Even by the standards of 2018, this has been an absolute ROLLERCOASTER of a week. A Government falls in Spain, one stumbles and maybe gets back on its feet in Italy (but if it makes it to Christmas I will personally be AMAZED), Don met Kim, a Ukrainian journalist came back from the dead, and we all continued to gawp, amazed, through our magical glass rectangles as the shitshow circus limps round the ring once more. 

WHAT LARKS!

Still, though, balls to all that. It’s SUMMER! I mean, not that you could tell looking out at the massed rooftops of SW9 right now, but all the major news outlets assure me that it is in fact the first of June and that means ICECREAM and SPRINKLERS and SUNBURN and DRUNKEN NIGHTBUS ARGUMENTS WITH STRANGERS and SALMONELLA and ALCOPOPS and ILL-ADVISED FIRST TIME DRUG EXPERIENCES and FALLING IN LOVE EVERY 5 SECONDS and DISAPPOINTMENT and LONELINESS and MIVVIS! All of those things!

So, while you soak in that PICTURE IN PROSE and contemplate your first big weekend of the Summer, while away the waning hours of the working day with the following LINK PLATTER to roast over the red-hot coals of your intellect – carefully selected, marinaded (don’t ask in what), and arranged below for you to select the choicest cuts at your leisure. Do not, whatever you do, attempt to consume them all, though (no really, please do, otherwise this is all for naught and frankly I could do without the existential worries right now) – this, as ever, is WEB CURIOS!

By Nicolas Uribe

SEEING AS IT’S JUNE 1, LET’S KICK OFF WITH AKIRA’S LATEST SUMMERY LO-FI HIPHOP MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO WADE THROUGH ANOTHER SET OF MARY MEEKER’S SLIDES:

• Facebook Messenger Stories Add Polls: Look, let’s be honest with each other here – I didn’t go to bed as early as I probably ought to have done last night, the amount of ‘news’ this week is honestly negligible, and so I’m probably going to phone this first section in a bit while I get myself used to the fact that it’s 6:54am and I have a good 5 hours’ writing to get through. You don’t mind, do you? Good! Anyway, you can now add a ‘poll’-type function to the Stories you may or may not be creating using Messenger. Are you excited? ARE YOU???
• Snapchat Launching Developer Platform…Soon!: Really, there is NOTHING happening this week. Even this, a moderately interesting piece of news indicating that developers are soon going to be able to get their hands on the ability to integrate Snapchat into third-party apps, is only a ‘maybe in the future’ piece; still, let’s work with what we’ve got. Reports suggest that Snapchat will soon open up its developer platform, meaning that app makers will be able to implement ‘log in with Snapchat’ options which will then take all of Snap’s interesting and fun and GOD I AM SO FCUKING BORED OF SEEING PEOPLE AIRBRUSHED AND WEARING DOG EARS CAN WE CALL STOP? visually arresting features and allow them to be used by the app in question. Which, if you’re into the idea of making AR-type app experience but don’t want to actually have to code any of it from scratch, is probably quite an appealing idea. Anyway, it’s not hear yet and there’s no indication as to when it might be, so CALM YOURSELVES.
• Google Launches Neighbourly: Or at least it does in India. Neighbourly is a new Google product, designed to effectively work as a localised Q&A app, enabling people to ask questions of the community within a set geographical radius of them – the idea being, I imagine, that it will act as a competitor to Facebook Groups and other local-area information services. Sadly it’s VERY geo-limited and only available to users in Mumbai – I am not, sadly, in Mumbai, and so don’t have any additional info as to whether it’s any good or not (also, it only launched yesterday GIVE ME TIME), but the concept is potentially a very useful one, and I’m curious to see how this does and whether it gets a broader rollout.
• Airbnb Launches Stories: Included here mainly as evidence for my ‘everything is going to be a fcuking Story soon’ narrative.
• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2018: I just did a quick check on what I said about this last year – I won’t paste it here, it…it may shock you to hear this, but it turns out it wasn’t  funny or insightful – and I realised that this is the fifth year in a row that I will have mentioned Mary sodding Meeker and her Internet bloody Trends report and oh God I am so, so tired. Anyway, if you want 300-odd slides of largely contextless DATA about…well, not really the internet if we’re honest, more a general grab-bag of business, tech and economic trends, and if you want those slides to be incredibly ugly and slightly grating on the eye, then once again it’s an early Christmas present. You can read some topline thoughts from Rob Blackie on WHAT IT ALL MEANS here, but your basic takeaways are that we’re all using the internet more than ever, that mobile is BIG, lots of people are buying voice assistants, we like purchasing things online, and – and this really did strike me this year – THERE IS NO NEED FOR THE SLIDES TO BE THIS UGLY. Seriously, can we have a whip-round and hire Kleiner Perkins a Powerpoint monkey to make this all less painful to look at? Anyway, I personally don’t think that this is that much of an indispensable read any more – there’s plenty of other data out there about TRENDS and stuff, and there’s more published every day, and most of it is far less deliberately ugly and obtuse than this stuff, and, frankly, most of these slides just seem to say “LOOK! A GRAPH GOING UP!” without any of the necessary wider contextualisation of said slide and I can’t be bothered. You shouldn’t bother either. Can we all decide to stop worshipping at this particular altar? Come on, REJECT MEEKER!
• Teens Hate Facebook: Or at least, American teens, as surveyed by Pew, hate Facebook. Or, more accurately, American teens are, according to this survey, using Facebook significantly less than they were three years ago. Although, hang on, didn’t we do ‘THE TEENS ARE ALL LEAVING FACEBOOK!’’ about, er, three years ago?Anyway, here is some MORE DATA, which is obviously all US but which won’t prevent lots of people from glossing over that and inferring some sort of universal truths from this. Winners are Snapchat, Insta and YouTube, unsurprisingly – the stats about internet usage stood out to me as interesting, also, as this is the first report of this ilk that I’ve seen that acknowledges the fact that, contrary to those spurious ‘5-6 hours’ claims made by other surveys of this type, kids are online literally all of the time; they cannot conceive of an instance in their waking life when they are not able to access the web and associated tools. Which is obviously true of all of us, but I did get an honest little futureweird frisson from reading that.
• The Hope Page: I am slightly amazed that I haven’t seen this done before, not least given we’re a whole year or so away from the boom in ‘use your spare processing power to mine crypto!’ scams. Anyway, this is an excellent, simple idea by UNICEF Australia – give the site access to your CPU and it will start doing some low-key Bitcoin (or whatever) mining, with the proceeds going to the charity. Simple, clever, easy to participate in, this is a lovely execution.
• The Jurassic Box: This links to a writeup of a US stunt for the latest Jurassic Park film (SPOILER: THE DINOSAURS ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN FOOLISH, HUBRISTIC MAN IMAGINED!) which isn’t itself that interesting – large box with film logo on it driven around LA is about the extent of it, frankly – but the ‘Ask Alexa’ call to action is an interesting idea and the sort of thing which you can probably do some fun and moderately creative stuff with, should you be so inclined to rip it off.
• Generate Your Own Bullsh1t Accenture Slogan: Riffing on Accenture’s jaw-droppingly bad ad campaign around the POWER OF AI (which if you haven’t encountered it yet really is spectacular – read the transcript of its ad here for the full effect), this little site autogenerates its own versions of the ad’s appalling slogans (COULD AI MAKE CRUISE SHIPS CLAIRVOYANT???? COULD IT??? ARE YOU FCUKING MAD??? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN???) for lulz. I just got “Can Google Duplex make a dog avuncular?”, which has cheered me up no end.
• Women Cannes: Finally this week, a move to acknowledge the often…unequal gender power dynamics in adland at this year’s annual festival of egos, cocaine and rose on the Croisette. Women Cannes is asking female attendees at this year’s Festival to echo the #timesup campaign by wearing black to highlight the industry’s own burden of sexism, and is also inviting people to nominate women in the industry who deserve, but do not necessarily receive, recognition. A good idea, and, should you be planning on heading off to spend other people’s money in the South of France in a few weeks’ time, something that is worth supporting.

By Lindsay Bottos

NEXT, HOUSEY VIBES FROM DJ PAULETTE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE IN THE PUBLIC EYE IS SECRETLY A DREADFUL RACIST, PT.1:

• Gif Cube: Gifs! We all LOVE gifs! What could be better than a gif, all looping and sassy, infinitely spinning in an idle browser tab, FOREVER? Nothing! Except, perhaps, that same gif, printed onto a cube of hollow sandstone and sitting in ACTUAL PHYSICAL SPACE before you! I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the point of this is – to be clear, this is taking an innately kinetic form of media and  transposing it onto an inanimate object to no discernible end whatsoever – but if you’d like to have a permanent reminder of your favourite reaction gif then WOW are you in luck here.

• The Longest Poem In The World: This very much has the look and feel of a site that has existed forever, but I’ve never seen it before and as such I’m going to claim that it only blinked into existence recently rather than admitting that there may be inadequacies in my all-seeing web panopticon. The Longest Poem In The World pulls tweets from the ether and arranges them into a rhyming poem, with no thought to anything other than the rhyme scheme. As wonderfully, beautifully, poetically nonsensical as you’d imagine – you might think it will just throw up rubbish, and you’d largely be right, but then you get juxtapositions like ““I want a truck so bad ” / “So all my friends left and now I’m sad” and, well, are you telling me there isn’t a HIGHER POWER behind this sort of beauty?
• Mix: Do you remember StumbleUpon? It was a very web2.0-type site, a bit like Digg or pre-Reddit Reddit, which effectively sought to work as a content discovery and recommendation engine and was basically killed by social media. Except it didn’t die – it’s limped on beyond what I would have expected its natural lifespan to be, and is now pivoting to become Mix. Mix is designed to surface content based on what you tell it you like – like a million and one recommendation engines before it, it promises much but the experience is a fundamentally empty one, imho. The problem I have with these things is that the recommendations are never leftfield or interesting enough – it all feels very Fiat 500, if you know what I mean, the curatorial equivalent of the ‘Hot New Stuff!’ tab on an MSN homepage or similar. Contrast the sort of thing you get served from this with the sort of stuff you’ll find by lurking a few popular subReddits around a topic of interest, for example, and you quickly see that algocuration is still a little way from being any good. Although, er, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
• The Queer Comics Database: An excellent resource which lets you discover comicbook series based on their representation of LGBTx characters – you can search by queer representation, subject matter, etc, and there’s a HUGE wealth of titles in here, many of which are webcomics which can be read online. Regardless of your sexuality or interest in queer issues, this is a great way of finding new comics to read.
• Flopstarter: Crap Kickstarter ideas – all fake, but beautifully-imagined and wonderfully dystopian and Black Mirror-ish. I particularly like the trust app, which automatically sends a copy of every message you send on your phone to your partner, and the ‘Natural Death Beef – made from cows who have just died in their sleep’, but you will find your own favourites.
• In The Eyes Of The Animal: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mosquito? No, I don’t imagine you have – WHY NOT?? In The Eyes Of The Animal is a VR experience which seeks to rectify your appalling paucity of imagination by letting you step into the…er…eyes of a selection of animals, including a frog, a mosquito, a dragonfly and an owl. It’s…not quite as immersively amazing as you might hope – certainly not when experienced onscreen, at least – although I imagine it’s more effective when you do the whole VR helmet thing; I am hugely disappointed that the mosquito experience doesn’t involve the insertion of a virtual proboscis into some plump, fresh epidermis, though.
• Recursive Recipes: This is SO CLEVER! Recursive Recipes is a recipe site which alters the recipe guidelines based on the amount of time you tell it you have at your disposal – the more time you tell it you have, the more of the recipe’s individual steps it will suggest you take; the less time, the more it will suggest timesaving measures. What’s WONDERFUL about this is the way it does all this on the fly – the coding is lovely – and the way it will, if you tell it you have a LOT of time, take you all the way back to milling flour or raising a cow for milk. Really, really smart and impressively-made; I am slightly in awe, and would like all recipe sites to work like this from hereon in, please.
• The Jack Torrance Trip: Ooh, I love me an IMMERSIVE DIGITAL NARRATIVE EXPERIENCE. The Jack Torrance Trip is a new project by artistic duo The Kissinger Twins, and the blurb is as follows: “The moon landing is one of the greatest milestones in human history. What if it wasn’t real? Meet Jack Torrance, the man who made it all happen. @jacktorrancetrip, one of the most complex interactive storytelling experiences on Instagram, tells his story. Follow his adventure to the dark side of politics and manipulation and learn how surveillance technologies have changed since 1969.” I don’t want to tell you too much more about it – get on Insta and have a delve, this is really very nicely made indeed (or read more about it elsewhere on Imperica).  
• Molecularis: This only has 11 hours left on Kickstarter so you’ll have to hurry if you want to get in at the crowdfunding stage – Molecularis is a supremely clever update to the traditional flipbook animation, which basically contains 6 different animations within it, accessed by flipping the pages in slightly different ways, all of which can be coloured in by YOU, the owner, and which will let you create some beautiful and psychedelic animated…things as a result. Very clever, very cool and if you’re an artistic, doodly-type person then the sort of thing I imagine you will find very satisfying indeed (I can barely colour inbetween the lines, so won’t be investing).
• ASCII Tattoos: Honestly, these are SPECTACULAR. I can only imagine how long these take, but the work – by Andreas Vrontis of Limassol in Cyprus, in case you’re after one for yourself – is truly superb. The taste of some of the models is…questionable (WHY DO YOU HAVE ANGELINA JOLIE’S ASCII FACE ON YOUR THIGH, FACELESS CYPRIOT???), but there’s no doubting the skill on display here.
• Routeshuffle: Do you jog? Do you strap on a pair of trainers a few times a week and haul your weary carcass around London’s grey and fetid streets, hopping gingerly between chicken carcasses, nitrous ampoules and the slumped bodies of the homeless? Do you think it will save you, that it will stave off death? IT WILL NOT. Still, if you are a jogger and want some assistance in varying your chosen route then this site is a godsend; tell it where you’re starting from, tell it how far you want to go, and it will churn out a new randomised route each time; clever, useful, and a nice way of breaking your routine whilst still, er, adhering to your routine.
• Have I Been Sold: Check whether your email address is on any known lists that have been flogged. Not that you’ll be able to do anything about it if it is, of course, but it might be nice to know why you’re getting all the Viagra spam.
• Neon AR: This is a version of the future. Probably not the future, but certainly a future. Neon is an AR app which effectively works in a similar way to the Snapchat Map, except it shows you where your friends are as an AR overlay – look at the world through your camera lens and it will superimpose your friends’ avatars onto your view, showing where they are relative to you. The app sells this as a solution to finding people at festivals, etc, which makes sense, but the obviously stalky side of this is hard to overlook. You’d hope that there’s some fairly robust two-sided opt-in consent built in, but WHO KNOWS?
• General Public: I have to say, I didn’t have Portia de Rossi on my list of ‘Hollywood famouses with a tech business’, but here she is going full Will.I.Am with this side project, which seemingly has no lesser aim than to basically ruin art forever. OK, fine, that’s a touch hyperbolic, and it’s certainly not how Ms de Rossi couches it, but really, that’s exactly what it is. To quote the blurb, “Unlike the current method of printing, which is merely a flat poster version of a painting, our textured prints are almost identical to the original with all the texture and articulation created by the artist.I like to think of the originals like sculpture molds, and that the prints are as valuable as the original painting. A SYNOGRAPH ™ like a photograph, allows the artist to create multiple works from the original, thereby taking great paintings out of galleries and making them available to the GENERAL PUBLIC.” So, to be clear, this is technology which 3d prints reproductions of works in potentially-infinite quantities, in a manner close-to-indistinguishable from the original – WHERE IS THE SOUL, PORTIA DE ROSSI? WHERE IS THE ARTISTRY, THE BEAUTY, THE TRUTH??? Although, fine, if it means I can get myself a reasonable Schiele knockoff for a few hundred quid then I’m IN.
• Black Messiah: Black Messiah is a forthcoming French(?) comic book featuring a lead character who’s a former male escort and the head of Neo Paris’ trendiest ad agency (so FRENCH!) – this website offers a slightly oblique introduction to the character and the setting, and whilst light on actual content I found the visual style to be rather arresting.
• The Emoji Tarot Bot: One-man bot factory Rob Manuel’s latest creation is this – a Twitter bot which will deal you a tarot card on request, to answer any knotty life questions you may have and to help guide you through the labyrinthine horror that is existence. No guarantee that you’ll find any sort of spiritual guidance from this, but, well, you probably won’t find any anywhere else either, and at least this bot has jokes.
• The Politics of Advertising: An Insta feed sharing cartoons about adland. Your appreciation of this will vary in direct proportion to how much you relate to gags about how undignified it is to make banner ads, or laugh lines like “Fine, the campaign was sht but the case study will clean up at Cannes”. I imagine rather a lot of you will enjoy it.
• Augenblick: Silly, brilliant tech art project which uses a face-mounted camera and sensors to capture those images you miss when you blink. “Blinking is a highly invasive mechanism for our eyesight. Everyday we close our eyes thousands of times without noticing it. Our mind manages to never let us wonder what exactly happens in the moments that we miss. Augenblick catches those exact forgotten moments and puts them in a whole new light.” There’s something wonderfully creepy – and hugely NOW – about this idea of never wanting to miss a single thing ever again; I honestly think this could be a real, saleable product with a few tweaks.
• Screenspace: A potentially hugely useful tool for those of you developing mobile software – Screenspace offers you an off-the-shelf means to create those nice, shiny CGI videos of phones showing off software that you see on app launch websites, requiring little-to-know animation skills to create something reasonably impressive. If you don’t have an app to launch, you could still amuse yourself by using this to create increasingly elaborate animations telling your colleagues to fcuk off. That’s what I’m going to do once I’ve finished writing this, at least (I’m really not).
• All of the 80s Tech Company Logos: I don’t really know why this exists, but, well, here we are. As a bonus, this site presents them as an infinitely rolling screen saver should you want to stare catatonically at a selection of brand logos floating past your eyeballs for the next few hours.

By Brian Mcdonald

HERE, HAVE A TECHNO MIX BY NATY SERES – ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE IN THE PUBLIC EYE IS SECRETLY A DREADFUL RACIST, PT.2:

• Art Deck: Another Kickstarter project which doesn’t make me want to kick things – is crowdfunding getting better? No, of course it isn’t, it’s still awful. Still, this specific idea is a wonderful one – it’s been funded after just a few days, and it’s still got a month to go so I’d imagine you’ll get loads of nice extras and stuff if you bung them a few quid. Art Deck is, as the name suggests, a deck of cards with drawing prompts on them; played with friends, they help create a wonderful-sounding, collaborative/competitive game of…well, no idea really, but it sounds like an odd combination of random doodling, Pictionary and Exquisite Corpse, and the sort of thing that if you have a lovely, friendly, idealised young family of the sort which I secretly imagine exists only in advertising, would be a BRILLIANT way of spending an hour playing together. Exactly the sort of thing which will end up in the RANDOM CREATIVE DRAWER of every single agency in London, but don’t let that put you off.
• Yore Computer: In the time since writing about Tarot Bot, Rob’s just made ANOTHER one – this Tweets random pages from old computing magazine, which means that its audience is likely to be slightly more limited than some of his other work. Still, if you’re a middle-aged (probably) man then you might find this a comforting shot of nostalgia in your feed.
• Twitter Screenshots: A VERY SPECIFIC Chrome extension which will add a little screenshot button to Tweets viewed on Twitter dot com, which will enable you to grab a nicely-cropped cap of any individual tweet you want with one click. Particularly useful to those of who like to slag people off on the platform by posting screengrabs of individual tweets rather than having the balls to address people directly (wow, I had no idea that that annoyed me so much until I started typing that sentence – WHO KNEW?).
• Buff Cat: The owner of this Twitter handle once met a very buff cat. This feed is dedicated to it. It is an EXCELLENT cat, although almost certainly not as good as YOURS.
• The Fading Battlefields of WW1: A wonderful collection of photographs of World War 1 battlefields as the scars of war fade; these are beautiful.
• The Video Game History Foundation: It obviously makes total sense that as games mature as a medium / artform so there needs to be an effort to catalogue and assess and taxonomise and offer a critical reflection on their significance, but at the same time it feels REALLY silly thinking of a manual for Sonic 2 being in a museum somewhere. “The heart of the Foundation is its digital library, an online repository of artifacts related to the history of video games and video game culture. The ultimate goal is to create a searchable, organized, always-online archive of verified, high-quality material that is accessible to researchers and historians as a public education resource.” – if you’re interested in games at all in any way, this is a hugely diverting archive of really interesting stuff.
• Ratio Bot: A bot sharing Tweets with a BAD RATIO. There’s an American skew to many of these, meaning you won’t necessarily understand why they’re problematic, but you’ll get enough of them to make a follow worthwhile.
• Hmmm: Thanks Ed for drawing this to my attention – Hmmm is my new favourite subReddit, with a very simple premise. “hmmms are textless images that make you think about the context, do a double take, invoke a deeper meaning, or just leave you thinking about how or why they exist” – you just need to click through here and enjoy them.
• UE Voxel: A Twitter feed of gorgeous, glorious little voxel art pieces. Honestly, I could lose myself in this style of work for days.
• Chartico: A staggeringly banal but surprisingly useful little webtool which lets you quickly and easily make bar charts. Which, I appreciate, sounds incredibly dull (and it is, fine), but if you’ve ever struggled to make the fcuking axes work properly on an Excel chart then you’ll appreciate the gentle wonder of this (which really is hugely useful, I promise).
• Become a Novelist: So this is seemingly legit, although it does look a bit too good to be true. De Montford Literature (not, to the best of my knowledge, anything to do with the University – no, it’s not, it’s an offshoot of a venture fund, which is even more baffling) is offering a limited number of salaried positions to people who want to write a book – they will literally pay you to churn out a novel. “De Montfort Literature is offering between 5 and 10 (and later up to 100) places to successful applicants, who will be paid a salary, and later a bonus as a percentage of the revenues from novels published, in return for (the authors) writing their novels.We will provide as much support as you need to be successful in your career. That includes providing professional advice and support from experienced mentors and editors.” There’s a backstory to this – the fund seems to be betting that it can (algorithmically?) determine which novels and authors have the greatest likelihood of commercial success and, I presume, would expect to make returns on its investments on this basis – and I have no guarantees that this isn’t a dark front for something hugely sinister, but, well, WHO CARES??? £24k to write a book! FREE MONEY!!
• The Forever 21 Slogan Generator: Can someone make one of these for the current generation of adland sloganwriters who keep spaffing out double-figure-IQ tripe like ‘Made with Great’ or ‘Be More Awesome’, please? Thanks. In the meantime, though, this does a reasonable job of skewering a particularly ‘now’ type of copy.
• Space Type: You didn’t know, did you, when you woke up this morning, that what would give you the most pleasure today would be a small site which lets you create odd little planetoid graphics with orbiting words around it? No, you didn’t, and yet here we are. That was, even by my low standards, a truly appalling description – check out the Insta account associated with this for a better idea of what you can do with this surprisingly awesome design toy.
• From Scraps: Lydia Ricci makes small sculptures out of scrap materials – paper and card and tape and glue and pencil shavings and that sort of jazz. They are gorgeous – there’s something beautifully fragile and intricate about the style of all these pieces.
• Local Lingual: A WONDERFUL project, seeking to map different accents and languages across the world. Click on any country, click again, and listen to different voices from different regions; just clicking around the UK this morning has made me SO HAPPY – I’ve just been listening to some kid say “I’m Matty from Wiltshire” on repeat, and by God it’s a Proustian time capsule for me. You can upload your own clips or just listen to those added by others; oh God, I just fell into a hole of comparing Roman and Venetian accents, I’m going to have to move on or I’ll never finish this bastard thing this week. Enjoy this, it’s SUPERB.
• Animated Knots: Knots, er, animated. Spend the rest of the day using the techniques here outlined to secure a variety of your colleagues’ personal belongings to their chair without them noticing.
• Collections: A really useful idea, this app, allowing you to sort, annotate, group and tag photos on your phone so as to make them less of a mess than they appear in your camera roll. Useful for creative types, but also for those of you who are finding it increasingly onerous to remember where you saved that sexy clip of your boyfriend ejaculating from all those months ago.
• Twitter Poems by Max Sparber: Max Sparber is a journalist and author. Every day (seemingly) since February, he’s been posting a poem on Twitter – this is a collection of them. These are by turns funny, angry, glib and sharp, but they’re all rather excellent – you will enjoy, I promise.
• Kudu Voodoo: “Matt”, I thought to myself this week whilst spelunking for links, “Matt, it’s been TOO LONG since you featured an online store with a terrifyingly diverse selection of synthetic monster cock dildos”. And indeed, I was forced to admit it was true – thank Christ, then, for my discovery of Kudu Voodoo, the best place to buy a 13” silicon dragon dong since Bad Dragon. This is, obviously, sort-of NSFW, although tbh there is very little sexy (to my mind, at least) about such terrifying toys as “Asethia the Whatsamacallit” (no, really) – with that spirit in mind, I strongly encourage you to click through to the full inventory and marvel at the rich, varied tapestry of human sexuality.  
• Card Games: All of the card games! Playable online! And some other things too!
• Batlight: Finally in the ‘miscellania’ selection this week, Batlight is an excellent little infinite-runner-type game which will have you cursing roundly at your screen within seconds, but will keep you cursing for hours – it really is VERY very good indeed. Enjoy.

By Tim Easley

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, A SUMMERY CLASSIC BY GROOVE ARMADA FROM WAY BACK IN 2014!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Broken Chains: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a wonderful site – it’s a celebration of the last outposts of former chain restaurants in the US, and each post is a potted history of the chain and the individual restaurant in question, along with a review of the food as it is now – whether or not you have any familiarity with US food chains (a subject I’m inexplicably fascinated by), this is a wonderful piece of cultural and social and culinary history.

• World of Corgi: O RUFF! O RUFF! O RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF!
• Photographs Rendered in Playdoh: None more Ronseal than this Tumblr; the skill on display by the artist, Eleanor Macnair, is astonishing, and she takes commissions should you wish to have one of your photos immortalised in putty for perpetuity.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The Tower: Andrew O’Hagen’s kilometric look back at Grenfell one year on. This is a very dense, very long, very well-written, tonally questionable piece – the line about Stormzy which you might have seen quoted online over the past few days is such an odd and misjudged take, for example, and there are a lot of people in here from the Council who seem to get a rather easier pass than you might have expected, though of course we must remember that the enquiry is only just getting started – and one which won’t scratch your itch for justice or resolution in any way at all; it’s an oddly weary piece of writing in may respects, which I suppose is oddly apt as we look back twelve months and see how far we haven’t moved.

• Volume 5: The latest short story by a collective who call themselves Upsidedown Clown, who if you sign up to their mailing list will send you a new piece of original short fiction every month or so. I’ve been subscribed for a year or so now, and the writing is consistently superb – the authors and the subjects and the tone and the style will change, but the stories have to date all been excellent. The latest, Volume 5, is gently supernatural and romantic and sad and just wonderful.
• Austerity Britain: The New York Times’ view of AUSTERITY BRITAIN, this article from last weekend’s caused its fair share of controversy, not least due to some reporting…inaccuracies about the state of the town of Prescot which, it turns out, is not quite as miserably fcuked as the article makes out. It’s an odd one, this – despite the fact that I personally fundamentally agree with its premise, to whit that the austerity project has resulted in large swathes of the country being fcuked beyond all hope, the tone of it is hyperbolic and frantic and just a bit wrong, really. Still, it’s always interesting to see us as we’re seen from the outside (we look fat, and pasty, and scared, it seems).
• The Psychology of Japanese Train Stations: All of you working in advermarketingpr and associated industries will doubtless have become sick of hearing anecdotal reference to the Number 10 ‘Nudge Unit’ in recent years, and talk of how simple system changes can effect mass-scale behavioural change; this is a nice antidote to that, profiling the frankly INCREDIBLE ways in which Japanese train stations manipulate passengers in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We are AMATEURS at this stuff, I tell you.
• The Trouble With Philanthropic Billionaires: SUCH a Guardian headline, this one. Obviously billionaires being philanthropic is better than them not being philanthropic, but you know what’s even better than that? That’s right – their participation in a rigorously-enforced system of progressive taxation and subsequent government redistribution of those funds! Or at least that’s what pinko lefties like the author of this piece (and, er, me) want you to believe. This is a decent look at some of the negative side effects of the current trend, visible in particular in the US, for the very, very rich to decide that they know better than the state when it comes to the best way to dispose of lots of money to large-scale benefit (Narrator: They didn’t).
• Insomnia: A truly gorgeous essay by A L Kennedy, from Granta magazine a few years back. Dedicated to all of the Curios readers who find themselves linkflitting at 3am.
• The Ethics of Icelandic Fiction: Fascinating look at the practical ethics of writing fiction from life in a country in which everyone is basically related to everyone else, and everyone knows everyone. How do you write thinly-veiled fictional versions of people when, well, literally EVERYONE in the country will know exactly who you’re talking about within a matter of hours? Question for anyone Icelandic who happens to be reading this – do subTweets become a lot harder on VikingTwitter?
• The Surprising History and Future of Fingerprints: There are several absolutely astonishing facts in this piece, but the absolute best one is that our fingerprints (so the best current theory goes, at least) are formed by the pressure of our fingertips on the inside of the womb during pregnancy. Look at your fingertips – THOSE SHAPES WERE MADE BY THE INSIDE OF YOUR MUM. I tell you, I am SHOOK by this – isn’t nature just bafflingly mental, eh?
• The Enduring Mythology of the Whizzkid: Almost a companion piece to the Guardian one on billionaires, this discusses why in most cases significant change in large institutions such as Government is most often driven not by shiny, flashy novelty, but instead by deeply boring, small, incremental changes, and how our obsession with the shiny flashy novelty stuff is probably hampering our ability to actually get things done.
• How Anna Delvey Tricked New York: This is a follow-up of sorts to an article I included in Curios earlier in the year (this one, if you recall) which described how faux-socialite Anna Delvey managed to scam her way into New York’s soignee social scene; this latest one presents a FAR more detailed account of exactly how easy it is to persuade people that you’re a rich, Eurotrash asshole when you go around behaving exactly like a rich, Eurotrash asshole. As someone funnier than me pointed out on Twitter, the film version of this is THE perfect Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle.
• What It’s Like When The Musk Mob Is After You: It is, seemingly, almost impossible to be rich and famous and lauded and successful and not a total prick in 2018. It’s not like Musk’s not got previous, but the past seven days, in which he’s slagged off the fourth estate for not being sufficiently hagiographic in its portrayal of him and his company, blithely dismissed a female scientist’s entire field as ‘bs’, written some pretty dogwhistley stuff about THE PEOPLE WHO RUN THE MEDIA and then failed to condemn the toxic bilge-flood of predictable anti-semitism which followed, and encouraged some not insignificant dogpiling, has been a doozy even by his standards. This piece explains what it’s like to be a journalist onto whom Musk sicks the mob – let’s be very clear here, that, regardless of what you might think of Musk, Tesla or the media, acting in a way that encourages your fans and followers to jump on someone online is a spectacularly cnuty thing for anyone to do, and failing to take steps to prevent or mitigate that happening makes you a prick.  Elon Musk is a prick.
• The History of the Treadmill: This is possibly my favourite new fact of the week – treadmills were originally invented as a punishment for prisoners in 19th century jails, designed to keep them occupied and reduce criminality through good, clean, healthy exercise. Didn’t work, obviously, but this excerpt gives you a flavour of the wonderful things you’ll learn by clicking the link: “But, over time, the device’s purported ability to cure criminality through sweat—never mind the actual work output—was called into question. For instance, a short article called “Prison Electricity” in an 1882 edition of Scientific American called for a more productive approach to treadmilling. “The convicts hated it, and no useful results came of it,” the author writes. The suggestion was for “attaching dynamoelectric machines to the cranks” to “store electrically the energy developed.” It argued that prisons could sell energy, and thus pay for their own upkeep.” Wonderful – send to everyone you know who ‘enjoys’ the gym.
• Policing GTAV: Weird videogame subcultures are the BEST subcultures. The modding community in GTAV is a varied one, and this piece profiles one of the most charming corners of it – players who’ve spent countless hours modding in vehicles and scenery to allow them to replicate London’s roads, so that they can then spend their time pretending to be British traffic police in-game. You know the stereotype of GTA, right? Killing hookers, running over pedestrians, slightly crap satire, ultra violence? Yeah, well these people are more about the parking infractions and the slow, orderly chasing down of pavement cyclists. God I love people sometimes (mainly when they’re behind computer screens and FAR AWAY, but still).
• Whatever Happened To Sundried Tomatoes: Remembering the most 1990s of food fads. Is it time for them to come back? I used to make toasties with sun-dried tomatoes at university, which gives you an idea of what an unsufferable ponce I was even then (and of the fact that I was old enough to get a full grant to Uni, as otherwise like fcuk would I have been able to afford them).
• What Happened In Vegas: Sad, fascinating look at what happened in the aftermath of last year’s shooting in Vegas – you don’t often get told what happens once the cameras move on and the news trucks depart, but this gives a sense of perspective as to how the event played out over the long-term. It’s also interesting as an indicator of the extent to which Parkland bucked the trend – the speed at which the narrative moves on in most other mass-shooting cases is startling when you stop to consider it.
• Procrastibaking: I am including this article solely so those of you working in planning / trends analysis can steal it as a ‘thing’. You’re welcome.
• Growing Up With Steve Miller: I’m guessing that, like me and probably most other English people, the only Steve Miller song you know is The Joker (WHY DO THEY CALL YOU MAURICE???); regardless, you don’t need to know anything about Miller to enjoy this honestly heartwarming story about how he took the author under his musical wing when he was in his early teens, and continued to mentor him, gently, even when the prospect of a career in music had faded. This is honestly lovely, and made me very much want to take someone under my wing in this way – then, though, I realised that the only guidance I could possibly offer was ‘finding links’ and that, on balance, no kid needs that.
• Lily Allen: Allen’s on the comeback trail and the interviews are coming reasonably thick and fast – this one, in Vulture, is a good one, and worth a read. Allen always gives good chat – that’s her ‘thing’, right, all gob and candour? – but she’s also a genuinely interesting figure, and reading interviews with her always takes me back a decade or so to a hot office in Camden where there was always a bag of coke in the breadbin. Ah, memories *pours out a 40 to the IG crew*
• Porn and Dating and Love: A short, reflective piece by Megan Nolan, on how porn and Tinder are creating a hookup culture devoid of sexual mystery and spontaneity. This is entirely outwith my area of expertise – I have never internet dated, never Tindered, and I barely consume bongo (no, honest! Gah, that’s absolutely one of those things which really doesn’t look true written down) – but Nolan’s writing is as lovely as ever, and her observations of about the tickbox eroticism of the post-redtube era are sadly beautiful.
• On Roseanne and Political Correctness: Read this, digest it, enjoy it, remember it, and then quote it verbatim at anyone stupid and dreadful enough to complain about the scourge of political correctness. The closing sentence says it all, but, really, the whole piece is superb: “Canceling “Roseanne” is not society regulating “mean” speech; it is us regulating our collective morality, so that we don’t atrophy into a moral vacuum. It is saying no, because we are more than animals.”
• The Moment Your Life Crashes and Burns: Jill Gallagher writes about a car accident and a divorce and a million and one other things besides.
• Dirtbag Sappho: I don’t normally include poetry in here, but this, to me, is exceptional. I have no idea who it’s by – the site it’s on is annoyingly vague about authorial identity, but there’s LOADS more excellent stuff on there so have a delve and enjoy.This verse has SO many lines I wish I’d written it’s actually making me angry.
• Three Lesbian Sex Positions: Finally this week, a short essay which really isn’t about lesbian sex at all (sorry to disappoint), but is one of the warmest pieces of writing about being in love that I’ve read all year. Enjoy it slowly.

By Mandy Barker

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. We kick off this week with ‘The World’s Best Kisser’ by Darwin Deez, which may be the most archly smart video I’ve seen in an age. Code monkeys, you will LOVE this:

2) Underworld and Iggy Pop. Tells you all you need to know, really – this is storytelling Iggy, which is my favourite of all the Iggys:

3) This is Icepeak – I think they are Russian, and there’s something sort of weirdly Die Antwoord-ish about them (I mean, they are nothing like Die Antwoord, but see if you get what I mean). This is really unsettling and darkfuturedystopiansnowboundweird, and I rather like it:

4) This is new, from the twisted animator behind Cool 3d World – it’s for Adult Swim, and it’s called ‘Spurt’, and it’s horrid:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! A 1Xtra Studio 82 set, featuring Curios favourites Manga and Big Zuu, and Eyez who I’ve not featured on here before but who I’m impressed by on this showing. Takes a while to get going, but the skill here in switching beats and flows is amazing and, honestly, the final 3 minutes where they go over the d’n’b beat is incredible (just look at Manga’s face):

6) The only Childish Gambino cover I’ve seen or heard of that doesn’t completely miss the point of the original, this is Falz with ‘This Is Nigeria’:

7) Finally this week, an animation made in paper cut outs and a one-take mobile phone shot. This is SO INCREDIBLY GOOD, I want this kid to become famous so please share far and wide. ENJOY! HAPPY FRIDAY! HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS! I HOPE THAT THE WEATHER IS NICE AND THAT YOU GET TO DO THE THINGS YOU LOVE BEST AND THAT YOU ARE AS FREE FROM PAIN AND TORMENT AS IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE IN THIS, THE MOST BEKNIGHTED OF TIMELINES, TAKE CARE, I LOVE YOU, BYEBYE!

{unsubscribe}Unsubscribe from the Imperica newsletter{/unsubscribe} – Subscribe to the Imperica newsletter

I went to the seaside last weekend. It was LOVELY, apart from the racist graffiti (residents of Broadstairs – you’re right, it is OK to be white, and literally NOONE is attempting to tell you otherwise! I promise! Also, looking around, I’m not 100% convinced that it’s you who need to worry about being unwelcome) and the seemingly endless seas of undulating pinked flesh peeking between poorly-inked expanses of stretched tattoo. Oh England, how you sparkle in the sunshine! We’re…we’re a really ugly people, aren’t we?

Anyway, said long weekend meant that, I tell you, it was a STRUGGLE to drag together enough quality content for this week’s newsletter; fortunately though, the web has once again provided, meaning I get to present you with a metaphorical tray laden with equally metaphorical digital delicacies – look at my happy, hopeful countenance as I hold up my findings for you to peruse and appreciate! You couldn’t not read Web Curios, could you? It would be like kicking a spaniel in the face – you’re not that sort of person. I know you’re not. So, come on, get stuck in, there’s 8,000 words and several hundred links to get through, and one of us wants to get to the pub sooner rather than later. INGEST MY LINKSOUP! TAKE ME INSIDE YOU! THIS IS WEB CURIOS!

[Oh, and in a slight departure from the norm – sorry – I am also going to take this opportunity to plug the forthcoming London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), which starts in a few weeks’ time and with which I am involved to a tiny degree. The lineup is honestly amazing, takes place at venues across the city, and features performers and playwrites from all over the world, performing pieces that have never been shown in London – do take a look. If nothing else, you really ought to check out the thing with the pigeons, which will be MENTAL]  

By Robin De Puy 

LET’S KICK THINGS OFF WITH ANOTHER LOVELY EPISODE OF ‘INTERNATIONAL AIRSPACE’, THE ECLECTIC AND WONDERFUL LONDON FIELDS RADIO SHOW!

THE SECTION WHICH VERY MUCH ENJOYED THE GOOGLE PEOPLE’S ABILITY TO KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE WHILST BASICALLY SAYING “ALL THIS TECH WE’VE BEEN PEDDLING’S A BIT ISOLATING, ISN’T IT? HERE’S SOME MORE TECH WE’VE INVENTED TO SOLVE THIS; OH AND BY THE WAY BY USING IT YOU’LL BE POWERING THE FUTURE AI SUPERBRAIN WHICH WILL ONE DAY TAKE OVER THE WORLD, BUT DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT NOW”:

• A List Of All The Google Announcements: Well, at least the day one announcements; they are ALL HERE. It’s mostly AI stuff, in the main, and not that much of relevance to advermarketingpr drones at this stage; you’ll have seen and heard the spectacular Duplex (and if you haven’t listened to the demo you really ought to; it’s spectacular and incredibly creepy),  but there’s also an update to Maps which introduces a whole load of new features to direct you to exactly the same places as everyone else (the future market for intensely-curated off-grid experiences is going to boom – one of the perks of being very rich in the next 50 years is going to be not having to rub shoulders with the algorithmically-led underclasses, like now but even moreso), and a bunch of AI photoretouching stuff. My FAVOURITE bit, though, is the fabulously disingenuous Google Wellbeing project – a raft of updates to Android OS and YT and other bits and bobs, all designed to stop us wasting so much of our PRECIOUS LIVES as a result of technology…through the use of more technology! Leaving aside that small point, or indeed the irony of a company whose billions and business model are built on people spending as much time as possible online telling people to, er, spend less time online, the very SMARTEST bit of all this is that Google’s new tools to help you stare at your phone less are ALSO, coincidentally, tools which help it keep its massive AI projects developing at superspeed and superscale. As our search data and browsing habits become less financially important than what we can do to train neural nets and hasten the development of AI-led product suites, so Google gently, almost imperceptibly, begins to nudge us in the direction of just that, as though we were just some sort of 7billion-strong horde of bovine plodders, waiting to be manipulated into action by profit-motivated supercorporations (as IF!). You sort of have to admire them, really. Sort of.
• Google’s Doing Ad Transparency Too!: These are ALL THE RAGE (and, er, not currently doing anything worthwhile, if the current Irish furore is anything to go by), and this is Google’s stab at protecting THE INTEGRITY OF DEMOCRACY – to whit: “We’ll now require additional verification for anyone who wants to purchase an election ad on Google in the U.S. and require that advertisers confirm they are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, as required by law. That means advertisers will have to provide a government-issued ID and other key information. To help people better understand who is paying for an election ad, we’re also requiring that ads incorporate a clear disclosure of who is paying for it…This summer, we’ll also release a new Transparency Report specifically focused on election ads. This Report will describe who ​is ​buying ​election-related ​ads ​on ​our ​platforms ​and ​how ​much ​money ​is being spent. We’re also building a searchable library for election ads, where anyone can find election ads purchased on Google and who paid for them.”
• Useful New Tools For Facebook Lives: If you’re a large-scale publisher – say, the BBC or similar – the inability to cross-post Lives to multiple owned Pages simultaneously has long been a right pain. NO LONGER! There’s some other stuff in here too but it’s too technical for me to care about and so, as if by magic, I don’t!
• Facebook Launching Its Own Bitmoji Clone: I never really understood the appeal of Bitmoji as I am a funless husk of a man, but recently my friend Luke discovered them and now occasionally communicates via images of him dressed as a very gay unicorn and I’m slightly converted as a result. Anyway, Facebook is launching its own version at some point in the future and there’s probably going to be the opportunity to give them branded clothes or something, because OF COURSE THERE FCUKING IS.
• Facebook Launches Political Ad Authorisation Process: This is a necessary step in the right direction; if I understand it correctly, any organisation wanting to advertise on national-level trigger issues (abortion, gun control, the environment, etc) will be required to undergo some degree of registration / approval from Facebook before being able to do so. Imperfect, fine, but if this leads to a situation which makes it easier to discover who’s behind which adverts – not just the Page name, but an actual, named individual or organisation – then it is A Good Thing.
• Facebook Is Doing Something Blockchain-y: Hang on, maybe this means it’s not all utter rubbish peddled by chancers to the credulous! Although there’s no actual detail on exactly what they’ll be doing, so perhaps don’t ICO yourself just yet. Although speaking of ICOs, I would p1ss myself were Marty to suddenly pivot to blockchain.  
• Better Messaging For Businesses on Instagram: “Starting today, businesses will have a better way to manage their messages. Now you’ll see important new customer messages in your main Direct inbox, instead of in the pending folder. You can also star and filter your conversations to come back to messages you want to follow up on. Additionally, in the coming weeks we’ll begin testing quick replies so that you can easily respond to common questions.” Good, isn’t it? ISN’T IT??? Ingrates.
• You Will Apparently Soon Be Able To Add Music To Insta Stories: This will only make them worse, I can confidently predict.
• Insta Stories Adds Emoji Slider Poll: Whilst this sort of boils my p1ss rather – I mean, emojis and a simple engagement-bait mechanic? Be still my throbbing spleen! – I reckon this is going to be HUGELY popular and overused by brands to the point of complete oversaturation within a matter of weeks; it’s a content unit for stories that let’s anyone insert a sliding scale poll, with SUPER HAPPY and SUPER NOT HAPPY emoji at either end, to let your braindead content-tappers inform you as to whether they feel (IDIOT’S FAVOURITE) CRYING WITH LAUGHTER or only SCEPTICAL HAND ON CHIN about, I don’t know, your latest abortion of a fast food meal deal or Kylie Jenner’s perineum or somesuch. DRIVE ENGAGEMENT BUILD LOYALTY DESTROY OUR ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN TAP AND SWIPE LIKE THE PASSIVE, IDIOT MEDIA JUNKIES WE ALL ALREADY ARE!
• A Massive List Of Useful Digital PR Tools: Worth a look and possibly a bookmark, this – a whole bunch of online tools and services, from planning to monitoring to analysis to editing…some are free and some are not (I would complain about this not being clear, but to complain about anything here seems cnutily churlish in the extreme in the face of  the fact that someone bothered to compile this at all, so I shan’t), but it’s a really useful resource and memory-jogger; there were several really useful things on here that I had totally forgotten about.
• Nike React Runners: I look at this, and I see an advermarketingpr industry that has reached the very end when it comes to superficially interactive product websites. Seriously, take this – you click through, you choose from a few variables describing what Nike React trainers feel like (on which point, if I know what they feel like, these brand new shiny trainers, wouldn’t that imply that I already own some and might not be in the market for some more?), like maybe feathers or, er, basketballs; you then choose a running style that most closely matches yours; you then pick a colourway… And THEN, you lucky, lucky Nike fan, you get presented with…er…a slightly odd, jauntily-running avatar comprised of those elements you initially said the shoes felt like, running in the style you picked, in your colours of choice. You can name it! You can share it! WHY WOULD I BOTHER! It’s neither cool enough nor fun enough to bother with, and feels very much like an agency recycling an old idea for the bucketload of Nike cash being dangled at them to increase engagement with the brand or whatever. I mean, if you want to create a spastically-running…thing…made out of feathers and basketballs and call it ‘MONGO’ then this might be the missing piece in the otherwise-complete jigsaw of your happiness, but in that case I’d perhaps suggest you might have other issues that need looking at.
• The Searchable GDPR Text: If you’re the sort of company likely to have BIG GDPR ISSUES and you’re only just getting round to thinking about it now then, well, AHAHAHAHAHAHA YOU POOR BASTARDS. Nonetheless, this is the text of the legislation, made all friendly and searchable and designed to let you easily search it for the bits that might apply to you; might be useful as you scramble to make sure that your professional and (I hope) hugely metaphorical arse is covered from all conceivable angles.
• When The Internet Is Down: You may remember back in February I featured a magazine based on the same idea as this site, which was only viewable / readable when the device on which you were trying to access it was offline; you may also recall I suggested that KitKat rip it off any pay me (or, more fairly, Chris Bolin who’s the brains behind it) some royalties. They didn’t, but French agency BETC (whose work I’ve featured before this year, I think) did, in service of a French broadband provider Bouyges Telecom; it’s really nicely done, damn them, and a really nice plug for their client’s internet offering. Kudos to them, though less kudos for not crediting what was very clearly the original inspiration.

By Meo Xian Qui

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE BRAND NEW(ISH) JON HOPKINS ALBUM ON SPOTIFY?

THE SECTION WHICH JUST DREW ALBANIA IN AN OFFICE EUROVISION SWEEPSTAKE BUT DOESN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE SONGS TO DETERMINE WHETHER THAT’S TWO QUID WASTED, PT.1:

• Google Tour Creator: Another one in the seemingly endless series of WEBTOOLS IN THE MODERN WORLD which you will initially look at and think “oh, how cool!” and then, if you’re anything like me, then go on to remember all the various other companies that used to offer services like this and which will now go out of business because of Google. Although then you’ll probably remember that they were all a bit crap, and that this isn’t really enough to build an entire business on, and in fact maybe it’s all just BUSINESS DARWINISM and you ought to get on with describing exactly what it is that this thing does before you lose everyone just a few lines in STOP IT MATT. Ahem. Google Tour Creator is a neat GoogleToy which lets you create lightly interactive (effectively annotated) 360 panoramic views of anywhere you like, which will exist on  their own URL and can be embedded wherever you like online. There are some VERY tedious examples on the site, but you could theoretically do some quite nice stuff here (and, if not, you can undertake minor acts of corporate terrorism by hiding rude annotations in parts of the photo you don’t think anyone will look. DO IT!
• The Ononeon: A website presenting headlines from the real world in the style of The Onion – all the news that, when read cold, sounds too preposterous to be true – but in fact is! Today’s “this would be funny were it not such a giddy combination of terrifying and depressing” smorgasbord includes gems such as “Republican who claims Holocaust was orchestrated by Gay Nazis wins enough support for Massachusetts Governor primary.” (TRUE STORY!) and “World of Warcraft Currency Is Now Worth 7 Times as Much as Venezuela’s Cash” (ALSO TRUE STORY!); is this website amusing? I don’t know, I’ll let you know when I stop gawping in horrified wonder at quite how odd everything is.
• The Emoji Scavenger Hunt: Another Google toy! Open this on your phone and MARVEL as it fires up a game which presents you with a series of emoji and then asks you to find stuff with your phone’s camera which represents said emoji – when I tried it it asked me for computer monitors, mugs, that sort of thing, but I rather hope it occasionally throws in curveballs like aubergines and horses. Don’t, as ever with these things, think too hard about the reason this exists, which yet again is to train the Google AI Brain to better recognise stuff so as to better be able to rule the world in the future. Let’s be clear – this is a front for a very, very menial image recognition task that you’d pay
• Art For Global Goals: This REALLY annoyed me, so I’m going to briefly share that annoyance with you. “After years of effort”, the website portentously intones on loading, “The United Nations agreed on 17 global goals for a better world by 2030”; you, the user, expect that maybe you’ll, I don’t know, go on to learn something about these global goals and how you might be able to help achieve them. BUT NO! Instead you’re taken to a SUPER-SHINY, almost fashion house-esque, site which is seemingly designed to showcase a series of paintings made by artchild Leon Löwentraut, each representing a different one of the aforementioned global goals. Now, I don’t doubt that the UN is better versed in the general improvement of global circumstances than I, and that Leon’s motives in collaborating on this are pure (though I also note that not all the proceeds from the sales of the works here referred to will go to charity, which, well), but there are things about this that really seem, well, just a bit stupid really. The UI gimmick is that users make ‘virtual brushstrokes’ on the site to unlock bits of content, and that the combined brushstrokes taken by all visitors to the site will be compiled into an artwork by Löwentraut on the project’s completion; the instruction to the user, though, to ‘Brush through and erase the 17 issues that lay at the heart of these goals’ is, well, nonsensical and pretty fcuking stupid. Is this a better idea than creating a website which actually, you know, told people about practical things they could do to help achieve the UN’s global goals? No, no it is not. Still, REALLY shiny website.
• Fanbits: MORE BLOCKCHAIN! Fanbits is a weird concept which lets creators make collectible digital artworks or artefacts, in limited series, with this limited edition status ENCODED ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! (it sort of feels like I need the caps to capture THE BREATHLESS EXCITEMENT OF THE BLOCKCHAIN but I promise I will stop now as it’s irritating me too). It uses Ethereum, and there’s a secondary market for trading in these limited edition things, and I suppose that there’s some comfort in knowing that your limited edition sketch of an anthropomorphised raccoon twink wearing a ball gag and a slightly trepidatious expression really is only one of three ever to exist, but, well, take a look at the work. Hm.
• Evil Corp: A new project by Alfie Dennen, who long-time readers might remember was behind the lovely Bus Tops project back in 2012; this is a soon-to-be-Kickstarted boardgame in which you get to play as one of the giant tech behemoths of the strangely familiar parallel future in which the game is set? Want to enslave the entirety of Northern England to act as packers for your giant network of fulfilment centres? Want to colonise Mars, take all your rich friends with you and then strip-mine the Earth for resources so you can live the Playboy lifestyle your bullied-at-school past feels you somehow deserve? Want to run your very own Big Blue Misery Factory? This will be RIGHT up your street, in that case. Obviously all similarities to current titans of business are entirely coincidental. Obviously.
• Google Pose Detection: Tech demo of the pose detection API – let it access your webcam, then step back and make some shapes and watch, impressed, as the software tracks your full-body movements. Then take a moment to think back a decade ago to Kinect and how mental it is that you can now do the same stuff in-browser, and then think a bit further and think about all the potential implications of combining this tech with, I don’t know, the fact that the UK is the most surveilled country in the world and that we are VERY SCARED of terrorists and this could be used for all sorts of incredibly impressive but also hugely intrusive body language monitoring systems using the CCTV network and, well, it all gets quite dystopian quite fast (your internal monologue might take you somewhere different and better; I rather hope it does for your sake).
• Fantasmo: Or, ‘the decentralised 3d map of the world’, which sounds a lot more impressive frankly. Fantasmo is a company looking to aggregate data on a building/street level as to the physical layout of our world, and to create a universal standard for the manner in which that data is encoded and made available, so as to allow for better, more uniform AR app development amongst other things. It’s a really smart idea, and if you’re interested in doing anything serious in the AR space this is probably worth taking a closer look at.
• Resistancehole: The Onion’s spin-off, Clickhole, has created this WONDERFUL site parodying the anti-Trump movement online; I clicked this this week and whilst initially I found it, predictably, very funny indeed (sample headline: “Game Over, Drumpf! This Intrepid ‘New York Times’ Reporter Just Has Two Seasons Left Of ‘The Wire’ And Then He’ll Be Free To Blow The Lid Off The Russia Investigation!”), it’s almost too on the nose in its parody of the idiocy of the online war on Trump and the slightly pathetic, overhopeful futility of much of it. Then, though, I learned that it was the companion to Patriothole which does exactly the same but for the other side, and felt marginally better about the fact that everyone is an idiot and both sides are depressing as hell!
• Very Legit: I have no idea why you would want to use this, but Very Legit is a url-masker which makes entirely benign links look like they are freighted with malware. Like this, for example: extremely.absolutely.completely.verylegit.link/x_2BxLDwFBjCi-*;paypal=402free)java0day!!creditcard.json.sh Although, if you’re meant to be delivering a web project and, well, haven’t quite finished it yet, firing one of these to your client on Friday afternoon will mean that they’ll be too scared to click on it and you can buy yourself an extra few days. Bonus points for lulling friends and colleagues into a false sense of security with this over the next few weeks and then BANG going straight into a Goatse when they’re all relaxed and pliable.
• Yoti: In the wake of the past month’s absolute sh1tshow around Windrush and immigration in general, the prospect of ID cards has begun to be whispered about in political and commentariat circles (it’s weird how we’ve collectively blanked the memory of how much money we wasted on the abortive project to institute a national identity scheme in the early-00s; I do occasionally wonder how different certain things would be had that gone through); Yoti is a scheme designed to allow for persistent, verifiable online identities, and according to a piece I read this week is already being used in a small number of towns in the UK to help with simple things such as age verification in pubs, bars, bookies and the like. The tech seems smart, but obviously things like this depend entirely on the takeup – the trialing is a good sign, though, and the idea of a universal digital ID is something I personally think is a smart idea (whilst obviously acknowledging that there are others for whom that might well be more…problematic). Worth watching, this.
• The Covers of Daniel Gil: 938 book covers designed by Daniel Gil; you may not know the name, but you’ll almost certainly recognise some of the designs in this Flickr set, particularly if you were anything like me and spent much of your life from about 11 onwards searching through people’s bookshelves for titles with interesting covers and which might contain a sniff of smut.
• Giant Cat Instagram: An Instagram feed sharing photos in which a Godzilla-sized kitten wreaks HAVOC. Weirdly, if you go far enough back in time it becomes quite a lot of 3d renders of cars and some Gundam models, but I do hope the ‘pivot to giant kitties’ shift is a permanent one. O MAOW! (come on, Saz, you can finish this one)
• Travel on Paper: An online shop selling a truly glorious selection of travel posters from around the world; even if you’re not in the market for a poster, it’s worth having a browse through the designs; many of these are just beautiful.
• The Hero Arm: I know I complain about it most of the time, but occasionally living in the future really is quite remarkable. The Hero Arm is a product being sold by a company called Open Bionics, and is designed to be a lightweight, affordable, cool-looking prosthetic for kids with below-elbow upper arm differences; it looks ACE, and were I a kid with arm issues I would absolutely kill for one of these. Not quite as fancy as James Young’s, but not a bad halfway house. I LOVE the fact that these are now a direct-to-consumer product.
• Pointless Wooden Bananas: The best waste of time you will see all week, I promise.
• The List of Lists of Lists: Another in the occasional series of ‘brilliantly niche Wikipedia Pages’, this is a list of all the lists of lists which exist on the site. You’ll look at that description and you’ll think ‘ffs Matt you’re just phoning this stuff in, aren’t you, what happened to the artisanally-curated hand-picked greatness we’ve come to, well, not expect exactly but at least occasionally hope for?’ and then you’ll wake up five minutes later having fallen down a wormhole through ‘lists of characters in Neighbours’ to a detailed biography of Stefan Dennis. You wait.
• Elon Musk Text Replacement: Are you as bored as I am of hearing Elon Musk’s every single utterance fawned over by fedora-wearing online inadequates? No, you’re probably not, but I spend more time online than you do. Anyway, this is a Chrome extension which replaces Musk’s name with “Grimes’ boyfriend”, which I hope for Grimes’ sake is a gag which is going to be out of date very soon indeed (lest we forget).
• Slow Heavy Metal Music Playing: A Facebook Page dedicated to the single but oddly amusing observation that every single video clip or photo can be improved by the addition of the caption “Slow heavy metal music playing”. It’s true, see for yourselves.
• Did Thanos Kill Me?: Well, did he?
• Record Label Logos: Do you want an exhaustive collection of record label logos from the past century, listed alphabetically? No, you probably don’t, and yet I proffer it to you with the beseeching eyes of a loyal gun dog. APPRECIATE MY OFFERINGS, MASTER.

By Brian Donnelly

NOW HAVE THE MAP-BASED MUSIC OF SIGUR ROS TO ACCOMPANY THE NEXT LINKSELECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH JUST DREW ALBANIA IN AN OFFICE EUROVISION SWEEPSTAKE BUT DOESN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE SONGS TO DETERMINE WHETHER THAT’S TWO QUID WASTED, PT.1:

• Visual Memoranda: This is a quite remarkable collection of superbly-designed IBM posters from the late 20th Century, accompanying the exhibition of the same name currently taking place at Auburn University in the US. “As a creative extension of Rand’s influence, designers White, Anderson, and Bluhm developed posters as a platform for elevating internal communications and initiatives within the company. While daily tasks for corporate graphic designers often included layout work on newsletters, binders, symbols, booklets, and brochures, the visually clear, single-message format of the poster offered a unique creative outlet and latitude for experimentation.” Seriously, the work collected here is remarkable.
• All We’d Ever Need Is One Another: I confess to really not understanding the title of this AT ALL, but maybe it will mean more to you. Nonetheless, this is a rather cool art project which generates images using two flat-bed scanners and no human input whatsoever: “The installation self-generates images using two flatbed scanners laying on their side, with scanning surfaces pointing at one another. A computer script creates automatic mouse movements, randomizing the settings of the proprietary scanning software interface, and beginning a scanning process. Each newly created image is then analyzed by a series of deep-learning algorithms trained on a database of contemporary artworks in economic and institutional circulation. When an image matches an existing artwork beyond an 83% match, it uploads it to this website and a twitter account.” The resulting works are surprisingly strong imho; you can follow the project on Twitter or Insta if you fancy some machine-imagined arts in your feed.
• Impact JS: I was talking to a friend last night about how incredible it is that kids have access to the most incredible suite of creative tools, largely for free, with which to explore the limits of their interests and abilities (and, lest you think that sounds uncharacteristically Pollyannish and hopeful, how this meant that he and I would be on the employment scrapheap within 10y unless we bucked our ideas up); this is yet another in said suite. Impact is a set of tools for people wanting to build games in HTML, for playing in-browser and across devices; I obviously have no aptitude for this sort of thing so can’t comment on ease-of-use or similar questions, but if you or one of your family shows interest and inclination in this direction then I think it looks like a hugely powerful and fun thing to play with.
• A Thread of Chinese Nicknames for NBA Players: You need know nothing about either China or basketball to enjoy this Twitter thread, in which Nick Kapur unpacks the meaning behind the nicknames Chinese fans give to their NBA idols. SO GOOD – the way you get an insight into the complexity and humour of the Chinese language is superb, and everyone ought to aspire to a nickname like the one given to Steph Curry (seriously, it’s amazing).
• Dangerous Roads: Mt friend Paul once went to Peru and sent me a great email about his trip along the reassuringly-named ROAD OF DEATH (he subsequently got malaria and spent a bunch of time in hospital; he’s got poor holiday luck, Paul); this site collects some of the best examples of other ROADS OF DEATH from around the world, which you can use as a guide as to where not to go on a camper van holiday this Summer.
• Botchain: Bots…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! (sorry) WHY DOES THIS NEED TO EXIST? “The $50B industry of autonomous bots lacks the universal standards or protocols of every other major software industry. There is also no verifiable visibility into bot decisions and actions. These conditions limit growth and presents significant compliance risks for corporations” – well, yes, fine, but there is still literally nothing about this project which suggests to me that the FCUKING BLOCKCHAIN is the necessary or desired solution. Also, as an aside, you might want to go about building a universally-accepted definition of ‘bot’ while you’re at it.
• Joseph’s Machines: Joseph has been making Rube Goldberg machines for years. This is his YouTube channel – MARVEL at his ingenuity.
• Drawn To Sex: A GOOD KICKSTARTER! Praise be! I think I’ve featured Drawn To Sex’s comics before on here, but if you’re not familiar they are cute, funny, instructional guides to fcuking and how to go about it in a way that’s fun for you and whoever you’re doing it with. This Kickstarter’s raising money to compile a selection of strips and some new material into a physical sex-ed book aimed at teaching kids the basics; given the fact that the scholastic system in this country seems persistently unwilling to engage with the need to give kids alternative ways to learn about sex than furtively watching hentai clips and extreme pegging on xhamster, this seems an eminently sensible idea.
• The Emoji Aquarium: A Twitter account which Tweets emoji images of randomly-generated aquariums every few hours. It only does one thing, fine, but given it’s Twitter and that one thing isn’t, say, getting into fights with people every three minutes or being an actual Nazi then maybe we should cut it some slack.
• The Escher Archive: Oh this is wonderful! A superb digitised archive of every stoned 16 year old’s favourite artist MC Escher; there are only 87 pieces, but it’s nice to be reminded of what an exceptional draughtsman he was, aside from his ability to fcuk with your head something chronic.
• The NASA Intelligence Tests: Have you had a pretty good week? Are you feeling, you know, reasonably good, reasonably pleased with yourself, pretty chipper? Do you think you’re pretty smart, most of the time? Well have a play around with these and watch all that misplaced self-confidence vanish within seconds as you realise that you are NOT special in the slightest. These are tests used in the 1950s by NASA to assess potential space programme inductees; I feel HUGELY inadequate now.
• Jeff Rothstein: Rothstein took amazing photographs of New York in the 60s and 70s; his website archives some of his work, and is worth a lengthy browse.
• The Great American Read: A list of the 100 most popular (? the selection process is a touch oblique, if I’m honest) novels produced by the US; if you’re looking for some inspiration for the Summer’s attempt to stop the slow atrophying of your brain through novels then this might be of use.
• Awful Taste, Great Execution: I don’t want to explain this subreddit any more than I absolutely have to. Imagine something very, very wrong, but done very, very well – yes, exactly, that. You will LOVE this, I promise you, but it might make you feel a touch…odd.
• We Are NY Indie Booksellers: Superb photoproject documenting New York’s independent bookshops and the people who sell in them. I would like to see this for London, please, while we still have some indie booksellers left.
• Out of Office: Internet Oddity Sadeagle has the best email address in the world, but also the worst email address in the world, meaning he gets a lot of email from strangers who really hope he’s something he’s (almost certainly) not. He has now published an overpriced coffee-table book collecting some of these emails with accompanying photos. He occasionally sends me some of these and, well, they are QUITE the thing. Click the link – I promise, it is worth it.
• 300 Super Nintendo Game Logos: I have no idea why these are here collected, but I am very glad they are. SUCH nostagiafeels!
• Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #1: This is called Tix Tax and it’s noughts and crosses, played against strangers online, but as part of a larger, 3×3 noughts and crosses metagame. Look, click the link and watch the tutorial, it will make sense.
• Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #2: This one is called Face Out and, honestly, I don’t want to tell you too much about it; it’s part Breakout Clone, part surrealist parable…”You are taken on the journey of a faceless man, cursed to lose his face in exchange for keeping his life. After living for years, unable to speak and trapped behind a mask, you are now looking to lift the curse. This will force you on a journey through the land of the dead – a journey to find the person who forced you to live like life, and taking them on.” Try it, it’s ACE.
• Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #3: Roulette Knight was made as part of the latest Ludum Dare game jam, as part of the challenge to combine two utterly incompatible game genres – in this case, RPG and Russian Roulette. It really oughtn’t work, but it’s surprisingly fun and tense and compelling. You might need to fiddle around to get a hang of the mechanics – they’re not as clearly explained as they might have been – but once you get into the rhythm this is an EXCELLENT timesink.
• Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #4: This is called ‘Sort Your Life Out’, and it’s a piece of interactive fiction which made me smile and think and very much remember what it’s like to be a teenager, hashing out BIG LIFE DECISIONS in someone’s room over a cup of tea and a spliff. Was that better than doing it over nine pints? It probably was, wasn’t it?

By Johann Barrios

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE THIS FABULOUS COLLECTION OF GREAT SLEAZY AUDIO FROM CLASSIC BONGO!

THE (FLEA) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (SERIOUSLY, ONLY ONE THIS WEEK? PULL YOUR FINGERS OUT, FACELESS CREATORS OF THINGS THAT I LIFT FOR THIS NEWSLETTER!):

• In Progress Pokemon: “In-Progress Pokemon explores how Pokemon might look if they physically transitioned from one evolutionary stage to another.” Yeah, fine, so there’s only one Tumblr but it’s a fcuking doozy.

• Bonus Twitter Thread Of Weird Tumblr Stuff: God I love web culture sometimes.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye: This was everywhere last weekend, and with good reason; if you’ve not read it, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take on West’s co-option by, and co-signing of, ‘The Intellectual Dark Web’(more on which later) and associated right wing fcukery is a brilliant piece of writing, on black cultural identity and the power and responsibility of role models. Wonderful prose, and if you haven’t read it already then you really must.

• I Am A Data Factory: Nicholas Carr writes on data and social media and us, and posits that rather than being mined for data by companies such as Facebook we are instead all taking on, willingly for the most part, roles of data factories – that is, our data is not being extracted with no labour on our part, that the data so valued is only accessible as a result of our ‘labour’ (should you be willing to consider clicking and ‘liking’ to be ‘labour’, which you might admittedly consider a stretch), and that as such this should change the manner in which we think about this, its value and its use. Smart.
• Pirate Radio on YouTube: I’ve featured a few 24h streaming YouTube radio stations on here in the past year or so, but honestly had no idea it was such a widespread phenomenon or indeed that it was possible to make £5k a month on ad revenues from a stream which basically runs itself. What’s also interesting is the different cultural role these serve when compared to ‘traditional’ pirate radio as you might imagine it; rather than existing to allow cultural and musical expression which doesn’t otherwise find an outlet, this is morelike aural chewing gum to accompany adderall-fueled study sessions. Which is…bleak, frankly.
• What Are Stories?: The first sensible / serious take on the idea of ‘stories’ as a content phenomenon, why they’re so popular and what their rise means in a broader cultural sense. Which, yes, sounds a little bit overblown, but consider the incredible rise in popularity of this specific content format as communications medium; when you factor in Snap, Insta, FB, Messenger and the other clone types, you’re looking at nearly a billion people communicating in a clearly-defined and identifiable format that simply didn’t exist a few short years ago – it’s quite phenomenal. Anyway, this Atlantic piece is clever, and this quote rather sums it up: “Stories is not a technology, nor is it a feature. It is a media format, or even a genre, in the way that a magazine or a murder mystery or a 30-minute television program is.”
• My Quest To Meet The Boss: A wonderful account of Toniann Fenandez’ quest to meet and interact with Bruce Springsteen, taking her to New Jersey and a Springsteen gig, and rendering her very poor in the process. Partly about the Boss, partly about Jersey, and partly about the author herself, this is a great piece of travel writing – there’s the same sort of deep sense of affection for place coming through here that resonates through all of Springsteen’s songs.
• The Tech Homes of Smart Obsessives: I know for a fact that there are a lot of middle-aged men who read Curios (HELLO, MIDDLE-AGED MEN! It’s lovely to have you here, make yourselves comfortable); this is for them. This piece interviews three people who have taken the whole smart home thing and run with it – I have to say, much as I want no truck with an internet-connected home and little as I care about having a 900-inch plasma 4k flatscreen thingy on my wall, some of this stuff sounds quite fun, in a sci-fi, star trek sort of way. I’m curious, though – would going to someone’s house after a date to find that he (again, I know that I’m succumbing to stereotype here, but this is a pretty blokey thing, right?) had automatically dimming lights and could activate his stereo by clicking his fingers make you think “wow, what a suave guy!” or “christ alive, it’s like train sets but more expensive”? Just wondering.
• Direct To Consumer Selling: See, the actual title is about startups vying to become the next Warby Parker, but I don’t know how many of you know what Warby Parker is (if you don’t, it’s a US eyewear retailer which famously disrupted the glasses market over there by selling straight to buyers online and cutting out the cost of retail space); anyway, this is a really interesting piece looking at the economics and challenges of launching a direct-to-consume business, as has become the trend for everything from slippers to mattresses to razors to, inexplicably, pants. You get the feeling that there are going to be a lot of failed businesses based on this model in a few years.
• Amazon’s Fake Review Problem: You will be shocked – SHOCKED, I TELL YOU – to discover that there are some Amazon reviews that are not the fact the sincere opinion of discerning consumers, but that are instead paid for by the item vendors themselves in order to gull customers into thinking that the products in question are actually any good. I KNOW! The scale of this is crazy, though, as is the impact it can have on sellers who choose not to undertake this sort of scamming. The best part, though? The blithe conclusion that, really, there’s not much Amazon can do about it!
• How Chain Restaurant Menus Are Made: Fascinating look at how mass-catering works at scale, and how menus for your favourite chain outlet, whether Nando’s or Pizza Express or Wagamama or whatever, are dreamed up by highly-paid consultants looking to exploit psychological triggers and HOOK YOU INTO THE BUFFET. Honestly, I would kill to do this sort of job – how does one get into it?
• How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists: Or, “the uncomfortable congruence between the ‘intellectual dark web’ [SUCH a laughable title!] and some actual nazis”, this piece looks at the rise of the ‘free speech at all costs’ movement and how it’s being Trojan Horsed by some particularly unpleasant people with some particularly unpleasant views. “There is a magnitude of difference between protecting an individual’s legal right to free speech and taking the further step of uncritically promoting white-supremacist propaganda in mainstream platforms.” – well, quite.
• Dining at the New Noma: Noma reopened in Copenhagen earlier this year, in a new purpose-built venue in crusty paradise Christiania; this NYT piece is an excellent writeup of the experience for those of us who are perhaps less likely to attend. Focusing on the experience as a whole rather than just the food, this is a lovely piece of writing, gently humorous, about the otherworldly nature of proper ‘temples of food’; as ever with pieces about Redzepi’s food, there’s a lot of this that sounds ‘interesting’ rather than ‘christ alive I want that in my face right now’, but I would sell a kidney to visit this place. Any takers?
• Skateboarders in La Paz: Not much in the way of writing here, but the photos in this essay are WONDERFUL.
• The Atlantic’s Editorial Meeting: This is possibly a *bit* niche, but I found it fascinating; this is the transcript of a recent editorial meeting at The Atlantic, in which editor Jeff Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates do a Q&A session with staff about their recent decision to hire, and then fire, right-wing columnist Kevin Williamson. You don’t need to know that much about the specifics of the case or why Williamson was fired (a lot of that comes out in the piece); I’m presenting this more as a really interesting look at how liberals are struggling to reconcile the need for plurality of voice and expression with the increasing demand from their readers for demonstrable, performative wokeness, and the internal contradictions that this exposes. This is VERY long, but it’s full of all sorts of interesting and revealing nuggets about current trends in liberal media thinking.
• Why Good People Turn Bad Online: Or, “The Science of Trolls”; this is a look at what the factors are that contribute to the breakdown of civilising norms in online communities, with a dash of prisoners’ dilemma-style behavioural experiment science thrown in. The stuff in here about using bots in a closed social environment as disruptors to improve problem-solving and discourse was honestly fascinating, and something I had never considered before.
• Meet Lil Tay: Do you remember Danielle Bregoli, aka the Cash Me Ousside, How ‘Bout Dat girl? No, of course you don’t, because you have better things to spend your mental juice on. I don’t, though, so stuff like that STICKS. Anyway, Lil Tay is the latest young woman to understand the incredible celebrity potential in being an extremely ghetto white chick, swearing for views on Insta.  The story – this nine year old kid is becoming a minor online celebrity for basically just having what I believe the kids call MAD BEEF with everyone and pretending to be a rapper – is bleak but familiar; the degree to which a baffling network of adults appear to be setting this up to make money out of the kid, is pretty spectacularly dreadful. Read this and then maybe go and hug your children and take them to the park (or if you’re childless like me, work out which of your godchildren is most ripe for similar exploitation).
• Modern Life Is Rubbish: Brilliant music journalism as ever by The Quietus – you can fund them here, if you want, they deserve it – looking back at Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish at a quarter-Century’s distance with a critical eye. The album’s lauded by many as Blur’s best, but Luke Turner’s retrospective focuses instead on the particularly plastic nostalgia that the band was mining even then in their gimlet-eyed pursuit of commercial success; there are some lovely old Albarn quotes in there which make you realise that Ed Sheeran wasn’t the first artist to be quietly, shrewdly cynical about finding and relentlessly exploiting a niche.
• How To Be Jamie Lee Curtis: An archive piece, originally appearing in US Magazine in 1985, this profile of Jamie Lee Curtis is just superb. The writing is brilliant, and the whole framing of the piece is just *chef’s kiss*.
• How Should We Talk To Alexa Around Our Kids: A conversation between the author and some parents, with occasional interruptions by Alexa herself, about how we might want to think about the manner in which we communicate with virtual assistants around our children. We’ve seen the questions addressed before, ish, but the angle here’s an interesting one and I like the format of the piece.
• The Roaring Girls of Queer London: This gave me SO MUCH JOY this week, not least because it taught me the word ‘fricatrice’ (which means exactly what you think it means). This is an extract from Peter Ackroyd’s (forthcoming?) Queer City, his history of Gay London, and tells of how the love between women was accepted or reviled according to the age. There are some CRACKING stories in here, as well as some excellent bits of knowledge; I am forever grateful to learn that dildoes used to be known as ‘shuttlecocks’ in the 16th/17thC, for example, and I imagine you now are too.
• The Rise of Juul: The vaping craze sweeping US high schools and college campuses (and possibly here too – has it crossed over yet as a brand?); the fascinating thing about this is that it’s presented with all the furtive awe of an addition to something serious whereas in fact this is just a bunch of kids huffing watermelon-flavour nicotine water; that said, it’s interesting to consider the opportunities for the creation of new BIG TOBACCO-style brand monopolies as we get a whole new generation hooked on a ‘healthy’ version of nicotine. I have to say, though, for someone who pointedly smoked filterless Gauloises all the way through interrailing at 16 (I was an insufferable ponce then, too; very little changes), this all seems, well, a bit silly.
• When Milky Got His Money: This…this is AMAZING. Meet ‘Milky’, a bit of a bogan but generally a pretty sound fella. Milky was in dire straits financially, when he one day discovered that the bank had seemingly extended his overdraft facility to…infinity. What did Milky do? What would YOU do? This is SO beautifully told, and does a lovely job of conveying the slightly vacant nature of its protagonist, blithely going along for the ride and enjoying himself very much along the way. It does, in very Australian fashion, slightly gloss over the seedier aspects of this – the coke, say, or the slightly staggering detail that he once hired a WHOLE BROTHEL FOR HIMSELF FOR A FEW DAYS (the archetypal example of one’s eyes being bigger than one’s…er…stomach, I’d guess), but the payoff is honestly heartwarming – the film of this will be GREAT.
• People Are Starving: Finally this week, the best piece of writing I have read in the past month or so; Suzanne Rivecca, on womanhood and femininity and identity and food and weight and self and growing up and regressing and so much else. This almost made me angry it was that good (it’s SO UNFAIR how other people can be so talented) – enjoy it, it’s a great read.

By Martya Syrko

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. We’ll kick off with This Is America, because if you haven’t watched it then you should, now, and if you have then you might want to watch it again.

(oh, and if you would like a close reading of it, though I agree that playing ‘Ready Player One’ with stuff like this and trying to spot all the cultural allusions seems to slightly miss the bigger picture, this Twitter thread is good, as is this piece)

2) This is called Girls on TV and it’s by Laura Jean, and I LOVE IT. It is a wonderful piece of storytelling and reminds me a bit of Suzanne Vega fwiw. Honestly, this is gorgeous:

3) This is a CRACKING video. The song’s a big old camp slab of disco house; it’s called ‘Don’t You Know I’m In A Band?’, and it parodies exactly the sort of thing you’d imagine it parodies – this is by Confidence Man:

4) This is slightly terrifying car-based industrial noise-type father/daughter pairing ‘YEAH YOU’ – it’s…honestly, it’s sort of horrible, but compellingly so. ‘Enjoy’!

(oh, and this interview with them’s worth a read if you’re interested in the ‘why?’)

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is the recent Fire in the Booth by Kojey Radical and it is very good indeed:

6) MORE UK HIPHOP CORNER! Very different, this, but I’ve liked George the Poet for ages now, and this acoustic version of Follow The Leader with Maverick Sabre is a really beautiful stripped-down take on the track:

7) NON-UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Blueprint, with the first single of his forthcoming new album – it’s going to be excellent, as is this. It’s called ‘Hoop Dreamin’’:

8) Last up, possibly my favourite song of the year so far. This is called ‘Where Did Your Truth Go?”, it’s by Girl Skin, Foster James and it reminds me of Mazzy Star and Avi Buffalo and it is SO lovely and perfect for a warm summer’s afternoon. ENJOY THE MUSIC AND ENJOY WHAT I HOPE IS A SUNSHINEY WEEKEND THANKYOU FOR READING I LOVE YOU AND I WANT ONLY WHAT IS BEST FOR YOU TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND SEE YOU SOON BYE!:

HELLO AGAIN EVERYONE! After a brief hiatus born of my having the selfish temerity to step away from the web for a long weekend – did you take care of it? is it ok? I worry, you know – Web Curios is back, ready to almost immediately clock off again as we look forward to celebrating the May Bank Holiday in inimitable British style. 

So, as you purchase your nitrous ampoules and get the pingers in, as you bulk-buy batch-crafted artisanal gin to mix into poorly-conceived mix-and-match cocktails, as you stake out your place on the nearest patch of beturded scrubland with your disposable barbecue and Tesco Finest snorkers and pray God that the rain stays away, let me ease you into the weekend with another selection of the very finest, the very best, the…well, not technically the freshest as a few of these have been hanging about since last week, but they’re still ACE, obviously…the…the…most links anywhere on the internet! Consider clicking on every link and reading every word a sort of intellectual pre-penance, a bit like taking confession before you go out and do a murder – there is so much assorted smart and interesting and brilliant (all the work of people who aren’t me, to be clear) in Curios this week that upon finishing it you will have EARNED the right to spend the next 72 sandblasting your frontal lobes with whatever combination of uppers and downers you choose. 

Once again, then, take a deep breath, take my hand, and proceed to DIVE INTO THE TELEPORTATION POOLS OF MY MIND as I take you on a meandering journey through a bunch of utterly unconnected websites all strung together with the mucus-like glue of my prose. I’m glad it’s back, youy’re largely indifferent, but, regardless, THIS IS WEB CURIOS!

By CESS

LET’S KICK THIS OFF IN FINE STYLE WITH A TRULY SUPERB MIX OF HIPHOP WHICH WAS SENT TO ME BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE (THANKS SCOTT)!

THE SECTION WHICH APPRECIATES YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN MUCH OF THE BELOW ALREADY GIVEN THE FORTNIGHT’S HIATUS BUT WHICH HOPES NONETHELESS THAT THE THIN VENEER OF ‘INSIGHT’ GIVES YOU REASON TO AT LEAST SKIM IT FOR OTHERWISE ALL MY WORK IS FOR NAUGHT AND YOU WOULDN’T WANT THAT NOW WOULD YOU?

• Facebook’s Earnings: Oh look, MORE MONEY! MORE USERS! Like some sort of poorly-conceived hoover/hydra hybrid, you cut off one head and the others just keep on hoovering up the pennies – in this case, whilst Facebook might be reaching peak, Insta and Messenger and WhatsApp are all still growing vertiginously and, per the earnings call, are being looked at in terms of increased monetisation (you didn’t REALLY believe WhatsApp was going to stay ad-free forever, did you? Did you?). Interesting side note from the earnings call (despite Facebook’s recent insistence that its entire raison d’etre was the fostering of community and not (heaven forfend, no siree!) the collection of the greatest collection of information about human interest and behaviour that has ever existed, to be used for monetisation purposes how and whenever possible): there were somewhere in the region of 10 mentions of the term ‘community’ on the call with analysts, whereas there were over 40 of the term ‘ad’ or ‘advert’. Draw whatever conclusions you feel most appropriate here.
• ALL OF THE THINGS AT F8!: And lo, it came to pass that once again the world’s media gathered in San Francisco’s environs to once again congregate within the hallowed halls of Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory to clap like seals at the GLORIOUS FUTUREANNOUNCEMENTS! And what were they this year? Well, there were LOTS (but mostly of limited interest, at least immediately, to advermarketingprdrones) – here is the full list from Day 1, and here is the full list from Day 2; and here is the Techcrunch aggregation of all of the stories from the event. For me, the big stuff is the ‘Clear History’ option for users, which enables people to effectively scrub Facebook’s profile of their browsing history – there’s no indication of how this is going to affect targeting options, and it’s not going to be live in the wild for a few months yet, but it’s a sensible move from a user (and PR, obvs) perspective. Other than this, the integration of apps into Stories on Insta and FB is a big deal – you can see by how excited people are getting about being able to inflict their musical tastes on their stalkers thanks to Spotify integration, for example – and something that, for appropriate brands, is a huge opportunity for expanding reach (oh, and the quote in here about them actively seeking to monetise stories with ADS is unsurprising but worth noting); equally, the additional expansion of AR for brands into Instagram and Messenger, along with the improved tracking tech they’ve announced, is big news (POOR THE SNAPCHAT), although it’s seemingly still going to be locked to those with all of the ad monies, at least for now. Oh, and there’s going to be dating, to keep the middle-aged locked into the platform forever, through the first marital slump, the affairs and the comfortable descent into the swinging and poly scene (that’s what everyone does in middle-age, right? That’s why all poly people you ever see on telly are so, well, unappealing, right?), but that’s of no interest to YOU, you virile young folk.
• FB Introducing New Video Ad Formats: Pre-roll, basically, which they’ve been touting for months but which seems now to be A Thing (in the US, at least, and only through Facebook Watch rather than in Newsfeed), these excitingly “also included a new feature called “preview trailers,” ads to promote Watch shows and other videos that can take viewers to the full-length program.” Excuse me while I take a moment for the tumescence to subside.
• New Tools for Facebook Fundraisers: Of course, sometimes Facebook does things that it’s hard to frame as anything other than A Good Thing, no matter how hard I try (and God knows, I tried) – this allows for matched donations, creates a whole new raft of categories for ‘personal fundraising’, and eliminates Facebook fees for said personal fundraising projects. As per, these are starting in the US and then rolling out globally, but it makes Facebook an (even more) obvious choice as a place to raise money (although I find the growing concept of personal fundraising incredibly depressing, given it feels like a direct consequence of the sorts of services / assistance that people might once have reasonably expected to receive from, I don’t know, the state, or third sector organisations which no longer exist as a result of several years of swingeing cutsohgodnopleasenotthepoliticsmakeitstop) (oh, good, see, I did manage to find a negative take, well done ME!).
• Marginally Better Video Retention Metrics for Page Admins: Thrill-a-minute stuff, this, isn’t it?
• Facebook Is Fighting Fake News By Making It Smaller: This is, I promise, not a joke or an Onion headline.
• What Does Facebook Know About Me: This Q&A, part of FB’s ‘Hard Questions’ series (see Curios passim – and also this one, which is honestly interesting regarding what it does and doesn’t allow on the platform), is actually a pretty decent rundown of what information Facebook holds about its users and how that information is then used, but contains this absolute ZINGER which I must quickly draw to your attention. ““Q: If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product? A: No. Our product is social media – the ability to connect with the people that matter to you, wherever they are in the world. It’s the same with a free search engine, website or newspaper. The core product is reading the news or finding information – and the ads exist to fund that experience.” WELL GOLLY GOSH, MARK! Given, though, that social media is necessarily constructed solely of content produced by us, its users, it is surely massively disingenuous to suggest that, given we are the ‘information experience’ the company purports to sell, that the product is not EXACTLY what fcuking are, you appalling obfuscatory fcukers.
• Insta Launching Native Payments: Well this is big, and snuck in somewhat unnanounced overnight – Instagram users in the US and the UK, at least some of them, are being offered the opportunity to input their credit card details so as to allow native payments through the platform, which is obviously HUGE from a retail point of view. No indication at all as to how the experience will work for users, and seemingly no retailers have yet been offered the opportunity to let users check out through Insta, but it’s a matter of DAYS, surely. Are you excited? I’m excited (I’m not excited).
• Download All The Stuff Insta Knows About You: IT IS OWNED BY FACEBOOK IT IS JUST AS SHADY FFS DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND YOU MOUTH-BREATHING IDIOTS?
• Twitter Results: These were widely hailed by analysts as A Good Thing for Twitter overall, and the toplines are positive – ad revenues are up 21% Q on Q (although contrast that with Facebook’s terrifying performance and you start to see that this is all pretty relative), and DAUs is up 10%…but equally, this is the third consecutive quarter in which that DAU uplift has shrunk, which isn’t a fantastic trend. I’m as bearish as ever on Twitter’s market prospects, though continue to find it impossible to conceive of a better solution for communicating at speed and scale (which perhaps speaks to my own paucity of imagination rather than to anything big about Twitter itself).
• Twitter Announces New Sponsored Content Formats: Buried within this rather tedious announcement about some new TV partnerships or somesuch is the SEISMIC REVEAL that “Twitter is also announcing new ad programs. There are Creator Originals, a set of scripted series from influencers who will be paired up with sponsored brands. And there’s a new Live Brand Studio — as the name suggests, it’s a team that works with marketers to create live video.” I confess to not having even bothered to look for additional information on these, as if you have the sort of budgets to be thinking of this sort of crap then you almost certainly have a Twitter rep already attempting to flog you it, but I hope that by acknowledging my professional inadequacy here I will go some way towards mitigating it. Have I? IS IT ALL OK?
• Snapchat Results: We’re not going to dwell on these, but TechCrunch’s piece is a reasonable overview of why the numbers are…not good (and further clues were found in the F8 stuff from Day 2 in which they announced that Insta and WhatsApp’s Story mechanics were being used 2x and 3x as often as Snap’s original version).
• Snapchat Launches Snappables: Presumably because ‘slightly janky AR games’ didn’t fit with the brand. Snappables are a series of interactive lenses, which allow users to play a series of simple games controlled using the same AR interface that puts dog ears on your head to hilarious effect no stop it I am crying it’s LIKE YOU ARE A DOG rofl. So you can bop your head up and down to do virtual keepy-ups, say, or contort your mouth to catch floating emoji poos, or whatever (I am guessing as to some of these, you may be able to tell). At the moment these are being built in-house and rolled out weekly, but they would BITE YOUR HAND OFF if you are a brand that wants to spend 6 figures (I’d guess minimum spend on one of these at the outset would be no less than $250k) on making a themed game where you have to, say, chomp as many Whoppers as you can in a minute (£10 says that literal idea, or a close variant on it by one of the fast food peddlers, is one of the first three branded versions). This feels very much like an excellent way for digital studios with some AR chops to make some quick and dirty cash for what will basically end up being fancy shovelware – God, it’s like 2010 and Facebook apps all over again!
• Snapchat Testing Unskippable Ads: Only in its – largely execrable – commissioned shows, mind (seriously, have you ever tried watching any of Snapchat’s original content? I know I am pretty far away from the target audience here, but, honestly, I’d almost rather watch Zoella) – beautifully, the report (apologies for the Mashable link, btw) refers to these unskippable 6-second spots as ‘Commercials’, as though Snap has invented something SHINY and NEW and REVOLUTIONARY. The future is the past all over again but with a greater degree of jaded ennui, I am discovering.
• Snap Launches Spectacles 2.0: Because it’s nearly Summer (ha!) and you might be in the market for a new pair of shades with which to record all of the sunburn and vomit and rejection. It’s not exactly clear what differentiates these from v1.0, other than the fact that they are on mass-sale and that they have some new colourways, but if YOU want to film slightly motion sickness-inducing facevideo then go for your life.
• All Of The Snapchat Ad Formats: A really useful rundown by Business Insider (again, sorry) – exactly the sort of thing that all platforms should have readily accessible as an explainer and yet weirdly don’t seem to have in place at all.
• Alexa Will Now Remember: Well, soon – and in the US only, but if you do stuff around recipes for Amazon’s Domestic Surveillance Hub (or Echo, as it’s more commonly referred to) then you ought to be aware of the imminent introduction of a degree of persistence in the device’s memory; users will be able to tell Alexa to ‘remember’ information (in the example they suggest birthdays, but one could equally use ‘my favourite Divinyls song’ or ‘the podcast that makes the red mist recede’); the applications for this for Echo app developers are obviously really big, not least for the creation of games – you could reasonably imagine scripting an audio-RPG which allowed for persistent and interactive inventory management, for example (Jesus, that’s where my brain decided to go first with that? SO DEPRESSING).
• Google Surveys: Josh, who knows everything about surveys and data, tells me that Google have been punting this to research agencies for a while now, but the fact it’s now available for anyone to use is a NEW THING! Using Google Surveys, anyone with a Google account can set up a reasonable (if, as professional datawonks would scream, VERY unsophisticated and statistically problematic) series of surveys using all the question types you might expect, targeted (roughly) by region (broad geography-level rather than anything so useful as postcode) and age (standard demographic brackets) – you pay per response, with the cost depending on all the usual factors like complexity and the like. Costs seemingly start at £0.08 per respondent, which seems like a pretty good deal as long as you don’t worry about fancy stuff like weighting and the like.
• Ofcom Media Use Data: The latest data dump from Ofcom, telling us all what we already know – to whit, we are all staring at our phones all the time. Nothing hugely surprising, but useful to bookmark for the next time you need to persuade a client that no, really, it is important that they have a mobile-friendly website (you scoff, but I get paid to deal with some SPECIAL PEOPLE). Oh, and the other main takeaway is the first real acknowledgement in these sort of stats that the vast majority of web users are simply not intellectually capable of understanding some of the complex issues which underpin online information flows, or indeed bereft of the critical thinking faculties required to make sense of, well, most things on the internet. Which is simultaneously true and incredibly depressing.
• The Strategic Planners’ Presentation Template: Obviously YOU are all far too sophisticated and professionally advanced to have need of this sort of thing, but on the offchance that you know someone who might benefit from this sort of guided instruction then SHARE WIDELY. It’s old, but it’s still useful.
• The Humanity Test: Simple, clever, and riffs on the Captcha ‘are you human?’ tests in an interesting way – smart, by the UN.
• Invisible Friends: Last up in the tedious-but-necessary section about WORK is this excellent idea by Australian charity MPAN (Missing Persons Advocacy Network) which uses Facebook’s otherwise creepy-as facial recognition feature to help find missing antipodeans – by adding profiles connected to these missing individuals as ‘friends’, Australian FB users can, simply by using the platform as normal, help identify them. Every time anyone gets tagged in a photo, it also alerts their friends that they have been tagged – meaning that if anyone gets tagged in a picture featuring these missing people, the profile owner (in this case, the charity) will get an alert, and a clue as to where the missing person in question was, when, and who with. Simple, smart and for a good cause, this ought to win awards.

By Dina Litovsky

“>NEXT UP, A REALLY LOVELY MIX BY THOMAS SPOONER WHO USED TO LIVE OPPOSITE ME WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID AND WHO’S GROWN UP TO BE A VERY NICE MAN WITH GOOD TASTE IN MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS TEACHERS PROBABLY DON’T GET PAID ENOUGH TO MARK HOMEWORK *AND* LEARN HOW TO FIRE OFF PRECISION ROUNDS IN INTENSELY HIGH-PRESSURE CIRCUMSTANCES, ON BALANCE, PT.2:

• Real Life Charts: Michelle Rial is a designer from San Francisco, and this is her Instagram account where she posts brilliant and funny graphs, all about, y’know, LIFE and stuff. So relatable! It’s quite difficult to describe this positively – I think it’s really good, but at the same time all the terms I want to use to describe it are generally the sort of words which generally make me want to gouge out my eyes. Still, click and enjoy.

• Historic Maps of London: Oh this is SUPERB! 50+ historic maps of London, ranging from old depictions of the tube to a ‘Hyde Park Glove Map’, designed to be worn by ladies with questionable orientation skills taking a gentle constitutional. Cartography enthusiasts (you crazy guys!) will adore this.
• Bump: The cooler kids among you – or the mindless Supreme zombies, either/or – may well know about this, but it was new to me. Bump is basically Wavey Garms as an app – it’s a streetwear buying and selling community, with marketplace and chat functionality, working with Paypal to manage transactions and provide payment security. Wonderfully, there’s an additional market where people basically offer themselves up to stand in line in Covent Garden or wherever to catch the latest drop – they queue so you don’t have to, and you don’t even have to know them or talk to them! Is this ok?
• List of Oreo Varieties: There are a LOT Of different types of Oreo, turns out.
• The Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies: Not a film that tends to get a lot of critical discourse around it, Gremlins 2, but in case you ever wondered about the Derridan implications of the Flasher Gremlin then you’re in for a treat.
• And Flowers: Thanks to Dan Green for pointing this out to me;  have you ever wondered what a florist would be like if you made it a lot less like a florist and a lot more like a cross between SuperSuper Magazine circa 2006, and everyone who’s ever lived in New Cross? It would be like this! Honestly rather lovely, despite being so hip it can barely see over its own pelvis.
• Public Office: The website of artist and maker Jonathan Levine, an Australian who makes the most incredible designs from cardboard – mechanical, architectural, fantastical, I would love to see this stuff animated in stop-motion.
• The Mercury Jacket: What could POSSIBLY go wrong with a jacket which has a built-in heating element and thermostat, controllable (OF COURSE!) by your phone? Why not be one of the thousands of curious folk to back this Kickstarter and find out! Yes, it’s another entry in the now-kilometric list of ‘internet connected stuff on Kickstarter which doesn’t really need to be internet connected and which I’m reasonably sure isn’t going to be as good as it looks in prototype!’ Here it is, then, the “Mercury Intelligent Heated Jacket — outerwear that’s voice controlled, built for anything, automatically heats to the right temperature, and learns your behavior to get better over time.” Yes, that’s right, voice controlled: “ALEXA WARM UP MY JACKET PLEASE” – who, WHO, is ever going to want to say that? “Alan, you’re sweating like a horse, what’s wrong?” “My phone ran out of batteries and now my jacket won’t let my body temperature fall below 101 degrees”. Oh, and OF COURSE it has ‘AI’ so it can ‘learn your preferences’. I mean, the possibilities are ENDLESS. Go on, buy one, let me know how you get on.
• Making Art With Alexa: Turning a pair of voice assistants into an interpretation of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 audio artwork “I am sitting in a room”. Peak Web Curios here, by Henry Cook.
• Not Quite Bronwyn: I don’t know who Bronwyn is, but I like the fact that she has an Insta account showing exactly how Starbucks mangle her name each morning.  
• Make Your Own Alexa-Controlled Toilet: Have you ever wanted to defecate and then walk away from the toilet, regally declaring “Alexa, eliminate my waste!” to trigger an automatic flush? No, no of course you haven’t. Still, this is a detailed set of instructions as to how you can turn your ordinary, banal toilet into an EXCITING, FUTURE CRAPHOUSE!
• The Material Properties Database: Occasionally I come across something online which is so tedious that I figure it has to be incredibly useful to someone – so it is with The Material Properties Database, which lists the physical properties of loads of construction materials, should you ever need to know exactly what type of plastic you might want to build, I don’t know, a giant garden dinosaur out of. You might read this now and scoff but JUST YOU WAIT until someone’s asking you whether they ought to use Polynenzamidole or Epoxy to secure the camera to the drone mounts. Or, er, something.
• Beecosystem: You get the impression that perhaps the name came first here. Beecosystem (ok, it is a great name) is a slightly mad-looking concept which effectively offers buyers the opportunity to have an attractively designed, modular, display-quality beehive, er, in their house. It’s certainly a feature, but I confess to not being entirely comfortable with the idea of having MILLIONS OF FCUKING BEES in my house. “Yeah, so I’ll be home by about 8, want me to swing by th- Clare? What’s that sound? CLARE OH GOD NO THE BEES ARE LOOSE GOD CLARE SAVE YOURSELF” I mean, that’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve not been warned. Still, they look quite cool.
• The Swiss Transit System: A live map of all the trains on the Swiss rail network, moving in beautifully precise and well-oiled ballet across the territory. Wonderfully, soothingly dull.
• The Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex: Everyone hates Powerpoint. Everyone is dreadful at it. Although possibly noone is quite as bad at it as the US Military, as evidenced by this absolute goldmine of bizarre and increasingly surreal documents – the diagrams! The language! The seemingly uncritical devotion to clipart? Imagine having one of these ‘presented’ at you by a screaming man in fatigues – horrid, isn’t it? This one’s especially for any designers out there who will have a conniption at the complete absence of any sort of unifying aesthetic here.
• Celebrity Tattoos: A slightly-too-obsessive database of famouses and their tatts from around the world, with accompanying picture galleries, which is perfect when you just absolutely have to know about what ink DJ Lethal out of Limp Bizkit has (he has a House of Pain tattoo, tatt fact fans!).
• Pommerman: A robot competition! Pommerman is an international AI challenge, in which developers are invited to create code which can successfully compete in a multiplayer game of (pseudo-)bomberman. If you’re interested in coding and botbuilding and suchlike, this could be a fun pastime. Alternatively, just go and play Bomberman.
• Crying in Public: I am not 100% certain where the ‘crying in New York’ meme/trope came from, but it’s very much a ‘thing’. Crying In Public is a map of New York onto which people have tagged their stories of public emotion in the city – mostly sad, but more generally just beautifully human. A special credit to the person who’s posted a story about being lifted off a man’s lap whilst having sex with them by a bouncer and still not getting kicked out of the venue, which is a pretty impressive feat. This is a very sticky site, and one you can get lost in – I would like, OBVIOUSLY, for someone to replicate this for London please.
• Popcorn TV: This is a PERFECT Friday afternoon piece of webdistraction, and very nicely made with it; it’s a fairly standard ‘how many of these TV shows can you identify?’ game, but the graphics are nice and there’s lots of bonus content and you can also do it in French so, frankly, what MORE do you want? Jesus.
• Robot Mind Meld: This is rather fun and pretty impressive. The site presents you with a bot opponent; you both start with a work, pulled out of the ether by the bot and from wherever you keep your word stocks by you, and then try and iteratively arrive at matching words by trying to find a common term between the two. Fcuk, that makes NO SENSE, does it? Even by my standards, that’s some POOR EXPOSITION, sorry. Look, just try it, it’s fun.
• Pornceptual: “Pornceptual presents pornography as queer, diverse and inclusive. We aim to prove that pornography can be respectful, intimate and artistic, while questioning usual pornographic labels. “Can art succeed where porn fails – to actually turn us on?”” More ‘interesting’ than titillating, to my mind at least, but this is a fascinating site at the fringes of sex, art and bongo; obviously it’s not that safe for work, but the photography’s honestly really very cool and not actually all that bongo-ish, so I reckon HR will be fine with it. Seriously, I’ve cleared it with them, promise.
• Battleships: Finally this week, this is basically Battleships crossed with Sudoku and it made me feel REALLY thick and so I’m inflicting it on you in the hope that you’ll fail as spectacularly to solve these as I did.

By Mike Campau

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS LOFI BEAUTY FROM AKIRA WHICH WILL BE PERFECT FOR THE LONGREADS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Walls and Portals: You may not think you want to look through a series of photos of walls and portals, but you do.

• Colourful Gradients: A different colour gradient, automatically generated by a computer, posted every 30 minutes. Really, really pleasing (and would actually make a far better Insta account than a Tumblr if I’m honest).
• Mapstalgia: Videogame maps drawn from memory. This is great – obviously a love of games helps, but I like the interesting interpretations of space different people have, evident from the way they attempt to draw these worlds.
• Shell Make The Future: This is in here SOLELY to showcase the quite remarkably soulless corporate music promo that Jennifer Hudson, Pixie Lott, Luan Santana, Yemi Alade and Monali Thakur all got roped into doing, all in the service of greenwashing Shell a bit. Scroll down, you’ll find it, it’s AMAZING. Have any of you actually knowingly heard a Pixie Lott song? As with the Saturdays, quite a large part of me believes she exists solely to give the appalling gossip pages in the Metro a blonde person to feature.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Fcuk You, I Like Guns: We’ve not been short on opinion pieces following last week’s tediously predictable school/gun event, but this is the only one I’ve read I thought essential; written by a former member of the US Military, it calmly and cogently lays out the reasons why there is no reason whatsoever to allow civilians access to military-grade weaponry. My personal favourite point is the one directed to all the people who use ‘the need to form militias against corrupt government’ as a reason for their semi-erotic attachment to automatic weaponry, which basically just says “MATE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FCUKING TANKS AND HELICOPTERS, YOUR AR15 WOULDN’T HELP”.
• Trending on Social is Worthless: A smart essay on why it might be better were social platforms to abandon the concept of ‘trending’ entirely, given the complete lack of any sort of agreed methodology or indeed transparency around how each platform’s selections work. When outlined like that, it does make quite a lot of sense – you wouldn’t necessarily give much credence to someone who was constantly shouting “LOOK AT THIS IT IS AN IMPORTANT THING” but who then was incapable or unwilling of explaining exactly why said thing was in fact important.
• The Good Room: This is a long and digressive but fascinating essay in which designer Frank Chimero writes about the importance of free public spaces in the physical realm as areas for human interaction and growth, and draws parallels to their importance – and, crucially, their decreasing accessibility – in the virtual. “Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it. It’s a visibility problem that’s an inadvertent consequence of values. The commercial parts become more self-contained and link inside themselves to keep you around—after a while, you’re looping around their cul-de-sac because attention is money on the web. Non-commercial sites link out and will let you go, which immediately puts them at a disadvantage for mindshare.”
• Absurdist Dialogues with Siri: This perhaps slightly snobbishly alarmist, but I’m broadly in agreement with the author’s premise – to whit, that the simplified and transactional nature of the language we are developing to deal with voice assistants is moving us ineluctably to a point where we see and use language in purely functional fashion. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Siri’s going to, y’know, KILL POETRY, but it’s an interesting line of thought.
• Casapound and Italian Neofascism: You may or may not know that Italy goes to the polls again in March, affording the Italian people yet another opportunity to make themselves a European laughing stock by once again doing exactly what increasingly-Piltdown-Man-looking Uncle Silvio – he’s back! He never really went away! Truly, it’s amazing the degree of rehabilitation that can be achieved when you own all the telly and some of the newspapers! – tells them to. Except this time there’s a lovely hard-right component to the election, comprised of Forza Nuova and Casa Pound, the subject of this excellent article which traces the history of Italy’s fascist movement since World War II. My mum says this is borne out of Italy never really having engaged in any critical analysis of its past relationship with extremism, which seems legit given my grandfather would proudly walk around in the 1980s and 90s happily saying he was a fascist and Mussolini was a bit ace, and everyone basically just thought he was a bit of a lad (to be clear, Web Curios is very much an antifascist publication and my granddad, god rest Nonno’s immortal soul, would have very much disapproved).
• Building All The Live Shows: From the same sort of ballpark as that piece about doing the audio for the Superbowl halftime show which I posted a few weeks back, this is about the company which designs, builds and manages the sets when people like U2 or Gaga go on tour. This sounds SO incredibly stressful – the various points in the piece where they basically acknowledge that, say, Bono, will literally just sketch something on a napkin and say “This, but flying and with laser rockets on” and then swan off, and you just have to make that happen, make me sweat nervously. I remember once meeting the bloke who managed the stage settings for the 2012 opening and closing ceremonies at my friend Paul’s wedding, who told me that his first meeting with Annie Lennox about her performance involved him sitting largely in silence with a cup of tea at her house, while she expanded an artistic concept which was basically ‘giant skeletal ghost ship’ and he thought, repeatedly, “I have literally no fcuking idea how to do that, Annie”.
• I Can Text A Poo, But Not My Name: A hugely interesting piece about the historic systems of cultural dominance and oppression which are being accidentally extended into digital life through unquestioning UX and UI design; the piece’s title is referring to the fact that whilst Unicode is really good at adding new emoji, it’s less good at expanding charactersets to support languages in the second and third world, for example.
• I Dated Bad Men Until A Bad Man Became President: This is a nicely written personal essay by Sarah Sweeney about her experiences dating fuckbois and wastemen and how the election of exactly that sort of person to the Presidency convinced her not to anymore.
• Your Cortex Contains 17billion Computers: Web Curios once again dips an ignorant toe into the murky (to me) wonders of neuroscience, a subject despite having had lots of really smart people patiently and kindly explain it to me, and in which I am genuinely interested, I simply cannot ever hold onto information about. Perhaps this essay will remedy that – it’s a really interesting and reasonably easy to parse examination of how exactly the brain relates to the concept of computational networks, and quite how much more complicated it is. Also contains some excellent images of dendritic networks which are always a pleasure to see.
• All The Art In Bojack Horseman: “Yes, Matt, we know you don’t really watch telly, there is no need to tediously announce this fact whenever discussing something televisual, we know you haven’t seen it”. Good, now we’ve got that out of the way, this is a brilliant look at all of the parody artworks featured in miserable alcoholic horse lolfest Bojack Horseman. I love this sort of thing – just look at the amount of art history nerdery that’s contained here, purely as extraneous detail, it’s wonderful.
• //medium.com/@dethtron5000/the-marvel-movie-graph-5-years-later-7334a6a01398″>The Marvel Movie Universe Graphs: Someone has poured a frankly baffling amount of time and energy into mapping the interrelationships between all the different bits of the Marvel Movie Universe. If you care about that sort of thing this will ENTHRALL you.
• Thunderdome: Oh WOW. When I was a callow 15 year old youth and shipped off to international school, I lived in my first year with a Spanish guy called Javier who’d previously lived in Brussels and whose CD collection included a few compilations of quite frankly terrifying high-tempo hardcore music under the name THUNDERDOME (my favourite of these opened with staccato gunshots and air raid sirens and then a massive Teutonic voice SCREAMING “FCUK PARIS! FCUK LONDON! FCUK MILAN! THIS IS THUNDERDOME!!!!”, at which point it all went a bit 240bpm for about three hours). Anyway, this is an incredibly comprehensive look at the culture around the Thunderdome parties, and the Northern European hardcore scene as a whole – even if this was never your vibe, check out the photos and click on a few of the links to some of the music; it’s…jesus, it’s horrible, can you imagine the amount of speed you’d need to be on?
• On Colorism: I had absolutely no idea that Colorism was even a thing until a couple of years ago when I worked on the BBC’s Black and British season and lots of the people I worked with educated me. This is a decent primer on the issue, and quotes Emma Dabiri who I have met a few times and is a frighteningly smart person on issues of race, society and representation.
• Let’s Talk About Waveforms: Just a GORGEOUS interactive, explaining what waveforms are, what they do and how they work. Beautiful design and a wonderful example of how UX/UI can make a huge difference in communicating tricky concepts.
• The WeWork Manifesto: Wonderful, haughtily scathing critique of co-working phenomenon We Work, which, not content with attempting to convince us that work really ought to be our entire life and that we MUST BE FRIENDS with our colleagues, wants to start building that brand loyalty even earlier with the launch this September of its first for-profit school, WeGrow. To give you a feel for the tone of the piece, and the insane hubris of the project, enjoy this beautifully cutting excerpt: “Though Ms. Neumann has no background in education (on the website, she describes herself as “an avid student of life” and says her “superpower” is “intuition”), she has applied for accreditation from the state, has hired a team of career educators and is accepting applications for the coming school year. Tuition for toddlers: $36,000 a year.”
• Opioid America: Not the first photo essay on the US opioid crisis I’ve featured, but this one by Time is full of bleakly brilliant pictures of an epidemic which continues to seemingly be utterly ignored by lawmakers.
• Northwest Passages: “For the past seven years, [Jessica] Dimmock has been photographing and filming older trans women in the Pacific Northwest. Dimmock is careful to explain that the situations are, well, complicated: some of her subjects don’t consider themselves to be trans because, as Dimmock explains, it was not an identity that they felt free to totally embrace. “They’ve been trapped in a timeline and a situation at home that has made it impossible for them,” says Dimmock. “But everyone I photographed is on the spectrum of having a full female identity. There are women inside all of these people.” The series of photographs below, taken in late 2017, returns the women to what Dimmock calls “these hidden and secretive spaces.”” These are superb.
• Can Free Speech Survive The Internet?: That is, in an era in which all (fine, not quite all, but) speech is infinitely recordable and recoverable, can we still be said to have ‘free’ speech (free qua unguarded)? Let’s just say the outlook doesn’t look fantastic. A lightly philosophical exploration by Thomas R Wells.
• The Great Stink: This is a long and wide-ranging essay by Laurie Pennie, touching on the need for men to take on the emotional burden of the Me Too movement and to, you know, not just sit around feeling scared and a bit vulnerable about it. “Suck it up and let go. Let go of your resentment at women’s lack of patience, let go of your wounded pride, let go of your useless shame, and let go of the idea of being a “good guy.” “Good” is not a thing you are, it’s a thing you do, or don’t do. The world is not neatly divided into good and bad men.” I know Pennie’s often divisive, but she gives good essay and this is a cracking piece of writing / thinking.
• Mother of Invention: A short scifi story by Nnedi Okorafor, set in future Nigeria. It’s one of a series being published in Slate around how technology is set to change our lives, themed around various prompts – this one’s on the theme of ‘Home’, and it’s so refreshing to read an African female voice in scifi; the framing and the ideas feel fresher than the majority of gunmental-grey futurescapes you often get fed.
• Derangements: This is a remarkable piece of writing, and I promise it will surprise you in ways you weren’t necessarily expecting. Beau Freedlander talks about his practise of ‘radical fasting’, and how that intersects with his manic/bipolar issues; it is VERY honest, whilst simultaneously giving me quite a lot of unreliable narrator vibes. I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but this *really* got to me this week and has been rattling around in my head for a few days. Give it a go.
• My First Year Sober: Finally this week, a comic strip by Edith Zimmerman whose words I have recommended to you before when she wrote at The Hairpin. This is a beautiful, sweet, and in-no-way preachy sequential art account of her experience of her first year sober; regardless of your relationship with booze, this is a glorious piece of work.

By Butch Locsin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, this is 90 seconds of PURE satisfaction. Marbles plus magnets plus rube goldberg = HEAVEN:

2) Next, this is ‘Dolly Said No To Elvis’, a bluesy song about how Dolly Parton refused Elvis the right to cover one of her tracks. The video is ACE and reminds me very much of the classic stop-motion accompaniment to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Enjoy:

3) I think a few of you are going to rather enjoy this. The Cellblock song from Chicago, reinterpreted to refer to the oh-so-modern phenomenon of mansplaining – The Cellblock Mansplaingo:

4) This is called ‘Interference Pattern’ by Loud Neighbour – the slightly dopplering drums go perfectly with the black and white visuals, and generally I can just sort of stare and listen to this on an infinite loop. GOOD TECHNO:

5) This is ‘Simple Love’ by Manifest and it is SUPERB and the video is absolutely gorgeous. Put this full-screen and enjoy:

6) This is…unsettling:

7) Dinosaur! This is a film by Nathan, who’s a small boy, and his Dad, who’s an animator. It is SO CHARMING – I would watch something longer in this style, but equally appreciate it’s ripe to be ruined by some advercunt:

8) Finally this week, the best-named band I’ve featured in Curios for an age. Say hello to Hardcore Anal Hydrogen – this is their…er…challenging track ‘Jean Pierre’ – I LOVE THIS VIDEO SO MUCH. And, as this is the end, I love YOU! Really! THANKS FOR READING THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING THANKS FOR NOT LEAVING ME ALL ALONE HERE I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO YOU AND YOURS BYE BYE BYE!

{unsubscribe}Unsubscribe from the Imperica newsletter{/unsubscribe} – Subscribe to the Imperica newsletter 

“>NEXT, HAVE SOME CRACKING HOUSE MIXED BY JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES YOU ALL ENJOYED MATT HANCOCK YESTERDAY BECAUSE IT IS OVER NOW, PT.2:

• Truisms: This site simply collects a succession of supposed ‘truisms’, displayed in alphabetical order in black and white. Many contradict each other, many are flat-out wrong, each has its own url and can therefore be sent to anyone as a sort of koanic instruction which I personally really like the idea of. Why not try communicating with one of your colleagues solely using lines drawn from this website for the next few days? If nothing else you’ll gain some potentially much-needed distance as they work to avoid you as much as possible.

• Bill Elis: The Insta feed of Bill Elis, who makes art with skulls. Lots and lots of skulls. And gold, and other stuff – I can’t quite decide if I like it or if it’s ‘Hirst-commissioned-by-morbid-oligarch’-levels of vulgar, but either way it’s a consistent aesthetic.
• Hostile Design: Stuart Semple’s been cropping up in Curios rather a lot over the past year or so; here he is again, with a project drawing attention to – and decrying – what he terms the practice of ‘hostile design’; that is, items or spaces “made specifically to exclude, harm or otherwise hinder the freedom of a human being. Quite often they aim to remove a certain section of a community from a public space.” So, pavement spikes to deter rough sleepers, kerb bumps to deter skaters, that sort of idea. Semple’s going to collect examples of ‘hostile design’ and is making stickers available through the site (free to those who can’t afford them, 50p otherwise) to enable anyone to mark hostile design when they see it. You could spend a productive few hours around the City with these should you so desire, just saying.
• In Depth Sound Design: I find this really interesting – not so much for the subject matter, which, fine, I’m sure is fascinating but I know literally nothing about sound design at all, but for the fact that it’s using Insta Stories to basically explore and deconstruct how sound design’s been done in different Hollywood films and what students of the discipline can learn from the examples in question. No idea what the numbers are like on these, but it’s a really nicely-executed series.
• Pop Up Zine: I really like this idea. To quote the site, “Pop-Up Zine is a DIY opportunity for fans of Pop-Up Magazine—or of creative collaborations in general—to create their own unique versions of our “live-magazine” experience in their local communities. The content, contributors, and locations of each Pop-Up Zine will be unique but will contain the following elements: 1 live-narrated photo essay. 1 live-narrated, reported, print-style story. 1 short documentary film, 1 onstage interview, 1 live-narrated radio story, 1 or 2 live songs from a local musician or band (optional). Each Pop-Up Zine lasts around 60 minutes and is intended for venues with a stage, a microphone, a screen, and enough space for 50-200 people.” SUCH an interesting approach to events and franchising an event around a brand; like TEDx but, potentially, less tediously self-regarding.
• Whipnote: If this works – and fine, it’s a big if, but IF – it’s a godsend. Whipnote’s an automatic speech-to-text converter which you can schedule to dial into your conference calls and do the horrorwork of transcribing them for you. Although, that said, given that 90% of any conference call involves people shouting over each other about whether or not X is on the line, you’ll probably have to do some significant pruning of the output by hand.
• Find A Grave!: Fine, so I added the exclamation mark myself, but the site warrants it. It’s a database of, seemingly, all the graves in the US – you can search by forename, surname, date of birth/death, geography…I suppose if you have US ancestors and want to do a roadtrip grave pilgrimage then this is super helpful, but otherwise it’s just a really excellent, macabre way of seeing how many dead people with your name are currently taking up space in North American burial plots. Oh, and please take a moment to appreciate the site’s logo, which, well, perhaps doesn’t have quite the degree of sober respectfulness you might expect here.
• Lettering The Underground: “Lettering The Underground is a series of 13 hand lettering illustrations that visually celebrates the rich character of the 13 historic London Underground tube lines.” These are good, but I confess to having fairly strong feelings about quite how much the ‘character’ of some of the lines is being misrepresented here. I mean, WTAF Jubilee Line?
• Silks at Linklaters: This is the Instagram account of the in-firm restaurant, called ‘Silks’, at Magic Circle law firm Linklaters. Designed, I presume, to give a mouth-watering glimpse of what the future might hold to eager graduate trainees – “Look at what you could shovel down your throat in three minutes flat as you take a tiny break from the 19-hour days prepping for yet another case of international shipping law in which you will protect the interests of yet another ethically-dubious but financially-heavyweight pan-global interest!” – this shows some of the food they’re prepping and basically gives a slightly odd insight into how the other professional half live.
• Mini Boat: A tiny, working, motorised boat which is just about large enough for a grown man to sit in as he pootles around the local park pond. You can order a kit for $950, or alternatively just a set of plans and instructions for $95, and if you’re the sort of person who loves a PROJECT and has some sort of weird and unrealistic idea of doing Danny, The Champion of the World-style construction-led bonding with your offspring then GO FOR IT!
• Review For Science: You may have seen coverage of this elsewhere, but even so it’s worth enjoying the #reviewforscience hashtag, in which scientists post on Twitter the odd uses to which they have put ostensibly mundane objects in the pursuit of scientific endeavour. Used film cannisters as containment vessels for the weighing of tiny chicks is possibly the cutest thing I have read all week; you will MELT, I tell you (and then start wondering about what exactly a lizard cloaca looks like). If you love critters – yes YOU – then this is the link for you this week.
• Queer Kid Stuff: Exactly the sort of link which would make a certain type of person APOPLECTIC with rage and thread-veined fury, and as such RIPE for inclusion, Queer Kid Stuff is a series of videos aimed at the LGBTx community  – “Creator and host, Lindsay and her best stuffed friend Teddy explain queer topics through a vlog-style conversation with young viewers focused on love and family. The short videos are a tool for parents, teachers, and LGBTQ+ adults to help them explain these words and ideas to young children in their lives, recommended for ages 3-7. A free, printable activity sheet accompanies each episode to further instill the lessons of the videos through activities which can be done at home or in the classroom.” There’s probably a market for something like this with an anglo rather than US slant, come to think of it.
• Cake: Not, sadly, anything to do with the drug (although, God, I just watched that again and GOD it stands up in 2018). Instead, Cake is a browser alternative for mobile which matches search with a Tinder-style interface – you search through the app and rather than presenting you with a list of links to pick from Cake instead gives you a swipable view – the first link to appear is the first site you’ll see the homepage of, swipe to move to the next one til you’ve reached the result you want. Hugely inefficient, but based on the fact that noone appears cabable of understanding ACTUAL WORDS any more (it’s the only possibility I can conceive of for why Curios has yet to attain breakout hit status) then probably quite useful to some of you (and the interface is really nicely done).
• Timeflip: Here’s a new rule for 2018 which I’m going to implement and you can too if you like – if any product or service or THING proudly states upfront that it’s going to ‘hack’ something (unless said product or service is an axe, or a ‘rent a psycho’ offering) then it is BOLLOCKS and you should run like the wind from it. Timeflip promises to let you HACK YOUR TIME – time travel? A rift in the space-time continuum? NAH MATE IT’S A FCUKING MASSIVE DIE, INNIT. But it’s a SMART DIE! Simply place it with the appropriate face uppermost – each face corresponds to a different activity, you see, and can be customised to pertain to whatever you want – to have it track the time you’re spending on that particular activity. Turn it so the photo of the games controller is uppermost and it will record how long you’re spending gaming; turn it..,oh, Christ, this is too stupid to explain more fully and you get the gist. WHAT THE FCUK IS THE POINT OF THIS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH USING YOUR PHONE’S ORDINARY TIMER? HOW IS THIS ‘HACKING’ ANYTHING? It’s timesheet software for people with an IQ in double figures.
• HappyHappy: “Random selections from a collection of 100,000 crowdsourced happy moments, posted daily.” Honestly, this is SO NICE and you won’t fail to be cheered.
• Virginia Woolf’s Photos: A wonderful find, this – a scanned album of Virginia Woolf’s photos from 1890-1847 – if you have any interest in the Bloomsbury Group then this is obviously wonderful, but anyone with any sort of curiosity about liberal intellectual lifestyles at the time (a Venn Diagram which includes ALL OF YOU, right? RIGHT!) will also enjoy. Sadly doesn’t contain any of the ‘specialist’ photography that you just know Ginny and JM Keynes almost certainly shot together.
• Dea Vivente: Every now and again online you get photos of anatomically-jointed versions of Michelangelo’s David or Botticelli’s Venus doing the rounds – they’re available from a Japanese company, I think, and look undeniably cool, but they have nothing on the WTF-ery of Dea Vivente, an online shop selling, as far as I can tell, bespoke, anatomically jointed figures of, well, beautiful women. The woman who makes these is obviously insanely talented, but I can’t help but think that there’s something insanely creepy about the whole thing (but if you want to commission a small, jointed doll version of your long lost love then don’t let me stop you).
• In A Parallel Universe: “In a parallel universe” is a series of fictional images, recreated from real ads in the mad men era, that question modern day sexism: showing it through a humorous light to spark a conversation through role play.” Some of these are available as prints and they are ACE.
• Kiyomi: Wonderful Insta feed depicting the insane skill of this particular Japanese maker of impossibly small miniature stuff. LOOK AT THE TINY BOTTLES!
• Pixel Gustavo: The best pixel artist I have seen in ages, Gustavo’s Instagram feed is a thing of genuine beauty and should get him all the commissions in the world. So, so impressive.
• Jazz Compostions: A beautiful drawing tool which lets you make abstract images in the style of, well, jazz. You sort of need to try it out to appreciate it, but you can make some honestly gorgeous pieces with this and it’s genuinely love to play with whilst listening to something like Count Basie.
• Make Me Pulse: Do you remember when you were me as a small child and my grandad used to take me to the Gianicolo in Rome where there was a small, shonky ‘arcade’ with those superb 1970s machines which disgorged a marble which you had to carefully guide along a wobbly racetrack covered in perilous holes using a steering wheen and your rudimentary sense of 6 year old’s balance, in hope of potentially winning said marble at the end if you were REALLY lucky? No, you don’t, do you. You know what your problem is? NO EMPATHY. Anyway, this is a digital version of one of those and is actually really fun to play as well as being quite pretty.
• Revenge of the Kid: This week’s ‘browser game included to attempt to get you all P45d on a Friday afternoon’ is Revenge of the Kid – sadly needs Flash, so desktop only, but it’s ACE in a sort of Wild West-themed pseudo-Angry Birds but not really puzzle game style. Lots of fun, nice art direction and a decent learning curve, plus a better-than-it-ought-to-be soundtrack – have fun, and don’t get sacked.

By Malgorzata Sajur

WHY NOT TRY A LOUD AND DUMB AND FUN SET BY LOUD AND DUMB AND fUN DJ TYCHO?!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Rotary Signal Emitter: Artwork by Reuben Sutherland for Audiovisual duo Sculpture. Black and white and a bit glitchy and generally rather good.  

• Woshibai: An illustrator and comic artist from Shanghai whose work I rather like. There’s something of the Perry Bible Fellowship about these, in a certain small way.
• Times Bestsellers: Not actually real Times Bestsellers, you understand, but made up ones which are better than the real thing. Who wouldn’t want to read “PLEASE SEND NOODS, by Grismalda Shernandez. (Quizmaster Romance) – The owner of a neighborhood noodle shop tries Tinder.” NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Choker A L’Epicerie: Things I love about the web sometimes – last week I included a Tumblr of goods abandoned in supermarkets before the checkout; via the magic of the internet, it got tweeted out by someone and ended up being seen by some French person (un cordiale salut a Marie A Labbe) who shared this back – IT’S THE SAME EXACT CONCEPT BUT IN FRENCH! AND THERE’S A TUMBLR FOR IT! ALL THE WORLD IS BUT A VILLAGE AND WE ARE ALL THE SAME UNDER THE SKIN LET US UNIFY UNDER THE BANNER OF ABANDONED SUPERMARKET GROCERIES!! This made me very happy, as you may be able to tell.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• The Female Price of Male Pleasure: I sort of expect that most of you will have read this one already, but if by chance you haven’t then I can highly recommend it – especially the men amongst you. There have been a few things in the past 4 months that I’ve read and have made me do a sharp intake of breath and a fairly unpleasant spot of self-interrogation – this has been another. The stats about sex and pain and not reporting were honestly shocking to me, not least when I saw the number of women doing the textual equivalent of nodding in recognition when discussing this; this piece is one of the best I’ve read so far this year on the current problems with gender politics around the male-female sexual act.

• Off Peakism: A look at the idea of the ‘Off Peak’ lifestyle, focusing mostly on internet finance guru Mr Money Moustache, who’s possibly the most famous exponent of the whole ‘if you live in a completely regulated manner designed to take advantage of software-like exploits in the way society currently works, you TOO could optimise your existence for massive financial gain’ lifestyle schtick. Fine, mate, but you will also find yourself shopping for groceries at 4am and only having friends who want to do the same thing, and, frankly, life is TOO SHORT and mostly crap enough as it is without taking steps to make it crapper. I’m all for not conforming to the working 9-5, but there’s something a bit efficiency-Nazi about much of this.
• Fat People and Videogames: A really interesting piece about the representation of larger bodies in videogames, noting (unsurprisingly) that it tends almost exclusively towards the grotesque. There’s an interesting argument here about the maturation of the medium and whether that should be accompanied by a more nuanced representation of physicality; then you remember gamergate and you’ll be forced to acknowledge that we do not yet live in a world where the majority of people laying down serious cash on AAA titles will accept a female character who doesn’t look like something drawn by Rob Liefeld.
• Sam & Max – The Design Document: Are there any of you who recall the EXCELLENT 90s point-and-click adventure Sam and Max Hit The Road? Anyone? Featuring the adventures of the titular canine gumshoe and his psychotic rabbit-creature sidekick Max, it was honestly one of the funniest things that 13 year old me can remember; this is the design document around which the game was built, and if you have any fondness for the title it is a JOY – gags and the series’ tradematrk humour, as long as great descriptions of characters and locations. If you DON’T remmeber the game but are interested in game or experience design then this might still be interesting  – otherwise, though, you may want to skip this one.
• Gigi Buffon: A charming interview with one of the last great iconic footballers of his generation, and an interesting and complex character to boot (whose politics have been weirdly glossed over, after a period a few years ago when he appeared to go a *bit* fashy). Good, solid football writing although possibly lacks a touch of brilliance – no matter, though, the Italian half of me LOVES this man (leaving aside the aforementioned potentially fashy bits).
• In Goop Health: In know there have been ‘an up-close-and-personal look at the MADNESS of Goop and wellness fads’ pieces in the past, some of which I’ve featured here, but this is a classic of the genre – this has the lot. Innocent abroad, insane pricetags for treatments on a par with homeopathy when it comes to their scientifically-validated effectiveness, wide-eyed, froth-mouthed zealotry, and all sorts of crazy, damaging, potentially unhealthy lies. Read this, read the skincare thing, go back to soap and water and the cave.
• Woody Allen vs Diane Keaton: This is a very, very strange story – not least the fact that it’s taken this long for it to come out, or indeed that it’s picked up so little traction from what I’ve seen. Last year, Woody Allen presented an award to Diane Keaton, specifically a Lifetime Achievement Award at the American Film Institute – and then delivered a speech about her. WOW, what a speech. This is quite something, and will make you think ever so slightly differently about how Hollywood actually works – and what you might think about people defending Woody Allen for stuff. Without wishing to be too clickbaity about it, I don’t want to give you quotes; just drop in and have a read and see what you think.
• The Disaster Tourist: This is brilliant – taking a trip with ‘Dark Tourists’, those people seeking EXTREME THRILLS by going on organised trips to Chechnya and Libya and North Korea, the author explores what it is that motivates people do to these trips, what happens on them (drinking, in the main, it would seem), and what they look like to the residents of the countries hosting these weird international Redditor tours (which is what this totally reads like, I promise you). It is…unlikely you will want to go on one of these trips as a result of reading this, but you might want a bit of a shower.
• The Encyclopaedia of the Missing: This is an astonishingly good profile of  Meaghan Good, who runs an incredible network of volunteers investigating missing persons cases across the US. As ever with these things, part of the fascination is the personalities of those involved – it’s fair to say that the majority of people dedicated to spending free time conducting unpaid missing persons investigations might be…outliers in terms of the whole societal conventions of normality – but there are so many good stories in this piece.
• On The Road: You wouldn’t think that a piece of writing about the road markings found all over the Capital’s tarmac would be interesting, but it is. No, really, I promise.
• THAT Quincy Jones Interview: You’ve probably read it by now, but if not then open a tab and prepare for a WILD RIDE, as Quincy Jones talks you through anecdotes about…well…everyone, really. Pretty much the only significant figure missing here’s the Dalia Lama, but most everyone else gets a look-in as Jones rattles through a frankly incredible selection of ripping yarns including the three times he nearly died, hanging out with Picasso and telling the Pope he was wearing ‘pimp shoes’. It’s AMAZING and an awful lot of fun, and, weirdly, the line about Bill Cosby is the one that really stuck with me as telling.
• Planet Of Cops: Thanks to Katie for pointing me at this essay – it’s not new, but I’d not come across it before and its portrait of us all as ‘Cops’ out here in modernity, willing to snitch on each other for the slightest misdemeanour. “People are alienated and worn down and hopeless, and so they see their opportunity to finally be the one pulling over somebody else’s car, lazily tapping the glass with their flashlights. “I’mthe one in charge now,” he thinks, as he sends an email to somebody’s boss over a Facebook status he doesn’t like.” This was a good take, I thought.
• //medium.com/@hondanhon/it-s-preschool-open-house-season-motherfuckers-6a1f8885cae0″>It’s Preschool Open House Season: Dan Hon here on sparkling form, pastiching the classic McSweeney’s ‘It’s Decorative Gourd Season…’ post for this, the time in which the parents of young children in the US start looking at preschool options. This feels like me to be a pretty accurate pastiche of a certain type of parenting trope.
• //medium.com/@nickw84/weaponising-the-search-box-with-james-bond-and-friends-5257e3f1d93c”>Weaponising The Search Box: This is a very smart piece of analysis by ‘funniest man on Twitter who works in telly’ Nick Walker, who apart from running the excellent Daytime Snaps Twitter feed is also very clever. This piece, looking at how journalists are increasingly using ‘stuff that perhaps three people actually said on Twitter’ as fodder for sweeping articles about GENERATION SNOWFLAKE, is an astute piece of ‘how the media works, and don’t we wish it didn’t?’ writing.
• Primo Levi on Surviving Auschwitz: From the archives, a piece from 1986. If you have never read ‘If This Is A Man’ or ‘The Truce’ or any other of Levi’s writings, this is an absolute essential – if you have, it’s worth reading his words again. Not only a superb writer but a superb human, if you can read this without being absolutely tied into internal knots then you’re a stronger person than I am.
• Joel Golby On Take Me Out: Finally this week, we have perhaps reached Peak Golby with this one – his take on Take Me Out, the Saturday night meat market nightclub in TV form and the only reason that I can see for the continued existence of Paddy McGuinness, is very funny and, as ever, contains some DEEP TRUTHS, not least his characterisation of every single one of the male and female characters which is deeply and disturbingly accurate.

By Helene Delmaire

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. First, this is a brilliant collection of Instagram WE WENT TRAVELLING cliche shots, wonderfully compiled and animated and coming to an ad campaign near you for adventure-type / alternative holidays as a ‘Don’t be like them, be DIFFERENT’ signifier in 3, 2, 1…:

2) This is by King Tuff and it’s called ‘The Other’ and the video is dull-but-meditative and the SONG, oh wow, this is 7 minutes of the loveliest, dirgey tunefulness I have heard in a while. This is gorgeous, imho:

3) Concussion Protocol, this is called – it’s BRUTAL, a collection of every single concussion suffered in the NFL to date this season, slowed anc edited and soundtracked for maximum impact. This…this shouldn’t be a sport in this form, should it, really?

4) Sufjan Stevens still owes us all a LOT of music – WHERE ARE THE OTHER STATES, EH??? – but if he keeps on producing things that are this lovely then I don’t really care. This is a remix of his song ‘Life With Dignity’ and it is glorious:

5) UK YOUNG KIDS MAKING MUSIC CORNER! So my friend Cal runs a little side-project called Homegrown, which he uses to showcase new young artists doing urban-type music – this is their latest offering, featuring Ghervana and Asa Greenwood, and it’s a nice primer to the sort of stuff you’ll find on there. Lovely beat here and the vocals are gorgeous – there’s a lot of decent stuff on the channel, do take a look:

6) Last up, this is called ‘Cautionary Tales’ and it is honestly GREAT and will put a smile on your face which, frankly, we could all do with. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE THANKS FOR READING AGAIN AND FOR BOTHERING TO GET TO THE END I REALLY APPRECIATE IT SEE YOU SOON BYE BYE BYE!

“>NEXT, TRY MY FRIEND JONATHAN’S FIRST LONDON FIELDS RADIO SET OF 2018!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY STRUGGLED TO TEAR ITSELF AWAY FROM IN-BROWSER MARIO TO WRITE THIS, SO COUNT YOURSELVES ‘LUCKY’, PT.1:

• DDance Party: You remember Gif Dance Party from a few years ago, right? Well this is that but BETTER (or worse, depending) – you’re presented with a 3d ‘dancefloor’ onto which you can place a seemingly HUGE number of animated 3d figures, all taken from memes and pop culture (from the dancing hotdog to Mike from Monsters Inc to a very much not approved by Disney Luke Skywalker and on and on). Select the backing track, move the dancers around, set their dancing speed and size and jankiness, and YOU TOO can create your own totally pointless slice of internet dance floor. This is a silly and fun thing to play around with, but it’s also incredibly impressive as a piece of webdev – oh, and you can also submit your own characters for inclusion so expect this all to be ruined by the inclusion of the racist echidna within about a week.
• The Map of #1s: I’ve featured the work of the smart people at Pudding on here before – this is another superb piece of datavisualisation, taking information about what was number one in several-thousand regions of the world over the past month or so, and presenting it as a navigable map which lets you click around and see what was top of the charts in different parts of the world. It’s really very slick, and there are some absolutely cracking tracks you can find through it – I’m currently enjoying West Bengal’s chart-topper and can highly recommend it. Also shout out all those central Asian nations currently still really, really enjoying Gangnam Style.
• Larry’s Quest: Are you a middle-aged man? Did you have a PC in the 1980s? You will, if so, perhaps remember early cult PC game classic ‘Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards’, in which players took on the role of the titular Larry in his quest to, well, get laid. It doesn’t stand up hugely well 30 years on, it’s fair to say, although its portrayal of Larry as a toupee-clad, white-suited loser feels strangely apposite this week. Anyway, this is a…thing, which takes the Larry sprite and puts it in a weird wasteland and…oh, just have a fiddle, it’s just sort of perfectly bleak and existential and after about 3 minutes had me convinced it’s the truest thing I’ve ever seen about the human condition (fine, hyperbole, but).
• WikiWear: WHY ARE THESE NOT FOR SALE??? This is a superb idea – WikiWear automatically creates tshirts emblazoned with images which are in the Wikipedia database but which aren’t currently used on any page on the site. It’s an incredibly random selection of objects and people and places and stuff, and weirdly it produces some superb (and very hipster, fine) results. Hook this up to Cafepress, Alibaba or Amazon and start making…er…TENS of pounds!
• Eye on the News: This is lovely. An Instagram feed showcasing the artworks of a reader of the Independent newspaper, who spent last year making a drawing of one story from the paper each day, and who submitted them to the News Editor by post thinking they might be of interest. These are SO LOVELY; it’s a beautiful idea, and the style of the illustrations is reminiscent of Molly Crabapple – as Barbara Speed, who the drawings were sent to, says, they make you see 2017 in a completely different light. Honestly gorgeous, do take a look.
• Population Estimator: I am not sure how accurate this is, and frankly I don’t really have an idea what the potential use case for it might be, but if you’ve ever wanted to be able to draw a shape over a map of the world and be given an estimate of the number of people living in that are then WOW are you in luck! Actually if you’re a (town) planner this might actually be helpful; I know nothing.
• Canmarker: Have YOU ever been crippled by fear at a party trying to work out which of the assorted mass of opened beercans is yours? Do YOU have a phobia of ingesting anyone else’s saliva? GREAT! Canmarker is currently seeking funding to provide a solution to that most pressing of conundra, and forever eliminate the fear that you’ll get a faceful of someone else’s warm backwash rather than your own, or, er, if you’re of a darker mindset (who, me?) to potentially enable anyone to know exactly who to roofie! Anyway, there’s 6 days left for these lads to meet their goal and they’ve only raised £50, so this may come under the heading of ‘ideas we’re just not ready for’. Shame.
• Perfume Ads: This is a legitimately brilliant Twitter account. Perfume ads will every two hours punt out an imagined script for a perfume advert, featuring a scenario, a star, and a closing shot. Seriously, you can’t not fall in love with something which helps you to imagine Tom Hiddleston playing the trumpet to a single squid in an attempt to flog you stinkwater. If anyone out there’s an animator with a lot of time on their hands, why not do a bunch of these YOU LAZY FCUK?
• The Jugend Archive: Jugend was an early-20th century publication from Germany, charting the art deco movement; this is its entire archive in digital form, spanning its first edition in 1896 to its final throes in the early years of WWII by which point it had been largely coopted as Nazi propaganda. This is a truly astounding treasure-trove of art deco design and style, and if you’ve any interest in design or art history of Germany then you will adore this. More (and, frankly, better-explained) detail here should you want some.
• Dive Sites: A global map of the world’s dive sites, should you be sitting here in the cold of The January That Never Ends contemplating an escape to sunnier climes. I just spend ten minutes zooming around and now really, really want to go to Mafia Island off the coast of Tanzania so if anyone can sort that for me that would be great thanks.
• Volume.gl: Ok, this isn’t an easy one to describe – you just sit there and watch as I flail around in my attempts to do so. Volume.gl is, as far as I can describe it, software which effectively lets you rip 2d elements from video and recreate them as 3d objects in an AR/VR space. So, in the example video you can see on the page, Travolta and Thurman’s dancing scene from Pulp Fiction is taken and dumped into the cameraman’s living room; janky, yes, but there’s a real sense of depth to the way they move around the space which is, frankly, mental. Couple this with the faceswap porn and WOW is there going to be some fun (read: appalling!) home entertainment coming down the line in the 2020s!
• Da Share Zone Card Game: Kickstarter, 3x funded, by meme factory Da Share Zone, to produce a card game based on the account’s unique skeleton aesthetic and weird wholesome/relatable/nihilistic tone. If you ‘get’ the account you’ll probably find this funny; if you don’t, this will be a classic ‘the internet is stupid and everyone on it is an idiot’ moment (I like to think that everything online is basically a constant ouroboros of those two qualities, frankly).
• All Of The Chuckle Tunes: You want a Spotify playlist of all the music ever played on Chucklevision and the Brothers’ associated TV output? No, of course you don’t, that sounds awful – and yet, once again, here we are. Another one of those ‘hook this up to the office sound system, lock your computer, leave and never come back’ links which I occasionally tempt you with; make the most of it.
• Possibles: This is a beautifully-designed website presenting a variety of artistic projects which have taken place over the past year in Montreal. The interface here is really rather beautiful; I love the way the site’s movement ‘flows’ (which, yes, sounds unforgivably wanky, I know, but click the link and you’ll see what I mean). Here’s their explanation: “Citizen consultations identified 12 major themes related to sustainable development in the city. Once a month an artist or a collective, together with collaborators, interpreted one of the selected themes in their own way (theatre, visual arts, performance art, film) with the support of a creative partner. This year of production has enabled the 12 artistic teams to test the creation protocol and to highlight three “alternate routes” from which stems a POSSIBLE.” Take a look.
• Icowid: A Twitter account mashing up ICO announcements with drug chat from erowid.Shouldn’t work, but the fact that it does goes some way to exposing the proto-shamanic insanity of much of the chat around crypto here in the year of our lord two k eighteen.
• Mental Map Test: This is a great little game; presenting you with the outlines of two countries, it simply asks you to adjust their relative sizes until you think they are roughly proportionate, giving you an overview of how accurate you were at the end. Not only a decent test of your base level geographical knowledge, but an interesting way of demonstrating exactly how Western-centric map design has warped our perception of relative country size over the years.   
• Audio Adversarialism: This week’s Private Eye (BUY IT) has an interesting snippet about this, but here are some practical examples. Audio Adversarialism is the practice of fooling voice-to-text and voice recognition systems by effectively embedding ‘hidden’ commands in audio files which are inaudible to human ears but which are picked up by speakers and mean, in theory, that we might hear the telly saying “Should have gone to Specsavers!” where instead our Amazon Echo is in fact hearing “Alexa, lock all the doors, turn on the gas and start sparking all the bogs in 00:59, 00:58…”. This is…not scary at all, oh no.
• Spoonbill: When I first saw this I thought “ooh, what a useful tool for journalists!”. Spoonbill is a tool which lets you track any changes to the ‘Bio’ section of a user’s profile – the copy, the website they link to, their stated location – and will relay any changes to you, either as they happen (ish) or in an update email. Which, from a media point of view, is undeniably useful. Except, as Kate Bevan rightly pointed out to me, there’s also a not-insignificant possibility that this could be used for unpleasant and stalky purposes – the fact that the FAQ section makes no mention of whether or not users can opt-out of the service, or how it works with people that a user may have blocked, doesn’t speak great volumes for the service’s attitudes to safety and privacy. Not wishing to get all TEACHABLE MOMENT about this, but that’s honestly the sort of thing that does rather make one understand the concept of privilege – I honestly hadn’t given that a moment’s thought, because I’m a white straight bloke who’s not a famous and therefore I simply don’t have to worry about being screamed at by strangers and therefore don’t take this stuff into consideration. FFS.
• Weird One-Character Domain Superstore: Do you want a weird, pointless one-character domain name, ideally using a weird unicode character noone will ever, ever remember or use? No, you probably don’t, but should you suddenly think of a use for them then here’s where you’d buy one. Actually, there’s been a strange and unexpected resurgence in the popularity (ok, ‘popularity’ is a big word, but) of ARGs in the first few weeks of 2018, and these could potentially be quite useful in that regard – maybe this isn’t totally pointless after all.
• Little Brick Lane: Not, sadly, a miniature diorama in which one can get a poor curry, a £6 pint and a £45 ‘vintage’ Lacoste with matching ‘vintage’ sweatpatches all whilst being coated with the cokesweat of the bridge and tunnel crowd. Instead, Little Brick Lane is an Etsy shop which, in exchanged for some photos of your house (oh, and a few grand) will make you an actual miniature LEGO model of your dwelling, complete with interior if you choose to cough up. Amazing work, and a perfect gift for…er…someone. Although I can totally imagine a certain type of KOOKY company having one of these made of its offices and making the ‘About Us’ page a photo of the building with custom LEGO minifigs for all staff standing outside and looking all happy Christ I hate this industry so, so much.

By Slava Thisset

NEXT, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING, TRY THIS FRANCO-CANADIAN-ARABIC SPOKEN WORD AMBIENT LOFIHIPHOP BY HODA!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY STRUGGLED TO TEAR ITSELF AWAY FROM IN-BROWSER MARIO TO WRITE THIS, SO COUNT YOURSELVES ‘LUCKY’, PT.2:

• Flesh Mesh: Hands-down winner of the ‘worst name for an app’ award for this week, Flesh Mesh is not, you may be displeased to learn, something that lets you create horrible Clive Barker-type flesh melanges but instead is a very, very impressive iPhoneX app which basically turns your face into a Spitting Image puppet in realtime. I’ve said this before about the iPhoneX stuff like this, but can someone use this with the faces of famouses off the telly? Seriously, that plus a bit of decent impressionism and you’ve basically got a no-budget satirical HIT on your hands. Maybe.
• Are.na: Are YOU a planner? Look, I know some of you are, stop looking shifty and pretending otherwise. Are.na is A N Other web-based moodboarding/annotation/shared scrapbooking tool, of which there are many, but I rather like the interface here; might be worth a look if you’re in the market for such a thing.
• Photos of a Woman’s March Weekend: Pictures from last weekend’s Woman’s Marches across the globe.
• Archive of Digital Film Posters: The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin in Texas is, slowly, digitising its collection of vintage film posters. They’ve only done the first 500 or so, of a collection of many thousands, but if you want some awesome examples of mid-20thC poster design alongside some reminders of some truly appalling-sounding films from the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood (although Forrest Tucker in ‘Fighting Coastguard’ sounds ACE) then this is a treasure trove.
• Trad Wave: A Twitter account combining the vapourwave aesthetic with, er, tropes from traditional catholicism. Very odd, but aesthetically perfect – the only thing that could make this better, to my mind, is if it’s eventually revealed to be part of the Church’s digital marketing efforts (which wouldn’t, frankly, be too much of a surprise).
• Ghanaian Film Posters: This is a wonderful collection of hand-painted posters from the Ghanaian film industry – you know the style by now, but the collection here is really quite impressive and if you don’t want the art from Deathstalker IVon your walls then, well, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. The only slight issue I have is that the gallery whose site this is, and which is selling all the posters, is charging eye-watering sums for them – $3200 for the aforementioned Deathstalker is…punchy, particularly when I am pretty certain that the seller’s not going to passing that cash back to the artist given he’s based in Chicago.
• Positive Romania: My goal of staying POSITIVE in 2018 is obviously still going FANTASTICALLY, but if you’re finding it a bit more of a struggle then you may find some small succour in this Twitter account, which exists solely to share positive headlines from Romania. Nice photos, announcements of feast days, good news from the country…I would like every country on earth to do this, please; it’s excellent tourist propaganda, and it would allow us all to live within the carefully-constructed illusion that the world is FINE. Also, whose world isn’t improved by headlines like “11-year-old boy from Targu Jiu returns found wallet with cash inside”? NOONE’S.
• VHS Distributor Logos: No, me neither, but still.
• Topi Tjukanov: Topi Tjukanov is not only the owner of a truly fantastic name (all the best people have alliterative names ahem) but is a very talented data visualiser; this site collects his work, which mainly focuses on dynamic data representation; this map, showing trains moving on a map whose size is relative their speed, is just beautiful.
• Coverclamp: An astonishingly aggressive product to introduce into a relationship, this, and approximately 0.5 of a step away from suggesting separate bedrooms in my view, Coverclamp is a piece of kit designed to literally CLAMP the duvet/sheet to one side of the bed so as to prevent one partner or another monopolising the covers. WHAT THE FCUK? How do you introduce that? “You’re so terminally selfish, even in your sleep, that I am having to take mechanical steps to safeguard my own warmth”? Do you broach it in advance, or just sneakily fit it without saying anything and then wake laughing in the night at your bed companion’s red-faced and futile attempts to deprive you of your rightful share of bedcover real estate? MADNESS. Although if someone can invent something which prevents your girlfriend’s cat from attacking your feet at 3am, or occasionally stepping on your face at night, that would be great (NB apparently a door to the bedroom is not a viable answer to this problem).
• The London Time Machine: Wonderful site which presents the 1682 Morgan Map of London, the first significant map to be produced after the Great Fire, and lets you navigate it whilst showing you the contrast with modern London as presented by Google Maps. The nature of the original map means that it’s most interesting in and around the City and central London, but as a quick overview of the city’s evolution in the past 350 years it’s hard to beat; check out the area around Lincoln’s Inn Fields and how north of there everything just…stops. Beautifully made, too.
• 3d Maritime Models: Yes, ok, that sounds very dull, but these are GREAT – 3d scanned models of shipwrecks presented for you to have a bit of a nose around, either in-browser or in VR. Hugely impressive, and a wonderful example of the sort of thing which in a few years you really will be able to do quite superbly in VR; we’re not far away from being able to just drop into stuff like this and properly explore it in reasonably immersive 3d, which is incredible (to me). See, sometime’s the future’s LOVELY!
• Igor Lipchanskiy: A one-gag Insta account, but it’s a great one. Igor takes famous album covers and imagines what’s happening just out of shot – click the link, it’ll make more sense, but this has ‘coffee table book’ written all over it, as well as ‘going to be absolutely ripped off for an ad creative by the time I finish writing this sentence’.
• Kisha: Ordinarily, regular readers will know, I am sniffy about internet-connected STUFF – I do not, fundamentally, believe that human life is likely to be improved by the addition of, say, toasters to the world of the interconnected. Occasionally though, something so beautifully stupid comes along and you can’t help but applaud – witness Kisha, a SMART UMBRELLA! Yes, that’s right, with the main draw being that you will NEVER lose an umbrella again, Kisha comes with a tracking device letting you pinpoint it on an app – meaning you need never leave it behind ever again! Oh, and the app also tells you if you’re going to need to take the umbrella out, just in case you fancy replicating the information that your phone’s homescreen already probably tells you. Which is nice. You know what else is likely to prevent you from ever forgetting your umbrella again, Kisha? SPENDING £100 ON THE BASTARD THING. Yes, that’s right, that’s the price point. Everyone is a moron. Everyone. Especially the people buying a smart umbrella.
• Realdoll Teledildonics: Can I just be clear about something? When I feature stuff like this it is, ok, in part a slightly ‘crikey everyone, isn’t the future a bit weird and ooh look SEX WITH ROBOTS’; I admit this, it is true. It’s also, though, slightly in order to attempt to showcase some of the slightly sinister implications of this sort of stuff – witness, for example, this latest innovation from teledildonics pioneers (not a phrase I was really expecting to type this early into the year, but oh well) Camsoda, who have partnered with Realdoll to create a doll/sexcam experience whereby a users’ experience with the Realdoll will mimic the experience they are having with the camgirl on a VR headset; so effectively mapping the actions of the real woman on the VR film to the…er…actions of the doll. Obviously this would be awful and janky as you like, not to mention depressing as you like, but there’s a deeper point here about quite how psychologically unpleasant it is. Or is it? Am I being a terrible prude here? I can’t quite tell any more, but whilst I’ve always found the realdoll thing a bit, well, odd, this time it’s veered very hard into creepy territory.
• Deepfakes: Sticking with disturbing futuresex, because why not, this is the subreddit which has sparked all those articles about faceswapping porn you’ll doubtless have seen. “r/deepfakes is a community for the use, discussion, and refinement of /u/deepfakes‘ algorithm for creating realistic face-swapped videos using neural networks”, the description reads; in reality what this means is it’s a subreddit full of porn onto which people have swapped the faces of other, real people. To be very clear – this is a subreddit full of porn, so perhaps don’t click on it in the office (or do! See what happens! Take risks!) but if you can stomach it it’s sort of horrifically fascinating. The fact that you can now take anyone who’s got a reasonable amount of video of their face in the wild and that you can make it look as it they are doing anything you like…well, it’s not hard to envisage scenarios where that is A Bad Thing, leaving aside the bongo. Factor in the voice synthesising tools which cropped up last year and it’s further proof that we are only seeing the very tip of the fake news iceberg at the moment. This is honestly the creepiest stuff I have seen in a very long time.
• Sign: Sign is an escape the room game for your browser. You know the drill. ESCAPE THE ROOM! Good but HARD, this one.
• Bullying and Behaviour: A beautifully-made site from Japan, presenting vignettes from a young student’s experience of being bullied and how he overcomes the experience through the medium of dance (I know that this sounds like a joke description, but it’s not I promise). The whole site is just beautifully made, the films are gloriously shot, and the message is lovely – really do take a look, it’s a wonderful piece of webwork.
• You Are The Stylist: SUPERB interactive music video, this, for the band Broken Back’s latest song – the gimmick here is that at any point once the video kicks in you can change the lead character’s outfit with simple controls. The joy here is not so much in the interactivity, though that’s beautifully executed, but the seamlessness of the transitions between outfits; this is superbly built, so well done to the devs whoever they may be.
• PLAY ALL THE NINTENDO: Look, this is an in-browser Nintendo emulator (desktop only); it contains working, happily playable versions of Contra, Castlevania, ALL THE SUPER MARIO GAMES, Bubble Bobble…seriously, it’s amazing and the best thing you can do to waste your employer’s money on a Friday afternoon, but, look, the rest of Curios is good too, please don’t go yet please stay please

By Ray Oranges

AND LAST IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS, TRY THE NEW, GORGEOUS NILS FRAHM TO ACCOMPANY YOU THROUGH THE LONGREADS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Groceries Left Behind: Is there anything more poignant than the site of as solitary, unloved cauliflower left abandoned on a supermarket checkout? There is not, and this site collecting photos of stuff abandoned at the till is proof of that.

• Floor Charts: This is ace, and a wonderful reminder of the fact that ours isn’t the only parliament with its own idiosyncratic and silly traditions. Floor Charts collects photos of all the weird bits of cardboard that people seem to have to use when illustrating points on the floor of Congress. Can someone explain to me why these are a thing, please, and why they can’t use a monitor?
• You Like My Succs: Succulents. Lots of succulents.
• Weird By North West: “Exploring the weird, gothic, supernatural and/or magic realist fictions produced and/or set within the Pacific Northwestern states of America.” Yes, that.
• Tavola Mediterranea: Not a Tumblr! Instead, this is an old-style blog in which the author explores and experiments with ancient Roman cooking, with discursive looks at Roman history, social as well as culinary, and guides on how to make modern versions of Roman dishes. Fortunately seems lighter on the garum than one might have feared.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Everything We Got Stuck In Ourselves in 2017: We kick off this week with Deadspin’s annual roundup of all (or at least a wide selection of) the things that Americans got stuck inside themselves in 2017. Fine, you can read about people getting magnets stuck in their nostrils, but we all know that you’re really here for the stuff at the bottom, the good stuff, the anecdotes about people ‘somehow’ getting a curtain rod stuck inside their bottom. My personal favourite this year is another in the long line of ‘just hanging out with the lads, yeah’ instances – “AT A PARTY HAVING FUN WITH HIS MALE FRIENDS WHEN ONE PUT A SHOT GLASS UP HIS RECTUM”. Just beautiful.
• Jake Paul is a Terrifying Genius: Rest assured, the title’s not 100% unironic, but this look at the younger of the Paul hellspawn’s  series of online tutorials, teaching how YOU TOO can become a millionaire YouTube celebrity influencer cancer, shows exactly how much effort and work Paul puts into his success, and demonstrates that he does, sort of, know what he’s talking about when it comes to pimping stuff to idiots online. The line about Facebook and marketing people is painfully, wonderfully accurate.
• The End of the Awl: The Awl and its sister site The Hairpin, which are shutting down soon because, guess what, publishing’s still fcuked in 2018, were two bastions of genuinely interesting and thoughtful writing – often personal, often very creative in terms of form and style, and often very, very funny. This looks back at the sites’ legacies, and speculates as to what the future of online writing looks like now we no longer have so many publishers – actual publishers, paying actual money – to new and experimental voices. (Imperica Publisher’s note: we are ALWAYS looking for new and experimental voices, and pay for articles. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  )
• I Will No Longer Recognise Gender (Mine or Yours): Alex Velky is a nice man and an online (and on a few occasions offline) friend of mine (full disclosure and all that), who is currently building a life for himself and his wife and two daughters in (very) rural Wales. This is Alex’s (long, slightly rambling, but) well-argued essay about why we might as well abandon gender identities altogether; he makes lots of good points in here, all of which seem significantly more apposite now in the aftermath of the tits’n’brandy club revelations from this week. Read it, it’s thought-provoking and smart.
• The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism: This is a lovely Guardian essay on the peculiar pleasures of having two (or more) languages and the way that language, and the way you think, is shaped by the fact. I particularly like the Italianglish examples the author gives at the beginning; if you’re interested in this, and like this piece, there’s another good one on how linguistic differences between English and Italian lead to different appreciations of football which you can read here if you fancy.
• Straight Outta Romford: From last year, this one, but resurfaced this week and a good enough read to include despite the lack of absolute novelty. Did you ever wonder, in the early 2000s and late 90s, who was making all those appalling straight to DVD UK gangster movies and, more pertinently, why? This provides some of the answers – more in the ‘who’ sense than the ‘why’, mind, as I very much get the impression that the combination of lottery cash and tax breaks meant that the answer to the ‘why’ was often ‘money laundering or massive fraud’. A lovely look back at the mid-point of Danny Dyer’s career – I was heartened to learn that his daughter, Dani, has taken on the baton by starring in some of these gems herself.
• Attending The First Rare Pepe Auction: In a year which even in its first few weeks has been pretty damn strange, let’s revel in the fact that one of the very strangest things has been the fact that a rare Pepe this week sold at auction in New York for nearly $40,000 dollars. Is this an art market? Is it its own form of cryptocurrency? Is it a wise investment in a world gone mad? HODL Pepe? Who knows, but this piece is a reasonably wide-eyed look at a frankly lunatic-sounding bunch of people. Blockchain-verified Nazi-coopted cartoon frogs, oh what a world we live in.
• The Story of Hedonism: One for you old ravers – and by ‘old’ here I mean ‘old enough to have been doing clubbing seriously in the late-80s’ rather than just, you know, my age – this is the story of legendary series of London club nights Hedonism, as told by the people behind it. This is long but FASCINATING as a picture of an emergent scene – the stories of what they took from New York, the music, the people, and the REALLY INTENSE DRUGS (there are, unsurprisingly, a lot of references to REALLY INTENSE DRUGS, to the point that you can almost taste the sweat of the man talking at you REALLY INTENSELY as his pupils grow to a size whereby he could swallow the entire room with his eyes); this made me feel VERY lightweight and, unless you’re basically Bez, may make you feel the same way.
• Second Wave Feminism and the Generational Divide: Another example of ‘good journalism comes in some unexpected places these days’, this excellent article on the current divide between ‘Second Wave’ feminists and young women online in 2018 was published on Elle; not the obvious home for this sort of thing, but then now that Teen Vogue’s on its uppers, maybe someone needs to pick up the ‘surprisingly woke fashion mag’ baton. This does a good job of explaining, for people like me who might have been ignorant of the history, what the major beef is within different feminist movements – still, it’s another depressing example of the left’s persistent and unfailing ability, when it has a reasonably free shot at the right, to shoot itself unerringly in the foot.
• No Filter: You will, I presume, have heard of this week’s hoopla surrounding Rebecca Watts’ NP Review (non-)review of Hollie Mcnish’s poetry book ‘Plum’ and Mcnish’s subsequent response. If not, you can catch up with the two links just posted – you don’t need to to enjoy this essay, though, which is tangentially-related insofar as it’s a critique of ‘Instagram Poetry’, that particular aesthetic which feels, in a literary sense, to have a lot in common with the international airbnb aesthetic (bare bricks, filament bulbs, ennui). I’ve featured a few things about Instapoetry before, though nothing as scathing as this – I’m not 100% certain I agree with the full argument or the thesis that it can’t be good work, but the author makes their case cogently and with good examples, and the repeated ‘Like’ numbers after titles is an exquisitely bitchy (but telling) touch.
• Amazon Go And The Future: So Amazon this week opened up its first ‘no humans, no cash’ shop, and it went surprisingly well – noone managed to break it, basically, and the coverage was all about as positive as they could have hoped for. Deep analysis of WHAT IT MIGHT ALL MEAN was a touch thin on the ground, though, aside from Ben Thompson, whose predictably smart take on Stratechery was basically “Now watch Amazon build these EVERYWHERE until they are retail and we are just basically paying Jeff 62% of our salaries directly every month”.
• Fish Feel Pain: It’s official, science has said. Obviously ‘pain’ is a very human concept and even amongst humans a hugely relative and subjective one, but rest assured that were you clinging to pescatarianism as an ethically-defensible form of semi-vegetarianism because ‘they’re only fish’ then, well, there go your standing legs. What’s interesting about this is, yes, partly the science, but also the arguments at the end around how the inherent ‘otherness’ of fish in purely species-level terms, and their lack of mammalian reference points, makes it so hard for us to empathise with them at all that even this knowledge might not significantly affect our attitude towards killing at eating them.
• I Invented The Dancing Baby: This is a great story, and a nice reminder that there was a time when going viral could actually mean that your life wasn’t entirely ruined and your past scrutinised for opportunities to milkshake duck you.
• The Wildest Places You’ve Had Sex, In 6 Words: A list, compiled by VICE, from their readers. I would like it very much if Curios readers could, with no explanation, start sharing their own 6 word confessions on Twitter with no context or explanation. Hats off to this person in particular: “Had a threesome in Paris catacombs.”
• The Man Who Fixes Broken Sex Dolls: This is about as cheery as you’d expect, but a really interesting look into a profession which, if all the focus on sex robots and the future is anything to go by, is likely to be one of the few growth professions for us human beings over the next few decades. If you want to be REALLY creeped out, have a browse through the forum threads on the Realdoll Community Repair forum – it’s really best not to dwell too hard on how the dolls became that broken in the first place.
• Reviewing Salt Bae: This is SUCH astonishingly good writing, it’s almost a shame that it’s being wasted on the preposterous new steakhouse – the latest in his empire – to have been opened by Nusret Gökçe, better known as Salt Bae. There is SO MUCH good prose here, so many killer lines – here’s a sample, but do read the whole thing: “Upon seeing Salt Bae, the first impulse one has is to reach for one’s phone. Salt Bae, knowing this, gamely waits a few moments in silence, for screens to be unlocked and cameras aimed before beginning his performance. Salt Bae does not talk. Salt Bae picks up your steak and twirls it half a rotation. Salt Bae squats slightly and, holding the steak at an angle, raises his large knife into the air. Salt Bae cuts with steak from the bone then the meat from the meat. He cuts with his whole body. With every slice he demi-pliés and his knife moves in graceful parabolas through the air when it is not cutting.. Salt Bae has done this many times. He will do this hundreds of times this night alone. The performance is both real and a reproduction. Salt Bae knows he is being held to the standard of his own 36-second video and its millions of views. He is a real-life meme, and he knows what we want.”
• The Baby Influencer: This kid has millions of followers on Insta. She’s a ‘legitimate’ ‘influencer’ (both words whose meaning I am unsure of here in modernity right now) whose mother curates and creates her account, and cultivates the ‘sassy’ persona which have brought the fans and the brands flocking. Meanwhile, though, take a look at some of this stuff and wonder whether or not this looks healthy (it doesn’t look healthy). Honestly terrifying.
• Just Ask: Thanks to Jay for drawing this one to my attention – this is a quite remarkable profile of “Kasia Urbaniak, a dominatrix and Taoist nun turned empowerment coach” (her description, and I’m not going to argue) which turns quickly into one of the most interesting disquisitions on gender and power and sex and abuse and politics and modernity and well pretty much everything you can think of that’s been vaguely socioculturally zeitgeisty so far this year. Long, but superb. Read this one. But if you don’t, then DEFINITELY read…
• Utopia: It’s hard not to get a bit arsey as someone of 38 when you read a piece of writing like this – so smart, so assured and so clever which is penned by someone of 21, but I’m going to try REALLY HARD. This is the latest editorial by Tavi Gevinson in her magazine Rookie, which is an essay to her young readership but also to anyone else who cares to listen, and which covers social media and constructed identities, the nature of the personal ‘story’ and the need (or not) for performative narratives, the web and youth and age and marketing and the fetishisation of adolescence and seriously, if you read a smarter essay by anyone this week I would like to see it. Awesome.

By Leah Schrager

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, a gorgeous video of someone snowboarding through trees, accompanied by classical music. Honestly, this is so lovely:

1. Next, this is by the appallingly-named Hippo Campus – it’s called ‘Buttercup’ and the animation accompanying this happily spring-like song is wonderful:

3) Step in a time machine, let it take you back to the 60s. This is not, whatever it might sound like, early Beatles or similar – it’s new, but an absolutely spot-on take on Merseybeat-era rock’n’roll by a band called The Fame Beats; it’s called ‘The Watford Stomp’:

4) Next up, the most beautiful song about the coil you will ever hear. This is called ‘IUD’ and it’s by Okay Kaya:

5) Francophone HipHop Corner! This is a few months old, but it is SO GOOD and the video is all sorts of bodyhorror creepy, and there’s a whole aesthetic running through the artist’s other work which if you like this you ought to check out – this is called ‘Malevolent Park’ by Al’Tarba:

6) Finally this week, my favourite song of 2018 so far (a whole 4 weeks!). It’s by Girli and it’s called ‘Mr 10pm Bedtime’ and it’s silly and it’s fun and it’s a truly knockout pop song – enjoy and BYE I LOVE YOU BYE HAVE FUN DON’T WORRY JANUARY IS ALMOST OVER AND THE DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER AND SOON THERE WILL BE SUN AGAIN AND IT WILL BE OK I LOVE YOU BYE!

“>NEXT UP, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING, HAVE AN EXCELLENT HOUSE MIX BY JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A WEBSITE AND WHICH AS SUCH WOULD REALLY LIKE TO SAY THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO EVERY WEEK MAKE THE STUFF THAT GOES IN CURIOS BECAUSE, WELL, FCUK ME, IT’S NO FUN IS IT, PT.1?

• How Generative Music Works: This is a lovely piece of webwork, and a really nice example of one way in which you can simply and coherently explain quite complex topics and make them FUN. This site takes you through a series of steps, with interactive examples, of what generative music is and how it works (you know, music produced by rules or sets of rules, the sort of thing Steve Reich and Brian Eno were pioneers at); the way it moves is, fine, a bit Prezi-ish, but the way it explains everything to you is lovely and is probably worth ripping off imho.

• Flotogram: I found this a couple of weeks ago and got SO excited; Flotogram is an AR photo app which, when you take a photo with it, places the photo in virtual space, locking it to its location in AR. Which makes little sense when I write it out, I realise, but which will make PERFECT sense when you click the link and watch the video. Aside from anything else, the first music video made using this is going to be wonderful – I think the creative applications here are really quite exciting.
• One Shared House: There was a Tweet that did the rounds this week as part of the regular set of screams about how awful everything is now (yes, I know, I am part of that cacophony, I am SORRY) which featured some startup or another boasting that they were ‘disrupting’ the housing market by inventing the concept of ‘shared living’; or, er, having housemates, as everyone has understood it for years. Anyway, this is sort of pertinent to that (why did I need to write all that? Jesus, it added nothing and was not particularly interesting and, Christ, look, I’m doing it again, STOP IT MATT!) – it’s a survey (but an interesting and really nicely-designed one) which asks you a bunch of questions about the sort of commune-type existence you’d be willing to put up with. It’s worth doing it – takes about 4 minutes, max – as the bit where you get to see other people’s results is genuinely fascinating.
• All Voices: This is yet to launch, but you can sign up to be notified when it does. It’s a really interesting idea – effectively a whistleblowing mechanic, much the same as the sort of ‘dead drop’ mechanisms employed by publishers in the past few years – which will work as follows:  “With AllVoices anyone can anonymously report instances of harassment, discrimination, or bias (either witnessed or experienced firsthand) directly to their CEO and company board. AllVoices aggregates the reports by company and delivers the data to the CEO and board without any personally identifiable information.” Obviously this will stand and fall based on whether companies sign up to it, but it seems like a smart and sensible potential (partial) solution to the problem of dealing with people being objectionable penises in the workplace.
• Drip: Patreon, by Kickstarter. I mean, that’s basically it – it’s a new Kickstarter platform which works on the Patreon model – rather than a creator seeking a specific level of funding for a specific project, they can instead set up a regular program of payments from fans and supporters to keep them in ramen while they churn out the hentai. I mention the anime bongo only as there’s been a recent furore on Patreon about it effectively clamping down on adult content; will be interesting to see whether Kickstarter exploits that by making itself more filth-friendly. Anyway, if you’re of the opinion that your blog is worth paying for (AHAHAHAHA) then this might be of use (although if any of you are willing to pay a quid a month for this, please do let me know).
• The York Mediale 2018: What is York Mediale? “York Mediale is a unique festival bringing together leading digital artists from around the world. The biennial event will present a 10-day citywide celebration of exhibitions, installations, performances, workshops and more. Underpinned by year-round activity, the festival will support York’s growing cultural presence and nurture the next generation of talent. It will intrigue, inspire and challenge perceptions for everyone.” Great! This is the website for the festival, which seemingly just features a bunch of silly-yet-pleasing webtoys. Click around and see what happens! I love this – frivolous and pointless and fun.
• M-operator: You want a whole bunch of minimalist, free audio to download and use as you wish? You do? GREAT!
• Trump in One Word: Yes, fine, it’s about THAT MAN, but bear with me. I really like this idea and think it could probably be happily reapplied to something less awful; the site invites users to submit a single word that they thing best describes Donald Trump; it then shows you how many other people chose the same descriptor, and shows you the other words people have picked and how common they are. It blocks swears, but some creative spelling gets around that – if nothing else, this is an excellent chance to play your own game of Pointle…OH MY GOD LET’S MAKE A UNIVERSAL ONLINE GAME OF POINTLESS WITH THIS COME ON SOMEONE. Please, it would be GREAT. Anyway, scroll to the bottom and see all the words that only one person has so far used – it’s fascinating.
• Google Advanced Protection: Seeing as we’re ALL now being hacked by Russia, it would appear (and I know this isn’t an original observation, but “RUSSIA HACKED THE BREXIT VOTE!” is sort of a disingenuous position to take when you then look back over the previous year’s Eurohate-stoking tabloid headlines, but wevs), some of you might find this useful; Google’s launching its own SUPER PROTECTION, aimed at journalists, politicians and the like, which is an upgrade on its standard 2FA security protocols. You have to buy an encryption key – and at the moment it autosuggests buying from Amazon US, meaning it may not be rolled out to the UK yet – but then Google takes you through the steps needed to keep yourself safe from phishing attacks and the rest. Worth a look if you’re paranoid, especially if you have reason to be.
• The Aberdeen Bestiary: OLD MANUSCRIPT! “The Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen University Library MS 24) is considered to be one of the best examples of its type due to its lavish and costly illuminations. The manuscript, written and illuminated in England around 1200, is of added interest since it contains notes, sketches and other evidence of the way it was designed and executed.” – this is a BRAND NEW website, presenting each page of the manuscript in hi-res, zoomable glory. Obviously it’s all in Latin, meaning your ability to understand this probably correlates pretty closely to the cost of your secondary education, but the pictures, oh my! If, like me, you’re a connoisseur of crap animals in historical art (I love me a crap lion, in particular), this is golden.
• The World Wealth and Income Database: Another in the occasional series of ‘websites which present stuff which is pretty dry and academic but whose interface and UX I find pleasing and which I therefore present here for your delight and amusement’. Lots of info here about world income inequality, which is about as cheering as you’d expect, but isn’t it nicely put together?
• Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards 2017: This year’s shortlist of photos of animals looking really, really silly. My girlfriend, who spends a frankly preposterous amount of time staring at animal stuff on the web, tells me that not all of these are brand new; I am presuming that you, though, spend less time gazing rapt at shark and cat videos and so will be ENRAPTURED by the derpy critters on display. A special shout out to the clumsy owl, who were I the sort of dreadful person who said stuff like this I would probably call my ‘spirit animal’ (no, Christ, even writing that brings me out in hives).
• Craigslist Mirrors: An Instagram account which showcases images used by sellers on Craigslist who are selling mirrors, So, er, lots of photos of mirrors. There’s a weird art to a lot of these, seriously.
• Princeton and Slavery: This is fascinating, I think. US Ivy League University, Princeton, has (like other institutions of its ilk), a, er, problematic history when it comes to slavery; this site is its attempt to explain and own that history, Bringing together historical documents around slave auctions and the like held on its campus, alongside timelines and visualisations of events, and stories which explain the deep way in which Princeton was to an extent built on slavery, this is an impressive and comprehensive account of a difficult subject. Kudos to them for doing this; I can see this becoming a sort of blueprint for this stuff in the next few years.
• Aesthoplasm: Gorgeous black and white line-drawn gifs, a Twitter feed thereof.
• Mui: I have no interest AT ALL in smart home, IoT type stuff, at least not so that I would ever bother with it at home (though I was impressed by a friend who said that their house is set up so that if they say ‘Alexa: Showtime!’ the lights dim, Netflix comes on, the surround sound gets activated and a special behind-the-telly light rig kicks in giving cinema-style lowlights – this is possibly the most MAN thing I have ever heard, but is quite wonderfully geeky), but this almost makes it appealing. I’m unclear as to whether it’s a proof-of-concept or available, but anyway. Mui is a wooden interface bar for your home – it’s a simple design in…er…some wood or another, which acts as a minimalist way of displaying information through small embedded LEDs, and which also features motion sensors to enable gestural interface, meaning you can use it to change the lights, the temperature, and all the other things that you might want to do. It is BEAUTIFUL and very slick, but won’t prevent you being locked out of your house because the WiFi’s broken.
• Puzzles To Print: Do you have a nana? This is her new favourite website – MILLIONS of crosswords and wordsearches and stuff, all presented here in printable form. Seriously, spend the afternoon rinsing your employer’s A4 stock by printing out everything on this, and then get it nicely bound and give it to your gran at Christmas; your inheritance will be IN THE BAG, mate.
• 01Ghibli23: You will, of course, be aware of Studio Ghibli, animation house of anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki and creators of Spirited Away, Totoro and other classics of the genre. This is an Instagram account dedicated to recreating meals from Ghibli’s animes and posting photos of the resulting dishes – I am an absolute SUCKER for ‘food based on fictional food’ projects, and this is no exception.
• All Of The World’s Vinyl Shops: I have a feeling I have included this back in the H+K days – I know I occasionally mention this, but it staggers me even now that this…thing that you are reading started life as a weekly blog on the website of an international communications agency; what were they thinking? – but certainly not in the Imperica days; this is a map of ALL OF THE VINYL SHOPS IN THE WORLD. Well, maybe not all, but a goodly chunk; cratediggers, here’s how you can get your fix whilst on holiday.
• Bail Bloc:This is a brilliant idea and the sort of thing which charities ought to jump on. “When you download the app, a small part of your computer’s unused processing power is redirected toward mining a popular cryptocurrency called Monero, which is secure, private, and untraceable. At the end of every month, we exchange the Monero for US dollars and donate the earnings to the Bronx Freedom Fundand through them, a new nation-wide initiative, The Bail Project. 100% of the currency your computer generates is used by the Bronx Freedom Fund to post bail for low-income people detained in New York effective immediately. Beginning in January 2018, funds will be routed to The Bail Project, which will over the next five years post bail for people detained in more than three dozen cities nation-wide.” Obviously will ruin your laptop’s battery and do chronic things to its energy consumption, but it’s all for a good cause; seriously, this is HUGELY replicable, it’s worth thinking on.
• Micd: This is a REALLY interesting idea. Micd is an app which lets anyone basically commentate on sport (or in fact anything, but it’s aimed at sports fans) and then let other people listen to the stream of their commentary; listeners can ask questions, interact with the show, participate in polls, etc, while up to 5 people can broadcast simultaneously through the app for that ‘Steve Wright Zoo Radio’ feel (wow, that dates me). I can see this being potentially huge for esports and the like, but if you’re a kid who wants to be a sports commentator then this is equally a great tool with which to practice and build an audience. Clever and (I think) has a lot of potential as an idea.
• The Illustrated Good Manners Guide: First published in 1855, this is a MINE of etiquette advice and still pretty relevant: “We have seen persons, quite estimable in some respects, putting on the eccentricity of ugliness; and acting with brusquerie and even brutality to get credit for frankness and honesty. But in these cases people seek to turn some deficit of temper into merit”. WELL QUITE.
• Emoji Star Trek: This ought to be in the videos section really, but it’s here more as an illustration of a fun thing you can do with an iPhone X; this is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, or at least 5 minutes of it, with Khan replaced by an animated emoji reading his lines. Which is sort of funny, and really impressive in terms of the mimicking of facial expressions – particularly when you realise that this was achieved simply by pointing the iPhone’s camera at the film playing on a screen. You realise what this means? You can literally point your iPhone at ANYONE on TV, record the audio and VWALLAH! They are a talking poo! I mean, I am sure that there are other applications for this, but this is going to make politicians’ lives even more hellish than before, isn’t it?
• GoFleye: A company making SAFE DRONES – the gimmick with these is that they are designed so as to keep all the spinning bits encased in a mesh cage, meaning they are safe for use in crowded or urban areas (I say ‘safe’ – whilst they won’t cut your face with their blades, I still wouldn’t want one to fall on me from a height. Still, if you’re looking for a kid-and-animal-friendly drone this could be of interest.

By Andrea Kowch

NEXT UP, ANOTHER SUPERB LOFI HIPHOP MIX BY THE INCREASINGLY PROLIFIC AKIRA THE DON!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A WEBSITE AND WHICH AS SUCH WOULD REALLY LIKE TO SAY THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO EVERY WEEK MAKE THE STUFF THAT GOES IN CURIOS BECAUSE, WELL, FCUK ME, IT’S NO FUN IS IT, PT.2?

• Makeapp: An app which applies a filter to photos to ‘remove makeup’, the only reason for the existence of which I can imagine is to allow men to see the ‘real woman’ behind photos on Tinder and the like, which is such a profoundly depressing thought that I am going to have to stop writing and do a bit of a sad for a moment.
• Twittris: The most interesting use of the 280-character limit I’ve so far seen, someone has built a Twitter bot which lets you (sort of) play Tetris with it. Tweet it with your instruction (move left, more right, rotate) and it will show you the state of the board after your move; it’s basically like “Twitch Plays Tetris” but on Twitter, and it’s SUCH a clever/silly/pointless little hack.
• Photos Of People Expressing Surprise At Screens: An absolute stock photography GOLDMINE, this. WHAT ARE THEY ALL LOOKING AT?!
• Beacon Relief: An initiative presenting prints by artists from around the world, all available for sale, with some of the proceeds going to disaster relief funds. Anyone can submit a design, and the prints ship internationally – they’re priced around $35, which is pretty reasonable (though obviously shipping to the UK will absolutely screw that), and some of the art is lovely; if you’re looking for a nice, ethical gift for someone or indeed yourself, this is perhaps a nice place to look.
• Diet Prada: If you’re into fashion you are probably all over this already; new to me this week, Diet Prada is an Insta account which points out the, ah, liberal inspiration, fashion houses occasionally take from past collections or shoots. I know it’s hardly news, but man the level of thievery here is impressive. GENIUS STEALS, eh kids?
• Blackout: Misaki Nakano is a graphic designer and web developer from Japan; this site is a showcase for some of his work, and features a few music visualisation tools which he’s built. The style here is lovely, not least the watercolouring of the landing page; give the man/woman/other some work, they are very talented.
• Blackwater: Seeing as you’re all enjoying Blue Planet II – did I mention I did an infinitesimally small amount of work on the social media stuff around it? Like, literally ONE THING? I DID! Basically it’s all down to me – here are some photos of OCEAN CRITTERS, taken at night. Stunning.
• Speechboard: This is really clever; Speechboard is yet to launch, but it will, so it claims, offer the ability to edit audio (they say podcasts because it’s 2017 and they need a defined market, but it could in fact be anything) simply by editing it as a document – so you could edit a podcast simply by cutting words out of its transcript. The example they have on the homepage is a bit janky, but the theory behond this is impressive and the applications vast – worth keeping an eye on, I think.
• Enhance Images: You know how on CSI they are MAGICALLY able to turn a 10dpi photo into a 300dpi photo using…er…some sort of software, and how anyone who works anywhere near digital always scoffs and says something annoying at that point about how, actually, that’s not really how digital photos and the manipulation thereof works, and the person who has to listen to them sighs a little and dies inside? Yes, yes you do. Anyway, this is a browser-based service which lets you do that very thing, using ,machine learning to determine what the photos is of and to sharpen it using MAGIC THINKING. Works surprisingly well on the few images I’ve tried, but will not enable you to magically zoom in 300x to any image to read what’s on people’s phones or the like. Sorry.
• Story Speaker: Part of Google’s suite of Voice Experiments, hacks playing with voice recognition in fun ways, this is SO impressive; you basically write a branching narrative, choose your own adventure-style story into a GDoc and this will turn it into a narrated interactive story which you can play through your Google Home speakers. As a fundamentally broken and empty shell of a human being I am never going to know the warm joy of having children, but I imagine that if you’re the sort of doting parent who writes stories for their kids then this is a whole WORLD of excitement and opportunity.
• ReScam: You’ll have seen this, I think – it’s been everywhere this past fortnight, and rightly so. ReScam is an AI that you can sic on spam emailers to get them embroiled in an endless 419-baiting loop of ridiculousness as payback for attempting to screw people over. It’s rather smart, using machine learning to develop rudimentary conversational ability in order to improve its ability to fool scam artists; I would like someone to develop a variant on this which targets software salespeople, whose tenacity is becoming frankly terrifying.
• Gamepee: FEMALE READERS OF CURIOS! Let me let you in on a MALE SECRET! Did you know that one of the oddities of being alive in 2017 is that there are occasionally rudimentary videogames installed in pub urinals, games that one can play by directing the stream of one’s urine in a particular direction? IS TRUE FACT! Anyway, this is the website of a company that makes those things – I am mainly including this because I think we should all agree to include one slide in every single pitch from now on which simply says ‘P1ss Activation’ and is about getting people to urinate over the potential client’s brand. DO IT DO IT DO IT.
• Amazon Lumberyard: I’m including this not because I think any actual game devs read this but instead because it illustrates another of the ways in which Amazon is, very smartly, LOCKING DOWN THE FUTURE. Lumberyard is a new game engine – that is, the code on which videogames are built which let you build gameworlds, do physics, that sort of thing – which Amazon owns and is making available to developers for ‘free’; they will have to pay for AWS hosting, fine, but otherwise the codebase is available for nothing. Factor in the integration with streaming service Twitch and you can see how Amazon is slowly and carefully building a setup where they own videogames too. Which is nice for Jeff, the Pillsbury-obsessed madman.
• The Museum of Online Museums: There is SO MUCH GOLD in here. I mean, look, without this I would never have learned of the existence of TOASTER CENTRAL. Fill your boots, kids.  
• Music Mouse: This is superb; a little synthtoy which responds to the movements of your mouse across an X/Y axis and which, on its default setting, produces incredibly good modern classical-style piano sounds in the style of
• The Great Diary Project: “The Great Diary Project was launched in 2007 by two diary devotees, Dr Irving Finkel and Dr Polly North. The project rescues, archives and makes publicly available a growing collection of more than 7,500 diaries.” No YOU’RE a voyeur!
• Mitte: This week’s ‘wow, people really will back any old rubbish on Kickstarter’ entry is this – Mitte is a system which has raised over $200k to date so that people can have a little box in their house into which they can pour tap water. The box will, when fitted with MINERALISING CAPSULES, add trace mineral elements to said water, turning it into MINERAL WATER! The projected retail price of this box? 429 Euros. 429 euros, for a box to put tap water in; additional mineral capsules are priced at…oh, look, they don’t say! THIS IS FCUKING IDIOTIC TAP WATER ALREADY CONTAINS MINERALS! THIS IS NOT GOING TO IMPROVE YOUR ‘MENTAL COGNITION’ EVEN IF YOU BUY THE SPECIALLY BRANDED MINERAL CAPSULES! If you have backed this, I hate you and wish you nothing but ill. Oh, and of COURSE it’s connected to the fcuking web. Christ.
• Drake on Cake: Drake lyrics, on cakes. WHAT OF IT?
• The Charlatans: Another one Whatley got to first, damn him (the internet IS a race, it turns out), this is a GREAT site (mobile only) for 90s indie darlings The Charlatans (and I am listening to this as I type and it is GREAT) which presents users with a faux-phone homescreen when they log on and lets them navigate the band’s back catalogue, stream tracks, watch videos and generally wallow in retro-fandom. It’s a really clever piece of design, take a look.
• Hair Nah: I am, you may be aware, neither a woman nor a PoC; that said, I’m aware of the weird phenomenon that is white people seemingly thinking that it’s totally ok to touch black people’s (specifically women’s) hair without asking, in the same way that people seem to think it’s ok to touch pregnant women’s bellies (why is that?). Anyway, this is a nice little broswer game in which you get to SLAP AWAY the hands reaching for your weave – hugely satisfying, even as a white bloke.
• Sandcastles: Build some sandcastles. Needs Flash, but who cares when it’s this soothing (contains bonus shoreline noises for added zen).
• Insignificant Little Vermin: Last up in the miscellenia this week, this is an entry into the 2017 IF contest but is also an EXCELLENT update to the choose your own adventure genre; if you ever played Fighting Fantasy books this will be RIGHT up your street; an excellent way to pass 15 minutes.

By Ian Francis

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HAVE THIS PLAYLIST OF SOME OF THE BEST ALT/INDIE MUSIC OF THE YEAR BY DROWNEDINSOUND!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Tumblr is DYING. Or at least so the dearth of exciting new ones would appear. I might have to switch this section out for Instagram accounts of the week. Did you know that the title for this – the ‘circus’ gag, I mean – was given to me by my little brother when he was alive? Clever kid, my brother. He died nearly two years ago  – December 5th, to be precise – of a longstanding heart condition at the age of 21; just in case you’re reading this and fancy a bit of Christmas philanthropy, why not chuck a few quid at Great Ormond Street Hospital where he spent an awful lot of his very early life. You don’t have to, obviously, but in case you feel inclined, here’s a link. Thanks.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The Proud Archivist: A few years ago, my friend Hector opened an venue on the canal in Haggerston here in London. I worked with him on the opening, and very much enjoyed seeing the venue get over its teething problems and become a success. Then his brothers basically set out to nick it and ruin his life. This is the story of what happened – it’s long, and convoluted, but if you could share it around it would be LOVELY, as poor Hector’s basically been bullied into penury by a criminal and I don’t think that’s ok. Seriously, read this, it’s MENTAL.
• All The Bad Comedy Men: Having added Louis CK to the list of ‘people whose work I liked whose work I can no longer in good conscience enjoy’, this piece is a miserable reminder of the prevalence of ‘troubling’ behaviour amongst male comedians, looking at Richard Pryor and others (David Cross? No!) whose unpleasantness has been overlooked because, well, y’know, they’re funny guys! Miserable, but what else would you expect? Oh, and one additional observation on this whole thing – who knew that ‘agressively w4nking at someone’ was a thing for SO MANY men? I mean, I had literally never even considered that as a thing someone might want to do – am I particularly vanilla here? Christ though.
• Obscure But Excellent Albums: A WONDERFUL Reddit thread in which users list their examples of “10/10 albums from obscure bands” – this is an absolute treasure trove of great recommendations which has led me to some excellent music this week, so check it out if you fancy a bit of a rummage through the obscure.
• The Year in Push Alerts: A look back at the 12 months since HE got elected, this is notable less for the content – it’s interesting, but nothing you might not have read elsewhere – and more for the design; watch as the year’s news is presented as a series of popup alerts, a design conceit which does a such a good job of showing the madness of The Year of the Donald, the breakneck pace of the mess of everything, that you’ll find yourself breaking out in a nervous sweat in sympathy.
• The Radioactive Boy Scout: The story of an American man who attempted to build an actual, working nuclear reactor in his back garden. No, really, that’s actually what he did. One of the 20th Century’s great eccentrics, you have to admire David Hahn – he was obviously a bit on the odd side, and his blatant disregard for the welfare of the DNA of his neighbours was a bit concerning, fine, but read this and tell me he’s not a hero: “Then, in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Hahn posed as a high school science teacher, and “managed to engage the agency’s director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, in a scientific discussion by mail,” Harper’s reported. “Erb offered David tips on isolating certain radioactive elements, provided a list of isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction, and imparted a piece of information that would soon prove to be vital to David’s plans: ‘Nothing produces neutrons … as well as beryllium’… David says the NRC also sent him pricing data and commercial sources for some of the radioactive wares he wanted to purchase, ostensibly for the benefit of his eager students.”” See?
• An Interview With Cambridge Analytica: Long, but worthwhile, transcript of a conversation between Mike Butcher of TechCrunch and the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, touching on elections, Russia, corruption, and Carol Cadwalladr. Won’t necessarily change your mind about any of this, and the guy comes across, weirdly, as a bit thick, but interesting to get their side of the story.
• Japan’s Fake Family Business: Thanks to the web and the fact that we now know everything about everyone and everywhere I’d sort of expected the ‘wow, isn’t Japan ODD?’ article to have died a death by now. NOPE! Japanese culture continues to baffle and fascinate and scare us in equal measure, as evidenced by this piece in the Atlantic which looks at businesses which provide a false family for people willing to pony up. Single but need a husband or wife to maintain face? No problem! Got a child who keeps asking about their dad, but don’t know who / where he is? Erm, rent a fake one! It’s the stories about the kids that are most upsetting here – this…this doesn’t really seem ok, when you’re lying to a child about the fact you’re their dad.
• The Baseball Catfish: An amazing tale of a teenage girl who posed as a middle-aged man for several years online to enable her to pursue her dream of writing about baseball. The kid in question maintained the charade in truly impressive fashion, inventing a family and talking about them in emails, even appearing on podcasts (did noone wonder about the voice though?), only to get unmasked when, well, things started to get weird (it is the web, after all). Truly odd, in classic catfish fashion.
• A Restaurant Ruined My Life: Everyone’s thought ‘oh, I could open a restaurant! I can cook! It would be so much fun!’. Read this and then think again – a pretty brutal telling of how a guy in Toronto thought it would be fun to open a place, and how so doing basically ruined his life. A very cautionary tale.
• What If China Makes First Contact?: A truly fascinating think piece, looking at Chinese culture and scifi and the idea that the nation with whom any alien life form makes first contact will potentially determine the future of our species in a pretty significant set of ways. This is all hung off the recent construction of the world’s largest satellite dish in remote China – the scale of the thing as described in the piece is another piece in the ‘we over here in the West really don’t matter that much any more, do we?’ jigsaw I’ve been mentally assembling this year.
• Being A Twitcher: Videogame streaming rather than birdwatching, but this is a really interesting look at the lives of various people who make a living streaming themselves playing games. I’ve linked to a similar writeup before, but this is more balanced, focusing on the increased professionalisation of the industry as well as just the slightly horrific and unhealthy workload it entails. I know it’s technically ‘just’ playing games, but this is HARD WORK. If you have teen kids who think it sounds like a reasonable career option, maybe make them read this and reconsider.
• Digital Ruins of Second Life: I know I seemingly include pieces about Second Life every 6 months or so, but I can’t help it – it’s fascinating to me. This is another lovely exploration of the people who call Second Life home; the way it’s become a safe space for so many people with disabilities and anxiety and the like is honestly heartwarming, and it also raises interesting questions about how improving technology is likely to lead us to reevaluate virtual worlds again as viable spaces for future interaction.
• At Home With Jon Jon: A profile of a man who is apparently the best surfer inthe world; notable mainly for the frankly hypnotically laid back quality of the profilee and indeed the prose, this is sort of the article equivalent of having a spliff in a hammock and then just gazing into space for 15 minutes (in the best possible way – it’s an excellent profile, promise).
• Decriminalisation: A Love Letter: This is a superb piece of writing, looking at the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal in the 1990s, the attendant consequences, the ,mechanics…brilliantly put together, fantastic stories, fair and even handed…I mean, I like the idea of watching Christopher Biggins and Pam St Clement pulling a whitey as much as you do, but this is probably a more sensible and worthwhile addition to the drugs debate than that Gone To Pot show.
• Travels With My Daugher: A gorgeous and sad piece of writing, about a mother accompanying her daughter to pick up methadone as she attempts to come off heroin. The prose is beautiful – this is really such an excellent essay, though obviously a rather sad one.
• Harmonia: Last up in the longreads this week, please put aside your prejudices as I offer you a PIECE OF INTERACTIVE FICTION! Yes, I know, you don’t play ‘games’, but honestly, this is just superb. Wonderfully written and taking advantage of the medium in some genuinely novel and creative ways (I love the liner notes), this is a wonderful example of what you can do when you experiment with medium. Give it a go, please, I promise you’ll enjoy it.

By Michael Mapes

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. This is a couple of months old, but I’d not seen it – I love this video SO MUCH. The track’s by Shamir, it’s called ‘90s Kids’ and YOU MAY FIND IT RELATABLE:

2) Next up, the new one from Pussy Riot. Are we worried that they are a covert Russian infliltration unit in the great culture wars? Ought we be? GOD I DON’T KNOW ANY MORE. Anyway, another excellent video and a particularly good tune, this – it’s called ‘Police State’:

3) This is ‘Blue Light’ by Kelela and it’s a great song but, mainly, I am mesmerised by her in this video. What an *incredible*-looking person:

4) This is called ‘Dig’ by Black Honey – the video’s a great little vignette of gangsters and molls, and I love the track; smokey and a bit loungey and a hell of a tune:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is ‘Scary Gary’ by Teardrop Estates and some others; the video, with the oilpaint animations, is lovely, but the track itself is just AWESOME plinky lofi excellence – seriously, give this one a listen:

6) Finally this week in the videos, this is GFOTY with ‘Poison Tongue’ and I don’t know what to make of it AT ALL. It’s…well, it’s obviously awful, but amazingly so, and the full-on gabber weirdness meltdown is quite the thing. Also, weirdly catchy chorus. Enjoy! AND BYE, HAPPY FRIDAY, TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER, I LOVE YOU, BYE!: