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

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

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

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

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

By Christophe Agou

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

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

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

By Yunil Nam

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

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

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

By Naro Pinosa

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

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

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

By Sarah Harvey

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Kris Kuksi

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Vaka Valo

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

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

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

By Ian Fisher

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

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

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

By Jacob Howard

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

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

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

By Owen Freeman

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Jean Vincent Simonet

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had a whole thing ready to go in my head last night about TWO WEEKS TO GO and all that jazz, but a) I was quite stoned and so it was almost certainly awful; and b) the news this morning was so horrific that I don’t really feel in the mood for making funnies about how banjaxed everything is.

This is Web Curios, please be nice to each other.

By Michael Baratz Koren

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE ANNUAL NPR SELECTION OF THE BEST NEW MUSIC FROM SXSW!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOTHING PARTICULARLY PITHY TO SAY ABOUT THE STATE OF THE S*C**L M*D** ECOSYSTEM THIS WEEK BUT WHICH WOULD JUST LIKE TO GENTLY POINT OUT THAT FACEBOOK’S OWN RULES ON WHAT YOU ARE AND ARE NOT ALLOWED TO POST ON THE PLATFORM CLEARLY STATE THAT ‘IMAGES OF REAL NUDE ADULTS INCLUDING VISIBLE ANUS AND/OR FULLY NUDE BUTTOCKS’ ARE NOT ALLOWED, ‘UNLESS PHOTOSHOPPED ON A PUBLIC FIGURE; THIS SEEMINGLY MEANS THAT YOU CAN FLOOD FACEBOOK WITH IMAGES OF THE CURRENT GOVERNMENT WITH THEIR MOUTHS REPLACED BY A GAPING, DISTENDED ANUS WITH NO FEAR OF REPRISAL, SO, WELL, FILL YOUR METAPHORICAL BOOTS!

• Facebook Replacing ‘Relevance Score’ With 3 New Metrics!: It’s coming! In April! No, sorry, this is too boring for me to waste time rewriting – you can have the bare bones and that’s it: “The new metrics are quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking. The quality ranking metric will measure an ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same target audience. The engagement rate metric will work the same way, showing an ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience. The conversion rate ranking shows an ad’s expected conversion rates when compared to ads with the same optimization goals and audience. As with the previous relevance score, these new metrics are not factored into an ad’s performance in the auction, but instead provide insights into how changes to creative assets, audience targeting or post-click experience may impact ad performance.” Happy? No, of course you aren’t, it’s 2019.
• Insta to Now Allow Sponsorship of Influencer Posts: Insta is launching ‘branded content ads’, which will let ad buyers put spent behind the posts of influencers they’re collaborating with. Which is, on the one hand, a nice way of being able to add a boost to your organic marketing efforts but which on the other is a nice new way to make you pay twice for a single activation. One might wonder why, if you need to pay to promote the post, you’re bothering throwing money at the shiny-haired ‘influencer’ in the first place, but, well, fuckit, it’s only you’re client’s money, and they’re getting you to handle this because they don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on so you can probably piss their money up the wall with impunity because, well, this is all a waste of time, isn’t it?
• Twitter Launches News Camera: Gosh, that sounds grandiose, doesn’t it? A NEWS CAMERA! The reality is much more prosaic, though – it just means that the Twitter app’s been updated so as to immediately open the camera when you swipe right within in, inviting people to immediately share live images and video into the feed, as part of Twitter’s ONGOING BRAND TRUTH about being the medium of the RIGHT NOW (or somesuch wank – you can, I am sure, come up with your own startlingly-banal agency strap-concept here). There’s not a huge amount for brands or agencies here, though it’s worth pointing out that as this is a new feature that Twitter’s trying to push there’s every possibility that posts from the Live Camera view will get a small algoboost over the next few weeks and that you’ll be able to get decent numbers in the short term simply by streaming any old tat. THIS IS THE FUTURE OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION! There’s a marginally better explanation of the featureset here, should you desire it, but, honestly, it’s very dull.
• Periscope Clamping Down on Spam: Although you won’t be able to stream stuff that features FAKE HEARTS and stuff like that. Not that you do that.
• Snap Becomes Layar (Or A N Other AR App From 10 Years Ago): Fine, it’s not quite that clear cut, but Snap has launched a new feature which brings it another step closer to being the technological AR layer underpinning all consumer-facing augmented reality stuff; this is the sort of thing I was convinced Snap already did, but apparently didn’t. You can now add Snap codes to a pack or poster which users can scan to see an AR ‘experience’ – in the same way as you’ve always been able to with other platforms, frankly, but this is another piece in Snap’s increasingly powerful AR toolkit that brands can harness. They launched this at SXSW with Game of Thrones and Pokemon activations, because one can never underestimate the tedious homogeneity of mass-market popular culture.
• Pinterest’s Ad Platform Expands to 4 More European Countries: I’m not telling you which ones, you can click the link just like I had to (oh, fine, it’s Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy).
• Twitter Launches Business Podcast: It’s a podcast! All about using Twitter! For BUSINESS! I confess to not having listened to any of this, but I imagine it’s aimed at small businesses and contains the STARTLING REVELATION that Twitter thinks that succeeding on the platform is combination of GREAT CONTENT and PAYING FOR ADS! Saved you a listen there, lads.
• Mighty Jungle: After the ‘portfolio website as Google Sheet’ from a few weeks back, we now have ‘agency website as Google Slides’! This is really nicely done and, honestly, makes me think I probably ought to suggest this to all clients from now on and save myself the headache of project managing website builds and all the idiot questions they entail (‘can we have more animation on the homepage? And can we make sure that there’s a really prominent blogs section that will never get updated because all our staff have the natural prose style of 4Chan commenters? Thanks!’).
• Time To Play Fair: You may have heard that Spotify is really upset with Apple at the moment for a variety of frankly tedious antitrust reasons that I can’t be bothered to explain but which you can learn more about if you click the link – this is the campaign site, aimed both at the public and regulators, which takes you through all the reasons Spotify are livid and Apple are baddies. I’m including it in the main as it’s a nice example of corporate comms and, also, a STAGGERINGLY ballsy move; pretty sure Spotify’s money will run out before Apple’s here, but, regardless, nice site.
• Questions In The Sky: This is LOVELY by Air France – I presume aimed at parents about to get on a plane with small kids, this site presents a small ‘game’ where you navigate a plane through the skies in a top-down view, passing through numbered clouds each of which presents a question about plane travel (“how does it stay in the air?”, “why can’t I open the doors?”, “will we all inevitably die if the engines fail?”, that sort of thing) answered by an Air France crewperson. Were I unfortunate enough to have to travel with a small child, this is EXACTLY the sort of thing I would try and distract them with while I got six pints deep at ‘Spoons pre-flight.
• Thisables: I keep on seeing excellent work by IKEA at the moment, and this is no exception; Thisables is a small site for IKEA in Israel (I think) which presents 3d-printable add-ons for IKEA furniture (and, I think, furniture in general), designed to make it easier to use and better to interact with for people with physical disabilities. Simple, smart and a great idea, this is excellent.

By Ilya Nodia

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY THIS PLAYLIST OF CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE-EASTERN TRACKS FROM ALL OVER THE REGION?

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY THINKS THAT IF YOU WORK FOR THE DAILY MAIL OR THE SUN AND YOU DON’T TELL YOUR EMPLOYERS THAT THEY ARE SCUM FOR POSTING THAT VIDEO ON THEIR HOMEPAGE TODAY THAT YOU TOO ARE SCUM AND OUGHT TO BE FCUKING ASHAMED OF YOURSELF YOU CRAVEN SH1TBAG, PT.1:

• The Gendered Project: An excellent library of gendered words, designed to draw attention to the many ways in which language reinforces and perpetuates gender roles and stereotypes. Not hugely shiny, fine, but if you’re in any way interested in language or linguistics then this is fascinating. To quote the project’s creator, “Early in 2017, during a discussion with my friends, I used the word fcukboy to describe a man I had dealt with. I wondered out loud why it took so long for a word that so aptly describes a common type of man to be used in popular culture. I thought of the myriad words that exist to derogatorily describe or shame sexually liberated women (as a social category) and the dearth of such equivalent words for men (as a social category). I decided to try and create something that would allow us to explore what the English language tells us about men, women and those who do not fit in those binaries.” If you love words, you’ll love this.
• TwoTone: Thanks Josh for pointing me at this – this is a totally pointless (at least for most of you – fine, there may be one person reading this who has a decent reason to turn spreadsheets into songs, but if that’s the case I would like you to get in touch with me and tell me WHY) tool which lets up upload a table of numerical data in Excel or CSV form and which will then translate said data table into music, based on the numerical values contained therein. Have you ever wanted to know what sort of cacophonous mess your corporate accounts would sound like if rendered in the musical style of a Bontempi organ? No, of course you haven’t. Christ, no imagination, you lot. I just plugged in a bunch of numbers about the state of the European technology industry and let me tell you it sounded GREAT.
• Data Gif Maker: One of several Google projects in here this week, this first is DATA GIF MAKER which, as the name might have indicated, lets you make gifs! From data! That’s a bit grandiose – you basically choose from three types of visualisation, input your numbers and it then lets you export a small gif showing said numbers. There’s not a lot of flexibility here, but if you want to create a nice, primary coloured visual showing, I don’t know, how much better this year’s sales figures are compared to last year’s, then this might make your otherwise tedious existence momentarily more exciting.
• Imagenet Roulette: Fun with image recognition! Upload any photo to this site and it will attempt to analyse it, recognising visible faces and assessing them based on its base dataset – “ImageNet Roulette uses a neural network trained on the “people” categories from the ImageNet dataset to classify pictures of people. It’s meant to be a peek into how artificial intelligence systems classify people, and a warning about how quickly AI becomes horrible when the assumptions built into it aren’t continually and exhaustively questioned.” This is GREAT, if rather horrible – I just chucked in a photo of the Chelsea squad from last year, and the software has chosen to label all of them with words like ‘cheat’ and ‘dissembler’, which suggests that the underlying software is, well, possibly quite accurate actually. I suggest that you try it with a group shot of your last corporate social event and then circulate the results – there’s nothing guaranteed to engender a pleasant workplace spirit like a photo in which a nameless piece of software calls you all stupid based on what it thinks of your faces.
• AI Art Online: A gallery collecting a bunch of AI (not, really, AI)-generated artworks, of the GAN-ish variety. Curated by Luba Elliot, who also writes an excellent occasional newsletter about this sort of thing which is worth a sub if you’re interested in computer-generated artworks.
• Bolo: This isn’t available in the UK – I think it’s India-only – but you can get round it with a VPN if you’re interested; Bolo is an app by Google designed specifically to help young children learn to read in both English and Hindi. The idea itself isn’t novel – apps designed to help with early-stage education are not a staggeringly innovative idea, after all – but it’s interesting that this is Google’s first step into this space. One would imagine that in time it will roll out parallel apps for all major languages, as part of its goal to bake it and its services into all corners of human life from as early as possible a time. I know, I know, this is horribly cynical of me – poor Google, just trying to teach the children to read, and doing it for FREE! – but I can’t help but think that someone somewhere over there has also spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time doing research into the long-term effects of positive, logo-led brand associations from infant-stage adoption.
• In Her Kitchen: I ADORE these photos. In Her Kitchen is a photo series which presents grandmothers from around the world, in their kitchen, surrounded by ingredients, and in parallel shows a photo of the finished dish made using said materials. Obviously this is riffing off the canonical Italian concept of the nonna – the stereotype of a slightly wizened woman of 80+ with forearms like hams who, when dressed in black, can carry seventeen times her own bodyweight in fresh fruit and vegetables – but it features women from all over the globe. The photos are lovely, not least the differing spread of foods being prepared; these will make you want to call your gran.
• Inaeent: Laura C Hewitt makes pottery, roughly inspired by typeset letters and weird mechanics, and it is great – slightly weird, slightly creepy, a tiny bit bodyhorror and all oddly eldritch (to my mind, at least); the plates and cups with the spiralling, clustered letters and numbers are wonderfully unsettling and a little bit like the sort of vessels you would drink very strong black tea from were you going very quietly insane (yes, I know that that’s a very specific description, but trust me when I say it is true).
• Squad: Squad is an app which does one simple thing – through it, users can share a live feed of their phonescreen with their friend, so that you can both experience the same view simultaneously. There are SO many obvious use-cases for this, and it’s quite interesting doing some reading across socials to see what people have been using it for since it launched last month – Tinder is a perfect example, with this being used to enable friends to discuss whether to swipe left or right on a bunch of matches. Obviously there’s obviously a huge parallel use case in terms of bullying – watch while I pretend to like this person I’m messaging before pulling a rapid and cruel reveal for the benefit of my watching audience! – but let’s for a moment pretend that people are actually nice and won’t in fact do that sort of thing. No idea if this will ever get any significant traction, but this is a very interesting idea imho.
• Adventurous: This is a brilliant idea and, I think, a dreadful business – though if someone could explain to me how it would be possible to do this without losing millions then I’d be hugely grateful. Adventurous is a service available in San Francisco, which puts on incredible-sounding immersive theatrical /experiential…things for kids and their families. Combining live performance and AR layered over real-world locations, this sounds incredibly involved and the sort of thing that has to be run at a loss unless they’re charging $1k a pop or it’s actually incredibly shonkily done. Regardless, it’s the sort of thing that I would jump at the chance to try – should any of you be in San Francisco (I think at least one of you is) can you try it out and let me know? Thanks. (by the way, additional thanks to all of you who do occasionally answer when I ask these questions in Curios – it’s honestly really appreciated).
• Tune: The comments and the horror getting you down online? Well why not install this Chrome extension, which works to tune out (DO YOU SEE?) all the bad stuff from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and others? You can continue to browse the web without seeing any of the UGLY stuff and instead skipping through your online existence like a digital Fotherington-Tomas, pretending that everything is fine and that the web isn’t in fact a hate-filled morass of awful! I’m conflicted about this – on the one hand, it’s right and proper that one ought to be able to shield oneself from some of the more egregiously awful hatestupidity spouted online; on the other, I do sort of think that just sticking one’s digital fingers in one’s digital ears or putting some sort of ersatz digital blindfold on isn’t perhaps addressing the baseline issues underpinning all of the egregiously awful hatestupidity.
• Six: Billing itself as ‘Instagram, but for hotels!’ which, honestly, sounds like the most boring thing in the history of tedium, but wevs, Six is an app which promises to match YOU, discerning traveler who wants somewhere boutique and cool and stylish to visit, ideally somewhere with a massively Instagrammable bathroom and statement wall, with your perfect hotel. There is, OBVIOUSLY, some sort of pseudo-AI (not AI) bullsh1t involved in here, whereby the app will ANALYSE YOUR STYLE PREFERENCES and recommend hotels based on its unique understanding of who you are and what you believe and suchlike, and you can book through it too; this is, personally, about as far away from my interest as it’s possible to be without being Top Gear, but some of you might find this of interest (and given its likely target market there might be some advermarketingpr hookup you could engender with some of your clients, potentially).
• Trash Plastic: This is a GREAT site, and an odd throwback to the old days of the web where people did stuff like blog. Sophe Tait is a Londoner who at the tail end of 2017 decided to reduce her and her household’s plastic usage by 80%; over a year on, she’s put together this website as a practical guide for anyone else who might fancy using a bit less plastic in their lives. This is full of actually useful tips that are achievable even if you’re not the sort of person who’s going to recycle egg cartons to make ‘pleasing artisanal planters’ or suchlike wankery – honestly, I am so charmed by this site (and if you’re a brand who’s looking to do a bit of homely greenwashing them there’s an obviously sponsorship/partnership opportunity here should you wish to exploit it).
• Accessibility Insights: Automatic accessibility testing for websites. Useful and might hopefully go some way towards ensuring that developers don’t forget all about accessibility when undertaking site builds (actually that’s unfair – it’s not just the devs, it’s the clients too; when was the last time anyone you work with bothered to even mention accessibility testing? Or, er, is it just that I work exclusively with bastards who don’t care? Oh God, it’s that, isn’t it?).
• Lookout: Oh WOW, this is magic. New from Google, and only available on Pixel devices in the US, this is very much a glimpse of the future – Lookout is an app designed for the visually impaired, and which works to identify objects seen by the camera. Users point their phone at stuff, and the app recognises what’s there and tells them – brilliantly, there’s a degree of discernment built in, meaning that it won’t attempt to list everything in its field of vision but instead limit itself to describing those things it deems significant (car, road, wall, mushroom cloud, etc etc). Not only that, but it has text-recognition capabilities, meaning you can point it at a sign or page and it will read the text there displayed. Honestly astonishing tech, and one of those moments where I forget how weirdly creepy Google is and just feel a sort of gentle affection for our unaccountable tech overlords (is this…Stockholm Syndrome?).
• Sumerian: Another day, another step in MechaBezos’ inexorable progress towards being at the heart of EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. Sumerian is a new suite of tools developed by Amazon and newly available to developers who want to make VR, AR or 3d experiences – it contains modelling, animation and scripting tools, is compatible with all the major VR viewers from HTC to Oculus, and you can even design stuff in-browser. All very impressive stuff, and useful if you’re interested in playing around in this space, but between this and the videogame development platform that they released last year(ish) it’s additional proof that there is literally no area of futurebusiness that Amazon’s not interested in getting a foothold in.
• Nedl: It’s pronounced ‘Needle’, and apparently has some sort of funny character over the ‘e’, but I’m typing on an anglo keyboard and, honestly, I can’t be fcuked to look up how to type it. Anyway, Nedl is a service which lets you search for anything by keyword and which promises to throw up live radio streams which are talking about that very thing from all around the world. It’s a download and I’ve not played with it that much – personally I’m not convinced as to why you would EVER need this, but you may be able to come up with a usecase.
• Firefox Send: Do you want a filetransfer service but for some reason not like WeTransfer? Well have Firefox Send, then, which is seemingly EXACTLY the same but, well, made by Firefox.
• Comixify: Do you remember a few years ago when there was a brief vogue for apps which took your photos and applied cool visual effects to them? Prisma, stuff like that, which got old quite quickly when we all realised that EVERYIONE could use them and that it made all our photos look exactly the same? Well this is like that, except it works on videos – plug in a YT url and it will (eventually) spit it out all retouched and tweaked, with a variety of effects including one that looks a bit like rotoscoping. No practical application that I can think of, other than to show people who work in low-level post-production gigs that their professional days are numbered too.
• Pi Music: It was ‘Pi Day’ yesterday on the American internet, a day which we can never really get excited about because to us right-thinking folk it’s nothing more than a continual reminder of how appallingly wrong those on the other side of the atlantic get their dating conventions, and I think this was released to mark it – why not have a listen to Shepherd’s Pi, a piece of music generated by the first billion digits of pi and which lasts for a continuous 999,999 years. Here’s an idea – why not make this the closing track at your funeral, and leave instructions that noone can leave the service til the music stops? You won’t be there to see it, fine, but that’s got to be worth a hollow deathbed chuckle.

By Alexander Reben

NEXT, HAVE THIS GORGEOUS AND SOOTHING STRINGS-BASED PLAYLIST TO RELAX YOU THROUGH THE COMING LINKS!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY THINKS THAT IF YOU WORK FOR THE DAILY MAIL OR THE SUN AND YOU DON’T TELL YOUR EMPLOYERS THAT THEY ARE SCUM FOR POSTING THAT VIDEO ON THEIR HOMEPAGE TODAY THAT YOU TOO ARE SCUM AND OUGHT TO BE FCUKING ASHAMED OF YOURSELF YOU CRAVEN SH1TBAG, PT.1:

• The Sewing and Embroidery Warehouse: The web, as you are doubtless all aware, turned 30 this week – by way of small tribute, I’m here including this EXCELLENT example of early websitework, which is not only an excellent resource if you’re into sewing and embroidery but which also contains a salutary reminder of why you really need to make sure your html is up to scratch. Scroll and you’ll get what I mean.
• How Random Can You Be?: Turns out it’s REALLY HARD to be random. This site asks you to simply hit left and right on your keypad, with no pattern whatsoever; it will try and predict which you’ll hit next. Each time it gets it right, you ‘lose’ virtual money; each time it doesn’t, you ‘win’ virtual money – the site keeps track of your performance, and you will very quickly realise that it’s a lot harder than you think it would be to act unpredictably. I am sure there is some very, very smart maths behind this but I am screwed if I can understand it- still, it’s sort of bafflingly cool.
• The Book of Kells, Online: Trinity College in Dublin have scanned and put online the whole Book of Kells, the legendary illuminated manuscript considered to be one of the finest extant examples of medieval religious texts; it’s wonderful to be able to examine these close-up.
• Genderless Voice: I think this was launched last week for International Women’s Day – regardless, it’s SUCH a good idea and I’m slightly surprised it didn’t get more pickup. Q is the world’s first genderless voice, designed for use in text-to-speech of home voice assistant software, and which you can try out on the site. There’s something initially very disconcerting about the way it shifts its pitch to maintain its genderless state, but you quickly stop noticing it – it’s interesting quite how fast one can just accept the fact that there are no strong gendered signals either way, and not consider it at all weird. Take from that what you will.
• YSplit: Based on the number of apps that currently exist to help young people split bills and payments, you’d think that the greatest threat facing this generation is their absolute base-level inabiliy to do simple maths. Still, this seems like quite a smart idea – multiple parties link their accounts to a card, which can be used to pay for joint purchases (meals, cinema tickets, 35million nitrous ampules, that type of thing) with all users being charged an equal split of the cost as soon as payment is processed. Sort-of useful sounding, but, equally, just do some mental arithmetic ffs.
• Travel Scams: A slightly crap website collecting reports of travel scams perpetrated on naive tourists across the world. This is useful solely as a means of marvelling at the sort of stuff people get taken in by – mate, look, if you need someone on a website to tell you that the Central European men on Tower Bridge doing the cup and ball game for £20 are perhaps not entirely legit (yes, DESPITE the fact that you just saw someone win £100! I KNOW!) then I’ve got some magic beans that you simply must see.
• Bell Labs in the 60s & 70s: Excellent vintage photos of people working with computers. You may not think you want to click this link, but I promise you that one of the people featured in this set – which, by the way, contains a lot of pleasing evidence that tech and IT work was in fact pretty diverse – features absolutely the greatest facial hair you will see all day.
• Woof3d: A mod for classic 3d shooter Wolfenstein3d in which instead of shooting the game’s famous Nazi dogs you can instead pet them. Let’s assume for the purposes of this writeup that the mod also de-Nazifies them, so you’re not in fact telling a bunch of fascist attack pups that they’re good boys.
• Hansard at Huddersfield: This is the second time I’ve featured an improved search function for Hansard in here – this is a new project by the University of Huddersfield, which has built a far nicer search and visualisation front-end over the standard corpus of recorded parliamentary business; you can track mentions of different terms over time, see who used them and see the exact snippets of speech in which they were used. Obviously the most immediately interesting thing to do is to check for swears – ‘cnut’ has been used a couple of times in recent years, but I was surprised to see that ‘twat’ has had such a high number of runouts.
• Sri Lankan Minefields: “Allison Joyce, a photographer with Getty Images, recently spent time with some of the Tamil women, many of them widows and survivors of the war, who work for the HALO Trust, one of the NGOs trying to clear one of the largest minefields in the world. Said Joyce: “Forty-four percent of HALO’s staff working in the minefields are female, of which 62 percent are the primary breadwinners of their family, and 37 percent have had relatives who were injured, killed, or went missing during the civil war. As of January 31, 2019, HALO Sri Lanka has cleared 309,354 mines and unexploded ordnance in Sri Lanka.”” These are wonderful shots.
• Avataaaaars: A nice, simple tool to generate 2d avatars for websites; you can choose skintone, hair length, eye colour, size and shape, and a whole bunch of other variables to create a really wide variety of faces. Particularly laudable is the fact that there’s no ‘gender’ binary here – you can create any type of look you want through the individual constituent elements, but they’re never labeled as ‘male’ or ‘female’ which I personally think is rather a nice touch.
• Tayl: ‘Turn articles into audio’ is not a new service, but Tayl is the first I’ve seen that will roll a whole bunch of them into your own personal podcast; the idea being that you could, say, plug all of the longreads from Curios into it and then listen to them as one long audio file (which would probably last about 3 days – on reflection, that’s perhaps not a viable solution to the whole ‘there’s too much fcuking stuff in your newsletter, Matt’ issue).
• The Celebrity Wiki Quiz: Guess the famous, based on the sections in their Wikipedia entry. This is surprisingly fun, and a really nice, simple hack of Wikipedia’s format. It’s American, so there are some that might be impossible for anglos unless you have a weird and encyclopaedic knowledge of US talkshow hosts, but there’s enough proper global famouses on here to make it worth a play.
• Movie Premieres Unlimited: A Twitter feed sharing some GREAT red carpet photography from film premieres in the (mainly) 90s. If you ever want a quick illustration of the differential standards applied to men and women in Hollywood, just look at some of the stuff the men get away with wearing. I mean, really.
• Traduora: A translation platform for teams. I’m really sorry, there’s literally nothing I can think of to make this less dull. Let’s…let’s move on.
• Hexagons: Do YOU have a longstanding need for a piece of software that will let you make hexagonal map-type things, of the sort you might use in tabletop wargaming if you’re that sort of person? No, you probably don’t, but nonetheless I present you with this site which lets you do that very thing, because I am CERTAIN that there will come a point in the future where at least one of you will desperately require such a thing and your life (professional or personal) will be SAVED thanks to me and Web Curios and my continued inability to prune this weekly mess of stuff like this, which is neither particularly interesting or particularly webby but is just, well, here. Still, if any of you do tabletop roleplaying this might be vaguely useful (clutching at straws rather here).
• Time Is Ltd: Well this is horrid. Time is Ltd is a workplace productivity tool designed to let bosses see EXACTLY what their staff are up to and quantify it for professional productivity gain. Plug it into your workplace IT and it will start tracking who opens emails from whom, which teams have most meetings, which people accept the most meeting invites…this sounds genuinely horrible and the sort of thing which would make your every workplace moment a surveilled hell so, er, don’t use it!
• Offensive Adult Party Game: Know anyone who thinks that Cards Against Humanity is the ne plus ultra of party funtime? Send them this instead and see if they get the joke.
• Pluto: Insurance FOR YOUNG PEOPLE! I am sure that this is a great company with a genuinely innovative business model, but equally I am sure that we’re hopefully reaching the bottom of the barrel when it comes to business models that can literally be summed up as “X for people who don’t like X”. Ticks all the Genzennial (sorry) stereotype boxes – personalised rewards? CHECK! Some light acknowledgement of the fact that this stuff is really boring and noone wants to have to think about it? CHECK! If you’re a feckless child who can’t be trusted with GROWNUP financial services products, perhaps this is for you!
• Tagging Monarchs: This might be the best thing I’ve learned all week. Did you know that there is a worldwide programme track butterflies by TAGGING THEM WITH TINY STICKERS?!?! This is honestly one of the cutest – and, if I’m honest, most wonderfully futile – human endeavours I’ve heard of in years. Seriously, even if you don’t want to read about the programme, just tick the link – I promise you the picture of the butterfly will make you feel slightly better.
• Logoland: This is an interesting service – Logoland will do you a logo, based on some basic information about your brand, for a flat-rate fee of $1500. Which, if you consider what branding agencies charge, seems like a genuinely reasonable price for a properly-designed piece of work by an actual human that you own and can use wherever you like.
• Co-parenter: As THE CHILD OF A BROKEN HOME (put away your hankies; the emotional damage mainly manifests itself in my shoddy treatment of others, I’m fine!) I can totally appreciate the fact that dealing with shared parenting can be a difficult and stressful thing; I do, though, despair slightly at the need for this app whose tagline is, seemingly with a straight face, “Save money. Stay out of court.Make better decisions for your kids.” Maybe…maybe reorder those priorities? Anyway, if you can’t arrange a pickup time with your ex without threatening them with some sort of creative form of significant physical violence then maybe this will be of servic.
• Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego?: Finally this week, a GREAT game on Google Earth, resurrecting the world-famous Carmen Sandiego franchise from the 80s/90s – hang on, you don’t know Carmen Sandiego? You never read the books or saw the series of played the game about the time travelling, globe-trotting, kickass female criminal Carmen Sandiego? WELL CORRECT THAT RIGHT NOW! This is genuinely great – loads of fun, lightly educational and a brilliant excuse to just mess around on Google Earth for the rest of the day because, as I’m at pains to remind you every week, if you work in advermarketingpr then your job is largely pointless and you should probably stop doing it!

By Seo Wonmi

LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS NOT IN FACT A MIX BUT A FULL ALBUM OF GLITCHY BREAKS BY JABRU – THIS IS EXCELLENT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Yideo Games: A series of posts on this particular Tumblr all about how to be Jewish in videogames – specifically, a lot of ridiculously-detailed enquiries into which Pokemon are kosher and whether Pacman sits Shiva after devouring those ghosts and that sort of thing. To be honest I am linking this mainly as the stupidity of the title made me laugh, but if you’re Jewish I imagine this is pretty funny (NB the blog’s authors are Jewish, fyi, so am reasonably confident linking to this presuming it’s all above board and well-intentioned).
• Art From The Future: Actually it’s all from the past, but there’s a really nice aesthetic to this collection of assorted old photos and bits of design and illustration.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Uhlectronics: Handmade DIY synths, in case you’re interested in that sort of thing.
• A Map A Day: Daily cartographical curios.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Decline of Local Media: It’s not a massively trenchant observation to suggest that local media is a bit fcuked. This looks at the state of the local media ecosystem in the US but all the stuff it says is pertinent to the UK as well, particularly in light of this week’s news about Global shuttering loads of its local stations; the main thing that strikes me about this debate is the way in which the lack of any local-level news does very real and very bad things to the sense of identity and place that a town or area can have; without observation and reporting on a community, does that community really exist? Well, yes, of course it does, fine, but I do think there’s a crisis of identity in small communities that can in some small way be attributed to this phenomenon.
• The Whatsapp Wild West: This is a great look at exactly how Whatsapp is being manipulated by politicians and criminals in India – I’ve been saying for a year or so now that the upcoming Indian elections are going to be a new high water mark in terms of ‘dodgy stuff being done using digital means’, and this does an excellent job of explaining how that might work. Honestly, you think that stuff on Facebook is bad, you just have a read of this. The coordinated use of Whatsapp groups as daily propaganda sources using tightly mobilised teams of activists to seed it is hugely powerful – even with the inbuilt limits on forwarding that Whatsapp’s imposed, you don’t need to be a mathematician to see the potential network effect here.
• Uber for X: An interesting piece analysing the fortunes of 105 companies that have at some point been described in the media as being ‘a bit like Uber, but for X’ – it does a wonderful job of explaining exactly why they’ve perhaps been a dreadful, dreadful thing for people and sectors overall: “all of these companies have brought hundreds of thousands of people into new work arrangements that are more than a gig but less than a job. They’ve rearranged the way people get basic tasks done, and they’ve wired those in local industries—handymen, house cleaners, dog walkers, dry cleaners—into the tech- and capital-rich global economy. These people are now submitting to a new middleman, who they know controls the customer relationship and will eventually have to take a big cut, as Uber drivers would be happy to tell them.”
• Another TikTok Explainer: I know, I know, you KNOW what TikTok is and how it works and stuff. FINE. This, though, is more interesting than that – it spends quite a lot of time talking about how the app is designed to present you with STUFF straight away, and how that draws you in in a way that’s sort of sui generis: “when you open the app: the first thing you see isn’t a feed of your friends, but a page called “For You.” It’s an algorithmic feed based on videos you’ve interacted with, or even just watched. It never runs out of material. It is not, unless you train it to be, full of people you know, or things you’ve explicitly told it you want to see. It’s full of things that you seem to have demonstrated you want to watch, no matter what you actually say you want to watch.”
• Foursquare’s Still Here: And it’s VERY CREEPY. Apparently they’re going big at SXSW again (did I mention that ONCE AGAIN noone’s seen fit to pay me to go to Austin and Tweet tediously about how much I love barbecue? IT’S NOT FAIR) with a ‘fun’ little map that shows realtime data about where actual people are in Austin at any given time, which is a STAGGERINGLY creepy thing and, to my mind, massively tin-eared when you think about current consumer sentiment around privacy. Or maybe 4sq just know what lots of us sort of deep-down assume – that people don’t actually give two fcuks about privacy when it really boils down to it. I do love the quote from the co-founder here, though: “We’re not sure if it’s the responsible thing or not to have a view like this in the phone yet”. Good to see those small ethical qualms and quandaries aren’t causing you pause, there, dude!
• Pay Attention: This is unsettling, and made me think quite a lot. The article’s by a lecturer in law who writes abut giving her students an assignment to pick a person on the subway and see how much information they could glean about them simply by looking at them and listening into their conversation. The number of examples she gives of people being able to quickly determine people’s name, employer, place of work and suchlike from a couple of minutes’ careful observation were not a little unsettling, and made me think a lot more about what I’m giving away.
• Meet Lindsay Ellis: This is a great profile of Lindsay Ellis, who does very in-depth and academic film critiques on YouTube which also happen to be funny and generally hugely entertaining (and I say this as someone with literally no interest in cinema as a medium). It’s about her, obviously, but also more broadly about the way YouTube and other platforms have opened up space for critical voices that wouldn’t necessarily have found a place, and equally about the frankly insane demands that both YT and the rabid fandoms place on creators.
• On Music and the Industry: I don’t quite know how to title this – it is the transcript of a talk by Mat Dryhurst and it is VERY LONG and a bit rambling, but contains some really interesting thinking and observations about music and the associated industries, along with the blurring of subcultural boundaries, the disappearance of the concept of the ‘underground’ and the new breed of popstars who are not just musicians but also sort-of large-scale culture-processing units: “Another cold-light-of-day re-reading of the surge of poptimism in the press over the past decade is to see it as the bargaining stage of grief over the seemingly inexorable charge of bot-like popular figures who hoover up ideas from the margins and deploy significant resources to capture a moment with music fortified from any potentially critical angle one might level at it. Pop stars are better understood as monarchic CEO’s of content production studios atop a feudal, trickle up, creative economy.”
• Hudson Yards: This is a great piece of journalism, not only as a criticism of the latest upscale urban planning waste of space being inflicted on New York in the shape of Hudson Yards, but also as a piece of longform web design. I know we don’t get excited by Snowfall-y stuff any more, but I think this is really nicely made. Also gets bonus points for its sneeringly dismissive reference to Thomas Hetherwick as ‘billionaire whisperer’.
• How Creativity Became a Capitalist Buzzword: I’m back working with an agency which does consumery stuff again for the first time in a while, and it’s interesting to be reminded of the breathless need for IDEAS and CREATIVE which seemingly never ends, despite the fact that 90% of the IDEAS and CREATIVE are generated purely to satisfy the whims of clients who need to spaff away some excess budget (re ‘spaff’, does Boris read Web Curios, by the way? HELLO BORIS!), and 90% of those will never go anywhere. When did we all become so obsessed with creativity? This is a good look at how late-stage capitalism learned that it could coopt this magical buzzword to fool us into thinking our pointless, silly jobs are in some way noble and fulfilling.
• An Alternate History of Sexuality in Club Culture: A truly heroic recap of club culture from the early 70s to now, spanning both sides of the Atlantic and becoming more globetrotting as it goes on. This is genuinely fascinating, whether you’re a student of club culture or otherwise; so much of modern visual /aural culture stems from this stuff, and queerness has been central to the concept of clubbing since time immemorial (is it still? Maybe, following the heteronormative mainstreamisation – yes, yes that’s what I said – of the scene in the late-90s/early-00s). Made me want to go and dance to techno, which isn’t something I’ve thought since I broke my foot clubbing with Fat Bob in Amsterdam a few years back.
• Notes on Peach: Peach – you remember! It was a BRAND NEW AND EXCITING social network we all tried out for about 24h a couple of years ago before realising that it, like all the others, was never going to topple Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory and its spinoff products! – still has a small but dedicated community using it; this piece explains what it is about the platform that makes it so appealing for this group, which are exactly the same reasons that it never really went mainstream. I very much enjoy these peeks inside small communities of which I will never be apart – this makes me hopeful that we’ll eventually all end up using the web through small things like Peach, returning us to a slightly more fragmented society of small groups rather than the miserypanopticon we’re all currently stuck in every time we turn on our phones or computers.
• How Discord Went Mainstream: If you’re not a gamer – not just a player of games, but a gamer – you might not know about Discord; it’s a bit like Slack, basically, except marginally less annoying, and it’s THE platform of choice for Twitch streamers, gaming YouTubers and gaming communities to congregate on. This piece gives a reasonable overview of how it works and why it’s so popular – there are lots of features here that make it a really useful platform for community engagement, should you be in the market for one.
• Meet Andrew Yang: This man is not going to win the US election in 2020, but, as a snapshot of how weird politics is right now, this piece is worth reading. Andrew Yang is a middle-aged entrepreneur-type, who’s currently on track to get enough individual donors to qualify him for a place on the initial Primary debate stage. How? He went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, talked about his idea for Universal Basic Income, and the shitposters have done the rest. It’s quite incredible that this guy’s gaining political legitimacy off the back of a bunch of kids on the Chans and Reddit deciding that he’ll help them to keep playing videogames in relative comfort (yes, yes, I know, I am OLD), and equally astonishing that political systems haven’t been adapted to take into account the sort of dogpiling that these online communities are so adept at. Let’s see how far Yang goes, and whether he at any point does anything about the fact that he’s probably being funded by a lot of people with a lot of very, very unpleasant views.
• Meet Lil Pump: This profile of Soundcloud rapper Lil Pump is one of the funniest things I read all week, whilst at the same time being a slightly sad picture of a little kid in a very grown-up world. You can’t shake the feeling that there are an awful lot of people making an awful lot of money out of this kid and that when he wakes up from the lean binge there might not be an awful lot left. Still, I imagine he’s having what to lots of people looks like a lot of fun in the meantime.
• The Moral Clarity of Slaughterhouse 5: I love Vonnegut, and I love Slaughterhouse 5, and this piece is excellent on exactly why it’s such a wonderful novel. I say ‘so it goes’ to myself on an almost daily basis, and it’s possibly the most comforting phrase I know.
• New York: This is from 1960, it’s written by Gay Talese and it’s a truly beautiful piece of writing, taking you on a tour of the city throughout the day, introducing you to characters major and minor in a series of unconnected vignettes which produce a wonderful picture of the city as a whole. Every single bit of this is marvellous; if you’ve ever been to New York, or even if you’ve only ever seen it in film, this is glorious.
• The Most Expensive Gay Bongo Movie Ever: There is a LOT in this story – robbery, a life on the run, drugs, bongo, bathhouses and, in the end, quite a lot of low-key tragedy. George Bosque stole $1.75million from the security van he was driving – this is his story, and that of CENTURIANS [sic] OF ROME, the blockbuster gay bongo movie he decided to finance with part of the proceeds of his crime. This is quite incredible; you can almost taste all the cocaine through your monitor as you look at the accompanying photos.
• A Road Trip Through Racism: In 1964, a Florida newspaper sent a black reporter to cover his experiences of discrimination in a newly-desegregated South. That reporter was Samuel Adams, “a St. Petersburg Times race reporter who spent two weeks traveling the South with his wife Elenora just months after the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Adams documented the 4,300-mile journey in a seven-part series, “Highways to Hope.” This is quite fascinating, and deeply uncomfortable to read – 55 years really isn’t a very long time at all. Adams’ dignity throughout the experiences he describes – many of which are miserable to read about – is remarkable.
• The Embryo in the Hallway: Thanks Katie for sending me this – a beautiful (if slightly hard to read, for me at least) essay about being pregnant and knowing that there’s a chance your child will be born with a serious defect: “As we learned too late, my husband and I have genetic mutations that, when combined, cause disease. This means there’s a one-in-two chance of us having a baby who’s a healthy carrier, like we are, and a one-in-four chance of a baby with neither of our mutations. The other one-in-four chance is what happened the first time I was pregnant. The other one-in-four chance is my son.” Not easy, but very good.
• Sophia Hanson Wants to Believe: On female robots and sex and gender and how current issues with the way we treat and have treated women will perhaps be carried into the future through the machines we make and the values we project onto them. The gender politics of robotics is a fascinating area of critical thinking I confess to not having given much thought to (male privilege, innit), but this made me start.
• Creative Differences: I don’t think I’ve ever typed “A brilliant short piece of fiction about sponsored content” before, but, well, there’s a first time for everything. This is really very, very good indeed – you don’t need to work in advermarketingpr to enjoy this, though you may feel it resonates slightly more if you do.
• Colour and Light: New fiction by Sally Rooney in the New Yorker – that should be enough to get you to read to be honest, but if you’re not familiar with Rooney’s writing then read this, enjoy the masterful way she does dialogue and spare prose, and then go and read her novels. This is wonderful, and along with the piece above is a pretty good way to waste half an hour in the office whilst doing stuff that could look from a distance like, you know, work-related research.

By Jenny Morgan

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Amanda Palmer is…a divisive figure, it’s fair to say; still, regardless of your thoughts on the person, this is a devastating song and video. It’s called ‘Voicemail for Jill’ and it’s about abortion and I’m not ashamed to say that this made me properly bawl at a couple of points. Christ, it just set me off again now it’s playing in a separate tab. You have been warned:

2) This, by contrast, is about as unemotional as it gets – spare, bleepy, angular and with a video that’s like a GAN trying to imagine cathedrals in pencil; I LOVE THIS. It’s by Max Cooper and it’s called ‘Emptyset’:

3) To be honest, the band’s name means I would possibly have included this even if the song was tripe, but fortunately it isn’t and so I don’t feel like I’m compromising my high editorial standards here. This is the fabulously-named Tropical Fcuk Storm with ‘The Planet of Straw Men’, and it’s sort of atonally brilliant:

4) This is the new song and video from the new album by QUEEN OF WEIRD DIGIMUSIC Holly Herndon, and per the rest of her stuff this is both ACE and pretty much at the Venn Diagram intersection of all the sort of stuff that Curios is interested in. It’s called ‘Eternal’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is new by Snips and it’s called ‘The Product’ and it features spoken word poet William Stone, and it’s generally ace, not least because of all the extreme old school cool featured throughout the video:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is Ho9909 (or, er, Horror, if you want to write it in a way that people can actually read) with Mega City Nine and it’s pretty horrible and unsettling and that’s sort of where I feel like leaving you today so BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU DON’T BE SCARED IT’S ONLY A SONG AND IT’S ALL GOING TO BE OK AND IT’S THE WEEKEND AND WE’RE HALFWAY THROUGH MARCH ALREADY AND THAT MEANS IT’S NEARLY LONG EVENINGS AND SUNSHINE AGAIN AND MAYBE THEY’LL SORT ALL THIS BREXIT STUFF OUT NEXT WEEK SO PLEASE DON’T FRET IT WILL ALL BE FINE I LOVE YOU HAPPY FRIDAY I LOVE YOU BYE!:

What’s been YOUR favourite stupid this week? SO MUCH TO CHOOSE FROM! It’s nice of the powers that be to ensure that the ‘Brexit’ box set we’ve all been enjoying for the past couple of years doesn’t peter out towards its denouement – though does anyone else get the feeling that, muchlike in Lost, the scriptwriters aren’t entirely sure of how to wrap it up?

Anyway, whilst in the real world everyone has once again been a CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT, the virtual world continues to deliver – exactly what it’s delivering is, fine, perhaps a matter of conjecture, but nonetheless it keeps on churning ‘it’ out and I keep collecting it, like an increasingly weary chef continually skimming the ever-gathering scum from the everbubbling pot of murky stew and then feeding it in ladlefuls to the starving masses clamouring for the faintest scraps of infonourishment, the ghostly taste of entertainments past long since boiled beyond recognition.

Wow, that was unusually bleak, nonsensical and convoluted, even by my standards. I must be tired. OF COURSE I AM TIRED IT IS 2019 AND THE WORLD KEEPS HAPPENING AT ME AND I HAVE BEEN UP SINCE 6 AND TYPING SINCE 645 AND HONESTLY I THINK MY FINGERS MIGHT FALL OFF.

Anyway, it’s another Friday, this is another Web Curios, that was another week. Maybe the next will be better! TRY AND ENJOY WHAT FOLLOWS.

(NB – gentle occasional reminder that Imperica (the publisher, NOT ME, to be clear, I promise this isn’t me trying to monetise this thing aahahahahahaha oh god chance would be a fine thing) has a Patreon that you can contribute to if you think Curios is ok and you would like to say a small thank you and cover some of the website costs – be like the lovely, callipygian Matthew Laws, who unaccountably decided to hitch his wagon to our truck and offer financial assistance, and who I imagine hasn’t regretted it AT ALL since! Hi Matt! How are you? Are you in fact callipygian? Is it weird that I’m speculating about your buttocks in public? Ought I stop? This…this isn’t going to help with the Patreon, is it? Sorry Paul).

By Claire Boscher

FIRST UP MUSICALLY, WHY NOT TRY THE NEW RECORD FROM UK MC LOSKI?

THE SECTION WHICH IS GLAD THAT THAT NICE MR ZUCKERBERG HAS LAID THIS PESKY ‘PRIVACY’ STUFF TO REST ONCE AND FOR ALL:

• A New Privacy Focused Vision for Social Networking: I’m sure you all read this yesterday morning with your coffee and cereal, but on the offchance that you’ve somehow forgotten its SEISMIC IMPORTANCE since then, let me refresh your memory. Facebook is CHANGING! It’s going to be all about MESSAGING and ENCRYPTION and EPHEMERALITY instead of the neverending cavalcade of horrors of the newsfeed and the cacophonously stupid racism and sexism and hatred and cruelty displayed by all the billions of great unwashed in the grand public square that sits at the heart of the Big Blue Misery Factory! Or, er, is it? This is a classic bit of Zuckerbergese, in that it makes vague philosophical burblings and talks at length about stuff that’s already actually been announced without actually saying anything new – the actual meat of the statement can be summarised as a) all Facebook’s different properties will eventually be linked on a back-end level to enable seamless interplatform interaction (which we knew); b) everything will be end-to-end encrypted (which we knew); c) people are in the future are going to use Messaging products more than s*c**l m*d** features (well, yes); and, eventually, if you read between the lines, d) Facebook basically wants to be a fundamental infrastructural layer across everyone’s interpersonal digital interactions, social and financial, in the same was as WeChat in China. Anyway, this stuff is all a bit of a while away so, you know, IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER (nothing matters). If you want even MORE of Mark’s thrilling utterances, he also did an interview with WIRED in which he elaborates on all this (very) slightly; the piece makes the WeChat slightly clearer (or at least it does to me), but overall this is another masterclass in ‘if we make this really boring then noone will notice that we’ve basically disguised a massive land-grab for the future as a gesture of concern for the well-being of humanity’-style comms.
• Events Can Now Be Shared on Facebook Stories: For all those of you living and working in those parts of the world in which people in fact use Facebook Stories. When you visit the Page for an Event, you’ll now be able to share that to your Facebook Story, or add links to said Event as stickers. Excited? No! Of course not!
• Facebook Adds ‘Tribute’ Feature to Memorialised Accounts: The slightly weird and yet hugely useful Facebook feature whereby the accounts of the dead can be ‘memorialised’, keeping them active but locking them from being hacked or edited, effectively preserving them in digital amber, has been slightly updated. Now you can add a ‘Tributes’ to a memorialised Page: “Depending on a memorialized account’s privacy settings, friends can currently still post on its timeline, including in the comments of posts the person made before they died. If a memorialized account has a Tributes section, however, posts made after the day it was memorialized (which prevents anyone else from logging in) will be placed there.” Death and Facebook (and digital legacy) is still weird and alternately sad and quite creepy, and the cynical part of me (such a small part, so miniscule, like a tiny black gland dripping poison deep within my throat) does wonder whether this is another cynical ploy to up engagement rates (they wouldn’t) (they would).
• YouTube Rolling out Fact Checks: This is interesting. Starting in India, but one would presume set to become a global feature, YouTube will start offering fact-checking information from third-party sources when users search for topics that are “prone to misinformation” – so if you search for ‘vaccinations’, say, you might be faced with an external link suggesting that perhaps this whole autism thing is unscientific rubbish (before proceeding merrily down the horrorrabbithole of idiot parents shouting that THEY KNOW THEIR KIDS BEST DON’T YOU TELL ME HOW TO RAISE MY CHILD I’VE READ ABOUT THIS IT’S A BIG PHARMA CONSPIRACY). I don’t mean to be a downer about this – after all, it’s early on in this week’s Curios and there’s plenty of time for the misery to kick in later on – but I do rather wonder whether the best response to the sorts of mad conspiracy theories which are explicitly based on the fundamental belief that THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW THE TRUTH is to place big, official-looking signs everywhere saying “OFFICIAL: THIS IS NOT TRUE”. We’ll see.
• LinkedIn Expands Trending Section: It’s now even easier than ever to see what people are talking about most on LinkedIn, as the platform has just updated its trending content section so you can better observe the themes that are DRIVING THE CONVERSATION and ADJUST YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY accordingly. Except obviously this is all pointless as we all know that all people on LinkedIn talk about is themselves, how much they are CRUSHING IT, and whether Oleg is performance art (niche joke for the LI crowd there).
• Excel Photo Import: I ordinarily don’t cover MS Office updates because, in the main, I care even less about them than I do about this stuff, but I’ll make an exception here because this is SO useful. The Excel mobile app now lets you take a photo of any tabulated data and will then MAGICALLY turn that into an editable spreadsheet – this is wizardry.
• Bobcat Agogo: Other things I don’t ordinarily feature include ‘kooky ads from yesteryear’, but I will make an exception for this ad for Bobcat – a company which makes diggers and the like, and which in 1967 felt its best advertising strategy was to produce a short film featuring the twin dancing talents of a Mary Quant-wearing female dancer, looking a touch on the rumpled and lascivious side, and a man doing, er, rudimentary dancing in a bulldozer. 52 years was a very long time ago.
• Free Dominos: Brands interacting with each other in ‘humorous’ fashion is one of the things that most grinds my teeth about modern digital marketing – I look forward to meeting the person who invented the term ‘brandter’ in hell at some point in the future and ‘enjoying’ a couple of eternities with them – but occasionally I have to concede that it can be done well. Kudos to (presumably tiny) US pizza chain &Pizza for this excellent bit of gentle trolling at the expense of Domino’s, which recently launched one of its semi-regular digital gimmicks whereby app users could get reward points if they uploaded a photo of ANY pizza. Yes, mad as that sounds (and really, how did this ever sound like a good idea?), that’s how it works – except it doesn’t, as the internet rapidly discovered. The app’s image-recognition software seemingly recognises ANY pizza – photos, screengrabs from the internet, slightly crap kids’ drawings…so &Pizza set up this site, explaining the loophole and inviting the web to cost Domino’s actual cashmoney by exploiting it at scale. Really cute, though this being American advermarketingpr it will probably escalate towards some sort of sickeningly self-congratulatory Twitter brand love-in, with Wendy’s quoting Foucault and the official Oreo’s account livetweeting its own Salvia trip.
• All You Can Jet: This is, I am grudgingly forced to concede, really clever and I wish I had thought of it. Simple and effective giveway gimmick by US airline Jet Blue, which is offering the chance to win unlimited free flights for a year – the catch being that to enter, participants have to delete all the pics from their Insta feed and replace them with a single one which promotes Jet Blue and the contest as a whole. Bingo – instant visibility and (ugh) talkability and virality and stuff. I am annoyed by how neat this is.

By Anna Karenina

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS HOUR-LONG MIX WHICH TOE-CURLINGLY DESCRIBES ITSELF AS ‘TURNTABLISM’ BUT WHICH I WOULD MUCH PREFER TO CALL ‘HIPHOP WITH SOME SCRATCHING!’

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THERE ARE ANY POLITICIANS LEFT WHO CAN’T BE DESCRIBED AS EITHER RACIST, STUPID, INCOMPETENT, INSENSITIVE OR A HEADY COMBINATION OF ALL FOUR. PT.1:

• Leave A Message for Europe: Three weeks ahahahahahahahahahahahahaohgod. Still, don’t think about what’s ahead (is it a brick wall? Is it a cliff edge? WHO KNOWS, THE BLINDFOLD’S ON!), think about what we’re leaving behind! This is a piece of BREXIT ART, ladies and gentlemen, and not (to my mind) a particularly good or clever or imaginative one, but, still, it’s probably all we deserve. Leave A Message for Europe invites participants to…oh, look, you can work it out, can’t you? Here: “the artist will install a sculpture, inspired by a 90s phone box, on Dungeness beach. Located at UK’s most south-easterly point, the inactive phone box acts as a beacon. It is a nostalgic call to action – a reminder of the way we once communicated – with the nuance of the voice. Exposed to the elements, the sculpture also represents the UK, facing new challenges and an uncertain future. Visit the sculpture in person or view it streamed live here, 24-7, as it is altered daily by its environment – and as we count down to B-day.” The site offers anyone the opportunity to record a message about their feelings on the subject – it’s unclear what will happen to said messages, but I imagine they’ll be compiled in some way at the end of the piece’s lifespan. What would be better, though, were if the piece comprised a third element – a massive, barn-sized woofer SPEEKING ARE BRANES at those Europeans from the cliffs of Dover, spitting out the messages of farewell to a largely uncaring continent. Someone make that instead.
• Pictures of Paintings: Many years ago I was personally convinced that virtual art galleries were set to be the future, and that we’d all spend time at our computers navigating through the digitised corridors of imaginary spaces, looking at works collected from throughout time and space. I was wrong, obviously – it’s simply not a particularly great way to experience art, overall, and, weirdly, it’s not been improved drastically by free-moving VR-type stuff either. Nonetheless, I rather like this slightly throwbackish site (I think it’s someone’s hobby project, but I can’t immediately see who – sorry, nameless creator) – it presents a few collections of classic artworks, thematically arranged, in a classic gallery setting with fixed-point navigation; there’s some accompanying explanatory text, but in the main it’s a simple recreation of walking slowly round a gallery, except as if you’re in Myst. I think this guided viewing experience weirdly works better than free movement for this stuff, but see what you think.
• Cryptovoxels: “Cryptovoxels is a virtual world built on the ethereum block chain. The world has streets, that are owned by The Corporation, and properties, that are owned by individual people. If you have an ethereum wallet, you can buy a property. Property owners can build on their property. They can add and remove blocks (voxels), signs, posters and in the future, add 3d models for people to interact with.” Why? NO IDEA! However, if you want the slightly odd experience of wandering around a mostly empty 3d world built through people spending crypto on virtual building blocks – Minecraft, for HODLers, as far as I can understand – then, well, enjoy! Of all the crypto stuff I’ve seen this might honestly be the most baffling. The main link takes you straight into the 3d, but if you want to learn a bit more about it first then click here – I promise you it still makes no real sense, though.
• Women & The American Story: A wonderfully-curated website presenting a women’s history of the United States, designed for educators to shine a light on the diverse range of women who throughout America’s history have made significant contributions to the country’s evolution. Writers, entrepreneurs, artists, spanning the spectrum of race and gender, this is really well put together.
• Twimmage: The main reason I tend to tell clients not to bother with Instagram (other than the perennial favourite “look ffs you’re an industrial insurance provide what the fcuk do you think you’re doing?”) is that not everyone has access to all the AMAZING AND INSPIRATIONAL AND BEAUTIFUL AND FUNNY IMAGE-LED CONTENT the platform is famed for (and, yes, I know that there are other ways you can use the platform, but work with me here). Twimmage goes some way towards resolving that by letting you take any Tweet and turn it BY MAGIC into a beatiful…er…photo of a Tweet, specially formatted to pop on the Gram (as the kids have NEVER said). This is obviously a very silly idea indeed, but the fact that you can use anyone’s tweets makes it almost sort-of useful; there’s definitely a certain mood/aesthetic you can convey through populating your Insta with the very worst of Twitter presented on a slightly twee inspirational background.
• This Waifu Does Not Exist: Another week, ANOTHER website which throws up an infinite array of GAN-imagined somethings to amaze and delight. This time it’s an infinity of GAN-imagined anime faces, accompanied by a similarly-autogenerated plot summary of a nonexistent comic/cartoon series – these are, as ever, really impressive (except if you’re an illustrator who specialises in doing anime facial portraits, in which case you’re yet another person miserably staring down the barrel of an automated future in which you’re no longer required!), but, honestly, I find the online practice of referring to anime women as ‘waifus’ so horribly, creepily neckbeardy that it makes me shudder.
• The Iditarod: I am AMAZED that I have never featured this before! The Iditarod bills itself as ‘The Greatest Race on Earth’ and while I’m not really in any sort of position to judge (racing not really being my thing) it seems to have a pretty good claim. The Iditarod is a 1,000 mile race for man and dog across Alaska, with participants competing to reach the town of Nome, commemorating a trade route that has stretched across the country for centuries. The photos are the draw here – LOOK AT ALL THOSE GOOD BOYS! O RUFF! Also, some excellent sunsets and, overall, some superb use of the word ‘MUSH’.
• Bab: Are you unfortunate enough to know one of those people, usually on Facebook, who’s become involved in some sort of crappy pyramid-selling scheme and now spends all their time spamming their wall about ‘exciting business opportunities’ and ‘quick cash easy wins’? Would you like to become like them, but marginally more socially acceptable? Well have I got the app for YOU! Bab is BRAND NEW and is basically a shopping app with the gimmick that, as you browse, you can fire off what are effectively affiliate links to your friends and family and followers with the tap of a finger; for each sale attributed to you, you receive a 5% of the sale which you can either bank or send to charity. Except noone’s going to do the charity thing, are they? They’re just going to spend all day spamming their mates with messages like “think these earrings would look really good on you hun 100 emoji winky face dancing lady” in the hope that they’ll bite. Welcome to the future in which we have rendered the concept of ‘influence’ entirely meaningless through reductive overuse!
• Mingering Mike: I’ve always had a small obsession with outsider musicians – I remain fascinated by Jandek, a man who really ought to have had a proper big old documentary about him made by now – and this guy really is an outsider. Mingering Mike…oh, look, here: “Between 1968 and 1977 Mingering Mike recorded over fifty albums, managed thirty-five of his own record labels, and produced, directed and starred in nine of his own motion pictures. In 1972 alone he released fifteen LPs and over twenty singles, and his traveling revue played for sold out crowds the world over. How is it that such a prolific musician has gone under the radar for more than forty years? The answer is that all took place in Mike’s imagination, and in the vast collection of fake cardboard records and acapella home recordings that he made for himself as a teenager in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s.” This website collects EVERYTHING – the artwork, recordings, essays about the man…another film waiting to be made, this. Oh, and the music is scratchy and fuzzy and so lofi as to be morelike the skeletons of songs than songs themselves, but they’re also weirdly compelling; I’ve been listening to this stuff all morning and it’s good.
• Taliami E Te Fazzu Pietra: Photography by Salvatore di Gregorio of sexworkers in (I think) Catania in Sicily; GREAT faces.
• Slave Voyages: A huge database collecting information on the slave trade worldwide, and presenting maps, stories and data on the movement of enslaved Africans. Intended for students primarily, it’s not the most user-friendly site in terms of navigation, but you can get to maps and timelines from the homepage – the maps in particular do an excellent job of communicating the scale of the enterprise, though the real depth comes in the ‘essays’ section should you want to explore it fully.
• Puns.dev: This website does nothing other than serve up bad puns about web development – refresh for new ones. These are all horrible, but will give you something to annoy the people in IT with next time they take three weeks to update your laptop and manage to brick it in the process.
• Camelot: Because I am terrible at BUSINESS it haven’t even occurred to me that there might be a market in supplementary service layers sitting atop streaming platforms (at least in the short-term); it seems there might be, though, with stuff like this. Camelot is a platform which streamers can set up atop their YouTube or Twitch channel through which their viewers can set ‘bounties’ – that is, things that they want the streamer to do, in exchange for donations. Streamers can then accept these bounties and get paid once they perform the activity in question, with the app taking 5% of the cash. This is just systematising the sort of reward-led donations that lots of streamers are doing already, but it’s a smart idea – there are obvious safeguards in place to stop the more obviously unpleasant sort of ‘bounty’ requests, and overall this is a small step towards the seemingly-inevitable future in which we’re all working piecemeal for each other all the time, monetising every single tiny interaction as we struggle to stay above water, our incomes whittled wafer-thin by transaction fees as these peppercorn sums flit fleetingly from bank account to bank account via FaceBucks (oh God that is actually going to happen isn’t it oh god).
• Codecoven: Do you remember when we were all going to learn to make websites and that would save the economy? AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Accepting the fact that front-end development is perhaps less of an attractive career proposition than perhaps it was a decade or so ago, there’s still obviously GREAT careers in serious, non-website-based coding, not least the games industry – Code Coven is a new online course, in sort-of beta at the moment, designed for women to develop their skills for working in game development. At the moment they’re looking for people to join their initial courses – these are going to be paid-for sessions, but at discount initially – so if you’re an ‘intermediate’ female gamedev looking to upskill then, well, here!
• The Disneyfication Map: As a street in Paris becomes the latest place to rail against the Instagrammers – THERE’S A SIMPLE SOLUTION JUST STOP PAINTING YOUR HOUSES IN THOSE TWEE PASTEL SHADES FFS – it seems a timely moment to share this map, which shows those countries who have the most tourists per capita. Weirdly, on this basis Iceland seems more affected by tourism than Italy, which doesn’t seem intuitively right, but if you’re looking for holiday destinations where you’re more likely to be in the minority as a tourist then this might be of some vague sort of use.
• Modulate AI: This is interesting – a sort of realtime deepfake for your voice. Modulate AI is a service that provides what it calls ‘voice skins’, so that it provides a live reinterpretation of your speaking voice as you talk. Which on the one hand might be a genuinely useful – if depressing – tool for women playing games online, say, who might want to have an evening off having tedious gags made at them about sandwiches; on the other, of course, this feels like it could take prank calling to an exciting and unpleasant new level. Which is it to be? A nice tool for reducing prejudice, or the birth of a new wave of Steve Penks? What do YOU think?
• The Big Hedgehog Map: Please help map the UK’s hedgehogs! FIND THE HEDGEHOGS! If you have the sort of small children who are all enthusiastic and outdoorsy and who might like spending the day looking for hedgehogs then this will be GREAT, though if they’re normal kids then they will totally prefer Fortnite and will not thank you for making them search the undergrowth for spiky mammals.
• On Time Every Time: A nice kinetic visualisation of the Amsterdam train network; each dot on the map represents a station, with trains moving between them as the day passes; there’s a nice visual trick here whereby the stations sort of ‘vibrate’ as the trains move through them, meaning the busiest ones have this sort of crazy kinetic representation of how much traffic passes through them. Practically I can see no use for this at all, but aesthetically it’s GREAT.
• Coburg Villas: Nice Imperica editor Paul has a thing where he occasionally searches through property listings for WEIRD STUFF. He found this 3d tour of Coburg Villas in Ilfracombe – it seems…unlikely to be the sort of thing that’s going to persuade anyone to shell out money, but gustibus nil disputandum and all that jazz. It’s worth clicking the ‘dollhouse’ button in the bottom left so you can see the full extent of the property, by the way, it is QUITE the thing.
• Moviesyncs: You know those people at university who you met once or twice and who were ALWAYS men and who were obsessed with the fact that if you started Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz at exactly the sa…OH FFS JUST GO AWAY AND LET ME MISERABLY SMOKE WEED AND FAIL MY FIRST YEAR IN PEACE, I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THIS OR ABOUT STAR WARS? Yes, them. Anyway, if you are one of them, or if you know one, or if you would like to briefly experiment with becoming one, then this site might be of use – it presents an exhaustive list of all those movie syncing theories with explanations of what they MEAN. Apparently Definitely Maybe works with This is Spinal Tap, which sounds weirdly apposite tbh.
• All of Trump’s Gifts: The ones from 2017, at least. This is the official published list of gifts presented to the White House by foreign dignitaries that year – SO MUCH STUFF. Could we maybe ditch the gift-giving protocol when the recipient is a self-described billionaire? Does Melania really need all those handbags? Fair play to whoever it was who gave her a portrait of herself on mother of pearl, though – I feel you really got to the heart of the First Lady’s brand, there, lads.

By Philotheus Nisch

NEXT, ENJOY THIS VAGUELY BRAZILIAN-INFLECTED MIX BY MIKE WHO!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THERE ARE ANY POLITICIANS LEFT WHO CAN’T BE DESCRIBED AS EITHER RACIST, STUPID, INCOMPETENT, INSENSITIVE OR A HEADY COMBINATION OF ALL FOUR. PT.2:

• Sea Creature Bot: It’s a bot, on Twitter, which posts pictures of sea creatures. They’re good sea creatures, in the main, if occasionally a bit toothy.
• Can You Pet The Dog?: Another Twitter account, this time with the sole purpose of looking at dogs in videogames and informing you, the reader, whether you can in fact pet said dog in the game. Red Dead Redemption 2? You can very much pet the dog (though not the cats, which did puzzle me rather). GTAV? Not so much. Essential reading if ‘dog petting y/n’ is one of the main question in your ‘shall I buy this game?’ checklist.
• Lines: This is a truly beautiful artwork by Finnish artist Pekka Niittyvirta – they have installed LED lights in the village of Lochmaddy in the Outer Hebrides which rise and fall along with the tides and provide a stark evocation of the projected sea levels should climate change continue at its current and predicted pace. The contrast between the space and the sky and the light here is just beautiful, and the pictures really are haunting (and yes, I know it’s an overused and slightly crap word, but I promise it fits here).
• Libby: Annoyingly it’s incredibly unclear whether this is US only or international – I think it works outside the US, but apologies if I have this totally wrong. Anyway, Libby is an app which allows you to borrow books from the library straight onto your ‘phone – sign up with your library card and instead of having to go and pick up a title from the building, get it sent digitally to your device. SUCH a clever idea and a boon for people who maybe can’t get to a physical library with such ease. If this does turn out to be a US only thing, can someone let me know if there is a UK equivalent that I’ve somehow missed? PLEASE? Ok, fine, please yourselves.
• Wavelength: This has SEVEN HOURS LEFT at the time of writing on Kickstarter, so if you’re reading this after about 5pm GMT on 8 March 2019 then you are TOO LATE (but hello nonetheless, I still value your eyeballs) – still, it’s funded 10x already so you’ll be able to get hold of it eventually regardless. Wavelength is a really interesting-sounding party game – it’s quite hard to explain, so I’d advise you to read the description, but it’s the sort of thing that sounds like it would end up being a lovely shouty messy evening and which doesn’t rely on the sort of cheap laughs that CAH does.
• Postmake: This is CRIMINALLY dull, sorry, but equally the sort of thing that might end up being really useful – you want a bunch of online project management tools and software all organised into one place, most of which are free? GREAT!
• Trestle: This is an interesting idea – Trestle is an online shopping app, but one whose gimmick is that all the sellers have been vetted for their ethical standards; so the theory is that you won’t feel morally compromised by the knowledge that your £3 all-in-one party outfit was stitched by a blind child on the 22nd hour of their shift in a sweatshop somewhere (at that price point, well, WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN??). Obviously a service like this stands and falls on the quality of the suppliers, as well as the price point, but if you’re rich enough not to have to worry about paying a premium for ‘ethical’ goods then you might want to take a look at this. Ah, the future – an age in which morality is the preserve of the wealthy!
• The Binary Graffiti Club Choir: I have featured this before, but my friend Rina asked nicely and they are doing a THING next week so it’s in here again – the Binary Graffiti Club Choir is a sort of part-walk, part-choir, part-performance art THING and it’s happening on 14 March from 6-9pm in London and you can learn more at the link and by emailing your full name, age, and mobile number to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  and, actually, now I’ve written that down it does all sound VERY dodgy but I promise you that I know Rina in real life and I’m pretty sure she’s not a murderer and even if she is she’s only about 4’9″ tall and you can probably overpower her should she get stabby.
• Language Learning with Netflix: A Chrome extension which lets you watch anything on Netflix in the original language, with accompanying subtitles in your own language (and the original too) so as to help you learn while you watch. Simple, clever, and potentially hugely useful – the sort of thing that in a way means that you can actually justify leaving your child in front of a whole day’s worth of crap cartoons because ACTUALLY they are learning Mandarin and you are being a really good parent and you DESERVED that wine stop shouting Karen.
• The Smithsonian Photograph of the Year 2018: IT’S BEEN 2019 FOR THREE MONTHS FFS SMITHSONIAN PULL YOUR FINGERS OUT. Tardiness aside, though, these are typically beautiful and span a range of categories including examples of digital manipulation and images shot on mobile. My favourite’s the Italians at the funeral; what’s yours?
• Sold From Under You: In case the spectacle of our elected representatives spending yet another week demonstrating their fundamental dreadfulness wasn’t enough of a reason to be angry with politics this week, why not get stuck into this excellent piece of investigative work by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maps some 12,000 pieces of land and property which have been sold off by councils across the UK as a result of the austerity measures which have crippled local government over the past decade but which can IN NO WAY be blamed for or indeed linked to the parallel rise in disenfranchisement and violent crime amongst the young in some of the most marginalised communities, OH NO SIREE! “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has…used this data to map for the first time the community spaces that have been lost across the country, in a searchable resource that anyone can use. Our investigation also looked at what councils have done with the money made from selling assets. Some have used the proceeds to fund hundreds of redundancies.” This will make you furious, and not in an enjoyable or even particularly cathartic way, just fyi.
• City Icons of the World: Free vector icons representing a sizeable chunk of the world’s cities, should you find such a thing desirable or useful.
• The Past Is The Future: A wonderful selection of pictures of musicians of the now, drawn as though they were musicians of the 80s and being depicted in semi-cartoon fashion on a cassette-tape compilation you might have seen in Our Price after school one day. Featuring Rita Ora (a woman who I can honestly say I see in the free paper EVERY DAY and yet whose music I have never, ever knowingly heard), Drake, DJ Khaled, Bieber and, weirdly and creepily, Chris Brown, these are really very good indeed – Drake-as-Lioned-Richiealike is particularly great.
• Rambalac: You remember the Slow TV movement from a few years back, which championed such things as 9-hour long first person train journeys through the Swiss alsp? Well this is a bit like that, but Japanese and on YouTube – Rambalac is a channel which presents videos which show a first-person view of someone walking slowly and silently through Japanese streets, some urban, some rural, in different types of weather. Really rather lovely, though obviously NOTHING happens other than the occasional car.
• Spritestack: A 3d pixel art editor, in case you want to make voxel-style sprites for use in whatever game or digital art thingy you might be making. Or, you know, just to design a slightly blocky 3d penis instead of writing that email. You know you want to.
• Spotify Editor: This may well be very useful to those of you with a slavish devotion to compiling Spotify playlists – this site lets you easily categorise, sort, edit and prune them, in a manner far more intuitive than Spotify’s own (to my mind) slightly iffy UI.
• Leave Me Alone: I am wary of presenting stuff like this to you, gentle reader, lest you start GETTING IDEAS – still, in the spirit of utility and safe in the knowledge that you would NEVER leave me (would you?), here’s Leave Me Alone, a service that you plug into your inbox and which will find all the emails you’ve subscribed to over a given period, giving you the opportunity to quickly and easily unsub from them en masse; for a full 6-month scrape they’ll charge an $8 fee, which might sound steep but then means that they don’t have to sell your data back to the email bastards to keep going. DITCH ALL THE OTHER NEWSLETTERS AND KEEP ME!
• The Boat: The best storytelling site I’ve seen so far this year, hands-down – desktop only, I’m afraid (or at least significantly better on desktop) – The Boat is by SBS in Australia and is a brilliantly told story of immigration into the country after the Vietnam war. Honestly, this is SO GOOD – one of the best attempts at a digital comic book I’ve ever seen, with wonderful audio and really nicely done textual effects to give a degree of kinetic urgency to the narrative (/pseud). Really beautifully made – hats off to the team behind it, this is gorgeous.
• Speed Demon: This, though, is literally just a top-down scrolling shooter – switch between 4 lanes, shoot demons, avoid obstacles, try not to die. This is FUN and has a very real ‘one more go’ feel to it.
• Monocube: Finally this week, another game – this time a slow, methodical block-moving puzzler, which slowly builds to become very satisfying and very complex, and which involves attempting to navigate a small cube through a maze and which you can probably play in a really small window on one side of your monitor so that you can still pretend to be looking at Excel or whatever boring, pointless task you’re pretending to care about today in exchange for food tokens.

By Kelly Beeman

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS EXCELLENT DIRTY SET OF ELECTRONIC BREAKS AND…ER…STUFF MIXED BY MOXIE & IMOGEN!

THE (ONCE AGAIN SADLY TUMBLEWEEDY) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Thicc Tech: Lovely chunky devices for you to drool over if that’s your thing.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Halston Blake: Halston Blake doesn’t exist yet, but they already have an Insta account and a logo, because Halston Blake is the foetal progeny of some INFLUENCER or another in the states and said INFLUENCER hasn’t been shy about exploring the early monetisation potential of their unborn child. Before you slag the parents, it’s worth noting that the account of this yet-to-be-spawned kid has garnered 150k followers in the week or so since it’s been live – THIS IS OUR FAULT. WE ARE FEEDING THIS. Special shout out to all those US lawyers currently working to ensure that they’re first in the queue for the inaugural ‘child sues parents for use of their image rights to accrue income from sponsored posts on Insta’ case coming down the line in about 2025!
• Dildos on Photos: It’s not sophisticated, fine, but it is quite funny.
• For Dark Skin Girls: “A positive platform for black women. Interviews, news, memes, reposts, conversations, vids and cute sht!”
• Tiny Little Dioramas: Miniature scenes of violent death in largely suburban settings. Like Jake and Dinos Chapman by way of Margate.
• Damselfrau: Amazing weird masks that for some reason remind me really strongly of the Greek Orthodox priesthood.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Britain and Austerity Socialism: Really interesting look at the rise of the Momentum Left (sorry, appreciate that that’s probably a very un-nuanced way of referring to young socialists in the UK but, well, honestly the tedious ‘Judean People’s Front’-type nomenclature stuff is one of the main reasons I have always been massively put off engaging with party politics) in the UK in the New York Times, which is in part an interesting outsiders’ perspective and, equally, in part reads like the author’s been slightly taken for a ride by a few of the people involved. Not quite sure – what do YOU think? The description of Wetherspoons as a ‘British restaurant chain’ was quite special too.
• The Surveillance Economy: Or, “why Facebook and Google won’t change’ – this is particulary interesting in the light of Zuckerberg’s privacy Damascus yesterday, not least as it gives a reasonable explanation why on balance it won’t really mean very much at all. Surveillance capitalism, the now-accepted term for the data-based economy born out of the tracking of our wants and movements and dreams and contacts and EVERYTHING for commercial gain, isn’t going to stop – it might shift, fine, it might take different forms, but there’s no reason they are going to stop making money out of data because that is what they are for. It’s worth reading this and then going back to the Zuckerberg/WIRED interview right back up the top – all the stuff about encryption ‘not necessarily being a barrier to advertising’ makes more sense, eh?
• Status as a Service: This is VERY long, so be warned, but it’s hugely interesting and very engaging, and made me think quite a lot. This is by Eugene Wei, a very smart person who’s had a lot of quite big jobs, and has obviously thought a LOT about the web and how things on it work. This is about status and the idea of social capital, how social networks operate, and how they use social capital as both a hook and a retention mechanism. You don’t have to agree with it all to find it interesting – I was talking with Jay Owens about this who had some interesting counterarguments to a lot of Wei’s points (to whit (hope you don’t mind me quoting you here btw) “Any social network too strongly geared towards status-competition will fail, because 50% of people are always below average and people don’t like failing”) – but it will, I promise, make you think a bit more closely about why and how network models thrive or die (but, you know, more interestingly than that).
• Men Are Scum: Or, what it’s like to be a part of the team that determines what it is and isn’t OK to say on Facebook – or, if you want to position it another way, what it’s like to have a very real and significant role in shaping what is going to be considered to be the prevalent standard applied to online discourse for the majority of the world. Which, when you put it like that, is quite a big deal. This is a profile of Monika Bickert, and others, who head up Facebook’s attempts to codify and systematise what can and cannot be said on the platform, and of then ensuring it can be applied and enforced equitably across the site’s 2bn users. There are many reasons I would not be qualified to do this sort of job, but it’s one of the few I can think of where having two degrees in philosophy might be some sort of help rather than a massive hindrance as it appears to be in every other role I’ve ever had.
• Inside the Lives of the Child Insta Stars: A companion piece of sorts to that Kidfluencer insta account up there, this is less about the kids (who, let’s be clear, are FCUKING CHILDREN and therefore unlikely to have a particularly nuanced perspective on the fact that their parents are pimping out their image for those sweet, sweet brand dollars) and more about the parents who are facilitating (read: driving, hard) all this exciting stuff. This is less horrifying than these pieces tend to be, with no obviously dreadful parents on display, but looking at the photos here it’s impossible for me not to feel a bit uncomfortable about the fact that these people are basically making their kids dress up for the enjoyment of strangers around the world so as to earn (quite a lot of) money off the back of it. Perhaps it’s all the Jackson stuff about this week, but it doesn’t really feel hugely ok to me.
• American Socialists: Yes, it’s fair to say that ‘socialism’ is very much having its moment in the American media spotlight thanks to AOC – this NY Mag piece is deliciously catty, cocking a snook at the Brooklyn hipster socialists, a subspecies committed to activism but also really, really committed to a strong lumberjack aesthetic and some sooty needle tattoo work. Contains this reported quote from one featured kid which, fine, is mean and snarky but is too beautiful not to share: “Everybody looks fckin’ sexy as hell,” shouted Cunningham, NYC-DSA’s co-chair. “This is amazing to have everybody here looking beautiful in the same room, spreading the message of socialism. Give yourselves a round of applause.” Now, there’s no reason on earth why these people shouldn’t look sexy as hell – after all, nothing’s too good for the proletariat, Comrade – but, well, HA. Still, better this than Tories, eh?
• Top Songs: This is the third year that the NYT has done this now – its annual selection of 25 songs that define THE NOW, with accompanying essays on each. This is SUCH a good ‘state of the Western world’ piece as seen through the prism of music – not all the tracks they pick are brand new, but each of them speaks to a particular aspect of 2019 and the accompanying writing is REALLY good and covers a brilliant range of topics; worth clicking for the analysis of all the many, many people with a writing credit on ‘Sicko Mode’.
• The WWF Story: It never feels nice sharing links to reports about ostensibly good organisations doing bad things – the Buzzfeed story about WWF funding murder squads and militias, though, is astonishing and really worth reading in full as a reminder that investigative journalism is powerful and important and needs funding and is HARD. This is such impressive work, if a depressing reminder that massive organisations will often be really, really ropey when observed up close.
• How To Make Dope Sh1t: Thanks to Curios reader Soph (half of ad duo Rohit & Soph) for sending this in – perennial Curios favourites The Pudding have produced a series of guides on, er, how to make ‘dope sh1t’, of which this is the second part, on design. If you’ve any interest at all in visual design online, particularly as regards infoviz-type stuff, this is a must-read, particularly given it’s written by some of the best practitioners in the business right now.
• Why Straight Men Are Joining Masturbation Clubs: I mean, are we? Why…why has noone asked me yet? Are you all happily stroking your firmness in merry communal fashion and excluding me? CHRIST. I have to confess that I don’t think that this is really a thing – it does feel very much like a classic case of ‘two Craiglists posts equals A TREND!’ – but nonetheless it’s quite an interesting article touching on (sorry) why ostensibly straight men might now feel more comfortable and relaxed masturbating in front of other men (we are moving beyond an age of toxic masculinity, apparently, and we are detoxifying it by ejaculating together).
• Pokemon London: There was another trailer released recently for that weird and creepy lookink live-action Pokemon film starring Ryan Reynolds, and it turns out that loads of the film is set in London; this is a far-more-detailed-than-necessary look at all the shots of the city used in the video, analysis of how they’ve been manipulated, and a lot of idle speculation as to whether they’re going to turn the Tfl roundel into a Pokeball at some point (they are, obviously). Is it me, by the way, or does all the non-Pikachu CG work in this look desperately shonky? Did they spend all the money on his luxuriant golden hairs?
• Women Painters Overlooked by Art History: The Google Art Project presents profiles of 14 female artists who had previously gone unrecognised by the art establishment but who are now receiving their dues; my personal favourite is Suzanne Valadon, but pick your own.
• Leaving Neverland: You will, of course, have your own opinion about the Michael Jackson documentary and what it does to your memory of the artist and the legacy of his work; it’s quite hard to look at this stuff and not think ‘hm, yes, looks like you’re bang to rights there, Jacko, and wow doesn’t that make a lot of stuff from the early 90s look pretty bleak in retrospect’. This piece is by Wesley James, who had previously defended Jackson against allegations and who now says he has changed his mind – this line struck me and stayed with me, and gives you a sense of the style of the piece overall: “I’m staring at the coat rack looking for somewhere to suspend more disbelief, and there’s no more room. I have to hold this.”
• Face Tattoos, Soundcloud Rap and Bieber: An exploration of that most modern of phenomena, the face tattoo. I once went to Arsenal to see Chelsea lose to them in a cup a decade or so ago at Highbury; the man in front of me had “GOONER” in gothic script across the back of his (very thick, very pink) neck and, when he turned round to celebrate Arsenal’s second and I tried to pretend to be happy rather than miserable and terrified, an accompanying 2-inch picture of the Arsenal cannon across his left cheek, which I always thought was an incredibly brave commitment to staying within a very, very specific area of North London for the rest of your life.
• Fight the Ship: Thanks to Katie for sending me this – if you like thrillers or the sort of mid-90s action movie that might have starred Denzel Washington or Sean Connery then you will absolutely LOVE this, which feels like it might start a Wahlberg were it ever filmed. It’s all about a US Naval warship disaster and the struggle to save both the ships and the lives of those aboard, and whilst the writing’s not stellar it makes up for that with tension and pacing; this is properly cinematic.
• Pac Man – How We Played: An essay born out of a charming little detail – when you examine old Pac Man arcade cabinets, you’ll notice that they all exhibit the same pattern of wear made from players universally using their left hands to steady themselves against the cabinet’s architecture. I love these things, when small details tell you about how people used an object and how that in turn defines elements of the space within which said objects existed (again /pseud).
• Bate Bola: It’s carnival in Brazil! Another year, another procession of terrifyingly-full silicon extremities and extravagant headdresses! There is, though, another side to the Rio celebrations, in the shape of Bate Bola, a sort of people’s carnival which takes place in the suburbs of Rio and is the more gritty alternative to the mass-participation spectacle in the city’s centre. This tells you the history of the festival, shows you the costumes and gives you a feel for the way it intersects with the gangs which dominate much of Rio’s poor districts. Fascinating, and something I’d never heard of before.
• Nick Kyrgios: Tennis players are famously boring. Andy Murray’s ability to occasionally use sarcasm and irony, and the fact he’s Scottish, combine to make him DANGEROUSLY personable by the standards of the ATP tour, and Stefan Edberg was once described by other pros as a man so dull that they honestly believed one of his hobbies was ‘staring at walls’. Which makes Aussie enfant terrible Nick Kyrgios such a guilty pleasure – he’s been around for ages, being a prick, but he won a tournament the other day which prompted this piece about how he’s such an insufferable tool. This is HUGELY satisfying to read, and contained at least one sentence of which I was very, very jealous.
• Travels in Pornland: An essay in Granta in which Andrea Stewart remembers her experiences of pornography and her work in feminist publishing, and examines the idea of ‘feminist porn’ as a concept; this is really interesting on how and if porn can ever be said to be a feminist experiences (she doesn’t, unsurprisingly, solve that one) and whether it will always be an inherently male-owned domain. Really good writing.
• Unnameable Things: SO BEAUTIFUL. About butterflies and the Troubles, two subjects that oughtn’t work in tandem except here they really do. By Kerri ní Dochartaigh, who really is a very talented writer indeed. This really is very good, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
• The Greeter: Finally this week, a short piece of fiction by T Kira Madden about a teenager, her mother, her mother’s addiction, adolescence, secrets and sex and all the rest. Even better than the last piece, and I don’t say that lightly. If you only read two things in the longreads this week, make it these last two.

By Chloe Wise

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) I..I don’t understand this AT ALL. Is this from someone’s Twitch stream? What is happening? IS THIS WHAT THE CHILDREN LIKE THESE DAYS?? I don’t expect any of you will watch all 20m of this, but it’s worth scrubbing through at random as it gets VERY weird indeed:

2) This is by Matmos, and it sounds like it was cobbled together by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the late-70s and it is GREAT. Nice video, too:

3) You want some surprisingly melodic Mongolian metal? YES YOU DO! Thanks to Ged for the tip here, this is really quite good – it’s by Nine Treasures and it’s called ‘Boddhicitta’:

4) This is an animation by someone called Kadavre Esquis – I know NOTHING more than that. It’s odd, but it’s also really, really technically impressive, in the now-legendary pixelart style:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Curios favourite Elro is back with another freestyle on JDZ – he’s got an EP out soon and he’s been off the booze a bit and this is GOOD; some of the wordplay on here is very sharp, and fair play to him for sticking at this through what I get the impression has been a bit of a tricky few years:

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6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Papergood’ by closegood, and I LOVE IT and I want to hear more of them RIGHT NOW. Really very good:

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7) Last up this week, 17m of short film that I really would urge you to watch. Do it on your phone, and get a screen’s-eye view of a day in the life of an average white teenage boy. It’s not particularly comfortable viewing, and if you’ve got teen kids yourself then it’s liable to make you simultaneously really want to know lots more about their secret digital life and really not know – regardless, though, as a piece of mobile-first, vertically-shot storytelling (sorry) this really is excellent and it is an excellent way to round out this week’s MASSIVE selection of links and a great point for me to say BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE HAVE FUN TAKE CARE AND STAY SAFE AND HAVE A GOOD REST OF THE DAY AND A NICE WEEKEND AND A GOOD WEEK AND IT WON’T BE LONG UNTIL IT’S FRIDAY AGAIN SO BASICALLY LET’S JUST THINK OF THE REST OF THE YEAR AS A LONG SUCCESSION OF WEEKENDS STRETCHING OUT AHEAD OF US AND MAYBE THAT WILL MAKE IT ALL EASIER TO BEAR ANYWAY I PROBABLY OUGHT TO GET ON SO BYE TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

First up, an apology from me to you for screwing up the html quite so spectacularly last week; hopefully this week the links should work and the words should be readable and the only issues you ought to encounter are the ones born of authorial inadequacy rather than the peculiar strain of CMS-luddism I appear to be infected with.

ANYWAY! How are we all? Did we enjoy the Summer? Are we read for Autumn and Winter, which the weather forecast seems to suggest are about to come careening round the corner with chilly abandon? GREAT!

It doesn’t matter how cold it gets, anyway – WE CAN WARM OUR FINGERS ON THE BURNING EMBERS OF CIVILISATION! I jest, of course – this is the best of all possible worlds, as the Panglossion Pinker-disciples like to tell me on the reg, and anyone who doesn’t agree is a miserable enemy of progress! So, then, tell me why it doesn’t feel like that for anyone I or you know? IS THE PROBLEM INSIDE US?

Oh I don’t know. Neither do you. Noone knows ANYTHING, which is part of the problem – at the very least generations past were kept inured from the foibles and failings of those putatively in control, meaning they were able to maintain a blind faith in the illusory superiority of the people at the wheel; now, though, with not only the curtain peeled back but also the first few layers of epidermis, we get to see EVERYTHING and we can see that just like us they are scared and frightened and incompetent and unhappy, and that what we might once have mistaken for conviction and zeal in their eyes is instead the same glazed expression we see in each others’, fruit of late nights trying to drink the care away.

Still, no matter – we may be heading to hell, but the handcart’s roomy as you like! Snuggle in, settle down and allow me to set you careening on your way through the swiss-cheese passageways meandering through this weeks SOLID BLOCK of congealed webspaff like some sort of fetid and unpleasantly-suppurating equivalent of Space Mountain. This, as ever, is Web Curios – WHITE RABBITS, EVERYONE!

By Lola Gill

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A MIX OF TRULY UNDERGROUND UK HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH FULLY EXPECTS A TIMES/MAIL STORY ABOUT ‘SICK YOUTUBE ADVERTISERS TARGETING KIDS BASED ON THE MOMO CHALLENGE’ WITHIN THE WEEK:

• Facebook Introduces ‘Showcase’ For More Tellylike Ads: This is literally creating a TV-style ad-buying market for Facebook Watch – only in the US so far, but I imagine that the buying/targeting options here detailed, which involve buying inventory across a specific set of premium shows, the ability to reach viewers watching ‘contextually-relevant’ content, and single-show sponsorship, will eventually be rolled out to other major markets. Thrilling stuff.
• Instagram Planning Public Collections: I’m trying to avoid reporting on conjecture in this section, not least because if I do it means I have to write this tedious crap up twice when speculation becomes reality. This is interesting, though – indefatigable codedigger Jane Manchun Wong (the person single-handedly responsible for seemingly 90-odd% of all current ‘x social media platform is working on y’ scoops, which is hugely impressive) has discovered that there’s code within Instagram’s existing ‘Collections’ feature (where you can collect ‘grams into your own personal scrapbooks, a la Pinterest) to turn said Collections public, thereby meaning that any individual or brand could in theory use the platform for pulling together themed collections of stuff, just like on Pinterest. Of course, Insta doesn’t have all the nice shoppability stuff built in, but, well, it will, won’t it? Poor Pinterest.
• A Detailed TikTok Playbook for Creators: Or indeed for anyone else who wants to use the GLOBAL PHENOMENON (it passed 1bn downloads recently, and whilst downloads obviously aren’t necessarily users that’s still a hell of a number). If you’re still yet to give it a go then this is actually a very simple and straightforward guide to the app’s usage and features – equally, I find it hard to imagine anyone over the age of 20 feeling at home there (not for any Snapchat like reasons of interface horror, more to do with the fact that it’s hard not to feel a bit like that classic Steve Buscemi meme when surrounded by video of brilliantly-yet-bafflingly creative children doing dizzying quick-cut edits of in-jokes that you will never fully understand).
• Pandora Stories: Only in the US (again) – sorry. This is an interesting idea, though – streaming service Pandora is launching its own version of the Stories format, but this one’s moderately more interesting than the standard ‘chunked-down photos and videos stitched together with little or no skill’-type thing. The idea here is that creators can stitch together playlists of songs with their commentary or explanation stitched between the tracks – so you could have an artist talking you through their album track-by-track, say, or someone doing their own Desert Island Discs-type show. This is SUCH a nice idea and I would expect Spotify to thieve this very soon.
• Amazon Personalise: I don’t imagine this will be of any practical use to any of you, but it’s an interesting little bit of Amazon news regardless. Amazon Personalise is a new offering from MechaBezos, which offers app developers to use Amazon’s machine learning technology to build a layer of personalised recommendation within their apps. “With Amazon Personalize, you provide an activity stream from your application – page views, signups, purchases, and so forth – as well as an inventory of the items you want to recommend, such as articles, products, videos, or music. You can also choose to provide Amazon Personalize with additional demographic information from your users such as age, or geographic location. Amazon Personalize will process and examine the data, identify what is meaningful, select the right algorithms, and train and optimize a personalization model that is customized for your data.” This is potentially hugely powerful, and another example of why Amazon is eventually going to win advertising and possibly everything else.
• C’est Parti: It seems that 2019 is the year of the cutely-pixellated branded browsergame, and I am ok with that. This one’s French, again, and is a simple-but-diverting vertical scroller in whichyou climb ladders, collect coins and avoid peril. I think it’s made to promote the French equivalent of John Lewis but, frankly, who cares? We’re done with the tedious s*c**l m*d** stuff in record time, and YOU deserve a reward!

By Lizzie Gill

NEXT, ENJOY AN EXCELLENT 20-TRACK CAREER RETROSPECTIVE OF ELECTROHIPHOPGRAFFITIPIONEER REQ!

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE WANTS TO SPEND THE REST OF TODAY RUNNING ROUND SHOUTING “ONE MONTH TO GO! ONE MONTH TO GO!” IN THE MANNER OF CORPORAL JONES FROM BLACKADDER HAVING WHAT IS COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS ‘A ROUGH ONE’, PT.1:

• Play With GPT2: A full two weeks since OpenAI’s scaremongering press release about how AI writing was going to DESTROY our last remaining scraps of faith in the integrity of journalism with its magical fake news generation properties (congratulations to the UK press for noble work in reminding us that, occasionally, the media can do quite well without any AI help at all, thankyou very much), we can now ALL play around with it (or at least a dumbed-down version of it). Chuck in a fragment of seed text, set the output length, crank the lever and see what results. It’s…patchy – I read somewhere that this was rather like linguistic impressionism, doing an excellent job of communicating the rough vibe of sensical (is that a word? Fcuk it, it ought to be) prose at a glance whilst without on close inspection really meaning much at all – but doubtless impressive. See what it makes of your last Whatsapp message for a creepy glimpse into how easy it is to mimic your writing ‘style’.
• This Startup Does Not Exist: ANOTHER machine learning toy, this time using ML to generate an infinity of webpages for nonexistent startups; refresh the page for a new company. I just got ‘Circumer – Using the blockchain to create AI chatbots’, which were this 2017 would be pretty plausible; admittedly it does fall apart as you scroll down the page, though I would personally invest in any real-life company which listed one of its qualities as ‘jocundity’, but overall this is a nice addition to the pantheon of sites which show us quite how well the machines will be able to fool us in about 2 years.
• Drivetime: Ok, you won’t be able to use this unless you’re in the US, but it’s still interesting, promise. Drivetime is a REALLY clever idea – an app designed for car commuters which every day will pair you with another player, driving to or from work (or anywhere really), and present you with a series of questions across 7 categories; the doubtless cheery and HYPER-AMERICAN hosts ask the questions, the app uses voice recognition to register your answers and, er, that’s it! You answer questions, you win / lose, and come back the next day to do it all again. The game will match you with contacts or strangers, but as far as I can tell there’s no person-to-person interaction so you don’t have to worry about people being pricks (small mercies), and overall this just seems like a great idea (ignoring any potential road safety implications – I don’t drive, so have no idea whether concentrating REALLY HARD on trivia is the sort of thing that might prove dangerous).
• NoClip: Many of you I know read this while at work in what I presume is a sort of minor act of rebellion which you deep-down know you might sort-of be able to pass off as ‘general internet trend research’ if noone looks too closely at the timesheets; presuming you ARE at work, and presuming you wish you weren’t, then enjoy this amazing site which lets you select from a range of old-school Nintendo games (and a few other titles), load up the game maps and then navigate weightlessly in three dimensions, floating around through the virtual space in weirdly-relaxing fashion. You can spend the rest of the day floating through MarioKart64’s courses or you can spend it pretending to care about yet ANOTHER pitch for a client who will make your life a living hell before sacking you unceremoniously when you yet again failed to make a ‘viral’ (honestly, in the past month I have seen at least three briefs that are basically just that – we’re regressing, I swear) – which do YOU prefer? Well, quite.
• European Tree of the Year 2019: It”s the most wonderful time of the year – when we get to choose Europe’s BEST TREE!!! This year’s field is pretty strong, and whilst part of me feels a patriotic duty to tell you to cast your vote for ‘Nellie’s Tree’ (could our entry be any more stereotypically British? You can just imagine that being read out in a wavering, paper-thin voice which then goes on to ask you if you’d like ‘a nice cup of milky tea from the little shop next door’) it’s clear that the standout arboreal contender here is France’s Bird Tree. Look at it, it’s MAGNIFICENT. Oh, and seeing as you’re here, have some BONUS TREE ENTHUSIAST CONTENT in the shape of this charming site which collects loads of stories an anecdotes about trees.
• Kanopy: How did I not know about this?! Kanopy is an AMAZING service which offers literally thousands of films to stream, for free, if you’re a member of select libraries or academic institutions worldwide. It’s got a truly insane selection of international films, covering all the bases that you wish Netflix would but which it never will – international cinema, arthouse stuff, old movies…honestly, this is wonderful. As far as I can tell, in the UK you need to be a University student to access it – but, well, if you know anyone who’s at University then maybe they could lend you their ID…NB WEB CURIOS IN NO WAY ENDORSES IDENTITY FRAUD.
• The Gyllenhaal Experiment: Blah blah blah The Pudding excellent dataviz and interactive blah blah blah. Yes, that’s right, it’s ANOTHER great piece of interactive datawonkery from The Pudding, which for its latest hit interactive exploration of numbers and stuff decided to build a site to track the most popular misspellings of the names of famouses. It’s really nicely built – it shows you a series of famouses, asks you to type what you think they are called, and as you type shows you how many people offered the same spelling as you, along with visual details of the various spell-splits along the way. Which, I’ve just realised, is an awful description. Anyway, try it! It’s fun! Though I have to admit I didn’t recognise about ⅓ of the people as I am crap at famouses and they are all American.
• Glass Leaves: Oh this is lovely. Glass Leaves is a small text toy which lets you plug in any copy you want and then manipulate it in a variety of ways; cutting up the text, removing adjectives, etc. You can stack manipulations, reverse them, and generally mess with the text in all sorts of fun ways; as a means of doing literary experimentation it’s not bad, and you can probably add an entertaining layer of inefficiency to your working day if you decide to run all your emails through several layers of this before sending them.
• The Music Burner Archive: Burning Man’s done a quite spectacular job of turning from ‘genuinely interesting-looking cultural/artistic experiment, albeit one populated by people who I’d probably cross mountain ranges to avoid’ to ‘literally THE worst example of the ridiculousness of Valley VC faux-hippy wankery’, which is pretty impressive in a way. Still, they’re making noises this year about attempting to take it back to its roots and remove some of the ‘founders on safari’ vibe from the whole thing, so good luck to them. This site collects seemingly every single musical set from the festival from each of the past 20 years – if you dig through there’s a pretty incredible and eclectic range of mixes, though there’s a slight tendency towards what I like to term ‘dog on string music’ (which, I now realise, will mean next to nothing to you – oh well).
• Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator: Another excellent and fun little wordtoy, this one letting you plug in a couple of words of your choosing and then spitting out attempted puns and portmanteau words based on what you gave it. It’s interestingly oblique – I just entered ‘car’ and ‘sheep’ and it responded with, amongst other things, ‘yakcident’ which I am slightly in awe of. This is really rather magical, if you’re the sort of person who likes wordplay and linguistics at least.
• Politiscope: This is a really clever idea. A US app, Politiscope exists to offer a quick, easy to access and clear database of elected officials in the US, offering you an at-a-glance look at their voting record, stance of specific issues, etc. through a simple and clear interface. SO useful, this – wouldn’t it be helpful to have something similar in the UK, with the ability to do your own quick and easy checking on this stuff rather than having to take the partisan infoslices fed to you on Twitter as gospel (obviously you can check this stuff already, I know, but presenting it like this seems to me like a genuinely sensible idea).
• King Charles I Return: Thanks Dan for this BEAUTIFUL piece of webwork – I don’t pretend to fully understand what’s going on here, but I’ll just leave the description here and suggest that you ensure that you visit this on a desktop and with the volume up: “Welcome to the website of King Charles I Return—the definitive character re-enactment of the 17th Century Stuart Monarchy faithfully brought to you by Daniel Williams. Join Daniel as he follow [sic] in the footsteps of Charles from his time.” This is sort-of lovely.
• Killiii: Beautiful photography of Inuit people and the landscape they live in, by native photographer Killiii Yuyan. Regardless of how much you think you might not be interested in this, I promise you that these are glorious and you will absolutely fall in love with the polar bears.
• Hypercard Adventures: If you had an old-school Mac (one of the grey boxes, pre the Steve Jobs pastel revolution) then you might well feel a strange pang of almost erotic nostalgia at this – if you weren’t, though, this will probably mean nothing to you. Sorry. “HyperCard was a piece of application software and a programming tool for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. HyperCard combined a flat-file database with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface.HyperCard also included a built-in programming language called HyperTalk for manipulating data and the user interface.” This is an emulator for that. Literally no idea what you might want it for but, well, not my problem.
• Goatse: This is sad – Goatse, classic internet shock site which I am going to presume I really don’t need to explain at this point in March 2019 but which if you’re unfamiliar with used to contain nothing more than a large and violently technicolour image of a man opening his anus to startling dimensions from an angle that can best be described as ‘photographic colonoscopy’, has PIVOTED TO BITCOIN. I think it’s safe to say that the time to HODL might have passed, lads.
• Expensive Chat: Fair play to the kid behind this, who’s managed to put a new spin on what I thought was a played-out idea – to whit, the ‘pay small amounts to promote something on a briefly trendy url’ thing. Expensive Chat is a chatroom platform – you go there, you type, stuff appears onscreen, lots of users can use it simultaneously – with the gimmick that each character posted on the platform costs $0.01 and you have to pay to post. At the time of writing it’s raised over $130 – if it reaches $1,000 I am giving up and going to live in a bin because, honestly, it’s NOT FAIR.
• The Improv Map of the World: A Google Map listing known improv opportunities everywhere in the world, for all you globetrotting comedians out there (I can number two known globetrotting comedians amongst Curios’ readership – Hi Alex! Hi Rina! – but there may be others) – not sure quite how up-to-date it is, but if you’re going to, say, Panama and want to see a man struggling through the realisation that he’s not as funny as his mates think he is then, well, here you are!
• Google 3d Search: Oh this is a wonderful goldmine of odd! This is a beta Google search tool that lets you search speficically for 3d models uploaded to Sketchfab. Honestly, just plug in whatever odd words and phrases spring to mind, and when you’ve defaulted to ‘penis’ (I KNOW YOU) enjoy some of the excellent rendering work on display (along with the inexplicable model of a small cartoony mouse called, for no discernible reason, “Big Gay”).
• Is Britain Great Again?: Just, you know, in case you were wondering. Has anyone checked who the first journalist was waaaay back in the early days of this mess to speculate, even in jocular ‘it’ll never happen!’ fashion, what it would be like were we to be a month away from March 29th with no sign of a deal whatsoever? There will have been one – go on, someone do the digging and make them feel smug.
• Oscar Photos: In case you didn’t get enough hi-res photos of beautiful people in fancy, silly clothes on Monday, here are some more. As ever, the Atlantic’s picture selection is fantastic, credit where it’s due.
• Underwater Photographer of the Year 2019: Yeah, it definitely feels like these are happening more often than once a year – still, once again, LOOK AT THESE AQUATIC LADS! Many of these are sublime, though I do feel they ought to strip out the very specific ‘beautiful woman photographed underwater in a way meant to look deeply artistic but which instead just invokes Jack Vettriano’ pictures into their own comedy category (special shout out to the Italian photo of that ilk which is entitled simply “Italian Beauty”, which is the most Italian name it could possibly have been given).
• Cursed Putters: Do you play golf? WHY? Still, you don’t need to be a golfer to enjoy this Twitter thread which glories in the over-the-top idiosyncracy of modern putter design – these are SO ugly.
• Tokyo Livestream: A webcam, capturing the live view of a few busy flyovers and a rail track in Tokyo. Obviously NOTHING HAPPENS, but it’s strangely soothing nonetheless and, per all of these things, seems to have a very dedicated community of a few hundred souls who gather to watch nothing at all happen in Japan and have a very civilised groupchat in the sidebar. Join them! Make friends! Discuss the peculiar majesty of Japanese rail transport!
• Cambridge Digital Library: You want an incredible library of digitised archive material from the University of Cambridge? YES YOU DO! Regardless of whether you have any interest in in-depth exploration of the materials, just clicking through is fascinating; you get a small impression of the incredible depth of the University’s archive and a vague, dizzying sense of years of scholarship. Can’t BELIEVE the bastards rejected me.
• The Interactive Typography Cheatsheet: Ever wanted to know what the little horizontal bit on a lowercase ‘e’ is called? No, I can’t imagine you have, and yet now you have the opportunity to learn something you NEVER knew you cared about, all thanks to Web Curios? Isn’t it great? WHY DON’T MORE PEOPLE CARE?!?! Ahem. Anyway, this is a nice little site which presents various letters and tells you what various parts of the character are called from a typographical point of view. Did you know that the letter ‘g’ has an ear? NO YOU DIDN’T DID YOU YOU INGRATES.
• Vai’s Guitars: If you’re the sort of person who’s really into guitars you probably have at least a passing knowledge of who Steve Vai is – if not, know only that he’s the sort of guitarist whose solos go on for about three years and who, to my mind at least, always struck me as looking like a very selfish lover (no idea why that is – sorry Steve). Anyway, this site collects photos of his guitar collection, which will basically be the musical equivalent of actual bongo for some of you.

By Leva Slizuite

NOW, TRY THIS 80sISH ELECTRO MIX BY GIANGO!

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE WANTS TO SPEND THE REST OF TODAY RUNNING ROUND SHOUTING “ONE MONTH TO GO! ONE MONTH TO GO!” IN THE MANNER OF CORPORAL JONES FROM BLACKADDER HAVING WHAT IS COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS ‘A ROUGH ONE’, PT.2:

• The Weather on Mars: The fact that you can visit this page and see what the weather is like on Mars – fine, ok, so there’s a few day’s delay, but STOP with your churlish complaining – is quite amazing. It was a balmy 10 degrees on Tuesday – HOTTER THAN BENIDORM, in classic tabloid fashion, which makes me wonder whether Martian tabloids were full of bikini-clad ‘lovelies’ frolicking in the unseasonably warm Mare Erythraeum.
• Names from Films: A datal-led exploration by Mary Zam of whether or not popular names in real life mapped onto popular names used in hit films in each decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. Fine, the data isn’t HUGELY exciting but the overall design and interface is lovely, and it’s very clearly a post-Pudding project, showing quite how much of an influence the site has had on prevailing dataviz and online interactive aesthetics in a few short years.
• Goat or Throat: Unsurprisingly this is one of several links nicked from last week’s B3ta newsletter – riding the coattails of old-school rhyming guessing game ‘man milk or moo milk‘ (click the link if you like, but it’s not HUGELY SFW), this presents a simple challenge – listen to the audio and decide whether the scream you hear is produced by a human throat or by a goat. WHICH IS IT? I keep getting this wrong, suggesting I neither listen to enough death metal or spend enough time at Vauxhall City Farm.
• The Crappy Games Wiki: This is a bit of a bugger to navigate, fine, but if you’re into games and fancy spending a couple of hours delving through a series of slightly-too-exasperated writeups of some of the crappest ones ever made then, well, this will be a godsend. The writing is…not good, in the main, but the games are so bad that that doesn’t really matter, and there are usually helpful links to YT let’s plays of the titles in question so you can enjoy video evidence of their jankiness should you so desire.
• An Amazing Thread of Public Transport Upholstery: THIS is what Twitter is for – Feargus O’Sullivan recently asked Twitter users from around the world to share photos of the upholstery used on public transport in their city – these are GLORIOUS, from the predictably adorable Japanese ones featuring illustrations about cartoon mascots and how great it is to be polite and respectful to the elderly, to the incredibly on-brand 70s Scandi brown of Stockholm. Just lovely.
• Should This Exist: Further proof that the lazily-termed ‘techlash’ is maturing into something a touch more considered is this podcast, which explores whether there are certain technologies and inventions that are objectively bad and ought not to exist at all. “”Should This Exist?” invites the creators of radical new technologies to set aside their business plan, and think through the human side: What is the invention’s greatest promise? And what could possibly go wrong? Show host Caterina Fake (Partner, Yes VC; Cofounder Flickr) is a celebrated tech pioneer and one of Silicon Valley’s most eloquent commentators on technology and the human condition. Joined by a roster of all-star expert guests who have a knack for looking around corners, Caterina drops listeners into the minds of today’s ingenious entrepreneurs and guides them through the journey of foreseeing what their technology might do to us, and for us.” Interesting, speculative and philosophical, and worth a listen.
• Things Found In Books: A Flickr pool collecting 118 photographs of things that have been found inside books. Doesn’t, on my limited perusal contain the all-time classic entry in this canon (a raw rasher of bacon), but nonetheless this is a pleasingly curious collection – WHO is the person who left a card with a short musical phrase scribbled on it along with the legend ‘Sadness & Death Theme’? Might start doing that to every book I give to charity shops from hereon in.
• Byrne’s Euclid: To be clear about this upfront, I don’t really understand this. It’s LOVELY though, and makes me wish I knew the first thing about hard maths, and the design and colours throughout put me in mind of Mondrian, which can’t be an accident given the mathematical nature of his work. Anyway, here’s the explainer: “Euclid’s Elements was a collection of 13 books about geometry originally written circa 300 BC. Shortly after the advent of the printing press, many editions and translations have been created over the centuries. Byrne’s 1847 edition of the first six books stands out for its unique use of colorful illustrations to demonstrate proofs rather than using letters to label angles, edges, and shapes. His edition was one of the first books to be published with such detailed use of colors and combined with its detailed diagrams makes it an impressive feat of publishing for the times and it stands out even today as a work of art. This site is a reproduction of Byrne’s Euclid by Oliver Byrne from 1847 that pays tribute to the beautiful original design and includes enhancements such as interactive diagrams, cross references, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.”
• Tap My Data: Are you paranoid that THEY are gathering data on you? Are you worried that THEY are compiling all the information into some sort of weird digital puppet ‘you’ that can be manipulated through the byways of the online and made to perform unspeakable digital acts? Or are you just worried that you’ll get crap ads everywhere you go? Whichever of those best describes you, Tap My Data might be of interest – it’s an app that claims to offer you an overview of the data that a company holds about you, and a one-stop interface to manage that. Or at least it does that for those companies that are signed up to it, which at the moment isn’t many – for organisations that DO deal with data and want to be transparent about it, though, signing up to something like this as part of a ‘transparency charter’ might not be a bad idea. Whilst it’s not quite working perfectly in this incarnation, and whilst it may never, it feels like this sort of thing is where we might end up sooner rather than later w/r/t the relationship between individuals and their data.
• The Climate Data Explorer: Would you like to spend a bit of time exploring country-by-country projections as to exactly how fcuked we’re all going to be in a few short years, and to explore the plaster-on-an-axewound commitments to ameliorating this sh1tshow that have been promised? No, I don’t imagine you would, and I don’t blame you – it’s quite miserable tbh.
• Nicky Tesla: The first genuinely novel portfolio site I’ve seen this year, Nicky Tesla’s made theirs in a Google sheet – fine, I can’t understand a damn thing and I have no idea how you’re supposed to read it, but for that very reason it’s almost certainly SUPER COOL and has got him loads of work. That’s how cool works, isn’t it? It’s basically ‘anything that I don’t understand’ at this point.
• Latchel: Disrupting landlords! Not, sad as though many of you will be to hear this, with a baseball bat to the face, but instead by offering an additional layer between tenant and landlord; effectively a remote and decentralised response service to tenants, meaning landlords pay Latchel money so they don’t have to worry about troublesome things like, I don’t know, the living standards of the human beings they’re making money from. As is par for the course in 2019, there is OBVIOUSLY a machine learning component – in this case, it’s used to parse requests as they come in with the promise that this will ensure that emergency requests are prioritised. Which is fine, but you just know that this will only work if statements are phrased in a certain way and as soon as someone writes a panicky email using non-standard English that the software will get all confused and the message will get lost and the fire will spread and the children will die. Fine, ok, that was perhaps a BIT apocalyptic, but I don’t think we’re quite ready to entrust this sort of thing to automated services yet.
• I Love Shelling: Pleasingly this isn’t a celebration of aerial mortar bombardment; instead, it’s a site all about how much its creator loves shells. Particular fan of her ‘Shell of the Year’ roundup posts, though 2018 seems to be missing (this is not ironic appreciation – shells are ace, and I will fight you if you say otherwise).
• The Cock Camera: You might read the title of this link and think “Ooh, Matt, how interesting! A GoPro for fowl! What an opportunity to get a cock’s eye view of the hencoop and to observe avian behaviour without the interference of human observation!”. You might think that, but then I would have to take you to one side and tell you that in fact it’s the other meaning of the word ‘cock’. Sorry about that. Yes, there is now a camera designed specifically to be attached to the penile shaft so as to allow for the sort of ultra-close-up filming that, honestly, I can’t even BEGIN to imagine anyone finding attractive; I mean, seriously, at that sort of zoom isn’t sex just like watching various cuts of offal sliding wetly across each other whilst wearing someone else’s glasses? Still, if this is your bag then I won’t judge you (I might). So much to love here – the fact that (of course!) it’s internet enabled; the fact that there’s an infra-red setting (WHY????); the INCREDIBLE promo video (honestly, please do watch it, it’s practically SFW) – honestly, this is a treat.
• The Amazon Workers’ Race Game: Finally this week, as Australian media got round to doing the ‘hey, working conditions in Amazon warehouses really blow, don’t they?’ story, ABC made this game to accompany their report; it takes you through the daily routine of a worker in a fulfilment centre, complete with motivational morning star jumps and the terrifying fear that you’re not fulfilling quickly enough. This achieves the excellent balance of being sort-of fun and at the same time making you feel slightly guilty about the fact it’s sort of fun – really well-made, and effective in communicating the slightly breathless permahorror of warehouse-based contract working.

By Kevin Peterson By Kevin Peterson

FINALLY THIS WEEK LET’S END THE MIXES WITH 50 MINUTES OF HAPPY HARDCORE – IT’S AWFUL, TRUE, BUT YOU WILL ENJOY IT MORE THAN YOU THINK, PLUS IT WILL CONFUSE ALL THE CHILDREN IN YOUR OFFICE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (WHICH THIS WEEK CONTAINS ONLY ONE THING AND EVEN THAT ISN’T ACTUALLY A TUMBLR!):

• Oscars & I: The owner of this blog, which isn’t a Tumblr but ought to be as far as I’m concerned, is going through every single Best Picture nominee ever. They are up to 1962 (Laurence of Arabia), and it’s interesting to read reviews or appreciations of these films through modern eyes, being appraised by someone who in the main has never seen them before.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Strange Planet: Life on earth as seen through alien eyes, in this breakout 4-panel Instacomic by Nathan Pyle. Funny, although if I’m being hypercritical it feels a BIT like the sort of thing that might have been designed be a supercomputer tasked with designing a comic specifically to appeal to millennial Instagram.
• Juan Delican: Truly amazing CG animations featuring little matchstick people. Literally, matchstick people. These are WONDERFUL
• Plants at the Window: THE TRIFFIDS WANT OUT.
• Gaku Carving: I am so cack-handed that the mere act of carving small, 1970s-style rose patterns into radishes renders me speechless with awe. This is mental.
• Daily Overview: Aerial shots of planet earth.
• The AIDS Memorial: Towards the end of last year I read ‘The Great Believers‘, a novel about the AIDS epidemic and how it affected Chicago specifically in the 80s – I recommend it unreservedly, it’s a beautiful book – and this Insta feed, remembering some of the people who were taken during the disease’s peak. Heartbreaking.
• Oli Krolik: Olga Kamenetskaya modifies dolls – she REALLY modifies dolls. Some of these look like a cross between Barbie and some of Schiele’s more skaggy adventures; VERY unsettling.
• Himaalaya Studio: A clothing brand’s Insta feed, featuring loads of promo photography taken in the Himalayas. Just a rather cool and different aesthetic to that I normally see in fashion photography – thanks to Curios’ Man in China Alex Wilson for the tip.
• Raf Grassetti: Grassetti is a designer who works in videogames, and who did a lot of character design for last year’s God of War reboot; his Insta feed presents sketches, works in progress, models and other gubbins from his work, and it’s GLORIOUS – obviously helps if you know and like videogames, but this is generally hugely impressive.
• Chiuso Di Domenica: Shuttered Italian shops – as the name suggests, this only posts on Sundays.
• Ghazaraza: Yoni-ish art, with an excellent Indian-inspired style to the work.
• This Much I Know: This, apparently, is THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM! Or at least it is according to the VC people at Guardian Media Group, who have decided to throw money at this EXCITING NEW MEDIA VENTURE,which seems to consist solely of poorly-constructed Insta stories done in the same sort of manner as you saw news orgs on Snap doing 3 years ago. Who is this for? What value is it adding? Where is the market for it? WHAT IS THE BUSINESS MODEL?? All questions you can seemingly swerve if you’re David Cameron’s sister-in-law, whose venture this is. Christ.
• Haiku for Millennials: Closing out this week’s bumper crop of troughs, this is a project by Biz Govindji – Instapomes crossed with millennial angst and ennui, like Rupi Kaur crossed with Bojack Horseman. These are great but also, Christ, this particular caricature is becoming a touch prisonlike, no?

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

• The Trauma Floor: First up this week, that report about how – whodathunkit? – working as a moderator in Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory is actually an AWFUL job that makes you mad and miserable in equal measure. The oppressive surveillance of employee productivity, the ceaseless procession of horrible images being dangled before your eyes, the knowledge that it’s ALL real and all being posted up by actual human being somewhere…it would, it’s fair to say, get you down. This piece in the Verge is well-reported and well-written and yet is very light on solutions – the problem isn’t just that the companies don’t want to risk profit by throwing money at this stuff, but also that, because of the limits of current technology, throwing more money at this means, basically, throwing more people at it. If we want massive, free networks but also want them to be policed, then we have to accept that there are actual people doing the policing, and that it is going to be HORRIBLE for them. As an aside, it’s worth reading Facebook’s slightly oblique non-response to this – WHO writes these and why are they so bad at them?
• Village Facebook: I thought this piece was a really good companion to the one above – it looks at the peculiar stress of being a local community FB Group moderator, and the very weird sort of behaviours that people indulge in within these networks. The point I wanted to make by juxtaposing these two is that there is a level of interpersonal connectivity above which people will start acting strangely and communities with start to warp; no idea WHAT that size is, but you can see it happening in the village Groups gere presented; now multiply that across THE WHOLE WORLD. I know I keep saying this, but I will keep banging this drum – WE ARE THE PROBLEM AND WE WERE NOT MEANT TO BE NETWORKED LIKE THIS.
• RIP The Culture War Thread: The final piece on the oddities of community and moderation this week, this is an excellent and interesting essay by the person who for years has been maintaining the Slate Star Codex blog, one of the most consistently interesting sites on the web for years now. He talks about his experiences attempting to moderate a long, meandering, very active thread about ‘The Culture Wars’ and what it has taught him about said wars and the very particular nature of comment and community online. The bits at the end were most interesting to me – the psychic toll that the work has taken on him is hugely evident in the final few bullets, and you leave the piece thinking that, well, it probably wasn’t really worth it.
• AI Future Crime: On the offchance that any of you are novelists or planning to become one, and that you’re in the market for some writing prompt ideas for the sort of things that could go wrong with AI in the future, then WOW is this for you. A paper by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Turing Centre, “this article offers the first systematic, interdisciplinary literature analysis of the foreseeable threats of AIC, providing ethicists, policy-makers, and law enforcement organisations with a synthesis of the current problems, and a possible solution space.” Dense and scholarly, fine, but it’s worth reading for the chilling section about AI and torture which ought to lead you very quickly to the conclusion that we must never, ever allow AI systems the opportunity to interrogate prisoners.
• Ditching The Phone: I know, I know, articles describing the author’s performative abandomnent of technology and how GREAT it made them feel are a) old hat; and b) largely INCREDIBLY smug and annoying. Given this one’s in the NYT it falls pretty hard against the smug/annoying hurdle, but overall it’s actually quite interesting as an overall examination of what it is that we lose through the constant interaction with information delivered by screen. I realised the other day that one of the few times I’m not directly consuming information during the day is when I walk (I don’t have headphones) – the rest of the time I am always ingesting stuff, which is terrifying and feels like it ought to be unhealthy. Is it? Who knows, I’m an ADDICT AND CANNOT STOP.
• Mr Wolfram’s Personal Infrastructure: Steven Wolfram is an idiosyncratic genius, no question – he’s invented programming languages and a search engine that despite being a decade or so old I still have no idea how to use, and I’ve featured his writing on here before – for such a brilliant mind he’s got a really engaging writing style, which is again in evidence in this (LONG) piece all about his personal daily productivity hacks and routines. If you ever worry that you’re perhaps a bit obsessional about productivity min/maxing and the like, this will make you feel LOADS better.
• How Microsoft, Google et al Support Big Oil: Not surprising in the slightest – after all, business is business and why wouldn’t these companies sell their services to others in the energy and industrials sector – but a useful reminder of the fact that, despite the nice talk about renewables and sustainability, the dirty old world of fossil fuels and mining and BIG MACHINES is still very much where the money is, and Don’t Be Evil stopped being a thing quite a long time ago now.
• Why Bohemian Rhapsody’s Win Was Bullsh1t: I have no particular interest in or care for the Oscars and who won, but this VERY ANGRY piece on Pitchfork does a good job of skewering Bohemian Rhapsody and explaining why it wasn’t a good or even fair choice for Best Picture. I was fascinated to learn exactly how nakedly commercial Queen had been – proper KISS-levels of monetisation – and the extent of the corporate tie-ins in BoRap (for that is what it is now called) and how that effectively acted as additional promo budget for the film above and beyond what other contenders had. Hollywood is SNEAKY and Queen, the remaining ones at least, are Tories.
• The 50 Best Movie Soundtracks Ever: Either something to argue about or something to remind you to listen to Trainspotting again (it’s a GREAT soundtrack, I don’t care that it’s a cliche).
• Russian Doll, Bandersnatch and Games: In a departure from habit I actually happened to watch an EXCITING NEW AND MUCH-HYPED SHOW! Russian Doll was…fine, clever and beautifully-shot and it treated the audience with a reasonable degree of respect, and I hope they NEVER make any more as there’s no way in which they could extend the premise without ruining an otherwise tightly-packaged and self-contained narrative. This piece looks at what it takes from videogames (LOTS) and how it does a better and more interesting job of replicating the game experience than Bandersnatch did. Intellectually interesting about the ‘gameyness’ of games, and how that can be captured and communicated by television.
• Fortnite and Mental Health: Another good piece about how Fortnite is less about the game and more about the community – I wonder whether we’ll look back at Fortnite as the very first babysteps of mass-adoption of avatar-led digitised social interaction (we won’t if you keep writing about it like that – Jesus, that’s an abortion of a phrase and I am sorry). Anyway, this is about how young men in particular are finding space in-game to talk about their feelings in a manner in which they might not be able to face to face, and how the digital environment provides mental breathing room. You could, of course, if you wanted, read this as a depressing indictment of the modern world that people need to take refuge in imaginary spaces to make the headvoices stop, but, well, let’s not dwell on that.
• The Rise of the 4-Panel Webcomic: Featuring one of the ones from this week’s Instas, I enjoyed this investigation into the rise of the 4-panel comic and what that tells us about the impact Instagram is having on all sorts of slightly unexpected areas of life. I think we’re massively underestimating the way that the ‘square’ and ‘rectangle’ as a unit of information consumption/transmission are changing how we communicate and what with, which is without a doubt THE pseudiest thing I am going to type this week, so you can now read on in the knowledge that it’s unlikely to get any worse.
• Star Wars in Real Life: As I say whenever I am forced to write about it, I do not care about Star Wars at all and therefore I am presenting this because it is FASCINATING and not because I dream of one day visiting the ice planet of Hoth (you don’t need to like the films to know stuff like this – if you’re in your 30s it’s literally in you, like a slight fear of strangers in vans and the faint pain memory of the feeling of a ridged plastic football hitting your cold, exposed inner thigh at speed on a freezing Tuesday). This is a preview of a new Star Wars attraction set to open up at one of Disney’s US parks later this year – the detail they go into in terms of the development process here is insane, and I found myself genuinely interested in the stuff about how VR and 3d modelling and AR were all used to effectively create a parallel digital version of the park on which all construction and changes were modelled first. The rest of you, though, will probably be more excited by the ride descriptions which sound honestly BRILLIANT.
• Dollars on the Margins: An excellent essay on the myriad benefits of the minimum wage, and how small incremental increases in base-level pay can make significant differences to the overall quality of life of those affected and, as a result, have significant positive knock-on effects in other areas, from social services to healthcare. How someone can read this and still think “Nah, it’s a terrible idea” is honestly beyond me. Nothing in this that you won’t be familiar with if you’ve ever read ‘Nickel and Dimed’ or similar, but if you want a decent suite of arguments to take to your employer when you tell them why they ought to pay the living wage rather than the minimum wage (and you ought to tell them) then this might be helpful.
• The Shrink Who Believed People Could Predict The Future: I don’t want to tell you too much about this – here’s the sub-heading: “After a national disaster, a British doctor began collecting foreboding visions. Soon, they closed in on him.” Good, eh? Now have this detail: “In the hospital, Barker was best known for his work on aversion therapy, a technique that involved the use of electric shocks and nausea-inducing drugs to treat addictions and other behaviors. He had a slot machine installed outside his office which gave a seventy-volt shock when the lever was pulled.” That gives you a reasonable idea of the sort of English eccentricity that this piece channels – this feels very much like the sort of thing that were it filmed would give someone a decent shot at a Best Supporting Actor gong, if you know what I mean.
• The Universal Language of Football: Sam Diss gets sent to Brazil to cover a 5-a-side tournament sponsored by a world-famous brand of energy drink, and writes quite beautifully about the melting pot of internationally minor-level superstars and footballing geniuses he met out there. Diss is a really good writer – casual but still technically excellent, and capable of the occasional beautiful turn of phrase, and this is a wonderful read.
• Ong’s Hat: On a day where internet conspiracies are all over the news, this harks back to a simpler, gentler time, when someone could create a massive, weird conspiracy rabbithole about phsyics and psychedelia and the paranormal, and it would just be a bit of harmless fun…sort of. Turns out, even back in the day before the internet was such a massive thing people STILL got a bit overexcited by this sort of stuff; still, it’s great to read about and is very reminiscent of (and in fact tangentially linked to) that time traveler hoax piece I linked to a couple of years ago and which, obviously, noone other than me is going to remember honestly I don’t know why I bother sometimes really I don’t.
• There Are No Winners in the Culture War: Subject to a great online hoo-ha on publication due to its accompanying illustration (since removed), it’s unfortunate that what was a (typically) great piece by Clive Martin got somewhat overshadowed. Whilst I think he’s perhaps a bit glib about elements of this, the overall description – of serried ranks of combatants across on line battlefields wearing cobbled-together cultural uniforms they don’t really know how they acquired – is a good one. I happened to see Lionel Shriver on Question Time last night and whilst she’s obviously been a dick for a while now it was staggering the extent to which she has literally just become an avatar for a specific sort of thought rather than being a ‘thinker’ herself in any real sense (the same can be said about many on the left too, fwiw).
• Do Things Matter: No, they don’t. If I were to get a tattoo – unlikely – it would say “It Doesn’t Matter” and it would be on the inside of my wrist and it would be a permanent reminder that anything that happens is almost certainly of little or no significance in the grand scheme of things and, anyway, we’re all going to die. You might think it’s nihilistic, I find it largely comforting. Anyway, this is a great little essay about how nothing really matters, really, and how that’s totally fine and you should just relax about it, ok? Good.
• The Language of What Happened To Us: Looking back at decades of being a woman and how one comes to terms with the memories of those years with the revised perspective of modernity, when you realise that you only now have words and vocabulary to talk about things you felt and experienced years ago. Beautifully written but very sad.
• How To Bury Your Dead Pet Monkey: Sandra Newman reminisces about her childhood friend Ted, who was always different. This is WONDERFUL – such a good portrait of difference in youth.
• Bandit: Last up in this week’s longreads, Molly Brodak’s story about her crook father and her memories of growing up with, and without, him. There’s something about stories that bridge the gap between the world viewed through child’s eyes and the retrospective revisiting of that view as an adult that I find hugely compelling, and this is a superb example of that – make a big cup of tea and enjoy.

By Maren Morstad

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdCrnBLchro)

1. This is by Radical Face and it’s called ‘Hard of Hearing’ and it’s a rather lovely and twee and gentle bit of slightly stripped down Flaming Lips-y indiepop:

2) Next, have the slightly terrifyingly NOW Suzie Wu with ‘Error 404’ – this is short of shonkily great and I am weirdly obsessed with it:

3) Now have THIS – by Paws, it’s called ‘Not Enough’ and it’s another jangly indiepop number which is fine by me, particularly given it’s slightly Death Cab-ish vibe:

4) This is Korean, and as a result I have no idea what they are singing about – hopefully it’s nothing awful, but even if it is it sounds SO NICE! I think these people normally do pop punk, so this is obviously them doing an end-of-album semi-acoustic closer; anyway, this is called ‘Let Me Lost’ and it’s by the fabulously-named ‘Drinking Boys and Girls Choir’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is JPEGMAFIA x HEALTH with ‘HATE YOU’:

6) IRISH HIPHOP CORNER! I had no idea Limerick was a hotbed of rap talent, but this is ACE – skip a minute in to get past the skit rubbish, but from that point this is ace. Not really sure what it’s called, but it’s the 4th part of something described on YouTube as ‘Citrus, Strange Boy, Hazey – Hindsight’ so, er, there you go!:

7) Finally this week, Modeselector feat. Tommy Cash. This is possibly a TOUCH intense but I like it very much – turn it up LOUD and watch the video and try not to look away and, above all, TAKE CARE HAVE FUN I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE HAPPY FRIDAY HAPPY WEEKEND IT WILL ALL BE OK AND IF IT WON’T BE OK THEN IT WILL AT LEAST SOON BE OVER OH HANG ON THAT WASN’T QUITE AS UPBEAT AS I’D INTENDED DAMMIT OH WELL NEVERMIND I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

A NEW PARTY! JUST WHAT WE ALL WANTED! Except it’s not the good sort of party, the type with party rings and sausage rolls and a secret stash of uppers that you find at 3am in the host’s sock drawer and which you know will add a whole new spin to the gathering – no, sadly it’s the other sort of party, all halitosis and misery and hastily-cobbled-together alliances of convenience. Not wishing to dwell on this, but do you think that maybe using a point just over a month from THE BAD THING to launch a new political vehicle might be construed, maybe, just a touch, as frantically wanking at yourself in the mirror whilst Rome merrily blazes around you?

Anyway, a plague on EVERYONE’s house, dear reader, except yours and possibly mine. It’s Friday, I once again have totally failed to ensure I have the afternoon off after this and as such I ought to CRACK ON. You, though, sit back! Relax! Feel my nimble wordfingers massaging pure OIL OF WEBSPAFF into your every mental crevice! Enjoy their lubricious tracing over your cerebellum! LET ME IN TO YOUR HEADS! This, as ever, is Web Curios, and I, as ever, am sorry.

By Pol Kuruscz

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A RATHER WONDERFUL PLAYLIST OF JAPANESE AMBIENT MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS THAT, REALLY, UNLESS YOU HAVE A VERY STRONG PROFESSIONAL REASON FOR READING STUFF ABOUT LARGELY INSIGNIFICANT TECHNICAL CHANGES TO S*C**L M*D** PLATFORMS, YOU SKIP THIS BIT IN FAVOUR OF THE NEXT SECTIONS WHICH HAVE GOOD LINKS IN THEM AND WHICH IN THE MAIN DON’T INVOLVE THE SOULLESS, HORRID DISCIPLINE THAT IS ADVERMARKETINGPR:

• Twitter Expands Political Ad Transparency Stuff: This is Twitter’s Political Campaigning Policy (you remember that! How could you? It was such a special time in our lives!), which stipulates that ads deemed ‘political’ be ‘transparent’, with details about who’s paying for them and who they are targeting – and now it’s being extended to all EU states, Australia and India! What a time to be alive!
• Twitter Opens Beta Testing Of New Conversation Tools: I mean, literally just that – you may recall that there have been rumblings in the past few weeks about Twitter introducing new features to improve users’ ability to follow conversations and better-determine which participants have interjected where; well, now those are in Beta and YOU can apply to participate in the test! That’s right! You can help a massive corporation improve its product set FOR FREE! You lucky, lucky kids! Anyway, this stuff is all almost certainly being added to the feature set reasonably soon, so worth taking a look to know exactly what minor alterations are going to be made instead of banning Nazis.
• YouTube Tweaks ‘Strikes’ System For Creators: Bad week, this, for YouTube, which found itself being blamed not only for flat-earthers and other lunatic conspiracy theorists, but also for a not-insignificant amount of in-comments paedoing. Anyway, this isn’t about that – this is about how its system of issuing warnings and first-strike censure against channel owners is changing slightly. Unless you’re some sort of sub-Pewds edgelord vlogger, this is unlikely to be of any interest or import to you at all, but why not read it anyway seeing as I’ve bothered to write it up for you. What? WHAT? Oh fine, you ingrates. Jesus.
• Reddit Ads Better Ad Performance Tools: You can now do app install ads on Reddit! That’s right! Oh, and the Reddit Pixel now offers improved conversion tracking! Look! “Reddit’s pixel can track eight conversion events, breaks out view-through and click-through conversions and allows for attribution windows of 1, 7 or 28 days.” Sometimes, you know, I write this stuff and feel a little bit as though I’m working for some sort of niche interest specialist publication, like Steam Enthusiast or Swarfega Monthly. Then, though, I remember that the circulation of Curios is even smaller than that. This is less-popular than a magazine devoted to the creation and maintenance of miniature railway dioramas – WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT YOU, GENTLE READER? No, hang on, don’t leave.
• TikTok Is Testing Native Ads: Not actually ‘news’ per se, but I’m telling you so that you can drop this futurenugget into the next meeting you have about flogging things to children and thereby look like some sort of seer (to be specific, a dreadful Cassandra-type whose visions of tomorrow consist solely of dead-eyed BRANDED MOMENTS OF TRUTH (I don’t know why, but every now and again I am reminded of the fact that there exists in London an agency – owned by Chime, who you will obviously remember also owned cuddly coup-enablers Bell Pottinger – whose name (honestly I am not making this up) is in fact Branded Moments of Truth. That’s right – that is an ACTUAL COMPANY NAME. They have in recent years attempted to hide their (vile, pestilential) namelight under an abbreviationbushel, renaming themselves BMT, but Curios never forgets.))
• Smart Speakers and Hype: Rob Blackie writing for The Drum about all the reasons why Alexa and the like might be the victims of a LITTLE bit too much hype; Rob’s contention is that, whilst the sales numbers are obviously massive the actual use-cases for the devices are in fact very narrow, and there’s no evidence at all to suggest that anyone’s using the damn things as anything other than radios and kitchen timers (aside from children, who to the best of my knowledge are using them as incredibly sophisticated Guantanamo-style psychological torture devices against their parents). Maybe hold off on spunking all that budget on an Alexa Skill, eh?
• Urban Scrawl: Incredibly slim pickings in advermarketingprland this week, so I’ll close out with this – it’s not hugely exciting, but it’s a cute piece of ‘content’ (sorry) which nails the ‘this will do the rounds of all the slightly whimsical linkdumpy blogs’ tone perfectly. The company behind it – Traveloka, no idea who the fcuk they are but I’d guess, er, travel – asked a bunch of people to sketch the one thing that most reminded them of each of 10 different cities, now presented on this site. Special shout out to whoever it was who drew a Goatse as the Underground roundel.

By Jamie Diamond

NEXT, DID YOU KNOW THAT MICHAEL CAINE, THE ACTOR, ONCE RELEASED A COMPILATION ALBUM OF HIS FAVOURITE CHILLOUT MUSIC? WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR IT? IT’S ACTUALLY VERY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO STATE VERY CLEARLY THAT, WHILST IT HONESTLY COULDN’T GIVE TOO MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT YOUR POLITICAL ORIENTATION (NO NAZIS, THOUGH, OBVS), IF ANY OF YOU WOULD SERIOUSLY CONSIDER REFERRING TO YOURSELVES AS ‘TIGGERS’ YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY FCUK OFF, PT.1:

• Mash: This is a really fun idea, at least in theory, adding a degree of creativity and play to the seemingly unstoppable narcissism-fest that are Stories. Mash is an app which takes the standard Stories format – discrete content blocks of image, text or video, strung together as a number of ‘cuts’ or scenes (yes, I know full well that you know exactly what they are and didn’t need the explanation, but Curios is a broad church and I have to expect that your mum might stumble in one day and need a few primers) – and turns it into a fun little toy. Users make a ‘Story’, filling in however many of the content blocks they want, and then share it with others, asking them to fill in the gaps however they choose. Whether or not this particular app ever takes off – and chances are it won’t – the premise is really quite clever and can totally be ripped off to a certain extent. If you’re looking for an ORIGINAL BRAND CAMPAIGN EXECUTION that in fact isn’t original at all, then, well, this could be PERFECT!
• Google Earth Black History: For Black History Month in the US, Google has created this simple interactive tour of the US, experienced via Google Maps, taking you on a trip across the country over the years and introducing people and places of particular significance to the history of black Americans. It’s not the most technically groundbreaking thing you’ll see this week, but it’s well-made and contains an absolute wealth of information about black American history and achievement.
• Prince GIFs: Prince’s estate have put the OFFICIAL selection of gifs of the late artist on Giphy. You want a HUGE selection of gifs featuring Prince being Prince? GREAT! The man was so preposterously sexy and charismatic that you can basically get pregnant just by looking at some of these, and that’s regardless of whether you’ve got any ovaries or not.
• This Airbnb Does Not Exist: Following on from last week’s ‘none of these are in fact real people’ GAN-generated digifacefakery, the internet this week has coughed up a bunch of analogues – this, the first of the bunch, is a site which will present you with a computer-generated Airbnb listing each time you refresh. All the images are processor-imagined, based on a GAN trained on existing listings images, and the copy’s derived from stuff stripped from the site; the words are a mess, fine, but the images have a really quite interesting creepiness to them; turns out that it’s harder to identify exactly why these photos of living spaces look wrong, but that they definitely do and that that makes them really unsettling in ways that I for one can’t adequately explain.
• This Cat Does Not Exist: As above, but this time with computer-generated MAOWs. An infinite number of SPECIAL LITTLE GUYS here for your viewing pleasure, although bear in mind that this will occasionally throw up a feline so wonky that it will give you nightmares.
• Which Face Is Real?: So what with all the fakery we’re confronted with, do YOU think you can tell the GANfaces from the goodfaces, the real from the rendered? Test yourself with this site, offering up two faces at a time and asking YOU, gentle human, to decide which is that of a real homo sapiens and which is a FILTHY COMPUTER-GENERATED IMPOSTER! This is momentarily diverting but in the main most interesting for the reassuring fact that you very quickly realise how, well, off the vast majority of the GAN-made stuff looks; whilst there’s a fleeting plausibility at first glance, any more serious scrutiny reveals all sorts of janky details around the edges; the software’s not capable of rendering backgrounds very well, and the hair almost always looks janky around the edges. Of course, while I sit here all smug about the fact that I am still just about capable of distinguishing real from fake, it’s worth remembering, again, that this sort of stuff is only about a year old and at this rate we are all going to be watching entirely GAN-generated bongo by Christmas.
• Some More Amazing GAN Stuff: See, this is why. This is the Github repository for code that uses ML to let you do some pretty incredible photo editing on human faces, in realtime, with very simple MS Paint-style tools; scroll down to see some gifs of it in action, but basically imagine that you can take a picture of someone with sunglasses on, ‘erase’ the sunglasses by scribbling over them with an ‘eraser’ tool, and watch as the sunglasses are magically removed from the photo and instead replaced with reasonably realistic eyes of appropriate colour, shape and placement. I know I keep saying this, but we really are VERY close to a situation where you can digitally manipulate anyone you like into doing anything you want them to, which doesn’t sound…great.
• Thread: I’m sure I’ve featured something very similar to this before, but this is NEW (and UK-based, part of our economy’s EXCITING RESURGENCE now that we are set to be unshackled from the albatross-like Europeans oh god it’s only a month away what the fcuk is happening). Threads is a service which offers the UK’s men and women the opportunity to get AI (not in fact AI)-powered assistance with their wardrobe – you answer some simple questions about yourself, select some looks you like from their proffered preselects and away you go. It matches you with a ‘stylist’ (or, more accurately, a particular algorithm which fits most closely with your choices) which will pick out items of clothing which vaguely work within the parameters you’ve defined, presented as part of ‘outfits’ which in theory means that even the most Helen Keller-ish of dressers (ie me) can look like Edward Enninful. I’ve not spent enough time with it yet to tell whether it’s any good – and, honestly, its recommendations so far look fine but also pretty generic highstreet menswear – but I really hope this can make me into the grownup I probably ought to dress as as I hurtle towards 40.
• St Beryl’s: If you ever read Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman then this, the OFFICIAL WEBSITE of the Chattering Order of St Beryl’s, will please you immeasurably. If not, then, er, not quite sure what you’ll get out of this, sorry.
• Rembo: This sounds VERY much like the sort of insult that children in the playgrounds of the 1980s might have hurled at each other across the pitter tarmacadam with their tongues lodged firmly into their bottom lips. It’s not, though – it’s actually FAR more irritating, being as it is an app which lets you put a list of chores in and which will then ACTIVELY NAG YOU til you’ve done them. Listen to this, it sounds ghastly: “With just a simple chat message you can stay organized and set alarms, reminders, medicine and even exercise notifications. Rembo is an AI digital assistant that is a To-do reminder with alarm and notification that will personally call you at the designated time so that you too can become a task ninja and never forget a thing. He is also very funny and is always up for sharing jokes and motivational quotes.” GOSH DOESN’T REMBO SOUND LIKE A FUN, HELPFUL GUY? No. No he doesn’t. He sounds like a wanker that you will grow to despise within a week.
• Medal: A gameclipping tool for PC – press your selected hotkey and the software exports a clip of the last 15s of gameplay. Look, I have no idea how many of you are avid PC gamers but based on the balance of probabilities there are probably about three of you who will find this useful and, well, I like to think that Curios contains something for everyone (except, of course, you).
• pray for Peach, while we’re here – and whilst this isn’t really a fully-fledged new attempt at a network it’s still a fun-looking timesink (thanks to Ben for the heads-up); Screenhole is basically a place where people can share screengrabs, nothing else, with the idea being that you experience a weird sort of disjointed visual stream of oddities. It’s invite-only at the moment, so no guarantee you’ll get in, but it’s an interesting idea to play around with and at the moment at least appears to be blissfully free from any horror or bongo or Nazis.
• Url Render: Look, here’s their description: “Url render allows you to browse on websites without opening new tabs. You can now search with google engine and navigate through sites without opening hundreds of tabs. As usual search something on google.com, “Paris”. The google search engine shows you 10 or more links. If something looks intersting you’ll click on it and the website opens in new tab. Now, with url render, just mouseover the link, a frame is opening and show you the real website without opening new tab. You can browse on the website.” I think this is French, hence the charmingly idiosyncratic written style here – as an idea it is GREAT and would work perfectly for Curios imho.
• Visualist: Of this is SUCH a clever idea; Visualist is an app specifically designed for creating visual instructions for devices or processes; it takes you through a simple series of processes to create a step-by-step instructional guide to, well, anything really. It’s an obvious idea, but now that I think of it I’ve never seen anything that makes the process of doing this simple or intuitive – honestly, ANY brand that has any vague tangential connection to, er, DOING THINGS ought to check this out and take liberal inspiration from it; as to the rest of you, this will honestly be a godsend should you have parents who regularly call you up to ask you questions about resetting the router.
• Endless Jeopardy: This is SUCH a great idea – you know Jeopardy, right? That US quiz in which the host hands you the answer and you, the contestant, have to formulate the correct question in the endlessly irritating formula ‘What is….X?’? Of course you do! This is a Twitter bot which plays the game through procedurally-generated clues; every hour it spits out a new one, with anyone invited to reply with their best guess or funniest offering, and the one with the most ‘Likes’ at the end of the 15m cycle wins points. There’s no actual money involved – obviously – but this is SUPER fun and weirdly addictive and will, once again, show you that there are lots of very funny people on the web and that you aren’t one of them.
• The American Archive of Public Broadcasting: WOW there’s a lot of public telly (and radio) in here. A touch overwhelming at first glance, but if you scroll down a bit you can see a list of categories through which you can browse the shows by theme; the ‘humour’ category alone has over 8,000 pieces of content associated with it, so if you have a weird and specific fetish for 20thC US public television (and radio) then, well, aren’t YOU in for a treat! If nothing else, there is an absolute sampler’s GOLDMINE here for you to explore if you’re into audiocollage-type stuff.
• ILLEGAL LEGO: Did you know that when OFFICIAL LEGO displays are set up there are certain configurations of bricks that are absolutely verboten and that will NOT be sanctioned by LEGO HQ? Well, you do now – this is the offical (no idea if it’s actually official, but wevs) PDF guide to what is proscribed in LEGOland; it’s obviously ridiculous, but in no way surprising from a brand which gets really pissy if you pluralise it. I suggest you spend the weekend policing all your kids’ LEGO builds based on these guidelines so as to educate them on how real fun can only happen within strictly-defined and enforced parameters.
• Dance Your Phd: One of the year’s highlights rolls around again, in which the world’s academic doctors compete to see which of them is best capable of rendering their original research as a piece of performative dance. The winning one here – an interpretation of “Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance” – is SO good and properly heartwarming; although I just had a sudden realisation that these people are not only brilliant minds, they’re also actually pretty good cinematographers and choreographers, which just seems incredibly fcuking unfair frankly.
• Vintage CGI: This subReddit does exactly what it says it does, presenting old clips of CGI work from games, TV and films of yesteryear (and elsewhere besides). As a place to glory in the blocky aesthetics of old school computing this is pretty much unparalleled.
• The Original Browser: MEMORY LANE! “In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as “the web” today. In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.” This is obviously shonky as you like, but it’s worth playing with just to see what an austere experience the web used to be – amuse yourself by showing it to your teenage kids and giving them another reason to believe that the past was a terrible monochrome prison of tedium.

By Peter Lindbergh

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY THIS VERY OLD SCHOOL SOUL MIX?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO STATE VERY CLEARLY THAT, WHILST IT HONESTLY COULDN’T GIVE TOO MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT YOUR POLITICAL ORIENTATION (NO NAZIS, THOUGH, OBVS), IF ANY OF YOU WOULD SERIOUSLY CONSIDER REFERRING TO YOURSELVES AS ‘TIGGERS’ YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY FCUK OFF, PT.2:

• Letters In The Mail: It’s lovely receiving letters, isn’t it? I mean actual letters from actual people rather than the computer-generated missives telling you that you will owe the bank everything forever, obviously, though they are rarer than hen’s teeth in this electronic age. Do you think you would still find it lovely to receive them when you know you’ve paid a tenner for the privilege? I’m not so sure. Still, if you want to pay $11 for the experience of receiving three hand-written letters through the post (no idea if this delivers to the UK, on reflection, but if it does it will probably be more than that), topics unknown and unspecified, then, well, go for it! This makes me quite incredibly sad, I have to say, but maybe it will be a beautiful and lovely thing. Go on, try it and let me know.
• Stories Set in a Future Now Past: Literally just that; HUNDREDS of stories, told in writing and film, which were at the time of their writing set in the future and which future has now become the past – this lists not only the titles and when they were set, but also some of the predictions they’d made about what this imagined future was going to look like. Big fan of this Twilight Zone plot synopsis set in the year 2000 which basically feels a bit like Instagram in 2019: “Set in a world in which people can purchase their adult bodies, but everyone goes for a small number of popular options.”
• The Satan Tapes: I follow this person on Twitter but know nothing about who they are or what they do. This week they Tweeted a VERY long thread featuring the covers of a host of old VHS movies with ‘Satan’ in the title – this is that thread. My personal favourite is ‘Sin-agogue of Satan’, but pick your own!
• The Peter Hook Auction: A truly HUGE collection of Peter Hook’s memorabilia is being auctioned off for charity next month; this is the catalogue. They’re taking online bids, so if you want to be the proud owner of, I don’t know, an unfeasibly-long guitar strap then this will be RIGHT up your street.
• The Frontiers of Design: Design people! This is for YOU! Frontiers of Design is a short film featuring 20 design luminaries from around the world talking about their practice – “As part of the 20th anniversary of the design firm Doberman, The Frontiers of Design is a short film interviewing 20 influential organizations and designers about what’s next for Design. Together they form a diverse patchwork of perspectives across industries, disciplines and markets. This is not a quest for The Answer. Because there is no holy grail. On the contrary, this is the beginning of a journey to uncover clues and spark an industry-wide dialogue about the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities at the Frontiers of Design.” On the one hand this sounds almost unbearably wanky; on the other, if you’re a designer this is probably really interesting and worth the 40m of your time that it will take to watch.
• Sphero RVR: 3x backed with nearly a month to go, this is doing great numbers on Kickstarter; Sphero is a rugged-looking all-terrain remote control buggy thing, which can be programmed and customised and which basically looks like what your childhood 1980s self imagined Big-Track to be (this is why not getting these things for Christmas was a blessing, is what I tell myself). It’s compatible with Raspberry Pi and Arduinos and all those gubbins, and basically looks like EXACTLY the sort of thing that a certain type of dad will buy for their kid in the knowledge that their kid will not give one solitary fcuk about it and that it will become theirs after approximately three days of desultory play.
• TikTok Divorce Vids: As previously mentioned on here, TikTok is a bit of a mystery to me – I know what it is, obviously, and how it works, but I can’t spend any time on there as, well, it just feels weird and wrong looking at all these videos of children, basically. Still, thankfully other collectors of oddities are doing their bit and surfacing wonderful cultural gems such as THIS trend, for breakup videos in which one party soulfully tosses their wedding/engagement/promise/friendship ring at their phones camera in a rueful ‘it’s over!’-type gesture. Honestly, there are about a dozen collected in this Twitter thread and they are ALL golden; expect to see this on Facebook next Summer.
• YourNote: A note-taking app which promises not to store any of your stuff anywhere, should you care about that sort of thing.
• Litho: This is interesting, though I’m not sure quite how useful / necessary it is. Litho is a wearable gestural interface for your phone or tablet; you clip it to your fingers and it allows for gestural controls in 3d, letting you wave and gesture and generally act like some sort of weird ‘Tom Cruise in Minority Report’ future infogod, mastering all the windows and the software with nothing but your fingers. Almost certainly a gimmick that doesn’t work quite as well as it needs to, but quite a cool-looking gimmick so, you know, there’s that.
• Metronaut: One for the musicians amongst you, this is a really interesting idea. Metronaut is an app which offers a full orchestral accompaniment to the solo player, the idea being that you tootle away on your violin or piano or whatever, and the app fills in the gaps where the rest of the ensemble would be, providing you with the full sound of a 30-piece philharmonic or similar. It sounds VERY clever, and purports to do all sorts of automatic things like adjusting its tempo to match you – I can’t play anything at all and so this is utterly wasted on me, but any of you with some actual musical ability might find it a fun thing to play around with.
• Mixed: Does anyone actually ever use collaborative creative online tools? Honestly, I have no idea. Still, if you DO do remote working and if you DO use collaborative creative online tools then, er, here’s another one! Mixer is basically a multi-user moodboard creator, with an additional layer of voice chat so you can all shout at each other for putting the picture of the cat in the wrong place (that’s how collaborative creative working functions, right?).
• The Moon in 81 Megapixels: This combines 50,000 individual images into one and is VERY detailed and, if you’re anything like me, will make you feel VERY smol indeed.
• Photopea: This is basically A N Other online version of Photoshop (NO I WILL NOT PUT THE ™ THERE ADOBE YOU HUMOURLESS FCUKS WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?) which, if you want to do photo editing but don’t want to pay the inflated market rates for the software and don’t want a cracked copy and don’t fancy dealing with the free-but-horrible-to-use-and-ridiculously-named GIMP, might be useful.
• The Beijing Silver Mine: “Since 2009, the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin has embarked on an unusual adventure: salvaging discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing that were destined to destruction. Undertaking one of the largest and most important archival projects in China, he buys by the kilo, taking away rice bags filled with thousands or rolls of slobbery, dusty and scratched negative film. Once closely examined, images are consistently selected, digitized, and classified. Today it encompasses over half a million of anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, reconstructing then a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in China.“ This is a remarkable archive of photography and a wonderful snapshot of late 20/early 21C Chinese life; there’s an Instagram account too, if you prefer to experience it that way.
• Astrobin: As far as I can tell this is basically Imgur but for photos of space, You want a repository of literally thousands of photos of stars, planets, moons, distant galaxies and the like? Of course you do!
• Mr Breakfast: This site is devoted to the MIRACLE OF BREAKFAST. I don’t know who Mr Breakfast is, but judging by this site he REALLY loves the first meal of the day. There is a LOT of very ugly breakfast-related content here, including 192 recipes for omelettes which seems like overkill to me, but there you go.
• Nomadic Tribe: I don’t really have the faintest idea of what this is – I think it’s some sort of new year ‘look how clever we are and what beautiful things we can make!’-type showoffy site from an agency but, honestly, it’s quite hard to tell. Still, it’s SO pretty and so nicely designed, and takes you through a slightly hippyish new age watercolour series of gently interactive vignettes, and I generally adore the art style here so WELL DONE whoever made it.
• Ancient Greek Punishment: UI Edition: Another in the series of ‘punishments from Greek mythology as small games’, this time themed around slightly arch UI jokes. More clever and funny than this slightly p1ss-poor description has made it sound, I promise.

By Christiane Lyons

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS HUGELY ECLECTIC NUMBER FROM REZA ATHAR!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Ad Teachings: A genuinely useful-seeming Tumblr about things in advertising, written by Suzanne Pope whos a Canadian advertising person and lecturer at the University of Toronto; really worth a read if you work in the industry, imho.
• Ryan Putnam: Quite possibly not in fact a Tumblr! Still, Ryan Putnam’s portfolio site where he also sells prints is really rather nice and his work is awesome and CHEAP, should you be in the market for some original prints for $15.
• outside the cinema then, well., ENJOY!
• Low Budget Milky Whites: Crap props from amateur theatrical productions. I think I featured this about 8 years ago back in the H+K days, but I rediscovered it this week and it made me laugh and all those blogs are LONG dead now which means there’s no evidence of my shameful link recycling and, well, there’s NOTHING you can do about it.
• Keanu Reeves Imagines: A Tumblr inviting you to imagine a variety of surreal scenarios featuring Mr Reeves.
• The Peter Tork Beard Appreciation Blog: RIP, Monkee.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Positively Present: An Insta feed which presents nicely illustrated little positive affirmations about LIFE and stuff – the sort of thing which personally makes my eyes bleed and makes me want to drink heavily and self-harm, but which some of you may like and for which, I promise, I do not judge you AT ALL.
• Mr Doodle: An artist who works almost exclusively in thick marker and who, judging by their Insta feed, very much…er…appreciated the work of Keith Haring.
• Bootscrapers of Dublin: THIS is the sort of niche use of Instagram that I am here for.
• Breeze Blockhead: Photographs of breeze blocks and assorted other concrete construction elements, for all you Brutalism fans out there.
• They Didn’t Die: Euphemisms for death taken from the obituary pages. If anyone ever describes me post-mortum as ‘passing through the universe’, know that whatever passes for my immortal soul is at that moment cursing them as hard as possible.
• Suru Denise: Beautiful and VERY vaporwave-y illustrations in the most millennial of colour palettes.
• Ofir Shoham: SUCH amazing animation, using neon lines overlaid onto video to quite wonderful effect; beautifully creative and about to be used in a MASSIVE ad campaign by someone (will it be you? WILL IT?).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Damien Collins vs Facebook: The very funniest thing about this week was Damien Collins’ BIG MOMENT being absolutely spiked by Chuka et al on Monday morning; SORRY DAMO! This Time profile of Collins and his very particular anti-Facebook crusade is interesting not least as it offers a pretty clear picture of a man who seems to be enjoying the personal profile this is granting him rather more than might be entirely decorous. Obviously I’m not suggesting that scrutiny of Facebook and others’ behaviour is anything other than A Good Thing – more that Collins seems to have decided that it’s far more important to paint himself as The One MP Prepared To Make A Stand rather than actually doing anything so tedious as sticking to the actual terms of the enquiry his Committee announced; to be clear, it was an enquiry into ‘fake news and misinformation’ online, not into ‘why everything is Facebook’s fault’. Lots of stuff is, don’t get me wrong, and it’s a largely hateful company which I wish didn’t exist, but to pretend that, well, all this stuff isn’t a little more complicated than ‘BAD FACEBOOK!’ strikes me as pretty reductive and not a little stupid – see this thread by Mat Morrison for more on this.
• Covington and the Media Landscape: We’ve all moved on and forgotten about the MAGA kids vs the Native American guy from a few weeks ago, but this is a really good essay from a few weeks back which examines what that whole sorry week-long period in the US media tells us about the way in which stories develop in 2019 and what we ought to do – as consumers and producers of media – to try and get better at dealing with the swirling horrorhurricane of modern news and the seemingly 27-hour-a-day infocycle.
• A Speech on Socialism: Andover is apparently a very posh school in the US – this is the text of a speech given there by Nathan J Robinson, editor of Current Affairs magazine, on why socialism is actually quite good. I was hugely impressed with this as a piece of rhetoric – it gently takes the audience through some serious thinking (Rawls et al) to set up with a socialist stance is fair and equitable and just, and why socialism doesn’t crumble in the face of shouts of “BUT VENEZUELA!” from the right. If you’ve got kids of 11/12+ this might be an interesting read for them (especially if you’re worried they might be going, well, a bit Tory).
• The OpenAI Text Generator: The OpenAI text generating thingy was announced last Friday as I was writing Curios and I couldn’t honestly be bothered to read up on it and include it in the last edition. Instead, you get it a week later with the CONSIDERED ANALYSIS that a week’s sober cogitation has afforded me time to develop (HA!). Basically my take on this is a) it is impressive but not THAT impressive; b) OpenAI are very good at PR – that ‘we are not releasing this FOR THE GOOD OF THE WORLD!’ is a tried-and-tested tactic that ALWAYS works; c) this will be used on content farms within honestly, if you can wrangle enough code to make it work then I recommend giving it a go here, but LOOK at what it throws out when you feed it some bongo:

OH GOD THERE IS A NEW NEWSLETTER CMS AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT AND I AM LATE AND HAVE A MEETING IN 90 MINUTES AND I AM STILL IN MY PANTS (little peek behind the authorial curtain for you there, you’re welcome).

I have to run – you take care of all the links and stuff, and please shut the door behind you on your way out; this, as ever, is the overlong, overwritten, overwrought and frankly overwhelmed Web Curios – click, share and if you can’t enjoy then at least, please, try and tolerate.

By Lin Yung Chen

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE SOUNDTRACK TO THAT SKITTLES MUSICAL WHICH – LET’S BE CLEAR – IS EXACTLY AS BAD AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT A PROMOTIONAL VEHICLE FOR SWEETS PENNED BY AD EXECUTIVES TO BE!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN PERSUADE MECHABEZOS TO BLESS LONDON WITH HIS TAX-AVOIDING AMAZONIAN MUNIFICENCE:

●      Facebook To Remove Ad Set Budgets: I’m starting this with what I hope will be the dullest entry of the week; whilst I can’t guarantee that the only way is up, one would hope that this represents a nadir. Come September, FB ad buyers will no longer be able to amend total ad budgets at an ad set level, instead needing to do so on a per-campaign basis. “Facebook says that advertisers will set one central campaign budget for all ad sets, and it will “automatically and continuously” distribute budgets in real-time to top performing ads.” Why is this happening? I, honestly, don’t know or care; you ought simply to know that it is.

●      Facebook Pages Can Now Interact With Groups: It’s FINALLY HERE – the ability for brands to extend the awkward anthropomorphisation of their online presence with participation in Facebook Groups, so now Sunny D can drop seamlessly into, I don’t know, ‘Halloumi Memes for Sad-Eyed Teens’ and drop some BRANDED TRUTH about the ultimate futility of existence in order to flog some more dayglo sugarwater.

●      FB/Insta Message Integration Comes To The US & Brazil: Brands on Facebook/Insta in Brazil and the US will now be able to respond to messages on Insta from their Facebook interface. It’s the very first inkling of the great unified platform future promised to us by lovely, benevolent Mr Zuckerberg and, frankly, from here it looks like all I could possibly have dreamed of and more besides.

●      Facebook Updates Features for ‘Creators’: This is sort-of maybe interesting, or at the very least UK-relevant; Facebook has rolled out its Patreon-like ‘subscription’ service to ‘Creators’, meaning they can now acquire paying subs to sustain them (GET A REAL JOB FFS), and it’s also launching its Brand Partnerships feature here and in Germany too, meaning if you want to find an ‘influencer’ to shill for you on Facebook then you needn’t waste money on a bunch of children in ripped jeans peddling themselves as an influencer agency and acting as pointless middlemen between you and the ‘talent’. Which is probably a good thing, no?

●      Instagram Adding IGTV Previews to the Insta Feed: Despite this, it is still a near-certainty that no real people will want to watch anything on InstaTV. It is a fact. Still, it might ‘aid content discovery’ for the three people currently persisting in trying to make InstaTV a thing.

●      Periscope Launches Group Streaming: This seems like a nifty little feature unsuited to the platform, but wevs. Periscope, the live-streaming platform owned by Twitter, is launching the ability for multiple users to jump on a simultaneous stream together, in the same way as you’ve been able to do on FB and other platforms for a while now. Except it’s audio-only at present, which seems a bit, well, crap really, and you sort of wondered why they didn’t wait for the full video shebang to be ready. The quotes in the linked article (Mashable, sorry) suggest that they are pitching this as allowing for talk radio phone-in style content, which is a nice idea but, well, like fcuk am I going to pause mid-scroll through the TL to tune into some strangers chatting about…something; this is what I get the 155 for.

●      LinkedIn Begins To Roll Out Livestreaming: A feature literally noone asked for and which noone wants is finally here after months of slightly sweaty-palmed anticipation! Truly, it is a new dawn! Or at least it is if a) you’re in the US; and b) they accept your application to be part of the pilot. Otherwise it’s the same old crappy dawn you’re used to, except one in which you know someone somewhere is livestreaming some BUSINESS on LinkedIn and thus one which deep down you know is fundamentally worse.

●      Pinterest Launches Automated ‘Shop The Look’ Pins: This is interesting, and further proof that Pinterest is quietly developing a roster of really quite impressive tech under its weddings-and-cupcakes-festooned hood. This is the news that its ‘Shop the Look’ feature – whereby brands can tag individual items within a Pinned image to make them shoppable for eCommerce benefit and joy – is being made available to all, and that it will be partially automated through image recognition. “Businesses will still be able to link their products to relevant objects, but Pinterest will also be able to do much of the work without intervention….”Shop the Look will tag organic Pins that have not been linked to a business account. For those brands who’d rather not have their Pins tagged, they can claim their domains.”” It’s not specified, but I presume that this isn’t live everywhere yet – still, it’s another reason to remember that Pinterest is VERY USEFUL if you’re flogging actual stuff to actual people.

●      Amazon Live: This is…bizarre. Amazon appears to have launched its own version of QVC – apologies if you’re all aware of this and have been enjoying this stream of unfettered quality retail content for months (why didn’t you TELL me?), but to me this was a joyous surprise. There is SO MUCH terrible, terrible shopping-related video on here, featuring a roster of varyingly-committed jobbing actors feigning interest in a range of low-end stuff; when I opened this a minute ago I was blessed with two guys in baseball caps in what looked like a mid-sized insurance office in the midwest having some low-key BANTER about screen-cleaning spray, but who knows what you’ll get. Quick, CLICK! Literally no actual relevance to you or your clients (though this is the app through which you can stream your shows to the platform, should you want to VPN it and have a play), but I wanted to include this because, well, it’s the best proof yet that we should all STOP commissioning new video because, really, NOONE IS EVER GOING TO WATCH ANY OF THIS STUFF. We’re about a year away from every single human who is ever born having a fcuking IMDB page.

●      Snapchat Launches Black History Month Gallery: This is a really nice use of Snapchat’s deeper AR functionality; to celebrate Black History Month, Snapchat has launched this feature whereby users can choose to apply a BHM banner to their snaps when the camera is in selfie mode; flipping the camera, though, lets them explore a virtual art gallery which features the work of various young black US artists. Simple, and a lovely illustration of some of the clever things you can do with Snap’s tech.

●      Fred Perry x Raf Simons: Is Fred Perry cool in 2019? Christ alone knows. Still, this is a rather neat twist on the traditional ‘oh look here’s a limited edition streetwear collab’ website; the collection here is presented as through Google Street View, with models wearing the gear scattered throughout the streets of a seaside town somewhere European (where is it? Anyone know? The pastel houses give it a weirdly Dutch feel, to my mind, but I honestly have no idea), and overall it’s a pleasingly frivolous way of showing the clothes in a real-world(ish) environment.

●      Refrigerdating: I was in an office on Tuesday and saw a Valentine’s promo from some supermarket in which they were offering FREE DATES to any singles who showed up at their shop in Chorlton on the 14th (the area has the highest concentration of singles in the country, DO YOU SEE????) and, honestly, gentle reader, I fucking LOST it; I had a proper, out-loud shouty moment in which I decried the PR industry and its advermarketing siblings and might even have had some uncharitable words for anyone working therein who has the temerity to call themselves ‘creative’ whilst churning out infopollution like this. I then realised that I was sitting slap bang in the middle of the consumer PR team, who really didn’t deserve that and who now think I’m a prick, quite rightly. Anyway, that wasn’t even the worst Valentine’s thing I saw this week – it was THIS aberration, an ‘idea’ which obviously started with the pun and worked backwards, an ‘idea’ which Samsung almost certainly paid money for, an ‘idea’ whose concept can neatly be summarised as ‘dating, with fridges’. Yes, that’s right, it’s a ‘dating service’ (not a dating service at all) whereby you upload a photo of the inside of your fridge and the platform matches you with a partner with a compatible arrangement of peppers in their salad crisper or something. Except it doesn’t – it is not a real thing, it’s a crap shell fronting up a skeletal concept, the privacy policy is iffy as you like and, generally, it’s an early contender for crappest and most-phoned-in PR gubbins of the year. WELL DONE EVERYONE WELL DONE I HOPE YOU FEEL PROUD.

●      Captain Marvel: The second-best film promo website of the week is this self-consciously 90s site promoting the new Marvel film. It’s nicely done and it’s a pretty comprehensive pastiche, even down to the comments, though if I’m honest I think that while the actual Space Jam site is still live it’s almost pointless to try and out-90s the very best.

●      The Miu Miu Twist: The second-best branded game of the week, this effort by the Prada perfume brand is basically one of those ‘click, jump and try and get as high as you can’ mobile games with a nice 16-bit aesthetic and a generally pleasing look-and-feel. Simple, quick, and the way the avatar’s outfits change at each stage is a nice little touch.

●      Black Snake: THE best film site and THE best branded game of the week, though, are the same thing – this is the promo site for French action film (at least I presume that’s what it is – I, er, couldn’t really be bothered to do the research, sorry) and it’s basically a browser-based Streets of Rage clone, meaning you select your character and then beat the everliving crap out of millions of generic thugs. It’s ace and oddly therapeutic and generally an excellent if obvious way of wasting 10 minutes at work, which, frankly, you deserve after having your mind polluted with that awful fridge dating thing.

By Sara Silks

NEXT, ENJOY THIS RATHER EXCELLENT 8-BIT ALBUM BY SHIRU!

THE SECTION WHICH, HONESTLY, SUGGESTS YOU JUST FOCUS ON THE EMOTION SOUND MAP BECAUSE IT’S THE MOST AMAZING THING HERE BY FAR (BUT WHICH OBVIOUSLY LOVES ALL THE LINKS EQUALLY AND ABSOLUTELY DOESN’T HAVE FAVOURITES), PT.1:

●      The Amazing Emotional Sound Map: Not, fine, it’s technical title, but it’s the best descriptor I have. This is…incredible. It’s a ‘map’ of human emotions – fear, disgust, etc – with associated sounds; you mouse over the various named emotions and the sounds people make when feeling those emotions play. It’s the fruit of a project from the University of Berkeley (the academic paper on which you can see here) where they recorded a variety of volunteers vocalising 24 different emotions in an attempt to derive a sonic taxonomy of feeling (yes, that’s right, A SONIC TAXONOMY OF FEELING. It’s my blognewsletterthing and if I want to be appallingly pretentious in my descriptions then I SHALL so THERE). Honestly, when I first found this yesterday I had some sort of genuine, weird physical reaction to this, part amazement and part revulsion; it is SO STRANGE to hear all these feelings all smooshed together, and there’s an honest-to-goodness physical reaction I get from the sensation of feeling someone (some people?) going through all these feelings so quickly. It’s honestly incredible, and there is SO MUCH you can do with this – from the idea of creating short audioclips giving an audioemotive version of famous novels or songs or artworks (what emotional journey in sound best describes the plot of Wuthering Heights, for example, and could you recognise it from the sound of the feelings?) to the possibility of creating a maze out of sounds (navigate your way through a space by following the happy sounds and avoiding the horrid ones), this is hugely exciting (to me). If nothing else, PLEASE put your headphones in and have a play – and then whack your volume up, take the headphones out and give your entire office a symphonic tour of the hinterlands between ‘anger’ and ‘desire’. They’ll (probably) thank you for it.

●      This Person Does Not Exist: Click the link. Look at the face. Click refresh. Look at the face. Repeat. Repeat. None of the faces you see are real. None of them are people. None of them have ever lived. None of them were ‘shopped by hand. They are all GAN-generated computer imaginings of faces, generated through computation and machine learning and what might as well be ACTUAL MAJICK. No practical application I can think of, other than perhaps to give you an infinite selection of faces to put to to the bullsh1t, made-up ‘personas’ you put in your next pitch, but this is quite incredible – it feels important to point out that this would literally have been impossible a year ago, should you need a gentle reminder of the pace at which this stuff is developing.

●      Kubrik: You want a website presenting the life and work of Stanley Kubrik, a celebration of his films and work? OH GOOD! This is a very nice collection of photos and information and footage, all presented as a beautifully-designed single-scroller; there is a LOT of information here, and the site design really is rather beautiful.

●      Tender: Ah, ARGs! Remember I Love Bees? No, of course you don’t, you’re all CHILDREN. Still, back in the day ARGs and the concept of TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING were all the rage and were considered to be a BIG THING; then we all realised that the number of people actually willing to solve problems and follow you down your meticulously-designed promotional rabbithole of mystery was a significant order of magnitude smaller than that required to render the expense and effort of setting these things up worthwhile. Still, people are still trying them out – witness Tender, which whilst pretending to be a dating app for vampires is almost certainly not that as, well, vampires don’t exist. Some digging suggests that it’s a promo for a new Vampire: Masquerade game, but, whether or not you care about that, this is a rather fun and nicely made portal into a MYSTERIOUS REAL LIFE WORLD OF POINTY TEETH.

●      Super Uplifting Friendship Simulator: Sometimes you need a friend to tell you it’s all going to be ok. Sadly the fragmented and atomised nature of modern society means that you might not have any friends, so why not outsource that job to this simple, reassuring and ultimately heartbreaking little game? Honestly, I just clicked through one of the vignettes (there are 8 or so) and the lonely emptiness of a small piece of code telling me it’s all going to be ok and that I am amazing and should value myself more is, well, making me a touch more moist-eyed than I might have expected.

●      MIDI City: “This is an interactive art experiment where MIDI songs become cities. Each row of buildings is an instrument in the song; each building is a note: the position is the time, the height is the pitch. You control the density of buildings and rows. When you change it, you make a new city and a new song. It might not be a good song.” The site is not lying when it questions the quality of its own output, but I do rather like the cityscape-style viz it’s doing here.

●      Since Parkland: You want a sobering statistic? Since the Parkland shootings last year, 1,200 American children (defined as under-18s) have been killed by guns. 100 a month. That’s…astonishing. This site, a memorial both to the Parkland victims and the 1200 others who’ve died as a result of gun violence since – it presents a small story for each of the dead, written by teenage reporters from around the country, a quite remarkable feat and a poignant tribute to the lives lost. Heartbreaking, but such a wonderful project.

●      Sh1t Solidarity: Buy a small pin badge to support workers rights and simultaneously celebrate your own occasional acts of fecal workplace rebellion – the badges bear the delightful legend ‘Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, That’s why I shit, on company time’, which is exactly the sort of classy workplace humour that we ALL appreciate, and proceeds go to an organisation called ‘Jobs With Justice’ which ought to be all the reason you need to buy one.  

●      Edit My Ex: A service which, for a fee, will digitally remove your ex (or indeed anyone else, I imagine) from a photo of your choosing. On the one hand, fine; on the other, you can probably ask Reddit to do it for you to FAR funnier effect, or use a pair of scissors, or learn Photoshop, or just THROW THE PHOTO AWAY; I’m struggling to imagine being so attached to a photograph but not the people in it (“God, I always LOVED the way my knees looked in that shot, such a shame Sharon’s in there ruining it with her STUPID FAT FACE”), but then again I am so pathologically disgusted by the way I look that I was last knowingly photographed in 2013 so, well, what do I know?

●      OK Video: This basically works like Vine, except without the 6-second limit. OK Video is an app which has a single, simple gimmick; it records when you have your finger on the screen, and stops recording when you don’t, lending itself to that dizzying speed of cut that characterised much of the output from Vine bitd. Obviously because it’s 2019 and there can be no more new social platforms ever this doesn’t publish itself; rather, you can export the resultant clips to whichever of the dopamine-dispensing Skinner boxes you like best. Worth a play – you can make some rather fun stuff with this, and there’s a pleasingly retro feel to some of the output (ridiculous as it sounds to refer to Vine’s edit aesthetic as ‘retro’, but, well, SUCH IS THE PACE OF MODERN LIFE).

●      144 Blocks: However self-important and deluded your employer or clients are, it’s a reasonably safe bet that they’ve never done anything quite so hubristic as what Swatch attempted in 1998 when they attempted to REINVENT TIME by introducing ‘Swatch Time’ or ‘beats’ – a global decimal clock which was intended to revolutionise the way global time measurement worked by placing everyone on a single timezone measured in 1000 ‘beats’ per day. You may note that as we jaunt gaily through the last days of the second decade of the 21st Century we are still stubbornly wedded to the 24h diurnal clock and timezones and stuff; Swatch Time was not, sad to say, the rampant success its megolomaniacal Swiss time obsessives might have hoped. Still, its spirit lives on it 144 Blocks, a time management system that attempts to help you make sense of your day by splitting it into 144 ten minute blocks – exactly why this is better than it being split into 24 hours of 60 minutes, or 72 units of 20 minutes, is never adequately explained, but if you have a violent and inexplicable revulsion for the conventions of temporal measurement then, well, go for your life. You weirdo.

●      PewdiePie vs T-Series Live Stream Counter: This is a YouTube livestream, started a week or so ago, that does NOTHING but stream a live counter of the relative subscriber numbers of YouTube’s two largest channels, owned by charming white supremacist-endorsing idiot manchild PewDiePie and the incredibly prolific Indian CG content factory T-Series. It does NOTHING ELSE, and yet, as I type this at 855 am, there are just shy of 3000 people ‘watching’ it and chatting absolute razz in the comments. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US ALL? How is it possible that there are 3000 people alive right now who can think of NOTHING better to do with this precious gift of life bestowed upon us by an unknown force? I don’t understand anything any more.

●      The Royal Society Collection: ‘Turning the Pages’ is the Royal Society’s scanned archive of old scientific papers from its archive. If you want to peruse a whole load of old papers detailing scientific enquiry from throughout the past few hundred years then WOW will you enjoy this. The illustrations in particular are worth a look – there’s some lovely anatomical sketching in here if you dig a bit.

●      The Banana Label Museum: God love the obsessive German who administers this site, though I can’t for the life of me fathom why.

●      Lisa Hietanen: Lisa Hietanen is an artist who works in wool and yarn, and makes knitted work including a life-sized collection of knitted people. I now want very little else in the world besides a life-sized knitted replica of me, to send to work in my stead and to stare stoical and uncomplaining into the middle-distance.

●      The Amazon Brand Database: Your weekly reminder that Amazon has won the future and that we just haven’t quite realised that yet – this is a database listing all the brands that Amazon is currently flogging which it secretly owns, all the own-brand stuff which isn’t in fact branded ‘Amazon’ but instead is given some sort of slightly folksy identity to make it feel less like MechaBezos is now basically taking 30% of your salary directly.

●      Gail: I am genuinely happy that this exists. Gail.com was bought for its owner as a birthday present over 20 years ago; it gets a…surprising amount of traffic from people misspelling ‘Gmail’, and its entire, slightly recursive raison d’etre is to explain exactly these two facts in a slightly frustrated-sounding FAQ. Gail, you are an indefatigable heroine of the modern internet.

●      Achewood Tarot: You either know Achewood or you don’t (if you don’t, honestly, LEARN); this is Achewood Tarot, presenting you with a series of panels drawn at random from the archives for you to scry whatever meaning you can from. Each is assigned a role in the traditional tarot, so you can make a PROPER reading from it should you choose. It feels like this is tapping into the hitherto-unimagined intersection of millennial girl occultism and millennial boy hipster ennui; go on, someone coin a name for it and write a 1500-word piece proclaiming it a new trend.

●      Live Transcribe: Potentially HUGELY useful new (I think) app from Google which, as the name suggests, will attempt to take a live transcript of any audio it picks up, in realtime. Whilst obviously it’s not going to be perfect, as a way of slightly shortcutting the transcription process this could be hugely useful.

●      The 2019 Westminster Dog Show: Photos of some VERY fancy canines. O ROFF!

●      Tinnitus Tracker: Rob Weychart is a music enthusiast and goes to a lot of gigs, so he’s made this site which tracks (almost) EVERY SINGLE ONE. “This is my live music diary, with information about nearly every show I’ve attended, dating back to 1992. There are currently 385 shows, browsable by genre, artist, venue, city, state, and year”, writes Rob, and crikey he’s not lying – this is a really interesting experiment in datavisualisation, a bit reminiscent of that guy whose name I forget who did an annual recap of his own personal life data each year for a decade or so; anyway, worth a look if you’re into dataviz or alternatively if you want to take a creepily intimate look at a stranger’s gig-going habits.

By Nguan

NEXT, ENJOY THIS PUNCH TECH-HOUSE SET BY LILY PALMER!

THE SECTION WHICH, HONESTLY, SUGGESTS YOU JUST FOCUS ON THE EMOTION SOUND MAP BECAUSE IT’S THE MOST AMAZING THING HERE BY FAR (BUT WHICH OBVIOUSLY LOVES ALL THE LINKS EQUALLY AND ABSOLUTELY DOESN’T HAVE FAVOURITES), PT.2:

●      Postscript: Fine, this isn’t hugely exciting, but the prospect of ‘Mailchimp but for text messaging’ is, whilst admittedly tedious, a useful one; the idea is that you can apply all the same sorts of targeting and ‘if this then that’-type actions to your text message marketing as you can to your email marketing. Worth a look if this is your thing.

●      50 Years Ago In Photos: A wonderful selection of pictures from around the world, all taken in 1969. Some genuinely great shots here – you’ll recognise some of the more ‘iconic’ (sorry) images, like the Queen on the tube, but some of these are entirely new to me – I have a particular soft spot for the photo of the kids playing on the fire engine, but pick your own.

●      Bread Clip Neue: You know those little plastic clips that keep plastic-wrapped bread closed – the ones that literally NOONE uses after you’ve opened the bread for the first time, choosing instead to do that sort of weird, ineffectual, twist-and-wrap manoeuver to try and keep the mould at bay? Well this is a font made entirely out of those. No idea why, but, well, why not?

●      HORG: Or, “The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group : A Database of Synthetic Taxonomy”, or, in language you might be more familiar with, a bizarrely comprehensive database of different designs of those little plastic clips that keep plastic-wrapped bread closed – the ones that literally NOONE uses after you’ve opened the bread for the first time, choosing instead to do that sort of weird, ineffectual, twist-and-wrap manoeuver to try and keep the mould at bay. THAT’S RIGHT! An actual, proper, honest-to-goodness thematically-linked segue there! These two sites cropped up independently of each other this week, leading me to believe that there is in fact some sort of higher power looking over my webmongery as I browse and occasionally moving invisible levers to grant a degree of coherence to these otherwise inchoate webspaffings (I don’t believe that, obviously; there is no higher power behind Curios at all, there is just ME and I am as base as it gets).

●      41 Strange: A Twitter feed posting…strange images. Sometimes a bit horrid, sometimes oddly cute, the general theme here is ‘stuff that will make you pause on the TL and do something of a ‘hmm, how queer’-type eyebrow’, basically.

●      Time Since Launch: Create a persistent timer for anything you like. You can enter whatever text you like to commemorate the time since something last happened –  a cigarette, say, or the last time you cried (ha!). The site creates a unique url for each timer so you can keep checking back on it for reassurance or whatever else; PERFECT for office lols (ie gentle bullying) – why not make one to commemorate ‘the time since X fcuked something up’ and then share it with the office so that you can all quietly enjoy the ratcheting pressure as ‘X’ strives to maintain perfection? GO ON.

●      The Unko Museum: The Unko Museum is in Japan and celebrates comedy faeces. No, really, it’s a museum that seemingly serves only to laud and commemorate the role of the ‘funny’ little swirly turd image that is universally acknowledged as the symbol for a brown. The site’s all in Japanese, and to be honest I don’t find this sort of thing particularly funny, but it’s worth linking to for some of the onsite imagery which, with no grasp of what the accompanying copy says, are honestly absolutely baffling. Try and work out what the copy says, go on – “POO MICHELIN MAN CARRIES OWN COFFIN” is where I ended up, but see what you think.

●      Death Generator: A little webtoy that lets you create bespoke copy for a pretty wide range of old videogame speech bubble-type things. Which, I realise, is an APPALLING description – let me try again. You know how at the end of a bout in Streetfighter you get a picture of both characters post-stramash, one all victorious and the other all pulped, with one gloating and delivering some sort of poorly-translated guff about Shen Long? Yes, well that but you can edit the text, and there are about 100 different old games whose styles you can replicate. Based on the number of you likely to click this one I probably oughtn’t have bothered with that explanation, eh? FFS.

●      The Spitting Image Auction: OH MY GOD A LOAD OF PUPPETS FROM SPITTING IMAGE ARE GOING UP FOR AUCTION! I imagine the opening prices here are ridiculously low – I can’t see any of this stuff for going for less than multiples of 1000 – but, well, THERE IS A FULL THATCHER PUPPET FOR SALE! Also, the Claire Rayner one looks a LOT like Poor Trees, so it might be worth putting a bit in on that one too. If any of you work in political consultancy then this will be RIGHT up your street (as an aside, it’s remarkable how obscure some of the people they chose to satirise now seem – sic transit Gloria Mundi and all that jazz, eh?).

●      The Period Game: A great week for the celebration of menses, this one, what with the announcement of the period emoji and now this Kickstarter, seeking another 9 grand over the next three weeks in order to be able to put the Period Game into production; the idea is that it will provide a relaxed way in which to talk to children about periods and associated issues, normalise the language around menstruation and the like. As someone who’s never had a period and is probably never going to I can’t really offer an opinion on its necessity or otherwise, but it seems like a nice idea and I like the fact that you can pledge to donate a copy to a school so all in all I’ll say this is A Good Thing.

●      Glide: This lets you create simple mobile apps from a Google Sheet, which seems like witchcraft and probably is. This isn’t for anything you could conceivably want to sell so much as for the sort of quick, single use app you might want to knock up for a company awayday or similar; you can get a reasonable feel for what’s possible from the website, and if you’re interested in fiddling with code and app development this could be a rather nice place to start.

●      How The Brain Works: A simple explainer site about how the brain works – which you could probably have ascertained from the title, and which I almost certainly didn’t need to type. FFS MATT! Anyway, I quite like the copy here which is the main reason I’m featuring it.

●      The Tiny Type Museum: Another Kickstarter, this one £18k shy of its target with a fortnight left – if any of you are hacks past or present then I think you’ll enjoy this. The Tiny Type Museum will, if funded, give backers a, er, tiny museum of type and printing artifacts. “Each custom, handmade wood museum case holds a couple dozen genuine artifacts from the past, including a paper mold for casting newspaper ads in metal, individual pieces of wood and metal type, a phototype “font,” and a Linotype “slug” (set with your own message), along with original commissioned art and a letterpress-printed book and a few replicas of items found in printing shops. Ingredients for the museum will be sourced from active letterpress printers, type foundries, artists, and nooks and crannies where people stashed the past in the hopes of someone showing interest in preserving it.” This is LOVELY, though possibly a bit on the pricey side.

●      Hot Pod News: The innocent days of podcasting are now officially OVER, with the Spotify/Gimlet deal earlier this week – Hot Pod News is a site collecting all the, er, hot podcast news (sorry, I appear to have fallen into something of a prose slump, I will try and snap out of it) that’s fit to print; if you’re interested in podcasting as a serious gig then this is worth a look.

●      Bite: Toothpaste…as a subscription service! Yes, you may not have asked for it but IT’S HERE ANYWAY! Isn’t it ANNOYING having to remember to buy toothpaste all the time? Don’t you wish you could have your toothpaste delivered to you in weirdly chalky-looking capsule form on a monthly basis? No, you don’t, do you, and yet nonetheless here is a service offering to fulfil that very non-desire! The best thing about this is that the packages (delivered every 4 months, turns out) work out as costing $7.50 per month – PER MONTH! WHO SPENDS £7.50 ON TOOTHPASTE A MONTH! ARE YOU MAD? You could totally do toilet paper as a service I reckon, on a £1 per roll basis. WHO’S IN?

●      Recordit: A really, really good screen recording tool. Not exciting, just useful.

●      International Garden Photographer of the Year: LOOK AT THE FLORA! So lush, so verdant, so impressive; I find the abstract shots particularly beautiful, but, honestly, these are universally spectacular and will make you want to give your nana a call (or maybe it’s just me).

●      Colourise: This is a great tool which uses ML to attempt to apply a realistic(ish) colourisation to black and white photos. I think it was built by the Singapore Government, though the site goes to great pains to reassure you that the photos are in no way stored anywhere – still, if you’ve got any B&W images you fancy playing with, give this a go.

●      Cone of Shame: Photos of dogs wearing cones of shame, except the cones have been jazzed up significantly. Included almost entirely because it NEEDS to be ‘borrowed’ as visual inspiration for a petcare campaign – it is TOO perfect.

●      The Yale School of Art: You know how when you’re a student there are certain other student groups who everyone has an opinion about – medics are all obnoxious alcoholics with a god complex, physics students smell so that blind people can hate them too, and art students can just fcuk off with their fashion and their hair and their cigarettes and opinions and talent (philosophy students, in case you were wondering, smoke cheap hash to the point of catatonia and attempt to become one with the sofa)? Well this website, the official one for Yale’s School of Art, is literally the digital embodiment of every art student you’ve ever hated. Quite spectacular really.

●      The Periodic Table: A lovely interactive visualisation of the periodic table and the history of its evolution, beautifully designed and the sort of thing that might be useful should you have a teenage child attemting to remember who the everliving fcuk Mendeleev was.

●      The British and Irish Dialect Quiz: The New York Times (bizarrely) has made this interactive quiz which reckons it can tell where you’re from based on how you pronounce things – SHOW IT YOU KNOW BEST (in fact it’s upsettingly accurate, but, well, maybe just lie to throw their data off a bit).

●      Lovesync: “This is a joke”, I thought when I found this on Monday, “and they’ve just knocked it out as a Valentine’s Day funny and will use the attention to, I don’t know, promote their creative design agency or something”. Fast forward a few days and it’s now a fully-funded thing, with nearly 250 people having pledged money to back a button designed to help couples with pretty serious communication issues agree when they can rub their mucous membranes together. The idea is that one half of a couple presses their button when they want to fcuk; there’s then a window of time within which if the other partner also presses their button they’ll both be alerted so they can indulge in sticky fun together. If the other party doesn’t press the button, the horny other can go back to seething in frustrated resentment without having had to suffer the overt rejection of their lover saying “no, I would rather do literally anything else right now than pursue an orgasm with you”. Life is really tiring, isn’t it, at times?

●      Strawberry Cake: The final miscellaneous link this week is a short, charming game about a picnic and baking. It’s lovely, and will wash away the memory of that horrid fcukbutton.

By Malte Jaeger

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY SOME GENTLY EUPHORIC AND SLIGHTLY SPARKLY BALEARIC-ISH STUFF MIXED BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED LOVE APE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

●      Sliplead: The slightly creepy, gothic and macabre art of Robin Isely.

●      Incorrect Labyrinth: Misquoting from the film Labyrinth. This isn’t a particularly exciting Tumblr, but it taught me that there are some people on the internet that spell ‘welcome’ as ‘whalecum’ and now I can never unsee it and I had to share it with someone and I am sorry.

●      Sad Chairs of Academia: You don’t need me to explain this, do you?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

●      Station 57 Cat: The Insta account belonging to a fire station cat in New York, featuring occasional canine guest apparances. What a SPECIAL GUY!

●      Accidental Icon: This woman might be HUGELY famous, apologies if this is very passe, but I found her account – in which she very much lives the influencer’s BEST LIFE whilst comfortably in her 60s – genuinely rather lovely.

●      Bird Freaks: Just some excellent birds really.

●      Apollon.Ru: Featured more because I like the concept than because I can understand anything it actually says – this is a Russian Insta account whose gimmick is that it only posts photographs of post-it notes on which are written descriptions of the most-liked and commented Insta photos of the day. I LOVE this idea and quite want someone to steal it in English please.

●      Pink Mitsubishis: The final Insta feed of the week is sort of a spritual successor to that poo flip video from last week; this consists solely of images and videos of Australians being utterly spangled, and if you’ve got a thing for slightly-mullety bogans gurning mightily whilst surrounded by stubbies then, well, are YOU in for a treat!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

●      The Ethical Dilemma of the Valley: Or, “will the next generation of Stanford grads spend rather more time thinking of the potential consequences of their brilliant innovations or will they simply do what this lot did and do what the VC tells them?”. The answer, unsurprisingly, is ‘noone knows’ – there’s a general sense throughout the article that students are at least on the surface more willing to consider and take into account moral questions when pursuing their careers, but there’s also a slight sense by the end that this is, to a degree, cosmetic, and that they would in fact fcuk the world with a rusty screwdriver if it meant a shot at Zuckerbergian wealth and immortality.

●      Mirrorworld: A BRILLIANT piece of thinking and writing about AR and the process of creating a persistent, universal connection between the real and digital worlds and the creation of a digital map of the physical which really is its territory. This is so, so interesting and I can’t stress enough how much is in here in terms of ideas – the general picture it paints is a slightly-overhyped one, fine, particularly in terms of the likely timescales (this stuff isn’t, I’d posit, quite as close as the author would like us to think it is), but overall this is all plausible and reasonably imminent, and as a way of getting yourself to think about some of the longer-term applications of AR and data layering it’s superb.

●      Money Machines: An interview with an anonymous algorithmic trader, in which they talk about the machines that rule the markets and exactly how this is warping the way in which trading works and markets move, and the associated risks that this can bring to global economies: “all quantitative models use historical data to train themselves. As these techniques become more widespread, the assumption that the world will behave in the future the way it has in the past is being hard-wired into the entire financial system.” That sounds…troubling?

●      Andy Warhol: The New York Review of Books reviews a new Warhol retrospective that’s on show in NYC at the moment; this is less of review than it is an assessment of Warhol’s artistic output overall, and is a pleasant surprise insofar as it’s significantly less interested in the Factory and Edie Sedgwick and Studio54 than it is the canvases and the techniques and the context within which Warhol existed in the early stages of his career. I sometimes think we’d all be better off for everyone just forgetting Warhol existed for a decade or so – I’d certainly like some of his influence to be scrubbed from the timeline – but this was fascinating and taught me a lot.

●      Netflix Is Too Horny: I confess to not having noticed this at all, but now that I’ve read this piece I can’t unsee it. WHY IS NETFLIX’S SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONA ONE OF NEAR-CONSTANT THIRST?? What is it trying to communicate? And will we one day be able to look back on these strange, brand-anthropomorphic times as a weird aberration that was never repeated? I fcuking hope so. Please, should any of you social strategist types be reading this, don’t let Sainsbury’s start tweeting about edging or anything like that.

●      The Loudness Wars: Absolutely designed with laser-guided precision to appeal to the middle-aged man, this article looks at this year’s Grammy winners and indeed recent trends in music to prove CATEGORICALLY that songs are getting…well, not ‘louder’ exactly, but sonically busier with less variation between the LOUD bits and the quieter bits. Basically this is all the grist you need for your ‘this isn’t music, it’s just noise’ mill.

●      The Thai Cave Rescue: This is an EXHAUSTIVE but very cinematically-written account of the Thai cave rescue from last year, and specifically the ragtag bunch of international divers brought together to effect the kids’ escape. This is properly exciting stuff – tense and nervewracking despite the fact you know how it turns out (THEY ALL SURVIVE DON’T WORRY) – and, even better, contains only one mention of El*n M*sk.

●      How YouTube Drives Conspiracy Content: Or, “This is the consequence of a platform that rewards people for giving viewers exactly what they want”. Of course YouTube is full of mad conspiracy videos – people love them! It’s an interesting read, though the central premise is neatly summarised in one paragraph: “Many YouTubers have realized that fringe content—like conspiracy theories and far right political beliefs—are successful on the site. Because they are rewarded with engagement and views, YouTubers are incentivized to create videos that edge further and further to the extreme. This phenomenon doesn’t have an easy fix because it’s built into the structure and model of YouTube as a platform.”

●      What The Crow Knows: Fascinating article about new research into animal consciousness, with a particular focus on corvids – the stuff about differential evolution of networked brain structures (cortex/non-cortex) is really interesting and just on the cusp of feeling properly breakthrough-ish; one does wonder reading stuff like this whether in 100 years our treatment of and relationship with animals will be completely redefined as we’re forced to confront the fact that they think and feel far more than we’ve traditionally thought.

●      How Sotheby’s Transformed the Art Market: If you, like me, have the misfortune to have worked in PR at all, you’ll know that a good ‘Index’ of something is a great way to get coverage. I bet your Indexes never literally changed an entire industry, though. This is the quite remarkable story of how Sothebys, though some very smart PR, managed to basically wrangle free press out of the Times for a few decades and simultaneously created the idea of ‘art as sensible financial investment’, thereby also ensuring that lots of rich people were all of a sudden more interested in dropping millions on fine art at auction through people like…Sothebys! Seriously, this is just brilliant – and a useful reminder of the importance of following ANY story you read as far back as you can to sniff out the sourcing.

●      An Interview with Temple Grandin: I confess to not really knowing who Temple Grandin was before reading this – now I know that they are on the autistic spectrum, a professor of animal science, an author of multiple books on multiple subjects, and a quite remarkable interviewee. It’s rare that you read a piece like this in which the interviewee’s voice is so incredibly strong and distinct – this is hugely wide-ranging, touching on autism and individuality and animals and farming and all sorts of other stuff, but more than anything you get a feel for a truly incredible and hungry mind. Honestly quite remarkable.

●      Ideophones: Are there certain words – sort of like onomatopoeia for feelings, I suppose – whose sound or shape can be said to convey specific emotions or feelings regardless of cultural background of the speaker and listener? If so, they’re what are called ‘Ideophones’ – this article examines the theory and some of the science which suggests that there very much are words of this ilk. It’s an interesting theoretical companion piece to the map of emotional sounds I linked to about 3 and a half hours ago (I have no idea how long it’s been since you read it, but I like to give you a realtime sense of my progress through this fcuking thing) and the concept really made me think quite a lot (to no apparent end, obviously, but, well, still).

●      Apex Legends: You may or may not be aware that Fortnite is OLD NEWS and that the new hotness is in fact Apex Legends, another Battle Royale shooter with cross-platform play which managed to hit 10million players in 3 days (Fortnite took, er, a fortnight to hit the same milestone); anyway, it is and it is. This is a piece about the new title – its real draw, though, is in its analysis of the systems that make the game a pleasure to play, and in particular its in-game interplayer comms setup – honestly, as an analysis of UX/UI design this is really smart and worth reading, regardless of your interest in games.

●      Bridesmaids – An Oral History: Bridesmaids is a bit of an odd film, insofar as for something so successful and, at the time, groundbreaking, it seems to have left no positive cultural impression whatsoever; if it’s recalled at all in popular culture it’s seemingly with disdain, which seems a bit weird (was it that awful? Was it problematic? I honestly forget). Anyway, this is a funny and nicely-collated oral history of the film’s genesis, timely given Melissa McCarthy’s Oscars tilt here in 2019.

●      Child ASMR: I feel very much as though the lovely underground shine of ASMR has worn off now, with adverts and mainstream appeal and now a whole generation of child stars being – frankly – exploited by adults for commercial gain. There’s something genuinely creepy about the fact that one of the best routes to YouTube wealth is to get kids to do stuff, and something VERY creepy about the idea of grown adults listening to kiddy voices as a relaxation technique – that said, as I’ve happily admitted here before, I like watching videos of women talking softly in Italian about cookery so, well, glass houses and all that.

●      Choose Your Own Corporate Adventure: McSweeney’s does ‘work’ in the time-honoured CYOA style. It’s funny! Except it’s not, because (as my mum said when I showed her the Office on TV for the first time around 1996) it’s not a joke, it’s our fcuking lives!

●      Reading in a Time of Distraction: A very good essay on a very modern phenomenon – to whit, the slow erosion of our collective ability to sit and focus on a text in deep and sustained fashion. I still read fcukloads – obviously, it’s not really possible not to when writing this bastard – but I am aware that I occasionally need to apply more discipline to keep from flicking my attention elsewhere every couple of pages. This is excellent on the switch from depth to breadth engendered by the web and its portals, and on what that might mean for thinking in general.

●      The Titan’s Shadow: A slightly frightening profile of Daniel Barenboim, a pretty incredible-sounding man by anyone’s standards – check this out: “a pianist and conductor, but also a diplomat, an entrepreneur, an advocate for peace and human rights. A child prodigy discovered by Wilhelm Furtwängler, he has served as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and La Scala in Milan, and has made some 500 recordings as a conductor and pianist. He has been awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale for music, and the insignia of commander of the French Legion of Honor.” (this paragraph carries on this vein for a while). He is also, by all accounts, a monstrous bully – the article asks to what extent this can or should be excused as a result of his brilliance and pursuit of artistic perfection. Great writing which presents a truly monstrous individual in every sense – for what it’s worth, the second-worst person I have ever experience professionally was the artist Hans Ulrich Obrist, now artisti director of the Serpentine Gallery and a man who made young women cry on an hourly basis and who I wish nothing but unhappiness on. YEAH, TAKE THAT HANS, YOU…YOU…IMMENSELY SUCCESSFUL PRICK!

●      Homecoming: Lagos: Part of VICE’s occasional series in which writers return to their home towns and document the experience – this is Diplo Faloyin writing about Lagos, and it’s a remarkable piece of writing; essays about Lagos tend to be fascinating (it’s hard to be boring about a city of 21million people), but this one’s superbly-written to boot. You have to read this one, seriously.

●      The Rise of the Tinder-themed Wedding: Not great writing, but I found this piece sort of brilliantly sadly hilarious; know that if you go to a Tinder-themed nuptials this year you will be BANG ON TREND (and know also that you are really not allowed to make the ‘love at first swipe’ joke because, well, really).

●      First Course: The story of the Native Haute Cuisine Team, who won gold at the culinary Olympics (yes, that’s a thing; no, I didn’t know either) in Frankfurt in 1992, and how that changed attitudes towards Native food and cookery across the country; the piece then segues to the present day, and how the skills and techniques of Native cooks are being preserved and passed on. Gorgeous food writing, and probably the first time you’ll be hungry for beaver tail stew.

●      Freedom: A wide-ranging, slightly rambling essay on the concept of ‘Freedom’ in the US in 2019 – what it means, how it’s sold, and how it changes depending on who you talk to and where they are, all presented as the author takes a similarly rambling road trip with a post-op friend across Trumpian America. Good travel writing, and excellent observations on the American national character.

●      How To Say I Love You: This is wonderful. Ostensibly an answer to a reader’s question ‘how can I find 100 ways to say ‘I love you’ to my girlfriend?’ this becomes something far, far better – just read it, it’s gorgeous.

●      Asleep At The Wheel: A chilling little bit of dystopian scifi from T Coraghessan Boyle. Excellent short fiction in the New Yorker.

●      The Communal Mind: Finally this week, Patricia Lockwood on what it’s like online. This is ASTONISHINGLY good – a prose poem about the specific feeling of being on the internet and of being EXTREMELY ONLINE which does a better job of just getting the feeling than anything else I’ve read in an age. I saw Lockwood read this piece last week and it has stayed with me ever since – this paragraph, about the experience of meeting someone you know solely on Twitter, made me angry it’s so good: “‘What was your name?’ she asked, and he told her, and a mundane ecstasy began to rush in her veins – his had been one of her very favourite lives. She remembered it in the minutest detail: the pints after work, the rides back and forth on the train, his search for ever spicier curries, the imagined dimness of his apartment with its crates of obscure records, the green waving gentleness of it all. She stood up and held him, she could not help it. He felt as breakable as a link in her arms.” I mean, ‘his had been one of her favourite lives’ is SO good it’s not really fcuking fair is it.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS WHICH IS REDUCED THIS WEEK DUE TO MY USUAL SOURCE FOR THIS BIT BEING MOSTLY OFFLINE BUT WHICH I WILL ENDEAVOUR TO RETURN TO ITS CUSTOMARY SPLENDOUR NEXT WEEK!:

1)    First, James Yorkstone remixed by the unlikely figure of Vince Clark of Erasure. I had no idea what to expect from this, but it’s BEAUTIFUL and the slightly stabby synthline works perfectly:

2) The second, and last, of the videos this week is this, by Aaron Taos, for his song ‘Communication’. Slightly 80s-ish with a lovely, simple animated accompaniment, this is a perfect song for a sunny Friday in February and with which to sign off and say BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE THANKS FOR READING AND TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND I HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD WEEK AND THAT YOU HAVE SOMEONE WITH WHOM YOU CAN GO ON SOME SORT OF CRISP SPRING WALK THIS WEEKEND OR FAILING THAT THAT YOU CAN SPEND IT HORIZONTAL AND COMFORTABLE AND THAT BASICALLY WHATEVER HAPPENS YOU HAVE A LOVELY TIME AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF I LOVE YOU THANKS FOR READING TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

They’re getting rid of all the self-harm stuff on Insta! That’ll sort out the growing feelings of fear, alienation, anxiety, rootlessness, despair, precariety, anomie, anhedonia, listlessness, loss and general fcuking confusion amongst the young, won’t it? I would make some sort of joke about bandaging an axewound but, well, I don’t want to give any of you any ideas. 

ANYWAY HELLO HI HELLO! Once again it’s Friday; once again it’s coming up on 12:30pm and once again I have bee typing more or less solidly since 645 am and once again I am close to 9k words in and, honestly, I know you don’t want it, and my publisher doesn’t want it, and, frankly even I don’t want it and yet here we are. I think I have a problem, webmongs. Does anyone know a prolixity specialist who can fix my logorrhoaea? Should I start breaking fingers to limit the output? OH GOD AND HERE WE ARE BACK AT SELF-HARM AGAIN THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET DOES TO PEOPLE.

Ahem. Anyway, prepare once again to apply the healing salve that is my words to the chapped, flayed, abraded surface of your mind, worn down to the very neurons by a whole week’s modernity and pace and NEWS; rest assured that this almost certainly won’t make it worse, and might even make it a little bit better (it will, and it most certainly won’t). This, as ever, is Web Curios – SUCKLE HUNGRILY AT MY INFOTEATS!

By Michal Chelbin

FIRST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HAVE THIS VERY ASTUTE PLAYLIST PURPORTING TO BE THE GENERIC SOUNDTRACK OF A TRENDY SMALL PLATES RESTAURANT WHICH IS BOTH ACCURATE AND ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SPENDING FAR MORE TIME THINKING ABOUT MECHABEZOS’ NAKED TUMESCENCE THAN IT WANTED TO WHEN IT WOKE UP:

• Mark Zuckerberg’s Birthday Letter: It’s happened, you know; I’m starting to feel a little bit sorry for Facebook. It’s not so much the constant stream of negative coverage – in the main it’s largely deserved, though I do want to grab all the normie journalists who have discovered that there’s something slightly sinister about Zucko’s social panopticon in the past 12 months (TAKE THE PULITZER NO PLEASE!) and shake them by the shoulders and point them in the direction of Amazon, Google and the rest – as the now-ubiquitous sneering and crowing tone of the headlines in the tech press who, as previously noted here, don’t really have all that much moral high ground to stand on (also, a near-ubiquitous sneering and crowing tone when writing about Facebook has been very much my thing for years and, well, I FOUND THE CONCH RALPH WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME SO HUNGRILY?). Then again, though, he goes ahead an publishes stuff like this, which is so spectacularly tone-deaf that you can’t really do much else than shake your head at his unshaking evangelism. Two things here particularly stand out – the opening, in which he seems to totally forget the incredibly well-known fact that Facebook begans as a stalkwanking tool for the bullied-at-school crowd, and the bits towards the end where he states with absolute conviction that the tools he has created (in the main, unwittingly) can only possibly be A Good Thing for us all. Mark, you know what? I don’t doubt you’re a fantastic engineer and a visionary software developer, but if the past 15 years has taught us anything is that you’re perhaps a less-successful ethicist or moral philosopher or indeed arbiter of what is ‘good’ for humanity. You know the famous thought experiment about the AI and the paperclips, where the monomaniacal intelligence destroys humanity with its single-minded dedication to maximising the number of paperclips in the world? You see where I’m going with this heavy-handed and unsuccessful analogy? Shall I move on before I get al overheated? Yes, yes I shall.
• FB To Launch Custom Audiences Transparency: I confess to thinking this was already a thing, but apparently it’s not – it’s a coming thing. As of the end of February, Facebook will add an additional layer to its ad transparency tools, allowing any user who can be bothered (so, a handful of enterprising journalists and any hungry lawyers looking to chase that GDPR ambulance) to see which ads they are being targeted by based on uploaded data, when that data was uploaded and who by. This is a pretty big thing, if only from the point of view of it now being REALLY QUITE IMPORTANT that you have a handle on where your data is from if you’re using Custom Audiences. I can only imagine the really exciting (not exciting) digging that’s going to happen around Brexit-related ads in the final month (ha!) before we leave the EU.
• Some Other Facebook Updates: Weirdly bundled up in a small, under-a-bushel announcement about how much Facebook cares about communities (Groups continue to be a big platform-wide focus, in case you care), Facebook just announced some tweaks. There’s some stuff related to Groups – including an annoyingly vague ‘partnerships with brands’ programme that I suggest you ask your rep about tout suite – which I will c&p here: “we’re adding new post formatting tools and ways to manage their group like how to inform a member when they violate a rule, filtering by date range in their admin activity log, and searching through membership requests by name. We’re also launching a pilot program that lets groups and brands collaborate, expanding subscription groups to more partners, and allowing relevant Pages to join their communities”, and then a bunch of other small things such as donations coming to Instagram Stories, which is a big thing for charities and influencers alike.
• The Facebook Transparency Report: You want all of the reports and information that shows Facebook is actually a totally transparent and benign business after all,in one handy place? YES YOU DO! This is where you now need to go to get up-to-date information on Government data requests to the platform, content guidelines, etc. Happy now? Hahahaha you work in advermarketingpr, happiness is an intangible and increasingly fuzzy memory you chase after with cheap cocaine.
• The Twitter Numbers: The headline in the linked article says it all really; Twitter has fewer daily active users than Snapchat. Twitter’s not going to die, and it will continue to be hugely, disproportionately influential because journalists and politicians, but, honestly, it’s not really where the real people hang out. Thank GOD, as real people are dreadful.
• The Snap Numbers: Not HUGELY interesting, but, well, when did that stop me? Snap’s user numbers have stabilised, and its latest earnings statement includes a lot of bullish chat about how great its ad penetration is amongst coveted demographics – they trumpet the statistic that they reach “70 percent of the total 13 to 34 year‐old U.S. population with premium mobile video ads on a monthly basis” which is both hugely impressive and almost totally bollocks-sounding. Anyway, don’t give up on it yet if you are peddling tat to kids.
• Reddit Launches Cost-per-Click Ads: I still think Reddit’s underexploited from an ad point of view (for the right brands, obviously; probably wouldn’t suggest it for, say, Shell *waves to pecten-loving readers*); the fact they’re now doing CPC ought to make you reconsider it as part of your paid-for mix.
• Kitamura: Finally in the awful section about s*c**l m*d** this week, this is a site promoting a Japanese manufacturer of luxury pillows. Just read the mission statement. Don’t you just want this man to tuck you in RIGHT NOW? Don’t you want to enjoy the ART OF SLEEP? Can you tell I am so tired I am practically crying as I type this? No, you can’t, can you? THAT’S HOW FCUKING PROFESSIONAL I AM.

By Cornelia Fitzroy

HAVE A MASSIVE AND SUPERBLY-CURATED BOWIE MIX NEXT! GO ON!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT A BUNCH OF SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS ROLEPLAYING AS BRANDS AND TALKING TO EACH OTHER IN CHARACTER ABOUT THEIR DEPRESSION AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES IS HONESTLY ONE OF THE MOST DARKLY FUNNY EXPRESSIONS OF THE MADNESS OF LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM IT HAS EVER SEEN, PT.1:

• The Night Watch Experience: I think I made some reference to Dutch arts and cultural organisations being really, really good at digital stuff – and lo, it came to pass that once again they prove me right, with this lovely interactive to celebrate the Year of Rembrandt. This is an audiovisual tour through a digitisation of his Night Watch painting, taking a super hi-res scan of the canvas, cracks and blisters and all, guiding the visitor through key elements and themes, from the historical context to the picture to the way in which the artist uses composition to guide the eye. As with everything the Rijksmuseum does online, this is wonderful and a genuinely great approach to digitised art – the addition of the curatorial audio layer in clearly guided fashion is a really nice alternative to the standard ‘here’s 3million hi-res images, fend for yourselves, you can Google for context’ approach.
• Tokimeki Unfollow: I’ve just checked and I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Marie Kondo at all on here so far, which I’m sort of proud of; sadly my resistance has now been breached, with this tool which offers you the chance to Kondo the everliving fcuk out of your Twitter feed. Attach your account to the site and let it show you the accounts you follow, one-by-one, each time asking you in brutal, flat fashion whether said account ‘sparks joy’ in you or whether in fact you should bin its digital clutter from your existence. This is nice, if a slightly silly gimmick, which would be immeasurably improved if you could add your own determinant criteria to the game – wouldn’t it be better if you could get given additional information on the accounts you follow to help you make your decision? How much do they tweet about football? How often do they participate in ‘funny’ meme games? Do they do the hilarious seasonal name change thing? Do they use twee compound swears? By the way, if any of you decide that Web Curios doesn’t ‘spark joy’ in your life then rest safe in the knowledge that I feel exactly the same way.
• Google Shadow Art: I was trying to think of a joke about shadow puppetry, but I got stuck on something about penises and naked molerats which I’m pretty sure none of you really want to think about very much. Sorry. Anyway, this is a new AI training tool-disguised-as-a-game from Google, in which it lures us into training its future sentient death machines by promising us some lightweight lols. This time we’re training the Googleplex to do something around interpretation of irregular shapes, I presume, via the medium of SHADOW PUPPETRY! The site will present a variety of shapes you have to contort your hands into to make a particular shadow puppet – it then tracks your hand/fingers and lets you know when you’ve sufficiently contorted your paws to match the original shape. The detection here is a bit iffy, and frankly I spent the majority of my time with it staring at my hands like someone on mushrooms who was very confused about their corporeal reality, but you may have more luck.
• Shout Against Violence: This is rather odd. The site’s designed to raise awareness of domestic violence and to raise money for organisations in support of sufferers and survivors; it does so by presenting a genuinely odd and VERY creepy couple of little CG interactive vignettes which, frankly, feel an awful lot more like some sort of slightly schlocky made-for-Netflix slasher flick than a charity appeal. Maybe that’s the point. Anyway, it’s an interesting approach that to my mind doesn’t quite work, but the site’s slickly-made and the cause is good. I don’t normally do TW-type stuff, but be aware that this is a) about domestic violence; and b) a bit creepy, so caveat emptor and all that.
• Emoji Mosaic: Long-term readers will be aware of the disdain I feel for the emoji as a THING; emoji are to nuanced, interesting communication what fingerpaints are to gouache (nice, early contender for ‘most pretentious line in Curios’ there at 8:12am) and frankly they can fcuk right off (apart from the sad smiley, which is perhaps perfect). This, though, is great; plug in any photo you like and it will make a version of it out of emoji, in the manner of those ‘close/far away’ Monet-type pointillist masterpieces but, y’know, of your face (or, if you’re feeling surreal, some bongo). This will make you your new, temporary avi, just accept it, embrace it and move on.
• Happiness Spells: Combining two things I don’t really believe in – podcasts and witchcraft – into one, occult audio bundle. Actually this isn’t really about witchcraft, despite the name; instead, the podcast, released twice weekly, consists of a five minute list of things that make people happy; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, that sort of thing. I was intrigued by this and so had a bit of a listen and, honestly, it’s really rather wonderful as a short, mental-palette-cleansing pick-me-up. Some of the things are funny, some rather too twee for my tastes, but it’s generally really cute. Oh, and it’s from the US, meaning that any UK brand wanting to rip this off (who ‘owns’ happy? God, that’s a bleak sentence to write) can do so with almost total impunity!
• sPoNGeCaSe: Do you spend a lot of your time online typing in mixed upper-and-lower case, you MASSIVE MEMEY EDGELORD? Well if so this keyboard download from iOS will make your life temporarily better – although I do question what the target audience for this will do with the additional few minutes of free time per week this will grant them. Nothing good, I’d wager.
• Can’t Unsee: This is GREAT, but will drive those of you with a slightly-OCD bent to distraction. It’s a simple game – you get shown a couple of different digital designs, two slightly varying versions of a Twitter-ish interface, say, and are asked which of the two is ‘correct’ from a design point of view. Actually a pretty good eye training tool, but equally the sort of thing which at least three of you will find annoying to the point of tears. Here’s an idea – design agencies, why not spend the afternoon playing this as an office, with the person who scores lowest getting the sack?
• Cignature Films: This is WONDERFUL, though I would imagine that copyright will mean it’s short-lived. Cignature Films is a new project looking to de-coolify (yes, what of it?) smoking in media. To do this, they’re planning on editing a load of famous films and TV series featuring lots of heavy smoking, so that all of the tabs are replaced with kazoos. You can see their first effort on the homepage, with a 20-second clip of Mad Men in which Don and…er…someone (sorry, never really watched it) have a bit of pillow talk whilst making occasional noisy toots on their plastic instruments. Reader, I cried – please, please, can whoever handles copyright for the studios just ignore this for a bit, as I need to see Goodfellas given this treatment.
• Deface: I’m possibly being a bit previous posting this – it’s not launched yet, but they’re interested in finding supporters or collaborators, so maybe one of you might be interested. Deface is a soon-to-be-launched (they say 2019) Chrome extension which its creators say will block Facebook from being able to read your messages, etc, as part of its ad targeting technology. I’m fascinated to see whether or not they manage to build this, and whether, if they do, it persists for longer than a week or so; regardless, if you’re interested in data and privacy and ads and STUFF then it’s probably worth keeping an eye on this.
• Track My Subs: This is a VERY useful site indeed. Tell this site every time you subscribe to a service and it will nudge you before your trial period ends so that you can swerve the charges, or at the end of each month so you can check if you want to keep it or not. Want to keep flipping your Netflix trial subscription so you never have to pay? YES YOU DO. Like Marie Kondo for subs, basically (she gets under your skin, that woman).
• Arrest Trends: The Vera Institute of Justice in the US has pulled together this website which lets you explore and examine US arrest data over the course of the past 35+ years; you can look at it cross-referenced by city,  demographic data, crime type, etc. It’s obviously an interesting dataset to explore, though equally obviously you’ll get more out of it if you’ve a particular interest in American social / economic issues, but it’s also worth looking at from a design/UX point of view and as an example of how you could go about cutting and displaying this sort of information.
• The Racial Injustice Calendar: Compiled by the American institution the Equal Justice Initiative, this is a deeply depressing but very impactful calendar which presents a separate, distinct example of significant past racial injustice that occurred on each day of the calendar year. Again, obviously everything on here occurred in the US, but as a visual reminder of the scale and recency of discrimination it’s hugely powerful.
• Bot of the Pops: B3ta dad and Friend of Curios Rob Manuel has been bothering his bots again, whipping up this delightful Twitter creation which will, when it launches (it’s currently locked but YOU can earn coveted ‘early adopter’ status by clicking the link RIGHT NOW!), post this week’s Top 40 from 30 years ago, with YouTube links and everything. This will be great, not least as a useful reminder to the older amongst us that popular music has, in the main, always been quite sh1t, and as such we should probably wind our necks in about how all this modern stuff is just noise and wouldn’t it be better with tunes and proper instruments and stuff.
• TankBall: The latest in a line of ‘videogames but using actual real things controlled over the web by faceless players by webcam’ (the name needs work), this is streaming through Mixer channel Other Ocean and is basically Rocket League but in real life with RC trucks. This looks a bit shonky but VERY fun – do you remember about 10 years ago when there were a variety of brand activation things involving shooting galleries and the like, controlled by the player through a FB app or similar? I reckon we’re about due a revival of that sort of thing, but better and higher-fidelity and without all the creepy datagathering stuff.
• Snapmail: Would you like a Chrome plugin that allows you to send certain emails as self-destructing messages that vanish after 60 seconds? WHY? WHY DO YOU WANT THIS? Anyway, here is such a thing, for all your nefarious needs – I honestly can’t think of a good reason for this to exist, but will nevertheless spend at least one afternoon next week responding to all professional emails with this feature enabled, just to make it impossible for anyone to hold me to any promises I might make (suggest you do the same and we compare the stories of our ruined ‘careers’ in due course).
• The Lonely Hour: The second podcast of the week – unprecedented! – this is a lovely idea; the premise of the Lonely Hour is that we all get lonely but that we don’t talk about it or acknowledge it enough, and so for an hour each week the pod will explore issues around loneliness and solitude and society and art and stuff, and will maybe be a salutory reminder that we’re all fundamentally alone in a godless universe and any sort of idea of human connection is basically a comforting illusion at best.
• Sketchnthecity: “In 2016 sketch artist Carl Lavia joined forces with photographer Lorna Le Bredonchel and together they formed the ambitious ’69 cities of the UK’ project. Which aims to create a portrait of the whole United Kingdom through large-scale sketches of its 69 cities.” This site collects their works to date and offers a selection for sale as (reasonably-priced) prints – the style here is GREAT, and though they’ve only done a dozen or so cities so far you get a real feel for the scale of the project. Beautiful work.
• Vampire Traits: A beautiful example of the weirdness of Wikipedia, this – a truly kilometric list of the traits vampires have been depicted as having in seemingly EVERY SINGLE WORK OF VAMPIRE FICTION EVER. You want to know whether the bloodsuckers in some obscure 1970s pulp Draculasploitation soft-bongo teeth-n-tits extravaganza were of the ‘no to garlic’ sort? This list has got you covered. You know how Wikipedia’s editors are, famously, about 90% male? One does wonder what the site would have looked like had there been more women involved from the outset. I reckon this entry would be MUCH shorter (though obviously if I’ve totally misgendered this – OBVIOUSLY women can be as obsessive about popular culture stuff as men, it’s just that, in the main, they tend to stop a few metres short of the ‘I know! I’m going to make it my life’s work to curate and maintain the global knowledge repository of vampire traits in fiction!’ insanity cliff).

By Sam Rodriguez

NEXT, TRY THIS 2015 LIVE SET BY FAMOUSLY ‘CHALLENGING’ ELECTRONOISE PURVEYORS AUTECHRE!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT A BUNCH OF SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS ROLEPLAYING AS BRANDS AND TALKING TO EACH OTHER IN CHARACTER ABOUT THEIR DEPRESSION AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES IS HONESTLY ONE OF THE MOST DARKLY FUNNY EXPRESSIONS OF THE MADNESS OF LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM IT HAS EVER SEEN, PT.2:

• Fabula: This is an interesting idea, though I was initially inclined to ignore it for its egregious use of the term ‘fake news’. Still, ignoring that, Fabula has potential promise – although it does use slightly wanky pseudo-AI language, which got my back up slightly. “To solve fake news, Fabula AI developed (and patented) Geometric Deep Learning – the first AI technology able to learn from social networks. This AI has been trained to deliver unbiased authenticity scores for any piece of news, in any language. The initial model has already proven its ability to quickly and accurately spot fake news. Fabula AI will deliver a better way to maintain trust in the world’s news: an independent, automated clearing house.” I’ve done a bit of research and, fine, Geometric Deep Learning does appear to be an actual thing with actual papers written about it so, well, fine, but I’m still a bit skeptical. Anyway, what’s interesting about this is their aim to make this an open API, so as to allow any third party to theoretically use the Fabula tech as an outsourced factchecker for their site. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Opsec and Beauty: I bet you didn’t know that what you needed this week to make it ALL BETTER was a YouTube channel combining the ostensibly-unrelated interests of online security and makeup tutorials and reviews. There’s something sort of brilliantly bleak about this – I can’t quite tell how much of this is performative ‘comedy’ and how much is just this woman being genuinely dry, but I watched all of these this week and my skincare regime is TRANSFORMED.
• The Norman Foster Collections: The Norman Foster Archive presents a LOAD of sketches and drawings from the architect’s studio, arranged by project – if you’re into architectural sketches and the like then this will make you VERY HAPPY, though it will also, if you go back far enough, make you do a bit of a nostalgic sigh and reminisce about those long-gone days in which throbbing verticality wasn’t the sole determining factor in an architect’s getting commissioned.
• Kofta: I really almost NEVER touch fashion here, mainly as I have only a passing acquaintance with what the word in fact means, but this site blew me away. Kofta makes bags and backpacks and these are AMAZING – sort of a bit like the sort of thing that a pleather trenchcoat-wearing industrial metal enthusiast might wear if they were also into nature or bodyhorror or, er, bricks. Look, you just sort of have to click the link to get a feel for these, but I promise you that they are incredible – were I a 6’6” albino cyberpunk I would TOTALLY buy the ‘leather backpack with screaming face looming out of it like the Prodigy cover from back in the day’, for starters.
• Save My News: Are you a journalist? Would you like a way of archiving all your published copy that ensures it’s safe from the vicissitudes of the media industry? GREAT! Save My News lets you put in the url of any article and makes a cached copy on the Internet Archive. That’s it – super simple, a great idea, and useful for loads of stuff besides its stated aim.
• Flight Simulator: An iOS app which replicates the best thing about being on a flight – to whit, being able to stare out of a plane window with nary a thought in your head for a few hours. Pick a flight path, turn on airplane mode, and stare at the virtual window as time passes and the light changes – honestly, this is a better idea and execution than 90% of the crap that passes for video art.
• On Being: I…I don’t know what this is. I mean, it’s a website, and it contains words and images in a sort of magaziney fashion, but, well, what is it? “The On Being Project is a media and public life initiative. We make a public radio show, podcasts, and tools for the art of living. Six grounding virtues guide everything we do. We explore the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, community, poetry, and the arts.” YES BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY DO? Still, this has apparently been going in various forms for 15 years and this is its new home online – as far as I can tell, it collects an awful lot of very nicely-presented, white-space-heavy content about MINDFULNESS and assorted gubbins; in fairness there are interviews with interesting people, including Maria Popova of Brain Pickings fame (where’s MY book deal, eh?), and the podcasts might be nice, but this basically feels like Goop for people who go to Art Basel (hang on, Goop is for people who go to Art Basel, I take it back).
• Iconary: Play pictionary – BUT WITH AI! You can choose to either draw the cluer to let the computer figure out the meaning or to be the guesser yourself. The software is VERY unimaginative in its parsing of the clues – in fairness, the clues are generally disappointingly literal – so it’s more fun to play as the setter of questions rather than the respondent. Works better on a tablet or phone due to the ‘sketch to search’ function for finding the icons you want to use – might be a fun thing to give your 7 year old to keep them quiet for 5 minutes (but obviously make them go on a 20k run afterwards to compensate).
• Dark Patterns: You all know what Dark Patterns are, right? Those little tricks of design that less-than-scrupulous designers and companies use to trick you into inadvertently doing something you perhaps didn’t want to do online? Yeah, you know. Anyway, this site collects examples of these – quite interesting from the point of view of UX/UI design, and of course an excellent and useful reminder of the fact that all online businesses basically want to fcuk all the money out of you all the time.
• Switching Social: As discussed last week, noone’s in fact actually leaving Facebook – in fact, I can’t see there being any sort of mass exodus from any of the major platforms any time soon, mainly because, well, we like the way they hurt us (god that’s a horrible truth, isn’t it? I LOVE MY SCABS THE SCRATCHY PAIN THEY AFFORD!). Still, if you or anyone you know would like a handy list of ‘services that are pretty much the same as those giant social platforms but are, at least at the time of writing, not quite as mercenary about the whole data privacy and monetisation thing, then, well, this is that list.
• Design 100: A project by Matthew Dunstan, in which each week he’ll post a different one-word question or provocation about game design and invite a bunch of industry luminaries to post their responses to that theme. It’s only one week in at the moment, but it’s worth bookmarking or following the accompanying Twitter account if you’ve any interest in games (or systems, frankly) design.
• The Music Lab: Are you tone deaf? PROVE IT! No, not by singing you sadistic fcuk, but instead by playing around in the new Harvard Music Lab, a beta project which compiles a bunch of online investigations into music being undertaken by the University’s department of psychology. There are several fun little games on the site, from one which asks you to guess whether a snippet of overheard conversation is being addressed to an adult or child, to one where you have to guess where a particular instrumental is from in the world, but the real fun is the tone deafness test, where you have to see if you can determine which of a series of sounds is loudest or quietest, whether tonal scales are going up or down, etc. Make the biggest music bore in your office do this so you can laugh at their tin ear forevermore.
• Draft: This is, I concede, VERY unsexy, but as a collaborative writing and draft-control tool this looks AMAZING. Draft lets you write in a simple, clean interface and then offers you a load of hugely useful tools to allow for collaborative editing, quick and simple edit approval/rejection, sensible versioning and so much more. Honestly, given how frustrating GDocs are for this sort of thing I can’t stress how good this sounds (caveat here being that I am yet to test it out properly so, er, sorry if my initial assessment is wrong and it’s a useless mess).
• Water Simulation: Feeling a big frazzled? WHY IS THAT ARE MY WORDS NOT RELAXING YOU WHAT DO YOU MEAN STOP SHOUTING. Take a moment to stare at this digital representation of a small tray of water, which you can mess with in gently pleasing colourful fashion. This really is properly soothing, honest.
• Pub: Really interesting idea, this – it’s intended as a means to make it easier for commercial users to license videos from creators, and for creators to monetise their output by easily being able to grant commercial use rights. It’s obviously very early days, and may well never take off, but as a concept – a button which can be installed next to any video anywhere online, much like ‘share’ functionality, which will let people apply to license a video in just a few clicks, wherever they find it. Clever, simple, and I rather hope this succeeds as part of the nascent drive to find new microtransactional monetisation models for content.
• Contact Sheets: A Pinterest collection of images of contact sheets from photoshoots from across the 20th Century. Some of these are great, and there are LOTS of them.
• Hire a Buzzfeeder: A database of some of the doubtless lovely and talented people who were laid off from Buzzfeed recently and who are looking for new jobs. Mostly North American, but there are a few London folk on there too; if you’re hiring for content-type stuff you could probably do worse than check this lot out (there’s a really mean-spirited gag I could make here along the lines of ‘but only if you don’t care about profitability!’, but a) that’s beneath me (ok, fine, it’s really not) and b) tbh if Buzzfeed were a normal business rather than a mental VC-funded rocketship then it probably would have been considered to be doing ok.
• Matchbox Restoration: I might have mentioned on here before that one of my online quirks is my deep and overriding passion for videos of soft-voiced women talking to me about their very, very mundane skincare routines (IT’S ASMR! IT’S NOT A SEX THING! WHY DOES NOONE BELIEVE ME?!), which send me into a proper eyerolling cat-having-its-ears-scratched-type-trance; I imagine that these videos of Mathbox toy cars being painstaking restored might well have the same sort of soothing effect on some of you.
• Simon’s Shoes: Very odd, this, seemingly having fallen through a timewarp from 2009 when the X Factor actually mattered and Simon Cowell was a genuine cultural trope rather than a slightly odd relic of a more innocent (yet significantly more handsy) era – it’s a Twitter account featuring photos depicting Cowell’s unique sartorial approach to the ‘jeans and scheux’ trope. Enjoy!
• Ryan Creamer: Yes, this is his real name. Yes, this is a link STRAIGHT TO PR0NHUB so BE CAREFUL. That said, it’s by far and away the most SFW page on the whole site, being as Ryan is the breakout star of such wholesome bongo hits as “I tuck you in after you cum” (I hate that spelling, but, well, I bow to the whims of the creator), or “I deliver you a pizza (and don’t put my wiener in it)” – basically Ryan is doing some sort of weird sex-free performance art thing on the world’s most popular bongobank and, well, it’s LOVELY! Just need to reiterate, though, that the link takes you straight to PH and, well, there’s a large chance that your HR and IT departments have some sort of loud alarm and flashing alert that fires up whenever anyone lands on that particular .com from the office IP so, well, BE CAREFUL!
• ASCII Game: A series of tiny little games made in ASCII, which are by turns baffling and brilliant and frustrating and which are SUCH good examples of imaginative game design within specific constraints.
• Linjat: Finally in this week’s selection of mostly frivolous webspaff, this is a GREAT little puzzle game which you will absolutely DESTROY for the first few levels and which will then proceed to beat you into submission with its difficulty while you sit and ask yourself whether you’re actually an idiot after all (you’re not, I promise, you’re VERY SPECIAL).

By Doan Ly

NOW ENJOY THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK, A TRIBUTE TO THE SLEAZY DAYS OF TIMES SQUARE AND A COMPANION PIECE TO ONE OF THE LONGREADS DOWN THERE!

THE (LONELY, SMALL, DYING) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• John Bercow’s Ties: A Tumblr celebrating the neckwear choices of everyone’s favourite walking, talking example of short man syndrome.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Porg: Or, to give it its full name, ‘Porg the Glass Kitten’ – Porg is a found cat who has a rare skin condition meaning it needs to wear a little sweater at all times to protect its sensitive dermis and, well, O MAOW! O MAOW!
• Ard Gelinck: This got on my tits rather this week – outlets all over the web ran photogalleries featuring images of famouses posing with younger versions of themselves, done in (pretty good) photoshop; very few of them made it clear who they were by, or linked to the artist’s Insta where the images originally appeared. Look, I know that all ‘curators’ online are essentially thieves but the very least we can do is acknowledge creators wherever possible. Credit where it’s due – we’re the parasites here and we ought to acknowledge that fact wherever possible.
• Picoworm: TINY MINIATURE MODELS OF THINGS! SO KAWAII!
• California Tom Cruise: The Instagram account of a Tom Cruise impersonator. I imagine this guy has a reasonably fun life, all thing considered.
• Thread Stories: An Insta account presenting knitted thread mask artwork type things – these are brilliant and sinister and, weirdly, really remind me of webseries ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’.
• Trashfashionshit: Last in the Instas, this feed compiles some genuinely amazing wtfery from fashion past and present. SO MUCH ODD.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

• The Economics of Airbnb: This is VERY long and VERY involved and pretty much SERIOUS BUSINESS, but it’s also an incredibly clear and well-argued assessment of why Airbnb is in many ways a toxic business that ruins the communities in which it gains a foothold and which affords only relatively small marginal gains to its users. As a sort of kilometre-high overview of modern capitalism and the service economy, this is pretty much superb; honestly, even if this description makes you come out in hives, make an effort and give this a skim, I promise it’s more interesting than you’d think.
• Your Algos Are Sh1t: Interesting, slightly contrarian piece asking why, given all the data brands and databrokers have on us, the ads we see and the personalised services we avail ourselves of aren’t, well, better. Lots of interesting food for thought in here, and I very much liked the subtext about how everyone wants to collect data – WE NEED THE DATA! – but noone really likes the hard and messy and unfun job of actually analysing the bastard stuff. The observation at the end about Netflix rang very true indeed and I think is an interesting side-point about the increased flattening of taste being the real, hidden effect of almost infinite choice.
• The Superbowl Commercials Sucked: If you’re one of those rare people who reads all the way through Curios you might have noticed that this year the section at the top (the bit most of you skip because, well, it’s boring and miserable) contained nary a mention of the Superbowl and its ads; this piece does a reasonable job of explaining why. As it notes, memery and kitchen sink-ing seems to have replaced creativity in big-ticket advertising at the moment, and the vast majority of this year’s Superbowl ads (notable, heartstring-tugging Microsoft work aside) was just a general cacophony of pop cultural tropes smooshed together with little art. As an aside, I felt much the same way about M&S’s ‘Love Sausage’ Valentine’s Day tweet this week – for one, is every single lazy answer to a brief now either ‘annoy Piers Morgan’ or ‘make some sort of crap ‘did they mean it?!’ innuendo’; for two, every single person who responded to that Tweet with some sort of ‘THEY SAID LOVE SAUSAGE BUT I THINK THEY MEANT COCK LOL!’ message is, honestly, the reason this country’s fcuked. HAVE SOME SELF-RESPECT YOU BASIC BITCHES.
• China and Kazakhstan: This is actually about the whole Belt & Road initiative, taking a particular look at a small, remote part of Kazakhstan that’s being developed as part of that and using it as a lens into the global ambitions underpinning all this investment. The sheer scale of this is fascinating; on the one hand, you read this and think “crikey, China really is the future and is going to be in charge of basically half the world within a century”; on the other, you read it and think “crikey, if China’s economy really is as fcuked as some commentators are speculating then, well, we’re all pretty screwed”. Tangential observation – read this, note the scale and the sums involved, and then take a moment to reflect upon some of the more hubristic rhetoric being spouted around Britain’s future post-Brexit. Major world power is it then, lads? Big player on the world stage? Someone with a seat at the big table? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAohgodohgodohgod.
• Failing to Build a Billion-Dollar Company: I ordinarily have very little time for founder stories and startup rhetoric, but this post on Medium (of COURSE) by Pinterest employee #2 and founder of Gumroad Sahil Lavingia is a genuinely interesting read; it does a nice job of explaining how, in many instances, VC funding is RUINOUS for startups, founders and staff, and how perhaps not shooting for unicorn status and instead just making something good that people like and use and which can employ and sustain a workforce is quite good enough thankyou very much.
• Marshmello in Fortnite: I don’t think this got anywhere near as much media attention as it warranted, but perhaps the big outlets still remember their breathless coverage of Duran Duran doing a gig in Second Life all those many years ago. Which serves to prove that ‘virtual gig by real band’ is by no means a new phenomenon; the difference is that Fortnite is a mainstream global phenomenon, and that the idea of a virtual shared experience is now normalised for millions of kids. Will be really interested to see which brands jump on this first – will cost loads, but there’s a LOT of early adopter/first mover advantage in this I think.
• LARPing AI: I don’t think I could have made that title less appealing to a mainstream reader. Wait! Come back! Yes, fine, LARP does stand for ‘Live Action Role Playing’ – that said, this is a really interesting piece about the odd subset of LARPing in which people roleplay as sentient AIs; the idea being that through this they can explore certain ethical questions that arise when we consider treating ostensibly human-level consciousnesses as somehow differently deserving of rights, etc. VERY high-concept, but the questions raised throughout are really interesting.
• I Was Bougie Literary London Woman: A N Other account of the weirdness of virality, this time looking at the oh-so-London-meeja obsession with the Bougie Literary London Woman Twitter feed, which exploded late-2018. A gently amusing read, though possibly a bit more smug than its author intended, which makes some good points about the unpredictability of how a joke will land with its intended audience, and the powerlessness of the creator when it takes on a life of its own.
• Book Covers of Instagram: The Grammification (yes, WHAT OF IT? You can have it for FREE, that’s how generous I’m feeling) of everything continues with crushing inexorability – this is about how its affecting the world of publishing, and in particular cover design, with cover art now being selected based on its aesthetic appeal on a  phone screen rather than on a shelf. Really looking forward to the first publishing house that decides it’s going zag hard against this and make covers designed to look fcuking awful in your feed just for the aesthetoterrorist lols.
• The Language of Development: An interview with the founder and curator of now-classic Tumblr ‘Development Aesthetics’, which captures the copy and tone used to describe new building projects in London, in which Crystal Bennes talks about the weird linguistic aesthetic that maintains and the strange homogeneity of aspiration and purpose that engenders in these constructions. There’s a lot to love here, but I would take issue with Crystal’s statement that “I’ve met people who work in the marketing departments at one of London’s bigger luxury apartment developers and does PR for huge commercial developers and they all talk about how much time they spend agonising over every word, every image used on the hoardings. I mean everybody thinks they’re the “good guy”, right?” Crystal, I worked on at least one of the developments namechecked in here and I can assure you that a) I spent the square root of fcuk-all time agonising about any of it; and b) I am under no illusion about what sort of “guy” I am.
• How Long Could My Murderer Pretend To Be Me Online?: It’s not really about getting murdered – it’s about the very weird ubiquity of ‘millennial affect’ as a tone (look, that’s what I’m calling it and YOU CAN’T STOP ME) and how it flattens everyone into a sort of homogenous mass of performative sadness: “Instagram stories are easily imitable; if you did a video zooming in on any plant and wrote “she’s doing it,” it could be mistaken for my work. If I were vague or AWOL with the people I message with, I think they’d really take it on the chin and assume I’m busy, because the rhythms of modern communication via technology deem it deeply unchill to demand a prompt answer from anyone about anything. My work Slack needs mostly only affirmations and a statement of what I’m going to be working on for the day (“Editing a piece,” “lol,” “lol,” “yes,” “sounds good,” “lol,” [link to some inscrutable local viral tweet]). My “mildly antisocial” state would be extremely easy for a murderer to replicate to make me look still alive, which raises the somewhat chilling question of how alive I even am in the first place.” I think this is INTERESTING and worth a deeper exploration, personally.
• The Poo Flip Story: Let’s be clear – this is a story about a viral video in which a man is shown jumping naked off a pier, doing a backflip, whilst defecating massively – seriously, a huge, fibrous buttload, parabolically exiting his sphincter like a proud fecal serpent – all of which is presented to you, the viewer, backwards, so that he first emerges from the water and then as he rises you see what’s happening and oh god is tha – fcuk, it is – WOW. That is what it is about. It’s features a link to the video in question so you can see it for yourself, but it’s actually a story about content thieving and virality. SPOILER: The lads in the original video were Australian. You’re not surprised, are you?
• Meet Lizzo: I featured Lizzo’s latest track in the first Curios of the year and since then she has been EVERYWHERE, which I wish I could say was testament to my starmaking power but in fact is a result of the fact she’s awesomely talented, has been doing the circuit for a few years now, and is pretty much THE perfect pop icon for 2019; body positive, nonconformist in terms of beauty ideals, that weird young person’s combination of extremely fierce and incredibly vulnerable, an avatar for anyone from your queer outsider in high school to suburban office workers getting ready for a night out…anyway, this is a great interview, she sounds awesome and she’s only going to get bigger (and do click the flute videos if you’ve not seen them, they are IMMENSE).
• Secrets and Wives: You know how at the end of Goodfellas the Ray Liotta characters does some sort of breezy signoff about living in Witness Protection and how dull it is? Did you ever wonder how that worked out for him? Well, wonder no more. This is VERY LONG, but often very funny – it’s a shame the writing’s a bit convoluted in parts, but if you’re interested in a post-Mob mobster’s attempts (not particularly strong attempts, it’s fair to say) to go straight then this is a great read. Also, ‘died of natural causes’ – truly, there is NO justice.
• The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer: What do you think it’s like being the sort of person who spends all their time sharing photos of yachts and yacht parties and massive, wrist-snapping watches in Insta? Fcuking miserable, it seems. I know we all know this but please can we make an effort to tell all the normies ALL INFLUENCERS ARE LIARS AND CHARLATANS. This is the point where I would have posted that massive influencer takedown piece that went up on Wednesday, but even the cache appears to have vanished, suggesting that influencers may well be liars and charlatans but it’s important to remember that they are often reasonably wealthy and litigious liars and charlatans, so perhaps best not to mention them by name.
• Sex Censorship Killed The Internet: Or at least some specific bits of it. Violet Blue has been writing about sex and online and the intersection of the two for years now, consistently well, and this is an excellent and weirdly very sad essay, reminiscing about the communities she found and, over time, lost as they were shut down by media companies who subscribe to the weird puritanical ideal that suggests that it’s a lot more dangerous for people to be exposed to, I don’t know, a photo of an engorged glans than it is for them to be subjected to seemingly endless streams of hatespeech and propaganda. A very good look at the weirdness that that puritanism has engendered and what we lost along the way.
• Orwell on British Cookery: This was commissioned by the British Council in 1946, but never published til this week – it’s fair to say that it’s not the most sparkling piece of prose Eric Blair ever penned (“it is very much bitterer”? Really?), but as a curiosity it’s great, and it will make you VERY GLAD that you are living in an era in which we have embraced such radical culinary ingredients such as olive oil and spices other than salt and pepper.
• Who Is Dan Mallory?: This is LONG, but SUCH a great story – add this to the list of ‘great grifters of late capitalism’, along with that woman last year who scammed half of New York’s high society. Dan Mallory is a published novelist, whose debut was acclaimed and optioned and made him very famous indeed. That, though, might be the only certainty in this piece – you will very much enjoy the increasingly astonishing levels of deception Mallory engages in, but there are a few interesting questions about this below the surface; does it really matter, in terms of his status as a novelist? How much of his ability to do this was a result of his whiteness and maleness? And how should we relate to him now? Really wonderful.
• Dishwasher Confidential: An Italian chef, working in Paris, writing in English about the role of the dishwasher in the modern kitchen. Brilliant writing which manages to touch upon issues of race, class, globalisation, cultural appropriation, food and much more without you even really realising.
• Elegy in Times Square: A former worker at a peep show revisits her old workplace; this is wonderful, on memory and youth and sex and freedom and all sorts of associated things.
• In the Prison of Your Skin: Finally in this week’s longreads, a piece I first read in the author’s collection of essays called ‘Sexographies’ but which is now reprinted in Guernica Magazine – Gabriela Wiener is a SUPERB writer, and this account of her visit to one of Peru’s toughest jails is just wonderful. Tattoos and hooch and love and lifers and gangsters and molls and, honestly, you won’t read a better thing all week.

By Moon Chanpil

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First, this is a newt (NOT A LIZARD! Thanks, everyone, for telling me that; no, really, thanks) coming into being, from the first cell to full growth. THIS IS AMAZING WATCH IT NOW LIFE IS A MIRACLE OH MY DAYS!:

2) Next, The Specials have a new album out – this is the lead track off it, called ‘10 Commandments’ and featuring a vocal from Saffiyah Khan who you might recall as the smiling woman facing down the EDL guy from that photo a few years back; this is a decent track but it’s her that makes it – hugely magnetic presence on record:

3) FRENCH POP! This is called ‘Mojo’ and it’s by Claire Laffut and, fine, I find her almost cripplingly attractive but this is also a great song so that makes it ok, right? Right!:

4) This is by Wand, it’s called ‘Scarecrow’ and I like it very much indeed; it’s sort of weirdly sparse without being in any way minimalist, and this is, again, why I am not a music journalist:

5) If you’re my age, you’ll remember a brief week-long window in which James Lavelle was actually cool as opposed to be an achingly-twattish poseur. This new track from UNKLE is a flashback to those times – genuinely great song, this. Still doesn’t excuse the popularity of BAPE, though:

6) Next, a short film about faceswap tech and what we might use it for. This, I feel free saying without fear of too many spoilers, doesn’t end well. Pleasingly horrible:

7) Finally this week, THE RETURN OF SALAD FINGERS! You’ll either know what that means and will already have clicked, or you won’t and will be reading this confusedly wondering what I am on about. CLICK THE LINK! IT’S HORRIBLE! Honestly the ability of this thing to give me the fantods a full 15 years since I first saw it online is amazing; see how it makes YOU feel! Oh, and, well, BYE! BYE! I LOVE YOU! BYE! IT’S BEEN WONDERFUL! I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY REST OF THE DAY AND WEEKEND AND TRY NOT TO SPEND ANY OF IT INTERACTING WITH BRANDS OR ADVERTISING UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ALTHOUGH OF COURSE I WOULDN’T PRESUME TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO AND, WELL, I WILL MISS YOU WHILE YOU ARE GONE AND I WILL BE THINKING OF YOU BUT ONLY IN A TOTALLY BENIGN AND POSITIVE WAY I PROMISE BYE I LOVE YOU THANKS FOR READING BYE!:

SO COLD. SO COLD. But no, it is not cold enough to go home from work, IT IS NEVER COLD ENOUGH TO STOP. 

I’m late with this today, what with…well, what with having been a bit slow, in the main. Anyway, as a result you’re getting little in the way of preamble; instead, enjoy this WARM AND SOOTHING bath of links I have prepared especially for you. Disrobe – MENTALLY AND METAPHORICALLY YOU SICKO, PUT IT AWAY – and slide yourself into my warm, soapy miasma. This is Web Curios – click ALL the links and watch your computer overheat, thereby providing you with something on which to warm your hands.

By Maxime Mouysset

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH A MIX BY CUT CHEMIST? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY AMUSED BY THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN THE MEDIA-SAVVY CLASSES’ OPINION OF BIG TECH AND THE VERY OBVIOUS ‘YEAH, WELL, WE DON’T GIVE A FCUK, GIVE US OUR CONVENIENCE CAPITALISM AND DIGITAL DISTRACTIONS BECAUSE, FRANKLY, PRIVACY IS THE LEAST OF OUR WORRIES’ ATTITUDE DISPLAYED BY SEEMINGLY EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD:

• Those Facebook Results: So these are the Q418 numbers and, well, seems we got over #deletefacebook pretty quickly (what’s that? Performative hashtag activism isn’t necessarily a good barometer of practical action? HEAVEN FORFEND!). You can interrogate the data yourself should you desire, but the headline numbers are that FB is making more money than ever, user numbers continue to rise in the developing world, even Europe added 6m MAU despite our being at near-saturation point, and, though the US is stagnant, the overall outlook is seemingly pretty good. Too big to fail? No, but it’s pretty clear that we are too apathetic to care. There’s an interesting analysis of WHAT THIS ALL MEANS here – the take is that Facebook will focus on innovation and new product in the next 12m after its focus on housekeeping over the past 18. HOW EXCITING!
• That Facebook Messenger Services Integration Thing: Obviously now this is OLD NEWS (I do hate it when stuff drops on a Friday just as I finish writing this; you’d have expected that the major press offices would take Curios into account and yet, well, unaccountably not), but I mention it for completeness. Yes, they want to do back-end integration between all the messaging apps that Facebook owns; yes, this will mean encryption on all platforms as standard. No, this doesn’t mean Insta and Messanger and WhatsApp will all be rebranded as one thing. Anyway, this isn’t going to be a thing til next year, earliest, so don’t worry about it – or at least it is unless some plucky little regulator attempts to point out the ever so slightly monopolistic nature of all of this.
• Data Privacy Day: This really isn’t important at all, but it’s worth pointing out Facebook’s statement for Data Privacy Day on Monday, in which its Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan (a person whose job I very much do not envy, I must say) charmingly tells us that it’s really important ‘for people to periodically review their privacy choices to be sure they’re still the right ones’. In a week in which Facebook’s been censured by Apple for being less-than-transparent in its research and datagathering practices, and just as a general mood, this requires some not insignificant chutzpah.
• FB Expanding Electoral Ad Transparency To More Countries: I mean, literally that, along with some additional information on what Facebook will do to prevent people from using its platforms and services to fcuk up democracy. Let’s be clear – WHATEVER IT DOES WILL NOT BE ENOUGH.
• FB Making Crowdtangle Data Available To Academics: Or at least, it will eventually – this is only of interest to a small subset of you, I’m sure, but those of you in research or academia should probably keep an eye on this – Crowdtangle is the software that basically shows users what is being shared on Facebook, and how much, and by whom, and is used by Editors to drive online content policy amongst other things; as a means of developing insight into information flow, etc, it’s potentially very useful indeed to researchers.
• You Can Now Use Insta Story Filters on Old Photos: On the one hand, I can’t get excited about this at all (and the link is to Mashable, sorry about that); on the other, if you’re the sort of person who relentlessly filters their selfies to perfect the no-texture skinfeel so beloved of the life-through-a-lens generation then know that you can now go back and revise your personal aesthetic history. This is the sort of thing that is a GODSEND for brands – you can basically reuse every single photo you’ve ever posted, but filtered for a ‘2019 aesthetic remix’ look. You’re welcome.
• Hulu Pause Ads: Not available in the UK – in fact, do we all know what Hulu is? It’s a US streaming service, is what – but SUCH a clever idea that I can’t believe noone else has done it already; Hulu’s introducing an ad unit that will display when users pause a video. Simple, and, as they rightly point out, static so as to minimise intrusion, the targeting options here mean you could be wonderfully creative with the image and copyrighting using this inventory. I realise that it’s pathetic to get moderately enthused about an ad unit, but, well, there’s not enough snow here for me to go sledging so I’m slightly clutching at straws for positives this morning.
• The Amazon Numbers: There is a LOT of stuff to unpack in these, not least the jaw-dropping stat that says that Amazon’s Operating Income was $3.8 billion for the quarter, up 81 percent year over year and almost as much as they made in all of 2017. Which is, frankly, insane. Other things that are worth noting – Amazon’s ad revenue is now 20% of Facebook’s, which is also insane given it’s still a nascent ad platform, and the earning’s call was a LOT about Alexa (despite the fact people only use it to listen to the radio, in the main). Basically MechaBezos is probably going to be able to afford a new robosuit made entirely of platinum, diamonds and the One True Cross within the next year or so.
• The Amazon Chronicles: As an aside, this is a new newsletter which will focus on news and analysis of Amazon as a business – I got the first one yesterday and it is EXCELLENT; if you’re the sort of person who needs to know about this stuff, or if you’re simply the sort of person who likes to keep up-to-date with the inexorable process of the apex predator of the capitalist anthropocene, this is a very useful resource indeed.
• A Guide To TikTok: Here at Web Curios, we’re not afraid to admit when we know nothing about something (a lie – I’ve built an entire ‘career’ out of talking quickly and with an air of authority about things I know literally nothing about), and I know next to nothing about TikTok – I downloaded it a year or so ago but just felt weirdly uncomfortable looking at it, like some sort of weird uncle (basically if everyone you see using an app is <20 and you are ~40, it very much feels like it is NOT OK), and, thankfully, very little of the work I do includes ‘REACH OUT TO THE BARELY PUBESCENT’ as an element. This guide, then – ostensibly for parents, but, well, wevs – is hugely useful; it explains the premise of the app, the interface, some of the memes, the culture and the controversy. Obviously if you’re familiar with it already this is probably laughable facile, but as a primer for people like me who will inevitably be asked about this by someone in a meeting, who will say ‘my daughter loves it should we be on TikTok ahahaha’, just like in 2007 with myspace and 2009 with Facebook and 2014 with Snap and OH GOD IT NEVER ENDS, this is helpful.  
• 2019 Shutterstock Trends: It’s February now (PINCH! PUNCH!) so this is the last trend thing I’ll put in here til we get to the 2020 predictions in 10 short months’ time (dear god the creaking of the sh1tty merrygoround really is ceaseless, isn’t it?), but this is worth a look – it’s based on data on downloads, searches, etc, from Shutterstock’s millions of members, and whilst obviously this is a silly and slightly bullsh1t statement a lot of these just feel right. Anyway, feel free to point at these to make whatever point you want in your meetings this month.
• Google Dataset Search: “Dataset Search enables users to find data sets stored across the web by way of a simple keyword search. The tool surfaces information about data sets hosted in thousands of repositories across the web, making these data sets universally accessible and useful.” Hugely useful if you need to find numbers for professional purposes.
• The Dulux Visualiser: I can count on the fingers of…er…possibly no hands the number of times I’ve included something here which has featured the words ‘AR’ and ‘useful’ in the same sentence, and yet here in the year of our lord 2019 I have finally found a genuinely smart application of it, by Dulux. Use the app to select the shade of paint you’re thinking of using, and then check out what your walls would look like in, say, Dowager’s Tears via the magic of Augmented Reality. Simple and solves a real-world need. CAN WE STOP WITH THE DANCING AR HOMUNCULI NOW PLEASE? PLEASE?
• All The Digital Stats: It’s that time of year when We Are Social and their various data partners drop their massive ‘ALL OF THE STATS ABOUT DIGITAL IN THE WORLD’ presentation – bookmark it and leech off their hard work for the next 12 months. They don’t mind, they want you to do it. Contains data on Alexa takeup by country and a few other new datapoints besides; equally, it makes clear exactly how meaningless the term ‘social media’ has become in 2019, and how silly it is to bundle usage of stuff like Messenger et al in with Insta / FB / Twitter; can we please start thinking about how we split out one-to-many networks vs closed networks when we talk about this stuff, because they are fundamentally different. THANKS!

By Alma Haser

NEXT, WHY NOT EXPERIENCE THE JOY OF MALLWAVE IN THIS TWO-HOUR MIX OF ODDLY-SOOTHING AMBIENT MUZAK?

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE ENJOYS THIS WEATHER AS IT RENDERS THE OTHERWISE DREADFUL MINEFIELD OF PROFESSIONAL SMALL TALK MOMENTARILY NAVIGABLE, PT.1:

• The Net Art Anthology: Let’s kick off with something BIG and CHUNKY and VERY INTERNET – this is a wonderful project, where over a two-year period will present 100 projects from the history of net art, one each week. “The series takes on the complex task of identifying, preserving, and presenting exemplary works in a field characterized by broad participation, diverse practices, promiscuous collaboration, and rapidly shifting formal and aesthetic standards, sketching a possible net art canon.” So there. If you’re interested in the idea of art as an internet thing, then this will obviously be up your street, but even if you think that the vast majority of what’s commonly called ‘net art’ is self-indulgent wank there is a LOT of it here and there will be at least one thing which you’ll look at and go “yep, I can totally rip off the base concept there and the client will think I’m a leftfield genius”. Also, thanks to this I have just learned that Brazil had email in the 80s, basically, which is MIND-BLOWING: “Videotexto, a pre-internet telecommunications network in Brazil was implemented in 1982, offering public information and a user-to-user messaging system via special terminals. Because a phone line was a rare and valuable commodity in Brazil at that time, these were mostly available in public spaces such as libraries or stores.” WHO KNEW?
• The Recursive Painting Tree Diagram: You’ve all read the story about the recursive Reddit painting this week, right? No? Fine, read it, I’ll wait. Done? Sweet, isn’t it? Anyway, someone built a little website showing the evolution of the meme from the original artwork through all the various baroque reworkings the community has churned out, all presented as a little family tree; the creator’s apparently going to keep updating this as new artworks are created, so expect the Louvre to be devoting its entire West wing to this stuff by 2021 if my maths is right.
• The News Lifespan: This is an EXCELLENT site and a really interesting project, seeking to map how the news enters, spreads within and then leaves the public consciousness, based on tracking Google search data. The project only takes data from US searches, but nonetheless it’s fascinating to see the commonalities in half-life amongst all the stories – they tend to follow a similar pattern of interest, in the main, though in certain cases the pattern extends over a far greater length of time than others. I would be fascinated to see how this applies to UK news; I wonder whether any of the big UK publishers would use their own traffic data to run something similar?
• Loop: This is a really interesting idea that I can’t imagine working at all, but I’m almost certainly wrong about that so perhaps go and invest in this RIGHT NOW. Loop is a yet-to-launch but seemingly-imminent service which will let consumers in the US shop for a selection of products from ACTUAL REAL BRANDS (Haagen Dazs and a few P&G/Unilever-type things, for example) which will be delivered to their home – so far, so standard. The gimmick here is that Loop will deliver the goods in their own durable, washable, reusable containers – so your icecream will come in some sort of metal tiffin tin, your detergent in a reusable squeezy bottle, that sort of thing. You use the stuff, you return the containers (free collection and shipping, obvs) and then you get a load of new containers full of stuff to replace the old ones. No packaging waste! So clean! So green! Let’s be charitable and assume that the whole supply chain here – deliveries and container-washing and the like – is carbon neutral here; even given that, do people want to get their stuff (even consumables) in packaging scuffed from repeat usage and high-pressure dishwashing? I’m going to say the sort of people who are rich enough to afford this are also the people least likely to to want to eat icecream out of a scratched metal tub which has been touched by STRANGE, GERMY OTHERS, personally, but then again I’m just a know-nothing digimong and these people have presumably got a fcukload of VC funding so, well, don’t listen to me.
• Phishing Quiz: A ‘fun’ little quiz from Google, which sets you a series of little tests to see how good you are at spotting when someone’s trying to trick you into giving up all your data through a scam website. Send this to your parents to scare the everliving sh1t out of them (don’t do that, it would be MEAN) – honestly, this is HARD (or, er, I am a moron and have very much been pwned by every single script kiddie out there, either/or).
• The B3ta Dictionary: B3ta’s been home to many projects, not least the no-longer-B3ta affiliated Sickipedia, the offensive gags website which really is the best example I can think of of how popular culture has changed in the last 10 years (1999: Let’s make a site collecting all the nonce jokes people can think of! 2019: Let’s never, ever make nonce jokes again, please don’t come round to our houses and burn us for our lapse in taste). This is another of those – the B3ta dictionary is a small lexicon of terms and phrases popularised on the board, and is a lovely reminisce if you ever spent any time on there. If you didn’t it may be in large part incomprehensible, but it could provide you with a whole load of obscure, rude-sounding phrases with which to baffle (and, eventually, irritate to the point of violence) your colleagues.
• PPT App: Having noted the ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD Dulux AR activation up there, we now return very much to the AR terra firma with this Canadian app – ANOTHER attempt to make ‘persistent AR tags in the real world’ a THING. “Be in the know and bring positive change to your community through localized augmented reality videos straight from your phone.Our mission is simple. We want to reconnect you with the people, places and things that make your neighborhood awesome.” So, to be clear, the idea here is that you will see stuff near where you live, use the app to add an AR tag to it – the developers’ suggestions include such helpful notes as ‘New!’ and ‘Yum’ and, incredibly, “Curb!”, a note that wouldn’t be necessary UNLESS YOU WERE STARING AT YOUR FCUKING PHONE RATHER THAN LOOKING WHERE YOU WERE GOING – and then wait for others to ‘discover’ your notes. HOW? HOW WILL THEY DO THIS? Do the developers expect everyone to wander round the streets staring through their phone in case they spot an AR love heart? Is there some sort of push notification when you stumble across a tag which tells you to launch the app to see it, and if so won’t that get a little old the 99th time you’re instructed to get your phone out to look at some idiot who typed an AR ‘Lol!’ over a real-world dog poo? THIS SOUNDS TERRIBLE. Bafflingly, this has seemingly been at least part-funded by the Canadian state – truly, they are so NICE.
• Pro Stories Video Editor: Do YOU make Stories? Of course you do! We love Stories! WATCH THE POORLY-SHOT-AND-EDITED-SUB-MADE-IN-CHELSEA REALITY-SHOW-THAT-IS-MY-LIFE! Ahem. Anyway, if you love Stories as much as we do here at Curios then you might find this web editing tool for video rather useful; it lets you crop and stitch them for the Stories format and then export them to the platform of your choice. As a free tool, this is probably worth a look. Be aware, though, that it won’t make people care.
• Google Talk To Books: This is a really interesting if not entirely successful idea – Google’s taken the huge corpus of literature its digitised and indexed and is running it through its natural language processing brains with a view to creating a searchable, conversational database that will let one draw from the wisdom of literature; the idea is that you can ask the interface anything you like, and it will try and make sense of your question and spit out a suitable bit of book that fits with your query. It doesn’t QUITE work, but there’s definitely a sort of ‘magic 8-ball’-type toy you could hack together with this. I just asked it “why am I so scared?” and it replied with “You’re surrounded on all sides by enemies bigger and stronger than yourself.Why wouldn’t you be scared? “But I’m here to tell each and every one of you that YOU AREA WINNER!” which, frankly, was just the motivational fillip I need at 845 on a snow Friday morning. See what it tells YOU.
• Black 3.0: I’ve featured Stuart Semple and his work in here quite a lot over the past few years; this is the latest in his gloriously petty (but also actually sort of serious) one-man project to annoy Anish Kapoor by creating a paint as-black as Kapoor’s famously VERY black Vantablack (if you want the background to the story you can read it all here, but basically Semple thinks that Kapoor is a pompous, self-important arsehole and, by all accounts, Semple is absolutely 100% right). Anyway, if you want the chance to own some of the blackest paint EVER MADE, here’s your chance – the Kickstarter for it is 3x funded with over a month left to go, so this is definitely happening, and it’s worth backing it purely to have the chance to draw ACME-style Wil E Coyote-esque fake tunnels on walls all over London.
• Bassoon Tracker: Sadly nothing to do with Shatner’s Bassoon – this is instead a seemingly-perfect replica of an old-style Amiga synth programme, lovingly recreated in your browser. Want to go back to 1993 and make the sort of track that could happily be used as the backing music on a pre-load crack screen? YES YOU DO! You can export your creations, in case you want to spend the day making slightly bleepy synth tracks and then uploading them to Soundcloud to an audience of literally noone.
• Buy Music Club: This is a lovely way of discovering new music – Bandcamp’s long been an excellent place to discover new, obscure, leftfield stuff, and this site lets anyone pull together a playlist of tracks from the site, give it a name and leave it here for anyone to stream, with the added bonus that all Bandcamp links are shoppable, meaning that (in theory at least) the creators have a chance of being paid. A Good Thing, and there are some really rather good mixes/playlists on there already.
• Blendle: Is 2019 the year in which someone finally nails micropayments as the solution to the CRISIS IN MEDIA? No, probably not – I am pretty much convinced that this is something that will eventually come, but when it does it will be one of the usual suspects who makes it work (it’ll be Amazon, won’t it? Everything’s going to be fcuking Amazon). Anyway, Blendle is an in-Beta service which promises that all sorts of major outlets are already signed up and which promises to finally fulful the promise of micropayments for news – you’ll pay a per-article price, though it’s not clear exactly what that is, and can get refunds if you click on something by accident. Actually, digging a bit more, this is already live in the Netherlands and Germany; it’s just in Beta in the US. Maybe it will succeed? It’s slightly depressing to note that the service covers features-y journalism rather than news, though – proof positive, again, that whilst we’re increasingly willing to pay for ‘journalism’ in its widest sense, we’re far less inclined to pony up for the hard business of news reporting. Doesn’t necessarily bode well.
• BIG Meals: Would you like a website featuring HUNDREDS of recipes for EXTREMELY LARGE AMOUNTS OF FOOD? Would you like to know how you might go about making a Waldorf Salad that feeds 100? Meatloaf for 1000? You wouldn’t want to eat ANY of this stuff, it’s fair to say, but it’s all sort of grimly fascinating.
• PUBG Report: OK, this is perhaps a bit niche but I think it’s potentially an interesting bellwether. PUBG refers to Player Unknown Battlegrounds, the shooting game that made the ‘Battle Royale’ genre popular before Fortnite sent it stratospheric. PUBG is a slightly more serious game, much less popular and played mostly on PC – this is an incredible website that lets you search for the username of any PUBG player (PC users only) and which will pull up footage of any kills they have made or suffered in-game in the past two weeks, presuming it was streamed on Twitch. This is HUGE – fine, you might not care about the current application, but as a window into how esports will work when they get BIG it’s fascinating. Imagine being able to quickly pull together a highlights reel of your favourite streamer with a few short clicks, or quickly get all the headshots from a particular map over the past week to analyse…honestly, however shonky this is right now, the theory behind it is VERY future.
• Vile and Awful Conservative Art: A Twitter account sharing the excellent, awful memery from the weird Conservative internet. It’s a US account and, well, it’s not exactly non-partisan, but neither am I and I find all this quite funny in a miserable, ‘really? Jesus’ sort of way.
• Along The Mekong: A beautiful travelogue on National Geographic, in which Christopher Niemann travels the river through Cambodia and Vietnam – the photographs are beautiful, and, in a lovely touch, they’re embellished with Niemann’s illustrations, adding his own personal observations to each seen. Just a really beautiful series of images, presented wonderfully.
• The Secret Dunny Box: SO AUSTRALIAN! An excellent, silly little arty project in which Nicole He set up a small Raspberry Pi-powered recording and playback device in a toilet, creating “a bathroom installation that lets you listen to a secret message left for you by the previous visitor, but only if you leave a message for the next person”. Literally just that, but if someone doesn’t attempt to pitch a variant at this to Andrex then, well, you’re MAD – look, pin it on the spurious insight that 34% of people feel like they only really get time alone on the toilet (I have made this up but you could totally get away with it, plausible as it sounds) and have their best thoughts there, I bet you they go for it. Here’s a list of all the messages people left, by the way – fair play to the multiple people who, bafflingly, chose to leave a message saying ‘drink more p1ss’.
• Occult Voices: You want a collection of creepy, occult audio recordings, with titles like ‘Jack Sutton contacts dead airmen’ and ‘Voices of possessed children’? No, I can’t imagine you do, but why not use your imagination and maybe set these to play quietly from a cupboard in the corner of the office all week and see how long it takes for people to start to worry?
• Codeblog: This is a nice idea. Yet to launch, but Codeblog is a project by Jarred (no surname) which aims to bring back the nice, free days of the earlier web in which people were encouraged to mess around with code on webpages – the idea is that codeblog will be a blogging platform which also allows for simple html, so you can type your copy and drop in <tags> which will all work properly when published. Here’s the less shabby description: “posts are written in a flavor of Markdown that renders React components inline. This makes writing words feel natural and writing JavaScript feel like HTML. You can write and publish posts directly on codeblog.app without downloading anything, or you can use your text editor. Host your codeblog for free on codeblog.app, or you can host it yourself.” Worth signing up for if this sounds like your thing.
• This Is Our Art: “Startling, strange and obscure paintings from the UK National Collection” – this is a GREAT Twitter feed collecting images of artworks currently in storage; this year it’s presenting pictures which depict the Thames, from the source to its mouth, and the whole account is generally a delight.

By Lucy Dyson

NEXT, TRY THIS EXCELLENT ALBUM BY CANNIBALE WHICH IS A PLEASINGLY JAZZY ANTIDOTE TO THE SNOW!

THE SECTION WHICH QUITE ENJOYS THIS WEATHER AS IT RENDERS THE OTHERWISE DREADFUL MINEFIELD OF PROFESSIONAL SMALL TALK MOMENTARILY NAVIGABLE, PT.2:

• Buttondown: There are a million-and-one newsletter solutions out there at the moment, but this looks like a particularly neat one. Free and seemingly simple to use, the idea here is that you can just paste some HTML or Markdown and then hit send, confident that it will all work ok and look nice and stuff. Which is generally A Good Thing – I say that as someone who somehow manages to fcuk up the formatting of this bastard newsletterblogthing every single week, despite having been writing it on this platform for the best part of 6 years. Oh, and as an additional point, we don’t need any more newsletters. Stop it. Noone reads mine as it is, I don’t want the competition. OK? Thanks.
• OMG A Girl: A slightly depressing, eye-opening and yet unsurprising YouTube channel, in which the creator, streamer Spawntaneous Gaming, posts compilations showing exactly what it’s like being a girl playing online. It’s no so much the sexism (and the racism, my GOD the racism) that’s upsetting so much as the crushing banality of it – it’s just air – and the fact that (and I know this isn’t an original observation, but I spend very little time with teenage boys and so it was new to me) how stupid teenage boys are. No wonder noone wanted to kiss me when I was 14.
• 80s Anti-Game Propaganda: EXCELLENT examples of the sort of scaremongering that was everywhere in the 80s, and which, if you choose to see it as such, is eerily analogous to some of the more breathless ‘TECH IS KILLING OUR CHILDREN’ screaming we’ve seen a lot of so far in 2019. I particularly love the ‘Pacman Eye’, with the pupil replaced with a gobbling sprite to connote the MAD ADDICTION of the gamer.
• Instaset: I shouldn’t be surprised that this is a business, and yet, well, I am. Instaset offers you, an INFLUENCER, the opportunity to buy some, er, slightly crap-looking vinyl backgrounds on which you can photograph your latest lifestyle or shoot or product haul, with a huge variety of colours, shades and textures available so as to ensure that your acai porridge quinoa breakfast prolapse really *pops*. On the one hand, I can totally understand the purpose of this and the market for it; on the other, welcome to a world in which you’re not effectively setting up a professional quality shoot for your artfully-posed makeup regime snapshot then you may as well be DEAD in Insta terms. Nothing is real, everything is faked and everyone thinks they are David fcuking Bailey. GREAT!
• Ceave Gaming: Think you’re good at videogames?You’re not. This person is, though – watch as they complete a bunch of Mario games increasingly weird and unfeasable ways. Did you know that you could complete the entirety of a Mario game without ever pressing ‘right’? No, of course you didn’t, nor indeed did you care, and yet now that you’ve read that there’s part of you that’s slightly curious as to how, isn’t there? God, I can read you like a book (30pp, £3.99, Usborn Slow Readers Series).
• Mascot Silence: Football mascots, observing minute’s silences, on Twitter. Genuinely wonderful.
• Headliner: ANOTHER video creation app – this one’s basically witchcraft, though, given you can just plug in a bunch of audio and it will, apparently, generate appropriate video (in the aspect ratio you specify) on the fly. THIS IS AMAZING. OK, fine, the outputs aren’t the most polished, but if you need to churn out a proof of concept or similar this is a GREAT idea – also, it’s free. I know I keep saying this, but 2019 is a very, very bad time to be a low-margin video editor.
• Photos Of Cold: IT’S REALLY COLD EVERYWHERE! Look at it!
• Weird Science: “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done for science? For me, it was giving nicotine enemas to caterpillars” So did Jason Rasgon kick off this WONDERFUL Twitter thread, in which scientists vie with each other to claim the crown of ‘oddest activity performed in the name of scientific enquiry’. You’ll find your own favourite, but I find it hard to look beyond: “slit the spine of a mouse at the top and bottom, insert a syringe and pop the spinal cord out like it was silly string”. Scientists, you are MONSTERS.
• Descript: ANOTHER piece of tech voodoo, this is probably magic. Descript describes itself as a visual audio editor, and it lets you do lots of cool things with regard to isolating words in an audio file and easily move them around…the main draw here, though, is the text-based audio editor; upload an audio file, it will spit out a transcript, which you can then edit in a text editor – those edits get automatically applied to the audio file. I KNOW, RIGHT? MAGIC! It’s a paid-for service, but, honestly, you can’t put a price on MAGIC.
• Queer Archive Work: I’m going to let them describe this – if you’ve any interest in contemporary art practive, queer theory, postmodernism or any of that jazz, this is very much worth a read / explore, but be aware that those of you with less of a background in artwank might find it a bit tricky to parse: “QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK is an urgent act of publishing that’s radical, messy, and future-looking. It’s a signal sent out into muddy waters, the start of a speculative practice emerging from (and moving towards) the undercommons—a collective place for subversive artists and writers who reject normative narratives.” Take a look.
• Autopo: Thanks to Ed for pointing this out to me – Autopo is an interesting tool designed to help people organise ‘gatherings’, whether parties, festivals or conferences; you can set up teams, manage workloads and workflows, take payments, and generally do any of the myriad things you’ll need if you’re the sort of lunatic who does events stuff rather than avoiding them like the plague.
• SeaTube: Would you like a YouTube channel devoted solely to very slow, very relaxing, VERY dull videos of shipping containers? YES YOU WOULD! Make a playlist of these and soundtrack it with Brian Eno and you’ve basically got a 7-figure art installation. You’re welcome!
• Squiggle: I give it literally a week before a YouTuber features these and they become a THING. ‘Artists’ the Bendel Brothers have made these ‘sunglasses’ – except their not sunglesses, they’re literally a perspex squiggle that sits across your nose and obscures your vision, looking a little bit like the sort of vapourwave stencil overlay you see on Insta stickers. There’s some high-concept here about ‘seeing’ or somesuch crap but, well, look at these and tell me they’re not going to be a desirable fashion item before the Summer comes round. Anyone working for TopShop or ASOS? Here’s your next thieving opportunity.
• Missing: This is a wonderful piece of digital storytelling by SBS Australia, about Wendy Jane Pfeiffer who was abducted in the mid-60s in Australia and who was subsequently found by a pair of aboriginal trackers. Presenting the story through photos and audio with a little bit of dynamic web interface gubbins on the side, I love the aesthetic of this – the way they use perspective and collage in many of the elements is lovely, and the voice work is wonderful. Really, really nice, and a great example of what you can do when you don’t have video but you have a good art director and some animation.
• Drawer Simulator: CAN YOU GET THE DRAWER OPEN? CAN YOU? Honestly, this game is GRIPPING (also, it’s very short and the multiple perspectives at once thing is a nice touch).
• Ancient Greek Punishment – Inversion Edition: I think I featured the original version og this – a series of small browser games in which you play through some of the Greek gods’ greatest punishment hits, like Sisyphus and his boulder and Prometheus and his eagle. This is the same game, except reversed – so instead of being Sisyphus, you’re the boulder. Short, clever, and funnier than it ought to be for a reasonably one-note gag.
• Wake Word: Finally in this week’s miscellanea, The Verge has commissioned an interactive fiction piece about the dystopian near-future we can all see just around the corner if we squint hard enough – I won’t spoil the details, but this is VERY good and the observations are painfully spot-on. All I’ll say is that it takes 5 minutes or so to get going, but after that, well, ENJOY.

By Igor Skaletsky

LAST UP, TRY THIS ECLECTIC ELECTRONICA MIX BY RESOM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (NEITHER OF WHICH THIS WEEK ARE TUMBLRS, THEREBY MAKING A MOCKERY OF MY CAREFULLY-CONSTRUCTED TAXONOMICAL STYLINGS ONCE AGAIN!)!:

• An Accumulation of Things: A Tumblr-ish website collecting the writings of…someone? No idea who the author is, but I *love* their work – honestly, take 5 minutes to have a peruse, there are some beautiful words in here.

• Brooklyn Stereography: You like 3d photos? I mean 3d in the old, left eye / right eye sense? OH GOOD! “Ian Ference’s blog on all things stereographic, from classic scopes & stereoviews to historical context & modern analysis”

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• TinTin: His creator may have been a dreadful man, TinTin himself might have some…questionable elements in his past, but he still has many fans, including whichever Brazilian enthusiast it is who runs this Insta account. You want TinTin? YOU GOT TINTIN!

• Nice Nails: A reasonably standard nail art account, but which is elevated to brilliance in my mind by the occcasional customer who seemingly comes in and says ‘hi, can you draw a whole bunch of crudely-drawn cocks on my nails, please?’.
• KJ Cardigan: Some genuinely remarkable knitting. The sausage rolls look good enough to eat.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Facts About Facebook: Or at least some of the facts, in the main the bad ones. This is a TechCrunch piece recapping all the BAD THINGS that Facebook, and Zuckerberg, has done in the past 15 years, and it is a HUGELY irritating article. You may be aware from Curios past and present that I am no fan of the Big Blue Misery Factory, but, equally, TechCrunch sitting here and talking about HOW EVIL IT IS whilst at the same time being part of exactly the same coterie of the uncritical tech press which for a decade gave the platforms an absolute free ride, talking up GROWTH and INNOVATION and how COOL AND FUN it all was, never asking any of the questions about data and privacy and intention and influence and impact that any proper journalist might perhaps have thought of…I mean, look, Facebook has lots to answer for, but the chummy smugness of this piece really boiled my p1ss.
• Steve Jobs Never Wanted This: An interesting look back at the launch of the original iPhone, and specifically the manner in which Jobs presented what Apple saw as the manner in which it would be used. No app store, ‘it’s killer feature is it’s a phone’…seems quaint, doesn’t it? A useful reminder to anyone and everyone involved in product design that you can never, ever accurately predict user behaviour in the wild.
• The Truth About The Techlash: Excellent piece of writing about the current backlash against tech companies, which suggests that part of the reason is that private companies have never been in a position of having so much public impact before, and that as such they are in uncharted territory when it comes to dealing with the issues raised by their products; as the author puts it, “Inventing new technology is easy; creating new kinds of organisations with novel governance arrangements is much more difficult.”
• The Emotional Support Dogs of Buzzfeed: There is nothing funny about a bunch of people losing their jobs, and there’s nothing funny per se about this piece which shares some of the conversations from the ‘Ask Jonah’ Slack channel at Buzzfeed, where staff waiting to find out whether the sword of Damocles was about to fall on them asked beleaguered boss Jonah Peretti for clarification on what the fcuk was going on. However, there’s something very now about the way in which the conversation pivots halfway through to a conversation about how everyone should be provided with emotional support puppies to cuddle as a means of dealing with the stress of all the job losses. Witness Peretti leaping on it as a convenient salve for the ills the VCs have wrought! Watch staff get distracted by the promise of PUPPY CUDDLES to the point where they seem to forget entirely about things like worker rights! This is so very, very NOW – but also, kids, if anyone suggests that you maybe have a doggy cuddle when they sack you, maybe you ask them about union representation, yes?
• Down From The Mountain: This is very long, but (at least for me, who is FAR from an expert on South American politics) it’s a hugely useful primer on the recent history of Venezuela and how, from an outside perspective, it’s arrived at its current, messy impasse. From the LRB, so as well-written as you’d expect, this is a review of a new biography of Chavez, offering a fascinating precis of ‘Chavezismo’ – reading this makes it all the more miserable that the country’s currently so utterly banjaxed.
• The Bulletproof Biohacker: Do you remember Bulletproof Coffee from a few years back, when people were momentarily convinced that adding half a pack of Lurpak to your latte would magically make you live forever? It sounded like bollocks then and sounds like bollocks now – and I was convinced it and everyone associated with it had vanished, but it turns out that the guy who ‘founded’ it is in fact still around and still rich and…er…undertaking an insane-sounding healthcare regime involving having axolotl jizz injected into his eyelids or something. Read this and realise that if this is what it is going to take to live to 150 then it sounds AWFUL. As an aside, just click the link and look at the guy’s photo and guess how old he is without reading any of the copy. What do you think? How old you reckon he is? A good looking 50? A really good looking 60? NO HE IS 45! FFS mate, YOU DON’T LOOK THAT GOOD.
• Can Computers See Bongo?: A fascinating look at how one could train machines to ‘know’ what bongo is – not just based on a percentage of fleshtone pixels within a certain area, but based on an actual ‘understanding’ of what bongo is. There’s a fascinating wider question here about how much of the web is made up of images of naked people fcuking and how odd it is that none of the bots and spiders and the rest are really doing anything with it; with a bit of luck, I will be able to bring you some GENUINELY EXCITING AND SEMI-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT all about this a little later in the year. Maybe.
• The Route of a Text Message: Do you know how text messages get sent? You don’t, do you? In fairness there’s every possibility that you don’t care either, which is obviously fine, but aren’t you even a bit curious? No? FFS. For those of you who do care, this is a very long and technical but surprisingly readable explanation of exactly how all the tech works when you send a message to someone else – from the touchscreen you input on to the phone that spits it out at the other end. You will learn something (or at least I presume you will, but then again I also tend to assume that everyone else is as bad at tech as I am).
• The Art of Eyeball Harvesting: Not actual eyeball harvesting, obviously, that would be SICK (also, is not art! Is science!), but instead the practice of delivering eyeballs to advertisers through EXCITING DIGITAL MEANS. This is a very, very useful primer on how ad buying works in 2019, explaining how the difference between various types of ad sales models and how they all work. To those of you who work in ad sales this might all be second nature, but I found it genuinely useful as a guide to the techy business of how ad servers determine who gets fed what.
• How Bots Ruined Buying Sneakers: Or ‘trainers’ to us non-obsessive normies. As per lots of other high-competition markets, the world of compulsive trainer purchasing has been transformed by tech, with all sorts of bots being developed to help the ‘heads get their hands on the latest ish (this is how they talk, isn’t it, the trainer people?) ahead of the competition. It’s interesting in part because of the specific intersection between tech and street culture this represents, but also because of the clear explanation it gives of how pretty much any market for any good where scarcity and high demand are in play can be effectively turned upside down using variations on this sort of approach. I am off to absolutely DISRUPT the high-end Koi carp market, brb.
• When Diderot Met Voltaire: It’s not often you can describe the account of a meeting between two intellectual giants of the late-18th century as ‘deliciously salty’, but that absolutely applies here. SO GOOD – I do love these pieces that remind you of the essentially crappy, human nature of even the greatest minds. Also, this description (of Voltaire, by Diderot) is just lovely: an “enchanted castle whose various parts are falling apart,” but whose corridors were “still inhabited by an old sorcerer.”
• Kingdom Hearts III: Might need to explain this one a bit, bear with me. Kingdom Hearts is a videogame series, whose third iteration launched this week, in which you play as some weird little anime kid fighting his way through a series of worlds all officially licensed from Disney properties; the game features literally EVERY Disney character you can imagine and a baffling, nonsensical plot and it is all VERY Japanese and VERY Disney and VERY weird. I have no interest in the games in particular, but this review is written by Tim Rogers (see Curios passim for how much I love Tim’s writing) and contains some truly BRILLIANT writing. If you’re interested in games at all, regardless of your interest in this particular one, you ought to read this piece. I mean, just LOOK: “It is a museum exhibiting its own architecture. Its decadent spectacle is the closest games have come yet to giving me the catharsis of walking into a Louis Vuitton store and neither buying anything nor being asked to leave. I challenge Metacritic to extract a number from that last paragraph.” See?
• Marlon James: A truly fascinating profile of Marlon James in the New Yorker, in advance of the publication of his next novel which the piece characterises as being like ‘an African Game of Thrones’. The stuff about the current book, and even about ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ is less interesting than the stuff about James himself, who comes across as a fascinating, contrary, stubborn and brilliant man; I particularly liked this quote, about James: “This is one of the things that’s always fascinated me about him. I don’t know that he always realizes how inventive he is, or how subversive. I think, in his mind, he’s always written this highly commercial thing.”
• Remembering The Day Today: You all know The Day Today, right? You must do. If not, you can find all the episodes on YouTube – here’s the first one, and don’t come back until you’ve watched them all (and yes, I am acutely aware of how incredibly fcuking annoying it is to have ANOTHER middle-aged white man tell you that HIS favourite thing is the BEST and MOST IMPORTANT thing, but, honestly, it really is the best and most important thing). Back? Good, we can continue. As you now know, The Day Today was a fake news show put together by Armando Ianucci (before The Thick of It was even thought of) and Chris Morris (pre-Brass Eye); it launched Alan Partridge (and basically Coogan’s mainstream career) and a bunch of other people, and if you watch it back now you realise that, well, it could literally be the news today, except then it was ridiculous and now it’s just, well, today. Just watch the opening credits – that was a JOKE in 1992, whereas now that’s every single fcuking news channel in the world. Anyway, this is an oral history of the programme – god it was good.
• The Race for the Egg: You remember The Egg, don’t you? Come on, it was only a few weeks ago! That’s right, the egg that became the most followed thing on Instagram ever and thereby attained a degree of cultural significance – this is a piece all about how various people are attempting to exploit its fame for personal fortune. Yes, that’s right, an Instagram account owned by a person pretending to be an egg is being seriously discussed as a viable means through which someone might launch their bid to be the next President of the United States. Hi, month two of 2019, you’ve got a lot to live up to!
• How Alts Went Mainstream: Sarah Manavis and Amelia Tate continue to do some of the most interesting writing about online culture in the UK, although it’s always a bit weird to see them bylined in the New Statesman of all places. Anyway, this is Manavis writing about how the ‘alt’ account is now a mainstream thing for everyone, or at least those people who feel the need to share and emote online but don’t necessarily want the public vulnerability that that can lead to. Are we moving towards a position where our online identities are nested like matryoshka dolls, getting smaller and denser as we descend, finstas all the way down? What do you think?
• Amazon Vine: I was honestly fascinated by this – I honestly did not know that Amazon Vine was a thing. If you’re similarly ignorant, then know that Vine is Amazon’s Super Reviewer programme, where people get sent LOADS of free stuff by Amazon in exchange for posting honest reviews of said stuff. This is REALLY interesting – in part because of the weirdly murky ethics of it, but also because of the repeated sense from the Viners interviewed that there was something quite psychologically odd about getting all this free stuff all the time, and that it warps your relationship with consumer capitalism in quite a strange way. This feels very much like there is a novel in here somewhere (which observation may well be why I am not, as yet, a bestselling – or indeed any sort of – novelist).
• The Oral History of Mark E Smith: The Fall’s lead singer died last year – he was a, er, problematic individual and there was a lot of quite reasonable debate around his death about whether it was ok to lionise someone who it’s pretty clear was at best ‘a bit of a cnut’ and at worst ‘a likely abuser’ – that said, this oral history of the man, pieced together for former bandmates, girlfriends, journalists and others who crossed his path, is BRILLIANT. Almost every line is gold – I mean, look: “Some trendy French promoters took us for a meal in this swanky restaurant. Mark decided he was going to horrify everyone by being as outrageous as possible. He ordered a steak with no vegetables or anything else, just steak. Then he proceeded to eat it without any cutlery, just eating it with his hands and mouth and tearing chunks off it like a starved wolf, and then spitting it out. You should have seen the looks on their faces. I was in hysterics. He was a wind up merchant.”
• Who Was Lil Tay?: I think I featured Lil Tay last year, in a sort of horrified ‘oh look what social media has wrought’ way – if you don’t recall, Lil Tay got some pretty hefty viral notoriety last year when videos appeared of a cute-looking 10 year old saying some very un-cute and un-10y/o things; fame quickly followed, and hookups with Bhad Bhabie and other such luminaries. Then, Lil Tay disappeared. Welcome to another story in which it seems a little kid is getting royally screwed by a bunch of adults who see marketing dollars where a small child should be – can we all agree that we’ll stop making these kids famous when it looks this dodgy? No? No, we can’t, can we? FFS.
• The Dons of Disco: Italodisco! Nylon! Polyester! SO MUCH COCAINE AND SYNTH! This is a brilliant yarn, about the prince of Italodisco and the slightly Milli Vanilli truth behind it all. It’s accompanying a documentary on the same subject, which frankly sounds like a bit of a must-watch.
• The High School Basketball Fraud: One of two proper WTAF stories in here this week, this is the tale of Sidney Gilstrap-Portley who decided to give himself a second chance of being somebody thanks to being a high school basketball prodigy; the only issue with this was that Sidney was in his mid-20s by the time he made this decision, and that pretending to be 17 so you can play high school basketball REALLY REALLY WELL is a bit, well, odd. This is a very, very strange story, and you feel pretty sorry for Sidney by the end of it, whilst at the same time really not wanting him to hang around your kids very much.
• The Bicycle Bank Robber: The second WTAF story of the week, this takes in bank robberies, Olympic cycling, the French Foreign Legion and crack cocaine – and that’s all just one man. This HAS to be a film one day – honestly, enjoy this one, it’s a cracking yarn.
• Thoughts and Prayers: Finally this week, near-future fiction by Ken Liu – the premise of the short is ‘how bad can trolling get?’, but the story itself is far more nuanced and interesting than the sort of schlocky scenario that conjures up. Eminently plausible, and like all the best scifi this is very much about the now rather than tomorrow.

By Kai Wai Wong

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, I have no idea what this is but the video unsettled me something chronic and so, well, here you are! It’s called ‘Compliance’ by Preoccupations and it’s a sort of droney industrial thing with a very weird pagan video and, well, er, enjoy!:

2) Next, give this a go from Stella Donnelly – it’s called ‘Lunch’, and I love her voice:

3) This is Balthazar, the song is called ‘Wrong Vibration’, and it’s a GREAT pop song with a slightly 60s vibe to it – also, the line ‘don’t let your morality / affect your imagination girl’ is beautifully sleazy:

4) Would you like a punk track where the video imagines a sleazy, techy future not unlike our own present while the singer screams about being on the brink of calamity? YES YOU WOULD! This is Pup with ‘Kids’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is brilliantly wonky – J.E.T.S. ft. Mykki Blanco with ‘PLAY’. This is really very good imho:

6) I have no idea at all what this is. It seems to feature a sentient soup can, but if any of you can explain it to me then, well, great. It’s fcuking unsettling, though, so fits right in with the accepted Curios aesthetic:

7) Finally in the videos this week, have this track by Japanese boyband World Order, which is a charming autotuned pop song with an equally charming video all about the Orwellian nature of the now – THIS IS AMAZINGLY GOOD! Enjoy, take care, have fun, and BYE BYE BYE WRAP UP WARM NOW IT’S VERY COLD OUTSIDE AND TAKE CARE NOT TO SLIP ON THE ICE LATER ON WHEN YOU’RE ALL DRUNK AND WOBBLY YOU KNOW HOW I WORRY ABOUT YOU SO WHY NOT DO THE SENSIBLE THING AND JUST STAY AT HOME AND MULL SOME WINE OR SOMETHING GO ON YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO ANYWAY TAKE CARE HAVE FUN AND MAKE A SNOWMAN I LOVE YOU BYE BYE!:

Welcome to a week in which it appears that literally everything that happens in the world now is the news equivalent of ‘The Dress’ or ‘Yanny vs Laurel’ – EVERYTHING IS BINARY AND NOTHING EXISTS BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES. 

