Hi! Hi! How are you? How’s it going? What’s new?

I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S NEW IT’S THIS EDITION OF WEB CURIOS! New and FULL OF STUFF! I’ve neither the time nor inclination to wax lyrical about how banjaxed everything is this week – instead let me inform you that there are some CRACKING links in the following selection, that there’s an honest-to-goodness novella for you to look forward to in the longreads (I mean a real one, by an actual proper writer, not my typically-overlong wordvomit), and there’s a dance track all about how TERRIBLE social media is right at the end. WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE??

That’s right, NOTHING. Love EVERYTHING about Web Curios, you ingrates, especially the fact that I DO IT ALL FOR YOU. 

Crikey, bit shouty today, turns out. I’ll leave this here, then, for you to hold and stroke and touch and explore and enjoy in whatever manner you see fit (but, please, do wipe it down afterwards for the next reader). I am Matt, today is Friday, this is Web Curios and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves. 

By Thisset

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL OFFERINGS, HAVE THIS EXCELLENT SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF FEMALE-FRONTED CLASSIC ROCK AND ROLL!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T NECESSARILY THINK THAT OUTSOURCING THE PROBLEM OF ONLINE BULLYING TO RUDIMENTARY AI SYSTEMS IS A PARTICULARLY GOOD THING:

• Instagram ‘Fixes’ Bullying!: It has! No, really, look! Instagram has finally begun to roll out its new, AI-based anti-meanness features, whereby users who write MEAN COMMENTS will be asked at the point of posting if they really want to type those hurtful words or if they wouldn’t prefer to swap them out for those incredibly fcuking irritating praying or praising hands or something equally blandly anodyne – the idea being that this small pause-and-check will cause the negativity and rage to dissipate, and lead to an overall drop in the number of thoughtlessly cruel content on the platform. And there’s more! “Soon, we will begin testing a new way to protect your account from unwanted interactions called Restrict. Once you Restrict someone, comments on your posts from that person will only be visible to that person. You can choose to make a restricted person’s comments visible to others by approving their comments. Restricted people won’t be able to see when you’re active on Instagram or when you’ve read their direct messages.” Except, er, the user will still be able to see the bad stuff! So this ‘Restrict’ feature will in fact just create a situation where the mean person can continue to say awful things under your pictures and only the two of you will see it – which seems, in a weird way, actually more unpleasant, in a ‘trapped in a closet with a cruel bully who keeps whispering into your ear how worthless you are’ sort of way. Look – obviously any steps these platforms take to address how awful we can all be to each other are generally Good Things, but all this does seem to rather ignore the extent to which all s*c**l m*d** is effectively a simmering cauldron of rage and hatred and anger because THAT’S WHAT GETS THE CLICKS.
• Facebook Improves Creator Monetisation Options: Were I Patreon – unlikely, as I am very much a baggy sack of wet and viscera rather than a digital business – I would be looking over my shoulder quite a lot this week and feeling a touch on the nervous side. Facebook this week has announced a slew of new opportunities for creators to squeeze their fans’ wallets, including the ability to pick where ads appear on their content, the ability for fans to buy ‘stars’ that they can bestow on their favourite videgonks which translate to ACTUAL CASH for said videogonks, and the option for creators to create special superfan Groups which said superfans have to pay to access. If you do the whole ‘I am an artisanal digital creator monetising my audience’ thing, this is worth a look – at the very least, it makes sense to consider having a parallel presence on Facebook to hook in the normie dollar (YOU WILL NEVER ESCAPE THE BIG BLUE MISERY FACTORY!).
• FB Improves Ad Transparency (Again): You can now see more detailed information on why you are being targeted with a particular advert on Facebook – the ‘Why am I seeing this Ad?’ button will give you additional information on who uploaded any email lists you’re on which have led to you being targeted, which data brokerages have sold on your info, which interest categories you sit in, etc, along with the ability to skip straight to the ad preferences bit to tweak what you see. This is, potentially, the sort of thing you could have a LOT of fun with if you had a bloody-minded streak and a lot of spare time; I reckon this is a potentially GREAT way of catching out a lot of non-GDPR compliant people who are playing fast-and-loose with email ownership.
• New Monetisation Options for YouTube Creators Too: What was I saying about Patreon? YouTube creators can now access tiered membership options – JUST LIKE PATREON – and their fans can now buy SUPER STICKERS with which to reward them for doing what they do, and there are new and improved merchandising options for YouTubers, and basically the future to me looks like one in which everyone spends their time streaming banalities into the ether to an audience of other banality-streaming morons. It’s increasingly clear to me that one of the main reasons we absolutely NEED universal basic income is that without a basic level of subsidy noone is going to have the time to watch all these hundreds of millions of hours of VITAL CREATIVE OUTPUT that modernity is gifting us.
• YouTube Makes It Easier To Edit Out Copyrighted Stuff From Videos: I mean, this is literally just that. It’s useful, if you’re the sort of person who absentmindedly keeps leaving clips of actual songs in the background of your uploads.
• Twitter Updates Hateful Conduct Rules: After several years of people gently nudging Twitter and suggesting that maybe it could be doing a touch more to tackle the issue of hatespeech which, it’s fair to say, the platform has a teeny problem with, it’s finally starting to move – the first change, announced this week, is to ban language that dehumanises people based on their religion. Again, A Good Thing; again, something of a bandage on an axewound here.
• LinkedIn Adds New Ad Objectives: NEW WAYS TO BETTER-INTEGRATE LINKEDIN WITH YOUR FUNNEL! You can now set up ads specifically optimised to get job applications, drive awareness or get users to do a specific thing on your website – this is obviously an incredibly dull piece of news, but equally it’s the sort of thing that you can probably spend 10 minutes writing up and sharing with clients as IMPORTANT INTELLIGENCE before congratulating yourself on your dedication and heading home for the weekend.
• More Video On Pinterest: Look how exciting this is! “We’re introducing new video features for creators and businesses to reach their audiences including an improved uploader, video tab, lifetime analytics, and Pin scheduling.” Do you care? I don’t!
• The China Internet Report: This is a really good report – you’ll have to give an email address to get it, but it’s only to the South China Morning Post so it’s probably nothing to worry about. Thanks to Alex for sending it my way – it’s effectively like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, but significantly less ugly and, to my mind, a touch more insightful. Contains lots of interesting information about specific trends around 5g, automation, payments, etc, as well as a whole bunch of platform usage-type stuff. Read it, and enjoy the fleeting sense of expertise that it will afford you.
• Doom Days: Bastille is a band which I am vaguely aware of, but whose songs I couldn’t pick out of a lineup – they exist in my mind as a few half-remembered snatches of past FIFA soundtracks – and I can’t quite imagine them having actual, proper fans (who would pick them as their favourite band? NO FCUKER, that’s who), and yet they obviously make their label enough money that they were motivated to spend what looks like not inconsiderable wedge on this interactive AR musical EXPERIENCE THINGY to accompany what I presume is their new album. The gimmick is that you’re wandering through some sort of house party-type scenario, with different tracks of the album playing in different rooms, and you can unlock little AR vignettes of the band by playing small minigames, which vignettes you can then drop into the real world via your camera, meaning that you too can enjoy the unique pleasure of having a TINY VERSION OF BASTILLE on your kitchen table should you so desire. It’s all neatly put together and slick, and is impressive in the main as an example of quite how much cool stuff you can do as a browser experience these days (Jesus, ‘these days’ – I REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS ALL FIELDS, etc etc).

 By Kenneth Pils

NEXT UP, WHY NOT EXPLORE THE INCREDIBLE OUTPUT OF THE HUGELY PROLIFIC ELECTRO ARTIST CRISTIAN VOGEL?

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK LEARNED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BOOK TOURS AROUND AMAZON FULFILMENT CENTRES WITH YOUR KIDS AND WHICH IF YOU ASK IT IS THE ABSOLUTE MOST LATE-PERIOD CAPITALISM THING IT HAS HEARD ALL YEAR, PT.1:

• The Atlas of Moons: This is an EXCELLENT articlewebpagethingy by National Geographic, telling you everything you could ever have wanted to know about some of the major moons of our solar system. Want to see some exciting 3d representations of Io, Callisto and all that lot? Want to learn lots of EXCITING MOON-RELATED FACTS? I don’t care either way, to be honest, but there is SO much information here, about orbits and surface and suchlike, along with really detailed models of each of the featured satellites; the whole thing is presented on a nicely-arranged single webpage, and, honestly, is more interesting than you’d think (although I feel honour-bound to tell you that at its heart it is still just a bunch of words and pictures of space rocks, and there is no mention AT ALL of little green men).
• Seeing Music: Another in the seemingly endless line of Google Experiments, this one all about the different ways that we can represent audio in visual form – allow it access to your microphone and it will pick up and visualise whatever ambient sounds it picks up, or upload your own music file and see what it makes of it. Fine, it’s basically WinAmp with bells on it, but the different visualisations are rather beautiful at times (the Hilbert ones in particular are gorgeous and remind me an awful lot of a sort-of multicoloured Mr Messy), and the various little additional gimmicks (you can plug in a MIDI input and watch it visualise as you play, for example) are rather fun. As far as I can tell this doesn’t appear to be anything to do with training an AI for an eventual uprising, but one can’t be certain with Google.
• The Redirect Method: More Google stuff, this time on the serious side. The Redirect Method is based on an experiment Google undertook to attempt to get users searching for ISIS-related materials to instead watch videos refuting IS propaganda in an attempt to halt the radicalisation process early on; the techniques employed led to users who had sought out pro-IS stuff watching half-a-million minutes of the anti-propaganda vids, which is pretty staggering. Now Google has made the methodology that it employed available as an open source programme for anyone else to copy – if you have any interest at all in comms, marketing, government, propagandising, disinformation and the prevention thereof or the modern world in general, this is very much worth reading. Not only is it genuinely interesting as a case study, there is SO MUCH here that you can use for shoddy advermarketingpr purposes were you so minded.
• Shoelace: ANOTHER Google thing! This time it’s another attempt at a social network – oh Google+, how do I miss thee! – this one based around people sharing actual, real-world activities that they’re doing so as to encourage others to get involved too. The idea is that I could be going to, I don’t know, an oboe concert at a local church (I COULD BE, DON’T SCOFF), and use the app to tell people that that’s what I’m doing in case they wanted to come too; similarly, it will learn what I’m into and suggest stuff happening nearby that I might want to get involved in. There are various privacy and safety measures built in, to hopefully prevent users from being stalked, harassed or murdered by any local weirdos, and the general vibe of the thing can be summed up in Google’s own disgustingly-folksy description: Shoelace “helps connect people with shared interests through in person activities. It’s great for folks who have recently moved cities or who are looking to meet others who live nearby.” Folks?! FFS Google! This is only currently available in New York, and there’s no guarantee it will ever evolve beyond that, but it’s interesting to see Google attempt to do something network-ish again, as is the local/irl focus of the whole thing.
• The Women In Rock Project: This is ACE – the whole site is effectively its creator’s Phd dissertation, and collects memories and stories of women who were involved in rock’n’roll’s ‘first wave’ in the 50s and 60s, an era in which women played a significant role which hasn’t always been documented. There’s SO much good stuff in here – memoirs and memories and recordings and playlists of great songs, and the way it reframes an era to better centre the women that helped shape it is refreshing.
• Scroll: The latest in the seemingly-endless stream of attempted solutions to the horror that is the current ad-funded web model, which satisfies neither publishers nor punters – Scroll is a service which hopes to REVOLUTIONISE PUBLISHING by letting users enjoy an ad-free experience when reading their favourite sites whilst at the same time ensuring that the publishers get paid at a rate less eye-gouging than the current horrible deal they get from all the appalling display ad clutter of the modern web. It’s very much in beta at the moment, but it’s worth keeping an eye on – it very much feels like someone is going to fix this soon, and whilst it might not be these people they do seem to have reasonable backing and buy-in from a decent roster of sizeable names.
• Colouring London: Thanks to Josh for pointing this one out to me – Colouring London is a delightfully-whimsical project which is asking anyone who cares to get involved to do a bit of Mechanical Turk-style datawrangling by slowly and meticulously classifying London’s buildings by age, land usage, type, etc – the idea being that over time it will turn into an accurate and up-to-date record of the city’s material DNA. There are similar projects going on all over the world – I’m certain I featured something similar from New York which asked people to help teach mapping software the exact boundaries of the city’s buildings, for example – and I am always a sucker for stuff that requires massive collaborative effort for a hugely banal outcome; what’s MOST lovely about this, though, is the multicoloured patchwork quilt of London that is emerging; as the map fills, I do hope they add the opportunity to export image files of specific areas to print.
• Otis: “CULTURE IS A NEW ASSET” screams the site’s blurb, which immediately got my back up a bit; ‘new’ in what sense exactly, Otis? You don’t know, do you? FFS. Anyway, the idea behind Otis is a simple one – it allows anyone to invest in CULTURE (fine art, limited edition trainers, etc) with a low barrier to entry; from an article announcing its launch comes the following miniblurb: “Starting July 9, the platform will allow art enthusiasts to invest in a curated selection of sneakers, comics, and other items starting at $25 USD per share. Inaugural launch items include artworks by Kehinde Wiley, KAWS, Takashi Murakami, alongside Supreme skateboard decks, Rolex Daytona watches, and Hermes Birkin Bags to name a few. Otis acquires high-quality assets, divides them into smaller shares, and offers them as equity investments. When you invest in an asset, you become a shareholder that owns a specific asset. Similar to a stock market, you’ll be able to buy and sell shares after a certain period of time”. Why exactly you’d want to own a 5% stake in a pair of 1998 Jordans in a limited-edition colourway is beyond me – as is whether there will in fact be a secondary market for these shares – but if you’ve ever wanted to feel like a BIG SHOT INVESTOR in, er, graphic novels or skateboards then go for your life.
• This Shirt Company Does Not Exist: Thanks to Gill for this one, perhaps the most ‘me’ site in this week’s Curios, combining as it does slightly crap tshirt design with an internetty gimmick. “The t-shirts feature doodles that were completely generated by AI algorithms using data from millions of drawings submitted to Google Creative Lab’s Quick, Draw! The dataset can be used for anything, from helping researchers see patterns in how people around the world draw, to inspiring artists to create things we haven’t ever thought of before… such as t-shirts :)” Actually I’m perhaps being unfair on the doodles here – these aren’t appreciably worse than the sort of crap I adorn myself with each day.
• Da Bungalow Clips: I’m only sort of vaguely aware of the concept of Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow, being as I was already WAY too old when it was on TV; I do have some sort of strange cultural memory of adult men shouting BOGEYS! at unsuspecting strangers in supermarkets, but I couldn’t tell you why. Still, I know that lots of you children will have fond memories of this formative part of your childhoods, so please enjoy this recently-created Twitter account dedicated to posting clips and gifs from the show for your nostalgic viewing pleasure. This is…quite odd, isn’t it? Was this what kid’s TV was like 17 years ago? Is this the reason you’re all like this?
• Share The Meal: There’s not really any excuse not to have this on your phone imho. “ShareTheMeal is the charity app by the World Food Programme that allows you to feed a child in need with one tap on your phone” – basically it’s a ‘tap to donate’ function, no more, but the bells and whistles and the light gamification / network features it builds in makes it pleasingly sticky, and the mere fact of its existence is A Good Thing. The cost of each meal is around 35p a pop, so presuming you’re like me and comparatively comfortably-off there’s not really any reason not to install this.
• Public Domain Flicks: Are you bored of being fed the endless diet of Netflix pabulum by the app? Have you spend yet another evening scrolling dully through an algorithmically-curated feed full of seemingly endless variations on the same three straight-to-TV movie concepts and not found a single thing you actually want to watch? Well why not break free of the shackles of the modern streaming hegemony and instead get yourself some CLASSIC OLD SCHOOL MOVIE ACTION with, say, the stone-cold 1922 classic “The Primitive Lover”, or 1973’s sexy horror extravaganza “Invasion of the Bee Girls” (which has the potentially-unbeatable tagline “They’ll Love The Life Right Out of Your Body!”, which, honestly, may be the apogee of English-language copywriting)? This site has an absolute treasure trove of copyright-free films to stream, and whilst 99% of them will be absolute tripe there will also be some gems and you owe it to yourself to at least check out the Bee Girls.
• The Archive Downloader: A Chrome extension which lets you batch-download files from the Internet Archive. HUGELY useful, especially for music files (of which more later – ooh, EXCITING FORESHADOWING! What authorial daring I’m displaying here!).
• Run Your Own Social: We are, it’s fair to say, probably all in agreement that this social media stuff was largely a bad idea – still, if you think that you could do better by creating your own miniature version of Twitter just for you and your friends, then why not do that very thing? This is a really interesting site which offers you the tools and information required to set up your own small social network, and whilst 99% of you won’t have any use for this I can imagine that there are a few people reading this who will find it hugely useful; aside from anything else, this feels like it would be a really interesting project for a computing class, or the sort of thing you could experiment with setting up as a bespoke alternative to the family Whatsapp group (oh God, YES – you could design in features specifically designed to exploit familial tensions, it would be GREAT!). Someone go and do something fun with this, please. GO!
• Carrd: On the one hand, services like Squarespace are hugely useful in terms of knocking up a quick website in next-to-no time when you have no coding ability whatsoever; on the other, they always, inevitably, look a bit sh1t. Carrd is a new alternative to those off-the-shelf sitebuilders, whose gimmick is that it lets you make single-page, long-scrollers, of the sort that were really fashionable about three years back. Obviously the quality of the output will depend largely on the quality of your imagery and your general aesthetic sense, but it might be worth a look if you’re in the market for a webpage for something or other.
• The Space Exploration Auction: SO MUCH SPACE STUFF! This is taking place on 20 July, but you can start getting your early bids in for, say, a prototype astronaut’s glove from the Apollo mission, or a globe of Mars, or, er, an old label from the ACTUAL APOLLO 11 COMMAND MODULE! That last one, by the way, will set you back an estimated $125-150k, in case you were wondering.
• Old Weather: “Help scientists transcribe Arctic and worldwide weather observations recorded in ship’s logs since the mid-19th century…Old Weather volunteers explore, mark, and transcribe historic ship’s logs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. We need your help because this task is impossible for computers, due to diverse and idiosyncratic handwriting that only human beings can read and understand effectively. By participating in Old Weather you’ll be helping advance research in multiple fields. Data about past weather and sea-ice conditions are vital for climate scientists, while historians value knowing about the course of a voyage and the events that transpired”! Not unlike Colour London back up there, this is another Mechanical Turk-ish, slightly dull but rather lovely project; it’s also a decent barometer of how much you hate your job because, honestly, if you’re reading this at work and thinking that a few hours of gentle transcribing of historic ships logs sounds like a blissful escape from the drudgery of your work then, well, perhaps it’s time to quit.
• IRL: An app which seeks to socialise your calendar – WHY?!? WHY WOULD I WANT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD TO KNOW WHAT I AM DOING, WHEN, AND TO HAVE THE ABILITY TO ‘FOLLOW’ ME AND COMMENT AND OPINE ON MY ITINERARY? This sounds ghastly, as does the idea that there could be ‘calendar influencers’ whose social lives could be considered compelling entertainment for the poor, less-popular masses. Aside from everything else, the potential counterindications inherent in this are…not insignificant.
• Netflix Hangouts: A Chrome extension which lets you watch Netflix in a way that will make it look to the casual observer that you’re having a four-way video call, meaning you can probably get away with a couple of episodes of Stranger Things in the office before sloping off to the pub (NB Web Curios accepts no responsibility if it turns out your boss is in fact less of a gullible idiot than you at first thought).

By Jack Welpott

NEXT, HAVE A HIGH-QUALITY HOUSE MIX FROM A SET IN BUENOS AIRES LAST YEAR BY ROY ROSENFELD!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK LEARNED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BOOK TOURS AROUND AMAZON FULFILMENT CENTRES WITH YOUR KIDS AND WHICH IF YOU ASK IT IS THE ABSOLUTE MOST LATE-PERIOD CAPITALISM THING IT HAS HEARD ALL YEAR, PT.2:

• Female D&D Character Art: A selection of about 100 character portraits of female figures in a fantasy setting, notable in the main for being actual, proper pictures of actual, credible (well, ‘credible’ within a fantasy setting, at least) female figures without acres of exposed flesh or impractical chainmail thong bikini armour. It’s amazing how arresting the nature of these pictures is, which makes you consequently realise how ridiculous the visual representation of female characters in fantasy art tends to be.
• The Social Media Death Clock: ANOTHER Chrome extension, this one designed to helpfully remind you of how much time you’re wasting by dicking about on social media; install it, and every time you visit a social site in-browser it will replace the logo with a ticking countdown to the likely date of your death. Sadly won’t work in-app, but I’d suggest surreptitiously loading this onto a colleague’s work computer and seeing how long it takes them to notice that Facebook’s now anticipating their demise.
• Metomic: FULL DISCLOSURE: my mate Ben is doing some work with these people at the moment, which is how I heard about this – nonetheless, it’s interesting enough as an idea that I’d have featured it anyway, The simple pitch is ‘all the analytics stuff you might need on your website, but less awful and evil and exploitative than the stuff currently created by Amazon, Google et al’, which seems like a pretty good reason to check it out if you’re the owner of a bunch of web properties and want to maybe downgrade the creepiness of your cookies and tracking bits and pieces.
• The B-Box: WE ALL LOVE BEES! Why not show them your love by backing this already-funded Indiegogo project which for the admittedly steep price of £900 will provide you with a lovely wooden home for bees which you can set up in your garden and which, you hope, will in a few short months be all abuzz with the fuzzy little lads doing their thing, making honey and serving their queen and hopefully not swarming into your house and turning you into a swollen red pincushion. This sounds VERY cool, although I do think it’s perhaps downplaying the ‘look, you’re also going to have to take care of the bees’ bit somewhat.
• Lightsail 2: “LightSail is a citizen-funded project from The Planetary Society to send a small spacecraft, propelled solely by sunlight, to Earth orbit.” This is the project website, where you can track its progress in orbit, see photos it’s taking, and generally see all the data and information its tracking as it makes its way around Earth. It’s obviously more interesting if you’re into space and associated things, but even if not it’s still quite amazing to be able to see all this realtime information about something zooming around a few hundred miles up in the air (he writes, like some sort of slack-jawed medieval yokel).
• Golden Hour: A website whose soul purpose is to inform you of the absolute best time to take some gorgeous photographs – it will tell you with exact precision what time ‘Golden Hour’ (the first and last hour of sunshine of the day, traditionally) is, so that you can take advantage of all that gorgeous light to take another fcuking picture of your fcuking face.
• All Of The Theatre Gubbins: Or, more accurately, the New York Public Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Division’s digital archive, which contains a truly remarkable collection of old theatrical material, from promotional photos of actors to old playbills and programmes. There are literally HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of individual items in here, organised into thematic collections, and the photos of stars of Broadway past alone are enough to keep your occupied for hours.
• The Economist Essay Competition: The Economist is running an essay competition, open to anyone between the ages of 16-25 – submit an essay of upto 1000 words on the topic “What fundamental economic and political change, if any, is needed for an effective response to climate change?” by 31 July to be in with the chance of winning £1k, publication on the Economist website, and attendance at an Economist event in October. When I was 16 it is…unlikely that I would have had any truck with this at all (or indeed at 25 if I’m honest with you), but if you know a YOUNG PERSON who is all dedicated and ambitious and stuff then perhaps this might be worth pointing out to them.
• Videogame GAN: This is wonderful – Jonathan Fly has paired up old videogame footage with Nvidia’s GauGAN software (see Curios passim), making the software try and create landscape images on the fly based on what it’s seeing happen in the game. I appreciate that that’s a bit of a shonky description, you’ll get the idea when you click the link; this is beautiful and dreamlike and weird and hallucinatory, and better than 90% of actual digital ‘art’ that’s currently being made.
• Various Cassette Tapes: If you haven’t already done so, you might want to scroll back a bit and download that Chrome extension that lets you rip files from the Internet Archive. Done that? Good. Now click this link and GORGE YOURSELF on this incredible trove of MP3s of old cassette tapes – there are WEEKS-worth of music here, and whilst it’s sort of impossible to know what any of it is before you listen to it that barely matters; just jump in at random and see what you find. I’m currently listening to something called ‘Audio Beat Warfare’ which is terrifying and great in equal measure, but why not dig around and see what weird stuff you can find? This is, honestly, WONDERFUL.
• Sunshine: A website which checks your location and then displays a countdown of the number of hours of sunlight left in your day. Put this on a big screen in the office so you can all see how much of the precious, fleeting English summertime you’re wasting on pointless busywork that doesn’t matter!
• The Wood Database: You want wood? SO MUCH WOOD! One of my very favourite sorts of site, this, utterly banal and yet terrifyingly, encyclopaedically comprehensive, and with a serious dedication to its subject matter; one gets the impression that the site’s owner probably has a limited tolerance for lazy, wood-based jokes, and wouldn’t take kindly to people repeatedly asking them if they ‘have wood’. The site’s pretty self-explanatory – it’s a database of information about lots of types of wood – but there are lots of small joys in the obsessional copy and the fact that it sells things like a ‘Rosewoods of the World’ poster for a knockdown $15 (which will make a GREAT Christmas present for a certain special someone!).
• Things Cut in Half: The most satisfying subReddit you will see all week, hands-down.
• The 3d-printed Lamborghini: Wow, THIS is a geeky DIY project. The fabulously-named Sterling Backus (who’s obviously some sort of proper science person in his dayjob) is, for reasons best-known to themselves, currently in the process of creating a full-size working replica of a Lamborghini Aventador (no, I didn’t know either – it’s a VERY ANGULAR sports car that goes very fast) almost entirely from 3d-printed parts. This is INSANE, honestly, and the Facebook Page here linked collects all the work in progress photos and videos and is a fascinating look at a truly insane labour of love.
• Arttwiculate: Last up in the miscellanea section this week is this GREAT game from B3ta’s Monkeon, where you the player are asked to pick which artwork from a selection is being referred to in a Tweet. Simple, silly, and absolutely the sort of thing it would be easy for a major museum to do for some nice ENGAGEMENT.

 By Arnout van Albada

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS EXCELLENT HOUR-LONG SELECTION OF CLASSIC SOFT ROCK WHICH YOU MIGHT NOT THINK YOU WILL ENJOY BUT YOU WILL SECRETLY ADORE I PROMISE!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ed Merlin Murray: Murray is an artist. This is his Insta feed. His work is…odd, but in a good way.
• Polly Verity: Verity makes work from paper, in a sort of 3d sculptural origami-type style, playing with texture and shadow in rather beautiful ways.
• The Tiny Chef Show: The Instagram account of a VERY SMOL chef, and his adorable little cooking show in miniature. This is, honestly, ADORABLE, and it’s worth checking out the project’s website for more details.
• Amaury Guichon: I don’t know if I want to eat any of these cakes, but I could look at photos of them for HOURS.
• Hollywood Back-up Plan: I don’t, I confess, have any real clue what’s going on here or why it’s called ‘Hollywood Back-up Plan’ (am I missing a really obvious joke?), but if you want an Insta feed featuring…oh HANG ON I JUST GOT IT! Photographs of company names on vehicles which also happen to be the names of famous film people! ALL BECOMES CLEAR! Thanks to Curios reader John Perlmutter for both creating this and drawing it to my attention and for reading this bastard emailnewsletterthingy!
• Philippa Knit: This is Philippa. She knits. Often she knits balaclavas, which she photographs being worn by largely-unclothed men. You may enjoy this, you may not.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Cadwalladr vs Swisher: Kara Swisher is one of the smartest people in the world reporting on tech at the moment; her ability to get under the skin of the Valley and its heroes is unparalleled. She recently interviewed Carole Cadwalladr for her podcast, and the transcript is now online and makes really interesting reading; I have one or two issues with the way in which Cadwalladr has gone about reporting the Cambridge Analytica stuff – not that it’s not a brilliant and important piece of journalism, don’t get me wrong, more that her absolute insistence that PYSCHOGEOGRAPHIC TARGETING and DARK INTERNET VOODOO swung Brexit and everything else was fundamentally unhelpful in untangling the more important issues which are around electoral funding and the legal framework around it; she’s since gone quite quiet about that side of things, whilst quite rightly continuing to investigate the financial links between a lot of the big vested interests around Brexit, but the damage has been done in terms of people overplaying the magical ability of digital ads to manipulate the masses (don’t get me wrong, digital ads are GREAT for manipulating the masses, but not quite as cleverly as Carole thinks) (also, I feel I should point out that I’ve met her a few times and we’ve had this conversation in person, so I promise I’m not just being a dick and shouting from the sidelines here; well, OK, I am a bit). Still, this is a really interesting conversation which showcases the best and worst of Cadwalladr and her reporting, and which is never less than an engaging read throughout.
• All The Businesses You Never Knew Amazon Owned: Scroll down. Keep scrolling. This isn’t an essay, it’s just a list, but it’s worth perusing and then spending a moment reminding yourself that Amazon wants to run everything, and, at the current rate of progress, probably will.
• The Race To Rule Streaming: This is LONG and very ‘TV-industry-inside-baseball’ in parts, but it’s fascinating regardless as a look at how the streaming industry is likely to evolve and what that’s likely to mean in terms of the market and the sort of programming that’s going to be produced. If you want a decent understanding of how modern entertainment media works, and of how economics defines art, this is pretty much essential reading.
• Half-Quitting the Apps: The NYT examines the weird situation we find ourselves in whereby more and more of us are trying to stop using THE FCUKING S*C**LS but not quite managing it, resulting in this doubly unsatisfying situation where we’re hobbling our user experience in an attempt to render it bad enough to force us off the apps entirely whilst at the same time still getting just enough of a dopamine rush to keep us hanging on in there. Testament to how brilliantly, evilly designed these things are, if you weren’t already convinced.
• The Gutenburg Lie: Honestly, I was SHOOK by this piece; I’d always blithely accepted the received wisdom that Gutenberg invented movable type and that it was he to whom we owe thanks for BOOKS and NEWSPAPERS and FLYERS and STUFF; now it turns out that actually the first printing press was invented 150 years previously in Korea. This is fascinating, not only because of the story of Choe Yun-ui who we really ought to credit instead, but because of what it tells us about how historical narratives develop and are set in stone, and how we ought perhaps to spend a but more time questioning and scrutinising creation stories.
• Being a YouTube Celebrity: A profile of Emma Chamberlain, hottest YouTube star of the moment and newly-signed creator of original content for Snapchat. It’s not going to tell you anything hugely new about the lifestyle of a professional content creator (dear God what a phrase), but there are a couple of details that gave me pause, not least that Chamberlain spends upwards of 20 HOURS editing her videos. Tell that to your client next time they want a ‘viral’ delivered in 36h.
• Twitter Needs a Pause Button: An essay exploring whether our experiences on and interactions with Twitter and other sites would be different were there an inbuilt delay in communications – muchlike Insta’s trialing with its ‘are you sure you want to say that?’ anti-bullying features. It’s an interesting question, but I’m not certain that it’s not anonymity which leads to the horror and the shouting rather than the immediacy.
• Can Hiphop’s Legacy Be Archived: On the immense musical/cultural patrimony contained in the boom in hiphop mixtapes in the 90s and 00s, and how the nature of the medium means that whole swathes of significant work by significant artists may be lost forever. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, from the specific musical history lessons to the wider cultural points about what sort of materials are considered worthy of archiving and why, and what steps we might seek to take to make our approach to preservation of cultural relics somewhat more of an active one rather than the current post-facto scrabble to catch up.
• An Introduction to Speculative Fiction by People of Colour: If you read scifi, fantasy and the like, but wish that you could find more stuff by authors who aren’t white then this list is for YOU.
• Blink 182: A nostalgic look back at Blink-182 and how they briefly made pop-punk sort-of almost socially acceptable. I was really into pop-punk as a teenager (of course I was) and I remember being genuinely annoyed when these idiots came along and made it popular when they weren’t even GOOD like the bands I liked that were all underground and I FOUND THE CONCH, RALPH! God, I was insufferable. Anyway, this is an interesting time capsule, not least because once again it reminds us that the 90s were a VERY weird time when it came to sex and gender politics.
• Disney Won: Another big entertainment industry deep-dive, this one investigating what the shape of the film industry could be if one accepts Disney’s seemingly-inevitable crushing dominance of the market over the next few years. The short answer to this is ‘tediously homogenous’, but it’s worth reading in full to get the more nuanced take. If you want to envisage the future, imagine the fcuking Avengers playing on every single flat surface in the world, on a loop, til the sun consumes us all.
• The Joy Of Grocery Shopping Abroad: I would hope that as readers of Web Curios you’re all sophisticates; the sort of urbane travelers who know that the best thing to do when arriving in a new place is to get straight to the local supermarket and look at the crisps and frozen food aisles to get right to the heart of the local people and their deepest, most shameful desires. This article is a lovely evocation of all that you can glean from perusing the weird groceries of any given destination – it made me want to eat Paprika-flavoured ridged crisps VERY much indeed.
• Meet the Amazon Nomads: Another wonderful piece shining a light on a niche group of people created as an unintended side-effect of our new digital economy, this time the people who spend most of their lives traveling around the US hunting out products that they can buy in bulk and resell on Amazon for profit. Just imagine, for a moment, that being your life – living in a camper van, going from Costco to Walmart to Costco and back, buying palette-loads of Swisher mop handle replacements because you know you can earn a $0.02 markup on each unit. Thanks, Amazon, for enabling such freedom and entrepreneurial spirit!
• This is Quite Gay!: A Nigerian emigre to the US reflects on the challenges of being an out and proud gay black man on social media when your less-tolerant family back home can see whatever you post and rinse you for it every time. The line in here on how ‘Pride is a privilege’ really struck me; this is a lovely piece of writing.
• The Garbageman of Cairo: I love this piece – the author writes about moving to Cairo and encountering the man who sorted out the rubbish for his apartment block and who, as a result, was the most knowledgeable person in the neighbourhood. This is the best sort of travel writing, telling you about place and people with deft, beautiful prose and a lovely spare style; it reminded me a lot of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, his book on Bombay which is still one of the best modern portraits of a city I’ve ever read.
• Meet The Cock Destroyer: The second article this week from the newly-revamped The Face magazine, this is a profile of the frankly terrifying Rebecca More, a UK bongo actress who’s seemingly transcended the world of sex on camera to become a sort-of mainstream cult figure thanks in no small part to the camp, sexually voracious character she plays on screen. This is a really fascinating interview with someone I knew nothing about before reading – it’s also one of the most weirdly British things I’ve read in years. Can you imagine ANY other country where Rebecca More would be as successful? What does that say about us? God we’re weird.
• The Sad Truth About Goofy’s Family: Did you know that Goofy has a son called Max? Did you know that he once was married? Do you want to know the horrifying truth about the backstory that Disney have actively chosen to bestow upon the cheerful canine doofus? This is…dark.
• Zadie Smith on Stormzy: A bravura piece of writing, in terms of both style and content. She is SO good, damn her.
• The Battle of Grace Church: Oh this is GREAT, possibly the best example I’ve ever read of the ‘snarky piece of reporting that is actually just slightly bitchy gossiping but which is also about some really rich and frankly awful-sounding people so that probably makes it ok’ genre. Grace Church is a very expensive, very exclusive nursery school in a posh area of Brooklyn; this is the story of the incredible power struggles and arguments that ensued as it tried to modernise its approach a few years back. This is FULL of wonderful details and waspish asides, I promise, and you’ll enjoy it very much indeed.
• Trash Talk: Or ‘On Translating Garbage’. A professional translator writes about their relationship with the words they work with, and the personal and professional horror that is having to work with garbage texts. I love this for the feeling it gives of words and language having personalities, and the nuance that a good translator can bring to bear, and most of all for its excoriation of International Art English, the very WORST of all the types of English and something I had to learn to write when I worked in arts PR many years ago; trust me, once you’ve spaffed out a phrase like “Tielemanns’ work speaks to the inherent quiddity of human experience and simultaneously addresses the ego and superego through its negatory uses of texture and palette” something inside of you dies.
• Night On Fire: An essay about menopause, specifically the hot flushes (here referred to in the American argot as ‘flashes’) that accompany it; far, far better than this very spare description makes it sound, I promise.
• This Is Pleasure: Finally in this week’s longreads, this is more novella than short story; regardless, it is MASTERFUL and one of the best things I’ve read all year, let alone this week. This is Pleasure tells the story of a Me Too-ish moment in one literary editor’s life, from the point of view of him and one of his female friends; the narrative switches between them, shifting your thinking and perspective and sympathy as you discover more about each of them and their relationship. Honestly, this is SO good and I cannot recommend it highly enough; this is a FAR better use of your time than that presentation you’re working on.

By Talia Chetrit

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is Rosa Bonita with the rather good ‘Volatile’ – it’s deliciously creepy and the video is wonderful:

2) Next up, this is the latest single by Four Tet; it’s called ‘Teenage Birdsong’ and while the song is great it’s the accompanying video that’s the star here – it’s honestly one of the best evocations of teenage friendship and fandom and fun I’ve seen in years, captured in just 5 short minutes. Wonderful filmmaking:

3) SUCH a good video, and not a bad song either. This is ‘Paramour’ by Anna Meredith and I want a model railway now:

4) This is called ‘God’, it’s by It It Anita of whom I had not heard before this morning and it is NOISY. Turn it up loud:

5) This is ‘Exhaustive’, it’s by Amish Boy, and I honestly have no idea WHAT is going on here:

6) Finally this week, a song all about how social media has ruined EVERYTHING – it’s called ‘Get Likes’ and it’s terrible-but-brilliant, and the video is great, and if you can use this as a bed in your next social media pitch video I will love you forever. Now, though, it’s time to say BYE BYE BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE I HAVE RUN OUT OF LINKS AND OUGHT TO PROBABLY GET ON WITH MY DAY WHAT WITH NEEDING TO GO TO THE SHOPS AND STUFF BUT NOT BEFORE I SAY THANKS TO ALL OF YOU FOR READING AND TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LOVE AND VALUE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU BUT MOST ESPECIALLY YOU AND I WANT YOU TO HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND AND GENERALLY JUST FEEL HAPPY AND RELAXED OK GOOD THAT’S SETTLED BYE THEN BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!:

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Man, holidays are good, aren’t they? The sun and the sea and the swimming and the ability to read books again and not having to pretend to care about the stupid clients and the stupid job and the stupid industry that you hate and disdain and want to get as fas away from as possible and yet which you exist in some sort of queasy state of symbiosis with…this is universal, right? Right?

Oh. 

You know what isn’t good? YES YOU DO IT’S THE FCUKING TORIES! Why, can someone please explain to me, does this sorry process need to take two fcuking months from start to fcuking finish? Anyone? The only small bright spot on the horizon, the only light at the end of the tunnel (I am, of course, ignoring the oncoming train) is that there’s a small possibility that that dreadful man (no, the other one) might win and then find himself turfed out of No.10 within months as his party eats itself alive and we return to the country; an entire career, lifetime, of ambition culminating in a premiership less long-lasting or significant than any other in living memory, a footnote to a footnote of the whole sorry debacle that has constituted the past three years in UK politics. It’s not much to cling to, but, to be honest, it’s all we’ve got. 

Anyway, it’s been something of a long week but I have MANFULLY put in the requisite 6 solid hours of typing (pace Truman Capote, this is definitely not ‘writing’) required to bring you a Friday lunchtime link-based pick-me-up. The least you ingrates could do is read it and tell your friends (or enemies, or indeed strangers – I am not fussy) how great it is. Anyway, once again, lift up the metaphorical manhole cover, don the rubber waders and breathing apparatus and ease yourselves gingerly into the (metaphorically) malodorous (hopefully metaphorical) sewer that is this week’s Web Curios – I DO THIS ALL FOR YOU, YOU KNOW. 

(Oh, and by the way, Imperica is going to be doing another print magazine and they want contributors and they will pay! So if you have an idea for an article or feature about the NOW and the HORROR and the FEAR and the WARP AND WEFT OF DIGITAL MADNESS then, er, get in touch with them – details here)

By Guim Tió Zarraluki

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH THE BRAND NEW EP FROM WALES’ PREMIER UNDERGROUND RAPPER, ELRO!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE IT IF THIS WAS THE LAST YEAR IN WHICH PEOPLE IN THE ADVERMARKETINGPR INDUSTRY HAD THE FCUKING EFFRONTERY TO SPEND A WEEK QUAFFING ROSE IN CANNES TALKING ABOUT ‘BRAND PURPOSE’ AND ‘ADVERTISING FOR GOOD’ BECAUSE CAN WE ALL PLEASE AGREE THAT NONE OF THIS SH1T IS ‘GOOD’ FOR ANYONE AND THE ONLY PURPOSE IS TO MAKE MONEY?

• Facebook Libra: Is it a cryptocurrency? Is it going to see Facebook’s Big Blue Misery Tokens replacing national currencies and existing payment platforms to become the de facto standard for online transactions for evermore? NOONE KNOWS! Still, that hasn’t stopped an awful lot of hot air and speculation from all sorts of people about WHAT IT ALL MEANS. You, probably advermarketingprdrone, don’t need to worry about it too much at this stage – it’s very nascent, the link only takes you to the White Paper introducing the whole project which is somewhat light on actual detail, and frankly this is the sort of thing you can probably just get away with namedropping in your next conversation about THE DIGITAL FUTURE whilst nodding sagely and muttering something about ‘decentralised ledgers’. Still, if you want to know more, the TechCrunch writeup isn’t bad, and there’s a very good longread on it *down there* for later.
• Facebook Comments to Become More ‘Meaningful’: Ha! Of course not! However, there will be a slight tweak to how comment visibility is determined, with comments on posts from individuals and Pages being upranked if they are interacted with by the original poster or the Page in question. Which means, if you’re in the unfortunate position of having anything to do with the pointless, soul-destroying task of corporate page community management, you’ll like the fact that you can use this to promote positive comments (and, by extension, bury negative ones) on your paymasters’ content. That’s nice, isn’t it?
• Facebook Launches Avatars: It’s basically Bitmoji, and it’s only available in Australia at the moment. Not so excited now, are you? I would expect the opportunity for brands to create clothing and accessories for these (“accessorise your avatar with a refreshing coke!”) to arrive in the not-too-distant future, so that’s something to look forwa…oh, actually, no, it isn’t.
• Facebook Watch Creates Stronger Links With Groups: In the main this post is about how WELL Facebook watch is doing – 140million people worldwide spend at least a minute on the platform, which is small beer compared to Facebook overall, but LOADS compared to piddling, insignificant platforms like, er, Twitter. The main point of interest here is Facebook continuing to place Groups front and centre by promotion official Groups associated with Watch shows right next to the video; just a reminder that it’s worth considering Groups stuff for pretty much anything on FB right now if you want to squeeze the last few remaining drops of utility from it as a non-ad platform.
• Brands Can Now Boost Influencer Posts on Insta: Look, I can’t be bothered to write this up – it’s old news now anyway, and the whole business of influencerwank makes me sick inside: “Now, posts uploaded by creators using Instagram’s ‘paid partnership’ tool(which signposts when content has been paid for) will also feature a toggle that says ‘allow my business partner to boost’. The feature will give the brand in question a chance to appear in the feeds and Stories of a wider audience, even if they don’t follow the social media star.” HAPPY NOW?
• Twitter to Remove Precise Location Tagging: To be honest, this is only really of significant importance to researchers; Twitter geolocation in search and in social monitoring platforms has always been shonky.
• Snapchat Launches In-App Shop for Influencers: Or 5 influencers in the US – including, amazingly, Danielle Bregoli, aka the cashmeousside girl, aka Bhad Bhabie, who has somehow been able to parlay a viral appearance of Doctor Phil into the most baffling music career I have ever seen and a place in the same celebrity pantheon as the fcuking Kardashians, which honestly proves to me that I am too old to understand anything ever again – although obviously it’ll expand soon. This basically means that these people can now flog a range of tat direct from their Snapchat profiles, direct through the app, which, if you’re a tat-flogging famous, is probably great news.
• YouTube AR Lipstick: There are, fine, a few other updates in this post (about display ads – you can now use 3d assets in them, which users will be able to interact with if they desire), but the only really exciting bit is the new feature which will let users watching sponsored makeup tutorials from their favourite influencer use AR to see the makeup being flogged on their faces. It’s only in Alpha at the moment, but it’s potentially huge and quite remarkable in terms of how quickly this stuff is developing.
• Google Adds AR to Mobile Search: This is VERY FUN (and thanks to Kate Bevan for flagging this to me while I was on holiday); on newer Google phones, searching for certain animals will now offer up the option to see a 3d model of the critter in question and, if you like, throw it into real life via your phone’s camera. Which is a fun gimmick if you want to enliven a meeting by putting an ocelot on your colleague’s head, but also presages a future in which IKEA pays Google an obscene amount of money to make sure that its 3d models are the only ones that show up when someone searches for ‘bookcase’.
• Spotify Now Allows Ad Targeting by Podcast Topic: Advertisers will now be able to target users based on the genre of podcast they listen to on Spotify, rather than simply by music genre or playlist. This is REALLY interesting, imho, and I think you can probably do some quite fun / interesting / creative stuff with scripting around it if you were so inclined. It’s unclear whether you can specify listeners of specific sets of podcasts or how granular the targeting can get, but worth exploring as part of your next media buy, regardless.
• A Load of New LinkedIn Features: You can tag people in photos! You can send pictures in your LinkedIn messaging conversations! They’ve made filesharing live! YOU CAN NOW REACT TO PEOPLE’S POSTS IN MULTIPLE WAYS! Sadly there isn’t, it seems, a reaction which allows one to show exactly how one has been CRUSHED by a particular post or insight, but we live in hope. Have I mentioned how much I hate LinkedIn? I hate it so, so much.
• Fortnite Buys Houseparty: There’s not really anything you can do with this information, but I thought it worth noting as another proofpoint in the ongoing ‘no, Fortnite isn’t just a videogame’ conversation. Epic’s purchase of briefly-trendy group videochat app Houseparty suggests that they are well aware of their status as many teens’ favourite chatroom. I wouldn’t be hugely surprised were platform integrations with other messaging brands on the cards. Then again, I am a know-nothing bozo who understands the square root of fcuk all about BUSINESS, so my opinion’s probably not really worth much here.
• Meeker: You’ve all pretended to have read this by now, haven’t you? I bet you haven’t, though; I bet you scrubbed through the first 40-odd slides and then skipped randomly through the rest before going and reading someone else’s summary. I have, though, and you know what? Total waste of time. I think this is the year we should all give up on this; it’s not that interesting, it’s not particularly insightful (EVERYTHING! IS! GETTING! BIGGER!), it’s unnecessarily ugly and, at 333 slides, it’s TOO LONG (I know, I know, pottle). PLEASE DO BETTER NEXT TIME MARY.

By Wonmi Seo

DO YOU WANT A DUB REGGAE DAVID BOWIE COVERS ALBUM? I BET YOU DON’T THINK YOU DO BUT YOU ARE SO WRONG!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD JUST LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT WHEN THE TORIES KNIFED THATCHER THEY APPOINTED JOHN MAJOR LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, SO IS THERE ANY CHANCE WE CAN HURRY THIS HORRIBLE FCUKING HORRORSHOW ON A BIT PLEASE BECAUSE, WELL, THERE APPEARS TO BE QUITE A LOT OF STUFF THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEONE GOT ON WITH SORTING OUT, PT.1:

• Stonewall Forever: It’s nice to be able to mark the continuation of Pride month with this lovely piece of webwork rather than some sort of ghastly bit of corporate queerwashing. Stonewall Forver is a digital monument to the Pride movement, taking as its starting point the Stonewall riots but covering six separate and distinct strands of US queer history, from pre-Stonewall to the riots themselves, to the first Pride march and the state of modern activism. It’s presented as a documentary and a parallel interactive, which lets users explore archive materials, eye-witness accounts of past events, and also submit their own photographs and memories representing their queer experience. This is SO nicely made, and a generally great project.
• The Google Exoplanet Explainer: It’s not actually an exoplanet explainer – it’s a promo site for Google Cloud’s work with NASA, using brute force computation and ‘AI’ to help the space agency search for exoplanets at speed – but it does a good job of telling you what they are, and why finding them is usually such a tricky proposition, and it’s all presented in such lovely, gently cartoony style that it feels far more like something educational than promotional. Plus, once you get to the end there’s a little game that lets you try and find unique planets in space, which is a bit like a slightly shonky version of about 1% of No Man’s Sky! Aside from anything else, this isn’t a bad site to use to explain to people ‘look, this is the sort of thing you can ACTUALLY use rudimentary AI for; can we now all stop throwing the term around willy-nilly as it’s making us all look stupid.”
• The Adversary: A new bot, made by Friend of Curios Shardcore for Privacy International – the gimmick here is that The Adversary will, when you follow it, track your Twitter behaviour and occasionally send you custom videos with its interpretation of your feelings and state of mind, based on what it’s ‘read’. A comment on the illusory nature of online privacy, and typically nicely-designed, this could, you feel, have been a LOT more sinister were it not for pesky considerations of ‘ethics’. You can read Shardcore’s own explanation of the bot and the project here, should you be so inclined.
• Use Less: A great website – a good project, and beautiful design. Use Less is a side-project by creative design agency Nice & Serious, to help Londoners find shops near to them which don’t use single-use plastics, instead offering people the opportunity to refill old bottles and containers with produce rather than bringing home yet another fcuking bag for life. It also contains a bunch of links to various places where you can buy more environmentally-sound domestic staples, such as toothpaste and washing up liquid and shampoo, all wrapped up in a lovely 60s(?)-ish aesthetic. It doesn’t change the fact that everything is fcuked and there is no saving us, but it’s nice to try.
• Pattern Radio: Whale Songs: Another Google project, this time taking several years’ worth of undersea recordings and making them accessible online, using ‘AI’ to isolate and pinpoint whalesong within the wider soundfiles and allowing users to navigate straight to the singing cetaceans. There are various ‘tours’ of the audio available, in which experts guide you through the sounds and ask you to think about what you’re hearing, and how the visualisation of the audiofile maps onto the actual sound, and if you’ve got kids who are interested in nature or audio this is actually a pretty cool general resource. The main draw, though, is the whale chorus – obviously you wouldn’t necessarily want to listen to it ALL the time, but I’ve quite enjoyed them lowing at me as I typed this.
• Break Kickstarter: This is, on the one hand, interesting, and on the other hand invcredibly annoying. Next month, Kickstarter is inviting people who want to run crowdfunding campaigns on the platform to BREAK KICKSTARTER. Except they don’t want you to BREAK anything – instead what they want is for fundraisers to mess with the standard fundraising model, introducing CREATIVE ELEMENTS like ‘choose your own adventure’ mechanics, or a regular webseries, to the process of begging for cash. This feels very much like someone said “WE NEED TO INCREASE ON-SITE ENGAGEMENT AND RETURN VISITS” and this was the first idea they came up with, and I really hope we don’t get to a point where creators are forced to not only design and promote their campaign but also become performing content monkeys just to get visibility on the platform. I will be fascinated to see what comes of this, but I don’t personally see it as A Good Thing. Still, if you’re planning on launching a Kickstarter in July, why not consider also making it an episodic novel of something. FFS.
• Fake Gestural Video From Audio Files: There’s quite a lot of decent audiovisual ‘AI’ gubbins this week, but my very favourite is this one – researchers at the University of Berkeley took audio of John Oliver, fed it to a machine trained on video of him, and asked it to recreate what it thought it would look like if he were saying the words in the audio. The results are astonishing – fuzzy, fine, and they wouldn’t fool anyone at present, but the accuracy with which it models the general gestures is incredible; there’s a point at the end where they compare what the machine came up with with Oliver’s actual movements when speaking the words in question, and it’s close to the point of being a bit disturbing. I know I say this all the sodding time, but, really, BELIEVE NOTHING (or at least, believe nothing in 2021).
• Sub Simulator GPT2: This is ACE. A SubReddit in which every thread is a conversation between GPT2 text bots, each of which has been trained on a different ACTUAL subReddit – it’s totally nonsensical, but it’s also wonderful to see the entire ‘personality’ of these communities boiled down into one slightly stupid but utterly compelling bot.
• Write With Transformer: And if you want to play around with the GPT2 thing, this is another site that lets you try it out in your browser. It’s not as good as Talk To Transformer from a few weeks back, imho, but it’s still fun to type in inputs and let it finish your sentences. Hang on, let’s see what it does with this copy – what follows is what it’s spat out: “”What are you doing in this house with you, 〉 ” I say, but it’s right up there with that.” That was TERRIBLE – BAD AI!
• Styleswapper: Or, to give it its official title, the AI Atelier Demo. This lets you input two different images and apply a style transfer from one to the other, which means with a little bit of imagination and no time at all, you can create something genuinely horrible. Why not spend the rest of the day taking the photos of your employer’s senior management and seeing what they look like when crossed with, say, photos of open heart surgery? MEATY MANAGEMENT. Bonus points to anyone who does this and uses the meaty ones to replace the official versions on the website.
• FakePhoto: It’s not called that – it’s by Nvidia, but doesn’t have a proper name, seemingly – but all you need to know is that this website lets you draw a bunch of abstract shapes and then tries to turn them into a photograph, based on what you’ve told it the abstract shapes are meant to be. Which is, I appreciate, a piss-poor description, even by my low-standards, but hopefully it will be pretty self-explanatory when you click. You can make some genuinely surreal stuff using this – it will all look a bit sub-Dali, fine, but the outputs are sort-of compelling nonetheless, and they can be downloaded should you want to start a side-Insta sharing gorgeous photos of the imaginary landscapes of the AI mind (actually that’s not a terrible idea).
• Nvidia Inpainting: Another Nvidia thingy (they don’t pay me – though they could if they wanted to – it’s just that they really are good at this stuff) which lets you play in-browser with its AI-assisted image-editing toys. Upload anything you like and seamlessly airbrush them, whether to remove the deep trenches on either side of your mouth in which you could reasonably grow potatoes were you so inclined (hate my appearance? Me? NEVER) or to delete an ex from history. A toy, but an impressive one.
• Apollo 11 In Realtime: Oh this is ACE, and such a smart use of archive materials. The site lets you experience the Apollo 11 mission as it happened, beginning 20 hours from the launch and taking you through until Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins stepped aboard the USS Hornet recovery ship. It ONLY uses archive materials, meaning it’s authentic as you like, and you can dip in and out of the memories at will, exploring as you go. Right now in realtime it’s July 21 1969 and the lads are on the moon, chatting with mission control – this is honestly quite remarkable as far as digital time machines go, and an exemplary piece of historical webwork.
• Flextime: This is…very sad indeed. Flextime lets you pick from a long list of celebrities (US ones, so your Kardashians and Jenners and basketballers and stuff) and, using your phone’s camera, lets you fake a screentime conversation with said famous; you, or the view from your phone’s camera, appear in a bubble in the top-left of the famouses’ screens as though you were ACTUALLY CHATTING; I presume that one would then use the resulting video as part of an HILARIOUS Story or similar. Potentially worth a look if you have a small child and want to convince them that you are friends with Kim K (your child is an IDIOT).
• Friendzone: We are all lonely. We are all isolated. We live in the post-Thatcherite atomised society and no amount of tapping and clicking will do anything to lessen the growing emotional distance between us as we move slowly and inexorably to the ultimate solitude of the grave. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! If the above bit of appallingly-teenage prose gave you the fantods, if you feel you would like to move on from the friends you had at University with whom you no longer have anything in common, if you’re sick of spending ANOTHER night with work because, then maybe Friendzone is for you – like a dating app, but for FRIENDS! It looks about as standard as these things get – profile, algorithmic matching, interest-based ‘AI’ pairing, yadda yadda yadda – and it will inevitably be ruined by men whose definition of ‘friendship’ is ‘aggressively sexually pursuing women on an app not designed for that purpose AT ALL’, but, regardless, check it out!
• Olivia AI: IT’S NOT FCUKING AI. Instead, Olivia is an open-source chatbot which you can use for whatever purposes you like; having played around with it, the current iteration doesn’t seem that good – but that’s the beauty of open source. Take it and make it better and STOP COMPLAINING (I can’t make it better, I am a useless non-coder and the future is not mine).
• Navigator: Another chatbot-type thing here, Navigator is designed specifically to make meetings less painful, helping compile an agenda, circulate relevant documents, take notes and multiple other features. I’m not 100% convinced that any of these things are that onerous, or indeed that this sort of hyperspecific bot-as-a-service thing can ever be useful or relevant unless it’s built bespoke for one’s own specific use-case, but if you’d like a virtual assistant to hassle everyone coming to your three’o’clock with increasingly intense “HAVE YOU READ THE STRATEGY DOCUMENT YET??” questions then this may well be some sort of digital nirvana for you.
• Botvolution: A Twitter account which, amongst other things, keeps an eye on the seemingly artificial boosting of political hashtags on UK Twitter. Interesting, and worth a follow – came to my attention this week after a fascinating thread on the campaign to oust Tom Watson crossed my eyeline.
• Arthacking Google Maps: I LOVE THIS IMMODERATELY. Artist Jason Isolini has exploited a Google Maps feature whereby business can upload 360 photos of the interior of their restaurants to specific locations by adding his own, odd, slightly vapourwave-y graphics to a bunch of locations all over the world. The link takes you to the overview of all his hacks; click on one to be taken to the streetview page for it, and marvel at the inventiveness. This is 100% stealable for a campaign (for the right sort of EXTREMELY ONLINE brand), and it annoys me that one of you will do this and win some sort of minor internet kudos for it when it was in fact my idea.
• 80s Hackney: A wonderful archive of pictures taken around Dalston and the surrounding areas in the 80s. I want a photo of that “I Don’t Hate Sharon” graffiti.
• Youper: Youper is an app that ‘helps you monitor and improve your emotional health’. You know what else might help you with that? NOT ATTEMPTING TO OUTSOURCE THE IMPORTANT EMOTIONAL PARTS OF LIFE TO A FCUKING APP. I have featured stuff like this before, and I think made the same point (I’m nothing if not tediously repetitious – although, come on, I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade now so you can probably let me off the occasional retread of old thoughts) – if you are feeling miserable or isolated or depressed, do you really think ‘talking’ to an uncaring, unfeeling machine is going to make you feel better? Also, this claims to be ‘powered by AI’ – OH REALLY? TELL ME HOW IT FCUKING WORKS, THEN? YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU? This stuff really boils my p1ss, honestly.
• Do Not Draw A Penis: Very silly, but also quite funny – the site uses all of the cock data accumulated by Google’s drawing project from a few years back to train an image recognition system which will automatically recognise and admonish you should you attempt to scrawl anything penile. Go on, you know you want to.

By Yves Tessier

CHECK OUT THIS SITE, COURTESY OF CURIOS’ (AND EVERYONE ELSE’S) MAN IN CHINA ALEX WILSON, FEATURING LOADS OF GREAT MIXES OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD JUST LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT WHEN THE TORIES KNIFED THATCHER THEY APPOINTED JOHN MAJOR LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, SO IS THERE ANY CHANCE WE CAN HURRY THIS HORRIBLE FCUKING HORRORSHOW ON A BIT PLEASE BECAUSE, WELL, THERE APPEARS TO BE QUITE A LOT OF STUFF THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEONE GOT ON WITH SORTING OUT, PT.2:

• The National Geographic Travel Photo Awards: A chance to look at a whole host of places you would almost certainly much rather be right now. In a nice touch, all the winning photos are available to download as wallpapers for desktop or phone, which is cute.
• Wiki TMNT: Or, to give it it’s full name, “Wiki Titles Singable to TMNT Themesong”. This will make PERFECT sense as soon as you click – I very much recommend following this one, mainly for the fact that means that, if you’re a heavy Twitter user, there will be several times each day when you’ll get the Turtles earworm, which is never a bad thing.
• UIBot: Autogenerate examples of UIs for inspiration. An interesting exploration of the effect of automation on design – “Uibot is an experiment on how far one could automate the generation of visual designs, what kinds of advantages it would lead to and what issues one would face.”
• Storyline: I tweeted this yesterday and then wished I hadn’t, as it’s SUCH a brilliant idea to rip off for almost any client with data they want to make fun and I really ought to have kept the very minor glory of stealing someone else’s idea and passing it off as your own for myself. Anyway. Storyline is very simple – it presents you with the title of a dataset – “sales of fidget spinners, 2015-19”, for example – and asks you to take your best shot at accurately graphing the dataset. Yes, I know it sounds boring, but I promise it’s more fun than you’d think, and can be applied to almost any data you think of.
• The Close Approaches Database: It’s good to know that NASA keeps track of all the foreign space objects that are set to be hurtling worryingly close to Earth- if you’d like to experience a very faint sense of planetary unease, this is a GREAT resource (though you might have to Google what some of the distances actually mean, which I promise will be quite reassuring – honestly, they’re not THAT close).
• Suspicious Site Reporter: Help Google get better at finding and de-ranking dodgy sites by installing their Site Reporter Chrome Extension; any sites that look weird, click the button and Google will check them out. In an age of FAKE NEWS and scams and the like, it seems like the sort of thing we should all do. Or does that make you a cop? Oh God, it’s so hard to keep up with who the ‘good’ people are.
• Doodle Place: This is brilliant and pointless and oddly nightmarish. Doodle Place is a small virtual space, accessible via your browser and navigated with WASD. Populating Doodle World are…doodles – anyone can draw anything they like and drop it into the space, where it will be animated and exist on the site for anyone else visiting to see. It functions like a weird, lo-fi, very shonky virtual sculpture park, but it’s quite nice to wander through and see what everyone else has made. At the time of writing there are NO SWASTIKAS, which is always a present surprise.
• Bullet: This is potentially useful for the podcasters amongst you – Bullet’s an iOS app which lets you quickly and easily create short snippet-vids from your podcast audio, complete with captions, meaning you could, for example, use it to clip out the two STANDOUT LOLS from your otherwise criminally self-indulgent 40 minute chat about nothing with your HILARIOUS mate and use those as a promo on social.
• Leetfree: Very much one for the programmers, this – Leetfree collects actual, real examples of those whiteboard tests that tech companies make programmers do to show that they can actually do real code on the fly rather than just nicking everything off Github like some sort of script kiddie. I obviously have no idea what ANY of this means, but it’s quite interesting even for a non-coder in terms of getting a feel for exactly how (in theory if not in practise) computation can be applied to real-world problem solving.
• Brick: GO BRICK NOW screams the URL. What is Brick? “Brick is a grassroots movement for young people who are dissatisfied with their relationship to screens and social media, and are looking to spend more time engaged in the real world. We challenge our community to turn their phone into a brick for at least an hour a day. That means to set it down, put it in Brick Mode or put it in a box, and go do something engaging in the real world.” A touch smugly “Why Don’t You?”, but you may find something to empathise with here if you’re a tedious mindfulnesstwat.
• Memos: This is smart and, if you’re a big phototaker, potentially really useful – I think that there are several other programs that do the same or similar, but they’re all things like Evernote and therefore horrible and bloated. Memos is basically a search engine for your photos – on iOS only – which does text-in-image analysis meaning you can take pictures of printed text and then search for the photo from the app using text recognition. Very smart indeed.
• A Neural Net Forgets: If you haven’t seen this already – it’s a few weeks old now (SORRY BUT I WAS ON HOLIDAY FFS) – then do watch it. Simply put, it’s what happens when a neural net imagines a face, and then has its neurons turned off one-by-one. This feels far darker and sadder than it ought – it’s an honestly beautiful project and Alzheimer’s UK could do worse than contact the artist and ask to collaborate on something similar on a larger scale as an awareness-raiser (can someone please get them to do that? I think it’s quite a nice idea on reflection). Part of the wider AI Told Me project of AI-based artworks, all of which are similarly well-conceived and executed.
• Photos of the Hong Kong Protests: A typically great selection in The Atlantic.
• Dialup Tarot: Do you do Tarot, either for fun or for…er…darkly occult reasons? GREAT! This app promises to match you up with another random user so that you can do each others cards – it’s an extension of the Dialup ‘random chats with strangers’ app that I featured in April, but it’s a cute, silly idea, and I love the concept of Dialup, so I hope you’ll forgive me the slight repost (please forgive me).
• The Most Brutalist Website Ever: Also, INCREDIBLY geeky.
• MS Paint In-Browser: I don’t quite know why you’d want this, but I suppose if you fancy adding the MS Paint aesthetic to all your camera roll photos to better stand out on the gram, then, well, WHY NOT? Hang on, do all PCs still come with Paint or has it died? *checks* THANK GOD. This is a pleasingly old-school version, though, so perhaps it’s just for the retro lols. Why am I still typing this entry?
• Slutbot: Sadly this is only available to users with a US or Canadian phone number, which is SO UNFAIR; there are, though, ways around this. Slutbot is a chatbot designed to help you get BETTER AT SEXY TYPING! This is pure filth, and SO funny (or at least to me, though I appear to have the sense of humour of a teenage boy when it comes to a machine telling me that it wants to feel me up). Exactly how it’s going to make you better at smutwriting, or what encouragement it gives you if it turns out you’re really bad at it, I have no idea – let’s find out!
• Vapegasm: You can now preorder a vape pen which connects to a vibrator via bluetooth so that each time you take a drag, the toy activates. Just imagine the sort of person who thinks this is a good idea.
• Tiles: A gentle, simple, rather lovely new puzzle game from the New York Times. Honestly, this is excellent and one you could well keep coming back to.
• The Complete BBC Micro Games Archive: Oh my God – if you are of the era in which you would occasionally be allowed to play ‘games’ on the single school computer, so basically about 35-40, then this is a proper time machine. IT HAS GRANNY’S GARDEN ON IT FFS! Honestly, these are all totally sh1t but SUCH a nostalgia trip; if you’re a child, click this link and see what passed for entertainment in THE OLDEN TIMES.
• Mario Royale: This shouldn’t work, but it really does. The first level of Super Mario, playable in-browser, with you racing against 99 other players to complete the level the fastest. This is great, but you will struggle to stop playing it.
• Magirune: Last up in this week’s selection of timesucking sack-baiters is this mini-RPG; explore the dungeon, kill the monsters, find the treasure. Small, simple, but rather a lot of fun – and there’s a proper challenge in there if you want to finish it ‘properly’.

By Thomas Prior

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, THIS IS CALLED “TROUBLE IN PARADISE: SONGS OF LOVE & LOSS FROM LATIN AMERICA” AND IT IS BY NICK STROPKO AND IT IS GREAT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Gif-fiti: Graffiti, gif-ed!
• Mathieu Bordel: An artist whose work I’ve featured on here before, but whose Tumblr collects a wonderful selection of their surreal, slightly 60s collage-type images which are also for sale as prints. I do love this stuff.
• 8–bit Fiction: I’m not 100% sure what this is – the page presents a series of 8-bit-style artworks, each illustrating a single quote, but the provenance of the quotes is unclear. Regardless, I love the style and the overall effect is pleasingly melancholic.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Paul Chaddeison: The work of French concept artist Chaddeison is ace, and a pleasing mix of subjects within his very recognisable BIG SCIFI style.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Memes: The account name lies – these are EXCELLENT memes. I do hope Nick Cave knows this exists.
• Seb Lester: Seb is a very talented calligrapher, and this is a very soothing Insta feed indeed.
• Alchemink: The best tattoo work I’ve seen in a while, this is a wonderful line style; ‘pollock’esque’ is a horribly lazy descriptor but, well, too late!
• Worship Leaders Without Teeth: Thanks to Dan for this – apparently these are all Christian rock band lead singers, without their teeth. This is probably funnier if you know who these people are, but, frankly, gurning rockstars are always worth a few seconds of your time if you ask me.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Facebook Will Make All The Money: This Bloomberg piece on the Facebook Libra announcement is the best thing I read on it this week (with the caveat that I got bored of reading takes reasonably quickly) – what I enjoyed was the way it couches the announcement in terms of Facebook’s increasingly clear desire to cement its status as a fundamental part of the web’s infrastructure rather than just a platform on it. It’s not too hard to see small countries in the developing world leaning into this stuff quite hard, not least given the de facto status of Facebook=the web across large swathes of the globe.
• Facebook Moderator PTSD: The latest Facebook PR horrorshow came in the form of this Verg article, in which people who’ve worked at FB’s moderation shops in the US break their NDAs to discuss the working conditions in the content-control farms. It won’t massively surprise you to learn that they are sub-optimal, nor indeed that Facebook (or the company it subcontracts the work to) doesn’t seem hugely bothered with the whole basic human dignity / ends-vs-means distinction. Two things, though, stood out – firstly, again, the fact that people are AWFUL and maybe all that stuff about Red Rooms on the Darkweb was true after all; and secondly, this line, which may be the most poignant thing I will read all year: “Other times, when he was having a particularly bleak day in the queue, a manager would hand him a bucket of Legos and encourage him to play with them to relieve the stress as he worked. Speagle built a house and a spaceship, but it didn’t make him feel better.” I might cry.
• Can Power Be Anything Other Than Zero-Sum: An interesting meditation on whether or not power must, definitionally, be a zero-sum concept (in most cases absolutely yes, is the answer – power is a finite resource; by definition, granting it to one person removes it from another, or blocks them from attaining it); what’s unusual is that it’s written by Jeff Raikes, ex-CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a VERY rich man. One doesn’t usually read stuff like this from people at the top of the pyramid; Raikes was apparently inspired down this road of thinking by a conversation with Anand Giridharadas, someone whose thinking and writing I really enjoy and who is very much worth a follow if you’re not aware of them.
• The New Wilderness: Another in the seemingly-infinite line of pieces about THE DEATH OF PRIVACY or THE NEW PRIVACY or suchlike (by the way, did you know that there’s no native word for ‘privacy’ in Italian? MAKES YOU THINK, EH?), but which distinguishes itself by coining a new (to me at least) way of thinking about the concept – to whit, “ ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.” A really interesting read, which whilst not groundbreaking offers a few useful new ways of framing the questions it addresses.
• Detecting Facial Manipulation in Photoshop: This is a very boring paper by Adobe and I don’t suggest you read it properly unless you’re a coder or a masochist; I just want you to know that SOON there will be tools that will enable us all to (in theory) easily see whether or not an image has been ‘shopped or not, praise God. Obviously this will only work for things done in ACTUAL photoshop (and no I won’t capitalise it or ™ it, screw you Adobe you preposterous fools) which means it won’t actually do all that much to curb fakery, but it’s a step in the right direction.
• Creators vs Influencers: A rumination on the difference between the concept of ‘creator’ and ‘influencer’ as they apply across social platforms. It’s a bit silly, but interesting from the point of view of the intersection of culture, the evolution of language, and the web. Let me put it on the record that I despise both terms, fwiw.
• Writing on a 30 Year-Old Mac: One of those occasional “I tried some old tech and WOW it was so good!” nostalgia pieces; on this occasion, the author exhumes an old Macintosh (one of those beige cubes, if you recall) in order to see whether he can write his copy on it. Unsurprisingly, his main takeaway is that the experience of working on a machine with so few features makes it easier to concentrate and offers fewer distractions; that said, he’s only saying that because the piece is entirely personal experience and self-reflecting; I’d like to see him write Curios on that bastard thing.
• The YouTube Rebrand: Primarily one for the designers amongst you, this is an exhaustive walkthrough by the design agency responsible for the YouTube rebrand (WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘WHAT REBRAND?’) – a really thorough breakdown of what they changed and why they did it. These things are often supremely wanky, but this is very clearly-written.
• Recommendations: Another in the THERE IS SO MUCH TAT ON SALE HOW DO WE CHOOSE series of articles, this looks at the retail-adjacent recommendation industry, encompassing review sites, newsletters and the rest. It’s interesting to see an analysis of a parallel / parasitic business area; I reckon you could probably still do reasonably well with something like this on Insta, using Stories, were you so inclined.
• The Ruthless Reality of Amazon’s One-Day Shipping: You know what I said up there about Facebook’s Libra being part of its long-term goal to become part of the fabric of the web? Well this is like that, but for Facebook read Amazon and for ‘part of the fabric of the web’ read ‘everything’. Explaining the lengths Amazon is going to to establish central control over as much of its logistics operation as it can, the piece paints a picture of a company that’s not going to be happy until it’s basically running anything that involves selling people stuff, start to finish. I read a BBC piece the other day which was looking at Amazon’s future plans; it was a bit puff-ish, and they’d been given access to a lot of senior Amazon people. One man they described as one of the company’s ‘visionary leaders’, and he was waxing lyrical about all the ways Amazon would change the world (for the better, obvs); a few paragraphs later, the piece briefly mentioned that he’d made his name at the company for coding something significant that helped save the company hundreds of millions at scale. Now, look, I’m not sniffing (I have never made my name at any company other than for a questionable attitude and a pyromaniac’s attitude to professional bridges), but surely that makes him a fcuking good coder rather than some sort of Jesus-like savant whose guidance we should blindly be following into the future. STAY IN YOUR FCUKING LANE, CODEMONGS!
• What Happened to SpeedX?: SpeedX was a Kickstarter project to fund an internet-connected bike – a very, very successful one. Til it went wrong and everything fell apart and loads of people lost their money. This is fascinating, not least on the quite mad world of doing business in China.
• CDs Are Coming Back: Are they? Are they really? I’m not sure about this one. Still, there’s an article about it online, which means that you can present it as an ACTUAL FACT next time you’re doing ‘strategy’ and need some rubbish to make you look like you’re on the cultural pulse. Apparently GenZ kids are buying CDs not to listen to but as an artefact of fandom or appreciation – which sort of works, I suppose, if you squint.
• The Queen of Mukbang: Mukbang, for those not already aware, is the term for people eating on camera for the pleasure (non-sexual) of the viewer; this is either from watching people eat improbably large amounts, or the ASMR-kick some people get from wet mouth sounds like chewing or swallowing (wow, ‘wet mouth sounds’ is a really unpleasant sentence to both read and type, turns out). Bethany Gaskin is a YouTuber who makes this sort of video, and it has made her RICH. Has any food brand done mukbang yet? It’s a pretty obvious win imho. Fcuk it, let’s go the whole hog and get Bird’s Eye to do a sploshing vid on Pr0nhub.
• Gunfluencers: Ah, influencers! This time, with guns (and, inevitably, breasts!)! This piece looks at the particular influencer economy that exists around firearms in the US, where gun companies are banned from promoting social posts that feature actual weapons; a ban which they gaily circumvent by paying people with huge followings lots of money to hold guns in their photos instead! This…this regulation of social advertising’s not really working, is it?
• Soberfluencers: Ah, influencers! This time, with the 12 steps (and, inevitably, breasts!)! Yep, even not being a raging alcoholic is now something you can be smugly positive about on Instagram; this, to me, is the very worst sort of performative claptrap the platform has to offer, this plastic commoditisation of a very real issue and a very real problem and something that people struggle with on a daily basis, coopted by people for no other reason than to sell an idea of ‘wellness’ to idiots. I need a drink (mum, it’s 11:13 am and I promise I very much do NOT need a drink, ok?).
• The Garfield Restaurant: The first ever officially-franchised Garfield restaurant has opened in Toronto. This is a profile of the restaurant and its owner, and it’s, honestly, one of the strangest things I have read all week. It has the slight feel of Tommy Wiseau about it – you know, someone utterly delusional but basically well-meaning, with a slight whiff of the mad/criminal about them. If any Curios readers happen to be in Toronto could you go along and tell me what it’s like please? Thanks.
• Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds: A New Yorker profile of the Hugo Award-winning author of (most famously) the Three Body Problem trilogy; this is fascinating, partly due to the very un-writerly nature of Cixin himself (a man who happily accepts he is far more interested in the science than the fiction), partly due to the few details that are sort of left hanging (his drinking, for one), but in the main for the very uncomfortable feeling you get towards the end when he effectively sanctions violent suppression of popular protest by the state and you get the very real feeling that there are certain differences in culture between East and West that are almost insurmountable.
• 100 Fascinating Word Facts: A podcast transcript, so occasionally a bit annoying stylistically, but these are all WONDERFUL. Look: “‘Smart’ has meant clever for some 700 years, but its etymology is from the Old English for pain. Because smarts are a cutting wit. And yes, it is painful, yes.” SO GOOD.
• Jeremy Vine’s Story About Boris Johnson: I don’t really want to talk about that man – this lovely anecdote by Jeremy Vine about meeting Johnson twice at speaking events is beautifully told, and as revealing as anything else about him. What do we think the protocol is when it comes to moving one’s mistress into Number 10?
• An Oral History of Bennington College: If, like me, you spent much of your teens worshipping at the altar of Tartt, McInerny and Easton Ellis, you will be aware of Bennington College as the alma mater of two of those three, and various other gorgeous, doomed members of the 80s literati and music world. This is an oral history of the college when all those people were attending – it reads, wonderfully, like a slightly detached combination of the Secret History and The Rules of Attraction and made me wish I’d been beautiful and damned and sickeningly talented and very rich and there in 1983.
• Mike Tyson Smokes the Toad: A truly excellent profile of Mike Tyson, now in his third act and reinventing himself as a legal weed brand. This is great writing, with some cracking lines – it also does a good job of asking why Tyson’s getting such a relatively easy ride from people despite his history of violence against women and sexual assault. It also contains the assertion that Mike Tyson is a “spiritually awakened shaman/cannabis-entrepreneur warrior of the light”, which is probably a best phrase in Curios this week.
• Boxing: Superb essay by Fatima Farheen Mirza, on boxing and womanhood and strength and family and race. Beautifully written.
• The Lesbian Cruise: Finally this week, the happiest thing you will read all week. Funny and romantic and heartwarming, I cannot recommend it enough. Read it, and then send it to everyone you know who’s even a little bit soppy about LOVE and stuff, it’s genuinely great.

By Naudline Pierre

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) This is by Sleater Kinney, the video is by Miranda July, and it is just fcuking GREAT. Even if you don’t adore the music, the video really is worth a watch:

2) This is by Mexico City Blondes, and as soon as I heard the beat I was transported back to Manchester in 1997 and Fat City Records and OH GOD this is good (if you’re a 90s fetishist):

3) This track is called ‘Dancers’, it’s by Plaid, and it’s a gorgeous slow-build piece of melodic electronica with a truly beautiful CGI video:

4) This is called ‘Runaway’ by Half Alive, and it’s the sort of slightly skippy/glitchy pop song that reminds me a lot of about 2008ish, in a good way. Not un-Hot Chip-esque, if you need a better comparator:

5) This is by Aidan Moffat and RM HUbbart, and I think it might be their last ever song together. It’s called ‘Cut to Black’ and it’s beautiful and VERY Arab Strap-ish, as you might expect:

6) Hiphop Corner! This is called ‘Gang Sh1t’, it’s by Marlon Craft, and I would encourage you to watch, listen and pay attention – this is excellent:

7) Finally this week, this is the second song this year by Mattiel I’ve featured on here – I think she might be my favourite artist of 2019 so far. This is called ‘Food For Thought’ – she is SUCH a good performer, and it’s a cracking song, and I hope you like it and oh that’s it for this week BYE BYE I HAVE MISSED YOU SO MUCH IT IS SO GOOD TO BE BACK DOING CURIOS EVEN IF THE OTHER BITS OF BEING BACK ARE A BIT LESS GOOD I HOPE YOU ALL HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND THAT THE SUN SHINES AND YOU GET TO SPEND TIME DOING THE THINGS YOU LOVE BEST AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK SO DON’T WORRY IT WILL ALL BE OK AND IF IT ISN’T IT PROBABLY DOESN’T MATTER BYE I LOVE YOU HAVE FUN BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

OH HELLO! I finished a job yesterday and as a result feel GREAT – even better, I seemingly managed to leave without alienating or upsetting anyone, although that will probably change next week when they realise that I have a secret backdoor login to the website and fully intend to go and make subtle but significant alterations to all the staff biographies as soon as they have paid my final invoice (what’s better, do you think? Misspelling everyone’s name by one letter, or giving everyone a 2:2 in Human Anthropology from Sheffield Hallam?).

Anyway, I am on holiday next week and the week afterwards, so this will be the last Curios til 21 June – take this opportunity, then, to writhe luxuriantly in my webspaff, and I’ll see you in a few short weeks, by which point I’m confident we’ll have somehow managed to relieve ourselves of this nationwide politico-cultural paralysis and everything will all be sorted and FINE. Won’t it? CAN SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE EVERYTHING FINE, PLEASE?

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and I am fcuking off now. Bye. 

By Solve Sundsbo

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES, HAVE THIS FRANKLY AMAZING SELECTION OF ‘SONGS OF THE SUMMER’ FROM THE PAST 50 YEARS!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS AT WHICH POINT FACEBOOK IS GOING TO BECOME LIKE SMOKING, SOMETHING WHICH THE KIDS KNOW IS FUNDAMENTALLY BAD FOR YOU BUT WHICH HAS A STRANGE APPEAL REGARDLESS:

• Whatsapp Is Getting Ads: Or at least it is IN THE FUTURE! Yes, that’s right, your messages may be encrypted and secure, but it doesn’t mean Facebook can’t still find a way to monetise them; Whatsapp is set to get a wonderful injection of advertiser cash next year when it starts to offer the ability to run ads in the ‘Status’ bit of the app – although it won’t be of any use or interest if you’re in the UK, seeing as no fcuker has ever used Whatsapp Status over here, ever (honestly, did you even know it was a thing? No, you didn’t, don’t lie). You don’t need to do anything about this now, obviously, but know that you can start to drop this particular nugget of information in meetings so as to look like some sort of crazy digital savant (you won’t look like a savant, fyi; you will instead look like a person who cares TOO MUCH about the minutiae of social media platform changes).
• IGTV Now Supports Landscape Videos: You don’t use IGTV! Noone uses IGTV! Now, though, you can post landscape-format videos on there so you can chuck ALL of your YouTube content onto the Other Platform without even bothering to recut it as vertical! What a time to be alive.
• YouTube Kills Live Subscriber Counts: I presume that you, like me, have spent the vast majority of 2019 glued to the respective subscriber numbers of Pewds and T-Series, slavering rabidly at the upticking counts and screaming with childlike excitement every time the lead changed hands. Weirdly, normal people neither know nor care about any of this stuff, which is probably why YouTube is set to remove the current granularity and realtime subscriber data from channels; this, obviously, is not in any way important news, but it does mean that your ability to run comparisons between your clients’ channels and their competitors will be slightly screwed. You still shouldn’t really care, though, as this is all stupid and pointless and none of it matters.
• LinkedIn Adds Ad Transparency Stuff: This is moderately-interesting (look, it’s a slow news week, I am clutching at straws somewhat here) – LinkedIn has this week announced a Facebook-esque move whereby you’ll n ow be able to see what ads a Page has been running along with a bit of info on targeting and the like; if you’re consumed by the fear that someone else is being better at BUSINESS than you, then you’ll now be able to keep tabs on your competitors LinkedIn ad campaigns with this THRILLING new feature (moderately interesting? I take it all back). “To bring even greater transparency to ads on LinkedIn, we are introducing a new Ads tab on LinkedIn Pages. In this tab, members will be able to view all the Sponsored Content (native ads running in the LinkedIn feed) that advertisers have run on LinkedIn in the past six months. Members can click on the ads, but the advertisers will not be charged for these engagements and the clicks will not impact campaign reporting.” SO MUCH EXCITEMENT! SO MUCH BUSINESS!
• Ofcom’s Online Nation Report: Useful and interesting set of new data from Ofcom, which this week launched its inaugural ‘Online Nation’ report, looking at the digital habits of the UK’s citizens. This is all about attitudes and platforms, so if you want a snapshot of which sites people say they use most often (weirdly, Pr0nhub, Xhamster and Redtube don’t feature anywhere) and what they feel about them, this is GREAT. Interestingly, this suggests that, despite what they might say, kids ARE in fact still using Facebook; they also, according to the data, think that it’s responsible for all the bad things in the world. Anyone would think it’s a perniciously-addictive service which does noone any good at all!
• MyWony: For a variety of reasons – not least my not quite having the figure for it – it is unlikely that I will ever be in the market for a wedding dress; if you, dear reader, are more inclined towards holy matrimony, though, may I present to you this OFFICIALLY WEBCURIOS-ENDORSED wedding dress manufacturer from the Ukraine? I have no idea whether the dresses they peddle are in fact nice, but the fact that they have chosen to create a beautifully-drawn and very stylised webcomicthingy, all about some sort of scifi love affair, to promote their wares makes me love them immoderately regardless of the aesthetic and sartorial quality of their output. GET MARRIED, WEBMONGS, AND INVITE ME TO YOUR WEDDINGS!

By Doug Kim

NEXT, HAVE A PLEASINGLY SUMMERY AND VAGUELY BALEARIC MIX OF LOUNGEY PIANO-HOUSE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS LIKE CURIOS IS A BIT THIN THIS WEEK AND AS SUCH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE BUT WHICH WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ANY PAUCITY OF CONTENT IS, FRANKLY, NOT MY FAULT AND IS SIMPLY A RESULT OF OTHER PEOPLE NOT MAKING ENOUGH INTERNET STUFF SO PLEASE PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGERS OUT YOU LAZY GITS, PT.1:

• The Romanov’s Twilight: I must confess here to be something of a historical dunce, and to the fact that as far as I’m concerned the Romanov’s might well be a brand of fancy chocolates as a storied dynasty. Still, this rather nice website has enlightened me a bit, and I now know that the Romanov’s were Russia’s imperial family who were killed or exiled in the wake of the 1917 revolution. This site presents the history of the family following the survivors’ flight from Russia, with biographies of the major players and various different visualisations of the family’s history; it’s not super-fancy, but the stories here are fascinating. This is made by Tass, fwiw, which when I was doing pseudo-journalism many years ago was by far and away the most exotic of the wire agencies – seriously, you have no idea how exotic and exciting it was to see stuff come in labeled ITAR-TASS, like it was actually news from a foreign galaxy or something.
• Astronaut: Thanks to Nathan Nelson on Twitter, who kindly pointed me at this earlier this week;Astronaut is a lovely site which presents YouTube videos uploaded to the site in the past week with specific filename types (DSC 11200, that sort of thing) and a very low viewcount. It’s not the first site of this ilk I’ve featured, but I don’t think I will ever get bored of the intensely odd and human spectacle of unwatched YouTube vids, uploaded for an unknown and uncaring audience by mystery individuals; honestly, this is SO ART and I could watch it pretty much forever. It is weird and creepy and surreal and just PERFECT and I love it unreservedly.
• The Pudding Wikipedia Popularity Map: Dataviz masters The Pudding return with a lovely coneit – a map of the US, in which all the major towns and cities have been replaced with the name of the person from said town or city who is ‘most Wikipediad’ – that is, “Person/city associations were based on the thousands of “People from X city” pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic).” I am VERY KEEN on the idea of this naming convention being adopted more widely; on that basis, I would have grown up in Melinda Messenger, which is absolutely preferable as a concept to having done so in Swindon. Although possibly not to Melinda, on reflection.
• The Labyrinth: Digital artist and Friend of Curios Shardcore has spent much of this week making really disturbing algobongo and sending it to me on Slack, causing me no end of workplace awkwardness (“No, look, it’s not real smut, it’s just what a computer imagines smut to be! What do you mean ‘that doesn’t matter and you’re still fired’?”), but he’s also found the time to put this on his website – a lovely little combination of the Tube map and a brainscan. “This map was generated from real human connectome data captured at CUBRIC. A minute sample of the 100,000 brain connections present in the average human mind was used to create the interconnected rail lines displayed across the representation of the brain here depicted. The London Tube Map is both a classic piece of design and a functional representation used by millions to negotiate the real geography of the city. With a nod to The Great Bear by Simon Patterson, I have assigned stations to locations along the lines = each of these stations representing sets of people and ideas which connect and intersect. This produces a juxtaposition of seemingly different concepts which at first may seem arbitrary, or perhaps even absurd, but which inevitably provoke the intellect to find a connection, perhaps revealing subconscious relationships and bringing them to the surface.” This is very cool, and there are prints available should you fancy buying an ACTUAL ART (I am not taking commission, FYI, but perhaps I ought).
• The New York Public Library Digital Collections: This is WONDERFUL – prints, videos, audio, documents, maps, manuscripts…it feels like this contains everything in the world ever, frankly. This contains over a million things and, to be honest, if you can’t find something you’re interested in here then you may well be dead.
• PokeGAN: What would Pokemon look like if they were imagined by a machine? THEY WOULD LOOK LIKE THIS! These are great, and Pokemon are, it turns out, the perfect dataset to train a GAN on – the weirdly amorphous nature of the pixellated buggers, when seen up-close, means that these imagined variants look pretty much perfectly plausible. The only negative here is that the creator didn’t map these creations to Janelle Shae’s neural net-generated Pokemon names, but you can’t have everything (WHY NOT FFS??).
• RRRRRRRRRR: This is, fine, nothing more exciting than a Russian website featuring photos of people’s pets, but a) LOOK AT ALL THE CRITTERS!; and b) the magic of Google translate renders this into some sort of weird deadpan poetry. Honestly, the copy absolutely makes this – I mean, look: “The hero of this week is the Scottish Fold cat Seva. In life, he is extremely relaxed and, despite his young age, has already managed to change a few names, turn over dozens of glasses of water and become the hero of this police investigation.” Also, there is a cat on here called ‘Serotonin’, which is frankly the best name for a pet I have ever heard.
• Buildbox: This is an interesting game-creation tool; it’s a commercial product, fine, but the feature set looks amazingly rich, and the potential for making rather interesting and involved games with relatively minimal effort seems vast. Check out the demo video on the homepage, which makes it look like you can basically make a BAFTA-winning mobile game in about three clicks; it’s probably marginally more complex than that, fine, but maybe this will be the moment when your untapped creative potential comes gushing out. Maybe.
• Goodbrief: A nice idea for design students or anyone wanting some creative prompts to practice with – Goodbrief is a simple design brief generator, which lets you choose a sector and a type of work, and throws out an imagined brief for a designer to respond to; should you be desperate for a work prompt but not have access to any actual briefs, this is potentially really rather useful – oh, and if you need to come up with tasks for prospective interview candidates, this will basically automate the entire process so that you can go back to playing Minesweeper or browsing overpriced stationery or whatever it in fact is that designers do at work.
• Nod To The Rhythm: Upload any photo you like, tell the website where the eyes and mouth are, and then watch in rapt amazement as it turns said photo into a lightly-animated image, nodding its head and opening its mouth and generally looking all slack-jawed and weird. If you, like me, tend to spend most of your time in an office thinking up ways to make your colleagues feel slightly upset or uncomfortable, you may well appreciate this – why not spend the rest of the day taking all the photos off the ‘staff’ section of your employer’s website and run them through this for the lols? Or alternatively just make one with your own face and spend the rest of the day replying to all emails with a gif of your idiot-looking face, nodding emptily? This is how everyone behaves at work, right?
• Ship Your Enemies GDPR: Do you remember a few years ago when there was that brief craze for silly internet businesses which would send anyone you liked a box full of glitter or horse dung or whatever as an HILARIOUS PRANK? This is like that, except instead of sending someone a box of tiny plastic dust motes you are sending them a data-related legal shakedown! Copy and paste the legal text on the site and send it to whoever you like, to cause them (in theory, at least) a not-insignificant degree of hassle to comply with the request within 30 days; even better, if they fail to meet the deadline they are technically liable for a reasonably-sized fine! Whilst this is obviously an incredibly petty and annoying thing to do, it is also, potentially, very funny indeed, particularly if you know the person whose job it will be to deal with the horror and can picture their look of pained irritation.
• Kite Plans: Many, many years ago I worked for an agency called Idea Generation, where staff were on average about 16 years old and there was always a gramme of coke in the breadbin (trufact!); we did the PR for Amazon, before they were the terrifying everything-peddler they are today, and used to do loads of stories identifying spurious consumer trends based on sales data. Back in the mid-00s, we literally created a publishing phenomenon when we put out a story about The Dangerous Book for Boys being THE hot book of the Summer as parents tried to get their kids to swap their Playstations for conkers – obviously it wasn’t, and obviously parents weren’t trying to do that at all, but in the early days of digital panic it made for a nice feature angle for every single mid-market and broadsheet in the country. Anyway, that’s a really digressive way of introducing this website, which contains literally hundreds of different designs for kites that you can make and which your children will look at dismissively before going back to playing Fortnite instead.
• The Electricity Map: This is a really comprehensive resource showing how various nations get their electricity, where they source it from, and the environmental impact of their power consumption. Honestly more interesting than you’d think, I promise.
• Batch Watermark: Add watermarks to images, in bulk, with a single click. Obviously there are all sorts of useful professional uses for this, but in the main I quite like the idea of adding a totally unnecessary watermark to every single photo I ever take in a massive display of creative hubris.
• Thyself: If you’ve read Web Curios for a while, you may have realised that I have no time or patience for wellness, mindfulness, meditation or any such stuff – it’s not that I don’t think these things can be useful for others, to be clear, it’s more that I am incredibly superficial and shallow and I don’t have enough internal life to warrant that degree of introspection and analysis. If you’re a little less two-dimensional than me, though, you may like the idea of Thyself, a Chrome plugin which will periodically ask you how you’re feeling and asks you to respond with an emoji, letting you track your moods and feelings in simple, visual fashion. To be clear, this won’t make you happier, but it may allow you to define with greater precision the exact flavour of existential malaise you’re afflicted with.

By Andy Rementer

NEXT UP, TRY THIS VERY RELAXED AND LOW-KEY MIX BY ARON MCFAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS LIKE CURIOS IS A BIT THIN THIS WEEK AND AS SUCH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE BUT WHICH WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ANY PAUCITY OF CONTENT IS, FRANKLY, NOT MY FAULT AND IS SIMPLY A RESULT OF OTHER PEOPLE NOT MAKING ENOUGH INTERNET STUFF SO PLEASE PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGERS OUT YOU LAZY GITS, PT.2:

• Chaos Burst Effects: For several years now there has been a general uptick in recognition and acceptance of Dungeons & Dragons as something that’s, you know, sort of ok. Whereas when I was growing up the mere suggestion that you might like to pretend to be a wizard in your spare time was a one-way ticket to a land of chinese burns and social ostracism, nowadays it’s COOL and socially acceptable to claim nerdery, and the weird escapism of sitting around a table with a bunch of people rolling dice and pretending that you are Tharg, Scion of Thargandia is vaguely aspirational. How the everliving fcuk has this happened? Anyway, this is a genuinely wonderful list of 1000 randomised status effects for roleplaying games, the idea being that Dungeon Masters can call on this sheet if they want to add a little bit of leftfield excitement to a play session – these are all things that can happen to magic users as a random consequence of casting spells. Regardless of whether or not you have ever played or have any interest in D&D, this is WONDERFUL – the imagination here is masterful, and there’s something lovely about imaging the odd directions that some of these could take a story – honestly, “Caster appears 50% fatter than they are in reality” would be a JOY to play with.
• BFF: A project by artist Shaun Feeney, which is best explained by the artist themselves: “The BFF project consists of 127 drawings combining the faces of friends. Inspired by my two-year experience working as a forensic artist, I drew the faces of 64 pairs of combined friends. I then drew a series of composites of the composites, until finally arriving at one drawing emergent from all 128 faces.” This is eerie and uncanny and sort of wonderful, and the resulting images are very, very strange and utterly compelling.
• Dirty Car Art: Artwork drawn into the filth of long-parked vehicles by Scott Wade, who is apparently very famous – he’s been on telly in over 20 countries, the website excitedly exclaims! – but has previously escaped my attention. It’s fair to say that nothing on this site matches the genuine brilliance of “I wish my girl/boyfriend was as dirty as this!”, but credit to Scott for trying (I jest, obviously ,this is all quite amazing and the sort of thing you can probably steal for a pitch if you’re feeling lazy and unimaginative).
• Muzli: A truly horrible name for an otherwise excellent little site – Muzli is a sort of visual inspiration search engine thingy, which throws out solely visual responses to any prompt you care to give it, and which is excellent from the point of view of creating mood boards and the like. The really clever thing is that it works with all sorts of quite niche terms – so you can input a pantone code, for example, and it will pull images containing that tone, or a school of design if you want a certain stylistic layer over all the results. I mean, this probably still isn’t as good as Google Images, but it’s good to have competition.
• Some Excellent Deepfakes: You might have seen the cliip of comedian Bill Hader ‘doing’ Arnold Schwarzenegger on late night TV in the US, rendered as a realtime deepfake – this is the YouTube channel of the tech crew who did the stunt, and there are half a dozen vids on there at the time of writing demonstrating quite how good the current state-of-the-art deepfake landscape is. It’s still not totally convincing, but it’s also significantly less horrifying and weird than it was a year ago, meaning at the present rate of improvement I’ll be able to bring you a totally convincing representation of me lifting the Europa League trophy by approximately Christmas.
• Bitlisten: This is the sound of all the world’s Bitcoin transactions as they happen; you can change the tones being used, and with the right combination of settings and a few tweaks of the volume you can basically ASMR yourself thanks to a bunch of idiots gambling on made-up non-money.
• Swit: There’s an interesting mini-ecosystem in terms of websites and apps at the moment, featuring products and services that exist solely to help people make better Stories – this is another of that ilk, an app which you can use to create small animations detailing your travels so as, presumably, to offer you bookend-type content with which to frame your EXCITING TRAVEL STORIES featuring you in a pool with some inflatable flamingos (FFS SUSAN THAT IS SO 2018). Nothing about this is particularly interesting per se, but if you’re after something which will temporarily make your Story stand out from that of every other plastic-lipped nonentity out there, this might be of use.
• Variable Fonts: Literally that! Discover and download variable fonts! “This site’s goal is to help designers and developers become more familiar with OpenType variable fonts in a way that isn’t overwhelming, while also providing straightforward info upfront about the font projects, who made them, and where to find more info or get the fonts to use.” Fine, it’s not exactly exciting but it might be useful to some of you. SEE, I DO CARE.
• Update Faker: This is VERY basic and won’t fool anyone with an IQ in treble-figures; however, you probably work in an office, meaning that there will be multiple people in your current field of vision who don’t reach that low bar and who will be RIPE for pranking. This site presents a variety of fake system update options which you can set running to baffle and confuse your idiot colleagues – actually, now I think of it, this is too good to waste on other people; why not set it running on YOUR computer, tell someone that it’s doing system updates and then fcuk off to the pub while you ‘wait for the IT to sort itself out’? I am a genius. DO THIS.
• Goat LARP: For those of you who have actually managed to achieve sexual congress with a consenting human partner and probably aren’t aware of these things, LARPing means Live Action Role-Playing – that is, doing role-playing in costume, with props. In the main, this seems to involve the sort of people who would have been Goths or Emos a few years ago twatting each other with blunt halberds before going on to bore each other to death over seven gallons of real ale, but occasionally the world of LARPing gets marginally more interesting – as it does here, with this event which is inviting people to come along to an event a fortnight on Saturday where they will be running a roleplay event specifically for some goats. No, I have no idea how that will work, or indeed what the goats are expected to get out of the experience, but should you be in the vicinity of Redding, Connecticut on June 15th then I would strongly advise that you pop down and check this out.
• The Satellite Map: ALL OF THE SATELLITES IN SPACE, ON A MAP! It’s amazing quite how many there are circling the equator; can the satellites see each other, do you think, or does the vastness of space mean that they’re forever orbiting in practical isolation?
• The Stick: If you’re a CREATOR (sorry) or just someone who quite likes making films on their phone, this could be a total godsend. The Stick is a very clever-looking peripheral for phones, consisting of a magnetic patch that you affix to the back of the device, and a massively versatile attachment that you can stick to the magnet and which can act as a stand or a fastener to attach your phone to your hand, your bike, or whatever else. As a means of securing the phone for filming in motion, this looks hugely useful, and in general the device looks like a genuinely good idea – it’s ‘coming soon’, apparently, and you can sign up for updates should you be so inclined.
• Blot: This is an interesting idea. “Blot is a blogging platform with no interface. Blot turns a folder into a blog. Drag-and-drop files inside to publish them. Organize your files in a way that suits you.” Basically this is a super-simple no-code publishing system – while it might not be hugely sophisticated, there’s a lot of potential here and the templates you can use are surprisingly flexible. The aesthetic is always going to be a bit ‘white space lifestyle kinfolk’, fine, but this is squarely aimed at the digihipster demographic and so that’s probably what you’re after anyway.
• Character Design References: The most incredible animation and cartooning resource I have ever seen. Honestly, this is the MOTHERLODE if you’re interested in cartoons, graphic novels, animation and the like.
• 2D Doom: So as I said in the upfront, this is a slightly reduced Curios this week (I blame America being on a long weekend, the selfish, lazy fcuks) – by way of recompense, though, have this WONDERFUL side-scrolling shootyjumpyplatformer, effectively taking some of the elements of Doom – Doomguy, hell, cacodemons, the chainsaw – and transposing them into a Commander Keen-style 90s shareware clone. Honestly, this is ACE and will happily keep you going til hometime.

By Arduino Catanfora

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES, WHY NOT CHECK OUT THIS EXCELLENT AND ECLECTIC SELECTION BY RAKALE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Second Beat Songs: Only one Tumblr this week, but it’s a GOOD ONE – Second Beat Songs collects versions of popular tracks, tweaked so that every second beat is removed. This is HORRIBLE but also strangely compelling; listening to these is a little like the audio equivalent of being on a slightly unpleasant comedown, with everything feeling a little too twitchy and jagged – seriously, click the link and listen to the MC Hammer track near the top, you will TOTALLY get what I mean.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ochre Jelly: Excellent LEGO kits. No, really, these are amazing.
• Lakin Ogunbanwo: A Nigerian photographer, whose work is SUPER stylised and FASHION; this is excellent, and the visual style here is wonderfully distinctive.
• Duda Lozano: A tattoo artist who does THE most incredible work; their pieces look like embroidered badges, complete with hanging threads, and the general effect is utterly mindbending.
• Cheap Old Houses: I imagine that quite a number of you spend your weeks living in your metropolitan rabbit hutches, dreaming of the possibility of a bucolic existence pursuing simple pleasures and maybe getting down to some good DIY to reconnect you with REAL VALUES and stuff; if so, this is basically pr0nography for you – Cheap Old Houses offers a seemingly endless stream of large, mainly quite fcuked rural properties across the US, all available for what appear to be preposterously low prices. Obviously what the account doesn’t tell you is how many people have been murdered in each property, or the skunk smell that haunts every single nook and cranny, but if you can ignore the practical realities then this is a whole load of morning commute dreamfodder.
• Tower Block 1: Thanks Gill for sending me this – the Insta feed of KLF legend Jimmy Cauty’s latest project, which sees him building a concrete tower block because ART.
• Nice Threads Mate: And thanks Dora for this, the Insta feed of an excellent-if-hipster embroidery shop; I would quite happily have their stitched representation of Pizza Hut ads on my wall, should anyone want to gift me such a thing.
• Naturally Jo: Vegan food art by a 17 year old kid – this is, honestly, remarkably well-done, and their eye is quite superb.
• Jonny Seven: I don’t really want to explain this too much. It’s…odd. Click and follow, and apologies in advance for the funny dreams.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

• Facebook Vs Fox: Ordinarily I wouldn’t link to something as US-parochial as a screed about fake news in the US, but the overall point here is germane whichever side of the Atlantic you happen to be on. Taking as its prompt the slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi that did the rounds last week, the piece addresses the odd dichotomy of our current moral panic around truth and misdirection in news, and makes the excellent, true point that, whilst we might get all frothy-mouthed about Facebook and the evils of fakery, the real problem here with the quality of discourse is the traditional media. It’s a US article, so Fox is the main target, but you could equally rewrite this from the UK perspective and insert the tabs or the Mail and come to the same conclusion. I don’t mean to defend Facebook – really, I don’t – but this keeps coming back to the fact that IT IS JUST A TOOL AND WE ARE IN FACT THE PROBLEM.
• Inside MeWe: MeWe is one of the many alternanetworks, established a few years back but growing in popularity amongst fringe communities who are increasingly steering away from the mainstream networks as a result of what they perceive to be the bias they show against right-wing views; it’s not quite Gab, but it’s vaguely on the same sort of spectrum. This is an interesting look at what happens to a network when there isn’t any control or moderation, where (practically) anything goes, and where the self-declaredly disenfranchised congregate – it may not surprise you to learn that it’s not very nice.
• Post-Mutti: A fascinating look at the end of Angela Merkel’s reign in Germany, and how history will assess her near-15 year stint in charge of the Reich. It’s possibly a result of quite how insular and self-absorbed the UK has been over the past three years that one of my favourite parts of this piece is that it doesn’t mention us at all – this is a picture of global politics that focuses on the big picture and the power players, and we don’t even merit a cursory nod in passing. The overriding theme of the piece is sadness; sadness at Merkel’s lack of an obvious positive legacy, at a world which is more fractured and confused than when she took office in the early 00s, and sadness at her status as perhaps the last Big Beast of global politics – aside, of course, from Vlad, who the article sniffily notes doesn’t really count because ‘noone trusts or believes him’.
• The Pentagon’s Race Against Deep Fakes: This is an excellent explainer from CNN about what Deep Fakes are, how they are made, and what is being, and can be, done to find and identify them; if you want a simple, clear explanation of the technology and what it can be used for, this is an excellent starter.
• There Is Too Much Stuff: On the strange choice-paralysis caused by the seemingly-infinite array of products available at the click of a mouse thanks to Amazon, Wish, and all the other peddlers of disposable tat sending shipping containers criss-crossing our seaways and making a mockery of the current trend towards environmentalism (you want to help the environment? Really help it? STOP CONSUMING SO MUCH STUFF, THEN. What’s that? It’s inconvenient and you really like all the stuff? Oh, ok, fine). This is an interesting look at a slightly surreal feature of modernity – to whit, the trend towards single-offering retailers as a reaction to the fact that there is no way of choosing between the seemingly-identical procession of 300 different variants on a single product you’ll find on Amazon. There’s quite a lot of intellectual meat in here if you can be bothered to dig for it, in terms of retail and consumption trends.
• The Ukrainian President’s Inaugural Speech: You are probably aware that the Ukraine recently elected a comedian as their President – a man with no political experience whatsoever, other than his leading role in a long-running sitcom about an ordinary bloke who becomes President of the Ukraine. His appointment, weirdly, has generated less interested than I might have expected – are we now completely inured to the idea of hideously-unsuitable TV candidates attaining high office? How quickly we become jaded! – but this transcript of his inaugural speech is worth a read; I honestly thought this was a spoof or parody at first, but research suggests this really is the verbatim text and, well, CRIKEY. This is in many respects a very good speech – and I imagine delivered by a skilled performer it landed very well indeed – but crikey does it also feel exactly like a script from a TV show. This is going to be very, very interesting to watch.
• I Lied On Twitter: Did you see that Twitter thread last week in which the author told a long, rip-roaring tale of a road trip he took as a young man which involved him inadvertently stealing a brick of heroin from the notorious MS-13 gang? If so, you might not have seen this follow-up in which the thread’s author admitted to making the whole thing up for the numbers, and in the vague hope that someone might give himn a screenwriting contract. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see someone try and roll back from a myth they’ve created; on the other, part of me does wonder whether the whole thing was planned to garner additional attention and highlight the man behind the story so as to better his hopes of getting that writer’s room gig.
• The Brilliance of Da Vinci: A lovely biographical essay on Leonardo Da Vinci, which does a superb job of not only telling his life story, insofar as its possible to do so, but also contextualises the importance of his work in modernity; it’s fascinating to see how much of his theorising is directly relevant to today’s art and science; the interview with the heart surgeon, in which he speaks of the direct impact that studying Leonardo’s anatomical sketches has had on the manner he approaches his work in the theatre, is fascinating.
• 94 Awesome Women: A selection of 94 profiles of awesome women, featured on the website of The Gentlewoman – these range from Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Adele to Sanda Oh to Tavi Gevinson, these are GREAT and, if you’ll excuse the term, not a little inspiring.
• Bullet Comments: I think I’ve mentioned bullet comments on here before, but in case you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to a particular feature of the Asian web whereby videos will often have playback comments overlaid on them, in the manner of a track on Soundcloud – so anyone can leave a comment at any point in the video, which will then flash up on playback along with all the others that have been posted. Does that make sense? It’s quite hard to tell. Anyway, the article does a far better job of explaining the idea than I can – I think this sounds like a fascinating feature, and I wonder whether it would catch on in the West; perhaps there’s something in Asiatic characters that makes the experience less unpleasant than it would be with Western letters cluttering up the screen. Regardless, I would like someone to hack this together for YouTube, please, just because.
• Trump’s Wikipedia Page: A look at what it’s like nehind the scenes on Trump’s Wikipedia page, talking to the editors who have made it their job to ensure that the entry for the most divisive President in US history (that feels like a true statement, even if I must confess that I’m not wholly confident in my knowledge of Andrew Jackson’s approval ratings) remains unsullied by trolls and partisanship. This isn’t really about Trump at all; instead it’s about the slightly odd and obsessional Wikipedian community, and how it self-regulates remarkably at scale.
• First You Make Maps: This is BEAUTIFUL and fascinating, on the history of cartography – you may not think that you want to read several thousand words all about the different ways in which people have made maps over the past 1000 years, but I promise you that this is ace and you will love it.
• I M Pei: The obituary of modernist architect I M Pei, the Chinese-American whose work defined much of large-scale corporate space worldwide, and whose buildings you have definitely seen even if you don’t know they’re by him. This is, to my mind at least, a quite startlingly brutal post-mortem takedown of the man’s work – I know that this style of architecture is far from fashionable at the moment, but I thought that this line in particularly was something of a low blow: “The only thing that kept Pei from becoming one of the immortals was his paucity of artistic talent.” – I mean, WOW.
• This Is An Ad Targeted At Millennials: From McSweeney’s. If you work in advermarketingpr – ha, of COURSE you do! – then this will make you cringe in horrified recognition.
• Meet Curvy Wife Guy: You may recall Robbie Tripp from his brief moment of internet notoriety a few years back, when he went viral based on an Insta photo of his wife in which he waxed lyrical about how much he loved her and her ‘ample curves’ (there’s no way of writing stuff like this without sounding like you’re writing something for the Sun, turns out); this is an interview with the pair of them, as Tripp launches his first single, a sort of internet-era Sir Mixalot, but VERY white and full of messages about body positivity and how it’s good to be thicc (sic). It’s more interesting than you’d expect, not least because the interviewer does a reasonable job of questioning the extent to which Tripp’s performative uxoriousness is genuine or simply a timely grift to exploit the recent trend towards fat acceptance. Regardless, the song is absolute garbage and you will be humming it for weeks.
• U Ok Hun?: This is WONDERFUL – an analysis and appreciation of the word, and indeed the very concept of, ‘hun’. From Gemma Collins to Natalie Cassidy, this is an exhaustive investigation into what ‘hun’ means, how it straddles gay male and ‘basic’ culture, and how it’s basically the ur-expression of that very British feeling of being ruinously hungover, watching terrible Sunday television with The Fear and eating Dairylea Dunkers in your pants.
• Incel Plastic Surgery: This piece did the rouns this week; the main thrust of commentary on it seems to have been that it’s an excellent and sensitive portrait of incel culture, and the strange form of mental illness that causes young men to contemplate significant surgery to up their value on the sexual marketplace. That’s certainly true, but there were a couple of other things that I found more interesting; the first, the reaction of the cosmetic surgeon to being told that he was effectively a God to all these sad, lonely, bitter young men; and the second, the slightly uncomfortable feeling that, whilst this is all obviously horrible and sad, it’s also not a million miles away from the way in which consumer culture has made women feel for much of the late 20th/early-21st Century.
• The Invisible City Beneath Paris: Finally this week, a truly wonderful piece of writing about going on an explore in the subterranean tunnel network beneath Paris. This NEEDS to be a film or documentary – it’s supremely cinematic, the writing is sublime, and there are some beautiful lines throughout. “All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere” is one that particularly struck me but, honestly, almost every line here is a joy.

By Shawn Huckins

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is an absolute BANGER of a tune – ‘Nails, Hair, Hips, Teeth’, by Todrick, by far and away the fiercest, queerest piece of pop you’ll hear all week:

2) This is called ‘Mapping’, it’s by Shortly, and it is SO LOVELY; the video’s rather beautiful too:

3) WHAT a voice this woman has. The song’s called ‘Keep The Change’, and the artist is called Mattiel and I think they ought to be more famous than they are. SUCH a good song:

4) I suppose it was only a matter of time til someone did an ASMR pop song – and lo! It came to pass that that someone was Charlotte Adigery – this is actually a lot better than it has any right to be, the triggers work a treat, and it’s oddly reminiscent of ‘Underwater Love’ by Smoke City from back in the 90s. It’s called ‘Cursed and Cussed’ – give it a try:

5) This is the new song from Why?, one of my favourite bands in the world. It’s called “I may come out a broken yolk, I may come out on saddle”, which is the exact sort of pretentious twaddle I adore them for:

6) Last up this week, it’s Poppy! HELLO POPPY! This is called ‘Scary Mask’ and, frankly, it’s horrible and unsettling! ENJOY AND THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK AND FOR A FORTNIGHT IN FACT WHAT WITH ME GOING ON HOLIDAY NEXT WEEK FOR A LITTLE BIT SO BYE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND THE INTERNET WHILE I AM AWAY AND KNOW THAT I WILL BE THINKING OF YOU EVERY SINGLE DAY AND HOPING THAT YOU ARE WELL AND HAPPY PLEASE TRY NOT TO WORK TOO HARD AND I WILL BE BACK BEFORE YOU KONW IT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU!:

 HELLO! NORMAL SERVICE IS ONCE AGAIN RESUMED!

That’s right, it’s ME! Not the algoversion – honest – but the REAL BOY, all flesh and sebum and mucus. ISN’T IT NICE TO HAVE ME BACK?

The website should have been fixed, the mailer software should be working…all that remains is for me to finish penning this desultory excuse for an intro and hit ‘publish’ and ALL WILL BE AS IT EVER WAS! 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you have no idea how good it feels to get all these links out of my head. 

By Brooke DiDonato

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS, WHY NOT GIVE THE FRANKLY LUDICROUS VOCAL RANGE OF DIAMANDA GALAS A GO?

THE SECTION WHICH HAS REALISED AT THE POINT OF HAVING TO WRITE UP A COUPLE OF FAIRLY GIRTHY WEEKS OF NEWS ABOUT S*C**L M*D** THAT IT REALLY COULD NOT GIVE LESS OF AN IOTA OF A FCUK ABOUT ANY OF THIS STUFF AT ALL, AND WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO THE POINT IN TIME WHERE IT CAN STOP HAVING THE WORD ‘DIGITAL’ IN ITS JOB TITLE AND INSTEAD PERHAPS PIVOT TO ORNITHOLOGY OR SOMETHING SIMILARLY PLEASANT AND BUCOLIC:

• All The Things FB Announced at F8: Or at least most of the things, from Day 1 (Day 2 was the boring, techy bit which, trust me, you really don’t need to know about at all). SO MANY THINGS! Group video watching via Messenger! A boost to Groups within the platform! A slight redesign to pivot away from the hateful blue (don’t worry, Mark, Facebook will always be the Big Blue Misery Factory in my mind!)! The ability for ‘influencers’ to shill directly from their Insta feeds! SO MANY THINGS! Read the list of updates and digest them for your next client meeting, but, equally, know that these developments are all just pipeline stuff at the moment and won’t impact your actual job for a few months yet so, well, who cares?! Honestly, the main stuff here is that Groups continue to become more important, that FB’s AR product is getting pretty good, and the ‘shop through Insta’ stuff – everything else is of fairly minimal interest to advermarketingprdrones such as yourselves, so relax about it and think about something more fun instead. Look – here’s some analysis by someone who is FAR more interested in this stuff than I am, read this and feel smarter.
• FB Changes Video Prioritisation in Newsfeed: Not, of course, that Newsfeed really matters any more, but wevs. This is a series of slight tweaks to the algo which mean that FB will now start to prioritise longer-form (3m-ish) video, and specifically longer form video with significant repeat viewership and at least 1m+ of view completion. The platform subsequently clarified that there was obviously still a place for shortform, but that it was working to prioritse longer original content as that, apparently. Is what people want. IS IT THOUGH? IS IT? Somehow I am doubtful. Still, if at some point in the past few years you or your clients have done a PIVOT TO VIDEO…well, congratulations! The rules have ONCE AGAIN CHANGED! This probably won’t affect most of you, but know that your 10-15s repurposed TV spot is going to do even less well without ad spend than it did last week. GREAT!
• FB Adds Small Business Features: Both of these things are genuinely useful and smart – one feature offers small businesses assistance with ad targeting, automating the majority of the ad setup process to make it super-simple to run promos to benefit your business, assisted by Facebook’s own pseudo-AI (not in fact AI), whilst the other lets businesses add a ‘book appointment’ button to their FB/Insta profiles for in-app scheduling and visit booking (oh, and there’s some stuff in there about a boost to the rudimentary in=-app video editing features too). This is, obviously, totally sensible, and exactly the sort of thing you ought to cite the next time someone asks ‘Why do people still use Facebook if it’s so evil?’ – BECAUSE IT WORKS, DAMMIT.
• A Slight Tweak To FB’s Policies on Promoting Crypto: Not, obviously, that any of YOU fine folk peddle that sort of made-up snake oil, oh no no no. “While we will still require people to apply to run ads promoting cryptocurrency, starting today, we will narrow this policy to no longer require pre-approval for ads related to blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency.” See? You can now flog empty promises and lies with total abandon – THANKS, FACEBOOK!
• FB Launches New Anti-Misinformation Measures: Whilst I’m obviously in no way averse to giving Facebook a regular kicking every week, it seems only fair to acknowledge when it does something that seems…sort-of good. So it is with this series of updates, designed to once more attempt plug the hole in the infodyke with Mr Z’s pudgy digital thumb (wow, that really didn’t work as an analogy, did it? Sorry!) – this is a series of tweaks that FB hopes will prevent individuals, Pages and, newly, Groups, from sharing content that has been proven to be false, with measures including alerts for Group admins when previously-debunked content is shared in their community, and the depreciation of links to sites that get loads of traffic from FB but none from outside it. These are all sensible, reasonable steps, and none of them will make a blind bit of difference – still, thanks for trying to cram that massive, amorphous genie back into the stinking bottle of meths from whence it came!
• You Can Now Add Images, Videos of Gifs to ReTweets: YES THANKYOU GOD MORE WITLESS MEME-BASED ‘CONTENT’ TO ‘ENJOY’!
• Snap Launches Premium Ad Platform: Brands can now pay Snap (what are presumably) significant amounts of money to guarantee that their ad inventory gets shown on ‘premium’ Snapchat ‘Shows’ – effectively it’s the digital equivalent of a guaranteed ad buy in, say, Corrie’s ad break. Why you’d want to spend this much cash on inventory on a platform that is dying is, well, beyond me, but it’s your clients’ budget, do with it what you will.
• Snapchat Launches Bitmoji Games: Oh, look, I simply can’t pretend to care about this – here: “Today Snapchat announced its new Bitmoji for Games SDK that will let hand-selected partners integrate 3D Bitmoji as a replacement for their character skins. With support for Unity, Unreal and the Play Canvas engine behind Snap’s new Bitmoji Party game inside Snapchat, the SDK should make it easy for developers to pipe in life-like avatars that give people a stronger emotional connection to the game.” Happy?
• All Of The Google I/O2019 Updates: I know that it’s fashionable to hate Google – and for quite a few good reasons – and that the whole ‘don’t be evil’ schtick is now risible and quaint in light of the digitally-ushered in horrorshow that is modernity, but I still genuinely believe that it (or more accurately Alphabet) is still one of the most exciting things in the world, ever. I mean, LOOK at this suite of things that they announced this week – almost none of them have a direct advermarketingpr angle, but if you can read through this list and not get a slight frisson of ‘wow, the future is basically indistinguishable from magic, isn’t it?’ then frankly you may as well be dead. INSTANT ON THE FLY VIDEO CAPTIONING AND TRANSLATION WITH NO INTERNET CONNECTION! AR DIRECTIONS! ALL THE AR STUFF! Oh, and the ability to automatically delete – and keep deleting – your data history with Google, which is basically just sort of A Good Thing and which makes Facebook’s promise to introduce a ‘delete your history’ button (made a year ago and on which there is still no update, fwiw) look like the sort of empty, cosmetic piece of Zuckerbergian PR cuntery that it in fact was.
• Spotify Launching Voice-Enabled Ads: Would you like to hear an ad on Spotify that would offer you EXCITING ADDITIONAL CONTENT if only you interacted with it vocally? No, of course you wouldn’t – who in their right mind is ever going to listen to an advert for some crap and be moved to spontaneously exhort it to offer them even MORE interruptive content? NO FCUKER, that’s who! This is ‘Insert Biscuit For Content’ again, isn’t it? Christ, WILL WE NEVER LEARN??
• Beat These Insights: Thanks to Paddy Collins for including this in his missive a couple of weeks back – this is a genuinely wonderful resource compiled by Sweathead and presenting a collection of INSIGHTS from various campaigns, showing how the insight informed the creative and how it can act as a jumping off point for a whole campaign. If you need to train people on ‘what the fcuk is an ‘insight’, anyway?’ (which, even though you may not think you do, you probably do) then this is, honestly, GOLDEN – so much interesting and useful stuff in here, I promise you.
• Tinder Launching Festival Mode: I’m including this mainly as it seems like SUCH a bad idea. Do you want to find an unwashed, comedowny stranger to ‘enjoy’ a few minutes of stinky, unwashed, enforcedly-flaccid intimacy with? No, of course you don’t, are you mad?
• Gucci’s Spring Kids Collection: Look, I know this is the third of these Gucci sites I’ve put in Curios, but, honestly, HOW CAN I NOT?! In common with their general digital aesthetic, this is another simple, bold site with the confidence to present nothing other than beautifully-designed and shot lifestyle imagery on the page – no text, no instructions, just the confidence that visitors will know what to do. Honestly, the strength of the aesthetic across all of the brand’s digital work at the moment is astonishing – the chutzpah to take this minimalist approach and run with it across everything is hugely impressive, and I’m saying this as someone who, honestly, would rather eat their own face than EVER work in or with a fashion house. So, so good.

By Truf Creative

NEXT, HAVE THIS AWESOME SPOTIFY PLAYLIST COMPILED BY THE SUPER-TALENTED TRACEY THORNE!

THE SECTION WHICH WISHES THERE WERE ANYTHING AS GOOD IN THIS WEEK’S LINKS AS THE ‘CHEETAH EROTICISER’ INVENTED BY ALGOMATT LAST WEEK, PT.1:

• The Taxonomy of Reddit Bongo: Ordinarily I tend to leave the more filth-focused links to the end, but I sometimes worry that the less hardy Curios readers – you know who you are, you skimmers, you incompletists – will miss them as a result, and this, I promise you, is too good to miss. Welcome to ‘The Tree of Reddit Sex Life’, where data scientist Piotr Migdal has gone through all the bongo subReddits they could find and produced this wonderful taxonomical guide to them, showing you all the different ones that exist within various categories – honestly, this is SO fascinating, providing as it does not only an easily-browsed (yes, and clickable, you PERVERTS) list of all the filth, but also an at-a-glance primer as to which sorts of taxonomical categories are most popular. WHY IS IMAGINARY NON-HUMAN FCUKING THE MOST POPULAR GENERAL CATEGORY?!?!? Honestly, I know I’ve touched on this before in here, but do you think that maybe there might be some sort of correlation between ‘young people are fcuking less than ever before’ and ‘people are increasingly masturbating to images of cartoon cars being fcuked by other cartoon cars’? I think there might be, you know. Seriously, this is SO interesting and not a little weird, making it PERFECT Curios-fodder – enjoy! Oh, this is also largely SFW (apart from the text, fine) as long as you don’t click on any of the subReddits in question, so you can totally waste timeAmagining exactly what the contents of /r/titler is.
• Talk To Transformer: So last week’s experiment with AlgoCurios went well – aside from all the people who emailed me to tell me how much they preferred AlgoMatt to me (know that it HURTS) – but I can’t stress enough how incredibly upsetting I still find it to have my style so easily replicable by a not-particularly-smart machine. The OpenAI textwrangling kit that underpinned AlgoCurios is now available as an open experiment for anyone to play with, courtesy of this site – feed in a gobbet of text, and it will attempt to carry on the sentence in suitable fashion. It’s imperfect, and the output is only ever at best about 80% sensical, but as another reminder of quite how close we are to legitimately convincing AI text it’s hugely impressive.
• A Song of Ice and Data: ARE YOU WATCHING IT? IS IT GOOD? WAS IT WORTH THE 300-ODD HOURS YOU’VE POURED INTO IT SO FAR? Honestly, I’m not being a prick about this – whilst I’ve never seen GoT I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it – but I can’t imagine investing so much of my life in, well, anything (my girlfriend is SUCH a lucky woman). Still, if you have invested all that time and you REALLY CARE about speculating over what’s going to happen next, you may enjoy this official companion site to the final series, which looks at the probabilities of all the remaining characters making it to the end and…er…winning the throne? Is that how it works? Regardless, this is a nice piece of promo work, even if I don’t really understand anything about it at all.
• Weird Cuts: I read a novel this week in which one of the protagonists worked in AR – this one, in fact; not 100% successful, but some beautiful sentences – and another character upbraided them for what they termed the ‘privatisation of public space’ delivered by digital overlays; an interesting observation which sprung to mind when I saw this new Google toy yesterday. Weird Cuts is an AR experiment which basically lets anyone with a reasonably new-model Android phone make arty AR collages, taking textures from the world around you and creating and placing cut-out shapes using those textures all overlaid on the real world to create new sort of cut-and-paste sculptures out of them. It’s quite hard to explain, but the video on the download link is helpfully explanatory – whilst I know that using this is basically just helping Google to work out how people like to play, and effectively just feeding the databeast, I can’t really mind too much when the results are this fun and playful.
• SHE: Or ‘Search Human Equaliser’ (no, I know it doesn’t work, but it’s a nice idea so I will forgive them the shoehorned acronym) – this is a Chrome extension that looks to redress the inherent gender biases that search encompasses by ensuring that Google throws up a more equal mix of men and women in its results. This is a really clever project, and the sort of thing I imagine that at least three of you will kick yourselves for not thinking of first, as this is EXACTLY the sort of crap that would win you a Lion if you did it for Dove. Here’s the blurb: “Only 10% of search results for “CEO” depict women, despite women comprising 28% of the occupation. Search any common job and when women appear, they are lower in the results than men 60% of the time. When you search “great hair” or “perfect hair,” the results prioritize white women with sleek locks. Our search engine algorithms are capturing our stereotypes and serving them back to us in the form of biased results. With biases like these, it’s no surprise that women are almost three times as likely to say that their gender made their job success more difficult.” Really, really smart.
• Boomy: I’ve been saying for years now that digital music toys are getting so good that we’re only a few years away from literally anyone with a phone and 4g being able to produce Neptunes-level beats with a buttonpress – well, we’re practically there thanks to Boomy (fine, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but still). This is basically an AI-driven music generator – you pick the parameters of the track you want to generate and it will, with a bit of thought, spit out an algogenerated track; you keep the good ones to train the machine whilst discarding the ones you dislike, and the idea is that after a few hundred iterations of the process you’ll basically have something that would get 1million+ views on YouTube. I confess to only having gone through about a dozen training rounds, but even through those I could see the compositions getting tighter and more directional; this really is incredibly impressive.
• Pranko: This is not big or clever, but if you’re a certain type of person then it will be funny. Pranko sells fake product boxes – so you buy a fake box into which you put your ACTUAL gift to the recipient, meaning you get to enjoy the HILARIOUS moment at which they unwrap your gift to discover a box of, say, fart-filtering underpants! SO FUNNY! Seriously, though, there is almost certainly one person in your family who would find this the funniest thing ever. I’m not judging you, or them. Promise.
• Foundit: This is such a clever little idea – enter your personal details (name, phone number, address) and this site will generate a QR code that you can print and attach to anything you like, the idea being that if you lose said thing the person who finds it can scan the code and find your details so that they can contact you to return your possession. Of course, this depends on them a) knowing what a QR code is; b) bothering to scan it, or indeed knowing how to; and c) getting in touch with you to return your stuff; also, there’s nothing here that couldn’t equally be achieved by just dyno-labelling your mobile number to everything you own, but, er, DIGITAL! Fine, I have managed to convince myself over the course of writing this that it is in fact not a good idea at all. HAPPY NOW? FFS.
• Powerwashing Pr0n: A subReddit dedicated to the slightly odd but very satisfying phenomenon of videos of stuff being cleaned through the application of high-pressure water jets. You may not think this is your sort of thing, but I promise you that it almost certainly is.
• Women NYC: This is such an interesting civic initiative. Women NYC is a programme of activity by the City of New York designed, in its words, to “make sure that New York City remains the greatest place in the world for women to prosper.” This site collects information on all the various initiatives that have been birthed through the programme, from tech training to investment programmes to childcare support initiatives – it’s quite amazing to see how much practical difference can be made with this sort of prolonged focus at a citywide level. Is there something similar in London? It feels like there isn’t, but that there ought to be.
• Remove Recommends: This is SUCH a useful Chrome extension; if you have kids, I’d recommend installing this on all your home devices asap. It’s a simple programme that does one main thing, namely removing the ‘Recommended’ sidebar from YouTube and therefore limiting the likelihood that anyone innocently watching ASMR slime videos will find themselves down a Kekistani flat earth rabbithole within 7 minutes of logging on. It won’t stop your kids from watching Logan Paul, fine, but it might stop them ending up watching Mike Cernovitz as a result.
• YT To Insta: Seeing as we’re doing YouTube stuff, here’s a site that lets you easily plug in any YT url and take a 60s or shorter clip of it to post directly to Insta as native video. Obviously this is a copyright horrorshow but, well, who cares? I would imagine that this will be shut down sooner rather than later, but while it’s up this is a hugely useful toy.
• I Want To Apologise: An EXCELLENT subReddit where users share clips of AI from videogames going very, very wrong indeed to largely comedic effect. Fine, you’ll probably need a slight gamers’ affinity to get the most out of this, but if you enjoy watching in-game bloopers (and WHO DOESN’T, eh kids?) then you’ll like this a lot.
• The BBC Script Library: This may well be old news, but I only discovered it the other day and was floored by the amount of great stuff in here. Turns out the BBC website houses a whole bunch of original scripts for old episodes of some classic shows, from radio, TV and film and cutting across comedy, drama and kids’ programming. If you have any interest at all in writing for stage or screen or radio this is an absolute GOLDMINE – honestly, there is SO MUCH in here, and so many all-time classics. Look, they’ve even got the script for an episode of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps – HOW CAN YOU NOT BE INSPIRED?!?
• Archipelago: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is made by my friend James, and I haven’t in fact listened to it because I don’t do podcasts. Still, James is a very clever man and an excellent journalist, and this – his exploration of culture, arts and society in his adopted country of Denmark – is almost certainly excellent. Give it a try if you’re after a bit of Scandiness.
• Bokeh: This will almost certainly come to nothing, but I admire their chutzpah if nothing else. Bokeh is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter – it’s halfway there with a month to go, so it might meet its target – to create an Instagram-alternative app, designed to be a slightly less horrid, vacuous and ad-laden mess. “Bokeh will be ad-free, have a chronological timeline, and will be private by default. That means that all accounts will start off as private. Public accounts will have an RSS feed, will have the option to cross-post to other social networks, and will support custom domains. All accounts will have an indie web compatible export so you can self-host if you want to. People won’t be able to find you by name, but will instead need to know your username to find you. Bokeh will never display publicly who follows you or who you follow. If someone has requested to follow you 3 times and you’ve declined, the app will prompt you to block them.” Does this sound like your thing? Chuck them a few quid, in that case.
• Voice Flow: This is a really interesting and quite slick service which I’m not 100% certain is really necessary. Voice Flow lets anyone make simple apps for Google Home or Amazon Echo, with a really intuitive interface to manage all the branching interactions – crucially, it’s all done visually meaning you can be a total no-code twat like me and still cobble together something halfway useful. The main issue with this, obviously, is that there is no evidence at all that anyone is in fact using their home assistant for anything other than, er, listening to music and setting timers, meaning the likelihood of anyone ever actually using your beautifully-constructed Alexa Therapist app is next to none. Still, it’s a really nicely-designed tool, so there’s that.
• Gentle Giants: Every now and again on Curios I like to remind readers of the existence of Ling’s Cars, still the best site on the internet bar none – in Gentle Giants, I have discovered a company whose approach to design and branding is very much attuned with Ling’s and WOW do I love it. Gentle Giants is a pet rescue and rehoming service that also makes and sells its own dogfood, it’s based in California, it’s run by Burt Ward who played Robin in the orginal Batman TV series from the 60s and OH MY GOD THE DESIGN OF THIS! Honestly, I can’t encourage you to click this enough – I’d also recommend investigating the website VERY THOROUGHLY, as you really don’t want to miss all the joyous surprises buried therein – seriously, don’t stop searching through it til you discover the dogfood packshots as the packaging is HALLUCINATORILY brilliant.
• 2269: I love this idea so, so much – this is a Kickstarter project raising funds for a run of posters, each of which promotes an INCREDIBLE party happening in 2269 – the high concept here being ‘Can the designers of this poster will an amazing future party into being simply through the medium of design?’. The project’s been fully funded with three weeks to go, so one would hope this means that 2269 will indeed witness the greatest party ever – honestly, this is so WONDERFULLY silly that it might be my favourite idea of the year so far.
• CSSFx: A bunch of really cute CSS effects, all with ‘click to copy’ functionality for easy webdev use. These are very nice indeed.
• Gifts Created for You: An Etsy store, presenting a series of novelty mugs with some quite bafflingly-spec;ific professions on them. Do you know any hacks? If so, they would LOVE a mug reading, inexplicably, “WARNING: To avoid injury, don’t tell me how to do my job as a journalist”. This is a perfect sweetspot of algogenerated oddness.
• Yesterdayvision: Do YOU have a spare £2500 burning a hole in your pocket? Would you like to spend it on a reconditioned oldschool TV, packaged in lovely wooden casing and very much of the Scandi retro design school, which comes packed with a Raspberry PI and emulator software and controllers and which you can use to play basically any old games system you fancy? No, I can’t imagine you do – YOU NEED TO BUY THE CHILDREN NEW SCHOOL SHOES, ALAN, WE CAN’T AFFORD THIS SILLY, CHILDISH CRAP ANY MORE.
• Project 562: This is a lovely photoographic project, aiming to document each of the 562 distinct Native American tribes with living members across the US. The photos and stories on the site are gorgeous, and speak to the incredible breadth and diversity of the native community (not to mention the degree to which Native peoples have been repeatedly and comprehensively screwed by US administrations for centuries).
• Heer: My lovely friend Matteo emailed me last week and told me he’s getting married, which is VERY exciting – COMPLIMENTI, MATTEO, NON MORIRAI PIU SOLO!! He also told me about this project, which, fine, is by his fiancee, but which I would have included anyway as it’s such a clever idea and a wonderful piece of design. Heer is a piece of street furniture designed to provide nursing women with a comforrtable, discreet place to breastfeed in public. Honestly, this is SO smart and the sort of thing that any female-friendly public space ought to consider installing asap – the benches are available to order, should you be so inclined.

By Ben Zank

NEXT, ENJOY THIS PLAYLIST COMPILED BY FRIEND-OF-CURIOS MARCUS JOHN HENRY BROWN AND WHICH ACTS AS A SORT-OF COMPANION SOUNDTRACK TO THE FINAL PART OF HIS ‘THE PASSING’ TRILOGY!

THE SECTION WHICH WISHES THERE WERE ANYTHING AS GOOD IN THIS WEEK’S LINKS AS THE ‘CHEETAH EROTICISER’ INVENTED BY ALGOMATT LAST WEEK, PT.2:

• Zuckerberg Smile: A little site which lets you adjust a slider to change the degree to which Mark Zuckerberg is smiling – from ‘no smile at all’ to ‘tight-lipped rictus simulacrum of human emotion’. Utterly pointless, but I rather like the idea of communicating with your colleagues solely via the medium of Inscrutable Zuck for the remainder of the day.
• BotJungle: GLORIOUSLY pointless, this – a Twitter account which involves a microphone, some audiotranscription software and the jungle of Borneo and which posts its interpretation of what the jungle is ‘saying’ every now and again. It’s irregular – the account only posts when there’s been enough noise that the software can parse as ‘speech’, which happens roughtly every 24h or so – and nonsensical, but also, to my mind, absolutely pure art.
• Two Names: This rather blows my mind, though I’m sure there’s just some fairly robust maths behind it rather than voodoo or magic or whatnot. This is a small, simple webtoy which lets you put in two names (or indeed any words) and creates a 3d visualisation of both whereby shifting perspective enables you to see one word or the other formed in a 3d arrangement of dots. Which, now I read that back, is almost ENTIRELY nonsensical – look, click the link, it will make sense I promise. Also, you can export the results as a 3d models should you want to commission some sort of perspex paperwhite combining your name with that of your wife/mistress/cat – what’s not to love?
• The Measure of Things: I once worked with a lovely man called Rex Osborn – a long-term Labour party stalwart who worked with John Smith back in the day, lived in a student flatshare with David Aaronovitch and Peter Mandelson (just imagine) and once explained to me that the reason he was OK with New Labour was that, in his words, “I used to be a Trot, Matt, but then I realised I was being a cnut so I stopped” – who pointed out to me that areas of geography are almost always referred to in relation to the size of Wales when on the news. Honestly, listen out for it – you’ll be amazed how often it crops up as a comparator. Anyway, this is a website that lets you type in any quantity of anything at all and will spit out a whole bunch of slightly ridiculous measurements to which you can compare your figure to. Why say ‘5 Tonnes’ when you can instead say ‘about ⅘ of the weight of an adult male elephant’? Well quite.
• Public Note: I love stuff like this. Public Note is a seemingly totally-pointless website which lets anyone create a permanent, editable entry about whatever they like. Type in anything you want – either it will throw up someone else’s annotation for you to read or edit, or it will come up blank, leaving you free to write the canonical entry for the thing of your choosing. I have claimed ‘web curios’ – feel free to find and create your own odd, hidden, tiny truths.
• The 2019 Big Picture Content Winners: WONDERFUL wildlife photography from the past 12 months. These are, as per, utterly astonishing – it’s worth clicking through into each individual category, as there are some stunning shots hidden there.
• Neck Check: Ah, here’s a lovely piece of 21C kiddie-dystopia for you! Are you worried that your kids are spending too much time staring at tiny screens and that their posture is suffering as a result? Well why not install Neck Check, a ‘fun’ ‘game’ (it is neither of those things) which tracks your kids posture in relation to their device and stops the thing working if it thinks that they’re staring down too much. To quote, “Once activated, the app runs in the background. When the phone is tilted at a dangerous degree, a friendly reminder takes over the screen. The only way to resume activity is to hold the phone at a proper angle. The app is password protected just in case your child tries to turn it off. So, as long as they keep it upright, their posture will be alright!” Want to devolve even the most basic of parental responsibilities to a fcuking machine? GREAT!
• The Fortnite API: You want the Fortnite API? GREAT HERE IT IS! No idea what you might do with it, but there’s almost certainly some sort of bullsh1t data-based integration with Spotify or something that you can hack together to link playlist generation to kill rate or something, should you be inclined to hack around with it.
• Library Extension: This is a really clever and useful little Chrome/Firefox plugin, which lets you quickly and easily check if the book you’re looking at online is available to rent at your local library, if it’s currently on loan, when it’s due back, etc. Simple, clever use of open data, and a gentle reminder that libraries are ACE and a hugely underrated resource in 2019.
• My Famicase Exhibition 2019: I can’t recall if I’ve featured this in Curios in previous years; regardless, this is this year’s edition of the My Famicase competition, where designers mock up Super Nintendo cartridges for imagined games, The artwork and design here are lovely, but the appeal for me comes in the slightly ridiculous nature of the imagined titles. Who wouldn’t want to play “Fish Dreams: You’re a lonely salmon with BIG DREAMS!”? NO FCUKER, that’s who!
• The Lasters: ANOTHER project by someone I sort-of know (sorry, I promise next week’s Curios will be less appallingly nepotistic) – again, though, I would totally include this even if I didn’t. Fred Deakin is a genuinely lovely and interesting man – he was part of Lemon Jelly, and Airside Studios, which if you’re a 90s/00s hipstercunt you will remember as being VERY COOL back in the day. He’s just finished a new record, which is an excellent ambient-y beatsy sci-fi concept album called The Lasters, which is funding on Kickstarter – it’s met its target with a month to go, but I’d still recommend you backing it as the finished product looks like being awesome in terms of design and production, not to mention the fact that the music (which I’ve been lucky enough to hear) is honestly wonderful.
• Climate Dreams: A fascinating project, collecting and documenting people’s dreams about climate change. “I am a writer and a psychotherapist interested in gathering, organizing, archiving – and eventually writing about – our collective dreams about climate breakdown”, says the site’s creator – the idea being that over time, perhaps patterns and insights will emerge shedding some light on the collective species-wide psychological response to the slowly-creeping planetary collapse we’re currently contributing to.
• The Alien Anniversary Shorts: It’s the 40th anniversary of Alien, and, to celebrate, a whole bunch of new short films have been commissioned by…er…someone, taking a fresh look at the Alien universe and spinning off some interesting and enticing new angles through a series of 10ish minute movies. I haven’t watched all of them, fine, but the two I did see are both excellent and smarter than this sort of thing often tends to be.
• Jumbo: This is a potentially useful app – Jumbo is designed to be a one-stop-shop for in-app privacy settings, designed to integrate with all your socials and let you manage all the various privacy options for each within one simple, easy-to-use interface. If you’re concerned that kids or less-digitally literate family members maybe aren’t as genned-up on this sort of thing as you’d like, this could be a really useful way of helping them manage their personal account privacy.
• Bitty: You know how AMAZING (not amazing) it is when you’re on public transport and your whole journey is soundtracked by some twat’s tinny music or film dialogue or whatever? Don’t you sometimes wish there was something you could do to trump their annoying behaviour with some even more annoying behaviour of your own? No, you probably don’t, as that would be sociopathic in the extreme – nonetheless, should you ever want to absolutely WIN the bus audio smackdown, may I suggest putting some money behind this Kickstarter which will provide you with a pocket-size drum machine with MASSIVE SPEAKERS, meaning that you can absolutely RUIN the top deck with your own home-produced beats busting out at nosebleed volume, much to the delight of the assembled other passengers. This actually looks very cool – please, though, don’t use it on the bus.
• Missing Numbers: One for the datawonks amongst you – “Missing Numbers is about the data that the government should collect and measure in the UK, but doesn’t”, and looks at questions including “Which policy areas in the UK are well-served by current reported data and statistics, and which are lacking? Which industries are required to report data about their treatment of consumers, and impact on society, and which aren’t? How does the UK’s Office for National Statistics choose what to include in its official statistics? And what are the big areas that it’s missing?” Interesting and useful.
• Gacha: The first in a reasonably big selection of games this week – Gacha simulates the experience of those ‘win a random present in a plastic ball’-dispensary toys that you see in slightly retro arcades. Except digitally, and with a really weird but very clear sense of slight melancholia. The art style is just *lovely*.
• The Lady’s Book of Decency: A short piece of interactive fiction, involving courtly intrigue and lycanthropy. This is BRILLIANT and really worth repeated playthroughs; the writing is very, very sharp, and the light RPG-style elements work wonderfully.
• Utsvulten: I don’t really want to explain this too much – just play. Feed yourself. Feed your companion. You can eat EVERYTHING – just see what happens…
• Proxx: Ignore the name – this is Minesweeper, in-browser, with slightly prettified graphics. I spent about an hour playing this while I was at ‘work’ yesterday – SORRY, PAYMASTERS!! – and I can confirm that it is as great as the original ever was.
• The Interlude: Oh, this is SUPERB – so clever, and so well-designed. I don’t want to spoil this by explaining top much – just know that you play this through a virtual old-school Nokia interface, and the weird distancing that provides makes the whole storyline that you play through all the more perfectly unsettling as a result.
• Minecraft: THIS IS ACTUAL MINECRAFT, PLAYABLE IN YOUR BROWSER! Ok, fine, it’s the very first iteration, meaning there’s no actual crafting and what you can do is pretty minimal, but it’s still hugely soothing to just potter about in bucolic blocky splendour, and if you’re a MILLENNIAL then there will probably be all sorts of nostalgiafeels engendered by even a cursory exploration of this. Amazing to see what Chrome can support these days, aside from anything else. ENJOY!

By Harriet Lyall

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE THIS SUPERB PLAYLIST OF GRIME BANGERS!

THERE SIMPLY WEREN’T ANY INTERESTING TUMBLRS TO FEATURE THIS WEEK, MEANING THE CIRCUS IS OUT OF TOWN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ard Bakery: Fashion designer-turned-baker, based in London – this is their Insta feed and MAN are these some beautiful and pleasingly-geometric cakes.
• Resting Stitch-Face: Moderately hipster-ish needlework, available to buy. They take commissions too, should you wish to buy, I don’t know, a piece depicting your face alongside the caption “I AM TIRED OF YOUR SH1T, SUSAN” (I have no idea where this came from but now I want that VERY THING).
• Burratagram: The best – alright, the only – mozzarella-focused Instagram account I have ever seen.
• Emilia Cocking: Emilia is, I think, a designer – I came across her Insta feed as a result of seeing some 3d renders she’s recently made inspired by the upholstery of the London underground, but her whole feed is generally a delight, with a nice mix of lofi photos and some really rather cool CG/design work.
• Grade A TikToks: Excellent TikToks, ripped for the ‘gram.
• Genetic Portraits: A fascinating art project, creating composite images of family members with a partcular physical resemblance to each other. These are quite remarkable, and will make you want to try this out with your own relatives.
• Eva Stories: This is quite remarkable – the story of the Holocaust, as told through the imagined eyes of a young girl on Instagram. Obviously you have to buy into the premise – what if Insta was around in the 30s – but the production and storytelling here is top-notch. It’s been interesting seeing critiques of this suggesting it’s somehow trivialising the horror; I personally think it’s a really sensitively-handled piece of work and an excellent educational tool, but see what you think.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• It’s Time To Break Up Facebook: …says one of Facebook’s founders! Whilst it’s obviously easy to be slightly cynical about one of the people who’s become unconscionably rich as a result of Facebook now calling for the platform’s DANGEROUS MONOPOLISTIC POWER to be somehow curbed, and whilst the piece by Chris Hughes doesn’t make any startlingly new observations, it’s a pretty good precis of the current majority thinking about FB; to whit, it’s simply not healthy for one company to have this much influence over the nature and context of human communication. The anecdote about Zuckerbverg’s unilateral decisions around the Rohingya genocide was particularly striking – whilst you sort of get that he was probably ‘right’, you also very much feel that he never ought to have been in that position in the first place.
• Beyond The Duck Houses: As another week passes in UK politics and the quality and tenor of debate becomes ever worse, and the opinion of the political classes amongst the lumpenproletariat falls ever lower, this is an interesting reminder of the extent to which the MP’s expenses scandal of a decade ago has shaped and characterised our attitude towards our elected representatives. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the current trend towards abhorrent, dehmanusing abuse delivered to politicians and public figures isn’t in some way a result to the gleeful bashing they all took way back then for having the temerity to do exactly as they’d been told all along, or indeed that all this isn’t exactly helping them do their jobs. After all, “the more we cut our MPs down to size, the less able they are to subject the forces of capital to meaningful oversight and represent our interests at a high level. Public figures become mere private individuals, with their pints of milk and their loo roll.”
• A Lovely Interactive Version of the Trolley Problem: Everyone’s favourite moral philosophical conundrum, as popularised by The Good Place, presented as a beautifully-slick interactive explainer which takes you through various permutations and lets you pick how many tiny, pixellated people you want to murder with your ambulant deathwagon.
• The Airbnb Death of Barcelona: I’ve not been to Barcelona for a few years so haven’t witnessed the anti-Airbnb sentiment there first hand, but visiting Lisbon last year it was very clear quite how much locals were starting to resent the (as they see it) parasite landlords gutting the city for actual residents and packaging it up as bite-sized lifestyle capsules for the affluent weekender crowd. This article examines some of the reasons at the heart of the increasing global backlash against the Airbnbification of cities – I find the arguments here about the way in which airbnb neighbourhoods fundamentally alter the associated urban character of adjacent areas fascinating, in a general sort of ‘chaos theory knockon effect’-type way.
• Why GenZ Loves Closed Captioning: I have no idea whether this is in fact a thing – young people, please tell me, is this a thing? – but, presuming that it is on the basis of this one article, there is DEFINITELY a clever-ish type of advermarketingpr thingy that you can sell to a client off the back of this ‘insight’ (not in fact an insight).
• How ‘Debate’ Works in 2019: This is ostensibly a profile of the right wing ‘Turning Point’ group’s tour of US colleges, but is more interesting if seen as a general primer to the way in which ‘debate’ works in this, what feels like the millionth year of the ongoing culture wars. It’s very good at pinpointing the exact characteristics of faux-discussion, both online and offline; a seeming reliance on ‘facts’, an eagerness to be seen be ‘debating’, and the absence of any sort of actual ‘debate’ in favour pf participants on both sides flinging out assertions and numbers to the frenzied clapping of their seal-like peanut gallery of supporters. This isn’t, to be clear, something exclusively of the right – the left is as bad (spend a day digging around Labour Twitter and oh me oh my do you see some wonderful examples of this), and it’s more a function of the fact that everything is judged by ‘likes’ these days (literally and figuratively) leading to empty performative shouting rather than actual oppositional discourse.
• Does AI Have A Dirty Mind?: I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit this week looking at pictures of cocks as imagined by Shardcore’s computer – I would link to them here, but, well, they’re not quite ready – rest assured, though, that they are VERY meaty and not a little misshapen. Anyway, this is an entertaining exploration of how and why AIs get confused about what is and isn’t NSFW content – the article contains a few fruity images (although obviously within an entirely academic context, so it’s probably FINE), so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
• Therapy in Fortnite: I love these stories about how people are bending Fortnite to their own ends, creating and endlessly flexible virtual world to use however they choose – it’s starting to look to me like the sort of exciting virtual community space that Second Life was always to weirdly geeky and complicated to become. This piece looks at the young women who are offering their services as ‘chatting companions’ – to an extent, light-touch therapists – to other players, charging by the hour to play in squads and voicechat about anything and everything. Fascinating, if you choose to ignore the slightly bleak truth underpinning it (to whit: lonely kids are paying money to talk to girls over the internet).
• Kickstarter Turns 10: I think Kickstarter’s been one of the more quietly influential developments for properly creative [people online, not least as it helped cement the idea that no matter how niche or peculiar, your art may well find a small but sufficient audience. This article looks back at its early days, its development and some of its greatest hits – man, we have backed some ODD TAT as a species, eh?
• How Technology Could Revolutionise Refugee Resettlement: Literally that – this is a fascinating piece about how analysis of large amounts of historical data about refugee resettlement, integration success and other factors can be used to make better decisions about where to home people fleeing violence or persecution. It’s nice to occasionally read a tech story that’s generally positive – and it’s even nicer to read something where the people involved are using tech to help augment and improve human decision making rather than instead taking it as an opportunity to remove the human element altogether.
• When Did Pop Culture Become Homework?: I promise you, you will absolutely FEEL this essay, even if you’re a GoT/Avengers/Line of Duty/Whateverthefuckelse Stan – this is an excellent and true series of reflections on the extent to which popular culture has come to effectively define and dominate the shared global conversation, and the extent to which that means that its consumption is now a base-level requirement of speaking the lingua franca. So, so good, this.
• Avengers and the ‘Content’ Endgame: Consider this one a companion piece to the above – all about how the preposterous success of the Avengers franchise basically means that everything from hereon in is CONTENT, and the multistrand narrative universe is here to stay, and everything that will ever get made from a cinematic standpoint from hereon in will only in part exist as a standalone artistic work, because the post-facto dissection and debate and discussion of its every single frame and second is in and of itself conceived of as an integral constituent part of the work itself and OH GOD THIS IS ALL SO TIRING.
• The Bear and the AntiVaxxer: This is about a hoax protest march, but it’s about so much more besides – this is honestly one of the stranger ‘wow, people on the internet are WEIRD, eh?’ stories I’ve read in a while, and one of the better evocations of exactly how hard it is to have any grasp on what, or who, is really real here in the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen.
• A Conspiracy to Kill IE6: A properly odd little story, this, about how the team behind YouTube basically banded together to effectively kill Internet Explorer 6 because, put simply, they couldn’t be arsed making their work compatible with what they saw as a terminally janky and outdated piece of software. I showed this to Internet Oddity Sadeagle, who used to work at Google, and he said it seems legit, so, well, it’s TRUE!
• An Oral History of Amazon Prime: You might not think that a corporate history of ‘How Amazon Invented Prime’ would be interesting, but you’d be wrong, honest. This is a fascinating look at how the company made the whole idea of Prime happen in next to no time at all, and how absolutely transformative it’s been as a concept to both the company and also consumers’ ideas of customer service and payment structures. To be clear, I dislike Amazon hugely as a company – that said, stuff like this makes it perfectly clear why MechaBezos is going to be rulling the world in a few short years and there’s NOTHING we can do about it.
• 20 Years of All Star: Celebrating two decades of the only Smash Mouth song anyone knows – this is charming, and you will leave it feeling much more positive both about the song and the band. The details in there about them knowing that they had an absolute, 24-Carat hit on their hands and being uncertain as to whether they wanted all the attention that would come with it is a really interesting one to me – would you take the money and the fame and the immortality in exchange for knowing that you will always and forever be associated with this single thing, and that nothing you will ever create will ever have the same impact?
• Chasing The Aurora: A piece about trying to see the Northern Lights, but also about the very idea of the Northern Lights as something less to be seen or experienced than documented for the ‘gram. Lovely travel writing with a slight side of wistfulness for a pre-Insta world in which you just experienced things directly rather than through a series of performative filters (GOD I AM A GRUMPY OLD MAN SORRY EVERYONE).
• Angelica Huston: By far and away the best celebrity interview I have read all year, this – honestly, everything in it is glorious. This line. My days: “I was young. My back was like liquid amber.” WHAT a woman – this is joyous (and contains great oldschool Hollywood anecdote to boot).
• Meaw Wolf: I’ve featured pieces about bonkers US art collective Meow Wolf in here before, but this is the first proper profile of the group I’ve seen – honestly, I can’t tell you quite how much I want to visit one of their installations. There’s lots to unpack in here – their influence over some of the prevailing aesthetics of the Instagram era, the idea of participatory play being the dominant performative trend of the 21C, the tension between their genesis as outsider creatives and their current status as mainstream darlings…generally fascinating stuff.
• Entering the Sublime: An interview with Hilary Hahn, who I learned through this piece is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary violinists. In common with all profiles of preturnaturally-gifted people, the whole piece has a slightly otherworldly air to it – reading people this talented describe how they think and how they do is always slightly discombobulating, like they’re using words that you understand but in ways that you don’t quite get. Honestly, the way she talks about classical music here is just glorious – the closest I’ve gotten to understanding how a synaesthete might feel. Ooh, and on that last point, this is FASCINATING if you’re into synaesthesia as a concept.
• Punch Line: Remembering a suicide. This is BEAUTIFUL writing, though obviously heartbreaking.
• My Cousin Tried To Kill Me: This week’s last longread is a masterful piece of writing – clear-eyed and dispassionate and horrifying and brilliant, on masculinity and male violence and role models and the things we turn a blind eye to because we want to believe things that aren’t quite true. I read this last night and found my knuckles involuntarily tightening at points through it, which may not sound like an endorsement but I promise really is.

By Luigi Ghirri

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is by Dude York – the song is called ‘Falling’ and I fcuking ADORE it. A perfect slice of pop-punk, this; so, so good:

2) I love Japanese noisepunk outfit Otoboke Beaver. This is called “Don’t Light My Fire” – turn it up LOUD:

3) SUPERB indiepoprock next from Mal Blume – this is called “I Don’t Want To” and this is another GREAT Summer track that if I had a car I would totally blare out of the windows whilst trying and failing to look cool at traffic lights:

4) This is genuinely great – no idea at all how to describe it, but it’s maybe a bit like a sort of early Chemical Brothers album track, perhaps? Anyway, it’s by Nathan Micay and it’s called ‘Ecstasy Is On Maple Mountain’ and it’s a cracking tune:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Manga and Murkage Dave with “Men Are Trash” – this is very sharp and very, very funny; awesome video too:

6) Last up this week, this is by Palehound and it’s called ‘Worthy’ and it’s a lovely song to see you into what will hopefully be a lovely weekend and now I’m off so BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE HAVE FUN AND TAKE CARE AND BE SURE TO BE KIND TO EACH OTHER AND PERHAPS SMILE AT STRANGERS (BUT NOT IN A CREEPY WAY) AND MAYBE DO SOMETHING NICE FOR SOMEONE WHO’S NOT EXPECTING IT AND GENERALLY WHY NOT TRY AND MAKE THE WORLD MARGINALLY MORE CHEERFUL OVER THE NEXT WEEK OR SO BECAUSE, WELL, WHY NOT? I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

I AM BACK HELLO DID YOU MISS ME?

No, of course not, you were all too busy stuffing yourselves with confectionery and weeping over the stigmata of the risen Christ, weren’t you? Typical. Have you had a good fortnight? Have you ‘enjoyed’ watching people getting unaccountably cross at some children asking us to maybe not fcuk up their futures? Do you wish people would stop talking incessantly about television shows and film series you have never and will never see? No? Oh. 

Anyway, this is another one of those somewhat bloated editions of Curios which force their way out of me after a two-week absence and which is veritably straining at the seams with the pressure of all the ‘goodness’ contained within it. Gird yourself, pierce the skin and let a fortnight’s worth of webspaff hose you down at high-pressure. Whatever you do, though, DON’T SWALLOW. 

I’m Matt, this is Web Curios, and you ought to be used to this by now. 

By Jon Juarez

LET’S KICK OFF WITH AN INFINITE STREAM OF AI-GENERATED DEATH METAL, WHICH HONESTLY IS PRETTY MUCH THE PERFECT SOUNDTRACK TO THE OPENING SECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS FACEBOOK’S LATEST NUMBERS SUGGEST THAT WE’VE BASICALLY JUST SORT OF GIVEN UP AS A SPECIES:

• Facebook’s Q1 Earnings: Relatively minor interest in Facebook’s latest earnings news, which is either a sign that there’s too much PROPER news going on or that we’ve basically all just resigned ourselves to the fact that we’re totally enslaved by the web. The headline here is – SURPRISE! – that even more people are signing into Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory than ever before and they’re making more money than at any point in their history, even factoring in the allowances made for fines they’ll have to pay. Oh, and Stories on Facebook are now used by 500million people, which is a HUGE numbetr (sorry Snapchat). ARE WE ALL FCUKING IDIOTS? ARE WE??? Oh, er, yes, yes we are.
• FB Updates Brand Safety Controls for Ads: Of course, one of the main reasons Facebook is so violently profitable is that its ad product is excellent and it continues to iterate and adapt its product for the primary benefit of advertisers. To whit, this update which applies an additional set of placement checks to Facebook ads so that brands can be even more certain that their promo for, say, mattresses (its always fcuking mattresses, isn’t it?) doesn’t appear on Pages promoting white supremacism or figging.
• FB Expands 3d Photo Options: You know Facebook’s 3d Photos feature, that lets you post pictures that look vaguely depth-y? Yes, well you can now add those to stories as well as just standard posts, and post them from desktop as opposed to just mobile. Are you excited by this news? Are you? I really fcuking hope not.
• Twitter’s Q1 Results: Like Facebook’s, but significantly less impressive! There’s not loads here to dwell on; Twitter’s numbers are improving, the market responded reasonably well to its news, but equally a look at the figures reminds you of the stark and significant difference in popularity and penetration between Twitter and, well, the networks that actual real people use – their DAU total is around 130m, which, to be clear, is significantly less than 10% of Facebook’s numbers. Can we please all agree that using Twitter as a barometer of what any real people think, feel or do is increddibly fcuking stupid?
• Snap’s Q1 Numbers: My friend Frith used to work at Snap and recently stopped, so I feel I don’t have to be so nice about the company anymore; user numbers are up but, well, Snapchat stopped being a viable social network-type thing about a year or so ago and we should all remember that.
• LinkedIn Adds Reactions: Just like on Facebook, but somehow worse! Now you’re able to go beyond the simple ‘Like’ or Comment on LinkedIn, with the ability to add a reaction icon to posts – you can choose from Like, Celebrate, Love, Insightful and Curious. Obviously I hate this beyond all imagining, but if you’re the sort of person who spends time ENGAGING WITH YOUR PROFESSIONAL NETWORK ON LINKEDIN then a) you might enjoy this ability to EXPRESS YOURSELF on the platform; and b) I don’t want you to read my blog/newsletter any more (really, please leave).
• Pinterest Ads New Ad Conversion Targeting Options: It now allows for “conversion optimization for Promoted Pin campaigns and a conversion goals feature for online video”. Is that interesting or relevant to your life? If it is then I am SO SORRY for you.
• The UK Government Does Alexa: This is frustrating; a clever, sensible idea that has received no coverage whatsoever (I honestly don’t know how I came across this link, but it was very much buried down the side of the metaphorical sofa) and as such will probably end up being a complete waste of time and money. Still, it’s genuinely pleasing to see an occasional piece of digital innovation from Gov.uk; Alexa owners can now be used to interact with Government portals to a small degree, meaning that you’ll be able to ask the device questions pertaining to 12,000-odd areas of civic information, from the minimum wage to Bank Holiday dates. Simple, smart, useful, I feel this ought to have been lauded more than it has been.
• A Thread About TikTok: Sensible, smart thread breaking down how TikTok works and how its various UX/UI features impact the platform’s use. Really simple, smart analysis, this.
• Diversity Explorer: Thanks Josh for pointing this out to me – this is a really useful tool which lets you choose a region of local authority in the UK and which then tells you what the ethnic makeup of that area is, based on the most recently available census data. If you’re doing a local / regional campaign, this is a hugely useful little planning toy.
• The Fellow Community: This is for all the adland women reading Curios – HELLO, ADLAND WOMEN! Fellow is ‘a platform that provides women the tools needed to meet relatable mentors, rise within their agency walls and elevate their careers beyond them’ – basically an app which exists to connect women working in the industry, to foster better connections and build networks. Given all the chat in the past week or so (and in fact the past several years) about sexism in adland, this feels timely and like A Good Thing.
• The Framework Factory: THANKYOU JULIAN COLE! I have no idea who Julian is, but they have created this set of Google Slides of templates to describe strategy and, honestly, they are a hugely-useful godsend if you’re like me and have all the aesthetic sense of Helen Keller after a night on the meths. Even if you’re at a BIG AGENCY and have templates up the wazoo, this is worth a look for inspiration as to how to present all the boring campaign stuff. Thanks also to Paddy Collins, who included this in the latest edition of his newsletter ‘Because the Internet’, which is honestly a must-read if you do advermarketingprwank – it’s like Curios, but shorter, snappier, more directional and with less of a deliberately obnoxious authorial voice, which is pretty much the best endorsement I can give.
• Nitejogger: Another in my occasional series of ‘activations by big brands that I don’t feel bad slagging off because, well, they are massive’, this is a new thing by Adidas to promote some new footwear or somesuch; the kicks are called Nite Joggers or similar, and as part of the launch thingy they’ve created a ‘plug your Spotify into this website and WATCH as it uses the data to do something fun’ toy. Except all it does is present you with a contrasting picture of your datytime and nighttime Spotify listening habits, which I’m sure was born out of some sort of tangential INSIGHT in the planning phase about how people have different identities depending on whether it’s daytime or nighttime, but which in practise translates to the website telling me that I like listening to hiphop and bedwetting indie during the day but I prefer SLOW hiphop and slightly-more-uptempo bedwetting indie in the evenings. This is just lazy, to be honest – DATA IS NOT IN AND OF ITSELF INTERESTING, ADVERMARKETINGPRDRONES!

By Casey Weldon

NEXT UP, AN EXCELLENT SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF ASSORTED ODDS AND ENDS BY ZENBULLETS OFF TWITTER!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS AT WHAT POINT ‘WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A MASSIVE PLANETARY FCUKUP CATASTROPHE’ BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH ‘OWNING THE LIBS’, PT.1:

• Dialup: Thanks Ben (and happy birthday!) for sending me this – a really interesting project which aims to bring back the OLD SCHOOL MAGIC of talking to people on the phone on a regular basis. “Dialup is a voice-chat app that calls you and connects you to the people you want to stay in touch and connect with. Whether it’s everyone you recently met at a conference, your book club, toymakers, poets, or just you and your mom—Dialup will ring your phone on an automated schedule and pair you in a one-on-one conversation.” Users can create their own call groups or add themselves to existing ones based on their interests; the concept of being connected with strangers like this is simultaneously hugely charming and also HORRID, but if you’re less of a weirdo misanthrope than I am you might find this a lovely little toy. Works on Android and iOS, so EVERYONE can get involved.
• Photomosh: Such a good browsertoy, this – you either upload an image or take one using your phone/webcam, and the site then lets you fcuk with it in a quite staggering number of ways; as a means of making images glitched and tweaked without photoshop this is unsurpassed, with literally dozens of different effects which can be applied and layered to varying degrees. Honestly, you can make some really quite astonishing stuff using this, and the fact that it’s all intuitive and in-browser is quite something.
• IoT Inspector: The main downside to our wonderful, smart, internet-connected future is that all of the wonderful, smart, internet-connected devices are hugely insecure and vulnerable and it’s really hard to be sure that anonymous, faceless strangers aren’t masturbating themselves to a shuddering, raw climax whilst spying on you through your fridge (what do you mean ‘I don’t worry about that, Matt, and I do not thank you for that horrendous mental image’?). Still, reassurance is on its way thanks to IoT Inspector, a prototype tool developed by Princeton University (Mac only at the moment, but Linux and Windows versions coming soon) which scans your local networks for IoT devices and reports on what they are talking to and what data they are transmitting. Miserably, I first saw this described as a convenient way of checking that your Airbnb isn’t full of secret internet-enabled wanky spycams, which is SO bleak – that said, it’s not hard to imagine that this sort of software is going to become more and more useful and necessary as we move towards the full ‘everything is on the internet’ future.
• The Codex Atlanticus: The Codex Atlanticus is the name given to the largest extant collection of drawings and writings by Da Vinci; this is an interactiuve website presenting digitised versions of all the materials in the corpus. It’s a GORGEOUS site – and I have just realised is made by The Visual Agency, a very talented group of people I have a very vague professional connection with (SALVE PAOLO COME STAI?). This is a really, really good piece of webwork – presenting a huge catalogue in interesting and dynamic fashion, and with a really smart interface to boot; there’s an English translation of the site (the language toggle’s on the bottom-right), so make it readable and explore – turns out Leonardo was quite smart. WHO KNEW?
• Drawalong AR: We’re still sort-of waiting for AR to happen, but this is the latest in a line of examples that suggest to me that we’re only about 3-4 years from it being genuinely mainstream and transformative. This video shows a Google project which works to allow you to layer videos over your camera view – so, in this example, you can play a video of an art lesson which shows how to do calligraphy over a blank sheet of paper so that you can effectively trace/draw along with the tutor. Yes, fine, that’s a really bad explanation – watch the video and get excited about all the possibilities this affords.
• Brill: I have literally just remembered that ‘Brill’ was a very odd ITV kids show from the early 90s, which featured as its host a weird rubber animatronic flatfish. Fcuk, the 90s were ODD. Brill is also a VERY clever app, to my mind nearly indistinguishable from magic, which lets you take snaps of written copy and turns it into digital text. Nor the first tool of its sort, fine, but a very capable evolution of the idea – the way it can isolate individual text snippets on a page is particularly clever imho.
• Eastern European Movies: You want a truly incredible resource for Eastern European cinema? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of films from Hungary, Bulgaria, the USSR and elsewhere, all streamable in HD? OH GOOD! This is a paid service, and not super-cheap ($5 for 24h access, $30 for a month), but the selection of obscure pieces from behind the Iron Curtain is quite astonishing. Cinephiles will be in heaven – the rest of us will look at the ‘most popular’ films selection and silently speculate as to exactly what the plot of ‘Maskerada’, a Yugoslav film from 1971 whose poster depicts a slightly cartoony but VERY erect cockandballs in silhoutted relief, might be.
• Mapping SubReddit Relationships: Interesting little network visualisation toy which lets you type in any subReddit you choose and which will then pull together a map demonstrating all the other subReddits to which it’s thematically related. Hugely useful in terms of finding communities if you’re looking to engage a specific interest group, or alternatively finding lots of really, really niche bongo.
• LonelyStreams: I love this SO MUCH. Taking its cue from similar projects focusing on YouTube, LonelyStreams is a simple tool which finds Twitch streams with no viewers and links to them; refresh to find a new, lonely streamer. SO MUCH about this speaks to me – the slightly weird modernity of people performing to the void, the very obvious comfort many of the streamers evidently find in displaying themselves, even to an audience of none, the opportunities to do some genuinely lovely things through this…it’s just ACE.
• Just Says In Mice: A Twitter account with the sole purpose of pointing out news items in which scientific studies conducted on mice are presented as though they were conducted on people. It literally just RTs links with the simple commentary “IN MICE”, which really oughtn’t be as funny as it in fact is.
• Global Light Pollution Map: I was at a wedding the other weekend in Devon and the absolute BEST thing about it (apart from the groom getting his new bride’s name wrong during his speech – YOU HAD ONE JOB FFS!) was the fact that it was in the middle of nowhere and I got to see the Milky Way. This online map shows you where levels of light pollution are highest and lowest around the world, and is an excellent resource if you’re perhaps planning on going away with a telescope for a few days.
• The Word of the Day: I am honestly gutted that this is only open to people in the US – surely someone will rip this off and do a UK version in a matter of weeks? Word of the Day is a genuinely BRILLIANT idea – an open Slack channel which anyone can join and which has one, sole scope. Each day the Slack’s administrators choose a word – that word will be ‘live’ for 24h. Whoever guesses that day’s word first wins $1000, paid to them by Venmo. That’s it. No clues, no hints, an infinite number of guesses…obviously this is VERY SILLY and also totally random and nearly-impossible to win (and WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM) but, honestly, were this something I could win myself I would literally by typing in words like a rat in a Skinner box hitting the pellet switch.
• GB Studio: The Gameboy turned 30 recently – I remember being very fortunate to receive one from a surprisingly rich Italian pseudo-cousin as a bribe when she came to live with us for 4 months when I was 10, and, honestly, Gameboy Batman is still one of the best videogames I’ve ever played (and the MUSIC, God) – and so it seems fitting to feature this creator kit which offers a really simple (ish – I mean you’re still designing games so it’s not quite kindergarten level, but it’s still reasonably wysiwyg and intuitive) way of creating old-school adventure games for Gameboy and emulators. If you’re interested in the principles of game design and creation, this is a really excellent way of dipping your toes in.
• The Unicode Art Gallery: This site creates autogenerated unicode artworks, presented as though in a gallery, which you can save and do with as you please. The code’s available to play around with too; I am personally fascinated by the possibilities afforded by algogeneration within defined parameters like this in terms of art and its creation, and were I more talented I would totally mess with this myself.
• Kids on 45th: SUCH a great idea, this, and absolutely the sort of thing that I think could do really well in the UK too. Kids on 45th is a site/service which offers used children’s clothing, packaged up in bundles, sight-unseen, at a low price – the idea is that it provides affordable, quality staples to parents who don’t have the time to go shopping or the bandwidth to worry about labels and aesthetics and just want to make sure their children have clothes that are clean, warm and look ok. Prices are around 10% of what they would be at retail, which is a pretty astonishing discount, and it’s not hard to see what a godsend this could be to parents struggling to make ends meet.
• Musenet: This is quite amazing. Musenet is a “deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles. MuseNet was not explicitly programmed with our understanding of music, but instead discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style by learning to predict the next token in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. MuseNet uses the same general-purpose unsupervised technology as GPT-2, a large-scale transformer model trained to predict the next token in a sequence, whether audio or text.” SO MUCH ALGOMUSIC! The tech did a full ‘concert’ stream on Twitch yesterday which you can listen to on the site; the stylistic variance on display is quite astonishing.
• Ambient Sleeping Pill: “Ambient Sleeping Pill is an internet radio stream playing the best music for sleeping, taking naps, tuning out distractions at work, meditating, or simply relaxing. Ad-free, beat-free, never too new-age or dark.” This isn’t bad, particularly if you’re somewhat sick now of the endless stream of lofi hiphop muzak seemingly overtaking YouTube.
• TikTok Jobs: One of the most interesting things to me about TikTok is the way it absolutely crosses demographic lines – it’s most popular with kids, fine, but as this EXCELLENT Twitter thread shows it’s also pretty popular with adults, many of whom use it to share details of their working lives. This is a collection of TikTok vids of people being really, really good at their jobs, and it is MESMERISING – you will find your own favourite, whether it be the beautifully-pointless and short-lived ice sculpting, or the person who pre-distresses your jeans for you. Also, WHO KNEW so many of these gigs were still being done by people? IN YOUR FACE, RELENTLESS MARCH OF MACHINE PROGRESS!
• Old People Facebook Banners: Another Twitter thread, this time compiling some of the best (worst) examples of people on Facebook writing updates using those incredibly annoying balloon/emoji background templates; specifically, those occasions on which the copy really doesn’t fit the aesthetic. My personal favourite is the one reading “My husband is dying and it’s so hard to watch” over a backdrop of grinning heart-eye emoji, but, honestly, every single one of these is a joy.
• Vid2Game: If you’re old like me, you will have scratchy memories of being in bowling alleys and leisure centres around the time the first wave of digitised videogames came out, and watching in slack-jawed adolescent wonder as the grainily mo-capped avatars in Mortal Kombat and Pitfighter jerkily punched their way across the screen as impossibly cool older kids smoked fags and swore at the screen as they once again failed to nail Sub Zero’s fatality move. 30-odd years hence and we’re now at a point where tech can automatically isolate a figure from video and then turn that figure into a manipulatable in-game sprite; this video demonstrates how that tech works, and what it can be used for, and I am now basically only a few years away from starring in my very own Pitfighter reboot and I am SO EXCITED.
• Paintmap: You want a tool to make maps with data? YOU GOT IT! This isn’t all that exciting but it’s potentially useful, and it also includes the absolutely baffling feature of letting you make stereoscopic – that is, Magic Eye – maps. WHY WOULD YOU WANT THIS? Still, if you’re a designer, why not save this up for next time someone asks you to make a map graphic and then present them with one which only works if you squint into the middle-distance. They will find it HILARIOUS, promise.

By Elmo Tide, who has no online presence whatsoever that I can find

NOW WHY NOT LISTEN TO THE BEYONCE HOMECOMING LIVE ALBUM? GO ON! DO IT!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS AT WHAT POINT ‘WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A MASSIVE PLANETARY FCUKUP CATASTROPHE’ BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH ‘OWNING THE LIBS’, PT.2:

• Mario C64: Someone’s remade Super Mario for the Commodore 64. I have no idea why, but it’s an impressive feat.
• Ethical Resources: This is a nice toolkit presenting a variety of digital tools and services which are [perhaps a little less evil than their more famous or commercially successful analogues. The stuff in here ranges from things you’ll have heard of – DuckDuckGo, for example – to a whole bunch of really obscure but pleasingly non-Google analytics products. Obviously using any of this stuff will probably be on balance about 15% more complicated than using the evil alternatives, but noone said being good was easy (which is why, in the main, I am an awful person).
• Turing Tumble: I can’t quite work out whether this is genuinely awesome of the sort of thing that only people who are so far away from childhood that they no longer recall what it was like to be a kid might think is awesome. Turing Tumble is a very odd little toy/game, which basically exists to teach kids about the rudiments of logic and programming using a marble run. The kit comes with a board onto which you can affix various gates, levers and the like, all meant to replicate a particular logic feature (AND, NOT, OR, etc) – the idea is that you pour the marbles in at the top and the system you’ve created will apply its rules to them on the way down, so you can devise systems to sort them, route them, etc, much in the same way you would write a rudimentary piece of code to apply effects to a dataset. There’s even a puzzle/comic book accompanying with it that guides kids from first principles to actual proper computation with a story-led game mechanic – I have to admit I am genuinely tempted to get this for myself, which probably means no real children would ever give it the time of day, but if your kids are a bit mathsy or engineer-y, this could be an excellent gift.
• Simpli.fy: A Chrome extension to simplify Gmail. Built by one of Gmail’s original lead designers, so it’s predictably excellent.
• Okai: This is SO well-made. Okai bills itself as an interactive introduction to AI, and it does a fantastic job of explaining the main principles and branches of AI in simple, clear, visual fashion. Honestly, this is an object lesson in visual communication and web design – regardless of your interest in AI or knowledge of it, I can’t encourage you to check this out enough.
• Alt Keyboards: Want a whole website devoted to weird, non-standard musical keyboards from across the world? YES YOU DO!
• Tiny Mirror: I have no idea why this has been made, but, well, why not? Allow the site access to your webcam and it will display a TEENY TINY version of you in the favicon for literally no discernible reason whatsoever.
• Monumental Almaty: A website celebrating the monuments and architecture of the Kazakh capital – to quote the site’s makers: “From the 1960s-1980s, dozens of monumental artworks, in five main formats, were installed on buildings in Almaty, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. We’ve photographed and mapped every work in the city for our groundbreaking digital catalogs.” I am SUCH a fan of the aesthetic of all of this stuff – it’s a wonderful collection of strong Soviet-era art and design.
• LEGO Funerals: After the Nazi LEGO the other week, here’s some more er…non-typical plastic brickwork, this time sold by the Vienna Funeral Museum (no, me neither, but there you are) and allowing you the opportunity to buy your very own brick-composed graveyard scene, or historical hearse, or, er, crematorium oven. I honestly can’t comprehend the desire to have a ‘build your own’ memento mori in your home, but if you want an EXCELLENT way of really upsetting your children on their next birthday then, well, go for it!
• The Book of War Devices: This is amazing. Another old book, not dissimilar to the Codex Atlanticus, except this one’s by a renaissance scholar called Johannes de Fontana and it’s basically his scrapbook of doodles of killing machines. You know how when you were a kid and you’d pass time during lessons by drawing elaborate gunships or fighter planes or extreme war towers or something (or at least you did if you were me)? Well this is basically like that, except 600 years old – I’d suggest just flicking through the nav on the left at random and seeing what you find, because there is some literally MENTAL stuff in here. My personal favourite is the elephant-drawn gun-toting Caravel-on-wheels, but, honestly, there is a WEALTH of stuff in here. Mr De Fontana, I salute you and your mad, bellicose brain.
• Old School Curls: A subReddit featuring old portraits ‘shopped to have modern haircuts. You wouldn’t think this would be as good as it is (its ace). Churchill as John Lydon is, frankly genius.
• NASA’s 3d-Printed Habitat Challenge: If you ever feel that reality is a bit mundane and that the future is a touch more prosaic than you’d hoped, click this link and prepare to be reminded of how batsh1t and scifi reality in fact is. This is a NASA webpage collecting entries into its 3d Printed Habitat Challenge, where the Agency has offered cash prizes to the best designs for 3d-printable dwellings for use on space missions. I WANT TO LIVE IN GIANT MARTIAN COCOONS! Except, er, I’d quite like not to have to go to Mars. Is that ok?
• Behind Tasty: These are really interesting videos, showing the behind the scenes process of making those fcuking ubiquitous top-down, 45s fast-cut food abortion films that are everywhere these days (and which inevitably feature food that noone in their right mind – or at least noone who’s not North American – would ever consider eating). These do a great job of showing the amount of effort and craft that goes into creating each of these, as well as including a hefty dose of bloopers, etc; if you’re interested in the craft of videography, these are more useful than you might expect.
• Cut Fold Templates: “I put these functional, foldable structures together in a collection was so that our class could develop new ideas from the same starting point of “classical” paper-engineering knowledge. These fundamental structures are scattered between the non-overlapping disciplines of origami, compliant mechanisms, pop-up books and the study of Victorian papercraft.” A series of gifs, patterns and instructions on how to create complex foldable paper structures. This sounds, I know, boring as you like, but I promise that you will be entranced as soon as you click on the link and start perusing the designs in there. This is FASCINATING and weirdly very soothing indeed.
• Pete for America: It feels like the 2020 US Presidential election has already been going for about a decade and it hasn’t even started yet and I’m not even American. One of the most talked-up candidates is Pete Buttigeig, ‘Mayor Pete’ as he’s folksily referred to, who’s probably peaked too early to have any realistic chance of a tilt at the White House (and whose name probably precludes him from office anyway) – whilst I’m not convinced he’ll get the nomination, if these things were decided on the quality of a candidate’s design offering he’d win hands down. This site collects all the official campaign logos, posters, etc, and is a masterclass of clean, simple, user-centric design – I am SO impressed with this, and it’s miles better than most similar resources I’ve seen from commercial companies. Still, though, his name is pronounced “Butt-Edge-Edge” – he’s not going to win (MATT, FFS, DO YOU REMEMBER HOW WRONG YOU GOT EVERYTHING LAST TIME THERE WAS A US ELECTION? SHUT UP!).
• Gifrun: Gifs, from YouTube videos! Not a new service, fine, but this is a really simple and clean interface and produces non-watermarked gifs, so it’s worth a look.
• Interstellar: Zoom around space in your browser! This is simultaneously very cool and slightly sickness-inducing, but as a way of exploring a small corner of the galazy it’s pretty much perfect.
• An Inflatable Canine Sex Toy: Let me be clear at the outset – this is designed to be used by other dogs, so get any filthy zoophiliac thoughts out of your head RIGHT NOW. My girlfriend’s cat is a VERY SPECIAL LITTLE GUY but has the slightly disconcerting habit of attempting to fcuk things, despite having been snipped at an early age; it’s not unknown for me to be woken in the morning by him attempting to make love to me ear, which, I can attest, is something of a rude awakening. Perhaps we should get him one of these so that he can try and hump it instead. The thing’s designed to look vaguely quadripedal but not specifically canine – it looks weirdly fetish to my mind, and if I were the sort of person who had a domestic fcuk dungeon I might consider buying one of these just for the aesthetic (let me please specify that I am not, in fact, the sort of person who has a domestic fcuk dungeon).
• Neuhaus: An EXCELLENT interactive music video, this, which is composed of a collage of photos submitted by all previous viewers of the video. You need to wathc on your phone for the full interactive experience – tap on individual elements within the vid and you’ll be prompted to take a photo of your own to replace it with. There’s seemingly no filter here, and whilst I’ve not seen anything dodgy I’d advise a slight caveat emptor as, well, it’s the internet and therefore it’s likely that at least one man has decided that what everyone needs to see is a picture of his unimpressive member.
• Not For The Men, Not For The Sea: This is an interactive story / game. It’s SO beautifully made, and I don’t really want to tell you too much else as it’s better if you come to it cold. Please give this five minutes of your time, I think it’s gorgeous.
• Lichenia: Finally this week, a small, beautiful game. “A city building game for the Anthropocene. Reclaim the ruins of a fallen city and create a sustainable human habitat. There are no goals and no endings in Lichenia. Learn about its cryptic ecology. Grow a city like a garden.” This is mysterious, soothing and really very pretty indeed – enjoy.

By Cristina Coral

LAST UP, A GENUINELY GREAT RECORD BY A BAND I HAD NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE YESTERDAY – THIS IS BY TANK AND THE BANGAS AND HONESTLY IT IS MY NEW FAVOURITE SUMMER ALBUM AND IT MAY WELL BE YOURS TOO THIS IS SO GOOD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Camera In The Mirror: Cameras taking photos of themselves in mirrors. Why? WHY NOT? Actually there is a purpose behind this – these are all photos taken inside museums or institutions by roving cameras in the process of mapping or digitising the collections. These are weirdly poignant, though I couldn’t quite explain to you why.
• Slap My Bot: This Tumblr explores the edges of human/robot interaction, examining the ways in which we treat, empathise with and to a degree abuse the machines we create.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Unionised Memes: Amusingly, this isn’t in fact a joke. THE MEME CREATORS ARE UNIONISING! You can read more about that here – it’s simultaneously sort-of silly and equally quite an important idea imho – but this is the Instagram account of the movement, which so far seems to exist solely to post memes about the importance of unionisation.
• Roman Booteen: An incredibly talented artist and sculptor from Russia, who makes what are known as ‘Hobo Nickels’ – coins painstakingly carved so as to display completely new, hugely intricate, often mechanically-enhanced designs. These are ASTONISHING.
• Unnecessary Inventions: Literally that. Although I refuse to accept that bobblehats for your fingertips are ‘useless’.
• Vernon James Manlapaz: Vernon is an AR designer. This Insta feed collects some of his AR experiments. They are glorious, and Vernon is a very, very talented person indeed – seriously, some of this is Hollywood-level CG being delivered as a layer on your phone. Astonishing.
• Kitt Bennett: An artist who paints murals on the floor, to be viewed from above. There is SO MUCH to gain ‘inspiration’ from if your job involves coming up with endless idea for tab-friendly photocalls.
• Dyke Blanchett: A queer Cate Blanchett lookbook, because WHY NOT? My word she’s an astonishing-looking person.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Inside Facebook: Being off for a week means that a few of the things in this week’s selection aren’t quite as boxfresh as normal; as such, you may well have seen this piece doing the rounds in the past week or so. If you’re yet to read it, though, now’s your chance – it’s a nice account of what it’s been like at Facebook over the past 15 months, post-Cambridge Analytica, and the tensions within the senior ranks at the company. It’s interesting to read this in light of this week’s latest earnings call – really, what exactly does Facebook have to do to get us to stop using it?
• A Blueprint for a Regulated Internet: A typically smart piece of thinking / analysis by Ben Thompson in which he looks at a possible model for applying regulation to the web – it’s worth giving a close read to, but the basic principle can be summarised as ‘the advertising-funded web requires specific and distinct regulation from the rest of it’ and is very well explained and set out.
• Amazon Consultancy: It’s a bit worky, this one, so if you don’t do consultany-type stuff then you can probably skip it. If you do, though, this is a reasonably interesting look at the scramble amongst the big holding companies to set up specific businesses dedicated to consulting on Amazon specifically – which is interesting considering how incredibly fcuking opaque Amazon is about its ad offering (really, though, it’s almost like they don’t want advermarketingprwankers like me scumming the place up with content).
• Irony, Politics and Gen Z: Interesting-if-rambling essay by artist Joseph Citarella, in which he looks at ‘young political spaces’ online and how the platforms used by the young are to an extent shaping the evolution of their politics. This is a bit twisty and not always the clearest in tone, but the conclusions are interesting and the reasoning sound: “TikTok is a place where young users are actively forming their politics. TikTok resonates with Gen Z for various reasons, among them the duet chain (“I relate to your post by building on it with mine”) resembles the Marxist dialectic of individual autonomy within collectivity. In the crisis handed to them, young people have already realized that their own political interests are more aligned with collectivities than the type of California Ideology and libertarian individualism built into networks like Facebook or Instagram. If channeled correctly, youth frustration has the potential to become a revolutionary political force.”
• An Interactive Primer on Fourier Transforms: I don’t really wholly understand Fourier transforms, even after reading this, but I am SO impressed by the way this page is set up and designed, and the interactions throughout, that I thought I would include it anyway. I was fascinated AND baffled simultaneously, and even if you don’t know the first thing about maths you will, I promise, find this very pleasing.
• Facial Recognition in NYC: A remarkable piece of reporting from the NYT, in which they create their very own facial recognition system for about $100 and use it to identify people walking through Times Square. What’s impressive about this is not so much the tech – we all know the machines can see us, and they don’t like what they see – as the fact that you can knock this sort of thing up with only fairly rudimentary tech and a bunch of open-source code. I reckon we’re only a year or so away from the first court case in which someone is sued for doing something like this for their own creepy, personal, almost-certainly-nefarious ends.
• Stalking Instagram: Technically that’s not the actual title of the post – it’s “10 TOOLS AND TRICKS TO VERIFY INSTAGRAM POSTS”, but that’s nowhere near as pleasingly descriptive. Another GREAT piece by Henrik from Bellingcat, related to one I linked to a few weeks back, all about how to do better detective work on Insta when it comes to garnering clues from posts. You…you won’t use this for anything bad, will you?
• The End of the Instagram Look: So it seems that the era of millennial pastels and blue/pink wall shots is over, which might be upsetting to you if you’ve just decided to redesign your office, bar or museum to feature an INSTA WALL or somesuch. This is a decent look into the shifting Insta aesthetic and how ideas of ‘realness’ are coming to supplant the pastel perfection of previous years on the platform, even down to kids now being less desperate to scrub bad/old shots from their profile in an attempt to curate their brand. Obviously this is the performative internet and the idea of any sort of authenticity on any social platform is literally laughable, meaning that even this ‘transparent, honest, no filter’ stuff is patently incredibly studied, but, regardless, just accept that you’ll be writing variations on this article in all your strategy upfronts for consumer clients for the next six months.
• How YouTube is Changing Football: A great piece on the BBC about the non-league clubs doing crazy numbers on YouTube and building global communities around their ostensibly less-than-stellar talent. This is really interesting, both in terms of its being yet another area in which the web has had an unexpected role in shaping real-life activity, but also as a sign of quite how un-surreal top-level football is and quite how much fans want to have a connection with a club and players they can at least relate to and empathise with a bit. See? MORE REALNESS (it’s not real, ffs, it’s on YouTube).
• AIs Vs Humans in DOTA2: DOTA2 is a videogame – you don’t need to know anything about it at all to appreciate this piece, though, which is all about OpenAI’s latest superbrain which has been designed to be the best DOTA2 player EVER and which has now been unleashed on the world. Anyone can queue up to play the machine – at the time of the article’s writing, the machine was boasting a pretty terrifying 1,923-9 win/loss record. What’s most interesting to me about this is how it demonstrates that the flexibility and plasticity of human thinking can occasionally win out over brute force machine brilliance…but only occasionally, and that’s only because the AI is ‘closed’ and not learning any more. One player’s quoted as saying “They are not learning, but we humans are. We will win.” That…that sounds to me very much like the sort of statement that will be darkly humorous come the end of days.
• Awkpods: Another one to store up as an INSIGHT for when this eventually comes to pass – this piece is a short exploration of the increasingly common akwardness caused by seeing people with their headphones in but not knowing whether or not they are listening to music and therefore whether you can speak with them or not. Whilst I don’t for a second actually believe that anyone is fcuking with their airpods in, I reckon you can TOTALLY get a campaign out of this.
• Eating the Reaper: The web’s not short of pieces in which people describe eating really stupid things for the lols, or indeed of video of them consuming said stupid things and looking very unhappy about it, but most of them aren’t as well-written as this account of the author’s trip to a chili festival and his decision to attempt to consume the world’s hottest chilli, the Carolina Reaper. THis is HORRIBLE, and the photos are amazing – also, the writing made me laugh a LOT: “The burn is gone from my mouth and throat but now I too feel a dull, placeless ache in my torso, a distant cousin of the sack-tap. After I share my own Reaper experience, Tank-Top asks whether I was the voice he heard in the bathroom, hollering, “Why is this happening to me?” which is the point at which I resolve not to use the restroom at this venue for any reason.”
• Dark Discovery: What would you do if you looked up an old friend online, only to discover that things had gone…wrong for them? This is the slightly creepy and very modern story of the author’s quest to look up an childhood friend and what he discovered along the way, and feels very much like it could be a writing prompt for next Summer’s Gone Girl equivalent.
• The Most Modern of Modern Sports: Oh this is just GLORIOUS! Travel back in time to pre-War England and the brief, glorious halcyon days when they had cheetah racing at greyhound tracks. Yes, that’s right, CHEETAH RACING. This is a quite beautiful tale of old-school eccentricity and, quite often, rank stupidity – I mean, look: “He also recalled a trip to a televised interview—one of the earliest in existence, as the BBC had only launched its television service in 1936—in which the cheetahs nearly escaped from their covered trailer in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. The prospect of wild cats loose in a crowded town square was apparently so distressing that Sumpter and Ali spent the rest of the ride lying flat atop the moving vehicle, holding the roof down with their body weight.”
• Red Dead Redemption 2 – The Film Crit Hulk Takedown: Absolutely, hands-down the smartest piece of writing about games, design and story I have ever read, bar none. I adored RDR2, but every single criticism of it in here stacks up, not least the author’s extensive and justifiable critique of some of the design decisions taken and how they impact the sense of immersion and flow. If you’ve played the game and finished it, this is a must-read; if you’ve not finished it then know that there are BIG SPOILERS throughout. Regardless, if you have any interest in systems design, narrative, storytelling or the wider games-as-artform debate, this is just superb.
• High-End Catering: Superb account of what it’s like working as part of a high-end caterer’s. In the piece, the author recounts their experience working the line as part of the catering for a black-tie New York dinner for 760 people. It’s a great piece, conveying the very particular feeling of being part of a large, efficient production line and the very specific stress that cooking at scale involves – if you like food, cookery and reading about both, this may well be your favourite of this week’s longreads. Also, this will make you VERY HUNGRY, so be warned.
• A Common Policy: A short but PERFECTLY-written piece in the LRB blog all about Georges Perec’s famous experimental novel La Disparition – you will either know the book and get the gag here or you won’t (sorry, don’t want to spoil it for you), but if you do and do then you will I am sure agree that this is very, very nicely done.
• How To Fall In Love After Divorce: I had to check where this piece was published after I finished reading it and did something of a doubletake – I don’t, it’s fair to say, spend a lot of time reading Glamour Magazine (and BOY does my fashion sense suffer as a result); is it always this good? This article’s by Liz Lenz, and it’s about her dating again after divorce, and the horrible men, and finding herself, and, look, there’s no way I can describe it without making it sound really twee but I promise it’s not. Take a look.
• The Metrics of Backpacks: This is not, in fact, about backpacks, but it is about work and identity and conformity and feminism and sexism and it is SUCH good writing it made me quite jealous. It’s by Victoria Gannon and I wish I could write half as well as she can.

By James Friedman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. Continuing my recent trend of enjoying VERY shouty music, this is Alexisonfire with ‘Familiar Drugs’ and this is GREAT. Turn it up loud and possibly headbang a bit as you listen:

2) I had never heard of Silversun Pickups – they’ve been around for ages, apparently – but I thought this was Placebo at first and rather liked it, so here it is. This called ‘It Doesn’t Matter Why’, and I love the video a LOT:

3) This is called ‘The Cracks’, the band is Another Sky, and the lead singer has one of the most remarkable voices I’ve heard in an age. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like it:

4) This is the new video from FKA Twigs. The song is great, but the real draw here is the video. The amount of control she displays over her body here is quite astounding – the muscles ffs – but the whole thing, from direction to choreography, is just beautiful. Even if you don’t normally bother with the vids I promise you that this is worth the 4 minutes:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is Open Mike Eagle with MF DOOM which is a hell of a combination on paper and an even better one on record. It’s called ‘Police Myself’ and it is SO GOOD:

6) Shardcore has built a transdimensional scrying mirror to show us what’s REALLY happening in Parliament. This is very funny indeed AND IN FACT IS THE FINAL VIDEO OF THE WEEK SO BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TRY NOT TO BE TOO SAD THAT IT’S ONLY A TWO-DAY WEEKEND AS IT’S ONLY A WEEK TIL THE NEXT LONG ONE AND I AM SURE THAT WHATEVER YOU ARE UP TO WITH YOUR TWO DAYS OF FREEDOM WILL BE PLEASING AND HAPPYMAKING AND FUN AND THAT YOU WILL FEEL AT LEAST ONE MOMENT OF PURE JOY OVER THE COMING 48H WHICH WILL MAKE EVERYTHING FEEL OK AGAIN AND WILL MEAN THAT WHEN MONDAY COMES AROUND YOU WON’T EVEN MIND SO MUCH AND, ANYWAY, WEB CURIOS IS BACK AND THAT MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER SO UNTIL NEXT TIME TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND EACH OTHER I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE BYE!:

We had a species-defining moment this week – one of those rare times within a lifetime where you can step back and say “yep, that felt pretty significant, shame I’ll be worms by the time the long-term implications of it are known”. Yet did we stop staring at our jizz-filled navels long enough to enjoy it? Did we BUGGERY. Although on reflection, “a significant moment which I will be long-dead before the significance of which is fully known” seems increasingly like it could apply to FCUKING B****T as well, so, well, wevs I guess.

Anyway, WE HAVE MADE IT TO THE FIRST PAUSE OF THE YEAR! That’s right, twelve consecutive weeks of 6am Friday morning starts and next Friday I GET A LIE-IN (yes, I am aware that for all of you with small children the mere fact of 12 weeks of getting up early one day a week is nothing remarkable, but, well, I don’t care)! Thanks, Jesus! This is the last Curios til after Easter, what with my (I think reasonable) assumption that next Friday you’ll be too busy doing chocolatey bulimia to bother with any of this crap.

This weekend I am going to a wedding which means I need to get a move on and iron my one shirt and hope that the new pair of trainers I bought actually fit and try and work out what acceptable small talk topics are when you’re the sort of person who spends far too much time on the web and who as a result is far more likely to want to talk about the nature of extremely online discourse than, say, the groom’s buttonhole or how nice the bridesmaids look. My girlfriend is SELFISHLY staying home with her SPECIAL LITTLE GUY (cat) to celebrate her mother’s birthday so I’m not even going to be accompanied; in the unlikely event that anyone who reads this also happens to be going to a wedding in Devon tomorrow, therefore, please look out for me as I’ll likely be looking wild-eyed and distressed and like I’m wearing someone else’s clothes and I will probably need someone to show me some gifs or something to help me through the day.

Anyway, Once again, it’s Friday; once again, there are too many words and too many links to come; and once again, Curios is straining against the barely-adequate casing of html and css that tries to contain it. PIERCE THE SKIN AND LOOSE THE LINKSPAFF! This is Web Curios, next weekend is Easter, I’m back in a fortnight, try not to die (unless you’re Jesus, in which case please DO die, it’s sort of important if I remember my scriptures properly).

By Linsey Levendall

LET’S START THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS WITH THE FULL, EXCELLENT NEW KAREN O / DANGERMOUSE RECORD!

THE SECTION WHICH WAS GENUINELY THRILLED TO READ ON MONDAY THAT ‘A REGULATOR’ WAS GOING TO SORT ALL THIS ‘HORRIBLE STUFF ON THE WEB’ MESS OUT!:

• The Online Harms White Paper: Yes, fine, this isn’t really to do with advermarketingpr at all, but it’s sort-of about Facebook and stuff so, well, humour me for a minute. The UK Government this week published the Online Harms White Paper, in which it set out its plans to REGULATE THE WEB and protect us all from The Bad Things that fester in the corners; if you’re not in the habit of reading documents of this ilk then it’s worth a quick skim, if only to get a sense of quite how…well…theoretical all this stuff is. There will be a regulator! It will regulate! How? What? Where? NO IDEA! Turns out you can get a good 10 minutes on the Today programme for a little bit of covert electioneering (don’t think we don’t see you, Sajid!) to bolster your ‘tough on the bad guys’ credentials based on something INCREDIBLY flimsy! Here’s the a taste: “The regulatory framework will apply to companies that provide services or tools that allow, enable or facilitate users to share or discover user-generated content, or interact with each other online…. o ensure a proportionate approach and avoid being overly burdensome, the application of the regulatory requirements and the duty of care model will reflect the diversity of organisations in scope, their capacities, and what is technically possible in terms of proactive measures”. So, er, this will apply to every single company with anything to do with either a) person-to-person communication; or b) UGC, but regulation will only be applied based on what is ‘technically possible’. I SEE SOME PROBLEMS HERE, KIDS.
• Facebook Is Trying, Honest!: I don’t for a second think that Facebook is, at a corporate level, particularly bothered by the UK’s attentions, but it was an interesting coincidence that these updates to its content and newsfeed policies were announced this week. There were several announcements; this one, about how the company is set to work on tackling ‘fake news’ more quickly through collaboration with ‘experts’; its continued focus on reducing the spread of ‘low-quality content’ (there’s an interesting note in here about how FB will start depreciating links that get big traction within FB but which don’t receive comparable levels of traffic from outside; effectively trying to prevent Facebook hoax storms from breaking out, but also tacitly accepting that Facebook is, in many ways, designed specifically to promote weirdo outlier sh1t that wouldn’t get traction anywhere else); and the way it deals with ‘problematic’ content across its platforms. None of this is particularly relevant to you, advermarketingprdrones, but it’s interesting in a general sort of way. Oh, and one of the points Facebook makes explaining why it’s incapable of stemming the flow of fakery through human means is that “there simply aren’t enough professional fact-checkers worldwide, and like all good journalism, fact-checking — especially when it involves investigation of more nuanced or complex claims — takes time.” One might, perhaps, ask oneself why a company which in its most recent earnings reported profits of nearly $7bn couldn’t maybe hire and train more fact-checkers istelf to fill the shortfall.
• Small Updates to Facebook Memorialisation: Small tweaks to the ways in which Facebook deals with the process of Page memorialisation – that is, the post-mortem locking down of a user’s profile to prevent trolling, hacking and the like. All good, sensible stuff, and worth looking at if you happen to be in charge of a loved one’s digital legacy (you know, I really don’t like that term fwiw; I want a PROPER digital legacy, not a bunch of photos of me drunk with people I don’t remember. Maybe some sort of multilayered CurioWiki or something; I’ll leave it up to you. DON’T LET ME DOWN).
• Twitter Lowers Daily Follow Limits: You can now only follow upto 400 new accounts per day on Twitter, in a move to undermine those autofollow/unfollow bots designed to artificially inflate your numbers which I know NONE of you would ever contemplate using.
• TikTok Spotlight: This has launched in Japan and Korea and it’s yet to get a global rollout but it does feel like the future rather. I’m obviously looking at this through a hugely old media filter, but think of it a bit as X Factor but that kids might actually care about – Spotlight is TikTok’s newly-minted artist discovery programme, designed to surface (and, one suspects, ruthlessly monetise) the exciting unsigned talent which is all over the app. “ TikTok Spotlight collaborates with 21 major industry players to discover and support the growth of independent artists. TikTok will work with partners to feature rising musicians and their best work on TikTok and various music platforms, bringing them direct exposure to music fans as well as industry leaders, such as labels, publishers, artist management agencies, agents, topline songwriters, producers, and more. TikTok Spotlight will officially launch on April 5. Musicians who participate in the program can create an account and submit their original content through the TikTok Spotlight Portal (www.tiktok.com/tiktokspotlight ) during the submission period. Once cleared, the original music will go up in the app and be promoted in TikTok’s featured playlist, and shared with TikTok users for content creation. TikTok musicians will also be officially verified on their pages with a unique badge.” I think this is going to be HUGE, and an absolutely massive area for brands and advertisers, but I also think I am probably not really the target audience for this and so therefore you might want to take my opinion with the requisite truckload of salt
• You Can Now Share PPT and .doc Files Directly On LinkedIn: Nicely-jarring platform juxtaposition there – LinkedIn really is the diametric opposite of TikTok in many ways, though now all I can think of is how genuinely amazing it would be to see Oleg lipsyncing his way through “Money, Money, Money” or something of that ilk. Anyway, you can share documents through personal profiles or company Pages, and (as far as I can tell) then boost said posts – I reckon there are probably two or three genuinely quite interesting (for LinkedIn) promotional things you can do with this – I don’t know, advertising your manuscript at literary agents, say – if you hurry up.
• Our Planet: A couple of years ago I did a (tiny, miniscule) bit of work on Blue Planet II, just on the social/digital bit of the series; seeing Netflix basically stealing the format wholesale has been a bit miserable, from a purely beeb-loving point of view, but it’s hard not to admit that they have done a brilliant job. Case in point is the accompanying show website – simple, but it’s shiny and full of decent content clipped from the shows, and some lovely interactive bits, and it’s exactly the sort of site that the BBC can never make for all the sorts of longwinded and convoluted reasons you’d expect, the sort of things that make all the people who work at the BBC and love it throw their hands up in frustration and then go and have another three-hour meeting with a nice-but-slightly-ineffectual humanities graduate from Bristol about ‘goal-setting’ or similar. Really, the stereotypes ARE true.
• The Art of Shares: This is pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned – shiny, ‘arty’, overengineered, and the sort of project where I would love to hear the brand manager explaining to me why it was a really good use of the money, honest. “The Art of Shares is an interactive tool that enables you to visualise share prices as beautiful 3D sculptures. It was created by IG, the world’s No.1 provider of spread betting and CFD trading,* to help you make sense of the unpredictable world of shares and visualise data in a way that has never been possible before.” Yes, that’s right, a spread betting company has created a webtool that lets you create 3d-sculpted renderings of share price data that you can, er, look at! Rotate in virtual space! Compare with other sculptures of share prices you might also care to render! This is SO BRILLIANTLY SILLY and it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d pitch to a client because, well, I just really like this sort of stuff and quite like the idea of wasting an gambling company’s filthy lucre on it.
• Play Galeries Lafayettes: It’s getting to the stage now where I feature so many beautifully-made, overengineered French websites that I am beginning to hubristically wonder whether the entire country’s webwork industry is geared towards providing content for Curios (to be clear, I do not in fact do this). This is a game made to promote the Galerie Lafayette department stores across the country, and it’s simple and really rather lovely in its design and art style – click and hold to launch the ball from one pillar to another; the longer you hold, the further the ball leaps. Good, clean, healthy fun.

By Viviane Sassen

NEXT, HAVE SOME GENUINELY GREAT SINGALONG PROTEST POP-ROCK-PUNK BY ACTIVIST AND WRITER EVAN GREER!

THE SECTION WHICH WITHIN A COUPLE OF MINUTES OF THE PUBLICATION OF THAT BLACK HOLE PHOTO SAW A COMMENT ON TWITTER READING “DOESN’T LOOK LIKE THAT TOOK LOADS OF TECH TO TAKE”, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT THERE IS LITERALLY NO MOMENT SO AWE-INSPIRING THAT SOMEONE CAN’T MAKE IT SH1T ON THE INTERNET, PT.1:

• The Brexit Wargame: This has – FULL DISCLOSURE – been made by friends of mine, but they’ve not paid me to include this (the fcukers) and I think it’s a nice idea and, well, IT’S MY BLOGNEWSLETTERTHINGY. The Brexit Wargame is the online version of a real-world game you can sign up to play – this is designed to mimic the SLIGHTLY COMPLICATED trade and industry-type questions that, let’s be clear, we’re not even CLOSE to thinking about the answers to yet! See what sort of Brexit deal YOU’d negotiate! Interesting, simply-but-effectively designed, and worth a look if you have to think about Brexit professionally (noone should think about it personally).
• Google World Draw: Embarrassingly I think this has been around for ages and I’m only just discovering it now; whilst I like to think that I am very much aligned with the general idea that ‘the internet is not a race’, it turns out that in my heart of hearts I don’t believe that AT ALL and in fact want to establish some sort of speed-curatorial dominion over all things online. Anyway, slightly-terrifying hubris to one side, this is great fun; part of Google’s overall ‘let’s trick the humans into teaching the machines how to think!’ AI farms, Google World Draw is a gorgeous and charming little platform, which lets anyone anywhere in the world log on and draw a simple shape of a thing in 2d, which thing will then be rendered as a 3d object by the software and dumped into this charming, blocky, navigable 3-d environment along with all the other slightly misshapen creations by hundreds of other people across the globe. The AI tidies up your sketches, thereby ensuring that the landscape isn’t populated solely by horrific-looking post-apocalyptic lumps, and generally this is so supremely cute and whimsical that it makes me a little sick (in a good way). Oh, and the ‘Game’ section is fun too. Basically this is great, and if you have kids you can probably distract them with it for a good 5 minutes on Saturday morning.
• Speedgate: Technically this probably ought to sit in the ‘stuff vaguely about advermarketingpr’ section, what with it being a piece of work by AKQA to show off to Nike with; as far as I can tell, it was developed to accompany some sort of big event at Nike HQ in Portland, and this site has spun out of that. Anyway, it’s interesting and AI-ish and I thought it would be a shame if I buried it in the dull stuff up top. Speedgate is (sort-of) a new sport, generated by AI – AKQA basically fed a whole load of rulesets of various games and sports to a neural net, got it to spit out a whole bunch of variants based on said rulesets, employed an AWFUL lot of human oversight to clean up and sort the outputs, refined, repeated and then….VWALLAH! A new sport is born! The site talks you through the steps they took, and then does an admirably clear job of explaining the game – if ‘Quidditch’ can become an actual thing that people play (not people you’d actually want to spend time with, fine, but nonetheless) then this feels like it ought to stand a chance. The commitment the agency seem to have to their creation is rather lovely – they’re even offering people help with starting local leagues and the like if there’s demand. Were it not for the fact that I last broke into a run circa 2006 I would TOTALLY give this a go.
• Change A View: You know what the past couple of years have taught us? No, not that, the other thing! Yes, that’s right; that existing methods of discussion and debate online are, well, a bit crap, a bit broken, a bit shouty and a bit toxic (what’s depressing is that we knew this already; we just didn’t care because it wasn’t materially fcuking our country)! Change a View is a fascinating idea which hopes to address that, spun out of the subReddit /r/changemyview – an astonishingly non-awful corner of Reddit where people would have long, nuanced, respectful and open discussions on often contentious points of theory and belief, laying out arguments and counterarguments in clear fashion and coming to the table with an open-minded desire to be challenged. The site is simple in theory – users state a position in 500 characters or more, and others, in a threaded conversation, get to present counterpoints. Kudos can be given to posts which present an argument that caused the original poster to question or rethink their original position, and there are other gentle nudge-type tweaks to keep the discussion moving intelligently. As a primer on debating and logic and how to argue, this is honestly excellent; as a place to learn about a plurality of views, it’s also great. Do check it out and have a dig – this deserves to grow, I think.
• Boomplay: Apologies to everyone who’s known about this for years; to the rest of you, Boomplay is basically Spotify in Africa (sorry, I know that that’s a hugely sweeping statement – A CONTINENT CONTAINS MULTITUDES – but it’s sort-of how they describe themselves) and is a great way of discovering a totally different (to me, at least) slice of musical culture.
• Thaw: Another week, another potential antidote to the gnawing void growing within you! Thaw is an app designed to make that tricky process of making new friends as an adult marginally easier; it’s designed in a similar manner to a dating app (although they are very keen to stress IT IS NOT A DATING APP), insofar as you tell it your location and your interests and it tries to match you with suitable others to share your passion for hiking / grouting / primal scream therapy with. This seems like it could be a good idea, but I can’t help but wonder exactly how it plans to stem in the inevitable flood of guys (it will, always, be guys) who think “Well, I know it says it’s not a dating app, but what better way to make someone fall in love with me than by engendering a strong, hobby-based bond which may one day blossom from Agape to Eros?”. Still, if you want to find someone else in Tooting who likes playing Euro Truck Simulator then this might be the app for YOU!
• The Most Beautiful Construction Set In The World: Not my personal opinion, you understand, but the somewhat-hubristic name that this Kickstarter has decided to give itself. Still, if you’re in the market for an INCREDIBLY-SHINY kit-type construction set, from which you can make cars and trucks and planes and other things that go then this might be your catnip; the models will ship in what I think are flat-pack, twist-apart component sets designed to be assembled in the manner of Airfix-type things, except this is all cogs and springs and metal as opposed to plastic and bostik and the weird, specific pain of taking several layers of epidermis off your fingers with superglue. These are very impressive, but at the same time I can’t help but imagine them sitting on the mantelpiece in a room with very heavy brown leather furnishings and some slightly distressed-looking box-canvas prints featuring CLASSIC BRITISH SCENES up on bare-brick-style walls. Do you know what I mean? You don’t, do you? FINE.
• Martin Pirongs Walking Self-Portrait: “Taking a line for a walk, nearly 200 miles long, over the first 10 days of April and creating a unique connection with a city and land. Harnessing the art of GPS technology and the age-old power of walking – by pavement, path, road and occasional field – Martin is aiming to configure the outline of his own body, with his own body on a giant scale. You are invited to witness the live GPS trail as it is created, slowly revealing an image that will inhabit the M25 and become the size of London.” Pirongs finished his walk two days ago – MARVEL at his silhouette spanning the M25! Anthony Gormley WISHES he’d thought of this.
• Edible Games: I make it a point of pride (Ha! ‘Pride’! Maybe I had that, years ago, but marijuana has since destroyed any remaining vestiges that lingered) that I don’t feature the same thing in Curios twice (annually-updating events excepted); I’m going to make an exception here, though, as last time I included this it was only a Kickstarter whereas now it’s available to buy and it looks ACE and I think it’s the sort of thing that anyone who likes baking and either a) has kids; or b) likes games (or even c) both) will enjoy. Edible Games is a cookbook and game book in one, presenting various games you can play with or around food; whether you’re making a boardgame out of biscuits, or making disgusting chocolate truffles in disguise, the games and fun and interactive and silly, and you can get a feel for them with the various examples collected on the site. Still, if you have a few spare quid I would be amazed if you didn’t know at least one person or household for whom this wouldn’t make an excellent gift (NB just to be clear, I have NO IDEA who the author is or anything like that – this is honest-to-goodness unfeigned enthusiasm, which NEVER happens and probably why I feel the need to explain and caveat it to this degree).
• Library of Congress Serendipity: Hit ‘Refresh’ and this site will spit out another random selection of links from the website of the Library of Congress. I just got, amongst other things, a scan of a 19thC collection of ‘Myths of the Rhine’ and something intriguingly called ‘A Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life’, but your selection of stuff will be entirely different. As a way of losing yourself in obscure historical corridors, this is pretty much unbeatable.
• A Spreadsheet of Covers by ‘Alternative’ Musicians of Songs by ‘Alternative’ Musicians: I mean, it’s not a catchy title but at the very least it’s accurately descriptive. Here’s the compiler’s description: “There’s nothing unusual about musicians playing songs by their peers. But in between punk and the mid 90s, there was something sort of interesting about the way so many bands used covers to stake out a whole audience and canon and set of shared references around what was still called “alternative” music. By the end of the 80s, as that whole realm gathered up into a thriving thing, there were a lot of those covers. It’s hard to capture, from today’s perspective, how much they presented as a kind of shared secret, badges for a club.” As its creator admits, this is not exhaustive, but there are a lot of links to cover versions in here if this is your thing, or if you ever wanted to know whether The Wedding Present covered Pavement (they did!).
• The Vagina Museum: It feels like the people behind the Vagina Museum have been seeking a venue for years – at the time of writing, they’ve launched a crowdfunder which isn’t going hugely well and could use a boost. In case you’re not aware, the Vagina Museum is intended to be a physical, bricks-and-mortar venue acting as the world’s first ever museum dedicated to the….er…vagina (there is a joke here about vulvas but I think we’re probably all tired of that one by now, no?), intended to educated and celebrate all things…er…vaginal. If you like the idea of a place where people can go and celebrate the…er…vagina (sorry, it’s not that there’s anything weird or embarrassing about the word, it’s more that after you’ve typed it a certain number of times it loses all meaning and starts to look very weird indeed) then chuck them a few quid.
• Applight: An app which lets you compose carefully-formatted Insta captions and then copy them into Insta whilst retaining said all-important formatting. You may thing this is silly or pointless or frivolous, but which amongst us hasn’t struggled for untold minutes with the appalling and finicky Insta text-input tool to get the appropriate line-breaks to display just the appropriate level of post-internet ennui in our captions? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO.
• Immersed: I think that at least a few of you who read this are into, or do, game design on a professional level; this is for YOU, or even those of you who are just into the idea of game design as players or as theoreticians. Immersed is a podcast which each episode talks to a different designer about their game, its genesis, its mechanics, and its relationship to the issues it’s about. As per usual I’ve not listened to this, but it was recommended to me by a site whose opinion I trust and so, here, TAKE IT.
• Other Places: A YouTube channel which each episodes posts a slightly dreamy, dialogue-free, pseudo-travel guide through a videogame world. The high graphical fidelity of modern AAA titles means that these take on the slightly surreal sheen of an imagined travelogue from a film you’ve never seen; the Hitman one, for example, could legitimately be the trailer for a very particular type of Hollywood film with the V/O turned right down. These are wonderful as an overview of game aesthetics and how the contrast, but also as pieces of wordless storytelling; whilst nothing happens in any of the films, there’s a real sense of narrative throughout which I personally find really impressive.
• CSS Battle: This is *so* geeky, but if you code then I imagine it’s also pretty fun. CSS Battle is a series of small coding challenges – the idea is that you have to edit the code on the page in such a way that the two images match; the skill here is to do so with the most minimal and elegant instructions you can. This is a really clever way of teaching, I think – you learn the basics of how the code actually functions, how commands work and stack, etc, but also, after that, how to refine and improve your work. SUCH a clever little toy, and just about simple enough that even I, a know-nothing code bozo, was able to muddle my way through a few (ok, one) scenes.

By Tish Barzanji

NEXT UP, THE LATEST BEATS IN SPACE MIX BY JAMIE TILLER, WHICH IS ALL SORTS OF EXCELLENT ELECTROHOUSEY GUBBINS!

THE SECTION WHICH WITHIN A COUPLE OF MINUTES OF THE PUBLICATION OF THAT BLACK HOLE PHOTO SAW A COMMENT ON TWITTER READING “DOESN’T LOOK LIKE THAT TOOK LOADS OF TECH TO TAKE”, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT THERE IS LITERALLY NO MOMENT SO AWE-INSPIRING THAT SOMEONE CAN’T MAKE IT SH1T ON THE INTERNET, PT.2:

• Targeted Shirts: If you’ve spent even three minutes on Facebook in the past couple of years you will at some point have been served one of those hypertargeted ads which presents you with an INCREDIBLY UGLY piece of clothing, usually a tshirt, which lists a bunch of qualities based on what the advertiser can tell about you based on FB data; so, for example, they’ll make one that says “Single, gun-loving, Texan Aries in her 30s – KID ROCK IS MY BABYDADDY!” (I mean, fine, that’s possibly a bit of a stereotype) targeted at “30-39 y/o female kid rock fans in texas who also like the NRA’. Anyway, this subreddit collects some of the best (worst) examples that people have been served and you think “wow, surely noone buys this stuff?” and then you realise “well, if noone bought it then noone would advertise it would they?” and you come to the realisation that there are almost certainly entire backwoods communities clothed only in this type of gear and that perhaps, actually, we ought just to end it all. If you want a pretty compelling argument for narcissism having become the defining quality of the age, this sort of stuff isn’t a bad start.
• Public Sans: God I love me a publicly-available font. Developed by the United States Web Design System, Public Sans is designed to be readable, flexible and free – the linked Github repository contains all the file types you need to crack right on and use it, should you so desire. IT’S MARGINALLY MORE INTERESTING THAN HELVETICA.
• Special Bricks: I honestly love it when people email links in for inclusion in Curios – it’s genuinely pleasing to know that a) people actually read this bastard thing, or at least bits of it, or at least they pretend to; and b) they care enough to want to submit things for inclusion. So I was hugely cheered when XXXXXXXXXXXX got in touch yesterday to suggest thi…eh? What? Ah, right, yes, the name. So they got in touch and sent me this link and when I thanked them and asked if there was a project or website or social feed they wanted me to link to in acknowledgement thought about it for a bit and then replied with “ok, but with the caveat that I am not and have never been and am not a member of the Nazi party” and then with a very quick follow-up of “Actually on second thoughts my boss is a subscriber so no”. So, Web Curios – A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET BETWEEN COLLEAGUES. How lovely! Anyway, this long discursive non-desciption is a roundabout way of introducing Special Bricks, a company modifying LEGO figures and selling them – the twist here is that they are modifying them to be things from WWII. Things like the Wehrmacht, and the SS, and the ‘German Brick Dictator’ (you can probably guess who that’s meant to be). In fairness, it also sells models designed to look like Allied troops, suggesting this isn’t a website for Nazis so much as one for people with a weird desire to replicate Stalingrad in blocky, modular plastic, but I can understand XXXXXXXXXXX’s reticense to have their name forever linked to Nazi LEGO online. Can I recommend, by the way, you check out the landmines? They are weirdly adorable and yet deeply sinister at the same time.
• Design Census: It’s that time of year again – the annual survey of the world’s designers, intended to take a snapshot of the global industry and the people who work within it. Designers, fill it in!
• Dissection Font: I love this rather, not least because the overall aesthetic is halfway between Mondrian and the animation they used to play on Sesame Street of the pinball machine that was all done in pastel pencil crayons (you know the one I mean)(I promise that will sort of almost make sense if you click the link). Each letter is made up of tesselating parts which can be rearranged into a cube; honestly, I love this, and there’s actually quite a cool code system you could employ using this, with a bit of tweaking.
• Titter: This week’s ‘Link Matt saw in B3ta last weekend and which he’s nicked for his newsletter but which now is a week old and so perhaps less interesting FFS MATT IT’S NOT A RACE WE’VE BEEN OVER THIS’-type thing is Titter, made by longtime B3ta legend Monkeon and which has one, simple gag at its heart: “In order to seek out double entendres on Twitter, I grabbed any response tweets which mention “oo-er missus”, “fnarr fnarr”, “Finbarr Saunders”, “that’s what she said” or “is that a euphemism?”, and then loaded the message they were replying to.” This is just an endless stream of entirely innocent and yet the same time oddly filthy statements and questions, very much in the seaside postcard style; the only way to improve it would be to add an image-search function so it created captioned images from the Tweets, but, honestly, that’s just me being greedy.
• Dust See: Generally speaking in the UK, air pollution’s not something you can actually see (in difference to the terrifying footage Alex used to send from Shanghai, where he’d document his commute by showing the horrifically-milky chemical clouds wafting past his speeding train) – why not change that and get REALLY SCARED about what we’re ingesting into our lungs, with this app which uses AR to present a visualisation of the current air quality where you are. The working version is only available to Korean users, but people elsewhere can check out a demo to see how it functions; the combination of air quality data, wind speeds and associated other vectors make for a really quite comprehensive reading, although that will be little comfort as you once again begin to cough up near-translucent slivers of lung.
• Scootermap: A map app designed to help people in US cities with high concentrations of electric scooters (Lime, Spin, etc) track them and, if they are so inclined, find the ones that need returning/redocking and do so for cash. Not an interesting app at all, per se, but I am fascinated by things like this that spring up at the margins of an industry as an unintended and presumably unforeseen parasite economy; I’ve featured a longread in Curios before about the weirdly competitive Lime-charging economy in LA, with people aggressively fighting over the ability to earn a few bucks for returning /recharging abandoned scooters, and this is basically the souped-up version of that. If any of you are the sort of people who firmly believe that they DO have a successful business in them, you could do worse than spending a bit of time thinking about the industries that are being disrupted RIGHT NOW and now you might work to make cash in the wrinkles of the fallout (does that make sense? It did in my head but now I’m not so sure. Hey ho!).
• A Personal Anthology: What a glorious idea. “Each week a guest is invited to pick and introduce twelve of their favourite short stories and, where possible, link to them online. You can browse guest editors and featured authors in the sidebar, or just start reading below.” If you want a regular, well-selected list of free reading material online, curated by some of the most feted contemporary authors of our time, then this is superb (and, also, why wouldn’t you?). The breadth and range of subjects who get to choose means that the range of stories you’re exposed to is vast; for each that doesn’t speak to you, you’ll find three that do. This is a treasure.
• The Far Side of Trump: Trump’s Tweets as captions to the Far Side cartoons of Gary Larson. Do young people still know/recognise the Far Side? It was so ubiquitous in the 80s and early-90s, but is it still a thing? Please tell me that Larson never went all Scott Adams redpill, it would be too sad a thing to bear.
• The Wolfman Museum: Oh WOW. This is pretty much peak Curios, right here. The Wolfman Museum is an online museum which basically exists as a sort of weird maze of pages and links, all hidden behind a slightly weird conceit that you’re wandering round the somewhat mysterious Wolfman Museum; clicking around will move you from room to room, and you can click on exhibits to see them more closely – the real fun, though, comes through exploring all the tiny interactive incidental details that you can discover, and which take you to some genuinely wonderful online art world rabbitholes. Video archives and digitised catalogues and shops and artist sites and so much more are all nested within this – play around on here for 10 minutes or so and you’ll realise quite how much stuff this leads you to. Just play around – it’s glorious, like the best ever arty CD-ROM you never got to play with in 1994.
• Super Aspen: Do you remember SkiFree on old PCs? No? Well this is JUST LIKE THAT, but playable in your browser. Quick, silly, disposable fun – and developed by Frank Force, veteran games developer, who also made a quite preposterously small ASCII version which if you’re of a more code-y bent you can also find out about and run here.
• Ancient Greek Punishment Teaches Typing: Pippin Barr returns with another tweaked iteration of his Atari 2600-style games based on the punishments meted out by the Ancient Greek Gods to those who defied or displeased them. You will, I promise, never want to type faster or more accurately than when you are being Sisyphus. Or Prometheus, waiting for that BLOODY EAGLE. I love this gag SO much, no matter how many versions of it he does.
• Sok Stories: Finally in the miscellania this week, Sok Stories is a series of very small, very simple games developed as part of the recent Now Play This festival of experimental games and play in London which took place last weekend (and which I annoyingly totally forgot about til it was finished, chiz). All the minigames are made with the Sok Stories engine, which lets you create simple sprites, add rules to them, and make games from those components, and the titles here collected demonstrate the weirdly extensive flexibility that such simple premises afford. All of these play differently, and none of them have instructions – just play and see what happens. So, so nicely done – do try them all if you have a chance, they’re literally a minute or so each.

By Raymond Lemstra

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS LOUNGE-Y, 80s-Y, NEW WAVE-Y SUNSHINEY RETRO BALEARIC…THING!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (OF WHICH NEITHER THIS WEEK ARE TUMBLRS AND YET THE NAME OF WHICH SECTION I AM REMARKABLY DISINCLINED TO CHANGE DESPITE THE NEAR-WEEKlY EVIDENCE OF TUMBLR’S DEMISE AS A CREATIVE ECOSYSTEM)!:

• Antigravity Bunny: The music blog of a person (nameless, that I can tell) from Salem in the US, who likes music, goes to loads of concerts, and posts regular and from what I can tell excellent mixes to this occasionally-updated site. The word ‘eclectic’ doesn’t even begin – there is some VERY obscure stuff on here.
• La Petite Melancholie: I’m not quite sure how to categorise what’s on this blog – it’s mostly turn-of-the-century entertainers and burlesque dancers and models and creatures of the demi-monde, that I can tell, with some excellent short biographies of some of the more interesting characters. Wonderful photos here if you’re into that period (and even if not). VERY occasionally NSFW, but not so’s you’d notice.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Millennial Labs: Personally speaking I’m not convinced by the concept of the Insta-Zine – it feels very much like the sort of thing that works in very specific instances for specific audiences but formatwise isn’t actually very good – but this is interesting nonetheless. It’s by ‘Millennial Think Tank’ Common Vision, and it’s an Insta-only thing sharing insights and information about the ‘millennial’ demographic which surely noone cares about any more because they’re all now in their 30s and it’s all about the Gen-Z kids anyway. Still, if you have to pretend to care about this sort of thing then this might be of use.
• Alia Bright: Lovely cut-out 3d paper lettering which will make far more sense when you click the link, promise.
• Into The Polaroid: Polaroid shots taken by Bret Watkins. Kids, this is what inspired all the photo filters we now recreate with software! Wild, isn’t it? *cries*
• Throw & Co: Personally I don’t really understand the appeal of an Insta feed sharing images of woven rugs, but, well, Curios is a broad church.
• Alexandre Luu: Rather excellent pencil/watercolour illustrations and the occasional animation. Beautiful style – thanks Dan for the tip.
• Preachers’n’Sneakers: Photographs of firebrand pastors, preaching and wearing some fancy kicks (or rocking some fancy gear, footwear or otherwise). Nothing says “humble soldier of Christ!’ like an equally-humble $5,000 pair of trainers, amiright lads?
• Crime Scene Cleaners: TO BE CLEAR, DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE AWFUL THINGS. It’s protected, so you can click the link without fear, but be aware that if you choose to follow it you’ll probably see quite a lot of bloaty corpse. This is the Insta feed of a company that cleans up crimescenes and all that that entails; it’s very much the sort of thing that makes you grateful that smell doesn’t yet travel electronically. I don’t know why you’d want to follow this acciount but, well, if you want an occasional reminded of the fact that we are all made of meat and we will all decay, sprinkled amongst the chiaseed-turmeric lattes and the weirdly self-aggrandising posts about mental health and fragility, then this is for YOU!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How Murdoch Won The World: If you only have the appetite for one ‘serious’ longread this week, make it this one (unless you read it last week, of course, or if you’d prefer not to be dictated to by a faceless webmong hiding behind a keyboard in his kitchen). This is a brilliant, sprawling piece of journalism by the New York Times, presented in multiple parts and taking a forensic look at the Murdoch empire – its genesis, its victories and (notably few) defeats, and the extent to which the man at its head has to a greater or lesser extent been one of the great architects of the latter half of the 20th, and first quarter of the 21st, Century. It’s extremely well-written and straddles the line between familial power struggle soap and objective reportage pretty well, given the inherently divisive nature of its subject matter. So, so good.
• The End of the American Century?: Almost a companion piece to the above, this from the LRB asks whether we’re seeing a real end to American international dominance on the political and economic stages or whether instead the current spats with China et al are simply presaging a messy, loud and ultimately destructive attempt to cling on to primacy in the face of increased, superior competition from other nations. Which do YOU think?
• Tax vs the Ultrawealthy: This is, fine, an American piece about a very specific case which the US taxation authority – the IRS – attempted to bring against one individual billionaire; as such there’s rather more detail about legal/tax stuff than I’d normally be able to stomach. It’s worthwhile, though, for the overview it gives of you of exactly why ‘we’ll just tax the rich / corporations’ isn’t quite as simple an answer as pinko lefties like me wish it were. The piece does an excellent job of laying out the base facts, namely that if an individual (or, by extension, corporation) is rich enough, it can afford to hire enough excellent legal counsel that they can filibuster any investigation to the point where it just sort of dies. The thing about the violently ultrawealthy, turns out, is that your prosecution will run out of money and brains before their defence does. Which is quite staggeringly depressing if you think about it too hard, so let’s not.
• The Man Behind the Biden Memes: I don’t particularly care one way or another about joe Biden and his Presidential tilt, other than to say that I’m not 100% sure that he’s the change the US could probably do with right now, but it’s fair to say that his somewhat handsy approach to interpersonal relations might have fcuked him rather. This piece profiles the random guy who’s become the go-to source of large-traction Trumpian memes on the web, and who made the ‘Biden Snuggling Biden’ video that was Tweeted by half the Trump family last week. Less interesting about the specifics than it is about the very, very weird flattening of political discourse that has occurred when self-described know-nothing shlubs like this guy, alongside genuine lunatics like Rachel Swindon over here in the UK, can become actual, proper avatars for whole movements. ODD.
• The Amazon Games: Amazon is introducing ‘games’ to its fulfilment centres to help motivate the workers to PACK HARDER and BE MORE EFFICIENT and FEED THE MECHABEZOS MONSTER, and it’s exactly as bleak as you’d imagine it to be. Go on, read this piece and try not to feel guilty about spending so much money with that bastard company – it’s impossible.
• How ASMR Became a Sensation: ASMR is a genuinely weird cultural phenomenon insofar as it’s simultaneously massively well-known if you’re a certain type of (extremely online) person and yet absolutely not known at all if you’re more of a normie. It feels slightly like that boundary is being blurred slightly – one of my favourite ASMRists in Italy has just been signed up to do ASMR podcasts by Audible, there have been multiple PR activations based on it, etc – but it’s still not quite the sort of thing that your mum will have heard of. Anyway, this is a reasonably good primer on the movement’s evolution – actually, on reflection, is there any other online community that’s been around for this long and hasn’t in any way pivoted to alt-right horror? Take a bow, non-fashy ASMR people!
• Blood Chocolates: One to add to the bulging folder marked “very weird stuff that was considered totally normal under command economies of the 20thC”, this is the slightly unsettling story of how as part of the drive to ensure the general health of the people under Communism, the Russian party produced a large number of foodstuffs that were supplemented with ACTUAL BLOOD to ensure the population was getting enough iron. Want a sweet treat but feeling a touch on the haemy side? No worries, YAM A HEMATOGEN BAR! It wasn’t just chocolate, either – drinks, powders, sweets, you name it, you could get a blood-enriched version of it. It’s almost worth seeing if you can find a job lot of these online, purely to taunt your kids with. “You want a chocolate, Susan? OK then, but it HAS to be one of the bloody ones”.
• The Pac Man Dossier: Do you want the definitive manual on the original Pac Man game – how it works, how it plays, how to memorise the patterns so you too have a shot at a world-record score and the chance of being featured in one of those slightly-sneery Raindance-nominated docs about obsessive retro videogame competitors? OH GOOD! This is surprisingly interesting, honest, but I appreciate you might not want to read every word.
• A Brief History of Internet Bongo: You will read this and you will be briefly heartened by the stories of some of the earliest people getting rich of online bongo services being women; you will then, if you are anything like me, get irrationally annoyed at the fact that you were neither old enough or savvy enough to register any of the good urls back in the day; if only I’d had the foresight to lock down www.urolagnia.com back in the day.
• Burundi Beats: Fascinating anecdote about the genesis of Adam and the Ants, and how Malcolm Maclaren ended up sampling – basically thieving – tribal music from Burundi for Bow Wow Wow’s song “Burundi Beat”. I promise, even if you’re not interested in 80s music this is an honestly great read – the ideas it raises about fair use and appropriation are interesting, and it’s always fascinating to read abot Malcolm McClaren who really does seem to have been a truly monstrous individual on almost every conceivable level; there are quite a few details in here that give that vertiginous “wow, the past, eh? Different country and all that” feeling, not least the stuff about the creepy sexualisation of the barely-pubescent Bow Wow Wow singer.
• Food In Antarctica: Fascinating piece about what it’s like being the cooking team at the Arctic station at Rothera, where the population varies between 100 and 20 people depending on the season, and the entire area is entirely locked away from human contact for stretches at a time. The challenges faced by the chefs are pretty much unique in terms of the restraints placed on them regarding the availability of produce and the pressure of cooking in an environment when meals really can be the highlight of a day or week; this sounds incredibly hard but, honestly, I would absolutely do this job given the option.
• 2025: I am ASTONISHED that this hasn’t received more coverage – presuming it’s real and I’ve not fallen for an April Fool, this is honestly the most batsh1t evolution of the reality TV beast that we’ve yet seen. I’ll have to C&P the description here, it’s simply easier: “In the middle of a small, gated desert town looms a large digital scoreboard. It doesn’t display sports scores, traffic delays, or safety alerts. Instead, the 20-foot-tall screen broadcasts something a bit more sinister–what each resident is worth–in actual currency. Each person is ranked, their name aligned with a hard, cold number. This is not any small town. For one thing, the paved, tree-lined streets give way to a mishmash of design styles: an idyllic Craftsman-style house sits alongside a sleek hotel, while a Brooklyn brick bar corners a flashy Art Deco bank. If you’re hungry, a marble-floor restaurant with top celebrity chefs can satisfy your cravings, but so can a meal vending machine. Talking holograms routinely appear throughout many of the interior and exterior walls. Here, 12 contestants enter an isolated Israeli town to compete in a societal experiment: What would happen if all of your day-to-day decisions were judged monetarily? The newly minted residents are tethered to wristbands that both monitor their moves and display their financial balance. Meanwhile, everything costs money, including housing, food, beverages, clothing, even hot water. The scores change second to second depending on cash spent. It’s as much a reflection of human behavior as it is an exploration of modern society. What do people spend their money on? How does it affect their relationships? Will it impact their status?” Honestly, I would watch the fcuk out of this – it sounds AMAZING. Although based on this report about viewing figures in the first month, I may not be representative.
• The Disturbing World of Sonic Fanfic: This piece presents a series of short extracts from a variety of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction. SEXY Sonic fan fiction. You will wish you’d never clicked but you won’t be able to stop reading. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, DON’T FIGHT IT.
• What Are Nerds?: I confess to reading this and agreeing with it VERY HARD. It’s a piece all about the slightly annoying tendency of people in modernity – an era in which performative demonstrating membership of a tribe or strata is as important as feeling that membership, or so it would seem – to self-describe as nerds and to do so loudly and continually and oh god, look, basically just this: “The woman wearing big sassy red spectacles who I introduced myself to at a dinner party and she said, “Um AWKWARD. We’ve met before.” When I said sorry, and that I was bad at faces, she said “NO NEED TO MAKE THIS EVEN MORE PAINFULLY AWKWARD. I’M JUST GOING TO STAND ON THE BALCONY AND BLUSH FOR A WHILE NOW.” Everyone turned around to look at us and she said “WOW THIS IS EMBARRASSING” and sort of fanned herself like she was hot, although in fact it was not hot and it was only embarrassing for me, because she was making it seem like I had transgressed some obvious social boundary and the two of us were now reeling around in a no-mans-land ungoverned by the rules of ordinary behaviour.”
• Why Buckle-Up Twitter Is Cancelled: The second piece this week which I felt guilty about liking because it’s probably a bit mean-spirited but which equally spoke to me SO HARD that it was all I could do not to shout ‘PREACH’ at my screen as I read it. Again, I’m just going to quote some of it and you can see if it feels like you might also find a home here: “BUCKLE UP, SLUTTY RAGAMUFFIN HISTORIANS. GATHER ROUND, O YE CLUSTER OF FURIOUS WHORES. JOIN ME, LADS AND LASSES, FOR THIS TALE OF MOTHERFUCKING WHIMSY AND WOE, 19TH CENTURY STYLE. CHARLOTTE BRONTË ? CUTE AND HARMLESS? ABSOLUTELY THE FUCK NOT!! HARK, WOMEN WHO HAVE BUILT THEIR PERSONALITY AROUND WEARING DISGUSTING CHUNKY JEWELRY AND REFERRING TO THEMSELVES AS “BLUESTOCKINGS”. HALT, MEN WHO QUOTE WITHNAIL AND I SO MUCH EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE IN THEIR THIRTIES, AND WATCH ME, KARL SNARKS, PISS COPIOUSLY ON THE GRAVE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË , GASLIGHTER EXTRAORDINAIRE, AND SKULL FUCK HER TINY PROBLEMATIC HEAD. FUCKEN SIT THE FUCK DOWN AND LET ME TELL YOU SHOWER OF IMBECILES ABOUT PHRENOLOGY. 1/236” – the irritatingly whimsical and self-aware profanity, the slightly neckbeardy faux-medievalisms, the chummy irreverence? GOD I HATE IT. Wow, that feels better.
• The Other Yous: An essay about the odd modern phenomenon whereby you’ll occasionally get correspondence for another you – someone who shares the same name, and who electronic mail decides for a moment shares your identity too. There’s something wonderful about these fleeting glimpses into the parallel realities that you could have perhaps inhabited. My version of this is the Matt Muir from New South Wales who seemingly goes on test drives every single weekend with no intention of buying the fcuking vehicles but who has nonetheless signed me up to the mailing list of every single fcuking dealership in the area. THANKS, OTHER MATT MUIR!
• Meet Cournet Stodden: This is quite a depressing profile. I didn’t know who Stodden was before reading this – turns out, she’s one of those occasional kids in the US who ends up becoming massively, creepily famous for marrying a man 40-odd years their senior with their parent’s consent; you know, the ones who end up getting creepily sexualised and who you feel are only a few short years away from potentially ending up in A Bad Way. Stodden looks pretty much as you’d expect her to, all pneumatic and, well, er, ‘naive’ is the charitable term I suppose, and the article is ostensibly a piece about how she’s all grown up now after ending marriage number one and hooking up with (still considerably older) fiance number two, and is TAKING CONTROL of her life and destiny, and parlaying her fame into a recording career. The reporter covering it seems to be want to be portraying her as a decent ingenue who’s come through an odd situation to finally be in charge of their fate…except, well, reading between the lines it doesn’t feel like that’s the case at all, and the fact that the piece can make some pretty clear allusions to not particularly pleasant coercive control of Stoddard from various adult figures in her life and the fact that she ended up doing shoots, etc, that she didn’t seem totally comfortable with, whilst at the same time TOTALLY failing to make any reference to the fact that her ‘new single’ is called ‘HOT AND JUICY’ and feels very much like something packaged up by a middle-aged man to sell yet another creepy teen=Barbie fantasy…It weirdly ends up working as a surprisingly decent critique of much of what’s passed off as ‘empowerment’ to young women in 2019, though perhaps unintentionally.
• Operation Columba: All about WAR PIGEONS! Honestly, this piece – about WWII and how pigeons were used by the Brits as part of the war effort – is just delightful. Eccentric and informative and, on several occasions, laugh out loud funny (though I confess I might have been laughing at some of the more slapstick examples of pigeon death). SO good.
• Privileged: Kyle Korver is an NBA basketball player. He’s white in a sport where the vast majority of the teams are black, but in a country where society is weighted heavily in favour of white people. This is Korver’s superb essay about how that feels and what that makes him think about his role in society, as a person who can and should attempt to be an ally and make a difference, and how he deals with his awareness of his own privilege. Sensitive and intelligent, I think, though I’m conscious my opinion’s probably not the important one when assessing this.
• How Does A Person Lose A Diary?: Gorgeous essay, about the strange pleasure of immersing yourself in a stranger’s diary. Honestly, I could read old diaries forever – those and boarding house guest books are my absolute lifeblood when it comes to perfect mundanity.
• Meet Josephine Bonaparte: Oh, this is TRIUMPHANT. All about Josephine, Napoleon’s mistress and then empress and then ex-wife, all-round badass and general woman-about-France. This is, honestly, the funniest thing I have read all week; without spoiling it, I was literally in tears at the line “stay away from my fcking llamas, Robespierre”.
• Colm Toibin’s Cancer: Cancer memoirs and the LRB go together hand-in-hand these days after the late Jenny Diski’s beautiful, heartrending series of writings tracking the course of her illness. Colm Toibin writes in the latest issue of his own diagnosis, surgery and treatment; not sure why, but I tend to come across more memoirs of illness by women than men, so it’s nice to read something on this from a male perspective; I know it’s a small thing, but the dispassionate way he talks about his testicles is honestly the favourite thing of mine in here (and people say men are obsessed with them, TSK).
• I Hate What They’ve Done To Almost Everyone In My Family: Finally this week, this came out as a newsletter last weekend but quickly did the rounds; if you missed it, it’s very much worth reading. The author shares stories, his own and those from other people, of how their families have been…turned by Fox News. Substitute Fox for, say, Brexit or Infowars or Rogan or Sargon or whatever – regardless of the angle you look at it from, this is hard to see as anything other than representative of the poisoning of minds by some very toxic culture.

By Jan Klos

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is called ‘Snake Tongue’ and it’s by The Beaches, and it’s a great bit of ‘fcuk you, disgusting men’ pop-rock:

2) Next up, this is the MOST slacker song I’ve heard in years and it made me think the 90s never left and I DON’T CARE IF THAT MAKES ME LAME. Ahem. Anyway, this is Friends Forever with ‘Thanks for Coming’ and it is ace:

3) I’m not quite sure what it is about THE NOW that’s causing me to want to listen to lots of music that could charitably be descrived as ‘like the sound of two lawnmowers fcuking’ and yet here we are. This is by Show Me The Body and it’s called ‘Forks and Knives’ and it’s HORRID:

4) This reminded me LOTS of early-period Weezer crossed with Compulsion, and therefore it is great. It’s called “Out For Blood” and it’s by Heart Attack Man:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Kida Kudz with ‘Jiggy Bop’ – this is SO good and will make it feel about 6 degrees warmer than it in fact is outside:

6) Last up this week, thanks to Katie for pointing me at it – this is called ‘Down By The Tree’ by Pearl City and the dancing here, oh my. This man is honestly incredible, and will make you feel like some sort of leaden-footed lump by contrast BUT YOU ARE NOT A LEADEN-FOOTED LUMP AT ALL, OH NO, YOU ARE SPECIAL AND I LOVE YOU IN A VERY PARTICULAR WAY AND I HOPE YOU NOT ONLY HAVE A NICE WEEK BUT ALSO A LOVELY NEXT WEEKEND AND A HAPPY EASTER, WHETHER OR NOT YOU DO THE JESUS THING, AND THAT THE WEATHER IS NICE AND THAT YOU ARE ABLE TO HAVE AT LEAST A FEW DAYS OFF THE WORK AND THAT WHEN YOU NEXT READ THESE WORDS YOU’RE IN A MARGINALLY BUT SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER PLACE IN YOUR LIFE BECAUSE, WELL, I JUST WANT THE BEST FOR YOU BECAUSE DID I MENTION I LOVE YOU BYE BYE HAPPY FRIDAY SEE YOU IN A FORTNIGHT BYE!:

“We did the democracy!”

That is an actual, direct quote from former Telegraph editor, Thatcher’s biographer and establishment pillar Charles Moore, on TV last night, about Brexit. We oughtn’t have another vote because ‘we did the democracy’.

Whatever your thoughts on the rightness or wrongness of going through this hugely enjoyable experience all over again (but, like New Game +, we’d get to keep all the accumulated Vitriol and Bile we got in our first playthrough!), can we all agree that this is absolutely the fcuking nadir of all political debate by our country’s ruling classes? Can we? Good!

“We did the democracy”. Jesus fcuking wept, Charles, you fcuking cretin. And I can say that because I was once at a lunch with Charles Moore and he totally ignored me, despite there only being 8 people there, because I wasn’t important (or because I was embarrassingly drunk, I forget which it was).

Anyway, enough of that! Time, as ever, is a-wasting, and you’re surely anxious to get your snouts deep into this week’s just-slain, freshly-eviscerated carcass to have a good old rootle in the chitlings – get in deep, wrap your teeth around a promising looking tube and SQUEEZE – who knows what flavour of malodorous infopaste you’ll get a mouthful of? This, as ever, is Web Curios, and I realise that I have just compared the experience of reading this to getting a mouthful of partially-digested food straight from a creature’s intestine but, well, don’t let that put you off!

By Adi Prawira

LET’S KICK OFF WITH ED SAPERIA’S IN-HOUSE PLAYLIST FOR HIS HOTBED OF DIGITAL CIVIC HACKERY, NEWSPEAK HOUSE! IT IS EXCELLENT AND GLITCHY AND A PERFECT START TO THIS WEEK’S CURIOS!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS LITERALLY NO PERSONAL INTEREST IN SNAPCHAT AS A PLATFORM BUT WHICH IS VERY MUCH HERE FOR THE ABILITY TO SEE MAJOR LANDMARKS VOMITING RAINBOWS:

• “Regulate Me!”, Demands Zuckerberg: Well, ish. Still, HOT ON THE HEELS of my snarking last week about Damien Collins’ grandiose plans to SORT THIS HOT INTERNET MESS OUT, Mark Zuckerberg made a series of announcements this week, both on Facebook’s corporate blogs and in interviews, suggesting that what he wanted most of all in the world was for some of the sensible grownups who run the world to just MAKE SOME RULES and stop his infernal Big Blue Misery Factory from ceaselessly fcuking society like some sort of appalling digital Sybian. This post lays out the basic areas where he specifically thinks regulation could help; the use of personal data, a standardised approach to harmful content, data portability and, most amusingly, political advertising. As the nation sits through what feels like the three-millionth day in the Big Brexit House, and as stories continue to break around the iffy-at-best, seemingly-unknowable network of funding pumping money into pro-Brexit advertising, it seems…not great that it’s Zuckerberg rather than any of our politicians who’s calling for a serious look at how we define and control political advertising.
• More Transparency For FB Users on Newsfeed Content: Small update, this, but interesting insofar as it offers a miniscule element of transparency when it comes to the magical, unknowable black box that is the Facebook Newsfeed algo; users will now be able to get more detailed information on why they are being served specific posts or ads within Newsfeed, with the platform now giving a degree of detail as to which signals its drawing to determine content placement – you ‘liked’ Terry’s last three videos, for example, or you click on Karen’s profile seven times a day (STOP IT SHE ISN’T COMING BACK), or, in the case of ad targeting, because you’re a 35+ male Londoner or something. Not TOTAL transparency, fine, but it’s an interesting start. Nothing significant for brands here, I don’t think, but maybe one of you can think of a clever way of using this information to do something hilariously arch and Cannes Lion-winning (I bet you can’t).
• Instagram Stories Ads Add Interactivity: I mean, I say ‘interactivity’ – what this actually means is Poll Stickers as an additional element on your Stories ads. As the post breathlessly explains, “In Ads Manager, choose Instagram Stories as your only ad placement. Then, where you upload your creative and edit your ad’s text, check the box Add an interactive poll. Try out the polling sticker to co-create a product, spark a conversation with your community, crowd source insights for product development, gamify your ad or run a contest.” God, that sounds thrilling, doesn’t it? Still, I reckon you can (depressingly) absolutely increase the viewtime on your Stories ads by adding a polling question at the top of them and implying that the user decision will somehow impact the ad’s story.
• Whatsapp Will Soon Allow You To Block People From Automatically Adding You To New Group Chats: There’s literally NO commercial angle to this, but I think it’s important that you all know how to do this because, well, really.
• Snap Launches All Sorts of Partner Integration Stuff: Snapchat’s approach to their comms is not unlike their approach to UX/UI within the app, aka it’s a total fcuking mess and seemingly designed from preventing you from understanding what is going on unless you’re 9. Snap did a big event yesterday, its first Partner Summit designed to persuade developers, advertisers and others that the company really IS a going concern still and not flailing slightly in the face of dwindling user numbers and aggressive competition, and trying to find a single list of what it announced has been HARD. There’s this blogpost, which explains a few of the new API features – the ability to pull app info into Snap from an app (so, to share what you’re watching on Netflix, say, as a sticker in Snap direct from the Netflix app) or, vice-versa, the ability to share your Snap Camera content into another app’s Story (this, I think, presages where the company eventually ends up), some more Bitmoji stuff (I will never, ever understand the appeal of Bitmoji), and a broader Snap Audience Network for wider ad placement beyond the Snapchat platform. But then there was a load of other stuff announced; Snap Games, which will allow for multiplayer gaming within Snapchat, complete with chat and stuff, 10 or so originally commissioned TV shows, which was on some other webpage, and bizarrely neither of those announcements mentioned the most exciting thing that was revealed – to whit, the introduction of specific AR lenses for landmarks, which will let you do exciting things like, er, turn the Flatiron Building in New York into a gigantic piece of pepperoni pizza, or make the Eiffel Tower vomit rainbows. Why? WHY NOT? Anyway, the app integration stuff seems like it could be useful, as does the ad network stuff, though if rumours about UK user numbers are to be believed then, well, who cares?
• Snap Launches Status Feature: And they announced this a couple of days earlier – couldn’t they have done it all on the same day? FFS. Anyway, this is an update to Snap Maps, which will allow people to set a Bitmoji avatar which demonstrates not only where they are but what they are doing, the idea being that it’ll allow users to signal whether or not they are ‘busy’ or free to chat, or whatever; there’s OBVIOUSLY a bunch of potential brand things here, as you can imagine that Domino’s or whoever would pay good dollar to be the brand that represents ‘eating a pizza’ on Snap.
• You Can Now Add Subtitles To Twitter Videos: You were always able to add closed captions, but the platform now supports the standard .srt filetype, bringing it into line with all the others, marking a long-delayed but welcome step forward in terms of accessibility, and causing me to write what will hands-down be the most boring and joyless entry in this week’s Curios. ARE YOU HAPPY, TWITTER?
• Alexa Healthcare Skills: This is quietly significant, imho; in the US, “the Alexa Skills Kit now enables select Covered Entities and their Business Associates, subject to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), to build Alexa skills that transmit and receive protected health information as part of an invite-only program.” Which means that the door is open for all SORTS of exciting potential Alexa tricks – “Alexa, refill my Oxy script!”, “Alexa, turn off grandma’s IV!”, that sort of thing. Obviously the US healthcare market is unique(ly horrible), but one would imagine that they will start seeking approval from local regulators to allow ‘select private partners in the healthcare space’ to start developing all sorts of exciting Alexa gubbins in countries all over the world.
• Gucci Zumi: Last up in the section of ‘stuff which might vaguely pertain to your job’, this is yet another EXCELLENT website by Gucci, who absolutely do the nicest webwork in the luxe sector at the moment imho. Following on from previous Curios favourites which had a gorgeous hand-painted aesthetic, this uses a vaguely similar visual style but focuses purely on the handbags – the only nav is a simple vertical scroll, and the only possible interaction beyond said scroll is clicking on the handbags to be taken to sales page. It’s just so wonderfully confident – “yes, our handbags are magnificent and beautiful; look at them, then buy them – what else could you possibly want to do?” – and a tiny bit brash, and, generally, I’m in love (with the website, not the handbags; I am not an ‘accessories’ sort of guy, although if anyone feels like buying me a present I could probably just about handle a Balenciaga clutch).

By Ian Trask

NEXT UP, HAVE THE NEW LP FROM UK RAPPER LITTLE TORMENT!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY IS GOING TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY IF THIS CARRIES ON FOR ANOTHER 12 MONTHS, PT.1:

• Have They Faked Me: This isn’t at all odd. You’ll recall (OBVIOUSLY) the spate of GAN-type toys from earlier this year, spitting out infinite variations on cats and anime girls and suchlike – one of the sites was This Person Does Not Exist, which spits out a dizzying array of totally GAN-generated human faces for you to marvel at. Now there exists a companion site, which lets you upload a photo of your actual face and checks it against its database of made-up faces to see if the machines have generated a nonexistent doppelganger for you. This is such an utterly surreal setup – you are, to be clear, asking a machine to check whether another machine has ever imagined a face like yours – and yet it’s nice to know that there’s not, as yet, any computer-generated digiMatt out there. Know, though, that at some point in the next couple of years I am absolutely going to outsource the writing of Curios entirely to an algo; whether any of you will be able to tell the difference is moot, as is whether any of you will care (so alone).
• The Boolean Game: I have a weird and slightly overdeveloped affection for Boolean operators, born out of some dark times in my late-20s when I used to have to spend hours running massive, pointless digital audit-type reports for brands like Pampers and crying over search strings like “(nappy OR diaper OR napy OR diper) AND (leak OR poonami OR “all the way up the back”)”, and my mastery of operational terms was the only thing I could feel vaguely proud of, professionally-speaking. Anyway, this is a lovely, fun and beautifully-designed little game designed to teach you the rudiments of how Boolean strings work – unions, conjunctions, disjunctions, etc – all via the medium of SHAPES AND DESIGN. It’s honestly really soothing, and looks gorgeous, and the soundtrack is genuinely encouraging.
• The Animal AI Olympics: Such an interesting idea. The Animal AI Olympics is a contest launching at the end of April, where teams will be invited to submit AI programs that can undertake simple navigational and decision-making tasks at a level comparable to the performance of known animal subjects – so AIs that can learn their environments and adapt to changes within it. “We are proposing a new kind of AI competition. Instead of providing a specific task, we will provide a well-defined arena (available at the end of April) and a list of cognitive abilities that we will test for in that arena. The tests will all use the same agent with the same inputs and actions. The goal will always be to retrieve the same food items by interacting with previously seen objects. However, the exact layout and variations of the tests will not be released until after the competition.” This is fascinating to me – the creation of ‘intelligence’ that can operate within shifting parameters is hugely complicated (there’s a reason why the current blockbuster AI examples are in Go, chess, and the like – the programs are obviously hugely impressive, but they are operating within closed systems with fixed parameters), so any advances made through this will be significant and hugely impressive.
• Flick: A new(ish) community/groups app based in Edinburgh, the idea behind which is that you can create and join themed groups of varying size, to discuss stuff with like-minded people, chat, share files, etc etc etc…I mean, it’s literally like every single other group-based app out there (LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE ONE) but if you want to add yet ANOTHER platform to the endlessly fractured modern communications landscape then this might be the perfect one. It might not, though.
• Greg Tatum: Greg Tatum is a programmer working for Mozilla, who in his spare time makes stuff that he says sits at the intersection of code and art and poetry; this is his site, which collects his various projects and experiments, and they are lovely – elegant and simple and beautiful to look at, and exactly the sort of thing that I’d want playing on a never-ending screensaver somewhere in my house (if I lived in a far more futuristic and shiny reality than the rather banal South London one which I actually inhabit).
• Name of the Year 2019: It’s become one of the great annual springtime traditions in my life – the clocks go forward and I know it’s just about time for the glorious procession of nomenclature-lols that is Deadspin’s Name of the Year contest – for newer readers, or those of you who inexplicably lack my encyclopaedic memory of every single fcuking link I put in this bastard thing, the Name of the Year contest lets readers pick the greatest single name featured (and verified as accurate) in the US media last year. This year I’m linking at the earliest stage, so you, Curios readers, can get involved in the decision making process to crown the owner of the best name in all of America in 2019 – they’re pitted against each other in traditional ‘bracket’-style, so in these early heats you get to choose whether, say, Sharky Laguana or Sureal Sparx deserve to go through to the next round, or to determine whether the truly fabulous Chastity Gooch-Fant deserves a shot at this year’s title. Honestly, I say this every year but WOW THESE NAMES. I was in tears at some of them – I am torn between Geor’quarius Spivey and the simple-but-near-perfect Reymundo Mundo for this year’s title, but you pick your own.
• The MySpace Dragon Hoard: Sometimes the web is awful and vile, true, but sometimes it is also QUITE GOOD. This is one of those times – someone contacted the Internet Archive to tell them that they had in got about 500,000 songs downloaded from the old MySpace archives and would they mind hosting them please; a few days later and HERE WE ARE! This is obviously only a fraction of the musical patrimony that was lost the other week, but it’s got some really interesting old fragments buried in there; early tracks by Gallows and Enter Shikari, and proper early days tunes from Katy Perry and other breakout artists of the mid-00s. The whole lot is about 1.3TB, so if you don’t fancy the download there’s a search/player linked to on the page – this is an excellent opportunity for you to remind yourself of exactly how bad your musical taste was 15 years ago.
• Manfest: On the one hand, it seems churlish to mock anything which seeks to encourage men to be more open and honest about feelings and stuff; on the other, it’s quite hard not to mock any event that calls itself ‘Manfest’, designed to…er…actually, I’m not really sure: “For us to go forward and handle the issues we face as Men, we need a stepping off point. Men need to gather to honour where we’ve come from and the lessons we’ve learned, to arrive in and recharge our bodies, to share ideas, stories, ambitions, wisdom, rites and recipes, to care for one another and to have FUN!!!” Hang on, I’m a man – where have I come from? Why has noone ever tried to share a rite with me? Maybe I do need to go to Manfest after all? Obviously my snarking is unhelpful and a bit cheap – sorry, Men – and I’m sure there’s a lot of good in things like this, but, equally, part of me wants to grab potential attendees by the shoulders and suggest that, honestly, if you want to get redpilled you can do it from your computer for free rather than spending £100 to go and have an angry wank in a tent.
• Animal Skull Search: Fully aware that that’s unlikely to be a description that drives a lot of clicks but, honestly, it’s GREAT. Select the type of animal skull you want to look at and a 3d visualisation appears in the box which you can zoom in on and move around til you’ve got it in the position you want; then choose a type of real animal you want to search for from another drop-down, hit ‘search’ and VWALLAH! It’ll throw out photos of your selected animal, posed per the angle you’ve positioned the skull at in the 3d viewer. Did that explanation work? It probably didn’t, did it? Look, just try it, it will make sense and you will than…no, you won’t thank me, will you? YOU NEVER DO, YOU INGRATES.
• Goth Crocs: Presumably designed for Goth Chefs or Goth Hospital Orderlies. These are obviously ridiculous but also sort of ace.
• Line of Action: If you’re interested in art – the practice rather than theory – then this is potentially really useful; Line of Action offers a whole host of resources for amateur artists, from posed photographs to sketch from, to tips and tutorials on technique, to a community where you can discuss…er…tempera and paper quality, probably (I don’t know what artists talk about being as I have all the aesthetic aptitude of a corpse). If you made a half-hearted promise to yourself to ‘get back into the drawing, it used to make me so happy, etc etc’ back in January that has sadly lapsed, this could be the fillip you need to get back into it. Don’t blame me if it isn’t, though.
• States of America: A project presenting one film for each of the 50 US States. “States of America is a series of documentary shorts, featuring one person in each of the 50 states in the Union. In the United States, you might be born one place, go to school or work in another, then pack it up and move somewhere else for a thousand different reasons of choice or circumstance. You might have been born in another country. What is it that ties us to these places and makes us adopt them as our home? How does our state affect who we are and how we identify ourselves? What makes us from there? In an increasingly fragmented time where identity, unity, and belonging are under scrutiny, States of America asks these questions in lyrical short documentaries, featuring everyday people as distinct as the physical and cultural landscapes they call home. By looking at several together, these films begin to portray a mosaic of America’s famously emerging identity.” There are about 20 completed shorts so far – I watched a couple earlier this week, and at 3-5 mins each they’re really beautiful examples of short filmmaking. Definitely worth a look.
• Cannaclusive: On the one hand, the recent boom in the weed industry in the US has been a stark example of racial inequalities inherent in the Western world, as mostly white investors stampede towards a massively lucrative new business area which has been the cause of the incarceration of so many black people for so many years, and anything that draws attention to that is A Good Thing; on the other hand, I have no fcuking idea whatsoever what Cannaclusive is or is for. It’s seemingly an organisation whose aim is to ensure that diversity and representation is included in this burgeoning industry – they’ve got a stock photo pack for weed businesses presenting a slightly less white smoking crowd for use on websites, etc, for example – but, honestly, read this and tell me what the fcuk they do: “At Cannaclusive we celebrate the cultures of this thriving community through curated experiences, groundbreaking insights, thoughtful content and dynamic visuals. We make it easier for brands to communicate with diverse audiences and ensure that minority consumers are not an afterthought, but a valued ally in the fight for legalization and destigmatization.” No, nothing.
• A List of Physical Visualisations: This is a chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts – that is, physical things designed to represent quantities or other concepts, so 3d data sculptures and things of that ilk. Honestly, far more interesting than you’d think, and the sort of thing which you might find oddly useful in terms of visual inspiration.
• SlimWiki: A simple, easy-to-use-looking Wiki maker, distinguished by the fact that it’s been designed to look marginally less horrid than the other Wiki makers already out there. It’s seemingly free, the feature list looks good, and compared to Wikipedia the outputs look GORGEOUS, so perhaps worth looking at if you’re in the market for such a thing.
• Eko: Weirdly 2019 has seen an unexpected resurgence in the concept of CYOA video – after Bandersnatch reminded us all of the fact that branching video narratives used to be a popular ‘THIS IS THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING’ trope, a bunch of ASMR people have started doing branching narrative roleplays on their channels; then last week someone asked me about doing one as part of a pitch proposal they were putting together JUST LIKE IT’S 2009! Anyway, then this popped up – Eko is a platform designed specifically for the creation of branching videos, with a slick-looking proprietary player and a surprisingly large content bank on there featuring actual, proper films by actual, proper creators. It’s really interesting to see the breadth of work on there; there’s a section for brands and creators too, should you want to sign up to make stuff on there yourself.
• German Pulp Scifi Magazine Cover Motherlode: Utopia was, as far as I can tell, a German scifi imprint from the 60s(?); this Flickr account collects hundreds of the covers in technicolour glory, and is a wonderful repository of golden era-style pulp artworks.
• Means TV: The current upsurge in interest in ‘socialism’ in the US (my inverted commas there – it’s just that sometimes I’m not 100% certain that the word means what they think it means) continues apace, this time with the launch of Means TV a “digital streaming platform with original shows and movies of various genre: news, talk shows, documentary, sitcoms, stand-up comedy, adult animation, dramas and more, featuring your favorite leftist journalists, activists, comedians and influencers.” OK, so it’s not quite launched yet, but page trailing it is up and you can get a flavour for the type of programming it’s going to be focusing on – in the main, seemingly, dispassionate portraits of people struggling against the yoke of late-period capitalism. The site itself offers a few videos, and general information about the movement that they hope to create; genuinely interested to see how this develops, but I could theoretically see it doing rather well.
• Wikienigma: An encyclopedia of known unknowns – basically listing all the stuff that we know but don’t understand, like dreams and the Novikov Conjecture and and lightning. Some of this stuff is obviously mysterious, but there will be quite a few entries on here which will make you scratch your head and then think significantly less of the scientists who are in fact meant to know things. What do you mean noone has any real clue as to the proper etymology of ‘dog’? FFS, linguists!
• Ring Generator: A website which will automatically generate a 3d model of a ring for you, depending on the different sliders and options you choose. Look, I don’t know why you might want this, but on the offchance that you’re in the market for a bespoke 3d-printed piece of jewellery then, well, here you are.
• Bryte: I was wondering what the next industry to be DISRUPTED by AI was goingto be – turns out, it’s fcuking sleep. Do you know why you can’t sleep well? DO YOU? No, it’s nothing to do with the screens and the stress and the booze and the drugs and the fear, don’t be stupid. It’s because your DUMB MATTRESS is TOO STUPID to automatically optimise itself to your sleeping patterns as you kip. Bryte promises to end that torture by readjusting your sleeping position as you snooze, waking you up with gentle daytime-type lighting, and LEARNING YOUR SLEEPY NEEDS. Which sounds fine in theory, but I can’t shake the feeling that the reality would be more akin to a horrible, roiling, seasickness-inducing rolling boil of movement, as your mattress spastically twitches beneath you as you sob, sleepless, atop it.

By Kai Samuels Davis

NEXT, GET SOME SUNSHINE UP YOU WITH THIS ROOTS/REGGAE MIX BY EDDY LONGO!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY IS GOING TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY IF THIS CARRIES ON FOR ANOTHER 12 MONTHS, PT.2:

• Setlists for Young Voices: An excellent charitable initiative which later this month will offer the chance to bid for signed setlists from around 100 gigs, all of which are being auctioned off to raise money for the Ministry of Stories and a new charitable initiative designed to celebrate young writers from around the world. Artists include Patti Smith, Nine Inch Nails, Bob Mould and Aimee Mann, and for a certain type of obsessive fan I can imagine this being hugely appealing.
• The Environmental Justice Atlas: A pretty remarkable resource, mapping areas of environmental conflict around the world – from fracking and the associated protests in the North of England, to police violence in support of mining companies in India – the site’s a bit shonky, fine, but if you’ve any interest in the global environmentalist movement and how it’s manifesting itself, this is probably worth a look.
• The Boston Public Library 78s: Another Internet Archive link, this time to a recently-digitised collection of old records from the Boston Public Library – this is an AMAZING collection, which as I type is allowing me to listen to Duke Ellington and his orchestra play ‘Louisiana’, complete with the scratchiness of the original ’78 and oh my word this is honestly wonderful. If you have a reasonably internet-savvy older relative, send this their way – I reckon they’ll lose HOURS to this, as might you if you’re in any way musically-inclined. Aside from anything else, there’s SO much in here which you can sample if you’re that sort of music maker.
• Wildlife Aid Webcams: There is almost no situation, whether personal or professional, that can’t at least be partially-ameliorated by watching some cute animals on a webcam. This page presents you with a selection – will it be the foxcubs today, or the badgers, or the super-young TINY FOX CUBS? Why not all of them? O ROFF!
• Dovetail: Not hugely fun or interesting this, fine (IT CAN’T ALL BE JAM, YOU KNOW), but potentially really quite useful if you’re looking to build a creative team, working remotely from each other; you can find talent, create virtual squads to work on projects together, undertake some project management, and generally take some of the pain out of resourcing and overseeing work. No idea what the overlap/link with stuff like Trello and Basecamp is, so it might be that the project management stuff is in fact otiose, but the talent-finding and organising features look interesting enough on their own to be worth a go; thanks to Ben for the tip.
• Armortek: The website suggests that these people are the world’s leading manufacturer of 1:6 metal kits, which, based on what they make, I’m not going to dispute too hard. You want to buy a small but otherwise perfectly accurate and actually working replica of a tank? WHY? ARE YOU TRYING TO START A TINY WAR WITH THE MAN NEXT DOOR? These are quite amazing, honestly, although whilst I admire the craftsmanship and marvel at the engineering and boggle at the pricing – you want a tank? 4 figures, mate, minimum – I also wonder who the market is for this. Is it unfair that all I can imagine is a succession of ruddy-faced middle-aged men, increasingly irate at the way the world is going to hell in a handcart and feeling very much like they haven’t in fact taken back any control at all, finally flipping out at that BASTARD at number 26 with his INCESSANT use of the leaf blower (“NO SUSAN I WILL NOT CALM DOWN IT IS THE FINAL STRAW!”) and getting into his painstakingly-recreated M3 Sherman and just going full-on Falling Down around the cul-de-sac? It might well be unfair, fine, but that’s what’s in my head and so, well, it’s what I’m going to presume is true.
• World Chase Tag: There was a period of time in the mid-aughts in which all sorts of incredibly banal things were rebranded as XXXTREME in a futile attempt to capture the attention of THE YOUTH – stuff like Pringles XXXTREME or Imperial Leather XXXTREME, that type of idea. World Chase Tag is a bit like what would have happened if someone had tried to make the classic playground sport of tag, but XXXTREME – it’s a weird cross between tag and parkour, apparently played in a specially-designed and obstacle-strewn arena, and the video on the landing page makes it look genuinely quite exciting. There are videos of the sport on YouTube that you can check out and, honestly, I’d watch this in short bursts (although if I’m totally honest, the main reason would be to see someone absolutely stack it face-first into one of the randomly arrayed pillars or posts scattered around the play area). They do this at the London School of Parkour, apparently, which is out by Watford somewhere, should you wish to investigate further.
• Shotty: A screenshotting app for Mac, designed to help you find your screengrabs more easily and share them to other apps faster and more seamlessly. Designers, you might find this one quite useful.
• Yonks: The second time-tracking app I’ve seen this year, this one’s English and so BETTER. Yonks lets you specify a specific point in the past or future and then gives you a countdown to / count away from that point – so you can track the time since you last smoked, say, or sent an overly-emotional voicenote to that guy you KNOW you had a real emotional connection with and who would DEFINITELY realise that if only he ever answered any of your messages. Maybe useful, though if you’re the sort of person who’d use something like this to track the number of ‘sleeps’ to a future event then I would like you to quietly unsubscribe from Curios and never, ever come back here again.
• Figgle: It’s unfortunate, really, that the name of this app reminds me so much of the practice of ‘figging’ – that is, the insertion of a piece of peeled ginger into the anus of either yourself or your partner so that you or they might enjoy the allegedly ‘pleasant’ burning sensation it induces (no, there was absolutely no need for me to share that particular fact with you, I know, but I see no reason why I should be the only person burdened with the knowledge) – because I can’t quite take it seriously and it does, objectively, look like it might be quite useful. As far as I can tell, it’s sort of like Flipboard but for EVERYTHING – so you can send whatever videos or Stories or links or anything else at all from all major social media platforms and indeed anywhere on the web to the app and then consume it there at your leisure later; sort of a universal ‘read later’ button for the web. Annoyingly it’s iPhone only so I’ve not had a chance to try, but if any of you do give it a go then please let me know what you think.
• Dragula: Potentially hugely-useful stock image search site – it only pulls royalty-free stock images, it has seemingly reasonably intelligent search, and lets you drag and drop them anywhere you like. Works on Mac and Windows, so worth a look if you spend more of your life than you’d like to admit looking for images to accompany a Powerpoint about THE CORPORATE JOURNEY.
• Pseudo Design Titles: Job title generation site for designers. If I were you and I worked in design, I would TOTALLY demand that I get the title of Scientist of Propaganda.
• Onesoil: This is really interesting, in a sort of technical and geeky way – I’ve had to spend a bit of time recently thinking about how machine learning and cloud computing can be used to solve large, complex issues at scale, and that’s exactly what this pertains to. Onesoil is a map that “allows you to explore and compare fields and crops in Europe and the USA. Zoom in and get to know the field: the hectarage, the crop, and the field score. In addition, on the chart, you can see how the field has changed over the past three years. Zoom out and understand the world: fields sizes and crops are displayed for each region. Compare ratings and get insights for more than 40 countries on the desktop and mobile devices.” It uses a combination of datasets and AI to identify crop areas from satellite photography and track land usage changes over time – and fine, I know that almost noone reading this is a farmer (ok, fine, literally NOONE reading this is a farmer), but the general principle of combining and analysing using brute force power, is hugely transferable. NOT EVERYTHING IN CURIOS IS FRIVOLOUS, YOU KNOW.
• Stash Puppets: Someone got in touch on Twitter to suggest these (apologies, I have temporarily forgotten who it was, but know that I hugely appreciated it) and, well, who am I to ignore a website which features genuinely unsettling and occasionally quite horrible puppets and photos and…er…stuff. If you want a general feel, click on the section marked ‘Rabbits’ – there’s a very real sense of the Ben Wheatleys about the vibe to all this, if you see what I mean.
• Great Escapes: Quick! Try this while you still can, before the shutters come down and we find ourselves trapped and marooned on this beknighted isle FOREVER. Great Escapes has a simple premise – it will find you the cheapest flights to ANYWHERE from your current location, leaving in the next 24h. If you and your mates are a bunch of MADLADS who like to do CRAZY THINGS FOR THE GRAM then you could possibly do worse than using this to plan your next crazy, last-minute excursion to parts unknown (which due to the magic of modernity and Stories will look exactly like all your OTHER crazy, last-minute excursions to parts unknown).
• Police Squad: Gags from Police Squad, with accompanying still from the show, on Twitter. God I love Police Squad.
• The Detroit Neighborhood Improvement Tracker: I don’t imagine there’s anyone reading this in Detroit (although if there is, HELLO DETROIT CHAPTER IT’S LOVELY TO HAVE YOU HERE IS YOUR CITY AS FCUKED AS EVERYONE OUTSIDE THINKS IT IS?), but I found this interesting more as a general example of digital civic engagement than as a practical, specific thing. The local government of the Detroit Metropolitan area has set up this site, allowing anyone who’s interested to track the progress of local improvement works – you can search by type of project or location and see how the projects are going, likely completion schedules, the name of the contracted body and the value of the contract; as an example of civic transparency it’s really impressive.
• Tudder: Are The Apps, as they appear now to be collectively described online by those caught in dating hell, getting you down? Do you find the constant ‘swipe, tap, chat, be ignored’ loop to be, well, less than satisfying? Well why not enjoy a change of pace by installing Tudder, which is Tinder but for livestock breeders? It might not get you laid, but I guarantee you’ll feel slightly better about life after you’ve spent 10 minutes swiping through alluring images of increasingly-pulchritudinous cattle.
• Women at Work in WW1: A GREAT selection of photos of women at work during the first world war. Come for the images documenting women’s incredible contribution to the war effort; stay for the quite astonishing examples of lax health and safety in the workplace on evidence in 90% of these shots.
• Too Many DVDs: Are you having what is commonly-described in sub-Chandler detective potboilers as ‘a rough one’? Is everything feeling a bit overwhelming? Click this link, then, and be soothed by the spectacle of a bunch of those bouncing DVD logos spinning all over your screen and occasionally, wonderfully, doing that *thing* where they hit the EXACT corner of the screen which is so inexplicably relaxing that it’s widely recognised as one of the greatest panaceas of the modern age. I promise you, this is hypnotic in the extreme.
• Baba Is You: Finally this week, a tiny, stripped-down, miniature browser version of current darling of the indie game circuit, Baba Is You. Read this review of the full game, which will explain the principle, and then have a play with this – and then try it again, and again, as there are a surprising number of variations on how it can play out. So, so smart.

By Michael Sowa

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE TWO HOURS OF PERIODICALLY MELODIC TECH-HOUSE COURTESY OF JULIET FOX!

THE (SOMEWHAT SAD AND EMPTY) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Cross Connect: Fine, so there’s only one Tumblr this week but a) it is actually a Tumblr!; and b) it’s GREAT. Cross Connect is a sort of Tumblr-magazine-type-thing, collecting all sorts of excellent artydesignydigital-type stuff; I have no idea who any of the people doing the curation are or where they are from, but (to my point last week about so much curated stuff drawing from the same two or three wells) this is a genuinely novel selection featuring stuff that I have almost never heard of or seen elsewhere. This is a great site, and the sort of thing part of me thinks I ought to be keeping for myself. See how altruistic and lovely I am?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Teens On Acid: No teens and no visible acid; instead, this is the feed of artist/designer/illustrator Josh Thorsen, whose style can best be described as ‘skateboard art meets the sort of adult figurines that a certain type of BAPE-wearing man pays over the odds for’.
• Joana Sus: Sus is an artist working primarily in watercolours; I stumbled across their feed when I saw their truly beautiful animated minimal watercolour of a skateboarder doing a kickflip. Wonderfully distinct in style, and the feel for motion is exceptional.
• Joseph Melhuish: CG design and illustration and animation, this is lovely and chunky and sort of pastel-vaporwave-in-3d in its aesthetic.
• Julia Ibbini: The most incredible cut-out geometric pattern art you will see all week, guaranteed.
• Oscar Petterson: The last Insta feed of the week is Oscar Petterson’s, a designer who makes the most incredibly satisfying looping CG animations which, I promise, will scratch a small brain itch that you didn’t even know you had.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• An Investigative Guide to LinkedIn: I met a nice man who worked for LinkedIn last night – on his telling me what he did for a living I made some sort of appallingly lame off-the-cuff ‘gag’ (really not deserving of the term) about whether he wanted to ‘connect’ with me, and the fleeting look of momentary-but-very-real-seeming-pain that passed across his countenance will, I’m sure, haunt me for months to come. Anyway, this is nothing to do with that – instead, it’s another useful piece from the investigative folk at Bellingcat, all about how you can use LinkedIn to find out a quite incredible amount of information about people and organisations, all on the sly.
• What Is Rees-Mogg Watching?: I don’t mean to keep banging on about this, but I keep noticing genuinely creepy, Overton Window-shifting stuff around the UK’s mainstream right wing at the moment – from yesterday’s staggering Spectator piece which blithely referred to genuine, actual fascist Matteo Salvini’s stint as de facto Italian leader as ‘daring’ and fawned over how he was ‘wildly popular’, to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sharing of materials culled from a very fashy YouTube account. This piece outlines the Mogg case and suggests why it’s important and what it’s signalling and to whom; it’s quite hard not to see this as just a bit sinister, though obviously I hope I am being a massively paranoid commie about it.
• The Ageing Online Population: The base level premise of this piece is that one of the reasons that the web and the representation of society we find on it is, well, a bit fcuked, is that there are so many old people on it – old people who feel confused and alienated and angry, and have a lot of time to act on that anger and alienation online. Whilst this starts off as a fairly tedious ‘boomers BAD’ piece, it makes the sensible point later on that this is quite likely to be exactly the fate that befalls people like us, the EXTREMELY ONLINE, who will eventually find that they’re unable to keep pace with the new-fangled platforms and interfaces and will end up angrily discussing ‘the problem with the world today’ on Instagram and sharing fake memes about Khloe Kardashian’s imminent 2045 Presidential bid.
• China’s Surveillance City: Another reason I have to be slightly dismayed at Italy at the moment is that they’ve become the first European country to sign up to China’s Belt & Road initiative, which as far as I can tell from what’s happened in other countries who’ve done the same means that they’ve basically signed over half the country in exchange for some Yuan and a few new roads. It’s not that I don’t think Italy could use the help – dear God, they really could – it’s more that I have qualms about, well, quite a lot of the Chinese state’s approach to things. Witness this honestly chilling documentary/longread (it’s basically a short news report but presented as a series of subtitled vignettes) about how the state is using digital surveillance techniques to detain and control the Uighur population in Kashgar, North-West China. You want a dystopian vision of tomorrow except actually it’s today? GREAT!
• Cat Sense: After this week’s STARTLING REVELATION that cats can actually understand you perfectly well when you call them but that they are just ignoring you because they just don’t care, you may want to immerse yourself in this frankly INSANELY long writeup/meditation on a 2013 book about cat psychology. This is very meandering, a bit weird, and wholly fascinating – if you’re a cat person (STOP LICKING YOUR BUM) then you’ll obviously enjoy it, but even if you’re not there’s some fascinating stuff on animal behaviour in here.
• The Boyfriend Call Button: Ok, so this isn’t an interesting essay or piece of journalism so much as it is a technical set of instructions for making a button which, when pressed, will cause your phone to ring; that said, if you’re in the market for a project to help you learn to build, code, etc, and if you’re equally in the market for something that will help you get out of awkward social situations by making your phone ring at the touch of a button then, well, this is for YOU.
• The Chinese Delivery Empire: I had no idea at all that China’s delivery economy was this mental – although, saying that, Web Curios’ (unofficial, unpaid) China Correspondent Alex Wilson hasn’t in three+ years out there given me any indication that he has ever cooked a meal, so perhaps I ought to have had a guess. Anyway, this piece looks at the corporate machinations that underpin the economics of the delivery platforms – I honestly don’t understand how this can be a viable business model other than by screwing the delivery guys SO HARD; I imagine that working one of these jobs makes doing Deliveroo look like the best job ever.
• Abigail Disney: You might have read this already – it’s been everywhere this week – but in case not, you really must check out this profile of one of the Disney family fortune heiresses. It’s notable for the self-awareness and candour with which Disney responds to the questions about her wealth, lifestyle, upbringing and attitudes (she’s even self-aware enough to appreciate and acknowledge the undue praise she was inevitably going to receive for her self-awareness and candour); I particularly liked the dismissive way in which she spoke of the ‘achievements’ of the very rich who manage to grow that wealth – “I could be a billionaire if I wanted to be a billionaire, and I’m not because I don’t want to be a billionaire. That’s an insane amount of money. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to make money if you start with money. And then people give themselves credit for being that smart when they’re not.”
• Three Weeks of Dreams: Mike Fahey is a videogames journalist who recently underwent surgery and as a result was unconscious for three weeks. Here he does his best to explain what his dreams were like over that time – honestly, I know that there is ordinarily nothing more boring than listen to other people tell you about their dreams (I DON’T CARE THAT IT WAS REALLY WEIRD I WAS NOT IN YOUR HEAD AND HONESTLY I STOPPED LISTENING TO YOU AS SOON AS YOU SAID “WEIRD DREAM” I BASICALLY TUNED OUT KAREN), but he manages to communicate the oddity of being effectively trapped in your brain; you’d imagine a lot of what he experienced is directly related to the very peculiar nature of his dayjob. Really, really interesting, and will make you want to go to sleep.
• Rejected Vanity Plates: A list of rejected applications for vanity number plates in LA last year, along with the reasons given for rejection. Honestly, these are ace and the people at the LA department of, er, number plate approvals (possibly not the official departmental designation) have a wonderfully dry manner about them.
• The LSD Ultramarathon: People who run marathons are weird. People who run ultranmarathons are extra-weird. People who do so whilst tripping are, honestly, frightening to me. This is a very strange, occasionally quite confusing and so probably quite perfectly evocative account of the author’s experience running a very, very long way whilst on a lot of drugs, and how he briefly turned gay along the way.
• How Disney Sold Us Mickey: If you want an insight into how good Disney is at making violent amounts of money from its properties, this is it. The numbers in here are truly staggering – in 2004, they sold an approximate $6bn in Mickey Mouse merchandising, marking the character’s 75th anniversary – but the really interesting bit in here is how they effectively pivoted Mickey from being a character to a brand icon. Makes sense really, because Mickey is by far and away the worst character Disney ever created; prissy, up himself, joyless little do-gooder that he is. Give me the duck, any day.
• We Built a Broken Internet: A fabulously ranty and angry excerpt from a forthcoming book by Mike Monteiro, in which he inveighs against the companies that have created the web that surrounds us. There’s nothing in here you’ve not read or thought before, but the vim with which he rails is satisfying in the extreme, and it’s hard not to nod along to pretty much everything in here: “We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer. It was built on our watch and it needs to burn on our watch. If your reply is that we didn’t design and build these things to be used this way, then all I can say is that you’ve done a sh1t job of designing them, because that is what they’re being used for. These monsters are yours, regardless of what your intentions might have been.”
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died: The week’s other ‘wow, this went everywhere’ piece is this one, from the New Yorker, which tells the story of a maverick paleontologist and the discovery announced this week of a point where excavations have revealed material evidence of the meteor strike which most believe was the cause of the dinosaur’s extinction. It ends up a sprawling exploration of geology and planetary history and weird academic feuds and one-upmanship, and it’s properly good (if perhaps a little too obsessed with the minutiae of digging).
• This Cartoonist is 8 Different People: This is one of the most invcredible things I’ve ever read, and I mean that in the most literal of senses – I honestly didn’t know how to believe this, and I still don’t really, but, well, it’s apparently true. Rogan Lee suffers from multiple personality disorder; together, his personalities combine to make work under the pen name of LB Lee. Read this and get a feel for quite how utterly bizarre this whole story is: “Rogan is part of a “system” of eight-ish people who live inside a single body. They refer to themselves as a “multiple” and, collectively, they sign the Xeroxed comics they publish with the name LB Lee. “LB” is short for “Loony-Brain,” “Lee” is a pseudonym — the system is hiding from the family that sired their body. Rogan is fully aware that he is what medical professionals refer to as an “alter.” The brain he and his “headmates” occupy has dissociative identity disorder (DID), the condition once known as multiple-personality disorder. Rogan shares the LB body with more than half a dozen headmates: gruff Biff, childish Gigi, mischievous Sneak, and mature Miranda, to name a few. Some go by “he,” some go by “she,” one goes by “zie,” and the group prefers that people refer to them in total as “they.” The brain they share is unwell, and they can all be described as symptoms.” You will be AGAPE at this, I promise; it is literally impossible to even begin to imagine what this might be like.
• Lulu: Thanks Alex in China for also sending this my way; a gorgeous piece of short fiction by Te-Ping Chen about sibling identity and bonding and Chin and the past and modernity and love and and and and. This is honestly sublime.
• Beauty Tips from my Dead Sister: This ruined me slightly, so caveat emptor (lector?) and all that. This is a letter from writer Namwali Serpell to her dead sister, delivered in the form of tips she passed on through her life – the grief and loss is sprinked throughout and the tone slowly changes as you read through and the almost-casual tonal shifts from fragment to fragment work so, so well. Beautiful, beautiful writing.
• Free Indirect Suicide: Finally this week, this piece in the Rumpus; I don’t know if it’s the best piece of writing of the week, but it’s certainly (to me) the most compelling, even if I found it almost impossibly hard to read at times. It’s a series of semi-connected vignettes, fragments of prose and poetry, free verse and snatches of scrambled thoughts penned by Seo-Yung Chu, detailing what I presume to be her own struggles with schizophrenia and medication and incarceration; I’ve had friends and relatives who’ve exhibited symptoms like this, all the way to suicide, and it’s almost unbearable in its evocation of that scratchy, broken thinking that they occasionally manifest. I thought this was wonderful, but you might not.

By Nick Lu

AND FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is by Reptaliens (AWFUL name), it’s called Venetian Blinds, and it’s lovely, slightly breathy, female-vocaled indiepop that feels very C86 if you know what I mean. Twee, but in a good way:

2) Another terrible bandname here (sorry, but really) – oOoOO & Islamiq Grrrls, with their song “The Stranger”, which is sort of coldly cinematic with a beautifully distant vocal and a generally slightly sinister vibe to the accompanying video:

3) The Greeting Committee next – the song’s called ‘Is This It?’, and it reminds me a touch of Avi Buffalo but with weirdly anachronistic farty sax dialed in from the 80s. I’ve made it sound sh1t, haven’t i? It’s not, promise:

4) GREAT animation for this, from Lea Porcelain; the track’s called ‘The Love’ and its bassline is so incredibly reminiscent of Homeboy by Adorable (go and look it up, it’s a fcuking GREAT song if, now I think on it, somewhat lyrically problematic) that it flashed me right back. The sort of song that a lot of young men wearing their coats indoors despite the heat would all hypnotically, rhythmically headsway too en masse:

5) DRUM’N’BASS CORNER! This is the latest from perennial Curios favourite Harry Shotta, from his new EP ‘Spanner in the Works’ – the title track sees him doing doublespeed MCing like noone else in the UK can, and, as ever, some of the wordplay is awesome; special props from dropping a reference to the Hugenots in there, which is joyously showoffy:

6) One of the comments on this describes it as ‘deliciously satisfying, like eating glass’, and, honestly, I can’t think of a better description. This is HORRIBLE and I love it – if you ever wondered what it sounds like inside my head just before I start typing all this on a Friday morning then, well, wonder no longer:

7) Last up this week, this song is called ‘Slap My Butt’ and it is FILTHY in every conceivable way – the squelchy bassline in particular is SO RUDE. Turn it up loud, enjoy and BYE BYE BYE IT’S TIME ONCE AGAIN TO LEAVE YOU BEHIND AND SASHAY INTO MY WEEKEND (HA! SASHAY! I HAVE NEVER SASHAYED IN MY LIFE!) BUT KNOW AS I LEAVE YOU THAT I LOVE YOU ALL INDIVIDUALLY AND WISH YOU NOTHING BUT THE BEST IN YOUR ENDEAVOURS NOW AND IN THE FUTURE AND THAT I HOPE AGAINST HOPE THAT WHATEVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS OF YOUR LIFE BRING IS LOVELY AND THAT SOMEONE GIVES YOU A REALLY GOOD HUG SEE YOU SOON I LOVE YOU HAPPY FRIDAY BYE BYE BYE BYE!

So THIS is what control feels like! How novel, at yet simultaneously how utterly familiar!

Yes, that’s right, it’s BREXIT DAY, on which we are all honour-bound to paint our faces with the cross of St George and to drink pints of warm bitter until the blood vessels in our faces burst with happy pride and we can swim home through the seas of Friday night guttervomit whilst singing the national anthem and masturbating ourselves to a shuddering climax whilst picturing whichever royal pleases us best!

Or at least that’s how I’m planning on marking today; you do what you choose.

While you wait to see exactly what variety of unpleasantly-spiked implement the country’s legislators intend to fcuk it with next, why not distract yourself with the following collection of words and links? It won’t make anything better, but it might keep you off Twitter for a few hours which, honestly, I think is probably for the best.

I am Matt; this, as ever, is Web Curios. It’s an overlong, barely-coherent mess, which funnily enough makes it the perfect thing to read on this, THE BESTEST AND MOST PATRIOTIC DAY IN OUR NATION’S PROUD HISTORY CRY GOD FOR HARRY AND SAINT GEORGE!

By Christophe Agou

TWO MIXES FROM INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE IN AS MANY WEEKS? I AM SPOILING YOU!

THE SECTION WHICH WAS AT AN EVENT WITH DAMIAN COLLINS MP YESTERDAY – YOU KNOW, THE ONE WHO’S BEEN ENJOYING DEMANDING THAT FACEBOOK APPEAR BEFORE HIS COMMITTEE FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS – AND WHICH HEARD HIM SAY THAT PROPOSALS ON REGULATING CONTENT DISTRIBUTION PLATFORMS LIKE FACEBOOK ARE ‘FORTHCOMING’ AND WHICH REALLY WANTED TO ASK HIM ‘MATE, LOOK, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK, BASED ON THE PERFORMANCE YOU AND YOUR COLLEAGUES HAVE PUT ON OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, THAT YOU COULD REGULATE ANYTHING, LET ALONE COMPANIES WHOSE BUSINESS YOU BARELY UNDERSTAND AND WHO CAN AFFORD TO EMPLOY ARMIES OF LAWYERS WHO WILL VERY MUCH ENJOY THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN MASSIVE RINGS AROUND THE BUNCH OF INTELLECTUAL PYGMIES CURRENTLY OCCUPYING THE HOUSE?’ BUT WHICH THEN REALISED THAT THAT IS A COMMENT NOT A QUESTION AND SO DIDN’T:

• Facebook Improves Ad Transparancy: Not a huge change, this one, but still. Facebook’s Ad Library now includes details of ALL ads running on the platform – you can search by advertiser name or keyword included in the ad, and the service will now pull through any and all ads currently running that match the search terms; previously you had to visit individual Pages and click through to their ‘ads’ section to see these. Seeing as today is our SPECIAL DAY OF POLITICAL EMANCIPATION (I promise I will get tired of making ‘jokes’ about this as the morning wears on, but bear with me for a second here) I thought I might see what the current crop of Brexit ads are saying – it’s gratifying to see that there are several running right now, all aimed at ensuring that we do in fact do a Brexit, and that they are all being paid for by such totally normal and transparent-seeming organisations with names like “NowBrexit” and “LifeAfterBrexit” and “Brexit Defence Force” and “Better Brexit”. Who are these people? No idea! Without wishing to go all Cadwalladr about this, isn’t transparency a wonderful thing? Anyway, this isn’t really all that new so much as a slightly better interface to an existing system, but it does make the process of seeing what other ads are running around a particular space easier, which probably has a few helpful planning / snooping implications.
• Facebook Bans The Term “White Nationalism” And “White Separatism”: Nothing much to say about this, other than a) good; and b) not sure it says wonderful things about where we are at the moment that a platform has to put out quite such a weirdly defensive statement on banning the sort of language used exclusively by Nazis. I’ve made a conscious effort not to spend too much time in websewers over the past fortnight, but I’ve no doubt that there’s a bubbling undercurrent of fashy offence from the usual suspects at this HIDEOUS EXAMPLE of tech companies pushing the LIBERAL AGENDA and censoring free speech.
• Google Launches Realtime Content Insights: This is potentially useful for publishers. Google’s launched a new feature which…oh, here, have someone else’s description: “Available to any publisher that uses Google Analytics (GA), RCI offers a more robust version of the real-time data in GA. It shows the top articles in realtime and past 30 minutes, realtime readers by geography and referral source. RCI also has a tab that offers “Trends in Your Region” insights to show trending topics using data from Google Trends and Twitter. Publishers can use this information to gauge reader interests, analyze article placement, improve user experience and optimize headlines.” This would, I imagine, work well alongside CrowdTangle and is worth checking out if you or your paymasters do the content thing at scale.
• Gmail Adds Dynamic Email Features: Or basically AMP for email, which is what they are inexplicably not calling it. This is potentially really useful: “Your emails can stay up to date so you’re always seeing the freshest information, like the latest comment threads and recommended jobs. With dynamic email, you can easily take action directly from within the message itself, like RSVP to an event, fill out a questionnaire, browse a catalog or respond to a comment. Take commenting in Google Docs, for example. Instead of receiving individual email notifications when someone mentions you in a comment, now, you’ll see an up-to-date thread in Gmail where you can easily reply or resolve the comment, right from within the message.” You can see how this is hugely valuable for anyone involved in selling stuff via email, but there are a host of other friction-minimising applications for this; the link contains a link to a blogpost aimed at devs on how to build these so, well, LEARN (or, more likely, send it on to the clever person you know who does the actual coding).
• Twitch Launches Squad Streaming Feature: Completely irrelevant for most of you, but the fact that Twitch is now allowing for 4-streamer multiplay in a single window is probably quite interesting for the three of you who work in or around the games industry (or who are streamers). It’s literally just that – up to four separate streamers can hook up to stream together in split-screen; get big names involved and it becomes a (very expensive and) hugely effective marketing gimmick.
• How To Make A Bar Chart Race Video: You will have seen threemillion of these by now and probably be slightly bored of them, but, in preparation for the moment next week when your client comes to you all excited with a clip they’ve seen on Facebook and demands you make one for them as well, here’s a helpful way of making your own from nothing more than an Excel sheet or CSV. My slightly tedious ennui aside, this is really useful and you can probably still get some mileage out of this on LinkedIn if you have some numbers that are all about BUSINESS. Thanks Josh for the link.
• We Present: This is a lovely site by WeTransfer – there’s obviously some STRATEGIC PILLAR in their business about ‘facilitating creativity’ or similar wankery (and, honestly, brands, STOP TRYING TO TAKE CREDIT FOR HUMAN ARTISTIC ENDEAVOUR WHEN YOU DON’T REALLY HAVE ANY RIGHT YES), and so, predictably, they have alighted on ‘let’s become a curator of creative stuff that we can then share with the ever-hungry cultural omnivores of the web’. Except this is actually quite good – there’s LOADS of stuff in here, it cuts across style and genre and type of output, with artists and filmmakers and essayists and musicians and all sorts of different and diverse work on show, most of which was totally new to me (and yes, I know that that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but, honestly, I see a LOT of ‘curated’ crap online and I promise you a good 90% of it features the same narrow selection of stuff). A good resource for creative ‘inspiration’ (theft) and just a really nice piece of brand work, despite my snark uptop.
• Discover Martell: The latest in Web Curios’ occasional exploration of the wonderful, over-the-top world of French web design, this is a site which lets you take a Google Streetview-style tour of Martell’s French Chateau to explore the MAGIC OF COGNAC and the HERITAGE and the CEREMONY and the SHEER GALLIC SUAVERY of the whole enterprise. There is a LOT in here – three floors to explore, secret keys to find (WHY???), videos to watch, some inexplicable deer prancing around like they own the joint (the chiefs)…but, as ever with these things, WHY? Do people who like to spend money on pseudo-fancy booze (is Martell premium mediocre? I sort of feel like it is) ALSO tend to like spending 10 minutes navigating around a virtual chateau? SHOW ME THE INSIGHT THAT LED TO THIS. If it’s anything more than “Our agency saw us coming a mile off” I’ll be amazed, frankly.
• Strategy Needs Good Words: Finally in the serious, boring section pertaining to people’s actual jobs, this is a great article by Martin Weigel on why it’s important to write strategywank out properly and how that can help with the creation of cogent, solid, helpful creative positions. I hate myself quite a lot for that sentence, fine, but this really is smart and sensible stuff.

By Yunil Nam

YOU MAY NOT THINK THAT THE MOOMINS SOUNDTRACK IS THE EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONICA YOU NEED TO SOUNDTRACK THE NEXT BIT, BUT I PROIMISE YOU THAT IT VERY MUCH IS!

THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T THINK IT WAS EVER GOING TO HAVE TO COPE WITH THE NAGGING FEAR OF BORIS JOHNSON BEING PRIME MINISTER EVER AGAIN AND YET, WELL, HERE WE ARE, PT.1:

• Default Filename TV: This is such a clever, simple idea to produce something that is basically better than 90% of all video art installations you’ll ever see (video art is largely balls, come on, you know it’s true). The site plays YouTube videos at random, the only stipulation being that the title of the video conforms to a default filename pattern – so it will only show you videos where the uploader hasn’t bothered to edit the filename before so doing. As a result, all the clips you see through this tend to have a very particular aesthetic to them, weirdly retro-ish – none of these were ever uploaded by people expecting to go viral. It’s an absolutely compelling cavalcade of school dance performances, poorly-recorded speeches at small town hall events, not particularly impressive athletic endeavours and LOTS of shots of moving traffic, and it’s honestly PERFECT – as a moving, infinite snapshot of who we are as a culture and a species (yes, I know that that sounds hyperbolic, but really) this is utterly superb and frankly ought to be a permanent installation somewhere. I love this possibly more than anything else I have found so far this year and, honestly, were it not for the fact that I know you’d all be DEVASTATED I would totally sack off Curios today and just watch this stuff for 7 hours instead.
• Political YouTube: A visualisation mapping popular YouTube channels across the left/right spectrum. Whilst obviously this is incomplete – after all, these need to me manually selected and categorised – the methodology used seems reasonable (you can get an explanation on the project’s GitHub page, should you desire one) and the picture it shows is really interesting; the size of the bubbles shows the number of channel views, whilst the lines between them, visible on hover-over, show how often video recommendations send users from one channel to another. It’s worth having a bit of a dig here – all the channels are US-focused, but what’s clearly visible is that whilst the ‘leftist’ output has broader audiences (partly due to the fact that stuff like the Colbert Report gets massive global traction), the right-leaning channels are far more numerous and are linked far more closely; there’s a very obvious strong network which has a significant amplificatory effect on the content and, hence, the messaging. Depending on your politics, this may or may not creep you out a bit.
• Petition Grapher: God, it’s been a long week in petitions, hasn’t it? From INTENSE EXCITEMENT to TEDIOUS SMUGNESS to RESIGNED ACCEPTANCE OF FUTILITY in seven days. This site (thanks Dan) graphs the growth of signatories on any petition you choose to ask it about, which might be useful if you want a nice shorthand for comparing the relative virality of concepts (or if you just like graphs).
• Morphin: This, to be clear, looks REMARKABLY shonky, but I’m including it as it’s a precursor of…well…something. Morphin is an iOS app whose aim is to let anyone insert themselves into any gif they want, by taking a scan of their face and doing that facewrap thing over the element of the gif that the software identifies as being, well, face-y. You remember about 10 years ago, when we all blithely allowed any old third-party website access to all our Facebook data in exchange for wonkily mapping some of our FB photos into a marketing video? No? They were great days, trust me. Anyway, the outputs look rather a lot like that, or, oddly, the CG in the Lawnmower Man – it’s crappy enough that it’s almost cool, and you could actually have quite a lot of fun with this if you’re a particular type of person/brand (and the fact that I just used those terms as interchangeable is a new nadir in Curios and indeed my life; rest assured I will be punishing myself for that one BRUTALLY later on) in terms of messing with reaction gifs, etc – the interesting thing for me, though, is where this stuff goes after this, when combined with improved GAN-type tech (spoilers: it goes somewhere quite confusing).
• Clit Me: Do you have a clitoris? Is your life characterised by a sense of disappointment at how bad other people are at touching it in pleasing ways? WELL HELP IS AT HAND! Clit Me is a project by perennial Curios favourites NFB Canada, developed in conjunction with students at the University of Ottawa to help address the ‘orgasm gap’ – when first having sex with a new partner, 62 percent of heterosexual women will reach orgasm, compared to 85 percent of men. It’s a mobile-only site which lets you learn facts about the clitoris whilst playing through five levels where you are asked to stimulate the onscreen cartoon clit in a variety of ways to help its owner achieve climax – SEXY, EH? As a non-owner of a clitoris I’m not really qualified to comment on how accurate this is, but it’s a lovely bit of design, presented in a fun way and with a good aim at its heart. If it goes some way towards correcting what I fear are some of the VERY WEIRD things young men are learning about sex from current bongotrends then that can only be A Good Thing, no?
• The Difference: As discussed here on multiple occasions recently, we’re at a weird point in the evolution of voice assistants in terms of their utility – we have them, but how do we want to use them? Do we, for example, want to use them to connect with a disembodied therapist, somewhere in the ether, onto whom we will unburden our woes? “No” would have been my automatic response to that question, but the people behind The Difference hope I’m atypical in this regard – this Alexa Skill works by giving users a unique PIN which they use to log into the platform with their Bezos Home Surveillance Pod; it then puts you in a queue for a therapist, who will call you on your phone for a 30 or 60-minute session. SO MUCH ABOUT THIS IS STUPID! If the therapist calls you on your phone, what the fcuk is the point of the Alexa integration other than to give Amazon information about the fact that you occasionally want to talk to a therapist? Given the fact that unless you pay a premium you have no idea which therapist you’re going to get, how can you get any continuity or long-term benefit? Where’s the accountability? This is a mess of an idea.
• Canopy: This is yet to launch, so I’m including it on spec here, but it seems like it might be interesting, and if it turns out to be amazing and game-changing then you’ll be able to say you got in early which is obviously the most important thing. Canopy is a soon-to-launch ‘discovery app’, designed to feed you interesting stuff based on what it thinks you’ll like – the interesting bit being that it claims it will work with no login or account structure, and that it won’t take any of your data, ever, and that no information will ever be stored anywhere other than your phone. They are VERY light on details as to how this will work, but it’s worth keeping an eye on imho.
• Seedo: This is INGENIOUS, and the sort of thing that 16 year old me would have coveted like little else on Earth; if you’ve always wanted to grow your own weed but haven’t fancied the idea of turning your attic into some sort of foil-lined hydroponic Kew-equivalent then WOW will Seedo appeal to you. It’s a variant on one of the many ‘grow herbs in a box with automatic watering and an app which will tell you if there’s anything wrong with your seedlings’ kits out there, except that this one is very explicitly designed for growing marijuana (look lads, the repeated use of the word ‘herbs’ all over the site isn’t really doing the arse-covering work you might be hoping here) and is basically like a fridge. All the LEDs and hydroponic kit sits inside a box which is HERMETICALLY SEALED meaning it’s odourless – I mean, you can see the market it’s aimed it. It ships worldwide. I WON’T TELL ANYONE.
• The Global Architect Card: Dash Marshall has designed a card for architects to carry which explains to anyone curious why they might be wandering round poking around buildings and structures in 14 different languages. “Architects go out of their way to visit interesting buildings when they travel, but often the buildings they care about are considered special only by other architects, leaving the staff who take care of those places confused to be visited by foreigners with funky glasses. We’ve chatted with confused security guards, befuddled janitors, and hesitant staffers while trying to explain why we’re taking 75 photos of a staircase. With the Global Architect Card, you don’t have to struggle.” I would very much like someone to make a version of these for ‘confused creative and strategy teams having a fact-finding awayday outside of London’.
• The Google Cemetery: ANOTHER website collecting Google products that are no more – this is broader than last week’s in that it includes seemingly EVERYTHING that it’s ever been involved with that no longer exists. Going back to the mid-00s is fascinating – what was ‘Lively’, the ‘web-based virtual world’, for example? Who remembers that Google had a product called ‘Ride Finder’ to help people find carshares which existed til 2009? Really interesting (if geeky).
• Put Your Face On A Billboard: Peroxide prankster Oobah Butler, he of The Shed at Dulwich and Giorgio Peviani fame, has a book coming out – as part of the promo for that, he’s, er, offering anyone the opportunity to get their face put on a billboard in New York. It’s a basic ‘Million Dollar Homepage’-type setup; the Kickstarter has a $6k target, and you can pledge whatever you like. Your face will appear on the eventual poster, presuming it gets funded, sized proportionally to your contribution to the fund – beautifully, though, it doesn’t have to be your face. There’s a very strong argument here for clubbing together and paying to have the face of the least-likely person you know plastered HUGELY across Manhattan for a few weeks, just for the lols, although perhaps a slightly pricey one.
• 7 Sets Venn Diagram: I’m going to be totally honest – I have literally no idea at all what this is showing me or how it works, so if anyone can explain it to me then I would be genuinely grateful; still, it looks GREAT and I’m a sucker for spinny, colour-y, maths-y things, regardless of whether I have any fcuking clue what they are trying to communicate to me.
• Fuckbois of Literature: A PODCAST! WHICH AS PER USUAL I HAVEN’T ACTUALLY LISTENED TO! Still, I don’t need to hear it to know that its topic is a winner – “The characters of literature other readers exalt, but you hope never to meet. Maybe they screw everything that moves (and moos). Maybe they’ve locked their first wife in the attic. Maybe they’re the author of love poetry that’s screwed up our concept of romance for over 150 years. The literary fuckboi toys with your heart and leaves you hung out to dry.” Another example of a podcast I WISH provided episode transcripts so I could consume this in the civilised manner.
• Textworld: This, awkwardly, is ANOTHER website I only have a slightly iffy grasp of, but bear with me here while I try and describe it. Or, alternatively, while I paste their description here and see if this helps: “Microsoft TextWorld is an open-source, extensible engine that both generates and simulates text games. You can use it to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn skills such as language understanding and grounding, combined with sequential decision making.” Oh, I get it! It effectively lets you create small narrative programs within which you can train language processing AIs! Got it! This is quite interesting – although, obviously, this is another example of a big company getting us to do quite a lot of work for it on the sly, as obviously all the info coming through this is going to get fed into Microsoft’s own machine learning/pseudo-AI projects, right? Anyway, there’s a competition up there at the moment where you can win a couple of grand for making a script that can work its way through a text adventure, which could be quite a fun challenge if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Humane By Design: A beautifully-designed site about design principles, this collects a selection of principles and precepts one might want to abide by when thinking about ‘ethical’ or human-focused UX/UI design; what’s most interesting about this is how when you read through them you’re very quickly going to start coming up with examples of platforms or products that do the exact opposite of this and are quite obviously employing all sorts of dark patterns left right and centre.
• Blendeo: Ooh, this is clever. Blendeo (annoyingly iOS-only) is an editing app which does some really clever trickery to apply a long exposure effect to already-shot photos and videos, allowing you to create some really striking imagery which, crucially, looks totally different from any other post-production effect I’ve seen churned out by a phone before. Get this and enjoy a brief week of feeling like an INNOVATOR before fcuking Instagram adds this as another of its standard camera effects and ruins it for everyone.
• Winamp Skins: Do you remember WinAmp? It was what we used to listen to music on PC in the 90s and it was a psychedelic mess, customisable with all sorts of preposterous skins and effects which are handily collected here by the Internet Archive. SUCH a strong aesthetic on show in these – honestly, wouldn’t Spotify be better if you could replace its frankly rather boring interface with one themed around the smiling features of Jackie Chan? Yes, yes it would.
• The Manual: The Manual is, to many, the greatest ever book to be written about the music industry. Penned by the KLF, it’s subtitled ‘How To Have A Number One The Easy Way’ and is basically a how-to guide to hacking the music industry as it was back in the 80s and 90s. This Twitter account is tweeting it out, one sentence at a time – it makes it unreadable, obviously, but the nature of the text means that the cut-up version often sounds like weirdly gnomic poetry. Built by Friend of Curios Rob Manuel, who finds the congruence between his own name and the fact that he is LITERALLY ROBBING ‘THE MANUAL’ far funnier than he ought to.

By Naro Pinosa

NEXT, WHY NOT HAVE THIS ACID HOUSE MIX BY THE VERY TALENTED JOE MUGGS?

THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T THINK IT WAS EVER GOING TO HAVE TO COPE WITH THE NAGGING FEAR OF BORIS JOHNSON BEING PRIME MINISTER EVER AGAIN AND YET, WELL, HERE WE ARE, PT.2:

• The Archaeology Data Services Archive: This is a HUGE directory of archaeological…er…stuff in the UK, covering all time periods from Roman digs to the historic war defences which still exist, slightly hidden, across London to this day. It’s worth searching by your home location to see if there’s anything interesting and historical nearby which you might not be aware of – if you’re in London there almost certainly will be, should you fancy somewhere geekily historical to make a pilgrimage to this weekend.
• Mockdown: Not by any means interesting – sorry – but potentially rather useful, Mockdown lets you take any website UI and turn it into a lo-fi mockup. Useful for anyone doing web or interface design, but probably not really worth a click otherwise, if I’m honest with you (when am I ever not, though? Honest Matty Muir, they should call me).
• Checklist Design: A semi-companion resources to the Humane Design site up there, this is a series of checklists to help designers ensure they’ve considered when putting together webpages – at the moment it covers bits like 404 pages, contact forms and the like, and they are planning to add others in due course. For the more experienced designers this is all probably a bit simplistic, but for people earlier on in their careers or students there may be some quite useful guidelines here.
• Coinflict of Interest: I’m not sure why, but the past week or so has seen something of a resurgence of ICO-wankery – has something happened? Are we all meant to HODL again? Anyway, this is a fun/silly little toy which is designed to attempt some rudimentary checks on the objectivity or otherwise of whichever CoinBoi du jour you choose to plug into it; add it to Chrome, and when you hover over any user’s Twitter bio it will tell you how often they tweet about each of the main crypto platforms and how that compares to the others, to give you a vague idea of their biases. I couldn’t possibly give less of a fcuk about crypto, but this contains the kernel of a genuinely useful idea; something like this that was customisable and let you do instant searches on hover-over to let you know whether a Twitter user’s the type to, say, use phrases like ‘SJW’ or ‘Cultural Marxism’ would be really quite useful. Can someone build it? WILL ONE OF YOU DO WHAT I ASK FOR ONCE???
• Women in VC: A global directory of women working in venture capital – “Started in New York City in 2015, the women in VC directory was created to enable women investors to connect with each other, inspiring collaboration and a sense of community. The directory quickly expanded to other markets, and is now the world’s largest self reported database of active women investors currently at institutional, corporate funds, or family offices – spanning more than 900+ women across 600+ funds and more than 25 countries.” It’s only accessible via password, and it’s only for women, but I know a few VC people read this so, well, here!
• Babycakes Romero: This person started following me on Twitter yesterday, and it was a genuine pleasure to discover that they are a really good street photographer who each morning at 11 posts a single new picture taken on the streets of London. These are honestly GREAT.
• Mogney: I rather feel for these lads, but at the same time, well, come on. Mogney is, put simply, payments via QR codes – JUST LIKE IN WECHAT! Download the app, attach a bankcard to it, and then use it to pay by scanning QR codes on participating website or in the real world! Theoretically, fine, not a silly idea – after all, it’s working for 1bn+ people on the other side of the world, and has been for quite a few years now, but, well, NO. Noone’s going to download this app, or at least not enough people for it to scale, and Facebook basically announced that they were going to bake this stuff in in the not-too-distant future so, well, I’m not envisaging a happy future for Mogney (leaving aside the horrendously-adenoidal-sounding name). Should anyone from the company happen to read this, feel free to come back and taunt me with your billions when you exit plutocratically in a few years’ time.
• Broadly Gender Photos: This is by VICE – specifically, their more female-focused outlet Broadly – and it’s testament to how far from cool VICE is these days that it feels genuinely odd to see the brand doing this rather than, I don’t know, shilling vapes to children on behalf of Philip Morris. It’s a good idea, though – they’ve compiled a selection of stock photography representing incredibly banal day-to-day life moments but featuring trans and non-binary people. Good stuff, although it’s unfortunate that, for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, all the models look SO American; it would look weird were you to use these on a UK site imho. Good opportunity to replicate this with a more Euro feel, imho, for the right people.
• Parkify: Apologies if this is something that is already really widely known or which isn’t necessary, but as a non-driver I have literally no idea what those of you in command of massive metal deathboxes need or want. Parkify is an app which automatically tells when you’ve parked your car and makes a note of its location, helping your find it again when it’s lost in a sea of identikit metal deathboxes – the use of the accelerometer here is quite clever, and if you’re in a hirecar that you wouldn’t necessarily recognise so easily I could see this being genuinely helpful.
• Discover Quickly: This is a Spotify hack which basically makes the interface about 100 times less horrible to use; once you’ve connected your Spotify account, you can choose an artist, song, album, or playlist to find other music you might like, or simply hover over the album art thumbnails that pop up to listen to a clip instantly. If you like what you hear, you can save it to a list in the web app, save it to your Spotify library, or add it to a playlist; all stuff you can do already, fine, but this makes the whole experience significantly less painful. Highly recommended.
• Listen to a Movie: I can’t work out whether this is a brilliant idea or a deeply odd and slightly stupid one – either way, it exists and so it’s here. Listen to a Movie is basically just a bunch of links pointing to downloadable film soundtracks in MP3 format so you can, if you wish, download the whole of the audio from Goodfellas and have that as the soundtrack to your morning commute (NO SAZ), a bit like an audiobook except with about a fifth of the words missing. The extent to which this ‘works’ will of course depend entirely on the film you choose, but as a means of surreptitiously removing yourself mentally from work this probably isn’t too bad.
• Perfect Circle: Can you draw a perfect circle, freehand? No, of course you can’t, but why not try this website which will tell you exactly how far from perfection your efforts actually are? Whilst we all know, deep down, that we are flawed, it’s nice to have something that quantifies exactly to what degree.
• Eighty Days: This is a potentially useful little site for those of you contemplating travel (WHILE WE STILL CAN); you input your starting destination, where you want to go, how many stops you want to make, etc, and it spits out multi-part itineraries which you can tweak per your exacting specifications; the nice bit of this is that the site allows for you to find all the components (transport, accommodation, transfers, etc) from one central place, making it hugely convenient. It seemingly hacks together all sorts of different sites to offer the service, it checks Airbnb as well as hotels, and, generally, seems like a properly helpful service.
• The Wind: The first an excellent selection of timewasting browser games this week, this is (I think) a promo for some film or another – oh, yes, it’s called ‘The Wind’, unsurprisingly – and it’s done in the style of a retro (c64-type) horror game, all pixel and clunk and scream. It’s short, but very nicely-made.
• Dinosaur Protection Programme: This is basically like Missile Command, except instead of protecting missile bases you are instead protecting lovely animated dinosaurs as they stomp across the surface of your cutely-geometric planet. This is reasonably tricky, but very addictive in a clicker game-type way; the graphics are rather cute, too.
• Grave: Finally, this one’s ACE – it’s a left-to-right hack and slash game, designed to look not totally dissimilar to Canabalt, and whilst simple it’s strangely addictive and gets VERY hard after about 5 minutes. Enjoy! It’s better than work!

By Sarah Harvey

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY A FULL HOUR OF 90s BHANGRA BANGERS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Sheela Na Gig: Not actually a Tumblr! Here’s the site’s description of what a Sheela Na Gig is, should you be unaware: “Sheela Na Gigs are quasi-erotic stone carvings of a female figure usually found on Norman or to be more precise Romanesque churches. They consist of an old woman squatting and pulling apart her vulva, a fairly strange thing to find on a church.” Oh the glorious restraint of that last sentence fragment!
• Customer Service Wolf: Small comics about a wolf that works in a bookshop. Whimsical, and, I’m pretty sure, Canadian, which weirdly is pretty much all the description I think you need to sort of ‘get’ this.
• Stationery Compositions: This is a project by stationery retailers Present & Correct, who run one of the best corporate Twitter accounts I know of and who I know occasionally read Curios (HELLO, STATIONERY SHOP SOCIAL MEDIA PEOPLE!); it’s a bunch of images of stationery products arranged in pleasingly geometric formations. WHY NOT EH?
• Stupid Pet Face: You really don’t need me to explain this to you, I promise.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Mark Dean Veca: You’ll recognise the work if not the name – Veca’s stuff, in particular the slightly puffy-looking renditions of cartoon characters, have done the rounds a lot, but his Insta feed is worth checking out, containing a mixture of his own work and shows around NYC.
• Marin Mushrooms: Photos of excellent mushrooms, for the mycolophiles (no, and I don’t care) among you.
• Droolwool: Wool/felt toy designs; the work here really is impressive, even if you’re not totally into cuddly toys.
• Davide Sasso: Sasso is an Italian photographer who takes rather wonderful neon-hued photos of Japan and other places around the world. Whilst the style, fine, isn’t hugely novel, the execution here is exemplary.
• Ben Frost: I featured Frost’s work – which mixes pop culture and pharma culture to unsettling effect – on here years ago, but this is his Insta feed and, honestly, it’s horrible.
• Clayton Shonkwiler: WHAT a name. Mr Shonkwiler is a designer making things, as they put it, at the intersection of maths and art. Pleasing geometries here.
• Emma Dabeny: Dabeny is a filmmaker in LA, I think – her Insta feed is just a bunch of slightly surreal meme-y stuff, but I promise you it’s good surreal meme-y stuff.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Future of Work: This is a fascinating piece of research/futurology by the RSA, which has published this extensive document imagining four potential scenarios for the future of work – and by extension the broader economy – in the UK between now and 2035. The paper is keen to stress that these are scenarios rather than predictions per se – on that basis, this is very much worth reading should you be in the business of INSIGHTS and STRATEGY and stuff. Oh, and one of their scenarios is the following – enjoy!: “Get ready for the backlash. A crash on the scale of 2008 dries up funding for innovation and keeps the UK in a low-skilled, low-productivity and low-paid rut. Faced with another bout of austerity, a new generation of workers lose faith in the promise of capitalism” TAKING BACK CONTROL!!!!
• Joe Rogan and the Gateway to the Right: It’s testament to quite how popular Rogan is amongst certain demographics that I was at a party the other week and some kid (he was in his 20s ffs) asked me if I listened to Joe Rogan and what I thought of him in full expectation that I would know who he was talking about (reader, I was…not shy in my opinion, and on the offchance that that kid happens to read this then I would like to offer a small apology for the…er…forcefulness of the response; while I’m here, I probably ought to offer a similar apology to the woman who I got annoyed with for using the term ‘feminazi’ too; in fact, I don’t think I’m going to go to parties anymore). Anyway, this is an interesting profile of the man and his show and how it acts as a gentle gateway to a particular type of pseudo-intellectual onboarding for some pretty fashy concepts. Obviously the piece is not ‘objective’ insofar as the author has some pretty clear ideas about Rogan and his ilk from the outset but, well, I agree.
• The Heavily-Armed Millennials of Instagram: On the weird US subculture of performative gun-toting Republicanism that has taken off amongst certain (mainly Southern) teens over there, and the broader manner in which this reflects the Culture Wars. There’s a lot to gawp at in here, and it also reminded me of the glory of ‘Tactical Parenting Gear’, which is basically a load of standard-issue kid accessories, like changing mats or baby bags, except in camo fabric and costing about 3x standard. Freedom! ‘Murica! GUNS! Blimey.
• Meet Gen Z: Lovely NYT interactive which presents photos of a whole load of kids from across the US who fit into the Gen-Z demographic (in the main, these are born between 1995-2000), along with quotes from them about how they feel they fit into to society and with their peers. By turns hope-inspiring and misery-inducing, what’s sort-of lovely is quite how typically teenage so many of these are – kids don’t change, at heart.
• Grindr Turns 10: Excellent look back at one of the most influential apps ever made, a decade after its creation. You think that’s hyperbolic? Honestly, read the piece and then come back to me – its influence on SO many aspects of culture is hard to overstate, and it fundamentally altered the way in which (male) gay sexuality and culture worked and is seen. Not only that, but no Grindr means no Tinder – it has, I think, had a hugely profound and fundamental impact on modern culture and mores, far more than almost any other app I can think of aside from the obvious big guns.
• How To Become A 3d Avatar Meme: This is long and involved and a bit technical, but if you follow the instructions then you too will be the proud owner of your very own digital 3d model of your physical which you can then seed out into the digital multiverse for others to do with as they please. The idea of seeding a Virtual Matt which people can use to populate future digital worlds is quite mind-bending in certain senses; fcukit, I am doing this when I have some free time and will put a link to a digital me that you can use and abuse however you see fit in a future Curios sometime.
• Making $50k from Garbage: This is simultaneously really clever and quite miserable – the story of how a couple of videogame makers realised that it was possible for them to automate the creation of an endless string of shovelware slot machine games, all minutely different but all created without their input, based on code they’d written, and subsequently realised that they could ALSO automate the process of putting these on the app store and as a result had managed to create a system that earned them actual cashmoney for no work whatsoever. This either proves that something is very broken or that something’s working perfectly, and I really can’t tell which it is.
• Human Contact Is Now A Luxury Good: It’s not, obviously, but it could be. This article is a weird mishmash of things – on the one hand, a look at the digital carer service economy, and the business working to provide digital / virtual companionship to the elderly or lonely; on the other, it’s a broader treatise about how increased automation of services at scale means that human interaction is by contrast likely to increasingly become more costly to implement, and that as such having actual real people to deal with is over time likely to become the preserve of the wealthy and restricted to the luxe market. I am torn by this – on the one hand, I find the idea of robot/digital companions for the lonely old utterly heartbreaking; on the other, it’s more heartbreaking to imagine a life without even that small degree of ‘human’ (not human) contact. As to the other, well, yes – Gibson nailed that back in The Sprawl all those years ago.
• Drunk Shopping Survey: A whole bunch of data on America’s drunk shopping habits – included here mainly as I would LOVE to see this done in the UK, and also because you can totally base an entire new business thing on the idea that people increasingly often buy things whilst entirely sh1tfaced between 11pm-1am.
• Screen Share Disasters: When I worked at H+K, they used to have an annual tradition of giving an award to the member of staff who perpetrated the biggest workplace fcukup that year. The year I almost got sacked for asking Sir Martin Sorrell where my fcuking bonus was on Twitter, I was pipped to this award by a woman who’d been presenting to an entire delegation of international hotel managers – literally 200-odd people – and who had been using her laptop to present from. She left it idle whilst answering questions midway through the session she was running, meaning the laptop started running a screensaver – unfortunately her settings meant the ‘screensaver’ was just a series of photos in slideshow pulled at random from her ‘photos’ folder. Which, at the time, contained photos she’d been sending her long-term partner who was living abroad. Which were displayed on a VERY big conference screen behind her as she talked. Apparently a kindly person leaped across the room to disconnect the screen, but not before the 200-odd people were subjected to a not-insignificant eyeful. This piece collects similar tales of woe, and is GREAT.
• The Best Value Restaurants in London: Jonathan Nunn is perhaps best known for consistently and effectively baiting Giles Coren on Twitter, and for calling out some of the rather more egregious cultural insensitivities of the UK food scene. He’s also a massive eater, and this is a quite exhaustive guide to his pick of London’s best value restaurants, with a heavy skew towards the less shiny bits of the city and authentic regional cuisines representing some of the city’s many diaspora. I was only personally familiar with a couple of these but I now intend to attempt to eat at as many as possible before I die (possibly of heart failure).
• The Chinese Burner: A Chinese scifi author’s account of their trip to Burning Man, notable mainly for their observations of how the other Chinese visitors to the festival engaged with it (or otherwise) and how they believe this explains certain current trends and themes in Chinese culture. Fascinating throughout, but it did make me repeatedly think that all our handwringing in the West about the moral obligation of tech companies to maybe think about things other than profit is perhaps not quite being replicated in the East.
• An Oral History of Morrowind: This is all about an old videogame, so if that doesn’t appeal then skip right along. The rest of you, glory in this WONDERFULLY in-depth look back at the development of the Elder Scrolls IV: Morrowind, a truly ground-breaking and genuinely strange game which even now is in many respects unmatched for player freedom and agency. If you’re a former player or just generally interested in games and their design, this will make you very happy indeed.
• Kayaking In Alaska: This wasn’t quite my thing, but I am including it as I reckon if you’re into action or adventure movies then you will adore it. The story of a campign trip in Alaska that goes very, very wrong, this features RAPIDS and ROCKS and JEOPARDY and BEARS, and frankly feels like the sort of film whos poster would feature a waterfall and some sort of massive ursine presence and a man in plaid in first-person closeup with some sort of minor facial abrasion staring concernedly into the middle-distance. You know what I mean, right?
• Brutalism and Music: An interesting and erudite essay exploring the various close links between brutalism as an architectural movement and various musicians and styles of the past 50 years. Written by Tom ‘He used to live opposite me when we were small and we’ve not seen each other for 15 years but I wish him well and enjoy his work’ Spooner.
• How YouTube Has Changed the Toy Industry: Another one of these odd cases where technology drives a very pronounced by unexpected change in an adjacent area – much as Instagram’s had a totally unexpected impact on retail spaces, so YouTube (and in particular the kid craze that is the unboxing/opening video) has completely transformed the toy market. We’ve seemingly moved away from the toy being the reward towards a position where you’re effectively paying for the dopamine hit the kid gets as it anticipates the reward that might be in the box which, well, doesn’t actually sound that healthy when you stop to think about it momentarily.
• How The Blair Witch Project Changed Film Marketing: Jesus, that was TWO DECADES AGO. I was never that fussed about Blair Witch, I have to say – I was one of those hugely annoying twats who wondered round saying things like “yeah, but Deodato did the whole ‘found footage’ fake-out in Cannibal Holocaust YEARS ago” and frankly it’s remarkable I had any friends at all – but reading back on this I’m reminded of what a very real phenomenon it was. The kids behind it basically invented ‘omnichannel storytelling’ (sorry) and the concept of the ARG, and all modern film marketing sort of borrows from this in some way.
• Why Everyone Gives Out Their Insta Handle: On the Insta username as the new phone number – or at least the unit of personal information we are now most comfortable sharing with strangers. There’s DEFINITELY a bullsh1t ‘insight’ you can pull from this to support some sort of brand activation; oh, God, INSTACARDS! Business cards with your insta handle and a 3×3 of your best ‘grams and an in-app-scannable code to autofollow. As an aside, does that mean that you’ll all start to think that anyone who’s not on Insta is weird? Asking for a friend, honest.
• Give the Nobel Prize to Dril: There will be two Nobel Prizes for Literature presented this year, to make up for the Academy’s self-imposed hiatus last year – this piece argues that as such one of them ought to be awarded to the internet’s sentient id, dril, for his Twitter oeuvre. “Dril is the infantile subjectivity of the internet: the internet as it eats, sh1ts, jerks off to pr0n, gets into fights, and posts a link to its Soundcloud in respose to a viral tweet. Perhaps the sole argument against the idea that Dril’s work moves in any “ideal direction” would be that, in a way, he can be considered the internet’s ultimate realist: he holds up a mirror, albeit grotesque one, to how we — the internet’s first (and, one can only hope, worst) children — really are.” Hard to argue with that, really.
• The Disappearance of Fan Bingbing: One of the many weird little stories from last year was the temporary disappearance of the first lady of Chinese cinema, Fan Bingbing, who after it was alleged she’d fiddled her taxes was magically disappeared by the Chinese state, only to reemerge, politely penitent, a few months later. This is a really good Vanity Fair writeup of the events, with some excellent background on the real reasons why it might have happened – honestly, you have to sort of admire (read: be terrified by) a state which indulges in kidnap of its own famous citizens as a means of large-scale misdirection.
• White People Being White: Men, specifically. This is a Twitter thread featuring people of colour, mainly women, sharing some of the more jaw-dropping interactions they’ve had with white people, mainly men, mainly on dating apps. Honestly, though, some of these are quite astonishing. IT’S 2019 FFS.
• City of Coffins: The people who make a living from El Salvador’s status as the most violent country per capita in the world. This is a brilliantly-written piece, and again touches on those really interesting areas where human experience and the economics of survival rub up against each other in interesting and unexpected ways.
• On The Bongo Ban: An excellent explanation of why the UK’s forthcoming attempts to protect children from the horrors of bongo might not in fact be a very well thought-out policy after all. The closing paragraph sums it up rather well: “This month six hundred children were taken out of Parkfield Primary School in Birmingham by their parents after they were taught about the existence of gay people. There have been angry demonstrations outside the building, with placards attacking ‘indoctrination’. Andrea Leadsom said charmingly by way of response that parents should decide when their children are ‘exposed to that information’, delusions of control being central to her political philosophy. It makes me think that porn might well provide some welcome and enjoyable instruction for all those kids kept out of sex education, especially the gay ones. But if they are fcuked up by it, it won’t just be the porn that’s to blame.”
• Married After Two Weeks: Wonderful and SUPREMELY New York interview with a couple who met in a restaurant (she was his waiter) and married within a fortnight. SO much to love in here, from the stuff about auras to the very many unanswered questions thrown up by their responses, this is just heartwarming and utterly bonkers from start to finish.
• Dawkins and Hitchens: A great essay looking back at Christopher Hitchens, and how much he has influenced Richard Dawkins in ways Dawkins probably doesn’t realise and which haven’t really done Dawkins any good at all. Interesting cogent on the weird zealotry that affects so many thinkers, to the point of rendering them bizarrely monomaniacal – as Daniel Soar writes, it was “the great realignment that took place early this century – its origin moment the planes and the towers – and the insistence that now more than ever you have to pick a side.”
• Psycho Analysis: I’ve long been a devotee of Bret Easton Ellis’ novels – I’ve read all his non-fiction, multiple times, which I know probably marks me down as an awful person – but have for almost as long been of the opinion that the man himself is, well, a bit of a prick. His recent obsessions with MILLENNIALS and SNOWFLAKES and THE RIGHT TO SAY WHAT I LIKE ON THE INTERNET sort of bears that out for me, and this blisteringly vicious review of his latest collection of essays, largely on these topics, skewers exactly why. I mean, OOF: “Like his hero Joan Didion, Ellis believes that style is everything; what a shame he has written a book with so little of it.”
• Mona’s Story: Finally in this week’s longreads, this is Mona’s Story – a long, sweeping portrait of Mona, a hijra (the term used to denote an intersex or trans person on the Indian subcontinent) who’s life reflects and mirrors many of the massive changes which have affected India over the past 70 years. Fascinating, sympathetic, and a decent reminder that there are plenty of other cultures who are already far more accepting of nonbinary gender identities than we seem to be able to be.

By Kris Kuksi

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. What would you do if you were a middle-aged man living in modest social housing just outside Helsinki with your wife and you found that a death metal sex cult had moved in next door? This is the premise of this EXCELLENT short Finnish movie called ‘Fcuking Bunnies’ – it is very, very funny:

2) The Pewdiepipeline is 30 minutes of reasonably clear-headed analysis of exactly how lovable internet personalities Pewdiepie and others are, wittingly or otherwise, acting as a gateway to some reasonably dark stuff via what’s known as ‘stochastic terrorism’. You may find this hyperbolic and alarmist, but I find it hard to look at any of the examples it points out without agreeing with the central thesis here pretty hard:

3) This is called ‘Turn to Hate’, it’s by Orville Peck, and it’s described in the comments as ‘the gateway drug to country music’ and, well, I’m worried they may be right:

4) I’ve not really managed to get on with Sleaford Mods to date, despite repeated attempts to ‘get’ it, but this, their latest single off the new album, is a legitimate banger. It’s called ‘Discourse’:

5) This is called ‘Faith’ and it’s by a band called Cold Showers and it’s described as being ‘synth-driven post-punk’ and I like it VERY MUCH:

6) Finally in this week’s selection of videos, enjoy this – it’s called Yam Yam, and it’s by No Direction, and it made me quite uncommonly chirpy when I heard it earlier this week and it’s doing the same now as it plays in the background while I type, and OH LOOK IT’S TIME FOR ME TO GO AND GET IN THE SHOWER AND GET ON WITH THE DAY AFTER A WHOLE FIVE HOURS AND FIFTY-FIVE MINUTES OF PRETTY MUCH SOLID WRITING (OK MAYBE FIVE HOURS AS THE FIRST HOUR IS ALWAYS SPEND READING THE OVERNIGHT STUFF) AND I NEED TO GET READY FOR A NICE LUNCH I AM HAVING WITH MY GIRLFRIEND AND TO ENJOY THE SUNSHINE WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT I HOPE YOU WILL BE DOING THIS WEEKEND INSTEAD OF WORRYING ABOUT STUFF THAT YOU PROBABLY CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT SO WHY NOT JUST FINISH READING THIS SECTION AND THEN TURN OFF WHATEVER DEVICE YOU ARE CONSUMING THIS ON AND GO OUTSIDE AND TRY AND HAVE SOME NICE UNCOMPLICATED FUN WITH YOUR FRIENDS AND IGNORE THE ‘B’ WORD AND LET IT RUIN THEIR WEEKENDS NOT YOURS BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE TAKE CARE BYE!

ONE WEEK TO GO! OR NOT! As Schrodinger’s Brexit sits patiently in its box, we anxiously await the big reveal. Is it alive? Is it dead? IS IT IN FACT WE WHO ARE DEAD, KILLED BY TERMINAL BOREDOM?

Obviously that’s all rhetorical – I have no idea! Neither do you! Neither does anyone else! Watching lobbyists do their jobs at the moment is quite amazing, I have to say – I don’t think I’ve ever read so many emails that say “nah mate, not a fcuking clue” with as many fancy words and with as much variation.

You know what the worst thing about this is, though? The very worst? The fact that it will NEVER STOP. It is entirely likely that I will live the rest of my life (admittedly, based on questionable lifestyle choices that might only be another 15 years, but still) hearing the word ‘Brexit’ EVERY SINGLE DAY. Maybe I can get someone to hypnotise me so that each time it’s spoken aloud I flash back to some sort of womblike happyplace and get suffused with a warm feeling of contentment; that would be nice, and would make a nice change from the weird one-two punch combo of nausea and very acute despair that it currently engenders.

Anyway, another seven days have passed, another billion links have passed before my eyes, and I have once again compiled the very finest – the choicest, the juiciest, the plumpest and most eye-catchingly sheeny – of them here for your pleasure. FINGER MY LINKY WARES, WEBMONGS! This, as ever, is Web Curios.

By Vaka Valo

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH A BRAND NEW CRATEDIGGING SELECTION FROM INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE WHO NOW LIVES IN BERLIN BUT WHO IS STILL AN EXCELLENT DJ!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS THE FEELING THAT ONE-CLICK SHOPPING ON INSTA MIGHT NOT BE VERY GOOD FOR PEOPLE ON THE WHOLE:

• Facebook and New Zealand: One of two statements released by Facebook this week following last Friday’s shooting in New Zealand (the second is here) – they both address the steps that the platform took in the immediate aftermath of the event to limit the spread and visibility of the footage. These statements, along with that Tweeted by YouTube earlier this week, do a reasonably good job of explaining how incredibly hard it is to automatically block this stuff (the Facebook explainer about how AI-powered video analysis works in these cases is broadly good, and does a decent job of outlining exactly why outlier events such as these are so incredibly hard for machine-vision to identify and suppress), but the detail that really struck me was that in the YouTube statement where the platform revealed that at points last week it was detecting new uploads of the footage at the rate of one a second. One a second. Regular readers of Web Curios might have gotten the perfectly reasonable impression that I’m not a huge fan of the social media companies, but even someone whose default position is largely akin to ‘Facebook is a cancer and frankly everything was better on dial-up’ can see that, well, if 60 people a minute were seeking to share first-person footage of dozens of people being murdered then that doesn’t feel like a problem of technology so much as a problem of humanity.
• FB Extending Watch Party to Live TV: Or at least that’s what it’s doing in the US and Latin America, where live broadcast through FB is more of a thing. This feature will enable users to set up Watch Parties (whereby people can watch the same TV show simultaneously through Facebook) with live TV – “When users with access to the feature start a Watch Party, they will see a new “on TV” option, which will enable them to choose the live game. Watch Party will then feature the score of the game atop the discussion. Facebook said it will test other interactive components, such as letting hosts add trivia questions and live polls.” Exciting, isn’t it? What? Oh, fine.
• Facebook Gaming Getting Own Tab In-App: This really isn’t interesting AT ALL, or indeed hugely significant beyond being another example of Facebook desperately trying to make gaming a thing on the platform in the same way as it is on YouTube and Twitch. It won’t work, but well done Mark for your persistence and optimism! In fairness, I imagine if you’re working with audiences outside major markets, where Facebook literally is the internet, this might actually be worth looking at, but, in the main, gaming on Facebook is to gaming on YouTube/Twitch as vegan cheese is to actual dairy produce.
• Facebook Moves To End Discriminatory Advertising: US-only, but it’s an interesting precedent (and says a lot about the lag between Facebook saying it’s going to do something vs them actually taking action). You may recall that 2-3 years ago there was a spate of stories about how advertisers flogging property, jobs or credit on Facebook were using its ad targeting tools to effectively discriminate against certain types of people, either targeting or excluding people specifically on the basis of income or race. Facebook has now bowed to the (legal) pressure from various US institutions to now disable the ability for advertisers to target or exclude people based on age, gender or postcode location when peddling credit, housing or employment – which is good! Do take a minute though to google ‘Facebook discriminatory ads’ and see exactly how long it has taken them to enact this, despite having been talking up their good intentions for 24+ months.
• Facebook Automatic Revenge-Porn Takedowns: This is interesting, though I am slightly confused as to how it will work in practice. Facebook has announced that it will start using video analysis techniques to identify and remove revenge porn at the point of upload: “By using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can now proactively detect near nude images or videos that are shared without permission on Facebook and Instagram.” The bit that really puzzles me about is the ‘shared without permission’ line – how, exactly, will software be able to determine the consensuality or otherwise of any filming? Still, regardless, this is A Good Thing and should be applauded.
• Insta Launching In-App Shopping: Or, more accurately, EVEN MORE SEAMLESS ONLINE SHOPPING! A cohort of 20 retailers has been signed up in the US to launch this feature, which will enable users to pay for purchases within the app rather than having to click through to a retailer’s payment portal to complete the transaction – “when people decide to buy a product from a brand or retailer on Instagram, they’ll be able to pay for that product inside the app instead of leaving Instagram to finish the transaction on a retailer’s website. Instagram will keep a small cut of the sale for facilitating the purchase, and it’s partnering with PayPal to process the payments.” So that’s it, then – you’ll no longer even have to think before two-tapping your way through to a shiny new bag as worn by your favourite shiny-haired influencer, or a multipack of oat milk, or whatever tat you’re being stealth-peddled. This is obviously HUGE for retailers, who til now have had to had to put up with a relatively friction-y user experience for Insta purchases; once this starts to roll out properly I can see it becoming a truly massive sales channel for…well, anything really. Even better (worse?), the fact that it’s all baked-in in-app means that in theory it ought to be easy to sort endorsement fees, etc, for influencers; you can imagine a feature whereby retailers can approve a, say, 1% fee on each sale for the click-to-buy link on an Influencer’s post. Thank GOD that we’ll all soon have another way to keep the massive, grinding wheels of global capitalism turning ever-faster.
• LinkedIn Adds Lookalike Audience Targeting: This is, potentially, very useful, though one might also argue that everyone you’re likely to reach on LinkedIn is basically exactly the same, some sort of vat-grown MASTER OF BUSINESS who exists only to CRUSH and WIN, and so therefore you don’t really need to do any targeting at all.
• What Happens In An Internet Minute: Here’s a graphic showing the INSANE VOLUME OF STUFF that happens each minute on the internet. This is exactly the sort of thing you are going to see in crap presentations for the next 12 months, illustrating the sheer MAD AND CRAZY PACE OF MODERN ONLINE LIFE – what it shows me, though, is that there is TOO MUCH STUFF out there and that as a result it’s even less likely that anyone will care about your sh1t brand campaign. Tell you what, here’s an idea – next time one of your clients briefs you on coming up with some digital comms-type stuff involving CONTENT, why not respond with a copy of this graphic and the simple answer “No, client, let us not do that. There is too much STUFF and people are already nearing saturation point when it comes to the consumption of THINGS in every waking moment of their lives, so let’s not make more pointless digital detritus that will sit, unwatched and unread and unloved, gathering dust. Let us not make any CONTENT; let’s maybe just stop this crap for a bit, eh?”? You could do it, you know, and it would be GLORIOUS. Try it!
• Takumi: Following neatly from the previous point, WHY DOES THIS EXIST?! This is a website by Lexus, all about the Japanese concept of ‘Takumi’ – the sort of mastery that comes from thousands of hours of repetition of a particular task or skill (60,000, in fact) – which features a lightly-interactive short film talking about the oddly obsessional nature of mastery of any practice, and profiling several hugely skilled craftspeople across a number of fields. It’s beautifully shot, well-narrated and the 10 minutes or so I watched are genuinely quite interesting but, well, WHY???? Yes, fine, I know that there’s obviously some sort of throughline from this ‘craftsmanship and expertise’ stuff and the HIGH-PRECISION LUXURY of an expensive car, but this seems like such a waste – of a nice concept, of money, of time. God grant us respite from advertisers as auteurs, please.
• Bushwick Analytica: “Bushwick Analytica is a series of workshops recently held at Bushwick Public Library inviting local middle schoolers to harness the power of data driven advertising and develop and promote their own targeted campaigns. These sessions delve into the inner workings of internet advertising, and the many ways that data is collected online and used to categorize us.” These are GREAT – special shout out to Michael, whose ad for ‘dogs’ is pretty much the best creative you’re likely to see this year.

By Ian Fisher

NEXT, ENJOY THIS LEGITIMATELY SUPERB MIX OF BEATLES AND SOUL AND FUNK BY SAM REDMORE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO THINK THAT ESTABLISHING A NETWORK OF PLAYGROUND FENCES TO SELL BONGO ACCESS CARDS TO TEENAGE BOYS IS, WHILST ETHICALLY ‘DUBIOUS’, A LEGITIMATELY GREAT BUSINESS IDEA AND A POTENTIAL PATHWAY TO MILLIONS, PT.1:

• Know Their Name: A memorial site created for the victims of Christchurch, simply presenting each of their names; clicking through takes you to a picture and a line about them. This is obviously incredibly sad – it’s the short text descriptors that absolutely ruined me here.
• Basement: Weirdly, despite the fact that we’ve all decided that Facebook is A Bad Thing and that Instagram is rapidly becoming a similarly dystopian nightmare of advertising and misinformation, there hasn’t been a new social network for a while. Or at least there hadn’t til this week, when Basement suddenly appeared – quick, WHAT IS YOUR BASEMENT STRATEGY??? Anyway, this is unlikely to ever take off or become a thing but I present it to you anyway, in case you feel like attempting to persuade all your friends to leave the comforting bosom of the Zuckerbergian ecosystem in favour of a shonky, underdeveloped, largely empty online environment. Basement’s ‘thing’ is that each person’s network is capped at 20 people, meaning you create a small community of friends, presumably people you know in real life, with whom you can engage in ‘fun online activities’ such as CHAT and MEME SHARING! So, er, like a Whatsapp group then? GREAT! There is literally no point to this at all, but I do like the fact that it adevrtises one of its standout features as ‘NO INFLUENCERS’ and then below that caveats it with ‘YOU’RE THE INFLUENCER!’. Basement – an app for people who are really salty about the fact that noone gives a fcuk what they say or think.
• Generative FM: This is basically infinite music. Oh, ok, fine, ‘music’ is an elastic term and the pieces here collected might not fit your own personal definition of it, but it’s definitely infinite sound which is probably basically the same thing, right? Generative FM contains a selection of generative pieces – “This site is a collection of generative music pieces which can be listened to. The term “generative music” describes music which changes continuously and is created by a system. Such systems often generate music for as long as one is willing to listen. The pieces featured on this site are not recordings. The music is generated by a different system created for each piece. These systems have been designed such that each performance is unique and plays continuously without repetition.” It’s very much on the ‘ambient’ end of the spectrum, and I’ve had one of these playing in the background for the past 10 minutes while I type and to be honest it’s yet to coalesce into anything that could reasonably be described as a tune or melody but, well, if you want a website that will churn out sounds which sound almost exactly like they’re being produced at random and if you want it to do it forever then this is basically your Nirvana.
• Changing Sketches To Photorealistic Masterpieces: The latest bit of GAN-bongo from NVidia, as they present the latest iteration of their super-clever machine-trained image-fiddling software; click the link and just watch a minute or so of the video and marvel at how incredibly good the software now is at generating realistic images from the simplest of brushstrokes. The bit where the artist creates a waterfall over a cliff was where I got properly impressed; honestly, we’re NEVER going to be able to tell what’s real or not in the future (‘the future’, potentially, being as early as ‘next month’).
• RoboRace: More PR for NVidia here, who sponsor this project; RoboRace is…oh, look, they can tell you: it’s the “world’s first competition for human + machine teams, using both self-driving and manually-controlled cars. It is a new platform for brands, organizations and individuals to test the development of their automated driving systems.” The site is heavy on shiny photos of the titular RoboCar and some video of it and other vehicles bezzing around racetracks, but it’s noticeably lighter on any actual details of how, well, it all works, and when and where it happens, and how you can watch any of it. Still, if you’re not that worried about pesky things like that then perhaps you’ll find this interesting – if nothing else, the car looks awfully fast and future, and that’s what counts, right?
• DNA Friend: A spoof website advertising an in-no-way-creepy DNA-testing service of the 23andme ilk; I don’t quite know why this exists, but it’s rather nicely done and some of the details are very cute; I was a particular fan of the instructions, including the very specific ‘open your mouth and take a picture of your saliva’, and the line about ‘send your DNA to our trained team of geneticists and marketing professionals’ felt pretty close to the bone.
• Waffle House Vistas: Photographer Micah Cash has taken this series of photos in Waffle House restaurants across the US (Waffle House is a ubiquitous and low-rent chain of diner restaurants which you can find pretty much anywhere you go in America, for those unfamiliar); each photo is taken from inside the restaurant, facing out to capture the view from the windows. There’s something really interesting about the picture that it takes of everyday, ordinary, (sub)urban America, and I would love to see this replicated in the UK with Wetherspoons pubs, or Wimpys, or similar. Someone do that, please. Thanks.
• Open Meals: As far as I can tell, Open Meals is a Japanese organisation that undertakes research and enquiry into the future of food and eating – to be honest, it’s a bit hard to tell with all the slightly esoteric language and terms like ‘food singularity’ being thrown about willy-nilly with little care for what they might mean. There are 6 projects collected on the site so far, from ‘Cube’ which explores the idea of 3d-printed cubic units of food as a standardised nutrition delivery system, to the Sushi Singularity which imagines creating bespoke 3d-printed sushi based on genetic analysis of the diner, with all the sushi bits designed to complement or compensate for people’s unique genetic composition. This is all obviously MAD, but ingeniously and supremely Japanesely so (that’s…not really acceptable English, is it? Sorry).
• Cake: This is quite good, I must say. Cake is a new browser, designed specifically for mobile, which lets you do all sorts of neat and smart things like setting a top hierarchy of sources from which results will be drawn first and a nice card-based results system. The interface is really nice, and if you’re someone who wants to divorce themselves from the Google ecosystem this might be worth a look.
• Bike Insights: Are you one of those men who has decided as you hit your late-30s/early-40s to replace your personality with a tedious obsession with cycling? Do you secretly think to yourself as you commute into work in your Rapha gear that you’d ‘probably cope OK in the peloton’? Christ alive, you ARE, aren’t you? Anyway, you’ll probably quite like this site, which presents a whole load of information about bikes and cycling and STUFF, specifically relating to frame size and geometry and fit – could you shave 30s off your personal Strava record if you had a slightly better-suited frame to your bike? I DON’T CARE, ALAN.
• Hello Goodbye: This is a very satisfying Chrome plugin which performs the simple, single task of blocking any and all of those infuriating and pointless pop-up helpchat windows that plague many company websites these days. NO I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE A LIMITED AND LIMITING NON-CONVERSATION WITH YOUR POORLY-WRITTEN CHATBOT YOU SH1TBAGS. Now I would like someone to invent one which blocks any and all autoplaying videos on US news sites too, and also perhaps one which replaces all current news with that of two decades ago when everything broadly made sense.
• Threedy: This is either brilliant, magical software or a shonky mess, it’s quite hard to tell. If Threedy does all the things it says it does, it’s definitely the former – it purports to be able to spin up 3d models from simple photos taken with your smartphone, which sounds sort of incredible – previous apps of this type have required you to do an awful lot of moving around and scanning an object from all angles, but this claims you can get the model from a couple of static shots. There’s a bunch of other features apparently forthcoming; if you’re interested in 3d modeling at all, this is very much worth a look.
• Smartify: This is an interesting idea. Smartify is an app for the art world which has partnered with a wide-ranging selection of art institutions around the world (in London these include the Saatchi Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and others) to enable you to have an enhanced gallery experience through technology. Users can snap artworks in participating venues to learn more about them, get additional content and material pertaining to each work, and collect them into a personal artlovers’ scrapbook of all their favourite pieces. The breadth of galleries already onboard makes this worth checking out – this seems like the sort of thing which could make a kid’s experience of a gallery visit moderately more engaging.
• The World Hidden From Men: A selection of photographs from National Geographic by women photographers, specifically examining how gender impacts the role of and access granted to female photographers. Beautiful shots.
• Chain Letters: Excellent wordy website and Twitter account recently passed 55,000 followers and celebrated by publishing this EXCELLENT game; it’s a bit tricky to explain so I’m not going to bother. All you need to know is that it involves wordplay and anagrams and it’s a RACE AGAINST TIME and it’s pleasingly head-scratchy. This will make you think harder than anything else you’re likely to have to do at work today.
• Blinker: This is a really clever idea. Blinker’s a US app designed to let people easily sell their cars – the clever bit is that it’s all automated using image recognition. You take a photo of the back of the car and the app analyses the image to work out what make and model and year the car is based on the design and proportions of its taillights and bumper and the rest; it then creates the listing through which you can sell or refinance the vehicle. Very smart indeed, and a really good use of image recognition and analysis.
• Wear Your Meds: On the one hand, this is a nice initiative designed to destigmatise mental health issues and medication, and offering people the opportunity to be open about the conditions they may be suffering from and the medication they take to cope; on the other hand, this equally looks like a hipster accessory shop and you just know that there’s a certain cohort of teens that would see a pinbadge featuring a photo of a Xanax bar as the ne plus ultra of druggy craft chic. Your choice which way to see this one, really.
• The Cat Trap Is Working: A subReddit devoted to cats that have fallen for their owners’ devious plans to trap them. O MAOW!
• The Apollo Press Kits: This is awesome – a huge archive of press materials from the Apollo missions, both from NASA and from their tech partners. If you’re in any way interested in space travel, this is an incredible time capsule.

By Jacob Howard

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS VERY SQUELCHY ACID BREAKBEAT MIX TO ACCOMPANY THE NEXT BIT, MIXED BY HELIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO THINK THAT ESTABLISHING A NETWORK OF PLAYGROUND FENCES TO SELL BONGO ACCESS CARDS TO TEENAGE BOYS IS, WHILST ETHICALLY ‘DUBIOUS’, A LEGITIMATELY GREAT BUSINESS IDEA AND A POTENTIAL PATHWAY TO MILLIONS, PT.2:

• Spreadsheet Horror Stories: If you have to deal with spreadsheets professionally then, well, I pity you. Sorry. Still, perhaps if you do you will appreciate the tales of TERROR AND HORROR here gathered on the hugely compelling website of the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (no, really). You know all those stereotypes about accountants being fundamentally dull, characterless, colourless people whose idea of a fun time is playing with their scientific calculator’s random number function? This site does very little to dispel them. Still, if you have made a spreadsheet-related fcukup at work recently this site might make you feel marginally better about it – at least yours didn’t involve anyone dying. Did it?
• Colour Our Collections: I’m a bit late with this, but still. Apparently for a few years now various libraries, archives and other collections have each year made some of the materials in their files available as prints to colour in; this year’s selection were released in February, but they are all archived here along with those from previous years. If your kids have exhausted all their colouring-in books, or if you’re a grown adult who for some reason finds solace and calm in drawing VERY CAREFULLY inbetween the lines then you will love this. The quality of the materials varies rather – I do feel like the University of Glasgow maybe phoned theirs in a bit – but, in general, if you’re after a bunch of outlines of old woodcuts and medical drawings to fill in then ENJOY.
• Fantasy Birding: At some point fantasy sports stopped being the sort of thing that you did casually with your friends and instead became some sort of weird, centralised hypercompetitive thing, with substitutes and captains and all sorts of modifiers and multipliers and dear God it all feels like work to me. If you hanker after the simpler times when you just picked a bunch of players and then forgot about them until Barry from accounts won at the end of the season then you may enjoy this – FANTASY BIRDWATCHING! Yes, that’s right, you too can now enjoy all the fun of birdwatching without, er, seeing any birds or going outside! This is so, so baffling to me, but here it is – “Enter as many upcoming or ongoing contests as you want, or start your own and invite your friends. In the simplest games, such as the North American Big Year, the object is to record the most species within a designated timeframe and geographic area. In other games, you may earn points based on each bird’s rarity or likelihood of occurrence. Instead of drafting and trading players, the main moves you make will be choosing a location to visit each day. Weather forecasts and recent sightings will guide you in your planning, and you will earn points for all birds observed and reported near your current location. Strike a balance between checking in at reliable hotspots and chasing rarities in remote corners of the globe.” This is MAD but also quite, quite wonderful at the same time.
• Musicards: Customisable online cards designed to teach the principles of music theory – notation, time signatures, etc, Spectacularly un-flashy, but potentially really useful for students.
• Interwoven: Diana Scherer is a German-born artist living in Amsterdam whose quite remarkable work uses living plants as both its subject and its material; Scherer somehow manages to create worth through the intertwined root systems of plants, which knit together to create strange organic patterns of embroidery. The effect is quite magical and, to me at least, really quite intensely creepy although I couldn’t properly explain to you why.
• Otter: A N Other live transcription service which will not only automatically take meeting notes but, it promises, will also assign actions, etc, from the audio log with no user input required. I am hugely sceptical about stuff like this – it never tends to work half as well in practise as promised – but I’ve seen several people who I don’t think are idiots talk positively about it on Twitter so perhaps this is the rare instance of something that does live up to its own hype.
• DarkaYarka: Stuff that is a ‘trend’ in 2019 – stuff made out of felt that looks like animals. After all the various masks and things meet DarkaYarka, whose Etsy shop sells felted slippers sculpted into the shape of animals (amongst other things). If you can look at the panda slippers and not emit an involuntary ‘squee’ of slight cute then, well, you’re a stronger man than I.
• Threads: Threads is best-described as a Slackalike – another collaborative working tool designed to combine the chatroom-type interface we all know and loathe with various other co-working gubbins. The particular gimmick with Threads is that it is designed to assist with and facilitate collaborative decisionmaking, with clear threading and topic distinction. I am personally hugely skeptical of the universal need for stuff like this – email is not the problem, it’s your working culture that’s the problem – but if you’re in the market for an EXCITING NEW DIGITAL COLLABORATION PLATFORM then this might be worth a look.
• Killed by Google: A list of all the projects that Google has started and then killed over the years (we’ll soon be able to add Google+ to this, and trust me when I tell you that I am hurting about this almost as much as you are) – it’s a staggering list, not least because of all the stuff on here that you will probably never have heard of. Google has killed more things than most companies EVER make; regardless of what you think of the company, it’s hard not to be slightly awed by the sheer pace and volume of innovation.
• The Trove: Oh wow, WHAT an archive. This site seemingly collects every single ruleset and magazine and supplementary pamphlet ever made about any roleplaying game ever. You want a scan of the Dungeons & Dragons basic rulebook from 1971? I mean, I can’t imagine for the life of me why you would, but who cares? IT’S HERE! Honetsly, this is remarkable – if you’ve any interest in tabletop gaming, roleplaying or even just broader games design then this will be Nirvana for you .
• Game Maker’s Toolkit: A YouTube channel which specialises in videos documenting the process of making videogames; you sort of have to be really into the medium for this to mean anything to you, but if you’re interested in a 20-minute disquisition into the optimal ways of implementing a skill tree, or the precise definitional elements that make something a ‘roguelike’, then this is honestly fascinating. It’s when I write stuff like this that I become quite grateful that my girlfriend doesn’t really read Curios (and it’s also when I once again express mild internal amazement at ever having lost my virginity).
• Journey North: There have been a few cute little nature sites I’ve stumbled across of late – last week’s butterfly tagging madness, and now this. Journey North is a site dedicated to information about migration patterns, avian and otherwise, with maps showing migration routes, tips of where to see specific fauna at various parts of the year, and a general motherlode of information about migration and related topics. It’s all so wholesome, and for once I’m not even wincing as I type that.
• Datahoarder: The news that MySpace has lost everyone’s music has been massively underreported, to my mind – or rather, the reality underlying the news has been inadequately explored. The idea of digital impermanence really ought to be one we might want to spend a bit more time exploring, given that we’ve all decided to blithely chuck all our stuff ‘in the cloud’ without, I’m reasonably certain, paying enough attention to what might happen should the provider of said cloud storage go belly-up. Anyway, this is a subReddit dedicated to those people who are very, very aware of the impermanence of data and who have decided to address it by storing EVERYTHING. Some of this stuff is cute, but quite a lot of it is obsessional and weird; just the way we like it.
• The Wu Tang Collection: Absolutely the most incredible YouTube archive of weird old kung fu movies you will ever find, hands down. Hundreds of full-length films here, many of which look truly mental – Shaolin Youth Posse! Ninja Pirates! ROBO VAMPIRE!!! Honestly, go and lock yourselves in a meeting room with some snacks for the next 80 minutes and enjoy yourselves with Samurai Blood, Samurai Guts – it’s what your boss wants you to do, promise.
• Nokia 3310 Jam: A selection of tiny games, all designed as though they were made to be played on an old Nokia. Some of these are honestly great – there’s some wonderfully inventive coding going on here to work within the constraints of the form. I particularly enjoyed ‘Get Out’, but there are dozens here so find your own favourite (STOP COPYING ME).
• Pawnbarian: Finally in this week’s miscellania, Pawnbarian is a really clever little game where you’re tasked with clearing the monsters from each screen; the gimmick is that the moves that your character is able to complete to undertake the task are determined by the cards you’re dealt, each of which corresponds to the movement set of a particular chess piece, placing new combinations of constraints on your movement set on each level. Really nicely done.

By Owen Freeman

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MIXES WITH THIS EXCELLENT ESSENTIAL MIX BY SHLOMO FOR RADIO1!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Animated Antiquity: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, who cares? This blog collects representations of Greek and Roman antiquity in cartoons. No idea why, but if you want to gain an exhaustive understanding of all the different ways Bugs Bunny wore a toga then WOW are you in luck.
• Having It All: A collection of artworks curated with a very good eye.
• Terrible Things Happening In Cold Places: Literally a listing of bad things that have happened in cold places. I have, honestly, NO idea why this exists and find the fact that it does ever so slightly unsettling.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Beautiful New York City: An Insta feed posting photos of the city with a focus on eating out and food. Except, and this is a good one, it’s all entirely automated – it’s been set up as an experiment in creating a totally automated influencer persona by Chris Buetti who’s a data engineer in the US, and it’s been an astonishing success; Buetti explains the idea and the process in this article, but the fact that the bot has been offered freebies from restaurants in exchange for a nice writeup does rather suggest that the jig might well be up with the whole influencer game.
• Long Service London: I adore this. This account shares photographs of the longest-serving staff members at London restaurants, bars and cafes, along with a few details about them, their life and their work. Gorgeous project.
• Bashir Sultani: Art made out of yellow pencils. It will make sense when you look at the photos, I promise.
• Studio 188: A truly great account which posts its own, ever-so-slightly-shonky reinterpretations of pop culture classics. Their recreation of the opening scenes of Star Wars, featuring a pair of very hairy white shins and a piece of pasta, had me in tears.
• Louise Hagger: Food photography. You will be VERY HUNGRY.
• Morewalls: Gabriella’s an artist who works in various media and who’s based in London and does commissions. Her work’s really nice, and I met her at a party last week and she’s lovely, so take a look and book her if you need anything doing.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Ironic Racism Is Just Racism: In the wake of last Friday, this piece makes the strong and serious point that there’s not really any excuse for edgelordy racist gaggery, and that, whatever millionaire lunkhead Pewdiepie might say, making ‘jokes’ that basically involve you spouting white supremacist rhetoric whilst at the same time declaring it’s fine because irony is, well, really not ok.
• It Was Not An Internet Terror Attack: In the past week we’ve seen the predictable scramble from large sections of the commentariat to blame THE WEB and THE TECH for the massacre. Well, yes, fine, this was very much a crime of the web, insofar as the perpetrator had obviously spent a fair old chunk of time in a variety of online sewers cultivating his particular breed of hate. As this article points out, though, he could equally have arrived at the same place had he subsisted on a media diet of print, radio and telly alone – it’s worth reading in full, but the central thesis can be summarised as follows: “Christchurch isn’t an “internet” terrorist attack. We can’t prevent future attacks by translating the internet-speak in a killer’s manifesto, or tweaking a platform’s algorithm. The attack in Christchurch can only be understood is part of a global problem with Islamophobic violence.”
• Ayn Rand Is A Dick: Except, or course, you can’t ignore the role of tech companies the web. This isn’t about shootings or terror – instead, it’s an excerpt from a forthcoming book about the general amorality of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the way in which VC money has absolutely skewed the way in which businesses think and operate and how, as a direct result of that and the insane success of a coterie of ‘disruptive’ business, it’s absolutely skewed the way much of the world works too as an unforeseen, unintended consequence. “Short-term decisions are all Silicon Valley seems to care about. We don’t build businesses for the long haul anymore, at least not the venture-backed ones. Those only need to last long enough to make it to their liquidity event so the investors can get their payday. So if Uber can show growth by squeezing drivers and riders, and Twitter can increase their engagement numbers by relying on white supremacists and outrage, and Facebook can rake in some extra cash from Russian fake news sites—they will do it. And we know they’ll do it, because they did it. Silicon Valley has exhibited total comfort with destroying the social fabric of humanity to make a profit.” Well, quite.
• Instagram’s The New Home For Hate: Hyperbolic headline aside, this is a decent look at how Instagram is increasingly being used as a place where right wing propaganda’s being propagated, and how there are certain peculiarities to the platform that make that a particularly troubling thing. Fashy memes for depressive teens, innit – you can absolutely envisage how you might create an account mixing vaguely relatable emo-meme stuff with a steadily-increasing diet of QAnon madness sprinkled in to gateway some poor kid into the alt right stable, which is SUCH a miserable and 2019 sentence to have just written.
• Lessons on Online Publishing: Apologies in advance for posting a LinkedIn article here – honestly, I feel dirty even typing that – but, honestly, this is really interesting if you’re in any way involved in or curious about online publishing models and practices. C Max Magee founded The Millions, and in this post shares nine things he learned about attempting to make a living publishing stuff online. This is, I promise, good, and largely avoids any of the usual cliches found in most writing on LinkedIn (the word ‘crush’ appears once, but I promise it’s contextually appropriate). It might not make it any easier to get paid for writing on the internet, but it’s some smart analysis of how you might go about trying.
• Y Combinator Day 1: This week saw famed Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator do its annual pitch days, where hundreds of startups attempt to get the attention and backing of some very rich people who will then eviscerate their business in exchange for equity (that’s how it works, right?) – this is a list of all the companies that pitched on day one. Interesting mainly as a snapshot overview of what people think a billion-dollar business idea looks like in 2019 – there are some ideas in here that look genuinely smart (the company dedicated solely to making tech that will let soldiers shoot round corners, for example, is obviously brilliant if the sort of thing I’d feel a touch guilty about getting rich from), whilst others seem to have been generated automatically by software. If you’ve got a brilliant business idea you’re itching to launch, it might be worth looking at this list and seeing whether one of these people has beaten you to it – you do rather feel for the poor people at Vectordash, a ‘cloud gaming solution’, who appear to have been royally fcuked by Google just 24h after appearing on stage.
• Google Stadia: Speaking of Google and cloud gaming (SEAMLESS SEGUE THERE), this is a decent overview of Google’s Stadia project which was announced this week and which, if it works as promised, will absolutely revolutionise gaming and kill the console market within a decade or so. Except, fortunately for consolemakers, internet speeds are still not likely to be consistently good enough everywhere for mass adoption of this sort of service for a good few years, so I reckon they’ll get the PS5 and new XBox out and into hundreds of millions of homes before this becomes a mainstream thing. Still, there’s SO much of this that looks exciting and not a little revolutionary – the idea that you can share footage of your game which anyone could then theoretically jump into to carry on playing the same experience you were having opens up some truly incredible possibilities for what you can do with gameplay design, for one.
• Autonomous Vehicles: Some thoughts about vehicular automation, in the wake of the recent Boeing crashes and the continued uncertainty about the safety or otherwise of driverless cars. There’s some really interesting stuff in here, not least the explanation of the varying ‘levels’ of autonomy which is obvious when you think about it but which I had never, well, thought about. As the article suggests, stage 3 automation (that is, automation with human oversight, as is the case with something cruise control) is in many respects the most dangerous of all, as it requires humans not only to be alert to failure of automated systems and to be able to react quickly to address any failure, but also to be competent to do so which, well, we’re not always.
• Crimebusting With Instagram: This is SO GOOD. Bellingcat explain how they helped catch a wanted man simply by using some excellent and very sneaky (but perfectly accessible) snooping techniques; it’s along similar lines to the piece last week about how much you can glean about people from eavesdropping to their conversations and reading their phones over their shoulders, except FAR more sophisticated. This is properly fascinating and made me want to have a reason to try some of this stuff out for myself; you will read this and then feel a little bit creeped out about your own Insta feed, I promise you.
• What Is Amazon?: This is an exhaistive and slightly exhaisting examination of Amazon as a business – where it came from, how it scaled. “So, what is Amazon? It started as an unbound Walmart, an algorithm for running an unbound search for global optima in the world of physical products. It became a platform for adapting that algorithm to any opportunity for customer-centric value creation that it encountered. If it devises a way to keep its incentive structures intact as it exposes itself through its ever-expanding external interfaces, it – or its various split-off subsidiaries – will dominate the economy for a generation. And if not, it’ll be just another company that seemed unstoppable until it wasn’t.”
• Netflix’s Future Looks Like Television’s Past: An interesting look at how Netflix’s initial promise of choice and breadth and creativity appears to have largely been replaced with a sort of crushing homogeneity of approach, and how the creation of content based on audience preference analysis appears to have had a massively flattening effect: “This is Netflix’s endgame: more of the same, and only more of the same, and all in one place only. You’ve got your two medical shows set in Chicago, your two cop shows set in New York, your four sitcoms about quirky people in apartments, and some aliens, only now you have them not from four different dumb competing corporations but one gigantic one.”
• Foodie: A really interesting look at how the culture and conversation around food has developed over the past few decades, and how the politics of eating and dining are finally beginning to be recognised as being entwined with issues of culture, race, heritage and the rest. I promise that this is a lot more interesting and less hand-wringing than you might think – if at any point over the past year you’ve enjoyed Giles Coren being dragged for being racist, or been on the fringes of the arguments around culinary cultural appropriation, then you’ll know the sort of territory this is exploring.
• Donald Cline’s Secret Children: This is a jaw-dropping and absolutely horrifying story. Donald Cline was a doctor in the US specialising in fertility, who practices throughout the 80s and 90s and who during the course of that time fathered 50 children, born to patients who had no idea that it was Cline’s child they were carrying. He literally impregnated his patients with his own sperm. I…I can’t even, honestly. There is so much jaw-dropping awful in here, but the main thing that amazes me is that his total punishment for this was a $500 fine and being disbarred (after he’d already retired). That…seems lenient? Jesus.
• Roleplaying in GTAV: I’ve featured GTA roleplaying communities on here before, but this is a great overview of a specific server on which players have to stay in character at all times, and where people have actual, mundane jobs that they undertake in-game (God knows why, but, well, it takes all sorts). I find the potential in this sort of thing vast – the idea of using it as a stage for longterm, persistent performance is really interesting to me – but equally it’s all just very silly; do check out some of the streaming videos embedded in the piece and see if you find them as idiotically funny as I do.
• A Brief History of Musical Failure: A beautiful piece of writing about what it’s like to be good, but not quite good enough to be great. I know there’s a very real ‘the sound of no violins’-type element to this sort of thing – “Oh how awful for you to be talented but not quite a genius!” – but I think there’s a very specific sort of sadness in being good enough at something to understand just how far away you are from being brilliant at it, being above average but still not special.
• The Saudi Lie: On MBS and the House of Saud and the incredible PR job undertaken over the past few years by the regime and its expensively-assembled team of advisors, and the largely uncritical line taken by much of the Western media when discussing the country. If you already though that he perhaps wasn’t a particularly good egg this is unlikely to change your opinion.
• Unfeeling Malice: An incredible piece in the LRB exploring the work of the man who gave his name to Asberger’s Syndrome, Hans Asberger, and examining the social and cultural climate within which the condition was first identified and how that affected the manner in which it was treated. This is so, so interesting (if not a touch horrific at times), and the wider considerations around the cultural context within which a medical condition is understood are fascinating: “If the terms ‘autism’ and ‘Asperger’s’ have gained momentum recently, that may be in part because of a rise in environmental triggers, but it’s also because our children’s minds are again under intense scrutiny – though for different reasons. In our era of networking and social media, of ‘ghosting’ and attention-grabbing individuation, we’re anxious about their ability, metaphorically and literally, to get the requisite ‘likes’. We now value a capacity not so much for feeling ‘Gemüt’ – or whatever the quality is that guarantees social inclusion – but for strategically emoting or performing ‘soft skills’. Twenty-first century boys are told they need to get with the programme.”
• Meet Elizabeth Swaney: Finally this week, a profile of Elizabeth Swaney, who competed and came last in the Winter Olympics Freestyle Skiing event. I have never, ever read something where I identified so little with the subject – Swaney and I have attitudes to life so different that we could barely be described as the same species. I found this oddly, weirdly terrifying, and ended it feeling quite glad that I am the lazy failure I have grown up into.

By Jean Vincent Simonet

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is by Loud Hound, and it’s called ‘High in the Bathroom’, and, oddly, it really does sound like the feeling of smoking poor-quality weed out of the school toilet window on a sunny Thursday afternoon in May:

2) This band is called ‘Barrie’ – a good name – and this is called ‘Darjeeling’, and it’s a lovely, slightly ethereal tune with incredibly pleasing (to my ears) rolling drums:

3) This is the latest by the Fat White Family – the song’s good, though I personally preferred them when they were a bit scuzzier, but the video’s the real star here. This looks like it was a lot of fun to shoot, and all the Monty Python stuff is nicely done:

4) This is excellent; Karen O and Danger Mouse filmed the video for their track ‘Woman’ as in one-take, as a single-shot, on the Late Show. This is so, so impressive (and it’s a great song too):

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new one from Manga, who’s still probably my favourite UK MC bar none right now. It’s called ‘We Fall’:

6) Finally this week, I don’t really know how to describe this – it’s sort of like a weirdly emo acoustichiphop stream of consciousness thing and I absolutely love it. It’s HUGELY teenage, and the band name is obviously awful, but, well, who cares? This is Wicca Phase Springs Eternal (see?) with ‘Rest’ AND THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF WORDS AND LINKS BYE BYE BYE HAPPY FRIDAY I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND PLANNED AND THAT THE REST OF YOUR DAY PASSES IN A HAPPY BLUR AND THAT WHEN YOU GET HOME TONIGHT THERE IS SOMETHING LOVELY AND UNEXPECTED WAITING FOR YOU THAT REMINDS YOU OF SOMEONE YOU LOVE BYE BYE BYE HAVE FUN TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU ALL BYE TAKE CARE BYE!: