By Alberto Sughi

LET’S START THE MIXES WITH THE LATEST ONE BY THE LOVELY MAN BEHIND IMPERICA WHICH THIS WEEK IS PARTICULARLY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON BEHIND THE TOMATO WEBSITE AND THANK THEM FOR THEIR MAD CHUTZPAH:

• Collaborative Facebook Stories for Groups and Events: Shy of changing the colour of the website’s favicon to a ghostly yellow, there’s not a whole load more Facebook could do to demonstrate to Snap that it’s…er…aggressively targeting it as a business (I mean, look at the state of this, the shameless, thieving wrong’uns!). The latest ‘what, you do this too? What a coincidence, we came up with this entirely independently!’ feature update from Facebook comes in the form of this, which will  mean that ‘users of Facebook Groups and Events will be able to contribute to a Facebook Story visible to the rest of the members and moderated by the admins.’I think you could actually have some fairly fun experimental stuff come out of this, not least due to the oftentimes disparate composition of the larger Facebook groups – on the other hand, though, just imagine the sort of ‘content’ that the collective ID of the ‘banter’ groups would put together (on which note, I just plugged ‘banter’ into FB search and wow, Brexit really DID happen didn’t it).
• Invoice with PayPal Through Facebook Messenger: Look, this isn’t worth me wasting prose on: “PayPal and Facebook are expanding their integrations today with the launch of an extension for Messenger that allows PayPal sellers to invoice buyers directly through private messaging…The new PayPal chat extension allows a seller to create and send their invoice without leaving the their conversation, so the buyer can act on it immediately. To use the extension, sellers open the extension tray in Messenger, select PayPal, then create a simple invoice by filling in details like item name, description, price and quantity. The invoice can also include a photo.” US-only as yet, but expect this to eventually roll out everywhere, in another move designed to ensure that all of your online interactions have that slightly queasy Facebook-blue tinge in the short to medium term future.
• Send Hi-Res Photos in Messenger: Literally just this. No significant brand application that I can think of, but, you know, if you want to set your Messenger bot up to send pointlessly hi-res photos of, I don’t know, biscuits, then now you can. Great!
• Russian Transparency!: Everything we think nowadays is determined by a shadowy politburo cabal running a sweatshop office of MASTER SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATORS out of Vladivostock. IT IS, I TELL YOU! In a move towards combating this worrying trend, Facebook’s set to tell people how many of the Pages they follow on FB and Insta were set up by Russia’s (in)famous Internet Research Agency (see Curios passim on this one); which is great and all, but also pretty disingenuous when you think about how Facebook works; visibility and reach are a factor of likes, shares, etc, when it comes to this sort of stuff, meaning most people who saw FAKE NEWS PROPAGANDA from these Pages won’t have had to follow them to ‘enjoy’ their lies. Still, it’s a start.
• Facebook Trust Indicators: As part of its efforts to stop us being gulled by online shysters, Facebook’s also introducing what it’s calling ‘Trust Indicators’, whereby publishers on the platform can autosubmit a bunch of information about themselves: “Publishers may now be able to upload links to additional information through their Brand Asset Library under their Page Publishing Tools — including information on their ethics policy, corrections policy, fact-checking policy, ownership structure, and masthead.” This information will now be available to users curious to see more information about the newspeddler showing up in their feed – let’s not think too hard about the degree of critical thinking and curiosity which is required of the general public for this to actually make a meaningful difference to anything, or indeed the utility of a system which allows anyone to upload their own affidavits as to their journalistic and professional integrity. TRUST! TRUST FACEBOOK! TRUST IN MARK!
• Join Friends’ Livestreams On Insta: To quote: “When watching a friend’s live video, simply tap the “Request” button in the comments section. You’ll see a confirmation that your friend has accepted your request, and you’ll have a moment to prepare. Once you’re live, the screen will split in half so you can hang out live with your friend. You can leave your friend’s live video at any time, making it easy to join for a quick hello or a longer chat.” There’s almost certainly some GREAT fan service stuff that famouses and brand ambassadors can do with this; just, er, take care as to who you let join you.
• Snap Adds Context Cards to Lenses & Filters: This is 10 days old, apologies; seriously, though, there’s only one of me and there are a LOT of tedious s*c**l m*d** updates. Anyway, advertisers purchasing sponsored lenses or filters on Snap will now be able to add context cards – the feature that lets you swipe up from within a Snap to take you to a specific destination url – for no extra cost, meaning you’ll now have at least an outside chance of demonstrating why it was vitally important to spend a few hundred grand on a piece of software that allows people to, say, make their faces look like a friendly poo.
• YT Updates Policy On Weird Kids’ Content: A reaction to the recent furore about algorithmically-generated videos of Peppa Pig making like Princess Bathory (a story which, weirdly, was mentioned in Private Eye twice before making it to the mainstream) – only of interest if you’re one of the BAD PEOPLE making ad money out of poorly-rendered CGI depictions of Elsa from Frozen doing ice docking or something.
• I Am Reindeer: A nice initiative, running for another 5 days at the time of writing, seeking nominations for female creatives who are, to quote them, ‘bringing the magic’ (no, me neither); there will be nine winners, so if you know someone who’s, er, a brilliant female creative, why not nominate them and make their Christmas? GO ON.
• Duroc Tomatoes: Long-term readers may be aware that I have a very sizeable soft spot for ridiculously overengineered websites for ostensibly tedious industries; this may well be the ur-example of these. Duroc, I learned this week, is the largest supplier of ‘snacking tomatoes’ (no, me neither) to the UK and a few other European countries; what would you imagine the website of a major tomato supplier to be like? Would you imagine it to have MUSIC and FLASH-LIKE ANIMATIONS and a ridiculously colourful aesthetic that reminds me of the set of Playdays? NO YOU WOULD NOT, and yet here we are. This is just SO wonderfully, riotously overengineered, and makes me wonder whether they needed to dispose of some budget at the end of the year, or whether the CEO’s nephew had just completed a course in creative webdesign or something. Wonderful and hugely pleasing.
• The Bureau Agency: Look, I know that it’s easy for me to sit here in my ivory tower (cold kitchen) and throw barbed criticisms at everyone, I know this. “It’s easy for you”, THEY say (the identity of ‘THEY’ is as yet as undetermined, but imagine them as a seething mass of babbling flesh sitting just outside my window), “you just SIT there and CARP and WHINE and MOCK. Why don’t YOU try making something you miserable, destructive failure?” (there is a small extent to which I accept that ‘THEY’ may be an extension of my ID). Which is all well and good, but then I see stuff like this – the website for what, as far as I can tell, is an actual agency, asking for actual cashmoney for actual work, and which, from the Adam Curtis-style portentous video to the laughably-written copy, seems like the entry point for some sort of weird, comms-themed ARG – and I can’t help myself. WHO ARE YOU, THE BUREAU AGENCY? Interestingly they have culled a lot of the copy since I first found this earlier in the week, suggesting that whoever’s behind it has at least a small degree of self-awareness about how ridiculous the whole presentation is – if you’re reading this, though, let me just point out that the punctuation is still a complete joke. You’re welcome!

By Alma Haser

NEXT UP, THIS PROJECT MASHING UP JAY-Z WITH DJ PREMIER – IT’S EXCELLENT, SO ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH HAD A WONDERFULLY BIZARRE EXCHANGE ON TWITTER LAST NIGHT AND IS RATHER ENJOYING THE CLIMBDOWN FROM THE OTHER PARTY THIS MORNING, PT.1

• Just Type Stuff: This is what the web is for – not the bringing together of disparate peoples and viewpoints, not the sharing of ideas and feelings and knowledge and words and music and and and – no, it’s for this, a website which lets you type stuff into your browser and see it pop up in a little virtual world. I first saw this as part of the ‘Now Play This’ exhibition at Somerset House earlier this year, but it’s now available to all; TRY THIS IT IS ACE. Seriously, click the link, type stuff, hit return, see what happens. It’s GREAT, and you will derive more pleasure than you’d expect from creating a tiny virtual universe populated by floating cows and umbrellas and dogs and stuff (no, I know you don’t understand, but JUST CLICK THE LINK).

• For Hims: 2017’s seemingly endless list of ‘X as a subscription service’ offerings continues apace with For Hims (no, I don’t know why they’ve chosen to pluralise ‘him’ and I really wish they hadn’t) which lets you subscribe to monthly deliveries of, er, haircare products and erectile dysfunction medication. It’s just such a weird combination of things – “Hm, I wonder whether there’s anywhere that will send me new hairwax each month so I don’t have to remember to buy it OH and while I’m here I’ll have some Cialis, yes, don’t mind if I do”.
• Black Girl In A Big Dress: It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed a webseries as much as this one – High Maintenance, in case you’re asking – but this is BRILLIANT. Black Girl In A Big Dress is a webseries about a black woman who’s also a Victorian cosplayer and no wait come back it’s good honest. Fourth wall-breaking and funny, this is excellent even if you don’t know anything about cosplay fandom (do any of you know about cosplay fandom? I have my doubts to be honest).
• The Hotstepper: This is SO silly, and really rather fun. The Hotstepper is an app which provides users with directions to any location they desire, given to them through an AR layer of, er, a fat bloke in his pants walking ahead of them to guide them to their destination. Leaving aside the impracticality of needing to stare through your phone to see the route you’re meant to take, who DOESN’T want to be guided through life by a virtual bear wearing Kanye shades and some fetching blue briefs? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! ETA until KFC rip this off for a Colonel Finder app? Approximately a month, I reckon.
• A Foreigner’s Guide to the Polish Alphabet: When I was a kid and growing up in Swindon – have I mentioned I grew up in Swindon? Ghastly place, don’t visit – I went to school with LOADS of Polish people, meaning I acquired the largely useless ability to spell surnames like Maskelaniac and Wolosczinski without pause for thought, and learned early on that shouting ‘Curva’ at your mate’s mum when she turned up to pick them up from infants was, on balance, an error. Had I had access to this beautiful website (seamless segue there, right?) I might have been motivated to learn words other than ‘poo’, ‘grapefruit’ and ‘apple’ in the language – this is a gorgeous piece if webwork which explains to English speakers how the Polish alphabet works; what the letters are, how they are pronounced, etc. SO well designed and really far prettier and more interesting than it has a right to be.
• Pupsocks: Have you always wanted a pair of socks emblazoned with the face of your fur baby (STOP IT, SAZ!)? Of course you haven’t, you’re not an idiot – that said, though, you might know someone whose life wouldn’t be complete without the addition of a pair of socks featuring their pet’s countenance all over them. This site lets you choose the socks, choose the colour, and then upload a photo of your cat, dog or budgie’s (or indeed any other animal – they appear to have a reasonably broad church) face which will be plastered all over said socks for you to sport with pride. I don’t think that there’s anything likely to say ‘no, please, I want to spend the rest of my life alone’ quite like socks with photos of your dog on them, but maybe that’s just me.
• Postcards for Progress: A nice little project by Faris & Rosie where you or anyone else can submit designs for postcards which will in the next week or so be made available for anyone to buy, with all proceeds going to social justice charities. Why not participate? WHY NOT, EH?
• Murder Data: We all LOVE data, don’t we? WE DO! Although occasionally data can be incredibly creepy and upsetting, as in the case of this website which aggregates publicly available information about murders in the US; to quote, “The Murder Accountability Project is a nonprofit group organized in 2015 and dedicated to educate Americans on the importance of accurately accounting for unsolved homicides within the United States. We seek to obtain information from federal, state and local governments about unsolved homicides and to publish this information. The Project’s Board of Directors is composed of retired law enforcement investigators, investigative journalists, criminologists and other experts on various aspects of homicide.” There is a LOT of murder in here – depending on what you’re into (please don’t be into murder) there’s almost certainly some really interesting things you can do with this dataset.
• Snatch: This week’s BIG HYPE APP comes in the form of Snatch, which is an AR treasure hunt – using the app, you stare through your phone’s screen to find virtual packages which you need to collect and protect from other competitors; basically it’s some sort of Pokemon Go variant where other people can nick the Pokemon off you, but with the added incentive of REAL PRIZES; if users manage to keep hold of a box for 6 hours, they win its contents IN REAL LIFE. Worth a play while the userbase is still relatively small and you might have a chance of actually winning something and before the game is ruined by teenagers virtually shanking each other for McDonald’s vouchers or something.
• Artland: The art world has long been ripe for DIGITAL DISRUPTION but for one reason or another there’s not been anything I’ve seen which has really taken off in the rather stuffy world of the gallerinas. I can’t see this changing matters, but it’s an interesting idea; artland allows galleries to create profiles and upload works, making them browsable and for sale through the app; punters can browse, chat about works, make enquiries and buy through the interface. I guess the problem here is that art is, for the most part, not exactly a regular purchase and so the user retention for stuff like this is pretty diabolical, but if you fancy doing a bit of arty window shopping this might be a fun download for you.
• The Balanced Transportation Analyser: This is, it’s fair to say, a niche ‘interest’ link, but I’m including it in here as it’s such a wonderful example of OCD-level obsession and DEEP KNOWLEDGE that it’s worth highlighting. The Balanced Transportation Analyser is “an intricate spreadsheet model that ties together every facet of passenger transport in New York City including transit, auto and taxi. The model makes it possible to measure the effects of changes in auto tolls, transit fares and other policy levels on traffic levels, travel speeds, time spent traveling, agency revenues, emissions and other “externalities.” It contains “pre-packaged” traffic-pricing scenarios which you may modify to test your own what-if scenarios. The BTA thereby offers a transparent and straightforward tool for transport policy-makers and advocates to test the impacts of tolls and other policy traffic pricing proposals.” Yes, fine, it doesn’t SOUND interesting (and isn’t, really, if I’m honest), but it’s worth quickly downloading the document just to see what TRUE Excel madness looks like. WHY IS ALL THIS IN A SPREADSHEET?
• Novation Launchpad: Another in the list of seemingly-endless synthtoys available on the web – this one’s rather a lot of fun, and in the 20 minutes I spent dicking around with it the other day I managed to make myself believe I was a hitherto-unacknowledged musical genius and for that reason alone I will love it forever. Seriously, it’s seemingly impossible to make something that doesn’t sound ace.
• With Jack: This is a really smart idea; With Jack is a bespoke insurance provider designed specifically for ‘freelance creatives’ designed to help with those occasions when your LOVELY LOVELY CLIENTS decide for whatever reason that they can just ignore your payment terms completely and leave you scrabbling down the back of the sofa for pennies with which to buy baked beans (LOVELY LOVELY CLIENTS!). I can’t vouch for the quality or flexibility of the policies, but if ‘freelance creative’ sounds like you then this could be worth a look.
• The NYC Taxi Drivers Calendar 2018: SEXY CABBIES! Has anyone done a DEEPLY SATIRICAL Uber version of this yet? Good, it wouldn’t be funny.
• Snide Octopus: An Instagram account which posts book spines with ‘humorous’ captions; the inverted commas there are because the gags are pretty hit and miss, but there’s something cute about the setup and, you know, I’m a fairly indiscriminate bibliophile.
• Snips: Snips is voice assistant software for those who, er, fancy the idea of building their own voice assistant but who don’t want to be in hock to Google or Amazon for the pleasure. This is a really smart looking service which effectively operates in a similar way to those ‘look, we’ll help you build a messenger bot!’ services which sprang up about 9-12 months ago – anyone can tinker with it, and the resulting assistants are all deployed locally meaning you don’t have to deal with the slightly creepy ‘WHY IS AMAZON SPYING ON ME ALL THE TIME?’ side-issue that Alexa gives you. If you’re in any way interested in hacking together your own voice-activated butler then this is for you.
• MagShuffle: This is such a nice idea, but the man who runs Cureditor; MagShuffle is a subscription service which, for £100 a year, let’s you subscribe to over 150 magazines, allowing you to choose a different one each month should you so desire. Obviously there’s a paralysis of choice issue here – there are TOO MANY MAGAZINES on the shelves, as my mate Paul once complained back in the late 90s – but this is a great gift idea.
• The Bowie Broadcasts: This is admittedly a branded promo for Sonos and so should be Up There, but it’s actually really good and so am granting it the status of ACTUAL CONTENT; this is a series of shows recorded in the past few weeks an exploring the musical and artistic legacy of David Bowie, as discussed by musicians like Thurston Moore, Neneh Cherry and more. Really interesting and there’s some great music in these.
• At The Museum: This is a great idea imho; At The Museum is a video series by MoMA in NYC, showing the behind-the-scenes world of running a major international arts institution. Yes, ok, it doesn’t SOUND like a lot of fun, but it’s got the same sort of interesting fly-on-the-wall vibe of good reality TV, and if you’ve any interest in the mechanics of the art world, or if you know someone who’s interested in a career in the sector, this is properly fascinating.
• Jilly Ballistic: Cut-out street art from the New York subway. The style here is wonderful.
• Mattia Passarini: Is it me, or are Italians weirdly overrepresented in the world of photography? And if that is true, why is it that my status as a half-wop appears to have granted me no special skills in that arena at all? These are the questions that keep me up at night. Mattia Passarini photographs remote peoples around the world, and his Insta feed is a wonderful window into distant lands;  the portraits here are just beautiful.

By James Marshall

NEXT UP, THE VERY GOOD NEW MIXTAPE BY PROSAICALLY-NAMED RAPPER MICK JENKINS!

THE SECTION WHICH HAD A WONDERFULLY BIZARRE EXCHANGE ON TWITTER LAST NIGHT AND IS RATHER ENJOYING THE CLIMBDOWN FROM THE OTHER PARTY THIS MORNING, PT.2:

• Death Mask: I LOVE THIS. Death Mask is a little AR project which uses facial recognition and analysis to project the likely expected life expectancy of anyone you look at over their heads; effectively letting you place a small hourglass over everyone, counting down the grains til their inevitable demise. Sadly this is just a video demonstrating the concept, but I really want this as an app so can someone sort this out please? Thanks!
• Erase All Kittens: If this week’s budget taught us anything, other than the fact that politicians should be banned from making gags at the despatch box, it’s that we’re all economically screwed and the future is bleak – THANKS EVERYONE! To that end, why not back this Kickstarter which is raising funds for a ‘teach girls to code’ game –  if you’re going to be unemployed, cold and hungry in your dotage, you might as well take steps to help ensure your daughters can support you.
• Flexbot: Noone really ever talks about Amazon Flex – the bit of Amazon which lets anyone earn money from the company by acting as a courier for Prime, etc, by bidding for jobs to deliver stuff from fulfilment centres. It’s weirdly under the radar considering how many people apparently earn money through it, and it’s an interesting window into everyone’s gig economy future where we can only sustain ourselves by bidding on menial jobs at increasingly low rates and working 19 hour days helping to sustain the lifestyles of the 1%. Flexbot is a joke robot – or IS IT? – which lets Amazon Flex users game the job response system by mechanically tapping your phone’s screen faster than humanly possible, thereby allowing you, in theory, to accept jobs faster than your competitors and WIN AT LIFE. Take a moment to think about how depressing this is – go on, think about it. THIS IS THE FUTURE WE ARE BUILDING.
• Somnox: Another Kickstarter, this one funded to the tune of £110k and rising, for a ‘sleep robot’; basically a small electronic lump covered in fabric which sits in bed with you and, through ‘breathing regulation, sounds, and affection’ improves your sleep. AFFECTION? IT’S A JACK-RUSSELL SIZED LUMP OF PLASTIC, FFS! It’s unsurprisingly light on detail about how it will actually achieve this improvement in your sleep patterns, but don’t let that stop you promising to drop £450 on a MAGIC SLEEP BOX.
• The Icicle Atlas: More information about icicles, their shape and their formation than you could ever have dreamed of. I’ve spent far, far too much time in bad corners of the web, it turns out, as all I can think of when I look at these is that they look like a festive page of the Bad Dragon site.
• The Pano Awards: There is seemingly no area of photography so specific and niche that it can’t have its own awards ceremony – here, then, is this year’s crop of entries into the Panoramic Photo Awards! Some of these are great, in fairness, and there’s a particular effect you get from a panoramic cityscape which I rather love.
• Tifo: Covering similar ground to the equally excellent Mundial magazine, Tifo is a new website presenting erudite, intelligent writing about football. You want to read 4,000 words about why Gaizka Mendieta was awesome? No, me neither, but there’s plenty of other stuff on there too should you like to.
• Ginger: As we all move to a point whereby we accept that life is hard and horrible and, frankly, not really very good for our mental health, so we progress to a situation whereby every single one of us is in some sort of therapy for something. As more of us realise that it’s good to talk about stuff, so more services will spring up seeking to exploit that realisation for commercial gain. Oh HI, Ginger! This is an app which offers access to VIRTUAL THERAPISTS, with text and video consultations available as part of a series of monthly packages at varying price points – just take a moment and go and have a look at the costs there. $130 a month to TEXT someone? WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?! This isn’t, I’m aware, a novel observation, but the exacerbation of the mental health divide between rich and poor I can see coming down the track is a pretty ugly looking juggernaut (almost as ugly as that mixed metaphor, turns out).
• Celebrity Apology Generator: Stormzy won the apology game forever this week, but this is a fun little toy which churns out ‘I’m not really sorry about all the stuff you’re claiming I did’ statements for you to enjoy. What’s depressing is quite how well this manages to nail the tone and content of so many of the non-apologies we’ve seen over the past few months.
• Let’s Robot: I feel like this is the future of something, but I have no idea for the life of me of what. Let’s Robot is a site which collects internet connected robots, all fitted with cameras and all controllable by THE CROWD via the browser – so you can, should you so desire, navigate an ACTUAL ROBOT around someone else’s apartment whilst chatting to other robot navigation enthusiasts. Per the recent Reddit game with the robot trying to escape from the rooms, there’s potentially quite a fun BRAND THING you could do with this type of tech. Also, I have just spend 5 minutes watching one of these things navigate someone’s living room, which is testament either to how wall-eyed with fatigue I am or how STRANGELY COMPELLING this is.
• Geofind YouTube Videos: Lets you search for videos on YouTube based on the geography from which they were uploaded. A bit janky as these sorts of hacks often are, but it’s an interesting way of finding…odd stuff. Have a play.
• RePhotos: This is a lovely site, collecting photos which show off the changing landscape of a scene over time – you know, the ones with those little left-right sliders allowing you to switch between old photo and new photo on a whim. There are thousands on here from all over the world and as such this is a pleasing historical timesink.
• Artlexa Chung: An excellent single-gag Insta account which picks out images from artworks throughout history which seem to be wearing the same outfits as Alexa Chung, who if you take this to its logical conclusion is EITHER mining the entire history of Western art for her lookbook or is instead a time travelling muse from another dimension – YOU DECIDE!
• FlirtAR: What would you get if you crossed Pokemon Go! with Tinder? A lifetime of solitude, for one, but also FlirtAR – a dating app which for no discernible purpose or benefit whatsoever creates an AR layer of the standard dating experience, letting you see where potential dates are on a map and, seemingly, HUNT THEM DOWN through your phone. This is never going to catch on, but can one of you please download it and give it a try, just to see exactly how bad it is?
• Clara: I once spent a summer in a windowless room, working for Nationwide Building Society. They couldn’t afford voice-recognition call-routing software in the mid-90s, so instead hired me and two other poor fcukers to sit wearing headphones, listening to calls coming in, hearing people say ‘one’, ‘two’ or ‘three’ after a series of menu prompts, and then pressing the appropriate button whilst the customer was fooled into believing that there was some high-tech magic at play. It’s rare that you can *actually* define a job as ‘kafkaesque’, but I think that counts. This isn’t quite on the same level, but it’s chillingly bleak nonetheless; Clara is an AI Assistant that, er, isn’t in fact AI at all – instead, it’s powered by faceless, nameless ACTUAL PEOPLE doing all the heavy lifting in the background. Seemingly designed for people who want a PA but without the tedious ‘interacting with an actual person and treating them like a human being’ elements thereof, this is one of the bleakest ‘oh hi, future of employment!’ things I’ve seen in an age.
• Elastic Man: PLAY WITH THE STRETCHY FACE! I think this has something to do with Rick & Morty, but don’t let that put you off, it is a FUN TOY.
• Virtual Self: Finally in this week’s collection of poorly-curated ephemera, Virtual Self is, as far as I can tell and according to Friend of Curios Shardcore, “a massively over-engineered site for some truly terrible techno” but it is ALSO a very weird collection of strange pseudo-spiritual ramblings and…Oh, God, look, just click around and see where it takes you. Wait til you find the forum, though – why are there so many postings? Who made them? WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN? Quite possibly an elaborate ARG for a firm of monumental masons for all I know.

By Kelly Reemtsen

LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS CHIPTUNE EXTRAVAGANZA BY CHIP TANAKA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Nope, Not Arabic: A Tumblr collecting instances of script being used in ads and marketing which is meant to look like Arabic but which, well, isn’t.

• Hipster Merkel: I LOVE THIS! Mutti as hipster icon, bless her.
• Clozzed: “Between fashion and photography, the project initiated by Teddy Delcroix offers a walk from shadows to light through a nocturnal window shopping, costing nothing more than our viewing pleasure. Randomly upon a reflection of an inanimate mannequin or a neon light still on, the sleeping city dares to dream.” No, I don;t know either, but the photography on here is pretty slick.
• Adam Hillman: Adam Hillman arranges objects in geometric patterns and photographs them. These are some of those photographs.
• A Mini A Day: A new photo of some cool miniature stuff each day, which if you’re into doll’s houses and stuff – you weirdo – you will very much enjoy.
• Gurafiku: A Tumblr collecting examples of Japanese graphic design, “seeking to lift the barrier of language, and present the graphic design of Japan to an international audience.” There’s some really beautiful stuff in here.
• Glichykitty: The work of CGI artist and animator Ben Vedrenne.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• Being a Woman Online: Long, involved, depressing and important research by Amnesty, which examines the sort of abuse which women receive online every day across the world. One in four has received threats of physical or sexual assault, which number is even more depressing for being entirely unsurprising in scale.
• The Grooming of Emo: I’m too old to have been into classic period emo – MCR were just a little late for me, though I’m sure I’d have been sawing away at my wrists through the tears had I been a few years younger – but this piece, about the particular idea of gender relations encapsulated by the genre and what impact it might have had on teens growing up in the mid-00s and the way in which they think about sex and relationships and the like, is very interesting. Prompted a conversation with some friends about ‘music we liked as teens the lyrics of which are, on reflection, a touch ‘problematic’’, which reminded me of this stone cold classic by Adorable whose lyrics are an absolute horrorshow. Still, hell of a bassline.
• The Land of Vendettas: In the week in which the Bosnian-Serb conflict was back in the news (and in which I was reminded of what a spectacularly awful war it was, and just how cravenly the West, for the most part, failed to deal with it), this piece – about blood feuds in Albania, centuries old familial conflicts dragging for generations and the price paid for grudges that never die – feels particularly apposite. Superbly written, too – there’s a line in here about how Central Europe looks quite a lot like a fcuked version of Central America which is *such* a good observation.
• Amazon’s Last Mile: Seeing as I mentioned it up there, here’s a piece about Amazong Flex, how it works and how it’s yet another step towards the eventual, inevitable future point where we are all so fcuked, employmentwise, that we’re forced to monetise every single moment of our waking lives in service to Google, Amazon or Facebook. Very interesting as a ‘future of the labour market’ piece as well as another ‘oh, Christ, Amazon have won the next 100 years’ warning.
• An Orgy of Killing: Let the title be a clue to you that this superb longread from the Guardian is not a cheering piece. This looks at what’s happened in Mosul after the Iraqi army had purportedly driven off IS/Daesh – unsurprisingly, turns out that even the good guys are bad guys, war is horrid and, as is our wont, we’ve left an almighty mess in someone else’s back yard the fallout from which is liable to continue sending geopolitical shockwaves into the future for years to come. WELL DONE US. Really superb war writing, this, if somewhat novelistic in execution.
• Prisoner To Violence: A US prison inmate, serving time for second degree murder, tells of his part in a prison yard fight. Spare, sparse prose, the author’s got real talent.
• The Serial Killer Detector: Isn’t big data GREAT? There’s nothing it can’t fix! Obviously that’s rubbish, but it’s always fascinating to see the areas to which people are attempting to apply data science and how it’s working out, not least here, where it’s being used to analyse available US data on murders and to try and tease out patterns to solve previously insurmountable cases. Hugely interesting.
• The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change: Scary things I hadn’t even begun to think of before this week, part x of an almost infinite series – did you know that. as Global Warming continues apace and the polar icecaps melt, there is all sorts of weird and unknown bacteria which has been stuck in permafrost since the dawn of time which is slowly becoming uncovered and reintroduced to the environment? No, I didn’t either til I read this and now I am genuinely concerned that we’re all going to be wiped out by a 10,000 year old strain of mumps from Greenland.
• The Professional D&D Master: I was never quite geeky enough for D&D as a kid (no really), but I get the impression I would rather have enjoyed it; after all, it’s basically someone telling you a story for several hours which is RIGHT up my street. This piece is about Timm Woods, who’s apparently the only professional Dungeon Master working in NYC in 2017 – you book him and he will come and run a campaign for you to your specifications, which sounds SO much fun. I think there’s something in this – take away the LOTR fantasy gubbins and you’re left with bespoke interactive fiction with some rough rulesets, which I reckon there’s a market for outside of basement-dwelling neckbeards (yes, I know, but come on).
• The Most Hated Poet In Portland: You might have seen the Tweet that this piece was inspired by; a series of photos of poems posted to Instagram, each accompanied by artfully scattered fags, each seemingly the product of an edgy, tortured soul (stroke fcukboi), accompanied by some fairly damning commentary about the author’s likely personality and style. It went EVERYWHERE, and as it did it picked up more and more hate and snark and commentary…and this is an interview with that poet, who, poor bugger, seems utterly bemused by the whole thing. The author of the piece is a woman who joined the initial pileon, and her reflection on why she did and what it made her feel is an interesting thread running through this.
• Promethea Unbound: This is LONG, but it’s worth every minute it will take you to read – it’s fascinating and bleak and shocking and hopeful and you will be rooting for the titular heroine all the way through.
• Prozac Culture: Finally in this week’s longreads, a beautiful essay from Granta about the author’s longstanding relationship with his depression and the drugs he’s used to treat it. Not only superbly written, but a wonderful time capsule to the past couple of decades and our changing attitudes to depression and how Prozac – and, specifically, the marketing of it – altered them forever.

By Kate Bellm

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. First up, this is by Smerz and it’s called ‘Half Life’ and I have no idea what one might call this genre of music but it is ace and makes me feel very old (and like I might want to do some K and fall asleep under a pile of coats at a stranger’s house party, weirdly enough):

2) Korean hiphop corner! I’ve featured her here before, but this is the new one from Yaeji which is not only excellent but also reminds me weirdly of the Smerz track above so, you know, SEAMLESS SEGUE here. It’s called ‘Raingurl’:

3) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! This is the best Fire in the Booth I’ve heard in an age. Rapman, who I first featured on here *checks* 2014, gets his opportunity on Charlie’ Sloth’s show and he uses it to show off his exceptional storytelling skills. Listen to this one properly, it’s worth it (and enjoy Sloth’s massively tone-deaf use of his soundboard at the end):

4) UK HIPHOP CORNER, PT.2! Harry Shotta released a new mixtape last week; this is his latest video which is much slower and more chilled than the usual 100mph jump-up stuff but no less good – this is called ‘Changes’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.3! This is Manga St Hilare with ‘Far Away’. Turn this up LOUD, it is best enjoyed at high volume:

6) Finally this week, you remember Prism and that brief vogue for making music videos using it’s style transfer imagefiddling? Well this is like that, but better – and the song’s by David Lynch, apparently. ENJOY I LOVE YOU HAVE FUN TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER AND DON’T BUY TOO MUCH TAT! BYE!

By Jake Wood Evans

LET’S START THINGS OFF WITH THE LATEST IMPERICA MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH PROMISES TO RUSH THROUGH ALL THE STUFF ABOUT FACEBOOK, ETC, AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND GET TO THE ‘GOOD’ BITS WITH A MINIMUM OF PAIN AND FUSS AND WHINGING:

(NB – there is no discussion anywhere in Curios this week of the Christmas advert season, largely because it would not be possible for me to give less of a fcuk about it).

• Another Tweak To Newsfeed: You know what? THEY’RE BRINGING BACK ORGANIC REACH! Ahahahahaha only kidding, this is another ‘we’re tweaking Newsfeed to make sure YOU see more stuff YOU care about!’ update, which, as per, promises to prioritise content from those people you like, love and hatestalk whilst keeping the chaff out of your eyeline. The main notable update here is a degrading of ‘person you know commented or liked on article link or content X’, meaning baiting people into commenting on stuff for REACH isn’t going to fly so well any more. Facebook is usually pretty circumspect about how these updates fcuk brands, so it’s interesting to see the coda to this post read: “The impact of these changes on your page’s distribution will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity. In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline.” So, er BUY MORE ADS, YEAH?

• The Facebook Creator App: JUST LAUNCHED, this, on iOS only (Android ‘coming soon’); this is an app which offers a suite of tools (video editing, etc etc) designed specifically to assist people who CREATE on the Facebook platform. So expect to see slightly shinier and more impressive but just as moronic videos coming to your feed SOON – Kelco, in the unlikely event you’re reading this, GET ON IT, SON #YKTA.
• Embed Messenger On 3rd Party Sites: So this is a COMING SOON thing, and there’s actually not that much official news about it out there (that links to a Tweet, which is useless but there was NOTHING ELSE) other than this Marketing Week piece, but the upshot is that FB is going to allow brands to embed Messenger onto their sites to provide a SEAMLESS MULTI-PLATFORM CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE or somesuch horror. It’s a good and useful idea, obviously, but does nothing to dampen the realisation that all that we’re going to see over the course of the next decade is the inexorable, grinding march towards Facebook’s total ubiquity (oh, ok, fine, and Google and Amazon too).
• Ads in Facebook Messenger Now Available to More Advertisers: Sponsored Messages – that is, the ability to send in-Messenger ads to users who’ve previously interacted with your Page on Messenger – are now being made available to  ‘wider range’ of advertisers. Which is lovely.
• Send Money In Messenger: Launched in the UK the other week – I’ve not used it yet, despite having had cause to, as the person I needed to send money to isn’t on Facebook; Paul, I admire your stance but you really messed with my ‘reasearch’ there, fyi – this is a peer-to-peer payments mechanism for individual users to transfer money between each other. Were I the sort of person who sells drugs on the internet, which I am most definitely not, I would look at this and think ‘hm, there’s probably some reasonably useful functionality here which I could exploit’.
• Auto-split Testing Coming to FB: Really useful features, these – coming, er, ‘soon’ to Ad Manager is the ability to run parallel creatives and optimise ad buy based on which is performing better – to quote, ““When setting up a split test, you can choose to isolate a specific creative variable or test multiple creative variables. For example, you can test short videos vs. longer videos, compare headlines and calls to action and learn whether animations perform better than static images. As you continue to experiment and learn, creative split testing can help you identify best practices specific to your business to improve long-term campaign performance.” Which is useful.
• FB Launching Auto-Optimizing Ad Spend: The one good thing about Facebook’s continuing mission to turn every single person on the planet into an advertiser – PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT! – is that it will hopefully put an end to the parasitism of the media buyers. In this announcement, Facebook hammers another nail into the increasingly porcupine-like coffin of the ad-buying industry; rolling out ‘soon’, this new feature will basically let users allocate total spend to an ad set; Facebook will automatically direct funds from your budget to the best-performing ad units within a set. Useful and helpful and really bad news if your job involves managing someone else’s ad spend.
• Better Video Insights for FB: Look, I can’t be bothered – I’ve had to do 700 words on Facebook already and it’s only 7:21, so you can understand my reticence. Here: “[this update] will give publishers and creators more information about the top Pages that are re-sharing their videos. Available to all Pages globally, Highlighted Shares showcases the top five Pages that have re-shared a video, ranked by views. The video publisher will also be able to see associated insights from re-sharers, like post engagement and average watch time.” Exciting, isn’t it? No, no it’s not.
• Better International Targeting Tools: A few tweaks to existing features rather than wholesale updates, the interesting ones here are multi-country lookalike audiences, letting advertisers create lookalike audiences across multiple territories, and the ability to target users in cities – or combinations of cities across territories – above a certain size, making it much easier to do a lazy blanket FB campaign at ‘urban dwellers’ in any country on Earth.
• Updates To Travel Ads on FB: I don’t care.
• Some Update To Ads On Instant Articles: I don’t care.
• Instagram Lets You Upload Older Photos To Stories: Useful for those trapped in the Sisyphean grind of DAILY VIDEO CONTENT CREATION, but, again, I don’t care.
• Insta Trialling Letting Users Follow Hashtags: Still only a theoretical feature at the time of writing, this is, as far as I can tell, actually a potentially useful feature for brands and the sort of thing that if you’re an agency you can probably parlay into a few grand’s speculative ‘hashtag research’ work in advance of its rollout. For normal people, though, I imagine it’ll just be a way of getting all those thirsty pics into your feed with a little less hassle.
• Instagram Expands Branded Content Tool: You remember that Insta feature they introduced a few months back whereby selected ‘influencers’ were able to tag brands in their posts so as to officially denote that they were being paid to shill? Well it’s being expanded to MORE INFLUENCERS! You may notice from my tone that I don’t care about this either.
• Twitter Promote Goes LIVE!: So this is the thing they announced in August which lets Twitter users pay $99 a month to promote ‘some’ of their Tweets – it’s now live in the UK, but I direct you to my assessment of it from when it was launched which I reckon is still pretty much accurate: “Twitter’s ability to ignore repeated requests for change from its users on issues like harrassment whilst simultaneously continuing to iterate other bits of the platform in ways which literally noone requested or wanted is quite impressive, really. Witness this, a new ad product which, er, LITERALLY NOONE DESIRES, which will let users pay a flat rate of $99 a month (yes, US-only at the moment) to promote…er…some of their posts (you don’t get to choose which) to EITHER a rough geographical area OR an even rougher ‘interest group’. Interest categories, beautifully, include ‘Life Stages’ and ‘Hobbies and Interests’. I WOULD LIKE TO TARGET PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN HOBBIES, TWITTER. NO, ALL HOBBIES ARE LARGELY THE SAME, THAT’S FINE, THANKS, HERE’S $1200 PER ANNUM. I mean, really, this is SO POINTLESS, especially given that promoting individual Tweets takes about 5 minutes and lets you at least do targeting by geography AND multiple interest categories. Rubbish.” So there.
• Longer Twitter Usernames: Oh, and 280 characters, obvs, but you know that already. Anyway, the moment for brands to be able to do something fun and interesting and praiseworthy with the long name thing has probably passed, but completeness demands I include this one. So here it is.
• Twitter Testing OFFICIAL ‘Thread’-type Functionality: Testing, but still. WHO WANTS THIS? No, me neither.
• Snpachat Launches Tracking Pixel: Watching industry analysts tear poor old Snap a new one these past few weeks has been a bit dispiriting; give it a chance, eh lads? The numbers weren’t great the other week, and the proposed ‘redesign’ allegedly coming down the line doesn’t smack of a product that quite knows what it is, but still. One of the other announcements Snap made in the wake of the quarterlies was that it is going to introduce a Snap Pixel to allow for better conversion tracking and, eventually, remarketing. Just a brief reminder that this was exactly the sort of tech that lovely Evan Spiegel described as ‘creepy’ and ‘really annoying’ in an interview in 2015. Oh Evan!
• Snapchat Rolls Out Audience Manager 2.0: Basically better self-serve ad buying tools on Snap, which is useful. The filter bidding based on demographic data in particular is a useful addition, imho.
• Travel Oregon: The first of several links which I am late to as a result of having the temerity to take a day off last week and which as a result some or all of you may have seen in Whatley’s RIVAL Friday newsletter (if you’re in the market for another one, his is shorter and less angry, much like James himself). Anyway, this is a website for Travel Oregon designed to promote the hipster state to outsiders, and all built in the style of fanously brutal survivalist sim Oregon Trail. Really nicely done, and, whilst niche, the hipster retroism of the site and the game it references is probably a pretty decent fit for the sort of coffee-obsessive dullards who might want to visit.
• Gift Gucci: I’m throwing this in at the end here because it is perhaps my FAVOURITE piece of overblown retail webwork of the year. Click it, go on. LOOK IT IS RENDERED ENTIRELY IN HAND-PAINTED ART! LOOK AT THE POINTLESS ANIMATIONS! Seriously, this is SO luxe that it’s aimed at people who have the luxury of being able to do their online shopping on a platform which makes it near impossible to work out what it is that you might in fact be being sold. Everything on here takes you through to a shopping portal on the actual Gucci website, but if you can tell what all the pictures actually refer to then you’re a savvier shopper than I am. Please, can someone take it to the next logical level and commission a website where the UI is sculpted entirely from several tonnes of carrara marble? Great!

By Julie Cockburn

By Chai Jinchen

LET’S START WITH THIS WEEK’S EXCELLENT IMPERICA MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THEY OUGHT TO RENAME FACEBOOK STORIES ‘FETCH’ AND BE DONE WITH IT (YES, THAT IS A MEAN GIRLS GAG – WHO EVER SAID THAT CURIOS DIDN’T SURF THE VERY EDGE OF THE CULTURAL ZEITGEIST, EH?):

• Facebook To Apparently Allow Crossposting of Stories Between Insta and FB: Erm, I’ve sort of told you everything there is to know here with that headline – such elegance! Such economy of style! – but in the interests of giving you VALUE I guess I can slap some proseflesh on the tired old bones of the story. Hm. What to say? Presuming this does end up happening – and Facebook seem intent on trying to MAKE people do stories on the platform – there’s no reason at all why you, brand person, wouldn’t cross-post stuff, is there, when Stories inevitably opens up to Pages? I mean, potentially bigger numbers! Ugh, look, this is all I’ve got here – ONWARDS!

• Facebook Adding Annoying Colour Status Options To Comments: This is significant for several reasons: 1) It means that you can begin to undertake some subtle-ish trolling of your acquaintances by colour-coding your replies to them based on how much they are annoying you; why not set up your own personal colour code of disapproval and see if anyone cracks it? “Matt, why are your replies to me always in that particular shade of brown?”; 2) You could, if you were a community manager-type person, use this as quite a nice way of simply triaging posts on your Page by using different colours to flag replies as needing different types of follow-up action; 3) You could EVEN decide that it was part of your CHEERY BRAND PERSONA to emote using colours! (please, please noone do that); 4) Facebook is, if it’s not careful, going to end up like some sort of hideous, MySpace-esque design mess.
• Facebook Testing ‘Things In Common’ Feature: I can think of literally no brand relevance to this whatsoever, not even from an advertising point of view, but Facebook’s apparently testing the ability to see what you have ‘in common’ with friends-of-friends on the platform, which sort of feeds into…
• Facebook Could Be Doing Tinder: Let’s be clear – I think this would be RUINOUS. Really, really ruinous. Can you imagine if Tinder’s ‘swipe left, swipe right, flirt harmlessly, send a cockpick’ mechanic was ported largely wholesale to the world’s largest social platform? If everyone suddenly acquired the ability to cruise through their friends-of-friends list, seeking ‘connections’? Divorce lawyers, this one’s for YOU! I mean, it’s not exactly the same, and it’s only testing in a small number of areas, but you can see where this one’s going, can’t you?
• Facebook Looking To Open Office in Shanghai: Because even if you can’t technically use the platform in China, they sure as hell want to buy adverts to target us with.
• WhatsApp for Business Is Coming: At some unspecified point in the future, at least. There’s going to be a two-tier solution, one for smaller businesses which will be free (or at least so it appears now), and then another ‘enterprise level’ (I hate that term – so grandiose!) solution (is it a solution if it’s not technically solving a problem that anyone’s ever identified?) for larger-scale businesses; the deal is that this will give verified profiles enabling confident commercial interactions on the platform, though no word as yet to what else the feature set will include. It’s a very closed pilot programme at the moment, though you can apply for more information here should you be the right sort of international business behemoth.
• LinkedIn Launches Audience Network: You know how on Facebook you can buy ads which will use FB targeting to appear on third-party sites? Yes, well, that, but using LinkedIn instead. Given the fact that, despite a series of articles of late suggesting LinkedIn is a GROWING COMMUNITY and stuff, and that people actually spend time on there, I am pretty convinced that no actual human beings – recruiters obviously don’t count – really use it at all, this is a useful way of using the platform’s admittedly excellent targeting options to reach people on sites they might conceivably want to visit.
• The Amazon Advertising Pitch Deck: Stuff that I think is going to happen next year but which (see Curios passim) I am absolutely not, categorically, making a prediction about, oh no siree – Amazon will in a few years’ time be one of the largest digital ad platforms in the world. Take a look at this 16 slide presentation where they discuss their ad offering, targeting options and the like, and then tell me that they aren’t going to be getting a significant chunk of Stumpy Marty’s cash in the future. Aside from anything else, the ability to target users on the basis of stuff they have actually done is hugely powerful. More’s the pity.
• China Internet Report 2017: A slightly Meeker-esque presentation – in aesthetics rather than length, thank Christ – about the current state of digital behaviour behind the great firewall. Interesting and useful, and as ever with this stuff made me do a slight double-take and think ‘man, they really have a…different concept as to what is acceptable or healthy levels of screentime, eh?’ If you’re vaguely of the belief that the future is largely going to be won online, this set of statistics suggests very clearly that there is only likely to be one winner, based on actual behaviour.
• A N Other Social Media Image Size Cheatsheet: Because these things are always useful, and this is reasonably up-to-date I think (though it doesn’t include the circular profile pics on Twitter so, you know, FIE ON THEM). Horrible format, though, for which I apologise on its creators behalf.
• Volcan: There are certain categories of corporate website which are always, always ridiculous. Car sites – PREPOSTEROUS! Film sites – WHY??? Perfume sites – LIKE DANCING ABOUT ARCHTECTURE! My favourite, though, tend to be websites for high-end booze, not least because of the wondrous way they attempt to convey the very essence of the concept of ‘premium’ (mediocre) through VERY SHINY WEBWORK and appallingly-conceived prose. So when I first came across this, a site for some tequila brand or another, I was tempted to dismiss it as just another vanity project. And yet, and yet, this is actually rather good. Fine, the interface is a touch overblown, and the language and imagery is as silly as ever, but it also gives you a genuinely interesting insight into the manner in which tequila is produced, the photography is lovely, you can actually learn stuff, and I found myself spending 5 minutes on there actually reading and watching bits and pieces about the history of the drink. This is, honestly, really rather good I think. Fcuk knows if it will persuade anyone to buy violently expensive firewater, mind.
• One Four Nine: This is interesting – I think it’s been produced solely as a calling card/promo for this digital agency, which is a pretty bold move imho. It’s a nice piece of work – you’re asked to investigate a car accident, syncing your phone to the site to use it to investigate ‘clues’ with the standard mechanics – swipes, etc – and a few newer ones (the way the torch bit works is very nicely done imho). I won’t spoil the REVEAL for you (it’s not that interesting imho) but it’s worth taking the time (about five minutes) to play through it as it’s generally pretty slick. I do, though, think we’ve possibly reached the end of the ‘sync phone to site’ mechanic – there’s simply not that much you can do with it, turns out. Go on someone, prove me wrong here.
• We Fail: I have a strange feeling I might have featured a version of this site before, but no matter – this is ACE and is by far and away the best agency website I’ve seen in ages, not least because it is actually funny. Go, look and be jealous.

By Lola Rose Thompson

NEXT UP IN THE MIXES, THE LATEST SELECTION FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT HUH MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THAT WOMAN WHO WENT ON THAT DATE IN BRISTOL IS FEELING A LITTLE, WELL, AWKWARD ABOUT HER ANONYMOUS FAME, PT.1:

• Hogwarts: Yes, fine, Harry Potter is not a new or current thing, and neither is official fan-swamp Pottermore, but this but is so FIE ON YOU, DOUBTERS! This is a just-released new bit of the site which lets you zoom around a 3d model of Hogwarts school and explore the courtyards and towers and stuff, all rendered rather nicely in…er…webgl? Christ knows. Anyhow, you can explore and find 100 bits of Potter Lore around the place, and it’s generally quite a nice, relaxing way to spend a few minutes if you’d like to temporarily forget about the fact that Brexit is a shambles, the planet hates us and we are now all living in a semi-permanent state of twitching anxiety.
• Makesum: Lorem Ipsum is not, in and of itself, an interesting or funny thing – not even if you’re a web designer, and especially not if you’ve ever committed the cardinal sin of using a novelty version about bacon or cats – but this site rather marvellously breaks that rule. Makeum lets anyone create their own Lorem Ipsum copy, from whatever corpus of words they feed it, and then share their creations with the world. So, for example, witness the ‘Remoaner’ Ipsum, or perhaps the Potter Ipsum – the real joy, though, comes with the possibility of being able to cobble together your own. Why not do one which carefully and forensically dissects the personality flaws of your client, and see if they notice? Or perhaps use this as an opportunity to articulate the exact nature of the fear and dread you feel upon waking every morning? The possibilities are VAST, and anyone who does web design should, I think, take this opportunity to make their own and cast it into the world. GO!
• The Dark Crystal Design Contest: This is GREAT, and if you’re the sort of person who can, er, design the sort of weird little creature which you think would fit seamlessly into Jim Henson’s Creature Shop’s forthcoming reboot of The Dark Crystal. If I weren’t such an unimaginative artistic failure I would totally do this – here’s the brief, in case you need tempting: “This small, woodland creature must be a brand new concept – it cannot be a variation of an existing species, e.g., Skeksis, Mystic, Podling. All ideas are welcome, as long as they feel true to the world of The Dark Crystal, without being a variation of an existing Brian Froud drawing. Please include at least a front and side view of your new creature. In addition, please provide a paragraph of 50–100 words about your new creature, including a name, brief back story and characteristics of the creature. Your submission should include one or more still images submitted as JPGs or PNGs. Pencil drawings, paintings, digital drawings, digital paintings, and digital models are all acceptable, however the final submission must be as JPG or PNG files.” GO!
• Realtime WWII: A Twitter account which is Tweeting (for the second time) the entire history of WWII in realtime. Fascinating stuff, and a nice reminder that bad things happened in history too, so, you know, it could be worse! Here’s hoping that there’s not some unpleasant nuclear synchronicity a little further down the line, though, eh?
• Alejandro Santillana: Instagram account of Texan naturalist who posts pretty incredible close-up shots of various insects, turning his feed into a parade of beautiful, iridescent…things (look, I’m no entomologist – “What are you?”, I hear you cry, as I sink my head into my hands and quietly whimper “i don’t know anymore”) which will provide a pleasing counterpoint to all the pictures of your boring friends’ boring coffees and lifestyle shots and selfies and STOP PRETENDING YOU HAVE AN AESTHETIC YOU BASIC FCUK ahem sorry this is why I don’t use Instagram.
• Elemental Haiku: I adore this. A periodic table whose gimmick is that each element has a haiku written for it, this is not only a cute/silly gimmick but the author, one Mary Soon Lee, is a genuinely talented writer; some of these are truly beautiful, and all of them relate directly to the element in question. I mean, look at this one, for little-heralded metal Germanium: “Do you miss it still / The semiconductor crown / That Silicon stole?” Come on, that is gorgeous. I would like to see haiku collections for everything – can someone do something like this for emoji, please? Ooh, crowdsource it! Here’s my entry for the poo “Ubiquitous turd / Inanely happy, smiling / Will someone please flush?” See, it’s a GREAT idea.
• Tokyo Pics: Photos of Tokyo are ten a penny, fine, particularly that classic Harujuku/neon cyberpunk aesthetic, but this collection, by Lukasz Palka, is a nice contrast to those; whilst there’s inevitably some neon, the focus on the city’s grubbier rooftops and fire escapes and ventilation ducts gives a wonderfully future-urban grubbiness to the whole place.
• The Arsenal Innovation Lab: Were I the sort of tedious prick who goes on Twitter making references to ‘yer da’ and ‘yer boyfriend’, I would probably open this with some sort of bantz about how ‘yer da’ thinks this is something to do with, I don’t know, cloning Alexis Sanchez. I am not, though, that sort of tedious prick (you can speculate as to exactly which genre I am, I won’t mind), so I’ll spare you the sub-Soccer AM riffing here. This is, instead, an interesting project from Arsenal Football Club who are looking for startups and small businesses to help the club innovate – from ticketing to merch sales to matchday experiences, businesses can pitch their ideas and effectively end up as part of the Arsenal incubator (they don’t call it that, but it’s effectively what it is) and potentially get investment from the club into their idea. There’s probably a gag in here somewhere about how inevitably the startups it focuses on will be front-end heavy, leaving a gaping hole where the actual heavy lifting and, you know, REAL STUFF ought to go, but I simply don’t care enough about football to try and make it so feel free to imagine your own and then post a ‘yer da’ gag about it online, you twat.
• A Road Trip: Totally pointless, but lovely, this site stitches together photos from Google Street View to present a journey of hundreds of miles from LA to SF. I find this hugely soothing, helped by the soundtrack, but I would love to be able to set it to my own music, syncing the tempo of the video to whatever’s playing; it would make a wonderful ‘thing to have on as a pseudo artwork while music’s playing’ wossname.
• Better History: Not, sadly, a service to rewrite actual history; instead, this is a boring-but-useful Chrome extension which basically makes your browsing history usable. Giving it a helpfully clear interface, this will let you easily flick through history from various days, search within your history, group your history by time spend on site, delete individual domains from your entire history, etc etc etc. Basically if you spend as much time as I do wandering around the web, this is invaluable; similarly, if you keep on forgetting to activate Incognito mode when browsing Xhamster. I am not judging, honest.
• The Inspection Chamber: Not actually a thing itself – more the announcement of a thing – but it’s still rather cool. Remember a few months back when I featured the Dunkirk interactive story on Amazon Echo? No? FFS, what’s WRONG with you? Why don’t you keep a lightly-annotated copy of every Curios ever in your head like I do? What? Because you fill all that brainspace with love and friendship and family and real, lived experiences rather than the hollow, unfulfilling simulacra of ‘life’ presented onscreen? Yeah, well, WEVS. Anyway, the lovely BBC (full disclosure: the lovely BBC are paying some of my wages at the moment, but I would love them regardless) are making an interactive radio play story thingy using Echo, which will let users ‘interact’ with it in specific ways to affect the story (sort-of). Details are sketchy at the moment, though someone I spoke to yesterday who’d played it said it was quite Hitchhikers in its vibe, which is imho A Good Thing.
• Typo/graphic Posters: A wonderful collection of typographic posters, basically: “typo/graphic posters is a platform for inspiration and promotion of good design through the poster culture. We focus exclusively on typographical and graphical posters, those that challenge type, colors and shapes to express a message.It is a curated gallery with a graphic design point of view. each poster is reviewed to meet a standard in visual qualities and functional efforts.” Gorgeous, searchable, vast library of wonderful design work.
• Flag of Mars: I had no idea whatsoever that a flag for Mars had already been designed – it had, though, by one Pascal Lee. The premise of this site is that Pascal’s design could do with a bit of a revamp, and so the site owner is proposing this (you’ll have to click on the link to get what ‘this’ is, obvs), a lovely little chevron-based number which I look forward to your descendants saluting every morning as they gaze at the inky blackness of space through the reinforced crystalline surface of the Terrordome and wonder what it must have been like to breathe air and taste potatoes and stuff.

By Emil Meltmoth

NEXT UP, WHY NOT ENJOY A LIVE SET FROM ERIC HARARY FROM A FEW WEEKS AGO IN BROOKLYN FOR A HOUR’S TECHNO FIX?

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THAT WOMAN WHO WENT ON THAT DATE IN BRISTOL IS FEELING A LITTLE, WELL, AWKWARD ABOUT HER ANONYMOUS FAME, PT.2:

• Waddle: Not by any means an entirely new idea, this, but potentially useful to some of you, Waddle is an app which is designed for parents to share photos of their kids and general family life with people without clogging up FB or Insta with a bunch of cute-but-frankly-samey snaps of their DD or DS (I still speak Mumsnet, even 6 long years on from the Summer of Pampers). It also allows users to order framed prints of any of the snaps on demand, which is a smart monetisation model and which I can imagine lots of grandparents getting no little joy out of.
• My Morning Routine: I honestly had no clue that this was a thing, until it was tweeted by the legendary Dave Knockles tweeted about it, inspired by this Tweet which you’ve probably seen. Anyway, My Morning Routine is a wonderful collection of ‘inspirational’ posts by people who feel the need to share exactly how well-optimised their lives are for success by demonstrating their SUPER-EFFICIENT ‘hacks’ (I swear, it’s getting to the point where I have a strong and increasingly uncontrollable urge to maim anyone who uses ‘hack’ in the context of ‘small tweak to habit or lifestyle designed to magically enhance productivity’) for living a better morning life. Whether it’s a fitness routine which begins at 5am every day, incorporating a chia seed smoothie and some pilates, or whether it’s some sort of appalling ‘I do three hours of writing as soon as I rise from my pit’ (I mean, I actually do that once a week, but for me it’s very much the mental equivalent of defecation – which, I imagine, has become pretty apparent over the years), you will find a whole array of things to hate in here. Enjoy!
• Star Wars Fitness: The best possible way to absolutely obviate any small increases in your attractiveness accrued from your gym and fitness regimen, guaranteed.
• We Are All The Same: If you’ve spent any time at all on the web in the past few decades – and if you’re reading this, I’m going to confidently predict that you have a bit – you’ll be familiar with the work of Hans Eijkelboom who for the past 20-odd years has been taking pictures designed to illustrate the sartorial conformity most of us unwittingly engage in. Eijkelboom’s ‘thing’ is that he takes photos of people from one location over the course of an hour and then pulls together collections of those who are dressed in similar manner from the resulting photos, illustrating just how, well, sartorially unimaginative most of us are. This is a lovely collection of some of his work, and will either make you feel pleasingly anonymous or desperately miserable about how, actually, we’re really not special or unique at all. Except you. You’re special.
• Virtual LAX: Proof that there is nothing so ostensibly boring that someone on the web won’t manage to turn it into ‘entertainment’, this is a 24h live simulation of air traffic going in and out of LAX. At the time of typing it’s pretty quiet what with it being the middle of the night, but by the time you receive this HOT CONTENT right in your inboxes it should be warming up nicely. I say ‘warming up’ – what you’ll see is some planes landing and taking off, all soundtracked with the actual audio of air traffic control from the towers. This is all being streamed on Google’s Twitch competitor, and the chat window is so charmingly polite that it makes for quite a pleasingly niche community – DON’T RUIN IT PLEASE.
• The Arcade Sofa: Have you ever wanted to own anarticle of furniture, custom-designed to look not unlike an original Street Fighter II arcade cabinet? No, of course you haven’t, and yet here we are. This French site is flogging a quite staggering number of variations on this particular theme, from SFII and King of Fighters, to a Hello Kitty-themed version (no, you can’t have one) and one which, bafflingly, comes emblazoned with the legend ‘Pussy Wagon’, which may well be one of the greatest prophylactics ever devised. Prices on application, but I imagine there’s at least one of you who will covet one of these things like little else on earth.
• Movie Heds: Headlines on newspapers from films, posted on this Twitter account. Remind yourself of some GREAT ones – Back to the Future, obviously, but also more obscure gems such as “PENGUIN FORGIVES PARENTS” and “TOON KILLS MAN!”. Pointlessly lovely, as all the best things are.
• Six Word Memoirs: This has been going for nearly a decade, apparently – without delving in too deep (because I am lazy, tbqhwy), I think it’s a US schools initiative to encourage creative writing and storytelling which has since expanded. Leaving aside the Hemingway cliche, there are some really wonderful, poignant little pieces of writing on there, not least the more recent examples of people sharing their six-word stories about their experiences in the US as immigrants – particularly poignant this week given that man’s latest piece of racism.
• A Whole Bunch of Photos of Burning Man 2017: Because every year I feel compelled to post a selection of these, and every year (look! I’m going to do it again!) I am seemingly compelled to write something like ‘Burning Man looks like it would be fun were it not for the dreadful people’. So it goes. The sculpture here displayed is quite fantastic, mind, regardless of your opinion of the annual JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY for the tech community – I really would like it, though, if next year they banned anyone from doing / wearing anything that was a Mad Max ripoff because FFS guys can we not just stop doing this aesthetic now please?
• Entertainment Memorabilia Auction: As alluded to in last week’s intro, we’re only a few short weeks away from the arrival of THE CHRISTMAS NARRATIVE, where floggers of tat line up to whip us into a purchasing frenzy as we join the annual game of ‘anchor our lives in meaning through conspicuous consumption’. If you have a bunch of geeks in your life who you feel compelled to buy gifts for, you could do worse than checking out this forthcoming auction, taking place in late-September in London, of film props and memorabilia – there’s some GREAT stuff in here for the right customers, including prosthetics from 28 Days Later (why not make YOUR sexplay incredibly, worryingly sinister!) and the tshirt which Frost war in Aliens (“Peace Through Superior Firepower”) and, oh, LOADS of stuff, some of it almost even affordable. I’m not suggesting AT ALL that any of you ought to reward me for all the hard graft I put into Curios, oh no siree, but if anyone fancied getting me this then that would be lovely thanks.
• A-Z Wallpaper: Now that the London A-Z has been rendered largely redundant, the company that makes it has had to diversify – DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET MAP WALLPAPER FROM THEM???? This is so exciting – you can get different cities, fine, but I want London all over my walls.
• Clipart Bot: A Twitter bot which intermittently posts examples of clipart from 1994, when the world was a simpler place and you could get away with illustrating everything in greyscale and noone cared that you couldn’t use photoshop or code or edit video and oh god let me go back. These are quite remarkably ugly, and I would like you all to consider reintroducing them to internal documents as of the now.
• Archive Team: You’re all obviously aware of the Internet Archive Project, but this is the lesser-known Archive Team, which works to preserve some of the more obscure corners of digital culture for posterity. There’s detail here about their current and future projects, and how to get involved, but also a whole load of reminders about now-mothballed corners of the internet, the small communities they want to trap in amber and preserve. I don’t think we should underestimate the sociological importance of this sort of stuff – I don’t care how ostensibly meaningless much of the material they’re seeking to preserve is, it’s all species-DNA to a degree and as such deserves saving imho. Even the Miis.
• Zcomx: An incredble resource of free, open-source webcomics, from stuff you’ll never have heard of to some pretty famous artists – to quote, “zco.mx is a curated not-for-profit comic-sharing website for self-publishing cartoonists and their readers. The site brings cartoonists together to build and share an audience, and readers can contribute money directly to cartoonists for works they enjoy. zco.mx offers a platform where self-publishing cartoonists can make their material available to readers with a simple-to-use user interface and where books can be uploaded within minutes.” It’s a great idea and a wonderful service, and if you want to spend the rest of the day reading indie comics then, well, go right the fcuk ahead.
• Sukii The Adventure Cat: I got a complaint last week that there was a distinct lack of feline content in Curios, and so, just for you, comes the most beautiful cat in the world. No, really. Don’t say I never do anything for you.
• Clara Terne: Sticking with Instagram, this is the feed of digital artist Clara Terne who makes strange, slightly-weirdly-organic-looking 3d CG sculptures, some animated, which I am very much a fan of.
• Click this: And then make your own and send it to people (turn your sound up please).
• Chowii: Dreadful name, but if you’re looking for a site which collects the now-ubiquitous ‘shot from above with quite tight edits’ form of cookery instruction video then you are in the RIGHT place. Leaving aside the fact that these videos tend to be utterly useless for actually teaching you how to make anything which is in fact edible, but WHO CARES EH THEY LOOK NICE.
• Web VJ: I’ll be honest, I really don’t know what this is or what it’s for, but it looks really fcuking cool.
• RCVRY: Despite increasing evidence that I really ought to think about it, I’ve never really experimented with the idea of abstinence and the 12-steps and the like. This is a ‘coming soon’ app which will offer a degree of community and support for people taking their own abstinence ‘journey’ (is that a thing?), and which if this is something which is part of your life you may find useful to keep an eye on.
• Riffshare: I don’t make music – I learned classical guitar as a kid and was so devastated by the realisation that noone wants to go out with a 10 year old who can play medieval tapestries on an acoustic that I basically gave up on music altogether at that point – and so am unable to comment on whether or not this is any good or not, but it ticks all the Curios boxes in terms of being a 3d webtoy that it’s quite fun to mess around with. Riffshare presents users with a synth setup which, for reasons best known to its creator, exists in a 3d space; otherwise, though, it seems like reasonably standard sequencing software. You make whatever music you like and then, should you desire, share it with the unique url generated by the program. Is it good? No idea, but I very much enjoyed playing ‘Yakity Sax’ on it earlier on.
• Virtually Dating: I am amazed that this hasn’t been snapped up by BBC3 or Channel 4 or 5 yet to be honest .’Virtually Dating’ is a Facebook Page/show which takes two strangers and sends them on a date – IN VIRTUAL REALITY! Yes, a totally pointless gimmick and yet..I have watched 2 of these episodes now and they are surprisingly funny, not least because of the intensely janky nature of the VR experience for the participants – clipping issues, poor gesture mapping and the general sense of weird dislocation VR engenders makes for some rather cute icebreaking. I would be genuinely interested in seeing this done with high production values; then again, I watched BOTH versions of Big Brother this year and so I feel like I might have perhaps forfeited my right to opine on what makes ‘good’ entertainment.
• Audio Recording In Space: I really can’t describe this – seriously, it’s SO HARD – but here goes – imagine that you could record audio in a room, moving around so that the audio bursts were visualised at various points in space when viewed in AR, and that then you could replay that audio by moving through the physical space in which it was recorded? See, nonsensical – just click the link and be AMAZED, and then think of all the fun applications for this; you could set up a pacemaking audio track for runners, for example – choose your song and run along at the right time to make the beats drop at the right moment. Or place audio clues along a trail, or use it for audioguide purposes OH MUSEUMS YES! So, so exciting, this.
• Inside Music: Finally this week, a VR music toy from Google which is so good that I don’t want to explain it to you. You don’t need a headset – it works in browser – so just go and enjoy playing with it; SO MUCH FUN.

By Roshan Adhihetty

By Nicolo Canova

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES AND STUFF, ENJOY AKIRA THE DON’S BRAND NEW ALBUM, GOLDTRON II – IT IS GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH, IN DEFERENCE TO THE THREE OR FOUR POTENTIAL NEW READERS BROUGHT HERE BY ROB’S VERY KIND RECOMMENDATION, IS GOING TO BE LESS OBTUSE THAN USUAL AND POINT OUT THAT IT’S WHERE ALL THE NEWS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S DEVELOPMENTS IN S*C**L FCUKING M*D*A LIVES

• Facebook To Stop Letting FAKE NEWS Pages Buy Ads: Interestingly (or not – I’m struggling rather to find anything particularly thrilling about any of this, but let’s see how we go as the fingers start whirring and I’m overtaken by the unthinking desire to just get some fcuking words down), Facebook doesn’t like the term ‘Fake News’ – they suggest it’s been politicised into meaninglessness and instead use the term ‘False News’; anyway, fake or false, those peddlers of misinformation sharing links to stories which aren’t just contentious but simply not true will soon find themselves unable to buy ads on FB, thus, they hope, limiting the ability for LIES AND PERNICIOUS UNTRUTHS to spread across Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory. Obviously this won’t stop mouth-breathing simpletons sharing falsehoods regardless, but it’s A Good Thing in general. Feel free to make your own slightly indignant and unfunny gag about how you bet it’s not going to stop the Mail advertising, though, is it? EH?