Or at least it is if you live on the internet – so, er, why not stop it? After you’ve choked down this week’s particularly appetising link granola, that is – please, though, do chew as I don’t want to be responsible for any perforated infobowels amongst you (NB – I appreciate that there may be a few new people reading this this week due to a nice recommendation from Jay Owens; to those of you who’ve not experienced it before, I’m afraid that Curios is basically sort of all like this, so if the overwritten prose is an issue I’d probably step away now before your confusion and disdain mature into actual hatred. Anyway, the first section below is for people who have to care about advermarketingpr, so please feel free to skip that if that doesn’t apply to you; oh, and please don’t feel you need to click all the links. Though know that if you DO I will love you forever). 

Anyway! Welcome one, welcome all into my enticingly-adorned tent of web-related fun! Except increasingly it’s not fun at all! It’s nervous and anxious and all-consuming and makes us ill! Wevs, THIS IS WEB CURIOS, CLICK THE LINKS.

Photo by ME. This was parked outside the office where I sometimes work yesterday – it is not, apparently, a joke.  

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS IS A BIT OF AN EMOTIONAL ONE FOR ME AS IT’S MY MATE’S KID’S FIRST ALBUM AND SHE IS 18 FFS THIS IS MENTAL I REMEMBER MEETING HER WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT A WEEK OLD AND GIVING HER A TEDDY BEAR CALLED ‘MR SCHNOOKUMS’ AND NOW SHE’S GONE AND MADE A GENUINELY EXCELLENT ELECTRO-Y, BEATS-Y ALBUM AND ANYWAY SHE’S CALLED IZZY FIELDING AND I PROMISE YOU THIS IS MUCH, MUCH BETTER THAN IT OUGHT TO BE SO GIVE IT A LISTEN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD BE GENUINELY FASCINATED TO HEAR EXACTLY HOW FACEBOOK ATTEMPTS TO SPIN THE ADDITION OF A ‘PETITIONS’ FUNCTION AS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A BRAND NEW TUMOUR ON THE ALREADY UNPLEASANTLY LUMPY BODY OF THE BODY POLITIC:

• Facebook Petitions: Sorry, not petitions – COMMUNITY ACTIONS! That…that sounds worse, doesn’t it, in a way, like some sort of horrible, double-figure-IQ pitchfork mob. Which, funnily enough, is almost certainly what this will end up being! Only launched in the US in the moment, so there’s an outside chance that the platform will see the error of its ways and mothball this before it spreads (let’s be honest, though, it’s not exactly a platform with a great track record on knowing when it’s dropped a massive, society-fcuking ricket). Anyway, the detail: “Users can add a title, description, and image to their Community Action, and tag relevant government agencies and officials who’ll be notified. The goal is to make the Community Action go viral and get people to hit the “Support” button. Community Actions have their own discussion feed where people can leave comments, create fundraisers, and organize Facebook Events or Call Your Rep campaigns. Facebook displays the numbers of supporters behind a Community Action, but you’ll only be able to see the names of those you’re friends with or that are Pages or public figures.” Take a moment to parse those sentences – a system which gives any idiot, or bunch of idiots, the tools to actively bother and harass government institutions and employees, all allied to the now-infamous ‘reasoned and well-informed debate’ that Facebook fosters every single day amongst its billions of users. Take a moment to read the whole piece, which does a reasonable job of outlining all the many, many ways in which this is, at best, a potentially tricky move, and then think about exactly how much this suggests Facebook has learnt from the past 12 months.
• More Accountability for FB Pages: Another one of those updates that won’t affect you, obviously, but you probably ought to know about just in case – this is basically going to start telling Page owners if their content gets removed or depreciated, and why, which seems like a sensible move. Here’s the blurb to save you a click: “people who manage a Page will see a new tab that shows when we remove certain content that goes against our Community Standards and when we reduce the distribution of posts that have been rated false by a third-party fact-checker. Second, we are updating our recidivism policy to better prevent those who have had Pages removed for violating our Community Standards from using duplicate Pages to continue the same activity. We’ll begin enforcing this policy in the weeks ahead.” That makes everything better, doesn’t it? Eh? Oh.
• Facebook Introduces Kite Mark-type Thing For Marketing Partners: Long story short, FB’s introducing a sort of quality certification for third party businesses that work closely with it on the advermarketingpr side, a designation which “recognizes companies offering proprietary solutions that can help Facebook advertisers review content options and control where their ads will appear.” God, I don’t care about this at all.
• Facebook Testing Option To Add Events to Stories: Hugely useful if you’re trying to shill an event using influencer endorsement. Or, er, I don’t know, invite people to your birthday party or something.
• Whatsapp Business Gets Better Customer Service Features on Desktop: This basically brings a whole host of features that were already available to Whatsapp Business users on mobile to the desktop / web experience, such as ‘Quick Replies’, chat filters and labels for users. I think Whatsapp is still hugely underexploited by most businesses for this sort of thing – updates like this might go some way towards changing that. Also, well done Whatsapp (ok, Facebook) for realising and acting on the fact that switching between your mobile and your desktop whilst working is, quite honestly, the greatest travail of the modern age and doing something about it.
• Some Largely Tedious LinkedIn Updates: As part of last year’s thrilling updates to LinkedIn Pages, this latest round up tweaks makes it easier for users to keep up with information from Company Pages – so you can now get information about a company’s staff more easily, and (this is exciting!) find out the most relevant hashtags for any business on their LinkedIn Page (I know, I’m tumescent at this too!). This is, in the main, individual-focused rather than business, but there is probably something you can do with the hashtag stuff if you care about LinkedIn and the dreadful people that spend time on there.
• Google Launching Political Ads Centre: So, India is having a general election later this year (April/May, to be precise) – in advance of what one can confidently predict is going to be a pretty spectacular shtshow of digital misinformation, Google is following in Facebook and Twitter’s footsteps by releasing information about political ads bought on its platform, showing who paid for them and how much was spent – this will inevitably be rolled out globally in due course, so, you know, BE READY.
• Social Media Guidelines For Influencers: So this week a bunch of famouses admitted what we’d all known forever – to whit, they were getting paid by brands to shill tat for them on the socials without going through the tedious and unappealing process of actually disclosing the payment. But! Now they are NEVER GOING TO DO THAT AGAIN, and they are pledging to abide by these guidelines instead! Once again, I feel the need to point out that none of this stuff will be relevant to you, you lovely, ASA-compliant advermarketingprdrones, but, just in case you’re wondering, the meatiest bit of this is as follows: “unclear use of hashtags, for example: using #sp; #spon; #client; #collab; etc; adding #ad directly after the name of the brand or business (for example #[BRANDNAME]ad); when the disclosure (for example #ad, #advert) is not prominent because it is hidden at the end of or among other text and/or hashtags”. Interestingly there doesn’t appear to mention the practice of social media agencies using multiple meme-type accounts that they own to boost posts featuring brands that are paying them without actually disclosing that payment – I do wonder what The Social Chain make of all this.
• Google Advanced Search Operators: A useful, up-to-date and pleasingly practical guide to all the stuff you can do using Google search. Read it – as I never tire of pointing out to people (they tire of it quite a lot, though), my entire working life is built on being marginally better at using Google than most of the people who employ me. You too could be a shiftless webmong with no drive, ambition or even ‘career’ to speak of!
• James Whatley’s 2019 Trend Gubbins: James Whatley and Marshall Manson used to write Ogilvy’s annual trend report – which I featured on here a couple of times, as it was less eye-gougingly stupid than most trend things written by agencies. They have now both left the agency, but James has written up some of his trend predictions/observations on LinkedIn (yes, I know, he’s a thought leader!) – this links to the first of them (you can find the others at the bottom). Covering Stories, Audio and Regulation, and a lot of other stuff besides, this is sensible and well-informed stuff.

By Shaun Tan

NEXT UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE A PRETTY INCREDIBLE MIX WHICH COLLATES THE SOUNDS OF 2017 IN A FRANKLY ASTONISHING COLLAGE!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IT WOULD BE AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THE QUALITY OF REPORTING WERE NEWS ORGANISATIONS TO BAN THEIR REPORTERS FROM USING TWITTER FOR A WEEK, PT.1:

• Dreams: So it’s 7:48am as I type this, and as per usual I have opened up 40-odd tabs to write this next section, and clicked on ‘Dreams’ to remind me of what it was and BLIMEY is it a somewhat psychedelic kick in the frontal cortex with which to start the day. A new webproject by Web Curios favourites the National Film Board of Canada, Dream is basically a…no, hang on, here: “Dream is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Edouard Benoit-Lanctôt. You can navigate the animated dreamscapes created by artists Caroline Robert and Vincent Lambert. You might also stumble across the illustrated dreams of people who participated in our live draw-in events. Each visual memory is there to be morphed and transformed into another memory, creating a unique journey for each dreamer. To interact with Dream, you can click anywhere, drag, release or even do nothing. As in dreamtime, you cannot “control” the dream but you can influence its content.” This is VERY TRIPPY, but also rather beautiful – that said, I can honestly say that my dreams are NEVER like this.
• 40075: I think that this is a student project by a class at France’s Gobelins school of digital design – regardless, it’s a beautiful little website that invites you to explore it to discover a selection of tracks by six different artists; it’s simple, but the visuals are lovely and it helps that I genuinely like all of the music they’ve picked. Have a play.
• What Do You Genuinely Not Understand?: A prime example of why Reddit is a brilliant website – this thread features a load of people admitting to things that they simply don’t get (what would yours be? Mine range from ‘anything in physics beyond GCSE level’ and ‘why people buy magazines about soap operas that tell them exactly what is going to happen in the soap operas they are about to watch that week’, fyi), with often INCREDIBLY helpful explainers posted by other Reddit users in the comments. Honestly, this is a SUPERB resource for finding out in simple terms stuff like ‘how wifi actually works’ or, er, ‘electricity’. It’s what ‘Explain it like I’m 5’ ought to be, but most of the time isn’t, and it has the added bonus of making you think you’re less stupid than you in fact are for 5 minutes or so.
• Hang The DJ: Communal playlist apps aren’t new, but this is a neat twist on the genre. You hook up your (paid only) Spotify account and the software lets you (and anyone else who logs into your playlist session) add songs, upvote them, downvote them, etc, for the classic ‘illusion of democracy’ party vibe. The clever bit is its use of software to then carry on playing music that feels like the rest of the playlist when people get too drunk / bored to bother adding new stuff – obviously there’s no guarantee that the AI (not actually AI) will do a decent job, but the idea is a decent one.
• Who Owns England?: Let’s be clear – the answer to this question is unlikely to make you feel good about the world (unless said answer happens to be ‘you’). The orange bits on this map are unregistered land – as the site points out, usually, this land has been owned by the same family or institution for many decades. There are some obvious bits – roads, for example, are unregistered but probably owned by the Highways Agency – but having a bit of a zoom around makes you realise how much territory in this country is in the hands of the Church or the Crown or the aristos, in whose hands it’s been forever and who have never had to register it because it’s never been sold. Want some light class-based anger on a Friday (or whenever you happen to be reading this)? You’re welcome!
• Script 8: This is a bit tricky to describe, but bear with me. Script 8 is basically a virtual 8-bit computer, in-browser, which anyone can code on to make simple games in Javascript; whilst initially quite complicated-seeming, there are a wealth of instructions and tutorials on there for anyone wanting to give it a go, along with examples of stuff that other people have made (click ‘cassettes’ in the top nav to check them out). The outputs are very small and very pixel-y, but there’s something rather wonderful about the DIY nature of this, and the live-coding nature of the way it works.
• The Map of the Brain: Friend of Web Curios and oddball digital artist Shardcore was recently commissioned by the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre to do an art about the brain – he turned it into a 17C-style map, which “uses a wide range of conceptual groupings to indicate the functions of the different areas, highlighting the metaphorical chasm between our linguistically bound representations of the mind and the actual functions of the kilo or so of fatty tissue which sits inside our skulls.” What this means in practice is he’s made this LOVELY old-school map featuring a whole load of things which map onto the way we understand different bits of our brain to work – I can’t stress enough how lovely this is, and, whilst the website is a nice way of exploring it, the real draw here is the limited edition run of prints he’s doing of this. Honestly, I could stare at this for HOURS (and no, he’s not paying me for this endorsement, the tight-fisted, silver-fingernailed pervert).
• The Paris Dakar Rally: Or, more accurately, photographs of said rally. You like dusty cars and sand dunes? OH GOOD!
• The Fable Cottage: Such a nice idea, this – Fable Cottage presents a variety of fairy tales, translated by native language speakers into a variety of languages, with the idea that you can use familiar stories in a foreign tongue to help you learn. The site covers English, French, Spanish, German and Italian, and features 5 or 6 tales in each language (so far – they plan on adding lots more), and the functionality is lovely – you can listen to an audio recording of each story as you read along, and each paragraph can be toggled between languages independently so it’s easy to look up words and meanings if you get stuck. This is ace.
• Uncover Harassers: A Chrome extension which will highlight the names of any known harassers on any webpage you navigate to. Which on the one hand is a sort-of nice idea in terms of being able to have a quick and easy visual guide to when a site or individual is discussing someone known to be a sexpest or worse, but on the other is the sort of slightly problematic mob rule-type thing that  characterises the very worst of modern online discourse. At what point does whoever updates the script decide that someone is a ‘verified’ harasser? Still, given the fact that we’ve all collectively decided as a society that nuance is hard and we probably shouldn’t bother with it as a result, this is fine!
• Shodan Safari: This is a link to a TechCrunch article, but I promise it’s interesting – the ‘Shodan Safari’ is the name given to the game that hackery-types play using Shodan, the search engine that surfaces internet-connected devices, in which they find the worst examples of insecure Internet-of-Things-type stuff. Scroll through these and realise that a) wow, there is a LOT of stuff connected to the internet that really doesn’t need to be; b) wow, lots of this stuff is really, really vulnerable; and c) wow, you really, really oughtn’t link your entire physical life to the web unless you know what you’re doing as regards security. On the other hand, though, just scroll through the list and imagine the sort of excellent gentle terrorism you could undertake by remotely taking control of, say, the video displays at Phil’s BBQ Restaurant in Texas and making them all play the party political broadcast for the Natural Law Party on a loop.
• Intern Magazine: An online magazine aimed at “the creative youth, empowering the next generation through content, support and training”. Which, obviously, is appalling, meaningless spaff – I thought everyone was creative these days?! And STOP SAYING CONTENT – but on the other hand might be genuinely useful to any CHILDREN reading this; there’s a lot of genuinely useful practical advice about legal stuff and how to charge for your work, and profiles of interesting (and, to me at least, largely unknown) creatives, and it’s pleasingly non-US centric too. Artydesigny youngsters (or, you know, anyone really, AGE IS JUST A NUMBER oh god I am 40 this year please god take this withered husk to your welcoming bosom and cease the fleshy torment of decay).
• The Baccy Papers: Now this is an interesting repository of stuff – “An archive of 14 million documents created by tobacco companies about their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, scientific research and political activities, hosted by the UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management.” Honestly, as a means of examining exactly how an industry did its dirty work over a 60-odd year period, this is unparalleled – you’ve got internal positioning documents and web materials and basically every bit of propaganda churned out by Big Tobacco in the latter part of the 20th Century. Students of communications and business will find a lot of interesting stuff here – as will any of the rest of you who work for…er…ethically questionable clients and who want a useful primer on how The Bad People go about their Bad Business.
• Magnet Fingers: Charlotte Dan has magnets in her fingertips. This is her little FAQ site, detailing the why and how and what of the project, and as with all homebrew cyborgery (yes, that’s right, CYBORGERY. It is now a word, fcuk off) it’s simultaneously deeply queasy and quite amazing. Don’t try this at home, kids.
• The 2018 Ocean Art Photography Contest: It seems that there is now a different underwater photography award announced each month – still, I personally LOVE pictures of weird fish and creepy marinescapes, so I’m quite happy to keep featuring them. This is a typically excellent selection, with the added bonus of each being accompanied by a short ‘story of the shot’ explanation of when and how it was taken – ctrl+f “face to face” for my favourite, but, honestly, there’s not a duff shot in here.
• Pokemon Shirts: There was a time when wearing an actual dress shirt which had tiny Pokemon integrated into the fabric design would have guaranteed you being the butt of some spirited ribbing, but now, as we live in an era in which even elected political representatives have grown up with videogames as a significant part of their lives and culture, you can probably get away with it. Is that a good thing? Is it? I mean, yes, probably it is, fine, but know that I will still judge you if I see that what looks like a sober pointillist pattern on your collar is in fact a tesselated infinity of Magikarp. This is all in Japanese, by the way, meaning I have literally NO idea whether it’s possible to get your hands on this stuff internationally – knowing the global nostalgiaobsession with Pokemon, though, I don’t doubt that someone enterprising is making a killing with these on eBay.
• Pocket Sprite: Do you want a miniature handheld console running emulation software which can play Gameboy, Game Gear and Master System titles on a piece of kit which you can also use as a keyring? Do you? WHY? Honestly, I think that this is so small as to be unplayable, but the kit does at least seem solid, and the open source nature of the whole thing is interesting and possibly appealing if you’re feeling a bit hackerish. Trust me, though, nothing you play on this will be as good as stuff you can now get on your phone.
• Swish: Swsh describes itself as a ‘social video maker’, and looks like a very, very useful thing indeed if you’re the sort of person who makes a lot of CONTENT for your SOCIALS; basically it’s a suite of tools for video editing, all in one place, which also does all the tedious gubbins of resizing and reframing content for different formats – so you can quickly make stuff that will work on Insta, Stories and Twitter, say, without having to do three separate edits. No word on how good the quality of the output is, but, regardless, this is the future and if you make a living doing video editing for this sort of thing then, well, good luck mate.
• Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts: Fonts that are also mathematical puzzles. I honestly felt so, so stupid looking at many of these that I am including them almost solely so that you will (hopefully) feel the same.
• Console Variations: Do YOU collect videogame and videogame systems? Would YOU like a website dedicated to tracking all the different variations of various consoles throughout history that were ever released? GREAT! You’ll love this site, in that case, which is an insanely comprehensive guide to every single games machine ever released (and it’s about to get a shiny new relaunch too, apparently, should you care about such aesthetic considerations).
• Liquid Cats: So as far as I can tell from other people’s writeups, this is a Twitter thread in which a bunch of people and Japan discuss the age-old internet question “are cats liquid?” and post photos of cats in various poses to prove their point. This is, basically, just a massive thread of floppy felines with the added bonus of the weird formality of the Japanese language – I recommend translating the odd tweet, as the images are improved immeasurably by such sober captions as “Only the one with a high viscosity was found, but we support verification”.
• InCoWriMo: You all know National Novel Writing Month, in which people around the world talk incessantly about the fact they are spending 31 days writing an unpublishable novel that noone will ever, ever read; this is a better, more socially-acceptable variant on that, in which participants will commit to writing one handwritten letter a day throughout the month of February. Think how HAPPY it would make people to receive a bunch of actual proper letters – even if you don’t commit to the whole thing, this is an excellent reason to dust off your Basildon Bond (just typing that made me realise that it’s entirely possible that noone under 30 has the faintest idea of what I mean by that, ffs) and write something to an old friend or relative. GO ON DO SOMETHING NICE FOR A CHANGE INSTEAD OF JUST FCUKING POSTING PHOTOS OF YOUR FCUKING AMAZING PLASTIC LIFE ON INSTAGRAM YOU PATHETIC WHELP.
• The Rappers’ Vocab Project, Updated: The Pudding has updated its iconic ‘Rappers’ Vocabulary Analysis’ thingy with a whole bunch of new artists, many of whom are from the ‘Soundcloud Rap’ end of the hiphop spectrum; feel free to use this as proof of why your younger colleagues’ favourite facially-tattood Xanax-guzzler is in fact a talentless hack compared to THE GOOD OLD DAYS.
• Punpedia: An exhaustive – and at times exhausting – guide to all the possible puns you might ever want to make, organised by theme. You want hundreds of potential balloon-related puns? WHY??? Still, you can find them here. Now I think of it, this is an absolute GOLDMINE for crap PR ideas which need a punny title – or, frankly, for any TV development executives who need a ‘funny’ title from which to work back and extrapolate a format (we all know that this is how it works).

By Jolene Lai

NEXT, TRY THIS SELECTION OF ELECTRO-PSYCHEDELIA WHICH I FOUND ON REDDIT AND IS SURPRISINGLY RATHER GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IT WOULD BE AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THE QUALITY OF REPORTING WERE NEWS ORGANISATIONS TO BAN THEIR REPORTERS FROM USING TWITTER FOR A WEEK, PT.2:

• Psychological ‘Tricks’: Another stupendous Reddit thread, this one listing all the great techniques people have for manipulating each other. Some of these are genuinely amazing and practically witchcraft – honestly, I read this one and did a proper forehead slap of astonishment: “To avoid workplace drama and be well liked is to just compliment people behind their back.” GENIUS. So, er, know that if you ever hear that I’ve said something nice about you I am doing it solely for the long-term social benefit!
• Qlearly: This is a rather nice idea; Qlearly is a Chrome extension which presents a customisable selection of bookmarks, arranged thematically per your preferences, each time you open a new tab; I’ve been using it this week and if, like me, you’re a pathetic creature of habit who looks at the same 60 websites in the same order every day (honest, I’m really fun at parties, promise), it’s will save you literally MINUTES each week.
• 1923 Zine: You may have read that this year a whole bunch of previously copyrighted materials from 1923 became public domain for the first time – this is a truly lovely project by Parker Higgins, who’s crowdfunded a run of monthly zines which will present a different selection of old, perhaps forgotten, culture from the past in each issue. Each one will highlight a work, an artist, a genre, or a medium, and will be sent to a limited list of subscribers – this is such a nice idea, and though all the physical subscriptions are gone, you can still get 12 PDF editions for under a tenner which strikes me as a pretty good deal.
• Seat 61: This is a VERY obsessional but equally hugely useful site, presenting incredibly comprehensive information about train travel all over the world. You want to know how to do a train journey from, say, Stevenage to Magnetogorsk? This site has you covered. Honestly, there is seemingly NOTHING it doesn’t know about travelling by train – the fact it’s maintained by just one bloke is slightly intimidating, frankly.
• Faces of Naples: Sam Gregg is a photographer who spend several years living in Naples and photographing its residents. As he puts it, he wanted to show a different side to the city than that depicted in the classic black and white shots of aspirant mafiosi, smoking aggressively in front of the tower blocks of Scampia. These are some AMAZING faces, several of which are weirdly reminiscent of my granddad. Beautiful.
• 400 Free Ivy League Courses To Take Online: Updated for 2019, this is a wonderful list of online learning resources by America’s most storied academic institutions, covering topics as diverse as Computer Science, Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, Art & Design, Science, Health & Medicine, Data Science, Education & Teaching, Mathematics, Science, Engineering, Personal Development, and Programming. You want to make that resolution to ‘learn something’ concrete? You could do worse than starting here.
• The Beef and Dairy Network: All of the links in Web Curios are RIGOROUSLY VETTED, as I hope you all know and appreciate – except for the podcast ones, because, well, life’s too short, frankly. As such I have NO IDEA whether any of the ones I stick in here are good – I select them based solely on whether they sound interesting. This one very much does, and has been recommended by several people who I think are smart, so here I pass it onto you – The Beef and Dairy Network is a comedy podcast about, er, beef and dairy farming. It’s apparently quite famous and has won awards and stuff. I don’t know, just listen. FFS.
• Van Gogh’s Japanese Prints: I had no idea whatsoever that Vincent Van Gogh was a passionate collector of Japanese art, or indeed that this passion informed and infliuenced his own work over the course of his life. I do now, though, thanks to this new section of the Van Gogh museum’s website which showcases his collection of Japanese art and the manner in which it affected his output. This is a really nice presentation of both the work and associated ideas – is it just me, or do Dutch art institutions do digital stuff so much better than most other places?
• Sphoon Phork: We’re all now wise to the fact that ‘make people angry on the internet’ is now a legitimate PR tactic in 2019, right? Good. Now look at this Kickstarter through that prism. These people are OBVIOUSLY going to launch a podcast or comedy show or a career as digital strategists or something off the back of this, right? That’s the only potential explanation for this idea – turning your phone into an eating utensil via the medium of  plug-in fork and spoon attachments so that you can…no, actually there’s no conceivable point to this at all, which is why it fails as a gag imho; it’s just too obviously stupid. God, what a joyless pr1ck I appear to have become (ha!); sorry, I will try and be more FUN.
• Domain Price Game: Simple and yet weirdly addictive – you’re presented with two domain names, and asked to guess which of them is more expensive. Not only sort-of fun, but an excellent source of ‘wow, I would NEVER have thought of that but I can totally imagine what I would do with it given the opportunity’ business ideas – go on, someone buy ‘iSprayer.com’ for the knockdown price of $3k and make the tubgirl 3.0 website the world needs.
• Cuddleclones: The most creepy thing about this is the name – honestly, doesn’t it put you in mind of some sort of awful ‘preemies-but-actual-cloned-children’-type futurehorrrobusiness? No? – but the whole business is quite weird. The site allows you to commission realistic replicas of your pets – you want a stuffed toy of your dog that looks exactly like your dog? You want a pair of slippers that look like your cat? You want to confuse the everliving fcuk out of your actual, living pets? GREAT! How would your cat react were you to take delivery of a lifesize replica of it? If it’s anything like my girlfriend’s SPECIAL LITTLE GUY he would almost immediately try to fcuk it, but why not buy one and find out for yourself?
• Bury Me My Love: Part game, part interactive fiction, this is the demo version of the recently-released full game which puts you in the shoes of a Syrian refugee. Playing out through simulated messages and texts – and as such, MUCH better when played on a phone – this is a beautifully-written and very much atypical representation of the refugee story, and a wonderful example of how you can use conventions of form and design in interesting ways when telling stories.
• Soft Earth: Finally this week, another beautiful, narrative, literary, mysterious game which is part ghost story, part reminiscence and part something else entirely. Due to certain themes it contains it’s also startlingly contemporary – I don’t want to spoil anything in here, but it very much supports the view that Graham Linehan is wrong about quite a lot of stuff, if you see what I mean.  I think this is lovely – do have a play, it takes under an hour and is better than anything else you’re likely to do in the office today.

By Stas Kalasnikov

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, SOME VERY LISTENABLE D’N’B TO CLOSE OUT THE AFTERNOON!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Cats On Synthesisers In Space: File under ‘self-explanatory’.
• Dogg: I mean, this one too, really.
• Optically Addicted: A very pleasingly-curated selection of odd and interesting visual bits and pieces, by Andrew Davidson.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Erika Lee Sears: An artist from the US (I think) who paints still-life-type scenes and whose style I really find rather lovely.
• Imma.gram: I’m not entirely sure why the concept of the ‘virtual influencer’ is getting another runout in the media now, a full year after Lil Miquela and the other, problematic one whose name I forget came to prominence. Anyway, here’s another one! This is ‘Imma’ and, well, Jesus, the CG here is pretty astonishing. Can someone make a male one soon, though, please, as I’m getting slightly sick of the weirdly fetishy uncannyvalleyness of all the female CG.
• 56 Black Men: An Instagram account accompanying the project of the same name, in which Cephas Williams is presenting representations of young British black men to seek to counter the misrepresentation of them so prevalent in the media and elsewhere. A really nice idea, and the portraits on Insta here are awesome.
• Collectors Weekly: Do you like weird or unusual old stuff? Would you like to see some of it in your Insta feed? GREAT!
• Ocean Ramsey: You may have seen photos and footage in the past week or so of that MASSIVE great white shark, and those frankly mental people swimming next to it, as though it wasn’t several tonnes of tooth and imminent death. This is the Insta account of one of the divers, the spectacularly-named Ocean Ramsey – a woman far braver than I (or you, stop being smug) will ever be, and whose feed will make you want to spend two months in the Cayman Islands learning to freedive (or avoiding tax).
• Turn Studio: By way of an antidote to the sharky terror, this is SUCH beautiful and soothing pottery. Honestly, you will watch some of these videos on a loop, I promise.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Digital Pollution: We’re not, it’s fair to say, short of ‘wow, hasn’t the web sort of ruined everything, eh?’ takes at the moment – Web Curios obviously doesn’t subscribe to this point of view, as, well, without the web its author would almost certainly be resentfully chafing against middle management in a dead-end white collar job somewhere instead of, er, typing thousands of words into the void every week for no personal gain whatsoever – but I rather liked the detail in this one. The basic premise is that the manner in which online systems and services have evolved have led to a point where there is an overwhelming and near-infinite amount of stuff, and the scale of it is damaging in a number of different ways which, really, we need to do something about. “Human society now faces a critical choice: Will we treat the effects of digital technology and digital experience as something to be managed collectively? Right now, the answer being provided by those with the greatest concentration of power is no.”
• Secrecy and Facebook Paranoia: This, on the questions which still surround the effect that Facebook has had, and can have, on the democratic process, is a fascinating piece – not so much for the content as the questions it raises. If we accept that there’s a degree to which we cannot ever really understand exactly how FB works (partly because of economic imperatives to secrecy on their part, partly because of the inherent ineffability of black-box algorithms), and if we also accept that questions about tracking and privacy mean it’s increasingly hard to track the actual effects of online content on secondary online behaviour (how often do users who see certain content on FB go on to perform other, defined actions, for example), then we also have to accept that we’re never going to be able to know exactly what they fcuk systems and platforms like this are actually doing to people and society. Which is, when you think about it, perhaps sub-optimal.
• The Purpose Paradigm: 2018 was the year in which purpose-led marketing became a huge and widespread thing, and 2019 kicked off with more of the same with the Gillette ad. Of course, as this piece rightly points out, it’s all rubbish – a publicly-traded company has its primary duty towards its shareholders, not some amorphous idea of ‘society’, and as such will only ever consider doing the ‘right’ thing if it has some likely bottom-line benefit. Meanwhile, the procession of platitudinous commitments to ‘initiatives’ and ‘pledges’ of support for causes are doing an excellent job of making it look as though actual, practical action is being taken when, in fact, it’s often nothing more than surface-deep. I’m not for a second suggesting that brand’s shouldn’t stand for something – and obviously as a pinko lefty snowflake, I’m all for them saying ‘feminism good, racism and ignorance bad’ and suchlike, but, please, let’s not pretend that a) brands care; or b) that brands are going to be the ones fixing the world. They really aren’t.
• You Can’t Escape Amazon: Gizmodo is running a series of articles this week in which its staff attempt to avoid the big 5 tech firms entirely and write up their experiences; this kicked off with Kashmir Hill trying to not use Amazon for a week and, well, you can guess how that went. This piece does an excellent job of demonstrating how deeply Amazon is plugged in to literally every aspect of modern life – not through its retail services but through AWS, which basically seems to be involved on some level with 80+% of the world’s web pages. Which is, honestly, insane. Out of interest, any journalists want to look into the number of sites hosting BAD STUFF are on AWS or related servers? I reckon there’s something in that if you want to p1ss off Amazon’s PR team for a few days.
• The Soros Conspiracy: A fascinating explanation of the various forces that have spent the past few years using George Soros as shorthand for ‘everything that’s bad about a globalised world’, and how the Hungarian has been been demonised by ‘populist’ (or, if you prefer, racist) politicians in Italy, Hungary and elsewhere. Most depressing of all is the fact that it’s basically some fcuking political consultants behind all of this – imagine being so removed from humanity that you see elections as nothing more than interesting machines for you to play with rather than, you know, important mechanisms for human self determination that aren’t designed for you to fiddle with ‘just to see if you can’.
• Masa World: Brilliant profile of Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, the man who’s intuition is seemingly providing a large part of the direction for the world’s business and economy. The numbers in this are astonishing – HOW many billions does Softbank have?! There’s not much in the way of hard questions being asked here, fine, and the lack of any sort of enquiry into the ethics of this all basically being Saudi cash is depressingly predictable, but as a look at what is possibly the most influential organisation in the world right now it’s certainly eye-opening.
• The AOC Phenomenon: Is she the Messiah? Is she a good long bet for President in 2032? Or is she an intelligent young woman who it’s too early to judge, but who’s a welcome breath of fresh air in the otherwise fetid world of US politics? This is a good Rolling Stone piece which mainly takes the latter point of view, but does an excellent job of pointing out quite how discomfiting the establishment on both sides of the divide have found her.
• The Young Left’s Anti-Capitalism Manifesto: The above is an excellent companion piece to this, which is a broader look at the ‘new anticapitalism’ of which AOC herself is a part. Focusing on a few activists and organisers across the US, this presents a picture of an interesting and distinct and vocal cadre of young Americans who genuinely believe they can stop ‘socialism’ being quite the dirty word it’s been for so long in the US. It’s interesting to read this with one eye on the UK; part of me think it’s almost a shame that the parallel conversation here has been so totally coopted by Momentum which is in many ways a tricky and unpopular and offputting vehicle for lots of ideas which one feels ought to have broader appeal here at the pointy end of late-period capitalism.
• Killing a Goat With a Stun Gun: You read that other Jack Dorsey article, right? The one in which he once again comes across so badly that you wonder whether he’s doing it on purpose, but then realise that it’s because he long ago stopped ever hanging out with anyone who’s not a super-rich, self-proclaimed genius and therefore noone’s said ‘hey, Jack, you sound like an absolute tool and, as it happens, not actually very bright’? Anyway, this is a wonderfully baffled piece about how WEIRD everything is now and I think you will find it very relatable.
• Geocities and the Internet Suburbs: A lovely bit of internet nostalgia, looking back at the Geocities era – the nice thing about this piece is that it doesn’t focus on the aesthetics of the time as they usually do, but instead the very odd early-web habit of attempting to make virtual space somehow mimic physical space through the use of terms like ‘neighbourhoods’ and the like. The section on the original Amsterdam website – which was arranged as ‘flats’ within which people could have their own webpages – was honestly fascinating, and the way in which digital architecture impacts the evolution of content is a really interesting area of enquiry.
• Recording The Stradivarius: In Cremona, they are working to preserve the sounds of Stradivarius violins. This is a lovely little piece about the challenges inherent in capturing such deep and layered sounds in the modern world; honestly, it feels a bit like reading a short documentary film, in the best way.
• Clean Musicians: This piece combines interviews with a selection of musicians who once weren’t sober but now are; it covers their addictions, their rock bottoms, the oddity of creating sober when once you would only ever create whilst fcuked, and some truly great anecdotes. Steven Tyler is a man who I imagine could keep this schtick up for literally weeks, but the standout quote in here is the one from the Eagles’ Joe Walsh: “When I stopped doing cocaine, it was amazing to me that I didn’t need to carry a gun anymore. I just didn’t need one!”. Life lesson right there, kids.
• Caroline Calloway, Redux: You may recall Caroline Calloway and her influencer workshop ‘scam’ from last week – this week this piece dropped, in which a reporter from New York Magazine attended one of said workshops and wrote up the experience. This is just delicious – the evident antipathy between Calloway and the attendant media, the correction at the end…it’s all just perfect. It’s also worth noting, though, that the non-media attendees seemed to think that the $170-odd that they spent on a day of listening to some Instaperson’s life anecdotes in what was essentially a really, really expensive meet-and-greet was money well spent so, well, more fool us.
• Meme and Theme Accounts: The latest in a long line of articles about ‘things that kids are doing on Insta which you will see brands co-opt in a few weeks’ time and which won’t be cool in two months’, this is about the rising phenomenon of ‘meme and theme’ accounts (which, honestly, I can’t be bothered to explain – just read the piece) and, more interestingly, the ways in which young people are twisting Insta’s features to make them work for them. The idea of using a ‘Cover’ image on an Insta post with a bunch of subsequent images for ‘depth’ is a really smart one, and I can think of LOADS of genuinely quite good brand-ish applications (SOMEONE PAY ME FOR THEM PLEASE).
• An Oral History of Office Space: I love the film Office Space, which contains the single line which most-effectively encapsulates my personal attitude to working life – to whit, “I don’t like it…I’m not going to go any more”. If you’re a fan of the film, this will be a great reminder of why you ought to watch it again; if you’re not, LEARN.
• Hagfish Slime: You wouldn’t necessarily think that an article about the inauspiciously-named hagfish would be this interesting, but you would be WRONG. MARVEL at the fact that hagfish slime is 10,000 softer than Jello-O! RECOIL at the video of what happens to the slime when it’s removed from water! IMAGINE the fun you’d have if you could get your mitts on a bucket of this stuff! Anyone know a friendly aquarium?
• Super Patriotic Anime Youth Wars!: Thanks to Wilson, Curios’ China Correspondent, for sending me this, a brilliantly odd story about how the historical rivalry/conflict between Japan and China is now being played out through Manga, an increasingly popular medium in the People’s Republic and one which is causing a degree of consternation at its potential to erode or subvert ‘traditional’ values. I just vanished into a pleasing 90-second reverie about a parallel universe in which we enact soft war with Europe through our smuggling of The Beano into their schools, which tells you a little about how INCREDIBLY tired I am right now. 11:26. One hour left. ONWARDS!
• An Interview With Leigh Alexander: This accompanies a scifi short story she wrote for VICE, which is linked to in the piece – I found the interview more interesting than the fiction, though, not least for observations such as this one: “I think the social media environment creates a compulsion to be connected, and I think it is gradually training some of us to expect more stimulation, more interaction, and more “reward” than we once would have been comfortable with in a similar period of time. It often feels like I’m frying circuits or something by going through so many things, with so many people.”
• Does Journalism Have a Future?: A question which will raise a miserable smile from Buzzfeed and Huffington Post staffers this week. This essay in the New Yorker covers a couple of books on the topic published recently, including Rusbridger’s, and serves as a decent overview of the past 40 years in news. I did particularly like its slightly sniffy observation that The Guardian, whilst having done an excellent job of refinancing itself through donations, doesn’t actually contain very much actual reporting any more so much as a series of impassioned op-eds along predictable political lines (and I say that as someone who likes and backs the Guardian).
• Maze: I had NEVER heard of this puzzlebook, but I absolutely adored this piece about it – go in cold, it really is beautifully-written.
• Precocious Puberty: Puberty is HARD. I imagine it’s even harder when it happens to you when you’re two. This is the incredible story of Patrick Burleigh, whose early life was dominated and defined by his condition, which meant he was a tall, muscular teen with all the expected and attendant sexual urges at the age of about 5. The writing is brilliant, and Burleigh does an excellent job of conveying the guilt and confusion that he must have felt throughout his extended adolescence. Honestly amazing.
• Deliverooing: Laura Seaton in the LRB on being a Deliveroo driver. Such wonderful writing, about “a future in which people sit alone in tall apartment blocks, eating homogenous food prepared by workers in black boxes scattered through public spaces made ghostly by disuse.”
• Sad By Design: This is a bit of a hard read – the writing’s in (poor) translation, I think, or the author’s not writing in their native language (I think they are Dutch) – but the ideas in here make it worth persevering with. “Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way. As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore.” Well quite.
• The Body That Says I’m Here: Finally in this week’s longreads, Carmen Maria Machado writes about her body and all the things she feels about it as a large woman. I loved this – brutal, unsentimental, unrepentant, this is worth a million ‘love my curves’ posts on Insta. Superb.

By Oriana Ingber

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Take 5 minutes to watch this short animation. I promise you it is worth your time, and you will feel better about everything by the end of it. It’s called ‘One Small Step’:

2) Meet Barry Beats. Introduced to me by Internet Oddity Sadeagle, this is a Cornish man who likes making beats. This is his £1 Beat Challenge – he has £1 to spend in the charity shops of Cornwall to make into an excellent beat – and it is UTTERLY CHARMING; Barry is lovely and gentle and obviously an absolute fcuking expert when it comes to cratedigging, and the whole thing is made immeasurably better by his gentle West Country burr and, honestly, if the BBC can keep making Doctors then surely they can chuck £50k at making a series out of this for BBC3 ffs:

3) This is an animation done entirely in Google Earth (it makes more sense when you watch it, promise) and it is AMAZING:

4) ‘Popular song remade with clips cut together from films’ is not a new thing, but I think this version of MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’ is the most impressive I’ve ever seen – they absolutely nail the cadence of some of these lines, and I can’t begin to imagine the work that went into this., Enjoy:

5) Finally this week, have a truly wonderful piece of verse by Mikael Techane – if you only watch one of these, please make it this one; it’s beautiful, and not a little heartbreaking, and is called ‘Boys Like Us’. THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK BYE BYE BYE HAVE FUN BYE I HOPE THAT YOU HAVE A LOVELY FEW DAYS OFF AND THAT IT’S NOT TOO COLD BUT JUST COLD ENOUGH IN THAT NICE, CRISP WAY THAT’S SO PLEASANT IF THE SUN SHINES AND THAT YOU GET TO GO ON A NICE WALK OR EAT A GOOD MEAL OR GET ABSOLUTELY BANJAXED ON WHATEVER COMBINATION OF SUBSTANCES YOU LIKE BEST, BASICALLY WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY IS THAT I WANT YOU TO HAVE A NICE TIME AND BE HAPPY BECAUSE I LOVE YOU THANKS FOR READING BYE BYE!: