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

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

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

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

By Linsey Levendall

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

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

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

By Viviane Sassen

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

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

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

By Tish Barzanji

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

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

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

By Raymond Lemstra

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

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

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Jan Klos

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We did the democracy!”

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

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

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

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

By Adi Prawira

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

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

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

By Ian Trask

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

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

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

By Kai Samuels Davis

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

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

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

By Michael Sowa

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

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

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Nick Lu

AND FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Christophe Agou

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

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

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

By Yunil Nam

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

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

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

By Naro Pinosa

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

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

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

By Sarah Harvey

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Kris Kuksi

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Vaka Valo

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

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

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

By Ian Fisher

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

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

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

By Jacob Howard

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

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

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

By Owen Freeman

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Jean Vincent Simonet

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!: