it can do, and why it might not actually be what you need for your thing, is honestly brilliant and ought to be required reading for anyone talking about how BIG DATA AND AI IS THE FUTURE OF CONSUMER PR or somesuch wankery.
• The Phantom of the Obvious: A stellar review of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s autobiography, notable and enjoyable in the main for the fact that the author quite evidently really wants to slag Lloyd Webber off – you can feel him coiling up, ready to strike – but seems to be unable to get past the fact that the guy seems, basically, to be sort-of ok; I mean, obviously insanely arrogant, and let’s not ignore the musical crimes, but, you know, basically not anywhere near Piers Morgan levels of awful.
• What Question Did You Not Expect To Be Asked During Sex?: A Reddit thread (of course) in which people offer their responses to this promising question. The answers don’t disappoint – you’ll find your own favourite, but I personally now cannot get the term ‘cheese pot’ out of my head.
• The Closure of Tsukiji: Tsukisji fish market in Tokyo closed last weekend – it had been operational for nearly 90 years, and was by all accounts a quite incredible place. This Reuters photo essay takes you right there, but thankfully without the presumably omnipresent odour of fish viscera which, as a general rule, I prefer to do without.
• The Commodification of Home: An essay examining the manner in which Airbnb has changed hosts’ attitudes to the concept of ‘home’, and the subtle way that it, and other services of similiar ilk, erode the boundaries between personal and professional space in a way that’s psychologically a bit, well, wearing. I’ve touched on this before here, but the commodification of interaction and humanity is very much one of the odder side-effects of the past 8 or so years of the development of the web.
• The Automation Charade: A really interesting essay – and a nice companion to the guide to machine learning piece above – which argues that much of the hysteria and hype around the inexorable rise of automation and the effect it’s going to have on the job market is just that – hype – but that one of the potential side effects of that will be the increased extent to which actual human labour will be hidden and rendered less valuable, and easier to exploit as a result. “The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives technology agency it doesn’t (yet?) possess, whereas “capitalists are making targeted investments in robots designed to weaken and replace human workers so they can get even richer” is less catchy but more accurate.” Cheering, isn’t it?
• The Sordid Truth About Degass’ Ballet Dancers: A brilliant piece of ‘behind the art’ history, looking at Edgar Degass’ depictions of Parisian ballerinas in the late 19thC and the miserable reality of said ballerina’s actual existences. I love stuff that recontextualises work in this way, particularly when it makes you think about the relationship and power dynamic between artist and subject. Fair to say Degass doesn’t come out of this hugely well – not that he’ll care, what with being long-dead, but still.
• What Are NPCs?: Little dispatch from the frontlines of the culture wars here – an explainer piece in Kotaku on what the ‘NPC’ designation in the context of alt-righters means and how it’s being deployed to undermine left-wing discourse in certain bits of the internet. Interesting in the main for the way in which the slightly hackneyed redpill ideology is evolving and mutating, but obviously in the main just hugely depressing.
• Weaponising The Brain: Or, ‘What DARPA Did Next’. This is FASCINATING, all about how DARPA (the bit of the US defence force concerned with R&D – you may know them from such innovations as ‘the internet’) is working to develop techniques which will potentially allow for mind controlled supersoldier robot things, and the ethical considerations which are holding them back (AHAHAHAHAHAHA JOKE!). There are, it may not surprise you to learn, about 30 separate things in this piece that will make you do a slow “oooo-ok” and a mental step back from the monitor – my personal favourite was the throwaway comment about soldiers being able to telepathically control indestructible combat jelly cubes, but you’ll doubtless find your own personal favourites.
• Forbidden Satires of China: Thanks to Alex for the tip here – this is a profile of Chinese author Yan Lianke, former Army staffer and famous writer, whose works are largely banned in China. This piece sees the journalist accompany the writer back to his childhood village, and is one of the best pieces I’ve ever read in terms of giving an account of the almost incomprehensibly doublethink-ish nature of 20thC/contemporary China; you will finish this (if you’re anything like me, at least) with a very real sense that China is very, very far away in every sense possible. As an added bonus, the writing’s great too – this is fascinating.
• Alexa, How Will You Change Us?: A really interesting look at how Alexa’s – and voice assistants more generally – are designed from a linguistic/interpretative point of view, and how increased interactions with increasingly human voice assistants can and will shape certain aspects of society and human interaction in the future. The bits in here about the backstory to the Google Assistant voice character is mental, and gives some indication of the complexity of creating humanoid interfaces in a manner that doesn’t feel massively fcuking creepy. Here’s a summary paragraph for you – this is very much worth reading: “Perhaps you think that talking to Alexa is just a new way to do the things you already do on a screen: shopping, catching up on the news, trying to figure out whether your dog is sick or just depressed. It’s not that simple. It’s not a matter of switching out the body parts used to accomplish those tasks—replacing fingers and eyes with mouths and ears. We’re talking about a change in status for the technology itself—an upgrade, as it were. When we converse with our personal assistants, we bring them closer to our own level.”
• This is 18: Superb NYT feature which presents the world as seen through the eyes of a bunch of 18 year olds from around the world. Looking at their interests, attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles, it paints a picture of a diverse and conscientious generation absolutely crippled by all the great stuff (not in fact great at all) we have bequeathed them. Try reading this and not feeling a little guilty: “I feel like social media has corrupted our generation a bit. We are meant to be this generation of new hope but it’s all so warped.”
• Matreon: McSweeney’s riffs on the idea of a Patreon but for emotional labour, and it’s very funny but perhaps maybe less so if you’re a woman.
• Kelly The Sassy Dolphin: SO MUCH SASS IN THAT BLOWHOLE! This is a great profile of Kelly, a veteran dolphin who is part of the entertainment troupe at some luxury hotel in the Bahamas – the piece tries to determine whether or not dolphins can be said to have ‘personalities’ in any meaningful sense, or whether in fact this is just another instance of anthropomorphisation and in fact it makes no sense at all to ascribe human qualities, or at least qualities we would perceive of as human, to a creature so bio/neurologically distinct from us. Kelly is ACE, fwiw.
• Daniel Radcliffe and the Art of the Fact Checker: This has been referenced all over the place this week, but the piece is lovely and it’s worth reading in its entirety. Daniel Radcliffe is playing a fact checker in a Broadway play he’s currently in – this is the account of what happened when he went into the New Yorker offices to get some on-the-job experience. Really sweet, which isn’t a phrase I often (if ever) use positively.
• Child Marriage in the US: This was something of a shocker. “Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children were married, most of whom were girls, some as young as 12, wedding men. Now, under pressure from advocates and amid a nationwide reckoning over gender equality and sexual misconduct, states have begun ending exceptions that have allowed marriages for people younger than 18, the minimum age in most states. Texas last year banned it, except for emancipated minors. Kentucky outlawed it, except for 17-year-olds with parental and judicial approval. Maryland considered increasing the minimum marrying age from 15, but its bill failed to pass in April. Then in May, Delaware abolished the practice under every circumstance, and New Jersey did the same in June. Pennsylvania, which may vote to eliminate all loopholes this autumn, could be next.” The prose and images here mainly relate to Phil and Maria, he 25 and she 16, and, honestly, this is absolutely heartbreaking. You very much do not get the feeling that things are going to turn out particularly well for either of them, though here’s hoping.
• Morality Wars: Does art have to be ‘right’ to be good? Can something with the ‘wrong’ perspective ever be art? And does something that’s very evidently coming from the ‘right’ side of the argument automatically get an artistic pass? My answers to those would, in order, be ‘no’, ‘yes’, and ‘no’, but this piece explores the questions around why we think what we think about the link between art and morality, particularly in this most polarised and polarising of eras. Smart and important writing / thinking.
• Meet Mr Bolsonaro: In case you weren’t aware, Brazil is the latest nation flirting with electing an absolute prick. This is a profile of Jair Bolsonaro, giving you all the reasons you need as to why it would be best for everyone if he didn’t win the eventual electoral run-off at the end of October. CHEER UP IT MIGHT NEVER HAPPEN (let’s hope it doesn’t).
• When Classical Musicians Go Digital: Really interesting look at how the advent of digital scores and annotations is changing the classical music world, not only from the point of view of modern performance – reading off an iPad! No more page turners! – but also from an archival/historical point of view, with these technologies now allowing for in-depth and interpretative readings of original manuscripts, and for the creation of iterative documentation showing each stage in the creative process. You don’t need to be a musician to find this interesting, promise – anyone working in or around digital archives will enjoy.
• Naming The Unspoken Thing: One of those occasional “you’ll never believe the crazy stuff that those Valley people get up to!” pieces, this time all about these super-secret and exclusive psychedelic happenings called ‘clambakes’ which apparently involve a lot of Silicon Valley bigwigs dropping a shedload of DMT with a coachload of old-school hippies from the days of Esalen and Big Sur; the piece is a fun read, but as with all these things my main thoughts are a) I don’t know if I really believe this; b) this sounds like NO FUN at all.
• A Brief History of Speedrunning: Probably only one for the gamers amongst you, this is a look back at how the process of speedrunning (that is, competing to finish a game, or a level of a game, as fast as possible) came about, and how the pastime has evolved. Excellent nuggets of game history in here.
• He Actually Believes He Is Khalid: 2018 has been a good year for grifter stories – after that one from a few months back about the fake Eurotrash princess, this is an even more insane scam involving an adopted Colombian child who somehow repeatedly managed to convince people he was variously a Saudi Prince or someone being bankrolled by a Saudi Prince. Some of the numbers and scams in here are astonishing, though there’s very much a sting in the tail when you get to the end – it’s fair to say that the subject of this piece doesn’t come across as the most…stable person, but what’s most remarkable is the number of times he got away with it. Has there ever been a better time in recorded history to pretend to be very, very rich?
• 20 Thoughts on Being a Man: I was in two minds about including this – after all, noone really needs to read anything about how HARD it is being a bloke – but I figured it was worth including, not least because it’s very well-written but also because it does a good job of touching on certain tropes of masculinity that, I think, most would agree are universal to a large degree and which have significant negative consequences on men (and, as a result, on everyone else). To be clear, this isn’t a pity piece, rather an exploration of some of the peculiarities of growing up as a man and how that maybe fcuks you up a bit sometimes. See what you think.
• Relax, Ladies: Then of course we get to this piece and the last one just feels a bit, well, unimportant. This is a brilliant essay about the pervasive sexism which embodied the 80s, and how it shaped and characterised so much of the two decades which followed. Really, really very good indeed by Anastasia Basil.
• Breaking The Codes: And this was heartbreaking, and in the week of the Kavanaugh confirmation a proper punch in the stomach. Trigger warnings about here, but if you can then I recommend this unreservedly – Suzanne Roberts in The Rumpus writes angrily, sadly and superbly about the minor and major aggressions that qualified her and her friends’ youth, and where those led.
• The Big Disruption: Finally in the longreads, a REALLY long read – a whole novel. The Big Disruption is a Silicon Valley / tech satire, and whilst I have yet to read all of it the bit I have read is very funny – also, it’s a whole book and it’s brand new and it’s on Medium for free – WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT? Christ.

By Scientwehst

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) Let’s start off with Willie J Healey – this is called ‘Lovelawn’, and it’s sort of excellently lofi and downbeat and a tiny bit Sparklehorse-y:

2) This is a GREAT song, inexplicably messed with via a video that starts with 90s of pointless unfunny monologue. Skip to around 1m30s and enjoy this – it’s very good indeed. It’s called ‘Growing Into A Ghost’ by Swearin’:

3) This is called ‘White Lies’ by Tatran, the animated video is superb and the song is really, really sinister in an unexpected sort of way. Give it a try:

4) 18 minutes of truly excellent music and filmmaking here – this is by Petite Noir, it’s called ‘La Maison Noir: The Gift and the Curse’ and don’t let the length put you off, it’s honestly worth it (for the art direction alone):

5) UK hiphop corner! Curios favourite Loyle Carner is back with a new track – it’s called ‘Ottolenghi’ (who else could write a legitimately great rap about a cookbook? NO FCUKER that’s who) and I love it like I love all his work:

6) Next, this is part of a wider project by Girls Who Code – Sisterhood is a visual album of tracks celebrating and empowering girls and young women (tomorrow is international day of the girl, if I’m not mistaken, hence them launching this week), and this is the lead track, called ‘Ooh Child’ and honestly it’s so much better than it needs to be. So good, and I normally despise ‘uplifting’ or ‘inspirational’ things:

7) Last up this week, a song which I wouldn’t normally feature because, well, slightly twee comic songs performed on the ukelele are basically the worst thing IN THE WORLD, and yet this one manages to be not just good but GREAT – funny, biting, and timely. This is called ‘Tough Time For Boys’ – ENJOY, AND BYE, BYE, BYE, TAKE CARE AND WHY NOT TAKE THIS WEEKEND AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO WEAR A LARGE JUMPER AND DO SOME HIGH-QUALITY PARK WALKING AND LEAF KICKING IF THE WEATHER PERMITS BECAUSE IT IS NOW VERY MUCH THAT TIME OF YEAR AND IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A DRINK WITH TOO MUCH CINNAMON IN IT JUST BECAUSE IT’S OCTOBER THEN YOU GO GIRL ANYWAY TAKE CARE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE!

Oh Christ. What a MESS. 

Look, let’s focus on the positives – the kids got rescued! 

What else? Eh? Oh. 

Sorry everyone, I have literally NOTHING else today – it’s all just TOO MUCH (and I have a lunch to get to, then theatre with a godchild, and then dinner with my girlfriend and then Fat Bob’s birthday tomorrow and then, doubtless, an awful lot of tears and recrimination on Sunday). Look, everyone, see if you can somehow derive some certainty and comfort from what follows, because God knows I have none to offer you myself. 

It’s July 2018 and everything is a total and utter fcuking mess, but at least I am a consistent presence in your lives – THIS, AS EVER, IS WEB CURIOS!

By Raku Inoue

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A VAST PLAYLIST OF THE BEST FIRST TRACKS ON ALBUMS!

THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T WRITING ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT’S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH ADVERMARKETINGPR AND BECAUSE IT’S ONLY IN THE US AND BECAUSE, WELL, THERE’S ALREADY TOO MUCH STUFF GOING ON, ISN’T THERE, BUT WHICH THINKS THAT FACEBOOK’S APPROACH TO INFOWARS DOESN’T DOVETAIL VERY NEATLY WITH THEIR STATED AVERSION TO ‘FAKE NEWS’:

• Facebook Testing AR Ads: I know, I’m excited too! Facebook, in typical fashion, headlines this as “New Ways to Inspire Holiday Shoppers with Video” which, Christ, is pretty much the most miserable and joyless way to describe the fact that now retailers (in the US, in certain categories, but, as per, this is the universal future do not try to fight it) can buy ad units in the Newsfeed which will exhort eager consumers to TRY ON GLASSES or TRY ON MAKEUP in AR! Isn’t it exciting? You can read a slightly clearer account of what you’ll be able to do in the TechCrunch writeup here, but, look, let’s all be realistic about this – there will be a couple of interesting, novel and reasonably high-quality uses of this and then there will be about 300,000 executions which let you, I don’t know, wear a Gregg’s pasty on your head, thereby hammering another nail into the coffin of the idea of ‘AR as something normal people might ever actually want to interact with a brand through’. Still, virtual sunglasses!
• Facebook Stories Adds ‘Highlights’ Option: Just like on Insta, you’ll now be able to compile expired elements from Stories past into ‘Highlights’ which can live at the top of your profile. Which is…nice? Is it nice? Has anyone willingly watched one of their Facebook friend’s Stories? NO MATTER, for this is the universal future (see above) as dictated by the Big Blue Misery Factory and who are we to question it? NO FCUKERS, that’s who!
• Instagram Question Stickers Are HERE!: You’ll know this, of course, as every single cripplingly dull (but so pretty!) narcissist you follow on the platform has spent the past few days exhorting their army of egofellators to ask them stuff about themselves, thereby turning Insta into Curios Cat or Ask.fm. Still, it was trailed last week and now HERE IT IS – in case you haven’t yet been exposed to it, anyone can now add a ‘Question’ sticker to their Stories, into which anyone can type a question for them to answer in future content. The questions or comments submitted aren’t anonymous – a fact I imagine has already let to one or two socially awkward moments – though they are when reshared to a subsequent ‘gram; this is, my inevitable, tedious snark aside, a really good way of driving interaction with an audience and I can imagine a bunch of ‘influencers’ (sorry) going full Diceman with this for the lols.
• Insta Expands Collection Ads and Shoppable Stories to All Brands: You remember these – made available to certain exclusive partners last month, now here for everyone to ‘enjoy’. Obviously if you flog tat to people, the ability to do so directly through Insta is A Good Thing – who knows, perhaps you could be the next ‘self-made billionaire’ just like Kylie Jenner!
• WhatsApp To Label Forwarded Messages: No real relevance here at all, but in the pantheon of ‘measures ostensibly designed to combat ‘Fake News’ which will do literally nothing to combat the spread of said ‘Fake News’’, this one is SPECIAL. If you forward a message to another user within WhatsApp, that user will see a notification informing them that it was indeed a forward. Er, what about simple c&ping, though? HAVE I JUST DISCOVERED A GENIUS WORKAROUND?
• The Twitter Cull: Not quite as dramatic as the Thanos subReddit cull (only click that link btw if you want to get a very, very detailed rundown of a very, very silly piece of internet culture), but still – as part of its efforts to clean up its bot problem, Twitter this week has started removing locked accounts (that is, ones it’s identified as being part of a botnet, spam accounts, etc, and which it has prevented from posting) from users’ follower counts. As such, those with large followings may see a drop in overall follower numbers – don’t worry, though, it’s probably not because everyone hates you.
• Twitter Offering New Promoted Trend Option: You know when you click ‘Explore’ in Twitter and it opens on the trend list above which is an image/headline banner which takes you to a Moment? Well Twitter’s testing the idea of selling that as adspace, with Disney being the first to buy it in the US. I can only imagine the sort of cost they’ll be attaching to that, so of interest only to those of you with 6-figure pockets and a pleasingly loose approach to targeting.
• Snap Teaming Up With Amazon: Not just Amazon, according to the piece, but that’s the most interesting one. It’s not official, but the reporting seems sound – code buried within Snapchat suggests it’s working on giving users the ability to take photos of products, barcodes, etc, and for those photos to be used to identify products and take them direct to purchase. Which is exactly what Amazon’s abortive attempt at a phone did, except, well, more useful, as you don’t need to buy an Amazon phone. Useful, unless you’re a retailer who isn’t Amazon and for whom this is in fact nothing more than another shovelful of dirt being dropped from a great height on your coffin lid.
• YouTube vs ‘Fake News’: YouTube, another platform whose relationship with the truth is an interesting and varied one, is also taking steps to combat the outright lies which tend to spring up seconds after anything moderately contentious happens in the world (oh hi, false flag accusations!). As of…soon, in the immediate aftermath of major news events, YT will surface links to written news reports in its results, given, as it says, it takes more time to make proper journalistic video than it does to write fact-checked copy. Which is A Good Thing, I think, though obviously the choice of sources will in itself be hugely contentious. The other stuff it’s doing is through investment in helping newsrooms around the world get better at making news video faster – what? What’s that noise? IS THAT THE SOUND OF NEWSROOMS REPIVOTING TO VIDEO?? It would be funny were the entire profession of journalism not so utterly banjaxed.
• Some Google Pay Updates: They’re adding P2P payments and mobile ticketing options. I am quite bored of writing this section and so am going to move on now.
• DO NOT STEAL MY MEMES: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but those belonging to self-described ‘memelords’ behind a bunch of super-popular astronomy accounts on Insta who, according to this brilliantly angry and *slightly* shrill presentation, have been consistently ripped off by Harper’s Bazaar and are NOT HAPPY about it. Funny, yes, but you can see why they’re annoyed – it really isn’t ok to do this sort of thing, and you will get found out (if you follow any cartoonists or illustrators you’ll know quite how prevalent this sort of crap is, and large brands really ought to have more shame).
• 4-Minute Showers: The sort of idea which I think is really clever and then, on further reflection, I think is exactly the sort of thing that only advermarketingprtwats like me will EVER see and is a classic example of agencyland having a public wnk if you see what I mean. Anyway, this is a smart little execution by Y&R for Water Aid, which sees them creating a playlist of songs which are exactly 4 minutes long, to highlight the need to save water in the shower (you time your wash to the track length, thereby ensuring an optimal duration for an environmentally acceptable scrub, DO YOU SEE?). Cute.
• The Body Hair Image Library: Billie is a US brand which sells female grooming and body products, made by women for women (or at least that’s very much the vibe they give off). This campaign is based on the ‘insight’ (SUCH INSIGHT!) that…oh, I’ll let them tell it: “There’s a serious lack of female body hair on the internet. Search “woman” in any image gallery and you’ll be scrolling for a while before finding a single strand. We’re here to change that. Because womankind is both shaggy and smooth. Help us grow our library by using #projectbodyhair or uploading your own photo below.” Now I really like this – it’s a nice idea, very of the now, etc – but reactions were more mixed amongst those I asked about it. What do YOU think? Why are you so weirded out by female armpit hair? WHY????

By Margaret Curtis

NEXT UP, A TRULY WONDERFUL NOSTALGIA-EVOKING PLAYLIST OF CLASSICS PAST!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT WHILST IT IS LOVELY TO PROTEST AGAINST DONALD TRUMP THERE ARE, THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS, A BUNCH OF PEOPLE SIGNIFICANTLY CLOSER TO HOME WE OUGHT TO BE PROTESTING AGAINST IE THE ENTIRE FCUKING POLITICAL CLASS OF THIS COUNTRY, NOT JUST THE CABINET BUT ON ALL SIDES REALLY, WHO EVEN BY THEIR LOW STANDARDS HAVE HAD A SPECTACULARLY INEFFECTUAL AT BEST AND CNUTY AT WORST WEEK, PT.1:

• The Elsewhere Visitors’ Guide: This is a lovely thing to kick off with; Elsewhere is a recent EP by Face Culler, which comes with this accompanying website taking you on a tour of the imaginary place that inspired the music (which, in case you’re interested, is electrofolkynoodling, which is a genuinely awful description but one which I can’t improve on here at 7:41am in my kitchen, sorry). Navigate the map, click on places of interest, read the descriptions and listen to the accompanying song – I am a total sucker for imaginary maps and places, and the writing is quirkily reminiscent of Fallen London and that sort of thing. Have an explore.

• GTA USA Gun Homicides: I am also a total sucker for videogame-derived art projects, and this, by Joseph Delappe, is right up my street. Every night at midnight the automated game will restart on Twitch, using in-game dead bodies to show how many Americans have died due to gun violence since January 1, 2018. It isn’t controlled by a player; instead it is updated automatically every night using data scraped from the Gun Violence Archive. This is far, far more affecting than you’d imagine from the description – it’s honestly really horrible, and I mean that in the best possible way.
• Captionbot: Or, depending on how cynical you’re feeling this morning (guess), another instance of us giving up our labour to train the army of AIs which will eventually enslave us! Still, it’s a fun toy, powered by Microsoft’s own image recognition software – upload any picture you like and the software will have a go at telling you what that image is of; you can rate its answer on a scale of 1-5, thereby helping the machine get better. Do we think it’s going to be perverted by people trying to train it exclusively on bongo? Part of me really hopes that that’s exactly what happens tbh.
• Slitscan Space: You remember Slitscanning, right? “The slit-scan photography technique is a photographic and cinematographic process where a moveable slide, into which a slit has been cut, is inserted between the camera and the subject to be photographed” (thanks, Wikipedia, I really didn’t remember, turns out)? Anyway, give this site access to your webcam, move around a bit in front of it, and watch in marvelling wonder at the strangely watercolourish semi-abstract visions that scroll across your screen (and don’t think too much about exactly what / who you’ve just given webcam access to).
• ICE Spy: This is interesting but genuinely creepy and not, I don’t think, a particularly good thing. ICE in this context is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, who have been responsible for much of the…let’s call it draconian enforcement of US border policy in the past months, to large-scale public disapproval and anger. Not totally sure that the answer to that anger is this, though – ICE Spy is a website which, using hundreds of ICE employee photos scraped from LinkedIn, invites users to upload photos of people they know which the site will cross-reference against the aforementioned LinkedIn archive to determine whether in fact you do know someone who works for ICE. Which, let’s be clear, doesn’t sound good AT ALL. Can you see where this sort of thing ends up? If you can, and it isn’t ‘somewhere really, really bleak and quite scary’ then you’re a far greater optimist than I am.
• Editing Music In Videos Using AI: Fine, it’s not quite editing music in the way in which you might be imagining, but this video shows how it’s possible to isolate individual audio tracks automatically and it’s hugely impressive; the applications here for quick audio editing are really quite exciting (unless you’re an audio producer, in which case that sound you hear is the robots coming for you too).
• Blockshade: What do you get if you mash a bunch of rubbish about STUFF ON THE BLOCKCHAIN with elements of the ‘erotic’ writings of EL James? You get this! Mostly doesn’t make total sense, but I am oddly charmed by phrases such as “Perhaps it was you who decided on gazpacho soup and a periodic, randomly chosen deterministic block signing order”; your mileage, though, may vary considerably.
• Comicon Cosplay: There’s nothing new or exciting any more about photos of people dressed up as cartoon or game characters – it’s actually sort of cute how mainstream this sort of thing has become, compared to the times a decade or so ago when I used to honestly feel for my little brother’s safety when he got on the DLR wearing massive parachute pants and a scratchy blond wig and carrying a 5ft wooden keyblade (RIP Cameron you massive geek, you) – but this is a lovely collection of seriously impressive efforts from the attendees of Montreal Comicon. Unrelated, but can you imagine exactly how unfun it must have been to be on the Furry float at Pride last weekend in that heat?
• Bumblebee Spaces: As all available space in London is taken up by high-rise apartments built for people who will never, ever live in them (latest in this fabulous trend, a new development near me whose exterior boards proclaim that the interiors are being designed by Versace Home – lads, NOONE WHO CAN AFFORD INTERIORS BY VERSACE HOME WANTS TO LIVE WHERE I DO!), so we need to look to more innovative storage solutions as we’re forced to continue subdividing our apartments until we each have 9 square feet to dwell in. Enter Bumblebee Spaces, a storage solution based ON THE CEILING! Yes, that’s right, instead of cluttering up your floorspace, place boxes on the ceiling which you can raise and lower with motorised straps, controlled by an app which also theoretically keeps track of what you’ve stored where. Click the link, look at the video, and then take a moment to imagine exactly how many times a day you’d be jostled by a wobbly IKEA box squeakily inching its way ceilingwards; or how much fun it would be to not be able to wear clean pants because the WiFi was out or you needed a software update. This is SILLY.
• Capsule Crit: A new website collecting ‘games criticism, personal essays, reviews, and fan fiction in micro genres’, Capsule Crit is a welcome addition to the increasingly diverse range of voices writing about games and related subjects in 2018, to which in your collective faces, GamerGate pricks.
• Parli-N-Grams: Or, Google Trends for the UK Parliament. Curios reader Giuseppe Sollazzo (a man who I have NEVER MET, demonstrating Web Curios incredible reach should any interested sponsors be reading this) sent this in – his own project, it allows users to compare a series of search terms from Hansard over time, meaning you can track the relative popularity of terms or concepts or issues in the UK Parliament over time. Try comparing anything you like with ‘Brexit’ for one of the more miserable illustrations of exactly how tediously one-note and suffocating parliamentary discourse has become of late.
• Parliawint: Tweets by Dril superimposed over political imagery from BBC Politics; this is far funnier than it should be, except when it features Boris Johnson and you realise that this isn’t funny it’s actually all our lives oh god.
• Women In Parliament: There will come a point when I stop featuring work by The Pudding as it’s just too consistently good and it feels unfair; not yet, though. This week they published this superb visualisation exploring the presence of women in the UK Parliament over history – it takes you through the growth of women as a political force in the UK in typically well-designed fashion, showing the impact of all-women shortlists and pointing out the still not-insignificant gender gap which exists in the Commons. I am slightly amazed that they are not yet shilling these services to brands, as they would make MILLIONS.
• Sensory Meditation: Many, many years ago I did a bit of work promoting RJDJ, an app which effectively used some sort of VERY rudimentary AI/ML to create augmented soundscapes of whatever you were listening to, based on ambient noise, your movement speed, etc (it has since pivoted to be this – which is a variant on the original and worth a look). This is a similar-ish idea – Non (for that is the app’s name) is a series of ‘generative sound meditations’  which deliver the user a series of unique sound experiences based on a whole raft of factors including location, previously determined preferences, etc. The visuals on this are LOVELY, and if you do meditation and mindfulness and stuff then this is probably RIGHT up your street.
• Talking To Alexa With Sign Language: This is only a proof-of-concept, but it is BRILLIANT. Abhishek Singh rigged this up so as to enable him to give instructions to his Amazon Echo device simply by signing at his webcam – I say ‘simply’, but obviously Abhikesh is a very, very clever person indeed – which ‘sees’ his gestures, converts them from sign language to speech, and then ‘talks’ to Alexa on the user’s behalf. The ingenuity and coding skill here is super-impressive, and however (rightly) wary I am of the domestic surveillance box (sorry, domestic voice assistant) there’s no denying the huge utility of technology like this for the less able-bodied.
• Freelance Wars: Do YOU like Star Wars? Are YOU a freelancer struggling to afford to leave the house or eat as a result of FCUKING INTERNATIONAL COMPANIES WITH MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR TURNOVERS FAILING TO HONOUR YOUR PAYMENT TERMS (let’s not be so crass as to name names, but were I to use the term ‘Photoshop’ without a little ™ sign, can you guess which FCUKING INTERNATIONAL COMPANY I might be referring to?)? Well you might enjoy this, which Tweets gags mashing up the two concepts. Or you might think “this isn’t funny, this is yet another jokey normalisation of the appalling manner in which large organisations treat piecework”, and you’d be right!
• Browsh: More technical people than me might be able to come up with a reason why you’d want an entirely text-based browser. I have no idea, but the fact that it can render videos in text on the fly is quite remarkable (watch the demo video if, as is probable, this description means nothing whatsoever to you).
• You Can Get Your Phone To Respond To Harry Potter Commands: Or at least you can if you’re on the very latest version of iOS (I think it’s easier with Android) – be clear, this is not really ok at all, but I know that some of you children out there won’t be able to resist.
• Birth Undisturbed: A selection of artworks depicting childbirth in all its…er…bloody, meaty glory. “’Birth Undisturbed’ is a fictional narrative series by British photographer Natalie Lennard. Travelling through the world and history to depict birth from ancient to modern, and squalid to famous, the series depicts stories of woman both real and imagined. Using images and video to examine current Western birth consciousness, the artist strives to speak a new language to bring the rawness of primal birth into the art world. Highlighting key figureheads and writers from the realm of birth philosophy, the series’ timeliness is ever more appropriate in a global maternity crisis.”
• Roadtrip: Oh this is SO GOOD. Roadtrip is an app (presumably using Wikipedia’s built-in ‘Nearby’ Page) which is designed to be used whilst on car journeys and which will read out Wikipedia entries for places of interest as you pass near them on your route. Ok, so when I tried it again just now it thought I was in Wollagong (I am, to be the best of my knowledge, really not in Wollagong), but the idea is so hugely appealing and there are SO many *ahem* inspirations you could take from it. Just lovely.
• Michal Sawtyruk: Sawtryruk works in a vector-ish style which I really rather love – take a look at his site, there’s some gorgeous art on there.
• Walmart’s Randomly Generated Inspirational Quote Posters: I am honestly devastated that these don’t seem to ship to the UK; as far as I can tell, this works off the same sort of algorithmic creation method which all those tshirt manufacturers from a few years ago did, whereby it pulls quotes from…somewhere, and then overlays them on a randomly chosen sunset-type inspirational scene and offers them for sale for $13 or thereabouts. I have no idea AT ALL where they are grabbing them from, but it leads to gems like this – who wouldn’t want “I have to tell you I enjoy Jon Stewart. That’s the truth. I actually think he’s very funny. I’ve paid to see him do his stand-up routine” on their wall? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Amazing; I want a UK version please.
• Yuni Yoshida: Yuni Yoshida is a South Korean (I think) art director and this is her Instagram feed featuring her work. Such lovely style throughout, and some rather good visual gags to boot.
• Astronomy Picture of the Day: From NASA, so the quality’s always pretty good. You can see the whole archive here, going back to June 16 1995 – early adopters, NASA, as you might expect

By Natasha Law

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS A TRULY GREAT SELECTION OF OLD PRINCE BOOTLEGS AND RARITIES!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT WHILST IT IS LOVELY TO PROTEST AGAINST DONALD TRUMP THERE ARE, THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS, A BUNCH OF PEOPLE SIGNIFICANTLY CLOSER TO HOME WE OUGHT TO BE PROTESTING AGAINST IE THE ENTIRE FCUKING POLITICAL CLASS OF THIS COUNTRY, NOT JUST THE CABINET BUT ON ALL SIDES REALLY, WHO EVEN BY THEIR LOW STANDARDS HAVE HAD A SPECTACULARLY INEFFECTUAL AT BEST AND CNUTY AT WORST WEEK, PT.1:

• 80s/90s Football Culture: Or at least the hoolie side of it. Photographer Bethany Kane has published a zine collecting photographs her own father took when on tour with England in the late-80s/early-90s – a few of them are collected here, but to see the full set you’ll have to buy a copy of the physical mag. One of the nicest things (as a non-England fan there weren’t many, true, but it’s important to be honest about these things) about England’s World Cup performance this year was the feeling that this sort of wing of the fandom doesn’t really exist any more, and that there’s little or no appetite for lads on tour beatings. Thank Christ.

• Chest Strongwell: This Facebook Page has one joke – it takes members of the Trump administration and photoshops them with no little skill onto the sort of staged studio photos beloved of a certain type of person in America’s South. Scroll down to enjoy the majesty of Ivanka, Donald, Sean and other stars of the past two years in mullety soft-focus. So good.
• Wilson: People have worked out that podcast discovery is a mess – Wilson aims to help sort that out by presenting a weekly selection of curated, hand-picked new podcasts as a playlist, the idea being that it will give you a weekly bunch of new listens, some of which may make it onto your personal rotation. No registration, no  algorithm, just human curation, like in the good old days. It could catch on, this sort of thing.
• Tag Walk: If you’re into fashion – I mean, really, into fashion, the catwalky, LFW-style fashion, not so much your Missguided – then this is potentially really useful. Tag Walk is a search engine which is pointed exclusively at shots from the past few years catwalk shows each seasons in the major capitals; you can search by city, season, designer or keyword, to pull out, say, all the cerise bandoliers from Milan SS 16 (is a bandolier an article of clothing or a weapon? I am now stricken with terrible doubt). I have no idea how good this is – tbh, I wouldn’t really know a Missguided from a Missoni, despite my earlier snark – but I can imagine it being very useful indeed in certain circles.
• The 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year: As per usual, these are absolutely insane. In the absence of any new Blue Planet for the next 7-10 years, you’ll want to get your fill of these – LOOK AT THESE SHARKY LADS!
• Room Racer: I confess to not having tried this yet, so all the usual caveats apply, but it looks fun – Room Racer is an AR racing game for iOS which lets you create a virtual track around any environment you choose, meaning you can make a virtual Scalectrix (does Scalectrix exist any more? Does that mean anything to you? AM I LOSING ALL MY FRAMES OF REFERENCE AND CULTURAL TOUCHPOINTS???) around your living room or wherever you like really. Try it and let me know if it’s any good.
• Ben Langworthy: Ben is an illustrator. This is his Instagram feed, where amongst other things he occasionally posts drawings of lighthouses which are SO SOOTHING although I can’t adequately explain why.
• Wakie: The sort of idea that very much seems like a relic from the early days of the web in which there wasn’t a semiautomatic assumption in place that anyone who attempts to engage with you online will be quite a lot of a dick, Wakie is an app which offers the opportunity to connect people with questions and people with answers – as they put it, “Wakie is free, anonymous, and connects you with people 24/7. Just post a topic, and jump on a phone call or have an online discussion. No phone numbers or personal info is exchanged.” Which is nice, except the problem with stuff like this is that the lack of mass adoption tends to mean that the people using it are, well, outliers; it might be that it’s a great place if you want to find out about Linux builds (but those people are, excuse my stereotyping, maybe a touch less likely to want to talk on the phone), but otherwise I imagine it will be a lot of tumbleweed punctuated by the odd bout of heavy breathing, clotted ejaculation and then embarrassed silence. Still, give it a try!
• This Is America Done On MacPaint: You’ve probably seen this by now, but if not it’s incredible and worth a 5-minute explore, particularly if you’re interested in pixelart/animation.
• RIVR: I know I’ve mentioned this to you before, but if I have to look at one more proposal with lines like “We will make a 360 degree VR video” in it, I will kick somebody in the face. Still, if your agency is at the point whereby you include the term ‘VR’ in every single proposal REGARDLESS OF THE FACT THAT YOU WILL REACH LITERALLY NO PEOPLE AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHY YOU’RE DOING IT (breathe, Matt, breathe) then you might want to take a look at this site, which might at least give you some ideas as to what you could do with the tech if you had some actual budget. RIVR make photorealistic VR experiences – so, if you want to recreate a warzone, say, or a crime scene, they might be worth a look. If, though, you’ve just chucked a line about ‘a VR film’ into a presentation about medical diagnostic technology and when asked ‘why is this here – what, exactly, do you think that VR experience might be?’ respond with a blank look, then, really, fcuk off (can you tell I am talking from bitter personal experience here? CAN YOU???).
• New Voices Fund: An investment fund for Women of Colour entrepreneurs. It’s in the US, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the site about investments being geograhically limited so it might be worth a look if you or anyone you know fit the criteria.
• Independent Voices: This is an amazing collection of the independent and the countercultural: “Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.” Brilliant stuff in here, and such an excellent resource – seriously, just look at the list of titles you can browse, it’s mental.
• Armadillo Online: You didn’t know, did you, when you woke up this morning, that you’d today find that online resource of armadillo facts that you’ve been longing for in that most secret corner of your heart? And yet here we are! Beautifully, there’s a page where it lists the remaining armadillo species for which the site has yet to acquire adequate photos – there are 8 of the scaly little buggers still proving elusive, so why not dedicate the rest of your life to getting a shot of one? It will be a better use of your time than attempting to sell deodorant to people, I promise you.   
• Big Clapper: It’s been a whole half-Curios and only now do I reach the stupidest Kickstarter of the week – maybe things are getting better? Big Clapper is a robot which, if funded, will sit and clap with its BIG SOFT HANDS, wherever you choose to place it. The only possible use for this is to train Michael Gove, Nicole Kidman and other aliens how to clap properly.
• The Spinner: Sometimes in the course of a week’s web-spelunking I come across stuff that I honestly think “no, no, that really can’t be real in any way, shape or form” – so it was with The Spinner, which purports to offer a service whereby husbands (of course!) can get their wives targeted with adverts promoting content designed to make them more…pliable, more desirous of sex, that sort of thing (the tech checks out – the idea is that the site provides a link which you send them; they open it, and thanks to a quick redirect get a cookie dropped on them before being redirected to a seemingly innocuous video; the cookie allows for the targeted content drops). You pay this lot $30, and in theory can start targeting anyone you want with articles about how they really ought to fcuk you more, is the upshot. Sounds like a scam, right, or a stunt to promote something else…well, thanks to Rich Leigh’s detective work we learned that whilst it might still be a scam it’s definitely not a front for something else; it’s definitely offering EXACTLY that service to a bunch of the sort of men who think that the best way to convince their partners to have sex with them more often is to spam them with Outbrain content. Oh, 2018, you really are a constantly evolving miracle.
• Propose…On The Moon: Got a spare 125 million quid? Are you a total idiot who can’t tell an obvious PR stunt from truth? GREAT! This is a French ‘propose in Paris’ service for the terminally unimaginative who are branching out and offering, from 2022, a GUARANTEED (not guaranteed at all) opportunity to take a spaceflight into lunar orbit where you’ll be able to propose to your beloved. Seriously, please do click the link – the description of the offer is SUPERB and will cheer you up no end.
• Get Eddie: A site which lets you order Viagra online on a monthly subscription basis via an almost-certainly risible ‘online consultation’ with a doctor. Included not because I believe you all to be in need of it, but more because I am suddenly curious as to how much you can get away with selling Viagra for on a pill-by-pill basis, and whether this might make for a useful shortcut to dealing (that is obviously NOT what I am thinking, mum).
• Ultraboardgames: Another week, another site collecting HUNDREDS of online versions of boardgames for you to enjoy instead of staring at Powerpoint for the nth afternoon in a row.
• Thunder Bella: Small timewasting game of the week, #1! Thunder Bella is an excellent little top-down shoot-em-up in which you play an umbrella trying to shoot down a cloud and, fine, whilst that might sound unbearably twee it’s actually really good ok?
• Roomba Quest: Small timewasting game of the week, #2! Roomba Quest is just BEAUTIFUL – a small little adventure-y story game in which you play a Roomba, the most poignant of all the domestic appliances.
• Industrial Accident: Finally in this week’s selection of miscellania, Industrial Accident is a very neat little (5-10 mins, max) Twine game/story – I don’t want to spoil it, but it is VERY satisfying in a way that you might find unsettling. Enjoy!

By Dennis Wojtkiewicz

LAST UP, THE NEW ALBUM FROM LEFT BRAIN WHO YOU MAY RECALL WAS IN ODD FUTURE BITD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Jun Cen: “Jun Cen is a Chinese illustrator and animator who is currently based in New York. He is the Overall New Talent Winner of the AOI Illustration Awards(UK)” His work is ACE, take a look.

• Opus Analogico: Not sure I 100% understand this, but it seems to present photographs (in the main) in pairs based on a shared framing or aesthetic. I rather like it.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• 150 Great Essays and Articles: Just in case I don’t provide you with enough superb reading material each week (I do, fyi, you are WRONG), this is a brilliant collection of wonderful essays by a variety of authors on a wide range of topics, all linked to from a single index. Worth bookmarking and dipping into next time you can’t face refreshing the BBC homepage again at 230pm on a Wednesday.

• How Google Started: An excellent oral history of the early days of Google; when I  sent it to a friend of mine who used to work there he replied that it was the most accurate thing he’d read, which is hopefully some sort of endorsements. Lots of great details about the madness and oddity of a bunch of young geeks inventing the future for fun – my favourite being the story about the bloke crouching in a cupboard, taking apart a DVD player, who was just fiddling around with ‘digitising all of broadcast TV’ – and a very real sense that noone really knew what they were doing at all, but that it didn’t matter. IMAGINE being this smart.
• Brutalist Web Design: A whole treatise on Brutalist design for the web – principles and practical tips. Only of interest if you’re a web designer but I know that at least a few of you are and, well, consider this a PERSONAL THANKYOU for reading this bastard thing.
• Survival of the Richest: In another week in which Elon Musk has, whilst on the one hand doin ostensibly good and helpful things, demonstrated himself to once again be something of a colossal prick, it’s timely to read this piece which looks at the peculiar obsession the super rich seemingly have with a) everything imminently going to tits, really hard, planet and civilisation-wise, and b) making sure that when it does they are WELL out of it. If we really are all moving towards a point where we expect the ultra rich to sort the planet rather than, say, governments attempting to do so through taxation and redistribution, I have to say that the outlook doesn’t look great.
• Everything I Know About Football: Friend of Imperica Mr Biffo, the man responsible for Digitiser on Teletext back in the day, writes up some nostalgia, talking us through his strange relationship with the sort of football – a pastime he’s never enjoyed and yet which has been an oddly consistent presence in his life. There are some GREAT anecdotes in here, and a description of at least one almost certain murderer, which really ought to be reason enough for you to read.
• Things That Happen In Silicon Valley That Also Happen In The Soviet Union: You have almost certainly read this Twitter thread, but in case not it’s the best ‘hahahaha oh no hang on this is true and isn’t actually that funny after all’ bit of ‘comedy’ you’ll see all week.
• The Academic Emoji Conference: A really interesting piece about how academics see emoji, why they are not a language (I TOLD YOU SO), and how they ought to be contextualised within the broader pantheon of methods of communication. Which description makes it sound anything other than really interesting, fine, but trust me here.
• The 3d Printed Firearm Future: You know that there is…a lot going on right now, when news that 3d printed firearms are no longer technically illegal in the US slips under the radar like this. You may recall that a few years back legislation was put in place to try and limit the distribution and printing of 3d gun templates; well, thanks to one impassioned free speech defendant, no more! THANKS, GUY! This is a really, really un-cheering read, and the combination of NRA zealotry and high tech on display here suggests that the oh-so-fun gun control debate in the US isn’t going to be moving anywhere in the near future.
• My Depression Is Like Having A Bad Dog: A comic about depression that takes the black dog metaphor and runs with it; this is a lovely description of what it’s like living with it, in all its changing forms.
• On Fortnite: Absolutely THE best piece I’ve read on the Fortnite phenomenon; so, so smart, from the understanding that its closest analogue is probably not other games but social apps, to the discussion towards the end on the skill with which the design team have built in streaks, reward mechanisms and the like to create an even more compelling, Skinnerbox-y set of mechanics. Required reading if you want to understand the phenomenon at least a bit.
• Fear of a Black France: The English football team’s narrative – a young team, multicultural, reflecting the diversity of the country it represents in a way that brings people together in a way previous teams perhaps haven’t – is in part mirrored by the French finalists; this piece looks at what the team’s success, and in particular the elevation of Kylian Mbappe to superstar status, means to France’s non-white population, in a country where racial lines are even more firmly marked than they are in the UK.
• Saul Williams at the Roundhouse: I don’t normally feature reviews, but this, of Saul Williams’ recent performance in London, is worth reading as William Drew has written it in verse and done an exceptional job to boot. This is, honestly, GREAT.
• I Murdered Some Trophy Hunters: In GTAV, that is. Exactly the sort of writing about videogames I love, where real world morality and ethics collide with the virtual space. What would YOU do if you met people in-game who, you realised, you really didn’t like the politics of? Would you take the opportunity to fcuk them up a bit? You might, mightn’t you? Lovely, and exactly the sort of emergent narrative that online play in MMORPG-type worlds is allowing for.
• On Semicolons and The Rules: I love me a semicolon; no idea if I always use them correctly, mind, but WHO CARES EH? There’s a particular cadence of speech that the voices in my head do which can only be reproduced with judicious application of the semicolon, you see, regardless of grammatical convention. Anyway, this is a good piece about why it’s such a good form of punctuation, which meanders off into a wider discussion about writing rules and when it’s acceptable to break them – readers and writers will particularly enjoy.
• What Happens When A Computer Runs Your Life: What would happen if you let an algorithm decide what you wore, what you ate, what you got etched into your skin? Depending on the algorithm, some PRETTY BAD STUFF, fine, but that’s not stopping intrepid software engineer Max Hawkins from doing exactly that. Dice Man (second mention this week, how queer) for the modern age, this: “Hawkins will say yes to whatever the computer chooses, just as he has regarding almost all aspects of his life since leaving his job as a creative software engineer at Google three years ago. In a world where technologies promise humans ever more control over their choices and preferences, Hawkins has decided to surrender his will to the whims of computer algorithms. He’s created programs that randomly choose where he eats, what he wears, where he lives, what music he listens to, and how he spends his time. In so doing, he says he’s discovered a different kind of freedom.”
• A BBQ, Not An Orgy: I don’t normally post heartwarming Buzzfeed human interest stuff on here, but this is a necessary exception; a man in the US posted an invitation to a 4th July BBQ on Grindr, specifying that it was NOT an orgy – this is what happened. SO CUTE (and not an orgy).
• Liquid Ass and its Uses: You may have heard of Liquid Ass – an actual product available for sale which basically just smells TERRIBLE and is intended for the terminally unfunny to use for pranks. It is, however, also used extensively in the training of medical and trauma personnel, and this article looks at how – and goes into some quite, er, challenging detail about some of the tools used in mimicking battlefield conditions. I don’t think I’d ever thought about the practical realities of administering emergency treatment to someone with a ruptured bowel, and now I wish I never had.
• Kylie Jenner, Self-Made (nearly) Billionaire: I am not the first to observe this, but the term ‘self-made’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Nonetheless, you can’t admire the hustle here, the naked opportunism and the very smart (I must admit) of modern marketing, branding and logistics that enable Jenner to have a company with this sort of crazy turnover and next to no staff (or indeed real physical assets at all). Like anyone’s going to bother being a brand ambassador in the future when you can just launch your own line of, I don’t know, incontinence products or somesuch.
• Court: A brilliant, harrowing account of the James Bulger court case by Blake Morrison in Granta. So, so sad, and it’s hard to do anything but agree with Morrison’s assessment that the use of an adult court to try the case was at best a misjudgment and at worst an act of cruelty to all concerned.
• I Turned My Jawbone Into Earrings: On body dysmorphia and self and surgery and the limits of one’s own rights over one’s body. This is a great piece of writing, if not for the very squeamish.
• When Your Muse Is Also A Demonic Dominatrix: Salvador Dali’s muse, Gala, was in one way responsible for his fame and notoriety and fortune; in another, she was responsible for the complete decimation of any sort of reliable catalogue of Dali’s work, or consensus as to what can or ought to constitute an ‘original’. She was also, according to this piece, a, er, character. This is a portrait of someone who you sense not only didn’t suffer fools gladly but who wasn’t that certain about her attitude to, well, anyone at all; one did not, I suspect, fcuk with Gala (although Gala would very much fcuk (with) you.
• The Endless Reign of Rupert Murdoch: This is VERY LONG, but an exhaustive portrait of the oldest, biggest bastard in all of media – there are so, so many things to love in this piece, not least the constant barbs about Murdoch’s lack of culture and curiosity, but there’s no denying that he’s been phenomenally successful at jdging what the public want from ‘news’ and how best to make as much money as possible whilst giving it to them.
• China’s Surveillance Future: I can’t work out whether I was slightly cheered by the end of this or simply more depressed about the panopticonic future. The Chinese state’s affection for mass surveillance, combined with AI, to keep the people ‘happy and safe’ (you never know who’s reading), is well-documented; this piece looks at the technology and its applications, as several others this year have, but is also rather better at taking a realistic look at how much it actually works – the slightly depressing conclusion (I have decided it’s depressing on swift reflection, so that’s that) is that despite the fact that the tech doesn’t actually work anywhere near as well as advertised, at least not yet, the mythos around it is sufficient to cause even greater adherence to the rules by the frightened populace. It’s Mussolini’s cardboard tanks all over again, except not really funny in the slightest.
• We Are All Public Figures Now: Absolutely the best essay I have read on the Plane Bae story (you know the one, come on) – this is a brilliant piece of writing on where the bounds of personal and public blur in an era in which we can, and will, document everything and everything for The Timeline and The Culture. If you have ever taken a photo of a stranger on public transport for the lulz, read this and no why that isn’t really an ok thing to do, ever.
• Sweetness Mattered: A gorgeous personal essay about the author’s discovery of his sexuality as a young man, and the contortions he went through trying to access that sexuality whilst staying within the rigid social norms of teenage boydom. Beautifully-written and pleasingly optimistic in a way much of this sort of writing is not.
• Lecter, My Therapist: Lastly in this week’s longreads, this is one of the best pieces I’ve read all year, no exaggeration. It’s about The Silence of the Lambs and going to therapy and abuse and recovery and it is SO well-written. Glass of wine with this one, for preference.

By Eddie Kamuanga Illunga

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. First up, an eleven-minute video featuring a series of shorts about girls and their boyfriends, accompanying the new EP by Becky and the Birds. This is SO LOVELY and it’s worth every second of your time:

2) This is by Ships – it’s called ‘Another Way’, and aside from the song being great the kid in the video is an absolute SUPERSTAR:

3) This is called ‘Candles’, it’s by a band called Daughter, and my friend Jim (HI JIM) sent it to me saying that the video really reminded him of the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and by God it really does. Lovely song, too:

4) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Have I mentioned recently how good Big Zu is? HE IS SO GOOD! Enjoy his recent Fire in the Booth – this is a GOOD ONE:

5) UK HIPHOP (WELL, GRIME) CORNER PT.2! This is Manga’s new one. He’s ace, it’s ace, it’s called ‘Trip Around The Sun’, enjoy:

6) Finally this week, this is sort of terrible but also SO OF THE NOW. 100 YouTubers do a rap about Fortnite – THIS IS THE CULTURE HAPPENING RIGHT AT YOU.  It’s…it’s horrible, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s it for this week, BYE TAKE CARE TRY NOT TO GET ARRESTED IF YOU ARE PROTESTING AND PLEASE WEAR SUNSCREEN AND ENJOY THE WORLD CUP FINAL IF YOU WATCH IT AND, GENERALLY,, JUST TRY AND TAKE IT A BIT EASY, EH, IT’S BEEN A VERY LONG WEEK AND EVERYTHING’S STILL QUITE FRAUGHT BUT IT WILL HOPEFULLY BE OK I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU:

Another BIG step towards full dystopia this week – you don’t need me to list all the reasons, but my favourite “Christ, we really are living in a poorly-crafted miserable future novel from the mid-1990s” moment came with this Twitter thread which, amidst all the furore over Don’n’Kim, really is worth reading.

Otherwise though it’s been more of the same, although I did get to go on loads of rollercoasters on Tuesday so frankly I’m marginally less full of dread and fear than usual. You, though, probably didn’t – in fact, you’re probably feeling more jittery and scared than usual, what with all the EXCITING FOOTBALL TENSION / TANNED MORON CHIRPSING EXCITEMENT (delete per your preference) happening right now. Why not, then, ease off for a couple of hours – take my hand and let me guide you through the sunlit uplands of this week’s internet, pointing out the contentflowers and contentbees and contentbirds and definitely NOT leading you further and further along a twisted and confusing path from which there may well be no return and from whence you may quite possibly never come home – this, as ever, is WEB CURIOS.

By Matthew Grabelsky

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE CZARFACE/MF DOOM COLLAB WHICH I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO RATHER A LOT THIS WEEK AND WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ALSO ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST HEARD THE TODAY PROGRAM ASKING WHETHER KIDS’ OBSESSION WITH SOCIAL MEDIA IS A PUBLIC HEALTH HAZARD AND HONESTLY JUST WANTS TO GO BACK TO BED AT THIS POINT TBQHWYM:

• New Rules Around FB Custom Audiences: We’ve all basically forgotten about Facebook being privacy-denying dataminers, haven’t we? Turns out NOONE ACTUALLY CARED!!! Fine, yes, that’s perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but it does rather feel that the whole ‘hang on, these terms and conditions are dreadful!’ furore has blown over somewhat. Still, the fallout continues, and Facebook this week announced that the way in which you use data to create Custom Audiences on the platform will change from 2 July; the change is basically just a series of arsecovering measures from Facebook to comply with the exciting new post-GDPR world, and will require advertisers who create custom audiences from email or telephone records to…er…TICK A BOX! Yes, that’s right, you’ll now have to confirm that you have the right to use those emails or phone numbers in your marketing, and WOE BETIDE YOU if you don’t. This is sort-of laughable, really, but from a legal perspective probably just enough to make sure that compliance is YOUR problem rather than Facebook’s, regardless of the fact that the company is probably better equipped to pay any resulting fines than you are.

• Users Can Now Report Misleading FB Ads: Part two of this week’s series of cosmetic FB announcements designed to give users the illusion that they are more important to the platform than advertisers comes in the shape of this exciting development – users will now be able to leave feedback on adverts to let Facebook know whether the ad buyer in question has lived up to the promises made in the promotion, with advertisers who get significantly bad feedback being…er…well, it’s not really certain what will happen, but one might imagine there would be a process of denial of Facebook privileges and the like. See? They DO care about us! They DO!
• Facebook Doing Blood Donation: We’re not quite at the point where you can open a major artery, spaff the resulting lifejuice over your phone and magically deliver it to a needy car crash victim on the other side of the world (of course we’re not, what are you, an idiot?), but this is an interesting (and, depending on how you feel about social platforms being used to effect widespread behavioural change, quite significant) development for Facebook. Users in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan will now see a ‘Blood Donations’ tab on Facebook which will alert them to opportunities to donate in their local area; the platform will also be promoting the feature to raise awareness of blood shortages in each of the countries in question. By no means a bad idea, but grist to the mill of those who are slightly concerned at the degree to which Facebook is presenting itself as The Internet to users and governments in the developing world.
• Facebook Puts Memories In Its Own Place In The App: This is literally all I have to say about this development, other than that if your most treasured memories are housed on Facebook then I am so, so sorry.
• FB Provides ‘Clarity’ On Its Definition Of Political Ads: By which I mean, no clarity at all! I’m including this solely because I think it’s illustrative of exactly the sort of semantic clusterfcuk that’s resulting from attempting to define ‘political’ in an ad context; this post basically says “Yeah, we know a lot of you, publishers in particular, are a bit scared that we’ll just define anything we think is a bit contentious as ‘political’, but, well, tough!”, and basically acknowledges that whatever Facebook says goes. Which, per the NIB in Private Eye this week, doesn’t really seem to be working that well at all. Still, MORE ARSECOVERING!
• Insta Adds Shopping Tags To Stories: YOU CAN NOW SELL TAT TO IDIOTS USING INSTA STORIES! I could write more, but frankly that’s all you need to know. The piece is annoyingly unclear as to whether this is a feature available to everyone or just select retail partners, but, regardless, this will be everywhere in six months so DON’T FRET KIDS.
• Twitter Goes Big(ger) On News: As per usual, news of Twitter making changes to some of its features was met with POWER USERS (I really do hate that term) wailing and gnashing their teeth and making a series of predictable gags about how the platform really ought to BAN NAZIS instead. Which would obviously be A Good Thing, but sort of also fundamentally misinterprets the nature of Twitter as a business, to whit IT NEEDS TO GET MORE PEOPLE USING IT. That means normal people, not the sort of weirdos who already enjoy getting their kicks from being ‘funny’ in front of an anonymous audience of webmongs – these updates are not for us, they’re for the normies ffs. Anyway, “Twitter is making some major updates to the Explore feed, which will now surface curated pages dedicated to news stories surrounding breaking news, live events and stories in a way that will drive a closer fit to individual users’ interests and help them find more of what’s happening across the site. Some of these changes will also be popping up at the top of user home timelines in a bid to draw users down exploratory rabbit holes that expose them to new accounts and new communities.” In the main, this is going to mean a mixture of algo- and human-curated news and information being delivered to users through the app, positioning (or trying to position) Twitter squarely as the ‘I want to know what’s going on, let me open this and see’ app. Which is, one the one hand, an interesting idea; on the other, perhaps Twitter is underestimating the degree to which normal people want to keep UP TO DATE with the world vs the degree to which normal people actually want to completely ignore the world and instead masturbate to a nightly parade of pituitary meatheads on ITV2. Anyway, you can read Twitter’s own announcement here if you like; there’s literally nothing I can see here for brands ATM, though obviously I may be violently wrong about this.
• Snap Kit Launches: As mentioned in THESE VERY PAGES a few weeks back, Snapchat has now launched its developer kit which allows, er, developers to leverage the app in EXCITING WAYS! From logging in via Snap, to allowing users to use Snap functionality within third party apps, to, bafflingly, letting you do things like use Bitmoji in your Tinder chats, this is a whole HOST of fascinating opportunities; the article linked to here is actually very good indeed on what you might be able to do with this, not least the integration of Snaps and Stories into third-party apps. Seriously, read this one, it’s useful and potentially important.
• Snapchat Launches Ticket Sales: It’s only a trial, and only in LA, and only with one commercial partner, but obviously this is going to be a THING everywhere and for everyone eventually, so, you know, PREPARE.
• Snapchat Adding Sales Tracking To Ad Impact Metrics: I saw quite a few articles this week touting this stuff with a strapline along the lines of ‘Snap wants to show advertisers its products are as good as Facebook’s’, which, well, made me laugh quite a lot; still, this initiative (launching, apparently, with a UK supermarket ‘imminently’) is a useful step in the right direction towards them being able to prove exactly how little a Custom Filter will actually impact your bottom line. Oh, and “Snapchat has also launched its marketing mix modelling (MMM) partner programme, which includes tie-ups with Neustar Marketshare, Analytics Partners, Kantar and Nielsen, to Europe. In coming this side of the ponds its also adding new collaborations with the likes of D2D (Dentsu Aegis), Ninah (Publicis) and independent MMM providers Ebiquity, Ekimetrics and Nepa. Skewed towards helping marketers justify their spend on Snapchat, the MMM scheme will see advertisers being given access to third-party data to better understand Snap’s impact on actions like sales and sign-ups.” Let’s…let’s not think about exactly how fudgey these numbers are going to be.
• You Can Now Delete Snapchat Messages Whenever You Want: What have you been sending?
• Reuters Digital News Report 2018: A whole report on how we, the world, are consuming news in 2018, with country-by-country breakdowns of media trust, popular sources and the like. The main takeaways are that Twitter is surprisingly popular as a news source, suggesting that, my pointless snark aside, they may well be right in their decision to go hard on this in their latest update, that people are sharing less news via Facebook and more via messaging platforms, that embedded video on publisher sites is hugely unpopular, and that Whatsapp is absolutely dominating news distribution in the developing / second world. You can read some topline analysis by Rob Blackie here, but it’s really worth looking at the whole thing (no, really, I promise it is).
• How Online Ad Tracking Works: There was an article on VICE last week – which I didn’t link to because it was appalling journalism – which once again rolled out the ‘your phone may be listening to you! And targeting ads! Based on what you’re saying!’ line without any actual proof whatsoever; it was subsequently fairly comprehensively debunked, but made the appearance of this Twitter thread (here conveniently unrolled) this week rather timely. This is an excellent, simple explanation of all the totally legitimate ways in which ads can follow you around the web, which is not only worth reading but worth sending to all your normie mates to explain that, honestly, the online tracking horse has not only bolted but is in fact happily eating grass and frolicking in a field several miles east of here now, so they may as well not worry too much about the gate.
• An Ad For TBWA: I saw this this morning and thought it was honestly one of the best agency promos I’d seen for a while, and pretty much captures perfectly (and simply) how comms can (or ought to) work in 2018 (it also captures perfectly how completely fcuking stupid EVERYTHING is in the here and now, but let’s not worry about that so much).  
• The Lockdown: This is billed as ‘The Wold’s First AR Mobile Phone Escape Room’ and OF COURSE it’s a piece of sponsored content by a bank! Step forward ABN AMRO, who have paid an unknown (but doubtless chunky) fee to build this AR game for both iOS and Android in order to, er, well…nope, I have no idea WHATSOEVER why they built it, but well done them. It’s actually quite fun, in a slightly clunky way, but, honestly, I would LOVE to hear how this was pitched.
• Universal Love: Last up in the ‘tedious stuff about social media and advermarketingpr and brands’ section, this is, fine, a bit of Pride bandwagoning, but I rather like the idea and so I’ll give it a pass. MGM Resorts has commissioned a bunch of pretty famous artists to rerecord classic love songs in gender switched versions (so, for example, Kele from Bloc Party singing ‘My Guy’, or St Vincent doing ‘And Then She Kissed Me’) and made them available to stream or download. It’s lovely, you honestly can’t hate this even if you try.

By Liam Cobb

NEXT UP, WHY NOT ENJOY LISTENING TO THE BACK CATALOGUE OF DJ SHADOW’S ‘FIND, SHARE, REWIND’ SHOWS?

THE SECTION WHICH WENT TO THORPE PARK THIS WEEK AND HONESTLY BELIEVES THAT THE AUTHORITIES NEED TO STEP IN AND BAN CONTOURING MAKEUP VIDEOS FROM YOUTUBE BECAUSE THERE IS AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF TEENAGE GIRLS WALKING AROUND OUT THERE WITH KIM KARDASHIAN’S FACE SEEMINGLY PAINTED OVER THEIR OWN AND IT IS, I WOULD HUMBLY SUGGEST, NOT OK, PT.1:

• Asgardia: One of the companies that pays me for my time – I mean, that’s really all they pay me for, I certainly haven’t done any work in months – yesterday received a press release announcing that, among others, Lembit Opik (former MP, former Cheeky Girl botherer, asteroid enthusiast and regular contender for the title of ‘handsiest MP in Westminster’ for much of the 00s) had been elected as one of the first MPs of the ‘Space Kingdom’ Asgardia. Well, I couldn’t not check it out and, wow, WHAT A PLACE! Asgardia is set to be (it is not set to be) the first ever Space Nation! It has a flag, and a coat of arms, and an ANTHEM! (Never mind that it doesn’t exist!) “Asgardia was created with three top goals in mind: to ensure the peaceful use of space, to protect the Earth from space hazards, and to create a demilitarized and free scientific base of knowledge in space. Asgardia also has a long-term objective of setting up habitable platforms in space and building settlements on the Moon. We believe that the creation of a new legal platform for the exploration of near-Earth and deep space is crucial to keep pace with humanity’s rapid technological and scientific expansion off-planet. Universal space law and astro-politics have to replace the current outdated international space law and geopolitics.” Which is all nice, fine, but sort of ignores the fact that there may be one or two issues down here on Earth which we might want to look into first. Still, with Lembit leading us into this glorious space future, how can we fail? Wonderfully, ANYONE can become an Asgardian just by signing up with an email address, so I look forward to seeing you in space in a few short years time. Honestly, it’s worth checking out the FAQ; it goes into quite startling detail about how electoral systems will work, but doesn’t do a great job of explaining WHAT THE SHUDDERING FCUK THIS WHOLE THING ACTUALLY IS OR WHY IT EXISTS.

• Stonewall Forever: A website collecting and presenting the history and story of Stonewall, from the riots to its establishment as a movement and byword for LGBTx rights worldwide. “Stonewall Forever is a project to find, preserve and share the untold stories of the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the early years of the LGBTQ rights movement. The LGBT Community Center with support from Google.org is gathering, digitizing and archiving this crucial history. The stories will be included in an interactive monument in honor of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.” An important archiving project which deserves to be spread far and wide, please do share this around.
• GOAT: A rather beautifully designed website for sneakerheads, presenting a frankly incredible lineup of trainers (not just any trainers, you understand, but the sort of trainers that get bearded men in their 30s/40s who were bullied at school but have never looked back since they grew a beard and got into BAPE and DJing and Ninja Tunes in the 90s and who now describe themselves as ‘A Creative’ INCREDIBLY excited) available for sale – new, used and slightly defective versions of the sort of footwear which commands hushed, reverent commentary from the fandom. Some of you might like this – actually, who am I kidding, most of you work in advermarketingpr, this is basically like crack for you.
• The Weather Report: A really interesting idea, this. The Weather Report is a site which lets anyone write a short series of answers to some set questions, which can then be shared via a URL with anyone they like; the idea is that it’s a way for people to share difficult or hard news with others in a relatively low-friction way. So, rather than having to email everyone, or answer individual questions, or write a Facebook post, you can fill in this stuff and just share the url – which strikes me as an eminently sensible idea which it would be great to see being adopted more widely, perhaps as a baked-in feature within platforms. As someone who did the whole ‘a bad thing happened, here is a post about it so I don’t have to explain it to everyone’ FB post a few years back and really wished I hadn’t had to, I can heartily endorse the thinking behind this.
• E3 Recap: This week has seen the annual Vegas jamboree that is E3, the videogames world’s BIG EVENT where publishing studios announce a bunch of new stuff, and thousands of overly-entitled men (it is always men) get angry about it and shout online about how EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE and ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM and SJWs SPOILING EVERYTHING (you think I’m joking? Take a gentle stroll through some of the reactions to a new title trailing a same-sex kiss) – you all have real jobs and things to do, so probably haven’t been able to keep up with all the news, so this site collects it all for you in helpful fashion – every title, with trailers, collected in one place. Only of interest to videogame nerds, obviously, so the rest of you can happily ignore this one.
• Slay Duggee: Continuing my occasional series of ‘Kickstarters We Can All Get Behind’, this is a project to create a metal / punk album for children, inspired by kids’ TV favourite ‘Hey Duggee’ (whose World Cup anthem ‘Kick’ is honestly amazing, and only improved by this metal cover version). Do you want to listen to the fcuking CBeebies album AGAIN in the car, or do you want to listen to a child-friendly version of Extreme Noise Terror? Well, quite. BACK IT.
• The World Cup API: An API! For the World Cup! I don’t know what you might do with it! But I am including it anyway! Maybe you could use it to, I don’t know, make a particular song play every time a goal is scored. Look, you’re the ‘creatives’ and ‘planners’ and ‘strategists’, I just collect links and try not to feel too scared.
• The World Cook: Obviously this is a RUBBISH month for anyone who dislikes football – I am sorry, I feel for you – but there are some World Cup-themed things which should be tolerable even for the refuseniks among you. This, for example – THE WORLD COOK! Collecting recipes from each of the 32 countries participating the in tournament, with new dishes dropping throughout, this is a lovely project and as an added bonus the recipes are presented in genuinely appealing fashion – the step-by-step photos are really helpful, particularly when making stuff from FOREIGN LANDS that you might not have cooked before.
• Control Your Phone With Your Eyes: Your latest shot of AR future tech – this is very cool indeed.
• The Most Iconic World Cup Photos: Here at Web Curios I have a fairly strong policy about the word ‘iconic’ as it’s almost always meaningless; in this instance, though, it’s deserved as these photos are AWESOME. You can’t help but feel the prickly onset of WORLD CUP FEVER as you look at these.
• Football Fields Around The World: More photos of football, this time of slightly idiosyncratic pitches around the globe. Awesome – the photo of the kids playing in Southwark, modern cars aside, could have been taken at any point in the past 100 years, and is SUCH a perfect ‘jumpers for goalposts’ shot, for example – and oddly reminiscent of Goal Click, a project I’ve featured on here before but which I’d urge you to check out again as it’s ace and they are friends of mine.
• All The World Cup Predictions: Do we still believe in Nate Silver? Not sure what the answer to that one is post-2016, but in case we do then here’s FiveThirtyEight’s World Cup prediction hub, updated LIVE in order to help you make statistical sense of all the FOOTBALLING MADNESS (NB I promise that all the football links are done now, honest).
• Dialogue: Everyone thinks they can write a novel, don’t they? And you can! Just be aware that it most likely won’t be worth reading! I imagine much the same applies to screenplays to be honest – helping fuel that slightly deluded fire of creativity is this app, which offers you the opportunity to write dialogue in an interface styled around messaging on your phone; the idea being that the display will help you write ‘natural’ dialogue which you can then export. Which is sort of funny when you consider exactly how ‘natural’ people’s text message exchanges are, but wevs I guess.
• The Creative Future Literary Awards: I am VERY late to this, and the deadline is in a few days, but if you’re a writer from an underrepresented group with work they would like to submit then GET TO IT. Open to poetry and prose, short stories and articles and all sorts of forms, this is a prize awarded to work by the sorts of people who don’t normally win literary prizes. Fcuk Shriver, this sort of thing is important and A Good Thing.
• Ludwig Favre: A photographer’s Insta feed, but a particularly good one. Glorious landscapes, pastel colours and a particularly nice line in depth and layering to these, imho.
• The Olympians: An incredible one-man labour of love, this site is seemingly written and maintained by one person – the idea behind it is to look forward to the 2020 Games in Tokyo, whilst simultaneously looking back at the last Games to be held in the city in 1964. This is very, very dense, but there’s so much fascinating material in here – I honestly don’t care about sport at all, but this is so full of stories and history that it’s hard not to get sucked in.
• Layers of London: An interactive London map which lets you layer various other historical views over the standard 21C view to give you an idea of how Tudor London mapped onto the present day, say. I particularly like the way you can adjust the transparency so as to be able to see exactly how the city’s changed over time; this is really rather fascinating.
• Performative Woke Man: A one-note gag, but a good one – this Twitter account skewers the sort of painfully earnest wokeness of a certain type of Twitter man (not you of course – I couldn’t possibly be talking about you!), whose performative allydom (is that a word? It’s a fcuking ugly one if so, sorry about that) masks a fairly strong desire to get into the pants of every woman he encounters. Is this about you? Is it by you? I feel like I know its creator from somewhere, but that might just be because this is basically every single London media man in their 20s/30s.
• Polymega: This is middle-aged nerd heaven. Seemingly not even available to pre-order yet, this won’t stop some of you getting all sweaty-palmed with anticipation – the Polymega (appalling name, lads) is a modular retro gaming system, which will let you basically construct your own bespoke old-school gaming stack comprising whichever systems you prefer. Want an NES, Megadrive, NeoGeo and PS1? NO PROBLEM. It looks really rather slick, includes all the sorts of fancy bolt-ons you’d expect from 2018 (Twitch streaming, Bluetooth controller, OS, etc), and, should it ever actually make it to market (I have skeptical feelings, to my shame) will rocket right to the top of every tshirt wearing manchild in Christendom (except this one).
• AR Pogs: Pogs are one of those weird 90s relics which I was just too old for and which as a result I don’t really understand – like LA Gear trainers or something. Nonetheless, you may be younger than me and currently winding your way down a nostalgia rabbithole back to those good old analogue days in which all you needed to make you happy were some cardboard discs with some slightly shonky 90s-style XTREME artwork on them – now forget that, and come back to a present in which this is instead turned into a digital game but with the added bonus that you can, er, scan all your old Pogs for AR fun. WHO STILL HAS POGS???? Seriously, these people are asking for $50k to cater for the audience of people who, bafflingly, have kept all their old Pogs from the 90s? I’m not pretending to have any sort of deep knowledge of the Pog enthusiast community, fine, but it does rather feel like every single person within that demographic would have to donate a grand to make this work. Still, if this appeals to you then chuck them some cash – they need about 35k in the next 3 weeks to make AR Pogs a reality (dear God, even typing that made me sad).
• Wheel of Fortune Answers: Tweeting pictures of incomplete boards from the Wheel Of Fortune game and suggesting answers which might be, but probably aren’t, right. You sort of need to click this to get it (unless you’re better at understanding my garbled prose descriptions than I am), but it’s worth it, honest.
• Archive Tweet: VERY useful, if potentially a bit cnuty – reply to any Tweet @-ing the Archive Tweet account, and the service will, er, archive the Tweet in perpetuity, meaning that you’ll ALWAYS have the evidence that THAT PERSON said THAT BAD THING on the internet. Like your very own personal wayback machine tagger, and exactly the sort of thing that journalists and other online arseholes will adore.
• Daily Purr: An Insta feed which posts minimalist cartoons about cats. These are fcuking WONDERFUL.

By Noirchen

NEXT, WHY NOT CHALLENGE YOUR EARS AND MIND WITH THE VERY WONKY SOUNDS OF DAVID SHANE SMITH?

THE SECTION WHICH WENT TO THORPE PARK THIS WEEK AND HONESTLY BELIEVES THAT THE AUTHORITIES NEED TO STEP IN AND BAN CONTOURING MAKEUP VIDEOS FROM YOUTUBE BECAUSE THERE IS AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF TEENAGE GIRLS WALKING AROUND OUT THERE WITH KIM KARDASHIAN’S FACE SEEMINGLY PAINTED OVER THEIR OWN AND IT IS, I WOULD HUMBLY SUGGEST, NOT OK, PT.2:

• Anon Opinion: I don’t know what’s happened to Rob Manuel of late – he’s gone one some sort of massive online creation bender, for which I am obviously hugely grateful, but does rather run the risk of me having to make him his own section in Curios. Anyway, this is his latest game/toy/project, Anon Opinion, which is tweeting out a selection of user-submitted ‘unpopular opinions’, riffing off the recent-and-slightly-played-out Twitter game. There are some GEMS in here, and you can rest (fairly) assured that Rob’s applying some manual curation to make sure that it doesn’t end up getting 4Channed and just shouting “ACTUALLY HITLER HAD SOME QUITE GOOD IDEAS” over and over again. You can submit your own unpopular opinion, anonymously, here – they’d better be anonymous, or some of you are never working again (although to the person who wrote “I am actually quite into the idea of incest, it’s just my family are all ugly”, BRAVO!).
• Libraire Mollat: The Insta feed of an indie bookshop in Paris. Retailers, look at this and LEARN, it is just lovely.
• Hit Like A Girl: Hit Like A Girl is an annual drumming contest for women – the website collects all the winners and entrants from the 2018 round, and CHRIST are they good. You may have seen the winner doing the rounds online this week, but it’s worth looking at all of these as there is some awesome talent on display here – parents, buy your daughters drum kits! Electric ones, though, with headphones, because I don’t want to have to hear them practice. Thanks.
• List Cleaner: You almost certainly don’t need this, given with how you’ve cleaned up all your mailing lists post-GDPR (HAVEN’T YOU???), but on the offchance that yours are still a bit dusty then this might be of use – an automatic service that does deduping and all the basic things which otherwise you’d have to bully an intern into doing.
• Aural Archipelago: Web anthropology is increasingly one of my favourite things (yes, I am fun at parties, why do you ask?) and this site, collecting the sounds of the Indonesian archipelago along with associated history and stories, is a lovely example of it, “an online repository for the musical sights and sounds of Indonesia, the most musically diverse country on the planet. Part digital archive, part blog, Aural Archipelago mixes field recording, video, photography, and in-depth articles compiled from years of travels across the archipelago.” Gorgeous – and, if you’re a DJ or musician, an excellent source of unusual inspiration.
• Art Passport: A wonderful idea, this – Art Passport is an app through which you will regularly be able to access ‘VR’ (not really VR, just 360 filming) viewings of exhibitions at major museums around the world, with new ones being added regularly (they say daily, in fact)- if you’re an art lover then this is pretty much essential. Honestly, I know I’m a miserable and pessimistic and bleak-hearted, dead-souled mess in the main, but stuff like this is genuinely wonderful and makes me slightly happy to be living in the future. Slightly.
• Ovie: Then, of course, I find another Kickstarter and the rage returns. This is Ovie, a SMART TUPPERWARE SOLUTION that noone asked for; should it get funded (of course it’s getting funded! It’s a pointless solution to a non-problem aimed at the global one percent!) it will allow you to put stuff in tupperware, set an expiry date, and then have all your electronic devices (including your Amazon Home Surveillance Device!) yell at you incessantly that THE CARROTS ARE GOING OFF. Yes, that’s right, you can now ensure that inanimate objects will reinforce and amplify your own existing sense of guilt and shame at your food wastage, you lucky, lucky things. There is one person who will be genuinely excited at reading this, I know, and to them I say “GET HELP SAZ”.
• Cat Explorer: This is a piece of software for the still-seemingly-illusory Magic Leap headset, whose makers continue to claim that it will one day actually be a real thing but who are concurrently doing absolutely nothing to convince that it’s not in fact all a very long-running and elaborate scam. Still, they’re releasing tech demos like this one – confusingly, available to play with on standard VR (Oculus/HTC) sets – which give a theoretical idea of the sort of things you’ll be able to do with the kit. In this instance, that means exploring the insides of a cute, CG cat – yes, you basically get to play X-Ray doctor with a cartoon moggy, running your hands up and down its body to expose its skeleton and viscera (but, let me reassure you, in a cute way!). It’s hugely impressive and very fun-looking, but doesn’t go any way towards making me think that Magic Leap is ever going to be reality.
• Xtian Miller: Typographic poster design on Instagram. REALLY GOOD typographic poster design on Instagram, in fact.
• What Did Earth Look Like 240m Years Ago?: Put in your postcode and see where YOUR house was hundreds of millions on years ago (clue: not where it is now). Pangea is quite a mental thing when you see it all laid out like this – geology’s quite cool really (sentences that mark one down as firmly embedded in middle-age, part x of a series of y).
• Creator Resource: A repository of advice, help and useful resources for people who are trying to make a living as independent comic book artists; there’s stuff here on contracts, copyright, getting paid, etc, and whilst it’s got a North American skew one of the people behind it is from the UK and so they should also be able to potentially help non-North Americans out a bit too. A Good Thing – share with anyone you know who’s trying to eke out a career as an indie artist of any stripe.
• Canals Of Britain: Christ, there really is no way around this – I am getting OLD. There’s no other explanation for quite how pleased I was at finding this, a map of all the old, abandoned, disused and soon-to-be-restored waterways of the British Isles which you can zoom around to plan your next walking holiday. See? Walking holidays. This is what I am reduced to. It’ll be Hornby trainsets and haemorrhoid cushions before you know it.
• Mara: Simple, easy-to-use online photo editor – if you know how to use photoshop then you won’t need this as there are far more powerful versions of this sort of thing elsewhere, but if you’re a…er…slightly less sophisticated image manipulator, you’ll find the helpful and clear interface here a boon.
• Instant 3d Photos: Not quite yet, admittedly, but this is the closest look I’ve yet seen at the tech which Facebook announced at F8 earlier this year which they claimed would let us turn our standard photos into VR-explorable 3d landscapes. It’s undeniably impressive, as long as you take it with the appropriate pinches of salt, and I can see this sort of thing being hugely impressive when applied to sports photography, for example. Before that, though, we’ll have to sit through all the tedious ways in which it’s going to be used for low-grade bongo – hold tight, ignore the poorly-rendered 3d cocks and we’ll be in the exciting future of photography before we know it.
• Focusmate: This is a very, very odd idea indeed. I spend quite a lot of time working from home, and even when I don’t I may as well be due to my charming insistence on ignoring my coworkers in favour of the wonderful and exciting WORLD OF THE WEB; others, though, seem to derive more comfort from a sense of company and companionship when toiling, and it’s for them that Focusmate seemingly exists. As far as I can tell, this is basically Chatroulette but for work – you tell it when you want to work and for how long; when that time comes, the service emails you with a link whereby you and your anonymous work buddy can log on, observing each other by video link so that you can…er…work silently in each others’ presence. WHO WANTS THIS???? Can you imagine anything worse than sitting at your kitchen table typing away and knowing that someone else is watching you do it? Seeing them doing the same in a little window in the top-right of your screen, getting silently, seethingly annoyed at the way they type and the way their nostrils flare? This is an atrocious idea; the only people I can see this appealing to are the types of men who like to aggressively masturbate at blameless strangers online – are YOU one of those men? I do hope not, I like to think better of my readers.
• Neverthink: This is quite a smart idea, I think, whilst at the same time being a really silly one. Neverthink is telly on the web – you fire it up, pick a ‘channel’ and watch, mindlessly, as it presents you with a seemingly infinite collection of videos on whatever theme you’ve chosen. Crippled by the INFINITE CHOICE of entertainment available to you? Abnegate that choice to a mystery algorithm – although actually the channels are ‘curated’ by actual people, which makes the whole thing more interesting than I’d first thought. There are LOADS of channels, they add news ones all the time (the ‘Bourdain’ one is new, for example), and if you are prone to senseless surfing and mindless staring then this could be right up your street.
• Wobble Yoga: This is very, very silly, but oddly addictive; if you can get past level 6 I will be hugely impressed.
• The Last Days Of Our Castle: Finally this week, a ‘game’ story in the style of an old CGA PC adventure – I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but I can’t recommend strongly enough that you try it; the music is gorgeous, the writing is great, and the whole thing has a perfect, abandoned fairytale vibe that is just wonderful. Enjoy.

By Pejac

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Hungover Owls: It’s been a slow week for Tumblrs, hence the inclusion of this venerable classic – it’s still fcuking great, though.

• Dean Adams Ceramics: Dean Adams is an excellent ceramicist. This is his photoblog, collecting images of his work. I love it rather.
• OK Cupid Woes: Inspired by this Tweet from Emma the other day, Kevin pointed me at this excellent Tumblr collecting examples of men being dicks on OK Cupid. FFS MEN!

LAST UP, THIS IS THE B-SIDES COLLECTION ACCOMPANYING DJ SPOOKY’S NEW ALBUM AND IT IS EXCELLENT AND DANCEHALL FEELS VERY MUCH LIKE A WORLD CUP APPROPRIATE SOUND TO END ON!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• Don’t Eat Before Reading This: The death of Anthony Bourdain last week saw a greater-than-usual outpouring of online grief, at least in the bits of online I see; what was interesting to see how many different tranches of people had been touched in some way by his work, from his Kitchen Confidential days to the recent global TV superstardom. Kitchen Confidential was the first book I ever read about food that made me want to work in a kitchen – it simultaneously proved to me that I was nowhere near hard-working, driven and obsessive to do so. This is the essay in the New Yorker in 1999 which launched post-Les Halles Bourdain onto the world, and which eventually became the book that made his name; he repudiated the more macho stuff in later life, and was honest and open about how much of an arsehole his addict self had been, but, regardless, this is a wonderful piece of writing and is so, so sad to reread.

• Bourdain and the Truth: There have been many, many tributes written to Bourdain this week; this, again from the New Yorker, is by Helen Rosner and is an excellent portrait of the man, his life and work.
• Tony: This, by contrast, is an intensely personal and very, very sad essay by David Simon (who wrote The Wire and worked with Bourdain on a variety of scripts), about losing his friend – this is a beautiful elegy.
• Inside VICE: The big story in media land this week – if you discount The Man and The Hookers, obvs – was this expose of Shane Smith and the VICE empire, which to the surprise of precisely noone told the story of how the entire thing was built on smoke and mirrors and lies, and all done very much by the seat of their pants. I knew one of the guys who worked on VICE when it was a Canadian-only offshoot bitd; he’d moved to London and was working on the UK version which was just starting up at the time, and the parties I went to (and the…uh…relaxed attitude to the law and drugs and the general concept of ‘work’ that maintained at the time) makes me think that there’s a truly wonderful Wolf of Wall Street-style film waiting to be made about all of this. VICE, let’s be clear, sounds like a pretty fcuking bleak place to work.
• Culture and Economic Development: An interesting essay about the relationship between culture and economic development, specifically looking at London and New York and presenting the argument that culture is a major driver – if not the major driver – of economic development and regeneration in major urban centres. Which the data suggests is true, fine, but which also ignores the other inference from this, to whit that it’s culture which is the major harbinger of the sort of gentrification which is pushing normal people out of cities and replacing them with empty high rises and generic media wankers like me.
• AI Is Not A Community Management Strategy: A really good piece about the limits of automating community standards online, and how whilst it’s an understandable method of attempting to define the terms of discourse, it’s fundamentally insufficient when it comes to attempting to actually develop and maintain a culture in any meaningful sense. I particularly like the sideswipe at AI as a catch-all solution to stuff – “try replacing the term ‘AI’ with ‘recipe’ and see if it still makes sense” is a statement which should be applied to basically everything which is banding ‘artificial intelligence’ around in 2018.
• How Terence Eden Became Da Vinci: This is EXCELLENT and a perfect example of why ‘WE WILL VERIFY IT ON THE BLOCKCHAIN’ is not perhaps the universal solution to everything in the world ever. Eden shows how he was able to become verified on an online art platform – POWERED BY THE BLOCKCHAIN, natch – as Leonardo Da Vinci, neatly exposing the fundamental flaw in a lot of this universal record ledger stuff (that being, people).
• The Influence of Twitter’s Power Users: Quite a timely piece, this – the past month or so has seen various bits of Twitter discussing the rights and wrongs of ‘pile-ons’; that is, the practice of quote-Tweeting someone to your followers with the implicit expectation that said followers will give the writer of the original Tweet some warm, cuddly Twitter love on your behalf. We’ve seen Elon Musk do it (and it’s he who’s the subject of the piece), and even lefty Twitter’s been in a tizzy about it with Owen Jones repeatedly being accused of encouraging his somewhat frothy-mouthed devotees to have a bit of a go at people who don’t share his one true faith. The piece basically articulates that there’s a point on a platform such as Twitter, with its necessarily aysmmetric power dynamics, where you have sufficient clout so as to be able to make other people’s lives unpleasant and, based on that, maybe people ought to be a bit less dickish. Seems sensible, doesn’t it? And yet here we are.
• Makeup Shades: This is ANOTHER of the Pudding’s superb dataviz articles, which I’m including in the longreads as there’s quite a lot of meat to this one and I found the subject matter generally interesting. The piece compares the tones of major makeup ranges on sale in various countries around the world to explore whether Rihanna’s recently-released Fenty range of cosmetics do in fact offer a revolutionary range of tones for people of colour (spoiler: they sort of do). What’s remarkable looking at this is how poor the offering for non-white skin tones has seemingly traditionally been – and the extent to which, looking at the Indian market, colourism really is a depressingly real issue.
• Skam: If you work in TV development, the only show title you’re more sick of hearing than Love Island is Skam – if you don’t, though, there’s no reason you’ll necessarily have heard of it. Skam was last year’s BIG INTERNATIONAL BREAKOUT SUCCESS STORY – a Norwegian show set in a school, presented weekly but with the groundbreaking conceit of having the characters lives play out across social media in realtime between broadcasts, offering viewers not only the opportunity to delve into their favourite characters’ inner lives but also to get clues and hints to how the plot might play out. The series was a HUGE hit in Norway and beyond, and has recently been picked up by US TV – it’s being remade for Facebook Watch, and the platform’s staking a lot on it being a success. This piece is a really nice overview of what the show is, why it’s special, and why you are likely to see an awful lot more stuff riffing on the online/offline thing in 2019 (although the grumpy old man in me wants to shout “YES BUT SKINS AND MISFITS DID THIS STUFF YEARS AGO FFS”).
• Wooodcut Memes: There is nothing new under the sun, a point proved perfectly and eloquently by this piece which explains how medieval woodcuts fulfilled the same function as internet-era memes, being endlessly repurposed for different audiences and with different messages. I would be VERY HAPPY if someone could make one of these the next American Chopper, so could you hurry up and do it please? Thanks
• The Local TV Scam: This is a brilliant piece, and a truly crazy and very British story – Local TV is a company which is seemingly exploiting loopholes around regional broadcasting to secure government funding for its work, to the tune of millions, despite making programming which is being watched by a few hundred people at most. Some of the details here are just perfect – the line about the guy behind the company calling the reported back by accident from his pocket is just too perfect. Feels rather like it might be the setup for a Drop The Dead Donkey-style sitcom, which isn’t the worst idea I;ve had all week tbh.
• Instagram Threads: Equal parts baffling and depressing (to me at least, a nearly-40 year old man sitting in his kitchen at the tail end of 7000 words and feeling a touch enervated, if I’m honest with you), this article explores the phenomenon of self-care ‘thread’ accounts on Insta, which post (as far as I can tell) incredibly anodyne ‘self care tips’ for teens. I don’t know what’s more saddening – the fact that I am almost certain that a lot of these are going to pivot to trying to monetise their audience, or that children are so lost and weirded out by LIFE that they’re finding some sort of hope and comfort in this sub-Hallmark bullshit. HMMMM.
• Snowflake: A beautiful photoessay (more essay than photo, fine, but the photos are incredible) about Wilson Bentley, who used home-made equipment and a ridiculous amount of ingenuity to take some truly staggering photographs of snowflakes in quite remarkable close up. This is heartwarming.
• You Have The Right To Remain Silent: I always enjoy reading Dan Hon’s thoughts, and this is a typically smart essay about the increasing extent to which we as web users are being asked questions by the services and systems we use to which there is no obvious means of opting out, and what that means from a human and UX/UI point of view. JUST SAY NO TO THE MACHINES.
• The Sinful History of Canoes: This is WONDERFUL. Did you know that back in the olden days, when teens wanted to get some QUALITY ALONE TIME and to touch each others’ mucus membranes they would occasionally repair to a canoe to do so? NO YOU DID NOT! Just take a moment to imagine your own awkward, teenage fumblings – now take another moment to imagine them, but transposed to the inside of a canoe. There is no WAY you wouldn’t capsize, deposited overboard, bum akimbo, to the laughter of your bankside peers. I love the moral outrage displayed in this 1912 newspaper article – “misconduct in canoes has become so grave and flagrant that it threatens to throw a shadow upon the lakes as recreation resorts and to bring shame upon the city.” A CITY SHAMED BY CANOE CHIRPSING! Seriously, take a boat out on the Serpentine this weekend and get fingering; it’s basically historical reenactment.
• The Politics of Now: An LRB piece on the World Cup, looking at the in-no-way-at-all-corrupt manner in which it happened to be hosted in Russia this year and Qatar the next time around. The stuff about Jack Warner won’t be new to regular readers of the back pages, but the sheer scale and brazenness of the corruption’s quite remarkable. I was quite taken by the line at the end, which questioned how long it would be before we saw a similar degree of fervour about virtual sporting tournaments – if the Fortnite craze is anything to go by, and the Twitch numbers on it are mental fyi, not long at all.
• Ethical Cannibalism: WARNING: THIS IS ABOUT COOKING AND EATING PEOPLE, AND CONTAINS QUITE GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF HUMAN TACOS. I confess to having felt a bit, well, funny after reading this; it’s the story of a bloke off Reddit who had to have his leg amputated and decided to see what it would be like to cook and eat his now-no-longer-needed foot. People are odd. Maybe don’t read this over lunch.
• What If I’m Just A Minor Writer: I loved this essay so much. One of the best things my mum has ever said to me (up there with other classics such as “I may love you, Matthew, but I don’t have to like you”) was a few years back where she casually dropped into conversation that she had “realised you weren’t special many years ago”; I mean, fine, it sounds brutal, but it’s also eminently true. This is a beautiful piece about being a writer and the creeping realisation that your work is…ok. Not storied, not for the ages, but…ok. CELEBRATE YOUR MEDIOCRITY WITH ME, WEBMONGS!
• Looking For A Fight: Finally this week, a beautiful and sad look at the last touring boxing tent in Australia, which travels the country with a ragtag bunch of washed up old soaks charging $20 a pop to the public to go three rounds with them. This is poetry, and has the feel of something that could be novelised without much effort – the characters are wonderful and broken, and you can practically smell the stale weed and boozesweats by the end. Truly glorious writing.

By Milena Naef

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS:

1. If you only listen to one song this week, make it this one. It is AMAZING – it’s called ‘Girls’, it’s by Girl in Red, and it’s about being young and queer and it’s such an INCREDIBLY beautiful piece of indiepop that it makes me want to be 15 again:

2) This is called ‘War Dance’ – it’s a housey-electro-type track, but the video’s the real star here; this is a wonderful piece of filmmaking:

3) I don’t normally feature country music here because, well, I don’t like it, as a rule; this is a rare exception, as this track by HC McIntyre rather grabbed me. It’s called “Baby’s Got The Blues”, which is SUCH a cliche title, but the song’s a lot better than that would suggest, and the video’s a lovely series of compositions in chiaroscuro and worth paying attention to; the lighting on her face is just wonderful:

4) I saw Cigarettes After Sex last year – they were wonderful, but they do lend themselves more to listening on record than at a gig imho. This is their latest, called ‘Crush’, and it will make you want to do both the things their name suggests:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is a newish one from Tyler; he is SO SO GOOD:

6) 10 minutes of oddly satisfying things. Because it’s been a long week, I know, and you need this:

7) Finally this week, absolutely the best fusion of Scottish and Punjabi music you will hear all year. This is ‘Drowsy Maggy’, as performed by The Snake Charmer, and it is pleasingly mental, and I can imagine it being played at multicultural weddings North of the border for many years to come. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE FOOTBALL CONSOLE YOURSELF WITH THE FACT THAT YOU CAN DO LOADS OF COOL STUFF LIKE GOING TO LARGELY EMPTY CINEMAS OR TO THE THEATRE OR TO FANCY RESTAURANTS WHILE THE ENGLAND GAMES ARE ON SO CHIN UP AND CHEER UP I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!