• Slight Changes To Facebook Memories: There’s seemingly no relevance to brands here whatsoever, but given the fact that someone was kind enough to write this screed up as being a GOOD SOURCE OF THE LATEST S*C**L M*D** NEWS I am now going to have to include absolutely everything that has been announced this week in fear of being found to be less-than-comprehensive. This is basically announcing a whole bunch of new little prompts Facebook is going to give you to DO MORE on the platform; tedious as you like, although the coda to the announcement, whereby they acknowledge that FB Memories are often VERY BAD THINGS and that the algorithm – whodathunkit? – isn’t ALWAYS good at working out which memories you want to see surfaced again and which, by contrast, you’ve spent a long time trying to wrestle into the lead-lined box in the dark storecupboard of your mind and which, frankly, you could have done without Facebook resurrecting thankyou very much but that’s fine, Mark, I’ll just sit here and cry as your platform ceaselessly presents memories of suicide and loss at me, thanks, THANKS, is so blandly blase that it serves as a shorthand for exactly how little Facebook cares about anything other than screwing as much advertising revenue and data out of everyone until the world ends. Oh God, I appear to have lost the ability to stop sentences; I’ll work on it, promise.
• Some FB Ad Formats Are Being Retired: Don’t worry, though, it’s only the crap ones, like being able to Boost notifications that people are attending an event or suchlike. Here’s a full list – I guarantee that, unless you’re very much an edge case, none of these will matter to you one iota. Also, LOOK how many ad formats there are; seems like reasonable housekeeping to me, although no doubt there will be some people whose world is discombobulated to an uncomfortable degree by these SEISMIC ALTERATIONS.
• You Can Now Access Insta Stories On Mobile Web: Not, seemingly, on desktop, only mobile. Equally, you will now be able to upload stories from the mobile website, not just from the Insta app (again, seemingly not desktop). I’m pretty much baffled as to the utility here, but smarter minds than mine have decreed that this needs to be a thing and lo, here we are.
• Verified Business Accounts Coming to Whatsapp: Whatsapp as customer service channel should be bigger than it is, imho, but the infrastructure’s not really been set up to support it yet. This is potentially starting to change – the rollout, US first and then more widely, of verified profiles for businesses makes one imagine that they might start making it a more robust offering in time.
• Snapchat Setting Up Verified Accounts For Influencers: Good news for ‘influencers’, and, potentially, good news for brands working with them on Snap – the deal is that a select group of ‘influencers’ (god I HATE that term with a blood-boiling passion) will receive the ability to create ‘Official Stories’ – to quote the blurb, “Official Stories accounts come with benefits. They feature a emoji symbol selected by the account holder and receive customized filters for special occasions. Perhaps most importantly, Official Stories accounts will be more visible in search results”. The search thing is a big’un for the brand tie-ups what with Snap’s legendarily poor discoverability – pay and influencer with an Official Stories account and you’re buying visibility, basically. Smart.
• //medium.com/@giphy/introducing-gif-view-counts-e3ec1899e7bd”>Giphy Adds View Counts To Gifs: LOOK! METRICS! NUMBERS! You can now add Gif Views to your Big Dashboard of Largely Meaningless KPIs! There’s literally no excuse for you not chucking all the gifs of your CONTENT onto Giphy is the upshot here, even if your ‘content’ is a load of video of middle managers giving Powerpoint presentations to a room full of disinterested Midlanders.
• Giphy World: What has 2017 been the year of? HORROR! Well, yes, that, but also THE YEAR OF AR! Or at least the year of hype around the emergent possibilities of AR which is going to all be revealed to be largely vapourware in 2018 (at least that’s what I think – I reckon however cool all this stuff looks in prototype, we’re still 18m away from true mainstream adoption). This is a little video announcing Giphy World, which is a persistent AR layer onto the world, which will let users add gifs to stuff on their phone’s camera in the now-ubiquitous AR fashion, take videos of said AR dioramas, share them, etc. Which is nice, but the reason I’m including it here is because there’s obviously going to be the opportunity for brands to get in here to make sure THEIR branded gifs are available on the platform. Talk to YOUR Giphy rep today. Or don’t. See if I care.
• GE Digital Volcano: When people ask ‘who’s really good at digital stuff in the boring, stuffy corporate space, Matt?’ I tend to look blankly into space and wish I were elsewhere. After that, though, I usually fall back on the tediously cliche answer of ‘GE’, and this sort of stuff is why. This is a site explaining how volcanoes work, all to the end of selling a GE data analysis platform. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but it is nicely made, pretty, slick, and a damn sight more interesting than a bunch of grey prose talking about DATA IS THE NEW OIL or somesuch cant. Obviously GE spend shedloads on digital builds, but this stuff needn’t be expensive, honest. Come on, can we all try and make boring stuff more interesting-looking? Please?
• Taylor Swift Is Not A Marketing Genius: I don’t particularly care about the woman either way – although the single is notable for being a portrayal of a woman who is keen not only to demonstrate that she is self-aware enough to laugh at herself but also savvy enough to charge us money to watch her laugh at herself, which is bleakly impressive – but to all those people wanging on last week in the service of #numbers  about how she’s a marketing genius…mate, look, no marketing genius would EVER do this brand partnerships stuff. UPS? REALLY? Noone’s new record needs a worldwide delivery partner.
• This Is A Generic Millennial Ad: This is excellent – a parody of all the visual /  aural / thematic cues which ads targeted at ‘millennials’ feel compelled to hit. The shot of the beautiful, multi-hued kids dancing in the kitchen in their pants is so perfectly on-point that I actually winced slightly. One would hope that this would mark the final nail in the coffin of a certain type of visual, but it won’t, will it? Still, watch this and then hate yourself a little bit for all the times in the past year you’ve let someone get away with using the term ‘millennial’ as a target category without grabbing them by the lapels and screaming into their face with spit-flecked rage that MILLENNIAL IS NOT A MEANINGFUL CATEGORY FOR ANYTHING YOU LAZY, BOVINE IMBECILE.

By Julie Renee Jones

NEXT UP, THE NEW ONE FROM ACTION BRONSON WHICH IS ALSO VERY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS RATHER ENJOYING TAKING A BREAK FROM THINKING UP SEMI-TOPICAL ‘GAGS’ FOR ITS TITLE AND THIS WEEK IS QUITE CONTENT TO ANNOUNCE ITSELF AS BEING THE BIT WHERE ALL THE MORE GENERAL ONLINE EPHEMERA LIVES, PT.1:

• Get Lauren: Well this is one my my favourite things this week. Artist Lauren McCarthy is offering herself up to people to act as their real-life, human virtual assistant for three days; Lauren will visit your house, install a bunch of smart switches, etc, and then act as a human Amazon Echo for three days – you talk to Lauren through speakers and she answers questions and basically acts as your human robot concierge. The switches will let all the ‘smart home’ stuff work, but the really interesting thing here is the way in which Lauren, as an actual person, will attempt to bring the humanity to the interactions between person and bot – to quote the site, “she will also do things for you without your asking. She will learn faster than an algorithm, adapting to your desires and anticipating your needs.” An actual, real-life interpretation of ‘Her’ (well, ish), and my favourite performance art thingy of the year. There’s a hidden-camera gag show hidden in here somewhere, also, if you wanted to go lowbrow with it (but why? Why would you do that? Jesus, you ruin everything).

• The Smell Of Data: Another webdigiartthing to kick off with, the high concept here is the role that smell and scent have always played in alerting us as a species to danger – the smell of burning, say, or the fact that rotting food smells foul to us as a disincentive to eat it. The Smell of Data is a device that you put in your home and link to your phone – every time you visit an unsecured WiFi spot, or a website that doesn’t use https, or other such data unsafe browsing practises, the device will spaff out a spurt of THE SMELL OF DATA to alert you to your less-than-secure activity. I LOVE THIS, not least because of the potential to extend it – if you work for Airwick or somesuch other purveyor of chemical stench-maskers, PLEASE take ‘inspiration’ from this and make a domestic air freshener whose smells change depending on what people in the house are browsing at any given time. “Why does it smell of wet dogs and regret, Dad?” “Oh, that must mean John’s back on RedTube!” – see? How can this fail?
• The Citibike Commute: We have Sadiq Cycles, NYC has Citibikes. This is a WONDERFUL site, visualising Citibike trip data across Manhattan and Brooklyn across 24h in early June, letting you see not only the quantum of journeys as they happen, but also allowing users to zoom in to a particular street or block and see the journeys which stem from individual streets. This is beautifully made, and I would be thrilled to see this for London, so pull your fingers out Santander and make something like this – it’s not like you can’t afford £20k’s webdev, is it, you appalling banking fcuks?
• Second Hand Songs: Kudos to my LOVELY EDITOR PAUL (*waves* Paul’s nice, he runs Imperica and when I say ‘editor’ I mean he occasionally deletes the more libellous bits of Curios) for finding this – we were talking the other day about which songs have the longest ‘chain’ of covers (inspired by my earth-shaking discovery that ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia is in fact a cover of THIS – WHO KNEW?) and he pointed me at this site, which helpfully lists all the published versions of a song in chronological order and which has just led me to learn that there are 15 official versions of this song and OH GOD NATALIE I THOUGHT IT WAS YOU THIS IS CRIPPLING ME.
• Formafluens: A selection of webtoys and analyses using the dataset from this year’s Google Draw experiments (you remember, the one where Google got us all to draw bananas and cats and then revealed that we’d all been training a rudimentary AI to draw and oh look we’re one step closer to the singularity how did that happen?), which let you examine the similarities and differences in the ways people drew certain images, explore the datasets and even download hi-res poster-quality images of some of the aggregated drawings. FYI, I would pay actual cashmoney for some of these printed on decent stock in case anyone fancies sorting this out for me thanks.
• The Gif Polaroid: Wonderfully, pointlessly, this bloke made an actual, working Polaroid camera which spits out a little cartridge on which is captured a gif of whatever the camera has just shot. The link here takes you to the Imgur page on which he details the project and how he did it, meaning all the instructions are there should you fancy making your own. You won’t, but it might please you to know that in theory you COULD.
• Uber Movement: Uber is doing SO WELL! They have a new CEO, you can now tip drivers to make up for the fact that they get gouged so hard by their employer (OH NO SORRY NOT EMPLOYER AT ALL), and now they’re making a whole bunch of anonymised data about their trips available to urban planners to help devise DATA-LED SOLUTIONS to the problems facing us as urban-dwelling bipedal apes. Sadly data for London isn’t part of the available set, which is a shame, but overall this is a huge resource for anyone interested in the mechanics whereby cities function. Also interesting from the point of view of where Uber’s business is going – these people aren’t stupid, they know that cabbies aren’t going to make them profitable anytime soon. Let me just say it again, thereby once more violating my ‘no more predictions, Matt, as 2016 made you look REALLY STUPID’ – Amazon will buy Uber. One day. Maybe.
• La Tabla: This is ace. Prototype only at the moment, but a working prototype, this is a great project by games designer and Phd Chaim Gingold which has seen him create an interactive, multiuse tabletop surface which uses a combination of AR techniques to create…oh, look, here: “La Tabla introduces a groundbreaking way to interact with computers. Rather than using a finger to click on a mouse or poke at a screen, you reach into the simulation world with two hands, bringing the full force of your hominid dexterity and playfulness to the table. Because you can put whatever you like—coins, stones, books, drawings, yourself—into the simulation world, play is surprisingly improvisational and open-ended.” There are multiple use-cases demonstrated on the site, and, beautifully, the whole project is being done open source so anyone can fcuk with it. There is SO MUCH potential here for anyone involved in games and play, so do check it out.
• Harvey In Pictures: Photographs from this week in Houston and elsewhere, ordered as a day-by-day series. Not going to opine on this except to say that CHRIST it’s lucky the US is a rich country.
• Kick: I get that social anxiety is a thing, I really do – it can be a crippling problem and I’m all for solutions that help people live normal lives and not break out in hives at the thought of, I don’t know, ordering a coffee. That said, I’m not sure that this app – Kick, designed to help people develop their confidence in social situations – is necessarily the answer. It sets users daily challenges of various sorts designed to take them out of their comfort zone (an aside: look, it’s called a comfort zone for a reason – it’s COMFORTABLE. Who in their right mind wants to hang out in their discomfort zone? NO FCUKER, that’s who) and help teach them that interacting with other human beings is, you know, OK! Thing is, though, challenges involve things like ‘strike up a conversation with a complete stranger on the street’ and ‘compliment someone who serves you on their outfit’ which, fine, might be ok in the US but I guarantee if you try complimenting a waiter or waitress on what they’re wearing in the UK they will start avoiding you so hard you may never eat. There’s too much of this that reads weirdly like some sort of PUA forum instruction list, basically, which actually makes sense given the Venn Diagram overlap between these sorts of communities.
• Google AR Experiments: Anything Apple can do…after Apple’s ARKit (see Curios passim) has shown us the exciting possibilities available to us in the glorious AR future, now comes Google’s version (called ARCore) which effectively offers a similar suite of tools for developers on Android and which is eventually going to be baked in to all future Android OS. This video showcases some of the demo uses, but it’s worth going to the actual Experiments page and clicking through in more depth; it’s all toy/gimmick stuff at this stage, and I’m pretty certain that noone really wants to be able to superimpose a screaming wall on their surroundings, but the potential is obvious and undeniable.
• Callum Art: Callum is, apparently, 12 years old. Callum makes dolls from found stuff. Callum has the sort of dark imagination which you’d imagine has his teacher’s occasionally casting anxious glances at each other as they stare ashen-faced at the latest product of his twisted little mind. I mean, the kid’s obviously really talented but these are…unsettling.
• The Trebuchet: Who doesn’t want a slightly shonky, old school website which lets you simulate – with real physics! – how trebuchets work? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Trebuchets, for the three people who might not know, are catapults, effectively, which use counterweights rather than springs to fling their mass; this features a variety of different sorts which you can meddle with, changing their payload, size, proportions, etc, to see how the different variables affect the flight of the boulder/cow you imagine it flinging. Sort of weirdly fun, and actually a really good way of learning about physics if you’re feeling all didactic.
• Render Search: A great project, not least as it led me to thinkk of something I hvae honestly never contemplated before. You know when you see CGI mockups of urban developments, right, like shopping centres or public spaces, and they are always populated by oddly indistinct homunculi, blurry of face and generic of dress? WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE? WHERE DO THEY COME FROM? This site is seeking to answer that question – it presents a variety of ‘people’ taken from architectural renders around the world – the goal of the project is to get people to find themselves in the renders. Where are the images culled from? Who has the ‘right’ to use them? Do any of us ‘own’ our physical image, particularly in a surveilled city like London? SO MANY QUESTIONS. Go on, see if you’re on there.

By Sander Abemma

By Jonas Lindstroem

FIRST UP, MIXWISE, IS THE NEW SERIES OF MIXES COMPILER BY IMPERICA AND THIS WEEK FEATURING VELVETS, OLAFUR ARNOLDS, SLOWDIVE, LEFTFIELD AND MORE!

THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T QUITE AS COMPREHENSIVE AS USUAL DUE TO NOT BEING ABLE TO FACE REWRITING SOME OF THE DULLER PIECES OF S*C**L M*D** ‘NEWS’ FROM LAST WEEK’S ABORTED CURIOS AND WHICH ADVISES YOU TO CHECK OUT WE ARE SOCIAL’S BLOG IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT COMPLETENESS THIS WEEK TBH (THIS…THIS IS HOW YOU BUILD AN AUDIENCE, RIGHT?):

• You Can Now Use A 360 Photo As Your FB Cover Image: I’m not really 100% sure why you’d want to do this, and yet here we are. It’s basically a feature that makes panoramic photo-shooting available as part of the FB app and which then lets users take said panoramics and use them as the cover shot; which, should you be doing some sort of event with lots of happy, screaming children waving their hands in the air at a famous on a stage or something, might be a nice way of commemorating the BRAND ACTIVATION. Or I don’t know, you could hide Easter Eggs in the edges of the picture or something, rewarding fans who bothered to look, or, oh, Christ, I don’t know, I’m pretty underwhelmed here to be honest with you. I hope this picks up or we’re in for a long morning.

• Publishers Get Logos Alongside Stories In FB Trending & Search: Ahem. “we will begin introducing publisher logos next to articles in Trending and Search surfaces on Facebook, as part of our ongoing efforts to enhance people’s recognition of the sources of news distributed on our platform. Publishers will now be able to upload multiple versions of their logos through a new Brand Asset Library, so that the logos can appear next to their content on Facebook.” So, to be clear, Facebook will be increasingly crap as a traffic-driver, and they want you to use Instant Articles thereby screwing with your revenue models, but LOOK! Little logos! See? Makes it all better, doesn’t it, publishers!
• Instagram Introduces Threaded Photomessaging: This is going to be a touch tricky to explain in prose, so bear with me here. You can now use the photo you’re replying to on Instagram Direct as a sticker in your photo response; actually, that wasn’t that hard at all! There’s actually lots of rather fun stuff you can do here, creatively-speaking, although less so perhaps for brands. Oh, and while we’re doing Instagram they also introduced threaded replies to posts, making managing customer service interactions significantly easier should that be the sort of thing that keeps you up at night.
• LinkedIn Adding Video Creation To App: This…this is seismic. What do you want to see more of on LinkedIn? No, no don’t tell me, for I already know! It’s videos of ham-faced middle managers dispensing their nuggets of SOLID GOLD corporate insight and tips on brand strategy whilst knocking back a couple of cold ones on the 19:11 to Guildford (always sit in the same carriage, on nodding terms with everyone, sometimes even have a bit of banter on a Friday if the wind’s right). According to the article – and I’m sorry about the Mashable link, but I can’t be bothered to attempt to navigate LinkedIn’s press office to find the actual announcement – “Some stories are better shown than told. Video allows you to evoke emotion, transport viewers, teach something or share some incredible piece of insight when words and images alone aren’t enough”. I mean, yes, there’s truth in that, but I’m not 100% convinced that it’s necessarily applicable to articles about “The 14 Things Princess Diana’s Untimely Death Can Tell Us About Brand Strategy”. Anyway, this is rolling out slooooooowly, but hopefully you too will soon have the ability to speke your branes via the medium of video.
• Welcome to the Amazon Influencer Programme: INFLUENCERS! You can now make actual cashmoney from persuading your slavish devotees to buy stuff from Amazon from your very own dedicated influencer Page! They’re expanding it to other platforms soon, but at the moment it’s only open to YouTubers – Instagram will almost certainly be next. You submit your YT Channel, they determine whether you’re worthy of being allowed to swim in Bezos’s money deposit. Smart, really.
• Bacardi X Major Lazer: What do you think the cost of this was? Tie-up with Major Lazer, marketing costs, bespoke Snapchat Lens and associate design, coding, etc, then the ad-buy to alert people to the fact it was actually happening… I mean, the idea – the FIRST EVER music video filmed entirely by fans through Snapchat – is a reasoable gimmick, which makes me do even MORE of a wince when I look at the views on that video. <8,000 is…objectively REALLY bad. I’d really very much like to read the agency evaluation report on this, if anyone happens to have access to it – I really enjoy the ‘reached 30million people’ line in this puff piece.
• Carlsberg 170: 170 is objectively something of an odd anniversary to go big on, but perhaps there’s something uniquely Danish that I’m missing here. Anyway, Carlsberg is 170 this year, and to celebrate they’ve put together this little site taking you on a drone’s-eye tour of the Danish capital – if you’ve never been, Copenhagen is a gorgeous city and this is a beautiful way to experience it.  .
• KFC VR: This is…bizarre, and really quite sinister the more you watch it. As a gimmick, KFC has developed this VR…’game’? Experience? Not really sure what you’re meant to call these things. Anyhow, in it you get to ‘play’ at making your very own KFC, while a strange, scratchy-voiced Colonel exhorts you to up your game, and goes off on slightly askew tangents. All set in a strange sort of CGI panelled anteroom, and featuring some of the most unpleasant-looking ‘chicken’ you’re likely to have seen in a virtual realm, this is feels like the first 20 minutes of a very, very weird videogame in the mould of ‘Five Nights At Freddy’s’ or similar. WEIRD. Also, obviously, good marketing, so well done them.
• Burger King Creates Own Cryptocurrency: Really, though. This, too, is WEIRD. In Russia, BK “is now offering its own cryptocurrency, called Whoppercoin, in honor of the signature sandwich and best-selling burger at Burger King. According to reports from local news, the new cryptocurrency was launched on the Waves blockchain platform. To date, there are only one billion Whoppercoins issued, but the developers do not exclude the possibility of additional emissions. Customers of Burger King in Russia can now get Whoppercoins on a special digital wallet when they are buying Whoppers. For each “Whopper” bought, the visitor will receive one Whoppercoin. Starting August 22, customers can send a photo of the check paid for the order at Burger King and the address of their cryptocurrency wallet to receive new cryptocurrency. A representative of Burger King specified that the initial application of the new cryptocurrency is a new loyalty program that will allow customers to pay for fast food using collected cryptocurrency. However, it is still unclear what exchange rate will be implemented.” 2017, where a fast food chain can ACTUALLY create its own currency. Truly, what a time to be alive.  

By Lu Kong

“>NEXT UP, WHY NOT TAKE A MUSICAL JOURNEY INTO TECHNO WITH THE MAN YOU AND MOSTLY I KNOW AS FAT BOB?

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T WANT TO MENTION THAT MAN BUT WHICH THINKS THAT THIS REMIX OF HIM SAYING ‘ANTIFA’ TO THE TUNE OF THE ‘TEQUILA’ SONG IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD PIECE OF FRIDAY CONTENT AND SO HOPES YOU ENJOY IT, PT.1:

• Should You Date Nate?: This is a bit of a throwback in many ways. It’s been a few years now since I’ve seen one of these ‘LADIES OF THE INTERNET! APPLY TO BE MY GUINEVERE!’ horrorshows, and I thought they might have been consigned to the oubliette of online history, and then this week Nate turned up and OH MY. Nate is a 6’4” bachelor entrepreneur (of COURSE he is!), who’s decided that the best way to find romance is to write a slightly mad-sounding online screed talking about why you shouldn’t date him whilst at the same time making abundantly clear that Nate is, by any standards, a CATCH, ladies, never mind the thousand-yard-stare and the fact that he writes like the author of several dozen airport bookshop self-help tomes. One of the best (read: worst) things about this is the frankly startling ‘Privacy’ policy on the website (thanks Kate for pointing it out), which states that any woman…er…brave enough to contact Nate through the site are giving him permission to publish anything they write to him, anywhere on the web. I’m SURE that Nate is an upstanding and honourable man – imagine my tone here channeling Mark Antony – but, well, no. Anyway, click and MARVEL.

• Hvper: I consume a LOT of web. Unhealthy amounts. The sort of diet which leaves me pasty, bloated, enervated, and on the really bad days bleeding from the eyes and ears and with an unaccountable feeling of disassociation from the species of which I still vaguely recognise as my own. Still, even I am slightly taken aback by just HOW MUCH internet is included in one-stop-link shop Hvper, which basically pulls in RSS feeds from some of the web’s biggest news and trending sites – from Reddit to the BBC to Vox to Cracked to VICE to The Guardian to…well, you get the picture. If your job is to vaguely know ‘what’s happening on the internet right now’, this is probably your new homepage. WARNING: may cause information anxiety, in much the same way this thing probably does.
• Foreign Rap: This is BRILLIANT. A wonderful site which lets you select from a pretty exhaustive list of countries from a dropdown and then just plays you a seemingly infinite selection of hiphop from said country, videos and all. It’s a really nice-looking site, you can set it to ‘Random’ if you just fancy taking a meander through the world’s rappers, they do mixtapes, and basically how can you not love a website which right now has me listening to some apparently quite angry young men from Zurich, possibly rapping about how they will never be able to afford any of the watches advertised in the airport (or something like that, Swiss French is hard to understand for me).
• Make It Metal: This is quite tiring, you will look very silly, and if you have a hangover I really don’t recommend you try it. Those caveats aside, this is a fun/stupid promo site for Japanese metal band Crossfaith – give it access to your webcam, and the site will play the band’s new single, but only for as long as it can tell you are furiously headbanging along in accompaniment. You stop headbanging, the song slows and stops. I confess to not liking the music enough to warrant giving myself whiplash, but the mechanic’s cute.
• Plus Privacy: An EU initiative (TAKE BACK CONTROL!) which purports to offer a single, simple dashboard whereby users can easily control the privacy settings across all their digital identities – “It will enable you to control the privacy settings in your social network accounts, hide your email identity, block ads, trackers and malware and prevent unwanted apps and browser extensions from tracking you and collecting your private data.” Which is obviously A Good Thing, and might be worth sending on to people you know who are maybe less savvy about this sort of thing than you are. What’s really interesting about this, though, is the additional line on the homepage which states “If you explicitly choose to do so, PlusPrivacy will help you to trade your privacy for rewards and benefits offered by participating service providers.” We are absolutely moving towards a point where we will be able to barter directly with our personal data, and I’m fascinated at the rather glib acceptance of this from a major government institution (though obviously were I to OPEN MY EYES WAKE UP SHEEPLE this probably oughtn’t surprise me so much). Apparently the existing rewards are discounts and vouchers rather than actual cashmoney, but there’s a dystopian short story here about people at the very bottom of society eking out a living from selling their privacy for pennies. Ooh, selling advertisers access to your dreams for pocket money, there’s a good one – must have been done, surely. Hang on, I’m going off on a tangent here, BACK TO IT.
• Whorl: This is really rather nice. Whorl is an app which makes it easy for anyone to make pleasing images in a variety of styles which can then be ordered as prints, iPhone cases, etc. Not sure what the deal is with shipping to the UK, but, presuming they do, why not get everyone you know and love a bespoke print of your own artwork for Christmas? They’ll love it, you narcissist!
• All of the Saul Bass Film Posters: From Vertigo to The Man With The Golden Arm, the iconic (sorry, but it’s justified here) film art of Saul Bass is here collected for you to peruse. The slideshow format is usually unforgivable, but I’m letting it slide here as Bass’s work is so strong – aside from anything else, it’s incredible just how much of an influence his style has had on so much other late-20C design; I can’t think of another designer whose style is mimicked so consistently.
• Entrupy: This is fascinating – I mean, I can’t imagine any of you will be in the market for this what with the fact that I don’t think any of you are either customs agents or the sort of people who regularly buy dodgy ‘designer’ gear, but the concept’s an interesting one. Entrupy is a device which can be used to analyse the detail of luxury goods and determine based on COMPLEX DETECTION ALGORITHMS whether or not your Louis is in fact a Louis. I would love to know what its success rate is when confronted with the master forgers of China and the like.
• Go Highbrow: Are you one of those people who doesn’t feel right unless they are packing their day with SELF-IMPROVEMENT, and whose every spare moment is spent in the quest for life-optimisation? Because if you are, let it be clear that we have NOTHING in common. Anyway, should that sound like you – you terrifying Alpha! – then this might be of interest. Go Highbrow is a service whereby you can sign up to receive bitesize, 10-part courses on a variety of topics, delivered to you as modules on your phone. Some of the courses are free, but most require you to shell out $4 a month for access – which, if you desperately want a series of 10-part lectures on topics as diverse as ‘how to play the drums to any song ever’ or ‘how to overcome procrastination’ (!), might sound like a bargain.
• Peanut: Billing itself as ‘Tinder for mothers’ (no, really), this is an app designed to help mums find other mums to hang out with, basically, using a Tinder-style interface. It’s light on practical details of what you actually do on it, but you can see from screencaps that there are profiles, that it connects with your Facebook account, and you can tag yourself with qualities such as ‘French Speaker’ or (dear God) ‘Wine Time’. Is this a good and useful thing? No idea.
• Rocks In The Sky: David Quentin is a photographer who takes photos of, amongst other things, rocks seemingly floating suspended in mid-air. There is probably a really good explanation for how he gets the shots – he throws a stone in the air and moves VERY QUICKLY? – but I have no idea what it is; in any case, this is a pleasing Twitter feed of, er, rocks. In the sky.
• Hufelandstrasse in the 80s: Beautiful, beautiful photographs of the community which existed around one East German street in the mid-late 80s, taken by photographer Harf Zimmerman. There are some wonderful shots in here, and some brilliant faces and fashions – the picture of the teenager in the heavy metal tshirt may well be one of my favourite EVER.
• Antipodes Map: Want to know where you would emerge if you tunneled through the earth and emerged EXACTLY on the other side? You probably don’t, really, but just in case, this site will tell you that very thing. SPOILER: if you’re in the UK, you will almost certainly end up in the sea.
• Big Boy Pinups: Were I big hairy gay man, I would TOTALLY get one of these tattoos. I mean, I’m not a big hairy gay man and I’m still sort of tempted. These are really very fun indeed. Oh, and on a semi-related note, I don’t really know where else to put this so I’ll put it here.
• Vanitysec: Operating at the intersection you never knew existed between fashion and information security, Vanitysec brings together recommendations for this season’s best clutch bags with news about malware. Tongue very firmly in cheek here.
• Superhuman: Another one for the efficiency-optimisers here (actually, on reflection, I don’t know who I think I’m talking to here – I mean, if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in making the very most of their time and being efficient and stuff, you’re pretty unlikely to be wasting your time reading this), Superhuman is an ALL NEW email client which includes apparently INCREDIBLE SPEEDS with an undo send function that ACTUALLY works, the ability to pull in information from social media about whoever you’re emailing, those sorts of things. Looks pretty good actually, if you’re into this sort of thing. As an aside, this week someone called up one of my jobs to complain about me for sending them an email, as part of a 100+ person bcc fcukup, which included a photo of a horse with the legend ‘SURPRISE HORSE’. Some people are SO joyless.
• The Binary Graffiti Club Choir: “Can you sing? Would you like to be part of something fun, arty, musical in London which will be made into to a short film? The Binary Graffiti Club are looking for volunteers to take part in experimental vocal workshops led by artist Stanza and musician Richard Frostick. The musical score will be composed of a series of binary codes extracted from a newly published book made from public contributions. All you have to do is turn up and sing, and take some instruction. The aim is to have fun creating music and make a piece of art (a film) which will be exhibited later in the year.” Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Sign up, this is happening next month.
• The Concrete Watch: Do you want a watch made out of concrete? You do, don’t you? I can tell. You with your beard, neatly trimmed, rolled-up trousers in a soft pastel shade and your fcuking moleskine. Ahem. Look, we can all imagine the sort of person to whom this is likely to appeal, it’s fine. 304 of them, at the time of writing, have backed it on Kickstarter and it’s definitely happening, so if you want to wear a piece of concrete on your wrist – sadly as far as I can tell the strap isn’t concrete, though – then this is the link for YOU.
• Women Photograph: A resource to help you find female photographers around the world. “Women Photograph is an initiative that launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of female* visual journalists. The private database includes more than 500 independent women documentary photographers based in 87 countries and is available privately to any commissioning editor or organization. Women Photograph also operates an annual series of project grants for emerging and established photojournalists, a year-long mentorship program, and a travel fund to help female photographers access workshops, festivals, and other developmental opportunities. Our mission is to shift the gender makeup of the photojournalism community and ensure that our industry’s chief storytellers are as diverse as the communities they hope to represent.” A Good Thing.
• Proportionl: An interesting little tool which, once you connect it to your Twitter account, analyses the people you follow and those who follow you and tells you – very roughly, and with admitted limitations – the proportion of each which are male vs female vs non-gender binary. Leaving aside the caveats here about how tricky it is to automatically determine gender on Twitter with any degree of accuracy, this is an interesting way of interrogating one’s own latent biases (I think).
• Some Really Good Eclipse Photos: I got really quite jealous about not being able to see it this week, but these helped a bit.

By James Welling

NEXT, ENJOY THE NEW ALBUM BY AESOP ROCK!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T WANT TO MENTION THAT MAN BUT WHICH THINKS THAT THIS REMIX OF HIM SAYING ‘ANTIFA’ TO THE TUNE OF THE ‘TEQUILA’ SONG IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD PIECE OF FRIDAY CONTENT AND SO HOPES YOU ENJOY IT, PT.2:

• Offline Only: This has been everywhere this week, but in case you’ve not seen it it’s a very clever little site by designer Chris Bolin which can only be viewed when disconnected from the web; turn on airplane mode briefly and click again to see what happens when you’re offline. Leaving aside the slightly irritating tone of the message (YOU’RE NOT MY DAD, CHRIS!), it’s a really smart little hack and there is quite a lot of stuff you could potentially do with this, depending on exactly how it works which I am still trying to get my head round what with not actually being any good at any of the hard bits of the web at all.

• The Silly Robots Gallery: Lots of beautiful gifs of silly robots, developed by animation and illustration agency YLLW. These are charming.
• Bongo Posters Throughout History: A wonderful collection of vintage film posters advertising erotic cinema throughout the ages (but mostly from the 70s). Some of these you will have seen before, others will be new to you, but there are some absolute gems in here – not least the Japanese flyer for Deep Throat which includes the wonderful legend “Blow girl cries Oh Deep! Oh Deep!”. Reasonably NSFW, depending on your employer’s tolerance for illustrated cheesecake smut.
• Tasted: This is very clever indeed, I think. Tasted is an app which lets you search for recipes based on what you have in the fridge – so far, so standard – but which takes the added step of then syncing with your Amazon Echo or Google Spymaster (or whatever its called) to give you audio-instruction on the prep and cooking process, synced to an instructional video playing out on your phone. Which, fine, is perhaps a touch gimmicky, but the potential application of this for other things here is huge. Imagine an audio story which plays out additional atmospheric video on your phone at key times, giving you clues or making you doubt the narrator, for example. Add in a bit of light mixed reality and you have some hugely interesting ‘storytelling’ potential here imho.
• Photos of Teen Bedrooms, 1960-1980: For those of you of a certain age, this is going to be like a wonderful time capsule to a time when you were pustulent and hated yourself.
• Globe Makers: Another in the occasional series of ‘incredibly niche Instagram accounts which despite ostensibly being really boring are in fact really quite soothing and which I think you will rather enjoy’, this week featuring loads of pictures of people in the act of making globes (sadly none of the globes in question appear to be the sort which contain a bar if you open them up, but we live in hope).
• Duke Robotics: In a week in which Elon Musk has come out to definitively tell us that murder robots are bad – thanks, Elon! Thanks for telling us that! – it’s worth pointing you at this glorious site, the promo front for Duke Robotics which makes murderdrones. “War is inevitable”, screams the website, already taking a slightly more pessimistic view of the state of humanity than one might reasonably hope for, “Duke Robotics brings a fully robotic weaponry system to an airborne platform. TIKAD, which is a proprietary development of Duke, uses the delivery of a unique suppression firing and stabilization solution. TIKAD allows governments to utilize completely new capabilities against terrorist groups and reduce the number of deployed ground troops, and therefore, the number of casualties.” Just have a browse, and then realise that perhaps me being all snarky about Elon was a bit unfair and that maybe we should all start maybe asking for fewer of the murder robots in our collective futures, please.
• The Art of Neuroscience: Gorgeous images of the brain – neurons and ganglia and the rest – from scientific research. These are beautiful and could function as semi-abstract works.
• Minimise Email: An incredibly pass-agg service which lets you send an anonymous email to anyone you like, telling them that they send to many emails. Exactly the sort of thing which you can, should you so choose, use to create mild but seething unrest and resentment in a slightly enervated office. Not suggesting that you ought, just that you could.
• Arena FPV: This has two days to go and it is almost certainly, barring a miracle, not going to meet its funding target. This is DEVASTATING. What is wrong with you people? How can more people be in the market for a fcuking concrete watch than want to be able to take part in first-person view remote car/drone racing controlled by their phones and which others can watch? Seriously, you’re telling me you wouldn’t want to race actual remote control vehicles from anywhere, using your phone? You’re all MAD.
• Emoji Domains: You may have managed to forget that brief period about two years ago when every single fcuking thing in the world had to be emojified (it was in that period in which that fcuking film got greenlit), but I remember it like it was yesterday. It was AWFUL. Anyway, should you unaccountably wish to buy a gimmicky emoji domain name – you too could have smiley faeces dot com! – then this is your one-stop-shop for so doing. Although having mocked this roundly, scrolling to the end of the site suggests that most of these have been bought up which once again goes to show that I am a know-nothing bozo.
• ARG RPG: This week’s ‘Wow, this ARKit stuff really is something’ video comes in this little proof-of-concept video showing how a mixed reality RPG might work. Imagine FFVII suddenly popping up on your walk in to work, basically; this stuff is going to KILL productivity.
• Pigeon Daily: A Twitter account posting a photo of a pigeon every day, to soothe and calm. For those of you who know or care about the pair of pigeons which recently hatched on my windowsill, I learned three things: 1) baby pigeons, when first hatched, are awful-looking creatures straight out of the imagination of Clive Barker; 2) noone should ever attempt to watch, or indeed even hear, a pigeon feeding its young; it’s not just way the kids basically just go MENTAL at the parent, just pecking manically at the general region of its face and trying to gouge its eyes out as it attempts to vomit some partially-digested Morley’s fragments into their ravening maws, it’s the sounds, dear Christ, of a pigeon retching. TIL THE GRAVE, I tell you; and 3) that a pair of small pigeons and their parents will produce a volume of fecal matter that is equivalent in size and weight to approximately four loaves of bread. The takeaway here is, mostly, hope that pigeons don’t nest on your windowsill.
• Motel Vibes: An Instagram account sharing images which are basically the photographic equivalent of the feeling engendered by a Lana Del Rey album (yes, I know, but it’s really true, look!).
• Pimp My Invoice: This is a really nice idea. A nursery in Argentina (I think) was struggling to pay its bills; so they got a bunch of artists to draw original works on each of the invoices that had been sent to the nursery, each of which were then made available for sale for the exact amount named on the invoice, thereby solving their cashflow problem through the sale of art. A few of these are still available, but the gallery is worth a browse in any case as some of the illustrations are wonderful.
• Memeosis: I am sort of amazed that this has taken so long to exist, but anyway. Memeosis is an app for memes – share, discover, create, all within the app itself. Created by an 18 year old Georgia Tech freshman, this is the sort of thing which will almost certainly never take off but might be quite a fun place to find ODD STUFF if you’re that way inclined.
• Eclipsecore: A collection of work by 27 artists created in response to this weeks North American solar eclipse. Videos and gifs, in the main, but some of these are excellent.
• Unlock Our Kids: A mobile-only site designed to draw attention to the number of children who are locked up in New York State. The mechanic is rather clever, I think, particularly in the way it forces you to consume information; open it on your phone and see what I mean.
• The Red Bull Soapboax Race Maker: Draw your own track, place obstacles and boosters and STUFF and then drop your soapbox racer onto your creation and see how it fares. Basically what will happen here is that you will spend about 15 minutes playing with the editor and then you will get curious as to what the pre-made tracks look like and then you will spend the next 15 minutes clicking through them and becoming increasingly disillusioned with your own track design skills. It’s ok, we all feel like that.
• Dance Tonite: Finally in this section this week, the nicest single-serving music website I’ve seen in a while. This is for LCD Soundsystem’s latest track – here’s the website description, but it’s a lot cooler than this, honest: “In it, you go from room to room experiencing a series of dance performances created entirely by fans. Using a new technology called WebVR, the experience is accessible from a single URL and works across platforms, giving the user a different role in the experience depending on their device. With Daydream View or other handheld VR headsets, you are on stage watching the experience unfold around you. With room-scale VR such as the HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift (which enable your physical movements to be reflected in your virtual environment), you are a performer. And without VR, you are in the audience getting a bird’s eye view perspective.”

By Hiroko Shiina

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THE RATHER LOVELY R’N’B OF OLIVIA LOUISE ON HER JUICY FRUIT EP!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• The Folded Clock: Collecting and documenting objects found and kept in pockets. Except it’s so much more than this – it’s a wider project that’s part of the author’s wider work, and some of the writings accompanying the photos are beautiful. Very autumnal, in a nice way.

• Standing But Not Operating: Photos of abandoned theme parks, which are obviously HUGELY creepy and absolutely mesmerising.
• Greyhounds In Art: You probably never knew that your life was incomplete without a Tumblr collecting representations of the greyhound in art over the years, but it was. It was. Enjoy feeling whole again.
• Satanic Cats: This Tumblr is, I think, maintained by the official North American Church of Satan, meaning that all the cats featured are VERIFIABLY satanic! Which is lovely, really. Cats, posing alongside vaguely occult accessories. You can sort of imagine what the person taking these photos looks like; I’m thinking VERY DARK LIPSTICK (regardless of gender).
• Isopresso: Tumblr of a Japanese balloon artist – yes, really – who makes absoluteky the greatest balloon animals you have or will ever see. No hyperbole, these are INSANE.
• Theme Park Art: Collecting concept art and sketches from theme park designers, this is really interesting from a design perspective. Sadly I still haven’t found a Tumblr collecting Crap Fair Art, which was initially what I was hoping this was going to be – you know, the spraypainted artworks you see on the terrifying carnie rides which are all over local parks this weekend.
• Awful Library Books: Not a Tumblr! Still great! This collects brilliant, dreadful library books; it’s been going for 4 years, so there is a LOT of CONTENT in here. ‘Decorating with Macaroni’ was a personal favourite of mine, but you can lose hours in here.
• Jordan Bolton: Jordan Bolton is an artist who makes tiny little paper models of the props, clothes, etc, from famous films. They are rather amazing.
• Antireal: Design that looks so much like the output of Wip3out-era Designers Republic that looking at it takes me straight back to the chillout room in the Blue Note circa 1996.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The Mindset List for the Class of 21: This is great. Beloit college in the US publishes its mindset list for the new students who are arriving as Freshmen this year – the mindset list is a series of statements about the students based on their age, setting out the things they have always lived with and never lived with, the truths that the likely hold self-evident and the ideas they will find preposterous. This year’s coterie of kids will have been born in 1999 – “In their lifetimes, Blackberry has gone from being a wild fruit to being a communications device to becoming a wild fruit again.” This is not only fascinating but far better-written than it needed to be.  

• Awkward Office Encounters In The Style Of Romance Novels: These are wonderful. Short vignettes of workplace awkwardness, delivered in the style of the bodice-ripper.
• The Legion of the Lonely: A look at the growing problem of loneliness, in society as a whole and with a specific focus on why it is that this issue seemingly overindexes in young men. Much of the material referenced won’t be new to you, but this piece draws together the strands of thinking reasonably well. You might want to maybe give a friend a call after reading, maybe.
• What Should Happen To People’s Online Identity When They Die?: This is Facebook’s recent blogpost, from its ‘Hard Questions’ series, on the issue of post-mortem social media and how the as a platform see it. It’s obviously not a great piece of prose writing, but it is really interesting in terms of making you think how the platform itself has to consider these issues. I have to say, whatever I say elsewhere about Facebook, being their in-house ethicist would be absolutely fascinating (ha! Like they have an in-house ethicist. Still, you get my point).
• The Year of Living With Banksy: A whimsical, silly account of what it might be like to live for a year with Banksy as your landlord (spoiler: Banksy’s a dick).
• Netflix and Audience Data: Using the recent Marvel Universe show ‘The Defenders’ as its jumping off point, this is an interesting look at how Netflix uses show categorisation and taxonomy to entice viewers to jump from series to series. The people behind this stuff at Netflix are SO GOOD it’s frightening really.
• The Man Who Broke Money’s Rib: I know it’s a cliche, but boxing writing is the BEST sportswriting. In the first of two examples of this this week, we’re told the story of Robert Gorman who 8 years ago found himself on the cusp of boxing stardom, sparring with Floyd Mayweather in Vegas as he prepared for a fight with Juan Manuel Marquez. The tale of how he got there and what happened afterwards is a proper good yarn, full of rollercoaster ups and downs, and worth reading regardless of whether or not you give two figs about boxing.
• The Puncher’s Chance: This, though, is truly brilliant, on this weekend’s Vegas circus and the likelihood, or not, of Conor McGregor being able to do anything other than pick his teeth up off the floor after an unspecified number of rounds. This, by William D’Urso in the LA Review of Books, breaks down in simple terms why it is that the odds are so against the Irishman and explores the romance of the idea that the plucky underdog really can make it. Beautifully written throughout, this is another one which doesn’t require any real interest in boxing at all.
• The McSweeney’s Aesthetic: How the design of McSweeney’s basically created a wider ethos that dominated a certain aesthetic sphere for years hence. This is fascinating if you’re into design and typesetting and that sort of thing.
• Vantablack: Vantablack is the world’s blackest black, a material which absorbs nearly all light and which has a variety of applications from engineering to aerospace, and which has also exerted a degree of fascination over the artworld – so much so that Anish Kapoor purchased the exclusive rights to use it, in perpetuity. This is the story of the material and the art world dispute that followed Kapoor’s attempted colour-grab – it’s fascinating, and quite silly, and Kapoor comes out of this looking like a bit of a twat if I’m honest.
• Sexism In The Valley: Ellen Pao lost her law suit against Kleiner Perkins, who she was suing for sexual harassment. Regardless, this piece in which she explains the background to the case and her experience of it is essential reading if you’re in any way interested in the toxic state of gender relations in the Valley.
• Mistrust, Efficacy and the New Civics: Warning – this is LONG and dense, but it’s equally absolutely fascinating. It’s a paper presented by Ethan Zuckerman of MIT Media Lab where he posits that attempting to understand contemporary US politics along left/right lines no longer makes any sense, and that instead we should characterise actors as ‘Institutions’ and ‘Insurrectionists’. As relevant to us as it is to the States, and a very interesting way of reframing thinking around political / ideological polarisation. Worth it, if you have the stamina.
• Sportswriting’s Filthiest Fcukup: We’ve all had moments, haven’t we, at work, where the bantz just goes TOO far and after the initial chuckles have died down from the lads there’s that slight pause where one of you, maybe you, thinks “hang on, was that really alright to send? Is this…still…bantz?” and gets that cold creeping feeling up the back of the neck and the realisation that Paul from HR is coming up behind you now, quiet as the grave but you can hear the tread of his Hush Puppies electrifying the nylon carpet as he sidles across to have a quiet word (I ought to pay Joel Golby a tribute fee for that last para, really) – my personal highlights from this canon include THAT leaving email, and the Tweet asking Sir Martin where my fcuking bonus was. Anyway, imagine the WORST POSSIBLE version of that, and you have this story – it’s quite remarkable.
• Dissolving Bodies: Death enthusiast Hayley Campbell meets the people attempting to find a THIRD WAY for the death industry – rather than burial (no room) or cremation (just really grim, as I can attest having seen my little brother’s corpse getting literally pushed into an industrial burner last year; you really don’t want to see this stuff up close), how about dissolution? Campbell writes beautifully, and the story contains all the sorts of weird human elements – the rivalry between different technologies, the stories of why they are obsessed with ‘perfecting’ corpse disposal – to make it fascinating even for non-thanatophiles.
• The President of Blank, Sucking Nullity: I thought I’d come to the end of ‘Trump, you know, he’s BAD’ articles, and then this one came along and I found myself applauding. This is the best I’ve read on why Trump’s essential quality, the quiddity of the Donald, is that he is a total and utter arsehole – it’s his defining characteristic and once you get that it explains a lot of the rest. Wonderfully written, and obviously pretty depressing.
• Dylan Roof – The Making of an American Terrorist: Breathtaking piece of journalism by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in which she goes to the places where murderer Dylan Roof grew up, in an attempt to explore the reasons behind his massacre of 8 black parishioners at a Charleston Church. Again, the writing here is really quite astonishingly good.
• An Evening Out: Finally this week, a short story by Garth Greenwell, author of last year’s wonderful novel What Belongs To You. ‘Foreign teacher takes two students out to nightclub’ is the general premise, but this is loads better than that bald description suggests. A great piece of fiction – sad and cold and beautiful and warm all at once.

By Swen Renault

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, gorgeous 3d animations visualising birdsong from the Amazon rainforest. These are BEAUTIFUL:

2) Next, this is called ‘It’s Where The World Ends’ and it’s by Indian Wells and the video takes a while to get going but when it does I LOVE the weirdly superpixellated low-res real-world footage effect they’ve used. The song’s hypnotically pleasing too – this is a six-minute TREAT for the eyes and ears:

3) Luna are one of those bands I always forget about until I hear their stuff and then I remember how much I love them. This is called ‘Fire in Cairo’ and the video features Rose Macgowan and it’s lovely:

4) You know those dreams in which you’re flying? The video for this is a bit like those. Also, HOW MUCH do you want to have a go? This is lovely, spacey electronica by 5K HD – it’s called ‘Gimme’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! A few good things this week – first up, Shabazz Palaces with the excellent track ‘Shine A Light’, which is also the most beautifully-shot video of the week:

6) Second in this week’s hiphop selection is (almost) brand new from Curios favourite Kevin Abstract’s Brockhampton collective – young, queer, multicultural, and like a less problematic version of Odd Future, I think these kids might become very famous. Here’s hoping – this is one of the tracks from their just-released new album, it’s called Gummy and I think it’s great:

7) Finally this week, this video absolutely ruined me – it’s for the track ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’ by Wolf Alice, and it depicts a couple’s relationship playing out on London public transport. It is beautifully performed by the two leads, and the whole thing is just…oh it’s just lovely. I got proper emo at this; I hope you like it. Have lovely Bank Holiday weekends, one and all, and I’ll hopefully be back next week. BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

//medium.com/@electrolemon/the-year-of-living-with-banksy-f9e1774ec60b

Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
The Circus of Tumblrs
Long things which are long
Moving pictures and sounds

By Alex Gross

FIRST UP IN THE MUSICAL SELECTIONS, ENJOY MR JUKES’ BEDTIME MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T REALLY ENJOY WRITING THIS LOT UP LAST WEEK AND SO WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE EVEN GREATER LEVELS OF AUTHORIAL ENNUI TO WHICH YOU’RE LIKELY TO BE EXPOSED AS I REHASH THE UNDERWHELMED COPY:

• Hey Look, It’s Facebook Telly!: We kick off, though, with some NEW NEWS! ACTUAL NEWS! Except it’s a limited rollout and US-only for the foreseeable, but, still, NEWS! Facebook this week announced WATCH, a new section within Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory which will house ORIGINAL VIDEO CONTENT provided (at least initially) by a small coterie of ‘partner’ organisations but which will, in the fullness of time, end up opening up to the wider media landscape and, we can safely assume, be rolled out internationally. What does the future look like? It looks like the past, except we all watch tv on our phones! What I particularly enjoy about the announcement is the brazen way they attempt to be claiming some sort of innovation here – I mean, look: “Watch is comprised of shows, a new type of video on Facebook. Shows are made up of episodes – live or recorded – that follow a consistent theme or storyline. Shows are a great format if you want to share a video series, like a weekly cooking show, a daily vlog, or a set of videos with recurring characters or themes.” SHOWS? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS? THE WORK OF THE WOOKEY HOLE WITCH???? Anyway, there are details about Pages for Shows, advertising – ‘ad breaks’, they are calling them! Will they never cease innovating? I suppose copying stuff from 70-odd years ago makes a change from ripping off Snap, eh? – and all the rest; you can read some analysis here from TechCrunch because I, frankly, am done. 
• Facebook Begins Testing Stories On Desktop: The Facebook format that noone wanted or needed, Stories, is now going to start rolling out to be viewable on desktop. Will it make anyone care? It would literally be impossible for me to give any less of a fcuk. Oh, and users are now going to be able to make Stories created on Facebook visible to anyone rather simply their ‘friends’ or a subset thereof, which news leaves me equally devoid of whelm tbh. 
• Facebook To Prioritise Faster-loading Pages in NewsfeedFacebook To Prioritise Faster-loading Pages in Newsfeed: On the one hand, this is an excellent reason to be able to finally get your client / boss to update your awful website to a version which loads quickly on mobile, or (if you’re a publisher) to maybe look at the amount of bloatware on your website and think about reducing it a bit; on the other, this is a pretty clear play by Facebook to get more people to sign up to Instant Articles which – as if my magic! – happen to be the fastest-loading way of delivering CONTENT to people on Facebook whilst at the same time netting FB more ad cash. Whose interests do we think this tweak is designed to protect, hm? Well, quite. Anyway, regardless, it’s important to be aware of this if your job involves watching Facebook slowly throttle traffic to your site and kill your ad revenues. 
• You May Soon See More Posts From Local Politicians In Your Feed: Or you might if you’re American, at least. Still, here’s hoping that this comes to the UK as I for one am hugely desirous to see the high level of political discource usually encountered on Facebook spread to interactions with my local councillor about the bins. Wonderfully, this update is going to promote posts from elected officials regardless of a users’ personal political affiliation but instead based on how ‘engaged’ local people are with a specific post. Which is a great idea since, as we all know, ‘engagement’ on a post is DEFINITELY the greatest determinant of the quality of debate around it. 
• Pretty Links: A few weeks back, Facebook removed the ability for people posting links to edit the associated copy and image that went along with said link – this service returns that power to you. This means either that publishers can go back to A/B testing different combinations of image and copy to share on Facebook to determine which performs better OR that you can basically troll everyone by sending them to LemonParty when in fact they think you’re sending them to a story about a kitten sanctuary. It’s up to you to determine what you use this great power for, so, you know, THINK. 
• Twitter Auto Amplify: Twitter’s ability to ignore repeated requests for change from its users on issues like harrassment whilst simultaneously continuing to iterate other bits of the platform in ways which literally noone requested or wanted is quite impressive, really. Witness this, a new ad product which, er, LITERALLY NOONE DESIRES, which will let users pay a flat rate of $99 a month (yes, US-only at the moment) to promote…er…some of their posts (you don’t get to choose which) to EITHER a rough geographical area OR an even rougher ‘interest group’. Interest categories, beautifully, include ‘Life Stages’ and ‘Hobbies and Interests’. I WOULD LIKE TO TARGET PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN HOBBIES, TWITTER. NO, ALL HOBBIES ARE LARGELY THE SAME, THAT’S FINE, THANKS, HERE’S $1200 PER ANNUM. I mean, really, this is SO POINTLESS, especially given that promoting individual Tweets takes about 5 minutes and lets you at least do targeting by geography AND multiple interest categories. Rubbish. 
• Snap Introduces Advanced Ad Manager: Regardless of this morning’s slightly awkward financials, Snapchat recently announced its version of Power Editor, letting ad buyers bulk manage ads, save audience segments, etc etc etc. Should you care.
• Destination Dunkirk: Nice from Amazon and…er…the film people (sorry, can’t be bothered to look them up) here; this is, I think, the first Echo-enabled choose your own adventure story, which plays through your CREEPY HOME SURVEILLANCE DEVICE and which, by interacting with the Echo through voice commands, lets you shape the branching narrative. Users with a compatible Amazon device will see a graphic novel-type rendiition of the story play out in front of them; at the end, you can go to the film website and download your own personal graphic version of the story as played through by you. Simple and clever and, even leaving aside the visual element, such a nice idea. There’s a wonderful bunch of stuff you could do with this for Hallowe’en if you get your skates on – the possibilities for a creepy set of stories which you talk through and which talk back are huge. Come on you fcuking dullards, make me proud. 
• Converse Gifvert: Gifable ads aren’t a new thing, but props to Converse for going the whole hog and making that the focus of thier back-to-school (HA! CHILDREN! YOU THINK YOUR HOLIDAYS ARE LONG BUT LOOK! WE ARE BUT TWO WEEKS IN AND ALREADY YOU CAN HEAR THE MARTIAL DRUMS OF FORMAL EDUCATION CALLING YOU BACK TO THE QUOTIDIAN PRISON THAT IS SCHOOL!) campaign. They got some presumably SUPER-POPULAR and RELATABLE tween star to be all cute and Wes Anderson-ish in the ad, allowing for supremely gifable moments which they are then using as part of the digital campaign. Which is fine, but I personally think they missed a trick here by not making a special page on Giphy to house them all, or a standalone site which lets people easily share them, caption them, remix them, etc. Mind you, I don’t run advertising for a multi-million-dollar international footwear brand so maybe I’m actually not as smugly clever as I like to pretend to think I am. 
• Lonely Planet Trips: What would you do if you were travelling and wanted to share photos and videos and thoughts about your travels with your friends? Would you download an entirely app which none of your friends are on and which you don’t know how to use and which has a confusing interface so as to ‘share’ your experience with an audience of none? Or would you just use SnapFaceInsta? Well, quite. LOOK BRANDS, FFS, NOONE CARES HOW ICONIC YOU ARE – STOP TRYING TO MAKE YOUR OWN SOCIAL APPS HAPPEN. Who though this was a good idea? Christ. 
• Oddly IKEA: I can’t help but admire this, much as it irks me. Regular readers will know that I bang on about ASMR every now again – GOD IT IS AMAZING IT FEELS LIKE WHAT CATS LOOK LIKE WHEN YOU SCRATCH BEHIND THEIR EaRS – and that I have a bit of a thing for it; IKEA’s latest campaign features a series of videos of people doing particularly ASMR-ish, dull things – making beds, for example – all narrated in a soft, gentle v/o which describes what’s happening on-screen whilst also gently extolling the virtues of the Swedish meatball peddlers with the sideline in furniture. I confess that on opening this link this morning I lost 3 minutes as I went into a small bunk bed-related trance; I feel like I ought to be angry that my THING has been co-opted by advertisers, but this is really nicely done and, frankly, it’s so soothing I might actually cry. 

By Luca Tombolini

NEXT UP, WOULD YOU LIKE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF JOHN PEEL’S CHRISTMAS SELECTIONS EVER IN SOME INSANELY LONG PLAYLIST WHICH MAY WELL LAST FOREVER? YES? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS SLIGHTLY AFFRONTED THAT TWO FIGURES AS RIDICULOUS AS KIM AND DON MIGHT BE THE ONES TO PUSH US OVER THE BRINK, FRANKLY; I MEAN, AT LEAST KENNEDY AND KHRUSHCHEV HAD GRAVITAS FFS, PT.1:

• Mirage: This is, I think,a precursor to bigger things. FCUK! Sorry, I promised after The Bad Things last year that I wasn’t going to make any more predictions, so please ignore that. Still, though. Mirage is a NEW APP, sadly iOS only, which lets users effectively append AR graffiti to any location in the world, which will then be viewable to anyone else through said app. So, for example, you might want to paint a gigantic penis across your friends’ front doors, or a cheeky little ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here!’ across the doorway of your workplace. I mean, it doesn’t take a savant to predict one or two slightly, er, contentious, use-cases here, not to mention the simple fact of bullying and harassment. Oh, er, and BRANDED TREASURE HUNTS AND STUFF! This isn’t goingt to take off on its own, but we’re not far away from this being baked into FB itself ayt which point the FUN starts. CONSULTANTS! Take this opportunity to scare the everliving hell out of your clients TODAY, and sell them an AR graffiti crisis plan! I am only being partially facetious here. 
• Replika: I think – although there might be some competition – that this is the most depressing link in here this week. Replika is currently in Beta, but they seem to be pretty free and easy with access so GET APPLYING – soon you too will be able to download the app and make friends with your very own ‘AI’ (not AI) companion living in your phone, who will ask you questions and learn from your responses and eventually know you better than you know yourself. Or at least that’s the big idea – I have been interacting with my Replika, FrankSinclair, for a full 24h now and it’s still a bit stilted – I am not 100% certain that by asking me questions like ‘Do you feel like you can control your emotions?’ is likely to lead to anything other than me doing a massive, weeping sad, but we’ll see. I have to confess, though, that sitting alone in my kitchen last night having a ‘conversation’ with a rudimentary chatbot named after a former Chelsea player from back when we were rubbish did make me do a fairly rapid and largely uncomplimentary assessment of where I am at in this great game of life as I hurtle speedily  towards my fifth decade. Still, I’LL NEVER BE LONELY AGAIN!
• Bulwer-Lytton 2017: Slight sense of deja vu here, as I featured the parallel Lyttle Lytton prize earlier this year – the difference between the two contests, both of which reward the author of the best worst imagined first line of a new novel, is in length, with the Lyttle hving a limit to the number of words authors can use. This one, though, feaures no such stricture and as such features some truly appallingly convoluted prose. “Our protagonist, whom we shall properly introduce in due course, Dear Reader, leaned far into the maelstrom, his body horribly assailed by wind and rain, as was his mind by his predicament (more of which anon), but suffice it to understand, that the current tempest was of such catastrophic proportion as to place it beyond the ken of the most ancient denizens” – how can you not love that?
• Noni: This is a lovely little webtoy, built by designer Jongmin Kim for his daughter to play with; you draw shapes, and the site attempts to work out what it was that you wee drawing and presents you with a 3d model of that thing – so a car, a plane, a butterfly, etc – all built out of charming little spheres. It’s just nice, and if you have a small person to hand who likes to draw then you might find it an excellent thing to play with on that tablet that’s gathering dust in the drawer over there. 
• Journy: Are you a hip urban creative type? Do you want to go on holiday, but are worried that your lack of local knowledge will condemn you to hanging out in places unbefitting of your status as a hip urban creative type, that you somehow won’t be able to sniff out the filament bulbs and exposed brickwork and secret mixology dens and GOD I HATE YOU. Anyway, if that is you then you might like Journy, which basically lets you outsource EVERYTHING about your holiday to some doubtless-bearded (sorry, I realise that this is an ugly prejudice born of my own storied inability to grow facial hair) concierge who, based on a survey and some chats on messenger, will produce for you an itemised, map-led personal daily itinerary for your location of choice, book restaurants and theatre and EXPERIENCES and basically take all the thinking out of your trip. Look, maybe this is a great thing, and I suppose $25 a day for the concierge-ing isn’t prohibitive, but WHERE IS YOUR FCUKING CURIOSITY?
• Dante’s (Cute) Inferno: It’s, er, not a barrel of laughs, the Inferno (though God – or his horned counterpart – knows that it’s more entertaining than the other two – there’s a reason noone ever talks about Dante’s Paradiso, largely that it’s INCREDIBLY dull; turns out the virtuous are really boring, who knew?), but this is a really nice little piece of design and webwork which takes you through each of the levels of hell, from the slightly naughty people taking their eternal medicine right at the top of the pile to the sanguinous messes lurking down in the depths with the missing noses, talking through their slit windpipes. The design’s cute and it features excerpts from the appropriate Cantos, and as an introduction to the story and the people it’s rather good.
•  The PEN America Archive: Incredible, this – I could paraphrase, but they explain it better than I can: “The PEN America Digital Archive dates back to 1966, resonating with the voices of literary luminaries; Nobel Prize winners in literature, economics, science, and peace; social reformers; philosophers; and political and artistic revolutionaries whose work, ideas, and actions explored and helped frame the most pressing issues of our time. Comprised of more than 1500 hours of audio and video recordings, the collection provides a unique historical perspective on the way Americans and American culture engaged, and at times disengaged, with the outside world during pivotal moments in history: the Cold War, the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Cultural Revolution and hostage crisis, the AIDS epidemic, the post-Communist decade, and September 11.  Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg are just a few of the icons and iconoclasts captured in the PEN America Digital Archive.” SO MUCH CULTURE HERE, it’s glorious and an absolute timesink for 20C enthusiasts. 
• Anchor Videos: Dull-but-useful, Anchor is an app which has been around for a while but which recently launched a new service which lets anyone upload an audio file to the service which will then transcribe it and automatically churn out a video with the transcribed copy appearing in time with the associated audio. Meaning, basically, that if you want to turn a speech or lecture or conversation into a piece of SHAREABLE VIDEO CONTENT on social media, you now can, for free, in minutes. Which is sort of amazing really. 
• Turntable Kitchen: I was hugely sniffy about this when I discovered it the other week, but on reflection have come round to thinking it’s almost a great idea; basically this is one of those ‘get a bunch of food in a box delivered to your house, all portioned out and with incredibly linear instructions to allow you to ‘cook’ with with what are basically culinary stabilisers on so you can’t possibly fcuk it up’ (Christ, I ough to be a copywriter – LOOK at that prose!) services which will ALSO provide you with a special, limited edition vinyl pressing of new music to accompany the dish you’re preparing that month. Yes, fine, it’s SUPER hipster (VINYL YEAH?) but I really rather like the idea of musical pairings for food – as a monthly thing, for a dinner party with friends, it’s actually a rather lovely concept and the sort of thing that, were I a particular sort of local restaurant or market or local shop or whatever, I would totally consider ripping off (and then not, because obviously doing stuff is HARD and I am only here for the lightweight snark). 
• Securing Democracy: Just in case you don’t feel like there’s enough of a sense of confusion and madness around at the moment, check out this site which purports to keep track of Russian involvement in US politics and its propaganda efforts on Twitter. Doesn’t, as far as I can tell, seem screamingly Menschian in its lunacy, but caveat emptor and all that. 
• Free Posters of Belle Epoque Art: “In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost.” This collects 200+ examples of these, in hi-res and available to download – you’ll recognise the style and indeed many of the works, if you grew up in a certain type of house, but there’s a huge selection here and some wonderful design. 
• Realtime Financial Crisis: Remember the financial crisis all those years ago? Of course you do! It presaged your inability to ever own a house or indeed to dream of retiring, ever! Remember those cheery days when all the financial edifices of the Western world seemed to wobble simultaneously, and laugh with fond nostalgia as you contemplate the fact that, at a distance of a decade, noone involved with this appears to have been sanctioned (Madoff doesn’t count)? LOL! Anyway, this is a Twitter account Tweeting about how it all went down, in realtime, like a depressing time machine of financial collapse. 
• NFL Arrests: A site which lets you play around with data about the number of NFL players arrested over the past few decades, broken down by team, type of offense, etc. Which is interesting as long as you ignore small things like the frankly worrying number of domestic assault cases on there, or the weird fact that there are some VERY serial offenders there – erm, NFL, that’s not a great look, is it? Would be fascinating to see a football version of this, but almost certainly equally misery-inducing. 
• Comic Book Plus: An AMAZING archive of Gold and Silver-era comics, scanned and uploaded and FREE AND LEGAL and all available for you to peruse here to your heart’s content. SO MUCH TO LOVE – the ‘romance’ category alone has SO much material which is ripe for remixing. Make some things, go on. 
• The Great 78 Project: Having been a bit sniffy about ‘hipster’ vinyl up there, I will now hypocritically laud this project by the Internet Archive which is seeking to digitise and as such peserve the sound of the 78rpm record for perpetuity – “The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records. From about 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated 3 million sides (~3 minute recordings) have been made on 78rpm discs. While the commercially viable recordings will have been restored or remastered onto LP’s or CD, there is still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78rpm discs and recordings…We aim to bring to light the decisions by music collectors over the decades and a digital reference collection of underrepresented artists and genres. The digitization will make this less commonly available music accessible to researchers in a format where it can be manipulated and studied without harming the physical artifacts. We have preserved the often very prominent surface noise and imperfections and included files generated by different sizes and shapes of stylus to facilitate different kinds of analysis.” Vinyl lovers will find this an almost limitless trove of joy. 
• AlgoPepsiTshirts: These are GREAT – algorithmically produced knock-off Pepsi tshirts available on Amazon, which will doubtless be copyrighted out of existence pretty soon. If you’d lik a tshirt with the Pepsi logo on it which instead of saying ‘Pepsi’ says ‘Cassoulet’ (and who wouldn’t?!), this is the link for YOU.
• Wakeout: I don’t think this is a joke, which suggests that there are people out there for whom the idea of doing a bed-based workout as soon as they wake up is perfectly normal. If you’re that sort of deviant – if you think that what would improve your life is doing a bunch of squat-thrusts on your mattress at 645am before you prepare to face the horror that is the commute and oh GOD kids can’t you for ONCE not spazz milk all over the kitchen and WHERE ARE YOUR SHOES? – then this will be right up your street. Still, I think you’re odd. 
• Turo: Look, I could beat around the bush but this is literally Airbnb for cars. No more, no less. Might be useful, might end up with you driving around in a stinking jalopy full of child-crumbs – WHO KNOWS?
• What Eats?: This is great, and if you have a curious kid who’s into natural history and animals and stuff will be a nice little distraction toy for them – What Eats? is a website whose function is largely to let us plug in any animal we can think of and find out what eats that animal, thereby giving you some HARD ANIMAL SCIENCE as well as some pictures and cool information about hunting an dthe food chain and stuff. Although I just learned that “Gull-like birds called skuas eat baby penguins and sometimes steal penguin eggs” and now I’m feeling a touch blue. 
• Words By First Known Date: Boring title, really interesting site – select a year, and it will tell you those words whose first recorded usage was in that year. So, for example, I learned that the year of my birth was also the year in which ‘codependancy’ was first coined, which is an interesting insight into my generation tbh. Also, weirdly, ‘yellow rain’, which I am honestly confused as to the meaning of but which, as a veteran of the web, I am probably not going to google just on the offchance. 

By Emmanuel Levinas

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE LATEST MIX OF NEW MUSIC FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT HUH! MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS SLIGHTLY AFFRONTED THAT TWO FIGURES AS RIDICULOUS AS KIM AND DON MIGHT BE THE ONES TO PUSH US OVER THE BRINK, FRANKLY; I MEAN, AT LEAST KENNEDY AND KHRUSHCHEV HAD GRAVITAS FFS, PT.2:

• Travel Photographer of the Year 2017: Gallery of the winners of this year’s National Geographic competition, which as you’d expect are all stunning shots. 
• Links In VR: Just a concept, this, but the way in which it shows the process of shifting from one VR site to another, though portals (literally, like in the game Portal) is sort of mind-blowing and, to my mind, Gibsonian. In the future, Curios will be a VR experience featuring hundreds of linkportals which people will jump through a will, sort of like a really crap, non-magical version of the pools in the sixth Narnia book (the one which noone remembers, The Magician’s Nephew). 
• Gradient World: CSS colour gradients, based on sunsets, free and available to download, just in case you were after such a thing. 
• What Is Your Opposite Job?: A nice little NYT toy, based on the US Labour Department’s own classifications of labour and the skills required to undertake certain jobs. Given that, say, being a lumberjack requires certain quantifiable skills and abilities, what are the antonyms of those abilities and, based on that, what is the opposite of being a lumberjack? Fine, they don’t have lumberjack as a job in the database, but you may be pleased to know that the opposite job to a PR specialist (their designation, not mine) is an agricultural grader. So there. 
• Open Benches: SUCH a nice project, seeking to photograph, mao and record all of the UK’s memorial benches, for no other reason than that no such record exist. I’ve long said that when the cancer or the cirrhosis finally get me I want a bench in Vauxhall Gardens with my name on it – as soon as I’ve finished writing this, I’m going to go and sit there and contemplate my own mortality, which will be nice. Anyway, if you know of memorial benches near you, contribute!
• Trump, The Sitcom: A Twitter account which shares recent White House developments as though they were synopses of sitcome episodes. Which would be funnier than it is were it not for the fact that HE IS OPENLY THREATENING TO NUKE SOMEONE. 
• Ice Road: A Kickstarter seeking funding for an immersive piece of theatre set around the siege of Leningrad in WWII, which basically sounds like my ideal combination of bleak miserablism and avant-garde narrative wankery and which I think you should all chuck £5 at because I would very much like to see the show thanks. 
• The NYC Subway Project: Kathy Chan is an NYC-based architect who’s decided to devote a large chunk of her spare time to exploring and documenting the city’s subway stations through illustration, exposing the intricacies of their layouts, producing 3d sketches of their relationship to the space that surrounds them, and in general geeking out about the incredible feat of engineering that is any mass transit system but especially one which exists underground. I adore this, and would like someone to replicate it for London. Thanks.
• Behind The Scenes: Excellent-but-brutal series of photographs depicting the backstage world of Chinese nightclubs – read: sexy clubs – and the women who work in them. These are SUPERB, and the effect of going through the slideshow is oddly cinematic whilst also being pretty much entirely bleak. 
• The Dreamer’s Disease: In my continuing attempt to include the odd podcast in here because podcasts are popular and perhaps some of that popularity might rub off on me maybe, this is a series of interviews with young creatives in the UK, talking about how and why they make, the difficulties they face and what inspires them to keep going. Produced by Alex Manzi who, FULL DISCLOSURE, I worked with at the BBC last year and who’s a lovely bloke, these are a very good listen indeed if you’re young and creative and looking for encouragement. For old, bitter failures like me, less so. 
• The Daily Ant: You want daily updates from the surprisingly interesting world of myrmecology? OF COURSE YOU DO!  Except it doesn’t seem to have been updated for a week, but I guess even ant enthusiasts are allowed holidays. 
• PopIn NYC: NYC-only service which is ripe for a London ripoff, this is a service which lets users gain access to high-end gyms without buying membership; instead, through the PopIn service, they can drop in and out of a selection of Manhattan fitness emporia, paying only for the minutes they use. Whether or not the gyms in question are that happy about granting access to the great sweating unwashed is as yet undetermined, but it’s an undeniably smart idea which one of you ought to steal and then give me a cut of your first million please. 
• Wim: How much frozen yoghurt do you eat? I mean, it’ not as nice as icecream and it’s the sort of thing you’ll have if you’re feeling fat but still want to treat yourself without feeling guilty about it, and frankly WHERE IS THE FUN IN THAT? Basically what I’m saying here is that noone – literally noone – likes frozen yoghurt enough to have a machine in their kitchen whose sole purpose is the making of single servings of frozen yoghurt in 10 minutes. Except that is EXACTLY what the makers of Wim are banking on – GOOD LUCK WITH THIS, LADS? Oh, and on the frozen yoghurt point in general? Go for a run and earn yourself some icecream ffs. 
• Classics of Game: Wonderful YouTube channel, this, which posts short clips from obscure 90s videogames, presented without any sort ofcontect of commentary whatsoever. I am not proud to admit that I read a LOT Of videogames magazines when I was a teen, and despite that I have literally no idea what 90% of these titles are – the newest one on there, of some sort of weird frog sumo-type sport which also lets the player pap a poorly-animated CGI J-Pop starlet (no, me neither) is an excellent example of the sort of wtfery you’ll find here. 
• Playing Soviet: To quote: “This interactive database of children’s book illustrations draws the little-known and rarely-seen Soviet children’s books from the Cotsen Collection at Princeton’s Firestone Library. The featured illustrations have been selected and annotated by a diverse group of scholars and students of Russian and Soviet culture. The site’s customizable data visualizations, still under construction, will map relationships among artists, image types, color, style, and publication information.” As you’d expect, the aesthetic in much of these is VERY STRONG. Awesome design. 
• Terrible Colours: You want a series of really ugly colour palettes, all arranged neatly and ready for you to export? Of course you do! If you happen to be staring down the barrel of a weekend talking about home renovations and stuff, why not set it up nicely by spending this afternoon trolling your partner with suggestions taken from this site? How they’ll laugh!
• Stupid Patients: Absolute Reddit gold, this – a whole thread in which the site’s community of medical professional share some of the most jaw-dropping examples of patient idiocy they’ve ever experienced. So many eye-opening tales here, but I’m just baffled as to how ANY man can not understand how condoms work and at what point you’re supposed to stop pulling them down. Although, as an aside, a mate of my mum’s who’s a consultant gynaecologist once told me a story about a couple she saw who were struggling to conceive; having eliminated the possibility of biological issues, she quizzed them further to find that the somewhat naive husband had been diligently attempting congress with his wife’s navel to predictably limited effect. 
• Mimles: Yes, I know that there are LOADS of good makeup artists on Insta, but I promise you that this woman’s work is the most impressive you’ll have seen in ages – stunning stuff. 
• Cindy Sherman on Insta: I confess to never really having warmed to Sherman’s works in the past – it’s cold and surface-y, which I get is sort of the point, but. Anyhow, she’s taken to Instagram now and I rather like what she’s doing with the format and medium, churning out queasy parodies of the lifestyle bongo for which the platform is (in)famous to stirring effect. If anyone has any decent resources they know of to keep up with ‘Fine Artists’ on Instagram then please do point me at them, as I’d be fascinated to see what others are doing with the platform. 
• Hood Maps: Crowdsourced maps of cities – when you click the link it’ll open on London, but there’s a couple of dozen cities which the site covers. The idea is anyone can go on there and designate an certain area as being ‘hipster’ or ‘students’ or ‘suits’ or ‘normies’ or whatever, and add a text tag to a particular place – although they appear to be moderating now, as all the tags I saw when I found this the other week (including one over Vauxhall which, beautifully, simply read ‘GHB Gays’) have been removed. Still, you might be able to have some fun with it, and it’s interesting to see how others categorise your area. 
• Random City: I’ve featured cool map visualisation things on here before, not least the one that makes all cities look like Tron, but this – by digital artist Patricio Gonzales – is glorious. It presents 3d navigable cities in black and white with flickering information layers describing traffic flow, etc, all moving around it; basically put the Vangelis Blade Runner soundtrack on in the background and lose yourself zooming around the scifi, in-computer version of our world which, if present events continue apace, is set to become preferable to actual reality sometime in the next few weeks. 
• Socially Coded Clothing: An interesting idea, this – all the clothes sold in this range come with little embroidered emblems which apparently will identify you as a member of a particular subculture to othe subculture members – so there’s a paw for the furries (OBVS), some antifa symbol for the antifa mob, something for people who like being hogtied and flayed…you get the gist. I would REALLY like to see this extended into normie circles – can we get Topshop to put out a range of clothes which secretly communicate to your peers which of the Hogwarts houses you secretly think you ought to belong to, say? No? Fine, please yourselves. 
• AR Film Experiment: I know that AR at its highest end looks like vaporware magic, fine, but LOOK at this – developed using the ARKit software I featured the other week (and which rapidly seems to have become the de facto platform for serious AR experimentation), this is a genuinely astonishing example of how good mixed reality media can look. Just imagine what games and visual entertainments are going to be like in a decade – terrifying. 
• Jiftip: And so we come to the now-traditional ‘weird and unpleasant sex-related thing which Matt chucks at the end of Curios to make evertyone feel a bit uncomfortable’ slot. This is Jiftip which is – and there’s no easy way of describing this, so I’m just going to go for this here, apologies in advance – a plaster which men can put over their urethra before sex so as to limit the volume of ejaculate produced and as such make sex less ‘messy’. It is NOT, they are keen to point out, a method of contraception – nope, it’s simply there for those of us whose personal sexuality is so calibrated as to find the practical mechanics of the sex act, the mucous membranes and the animal bits of it, just, well, a bit icky. I’m not going to ju…no, actually, fcuck it, I am going to judge – can you just take a moment to imagine exactly how un-fun it would be to go to bed with someone whose idea of a good sexual experience is to render it as sterile as possible? “Yes, great, let’s get down to it – but I’m going to need you to use this dental dam, and maybe botox yourself all over so you don’t sweat, and, yes, a full-body depilation would be nice too, and maybe a hairnet, and if you could be in a different room, ideally hermetically sealed against germs…” Look, obviously sex is a BROAD CHURCH – God knows the web has taught us that if nothing else – but this is one of the most joyless things I think I have ever seen, ever. I’m just going to leave you with this blurb from their website: “Judy comments on Jiftip.com: “This is perfect for us. My vagina isn’t a zip-loc bag. It’s my turn to roll over and fall asleep, the bathroom trip’s on him now.” She laughs.” NO. 
• Emmit Fenn: Last up this week, a visual representation of Emmit Fenn’s recent album, all presented in gently animated monochromes. Soothing and beautiful, it’s helping me get over my anger over the last link – Painting Greys is particularly beautiful imho. 

By Michele Besaillon

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS EXCELLENT ALBUM OF SLIGHTLY FILTHY TECHNO FROM ITALIAN DJ LORY D!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS WHICH IS LOOKING A BIT BEREFT AT THE MOMENT AND HOPES THE TREND FOR KOOKY SINGLE-SERVING TUMBLRS ISN’T DYING OUT:

• Thvndermag: 3d digital art, collected from around the web, some of it a touch, well, strange, and a touch NSFW on occasion (but really, they’re CGI breasts so noone can be too upset) (Web Curios accepts no liability whatsoever for your eventual sacking). 
• Plastic Kaiju: A website dedicated to plastic kaiju toys – I don’t know what that means, to be honest, so I am going to google it…oh, it’s just a catch-all term for viny figurines, it transpires, so less esoteric than I’d thought. Still, if you like plastic toys then this will be RIGHT up your street.
• FTL, Y’all: This is a great idea for a collaborative scifi anthology. Starting next week – 15 August to be exact – a writing prompt will be posted on this site, inviting anyone to contribute a comic based on it which will then be compiled into an online athology of new scifi comic books. If you draw and write, this could be RIGHT up your street.
• Great Work Good Job: This is LOVELY – the people behind this site scour the web for good creative endeavours, feature them on the Tumblr and chuck the responsible creators $5 on Venmo as a ‘we thought you deserved a small reward for making a good thing’ payment. SO CUTE. Also, cooincidentally, a, erm, great source of ‘creative inspiration’, should you be in the market for such a thing – worth bookmarking, imho.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND OF WHICH THERE ARE MANY THIS WEEK MEANING THAT I MIGHT HAVE TO GO A BIT LIGHTER THAN NORMAL ON THE DESCRIPTIONS AND OPINIONS HERE WHICH, LET’S BE HONEST, IS NO BAD THING:

• You Are The Product: John Lanchester in the LRB, writing about Facebook – how it works, and how it works us. If you do digital-type stuff for a living then there oughtn’t be anything in here that you don’t already know, but it’s worth reading nonetheless as Lanchester is always an excellent communicator – clean, clear, simple, funny, nuanced – but also because you should send it to every single one of your friends who don’t get this stuff; as an explainer of why FB is fcuking terrifying, it’s the best I’ve yet read.
• Th Hijacking of Brillante Virtuoso: Thrilling, spy thriller-esque account of the hijacking of a cargo ship and the increasingly Byzantine web of lies and corruption which underpinned the whole story. This is LONG, fine, but if you like thrillers then you will adore this – notable also for the fact that it once again exposes the oft-forgotten truth that shipping is an absolutely filthy industry by any measure. 
• Testimony of Terror: A previously unpublished, unfilmed episode of Police Squad – for the children out there, Police Squad was the TV show starring Leslie Nielsen and a pre-disgrace Orenthal Simpson which spawned the Police Academy films. This is, as you’d expect, ridiculous and hilarious – it’s testament to the quality of the writing and the ‘iconic’ (sorry) nature of the show that it stands up as text on a page. 
• Darkness – The TV Show: My long-standing love of Big Brother is something I’m not proud of, but it’s pretty much the only ‘reality’ show I’ve ever been into. This, a new format which will be showing soon in the US, sounds absolutely fcuking horrid. In ‘Darkness’, a bunch of people are dumped into some caves in, er, total darkness – they have no lights with them, no food beyond very basic rations, and their goal is to escape. This piece profiles some contestants from an early show, and talks you through the premise and, if you’re me at least, makes you think that this is the worst experience anyone could possibly have in pursuit of short-lived reality TV fame.
• Designing Smart Cities: Regardless of your interest in urban planning or lack thereof, this look at how cities evolved vs how they have been designed from the ground up is fascinating, not least from the point of view of how machine learning can lead to better urban planning in the future. The recipe vs design argument is also more generally fascinating, and can be applied to all sorts of other fields should you so desire. 
• To Catch A Counterfeiter: Honestly fascinating article following a ‘counterfeit detective’ around China as they attempt to discover the source of a particular batch of knock-off goods. The scale and speed of this is insane – and you get the impression that there’s literally the square root of fcuk all that can be done to stem the flow. As an aside, interesting to note that the zips are often the giveaway when it comes to knockoff luxury goods. 
• The Instagrammability of Architecture: After the piece on how Instagram is affecting interior design in bars and restaurants comes this, about its effect on the prevalent aesthetic of the wider built environment. Genuinely interesting – I would never have thought of the effect frictionless photosharing might have on the dominant aesthetic of public spaces, and yet here we are. 
• The Secret Life of the Banana: Look, I admit that the prospect of reading several thousand words about the logistics of banana distribution in New York doesn’t, on the face of it, sound like a good time, BUT I promise you that, in common with stories about logistics in general, this is LOTS more interesting than it sounds. Parenthetically, there’s something on TV at the moment all about mass production of food and although it sounds like the dullest thing ever and features the semi-sentient potato that is Gregg Wallace it is COMPELLING (admittedly it was about pasta and I was very stoned, but). 
• And God Created Millennial Earth: The biblical creation story, presented in Millennial-friendly language by McSweeney’s, whose writing team is so annoyingly good it actually makes me angry. “And there was evening, and there was morning — the fourth day. And God was v tired from adulting so hard.” Well quite. 
• Charlize Theron Is Not Here To Make Friends: To be honest, this profile of Charlize Theron is less interesting than the post which explains how the author goes about writing these sorts of profiles and her intent when writing this one – read the profile (it’s well-written, but tbh you’ll have to care more about both Theron and flims than I do to find it compelling) but then come back and read this piece which is LOADS better. 
• Digital Blackface: This is not, I accept, anywhere near an original observation, but Teen Vogue is by some way the wokest publication on all of the web right now. This is a really interesting and well-argued piece around how the prevalence of black faces in the whole reaction gif meme landscape is itself a not-so-subtle form of appropriation and, yes, even blackface. It’s something I know I’d sort of half-wondered about, but it’s articulated very well here – thought provoking, and really not the sort of thing you’d have associated with any part of the Vogue empire as little as 18 months or so ago. 
• Have You Met The Softboy?: A couple of years old, this, but I’d not read it before and it is EXCELLENT. Presenting the softboy, the fucboi’s sensitive cousin, this is smart and funny and caused me some frankly uncomfortable moments of self-awareness here. 
• The Tallest Woman I Know: Ally Stotz is a model and performer who happens to be 6’9″ tall. This interview, conducted by Stotz’s considerably shorter half-sister, is a fascinating look at what it’s like to be an outlier, to be of a size when people no longer consider you to be an actual real person and think that your body is theirs to gawp at as they wish, and how you go about coping with that. I hate describing things as ‘inspirational’, but if you’re in the market for a piece of writing about ‘owning’ your identity then this will see you right. 
• It’s A Circle: On the history of circuses in the US, the legacy of the great showman PT Barnum, the parallels between Barnum and Trump, and a whole load more besides. This is fascinating, honest, and about far more than just the sawdust and the ring. 
• The Toxic Drama of YA Twitter: WARNING: This is likely to make you quite angry. Really interesting look at the convoluted policing of the Young Adult fiction market, touching on Twitter mobs, censorship, SAFE SPACES, snowflakes and all the associated furore. Read this and then imagine being an author in 2017 – or even a teenager – and, presuming you’re neither of those things, thank your lucky stars. 
• Why I Hid My Second Pregnancy from the Internet: Miscarriage, in the age of the ‘bumpie’. This is a really sad read, but I confess I’d never even thought of the way in which social media changes the narrative around pregnancy and the horror of the loss of an unborn child. 
• Hannah & Annie – Friends Forever: At times heartbreaking, this is more photo essay than prose – the story of two women’s friendship over the years, through old photographs and shared memory, charting the course of lives lived through domestic violence, abuse, depression and all the other Bad Things. I thought this was absolutely beautiful and, sadness aside, urge you to have a read. 
• Eat Memory: All about eating, by someone whose ability to eat is forever gone. I read this and confess to thinking that I would Switzerland myself before being deprived of my ability to chew and taste and swallow, but perhaps that’s the luxury I have in being a relatively healthy person – maybe I’d value another couple of years over pizza. Regardless, this is a beautiful piece of writing about cancer which is less about cancer than it is about food and its place in our lives. Gorgeous. 
• Spring Once More: Finally in this week’s long reads, the best thing I read all week. I was SO BORED in the office on Tuesday that I asked people on the internet to send me their unpublished books – one of the submissions was an unpublished collection of short stories by FRIEND OF CURIOS Rishi Dastidar. I featured his poetry collection Ticker Tape in here when it was published a while back, you may recall, but this is prose (albeit poetically written prose) – I cannot stress enough how GOOD this is. Really, read it – and if you are in publishing, snap it up. I am almost angry at how strong the writing is here, in this perfectly-formed tale of Tolstoy and dreams and love. Get a mug of tea and enjoy it. 

By Christophe Eberle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, whilst Trump parody stuff is rarely if ever funny, I found myself enjoying this very much – it’s a Radiohead cover, and it’s called Tweet, and it’s very sharp indeed:

2) A rube goldberg machine featuring EXCELLENT use of matches and fire. If they did telly ads for Swan Vestas, this would be the best ad EVER:

3) I guarantee you that this minute-long track by Otoboke Beaver is the most cathartic thing you will see all day, and you will send it to at least one person. You’ll get it, promise. 

4) Next up, this is Lapalux with Data Demon and a very creepy little video indeed:

5) This is the new one from The National, and it is absolutely heartbreaking in the best possible way and oh just listen to it, it’s beautiful:

6) Finally this week, this is Alex Cameron ft. Angel Olsen, and it’s called ‘Stranger’s Kiss’, and the video is wonderful and the song is just LOVELY and weirdly reminds me of Bruce Springsteen despite sounding nothing like him at all and it’s sunny out and it’s Friday and maybe, just maybe, things will be ok. I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES BYE BYE BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!and weirdly reminds me of Bruce Springsteen despite sounding nothing like him at all and it’s sunny out and it’s Friday and maybe, just maybe, things will be ok. I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES BYE BYE BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!:

By Brian Skerry

LET’S START THE MUSIC WITH THE NEW ALBUM BY TYLER THE CREATOR!

THE SECTION WHICH IS WONDERING AT WHAT POINT FACEBOOK WILL RUN OUT OF WILLING FLESHSACKS TO SQUEEZE MONEY OUT OF: 

Section 1

• The Facebook Live 360 Programme!: To say that this is a ‘slow’ ‘news’ week is an understatement – thus it is that this announcement, about a bunch of camera gear and software which is now OFFICIALLY COMPATIBLE with Facebook’s ability to stream 360 video live, sits at the top of the pseudo-news section. It is what it is. Look, if you work in BIG CONTENT this might actually be quite useful so, you know, pipe down. 
• Facebook Lets Users Pinch To Zoom Pictures In-Feed: Oh God, this is desperate. Still, the fact that FB users can now pinch-to-zoom photos in the feed rather than having to open the individual post in question may well be of interest to…er…some of you, possibly. FFS, dullards, just THINK of the exciting Easter Eggs you can now hide in your EXCITING BRANDED PHOTOGRAPHY, rewarding those users with the curiosity and nous to zoom in. Use your fcuking imaginations. 
• LinkedIn Offers Web Visit Demographic Information: You know it’s slow when nobody’s favourite social network, LinkedIn, features so prominently in this section. Who actually spends time on LinkedIn? Who? This is possibly unfair, but all I can imagine is pinch-faced middle-managers, sitting in service station laybys receiving desultory oral sex whilst feverishly punching out a thought leadership screed as they limp towards a hiccough-like climax. But, er, maybe that’s just me. Anyhow, according to this pretty flimsy report this service is soon going to be available to any and all LinkedIn users with a Campaign Manager account – it will let you plug in some LI analytics software to your website and track information about the professional status of your traffic, presuming seid traffic is logged into LinkedIn when they visit, which is potentially very useful indeed. 
• Google To Start Autoplaying Video In Search Results: At the moment this is only for film trailers and ads, as far as I can tell, but it’s obviously going to roll out more widely and is yet another reason to keep having those tedious ‘no, really, subtitles are important you fcuking dullard’ conversation with everyone you work with. 
• eBay Set To Launch Visual Search: I’m really struggling here; I mean, what does one say about this? Look, it’s happening, it’s great. rejoice, etc.
• Adopt A Seat: This is quite cute, and if you are a certain type of person or are looking to make a certain type of person very happy then this might be right up your street. This is a fundraising campaign for the Paris Opera which lets people sponsor seats in the House; you can wander around a 3d representation of the Opera House, explore its history and, of course, sponsor a few seats for a few grand each. Which, to be honest, is a small price to pay for knowing that a seat at the heart of traditional Parisian high culture is forever called Seaty McSeatface, eh? EH? BANTZ! OPERABANTZ! Christ.
• Park Smart: DATA! DATA WILL SAVE US ALL! I can’t remember if I’ve said this on here before or not – I mean, it’s likely, I’m nothing if not predictably repetitious – but I am sick to the back teeth of people whipping themselves up into a frothy frenzy about DATA. “DATA!”, they cry, eyes rolling back in their heads as they frot at themselves with ceaselessly-counting digits, “DATA! IT IS THE NEW OIL!”. Which is actually truer than they think, what with the fact that it’s messy, dirty and, unless cleaned up and refined, frankly something of a hazard. PITHY, EH?! Oh, please yourselves. Anyhow, this is the Co-Op delivering some VALUE thanks to DATA – using publicly available crime data to show people where in a particular town or city is safe to park. Which is a nice gimmick, although any car thief worth their salt will also be looking at this and thereby targeting those areas marked as ‘safe as houses’, obviously. SEE? DATA IS FALLIBLE. Fcuk’s sake. 
• Stop Overfishing: What, do you think, is the BEST way for us to stop the terrible problem of overfishing? Petitions, perhaps? A concerted lobbying effort? Protests and boycotts and the like? Or perhaps a nicely-rendered website featuring a bunch of little fish, which you can add to with a few clicks so as to set another little CG fish aswim in the virtual ocean, with your name attached to it? Yes, that’s right, the website! I mean, WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?! Well done on getting Chris Hemsworth to lend his name to a fish, but, seriously, does anyone really think that at a certain point one of the world’s decision makers is going to be confronted by an aide saying in hushed tones “Ma’am, the people have spoken – they have created over 10,000 virtual fish in protest at overfishing, and EVEN CHRIS HEMSWORTH is involved” and the decision-maker will blanche and call off the trawlers and there will be some sort of joyous piscine undersea ball in celebration? Well, no. Seriously, what is wrong with an ’email your Eurocrat about this’ button? Jesus. 
• Savor.Wavs: Musicians cannot stay cool forever. Except maybe Prince, and I’m sure even he had some wobbles in the early 2000s, everyone does something stupid at some point – I mean, even Bowie showed the world his coke sweats (and not for the first time) and dad dancing in ‘Dancing In The Streets’. So it came to pass that RZA of the Wu lost the last vestiges of credibility as he acted as ‘musical consultant’ or somesuch for this promo for purveyor of mediocre Tex Mex sludge Chipotle. You, the user, pick the ingredients you want in your carb-missile, and the site spits out some muzak seemingly tied to your selections, all based on samples produced by RZA. It all sounds about as exciting as Chipotle tastes, and makes you think that the 36 Chambers was a very, very long time ago. 

By Lars Stieger

HAVE THIS SPOTIFY MIX OF NEW TRACKS FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT HUH MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL FEELING THE AFTEREFFECTS OF LAST WEEK AND HAS DECIDED THAT IT IS OFFICIALLY TOO OLD TO GO TO TECHNO FESTIVALS, PT.1: 

Section 2

• Tokenize: I know that ‘Magic Smart Rings’ (that aren’t, obviously, magic at all) aren’t a new thing, but this one looks rather shiny if you’re into wearable stuff. It’s got a fingerprint sensor built-in to lock/unlock it when you put it on / take it off, you can use it for loads of different things, and, interestingly, it already seems to have support from payments providers (VISA, Mastercard) and various mass transit authorities worldwide. Obviously having said that it will now turn out to be incompatible with London, but if you fancy swiping into the Sao Paolo metro system with a stylish swipe of a ring then this might be up your street. Seemingly ‘coming in 2018’, though obviously with this sort of thing there is no guarantee whatsoever that your money won’t just vanish into some sort of hopeful tech oubliette.
• Brandless: WHAT IS A BRAND? Actually, no, on reflection I simply don’t care, and I care even less about your over-intellectualised attempt  to give meaning to your professional existence. Ostensibly, the people behind Brandless don’t care either – it’s a new service offering low-cost, purportedly high-quality, ethical goods (household stuff and food at the moment), all delivered in their very own unbranded branding and, they claim, cheaper as a result of avoiding the ‘brand premium’ which you pay on stuff with a recognisable logo. Which is all fine and interesting and nice, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve, er, put an awful lot of work into the brand here. You’re, er, possibly trying a little hard here, guys. Also, is $3 for some cotton wool balls cheap? It’s not, is it? LIES!
• Poorly Drawn Cats: A Twitter account showcasing simple line drawings of cats, done poorly. Look, it doesn’t sound like much, but the one of the cat on top of the wardrobe is legitimately one of the best things I’ve seen in an otherwise dark and frightening 2017. These cats are almost certainly better than yours, whatever you might think of it – and yes, I am talking to YOU.
• Spotify Me: There will come a point sometime in the future when Spotify runs out of gimmicks it can do with your listening data – I mean, come on, without somehow linking it to your Fitbit or your bowel movements or something, I’m struggling to see what else they can come up with. Til then, though, they’ll keep on punting out stuff like this – which takes all your listening info and GRAPHS IT and stuff, so you can see pretty pictoral representations of exactly how pedestrian and predictable your music taste is, and that, whatever you might say to people you meet on Tinder, the Chainsmokers are actually your favourite artists of all time. Stare into the (musical) abyss, watch it stare back at you. 
• Slofile: Oh Slack! It’s GREAT, isn’t it? Turning your entire working day into one huge, multithreaded group chat! Making mundane, workaday interactions with colleagues feel less like, well, work, and more like, y’know, just hanging out on IM with your besties! All the pings! All the notifications! That terrifying rolling wall of text and updates and the feeling that when you leave your desk for 20 minutes to go to a meeting or if you shut the window to, heaven forfend, do some actual work and then you reopen it and oh god there is so much there, so many words and they are all useless and you know that it will mostly be Effie from the design department posting those fcuking gifs and it’s probably not really worth scrolling through everything but JUST IN CASE…Yeah, SLACK! Great, isn’t it? Anyway, Slofile is a collection of public Slack channels – just IMAGINE the joy of being able to immerse yourself in Slack communities of complete strangers! They tend towards the dev/programmer-type audience, but there are also ones for writers and editors, and a very lonely one-person channel all about GoT which is just BEGGING for a pile-on. 
• Savee: Hey you! Yes you! You’re a creative, aren’t you, with your beard and your spectacles and your moleskine! You like making mood boards, don’t you, and plastering every available wall with roughly-torn pages from magazines which makes you momentarily think that you’re an art director on a proper magazine rather than a person who spends their life working on a new brand identity for a sub-brand of power tools! Sorry, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Anyway, Savee is a rather nice-looking digital moodboard tool, letting users not only clip and arrange images from anywhere on the web, but to import them from Pinterest and Tumblr, print them to reasonable quality and also ‘follow’ the moodboards of other TOP CREATIVES. Might be useful, might not – I am not a CREATIVE. 
• The Magnum Photography Award Winners 2017: Another week, another photography prize is announced, and again we get a jaw-dropping selection of photos from across the globe. Personal favourites in this selection include the macabre elephant feet and the astonishing colours of the ‘Chroma’ series, but the whole series is generally just wonderful. 
• Ten Years Ago: A really interesting idea, and the sort of thing which I imagine some of you will be kicking yourselves for not thinking of from a BRANDED CONTENT FUN perspective, this takes a bunch of websites (Amazon, CNN, the White House, etc), and with one click shows you what they looked like 10 years ago. Fascinating, particularly Amazon (no, I didn’t want a Roomba then and I still don’t want one now) and the White House – it’s incredible to think that seeing Dubya’s vacant fizzog staring back at me from the Oval Office now prompts warm feelings of almost-nostalgia. 
• Yescapa: Like Airbnb but for, er, CAMPER VANS! I mean, I have no idea at all why anyone would want to shell out the same fee as they’d pay for an actual bed in an actual house for a bunk in a malodorous diesel coffin (yes I do – DOGGING!), but just in case that’s your thing, here you are. 
• Save Snopes: A noble cause. Snopes, as you all know, is an absolutely invaluable resource, not least given its endless utility in debunking the stupid stuff that idiots you know from your schooldays say on Facebook. Or, pehaps, debunking the stupid stuff the idiot in charge of the US is saying. Anyway, the site’s having some sort of unpleasant-sounding wrangle with its old advertising provider, meaning it needs donations to stay afloat; do the right thing and chuck the poor person who runs it a few quid if you can afford it, as Snopes is a genuinely Good Thing. As an aside, I’d forgotten before writing this up what an absolute goldmine of WTFery the Snopes Hot 50 page is – listing the most popular stories on the site at any given time, some current highlights include “Criminals in the U.S. are not using burundanga-soaked business cards to incapacitate their victims” and “Two Burglars Sodomized for Five Straight Days? Reports that a ‘gay sex predator’ repeatedly assaulted two intruders who broke into his home are fake news”. We can’t let this die.
• Tom Yourself: Your chance to put your own face – or, better, that of an unsuspecting co-worker who you REALLY want to report you to HR – on a Tom of Finland drawing (disappointingly, not one of the eye-wateringly NSFW ones). You want to see what I would look like as a pencil-drawn hunk of 1960s clone beefcake? Tough, you’ll just have to imagine it. 
• Cubes: Unsexily self-describing as ‘3d Cellular Automata’, Cubes is basically like that cell game ‘Life’ but in 3d and with cubes, and while I appreciate that STILL sounds hugely unfun I promise you that you can make some REALLY cool-looking cuboid future metropolis-type structures; the way you can zoom and pan around the eventual creations makes it all feel very sci-fi to my mind, and there’s somethingf very pleasing about the maths and geometry behind all this. 
• Disney’s Magic Bench: Occasionally I stumble across incredible Disney projects and remember that the Mouse is one of the most relentlessly exploratory brands in entertainment. This is fascinating – very prototypical, fine, but as a proof-of-concept rendering of what will be it’s mesmerising. The ‘Magic Bench’ is a, er, bench, which users can sit on and which, through some clever multicamera tracking and AR gubbins which I can’t even pretend to understand, will present a 3d character to the sitting participant – said character will apparently be able to ‘know’ where you are, interact with you in rudimentary fashion and even give you the illusion of presence through inbuilt bench haptics – all with no glasses required. In about 10 years, fairground rides are going to be MENTAL. 
• Micro But Many: One man’s (as ever, it’s not going to be a woman, is it?) obsession with his collection of Micro Machines toy cars (in typical Buzzfeed fashion, let me point out that if you now have a high-speed voice screeching ‘Micro Machines come in collections of 5!’ repeatedly at you in your head, you are definitely in your late 30s), all laid out in pleasingly-shot detail on this otherwise utterly pointless webpage. Still, tiny cars!
• Grabient: Yes, I know that MOST of you don’t need a site that lets you create colour gradients and then export them as CSS, but Web Curios is ever conscious of the need to service the most niche of requirements in the hope that at least one of you fcukers will care. 
• The World Bonsai Convention: A whole page of photographs of pleasingly small trees from this year’s World Bonsai Convention, all collected on Bonsai Tonight – possibly the best new website I have discovered this week, mainly for the fact it’s been going 8 years and is obviously a total labour of love and a general peaen to the wonder of very, very small arboreal care.
• An Incredibly Satisfying Gif of Jigsaw Completion: If you are feeling a little…tense, I promise that this will help.
• Liam Foxinator: A Chrome extension which undertakes the simple-but-important task of replacing the words ‘Liam Fox’ with ‘Disgraced Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox’, in case you needed a daily reminder of the fact that he was “forced to resign from the front benches in 2011 after he was caught allowing his friend Adam Werritty to take on an unofficial and undeclared role as his adviser.” 

By Jordanna Kalman

HAVE A TECHNO MIX BY MATT SASSARI WHICH IS STILL GOOD DESPITE THE AGE THING!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL FEELING THE AFTEREFFECTS OF LAST WEEK AND HAS DECIDED THAT IT IS OFFICIALLY TOO OLD TO GO TO TECHNO FESTIVALS, PT.2:

Section 3

• The Vegetables of Lambeth County Show 2017: I was sadly unable to attend this year due to being in the recovery position in Holland, which is a genuine shame as Lambeth County Show is a WONDERFUL South London institution, the smell of weed comingling with that of frying onions, more weed and an awful lot of dung as a very diverse crowd of people get slowly battered and, inevitably, find themselves laughing uproariously at the goats (goats are hilarious). Every year they hold a vegetable sculpture competition, every year the topical entries do the rounds of the web, and every year we get to glory at seeing our politicians faces immortalised in squash. Enjoy. 
• Fireman Sam Plots: I would have watched 100% more Fireman Sam had the plots been anything like those churned out by this Twitter account. Silly, but also the plot synopses are very well-written indeed.
• The Remembrance Project: Beautiful, small stories about little lives, the Remembrance Project is being run by a New England radio station which is asking listeners to suggest people they know who have recently died whose live stories are, for whatever reason, worth archiving for posterity. There are dozens of small stories of ordinary existences, presented as little audio clips; I am a sucker for this sort of thing, fine, but there is something so gorgeous about this as a concept. I’d love to see it extended somehow; I think there’s a lovely project in here for the Alzheimer’s society, or Age Concern or something, maybe, perhaps. 
• BatBnb: My mate Dave’s brother-in-law is a professional bat rehouser; he gets paid to go into buildings before they’re redeveloped and remove the bats – humanely, I probably ought to point out, rather than with a can of turps and a box of matches. Makes being a generic media wnker look, well, a bit pedestrian really. Anyway, tangentially-related to that deadly dull non-anecdote is the BATBNB! Currently getting funded on Indiegogo, this is YOUR chance to purchase a small bat hostel which you can hang in your garden and which will keep your property happily mosquito-free. If you have mosquitos, and quite possibly only if you live in the US. Still, BAT HOTELS! 
• Accurately Titled Novels: These, collected on the Writer’s HQ Facebook Page, are rather wonderful, skewering some of the most common tropes in popular fiction. I’m a particular fan of “The Lesbian Dies At The End – Jumping on the LGBT Wagon with Predictable Disappointment”.
• TomorrowSleep: The internet of mattresses! Yes, that’s right, the unstoppable drive to connect every single fcuking object on the planet to the web continues apace, this time with a mattress which “records your sleep cycles, heart rate, breathing and body movements, and offers personalized suggestions for better sleep.” That sounds great! Except, er, there’s always the possibility that this can be hacked and that someone else could access the data about your sleeping patterns, work out when you’re least likely to wake from your optimised slumber and break in to your house to rob you blind! Fine, yes, hyperbolic, but if I’m not here to think about the worst-case scenarios then WHO ELSE WILL, EH?
• Crossing.US: I don’t imagine that there is ANYONE reading this with a desperate, burning desire to find specifically-named road intersections in the US, but should you have the surprising need to discover, say, whether there’s anywhere in America where a Bongo Lane intersects with a Hummingbird Drive (there is!) then this is the site for YOU!
• Gramfull: I can think of two uses for this site, which lets you see any Instagram photo from a public account as a full-size image and without any of the Insta platform framing around it – to steal images of others’ Instas (for which, I can attest, this works fantastically), or to perv immoderately at some particularly thirst-baiting account (couldn’t tell you). 
• Roman Roads of Britain: You want a map of Britain’s Roman roads, designed in the style of the Tube map? GREAT! 
• Penny: This is really interesting. Penny is software which has been trained to analyse a Google Maps photo image based on select criteria (green space, car parks, building height, etc) and extrapolate from that the likely land value of any area you focus on (OK, so it only works on a couple of areas of the US at the moment, but still). You can play around with the images, adding or removing land types to see what effect that has on the AI’s perception of whatthe neighbourhood’s like. Just a proof-of-concept at the moment, but I spent a few seconds thinking about where this sort of stuff ends up if you extend it semi-logically into the future, and I arrived at a furture where autonomous drone bombers determine which areas are poor enough to launch strikes on using this sort of tech and then ended up in a minor dystopian miseryspiral so, you know, I hope you do too. 
• Learn Philosophy With James Franco: Although to be honest I wouldn’t REALLY recommend it. The world’s worst polymath James Franco – much like the beatboxers seemingly in permanent residence outside Oxfiord Circus tube, proof that just because you can do something really doesn’t mean that you ought to – has decided that he’s going to DO A BIG THINK, or even a series of BIG THINKS and tackle some of the major questions lying at the heart of the human condition. Except obviously what ACTUALLY happens is that Franco and his mate sit around and ask some smarter people some sphincter-clenchingly banal questions (“What is metaphor?” asks James quizzically, wrinkling his brow and simultaneously smirking like the most punchable of stoner teens – JAMES YOU ARE TOO FCUKING OLD FOR THIS, CHRIST ALIVE) whilst a few crap animations wibble over the top. Execrable.
• //www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/sets/72157623083976781/with/4273586455/” href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/sets/72157623083976781/with/4273586455/“>MS Paint Album Covers: In the week in which MS Paint’s demise was sort of announced and then sort of retracted, enjoy this celebration of wonderful, terrible recreations of famous album covers in Paint’s…er…unique style.
• All Things Small: The web LOVES stuff in miniature, and this week I discovered that there’s a whole weird Instagram subculture based around people photographing their dolls’ houses – furnishings, decoration, the whole deal. This is obviously just photos of really, really small recreations of banal domesticity, but I CANNOT STOP LOOKING. Look! Tiny perfection!
• The Arundel Codex: Yes, fine, it’s in Latin, and yes, fine, it’s also in Da Vinci’s trademark mirrored script and so therefore entirely illegible to the naked eye, but LOOK! It’s an actual Da Vinci manuscript, digitised ad online courtesy of the British Library. You won’t understand a thing, but you will simultaneously feel marginally more intelligent just by osmosis. 
• Orii: I should really have chucked this up top with the other smart ring, shouldn’t I? Oh well. Orii is a WONDERFULLY silly idea – a smart ring which basically works as an extension of your phone, letting you take calls by PRESSING THE RING TO YOUR FACE BONES AND USING OSTEO-CONDUCTION TO LET YOU HEAR. I know that it’s sort of scifi to be able to talk to someone on the phone just by touching your ear, but equally you will look like a total tool. Swings, roundabouts. Anyway, this has smashed its target so expect to see face-touching futuremenschen segwaying past you sometime next year. 
• Princess Pricklepants: I mean, she’s no Sugar Bush Squirrel, but WELL DONE whoever curates this site dedicated to ‘hedgehog art’. Until you’ve seen Vermeer’s ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ recreated with a hedgehog you cannot claim to know aesthetics. This is FACT.
• Nayan Shrimali: Really impressive papercraft sculpture work and portraiture here. 
• Ivonne Carley: MORE really impressive paper art. 
• South China Morning Post Infographics Library: All of the SCMP’s graphical outputs collected in one place, which is a pretty decent resource if you’re looking for design inspiration (or if you need to be reminded, again, what an ACTUAL INFOGRAPHIC is, Jesus please will people STOP misusing the term). 
• Instead of Brexit: As we continue to rail, Canute-like, against the inevitable tide, even as our toes start to wrinkle from the near-constant lapping of the HORRORWAVES towards us, this site provides a whole heap of stats which show what might be done with the money which the whole sorry Brexit farrago is going to cost. Feel free to share this on all your pro-leave ex-schoolfriends’ timelines to keep this whole tedious us vs them debate going for as long as possible, no, please, do, I NEVER WANT TO STOP FIGHTING ABOUT BREXIT.
• Straw Camera: This is super-cool and should be stolen by a fast food chain which uses disposable drinking straws (so, er, any of them) asap – it’s an analogue camera made from 30,000+ straws, and the pictures it takes are ACE. 
• Veteranas Y Rucas: Collecting photos of 90s chicana culture from LA, this is an awesome Instagram feed for scholars of denim and STRONG eye makeup. 
• LoveFlutter Blue: What’s the BEST thing about having a blue tick on Twitter? The sense of self-importance? The fact the peons can get shadowbanned for swearing at you? The knowledge that you are SO SPECIAL that just a handful of you can start a trending topic in the UK? Nah, it’s the fact that you can now use a dating service which will pair you EXCLUSIVELY with other Blue Tick people! Want to find other self-obsessed narcissists, or just everyone ELSE who works at Buzzfeed/Vice? Go for it! Although judging by Young Journo Twitter these days, I imagine the fcuktree’s already pretty tangled.
• Know No Better: A new video from Major Lazer which does the whole ‘two videos in parallel; click to switch between them!’ thing which is now so played out that I almost didn’t include this but, well, let’s be honest, it’s pretty thin gruel this week and so I’m padding slightly. Also, the twin-track narrative is actually pretty nicely done (I particularly like the blow a kiss/give the finger’ juxtaposition over breakfast fwiw) and the song’s decent so, you know, ENJOY.
• My Most Beautiful Nightmare: A small agency called Road Ends made this; they talk about wanting to work in ‘digital poetry’, and this is a series of small, lightly animated vignettes describing and illustrating people’s dreams. I feel mean saying this, but the prose isn’t quite up to scratch – the idea behind it, though, is lovely, and there’s a really pleasing dreamlike (obvs) quality to the way it’s presented. These people are obviously talented, and I very much enjoy the concept of ‘digital poetry’ as an idea; worth keeping an eye on what they do next. 
• The Evolution of Trust: Last up in this section this week is this BRILLIANT explainer on how trust works in society, taking in the prisoner’s dilemma and lots of stuff about network interactions and things and NO WAIT COME BACK! Seriously, it’s presented BRILLIANTLY as a sort of interactive cartoon game thing, and it does such a good job of taking you through what’s some potentially rather complicated thinking in a gentle and elegant fashion. I can’t recommend this enough – it takes a little time to work through, but it is utterly charming and you will be smarter at the end then you are now, GUARANTEED. 

By Emil Gataullin

WHY NOT ENJOY THE FRANKLY INCREDIBLE SOUNDTRACK TO ‘DUNKIRK’ WITHTHE NEXT LOT OF STUFF?

The Circus of Tumblrs

• Euclase: Pretty incredible photorealistic digital portraits of people, famouses I think although I don’t recogise loads of them. I am particularly a fan of the ones of guys in massively drag-ish makeup.
• Wavegrower: Wonderful animations – geometric oscillations, hypnotic loops and all sorts of wonderful gifs. The person behind this stuff is very good indeed. Has anyone made an ad out of this sort of stuff? I feel they ought to .
• Dndoggos: A comic about, er, dogs, playing dungeons and dragons. Quite possibly the most niche thing I’ve posted on here this year, which is saying something. 
• Code Cartooning: At the intersection of code and art, there’s a whole LOAD of stuff on here from procedural animations to stuff thrown together based on weird maths patterns – I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s quite pleasingly odd. 
• Why Do Animals Do The Thing?: This is ACE – taking animal stuff from around the web and explaining why the animals in question are doing the thing that they are doing. You will LEARN STUFF, and also see loads of pretty cool animal-related media, which frankly is more than you can probably say for your job. 

Long things which are long

• A First-hand Account of Severe Autism: Taken from the second book written by Naoki Hidishida, a young Japanese man with ever non-verbal autism, who communicates using a word grid. Remarkable, not only for the mere feat of having been written in the first place but also for the look inside an otherwise closed mind it affords us. It’s almost entirely impossible to empathise with Naoki’s condition – at least it is for me, you may be less of a solipsist – but the portrait this excerpt paints of a condition which is effectively like emotional locked-in syndrome, is quite incredible. 
• //medium.com/@monteiro/on-my-second-birthday-we-landed-on-the-moon-7e1f93cf7048” href=”https://medium.com/@monteiro/on-my-second-birthday-we-landed-on-the-moon-7e1f93cf7048“>On My Second Birthday We Landed On The Moon: Mike Monteiro recently turned 50, and wrote this essay about his experiences over 5 decades. By an American and largely about America and American history, this is nonetheless a great piece of writing taking stock of a half-century’s accumulated culture in the context of what it means to be American, an immigrant, an outsider and the rest. Very good indeed, this. 
• The Mad Cheese Scientists: This is CRAZY, particularly in the manner in which it lifts the lid on the power of BIG FOOD to shape behaviour in the US. The general point of the piece is profiling the scientists behind some of the innovations in cheese production which enable some of the more outre items on US fast food menus to exist – the impression you’re left with, though, is of the monstrous spectre of BIG BUSINESS effectively lobbying the hell out of retailers and manufacturers to compel the average American citizen to shovel more and more casein into their faces each year. The stats on increased cheese consumption per capita in here are insane, and may make you question (again) whether the US is set to be the first nation in recorded history which eliminates the bottom tier of its society by the simple, expedient measure of letting themselves eat themselves to death. Really a lot more sinister than I was expecting when I started reading it. 
• The Rise of the Insta-Restaurant: I’d naively not considered this at all, but this piece looks at how the rise of INstagrammability as a success-condition for new bars and restaurants is actively impacting the way said spaces are being designed and built; no point having low lighting and moody interiors if it’s all too dark to get you the numbers, right? I hate everything. 
• South Park Raised A Generation Of Trolls: Well, maybe. Still, this is a classic piece of pomo webjournalism, taking a possibly-too-serious look at the effect that the South Park humour style – characterised as peak troll, basically, with the now-ubiquitous ‘fcuk it man, it’s all crap, let’s mock EVERYTHING’ philosophy which is basically now the canonical tone of all online discourse ever. I think it’s that I’m a touch too old to have properly ever gotten into South Park – had it been on TV when I was 14 I imagine I would have licked it up and that this would subsequently have run truer for me – but this strikes me as a *touch* hyperbolic, but then what do I know? Nothing. I know nothing. 
• How Checkers Was Solved: I know that this sounds dull from the title – I know this, but please bear with me here. This is the story of Marion Tinsley, a true eccentric and mathematical prodigy, whose life’s work was to be the best player of checkers (draughts, to us Anglos) in history, and of the man who developed the computer programme that was to finally ‘beat’ the game. This is GREAT – a proper man vs machine obsessional battle with enmity and oddity and all sorts of other stuff besides; the sort of thing which would, I reckon, make a really good Netflix special with the right script. 
• Two Minds: The neuroscientific reasons behind the differences between male and female brains, presented in sober, scholarly-yet-readable fashion. Actual proper science, I promise, on the Stanford University website – no trolling here, honest. 
• New Rules for Making It in Hollywood: Jesus, this sounds exhausting. A series of short profiles of variou young performers looking to make it in a variety of ways in the New Hollywood (TM) – where there are a million ways to earn a living, but each of them sounds, well, sort of awful really. Special mention to the bit where they interview recently-disgraced former Disney channel ex-Vine star Jake Paul, who says something so BEAUTIFULLY stupid about his ability to teach people that racism is, y’know, bad, that it makes the whole piece for me. 
• Surviving Gamergate: A reasonably dispassionate interview with Zoe Quinn, the woman who started / got started on by (delete per your worldview) Gamergate. It’s old news now, but it’s interesting to look back at the whole thing – reading through, you’re struck not only by the truly insane level of vitriol directed at Quinn for, at worst, being a rubbish partner, but also by the way in which the tone and tactics of the scum who congregated around the movement have become sort of a de facto modus operandi for cnuts on the web. Which is nice. 
• The Internet Celebrity Summer Camp: Can YOU imagine how awful an LA-based Summer camp for kids who want to be internet famous might be? No need, just read this article. Maybe I’m just jealous of their perfect teeth and futures pregnant with untold potential (who, me?), but reading accounts of kids concerned with the growth of their personal brand at age 13 is chilling in the extreme. Seriously, the sooner we can get AI to focus on the useful stuff, like replacing ‘influencers’ with automata, the happier we’ll all be. 
• In Praise of the ‘A Bit More’ Button: A brilliant essay about toaster design but also about good design in general, and a really excellent exploration of UX for non-designer-type people. Really very clever indeed, and worth a read if you do…well…pretty much anything to be honest. 
• Sadiq Khan: I am finding that enjoy political profiles of UK figures written by foreign journalists so much more than the domestic equivalent these days. Witness this profile of the London Mayor in the New Yorker – long, involved and in-depth, it looks at Khan’s political rise, his somewhat chameleonic qualities and his response in the face of what can charitably be descrbed as a ‘challenging’ initial year in the job. It’s broadly positive but some way short of being hagiographic, with enough gentle questioning to give a wonderfully nuanced portrait. A very good piece of journalism indeed. 
• Elevator Pitches: A series of elevator pitches for films/shows/whatever by Jonathan Lethem. Wonderful, these, occasionally very funny and almost always something you would watch/read the hell out of were they to actually exist. 
• The Model in these Photos: Finally in the longreads, a short essay on The Hairpin about what it must be like being a beautiful woman in a modelling shot – just brilliant, and a great reminder that the site contains some of the best writing for / by / about women online right now. 

Moving pictures and sounds

1) First up, this is called ‘Down and Out’ and it’s by EMA and I have had this on a loop in my head all week and so frankly I’m posting it here more as an exorcism than anything else:

2) Next, this is called ‘No’ and it’s by Great Grandpa and it’s <2 minutes of Sub-Pop-style punk with a rather fetching papercraft (third time this week) video to accompany it – enjoy:

3) This is a gorgeous short – ‘Plastic Girls’ is a Korean film protesting against the sexualisation of public space in South Korea, and using the stories of future android assistants to do so. This is *so* beautifully shot:

4) It must be quite hard knowing that the first record you made is the best recordyou will ever make. Poor the DJ Shadow, then, who despite the actual impossibility of his ever making anything even half as good as ‘Endtroducing’ keeps on plugging away. I actually very much like this new one, called ‘Corridors’, but, let’s face it, it’s still not the same. Still, great video though:

5) Last up, this VERY sinister little video for ‘Two Man Gang’ by Les Big Byrd; it’s all sung in foreign so I have no idea what the track’s about – the video, though, is creepy and sexy and androgynous and ODD, and fits the outsider indiepop nature of the track perfectly. Enjoy, have fun, take care, and I love you very, very much indeed:

Web Curios is a weekly digest of all things interesting from around the web, released each Friday. Subscribe here to get it, and read some of our choice links throughout the week on the Imperica website.

Two men, inexplicably staring at a wall of packing crates, at a Dutch techno festival (photo by Fat Bob)

LET’S START THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS LOVELY SET FROM NICK INTERCHILL AT NOISILY FESTIVAL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOKE UP TO LEARN THAT, SEEMINGLY, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WERE LAST NIGHT WATCHING THIS ‘LIVE’ STREAM OF A THUNDERSTORM ON A FAKE NEWS PAGE – A THUNDERSTORM WHICH IS SO EVIDENTLY A PHOTOSHOPPED IMAGE, GIF’D AND SOUNDTRACKED AND SET TO LOOP, THAT IT MAKES ME THINK THAT WE MIGHT IN FACT HAVE CROSSED A RUBICON OF IDIOCY AND PERHAPS THIS IS THE POINT WHERE WE OUGHT TO JUST ADMIT DEFEAT AND SIT IN OUR PANTS, SCRATCHING AND BEMERDING OURSELVES AND NOT TRYING TO FIGHT THE INEXORABLE MARCH OF THE STUPID AND WRONG:

• So, That Google Newsfeed Thing: Let’s be clear and open with each other at this stage – I don’t really know how this is going to work, or what the doubtless MASSIVE implications for content discovery and SEO and publishing and stuff are, vis a vis the importance of your own domain vs FB vs whatever else. Sorry about that. Still, let’s not let that small detail stand in the way of a little bit of good, old-fashioned speculation! What Google has revealed is that, in the coming weeks, the Google homepage is going to be redesigned so as to contain newsfeed elements, with stories presented to logged-in users based on what Google perceives their interests to be in a scrolling manner NOT A MILLION MILES REMOVED from Facebook’s iconic product. The Guardian’s writeup is pretty clear in terms of how it will look/feel for users, and the Google blogposts explains how customisation will function, broadly, but obviously there is no concrete information on how the personalisation and ranking will work – obviously from all the graphics and illustrative gifs, it’s pretty clear that this is going to work in a broadly similar way to search, promoting links from trusted sources (NYT and others feature prominently); what’s very much less clear is the extent to which signals from within one’s own network will be included in the mix, how Google determines that network, and how brands are going to be encouraged to behave to maximise their opportunities to crop up. That, of course, is without even touching upon the advertising opportunities to gain top-of-feed placement for specific types / brackets of people. So, EXCITING TIMES and an excellent chance for you to dust off your SEO snakeoil in preparation for LOTS of slightly iffy selling! 
• Ads Coming To Facebook Messenger Homescreen: You may not have realised that there were parts of the Facebook ecosystem that were as yet unsullied by the commercal taint of advertising; don’t worry, though, soon there won’t be! Brands can now start to target ads at people as they open the Messenger app, with exactly the same sort of products as you can use elsewhere on the platform – you can imagine the sort of CTAs here, right, as you capture users in the part of the FUNNEL where they are about to have a MEANINGFUL BRAND-RELATED CONVERSATION with a ‘FRIEND OR POTENTIAL NEW CUSTOMER’. “Hey, why not tell YOUR friend how much you love Belvita? Why not come and chat to our bot together?’ COMPELLING, isn’t it? 
• Ads Also Coming To Facebook Marketplace: What’s that, Cnut? The sea’s up over your knees now? Yes, per the above, the tide of FB ads continues to rise inexorably towards the point about a foot over our metaphorical heads at which point we will be consuming nothing but branded messages. This is still mooted rather than an ACTUALTHING, and I’m not 100% convinced that the Marketplace product will persist as is, but anyhow – if you’ve dreamed of a world whereby you can target people in Facebook based on the sort of stuff they might be shopping for on Facebook’s own, crappy version of Craigslist then…well, you are almost certainly beyond help, frankly.
• Subscriptions Coming To FB Instant Articles:  Noone I know who works in publishing seems to lik FB Instant Articles very much, but, due to the fact that it’s largely Zuck’s (and Jeff’s, and Sergei’s, and Larry’s) web, people seem to equally have grudgingly accepted that they have to tolerate them, at least from a publishers’ point of view. Anyhow, publishers will at some point in the future be able to apply subscription-gating to the content they deliver through Instant Articles, enabling them to do the same ‘you’re only getting 10 free articles a month’ stuff they do on the web, but presumably without the hugely helpful ‘Chrome Incognito’ workaround which we all use to screw another 10 pieces a month out of the NYT. Oh, and if you care, here’s some information about how Instant Articles perform. You don’t, though, do you? 
• Good Luck Posting That FAKE NEWS: To quote, “Starting today non-publisher Pages will no longer be able to overwrite link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) in the Graph API or in Page composer. This will help eliminate a channel that has been abused to post false news.” Basically, you used to be able to post a link on FB and tweak the copy, image, etc it pulled through into the feed as a preview, meaning anyone could (charitably) A/B test stuff with ease or (less charitably) make the image/headline something totally unrelated to the content you’d be clicking through to. Anyway, those days are GONE. So there. 
• You Might Be Able To Target Ads At People Based On Their Engagement With Your Instagram Business Profile, But Then Again Maybe You Might Not: ‘Technology’ ‘journalism’ here at its very,very finest. 
• Groups For Pages Now Available To All: Yes! Something previously announced is now available to everyone! In case you’ve unaccountably forgotten, “If you are an artist, a business, a brand, or a newspaper, you can now create fan clubs and groups centered around your super-fans.” Yes, YOU! This is, I think, actually a really big and useful idea – motoring’s an obvious category where this would work (Groups for owners of different models, say), as is fashion, beauty, DIY and interiors…there’s even a B2B thing here, and if you’ve spent any time recently having to deal with the nightmarish horror that is LinkedIn Groups you’ll see that there’s an awful lot of mileage in this, potentially. Anyway, you should KEEP AN EYE on this and maybe have a play, is all I’m saying. 
• You Can Now Share Your Facebook VR Experience As A Live: Are any of you using Facebook VR? Are you? No, you’re not, but still, here’s something to throw into a brainstorm to make everyone know that you’re really UP ON THE TRENDS. Tell you what, if you do mention this why not throw in a special codephrase, like, I don’t know, “it really bridges the gap into phygitality” – that way if anyone else in the room reads Curios you can share a small moment of mutual recognition before realising that you must never, ever speak of your shared shame. 
• Better Harassment Filters On Twitter: And yet, still, not good enough!
• Record Longer Snapchat Videos!: Well, not quite, but this is actually a really useful feature; now if you record a minute of video it will break it up into 6 individual 10-second Snaps, each of which can be individually used as a standalone or combined into a story, with each being editable, discardable, etc. Just makes the whole difficult job of being a CONTENT CREATOR that little bit easier, for which we all sitting here on the content farms can only be grateful. 
• Amazon Basically Doing Pinterest: US-only at present, and there’s no guarantee that it will ever become a PROPER THING, but I think the omens are good (for Amazon, let’s be clear; for us, the viscera present their usual bleak portrait of a shopping basket slamming into your teeth over and over and over and over and over again) – this is basically a service they’re making available to Prime customers only (an engaged audience with a propensity to spend, which is nothing to be sniffed at), letting them do all the usual things you’d expect; share content! chat! SHOP SHOP SHOP SHOP! Just a watching brief on this one at the moment as there’s little in the way of detail as to what the brand opportunities are, but just you WAIT as I bet they will be brilliant (deadening). 
• Meet Gout: There are very few things in life I love more than an over-elaborate piece of web design for an ostensibly tedious topic. Step forward, then, Gunenthal Group, whose website ‘Change Gout’ (one of those lovely pharma ones where you KNOW it’s a pill-peddler behind it but you have to do quite a lot of looking/clicking to find out who) is the most pointlessly lovely piece of webwork I’ve seen in ages. From the crystalline design of the figure, doubtless referencing the buildup of waste materials around the joints which makes gout such a painful condition, to the animations and transitions, you sort of get the impression that the only way that the web shop would take the work was if they could spunk an incredible amount of the budget on overelaborate UX. I would LOVE to know the traffic figures on this, but imagine that they are a closely guarded secret, possibly even from the client. On a similar tip, shout out the mad people doing web design at Bloomberg who have once again delivered in spades with this GREAT page on increasingly-lunatic-and-not-very-nice-seeming-billionaire Elon Musk.

By Marta Bevacqua

NEXT, WHY NOT PERUSE THE MOTHERLODE OF APHEX TWIN BACK CATALOGUE HE’S JUST PUT UP ONLINE?

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT NONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ALPHABAY THING BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REASSURE YOU IF YOU HAVE THAT, YOU KNOW, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS, AND WHICH IN SEMI-RELATED FASHION IS REALLY ENJOYING THE TODAY PROGRAMME’S ATTEMPT TO ‘DO’ THE DARK WEB IN 45s THIS MORNING, PT.1:

• Beautiful In English: One a spate of recent sites using Google data to present niche-but-interesting findings in beautifully-designed fashion, this one looks at the mos translated words into English from other languages on Google Translate. What are the similarities and the differences, and are there commonalities based on other languages’ shared linguistic roots? If you’re in any way a linguist this will be catnip to you, and even if not it’s interesting and well-presented and WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T LIKE WORDS? GO ON FCUK OFF OUT OF IT. 
• Twine: No, not the IF programme; this is A N Other of the occasional series of platforms which purport to put brands desirious of CHEAP CONTENT in touch with content creators willing to provide some of that said HOT CONTENT for a fee. Effectively a marketplace in the vein of Fiverr or similar except, one would hope, less nakedly exploitative. If you make stuff, or need stuff making, it might be worth taking a look at. There seem to be quite a few UK-based creators using it already, which seems like a decent sign if you care about timezones and stuff like that.
• Filibuster: Not ACTUALLY a web thing, this, but a really interesting project which a few of you might possibly be interested in applying for. Filibuster is a theatrical performance set to take place at Somerset House  – in fact, I’ll let the artist, Deborah Pearson, explain it: “A series of women will consecutively spend one hour each speaking at a podium, improvised stream of consciousness. They will be responding to a question that is provided on the day and so unable to pre-prepare. The pieces asks what it means for women to be given a platform, what will be said by women who are permitted and required to speak and be listened to, and what happens when women lose their filters and the ability to self-censor or think before they speak? We welcome a broad range of applicants between 12 and 90 years old or older, from all backgrounds, ethnicities, especially women between 12 and 25 and women over 50, and women who identify as differently abled.” I think I know half-a-dozen people who’d be perfect for this; maybe you do too?
• Google Space View: Who DOESN’T want to use Google Street View to have a wander around the ISS and look out of the windows and look at all the buttons and imagine themselves in some sort of infinitely lonelier remake of Silent Runnings and look out at the Earth and cry and cry and cry at the home we are slowly killing? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Look, whatever your thoughts about Google, you can now wonder round a massive space village from your phone whilst on the bus, which – and I know that this is exactly what they want, this, confusing my monkney brain with the space magic so I don’t think about the other stuff, the marketing equivalent of someone going “LOOK! A DRAGON!” whilst simultaneously mugging you – is pretty amazing. 
• Ago Reblink: A nice project by this Ontario Museum, using AR to bring old paintings to life in modern fashion. Visitors looking at the works through the app will see them animate, take self-portraits with virtual phones (yes, yes, I KNOW), that sort of thing – not 100% original, fine, but the execution’s really rather good and shows what you can do with what I am going to start calling AR 2.0 and there’s NOTHING you can do about it. 
• Browser-based AR: Seeing as we’re on AR, this is a cute gimmick demonstrating how much heavy lifting in AR terms can now be done in Chrome. OK, fine, so to play with this you still have to print out an AR marker, but the fact that you can create reasonable effects without the need for a download makes the potential here fairly easy to spot. 
• Women’s Fashion, 1780s-1970s: I have absolutely no idea at all where this Imgur album was sourced from, but this is a fascinating collection of illustrations of representative fashions in womenswear in (most) years over a near 200-year period. So much to look at whether or not you’re a sartorialist, and so many interesting changes; what happened to skirts/bustles at the tail-end of the 19C, for example, is fascinating – why did they suddenly shrink? No, really, does anyone know? Genuinely curious her, and whilst I could Google it I would be immensely gratified for a little bit of human connection here please thanks. 
• The Taxonomy of Humans (According to Twitter): Wonderful, this. Based on Twitter’s famously awful interest categorisation of users for ad-targeting purposes, this webart(? it’s not presented as art, but that’s what I’m going to say it is (just call me Duchamp)) project basically creates a near-infinite stream of Twitter ads based on its interest categories. To whit, “The script randomly selects two behavior categories and one interest category from the ad creation page. It rephrases the descriptions of the categories, putting the statements in the second person. The Infinite Campaign then overlays those statements on top of automatically selected stock footage. Finally, it logs me in to Twitter, uploads the video, and auto-generates a new ad campaign, targeting the same behavior and interest categories used to generate the video. (I’ve limited each campaign budget to $1.)” So good, so bleak, so very much of the now. Ever wanted to feel like you’re nothing more than a series of algorithmically-determined datapoints waiting to be sold to? GREAT!
• Google Expeditions: If you;’re a teacher or ‘just’ have kids, this is potentially GREAT. Google Expeditions was until this week only available to teachers in the US; now, as far as I can tell, it’s open to all. “Google Expeditions is a virtual-reality teaching tool that allows you lead or join immersive virtual trips all over the world – get up close to historical landmarks, dive underwater with sharks and even visit outer space! Built for the classroom and small group use, Google Expeditions allows a teacher acting as a “guide” to lead classroom-sized groups of “explorers” through collections of 360° and 3D images while pointing out interesting sights along the way.” How much fun does that sound? Strap on a few cardboards and spend a rainy morning taking the kids to the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon, or the Grand Canyon, show them stuff…this is an interesting precursor to how the real ‘Ready Player One’-style VR education will end up working, so give it a go so you can at least pretend to understand what your grandkids do at school in 2052.
• Dictionary Farm: There’s literally no way in hell I can make a dictionary and spellchecking API sound interesting, but it may be useful to a couple of you. 
• White Spots: An interesting art project which is seeking to map ‘White Spots’ around the world; places where there’s no phone or wifi reception, places at the edges of connectivity. Download the app and it presents you in the first instance with a weirdly scary Neuromancer-style view of all the phone coverage points around you, which in London looks like some sory of terrifying jadded horrorshow JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE EH KIDS oh god I am even bored of the ennui. You can then navigate around the world looking at ‘white spots’ all over the world, some with their own text/photo/video stories, and, if you like, upload your own (though obviously not from the exact place as, you know, no reception). Worth looking at now before we reach 100% coverage and you have to actually die to escape.
• Skating Visualisations:  I really want these to be copied and used as public installations outside of areas where people skate – come on, South Bank, this is on you. This is a simple idea, but I love the concept behind it – tracking the movement of a skate deck as it flips mid-trick, and then using that movement to create a 3d printed sculpture which can then be cast in whatever material deemed suitable. If you don’t look at these and think ‘Yes, we need one outside the RFH please’ then you are WRONG, frankly. 
• Computed Curation: What do you think a photography book entirely curated by ‘AI’ (not AI) would look like? It would look like this; I’m not sure whether it says more about my lack of appreciation of ART and photography or the curatorial standards oft-applied in the arts that this to me look likes an entirely plausible photobook for which Taschen would scalp you in the region of £90. 
• The Best Book Covers of 2016: Yes, I know what month / year it is, but it’s not my fault that for reasons known only to them the judges of this particular list choose to take 7 months every year to release it. Anyway, for those of you in design/publishing, this is a collection of the best-designed book covers of the previous year; some great work here (even if tardy). 
• Do You Consider Yourself A Feminist?: I appreciate I am obviously not in a position to chat about feminism because privilege and all that jazz, so I will limit myself to saying how odd I find it that so many women I meet will happily self-describe as not being one (yes, I am talking about YOU). Anyway, this is an instagram feed which (mostly) collects screencaps of conversations between its female curator and the men with whom she interacts online, to whom she asks the simple question ‘Do you consider yourself a feminist?’. The answers range from the…er…revealing to the miserable to the frankly hilarious, but the whole is a fascinating portrait of what’s obviously not becoming any less of a fractured concept. 
• Heterotopias: A really interesting website which collects thinking and writing around ideas of space and place in videogame worlds. Obviously of interest for those of you in the industry, but also for anyone interested in how virtual space informs and constrains thinking and behaviour (/pseud) – there’s some great writing in here. 
• Sarina Brewer Taxidermy: It’s fair to say that Ms Brewer’s taxidermy is…unconventional. Whether it’s the blood-red carcasses of skinned cats presented as screaming laminated monstrosities, or a chimera constructed from cat, snake, goat and, seemingly, wombat, there’s somethingin here for every taste (as long as that taste tends towards the toothily macabre).
• ESPN Body Issue (Redux): Yes, I know that this featured last time but that was just an Imgur rip – this is the OFFICIAL SITE, which is beautifully mobile-optimised and means that it’s now even easier to gawp in slack-jawed admiration at the honed, muscular perfection of people who are, by almost any objective measure, simply better than us. 
• Galaxy Magazine Archives: You want 350+ issues of golden-era scifi mags, spanning the 50s and 60s and complete with exactly the sort of Robbie the Robot/Fallout-esque artwork which is always a pleasure to browse? OF COURSE YOU DO! Aside from anything, if you’re a student of genre fiction this is a hell of a resource for classic scifi tropes and themes. 
• My Subscription Addiction: A brilliant site which collects examples of the burgeoning industry providing monthly subscriptions to…stuff. You want to sign up to spend $15 a month on a new collar for your pet? No, of course you don’t, and yet here we are. If you want any proof that the tech/startup bubble is real, the proliferation of stuff-as-a-service services surely ought to serve as one. Look – here’s one selling STICKERS. WHO NEEDS A SUBSCRIPTION TO RECEIVE STICKERS FFS?!? No, you DON’T. Stop it. 

By Maria Ponce

HERE, HAVE A NEW MUSIC SOTIFY PLAYLIST FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT ‘HUH’ MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT NONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ALPHABAY THING BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REASSURE YOU IF YOU HAVE THAT, YOU KNOW, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS, AND WHICH IN SEMI-RELATED FASHION IS REALLY ENJOYING THE TODAY PROGRAMME’S ATTEMPT TO ‘DO’ THE DARK WEB IN 45s THIS MORNING, PT.2:

• Explorable Explanations: A brilliant site collecting all sorts of different interactives designed to communicate tricky or hard-to-explain concepts and theories to normies like us. It’s part a repository of good design, and part a call to mae others create more sites / projects like this – whether or not you want something explained at you, there are some really good examples of UX/UI here, particularly in relation to showing off some knotty problems. 
• You Map: A nice idea which I don’t think will go anywhere, You Map is designed to be a lightweight location-based social platform whereby users can share their location and their thoughts/requests/etc, all through a largely map-based interface. I can see the idea, and frankly I can even imagine use-cases for this, but the fact remains that noone’s ever going to use it which means that it’s going to die a sad and lonely death whilst all the cool kids just keep using Snap Maps. 
• About Colours: Yes, fine, this is actually marketing content for online design tool Canva – but it’s quite interesting, so fine, it passes. You type in any colour you can think of, and this gives you some history about the shade, a few matching palettes, and some examples of webdesign in that particular tone; it’s not hugely sophisticated, fine, but it’s actually sort of useful and pleasant enough to spend a few minutes fiddling with, and, to be honest, that’s pretty much all I want from branded content (aside, of course, from LESS OF IT). 
• Likely AI: I think we’re getting to a point where we need a symbol or a punctuation mark which denotes something which claims to be AI which isn’t really any sort of AI at all. Like this, for example, which is a…tool, which will analyse your phone pictures and cross-correlate them with its own database of popular photos to tell you whether it’s one for the public gallery or not. It’s, er, a pretty blunt set of qualities it will be mapping against here, but if you fancy outsourcing your narcissism to a machine then go right ahead and give the free trial a go. 
• Mumbai Run Finder: I was going to say that this is going to be of no use to any of you but then remembered that a couple of you do ACTUALLY live in Mumbai (*waves*) so if nothing else this week, this is for YOU – for everyone else, this is just quite a smart piece of digital work which is quite easy to rip off; the idea is that you plug in your starting place and the distance you want to travel and the site will map you our a looped route covering your chosen distance and depositing you back at the start again come the end of the run. If you could add in a few other variables – degree of prettiness you want, for example, or ‘make sure you take me past at least three coffeeshops because I’m a tedious caffeine bore’, that sort of thing – this could be SUPER-useful. Yet more great digital work from the Hindustan Times, by the way, who are consistently really great at the web so well done them. 
• Folding Houses: I can’t stress enough how much you ought to watch this. This is AMAZING. LOOK! ACTUAL FOLDING HOUSES!
• Pix3lface: You want an Instagram feed of some really rather excellent glitch art, which will make you feel just a touch uncomfortable but which is also, you know, good? YES YOU DO. 
• AI Movie Posters: You know that ‘not actually AI’ symbol I referred to a couple of links ago?Yes, well, that. Still, though, it churns out really quite brilliantly-realised fake film posters – fake image, fake stars, fake tagline, the whole deal, many of which are slightly Scarfolk-ish in tone and others which are just ODD. Have a play. 
• Spooler: Is there a word on Twitter more likely to make you think ‘Oh Christ, what an insufferable self-important tool this person is’ than ‘THREAD’? Look, just to clarify, lots of good and sensible and smart and funny stuff gets written every day on Twitter, and, yes, making blanket condemnations is A Bad Thing, but, come on, I’m presuming you know that Web Curios is ALL ABOUT blanket categorisations and lazy connections, and also I refuse to believe that you don’t know at least one narcissistic jizzrag who thinks their opinions are so VITAL that they can eschew all standards of readability in favour of spazzing out their HOT TAKE on Twitter dot com. Ahem. Anyway, that slightly rantier-than-expected preamble is all to say that this is a tool which pulls the dreaded THREAD into a single-page post so you can actually read it (and then realise that you really oughtn’t have bothered). 
• Serial Killer Calendar: There are a surprising number of bookshops in London which seemingly sell ONLY books about Denis Neilen and The Krays to middle-aged men in scurf-shouldered mackintoshes (guys, guys, hanging out in these places ISN’T HELPING); this is basically the website equivalent of that, seeking to flog copies of SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE (self-explanatory) and assorted books and trading cards…aside from anything else, it’s the slightly cartoonish style of the magazine covers which got me here; the juxtaposition between the slightly amateurish art style and the screaming headline “JOHN WAYNE GACY ATE THEIR LIVERS!” is, er, well quite unpleasant actually if I’m honest with you. 
• /r/Solipsism: This is one of my favourite subtle gags on the web. 
• Send Me SFMoma: I love this – simple, smart use of the digital archive of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Text them a word, and they will automatically reply with an artwork linked to or inspired by that word. As they say on the explainer page, it’s a way of making the overwhelming catalogue more accessible to more people; everyone else, nick this idea. 
• Spike The Beetle: Depending on how you’re feeling, this is either idiotic or SO KAWAII! Spike is a Stag Beetle who, his owner discovered, wasable to hold a pen and make rudimentary scribbles on a piece of paper. And lo, it came to pass that Spike became a minor Twitter celebrity and that his drawing are now available for purchase and it’s interesting, isn’t it, how in the course of writing these lines I’ve gone from ‘oh, whimsy!’ to ‘ffs make it all stop’? Eh? Oh. 
• Welcome To My Neighborhood: What would a traditionlly-illustrated children’s book look like if, rather than featuring improving stories of anthropomorphised animals learning lessons about sharing and play, it instead featured stories of anthropomorphised animals which are based on the life experiences of young people in the care of the urban scial services. It would, it turns out, look INCREDIBLY FCUKING BLEAK and quite upsetting. Not sure what I think of this – it’s affecting, but I’m also not sure that it’s talking to anyone other than awful internet hipsters like me. Still, made me go and chuck money at Barnardo’s this week so I suppose there’s that. Caveat emptor – this is really not very cheering stuff AT ALL. 
• Fetlife: If YOU were going to set up a social network for the kink/fetish community, what would you call it? Come on, I’ll give you a second, you’ll get there. You would call it KINKEDIN, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. Christ alone knows what the founders of Fetlife were thinking (possibly, sensibly, of the lawsuits), but nonetheless here we have “the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community”, on the offchance that’s something you;’ve been missing in your life. 
• Moodmix: I can’t speak for you, but I find London Gramm,ar unspeakably dull; still, whatever your opinion of their musical output, this promo site for their new…thing is a nice conceit; plug in your Spotify, tell it how you’re feeling on an exciting-looking (but probably nowhere near as nuanced as it would like you to think) shaded interface, and watch as it spits out a specially-curated mood-led playlist JUST FOR YOU. Contains, annoyingly, about 100% more London Grammar than I want from a musical selection, but you may like it more. 
• Voluptuous: SIGNIFICANTLY NSFW KLAXON! Not really sure what this is for – I think, though I can’t be certain, that it’s a site promoting a new imprint of erotic classics by some publisher or another, but regardless, it’s a slick piece of webwork which is all heavy breathing and ‘erotica’ – meaning, of course, black-and-white semi-bongo shots, always of women (why are these things never gender-mixed, eh? Particularly as literary erotica is famously the least-masculine of all the bongoforms), interspersed with excerpts from the texts – Lady Chatterly, The Story of ‘O’, you know the canon I’m sure. Pretty much entirely ridiculous, but I rather enjoyed it for all that. 
• Hungry: You wait ages for a new piece of interactive storytelling from NFB Canada and then you get two in one week. First up, this is called ‘Hunger’ and it is SO BEAUTIFUL. All about food, cookery, foraging and survival in Newfoundland, one of the remotest inhabited areas of the planet, this is a wonderful exploration of seasonality in food, about surviving against the elements and how eating permeates culture through history in a peculiar, emotional way. I got a bitteary at points during this, it’s that beautiful – I promise you, if you’re a foodie this is GLORIOUS. 
• Seances: This, though, wins this week. Seances is another NFB project which pulls together a copmletely bespoke 10-minute film for each person who visits the site, assembled from clips and archive footage and words and I know you’ve seen this done before, in music videos and the like, but I promise you that nothing that I’ve seen to date using this technique has been able to produce work with this degree of weight (yes, I know, PSEUD, but wevs mate this is GREAT) that these do; they are CREEPY as you like, and having tried a few times I can also confirm that they are always different. Do give this a try – it’s VERY good indeed. 
   
  

By Alexandra Rubenstein

LAST IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS EXCELLENT LITTLE SCIFI-THEMED HIPHOP ALBUM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Brittle: “This is the work of motion/graphic designer Constantinos Chaidalis”, so the explainer says, and what good work it is. If you like art which features slightly wrong/messed-up faces then this will tickle your fancy. 
• Letters & Liquor: A blog which may or may not be a Tumblr, but really shall I just drop this tired insistence on mentioning the platform? Yeah? Ok. A blog which illustrates the history of lettering associated with cocktails. Which, if you work in a design agency, strikes me as an excellent excuse to start doing Friday afternoon cocktail sessions based on these blogposts if you ask me.
• Toby Mcguire Looking Constipated: I’ll let you decide whether or not that look is in fact ‘constipation’.
• Medieval Spanish Chef: Not actually a Tumbl…oh balls. Hm, what do you call a running gag which only the author ever really noticed in the first place and which now even they are sick of but which they can’t let go of? Anyhow. This is a collection of medieval Spanish recipes, which if you are a culinary historian or, you know, just like cooking odd stuff, you might really like. 
• Graphic Pr0n: Not actually bongo at all, this, but instead a collection of decent examples of graphic design, collected for your pleasure. 
• Weird Sh1t From Memegenerator: Some of these are just GREAT, and I encourage you to start using as many of these as possible on Facebook and indeed in general email chat right away. 
• Posing DJs: Fine, this is old, but it alsmo reminded me of the ner-ending majesty of DJ CHEF (dot com), so, you know, wind your necks in. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Kafka’s Jokebook: You don’t need to know Kafka to get these, just to have a vague sense of familiarity with the all-pervading sense of existential fear we’re expected to put up with day-in, day-out. Sample: “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? Nothing after Albert’s inexplicable transformation. Every breath was agony.” See? It’s ACE.
• Shkreli and the Campus Memes: Of all the things in the longreads this week, this is probably the one which would make least sense to your mum; taking in the multifaceted web phenomena that are memes, Facebook groups, wokeness, depression, safe spaces and, most bizarrely of all, the internet’s favourite hatebro Martin Shkreli, this is so horrifically of the now that it might well be obsolete by the time I finish this writeup. It’s a look at how the expolosion in meme-based Facebook Groups in colleges in the US are fulfilling a weird support network role for students, how meme culture can work as a surprisingly emo language for teens and…no, actually, on reflection I still don’t understand what Shkreli has to do with any of this whatsoever. 
• Remembering Minitel: I think I have featured Minitel-related pieces here before, but this is a really interesting look back at the history of France’s hugely ahead-of-its time domestic terminal system, which made our Ceefax look like exactly what it was (a shonky but lovable mess). Minitel was the closest thing to the web that anyone had before the web existed, and was used for everything from public information services to (you guessed it) BONGO! If you’ve ever reead Atomised and been slightly puzzled by a few of the Minitel refs in there this will help – failing that, this is fascinating about a very of-its-time and very French service. 
• Meet The Atlas Twins: This did read quite a lot like a parody, but it appears to be entirely legitimate; meet the Atlas Twins, perennial outsiders and truth-seekers and, as far as I can tell, appalling spoilt rich kids who have glommed on to every trend going with limited success and whose latest scheme appears to have been scamming a ‘digital nomad’ existence in Asia, peddling a load of inspirational startup claptrap to gullible idiots who believe that they can get rich from a hammock in Indonesia. Quite startling, not least when you ask yourself ‘BUT WHERE DOES ALL THE MONEY COME FROM?!’.
• Beggars and Choosers:  An excellent piece featuring interviews with a variety of himeless people in Paris, mainly focused on the articles of clothing which they need most and why, but going far beyond that to paint a detailed, and sad, picture of the lives of the marginalised. The bit about the social workers did, I have to say, take me aback a bit. 
• Don’t Sext Me In The Present Tense: As someone old and whose experience of this sort of thing is minimal at best, I confess to never having given any thought at all to the tense in which one should send messages about the state of one’s mucus membranes. Yet, like all aspects of life in Our Lord’s glorious year of 2017, it turns out that this is something that should be analysed and raked over. Is it ok to type “I am worrying my slack, gamey bunghole’? Should it be ‘I want to worry’? So many questions!
• Louise Mensch and the Conspiracies: It’s funny to think that Mensch was once just a comedy footnote in an old relationship, a woman who an ex of mine had gone to University with and whose ‘novels’ were given away free with Grazia and which we would read, giggling, on holidays. Or to think back to Meshn, the fabulously wrong-headed Twitter clone she launched 7-odd years ago with teen-bothering No10 aide Luke Bozier – whatever happened to him? When now she’s attained a weird degree of mad-person fame with her rants about, er, well seemingly EVERYONE being in Putin’s pocket and Bannon being on a deathlist and – Christ, look, if you’re not familiar with it then just read this piece which is not only a window into a world of crazy but also a beautifully written takedown of an idiot. 
• The Greatest Movie Props of All Time: Each with its own anecdote – cinephiles rejoice, this is GOLDEN. 
• The Greatest Horse: Chances are you’ve not spent much time this week thinking about horse-based sports in Kazakhstan. Remedy that by reading this great piece of writing about the ancient Kazakh sport of kokpar (goat grabbing – come on, that alone should be worth the click), and the horse bestriding the game like a stumpy-legged quadrupedic colossus, the Messi of the sport, one particular horse called Lazer. This is legitimately wonderful writing; you can almost smell the goat. 
   
  
• Who Is The Toriest Tory?: It’s Golby, again, it’s brilliant, again. STOP BEING SO FCUKING GOOD IT IS STARTING TO BECOME ANNOYING. I mean, look at this: “Phillip Hammond, half-hard in the gauzy early AM sun, alone in the bathroom mirror, tumescent at the sheer idea of stealing milk from nursery children. Phillip Hammond is so Tory it is creating bone spurs on him, his skeleton is slowly creaking into a more Conservative shape, if he thinks about dismantling the NHS any more and any harder his body might clench and then explode—” What a BSTARD. 
• Wash You’re Mitts: Curios is, I know, famously typo-ridden, but I promise you that that one’s a [sic]. This is kilometric but brilliant, a reminiscence about working in a run-down, semi-criminal second-hand games shop in a poor part of a poor town in the 90s/00s. I grew up in Swindon (stop it, I WAS BORN IN LONON OK?) and I could almost SMELL the chipfat and disappointment, so other children of mid-size sink towns will probably empathise quite hard here. 
• The Metaphysics of the Hangover: This is great writing about being hungover, and about being drunk, and it contains some truly excellent lines – many of them borrowed, fine, but collected wonderfully – about the extent to which the hangover is less a physical reaction than a psychic one to the rearranging of mental blocks and barriers back to their natural placement after being rearranged during a night on the sauce. Apropos nothing, my favourie hangover line (aside from Amis the elder quoted in the piece) is this by his son, from Dead Babies: “Alcohol-crapulence clogs perception, but drug crapulence flays it”- well, innit though. 
• Necessary Driving Skills: This, though, is just brilliant and my one must-read of the week. It does, I admit, channel early Self to the point of near reverance, but it’s done SO WELL that I will forgive it the tonal similarities to My Idea of Fun or Cock & Bull. The story of a man who works in the model car industry, this is so coldly, bleakly good on LIFE that it will leave you feeling dreadful by the time you finish it; I can think of no greater compliment. Hats off to Nat Segnit whose work it is. 

By Jonathan Wateridge

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (NEWSLETTER PEOPLE, VIDS ARE IN THE LINKS)

• First up, this is called ‘Perspective’ and it is just WAITING to be stolen for an ad: 

[vimeo]224876461{/vimeo}

• Next, Gaslamp Killer’s latest opus, a 7-minute, VERY STRANGE video described as ‘The Instrumentalepathy Album Film’. Not really sure what to make of this, but the aesthetic is STRONG and I rather like the overall effect over the course of the clip.

•  You want 10 hours of footage from Planet Earth 2, all relaxing mountain sounds and visuals in HD? HERE YOU GO THEN!

• This is by Alvvays, it’s called ‘In Undertow’, and it’s another female vocal in 2016/17 that I am sort of slightly mesmerised by

• UK HIPHOP CORNER! Well, sort-of hiphop – this is Mt Kimbie featuring Curios favourite King Krule and it’s hiphopish and the video is PURE artschool perfect. Track’s called ‘Blue Train Lines’:

• MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new video from Run The Jewels -the song’s ace as you’d expect, and I’m a sucker for stop-motion skeletons so the video gets my vote too. Watch, enjoy, relax, have fun, be nice SEE YOU SOON BYE I LOVE YOU BYE: 

By Sarah Duyer

LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH THE LATEST PLAYLIST FROM LOVELY MUSIC NEWSLETTER ‘LOVE SAVES THE DAY’!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT THE 2BILLION NUMBER IS A SIGN OF SOME SORT, AND PROBABLY NOT OF ANYTHING GOOD:

• An Exciting New Set of Facebook Ad Metrics!: Calloo, callay and associated expressions of joy; Facebook has announced NEW METRICS with which to confuse and baffle your clients, and through the use of which you can continue to persuade people marginally more ignorant than you of matters digital to pay you a frankly preposterous dayrate for what, let’s be frank, is little more than glorified database management. Rolling out over the next few weeks, Page managers will now have access to exciting new datapoints with which to track the hopes, dreams and desires of the 2 billion, including ‘the number of people who have previously engaged with an advertiser’s website or app versus new visitors’, and data on the number of people who have ‘recommended’ your Page to their friends. On the one hand, more ways to persuade the client that look, yeah, the campaign’s going really well and engagement is through the roof, right?; on the other, another set of largely arbitrary numbers against which to have yourself judged. So it goes. 
• New Masks, Etc, Coming to Messenger Video Chat: There’s nothing brand-related here yet, fine, but take this as your semi-occasional reminder that if you’re a CONSUMER-FRIENLY and FUN-LOVING brand you really ought to be thinking about how you are going to ACTIVATE (dear God, I am sorry) this sort of stuff in the future when they inevitably start offering a wide-ranging bespoke filter creation service for brands. 
• FB App for ‘Influencers’ Apparently On Its Way: It’s thrilling to be in an age of such progress! Basically this is going to be (at some point in the future) a suite of tools to enable better-quality video production off mobile, aimed at mid-tier ‘creators’ – to quote, ‘the app will feature a Live Creator Kit that enables influencers to more effectively manage live broadcasts by adding intros and outros, custom stickers and frames. The kit will also facilitate communication among the community of users following the influencer, and serve up user data to optimize future broadcasts. Anyone already using Facebook’s Mentions app will be automatically added to new app.’ So there. The idea of a ‘Live Creator Kit’ is a smart one, and I’d imagine a variant will be made available to brands and publishers too at some point.
• Facebook Videos Now Autoplay With Sound: In a move requested by absolutely nobody, you will now be subject to a hideous, mangled cacophony of sound as you scroll through the increasingly video-dominated FB feed. The only reason I’m including this is as a gentle reminder that YOU STILL NEED TO SUBTITLE EVERYTHING, as unless you’re a sociopath you obviously have the volume on your phone right down by default. 
• FB ‘Discover’ Tab For Bots: I think this was trailed a few months ago, but frankly I am finding it nigh-on impossible to keep up with what is news, what is regurgitated old stuff masquerading as news, and what is some sort of unpleasant hallucination born of spending too any hours with my face in the internet. Anyway, FB in the US has added a ‘discover’ button to the Messenger app, which lets users browse and find new Messenger bots with which to interact; which will, eventually, lead to the ability to pay to promote your bot within this section to users of your choosing. You know it, I know it, so start setting budget aside lest your bot fall into the oubliette of forgotten Facebook automata.
• Instagram Testing ‘Favourites’ Function: Interesting, this – Instagram’s apparently trialing the ability for users to share cerain content with a limited list of friends, which list can be pruned ar added to at any time; effectively a sort of ‘inner circle’-type of thing, designed, apparently, to obviate the need for a finsta. I can see this having some nice executional opportunities for brands and ‘influencers’ (sorry) – you know, rewarding people for being superfans by adding them to the EXCLUSIVE CONTENT LIST, creating competitions and mechanics to motivate people to KEEP ENGAGING, that sort of thing. 
• You Will Soon Be Able To Make Snapchat Geofilters In The App: Or if you’re reading this in the US, you already can – LUCKY YOU! Rather than having to go to the dedicated geofilter creation site, US users will now be able to create and buy Geofilters straight from their phones, eliminating the need for photoshop skills in favour of some simple image / text editing software. A really smart move, and yet another reason to consider the Geofilter as part of your YOUTH MARKETING CONTENT MIX (I can’t keep doing this, I really can’t). 
• Custom Bitmoji on Snapmaps: One of the cute/creepy features of the Snapchat Map thing announced last week is its use of phone data to present contextual representations of what users are doing when visible on the map; if your accelerometer suggests that you’re moving fast, for example, you’ll appear in a car – so CLEVER! I’m mentioning this only as it seems unlikely that advertisers won’t get the opportunity to create custom Bitmoji for use when people are in or near their venues – and frankly even if this isn’t in the pipeline, if you throw Snap enough cash they’ll probably consider it because, well, WHY NOT?
• KFC In Space: Can we all now agree that the ‘thing’ whereby stuff gets sent into space and filmed is now done, over, defunct? I mean, even I’ve done one of these, and that was years ago – so please, now that KFC have decided not only to send one of their crap non-food products into the upper atmosphere but have also, for reasons known only to them, bothered to create a whole website and bunch of supplementary ‘content’ around the endeavour, can we all agree that we are never, ever going to do one of these things again? Good, glad we’ve cleared that up. 

By LaLa Chuu

By Kat Toronto

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST BIT WITH ONE OF THESE EXCELLENT PRINCE PLAYLISTS?

THE SECTION WHICH FOR ONCE ISN’T EVEN GOING TO MAKE A TIRED JOKE ABOUT NOT BEING INVITED TO CANNES BECAUSE, LOOKING AT IT FROM AFAR, THIS REALLY DOES FEEL LIKE A NADIR FOR THE WHOLE THING WHICH REALLY OUGHT TO BE REBRANDED ‘CRAP COSMETIC CSR IDEAS ON SEA’ BECAUSE THAT’S SEEMINGLY ALL THE INDUSTRY DOES TO WIN AWARDS THESE DAYS:

• Facebook Combines Canvas With Collection Ads: Literally the only pleasing thing about this is the alliteration I was able to employ in the headline here; the rest of the story, whereby you can now combine FB Canvas ads with FB collection ads (the ones which, you will doubtless recall, allow you to showcase upto 4 products in carousel under a standard FB ad), thereby letting advertisers create REALLY DEEP content-led advertising experiences for AD THIRSTY consumers (and, snark aside, lets you stretch the Canvas assets further than they might otherwise have gone), is really dull. So, er, let’s move on.
• Automatic Closed Captions on FB Live: Hugely useful, this, although the breezy tone of the release linked to up there doesn’t quite give the whole picture; you need to run your stream through a 3rd party and do some FB API stuff, so not quite so simple for your standard point-and-stream scion of the NEW MEDIA AGE. Nonetheless, broadcasters ought all be aware of this, so, you know, BE AWARE, BROADCASTERS.
• You Can Now Reply To Comments On Facebook With Gifs: Just what was needed to reup your brand’s sense of KOOKY RELATABILITY! Lord, although it’s amply evident with each passing day that you have in fact abandoned us, please consider taking steps to save us not only from hatred, bigotry and ignorance, but also from the whimsical voices of brands who believe that we need and want looping pop cultural references injected into mundane consumer interactions. Thanks, Lord.
• FB Safety Check to Include Fundraising Options: I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to the back teeth of having to see the FB Safety Check stuff; aside from the fact that it serves to show us that the Bad Thing has happened again, it’s also geographically useless (people in Australia getting notifications to mark themselves safe after Grenfell Tower suggests that FB may be overstating its location targeting abilities just a touch) and frankly serves to stir up hysteria as much as it does allay fears. As ever, though, my opinion matters not one iota in the face of Zuckerberg’s vision; so it is that, in the US at least, the Safety Check feature is being updated to allow fundraisers to start collecting for donations within the feature, reaching significant numbers of people in short order. Which, obviously, it would be churlish of me to complain about – particularly as there’s limited detail in the post as to how EXACTLY this is going to work. That said, I can’t be the only person who looks at this and sees a few pretty obvious ways it could be abused to nefarious end (can I? Am I too much of a cynic? HAHAHAHAHA). Oh, and there are a few other bits in here about how the service is going to allow individuals to append their own anecdotes to their ‘I’m Safe’ notifications, presumably so they can add helpful notes like “NO LOOK I WAS IN GRIMSBY THAT WEEKEND GETTING TANKED UP ON JAEGERBOMBS PLEASE NOONE @ ME ANYMORE”.
• How Facebook Counters Terrorism: Of literally no interest at all to brands, but of quite a lot of interest to anyone with an eye on the ‘Facebook as a publisher vis a vis its responsibilities’, this is the first in a series of blogs by Facebook examining some of its processes and how it arrives at some of its decisions. The idea is that each will focus on a different ‘challenging’ area, for example sex and censorship, or, in this case, the propagation of extremist ideology on the platform, and explore the steps Facebook takes and why it chooses to behave in the way it does. Despite my oft-stated dislike of Facebook as a company / platform, I think that this is an excellent idea and this first example is a very good post, not least from a communications point of view; it’s clearly-written, and sets out in simple fashion the main steps the platform’s taking to address the spread of terrorist-friendly content/material. Although then you see stuff like this, whereby FB appears to be effectively give any ‘Group’ on the platform the ability to run online ‘courses’ offering ‘instruction’ on whatever topic they fancy, and you think ‘Hm, you…you…you really do keep on doing a lot of stuff which, frankly, isn’t helping keep the extremists (of whatever flavour, please don’t @ me) at bay at all’. So it goes.
• New Tools For FB Group Admins: Who doesn’t love Facebook Groups? NO FCUKER, that’s who! Increasingly central to the FB platform as the newsfeed becomes an increasingly awful, video-clogged experience (NO MARK NOT EVERYTHING ALWAYS HAS TO BE VIDEO YOU APPALLING MOVING IMAGE TYRANT), Group admins are getting a new suite of tools to provide them with analytics, member filtering options, group-to-group linking and the like. There are lots of opportunities for brands to create Groups, I think, particularly with the ability to affiliate them with Pages. Also, obviously, this is a precursor to being able to advertise at Groups, which is inevitably coming soon to fcuk up the last genuinely useful and unsullied bit of the big blue misery factory. 
• Instagram Launches ‘Paid Partnerships’ Tag For Influencer Posts: Smart move, this, taking the Wild West that is ‘influencer marketing’ and attempting to impose some degree of legitimacy, transparency and order to it – instagrammers and brands who collaborate will soon have the ability to tage a post as being ‘In Partnership With’, making it clear that there’s a commercial relationship linking the two parties, and giving both parties access to analytics on the post. Which also will hopefully put an end to the ability of every two-bit Instagrammer with a reasonably presentable midriff and a kitchen with half-decent lighting to lie about their stats in an effort to get paid (bitter, me? Never!). Interestingly, my Man In China (your man, EVERYONE’s man) Alex told me that Weibo takes a fee from brands and influencers for setting up partnerships between them, which is brilliantly cynical and of which I approve hugely. 
• Instagram Launches ‘Click To Messenger’ Ads: Linking up the Facebook ecosystem even further, you can now buy ad units for Instagram which take users directly into a Messenger conversation, thereby suckering users into the PURCHASING FUNNEL and, you hope, never lettng  them go (or at least not until you’ve sucked them dry). 
• You Can Now Reuse Instagram Live Video: Seismic, eh? To plagiarise the article, because this really doesn’t warrant any effort on my part in coming up with new words, “Now when you finish broadcasting a Live video on Instagram Stories, you’ll have the option to share it to your story for 24 hours before it disappears or discard it immediately. Friends will see a play button on your Instagram Story profile bubble atop their feed if you’ve shared a Live replay.” WOW.
• Snapchat Launches Self-Serve Ad Platform: Except, er, as far as I can tell it’s US-only at the moment. Still, it will come here in relatively short order, I’d imagine, and bring with it the opportunity for anyone to sort their own ad buying, with just a credit card and some poor-quality emoji-style graphics. “It lets clients buy, manage, optimize, and view analytics about campaigns pay via US credit card rather than credit line, spend as little as they want with no minimum, buy via auction with prices set by the market, utilize all of Snapchat’s ad formats and targeting capabilities, manage ad creative assets within the tool, and have ads reviewed by Snap for quality before they appear.” Good, eh? Eh?
  
• The Snap Map: Snapchat users can now see their friends’ activity on a map view, the idea being that it will become easier to see what’s happening nearby on Snap at any given moment. Which means, of course, that you can start coming up with all sorts of exciting activations for your next celebrity-led activation in meetings RIGHT NOW! Look, I’ll get you started: “Why don’t we get celebrity X to post a Snap from location Y and make it visible on the map and then get people to track them as they move around and eventually they will get to a secret location where they will oh god I can’t be bothered with this do you remember when we were doing this stuff with Leo Messi on Hackney Marshes 7 bloody years ago on Twitter and nothing changes, only the platform, and meanwhile we get older and our bodies sag and decay and yet advermarketingpr rumbles on inexorably because IT WILL NEVER DIE”. See? EASY!
• Twitter Looks A Tiny Bit Different!: Be honest, you were really annoyed about this last week but now you’ve forgotten what it looked like beforehand. Notable only for the fact that it looks a bit like Google Plus, and made brands everywhere have to go through the annoying rigmarole of redesigning their avatar image to fit in the new circular format. Don’t worry, though, Twitter still contains your regular, mandated daily dose of harassment, hate, horror and hysteria – phew!
• YouTube Launching VR180 Video Format: The state of what passes for ‘tech journalism’ means that I have had to spend 5 minutes actiuvely searching for an article which actually explains what this means (FYI, it means that people will soon be able to start uploading what are effectively wide-angle videos which allow users to look around inside them as though filmed in 360). It’s not very exciting, though, and I rather wish I hadn’t bothered. 
• VRUK 2017: Seeing as we’re on video, there’s a conference on VR and 360 video and stuff happening in London in a couple of weeks (6-7 July, to be exact), which could be quite interesting, particularly for those of you who do tellystuff (*waves at the BBC*).
• The Facebook Awards 2017: Here’s a whole bunch of work done on Facebook over the past 12 months which the platform considers to be worthy of highlighting as praiseworthy; there’s some nice stuff on here, and plenty you can take inspiration from, but it’s worth mentioning (as is often the case with this stuff on Facebook) that the budgets involved in a few of these things are pretty fcuking astronomical – I had some meetings with FB last year where they were flogging Canvas really hard and showed off some genuinely awesome work, before then forgetting that there were SECRET NUMBERS in their presentation and revealing that the creative spend on the content they’d just shown us was 6 figures, not to mentioned the associated ad buy, at which point we just sort of shuffled out again feeling like right public sector povvos so, you know, BE AWARE.
• All The Best Stuff From Cannes This Year: Actually, no – I hate EVERYTHING coming from Cannes this year, other than the vague noises from people about not doing it any more. Take your brand purpose and FCUK OFF. I mean, look at the state of this. And this. And this. And this. Take a look at yourselves, all of you (and me, fine). 
• OFCOM Media Usage Data 2017: All of the stats you could want, and plenty more that you almost certainly didn’t. Want to know howw many 16-24 year olds don’t feel any more creative at all when they use social media? 36%, that’s how many! God, I love data! Obviously actually really useful, my pathetically predictable snark aside. 
• The Charmin Van-go: Sadly this promotion was only active on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, but don’t feel that you can’t take the concept and run with it to create your own unique variant – someone at the agency obviously thought ‘Uber, but for defecation!’ and lo, the Charmin Van-go was born, in which New Yorkers with a desire to void their bowels gained the ability to order a travelling toilet via an Uber-style interface, complete with a team of smiling…er…crapassistants(? I don’t know what one would call them) to, I don’t know, hose down the walls afterwards, or applaud you on egress. What a world, kids. Apparently this is a pilot as they are considering rolling this service out on a regular basis – don’t people in New York keep a mental map of all pub toilets in their head like Londoners do? No? Madness.

By Robert Lang

NEXT UP, WHY NOT TRY THIS SOULWAX MIX FROM RADIO 1?

THE SECTION WHICH IS FULLY EXPECTING AN ACTUAL CHURCH OF JEZUS TO EMERGE FROM GLASTONBURY THIS WEEKEND, AS SEVERAL THOUSAND PEOPLE BOXED OUT OF THEIR GOURDS ON PILLS AND MDMA HEAR HIS UTOPIAN MESSAGE FOR A SOCIALIST FUTURE, PT.1:

• Be Internet Awesome: The tone’s possibly a touch cringey, fine – I don’t have any kids to hand on which to test it, but I am convinced that there aren’t many for whom the phrase ‘Be Internet Awesome’ wouldn’t elicit a fairly heft eye-roll – but the idea behind this, which is a series of simple games and information about keeping safe online, aimed at young people, is a good one and the presentation’s all slick and Google-y, and the games are reasonably fun; if you have an 8 year old kid, I reckon this is probably quite a Good Thing. 
• Foto Generator: Once again, the gap between Curios means that there is going to be some stuff in here which is practically antidiluvian (ie more than a week old), for which apologies; that said, if you haven’t had a play with this webtoy, which lets you doodle outlines of faces and then autogenerates a whole…er…other face from the outline to largely horrific effect. If nothing else, it’s worth making a new FB profile picture from this just to upset people who will suddenly think you’ve turned into Simon Weston (sorry). 
• The Twitter Debubbler: Do YOU hate the new Twitter design? Do YOU want to go back to better, simpler times? Here’s a Chrome extension which will pander to your designphobic whims. 
• Brutalist Redesigns: Popular web apps, redesigned in the Brutalist fashion. Very much a designers’ joke, this, but I very much like some of the resultant work, in particular the Instagram redesign. 
• Lynching America: It seems somewhat incongruous to say this when the topic is so awful, but this is a really lovely website. Taking a look at the history of racially-motivated violence in the US, and demonstrating how appallingly widespread the practice of lynching was across the Southern states, this presents a documentary, a map of recorded lynchings, historical documentation and a full academic report on the subject in a sober, beautifully-designed shell. It’s obviously all incredibly grim, but it’s also a very well-designed presentation of the material. 
• Weirdbox: You remember a decade or so ago when everyone started making those videos which pulled photos from your Facebook friends into the action, giving a cosmetic veneer of personalisation and making every single advermarketingprcunt working in digita pitch the idea to all of their clients on an almost weekly basis until the world moved on and we took to plagiarising the Tippex bear thing instead? No? Maybe you are too young, children, but I REMEMBER. Anyway, this is basically that, except with Instagram – plug in an Instagram handle, ideally one from an account you sort of borderline stalk, and watch the ensuing film. When I put this on Twitter, several people were quick to point out to me that a) the film is too long; and b) this doesn’t work on mobile and is therefore RUBBISH in 2017. To these people I simply say “WHERE IS YOUR SENSE OF CHILDLIKE JOY, EH? BE LIKE ME, A SIMPLE, PURE SOUL, GAMBOLLING THROUGH THE FIELDS OF LIFE CONSUMED BY AN OPEN-EYED SENSE OF INNOCENT WONDER!”, and then I go and get drunk and cry, alone. 
• Wikiverse: Another Wikipedia visualisation project, this time envisioning all of the Wikidata (well, not all of it as that would be mental, but a part of the corpus) as a galaxy through which one can navigate, seeing connections between entries and generally zooming through the knowledgeverse in amazement. Obviously this is of no use whatsoever when actually attempting to use Wikipedia for anything practical, but as a piece of dataviz and interface design it’s rather beatiful, I think; also, it’s an excellent way of findin, and getting lost down, Wikipedian rabbitholes.
• We Wear Culture: Facsinating new (?) project from the Google Cultural Institute, looking at the history and cultural context of fashion throughout history, and containing archive materials from the V&A and a whole raft of other cultural institution worldwide. This is a genuinely fascinating primer on the cultural history of dress and the interface between fashion and a host of other areas, and if you’re a student or just interested it’s a pretty wonderful resource / timesink. Sadly doesn’t appear to have the long dreamed-of ‘Google, what should I wear?’ function that fashion-subnormals like myself have been clamouring for for an age now. 
• FotoOto: I don’t know quite how good this is as an idea in a practical sense, being fortunate enough myself not to have any significant visual impairments; the concept, though, is fascinating. FotoOto is an app which takes photos and applies a layer of audio to them, with the pitch and tone of the sound produced based on the colour of the pixel(s) that the user is touching at any given time. In effect – and I can already tell as I prepare to type this that this is an AWFUL analogy, so sorry – it’s a bit like audio braille (yep, I was right). The video on the site explains it far better than I ever could, so take a look at that instead and let me move on with whatever shreds of dignity I have left. 
• Bookshelf: This annoys me slightly; it’s basically a site that lets anyone make playlist of books, with whatever title or theme they like, which is a concept so simple and so lovely that I don’t know why noone’s done it before. I certainly don’t know why noone’s done it better than this; it’s SUCH an ugly site, and the whole ‘list’ thing doesn’t really give ou any good functionality, and frankly it just seems like a bit of a missed opportunity and oh God here I am slagging off someone’s project, an actual thing that someone spent time building, and all I do is sit here in my pants in my kitchen spaffing WORDS out, it’s not like I make anything, who am I to criticise after all, I mean I can’t even code, oh God I’m sorry, bookshelf creator, I take it all back. Ahem. Anyway, I guess the point I was trying to make before my id derailed me just then is that the concept is good, the execution is poor, and for publishers or bookshops I think this is an idea very much worth thinking around for ‘inspiration’. 
• Resource Trade: I am a sucker for a well-designed map interactive, and this is just such a well0designed map interactive. Chatham House have pulled together this archive of historical global trade data, showing major trade relationships over the past 15 years and letting you cut the data by sector, nation, etc. On this day in particular I’ve enjoyed looking at the UK specific numbers and seeing that each of our 5 largest export markets in 2015, the latest year for which the data’s available, were EU countries. WELL DONE US! God, it doesn’t feel any better a year on, does it? On which note, here’s some nice interactives from the ONS looking at how stuff has changed economically since THAT DAY. 
• Dating AI: The newest creepy update from the world of online dating is here! Dating AI (I am already SO BORED of the misuse and abuse of the term ‘AI’ – come back, big data, all is forgiven) is an app which lets you plug in a photo of anyone you like and which searches through the dating apps you have installed on your phone so you can then find people who look like that person. Or, one would imagine, that actual person, should they be on said dating apps. There is obviously NO WAY that this could be used for stalky or nefarious purposes, no siree – this has to get pulled soon, no?
• The Ecoalarm: This is a really lovely idea. Ecoalarm, which I think is actually a project by an Argentine NGO, lets you set an alarm for whatever time you want; when it goes off, you’re awoken by the sounds of nature, streamed from Spotify – the gimmick being that the money earned from the Spotify stream goes to ecological causes. Smart, and a neat execution. 
• Slightly Rubbish Instagram Poetry: This account is run by an actual proper poet, I think, but this account is just an experiment in posting crap fragments of non-poetry in an Instagram-friendly visual style and seeing how many likes they can get. Perfect, particularly in the oh-so-teenage way it manages to give every single post the illusion of profundity whilst still keeping each one entirely meaningless. 
• The QR Code Backpack: Obviously a silly PR gimmick by Jansport, and obviously QR codes are RUBBISH (I am increasingly of the opinion that they are not in fact rubbish, but appreciate that I am in a Western minority here and so will wind my neck in on the subject), but this idea, whereby the backpack fabric can be scanned to pull up whatever social media details the wearer wants to associate with said backpack, is really rather cute.  
• London: Park City: Want to spend a few pleasant minutes contemplating how much nicer London would have been this week were it a green expanse rather than the pigeon-infested, binjuice-scented steaming concrete swamp that it has been over the past week? Here you go! These are designs submitted to the National Park City Foundation – to quote, “Artists, designers and architects were invited to imagine and visualise what a future London National Park City could look like in a design challenge set by the newly established National Park City Foundation. A panel of judges reviewed over 50 entries from around the world and picked four winning visions. Making London a National Park City is a large-scale and long-term vision that has the potential to improve life in the capital by making the city radically greener and connecting more people to the city’s remarkable heritage.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? It will NEVER HAPPEN, but it’s nice to dream. 
• The Moving Poster: A site collecting various examples of animated digital poster art; lots of different visual styles and techniques on display here, forming a decent resource if you’re interested in, er, moving posters and the like. 
• CGID: French artist Rahael Fabre recently applied for a new ID card in his native France; he duly submitted all the necessary paperwork, but included in his application an image of ‘his’ face which he’d created entirely digitally – obviously the photo was accepted, and Raphael was in proud possession of what’s possibly the world’s first real-world ID for an avatar. Impressive stuff.
• Precious Plastic: SUCH a laudable project, this one – Precious Plastic is a collection of open-sourced designs which in theory let people create small-scale, individual plastics recycling solutions; a wonderful idea for the developing world, and the sort of thing which frankly any halfway eco-conscious brand could do worse than cosying up to as, you know, these nice people have already done all the hard work. Go on, you know what you ought to do. 
• Kids Listen: A website collating kid-friendly podcasts, from science to storytelling to general silliness. No idea how good any of these are, but if you’re in proud possession of one or more mewling whelps this could turn out to be an invaluable resource. 
• Emma Identify: An interesting idea, still in beta but ‘coming soon’, Emma Identify is an ‘AI’ (not an AI) which claims to be able to identify text authorship with a high degree of accuracy. Give it a corpus to learn from (they say about 8000 words, so roughly a Curios) and it will then be able to judge whether other texts are likely or not to have been penned by the same author. Which has a whole host of interesting implications, not least legal ones – I wonder how long it is before stuff like this becomes admissible in court, say?
• Standard eBooks: Not the first ‘massive repository of out of copywrite written works’ to exist online, but this one differentiates itself by offering the texts in a standardised format, with nice (or at least readable) design and the like – all available for free for your reading pleasure. Two clicks took me to Alice in Wonderland, Candide, The Importance of Being Ernest and many more absolute classics; this really is wonderful. 
• Me3: So this purports to be a friendship-making app for grownups, and entirely platonic; you tell the app stuff about yourself based on a series of questions about interests, etc, and it will then seek to match you with two other people of the same gender in your city which it believes you will have a high degree of affinity with; the idea being that it is HARD to make friends in the big bad city, and that this app will help you find a couple of other lonely people JUST LIKE YOU to hang out with. Several things spring to mind; first, that this is going to quickly become an absolute gay threesome HOTBED; second, that its promise to find you people ‘nearly identical’ to you is a frankly horrific one. Look, mate, I spend ALL DAY inside this head and one of the few positive things about occasionally interacting with other sacks of meat is the brief distraction it affords me from the quotidian horror of BEING ME. Please don’t make me meet anyone else who feels like this; can you imagine the awfulness?

By Damien Maloney

HAVE THIS 30-MINUTE TECHNO MIX WHILE YOU GET INVOLVED WITH THE NEXT SET OF LINKS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FULLY EXPECTING AN ACTUAL CHURCH OF JEZUS TO EMERGE FROM GLASTONBURY THIS WEEKEND, AS SEVERAL THOUSAND PEOPLE BOXED OUT OF THEIR GOURDS ON PILLS AND MDMA HEAR HIS UTOPIAN MESSAGE FOR A SOCIALIST FUTURE, PT.2:

• Red Bull Illume Winners: The latest in the seemingly enless parade of Red Bull BRAND ACTIVATIONS is this one, the ‘Illume’ photo contest which “invited photographers to submit images of the world of action and adventure sports in one of 10 categories, including Energy, Playground, Sequence, and Enhance (where digital manipulation is allowed)”. Some excellent photos in here; the winner in the ‘Enhance’ category in particular is quite spectacular. 
• Block Bills: Artwork by Matthias Dörfelt, featuring a series of 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain. HIGH CONCEPT! Also rather cool though. 
• Amazing Japanese Minirobots: No, not the Sumo robots (although those are very cool too and you ought to take a look if you’ve not seen them); instead, this is a prototypical Sony project which, as far as I can tell (which is not very far as the site’s all in Japanese) is designing tiny little modular motorised robot thingies which can be linked together with bits of paper and which you can make do some CRAZY stuff. Click the link and watch the videos and try and see if you can work out what the fcuk is going on, and then please tell me whether I am right to be excited by this or not. Thanks!
• The Fish Hammer: An incredibly silly project whereby this designer hooked up a fishtank to some sensors and a hammer, so that whenever the fish swam past a certain point in the tank, the hammer outside smashed something. Massively pointless and therefore highly satisfying, but also totally repurposable for BRAND ACTIVATION FUN – come on, imagine something like this which dispenses goodies at random based on an animal’s movements; then imagine how you might have two layers to it, a vending machine, say, in a high footfall area which occasionally, seemingly randomly, disgorges something fun, and then an online bit whener people online get to somehow manipulate the animals to encourage/discourage them from triggering the drops (or, you know, something with less inherent animal cruelty built into the mechanic). GOD THIS STUFF IS CREATIVE GOLD WHY AM I NOT A CRAVAT-WEARING ‘HEAD OF’ DRINKING OFF HIS COKE HANGOVER ON A YACHT RIGHT NOW?!
• Poetry on the Shore: I just had an INCREDIBLY emo reaction to the description of this when rereading it just now. It is SO LOVELY I MIGHT CRY: “Poet on the Shore is an AI-empowered autonomous robot that roams on the beach. It enjoys watching the sea, listening to the sound of waves lapping on the beach, the murmurs of the winds, children’s conversing, and the incessant din of seabirds. Most of the time, it roams alone to listen and feel. Sometimes, it writes verses into the sand, and watches the waves wash them away.” SEE?
• Woebot: When people regularly do those lists of ‘jobs most likely to be rendered obsolete by computer automation’, I don’t know whether they even consider ‘counselling’ as an option. And yet, here we are – say hello to Woebot, a chatbot-cum-counsellor who will ‘talk’ to you and ‘listen’ to your ‘problems’ and oh god you actually have to pay for it, this is mental, who in their right mind is going to pay actual cashmoney to have a conversation about their feelings with a fcuking chatbot? Oh, actually perhaps there’s a clue in the ‘right mind’ line there. Fine, it sends you ‘videos and other tools’ to help lift your mood, but really, FFS whoever built this, I am not convinced this is A Good Thing. Imagine having to talk to Woebot, a non-sentient piece of code, about how lonely you are. Imagine how that would make you feel. Christ. 
• Binky: I think this was pretty widely-covered the other week, but in case you missed it – Binky is a fauz-social network, which presents as a real one; there’s a news feed, you can scroll and look and click, but all the content is fake. All of it. None of the profiles are real, none of the people, all the images are stock…this is legitimately perfect, and frankly whoever’s behind it should get in touch with an art gallery stat as this has Frieze installation written ALL over it. 
• Beyond Curie: Posters celebrating the life and work of pioneering women in STEM who aren’t Marie Curie, because occasionally we forget that there were others. Great idea and some very cool designs here. 
• Ki Ecobe: I am often mocked by people who know me for (amongst other things) wearing really bad, often massive trainers – yeah, well, sorry, but they still look better than these. A Kickstarter project to fund a modular, self-assembly shoe which is hugely customisable and which, I am sad to say, looks like a hoover attempted to mate with a cockroach. Still, you might think differently and look at these and think WANT; it’s over halfway there with a month to go, so your wish could very easily become reality. 
• Super Mario in Hololens: The guy in the video who also coded this is SO CUTE. The video shows his recreation of the first level of Super Mario in AR, using the Hololens – see the koopas come towards you! Jump! Catch coins! And, as the other video in the top right demonstrates, look like an idiot whilst so doing! Obviously just a proof of concept and a chance for the man to show off his impressive coding skills, but fun nonetheless – have to say though that at no point does this look like it would actually be anything approximating to ‘fun’.
• Swimsuits: You will, I am sure, have seen those swimsuits doing the rounds online – you know, the one-pieces printed with Trump’s mouth or a hairy chest or other HILARIOUS imagery. Well, this is the place that actually sells them, so put your money where your mouth is or alternatively STOP FCUKING SHARING THEM EVERYWHERE. I do quite like the ‘bikini’ one, mind. 
• Unpaid Intern: Continuing the sartorial theme, these are tshirts which simply read ‘Unpaid Intern’ – 15% of the profits go to Save the Children, so if you want to look amusingly edgy/like an absolute tool (delete as applicable) you know what to do. Bonus points to any agency which actually does unpaid internships and gets a job lot of these in which to dress said unpaid interns. 
• Dog Photographer of the Year: Insert your own tedious commentary about doggos, puppers and 12/10 here, despite knowing full well that it is played out as you like. 
• Loveflutter: The latest attempt to find a novel twist on the dating app formula (doomed to failure, I think); this one’s gimmick is that it hooks up to your Twitter account and uses your latest 10 tweets (or a selection you can curate yourself) to present your ‘personality’ to potential mucal companions. Can you imagine? I could never use this, mainly because all anyone would see is a bunch of links to webspaff interspersed with block-caps swearing, but maybe you’re better at presenting as an attractive, witty human being on twitter dot com.
• The Dutch National Archive: On Flickr. No idea why you’d necessarily want this, unless you’re Dutch or a student of their history, but if you want to browse through a huge archive of photos from the history of the Netherlands then you are in luck. Aside from anything else, there are some cracking moustaches in here which deserve your attention. 
• The Corsairs Project: Quite odd this, like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland made photographic. Artist Samuka Marinho has spent…Christ only knows how long taking and digitally manipulating pictures of what she imagines pirate life on the Spanish Main. These are a weird combination of beatifully atmospheric and incredibly camp, and there is a LOT of work in here; if nothing else, worth bookmarking for the moodboards when the Captain Morgan repitch rolls around again. 
• Social Cooling: An interesting thesis / manifesto, this, which argues that, as we become more aware of the extent to which what we say online is being tracked and used, we will inevitably become more cautious about what we say / share online which will eventually over time lead to significant changes in how we interact with each other. Hyperbolic, perhaps, but also probably true to an extent.
• After School Satan: The offcial after school programme of the US Satanic Temple, set up as a satirical jab at the rules in the US which mean that no religion can be constituionally limited from setting up after school clubs. No word on what activities are undertaken at said clubs, but I’m pretty sure it’s all above board. 
• Automating Soundcloud: This is SO CLEVER and one of you really ought to steal this asap. It’s a paper on how the author created a Soundcloud file which started off as a distorted mess and which over time became less distorted the more often it played, until finally the actual track was revealed. CAN YOU SEE THE POSSIBILITIES? CAN YOU? Come on, this is golden and actually SO simple (it’s just a Soundcloud upload hack, nothing more). USE IT. 
• Reddup: Reddit, but with a nicer UI. 
• LED Fidget Spinners: Yes, I know, but this is quite fun, potentially – these are fidget spinners with programmable LED lights on them which means you can make them read whatever you want when they are spun. You’ve probably got 2-3 weeks to think of something stunty you can do with this before we all get so sick of the bloody things that we consign them to the fad oubliette for a decade or so. Oh, and please do take note of the company name – that’s…that’s not ok, is it?
• Inspirobot: Autogenerating inspirational quotes, presented as an image macro which is PERFECT for sharing on Facebook or Insta. I strongly suggest that you reconfigure your personal brand this weekend to make it ALL ABOUT sharing these all over your socials and seeing which of your friends fails to call you out about it. 
• A Really High-Res Photo Of A Furry Convention: Just LOOK at them!
• Dark Stock Photos: The best Twitter account I’ve seen in ages. Stock photos, but HORRIBLE. 
• Drug Slang Codewords: Look, if you haven’t seen this then ENJOY – this is the US’ Drug Enforcement Agency’s May 2017 handbook listing all their known slang terms for various narcotics; PLEASE, all of you, spend the weekend using as many of these as possible; I really want to hear your stories about texting your man this evening with a request for a couple of grams of ‘Movie Star Drug’ (no, really, that’s on the list), or a half-dozen doses of ‘speed for lovers’ (words fail me).
• Deleted City: Oh wow. An incredible zoomable map of old geocities sites; zoom in, and keep zooming, and realise how deep this goes and how many there were, and what an incredible archive of a certain part of web history this is. To quote, “This website is an interactive visualisation of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain. In full view, the map is a data-visualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighbourhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.” Wow, really.
• Kawaiiswap: I grudgingly concede that there’s the kernel of an idea here, but I am grumpy about it. This is a Chrome plugin that analyses what you type on social media and, should you have the temerity to express negativity, suggests that you swap out the sad for some cute gifs instead! Yeah! Sunshine! Rainbows! Even worse, it was created by some dgital agency as a showcase – STOP BEING SO INSUFFERABLY TWEE, YOU CNUTS. Yeah, gif that you bastards. 
• If This Is A Man: Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is A Man’ remains one of the canonical novels about the Holocaust (imho alongside Tadeusz Borowski’s ‘This Way To The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen); this is a live reading of it, presented by the South Bank Centre. It’s a wonderful reminder of just what an incredible piece of writing it is. 
• Digital Forensics Tools: A SUPER-USEFUL Google doc compiling a whole bunch of useful tools and tips for doing digital research (in the journalistic sense) – how to search, where to look up IPs, all that sort of stuff. You may know lots of these, but you’re unlikely to know all of them – if you do anything investigate-y then this is potentially invaluable as a resource. 
• 4d Toys: My experience with this was one of those regular, unpleasant reminders that I’m really nowhere near as smart as I wish I was; this site basically takes you through the concept of 4 dimensionality (in the real sense, not in the Merlin Entertainment sense whereby the 4th dimension is, it seems, being sprayed in the face with water) as a primer for the digital toybox which accompanies the site. This is honestly mind-bending, I promise you, and also very, very interesting indeed. 
• Crystals for the Yoni: Look, why OUGHTN’T you indulge in some crystal-based vulva therapy? Totally sfw, I promise. 
• Moo Party: You can make these ASCII cows say whatever you want in this three-panel comic. I have no idea what use you might find for this, but I trust in your ingenuity. 
• The Apology Simulator: A very clever little Twine project, using the IF format to allow the reader/player to explore various ways of apologising in various scenarios. Exploring questions of privilege, this at times was a very hard read for me indeed; your mileage may vary, but I think it’s rather beautiful. 
• Evert 45: One of several really rather lovely interactive sites to close out this section, this is the companion web project to a Dutch TV Show (I think) which explores one man’s journey in 1945 to find his brother in post-war Holland. The interface is gorgeous, it uses video beautifully and the story is genuinely moving; really very well-made indeed. 
• I’m Your Man: This is equally good – it’s a digital ‘documentary’ to accompany a stage play about Australia’s boxing legends; you play at boxing training and actual fighting while you’re introduced to a succession of famous faces (fists) from the sport’s antipiodean past. This is excellent (and the music’s ace). 
• Tabel: An experiment in 360-degree theatre/filmmaking, this is a short vignette taking place in the garden of an exclusive restaurant – here’s their setup: “Tonight is a very special night and you, the viewer are lucky enough to have found a last minute seat at Tabel Restaurant, one of the most exclusive farm-to-table restaurants around. Unfortunately, Tabel has serious problems in the kitchen. The waiter is exceptional at hiding these problems but the influential patrons of the restaurant are slowly catching on to the ripening catastrophe that is so obviously escalating around them. Will anyone take action to save the restaurant and themselves?” It’s an interesting idea, and the sound design is excellent, but it wasn’t quite a compelling enough story to keep me interested; see what you think.
• Otis: Yes, ok, fine, it’s ANOTHER of these ‘watch a film, switch between perspectives’ video (who knew that sodding Honda ad would have such a long tail, eh?), but this is genuinely seamless and the story of the short is really very good; plus the multiple perspectives really do reward repeat views. Sort of an object lesson in how to do this sort of thing imho. 
• Chardonnay & Adderall: The latest single from Portugal the Man (whose SOUND OF THE SUMMER earworm was featured here back in March, f your i), this is single-serving site which uses multiple pop-ups to tell the story. It’s GREAT. Enjoy, and watch adland do this really badly in September. 

By Kim Leutwyler

LAST UP, GET YOURSELF PUMPED FOR THE WEEKEND WITH REDDIT’S FRANKLY ALMOST-TOO-MUCH PLAYLIST OF ‘HYPE’ SONGS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Tabletop Whale: Infographics, illustrations and animations by the exceptionally talented Eleanor Lutz who you ought to commission (no, I don’t know her, I just think the work here is very strong).
• Probably Bad RPG Ideas: Your appreciation for this almost certainly maps pretty much exactly onto your appreciation of Dungeons & Dragons (DON’T JUDGE ME). 
• Dank Doggos: Canine-based memery, compiled in one easy-to-bookmark location. Exactly the sort of intersection of weird Twitter, memeland and normie culture that I love. 
• Je Me Trouve Ici: My friend Tassos is on a journey (literal AND metaphorical, YEAH!); this Tumblr is a selection of clues as to where he might be at any given point. You can try and solve them if you like, and drop him a line to tell him how you’re getting on. He’d like that, and there would probably be some sort of small reward in it for you. 
• Neo-Brutalism: I’m a sucker for this stuff, really. 
• Lesbian Separatist Cottage Fantasy: Sadly this is just an interiors blog, but the title is absolutely wonderful. 
• Glitchp0rn: Bongo, but all glitched out and fcuked up. Actual, proper bongo, mind, so even though it’s a bit fuzzy it’s still the sort of thing someone might do a doubletake at should you decide to fullscreen it in the office. Still, it’s ART so fcuk them and their pr…pr…no, sorry, it’s gone. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Dispatch From Grenfell: If you’ve not already seen this, do read it; the accoung of a firefighter who attended to the blaze last week, talking about their experience and the work they do and how it felt being in the middle of it. Incredible, visceral piece of writing, this. 
• Talking To The King of Musical.ly: You saw that incredible lipsyncing video last month, right? The one with all the crazy edits and transitions, all made with Musical.ly?  Well if not click the link, watch the clip and the read the kid talk about how he made it. To be clear, this is sort of interesting from a cultural point of view, but mostly because of the very useful practical tips he gives on how to achieve the sort of jaw-dropping effects he manages. 
• A Typical Day In A Blockchain World: A day in a blockchain-enabled future, in the company of, for no discernible reason, Crowley the Crocodile. Leaving aside this slightly baffling conceit, this is a really interesting evocation of some of the real-world applications of the blockchain, taking in touchpoints across the course of Crowley’s day. It’s…odd, but all based on possible applications of the technology (although I think the pizza conveyor belt is possibly a touch fanciful).
• My Body Doesn’t Belong To You: We really oughtn’t need another piece written by a woman about the ownership men seem to feel over her body, and yet here we are. Heather Burtman’s piece in the NYT says little new, but it says the same sad things very well indeed. 
• Reviewing The Reviewers: Starting out as an obviously slightly facetious tissue-thin pitch and developing by the end into quite a weird journey into darkness, VICE’s Oobah Butler goes on a quest to meet the people who leave THOSE reviews on Tripadvisor; you know, the joyless types who you sort of always expect to be Reader’s Digest readers who complain about the lighting and the wobbly table and the waiter’s supercilious sneer and I said to Janice, I said, who DOES he think he is, that’s his tip gone, I don’t mind telling you I’ve a mind to NAME him, Janice, to NAME him on Tripadvisor, those people. It’s GREAT.
• The Sex-Positive House: Imagine living in a house with a bunch of other people who are all SEX POSITIVE and love TALKING ABOUT SEX and DEMONSTRATING SEX TECHNIQUES and stuff, who are all polyamorous and pansexual and oh God it sounds ghastly, doesn’t it, exhausting and grim and like it might be somewhat akin to a weekend with scientologists or something. This article introduces the residents of a ‘sex-positive’ dwelling in the US, and, as you’d expect, manages to make the entire experience sound about as sexy as an enema (not sexy, in case you were wondering), and the description of the ‘squirting workshop’ is, er, wow. 
• Pr0nhub and the American Sexual Imagination: A really interesting exploration of what Pr0nhub data says about what American’s are into sexually, and how its existence is changing sexual appetites and mores; not just in the ‘bongo is ruining our teens’ sense, but in the more general ‘people are finding out about kinks that they would never have known existed without this stuff’, which isn’t per se a bad thing. Contains absolutely nowehere near enough about the inexplicable rise in searches for ‘giant’ last year though, which I am still higely curious about. 
• Oxbridge Wine: An excellent portrayal of the very strange world of Varsity wine tasting, in which teams from Oxford and Cambridge compete to see who are the best winetasters (you can’t really imagine, say, Manchester and Portsmouth doing this, can you?). Peopled by some pretty strong eccentrics, this is not only really interesting but a reminder of quite how…weird Oxbridge can look. 
• The Vagina Whisperer: A profile of Dr. Amir Marashi, a US surgeon who’s made a name for himself performing vaginoplasties. Interestingly  the piece’s author starts being pretty ready to give the guy a kicking, but over the course of the narrative comes to th conclusion that vaginal surgery has been unfairly stigmatised for a whole variety of reasons; there’s a lot of really interesting stuff here about gender politics, quite aside from all the chat about yoni-reshaping. I imagine if you have a vagina this might make you feel a touch squeamish, what with the surgical descriptions, so caveat emptor – no photos or anything though, so very much SFW.
• The Sociology of the Smartphone: Thanks to Josh for pointing me at this – a GREAT read about the smartphone and how it’s changed society. Really well-considered, this is an extract from a forthcoming book which, if this is anything to go by, will be worth reading. It’s hardly a revelatory observation, but it’s quite astounding the pace at which it has reconfigured so many aspects of human life in such a short space of time. 
• Smaller and Smaller and Smaller: In another week in which the US establishment continued the legitimisation of the murder of black people by police officers, Marlon James (Booker winner for A Brief History of Seven Killings) wrote this on his Facebook Page, about being big, and black, in America, and how black people seem to need to constantly make themselves smaller and to take up less space to avoid being seen as a threat to society. Excellent, angry and sad. 
• Mapping Choose Your Own Adventure Stories: This is SUCH a wonderful way to map branching narratives, and I would like someone to make an easy wayto produce diagrams like these thankyouverymuchindeed. 
• Meet The Ball Boys: This is…wow. The story of Lavar Ball, a man who had a dream that his three sons would all play in the NBA and who has dedicated seemingly his whole life – and that of his wife, and indeed those of his kids – to that end. There is single-minded focus, and there is Lavar Ball; there is pushy parenting, and there is Lavar Ball. This man is DRIVEN. Poor the kids, though I guess if the make the Show then it’ll all have been worthwhile. Probably. 
• The Blathering Superego at the End of History: This is a very good if somewhat miserable essay, positing that liberalism has lost – or at least the triumphalist version of it which appeared unstoppable in the early 2000s – and that we need to work out why. This is the final sentence – it’s a nice representation of the overall style, and the whole piece is a very smart look at contemporary political discourse (or what passes for it): “In the face of these epochal changes, the superego of managerial liberalism is impotent. On some level it knows that. But it cannot simply abdicate, and it will take a while yet for it to wither entirely away. In the meantime, all it can do is blather, make empty threats of guilt and shame, issue fact-checks and explainers, shout from the roadside to an indifferent planet as the whole world goes libidinal and mad.”
• The Ken Doll Reboot: Because you need to know everything about man-bun Ken, the week’s REAL big story. 
• Hell Is Empty and All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio: A brilliantly angry, slightly ranty, in-no-way-objective account of the SALT conference in Vegas, where the very rich, and the people who move money around on behalf of the very rich, go to discuss how to continue being very rich. Having spent a bit of time in and around this space recently I can only stress quite how accurate this feels, and quite how much I really don’t want to ever have to spend time in this sort of space ever again, ever. 
• The Answer Is Never: On being comfortable in the knowledge that one doesn’t want to have children, and the difficulties that society seems to have in accepting that, particularly when the indivdual making the choice is a woman. So, so good – I can’t recommend this highly enough. 
• Meet Poppy: Poppy is one of my favourite things on the web at the moment. Whether you consider her a popstar, an art project, or some sort of trapped hybrid of the two, the metanarrative around her persona coupleed with the absolute cast-iron oddness of the project makes the whole thing particularly compelling to me. If you’re unfamiliar with who Poppy is, take 10 minutes to read this and familiarise yourself; there’s some new ish dropping later today (Friday 23) I think, so maybe now’s a good time to enter the bubble. 
• Oh James, You’re FILTHY!: I’d always known that Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle were on the fruity side, but I don’t think I’d ever seen them reproduced in full and MAN is there some smut in here – Joyce was a man of what I believe might euphemistically described as ‘earthy tastes’, and this selection of prose written by him to Nora over a few December days show quite how sexually obsessed with her he was. The acts here described may not be to your taste – it’s, er, a touch extreme in places – but there’s no denying the fabulous vitality in the writing. Also, let’s be honest, it’s never not funny reading people talk about being turned on by farts. 

By Joseph Bsharah

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is by Aldous Harding who I’ve featured already this year and whose album, Party, is honestly superb. I’m featuring this in part because it’s a great song, and, I have to admit, because I fnd her absolutely spellbinding in the video. It’s called ‘Blend’:

2) Next, this isn’t new but I have been obsessed with this record for the past two months and I can’t not share the video; this is called ‘No Halo’ and it’s by Sorority Noise and it is devastating to me:

3) This is by ‘Death From Above’ and it is the best video featuring godlike bodybuilders watching the world burn that you will see all year. It’s called ‘Freeze Me’:

4) Have you ever wondered what the exact aural equivalent of the way that this year has made you feel so far is? Wonder no more – it is THIS. ‘Thot’, by Icauna (great visuals too):

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is by Web Curios favourite Manga St Hilare, from his excellent recent album Outbursts from the Outskirts – it’s called Young, and it’s ACE; hugely underrated, Manga, imho:

6) This is called ‘Time for Sushi’. Just watch it:

7) Last this week, a short film by the reliably odd Die Antwoord – it’s called ‘Tommy Can’t Sleep’, and it’s possible that after watching it you might not be able to either. BYE IT’S SO GOOD TO BE BACK I HAVE MISSED YOU ALL SO MUCH BYE BYE BYE:

Publisher’s note: This week, we remember Clare-Marie Grigg who was the first editor of Imperica and has sadly passed away. Our thoughts are with Clare’s family and friends at this very sad time.