By Evgenia Arbugaeva

4 HOURS OF SMOKY JAZZ? YOU’LL NEED IT TO GET THROUGH THIS LOT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS WELL AWARE OF THE CHALLENGE FACING IT IN RUNNING THROUGH A MONTH OR SO’S S*C**L M*D** NEWS IN ONE GO BUT WHICH IS CONFIDENT THAT WITH A DECENT RUN-UP IT CAN JUST ABOUT MANAGE IT:

• Facebook Making Canvas Ads Easier To Make: Noone really seems to like Canvas as an ad product, mainly due to the fact that they are such a colossal pain in the backside to put together and require loads of ASSETS and stuff to populate them. Now, though, you can autogenerate much of the content required to make them just by plugging in a url  – the ad-builder will automatically pull all images from the webpage into the ad editor, in theory at least making it really easy to create a Canvas from them. Except, of course, this relies on the images actually being good, and the right size/shape, and all sorts of other things, but points to them for at least attempting to take the pain out of the creation process.

• Facebook Rights Manager Gets Better: Christ, it’s only when you’ve not done this for a few weeks that you truly realise quite how stultifying much of this crap which passes for ‘news’ is. Still, this is probably quite important to those of you who are tasked with the VITALLY IMPORTANT task of ensuring that your branded content isn’t misappropriated by unscrupulous videopirates – I could keep writing, but let’s instead take Facebook’s own word(s) for it: “With Rights Manager, rights owners can find matches of their video content on Facebook; these matches are surfaced on a dashboard. Previously, the rights owner would review these matches in the dashboard to take action. To help make management more efficient for rights owners, we’re now enabling them to automate more of the process, and providing more options for what happens to matched content. This means that the rights owner can decide to set an action to happen automatically when a match of their content is found on Facebook, simplifying the process”. GOOD, EH? Oh.

• You Can Run Ads For Your Newsletter Through Facebook Now: Mailchimp lets you buy ads through Facebook now, which is exactly the sort of thing I would do if a) I had the money; and b) I thought there was an actual audience for this crap out there; and c) if Mailchimp hadn’t suspended Imperica’s account for reasons they don’t seem keen on divulging, the bstards.

• Reactions In Facebook Comments: Yes, you all know about this, I know; I am mainly doing this section so that I can clear the insane backlog of links in my head and commit this stuff to memory (it doesn’t seem to work if I don’t write it down). Anyway, this is mainly interesting in terms of the way it extends the number of data points that FB is collecting around users’ interactions with content; I’ll be AMAZED if before too long brands aren’t being offered the opportunity to target ads at people based on which reactions they most use on posts, in comments, etc.

• Facebook Groups Can Now Set Admission Questions: So now your public Group all about the brilliance of cranes can establish some questions to determine whether or not an applicant for membership has the requisite cranepassion. Obviously mainly of use to, you know, ACTUAL PEOPLE rather than brands, but the combination of this and the ability to attach Groups to brand Pages makes me think that there’s some quite interesting stuff you could do with focus groups here, although to be honest I am too bored to think on that any more.

• FB Rolling Out ‘Deliver Food’ Function in US: In partnership with a couple of US Just Eat equivalents, as far as I can see; will over time inevitably come to the UK, as we move ever closer to a world in which you need never, ever leave the safe, blue-tinged walled garden that is Facebook. Why are there spikes and broken glass atop the walls? Oh, to protect us and definitely not to keep us inside? Oh, great, ok then!

• Facebook Fundraising Rolls Out To All (In US): I…I don’t know about this. On the one hand, fundraising is GREAT and philanthropy is WONDERFUL, and all of us fortunate enough to have some spare pennies should where possible give at least some of said spare pennies to assist those less fortunate. Totally. Erm, but, I get the horrible feeling that the ability for people to set up fundraising for themselves on Facebook is, in pretty short order, going to lead to some pretty egregious trolling of the system, not to mention some SPECTACULAR online fights and stuff. Actually, on reflection, this will be ACE, bring it on. Oh, really bad news if you’re JustGiving, obvs.

• Facebook Live Social Chat Is Here: If you’re one of the people who actually enjoys watching livestreams of exceptionally mundane things on Facebook, rejoice in that you can now open a chat window to discuss it separately with your FB ‘friends’ as you do so. Oh, and the ability – previously only granted to famouses but now available to peons like us – to do a side-by-side livestream with a friend is also rolling out, so expect to see your most BANTEROUS mates doing their two-header hot takes on the news SOON. God this all sounds awful, doesn’t it?

• FB Apparently Testing Video Cover Images For Pages: Because everything must be video, it is the will of Zuckerberg. This seems relatively fine and benign until you begin to consider the future reality of your banking client demanding that you make them a ‘really sexy’ video header – because that is exactly what will happen.

• Instagram Adds Lots Of New Features Which Makes It More Snapchatty: Face filters! The ability to make video in reverse! Hashtag stickers! Whilst the face filters thing has limited relevance to brands, unless of course you’re a brand so plutocratically rich that it can afford to negotiate with Facebook around building you your own variant, I think the hashtag stickers thing could be rather useful – much like the feature Twitter launched last year, which noone seems to use, this works as follows: “Just tap the sticker icon at the top right of your screen, select and customize the hashtag, then add it to your story. As with mentions, you can also add hashtags using regular text. People watching your story will be able to tap the hashtag sticker or text to visit the hashtag page and explore related posts.” It’s potentially a nice, easy way of encouraging and collating/curating UGC around a brand campaign if that’s the sort of dreadful thing that floats your professional boat.

• Instagram Testing Direct Response Ads: Literally this. Testing. Direct. Response. Ads. Christ alive. You know, when I was a little kid I briefly wanted to be in the RAF; imagine kidMatt’s disillusionment were he to know that instead his future self is writing ‘content’ about the possibility of a new type of advertising platform being introduced on a social network he doesn’t even use. Poor kidMatt.

• TWELEVISION!: YEAH THAT’S RIGHT. Twitter has seen the future, and the future is, er, telly! Yes, Twitter’s planning on bringing 24/7 broadcasting to the platform, because there isn’t enough utter crap being pumped into our faces ALL THE FCUKING TIME; early announcements suggest Bloomberg are on board, as are a whole host of other partners; it remains to be seen whether anyone actually wants to watch tv on Twitter (oh God, calling it ‘TV’ is going to become a really old person thing, isn’t it? Are we just going to start to have to refer to this stuff as ‘video content’ all the time?), but there’s obviously a huge potential boost to them in terms of ad revenue when they start selling in-broadcast inventory.

• Twitter Now Lets You Promote Your TwitterChatBots With DM Cards: If anyone’s actually using Twitter bots to any extent I am yet to see it – which may explain why they’re taking another punt at improving uptake with this new feature, which lets brands promote their bots at users through DM cards. These create promoted Tweets which prompt users to start a ‘conversation’ with said bot, which then slides right into their DMs like the SLAG it is. “The cards are not about pushing people to bots that help solve customer service issues or encourage purchases from the brand in question, as is the focus of many Facebook chatbots. Instead, they’re about getting people to interact with the brand through a private messaging experience that’s meant to be fun, not transactional”, witters the article. Does that sound like something that any sentient human being would actually want to do? No, no of course it doesn’t, and yet here we are.

• You Can Now Search Twitter For Emoji Use: This serves no actual purpose whatsoever, but it is quite interesting to see what comes up if you plug in some of the really obscure, technical-looking ones.

• Twitter Lets You See Which Advertisers Are Targeting You: …and, by extension, shows exactly how appalling its ad targeting options are. Oh Twitter! I wrote this for ANOTHER PUBLICATION (bonus points to anyone who can guess/find out which) and so am going to reproduce it here as, frankly, I am feeling incredibly lazy and getting through the rest of this is currently looking like my own personal Everest, so: “As confusion continues to reign in the mainstream media over how social media ad targeting works and what effect it can have on democracy, credit to Twitter for injecting a welcome dose of transparency into the debate. In an unusual move, the social network recently updated its privacy settings to grant all users with an account the ability to see the information advertisers can use to target them (something which Facebook, for example, doesn’t offer with anywhere near the same degree of clarity), as well as a list of all those advertisers who have targeted an individual. Laudable in its transparency, this move had the side-effect of exposing how…er…esoteric some of Twitter’s assumptions about its users can be, and therefore how accurate – or otherwise – its ad targeting is. Although it affords advertisers the opportunity to target by age, most Twitter users seem to be categorised as ‘between 13-54’; hardly the laser-guided targeting some might expect. Interest categories available to advertisers include such insightful, granular options as ‘Politics’, ‘Politics and Current Events’ and ‘Political Elections’ and, er, ‘Politics’, with no indication as to what, if anything, differentiates each from the other. UK users were in many instances bemused to find that they were grouped into categories suggesting they might be interesting in purchasing financial services products from brands such as Geico, Aetna and Suntrust – none of which in fact operate in the UK, and who would find the ability to market to people here useless. It seems clear that, on Twitter at least, the promised ability to apply ‘laser guided’ targeting of customers hasn’t quite manifested itself. There may be a reason Facebook is less than keen to avoid a similar degree of transparency…”

• LinkedIn Now Lets You Do Matched Audiences Like FB & Twitter: You know that thing where you can give FB or Twitter a list of email addresses or website visitors and target them with ads on the platform? Yeah, you can now do that on LinkedIn also, which is thrilling.

• Snapchat Launches Custom Stories: This is a really interesting idea (which I seem to recall reading this week that Instagram has already basically ripped off, but I can’t find the link to that right now); Custom Stories lets any Snap user create a Story, and then invite any number of Snap users they like to contribute to it – effectively making it a collaborative storytelling platform (sorry). You can also geofence the stories, meaning this is PERFECT for doing stuff at concerts, festivals, conferences, etc; in fact, this is potentially hugely useful to broadcasters in terms of pulling together Stories from multiple reporters covering one particular event. LOADS of options here if you could only be bothered to THINK about them.

• Snapchat Basically Adds Photoshop: Well, sort of – this is its new ‘Magic Eraser’ feature which basically lets people erase stuff from images and video shared on Snap and which also does some really clever stuff around replacing all the background imagery after you’ve erased something, which, I can confidently predict, is going to lead to both some excellent Vine-style creative work and also at least one news organisation with poor image-checking skills being absolutely taken in by some FAKE NEWS.

• Pinterest Launching Visual Search Ad Targeting: Or at least they will be, soon. Their clever tech which lets users take photos of stuff and then use said photos to search Pinterest for similar-looking things will soon let advertisers target people based on the things they’re conducting visual searches for; so you can, for example, target people taking photos of red hats with Pins linking to the purchase page for YOUR red hat. This is also going to come to Google, with all the announcements around Lens at the recent I/O Conference, at which point this will become REALLY interesting. Oh, and Facebook will almost certainly do it to because THEY DO EVERYTHING, eventually at least.

• Pinterest Launches Autoplay Video Ads: I have literally nothing else to say about this.

• Google Launching ‘Exciting’ New Tools To Track Offline Spend Against Online Ad Exposure: In case you didn’t feel that enough of what you do in your day-to-day existence is being monitored by sinister agents of the gigantic capitalist superstructure, welcome to a new series of services from Google which will enable advertisers to track exactly how exposure to ads correlates to purchase behaviour, OBVIOUSLY this will all be anonymised – don’t worry, kids! – but it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable, much like nearly everything else so far this year.

• Quora Launches Ads: Quora’s an odd place, seemingly populated exclusively by really Alpha valley-type people, slightly strange monomaniacal single-topic experts and a LOT of swivel-eyed loons (these audiences often overlap). If you want to advertise at people like that, GREAT! The ad offer seems pretty standard, although the targeting is limited to location, topic interest and platform which is pretty shonky when compared to almost everything else out there. Still, my facetiousness aside, the user profile is interesting enough that it might be worth considering.

• Telegram Launches Chatbot Payments: Telegram’s pretty niche, fine, but this is interesting if only in terms of an indication as to how this will work on every single other messaging platform under the sun. Potentially a reason for brands to take an interest in Telegram too, though I imagine that the audience in the UK is so vanishingly small that it’s not quite worth the hassle (oh, and also the payments thing is, as ever, US-only as yet, so, er, probably not even really worth talking about. Sorry).

• Dominos Does IFTTT: This is a simple idea but such a clever one, and SO on-brand when it comes to their whole ‘we are the masters of tehnology gimmicks’ PR schtick.

• IPSOS Global Trends: ALL of the bullsh1t trend analysis essays you could want, in one place. It’s actually presented pretty poorly, but there’s a lot of useful stuff in here which those of you who have to pull together planning stuff might find useful for the preparation of your TISSUE OF LIES.

• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2017: I bet, as you limp tiredly to the end of this section of Curios, you’re thinking “God, what I’d REALLY like now is to wade through 355 slides of internet trends data”. YOU LUCKY PEOPLE! This is Mary Meeker’s annual datadump, as comprehensive and ugly as it always is; as I type it was only published yesterday, so there’s no decent deep analysis of it online yet, but I’m sure by the time you’re reading this there will be LOADS. Haven’t read it all yet, but the stat about voice search was interesting to me; does anyone know what voice recognition tech is like at identifying gender and regional accents? I reckon that sort of tech is going to be HUGELY useful in ad targeting around this – you know, targeting ads at people doing voice searches for a certain thing, and attempting to hit, say, men from the North of England. Hang on, this is an ACTUAL great business idea, someone go off and become a billionaire and chuck me some monies.

• The Airman Challenge: Last this week in the boring section noone really wants to read but which I know some of you do and I salute your indefatigability, this is a really shiny and well put-together site for the US Airforce, all about persuading young men and women that a life in the skies is FUN! And, er, presenting you with a series of chillingly entertaining little games about killing, basically. Makes you feel excited and really guilty at the same time, like the EXACT instant of masturbatory orgasm.

By Frank Hertford

HAVE AN EXCELLENT HIPHOP MIX ON SPOTIFY!

THE SECTION WHICH, GIVEN THE HIATUS, IS NOT SO MUCH ALL-NEW WEBSPAFF AND INSTEAD IS MORE OF A SELECTION OF SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PAST MONTH AND WHICH IS GOING TO DO ITS VERY BEST TO APPLY SOME SORT OF QUALITY CONTROL FILTER TO THE FOLLOWING SELECTION OF LINKS AS AT THE MOMENT IT’S RUNNING TO 5 PAGES OF URLS WHICH IS SIMPLY TOO MUCH EVEN FOR THIS GODFORSAKEN MESS OF A BLOGTHING, PT.1:

• The Lyttle Lytton Prize 2017: So this is REALLY old – a whole month or more – but it’s too good not to kick off with. In case you don’t know, the Lyttle Lytton prize is given each year to the person who can come up with the best, worst opening line to an unwritten novel – cliches are encouraged, mixed metaphors abound, and each year it’s one of the most joyful celebrations of creative writing you will see. I shan’t spoil the enjoyment of reading these yourself and finding your favourites, but my personal one is the following GEM: “Thornmill Greyeyes was a proud elf. His ears stood proud, his cock stood proud, but most of all his heart stood proud as he watched his bride mince down the isle with her ravishingly good looks.”

• Webby Awards 2017: The latest batch of award winners from the annual celebration of good stuff on the internet, this is a useful place to check out some decent webwork and ‘get inspiration’ (nick other people’s ideas and pass them off as something halfway original). Lots of this stuff has already featured in Curios, turns out, which suggests either that I have an eye for GREAT CONTENT or that I spend far, far too much time on the web.

• THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET: Hyperbole sort of justified here, as Yahoo! Japan presents the whole history of the web and the tech and culture around it as one, immense, vertically-scrolling animated illustration. It’s VERY dense and if you, like me, are some sort of web culture aficionado you are going to find a lot to love in here. You can click on bits of the image to get popup explainers, but it’s all in Japanese so I am no wiser as to knowing what much of this stuff is. WHO WAS GREE??? Anyway, this is ace and really quite fun, do check it out.

• Mail Me To The GOP: Er, are you allowed to do this? This website, created in protest at the Republican Party’s work to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, is designed to help people pull together the correct paperwork to have their ashes mailed to a Republican congressperson on death, the message being “YOU KILLED ME BY YOUR ACTIONS, NOW STARE AT MY DUSTY REMAINS IN GUILT”. It’s, er, a strong message, not going to lie – it’s quite tempting to set this up in the UK, even as a joke, just to watch the Mail get into a frothy tizz.

• BotBot: Smart little tool which lets you quickly and easily make rudimentary bots on Facebook based on a few basic templates – answering questions, selling stuff, ordering food, etc. Uses integration with Zendesk et al, so may not be for everyone, but it’s a nice illustration of how simple these things can be to put together. Oh, and as we’re doing chatbots, this is a service building them specifically for music artists to ‘interact with fans’ and, more importantly, push notifications at them about tickets and merch. SO AUTHENTIC!

• Twitch Does Investment: Remember Twitch Plays Pokemon, where a bunch of people on Twitch tried to collaboratively play through Pokemon using crowdvoted commands? Well someone’s doing the same thing with $50k of REAL MONEY, letting Twitch viewers vote on what to buy or sell, one transaction every 5 minutes. Quite mental, not least because if you described how this works to someone 5 years ago they would likely have just BOGGLED at you.

• Pipes: The geekier among you (ha!) will recall Yahoo! Pipes, a rare instance of Yahoo! doing something genuinely innovative and useful which they obviously then went and killed. Pipes was basically a really smart way of filtering information and data from all over the web in a variety of ways; it let you do all sorts of clever things in terms of pulling info from a range of sites and then fiddling with it and spitting it out elsewhere – which is a really dreadful explanation, but anyway it’s sort of been resurrected and oh god it turns out that doing all this writing is really HARD when you’ve not been doing it for a while, eh?

• Fireflies: This is an interactive simulation of fireflies, and how their lighting systems work – it is simultaneously REALLY relaxing and also revealing as to how incredibly fireflies operate, and I could basically stare at it for HOURS.

• The Rosetta Wearable Disk: Ignore the appalling webcopy here – the upshot of this is that, for a donation to the Rosetta Project of $1000 or more (the Rosetta Project, in case you don’t know, is devoted to the archiving of human language in perpetuity), you can get a TINY LITTLE NANOFICHE which you can wear around your neck and which is covered in 1000 pages of microscopic information in hundreds of languages. WHY NOT, EH? If anyone has a spare grand they’d like to give me so I can get one of these that would be ace, thanks.

• Where’s Wallace?: Where’s Wally?, but redone with characters from The Wire. It is HARD.

• Dog Names of NYC: See, THIS is what public data is for. In New York you obviously have to register your dog with the City; they’ve taken all the registered names and mapped them by frequency, so that you can learn that Max, Bella and Coco are the most popular, and that there are some very, very strange choices lurking when you get down to the low frequencies. Shout out in particular to the wonderful idiot who has chosen to name their dog ‘Playboy’, and for whom I slightly fear a life of perennial singledom.

• Talk Obama To Me: Type in anything you like into the textbox and watch as it’s spoken back at you by the much-missed ex-POTUS Barack Obama, in a word collage stitched together from his speeches and TV appearances. It’s a touch shonky but pretty impressive, and I personally got more enjoyment than I probably ought admit from getting Barry to tell me he wanted to ‘woof me right in the dirtbox’.

• Cold War Simulator: Looking a LOT like 1980s classic War Games in aesthetic, this little site lets you model a two-combatant nuclear conflict complete with missiles and bases and, cheerily, with little mention of any of the pesky side effects like ‘fallout’ and ‘a ravaged planet’.

• WebVR Experiments: Google’s collection of little WebVR toys, all gathered in one place for you to enjoy. There are some lovely ones here – you’ve probably seen the ping pong game before, but it’s worth exploring all of them as there’s some glorious design there and some really clever executions and explorations of what you can do with the (really impressive now) tech in Chrome. One of my favourites is this one, which uses speech recognition to let you tell the programme to take you wherever you like in the world using Google maps – SUCH fun and the sort of thing I imagine it would nice to play with with your kids.

• Lighthouse: Lighthouse is ‘the interactive digital assistant which tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on at home”; or, as a less-optimistically-minded person might have it, a home surveillance system for the evil or paranoid. It’s an always-on, always-recording camera which uploads footage of what it sees to the Cloud and which can report stuff to you based on what you ask it – so, at least it claims, it will be able to answer ‘was the dog walked today?’ by recognising the question and then scanning that day’s footage to ‘see’ whether anyone took the dog out. Or, maybe, “did my teenage son leave his room today?”, or “what time did my husband get home last night and was he drunk?” and oh god this is going to be the end of so many families, and will lead to so many parents seeing their kids masturbating, won’t it?

• A World Without People: A beautiful collection of photographs of places abandoned by people. Stuff’s often so much better without us really, isn’t it?

• Night Lotion: I’d not noticed that this was a thing, but apparently there’s a TV/film trope about women applying lotion to themselves before they go to bed; this is an Instagram account collecting those instances. Hey, Dove, why not do something fun with this sort of thing rather than making increasingly patronising wishy-washy noises about physical diversity which are nothing more than an increasingly transparent attempt at woke marketing? Eh? Oh.

• The Pregnancy Pause: This is a brilliant idea. Pregnancy Pause is a US initiative looking to address the issues surrounding maternity leave in the US and the fact that CV gaps are often used to stigmatise working women on their return to the workplace; the simple gimmick here is that the campaign has set itself up as an employer on LinkedIn, meaning now mothers can have an official-looking ‘Pregnancy Pause’ entry on their CV covering any maternity gap, which then links back to the campaign and explains its objectives. This is SO SMART, and has the benefit of being easily translatable across other experiences/issues – if you’re a charity reading this, you ought to think on your own variant as it is CLEVER. MIND for mental health, perhaps, or anyone really. GO!

• Amazing Style Transfer Video Thingy: Yes, ok, fine, but YOU try describing this in 6 words. Anyway, watch the video and be STAGGERED – there’s no sound for some reason, and this is still very much theoretical as there don’t seem to be any details about how it actually works, but if it’s real it’s incredible; this is basically a video of a bloke talking; as he does so, some software applies a visual effect to his face in realtime based on a variety of sources – paintings, a statue…it’s genuinely astounding, take a look.

• Make Your Own Data Gifs: Neat little Google tool which lets you automatically make gifs comparing different datasets. It’s VERY simple, and if you’re some sort of datageek you can almost certainly do better than this in your sleep, but for those, like me, who are crap at both numbers AND making stuff, this is a godsend.

• The Infinite String Quartet: This is a very, very soothing little webtoy. The spheres at the top correspond to different strings; where you place them on the landscape determines pitch, etc. Just play and listen to what happens and imagine that you are somewhere far, far away from all the electioneering and madness and despair.

• Searching For Syria: It’s important that we occasionally get reminded just how fcuked much of the world is, and that it continues to be fucked even when we decide to ignore it because we’re doing a democracy. This site, put together by UNHCR, is a nicely-built and tells the story of the conflict and its impact in simple, clear fashion; it’s also obviously a bit heartbreaking, as you’d expect.

• Virtual Cities From Photos: I am pretty much entirely baffled by how this works, but nonetheless. It’s basically tech which, although it’s obviously in its infancy, works to stitch together 3d models of cities from photos of said cities, automatically modelling features like road width, building height and even traffic density through interpretation of images. So, in theory, we’ll soon be able to point it at all the photos on Flickr tagged ‘London’ and BOOM, hello virtual capital. Or at least that’s what I imagine will happen; perhaps someone with a better grasp on actual real technology can correct me.

• The Paleobiology Database: It’s a resource for people interested in paleontology, OBVS – it’s also, if you click on the ‘Explore’ button, an interactive map of where all the known fossils in the world are, which if you have a small, dinosaur-obsessed child is probably a pretty wonderful thing to let them play around with.

• Neural Network Illustrations in Allo: Allo, which you will recall is Google’s messaging app which has all the fancy (creepy?) Google Assistant stuff built in, recently launched this feature which noone really picked up on but which I think is sort of amazing; you give it a photo of yourself and it uses Neural Network tech to spit out a series of cartoon stickers of yourself; seriously, this is REALLY impressive and were I a cartoonist would have me looking nervously over my shoulder.

• The Manhoff Archive: I’m just going to quote the site here: “Major Martin Manhoff spent more than two years in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, serving as assistant army attaché at the U.S. Embassy, which was located just off Red Square at the beginning of his time in Moscow. He took full advantage of his post, using his gifted photographic eye to capture hundreds of images of everyday life in Moscow and across the U.S.S.R. When he left the country in 1954 amid accusations of espionage, Major Manhoff took with him reels of 16 millimeter film and hundreds of color slides and negatives he shot during his travels – including of one of the Soviet Union’s pivotal events, Josef Stalin’s funeral. But after his return to the United States, the trove of rare images lay forgotten, stored in cardboard boxes in a former auto body shop in the Pacific Northwest until its discovery by a Seattle-based historian.” This is a really wonderful collection of photography and a proper timesink.

• 100 Days Of Secrets: 100 secrets, one a day for 100 days, illustrated by Filipino designer/illustrator Terence Eduarte.

• The David Rumsey Map Collection: You want maps? HE GOT MAPS. All the cartography you could ever want.

• Scrb: Autotranscription service which lets you upload an MP3 and get back a transcript in what they promise is a matter of minutes. Which, frankly, even if it’s a tiny bit shonky is basically miraculous and so useful and oh, what’s that, another industry being slowly crushed by the advent of machine learning? OH YES INDEED! Sorry, transcribers.

By Raymond Depardon

WHY NOT ENJOY SOULWAX’S RECENT ESSENTIAL MIX, WHICH IS ACE! 

THE SECTION WHICH, GIVEN THE HIATUS, IS NOT SO MUCH ALL-NEW WEBSPAFF AND INSTEAD IS MORE OF A SELECTION OF SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PAST MONTH AND WHICH IS GOING TO DO ITS VERY BEST TO APPLY SOME SORT OF QUALITY CONTROL FILTER TO THE FOLLOWING SELECTION OF LINKS AS AT THE MOMENT IT’S RUNNING TO 5 PAGES OF URLS WHICH IS SIMPLY TOO MUCH EVEN FOR THIS GODFORSAKEN MESS OF A BLOGTHING, PT.2:

• Airwaybill: This is a really smart idea. Airwaybill basically lets people use airline passengers as couriers – you say what you want taking from where to where; and the system matches you with someone willing to take it with them for a few quid. Obviously this isn’t designed to be used to ferry kilos of cocaine across the Pacific – that still needs to be hastily swallowed inside a condom – but for small things (gifts, documents, etc) it’s a really useful concept which I would totally use.

• Moments: A series of small, pointless webtoys which I absolutely adore. Just look at this cat! Look at his little face as he plays with the string! God, I could die.

• The Best Time To Visit Anywhere: If you’re a travel brand, STEAL THIS. Plug in your desired temperature range for a holiday destination, when you want to go and press the button – the site will spit out a list of places where the average temperature for that time of year suits your requirements. It doesn’t take a genius to work out how you could link this to sales, right?

• VR Gluv: Stupid name, but a cool piece of kit – I have banged on for ages about how I think it will be the haptic accessories that make VR as a tech; these are the first gloves I’ve seen which seem to offer the ‘grasp a virtual object and it will feel like you’re actually holding something’ experience which is crucial to giving the illusion that there’s a ‘there’ there; sadly, though, their line about being able to feel things that are ‘hard, or soft, or somewhere inbetween’ took my brain straight to the creepy techsex places it tends to go when confronted with stuff like this and I had to stop looking at the page, but maybe you’ll fare better.

• YouTube DJ: Plug in any two YouTube urls and this site lets you mix them on virtual turntables, crossfader and all. Fun, but I can personally vouch for the fact that it is impossible to create a pleasant-sounding mashup of Diamanda Galas and Miley Cyrus however hard one might try.

• 100 Million Books: I LOVE THIS. Publishers, please take note – a really simple Chrome extension which each time you open a new tab suggests a book you might be interested in reading. The books are plucked at random; there are no genre filters or anything like that, just pure, unfiltered BOOK. Let me repeat, I LOVE THIS. Oh, and there’s another thing just like it but for art from the Europeana project, if you prefer images to words. CHROME EXTENSIONS ARE ACE MORE PEOPLE SHOULD DO THEM.

• Lost & Found: Striking collection of photos by Michael Joseph of kids in the US living their life on the freight trains which cross the country. It’s worth selecting the thumbnail view as there are lots of these; some of the faces are just beautiful, captured as though through tintype photography.

• The Positive Lexicography Project: A lovely idea, this, presenting an “evolving index of ‘untranslatable’ words related to wellbeing from across the world’s languages.” Browse words relating to joy, aesthetics, tastes and much more, from all around the world. I have just been reminded of the word ‘Petrichor’ which has made me inordinately happy; if you’re any sort of linguist this is going to be like catnip for you.

• Women Who Design: A filterable directory of women working in design (in its broadest sense) across the world, with links to their Twitter profiles, etc. Literally NO excuse for having an all-male team anymore, really, in pretty much any industry.

• This Is Your Jam: Pick a song, and then see whether you can remember all the lyrics within the time limit. Simultaneously really annoying and startlingly addictive, and the co-op play element is a nice touch.

• The Searcher: I love stuff like this. Did you know that there’s a dedicated magazine for metal detection enthusiasts? OF COURSE THERE IS! Explore its wonders here.

• Fonts From The 90s: Yes, ok, so this is a marketing thing for some font platform or another, but tell me you don’t want access to the fonts used on the Fresh Prince.

• Every Single Word In Icelandic: An intensely lovable and very Nordic Instagram account, presenting simple illustrations of every single word in the Icelandic language, one by one. If you don’t want to learn stuff like this: “Remember the word for earth, jörð, from yesterday? If you add the word for berry to the end you get jarðarber, meaning strawberry” every day then frankly you are a MONSTER.

• Cheeky Exploits: Another Instagram feed, this time of photos of people flashing their bottoms. Not exactly erotic unless you have some sort of latent exhibitionist tendencies, more sort of cute and slightly whimsical (can bottoms be whimsical? They can, yes).

• [email protected]: I don’t have a better way of describing this than ‘Shazam for plants’. So, er, that’s it – Shazam for plants. Such an excellent idea/project/resource, and the sort of thing that would make country walks for city idiots like me who can identify literally NO nature whatsoever.

• Down and Out in Los Santos: GTAV was an excellent game though I think I’m done with the series’ ‘edgy’ humour and fratboy ‘satire’; what’s been amazing, though, is its longevity through its online incarnations, and the number of art projects which have spun off out of it. This one documents the ‘homeless’ characters within the game, presenting photos of them as if from a real-life documentary; it’s ace, and if you can be bothered to think of it this way raises one or two interesting questions about our relationship to actual, real life homeless people.

• Trollcakes: Sadly this is a US-only service at the moment, but definitely deserves recreating over here; Trollcakes lets people submit a mean tweet they were sent, which content gets iced onto a cake and delivered to the troll in question. They also do all the donkeywork of tracking down the postal address of the troll in question to deliver it, which is the most impressive part of the whole thing imho.

• Subtle Dildo: ANOTHER Instagram account, and another thing that’s like Where’s Wally? – except here, every photo has a dildo artfully hidden within it which you have to find. Well, you don’t have to, but frankly what the fcuk else are you going to do with your time on this planet other than look for veiny, sculpted cocks on Insta?

• Pictooptics: No idea why this exists but it’s rather nice; type in any word you like and it will spit out a weird kaleidoscopey pattern-thing (my descriptive powers, it would appear, have survived the hiatus unscathed) made out of icons associated with that word. Trying it with ‘penis’ yields some interesting results.

• The Guggenheim Archive: A load of old exhibition guides from the Guggenheim, digitised and online for all your art historical needs.

• Crytch: This is a BRILLIANT way of sending encrypted messages online, and it’s fun. I can’t be bothered to explain it, but I promise you it’s really good, honest.

• Spellfcker: The MACHINES read everything (even Web Curios). They read the web, they read your emails, they will soon read your minds if Zuck has his way. Small cheers, then, for stuff like this – Spellfcuker takes any text you give it and scrambles it in such a way as to make it impossible (or at least very hard) for machines to read whilst still letting humans have a reasonable shot at working out its meaning. Yew kan unnahstannd this, ckan’ed yu? Told yew ead whohrked.

• Orphe: SMART SHOES! Actually these are more of an art/music/dance project than practical footwear, but – Orphe is footwear which contains LEDs in the sole which are programmable, which tracks your movement, which can be used to create music using in-built motion sensors…frankly it looks mental. They seem to be claiming that they can be bought, and there are store links to Amazon, but nothing in stock…HM. Still, looks cool even if it might just be vaporware.

• Fontmap: “This interactive map of more than 750 fonts has been organized using machine learning”, burbles the website. Yes, it has! Really interesting to see affinities between different font design; you get a real feel for the way designs evolve from each other looking at it this way.

• Vinylpost: SUCH a nice idea, this. Subscribe to this service and each month you’ll receive a floppy vinyl postcard, each etched with a playable song from that month’s featured musical artist, and designed by that month’s featured graphic designer. Fine, OK, it is, I concede, almost beyond parody in terms of its hipsterness, but it’s lovely and cute and so I don’t care (also, as an INFLUENCER MARKETING gimmick this is super-stealable imho).

• Highlight: This is basically magic. These people have invented tech which lets you highlight, clip, copy, etc, text from ACTUAL PHYSICAL BOOKS. I mean, it will never take off, at least not in this incarnation, because the unit cost of each book must be absolutely insane, but it’s an incredibly interesting idea. Actually you could probably do something like this with smart glasses recognising text and using gestural interfaces to track your finger moving along a line, so perhaps this isn’t that smart after all and will be totally redundant. WHO KNOWS? Certainly not me, I’m just some webmong.

• The Real Story: “The Real Story is a writer development project and journal devoted to promoting the form of nonfiction writing in the UK.” It publishes work and supports writers – if you do this sort of thing, it’s worth a look.

• The Food Memory Bank: This is a wonderful collection of short stories, memories, vignettes, whatever, all centred around people’s memories of food. Long, short, happy, sad, there’s a whole world of human life in here, all of it underpinned by that Proustian idea linking food, powerfully, to memory. There’s some great writing too; a lovely site.

• Privat: Launching soon on Indiegogo, this is a really interesting-looking smartphone for those concerned about privacy and surveillance. You can read a full list of features on the site, but the ability to have the camera and microphone disabled as the default setting is interesting, as is the inclusion of a second, separate camera which in theory would prevent anyone spying on your pics. If you are a VERY paranoid person this is your new top-of-wishlist toy.

• Learn Music With Ableton: This is a simply brilliant series of tutorials by Ableton on making electronic music – from the basics of how grid-based music programming works to more complex elements, all presented in simple, friendly fashion. Would be perfect for kids just getting into the idea of making music, digitally or otherwise.

• The RompHim: I first found this hideous thing right back at the start of its crowdfunding journey, before over 3000 IDIOTS decided to back the project and contribute over £300k to making a male romper suit a reality. WELL DONE LADS WELL DONE YOU HAVE JUST PAID £100 FOR SOMETHING WHICH, AT BEST, YOU WILL WEAR ONCE AND WHICH WILL MORE LIKELY ARRIVE A YEAR LATE BY WHICH POINT YOU WILL BE TOO FAT TO FIT INTO IT ANY MORE BECAUSE OF ALL THE CRAFT BEER YOU CONSUME AT YOUR IRONIC BANTER SESSIONS OH CHRIST I HATE YOU sorry but.

• Skinmotion: Have you ever thought “You know what I’d like? I’d like a tattoo of a waveform which I can scan with an app and which when I do so will cause my phone to play a particular piece of audio, up to a minute long, associated with that waveform”? No, of course you haven’t, YOU ARE NOT A FCUKING MORON. Well DONE, Skinmotion people, you have invented a very specific, very pointless variant on the QR code! Jesus.

• Unsung NYC: This is a very nice project indeed which I would love to see replicated in London in some way. “Immersive soundscapes compare today’s urban cacophony to the island Henry Hudson encountered in 1609. History unearths wonder in the green heart of New York”. A really gorgeous audio history project, this.

• Amputee Love: In 1975, this comic was published to attempt to break down prejudices against amputees; in the words of its author, “ We are probably all crooked or bent in some way. Limited is what I mean. We all have limitations.” He attempted to break down these prejudices by, er, producing a really rather racy comic about having sex with amputees. Which gives me the only excuse I need to link to this EXCELLENT song.

• Dank Big Meme Hunter: A game by the ever-excellent Adult Swim, which basically rips off Duck Hunt and lets you use your phone as a controller to shoot stuff on your desktop. Reasonably fun, but it’s the phone/controller execution I really like here.

• The Service Droid: THE worst thing (I mean, not the WORST thing, but certainly the worst thing I feel comfortable sharing on here) that I saw in the whole month of downtime was undoubtedly this; now, revisiting it, I am not only horrified by the premise but also by the fact that some 30 people have seen fit to back it on Indiegogo to the tune of £6k. WHY? WHAT SORT OF MONSTERS ARE YOU. The Arlan Service Droid will, the man behind it claims, be “the first robotic droid sex toy capable of recreating intimate human oral interaction”. Now, take a moment to think about that and (sorry, but it’s worth it) to imagine for a second what a blowjobbot might look like. Got that probably distasteful image in your head? Hold it there a second. Now click on the link – I’ll wait ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….SEE?! IT’S WORSE THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED! Why is it designed in the foetal position of someone being beaten? What is wrong with the faces? WHO HAS BACKED THIS HORROR. Seriously, men, however lonely you are THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER.

• Stained Glass: A beautiful interactive music video to finish with, which will hopefully cleanse the palate after that last horrorlink – colour it in as it plays and make something beautiful and soothing to share with the world.

By Honey Long

LAST UP, FRIEND OF CURIOS AKIRA THE DON HAS LAUNCHED A RADIO STATION!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Is It Better Than Emotion?: Tracking review scores of supposedly good albums on Pitchfork and comparing them to their review of Carly Rae Jepson’s album ‘Emotion’ with often surprising results.

• Sonic The Hedgeblog: All Sonic, all day.

• From Another Room: “A blog dedicated to the “from another room” effect: an auditory recreation of music that sounds muffled as though it were playing from another room. it can have one or multiple contexts, depending on the listener (examples: wandering through an apartment building, being upstairs from a party, or getting murdered behind a club)”

• Marvel NYC: Where Marvel Comics and New York City intersect.

• Buble Raptor: Michael Buble being stalked by a velociraptor.

• Pubcats: Cats! In pubs! Pubcats! Not technically a Tumblr but I DON’T CARE.

• Goths Up Trees: Largely self-explanatory tbh.

• Sh1tty Car Mods: All nicked off Reddit, but reasonably funny if you understand anything about cars (I don’t).

• Subject-28: Original production art from Akira. Awesome stuff in here.

• James Curran: AMAZING gifs and animations by this very talented designer.

• Find The Woman: Dedicated to pointing out the fact that adland is often really, really bad at gender diversity. FFS, adland!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK I AM LIMITING TO 10 (TEN) CHOICES BECAUSE, SERIOUSLY, OTHERWISE I WOULD BE HERE ALL FUCKING DAY:

• The Loneliness Of Donald Trump: We’ve not exactly been short of long takedowns of THAT MAN, but this, by Rebecca Solnit on Litbub, is an astonishingly good piece of writing, as enjoyable for the prose as for the way she deconstructs the manchild.

• I Didn’t Want A Parrot: I unexpectedly found this on Reddit a month or so ago and was enticed by the title, and then got sucked in – this is a genuinely great tale, about finding a parrot and, in part thanks to said parrot, stopping being a raging alcoholic. A really good piece of writing, if an unusual one.

• When Your Child Is a Psychopath: Like ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ but real and therefore infinitely more chilling, this is a look at methods used to treat kids who display psycopathic tendencies. I’m sure your kids aren’t psycopaths, though, honest.

• When KISS Went To Moscow: KISS are a ridiculous band in almost every sense, more marketing machine than musicians; this is a brilliant profile accompanying them to a gig in Moscow and touching on the oddities of personality required to be in a world-famous rock-and-roll band for several decades, what the makeup means, Gene Simmonds enormous tongue, groupies and all the rest. It’s ACE, and makes being a superstar musician seem exactly as strange as it ought.

• The Amazing World of London Clerks: Brilliant peek into the very, very odd and intensely traditional world of the clerks of the legal profession, who keeps the wheels of justice oiled and spinning and effectively act as brokers between barristers and the legal profession. Fascinating, and an excellent reminder as to quite how queerly anachronistic the legal profession seems in 2017.

• Meet Missy: Superb piece for the cover of this month’s Elle, chatting with Missy Elliott about her music, her life, her peers, black culture and identity and loads more. A really thoughtful piece, talking to a really thoughtful artist who’s largely kept out of the public eye.

• How To Murder Your Life: I featured an excerpt from Cat Marnell’s memoir ‘How To Murder Your Life’ a few months back, and described it thusly: “I found the style to be a huge Easton-Ellis-pastiche, and the ‘I’m so crazy and damaged yet living in NYC and somehow amazingly successful despite being a total carcrash of drink and drugs’-style narrative a touch on the cliche side, and yet it has stayed with me all week in a manner little else has done, which suggests either that my subconscious has terrible taste or that it’s better than I at first gave it credit for.” This is a profile of Marnell herself, and whilst I’m no less ambivalent about her as a person, I now really, really want to read everything she writes.

• Who’s The Real Cunt?: On the Daily Mail. It is WONDERFUL – seriously, you must read this piece for lines like this: “In my weeks of reading the Mail in the wake of Addison’s book, I found no real humour but many hundreds of sneers, which is what passes for humour in that whispery world of frightened men who don’t know how to talk to women and wish they knew bigger words.”

• A Nasty Name for a Nasty Thing: Segueing nicely on from the last piece, this is an excellent history of the word ‘cunt’ – it’s etymology, usage and position as the worst word in the English language. Scholarly and exhaustive, this is a wonderful read for people who like words and the politics of language.

• Why I Don’t Trust Batman: Finally in this section, a brilliant short story written from the point of view of one of Gotham’s nameless denizens, a blue-collar everyman who doesn’t quite feel as warmly about the mildly-sociopathic caped crusader as perhaps his creators might have expected. Superb subversion of your standard comic book hero narrative, this.

By Alina Cara Oswald

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is absolutely the most relaxing this I was able to find over the past month; I suggest you watch this pretty much on a loop between now and the moment when you have to come to terms with the crushing reality that the wrong people won:

2) Next, an INCREDIBLE piece of black and white animation called ‘Caverna’ – this really is exceptional, and very clever indeed:

3) This is by the fabulously-named Otoboke Beaver. It is called ‘Love Is Short’ and it is short and shouty and Japanese and it is GOOD:

4) This might be terrible; in fact, I’m 99% certain it is terrible, and yet I really, really quite enjoy it. No idea why at all, maybe it’s a mid-life crisis. Anyway, it’s called ‘Meow’ and it’s by Cherie and Renno – ‘enjoy’:

5) CHINESE HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Made in China’ and it’s by Higher Brothers x Famous Dex and it is ace:

6) This is beautiful. It’s by Francis & The Lights, I think, and features Chance The Rapper, and it’s like something from the closing scenes of an 80s movie, in the very best way. It’s really gorgeous, I hope you like it – it’s called ‘May I Have This Dance’:

7) Last this week, a truly OUTSTANDING vocal on this track by Algiers; it’s called ‘The Underside of Power’ – enjoy! BYE ENJOY THE ELECTION I HOPE YOUR FAVOURITE TEAM WINS AS LONG AS IT’S NOT THE BLUE ONE SEE YOU SOON(ISH) BYE!:

Web Curios will return. That is all.

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A LIVE MIX FROM BRIXTON ACADEMY BY JAMIE XX!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT NOONE IS PAYING QUITE ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT FACEBOOK IS DEVELOPING MIND-READING TECHNOLOGY, BUT WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE THAT THERE IS NO WAY THAT WE ARE AMBLING TOWARDS A FUTURE IN WHICH WE ARE SERVED ADVERTS BASED ON OUR DEEPEST SUBLIMINAL HOPES AND FEARS AND WANTS, OH NO SIREE:

• FB F8 – ALL THE VIDEOS: WHY do the fcukers have to make all these bloody announcements in one of those weeks where I’ve got a fortnight’s internet to write up? Damn them. Anyway, these are all the videos from Facebook’s F8 this week, which are techy and obviously massive puff-pieces for how awesome Facebook is but which are, the few bits I’ve watched, actually pretty interesting if you’re into all this stuff (and if not, really, please do skip this section as it’s likely to wang on a bit).

• FB Goes Big On AR: So the BIG news (apart from the fcuking mind-reading, let’s be clear) was the Facebook Camera Effects stuff – ripping wholesale the line Snapchat peddled about its software putting the lens front and centre of the user experience. You can read all about the featureset in the TechCrunch piece linked above, or in this Buzzfeed piece here – the main things to note, as far as I can tell, are: 1) This is the biggest thing for AR since Pokemon Go! last year and marks a significant step on its journey to mainstream ubiquity; 2) This is a HUGE opportunity for agencies to set up shovelware shops for all this crap, much like we all did when FB apps were a THING that we could charge clients for – seriously, each and every one of you will be pitching your clients branded AR layers every single sodding week for the next two years, because why wouldn’t you? This is basically opening up Snapchat-style brand overlay stuff to EVERYONE, eventually at least, so expect to be bombarded with opportunities to slap a fcuking AR layer onto anything and everything, regardless of utility or use case. So, you know, go wild!

• FB Messenger Chat Extensions: This is basically a whole load of updates to the Messenger platform software which enable Messenger to function a little more like a series of plug-in apps; so you can now, say, call up a collaborative shopping list when in Messenger chat with friends to which everyone in the conversation can contribute, or “a photo bot that lets people create shared albums that live in the thread”; or “a flight-reservation bot whose main interaction is in a person-to-bot thread, but that lets people share itineraries and flight status in threads with their friends.” Effectively this is going to increase the utility of chatbots (we should really stop calling them bots; they’re apps) and make it easier for them to propagate – it’s not clear how the whole ‘you can advertise to anyone who’s interacted with your bot in Messenger’ permissions thing is going to work with this, which makes it LOADS easier for a bot to get thrown into your conversation without your sayso – if someone I know introduces the Ocado bot to our conversation about our middle-class picnic planning, does said Ocado bot then have permission to occasionally pop up to try and sell me more halloumi? HM.

• FB Messenger Discover: It’s only 7:03 and I am already SO BORED of this Facebook stuff. Let’s just C&P this: “Discover is a new section in Messenger where people can browse and find bots, nearby places and businesses to message. As a developer, Discover allows you to showcase your messaging experience to the more than 1.2 billion people who use Messenger each month.” The thing to note here is that you have to submit your bots for inclusion in this section – so, er, DON’T FORGET. Interestingly it is also possible to limit discoverability and prevent your creations from showing up here; I quite like the idea of building an exclusive, in-the-know-only Messenger concierge service for an exclusive elite of Facebookmongs, but maybe that’s just me.

• QR Codes In Messenger: I think this might be the point when we all have to stop laughing quite so hard at the idea of the QR code – now that it’s baked into Facebook Messenger, expect to see them being used a LOT more (admittedly the base is LOW here, but). You can generate a code which, when scanned through the camera with Messenger, will launch a specific chatbot within the app for the user to engage with. Again, this is a very smart move for marketers – because of the aforementioned ‘talk to the bot once and it will advertise at you FOREVER!’ nature of how Messenger ads (currently) work, inducing people to use your Messenger QR code basically gives you tacit permission to sell them stuff in perpetuity on the platform. Great!

• Group Payments Available In Messenger: This wasn’t an F8 announcement, but I am trying to be neat. Anyway, you can now send payments to people you’re having a group chat with. Not exciting, but satisfies my need for thoroughness.

• Facebook Launches Spaces For VR Fun!: Look, I know you invested all that money in Oculus and that you need to push this stuff, I get it, but NOONE WANTS TO EXPERIENCE FACEBOOK IN VIRTUAL REALITY. NOONE. You can get a feel for what it’s like in this Mashable (sorry) piece and accompanying video, but you can sort of imagine – disembodied hands, weird Mii-like avatars, the ability to do all the stuff you currently do on Facebook with a clunkier interface and slow graphics. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that some variant on this sort of stuff is The Future in some sort of sense, but it’s just not quite here yet. Obviously the technology is hugely impressive, but I can’t see this as anything much more than a gimmicky tech demo.

• Facebook At Work Adds Features: Basically filesharing, Slack-style bots and some compliance stuff. It’s REALLY boring, this, trust me.

• FB Launches Calls-to-Action Within Instant Articles: If you have Facebook Instant Articles set up, you can now add “Page Like and Email Sign-Up call-to-action units, prompts for readers to like a publisher’s page or sign up for an email newsletter from within an Instant Article.” So there. Although given the fact that noone appears to like Instant Articles or indeed see any benefit from them as publishers, your mileage here may vary.

• Facebook Releases Canvas API For Advertisers: This is, I think, rather a big opportunity (although word is that Facebook is now downplaying Canvas as a platform opportunity, so maybe this is another example of my backing a horse that is destined for the knacker’s yard) – basically this means that it’s even easier for agencies to offer Canvas as a service to clients. Given the fact that we’re all going to be making stuff that looks a bit like Canvas in the future – full-screen, mobile-first (only, frankly), I’d suggest that making this sort of stuff is a pretty smart move for agencies, as if nothing else it’ll prepare you for the future in which everything is shiny images and video and we have all forgotten what these funny symbols you’re looking at right now are.

• Facebook Improves Video Metrics In Page Insights: Basically a whole new, more granular, set of numbers that you can baffle clients with. DATA! BEAT THEM TO DEATH WITH DATA! What does any of it mean? FCUKED IF I KNOW, BUT DATA!

• Pages Link To Groups Now: This is really quite interesting – Pages can now point users at particular Groups from a ‘Groups’ tab in the left-hand sidebar, meaning they can now designate, say, official communities to send fans to – “As part of the new features being tested, brands can also create groups and link to them from their Pages. So, if a nonprofit has a brand page, its administrators can create groups specifically for certain causes, like helping children or disaster relief.” You could do quite a bit with this, I think, in terms of creating fan communities or campaign organisation and the like.

• New Features for Instagram Stories: Sort of superseded by the F8 stuff, this, but this is another host of Snapchat-ripped functionality for Instagram’s Stories platform, offering users the ability to add tracking stickers to video and the like. Again, brand options here are unclear but you can bet your life they will be myriad because Mark’s not an idiot. Oh, and seeing as we’re doing Instagram, here’s an announcement about how all your messages, the ephemeral ones and the standard ones, will now all go to the same inbox – huzzah! And another, where you can organise your saved posts into folders so that you can conveniently return to all the thirstiest shots from the people you stalk whenever you like.

• Snapchat Introduces World Lenses: I mean, they did this on Tuesday and then literally a few hours later Facebook announced all its AR stuff and OH SNAPCHAT! It’s all getting a bit awkward, really. World Lenses are basically Snapchat’s own version of the FB camera stuff up top, except without, as far as I can tell, the open developer platform underpinning it all – it lets you drop virtual 3d objects into the real world and then record them in your Snaps to share with people. Really impressive tech, again, and it looks fun, but if you had to bet on one company monetising this sort of stuff successfully and making it mainstream and ubiquitous and stuff, it probably wouldn’t be the yellow one.

• Snap To Store: Although they have launched this ad product, in the US at least, which lets advertisers track which customers who saw a promotional campaign on Snapchat then went on to visit physical retail locations, which is obviously pretty useful. There’s also some stuff in this story about future ad products which will see users on Snapchat divided into interest groups, etc, for better ad targeting, which is crap for users but good news for advertisers – still, lads, might want to get a move on with this monetisation stuff because, er, time’s a wasting.

• Pornhub Launches AR Stickers For Your Naked Photos: Silly, but an example of really smart (silly) PR.

• LinkedIn Launches Lead Gen Ads: Harvest email addresses from the besuited dullards who interact with your branded content on the world’s most tedious social network! My predictable and increasingly unfunny snark aside, this is a very useful addition to the product suite imho.

• Periscope Launches Custom Hearts On Live Video: Oh Twitter! It’s almost quaint quite how un-zeitgeisty this feels after the tsunami of future which everyone else hit us with this week, but hey ho, here we are. Brands will now be able to pay to have  custom image replacing the ‘hearts’ which pop up when users interact with a video on Periscope – so you could have your logo appear all over the stream, for example, or a custom graphic depicting something pertaining to a particular campaign. Why would you want to do this, particularly giving the eye-gouging amount of money this is likely to cost? NO IDEA!

• Google Analytics Is Getting A Bit Easier To Use: I find GA a horrendously unfriendly service, so this is pleasing. You’ll basically get easier-to-customise dashboards, and the whole thing looks like it’s going to get a little less ugly. It’s not exciting – is anything anymore? It’s now 747am and I am in some sort of weird, social-media-news-addled fugue state – but it’s useful.

• The VR Press Centre: WHY? I know, fine, it’s not meant to be a real, useful thing – it’s a proof-of concept, a gimmick, I get it – but it’s just SO RUBBISH. This is built for KLM, and it’s a VIRTUAL PRESS CENTRE! Look! It’s a 3d-rendered KLM cockpit, which you can look around and, er, READ SOME PRESS RELEASES! LOOK AT SOME TWEETS! There’s so much that’s confusing about this, not least the question of why the newsroom is in the cockpit of a plane, or indeed why anyone bothered to make it. Still, marks for effort at the very least – I am going to confidently predict that this is not the future of the press centre.

HAVE YOU EVER LISTENED TO CHIPTUNE SYNTH METAL? MAYBE YOU OUGHT TO TRY!

THE SECTION WHICH, FOLLOWING THAT HORRORSHOW, IS GRATEFUL FOR YOUR CONTINUED ATTENTION AND PROMISES YOU THAT THERE ARE SOME CRACKERS IN THE NEXT SECTIONS, HONEST, AND THAT THAT WILL PROBABLY MAKE UP FOR AT LEAST SOME OF THE PRECEDING FACEBOOK RUBBISH, PT.1:

• Google Earth In-Browser: To be honest, lots of you can stop at this link – if you never bothered to download Google Earth back in the day you will absolutely lose yourself in this. You can now do all of the amazing stuff you used to be able to do within Google Earth on desktop in your browser – you can zoom literally ANYWHERE and check out the incredible 3d renders of EVERYWHERE ON THE PLANET. I just did a little narcissistic zoom down onto my road and had a proper “oh my God isn’t the majesty of nature amazing” moment; seriously, just go and play with it.

• Every Noise At Once: I know for a fact that I have featured this before but it was YEARS ago, possibly in the H+K days, and it surfaced again this week and it’s still good and not everything always has to be new and I should probably just get on with telling you what it is. It’s a map of EVERY SINGLE musical genre possibly imaginable (no, really), developed by a Spotify engineer and which, to quote the site, “is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1524 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier” You can listen to examples of all of the genres, and what’s really nice is that if you scroll all the way to the bottom there are about a dozen more links taking you to different cuts of the data, in terms of popularity by geography, say. This is just wonderful, basically.

• Mike Boyd: Truly beautiful tattoo work. Really, really lovely Instagram account, this.

• Postepic: I’m sort of torn on this – on the one hand, I’m all for sharing stuff from / about books; on the other, I find the styling here almost nausea-inducingly twee and ‘inspirational’. So it goes. Postepic is actually a really smart idea which could / should be co-opted by publishers (or, more likely, by fcuking Amazon) – it’s an app which lets users take a photo of a page in a book they’re reading, isolate a particular passage and then turn said passage into an image with the selected quotation included on it, o you can create your own slightly cliche quotepics to share with your SOCIAL NETWORK. I am personally slightly tempted to get this and then create a series of beautiful, contemplative pictures featuring sunset scenes accompanied by some of the more colourful passages from American Psycho, but I can’t imagine anyone else would enjoy that as much as I would.

• Stumbl: Another excellent portal through which to experience the avalanche of HUMAN LIFE that is YouTube. You tell this website how long you want the videos it serves you to be, how many views they ought to have, whether they need to be in a particular category or tagged with certain keywords, and then it basically creates an infinite playlist of CONTENT based on the parameters you select. Fascinating, and potentially a near-fatal timesink if you let it get its claws into you.

• Cabana: A new app from Tumblr which lets you watch videos with friends (up to five of them) and do video chat. It’s simple, no frills, and will probably find a small, dedicated audience amongst the fandoms; you may find a use for it. Although actually this might be quite a useful way of getting feedback on work-in-progress stuff, come to think of it. Oh, I don’t know, YOU come up with a reason it exists.

• FindFace: Another one of those in-no-way-creepy services which lets you plug in a photo of someone and then spits back at you what it believes to be their Twitter profile (presuming of course the image they use as an avatar vaguely looks like them). Not suggesting that you all ought to not use your faces as avatars, but, er, maybe you shouldn’t actually all be using your faces as avatars. Is this paranoid? I can’t even tell any more, frankly.

• Autodraw: More witchcraft (YES, FINE, I KNOW, WITCHES ARE DEFINITELY A THINK IN 2017, I AM SORRY JWT) from Google – Autodraw is a frankly crazy platform which lets anyone – even someone as artistically inept as I am – scrawl some stuff on a canvas, at which point the system tries to guess what it was you were trying to draw and lets you select from various templated ‘best guesses’ to drop onto the canvas. So, to give a practical example, you could use this to do INCREDIBLY quick and easy diagrammatic representations of stuff – just draw some lines and shaky squares and circles and this will make it look significantly less sh1t. Or, alternatively, draw a crudely-drawn penis and giggle childishly at what Google thinks you might be trying to create.

• AI On Twitch: This is…weird. A 24h Twitch stream hosted by some sort of AI (it’s not an AI, it’s a chatbot, but frankly these terms are all so weirdly mixed-up that it’s moot whether anyone currently has working mass-market definitions for any of them – although, actually, the description does make some mention of it learning from interactions so there must be a neural network back there somewher…oh, hang on, you don’t care about my internal monologue here at all, do you? Sorry!) which lets anyone ask it questions and have a bit of a chat. It’s rudimentary and not that compelling, but there’s something quite…future about this, and weirdly sort of sad. Particular props to the developers for saying, prominently, that trying to make it say sex stuff is boring and people should be more imaginative.

• The Global Jukebox: An incredible repository of folk music from around the world, the Global Jukebox, to quote, “explores connections between families of expressive style. One can travel the world of song, dance and language through the Wheel Chart and the Map. Thousands of examples of the world’s music, dance and other expressive behavior will now become available. The Global Jukebox is presented as a free, non-commercial, educational place for everybody, students, educators, scholars, scientists, musicians, dancers, linguists, artists and music fans to explore expressive patterns in their cultural-geographic and diasporic settings and alongside other people’s. By inviting familiarity with many kinds of vocalizing, musicking, moving, and talking, we hope to advance cultural equity and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage.” This is VERY deep, and whilst it’s not going to provide you with material for your next house party playlist it is a fascinating collection of musical and ethnographic history.

• Vulgar: Oh I LOVE THIS! Vulgar is a made-up language generator which at the press of a button will spit out a completely fictional fantasy language, with a name, vocabulary, sentence structure, phonetics, the works. If you like language this is beautiful and a bit compelling.

• Nikita Golubev: Instagram account of an artist who uses dirty cars and vans as his canvas, and which I can absolutely guarantee you are going to use in a pitch deck (NOT A FCUKING DECK) or moodboard at some point in the next few months.

• Oldschool Mac Emulator: Before Macs were cool, they were just these weird, ugly machines with crap graphics which odd people had (look, it’s true, trust me). This, from the remarkable folk at the Internet Archive, lets you hark back to those days, with a motherlode of old Mac programmes you can play around with, including some truly dreadful but weirdly compelling games – the art direction on Mac titles was always very distinct, so if nothing else it’s worth checking out for the visual / aesthetic cues.

• DISCO!: The Getty Images archive of old photos of the disco era (and, actually, clubs in general)  is legitimately wonderful and absolutely mesmerising. You just know that if you were to lick any of these people your tongue would go numb within milliseconds – there is a WHOLE lot of cocaine knocking about here. Have a dig – it’s a mixed bag, but there’s so much gold in here if you look.

• Songsleuth: This is LOVELY – Shazam for birdsong, basically. Not really sure I can describe it any more than that, but it’s a glorious idea and the sort of thing it might be nice to download next time you go on a countryside walk or something, presuming any of you detach yourselves from the web long enough to undertake one (I am obviously projecting here, aren’t I?).

• Zero Likes: Cracking art project which, to take the description from the page, “is a meditation on the aesthetics of nothingness. I trained an AI to create images in response to over 100,000 Instagram posts that received zero likes.” The images are abstract but have the quality of degraded daguerrotypes and are rather beautiful I think.

• The Hyperrealistic Donald Mask: Ebay. 3 days left. $4300 at the time of writing. Just in case any of you weirdos is interested.

• Forest: I don’t really go in for ‘mindfulness’ as a thing, to be clear, but I rather like this app – Forest is designed to help people concentrate and ignore their phones, the idea being that each time you want to be incentivised to PUT THAT FCUKING SCREEN DOWN, you open the app and it starts to grow a little tree. The tree will only grow for as long as you keep the app open; closing it prematurely will kill the sapling DEAD. Over time, you build up a forest based on all those moments you’ve spent focusing on stuff that isn’t THAT FCUKING SCREEN – a forest which will look WELL rubbish if it’s full of dead trees, so there’s your incentive. Cute.

• USA Facts: Dull-but-actually-interesting, this – backed by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft fame, this is an independent service which provides an easy, open repository of verified data from US government agencies in one place. There is a LOT of information here, pulled from over 70 different sources, and it’s no mean feat – it’s telling that, whilst this is the sort of thing that Government would LOVE to be able to do itself, it takes private income and freedom from bureaucracy to pull it together. Those of you who read this and work in public sector digital, do check it out – it’s really very impressive.

• Kevin & Friends: An Instagram account sharing short comic strips about ‘Horribly Optimistic Kevin’. It’s a one-note gag, but it’s a good note.

• Hololems: I confess to getting a little fanboy excited at this. This is a demo of what Lemmings – you remember Lemmings, right? LET’S GO!, etc – would look like if played on a Hololens, with the Lemmings using your living room furniture as their course. This is really, really smart – obviously the gameplay looks janky as you like, but the object recognition and stuff on display here is really impressive.

• Tweetstorm Generator: If YOU want to be one of those irritatingly hubristic people who decides to write 32-tweet threads about STUFF, then why not try this iOS app which takes any lump of text you feed it and automatically breaks it up into a series of numbered tweets for you so that you don’t have to. I am sort-of tempted to plug a Curios into it and kill my miserable Twitter following over the course of 37,000 tweets. I bet that poor sod who vowed to Tweet the entirety of Potter at Piers Morgan wishes he’d known about this.

• The Nasa Image & Video Library: Newly made available online, this is basically the spacey motherlode – all of the photos and videos you could ever want of NASA stuff, from launches to moonwalks and everything inbetween. Wonderful archive of great things (and, it seems, quite a lot of photos of NASA staff socials, oddly).

• Feminist Ads: A project creating a different feminist advert for a major brand each day for 100 years. Some of these are really excellent; kudos to LA-based copywriter Eileen Matthews whose work this is.

NOW WHY NOT TRY A PLAYLIST OF NEW TRACKS COMPILED BY HUH MAGAZINE? IT’S GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH, FOLLOWING THAT HORRORSHOW, IS GRATEFUL FOR YOUR CONTINUED ATTENTION AND PROMISES YOU THAT THERE ARE SOME CRACKERS IN THE NEXT SECTIONS, HONEST, AND THAT THAT WILL PROBABLY MAKE UP FOR AT LEAST SOME OF THE PRECEDING FACEBOOK RUBBISH, PT.2:

• Chaos of Delight: I confess to not really having that much of an idea as to exactly what soil mesofauna actually are (In the unlikely event you care, “In soil science, the mesofauna are usually defined as invertebrates, sized between 0.1 mm and 2 mm, although some references increase this to 10 mm.”, but from what i can gather from these amazing photos they are very, very small insects, here presented in some rather wonderful close-up photography.

• SCUMM-8: There are only a couple of you to whom this is going to be of any interest, but if you’ve ever wanted the opportunity to be able to build your own Lucasarts-style point-and-click adventure then this tool, which presents a cobbled-together version of their SCUMM interface for the Pixel-8 development platform meaning anyone can, in theory, make their own Secret of Monkey Island.

• Stranger Love Songs: Butcher Billy (see Web Curios passim) returns with his latest pop-culture riff, this time taking classic love song titles and illustrating them as though they are paperback horror novels from the 80s. Great design work.

• Waitchatter: Christ, this is depressing. I mean, it’s sort of a clever idea and I get the application, but are we REALLY not allowed to waste any time any more? Must we fill each and every minute of every single fcuking day with ACHIEVEMENT and SELF-IMPROVEMENT and GROWTH and Christ alive JUST LET ME STAY MEDIOCRE YOU SLAVE-DRIVING FUTURE-BAST4RDS. Ahem. Anyway, sorry, this is a Chrome extension for Gchat which will, while you’re messaging someone on the platform, fill the seconds while you’re waiting for your interlocutor to respond to your scintillating conversational gambit by asking you to translate foreign words so you can LEARN WHILE YOU WAIT. I mean, it’s A Good Thing but I am so tired and I don’t think I can improve any more.

• Slime Queens: Not, it may surprise you to learn, anything filthy at all – instead this is an Instagram account which features videos of people playing with slime (that is, a home-made mix of glue, borax and soap which goes all gloopy and sticky and satisfyingly tactile) to really pleasing effect. If you’re at all ASMRish you might find this triggers you rather pleasingly; oh, and here’s a guide to making your own, which if you have kids would, I think, be a pretty fun rainy day activity (look, see the wholesome tips Web Curios provides? It’s not just for childphobic misanthropes, honest!).

• The Iron Maiden Cover Art Gallery: An exhaustive look through the cover art of Iron Maiden, from Eddie’s first appearance to his increasingly camp later outings. I remember going into Our Price in the 80s and staring mesmerised at the Maiden covers – there’s something really bleakly hopeless about the art style employed back then which is so redolent of the Thatcher years imho.

• Pasted: An iOS app which lets you easily create arty collages from your photos – simple tools, but they work to pleasing effect (though the aesthetic is exactly the sort of slightly bland airbnb/wallpaper-style of anodyne Scandi minimalism which has become ubiquitous over the past couple of years). It’s by one of the blokes from the Shins, which may or may not influence your decision to interact with it.

• Svaha: A US clothing website which ships internationally, Svaha designs clthes for geeks – specifically, for women and kids who want to show off their geekery whilst maintaining some sort of veneer of fashionability (I refer you to previous caveats as to my inability to work out what looks good and what doesn’t). I think some of the kids’ stuff on here is lovely, though, particularly the tshirts with code on them – see what you think.

• Science Posters: There are marches happening tomorrow and next weekend in the US to protest against cuts to science funding and raise awareness of climate change this site is collecting poster designs for people who want to print and brandish something a little more pro-looking than they might be able to come up with themselves. Some lovely designs here, and the sort of thing which is repurposable for whatever local pro-science thing you may or may not be getting up to.

• LOT2046: I am pretty sure that this is an ARG (remember those?), but I am baffled as to what or how. The blurb says it’s a clothing store – “LOT is a subscription-based service which distributes a basic set of clothing, footwear, essential self-care products, accessories, and media content. The clothes are dispensable: as they wear out they can be bundled and returned, eliminating clutter.” – but there’s a lot of stuff on there that seems like a nod to a wider mystery or story beneath the surface. WHAT DO *YOU* THINK?

• GeoVisual Search: Pretty amazing, this. Select an area on Google Maps and this will search the world for other areas that look like it – so, for example, you can show it a football stadium and it will pull up all the other places where it has recognised a football stadium. I mean, no idea at all what you’d do with this right now, but it’s incredibly impressive.

• The Great Language Game: Geeky-but-great, this plays you a short snippet of someone talking in a MYSTERY LANGUAGE and asks you to identify which language it is. Look, fine, I know it sounds dull but it is surprisingly ace, I promise you.

• Parihug: Just-funded Kickstarter for a soft toy which lets you share hugs from across the world (SO CUTE!) – the toy has a pair which, the idea is, a parent takes with them when travelling and which is connected to its ‘twin’ online. Parent hugs their toy, kid’s toy hugs the kid. Which is quite lovely, and I am really struggling to find anything cynical to say about it all. How queer.

• Dawn Chorus: Alarms on phones are HORRIBLE, aren’t they? Either horribly jarring or falsely saccharine (STOP TRYING TO CONVINCE ME WAKING UP TO GO TO WORK ISN’T HIDEOUS), there’s a dearth of good options out there (or at least I’ve not seen any). This, though, I love – and it’s a really nice piece of marketing for The Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, which has launched this app for iOS allowing you to be awoken each morning by the sound of birdsong from its digital archives. I mean, obviously most of us live in concrete dystopias and so perhaps the idea of being awoken by nature is just too cruel, but I quite like it.

• Feral Horses: Nice idea, this. Feral Horses is a soon-to-be-launched art investment platform, which promises to let anyone invest in an artwork, or a fraction of one; the artworks are then rented out and the profits divided among the shareholders. Potentially a hugely interesting idea, although I was made irrationally angry with jealousy when I scrolled down and saw how young, attractive and rich its founders look.

• Cheese or Font: Is it a cheese or a font? WHO KNOWS?

• Inert Products: If you’ve ever wondered ‘Where can I get my hands on an incredibly realistic replica of a car bomb?’ WONDER NO LONGER! Inert Products sells this stuff, presumably to organisations who train people for deployment in warzones and the like – there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on who can buy this stuff other than cost (fake mines don’t come cheap, turns out), so if you fancy causing a major terror alert this Summer, or alternatively really upping the ante next time you go to a fancy dress party hilariously costumed as a COMEDY TERRORIST then fill your boots.

• I Don’t Give A Seat: Celebrating the upholstry of public transportation networks worldwide, because this is exactly what the web is for.

• The Smart Bra: The internet of breasts! Nearly-funded with three weeks to go, this is called Vitali and is fitted with sensors and stuff to track your breathing, posture and  heart rate – creepily, the blurb suggests that if it notices that you’re breathing erratically or demonstrating symptoms of stress, the bra will encourage you to regulate your breathing (“Why are you breathing like that?” “Oh, my tits are vibrating; they’re telling me I need to centre myself”). As a non-bra wearer I’m not sure what to think about this – can any of you imagine this being a useful or necessary thing?

• Things Full of Beans: …that really shouldn’t be full of beans. Oddly really quite upsetting.

• Self-reflected: Beautiful images of brains, sliced and coloured and oh so glorious. Sadly not available to buy, as far as I can see, but I am totally going to email the person behind this and ask about prints because I WANT.

• Paper Sizes: All the standard paper sizes from around the world, in one place. Yes, I know, it’s STAGGERINGLY dull, but probably useful to a couple of you, maybe, perhaps. LOOK, I AM TRYING TO BE HELPFUL FFS.

• Ultimate Dream Life Abroad: The latest iteration of THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD EVER, this one doesn’t appear to be a marketing thing for any particular place – instead, it’s the chance to win the rights to a bookshop in Laos, currently owned by a Quebecois expat who wants to hand it over to the ‘right’ person, along with, apparently, $10000. It’s all being documented by a US filmmaker, so I presume this will all become a documentary at some point, but if you fancy having the opportunity to give it all up to sell battered copies of ‘On The Road’ to opium-addled gap year stereotypes then this is your DREAM CHANCE. There’s a $50 entry fee, FYI, which makes me think the current owner’s got this figured out pretty well.

• NYC Taper: An INCREDIBLE resource, this, providing recordings from recent New York gigs. It tends towards the hipster indie end of the musical spectrum, fine, but the archive here is astonishing and rewards careful perusal.

• 1001 Roguelikes: Browser-based roguelike game which you will enjoy if that sentence means anything to you and which if it doesn’t you can probably skip.

• Seedship: A lovely little story game in which you play the AI in charge of a ship full of colonists fleeing Earth for a new home; you play through as you attempt to find another planet to inhabit, with decisions you take during the playthrough shaping the evential fate of the civilisation you eventually create. Short playthroughs – about 5 minutes a time – which leave you with a lovely set of persistent stories and imagined worlds at the end. Gorgeous, really, I can’t  recommend this enough.

• The D1ck Code: This was EVERYWHERE over the weekend, so apologies if you’ve seen it – if not, though, ENJOY! The D1ck Code (sorry for the silly spelling, but I don’t have enough readers to absolutely ignore firewall compliance) is designed, apparently, to enable men to share information about the size, shape and, er, ejaculatory performance of their wang without having to go so far as to share a photo or video. Which, er, is all well and good, but I’m not sure that people share pictures of their cocks (ach, FIREWALLS BE DAMNED and screw the reader numbers) for purely informative purposes. Ah well. You can obviously use this for WHATEVER reasons you like, but I think it would be a fun way for teams of girls to speculate as to what THEY think the penises of their male colleagues look like. Go on, live a little!

• Words Hurt: Yes, OK, it’s ANOTHER single-serving site for a music video. BUT this one’s all interactive and the branching narrative works really, really well, and I like the interface and the song’s actually pretty cool, and there’s quite a lot of cool UX/UI stuff with the controls that you could rip off, so CLICK THE LINK.

• The Reddit Bongo Categorisation Motherlode: Finally this week, there is SO much wonder here. This is a Wiki featuring some 10,000 subreddits, ranked by number of subscribers, all about sex. Whether it’s places where people share clips and gifs, or images, or just chat, this is one of the most incredible examples of rule 34 I have ever seen. Technically SFW until you click into the Subreddits (though obviously there are some BAD WORDS on the page) the joy here is in scrolling down and thinking “What? There’s a whole community for people who are into *that*, and it’s *how* big?!”. The top of the list is pretty vanilla, but scroll down long enough and you start to hit some pretty esoteric stuff. I don’t want to click on ‘predicament bondage’, for example, because it’s too much fun speculating as to what the fcuk it might mean. WONDERFUL, more from an anthropological than sexual point of view (honest, guv, I buy it for the articles, etc etc).

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, HERE’S AN INCREDIBLE SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF HARUKI MURAKAMI’S HUGE JAZZ COLLECTION – ENJOY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Grauniad Highlights: Laughing at the middle-class stereotypicality of the Guardian is a bit easy, sure, but that doesn’t stop this from being funny. Seen in isolation, a headline reading “I ordered 50 tiny tambourines online, then wept” is too, too beautiful.

• Precious Possessions: A small student art project inviting people to submit photographs of their most treasured material possessions along with a short piece of prose explaining why they were chosen. Predictably I love this and got WELL emo when I came across it.

• Relatable Pics of New Labour: Do you know what the Labour Party’s lead in the polls was around this time 20 years ago? 20-odd %. Mental. Anyway, remember the days when they were a credible political force / shake your fists at the people who killed the dream (delete per your personal belief system).

• Dumb Birds: A Tumblr collecting pretty decent sketches of North American birds with insulting captions and descriptions. Silly, but I quite like the futile rage.

• SASJ: A Dutch visual artist studying in London (she doesn’t state her name) has been making one digital work a day since 01/01/15 – this is where she collects them. Lovely, soothing gifdesignwork here.

• Pixels In The Wild: Collecting examples of pixel art and typography and stuff; a potentially useful design resource, maybe.

• Cheeky Mooning: Very gently NSFW, the blog description alone was enough for me to include it: “The number one daily source for cheeky straight lads mooning and flashing their arzes”. Number 1? There’s competition?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Pulitzer Winners: NOt exhaustive, but a decent list of links to some of this year’s winners across various categories. Special mention to this piece on PTSD post-Afghanistan, which is an absolutely stellar piece of journalism and one of the most emotionally-affecting things I’ve ever read about the experience of war.

• American Strongman: Wildly entertaining (and, yes, VERY Foster Wallace-ian (sorry, not a word, I know)) piece looking at the competitive bodybuilding landscape in the US, all oiled and mahogany and MASSIVE, but taking in wider US cultural issues, the Donald, modern masculinity and all sorts besides.

• From Somerdale to Skarbimierz: This is LONG and a bit hard, but it’s very much worth it – ostensibly the story of how Cadbury’s shifted production from the West Country to Poland, this (very, very long) LRB piece sort of morphs into one of the best explanations of how global capitalism and supplychains work, EU protectionism and subsidy and how everyone at the bottom is likely to just keep getting squeezed harder as we dive into the future. Not, as you might have gathered, a hugely uplifting read, but one which will leave you feeling smarter than you were before.

• Notes from a Nuclear Tourist: One of those pieces which, when it was commissioned, probably didn’t feel as teeth-janglingly contemporary as it currently does (thanks, Donald!), this is a look at the people who, should it come to it, have responsibility for actually pushing buttons in the US nuclear control centres. I don’t think I’d enjoy the responsibilty tbqhwym.

• The Guy Has A Point: A really interesting essay looking at the furore caused when the artist who designed the bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange complained that the addition to the area of the ‘Fearless Girl’ sculpture alters the meaning of his work and should be removed. Briefly, the piece attests that the original artist is entitled to the opinion because Fearless Girl was, lest we forget, an advermarketingpr stunt as as such that impacts its status as an artwork. BIG QUESTIONS here, but presented in a thought-provoking and engaging way.

• A Hipster in Syria: This will probably make you quite angry – it certainly did me. The story of Brace Belden, Brooklynite and archetypal hipster, who decided that he wanted to go to Syria and check out some war. Maybe I’m being unfair on him, but the man sounds like a tool.

• The New Hirsts: One of the big draws at this year’s Biennale in Venice is the new stuff from Damien Hirst – this is an excellent overview of it, from high-concept to execution, which also talks to Hirst about his work, the market and the money. I’ve never massively liked Hirst’s work, but the scope and ambition of this stuff is just startling, and I’m a sucker for the imagination behind the backstory (which, if you’re unfamiliar with it, positions the works Hirst’s showing in Venice as salvage material from a shipwreck uncovered by the artist and here displayed for the first time)..

• The First Decade of AR: Timely, this, from Ben Evans, given F8 this week – this is his look at AR so far, how likely we are to be moving towards mass-adoption, and where the tech’s going to go next. I’d be interested to know whether Evans thinks any of this needs revising in the wake of all the Facebook stuff, but in any case this is a smart, as ever, exploration of some of the potential extrapolated consequences of AR getting a foothold within the mainstream.

• The EVE Fanfest: I occasionally post stuff about EVE here – EVE, for those of you unaware, is a heinously complicated virtual spaceworld game, with the most evolved and frankly insane-sounding virtual politics, economy, media, etc in-game – and even though I have never, and probably will never, play the thing, I find its stories endlessly fascinating. Here a journalist goes to its annual fan convention and tries to explain how it all works – he fails, totally, but it’s a wonderful evocation of exactly how seriously its players take this, and the extent to which in a weird way it’s almost a full-scale permanent work of digital performance art (yes, I know, sorry).

• Civil War In The White House: Team-by-team breakdown of the factional wars breaking out in the White House as Kuchner and Bannon (apparently) vie for power behind the scenes. Brilliantly soap opera-ish, but also just a little bit scary – er, lads, SHOULDN’T YOU BE WORRYING ABOUT RUNNING A MASSIVE COUNTRY? Lads?

• Dropped: A wonderful profile of Anthony Gatto, widely acknowledged as the best juggler ever seen, who stepped away from it to, er, run a concrete business. Less about juggling – though there’s quite a lot of juggling, fine – and more about what it feels like to attain mastery of something, how that feels, and why one pursues that status in the first place and why one then bothers carrying on (or not). Brilliant writing, this.

• Aadhaar: I had no idea that India had instituted a universal ID system where everyone is effectively issued an ID number at birth (they have) – this is a really interesting at how it’s working and what it means, and what some of the slightly creepy and Orwellian (an overused term, I know, but really apt in this case) use cases for it might be in terms of social control and the like. Shades of Kafka, too, in the bureaucratic hell that not having a number could unleash upon someone.

• Winning and Losing in Modern China: Fascinating look at the culture of ‘losers’ in China – ‘Diaosi’ is apparently a term used by young men in China to describe themselves. To quote, “they are predominantly men born in the 1980s, the large majority play online games (82.5%), and finally, by self-identifying as Diaosi, it means that they do not see themselves as Gao Fu Shuai (tall, rich, handsome, 高富帅). This seemingly innocuous combination of commonalities—masculinity, technology, and class—has in fact situated these so-called losers as one of the most politically dynamic social forces to have emerged in contemporary China.”

• Ray Davies Speaks: A BRILLIANT interview with Ray Davies of the Kinks, who reveals himself to be a brilliant eccentric and curmudgeon and which leads to one of the most entertaining interviews I’ve read in ages. Regardless of your knowledge of the Kinks or the 60s, this is an excellent read.

• Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia: A brilliant profile of one of modernity’s best-loved literary figures, Atwood’s imagination and writing continue to be exemplary, and, as this proves, she’s got a hell of an eye for a pithy one-liner. I would give my right arm to be able to come up with stuff like this: ““The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect..At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”

• The Donald Trump Style Guide: Oh, McSweeney’s, how do I love thee. This is brilliant and savage.

• The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump: Attempting to get inside the head of the first lady through analysis of the photos she’s posted on Twitter, this is a far better piece of writing than that description would suggest. Very smart, well-written and fascinating on the semiotics of photography both generally and specifically.

• Superbabies Don’t Cry: Finally this week, a wonderful essay by Heather Kirn Lanier about her quest to optimise her pregnancy and how she coped with the reality of her failure to produce a ‘superbaby’. Beautiful and sad and hopeful and I loved it even despite being emotionally barren. Read this, it’s great.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is called ‘Imagining My Man’ and it’s by Aldous Harding, and I love it immoderately. It is a glorious song, and her album’s out soon and you should all buy it. Melancholy beauty ALL OVER THE PLACE here:

2) Next up, though I have NO TIME for Pharrell and not much for Cassius either, this is a hell of a use of splitscreen in the promo for their song “Go Up”:

3) This is by Maier & Erdman and I am going to let them explain it: “The video shows a landscape created synchronously with the music. The generation of the visuals is based on the sound spectrum. The diverse frequency bands have been used to algorithmically define the visual parameters such as geometries, materials and lightings. Through this sonic analysis and spectral decomposition each element and texture of the track has been visually processed. The whole sequence has been created in a procedural way where the definition of every part has been based on mathematical integrations.” It is GOOD:

4) The best 8-bit-style animation I have seen in ages, this – it’s by Mozuya, who I think I have featured on here before, and it’s called LV5:

5) THRASH METAL HIPHOP CORNER! This is H09909S (Horrors, OBVS) with ‘City Rejects’. They are VERY ANGRY YOUNG MEN, and this is very cathartic to blast loud:

6)MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is, lyrically, SO smart – I’m not 100% about the production, but lyrically this is spot-on. It’s by Open Mike Eagle and it’s called “Dark Comedy Late Show”:

7) EVEN MORE HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week is this – look, I know it’s 10 minutes long but I promise you that it really is worth it. I laughed SO MUCH watching this, it really is worth paying attention to and persevering with. The first 50s are a bit NSFW, fyi, but after that it’s pretty vanilla and once you get into the swing of it it is legitimately hilarious, I promise. Anyway, BYE ENJOY YOURSELVES I HOPE WE DON’T ALL DIE IN A NUCLEAR CONFLAGRATION BEFORE I NEXT GET TO SPEAK TO YOU BYE BYE BYE!!:

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LET’S KICK OFF THE MIXES WITH THIS ESOTERIC AND DOWNRIGHT ODD HOUSE-Y MIX BY LORD TUSK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS MOSTLY JUST GLAD THAT PEPSI APOLOGISED TO POOR KENDALL:

• You Can Now Search Stories On Snapchat: Snapchat’s in-app discovery is still a total car-crash when it comes to actually finding people you know, or want to interact with, or indeed anything at all, but they have now introduced the opportunity for users to search among Stories (at least those posted publicly to Snapchat’s ‘Our Stories’ channel); there’s something compelling about being able to cycle through the little human vignettes, and I say that as someone who has as little truck with Snapchat as possible. Of course, we all know what search means, right? AD OPPORTUNITIES! This is going to spin out into bidding to appear top in search for keyword x, and there is NOTHING we can do to stop it. Not that we want to – we love adverts here at Web Curios, and you’d be a fool to think otherwise.

• New ACTUAL Snapchat Ad Offerings: It’s offering App Install ads – that is, targeting at people who the service thinks are likely to install your app – and targeting of people who have previously interacted with one of your ads. Which is all well and good, but there’s still appalling demographic info and the ad units are still violently expensive and, you know, tracking and conversion stuff is at best patchy, but YOU GET TO ADVERTISE AT YOUNG PEOPLE, and, despite the fact that they have no money to actually buy anything, the ad industry continues to fetishise them in a way which, frankly, is a bit creepy.

• Say Hello To Facebook’s ‘M’!: Or don’t – after all, it’s just a Messenger Bot and won’t care at all. This is ‘M’ – the virtial assistant which Facebook has been trialling for a couple of years(ish) now with people in the Bay Area and which was at its inception an odd sort of chimerical hybrid of human intelligence and machine automation but which at its launch to the public is, as far as I can tell, basically a bot version of that fcuking Clippy assistant from mid-90s Word, popping up in your Messenger converstations to suggest Gifs you can include in your chat, or to exhort you to get an Uber or Lyft…obviously the interesting / coming thing here is its suggestion of context-relevant products or services, and how it decides whose offerings to pimp – here’s a thought, do you reckon it will be more likely to recommend stuff from brands or companies that have paid a lot of money to Facebook? NEVER! This is US-only at the moment, but expect it to be rolled out in other English language territories soon; does, er, anyone else find the fact that they just seem to be basically announcing that this will read ALL your conversations on Messenger from hereon in a touch on the creepy side? No? WAKE UP SHEEPLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

• A Free Version of Facebook At Work Is On Its Way: No idea as to when, but worth keeping an eye out for as I still think it has the potential to be a really useful internal comms platform when you remove the steep fees that they charged at launch.

• FB Testing New Newsfeed: Because it’s FAR too hard to have stuff that you don’t necessarily like or care about spaffed in front of your field of vision online, Facebook is testing an alternative Newsfeed, sitting alongside the standard ‘rubbish from people you are friends with and Pages you ‘like’’ version, which will instead feed you ‘interesting stuff we think you will be interested in which comes from Pages you have never actually expressed an interest in’. Yes, that’s right, ANOTHER POTENTIAL AD CHANNEL!. No clear indication at present as to how this might play out – or indeed if it’s ever going to go beyond a test phase – but, you know, it’s ‘news’.

• Facebook Has FIXED Fake News: They haven’t, of course – here’s a novel idea, maybe it behooves the consumer to actually apply some small degree of critical analysis to stuff they’re told rather than hoovering everything up like some sort of bovine infosponge? – but they’s said some stuff about how, you know, they will be CRACKING DOWN on this sh1t. Details are pretty sketchy, and there’s no implication here for advermarketingprdrones, and it’s 726 and I already feel like this is slipping away from me, so let’s crack on and talk of it no more.

• WhatsApp Set To Launch Payments In India: Just FYI really, and a convenient reminder that if you’re working in/on a payments business you’ve got a pretty finite window before the big boys absolutely screw your pooch, so to speak.

• Twitter Has Fixed Harrassment!: HA! NO IT HASN’T! Although accounts without a profile picture won’t have egg avatars anymore, they’ll have generic human silhouettes; which, frankly, didn’t strike me as THE biggest problem with Twitter when it comes to people being vile, but THEY KNOW BEST! (I am increasingly of the opinion that noone at Twitter knows best).

• New Twitter APIs Launched: Look, I’ve never pretended to be an engineer or developer or whatever, so don’t expect me to be able to explain what all this stuff is actually about. There’s stuff in here about being able to do more stuff with DMs, and about them having “launched the Account Activity API, which provides access to real-time events for accounts you own or manage, with delivery via webhooks.” Exciting, eh? God, I am such a dumb marketing drone.

• Businesses Can Now Ask Customers To Share Their Location In DMs: Which, from a customer service point of view, is quite useful if you have physical stores and the like; imagine the easy ability to direct people to their nearest store, or, using it as a way to help breakdown engineers reach people in their cars. Potentially useful.  

• Twitter Lite: Ignore the spelling – this is a new version of Twitter which is designed for people with crappy connectivity. No brand implications that I can see, but I had a play with it and it’s quite a lot smoother to use than the standard app so you might find it worth a look.

• Amazon Does ‘Influencer’ Stuff: This is basically just an extension of the standard Amazon Affiliates programme, whereby anyone can get commission on stuff that gets sold on Amazon through links from their webpage – the difference is this is a slightly shinier version, available by application only to people deemed INFLUENCERS by Bezos and his terrifying drone army. Worth being aware of if you’re trying to use a famous to flog your tat, though no indication as to how long it will take to get to the UK.

• ALL OF THE APRIL FOOL’S GAGS!: Whisper it, but it feels slightly like this year might have seen the beginning of the end – or at least a slight lessening – of the dead-eyed, humour-free adcuntpalooza that has been branded April Fool’s gags. We’re all just too tired and sort of dazed by everything to be able to parse any of this stuff, and frankly we’re being lied to by everyone on an hourly basis and could do without a fcuking biscuit brand adding to the confusion. Anyway, here are all the BRAND LOLS from the US, and here are all the UK variants (I presume PR Week is throwing some shade here with its reference to ‘creative flair’ in the url).  

• What Google Thinks Kids Think Is Cool: The most pilloried thing in advermarketingprland this week until Pepsi happened and buried it under an avalanche of woke, this is Google’s report into what THE KIDS are into in 2017, which cause the Steve Buscemi meme to become so ubiquitous that it really should be retired for a while. It’s worth pointing out exactly HOW bad this is, though – from the title (“It’s Lit!” – is it, Google? Is it?) to the casually-included statistic which suggests that 42% of Gen Z is on Google+ (YES MATE YES THEY ARE), this is a pretty clear example of why you shouldn’t publish a bunch of claims based on a sample size of 1,000.

• That Pepsi Farrago: Look, it’s DONE – but in case you missed it, the Indy’s takedown is very good, as is the New Statesman’s, but both of them pale before the (predictable) brilliance of McSweeney’s. Oh, and in case you missed it, this longread from a couple of months back seems eerily prescient in the light of this sh1tshow.

• Impossible Fortress: From what I can tell, Impossible Fortress is a book which has seen Ready Player One and thought ‘yes, the world needs another one of these so let’s channel every single little bit of fan-fulfilment 80s pop/nerd culture nostalgia into a cash-in tonal ripoff so blatant that it’s almost a touch embarrassing’, but they have made a really rather good 8-bit browser game as part of the promo campaign so all is forgiven.

• The Fedex Soundtrack: Fedex have just officially killed the ‘hey, let’s turn DATA into MUSIC’ thing – you can now turn your FedEx tracking number into MUSIC! Actually I’m being a bit unfair – the site’s pretty, the visualisation of the package’s journey is nicely done and the music’s actually not bad, and there are plenty of cues for users to sign up with the brand thereby making it all TRACKABLE and MEASURABLE and stuff, – but who has ever thought “I want to spend 8 minutes of my life logging on to a website and entering in an alphanumeric string in order to hear some algorithmically-generated plinking based on some logistical data”? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO.

• The Poop Troop: There were yoghurts when I was a kid – and, turns out, also nowadays – which were called ‘Munch Bunch’ and had cheery anthropomorphised fruit mascots all over the packaging. Now imagine if instead of humanoid fruit designed to sell you edible bacteria you were instead confronted with humanoid faeces designed to educated you about chronic idiopathic constipation (CIC) – wouldn’t that be fun? Well IMAGINE NO LONGER, as here come THE POOP TROOP! This is…just amazing, really. It’s basically a series of stickers/gifs which are designed to be used…no, sorry, I have literally no idea as to the use case for this. “Brings to life multiple types of bowel movements and some of the associated emotions with each”, it says! “Use the series to determine treatment goals and have a more productive dialogue with your doctor”. Really? Would you be LESS embarrassed introducing your doctor to ‘Clogged Chris’ rather than saying ‘Doctor, I am having trouble defecating’? Special mention here to whoever thought that it was necessary to add a hashtag to this campaign – I can really see #confrontconstipation being used ALL OVER the web.

NEXT UP, A NICE SUNSHINEY AMBIENT-Y BEACH-FEELING MIX BY DJ ROCCA!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE AND SUGGEST THAT MASTODON IS NOT GOING TO KILL TWITTER, PT.1:

• Mastodon: Right, let’s get this out of the way now – apologies, it might take a *little* explaining. Mastodon is a Twitter clone, whose main selling points are its open sourceness and its straight-up position of banning Nazis. The link there takes you to a list of all the Mastodon ‘Instances’ that are currently live – rather than just existing in one place, Mastodon effectively lets anyone set up their own version of the software which acts both as a local community and one which can link up with the wider ecosystem (to a degree). Pick an instance which is accepting signups and have a play – it works like Tweetdeck used to, is full of people who work in software and advermarketingpr, it already has a parody Trump account on it (why would you do that? WHY?), and its onboarding and explanations make Twitter look like a user-friendly cakewalk. You can read a writeup of it here and here and here – see what you think. Bonus points to any of you who can convince your clients that they need a Mastodon strategy by close Monday.

• Emo Diary ‘05: Tweeting a line at a time from an emo teen’s diary from 2005. If you have ever enjoyed Cringe or things of that ilk you will adore this – come on, how can you not love an account which shares gems like: “24/06/06 megan gets what she fckin deserves when harry disses aidan, seeing as she’s been doing it about my bfs like, forever”? Impossible.

• The Internet Noise Machine: A response to the in-no-way-creepy-or-thin-end-of-the-wedge-ish recent legislation passed by US Congress which “makes it legal for your Internet Service Providers (ISP) to track and sell your personal activity online. This means that things you search for, buy, read, and say can be collected by corporations and used against you.” This site will, at the push of a button, open a new tab in your browser and keep loading up new random websites within it, thereby creating a false internet history to confuse and befuddle the buyers of your data. Which is fine, but personally the real joy in this comes from the strange journey that it takes you on – I could pretty much put this on a big screen and watch it cycle through odd sites and searches forever. Look, it just searched for “Turkey motor section dungeon”, it’s BRILLIANT.

• Moodelizer: Silly but sort-of brilliant, Moodelizer is an iPhone app which lets you add dramatic soundtracks to any video you shoot – there’s a simple synth-style interface which lets you change the intensity and tempo of a series of predefined backing tracks simply by dragging your finger over a little trackpad, and the results (you can play with it on the site) are actually pretty fun (in a dumb way).

• The Great Taxonomy of Cock: Does ‘cock’ present firewall issues? Tbh my slightly inconsistent attitude towards swearing in Curios means that I’m pretty sure that this gets Scunthoroped by most corporate email servers, so I can’t imagine that this will be the particular straw that fcuks the dromedary. Anyway, this is a GREAT visualisation of a whole host of different terms for ‘penis’, arranged by whether they are descriptors relating to purpose, shape or whatever else. You can discover your own favourites, but I’ll wager that whoever referred to it as a ‘bowel starter’ in the late-19thC probably didn’t get much use out of it.

• JellyTank: This doesn’t appear to be a joke, in which case I WANT ONE. Jellytank is ‘coming soon’ – a small fishtank for jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish. Buy one of these, sit it on your desk, fill it with little jellies and watch, mesmerised, as they pulsate around all over the place. I confess to having no idea at all about the morality of keeping jellyfish in a confined space like this, but I’m going to be hugely vertebrate-centric about it and presume that they’re not hugely sentient and as such it’s broadly ok. JELLYFISH TANK FACT – jellyfish tanks should always have curved sides, as otherwise the jellies can get trapped in the corners. I have no idea how I know this.

• DroneClash: This is going to be on TV soon, no doubt. DroneClash is a Dutch project designed to basically do Robot Wars but with drones – it’s going to happen in December 2017, and they’re currently after sponsors; as far as I can tell, participating teams are going to be able to bring a team of drones with them to race and fight, with some sort of additional drone bosses to fight (details are a touch sketchy at present). This sounds simultaneously dreadful and all sorts of fun, and if Craig Charles isn’t fronting a C5 version of this by 2019 I will be most disappointed.

• Make Slogan Great Again: Make your own Trump 2020 campaign poster! Laugh, and try and ignore the terrifying reality of that man being in charge of significant US foreign policy decisions!

• Trump’s Ties: Childish-but-great, this – Tweeting pictures of Donald Trump doctored so that his ties are of kilometric length. Particularly nice because the ‘shopping is actually really good; technical skill elevates the gag slightly (‘elevates’? What is this, Great British Menu? Christ, Matt, sort it out).

• Sounding Gestalts: You know how I said up there that the FedEx thing has killed the whole idea of ‘make music from datasets’? Yeah, I take it back – this is the sound of MOULD. To quote, “by inoculating and documenting the different growth patterns of Yeast, E. coli and Lichen via a large format enlarger (treating the Petri-dishes as photographic negatives)…[a] bespoke grid system is then placed above a petri dish or a select microbial colony, enabling the transcription of growth patterns onto fully chromatic punch card strips to be fed into a mechanical music device such as a grinder organ or music box.” Want to hear the sound of lichen? COURSE YOU DO!

• Diverse UI: A good project compiling user images of non-white people for use by developers who need avatar images to illustrate their social network or whatever. Useful, and generally A Good Thing.

• Lolly: Crowdfunding project which looks like hitting its target – its goal is to produce a 3d microphone which can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, which basically means that anyone will be able to do full 360 audio on the go. If you’re a filmmaker, ASMRtist or just someone who likes the idea of messing around with 360 video and audio, this might be quite useful.

• MeMoji: Look, I didn’t name the bloody thing. MeMoji is an app which lets you take photos of your face (or your friends’ faces) and warp them into human emoji. Which sounded like a rubbish idea when I started typing this but then segued into my imagining what an exquisite troll it would be to make my friend Paul’s face the go-to expression of laughter, say, or mild embarrassment, in all future conversations with him. Try it today with the fizzog of YOUR most shy and self-consious pal!

• World Emoji Map: I think this was an April Fool’s thing by Dark Sky, which provides weather data to developers – you can see a map of the world with, instead of temperatures or wind directions or whatever, emoji overlaid atop it, giving a really quite surreal impression of the world’s general mood – I think the emoji are determined by weather, but as I type the whole of Europe is covered with largely shell-shocked little yellow faces which feels about right, emotionally-speaking.

• Theo Cook: Theo Cook is a very skilled carpenter and craftsman, and his Instagram feed is full of beautiful woodwork. The Japanese Dovetail Joint may well be the most satisfying piece of video I’ve seen all year.

• Defrag Drive C: Emulating the old Windows defragging programme which you used to have to do every now again for reasons that were never made clear to teenage me, and which made a noise like death and took forever. Weirdly nostalgic, and also SO old and arcane looking that you can probably set this to fullscreen and just leave it running while you tell IT that your PC is ‘doing updates’ and slope off to the pub (you’re welcome!).

NEXT UP, SOME LATE 80s/90s HOUSE AND TECHNO COURTESY OF SLIP-D!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE AND SUGGEST THAT MASTODON IS NOT GOING TO KILL TWITTER, PT.2:

• Women When Noone’s Watching: A lovely series of drawings by artist Sally Nixon, depicting women doing stuff alone and unobserved. Mundane, funny, cute, and with a beautifully idiosyncratic art style, these are gorgeous.

• Kate Nash Is Making A Record: I don’t care what you think, Foundations is one of the best singles of the past decade, and she was on Watsky’s excellent Cardboard Castles album, and she’s crowdfunding to do another album without label support and, frankly, I reckon she deserves a tenner. You may do too. BONUS RETRO MUSIC CONTENT: the video for Foundations really reminded me of this CRACKING promo for Plan B’s ‘No Good’, which is still a brilliant clip.

• Cassini’s Greatest Pics: It was announced this week that the Cassini spacecraft, which has been taking pictures of the cosmos for the past 20 years, will suicide itself in September this year as it will finally succumb to Saturn’s gravitational embrace. This is a collection of some of its finest pictures, and they are glorious.

• The Post-punk Motherlode: Literally ALL the post-punk music you could ever want to download, all in one place – there are about 25h of artrock, punk, new wave and the rest here, all zipped and ready for you to snaffle; it’s all free, so it would be practically rude not to sample some of it.

• Vintage Patterns: An amazing collection of vintage sewing patterns – ‘vintage’ in this case meaning ‘more than 25 years old’, which if you do fashion or craft or whatever else might be rather useful and potentially quite fun; if nothing else it might save you from being scalped by some nefarious Brick Lane boutique owner who definitely saw you coming, fresh from your bottomless prosecco Shoreditch brunch (I’m not judging you)(oh, ok, I am).

• Elicia Edijanto: The Instagram feed of artist Edijanto, whose black and white watercolours are rather beautiful I think.

• Birth Photography Competition 2017: I wasn’t expecting much here – I mean, there are only so many pictures of purple, wrinkled, squinting homunculi cradled to a sweating parent’s chest that anyone need ever see, right? – and then I clicked and realised that these were perhaps slightly more interesting; fine, there are a few standard ‘mother and child post-partum’ shots, but there are also quite a few which show slightly different sides to childbirth (namely, the screaming) – the winning photo is stunning, and there are dozens of hugely impressive shots here. Even for someone who keeps telling himself he’s getting a vasectomy for his next birthday, these are really rather incredible.

• Joycestick: An interesting project looking to create an interactive, explorable 3d world inspired by Ulysses; it’s still in development so the site’s mostly explainers and proof of concept stuff, but it’s worth a look if you’re interested in how 3d/VR can be used to do experimental narrative stuff, or to assist with the educational / critical experience.

• Cheese Science: A WHOLE WEBSITE dedicated to the science of cheese and cheesemaking, which may not sound thrilling (OK, it’s not) but is exactly the sort of pleasingly niche concern which is Web Curios’ bedrock. “Blue cheese has a unique aroma that is between perfume and cough syrup.” Cough syrup? Really? Anyway, if you’d ever wanted to conduct some in-depth research into the chemical properties of casein, you need look NO FURTHER. Also, how can you not love a site with copy like this: “Want to learn about the chemistry of Fondue? More like FUNdue, am I right?!” EXACTLY.

• Arabic Letters: A beautiful and rather clever illustration project, taking Arabic words and drawing them in the shape of their meanings – so the word for ‘fox’ is drawn in the shape of a fox, etc etc. So lovely, and made me temporarily want to take up calligraphy until I realised who I am and what my limitations are.

• Cedric Grolet: It seems not a week can go by without my discovering another baker on Instagram making cakes so magically Wonka-ish that they look like something from the early bit of the fairtale before the kids get punished for their gluttony by being eaten. This is the feed of French patissier Cedric Grolet, who has raised the bar even higher than last week’s cakes in the shape of actual rocks with his frankly incredible creations. LOOK AT THAT APPLE TART. Bake Off can DO ONE, frankly, I want to see this bloke at work.

• Deep Colour: Input a line drawing, give the software some pointers as to what sort of colours you’d like it to be, and be AMAZED as this website colourises the outline for you. It’s sort of crap, but simultaneously quite impressive when you think that this sort of thing will work perfectly in about a year’s time.

• Hyperlax: A really relaxing site which pulls new videos tagged #hyperlapse on Instagram and plays them one after the other with some slightly crap chill soundtrack in the background. Turn the sound off, put something decent on  in the background and zone out as you travel around the world at several millon miles an hour. This is honestly wonderful – much like the Snapchat Stories discovery thing I mentioned up top, there’s such a wonderful feeling of the breadth of humanity you get from this stuff (sorry, that was uncharacteristically upbeat – NO MORE!).

• Old Cinemas: Vast Flickr archive of photos of old cinemas, the sort which have latterly been transformed from art deco masterpieces of the golden age of movies into dun-carpeted cirrhosis megastores – CHEERS, WETHERSPOONS! There are a LOT of photos here, so if you’ve ever wanted to lose yourself in the ODEON architecture of the 1950s then WOW are you in luck.

• Giphy Says: A new gimmick app from Giphy which, much as it pains me to say so, I am quite in love with the idea of – film yourself talking into your phone camera and this will recognise your speech and produce a gif of you talking with auto-captioning, meaning it has never been easier for you to create a series of looping animations of you telling people to “FCUK OFF” in a variety of entertaining fashions – if that’s not progress I don’t know WHAT is.

• Eyegaze: If you want a slightly creepy glimpse into just how easy it is soon going to be for anyone to create their own digital version of you, which looks like you and moves like you and which they can manipulate in virtual space for whatever purpose they choose, then take a look at this little tech experiment which takes photos of people and makes them reactive so that the eyes follow your cursor around the screen. It’s a small thing, fine, but it looks *just* close enough to real to be really quite unsettling – take a second to let your imagination go crazy on where this sort of tech might end up. Yeah, LOVELY, isn’t it? Christ.

• Actual TV Shows Being Pitched This Week In Cannes: Because we’re all advermarketingprtwats (oh come on, we are), we think Cannes is just the Sorrellfest in June – but NO, there’s the film festival, or course, and MIPIM, and this one which is all about the TV industry. I have literally no idea at all as to whether these are ACTUAL shows being pitched, but I don’t care because they sound so brilliantly awful – it’s quite TV Go Home, and the fact that I can’t tell whether it’s satire or not is in and of itself a touch troubling. Is this real? “Wild Therapy (Banijay Rights): Crisis couples try surviving wilderness w an ex-Special Forces soldier”? Is this? “Sins of the Father (Gil Formats) – children of notorious criminals tell their stories and confront their parents”? God I hope so.

• Reddit Place: This was an unexpected positive news story about internet culture, which isn’t something you can often say – last weekend, Reddit launched one of its occasional experiments (remember the Button?) – this one presented Redditors with a blank canvas on which they were invited to collaboratively draw. A cursory understanding of ‘how stuff works online’ might suggest that this would quickly have descended into a hell of swastikas and crudely-drawn penises, and yet this was the lovely result. This is a rather good piece explaining it a little better, and this is an annotated version of the final image explaining who made each element of it and what they all signify. Honestly brilliant, this – sometimes (and only sometimes, and only for brief intervals) I love the web.  

• http://www.wwwwwwwwwwwww.xyz/: No idea. Really, I don’t understand this AT ALL – it’s a piece of webart pulling stuff from YouTube and letting you create your own audiovisual collages by switching between 30-odd channels at a pace of your choosing and in any order you like, but beyond that I have NOTHING. This would look great on a big screen, but is oddly immersive even on your monitor – have a play, and if you can work out wtf it’s actually about / for then please do let me know.

LAST UP IN THE MUSIC LINKS, AN ACTUAL, HONEST-TO-GOODNESS EMO RECORD, BY SORORITY NOISE! IT IS ACE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Bad Samples: Celebrating the outputs of neural networks and machine learning systems that don’t quite work in the way their creators would like to present to academia (this is pretty niche, I think, even by Curios standards).

• Lewis & Quark: Subtitled ‘Postcards from the Edges of Science’, this is a WONDERFUL Tumblr and a new personal favourite; from recipes produced by neural networks, to bot-created knock knock jokes, this is FULL of brilliant, funny and slightly geeky work which also does a gentle job of exploring how this stuff actually works. Excellent and worth reading.

• Daniel De Bruin: Digital artist and inventor, collecting his projects on Tumblr – includes a frankly TERRIFYING-LOOKING biometrically-controlled ‘thrill ride’, which looks like an absolute horrorshow.

• Marvel 1980s: Marvel comics of the 1980s! Er, that’s it! Lots of really cool illustrations from comics published bitd.

• Death Sentences: Lovely literary snobbery, this Tumblr collects ‘the last phrase you read before abandoning a book’ – marvel at sch prose gems as “With that she moved in between them and shortly was enjoying being the middle layer of a triple layer orgy.” (from this, apparently).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK INCLUDE 5 ACTUAL PROPER MUST-READ THINGS!

• Alexa Is Not Your Friend: Let’s kick off this week’s longreads with this in-no-way depressing look at the emotional connections people are forging with their Amazon voice assistants – hot on the heels of this week’s revelation that people want to fcuk Siri (look, noone wants to fcuk Siri), this piece examines how easy it is to create a bond with something with which we interact vocally, and the role that digital assistants like this could play in helping us cope with the lonely, disconnected futures that all await us.

• I’m With Her: At the time of typing this site’s down, but hopefully it’ll be fixed when I publish this as this is a great piece by the designer behind the Hillary 2016 campaign logo – you probably don’t remember, as, well, it was ages ago and quite a lot of other stuff’s happened since then,  but when it was launched it was widely ridiculed as being simplistic and childlike; over time, though, it was adopted by her supporters and became an instantly recognisable – and hugely flexible – piece of design. The author’s explanation of how it felt to be the person who created it and watched it go out into the wild is honestly fascinating.

• My Fully Optimised Life: Yes, ok, so making fun of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop and all that stuff is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it doesn’t mean it can’t also be very funny (the smoothie bit alone is worth the click).

• Computer Moves: Despite being whatever the opposite of a chess savant, I am increasingly drawn to reading longform articles about it; there’s so much interesting stuff around the edges of the game, not least the manner in which it’s possibly the field in which AI/human collaboration is most advanced. This piece looks at how AI in chess currently works, and explores (though perhaps not in as much depth as I’d like) how, despite the absolute dominance of AI in matches against humans, a human/AI combination will nearly always beat a pure AI opponent. Slightly reassuring, insofar as there’s hope that the machines may find some use for us in the future.

• Breaking the Seal on the Kayfabe: If you’re not familiar with the term ‘kayfabe’, here. Got it? GREAT! This is a brilliant article by a woman who had never previously watched wrestling experiencing the hallucinatory madness that is Wrestlemania for the first time and recording her impressions. Very funny, totally confusing, quite odd, and proof that WWE is basically ‘Days of Our Lives’ in tiny pants.

• The Emotions of London: Hugely geeky but rather wonderful academic paper which analyses novels set in London from the 19thC onwards and maps how they depict the city and their characters, plotting where gothic vs historical novels are set, how ‘happy’ characters are depending on where they’re said to live…I would LOVE to see a whole website dedicated to this sort of analysis, should anyone have a whole bunch of time and money they can devote to creating one.

• The Style of the Decade: An interesting NYT piece on female fashion in the second decade of the millennium, which posits that the defining aesthetic trend of this 10-year period in women’s fashion is the covering up of the female form, with a move away from visible flesh towards a slightly more androgynous silhouette, and the idea being that this is the result of a general Western trend towards female rejection of the male gaze.

• Sequoias: A lovely piece, again from the NYT, on the frankly MASSIVE sequoia trees of California. Will make you want to get on a plane to the West Coast and hug one – if you have never been, add it to your list of ‘stuff I would like to see before the world becomes too fcuked and we are all living underground’ as these things are INCREDIBLE. Also, lots of them are in a park called ‘Muir Woods’ which when I visited my dad out there when I was very small made me feel SUPER important, which is a small personal detail about which none of you will care but of which I was just reminded and got all misty-eyed about.

• What’s In Your Spank Bank?: A bunch of YoungTwitterJournoCrowd writers wax lyrical about the weird things which they crack one off to. There are a couple of excellent pieces of writing here, and fair play to them for not using aliases – in particular Carl Anka, whose Google results will forever reveal that he once joined a ‘no wnking’ community on Reddit. Fair play, Carl, fair play.

• Tony Hawk Teaches Me How To Olly: Sadly not actually ME – had it been I would probably still have been surgically attached to Mr Hawk’s ankle, begging him “PLEASE BE MY FRIEND TONY” – but instead Kelly Conaboy, whose endearingly silly tale of how she travelled to Tony’s house and spent a few hours with him as he patiently tried to get her to jump on a skateboard is honestly just heartwarming and goofy and fun. I challenge you not to smile whilst reading this, go on.

• Uber’s Dark Patterns: A look at all the tricks and techniques that Uber uses to keep its drivers driving – mainly using the sort of UX/UI tricks that app and videogame designers have used for years to trigger the ‘just one more play!’ impulse and keep you jabbing at the Skinner box. Notable not for the fact that it happens – after all, this shouldn’t really be news to anyone and it’s not like we thought Uber *wasn’t* a deeply sinister corporation with the morals of a sexually voracious tomcat – but more that we don’t realise that 90% of service providers and brands use stuff like this ALL THE TIME to a greater or lesser extent. Bear this stuff in mind next time you’re on Amazon, is all I’m saying.

• Cars & Second-order Consequences: Very smart piece by Ben Evans exploring some of the broader economic and social outcomes that might be engendered by the advent of self-driving cars. Made me feel REALLY stupid, not least as I hadn’t thought of any of this stuff myself – the points about the knock-on effects on jobs in retail, manufacturing, etc, are all hugely relevant and you ought to read this if you have even a cursory interest in futurology and stuff.

• Fcuk You And Die: Something Awful is one of the weird, semi-forgotten places where internet culture as we know it all began – this is a great oral history of the site, featuring interviews with Rich Kyanka who founded it and who is responsible for some of the funniest things I have ever read online, as well as several other contributors including @fart and other WEIRD TWITTER icons. It’s worth noting that these people, who all presided over a site where some really pretty reprehensible stuff got posted, are collectively of the opinion that ‘the web’s a really horrible place these days’, which, fine, might just be old men shaking their fists at the newfangled motorcar contraptions, but gave me slight pause for thought. BONUS SOMETHING AWFUL! Edward Penishands, still making me cry with laughter a decade on, and the terrible story of Swap.avi and why it’s not really OK to laugh at stuff like 2G1C.

• A Lexicon of British Comedy Writing Terminology: You’ll need a passing familiarity with the UK comedy scene to really get the most from this, but see whether you like this and then click or don’t: “Jazz Trumpetry – the extra, unneeded punchline that comes after the punchline you should’ve finished a sketch or scene on. It comes from the Brain Surgeon sketch which the Dawson Brothers wrote for Mitchell and Webb. The original draft was road-tested at (they think) London’s tiny Hen and Chickens theatre, where they had a joke where a rocket scientist comes in and says “Brain Surgery? Not exactly Rocket Science.” Big laugh. But they’d written an extra line after that, where a Jazz trumpeter comes in and finishes his line with “Rocket Science? That’s not exactly Jazz Trumpetry.” It tickled them to write it, but at the test out night, no laugh at all. So Jazz Trumpetry was cut from the final sketch that got on air – and ever since, has been the Dawson Bros’ shorthand for misjudged bonus punchlines. “

• Love in the Time of Cryptography: Another week and this would have been my best-of pick, but it’s SUCH a strong collection that it’s been beaten into 5th place. Still a GORGEOUS piece of writing by Quinn Norton about her relationship with her reserved, geeky and super security conscious foreign partner, and how it developed alongside encrypted conversations between them. Really very lovely indeed.

• Bringing it Back Up: Anorexia and blindness and parents and control all mixed up in this beautiful piece by Ethel Rohan. Superb writing here.

• Confessions of a Watch Geek: I have wanged on enough about how good Super Sad True Love Story is that you should all have read it by now and should therefore all be excited to read a new essay by Gary Shteyngart – this is about his middle-aged watch obsession, how he became a collector and an obsessive, and how, to quote the piece, “In a society hopeless and cruel, the particular and the microscopic were the only things that could still prove reliable”. Brilliant.

• Boys: This is absolute virtuoso stuff – tightly structured with a stylistic tick which could be considered a gimmick were it not so successfully realise, this essay by Rick Moody is about two brothers growing from childhood to adulthood, their relationships with each other and their parents and the world around them. It’s rare for prose to read so poetically, but this is wonderfully lyrical.

• Out Line: Finally though, THE BEST THING IN HERE THIS WEEK. No question – if you didn’t see it on Twitter on Wednesday, please do click this. Get a cup of tea and enjoy what is possibly the best piece of (ever so slightly) interactive fiction I have ever read – not only is it a great piece of writing, but the way in which the form and function work together left me on the floor. It’s so, so good, and I really can’t recommend it enough.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is called ‘Reliquary’ and it’s by Pivovar, and I love the CGI in the video as well as the skittery percussion:

2) Next up, this is by Greta Isaac, it’s called ‘You’, her vocal is great and I want gifs of all the faces of the people in this as they are just SPLENDID:

3) Dante’s Tail is a NEW SHORT BY PIXAR! Well, that’s a bit grandiose – it’s more of a trailer for their next full-length film called ‘Coco’, but it’s a cute little vignette and the dog has a GREAT spastic face, 12/10, great doggo:

4) This is the new one by Bjork, called ‘Notget’ – you know what it’s going to sound like, it’s Bjork, but even if you’re not 100% charmed by her electropixie stylings this is worth a wathc for the excellent Lawnmowe Man-ish visuals alone:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Featuring Scrufizza, Mikill Pane, Dream Mclean & Al, the Native, this is called ‘Drumroll Please’ and sounds like a bunch of grime MCs going over the soundtrack to ‘Whiplash’, which is exactly as good as it sounds (no really, this is excellent and the production is huge imho):

6) Finally this week (sorry, time has been TIGHT), an absolutely brilliant and VERY ODD animation about ‘love and regicide’ by Felix Colgrave called ‘Double King’. Enjoy, and HAPPY EASTER PLEASE TRY NOT TO GET DIABETES FROM ALL THE CHOCOLATES OR TO GET CRUCIFIED BY THE ROMANS!:

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SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH KYLE MCLACHLAN’S SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF TWIN PEAKS-THEMED TRACKS? YES, YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH PROBABLY WOULD PAY FOR TWEETDECK TBH, WHICH SPEAKS TO A SORT OF DEEP-LEVEL ADDICTION I DIDN’T KNOW I HAD:

• Facebook Live From Desktop Now…Er…Live: It’s one of those weeks where I’m going to have to report on the launch of features that were trailed a few weeks ago, because this is how the tech news cycle works these days. Isn’t it fun? Anyway, we can all now SPEKE OUR BRANES live from the comfort of our own Cheeto-encrusted chair of choice, as Facebook this week rolled out the ability to stream live from desktop. Will be interesting to see how this develops, and whether it makes any inroads into Twitch’s territory (the lack of inbuilt payments means Twitch is probably not to worried right now) and how quickly the Mail starts frothing about the bongo possibilities this affords. I also reckon that each of you knows one person who, though you and they don’t yet know this, are going to use this feature as an opportunity to go LIVE at any opportunity to offer their own blistering HOT TAKE on news and current affairs to their ‘friends’. It’s going to be so great.

• Reactions Come To FB Messenger: Yes, this was trailed too. Sorry. Anyway, this is now live and, as predicted, appears to basically be a wholesale lift of features from Slack. Nothing specific for brands here at the moment, but I quite like the idea of using this to determine the course of conversations – why not treat your next interaction with a group of people on Messenger as an elaborate ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game whilst keeping it a secret from your interlocutors? Each time someone reacts to something you write with a ‘Love’ reaction, say, bring your conversational tone one step closer to ‘murderous rage’, just for LOLs!

• FB Awards 2017 – Nominations Open: In case you want to win a metal balloon, pace Koons/Kapoor, and the envy of advermarketingpr people around the world. They have NEW CATEGORIES this year, based on the effect your work had on consumers – click that link and die inside a little when you realise they have had to explain the categories as though everyone likely to be reading it has an IQ in double figures. “Love – This is the work that made us fall in love with a brand”. Oh God, everyone thinks people like us are stupid, don’t they?

• Twitter Considering Premium Tweetdeck: I think this isn’t a bad idea actually. Twitter is currently asking a test group of users whether they’d pay for an upgraded version of Tweetdeck (doesn’t actually sound that upgraded at all tbh, but hey ho) and exactly how much they’d be prepared to fork out. I’d pay – Tweetdeck basically underpins the fiction that I know how to do my (any) job – as would journalists and other advermarketingpr drones like me; it’s not enough to unfcuk the business in one fell swoop, but it’s certainly a good way of driving regular income. Although if you try and charge me $20 a month, I’ll…I’ll…well, almost certainly acquiesce, but grudgingly.

• Periscope Broadcasts API: All of the fancy LIVE Api multicamera tech wizardry now on Twitter! Great! Not 100% certain why anyone would choose Twitter as their go-to platform of choice for a LIVE given Facebook hammers them on reach, but what do I know (as ever, rhetorical)?

• You Can Now Save Livestreams On Instagram: Erm, not much more to say on this other than it’s only the broadcaster who has the option to save the file; obviously useful should you want to reuse the video on other platforms after the fact.

• Instagram Trialing Letting Users Book Through The App: This could be quite big and DISRUPTIVE (can everyone please, please stop saying this?) – no suggestion as to when this might come to pass, but the option to book, say, restaurants through Instagram is a pretty big deal when it comes to marketing destinations.

• Instagram Launches 2FA: So, er, turn it on. There are also a few other feature announcements in here – users will soon start to see some content in the feed not automatically displaying on scroll – this will be stuff that has been flagged by other users, and verified by Instagram, as ‘sensitive’ (no, me neither) and as such only viewable by choice rather than by default (following another day in which Twitter users continued to erroneously believe that I, and others like me, really wanted to have pictures of a human torso pinned under the wheel of a double decker waved in front of their faces, I can sort of get behind this). Oh, and this, too, which tweeness is so appallingly emblematic of Silicon Valley’s bland tech utopianism that it has made me REALLY annoyed and it’s only 714: “On March 25 and 26, tens of thousands of Instagrammers all over the world will come together for the Worldwide InstaMeet 15 to share their stories and spread kindness in the world. You can find an InstaMeet near you or spread kindness by leaving an encouraging comment, giving an inspiring person a like or sharing a message of support with a friend.” Insagram is about FOSTERING KINDNESS and in no way about selling you things. HONEST.

• YouTube Statement On Improving Brand Security: Says nothing other than ‘we’re working on this’. One of the more interesting things about this whole story, imho, is that it points out one of those very weird areas where, despite the vast might of both Google’s computational power and the brains of its workforce, actual people are better than machines at picking out THE BAD STUFF – as poor, embarrassed, bongo-addicted Ben Evans pointed out, pulling down copyrighted material is relatively easy (“does the audio match what’s in our database? Yes? PULL IT!”) whereas determining whether a piece of content is allied to, or inciting, hate or extremism is a little tougher for a machine to determine.

• YT Annotations Are No More: A slightly sad farewell to afeature which sort of defined the early YT aesthetic – you will no longer be able to enjoy the sudden, unbidden pop-up of an oddly-coloured ‘SUBSCRIBE BELOW’ box, or watch a YouTuber pointing into space at a suddently appearing message linking to their commercial sponsor or whatever. Except you sort of will, because all the features (including the ability to create branching narratives, etc, which annotations afforded) are all supported by YT cards anyway. As you were, then.

• Google Posts Extended to Museums, Teams, Etc (In The US): Google Posts were, you will doubtless recall, launched last year and effectively acted a little as a changeable pinned Tweet at the top of Google search which famouses could set up to share LATEST NEWS with fans searching for them. This is being extended, in the US and Brazil, to sports teams, cultural institutions and, in the case of Brazil, musicians – this will be global eventually, so, you know, GET READY.

• LinkedIn Introducing Trending Storylines: This is a rejig of the LinkedIn newsfeed, whereby it will pull out popular stories from across the network and present them in a ‘Trending’ tab on the app; you can use HASHTAGS to JOIN THE CONVERSATIONS. Great! Absolutely no details whatsoever on what the eventual options are going to be for brands to force themselves into the top of this new, exciting information curation EXPERIENCE via the injection of LOTS OF MONEY, but give them a few weeks.

• Medium To Offer Premium Service: Now you will be able to pay a small fee to access some fairly rubbish-sounding stuff – EXCLUSIVE CONTENT (what, you mean more endless platitudes from the VC/founder community about how awesome everything is and how the relentless march of global capitalism can only be A Good Thing and by the way do you know how successful and alpha I am? THANKS!) and offline reading lists and new features (unclear what). HM.

• Google Data Studio: Potentially useful service, this, which lets you produce reports on your Google Data (analytics, adword performance, etc) which then automatically refresh – basically custom Google data dashboards. Dull, but some of you might find it helpful.

• Apple Launches Clips: Sort of their own Snapchat-type thing, except it’s no social element – this just lets iPhone users create Story-type content (video, stickers, drawings, effectszzzzzzzzzzzz…you know the drill by now) which can then b pushed out to all other social platforms. Quite a smart idea – rather than attempting to compete, this is simply providing a high-end content creation tool which is platform agnostic and, if the output’s half-decent and the cool kids pick it up, make iPhones a Thing To Have so you can use it too.

• Meet Walter: A new Alien film is coming. This may or may not excite you; I couldn’t possibly comment. This is one of the doubtless myriad web promos for it, introducing the Leyland android Walter (the Fassbender character from Prometheus). It’s pretty but shallow, presenting various android features and letting you click some stuff, but the bit where you click ‘Reserve’ to attempt to buy one broke my heart slightly – you are presented with a message in dead-eyed legalese which states: “Walter is a fictional character in the film Alien: Covenant. By clicking the Connect button, you will not receive an actual “Walter”. Fox may place ads about your fictional “Walter” tailored to you on certain websites that you visit. By clicking the check box and proceeding, you agree to receive email updates and offers from Fox” YEAH THANKS FOX FOR KILLING MY IMMERSION IN YOUR METICULOUSLY-CONSTRUCTED SCIFI UNIVERSE. Christ.

• Great Britain Experience: Joint work by Expedia and Visit Britain showcasing some of the GREAT THINGS around Britain, this is just a bunch of promo videos, let’s be clear, but the tech which syncs them all together seamlessly as you, the user, switch between London, Manchester, Cornwall, Wales and the Highlands is really rather nice – you can’t see the joins at all.

• Tech Nation: This is the website accompanying the recent Tech City UK report into the state of the tech industry; it’s not hugely exciting, fine, unless obviously you work in UK tech or policy (and even then tbh), but this is a textbook example of how you can launch a piece of research with a decent digital version alongside it. All the graphs are individually shareable, the interface is nice, it’s reasonably shiny but not too much so…look, you may not be impressed by this, but I promise you that there are still more organisations such as this who think that creating infographics from a report is DARK VOODOO, so let’s applaud those who are at least a little more advanced in their thinking.

• Gucci Memes: This is sort of genius. Not all brands have a right to play (oh my God, WHAT did I just type? Sorry) in this space (OH GOD SORRY), but Gucci do – this project, where they work with artists to create memes featuring Gucci products, nails the aesthetic and the tone perfectly. STRONG work, and if you’re fascinated by the bleeding between high fashion / art and the edges of web culture then this is all sorts of interesting.

NEXT UP, JOE ‘HOT CHIP’ GODDARD’S RECENT BBC ESSENTIAL MIX WHICH IS SO SO GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH APPRECIATES YOUR SENTIMENTS OF POSITIVITY AND SOLIDARITY BUT WHICH IN NO WAY WANTS TO READ YOUR 20-TWEET ‘THREAD’ ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK AND FEEL BECAUSE, WELL, YOU ARE NOT THE STORY HERE, PT.1:

• Name Of The Year 2017: One of my very favourite annual traditions, along with European Tree of the Year (on which note, shout out Oak Józef, worthy winner of the 2017 title), is the Name of the Year contest, which plucks the best names found in the media worldwide over the past year against each other in a public vote to determine which is the BEST name. The site’s a bit horrible, fine, but scroll down a bit and ponder whether to cast your vote for Shaft Cubit or H King Buttermore III, Bonjovi Hardeman or Cherish Bloodgood. Imagine being called ‘Cherish Bloodgood’ – WHAT must life be like?

• Resist Bot: When I first saw this I thought ‘wow, what a clever use of bot tech’, and then someone I know in the US tried it and told me it doesn’t seem to work (or at least didn’t earlier this week). Still, a smart concept – an SMS bot which will take text messages a user sends it and turn those into letters sent to the user’s congressperson – easy, simple, and avoids the pro-forma letter thing which apparently is getting less and less cutthrough in US campaigning terms.

• Collective Nouns for Pokemon: In case you’d ever had a burning desire to know what one might want to call a bunch of Magikarp (‘a piteousness’, apparently).

• This Bot Kills Fascists: A Twitter bot which tweets out pictures of stuff, overlaid with the text “X KILLS FASCISTS”. Which, when written like that, sounds rubbish and sort of is, but some of these made me laugh this week which, for much of it, has been no mean feat.

• Tinder Diaries: Ah, men. Men! Lads! What must it be like, I wonder in my more idle moments, to be an attractive woman on Tinder? Or indeed any woman, frankly? Well, curious men of the web, we can now lift at least some of that veil of ignorance thanks to artist Audrey Jones, who in this project creates small drawings illustrating some of the excellent conversations you can have with strangers on dating apps. I would buy these as prints as there is some GOLD in here. “Will you bring me BBQ?”, Audrey asks one potential suitor; “I will bring you whatever you want…”, he replies, “…Including my huge cock”, there conveniently failing to check whether said ‘huge cock’ falls within the Venn Diagram of ‘stuff Audrey wants’. Lads!

• Violence Against Women Online Survey: Amnesty is doing research into the violence experienced by women online, across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit an elsewhere, and is looking for women who will share their experiences as part of the work. I hope you don’t you have anything to contribute, but I imagine most women reading this probably do.

• Breaker: If you listen to a lot of podcasts this might be an appealing (iOS-only) app – Breaker effectively adds a social layer to podcasts, letting you share what you are listening to, browse others’ selections, discuss whole pods or individual episodes, that sort of thing. Oh, on which note, if you’ve a favourite UK podcast you should vote for it in the UK Podcast Awards.

• Oree: I thought this was a joke, but, turns out, NOPE! Ever wanted a wooden keyboard or trackpad or speaker? No, I thought not, and yet here we are. Still, if you aspire to the most Instagrammable of Instagrammable existences, if your home is basically a series of stills from a scandi-inspired Airbnb listing, then a) you might like this; and b) I’d like you to stop reading now, please.

• Elbow: This is sort of brilliant, at least from a design point of view. Do any of you old people remember, in the dying days of the cassette tape, someonereleasing a really small Walkman called the ‘Pebble’ or somesuch, which had a really strange design which left much of the tape casing exposed? I can’t find any evidence of it in the 30 second cursory Google I just did, so perhaps it was a fever-dream. Anyway, this is like that (thing that I just failed to adequately describe and which may not have in fact existed – God, I am good at this!) except even more minimalist – Elbow’s a prototypical tape player which just clips over the cassette itself, much like one of those clips your mate’s mum (who was really organised and had a freezer full of these) used to secure freezerbags. It looks ACE and scifi, despite the absolute pig’s ear I’ve made of this writeup, and if you’re a certain type of hipster you will salivate all over it. Details on if and when it will be available are sketchy, but there’s a survey you can fill in to register your interest so maybe fill it in and hope.

• Two-Inch Brush: After another week which can charitably described as ‘a touch stressful’, this is a very timely website. Two-Inch Brush collects all of everyone’s favourite fuzzy-haired ASMRtist Bob Ross’s painting videos in one place – all 403 of them. I don’t imagine that there’s anyone reading this (ha!) who hasn’t experienced the soothing, soothing sounds and visuals that characterise Ross’s work and which have made him a legitimate internet legend, but, on the offchance, put some headphones on and give one of these a go. Do let me know if you discover yourself to have ASMR as a result.

• Niles: Another really smart bot idea, Niles is a Slackbot which ‘learns’ – that is, you can add to its knowledge corpus through the Slack interface, as well as drawing from a variety of datasources such as Salesforce, Google Drive, etc. This is potentially really rather powerful, and is again a really smart way of using pseudo-AI for practical, tedious drudgery.

• Partnership On AI: An organisation looking at the development of Artificial Intelligence (running the gamut of that increasingly imprecise turn) from an ethical / moral point of view. To quote, “the organization will study the potential societal impact of AI systems, and develop and share best practices. We will also create working groups for different sectors, for example healthcare and transportation, allowing us to conduct research on the specific AI applications in these different sectors of the economy. We will also develop educational resources and host open forums to widely disseminate information about the latest topics in the field and support an ongoing public discussion about the technology.” This is one of the most interesting fields in any discipline in the world right now, imho.

• A(irport)PI: Sorry, that is a truly APPALLING ‘joke’. Anyway, this is Schiphol airport’s (lovely, lovely Schiphol) APIs, all exciting and open and AVAILABLE. Except at the moment the only thing there to play with, and it’s pretty unlikely that any of these will let you do anything TOO wacky, but still, it’s an interesting idea from both an openness and a data security point of view; although the range of interesting products and services that one can imagine being built on something so ostensibly simple as the flight times is already pretty vast, so the opportunities here are rather large I think.

• Passive Aggressive Art Gallery: Artist Justin Cousson has been gently pointing out instances of inconsideracy in public spaces by setting up gallery-style notes and prices around them – so a roommate leaving a spoon in the sink becomes “”Sour Cream-Covered Spoon Left In Sink Before Leaving Town For Four Days,” mixed-media (metal, porcelain, sour cream, filth), 2017 – $3400 – SOLD” You get the impression that Cousson goes through roommates pretty quickly, but this is rather funny.

• Japanese Animated Film Archives: This is an incredible trove of vintage Japanese animation, covering the history of anime and more besides, presented by what I am guessing is the Japanese equivalent of the BFI. I say I am guessing as it’s all in Japanese, meaning there’s a very random quality to the browsing which I quite like (there’s an English-language version coming in ‘a month or two’, so if you’d prefer to know what the hell it is you’re looking at then bookmark this and wait, patiently).

• The Facebookuette Cube: Odd, this – a printable PDF which lets you create a decision die which will help you determine how you should respond to comments on Facebook (if at all). This is EXACTLY the sort of thing I expect to see at Frieze in October – the aesthetic, the copy, the typeface feels VERY artworld of the now to me, which probably means it’s actually ‘artworld of 2014’, but wevs.

• Animista: One for the coders amongst you, this site lets you create CSS animations on demand, which, given that as far as I can tell CSS stuff is pretty close to witchcraft at the moment, is useful.

• Yesterdaynite: Instagram page of US artist Alim Smith who’s filling his feed with brilliant cubist-style images of black memes for US Black History Month. The style on these is ACE – see how many YOU recognise!

• Untitled Serif: Yes, it’s a font, but I LOVE the way it scales when you scroll (look, just click it, it’s beautifully done).

• Catching A Real Ball In VR: This is, admittedly, not the most compelling video you will ever see, but the tech is quite remarkable – this is Disney messing about in their VR labs and creating a setup where a ball can be caught by someone wearing a VR headset – meaning that they have been able to track the object’s movement in physical space and render it in virtual space in realtime, with enough accuracy to enable the user to catch the object in virtual and physical space simultaneously. Which, come on, is AMAZING. If nothing else, your future 5-a-side games will be VASTLY more exciting when you can play them in a VR Maracana with 100,000 screaming fans.

• With Replies: Tweet song lyrics at this bot and it will tweet the next line back at you. Except it didn’t get Momus, always my go-to for ‘how obscure can I go with this’ testing. Still, a cute idea.

• Pixelart Baseball Card Paintings: I am including this not because I have any care for baseball but because I really, really want to see this done for football stickers – I want Panini to commission this for next year’s World Cup. Come on, those would be GREAT (as indeed are these, by artist Robert Otto Epstein).

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH THE NOW-TRADITIONAL TORRENT OF NEW MUSIC FROM SXSW TO WHICH I ONCE AGAIN WASN’T INVITED THIS YEAR? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH IN CONTRAST TO LAST WEEK IS SOMEWHAT EMBARRASSED BY THE PAUCITY OF ‘NEWS’ HERE DISPLAYED BUT WHICH TRUSTS YOU’LL APPRECIATE THE FACT THAT THERE’S LESS OF THIS STUFF TO SCROLL PAST:

• You Can Now Watch The Facebook Messenger Snapchat Stories Clone On Desktop!: So, er, yes, let’s be clear, there’s something of a dearth of STUFF HAPPENING this week; you’ll get what you’re given and LIKE IT. In the spirit of this ‘quality of news really is NO BARRIER’ ethos, here’s the ‘news’ that you can now experiment with the FB Messenger ‘Day’ stuff, announced last week and as featured in Curios a mere 7 days ago. The main takeaway from this is a) oh god if you thought that Instagram Stories were dull you have seen NOTHING yet, please can we stop telling people that they are creative because it is causing me nothing but aesthetic pain right now; and b) literally NOONE knows this feature exists yet in normieland. Whisper it, but perhaps they don’t want it or care. Maybe it’s popular indifference on the part of the lumpenproletariat which will save us from the inexorable tide of Snapchatism. Maybe.

• Facebook Stories Slowly Rolling Out Worldwide: Or, it turns out, maybe not, given that the bloody Snapchat clone stuff on the main app is being thrust at everyone with increasing frequency right about now. Those of us outside Eire will soon have the opportunity to ‘enjoy’ ephemeral video-based content – such larks!

• Twitter Begins To Offer Guaranteed Viewer Numbers On Ad Buys: Were I feeling less charitable than I in fact am (who am I kidding? The amount of charity I feel towards anyone, frankly, at this time of the morning on a Friday is vanishingly small at the best of times, not least when I’m dealing with a hangover), I’d make some sort of gag about how this would provide INCREDIBLE longevity for your ad campaigns based on how long it will take you to reach a set number of people with your on-Twitter pre-roll. To quote, this is “its first guaranteed ad product, which lets brands order a set amount of pre-roll video ads with certainty that they get seen by a target group of consumers”. Cost? The ‘low six figures’, apparently.

• Alternative Universe Nazi Radio: So in actual fact it’s called ‘Resistance Radio’, but I’m pretty sure that my name is better. A promo for the Amazon ‘BUT WHAT IF THE NAZIS HAD WON???’-alternarealityscifi show, this is a site showcasing faux-radio stations from the programme’s alternative universe timeline, with three (or more?) different stations, DJs and musical styles on show. I am a sucker for this sort of worldbuilding, but can’t help look at this and think Amazon were a bit cheap here; the site design’s functional at best, there’s limited effort gone into the interface and it all feels a *little* bit sub-Fallout in execution. Still, er, Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in human history and I am a hungover man in his late 30s writing about stuff on the internet to an audience of bored office workers, so, er, hm, I WIN!

• I Am Major: This is pretty much an object lesson in how you get burned by memes. So this is a promo site for forthcoming Scarlett Johanssen vehicle ‘Ghost In The Shell’, itself adapted from a popular anime from the 90s, which lets ‘fans’ create their own memes based on one of the show’s tropes, uploading an image of their choosing and overlaying it with some INSPIRATIONAL copy – “I am [INSERT EMPOWERING PLATITUDE OF YOUR CHOICE]”, basically. Except the film’s been dogged by controversy since Johanssen’s announcement as the lead, given that, you know, the original was Japanese, set in Japan, and she’s quite evidently very white; you know the way this goes by now. So the site’s basically offered a free, franchise-sanctioned platform for all the HATERZ to create Scarlett-bashing memes pointing out exactly how un-Japanese and whitewashed the movie looks, all in the production’s own officially-sanctioned look and feel – you can get a nice rundown of all the ‘I am a white actor taking work from Asian actors and an example of cultural appropriation’ memes here; the whole thing is simultaneously a funny ‘HA! Fools!’ exercise in Nelson Munce schadenfreude and a microcosmic example of just how exhausting everything is, all the time, everywhere.

• Somebody Else’s Baby: This is a REALLY small thing, but I thought the design of this site which collects Tweets protesting against the recent statement by US Republican Steve King, in which he charmingly stated that America can’t regain its Chimerical ‘greatness’ by letting in ‘somebody else’s babies’, was simple and clean and easy and cheap and just A Good Thing. That’s it.

• The Most Dad Website You Will See All Week: Look, it’s been slow, fine, but I guarantee that you will get a small frisson from this. It’s a site for those massive, fancy, expensive gas barbecues you can buy and it is an absolute MASTERPIECE of slightly macho and yet quite camp overdesign. Listen to the birds chirp as you imagine yourself outside in a garden GRILLING MEATS! Salivate over the 360-degree navigable CGI render of what is, let’s be clear, A FCUKING BBQ! You can just sort of hear a particular type of man ‘hmmm’-ing appreciatively at this site as they mentally prepare themselves for a nice Sunday BBQ hosting the lads and The Wives (you always capitalise The Wife, it’s A Thing). It’s basically the website equivalent of Basingstoke, this.

NEXT UP, HAVE A BEATS&BREAKS SELECTION VIA THE WONDERFUL ‘MUSIC FOR OPEN-MINDED B-BOYS’!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL AT MIPIM THIS WEEK, THE PROPERTY INDUSTRY SHINDIG WHICH TAKES PLACE IN CANNES EACH YEAR AND IS LIKE THE LIONS BUT FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE SELF-AWARE ABOUT HOW BORING THEY AND THEIR JOBS ARE, PT.1:

• Google Family Link: A really clever idea, this; Google’s new attempt to reassure parents that the internet and technology aren’t going to take their children down the road to perdition and penury lets parents apply specific parental controls to individual Google devices, and apply them remotely via their Google account – to quote, “Family Link lets you create a Google Account for your kid that’s like your account, while also helping you set certain digital ground rules that work for your family — like managing the apps your kid can use, keeping an eye on screen time, and setting a bedtime on your kid’s device.” Obviously it’s not going to stop your 13-year-old son masturbating to the point of friction burns to Brazzers, but it may mean that they’re forced to do it on someone else’s phone. So, you know, SMALL WINS!

• Italian Comments: I’m allowed to laugh at this because it’s MY CULTURE (well, my Mum’s, but) so it’s ok. This is an EXCELLENT Twitter feed featuring screencaps of Italians (or, more accurately, the weirdly obsessive second/third-generation food police Italian community) having a go at people on the internet for the lack of authenticity in their food. SO MUCH ANGER OVER TOMATOES HERE.

• Blackout Poetry Generator: This is rather cool; a little browser plugin which generates blackout poetry from any webpage you happen to be on at the time. Results obviously vary, but there’s a certain beauty to the oddity it produces (which suggests that perhaps blackout poetry isn’t in fact, er, very hard or indeed profound, but hey ho) (oh, and on which note, can I just take a moment to plug A Humument which is still by far and away the most interesting and successful variant on this technique I’ve ever seen? Can I? YES I CAN).

• Every Name: I have NO IDEA why this exists, but it does and the web is a marginally better place for it. This is by artist Andrew Venell, and it’s a webpage featuring a seemingly infinite selection of invented names – long names, short names, all obviously generated by some piece of Excel or Markov Chain or whatever (yes, I know, I am misusing that term but FFS) in the back that produces new ones on each refresh. Don’t YOU want to meet Arno Feldmouth and hear his story? Wouldn’t you like to hang out with Lilian Blamechance? This basically made me fall into a 10-minute reverie about the imagined protagonists of the novels I will, thankfully, never write, and is imagination catnip imho.

• LEGO Tape: Such a smart idea, this – not OFFICAL in any way, this is an already-funded Indiegogo campaign for sticky tape which creates a surface on which you can stick LEGO bricks, meaning you can turn any surface into a building opportunity. There are obviously myriad applications for this, but surely one of the greatest is to ensure that your children never leave LEGO bits on the floor ever again. That, or enabling the construction of elaborate LEGO garotte traps across domestic doorways; either/or.

• Before The Flood SeaThingy: Yeah, fine, so this is a promothingy for last year’s DiCaprio-fronted climate change documentary meaning this is both OLD and BASIC, so, yeah, sorry about that; still, it lets you put in any location you like, pulling the resulting Gmap, and see exactly how banjaxed it will be when the temperature rises by a few degrees. Reassuring for me, less so for those of you living in Plymouth.

• Where’s The Jump?: A database of jump scares in horror films, for those of you who want to know EXACTLY where they are and when – or, alternatively, for those of you who want to pick absolutely the most unpleasant film to watch with your twitchy date of choice this weekend.

• Hearmuffs: A pretty basic gag, this, except it doesn’t feel that funny – Hearmuffs are spoof earmuffs for your Amazon Echo which will prevent the device from listening to every single thing you and your family say and logging it on a server somewhere so that Amazon can sell you more things. Except,  hahaha, it’s a joke, hahahaha, and you can’t ACTUALLY buy it and even if you could it wouldn’t work because you can’t stop this now that it’s started and we probably just ought to accept that we’re just a bunch of datapoints, waiting patiently to be mined, trapped inside a slack, meaty prison. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!

• Block The Bully: This is VERY SILLY, but equally sort of A Good Thing; it’s a site which will automatically, when authorised, follow, then unfollow and block Trump’s Twitter account – an entirely cosmetic act of resistance, fine, but equally the sort of thing which you could imagine really getting under his skin. Just think of the reaction should he discover one month that his Twitter following has fallen, or if he becomes the most blocked human on the planet! Imagine the LOLS! Imagine the steely, massed, thermonuclear LOLs!

• Spider Ties: Yes, I know this is just a PR stunt, and yes, it’s a silly gimmick, but equally, LOOK! A tie made from spider silk! I mean, it’s ugly as you like, but still, SPIDER SILK!

• Autonomous Trap: I rather love the idea behind this. Simultaneously, though, I am started to get quite creeped out about how much witchcraft-related stuff I am seeing in 2017, following my confident assertion that the trendhunters’ prediction of ‘NEW WITCHES’ was absolute claptrap. Turns out I know nothing about anything – WHODATHUNKIT?! Anyway, Autonomous Trap imagines how one might use old techniques from the occult to stymie autonomous vehicles in the future – I do love the idea that you might be able to completely fox a self-driving car by pouring salt around it like a slug.

• Charlie vs The World: Friday, yeah, the WEEKEND! The moment you’ve been waiting for to dispose of £60 of your salary in exchange for some lignocaine and a small portion of your self-respect! This is a nicely-designed site which shows you some facts about exactly how bad your occasional weekend gram is for the environment, what with the carbon footprint and all. I am still amazed that noone in London is peddling Fair Trade cocaine; you would CLEAN UP, seriously.

• Cloth Map: A website promoting a hoping-to-be-funded-on-Patreon series in which the presenterbloke (of COURSE it’s a bloke!) travels around the world talking to people about the games they play, and exploring play culture worldwide in documentary style. Absolutely the sort of thing which doesn’t in any way need to exist, but pleasingly pointless and thus worth including. Who DOESN’T want to learn more about Bogota’s Dungeon’s and Dragon’s community? NO FCUKER, that’s who!

• 365 Luncheon Dishes: Turns out I am an absolute SUCKER for old-school recipe books; this one, from 1902, presents a different recipe for each day of the year and is a brilliant culinary time capsule. Fine, I concede that some of the recipes are a touch on the cursory side – I mean, really, WHAT IS THIS? “1½ lbs. of round steak, 2 eggs, salt, summer savory and pepper. Chop the meat fine, season. Beat the eggs well and add to the meat; when well mixed, roll it up closely, put into a dripping pan and bake an hour. To be eaten cold.” – but there are some wonderful oddities here.

• S-Town: NEW TRENDY PODCAST KLAXON! By the people who brought you Serial and This American Life comes, soon, S-Town, which will be momentarily the talk of middle-class media Twitter until the next hot thing comes along. Here’s the blurb – it launches in 10 days, and all the episodes will be released simultaneously thereby making ‘binge listening’ a thing that actual journalists will write actual articles about: “JOHN DESPISES HIS ALABAMA TOWN AND DECIDES TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. He asks a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, sparking a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.” THRILLING, EH?

• Make America Misogynistic Again: Sexist ads from the 20th Century, accompanied by ACTUAL QUOTES from Donald. He’s, er, SUCH a charming man, and these are brilliantly effective (says the pinko liberal).

• The Maps of the CIA: When they’re not listening into us via our white goods, the CIA also do some international work; this is a selection of maps from the last century produced by the CIA and recently published on Flickr, which, fine, can tend towards the specific (ethnogeographies of the central caucuses, anyone?) but are cartographically fascinating and actually quite cool to browse in a weird, Dr Strangelove, military paranoia flashback sort of way.

• Nuclear Test Footage: Continuing the theme of Cold War paranoia, this is a YouTube channel featuring nothing but recently-declassified footage of US nuclear testing. Mushroom clouds as far as the eye can see; an absolute treasure-trove of FUN APOCALYPTIC FOOTAGE for you to play with, should you be so minded.

• Bumpr: Do YOU use a Mac? Do YOU, like the person I was sharing office space with yesterday, fly into a slightly frothy-mouthed rage at the fact that it will make annoying, arbitrary decisions as to which programme to use to open links, files, etc? This is a plugin which offers a really nice solution – hover over any link or file and it will pull up a clickable menu letting you choose how to interact with said thing. Really nicely designed, this – whilst the application’s a bit dull, I concede, the idea behind it is slickly executed.

• Blue China: Photos from China, taken at the point of the day/night cycle when dusk is falling at artificial lights are coming on and everything is imbued with this slightly odd indigo hue, giving landscapes the look and feel of your favourite cyberpunk narrative. The aesthetic here is gorgeous and SO future.

• Supersonic: As we careen recklessly towards a future in which none of us can read or write and our interactions with the world are entirely defined and determined by the operating systems of the machines we’ve designed to coddle us (yes, fine, hyperbole, but), think of this as a small link in our inevitable decline as a species. Supersonic is a Google-developed Messenger app whose gimmick is that it doesn’t have a keyboard; messages are transmitted via text using a text-to-speech interface which transcribes your utterings and sends them to the recipient of your choice, thus obviating the need for fingers. Obviously this is superclever and not A Bad Thing per se, but I am an old man and mistrustful of change.

WHY NOT GIVE THIS SELECTION OF AMBIENTY, LO-FI HIPHOP INSTRUMENTAL MIXES A TRY? THEY ARE REALLY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL AT MIPIM THIS WEEK, THE PROPERTY INDUSTRY SHINDIG WHICH TAKES PLACE IN CANNES EACH YEAR AND IS LIKE THE LIONS BUT FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE SELF-AWARE ABOUT HOW BORING THEY AND THEIR JOBS ARE, PT.2:

• Songsim: I like the outputs of this site even if I confess to being utterly baffled at the explanation of how they’re arrived at. Basically it presents a bunch of songs, visualised as geometric shapes based on their lyrical structure – there’s a whole maths-y underpinning to this which explain how it works but I am far too sleepy to make head nor tail of it. Suffice it to say that there’s something rather wonderfully minimal and 8-bit about its visual renderings of the music; all the outputs are available to download, and I reckon these could make nice posters or tshirts if you’re that way inclined.

• The Sideways Dictionary: A really nice project, both conceptually and in design terms, which seeks to provide easily-understandable definitions of tech stuff (two-factor authentification, say, or cache, or HTTP) explained in metaphor. I love the layout and the interface, and think it could be ripped off for all sorts of other applications with a bit of imagination.

• Joto: I WANT ONE OF THESE. Not enough to actually back the Kickstarter, fine, but enough to blart pointlessly about it on the web. Joto is a connected drawing board thing – basically a whiteboard with a robot arm attached to it, which robot arm will draw stuff on which whiteboard based on inputs from an app. So, say, you could draw a crudely-drawn penis on the app on your phone, and an EXACT rendering of the selfsame crudely-drawn penis would be spaffed out by the robotic arm in my house. AMAZING! Obviously the people behind this are offering all sorts of highbrow applications – allow anyone to draw original art on your walls from anywhere! – but, let’s be clear, this is mainly about the crudely-drawn penis potential.

• The Loving Project: A webart photoproject which takes as its starting point the fact that interracial marriage was only legalised in the US 50 years ago, this presents couples whose marriages would have been proscribed. Combining audio and photography, this is a fascinating exploration of something which is very much still a contentious point in the US in a way in which it’s quite hard to understand in the UK.

• The Disobedience Award: I am glad that this is a thing, but it says an awful lot – none of it good – about how we see the relationship between us and powerful institutions in 2017 that it need exist. Established by MIT, the Disobedience Award self-describes as follows: “The award will go to a living person or group engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for the benefit of society. Specifically, we’d like to call out action that seeks to change society in positive ways and is consistent with a set of key principles. These principles include non-violence, creativity, courage, and taking responsibility for one’s actions. We’re seeking both expected and unexpected nominees. This could include–but isn’t limited to–those engaged in scientific research, civil rights, freedom of speech, human rights, and the freedom to innovate.” I like to think that my continuing efforts to extract maximum pay for minimum effort from everyone who employs me makes me worthy of a nomination, but perhaps you know someone more worthy.

• Archivio Grafica Italiano: A digital archive of Italian graphic design, which is basically bongo for the aesthetes amongst you.

• Gender Equality in Films: Or, perhaps more accurately, not gender equality in films, as this nice piece of research / dataviz by Google demonstrates, showing exactly how disparate representations of men and women in cinema are. There are many excellent (depressing) facts in here, not least the one about horror being the only genre which features more men than women.

• V For Wiki: The latest in the seemingly-neverending list of projects designed to make Wikipedia look a little less rubbish than it ordinarily does; this is an iOS app for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch (ha!) which makes Wikipedia pretty and a little more responsive – it will, for example, pull entries up based on your location, enabling you to bore whoever you’re with with obsessive amounts of trivia about whichever particular street you’re on or the fascinating manhole covers you can see if you ju…wait! Come back!

• Good, Clean Jokes: Your mileage here will inevitably vary, but if you need a bunch of safe-for-kids gags then this Reddit thread delivers. Sadly doesn’t appear to contain my personal favourite, but I’ll leave it here for you by way of small recompense: What’s red and invisible? NO TOMATOES! Yes, quite.

• Make Words Matter: A small project / provocation seeking to make us look at the language we use in the face of adversity – everything is a ‘fight’, a ‘battle’, a ‘war’, with ‘sides’ – and suggesting that perhaps there’s a useful exercise to be done in minimising this type of phrasing. If nothing else, last year’s referendum and the looming horror of Joxit make this worth a passing thought.

• Live UA Map: This is an ugly site, no question, but there’s something bleakly compelling about this world map with STUFF GOING DOWN plastered all over it. As a way of browsing news stories from around the world, I rather like it – even if the overall effect is somewhat akin to having someone standing next to you and repeating a neverending litany of deaths from every single countrty you’ve ever heard of into your ears.

• Pipes: Beautiful photos of massive organs.

• A Ridiculous Timeline Of Star Wars Videogames: I care even less than you do about Star Wars videogames, trust me, but the sheer insane depth of information here present is simultaneously terrifying and…actually, no, just terrifying.  

• Bees and Herring In Red: A YouTube Live stream of a Facebook Live stream of an Instagram Live stream of a Twitter Live stream. I’m sure this is making some sort of point about something, but frankly this simply strikes me as the absolute logical endpoint of this fcuking insistence on turning us all into broadcasters.

• Supermute: Twitter hack which lets you specificy a word or phrase which should anyone you follow on Twitter have the temerity to mention it will result in them being blocked from your account for a week. Arbitrary, and the sort of thing which if judiciously applied could improve your Twitter experience no end.

• Oddity Viz: Like David Bowie? OH GOOD! “Space Oddity – a visual deconstruction, AKA Oddityviz, is a data visualisation project on David Bowie’s Space Oddity by designer Valentina D’Efilippo and researcher Miriam Quick. The project visualises data from Bowie’s 1969 track Space Oddity on a series of 10 specially engraved records with accompanying posters, plus a moving image piece. Each 12-inch disc deconstructs the track in a different way: melodies, harmonies, lyrics, structure, story and other aspects of the music are transformed into new visual systems.” So there.

• The Dating Game: Back in the day when Google Glass was still looking like it might be a thing, I remember writing something on here about how there was SO MUCH POTENTIAL for interactive dating shows using the tech – livestreaming a dating experience with people making suggestions to Cyrano the poor sap into the affections of their partner (or get them slapped, either/or). Anyway, Google Glass is dead but FINALLY someone has caught up with my visionary blue-sky thinking. The Dating Game is seeking funding on Kickstarter to set up what they term an ‘interactive game show’ where you (either an individual or a team) are granted the power to guide someone through a first date and see what happens. This will almost certainly not meet its target, which is a great shame – can someone else with money pick this up and make it happen? It sounds brilliantly awful.

• Listen To The Cloud: Remarkably relaxing, this – a site which lets you listen in to the chatter of airport communications from around the world, laid over gentle ambient sounds. Kind of white noise-ish, but simultaneously oddly compelling – perhaps I’m just listening in the hope of overhearing a live air traffic controller breakdown, though.

• Endless Night: I could try and describe this (it’s basically a semi-interactive music video featuring a beautiful and well-muscled guy dancing in a studio; press ‘c’ to switch between different versions of the video in the now-hackneyed Honda Splitscreen manner), but I’d rather just leave the actual description here for you to enjoy. Well DONE, copywriter! “Endless Night testifies to the perfect symbiosis between man and their environment. As of the dancer’s wake-up, his body and the décor get animated against a minimalist and airy white background. The dancer injects his own rhythm to the décor that, in turn, comes to life.A human creation that places the human being at the centre of the concept but which, eventually, reveals that the belief of human supremacy triumphing over nature is pure trickery.” YES!

• My Body Gallery: Designed to be an encyclopaedia of the human form, showing all the different shapes and sizes we come in without judgement and giving people a place where they can look at the near-naked bodies of actual, real, non-model people and feel a little better about how lumpy they are. A Good Thing, I reckon, and maybe the sort of thing which Dove might want to chuck some money at because REAL BEAUTY SELLS COSMETICS! You can toggle between men and women at the top, by the way.

• Project 1917: A history project telling stories of those who lived through the Russian revolution, using only primary sources to paint the history. It’s a properly crazy time, if you’ve never studied it, and there’s some wonderful material in here – also, I just learned that on this day in 1917, “Lenin hatched a crazy plan to reach Russia in the guise of a deaf-mute Swede”, which is without a doubt the best thing I’m going to learn all day, hands-down.

• Animal Pants: One of you will buy these, guaranteed.

• The Vachina: Because, equally, one of you will also buy one of these vagina-styled purses off Etsy (of COURSE off Etsy!).

• Purenetics: Finally this week, something which I think has to be a joke but doesn’t in fact appear to be one. Purenetics is a service which purports to help high-net-worth people looking for genetic material to help them have kids source the very best from the very beautiful; the service offers to pay upto £500k for 10ccs of dusty output, or some eggs, if you’re pretty enough. It’s so staggeringly crass that it feels like it should be a front for something, and yet there’s no indication that it’s a marketing campaign for A N Other creepy future film. Am I missing something? Am I being stupid? SOMEONE EXPLAIN.

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC WITH THE FIRST, AND BEST, PLAYLIST TO LAUNCH A POETRY BOOK YOU’VE EVER HEARD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Videogame Powerpoints: Erm, slides from powerpoints about videogames, but it’s all rather nice jagged graphical stuff rather than barcharts so there’s an aesthetic purpose to its inclusion, honest.

• Trains In Games: A further addition to the ‘there is nothing so niche that there can’t be a tumblr of it’ pantheon.

• People Hugging The New Joanna Newsome Album: See above x10000000000.

• Philip Kremer: Absolutely the best weird, creepy, horrifying faces you will see all day. If you are feeling ESPECIALLY ballsy, why not see if you can swap the photos of senior management on your company website for some of these beauties?

• Maps On The Web: Not going to patronise you with a description here.

• TrumpTrump: A new creepy pen and ink drawing of Donald each and every day. These are really quite creepy in a spiky, angular, slightly broken sense.

• Spongebob Closeups: The oddly fine art-like beauty of isolated elements from Spongebob Squarepants.

• We Are The 15%: Companion piece to the project up there about interracial marriage in the US, this is a crowdsourced Tumblr of mixed-race unions and it is just sort of generally charming and not a little heartwarming.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• That One About The Queen Dying: This was EVERYWHERE yesterday, and for good reason – a brilliant piece of writing in the Guardian about the plans in place for when our monarch finally chooses to shuffle off this mortal coil, giving a moment-by-moment account of how the news will travel and what all the different layers of pomp and circumstance will be. Regardless of your republican / monarchist sympathies, this is quite marvellously odd; on the one hand, yes, it will be a major global historicocultural event; on the other, MAN there is some pretty baroque ceremony and pageantry in here given it’s 2017. Still, think of the extra days off work!

• The Venn Diagram Museum: Bit of an outlier, this, but I wanted to include it as it’s an excellent illustration of the potential inherent in VR for exposition and information-delivery. The essay describes how Vi Hart (see Curios passim) designed a ‘Venn Diagram Museum’ using an HTC Vive to sculpt it in VR space. The really interesting stuff here is about how the medium worked to impose a degree of mental order on the concepts that Hart is trying to communicate; really made me think of the potential for this sort of use of VR as a communications tool aside from anything else.

• How 4Chan Punked Shia: I am in no way condoning the sh1tlords of 4chan, but this piece, about how they assiduously pursued Shia Lebeouf’s ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ project (at the time of writing, not currently live) across the country with the express purpose of ruining it, is a neat distillation of all that is mad about that corner of the internet. This is a LOT of effort for the lulz, lads.

• Treating Mental Illness With Psychedelics: All about the trend for treating mental health issues with varying doses of FUNDRUGS! I say ‘fun’ – pretty sure there’s noone out there taking ayahuasca for wholly recreational purposes. Lots of really interesting stuff about the history and conflicting schools of psychiatric treatment, along with some fairly strong reminders as to why I am pretty much entirely disinclined to ever take acid to ‘find myself’ (some things very much deserve to stay lost).

• IKEA For Irish Pubs: This BLEW MY MIND. You know how wherever you go in the world you will find an ‘Irish’ pub, serving a bewildering array of Irish-sounding beers which you’ve never, ever seen on sale anywhere in Ireland and with exactly the same array of ersatz paddymobilia adorning the walls (in much the same way as at certain points during the 90s you couldn’t go anywhere in the world without seeing a bunch of slightly homesick-looking alpaca poncho-clad Peruvians blowing desultorily on a set of panpipes and wishing that Simon and Garfunkel had never written El Condor fcuking Pasa)? This piece informed me that there is an ACTUAL COMPANY which exports them all over the world – they build flatpack pubs in 6 different styles, to be shipped out and then assembled on, say, the Russian Steps as ‘O’Malley-tovs’ taks shape. Globalisation is MENTAL, mate.

• They Are All The Same Banana: Equally mind-blowing was this piece, about the history of banana cultivation. Wait, no, seriously, it’s REALLY interesting. Leaving aside the fact that the banana is the devil’s fruit (it smells slightly fecal, there’s no two ways about it), this piece from Wired explains how each and every banana is basically genetically identical, being derived from cuttings from the same plant – making the world’s banana crop effectively the largest single organism in the world, and making it wildly vulnerable to disease. Hugely interesting about all sorts of things, not least the dangers of worldwide food monocultures.

• My Intersex Body and Me: Arisleyde Dilone grew up tall, slim, tomboyish and flat-chested, before discovering that she was born with male chromosomes and learning that she would likely never develop breasts. This is the story of her growing up, her first boyfriend, her breast implants and her sense of self and identity and femininity, and it’s fascinating (and not sad).

• Escape To Another World: I know I featured one of these last week, but this is another EXCELLENT piece on the whole ‘young men effectively choosing to drop out of life in favour of videogames’ phenomenon; this is a better read than last week’s, and makes a reasonably convincing case as to why there might be a shift in the minds of many young men in the affluent west that there’s simply no real point bothering with much of the trappings of what we generally come to see as ‘life’.

• HP Lovecraft and Robert Barlow: Lovecraft’s attained that position in the popular cultural pantheon that everyone knows a few things about his work – eldritch, tentacles, madness – without most of them (myself included) ever having read a word of the man’s output. This is a fascinating piece examining Lovecraft’s relationship with Robert Barlow, a fan of his whose slightly tragic life is a microcosmic portrait of 20th Century sexual repression (and which contains a throwaway line by Allen Ginsberg which does nothing to dispel my growing feeling that the Beats were, to a man, absolute arseholes).

• The Green Book: Along with the ‘no interracial marriage til 1967’ fact I learned this week, this was this week’s other stark reminder of just how recent a reality racism was in the US. Published in the 30s and 40s, ‘The Green Book’ was effectively an AA guide for black people traveling around the US, detailing the places where they might be able to do things like eat, wash and sleep without getting lynched (not actual hyperbole). Wonderful social history, this.

• The Brain Meme: A far-too-involved exploration/explanation of the ‘4 levels of brainpower’ meme you may or may not have seen doing the rounds. Exactly the sort of over-serious exploration of internet nonsense that I love.

• Mary Beard on Women In Power: Transcript of a wonderful lecture given by Mary Beard for Radio 4 in which she discusses the relationship between women and power through history with customary humour and erudition. I slightly love Mary Beard.

• The Dominos Pizza Empire: This piece by Bloomberg looking at the Dominos business, how it reinvented itself following its mid-00s slump, and how smart its marketing is, is reasonably interesting but I’m including it mainly for the design on the page which is…I mean, I’m all for giving designers free rein, but this is quite…well…silly. Fun, but silly.

• Kellyanne’s Alternative Universe: Because we couldn’t not include something about The Administration, right? This is an interesting and reasonably sensitive and even-handed portrait of Kellyanne ‘SPYING MICROWAVES’ Conway, which despite being pretty even in tone still manages to make the whole lot of them sound utterly mad, and presents the reality of working in the Trump White House as being a little like having to play a constant improv game with someone who is holding a loaded gun and may or may not be on meth.

• Plot 29: This is gorgeous and sad and hopeful – an extract from a memoir by Allan Jenkins, about how he found comfort in gardening after an upbringing in care. Made me do a *bit* of a cry, I must be honest.

• I Don’t Have Cancer (Yet): What does it feel like to learn that you may (in fact probably will) get cancer, that your genes may well already be conspiring with your body to fcuk you up, and to come to terms with the time bomb in your mid-30s? Like this, apparently – a smart and funny and honest and hopeful piece of writing.

• Death Is Real: This is a beautiful interview with / portrait of US singer Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), whose wife died last year leaving him to bring up their small daughter. It’s gorgeous and intimate and sad, particularly on dealing with death through art. You can hear the album that came from the death here – it’s not, let’s be clear, a happy listen, but it’s very lovely.

• Is Intersectionality A Religion: I found myself agreeing with more of this than I expected, about the increasingly cult-like approach to wokeness affecting much of online discource about now. Does that make me a fascist? I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANY MORE!

• The Hofziner Club: This is an extract from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and it is BRILLIANT. If you’ve not read the novel, enjoy this and then go and buy a copy from your local independent retailer (or, fine, Amazon) and spend the weekend devouring it – you will thank me, I promise.

• The IOU: Published this week for the first time, this is a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald about…oh, just read it, it’s very good indeed and it will take you RIGHT back to the early 20thC.

• Homecoming: Oxford: This, last up this week in the longreads, is beautiful. I didn’t realise VICE were doing a series of these, taking writers back to the towns where they grew up to do reminiscent-y retrospectives; this is Nell Frizzell writing about growing up in Oxford, and it is gorgeous and will make you remember that Summer when you were 16 and EVERYTHING was exciting and possible and you hadn’t yet learned that the glister rubs off of life after a while.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) I’d completely forgotten that Portugal The Man existed after they went through a period of releasing cracking songs and videos about 5-6 years ago. They lurched back into my consciousness this week, though, with this absolutely excellent track – this is called ‘Feel It Still’ and I challenge you not to click your fingers all the way through. This is going to get ruined through overuse in advertising, inevitably, so enjoy it while you can:

2) What do you get if you cross hardcore with hiphop and a healthy dose of social protest? You get this, apparently – it’s by Ho99o9 (that’s how they spell ‘Horror’, you see) and it’s called ‘United States of Horror’:

3) There aren’t enough trailers for poetry books. This is a lovely one, though – bright, clean animations to accompany selected lines from Rishi Dastidar’s forthcoming collection (about which more next week). I would be really interested to see a collection of poetry presented as a series of interactive animations, playing with kinetic typography and stuff, so if anyone wants to make that that would be great thanks. :

4) This is called ‘Dance With Me’ and it’s by Cameron Avery and it reminded me slightly of Leonard Cohen who I realised last week I am still really sad is dead:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Novelist has been getting ALL the hype over the past year; this Warm-up Session on SBTV is a pretty good primer as to why; it is VERY good:

6) Finally this week, this is by Kid Koala and Emiliana Torrini, it’s called ‘Fallaway’ and it has relaxed me to the point of near catatnia. I hope it does the same to you – HAPPY FRIDAY! HAVE FUN! TAKE CARE! TRY NOT TO DIE!:

7) Oh, no, HANG ON – THIS is the last video this week. It’s by Tommy Cash, it’s called ‘Surf’ and it is simultaneously utterly filthy and totally SFW – ENJOY!:

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LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH THE LEGITIMATELY STELLAR NEW ALBUM BY JONWAYNE – THIS IS RAP ALBUM TWO AND IT IS GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY, GENUINELY SORRY ABOUT HOW MUCH S*C**L M*D** NEWS  THERE IS AFTER A FORTNIGHT’S INDOLENCE, AND WHICH PROMISES TO TRY AND GET THROUGH IT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE FOR ALL OUR SAKES:

• Facebook Messenger Is Doing Fcuking Stories Too Now: Fingers crossed for PLUCKY LITTLE BILLION-DOLLAR UPSTART Snapchat with its recent IPO; it’s sort of hard to see how it’s going to maintain any sort of competitive position, mind, when this keeps happening. Yes, ‘Stories’-style CONTENT CREATION has now been added to FB Messenger, after its inclusion in both Instagram and Whatsapp – this is a pretty straight clone with some additional functionality around being able to choose exactly who you choose to share your crushingly banal life snapshot with from your friends list. As an aside, there was an almost-sickeningly hagiographic puff-piece on Techcrunch yesterday trailing this update, which took the line that Facebook wasn’t just copying, it was changing the way we interact with the camera function on our phones – which was exactly the same line punted by Bloomberg in a piece on Snap from last year. EXCELLENT WORK, TECH JOURNALISM. Anyway, combine this with some HOT CHAT about how messenger bots are the future for some easy ‘impress your moron novelty-obsessed client’ meeting wins TODAY!

• Updates To FB Messenger: Techy, but if you do this stuff then it’s important to know about. Basically the big takeaways here are a whole load of features which make it easier to share from Bot conversations to the wider world, as well as easier to pull content in from elsewhere on the web to Bot conversations; helpful for Customer Service reasons, among other things. Oh, and there’s some interesting stuff about how the platform can use menus, making it easier to build user journeys through more complex pathways (they’ve sort of accepted that natural language conversation with bots isn’t really a thing yet, which is for the best imho).

• Facebook Messenger Potentially Turning Into Slack: All that waffling about a ‘Dislike’, or thumbs-down, button in Messenger is a red herring; the story here is actually about the addition of line-by-line responses to Messenger conversations, just like you can in Slack. BECAUSE EVERYTHING MUST BE THE SAME. It does rather feel like, if you were Snapchat or Slack or one of the COOL NEW SOCIAL MEDIA KIDS, you could create any totally preposterous new feature and Facebook would clone it just because they can, much in the manner of the kid in the playground who, desperate to be liked, will happily agree that they love the new album by Chimney Factory and that it’s the best thing EVER, only to be told after they’ve spent 10 minutes extolling its virtues that it’s in fact totally made up, at which point their slightly fat face crumples and warps as the tears start. Except, er, Facebook’s the biggest bully in the playground and so that analogy really doesn’t work in the slightest. Sorry, turns out I’m slightly more logorrhoic than usual this morning after the fortnight off; I’ll try and rein it in or we’ll be here all day.

• Love Trumps Like In FB Reactions: Momentous occasion, this – I just typed the word ‘trump’ in a context which has nothing to do with That Man! Anyhow, this is the news that Facebook is now giving additional weight to reactions beyond Like when it comes to the Newsfeed – so, simply put, if you’re a Community Manager then you’re going to start wanting to beg people to ‘Love’ rather than ‘Like’ your posts as you continue to chase the chimera that is ‘organic reach’. Oh, and just so’s you know, this is all feeding into an inevitable ad product which allows targeting based on a range of emotional affinity with a thing. Datapoints, kids, YOU’RE ALL JUST DATAPOINTS.

• Ad Breaks Coming To Facebook Video: Literally this – not here yet, at least not for everyone, but this announcement lets people broadcasting Live on FB to over 300 people insert ad breaks in their shows for ££. They’re also testing the ability to add mid-roll ads into uploaded video – new or historical – which is in NO WAY going to provide an intrusive or upsetting experience, oh no. Actually there are a few interesting / creative ways you could approach a TV-style mid-show ad break on FB, particularly with live broadcast, so if you work with content creators it might be worth spending 10 minutes thinking up some CLEVER IDEAS you can sell in before the novelty wears off and these just become hideously played out.

• Facebook Advanced Measurement For Ad Effectiveness: I’m really sorry, I just can’t bring myself to care about this. I’m just going to lift some spiel from the article – is that ok? It’s ok: “Facebook is launching a new tool called Advanced Measurement that lets advertisers stack up how their Facebook campaigns performed compared with other platforms…Advertisers can soon use Advanced Measurement to assess which platforms — such as Facebook, Instagram, search, or display ads on Google — drove the most purchases on their online store, or had the highest reach among their desired target audience…It works by using a measurement tag to track users as they cross around the web and apps and from one device to another. Facebook users often log into the platform using different devices, so the tool has reliable first-party data about whether people who saw an ad for a product on one device checked it out on another.” Do you care? Good, I am happy for you.

• You Can Now Look At FB Photos & Videos In VR: If you have a Samsung Gear, at least. Christ alone knows why you’d want to, but you can.

• Facebook Job Listings: North America only at the moment, but an interesting development which I think will be great for small businesses; obviously part of the attraction is the targeting options you’ll have when advertising any listing. There will be a brief window when these launch in Europe in which you’ll be able to do some genuinely interesting / clever things with this in terms of advertising (in all likelihood about 8 hours) – really interesting way of recruiting brand fans for stuff, for example (you can imagine something like 2010’s ‘Marmarati’ campaign working quite well through this sort of thing, for example, or at least I can).

• Facebook Adding City Guides: Basically pulling together a whole bunch of data about where people check in, take photos, etc, in cities, including where your ‘friends’ have been, to ensure that you can have exactly the same cookie-cutter experience when travelling as everyone else, that you can take the same selfies in the same place, that you can eat in the same Instagram-friendly eatery and enjoy the same artisanal icecream and generally continue your evolution into some sort of data-driven simil-human with all the rough edges sandblasted off by the irresistible force of the INFORMATION SANDBLASTER that is Facebook. Doesn’t that sound GREAT? Oh, there’s almost certainly going to be the option for venues, etc, to pay for privileged status on these Guides; I mean, it’s not stated but it’s hardly a stretch to imagine it.

• Whatsapp Also Becoming Snapchat: I can’t be bothered to write this up as a) it’s OLD NEWS now; and b) you know exactly what this means/entails, so can probably fill in the gaps yourself.

• Post Multiple Photos/Videos In A Single Instagram Post: Upto 10, in fact. Also OLD NEWS now, but I confess to having been slightly disappointed at the lack of any standout ‘LOOK! WE ARE USING THIS IN A CREATIVE WAY FOR SPURIOUS ‘STORYTELLING’ PURPOSES!’ from brands since this launched the other week. Up your games, kids (or send me examples, I am ‘genuinely’ interested).

• Instagram Launches Geostickers: JUST LIKE SNAPCHAzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Well, quite. Only available in NYC and Jakarta at the time of writing, but inevitably coming to the whole world soonish, this is the standard ‘we know where you are, have some SPECIAL STICKERS to add to your Story!’ feature which Snapchat’s had forever, brought to Instagram with, as far as I can tell, absolutely no difference whatsoever. I imagine they’re currently looking for deep-pocketed partners with which to launch the commercial side of this, so speak to your rep TODAY to get what is doubtless a violently expensive rate card chucked at you with a dismissive giggle.

• Instagram Lanching ‘Tag Partners’ Feature: Timely, given recent rulings here in the UK about disclosure of commercial partnerships on s*c**l m*d**. This is the same sort of thing as Facebook announced last year, whereby an INFLUENCER can post something and tag the brands they’ve partnered with in that post, to connote a commercial relationship and to allow for automated revenue splits from videos, etc. It’s only being tested at the moment, but worth keeping an eye on if you’re in the hideous, soul-crushing business of paying idiots money to grin whilst drinking protein shakes in the name of ‘influencer marketing’ (it’s not too late to stop, you know).

• Twitter Launches Personalised Customer Service Messaging: Not sexy AT ALL, but sort of useful; Twitter quietly launched this the other week, meaning companies can now receive DMs from customers and have their staff respond to the conversation with a named profile; so rather than talking to the impersonal T-Mobile Twitter account, for example, you might instead get help from Hans or Anna or someone. The thinking is that it will allow people to know when they’re dealing with a real person rather than with a bot; it will also save VALUABLE CHARACTERS by obviating the need for CS minions to sign off their posts with their initials. Anyway, this is in Private Beta at the moment, but if you do a lot of this sort of stuff on Twitter it might be worth investigating if you can have a play.

• Analytics For Twitter Moments: Literally just that – you can now see how many people have looked at any particular moment. Which is nice.

• Twitter Did Some Safety Updates: Once again, too little too late – but the ability to mute eggs is a nice touch, admittedly. Might be worth looking at being able to mute anime avatars too, though, and Pepes.

• You Can Now Do 360-Degree Video On Vimeo Too: Expect to see some REALLY nicely-lit artvideowank as a result.

• YouTube Is Killing 30s Unskippable Ads: About time too, frankly.

• Google Hangouts Is Now Copying Slack Too: Really boring, but if internal comms is your thing then this is reasonably big news, offering another reason to move all your stuff to the Google Suite. This announcement is both about its improved Hangouts system for enterprise, called Meet, and updates to Hangouts Chat which is Slack in all but name. The ability to build bots for it is interesting, and I can imagine some really interesting tools you could cobble together pulling data from Gdocs into chat with single commands. Yes, I know it’s dull, but it’s USEFUL. FFS.

• Medium Launches Series: NEW STORYTELLING OPPORTUNITIES!!! Medium – look, guys, IT’S JUST A FCUKING BLOGGING PLATFORM – is introducing something it calls ‘Series’, which is (and sorry, this is going to be a VERY lackadaisical description but it’s 738am and there’s literally 9 pages of links for me to triage here and frankly it’s all I can do not to cry, so bear with me please) basically a way of presenting posts as a series of cards – it reminded me quite a lot of FB Canvas in the way you can combine images, prose and video into a series of swipable slides which let you craft a narrative in some interesting ways. There’s some fun stuff you could do around episodic storytelling here, along with some potentially fun multimedia stuff; worth having a think about ways to use it, I think.

• Pinterest Launches Labs: Doing AI stuff. “Labs brings together top researchers, scientists, and engineers from around the world to work on image recognition, user modeling, recommender systems, and big data analytics. Our researchers are embedded throughout Pinterest allowing our discoveries to affect hundreds of millions of users each day”, apparently. So there. Oh, and they bought Biz Stone’s Q&A app Jelly, too, though fcuk only knows why.

• There’s A Bot For That: A search engine for messenger bots, which is a useful resource if you’re interested in flogging some of these and want to know what’s already out there that you can ‘take inspiration from’ (ha!). Seeing as we’re on bots, this one by Transferwise is really rather smart indeed, letting you move money from within Messenger. By contrast, this one by anti-food brofuel Soylent is wonderfully pointless (also, as an aside, the press release promoting it referred to the bot being ‘coyly named’ Trish; ‘coyly’? Really? FFS you dreadful cnuts) and sort of terrible, and this one by KLM, which lets you send emoji and get travel tips back in return, seems to believe it’s still late 2015 and we are still all excited by pictographic communication. Bless.

• The Gruffalo Spotter: I’m including this as literally EVERYONE I KNOW has children these days and they all go through a phase of loving the Gruffalo and as a result all my friends will, if they’re in the right sort of battered-by-parental-exhaustion frame of mind, occasionally enter a sort of fugue state whereby they just repeat the opening couplet to the original story under their breath like a strange, terrible mantra, and as such I reckon that many of YOU, gentle readers, who I know are unlike me and don’t necessarily view procreation as an horrific and mentally ruinous ordeal, might appreciate this app by the Forestry Commission which will let you do some gentle AR-enabled Gruffalo spotting in the manner of Pokemon Go!.

NEXT UP, HAVE A RECENT RADIO SHOW OF ECLECTICISM BY THE INTERNET ODDITY FORMERLY KNOWN AS SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH WASN’T LYING ABOUT THE NINE PAGES OF LINKS AND WHICH AS A RESULT IS GOING TO BE DOING QUITE A LOT OF ON-THE-FLY ‘CURATION’ HERE AND SO APOLOGISES IN ADVANCE FOR THE LIKELY SOMEWHAT EMBATTLED QUALITY TO MUCH OF THE PROSE WHICH FOLLOWS, PT.1:

• Texts I Want To Send My Ex: I can’t stress enough how great/terrible this is. I found this somewhere a full 2-3 weeks ago and have been sitting on it since, hoping it stayed live long enough to share with YOU fine folk. This is a Google sheet containing a whole load of text messages the anonymous contributors would like to send their ex partners. Sad, funny, poignant, profane, mad and wonderfully human, I could literally read this for hours at a time; this is why I love the web.

• Tiny Trumps: Funny not least because it’s not hard to imagine exactly quite how upset this would make him.

• Resist Supply: A free resource for protest signs, available to customise and print out, because frankly who’s got time to spend on crafting the perfect ‘guaranteed to go viral’ pithily-worded message which simultaneously conveys your wokeness and your ironic sensibilities? NO FCUKER, that’s who! There’s something sort of terribly wrong about the bland, mass-produced aesthetic here, which seems to be sort of semiotically (META) antiethetical to the whole principle of signs at protests, but, er, wevs.

• Emotional Labour: This is BLEAK. A Chrome extension which works with your Gmail account to add some emotional engagement to your emails with the click of a button. That’s right, you just churn out your standard prose, devoid of any emotional affect and icy as you like, and this will seek to gussy it up with some actual, real human feeling (provided by a computer programme). Obviously a joke, but also a Black Mirror vignette in waiting.

• Snakisms: One of the smartest things I’ve seen in AGES, this is a little webartgameprojectthing which presents a variety of different takes on the classic ‘Snake’ game, each one serving as an example of the characteristics of a particular ‘-ism’; so, for example, when playing ‘capitalism’ you can only eat the apples until you run out of money, at which point you’re told you can’t afford any more apples and starve to death – LOL! Erm, ok, so that’s a bad example, but some of these are genuinely funny – ‘narcissism’ made me laugh out loud, for example. Philosophy students past and present will enjoy this particularly.

• Crafted By My Heart: Turn your heartbeat into a ring! Again! There have been several variants on this theme which I’ve featured here in the past, but here’s another one in case my hunch is wrong and the resulting jewellery isn’t in fact really ugly (I think it might be, though).

• SnooTube: Useful service which lets you plug in any sub-Reddit you like and watch all the videos from it in a carousel format, which is great for killing time and meant that when I found this I lost an inordinate amount of time to Japanese cooking videos. Obviously there may be other subs you wish to explore using this feature; I couldn’t possibly comment. DON’T GO BLIND KIDS.

• Reddit User Analysis: Potentially useful tool which lets you plug in any Reddit username and gives you stats on their posting frequency, favourite subs, most popular posts, etc, which, if you’re in the unfortunate position of having to do influencer work on Reddit, might actually prove rather helpful in identifying people to tap up.

• Passport Collector: A whole LOAD of information about passports from history. No, I don’t know who this is for either, but never let it be said that Web Curios is afraid to explore the very edges of what might be termed ‘niche interest content’.

• Langorhythm: Wonderfully pointless but strangely pleasing, Langorhythm lets you input any text you like and generates ‘music’ from the copy you feed it. The compositions tend towards the minimalist and piano-led, and are obviously dreadful and yet there’s something weirdly near-listenable to the stuff it’s generated for me so far; the sound of Curios is, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, a godawful mess.

• Idiots Win: A GREAT little game which asks you to guess which of 5 options is the top Google Autocomplete result for any given input. Will suck you in whilst simultaneously making you wish for a nuclear-level event to wipe this human cancer from the planet forever – you always think that you can’t be any more amazed by people’s idiocy, and then you see that people do actually search for stuff like ‘Can humans get fleas?’ and you want to burn everyone.

• Go Rando: Randomising your Facebook reactions to FOOL THE MACHINE. Go Rando is a plugin which randomises which reaction you express when you hit ‘Like’ on a FB post – which is interesting from the point of view of attempting to obfuscate the datacollection of the Big Blue Misery Machine, but also from the point of view of how you explain to your friends why you just ‘Loved’ that post about their imminent divorce.

• Code Poetry: To quote the site, “This website displays a collection of twelve code poems, each written in the source code of a different programming language. Every poem is also a valid program which produces a visual representation of itself when compiled and run.” Some of these are more accessible than others, but even to a non-coder like myself there’s some rather beautiful work in here; if you get this stuff more than I do then there’s probably something genuinely elegant about the form.

• eBay Garfield: A Twitter feed showcasing a selection of the Garfield-related tat on sale on eBay. There is a LOT of Garfield-related tat for sale on eBay.

• TNY Poetry: A Twitter bot by the New York Times, which Tweets a poem each day. Small and pleasing.

• Deep Elon: Neural Network Twitter bot trained on Elon Musk’s gnomic utterances which produces some oddly plausible results. “I think we’ll be able to create a species. I think long term.” is pretty much a textbook Musk-ism. Why do I find this man so unsettling?

• AutoEdit: This is HUGELY impressive, and is almost certainly a possible future for video editing. The idea is you upload a video, it does speech-to-text analysis of it to provide a transcript, you edit the transcript (removing bits, swapping bits around) and then the software produces an edit based on your textual changes. Obviously won’t work for anything with sophisticated cuts or multi-camera stuff, but for simple pieces to camera this is absolute genius.

• Everlearners: This is an incredible resource of online learning materials, featuring links to a mind-boggling selection of courses, videos, podcasts, etc, on a huge variety of topics. If you’re interested in doing online learning around…well, frankly almost anything to be honest, this is an excellent place to start and is well worth bookmarking.

• Future Library: This is such a lovely artwork. “One thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114.” The website will over the course of the coming 97 years collect information about each of the selected writers (those so far are Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Sjon), essays by them and in response to them, and, eventually, will be a digital record of the forest and the works associated with it. Gorgeous.

• Diamond Route Japan: Yeah, ok, so it’s a tourism site, but it’s SO nicely made. Really slick webwork, and I like the UX/UI very much indeed. Also, contains loads of really pretty and generally fascinating videos about Japan.

• Sony World Photography Awards 2017: This year’s selection of ‘wow, isn’t the world a beautiful and diverse and generally amazing place if you can just ignore all the horror?’ photos, which as ever contains some absolutely cracking entries (and, obviously, a healthy dose of horror in the shape of the ‘Current Affairs’ section which also contains the best images imho).

• Woman Interrupted: Miserable that this even needs to be a thing, but hey ho. Woman Interrupted is an app which uses the mic on your phone to listen to conversations and track how often male voices interrupt female voices in meetings, lectures, or just in general day-to-day life. If you feel that your domestic life is just a bit too tranquil, why not download this app and leave it running in your house this weekend and then enjoy the full and frank exchange of views that the data might engender? Let me know how that works out for you.

• FetchitGo: A smart idea, this, if you’re the sort of person who likes the idea of those programmable buttons which let you order a pizza or some toilet paper with one tap; FetchitGo is seeking to raise money for a customisable, multi-button piece of kit which lets you programme 16 separate buttons to perform automated tasks when pressed and which can be reconfigured when/however you like. It’s all based on IFTTT and so seems pretty simple to set up and use, and could be a reasonably simple and cost-effective way of setting up your smarthome and of automating your condom or milk purchasing FOREVER. What a glorious future this is.

• Cardigan: A service to help you delete your Tweets, simply and quickly and in bulk. Just in case you’re travelling to the US or similarly ‘difficult’ country anytime soon and want to hide some of your more controversial utterances from anyone who might want to check up on you. Oh, and here’s another one in case you want a different option.

• The Supremo Putin: Just in case you’d ever dreamed of owning a lavish Nokia 3310 in a gold and platinum case embossed with the likeness of everyone’s favourite diminutive judo master, here’s your chance! Beautifully, the accompanying blurb lists one of features of the phone as the fact that it’s ‘not cheap’, suggesting that the old Stella Artois adage continues to hold true amongst taste-deficient morons the world over.

• Phil Collins Given The Steve Reich Treatment: You know Piano Phase, right? Well this is the same principle – timeshifting and layering the playback of a piece of music to create interesting layered doppler-ish effects – applied to the drum fill from In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. It’s MESMERISING. BONUS PIANO PHASE! Here’s the same technique applied to a pair of iPhones – Steve Reich Is Calling.

• The 90s DJ Archives: Spend the weekend reminding yourself of those times when you used to go out on a Friday rather than slumping into the familiar dent in the sofa and praying for sleep to overtake you with this MENTAL archive of DJ mixes from back in the day. There are literally hundreds of mixes on here, so get a Mitsu down you and gurn like it’s 1995.

• Beetmoves: Yes, I know, but I don’t make up the names. This is a COMING SOON innovation which is basically a motion-sensing wristband which makes music based on your movements and which, I am pretty confident in predicting, will not make the sort of cool music produced by the telegenic Japanese youths in the video when it’s attached to the arm of one of your kids.

• 360 Northern Lights: This is rather soothing, in a simple sort of way. Look around and MARVEL AT THE VIRTUAL MAJESTY OF THE ATMOSPHERE!

HOW ABOUT A RATHER GOOD FRIDAY-FEELING MIX BY HORSEMEAT DISCO NEXT? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH WASN’T LYING ABOUT THE NINE PAGES OF LINKS AND WHICH AS A RESULT IS GOING TO BE DOING QUITE A LOT OF ON-THE-FLY ‘CURATION’ HERE AND SO APOLOGISES IN ADVANCE FOR THE LIKELY SOMEWHAT EMBATTLED QUALITY TO MUCH OF THE PROSE WHICH FOLLOWS, PT.2:

• Memebroker: There’s an extent to which discussion of the ‘meme economy’ and the trade in Pepes, rare or otherwise, is the point at which I stop being able to even vaguely get or explain web/chanculture. I mean, really. Still, if this sort of stuff means more to you than it does to me you may well enjoy this app which provides access to a marketplace where you can trade the dankest memes. “Invest in the right memes, use your skills to identify trends and sell memes in your portfolio at the right time to make the highest profit. MemeBroker is a simulation of the meme economy, connected to Reddit so that when a post gets upvoted, the share price of that meme will increase.” Got that? Good. Oh, and there’s now a magazine about meme culture and the meme economy – read an issue here and get VERY CONFUSED about how the world works in 2017.

• Dwitter: One for the programmers amongst you, Dwitter is a neat little riff on Twitter on which programmers show off their skill in creating stuff in <140character codebursts in Java (I think). I imagine some of this stuff is really impressive if you understand more about programming than I do.

• The Hardlight VR Suit: So it’s been a longstanding theory of mine that until haptics become more of a thing VR simply won’t move beyond being a niche pursuit; the lack of feedback mechanisms makes it simply too hard to fool us into thinking there’s a ‘there’ there. Well, here’s a Kickstarter seeking to bridge that gap – fully funded with a fortnight to go, this will theoretically go into production this year. It’s a vibrating bodysuit thing designed to provide physical feedback such as punches, gunshots, etc, to gamers, to better immerse themselves in the experience. Oh, and, inevitably, there will be some sort of slightly depressing and grubby sex application too – the suit’s advertised as being ‘sweatproof’, which presented me with a really rather vile mental image of its use which I now wish to share with you. You’re welcome.

• Seeing Theory: This is just excellent. A selection of visual guides to probability and statistics produced by Brown University, which if you know anyone studying this stuff is just SO helpful and useful. Aside from anything else, the coding on the animations and transitions and stuff is also wonderfully elegant imho.

• Nope: I’m currently doing 4 days a week across two different jobs in two different offices, and I’ve been reminded of the great horror of office working, namely that people actually occasionally want to talk to you. This is a Chrome extension designed to help mitigate that horror – at the press of a button it will call your phone, giving you an immediate excuse to not converse with whoever’s attempting to engage you in small talk. NB – in the unlikely event that any of my colleagues are reading this, I obviously don’t mean you.

• Little Planet Factory: You can buy miniature planet models on Etsy. I mean, LOOK how cute they are! I mean, they’re also £50-odd quid, but still, planets!

• The CIA’s Approved List of Japanese Emoji: Just because they’re the intelligence services doesn’t mean that they’re not into some frivolous online banter! Obviously of vanishingly small import amongst the whole load of stuff revealed this week, but it’s also a very, very strange thing for the CIA to have compiled, no?

• Raildar: All of the trains in the UK! In realtime! On a map! I’ve had to spend quite a lot of time in the past few weeks eavesdropping on the online conversations of rail enthusiasts (it’s a glamorous life, mine), so perhaps when the job’s done I will reveal myself and leave them this as a thankyou for all of the trainlols.

• HiPhi Nation: A podcast exploring philosophical concepts in a really rather nice style – these are very good if you fancy a bit of chewy thinking in your podcast diet.

• 420 Friends: A dating app for marijuana enthusiasts, so you can find that special someone to not have sex with!

• The Wellcome Image Awards: This year’s pick of scientific photography – this is my favourite, but there are some wonderful shots scattered throughout this.

• Enter The Sandbox: Ok, so this is a promo thingy for Audi, fine, but the interesting thing here is the application of the tech; using 3d scanning and VR, this is a toy (really, it’s a toy) which scans an actual 3d sandpit at turns it into a virtual environment for a user to drive a virtual car around. Imagine the possibilities in game design, 3d-modelling, etc – this is really quite exciting and VERY clever.

• Logobook: An encyclopaedic collection of logos, symbols and trademarks in black and white. If you’re a designer or student of branding, this is a fascinating archive.

• The Skittles Sorting Machine: If you work for a music venue then you HAVE to contact the inventor and buy this off him, if only for the inevitable EXCELLENT PR you’d get off the back of the classic rider-nased ‘No Brown M&Ms’ gag. Seriously, DO IT. Oh, in case it’s not obvious, this is a machine which sorts Skittles (or indeed any coloured sweet) by colour. INGENIOUS.

• 400 Ways To Make A Sandwich: A brilliant collection ofsandwich recipes from the early 20C, which includes amongst others the recipe for the fabulously-named ‘Bummers Custard’ (but aside from the childish sniggering it’s also a really interesting piece of food history).

• Incredibly Carved Fruits: Yeah, I know, but just click on this and MARVEL. You will TOTALLY follow this Instagram account, I promise.

• Commonplace: A N Other attempt to break the filter bubble, Commonplace is a Facebook bot which sends you regular links and questions to content from THE OTHER SIDE of the political divide. A nice idea although I personally find the execution a touch shonky; I think, though, that there’s an interesting kernel of an idea here which could be developed; maybe something that sends you a selection of stories each day from media you’d normally eschew, or the most-commented Mail link of the past 24h just so you can see what the others (the WRONG) are thinking, that sort of thing.

• Txt.ify: Ephemeral, anonymous blogging platform – type anything you like into the interface and it will be presented as a plaintext screed with its own url for you to share just like this. You could have some fun with this, I think – the potential for textual treasurehunts and the like is high, and the low-friction nature of it means you could very quickly spin up quite a nice web of CONTENT to direct and misdirect. Obviously it’s also RIPE for use by people who want to be bastards, but WHAT CAN YOU DO? Nothing, fyi, the bastards ALWAYS win.

• The Hypochondriapp: Tell it your symptoms and it will suggest the worst possible thing that might be wrong with you. Worth bookmarking for use with that colleague who insists on whinging about feeling ill all the time but who is never seemingly ill enough to FCUK OFF AND DIE (you can tell I’m enjoying work at the moment, right?).

• Steps To Overcoming Social Anxiety: A little app which presents a series of small tasks, delivered daily, encouraging users to take tiny steps towards tackling their social anxiety. Offering daily goals – go somewhere you’ve never been, make eye contact with the coffee person, that sort of thing – it’s a gentle way of helping people cope with STUFF which I can imagine potentially being useful to people struggling with the basics of social interaction for anxiety-based reasons.

• Renaissance Art In Real Life: Photoshopping figures from renaissance painting into real-world situations with some pretty astounding skill, this is a very impressive Instagram feed indeed (and also, you know, all like JUXTAPOSE-Y and stuff).

• The Robot Pr0n Addict: Making a neural net watch bongo and attempt to describe what it sees. “A man holding an apple”, apparently, which raises lots more questions than it answers. Totally SWF, this Twitter feed pleases me no end.

• Affine Layer: You remember that thing that did the rounds the other week which let you draw an outline of something and then get a neural net to fill it in with its best approximation of what it would look like were it a cat, say, or a handbag? Yes, that. I know it’s a hugely unprepossessing description, but if you’ve not played with this yet then it’s totally worth doing; it’s impressive and points towards how easy it’s going to be in very short order to create AI-generated generic imagery, but it’s also a really great way of drawing some truly horrifying cat beasts without even trying.

• Lab Box: FULL DISCLOSURE – the people behind this are friends of mine, but I’d be including this anyway as it’s SUCH a clever idea. Just over 3 weeks left to go on Kickstarter and funded to the tune of nearly 10x its goal at the time of writing, Lab Box is a super-clever piece of kit which lets you develop film photographs quickly and easily without recourse to a darkroom. Given how COOL analogue photography is these days I imagine that several of you hipsters will have film-based cameras; this is a pretty essential piece of kit if you do, I think.

• T-Rex D&D: Sue the T-Rex is the Twitter account of the Field Museum in Chicago’s T-Rex skeleton. The other day, the account started livetweeting a game of Dungeons and Dragons for its followers to interact with – this is BRILLIANT, geeky, funny and wonderful, and exactly the sort of thing which Twitter is best at; have a read of the whole thing, it’s glorious.

• Lollyphiles: You want to buy wasabi flavoured lollipops? Blue cheese? No, me neither, and yet here we are.

• Gastaloops: 100 days, 100 looping gifs by Nicola Gastaldi. The quality of the work on display here is astounding, as is the consistency; these are really quite beautiful.

• Dull Men’s Club: A community for men (though they are accepting of women, they equally understand that, well, it’s mostly going to be men, isn’t it, who collect hubcaps or want to obsess about Dinky cars?) who are into boring stuff. Charming and, as with all ostensibly boring things, much of this is fascinating (in small doses, admittedly). You can probably get a half-decent ‘Your Da’ joke out of this if you’re part of that corner of Twitter (you know who you are).

• The Smithsonian Photo Contest Finalists 2016: More wonderful shots.

• Tube Patterns: Patterns, on the Tube, on Instagram. Pleasing.

• Pixar In A Box: A pretty astounding series of resources deisgned to teach you how to animate like the people at Pixar (NB won’t actually teach you that, obvs). This is all quite deep and hard, but if you’re serious about learning – or improving – digital animation techniques then this is an absolutely invaluable resource.

• Neverblink: A selection of unskippable web TV channels. Choose where you want it to pull videos from and it will play an infinite selection, one after the other, of whatever crops up. You can’t skip, you can only switch channels or turn it off; probably useless for entertainment purposes, but one of the better ‘This is the id of the web, marvel at the weird horror of who we really are as a species’ things I’ve seen lately.

• Godotify: This is EVIL GENIUS – a piece of code which will add the blinking ‘…typing…’ ellipses to every single conversation you have with anyone on Messenger, keeping them waiting for a message which will never arrive. An exquisitely-conceived exercise in psychological torture, this.

• Tintype Portraits from Afropunk 2016: Beautiful, stylised, old-school-effect photos from last year’s Afropunk festival. Such beautiful people in here.

• Whitman Alabama: A lovely project, taking the stories of Americans from across the state of Alabama and presenting a patchwork picture of the character of the state through the words of Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’, each verse read by a different Alabaman. Human, affecting, and a celebration of diversity which is a nice antidote to That Man and prevailing US political discourse so far this year.

• iSpy: Dropping with near-perfect timing, iSpy is a webdoc in 5 parts exploring the Five Eyes Alliance, “a secretive, global intelligence arrangement between the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States. The alliance represents the largest surveillance program in human history.” Really nicely put together from a webwork point of view – I can’t say that the content makes for anything other than grimly unsurprising viewing, though. But, er, if you’ve got nothing to hide it’s fine, right? Right? Eh? Oh.

• Bear 71: Another WONDERFUL project by NFB Canada – see Curios passim for further explorations of their excellence; if you don’t know their work, do go here and check it out as they have consistently been the best purveyors of ‘digital storytelling’ stuff I’ve seen over the past 5 years from a narrative/design point of view – this time exploring the life of a female grizzle bear over the 8 year period she was monitored by conservation officers. Merging VR, film, graphics and excellent interface design, this is an object-lesson in how to ‘do’ interactive storytelling.

• The i-Con: Lesser curators (sorry) of internet ephemera and weirdness have been referring to this as an ‘internet connected condom’. IT IS NOT! It is an internet-connected cockring! DO YOU NOT SEE THE DIFFERENCE??? Anyway, should you ever have wanted to track every single minute aspect of your inevitably disappointing sexual performances, now you can – simply apply this bit of kit to the base of the penis, to record exactly how many thrusts, etc, you perform during the course of the act. Obviously don’t want to generalise here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that people who are that obsessed with the quantification of their sexual performance are – whisper it – probably not particularly sensitive or generous lovers.

• OCast: More teledildonics news! This is…blimey. OCast is a gimmick from some camgirl outfit which lets users record a unique vibration pattern using their phone’s touchscreen which can then be downloaded and used to power a sextoy. Anyone want to try this out and let me know how it works? No? Thought not.

• HTML Marquee De Sade: The major works of the most famous deviant in history, presented online with Marquee html markup making them look rather a lot like random MySpace pages, in what is the best single-note literarygeekgag I have seen in AGES.

• Girl Talk In A Box: Finally this week (THANK FCUK), this is absolutely the best ‘play at being a remixer’ toy I have ever seen. It’s ugly, fine, but you can do SO MUCH with it. Take any track you like and just mess with it – seriously, you’ll lose HOURS with this, I promise.

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THE SOUNDS  OF THE WU MIXED WITH THE SOUNDS OF NEW ORLEANS – WU ORLEANS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS WHICH IS GOING TO HAVE TO BE PRETTY TERSE ON THE DESCRIPTIONS THIS WEEK IF WE’RE EVER GOING TO FINISH HERE SO, YOU KNOW, APOLOGIES:

• Minus Garfield Plus Lying Cat: Garfield strips in which Garfield is replaced with 2017’s mascot, Lying Cat.

• Ugly David Tennant Fan Art: Yep.

• Twin: Collecting photos of, and exploring ideas around, twins and twin-ness.

• Life In Hell Archives: Before Matt Groening did the Simpsons, he wrote Life In Hell. This is basically every single strip ever, and they are great and have aged surprisingly well.

• The Smithy of my Soul: I stumbled across this the other week, can’t recall how, and I was really impressed. Poetry and occasional thoughts – but mostly poetry – by….er…someone, no idea who. Very good, whoever it is.

• Scifi Covers: Pulpy, pulpy scifi.

• #Faketoys: Imagining the current crop of horrors infesting the upper echelons of politics and media as action figures. The Murdoch one is ACE – if these were real, they would sell out in seconds.

• Lushie Peach: A tribute to food with eyes.

• HeaderXs: A series of beautifully-drawn header images for social platforms, (I think) freely available to download. Some of these are gorgeous.

• B416: Highlighting parallels between contemporary hiphop culture and renaissance art, of which there appear to be a surprising number.

• Positive Doodles: Because sometimes it’s nice to see nice things.

• Get Out Of There, Cat!: Photos of cats putting themselves in places they shouldn’t be.

• Signs from the Near Future: Imagined signs from public spaces of the future, which are about exactly as heartwarming as you’d expect and will IN NO WAY fill you with mild futurefears.

• Cars That Never Made It: Concept vehicles that never came to production (ie most of them).

• Hamilton In Sunnydale: Stills from Buffy with Hamilton captions, because there’s apparently no two pieces of pop culture that can’t be smooshed together.

• Bad Furry Tattoo: I mean, you say ‘bad’…tattoos of people’s fursonas which are about as excellent as you’d expect.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH AGAIN APOLOGISE FOR THE BREVITY OF INTRODUCTIONS TO EACH PIECE THIS WEEK BUT WHICH HOPES THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SELECTION MAKES UP FOR IT:

• Where Music Is Going 2017: Once again the New York Times produces an EXCELLENT longread taking a look at 25 tracks and what they say about the the state of (Western, mostly pop) music in 2017. Great writing and a decent breadth to the selection makes this a very good read indeed.

• What It’s Like To Lose Your Short-term Memory: Brilliantly lucid piece of writing about how it feels to all of a sudden have no short-term memory at all, to have to reappraise situations, people, feelings, desires on a minute-by-minute basis, and what it does to one’s sense of self and identity. Not as depressing as I have just made it sound, I promise.

• Leaving North Korea: Told in comic strip format, this is a beautifully-drawn (and thus told) account of what it takes to escape the DPRK and how it’s becoming ever harder to do so without outside assistance.

• My Freecell Win Percentage Is All I Have: McSweeney’s capturing perfectly the everyday sensation of futility and lack of agency that, let’s be honest, is pretty much the defining characteristic of the year so far.

• A Normal Person’s Guide To The Alt-Right’s Vocab: This is interesting, and funny, and Katie Notopoulos is as ever spot-on on web culture, but it’s also increasingly impossible to separate this stuff from parody, isn’t it? I mean, this could literally ALL be a Brass Eye sketch and we’d be none the wiser. Chris? Is that you?

• The Redpill Right: The few of you who actually read and remember the words I write between the links may recall me opining on the links and intellectual red thread which can be drawn between the meninist movement and the Alt-right; here’s a decent explanation of exactly that thread.

• Laurie Penny on Milo, Again: So this got absolute pelters from Woke Twitter when it was published, not least because of a couple of ill-advised lines making comparisons with young black kids which got people most angry. Leaving that aside, if you can, this is actually an excellent piece of writing about the sort of weirdly childlike way in which Milo did his schtick, and the equally childlike manchildren who are his followers and entourage. I thought at the time – and still do – that there’s an interesting line between this and the manchildren on the tech and startup world, which after all is where Milo got his first sniff of notoriety and which, as far as I’m concerned, is far more culpable for the cnut’s rise than it seems to want to accept.

• Videogames Are Better Than Life: On why, and how, increasing numbers of young men (in the States, but also elsewhere) are pouring more of their emotional energy into games than anything else. Add this to the file marked ‘datapoints on the way to Ready Player One becoming actual, real life’.

• Solo Disneyland: Reflections on going to Disneyland alone as an adult. The author of the piece is, it’s fair to say, a Disney superfan – it’s very well-written and absolutely not a sad piece, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of absolutely intense and crippling loneliness between every single word here.

• The Power and Purpose of PMQs: Wonderfully observed vignette of how PMQs works behind the scenes and what, if you’re the government, it’s *actually* for.

• How The World’s Heaviest Man Lost It All: This, though, really IS sad – what happens when you’re the world’s heaviest man, and you decide to lose the weight? I really wanted to give him a hug at the end of this.

• And Then The Strangest Thing Happened: A really interesting breakdown of the signature, singular Adam Curtis style, how it’s evolved, and how it’s made his documentaries arguably less effective. I always find watching Curtis that it’s terribly convincing while I’m in the moment but a few days afterwards I can’t help but think of it as an example of the clever propagandising he himself decries.

• Second Life For The Disabled: One day I will stop posting stuff about Second Life – it continues to fascinate me, though, particularly it’s use case as a community for marginalised groups. This is a genuinely uplifting report about disabled people from around the world coming together in virtual space with a freedom their physical impairments mean will never be afforded to them in meatspace. Seriously, made me very happy, this.

• Meet The Mole Catchers: I had NO IDEA it was such a divided world, frankly. This is great and wonderfully, beautifully British in its eccentricity.

• 20 Questions With Peter Singer: Still, to my mind, the most interesting moral philosopher of the 20th Century, this is eminently readable even if you don’t have a background in the discipline. There are few people better at making you think about hard answers to unpleasant questions, imho.

• The Commis Chef: This is a VERY technical look at the role of the commis chef in a Chinese restaurant kitchen – if you’re interested in food, though, and the restaurant business then I promise you it’s a fascinating read.

• A Tribute To AA Gill: Wonderful writing about a wonderful bastard of a writer.

• The Wait: This is about having a miscarriage; it’s obviously not a happy piece of writing, but it is very beautiful indeed.

• A Season Under The Gun: This is BRILLIANT journalism. A 5-party series (the link goes to pt1, all the others are linked to from the bottom of the piece) about teens playing basketball in downtown Chicago, against a backdrop of all the sort of classic urban issues you’d expect, from drugs to guns to organised crime to grinding poverty and all the stops inbetween. If you watched Hoop Dreams (and if not, why not? HERE YOU GO!), you’ll find a lot to love in here.

• Europe’s Child Refugee Crisis: In a week in which the Dubs amendment got given its marching orders to little-to-no outcry, it’s worth reminding ourselves of exactly what kids across the Middle East have been going through to get to some place of safety, and exactly how badly we’ve been letting them down. Still, jokes in the Budget!

• Gay Loneliness: A really interesting essay examining what the author perceives as a fundamental loneliness at the heart of the gay male experience. I can’t speak to the truth or accuracy of this, but it was a really interesting read.

• You May Want To Marry My Husband: Finally this week, I warn you that this made me absolutely bawl my eyes out and it may do the same to you; still, it’s a truly beautiful little essay and it deserves your attention. You might want some tissues handy, though.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is called ‘The Future of Shopping’ and is an interesting look at the future of retail; what’s notable about it, though, is that it’s all drawn within Tilt for Oculus, and as such offers a really interesting look at how you can use the tech for effective exposition. Worth watching, honest:

2) This is by Cosima, it’s called ‘Build a House’ and it is the best vocal I have heard in an age. WHAT a voice:

3) Ok, if you accept the fact that large parts of this are a straight rip of ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan, this is a legitimate dancefloor BANGER. It’s called ‘Give Me A Reason’ by Ibibio Sound System:

4) This is by a young man called London O’Connor, it’s called ‘Nobody Hangs Out No More’, and I adore it immoderately (it has elements of Kevin Abstract, which may be why):

5) HIPHOP CORNER! Can’t stress how good this one is – it’s called ‘Back Up’, it’s by Clipping, and the whole package – song and video – is unsettling and claustrophobic and nervous and slightly comedowny and generally ACE:

6) I can’t quite work out if this is utterly dreadful or sort of genius, which equivocation suggests it’s probably the former; still, in the 3 weeks since I first heard it I keep coming back to it, which suggests…well, that my taste is possibly dreadful. Still, see what YOU think – this is called ‘Cruel’ and it’s by The Rhythm Method:

7) Last up this week is this beautifully-shot promo for Serpentine by Oyinda; simultaneously warm and glacial, the track’s rather good too. Enjoy, take care, and HAVE FUN! Anon, webmongs:

Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle.

Matt Muir

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LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE LATEST MIX FRESH FROM THE DECKS OF AKIRA THE DON IN LA!

THE SECTION WHICH, YOU CAN IMAGINE, HAS NEXT TO NO INTEREST IN REPORTING NEWS ABOUT S*C**L FCUKING M*D** THIS MORNING:

• Better Facebook Ads For Retailers: If your job involves promoting ACTUALY PHYSICAL SHOPS (how retro of you), this is BIG NEWS. New Facebook Ad units were announced this week, which will allow retailers to point Facebook users to the store nearest to them within a specifically-designed map-advert – effectively a user will see a little map in their timeline with a big arrow saying “GET YOUR CORONARY-INDUCING MEAT BOMB HERE!” or some other suitably enticing exhortation. Combine this with a carousel format which shows you an enticing, glistening picture of said meat bomb and BANG! FOOTFALL! More impressively / scarily, Facebook’s also going to start tracking user movement so as to be able to determine the efficacy of these ads – they are light on technical detail here, but you might want to turn location services off if you’d prefer not to let Facebook know exactly how susceptible you are to photos of glistening meat.

• Enhanced Messenger: More of a thing for people than brands (“But Matt!”, I hear you cry, “Brands are people too!”), this is a host of new features which will be cropping up in Messenger including birthday reminders, prioritisation of your most used contacts and the like. It’s surely only a small step from this to the ability to, say, promote specific deals from specific retailers in the app, with the ability to buy direct.

• The Snapchat Adpocalypse is Coming: OK, so perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but the fact is that as things stand Snapchat is a relatively ad-free place to hang out. NO MORE! As of the next few weeks, Snapchat’s introducing ads inbween Stories – so as you flick between the deliciously vapid windows into your friends’ lives and LOL at their funny puppy ears, you’ll be presented with a variety of slick, full-bleed ads for a variety of exciting commercial opportunities; these ads will let users skip them (thank Christ), but will also include additional links to external websites or MORE CONTENT if said users swipe up. This isn’t quite going to create a free-for-all – much in the manner in which Instagram started, ads are only available through a selection of Snapchat’s accepted creative / commercial partners, which should at least maintain a temporary veneer of quality; I give it 6 months before any old agency twat can start creating hideous, invasive branded content, though. Anyway, if you’re a brand which wants to sell to children then a) I hate you; b) you probably should get on this. Oh, if you’re interested there is a MUCH longer breakdown here.

• Twitter Introduces Emoji Targeting: What, let me ask you, is the ‘good’ thing about emoji (the inverted commas are my own and you can hopefully imagine the tone that they are meant to convey)? Yes, that’s right, it’s their innate context dependence and utter subjectivity, which makes them a hugely flexible (and MASSIVELY INEFFICIENT) means of communicating. Which is why Twitter’s MASSIVE NEWS that you can now use emoji use as another ad targeting variable is such a silly gimmick; unless you make condoms or bongo, in which case fire that CONTENT at anyone using the taco, aubergine or any of the dozens of other ‘comedy’ genital signifiers, you’ll be targeting people who are using a symbol whose potential meanings are so broad that it is in fact no sort of worthwhile targeting at all. Still, look forward to a bunch of brands doing stuff with this and Twitter talking about how ACE it is, because, you know, GIMMICKS. Christ’s sake.

• Twitter May Promote Moments In Timeline: MAY being the operative word here. That said, this strikes me as a move towards expanding the potential commercial opportunities for moments – if they are appearing in timelines then they are necessarily going to be more appealing a prospect to advertisers, and they can be targeted at specific users more easily. Not using emoji, though, please.

• Everyone Can Now Periscope Straight From Twitter: As I wrote that, I had a sudden moment of comprehension that this is a sentence which would have meant literally nothing a few years ago. Weird. Anyway, now all users of Twitter on iOS and Android can do this, should they so desire, making it even easier for people and brands to LIVE STREAM THEIR LIVES (or whatever simulated version thereof they wish to present). Great.

• You Can Now RT Yourself If You So Desire: Remember that FIRE Tweet you posted back in 2011? No, neither does anyone else, and nor indeed do they care, but don’t let that stop you from re-upping all your greatest 140-character hits to a totally disinterested audience. Lucky, lucky us.

• Pinterest Doing More To Track Offline Behaviour: Or at least it will, using a partnership with Oracle Data Cloud. This is more a general ‘this will happen’ thing, but is also an opportunity for me to once again say how underrated I think Pinterest is in the marketing mix, and to point you at this rather interesting interview with its Chief Executive on the occasion of the opening of its London office. If you’d like to debate whether the term ‘social network’ is now dead, feel free to do so (but a long, long way out of my earshot if you don’t mind). Hang on, I just scanned that again and the bastard is 33. 33. You absolute shitbag, Ben Silbermann.

• A Decent Guide To The New Google Map Ads: You know the whole ‘you can now buy advertising pins on Google Maps’ thing from last week or whenever it was? Well this is a 101-ish rundown on how they, and the whole general advertising on Google Maps things works. Useful and helpful.

• YouTube Director: One for the small business people out there, this is a potentially really useful app from YouTube which helps you make professional-looking video ads for whatever it is that you do, using a surprisingly flexible series of templates, fonts, etc, delivered via a bespoke YouTube app. Obviously the end goal of this is to get you to buy pre-rolls on YouTube (OBVIOUSLY), but, you know, still.

• Bumble Integrates With Spotify: Not technically about advermarketingpr, but I find the principle interesting. Dating app Bumble is now integrating Spotify data into its profiles, meaning you can add ‘taste in music’ to the list of superficial criteria you use to decide whether to let someone inside you. I reckon there is LOADS more interesting stuff that can be done by brands with Spotify data, but I’ll let you clever people in the agencies work it out.

• Oh, Yes, Microsoft Bought LinkedIn: A union of two of the most tedious companies on the planet, there’s no actual NEWS here beyond the frankly HUGE price they paid; this is a really smart (and occasionally surprisingly funny) piece listing 9 things that Microsoft could do with everyone’s least favourite social network. It’s hard not to see this as being eventually part of Office and overall a great big hedge against Facebook at Work, but TIME WILL TELL.

• The Cheetos Museum: Included more because I desperately need some sort of frivolity this morning than because it’s particularly great, this is the website for a promo by purveyors of potentially toxic cheese dust Cheetos (NB – WEB CURIOS WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY THINK THAT CHEETOS ARE POTENTIALLY TOXIC, HONEST) which is offering a series of prizes of $10,000 (the world has gone mad) to the people who upload photos of the oddest looking corn snacks they’ve found in their packets. Silly, but I would love a major food manufacturer run something like this across their whole range – “WE ARE OFFERING A MILLION QUID TO THE BEST JESUS FOUND IN ONE OF OUR PRODUCTS”, for example. Take a look at the gallery, and look at how many people have uploaded photographs of misshapen, nuclear-orange snack-foods, though. LOOK. To the one person reading this who I know for a fact spends most of their life covered in a fine haze of orange cheese dust, SORT YOUR LIFE OUT MATE.

• Snapchat Filters for Charity: A nice idea from W Hotels in the US, whereby users Snapping in the vicinity of a few of their hotesl across the country can use a rainbow filter in support of Pride Month, and by so doing date $1 to LGBTI charities. Simple, smart, and the sort of thing which should become a no-brainer for charity partnerships all over the place.

HOW ABOUT SOME ANGULAR INDIEPOP FROM WEAVES’ SELF-TITLED LP? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PLEASE LIKE YOU ALL TO SPEND THE NEXT FEW WEEKS JUST BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER AND MAYBE NOT SHOUTING AND ARGUING SO MUCH ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON’T MIND, THANKS, PT.1:

• Score Assured: Seeing as everything is so utterly, utterly banjaxed, let’s kick off with a website-stroke-service which encapsulates much of what is horrible about 2016. Score Assured is a charming site which will, if these reports are anything to go by, mine Facebook data of potential tenants and employees to allow landlords or potential employers to determine whether or not they should be given houses or jobs. The idea is that it’s part of the background checking process – employers or landlords ask prospective tenants or employees for access to their social media accounts through the site, which then analyses EVERYTHING on it and ‘works out’ whether or not they’re a safe bet for employment or a roof over their heads. Yes, that’s right, an algorithm is going to start determining whether or not you should be allowed to live somewhere – spend too much time talking about getting all messed up at the weekends in your Messenger conversations? ACCESS DENIED! Dystopian present, how do I love thee? Let me count the wa…no, actually, let’s not bother.

• Dango: How will we know when machines have reached sentience? Balls to the Turing Test – emoji are obviously the new benchmark of AI comprehension. Dango is “a floating assistant that runs on your phone and predicts emoji, stickers and GIFs based on what you and your friends are writing in any app. This lets you have the same rich conversations everywhere: Messenger, Kik, Whatsapp, Snapchat, whatever.” The intriguing part here is the idea of its being able to predict which visual signifier is most appropriate at any given time – maybe if this takes off, we can move towards a proper, defined taxonomy of emoji, as defined by machine learning, thereby making Twitter’s ad targeting thing above less preposterous than at present. Maybe.

• The IKEA Museum: Opening on June 30 in Älmhult, Sweden, this is going to be several thousand square feet of flat-pack furniture and meatballs and domestic arguments, celebrating the history of what is simultaneously one of the most convenient and most infuriating retailers in history. Do you think it will have the same sort of intense effect on visiting couples as visiting one of the actual stores will? Actually, there’s quite a fun (I use the term advisedly) art project in this; get a load of couples to reenact arguments based in different eras from IKEA’s past in different areas of the museum. IMMERSIVE THEATRE! Go on, someone, do this.

• Live From A Moon-Shaped Pool: If you’re reading this on Friday 17 June 2016, Radiohead are doing all sorts of interesting livestreaming stuff on this website today. If you’re not, YOU’RE LATE. Oh, and if you’re seeing this on the CurioBot then let’s just agree to ignore it and move on (though they may have archived it, actually, so maybe click on the link just in case).

• Ebooks_goetia: Just in case you wanted a mildly occult Twitter bot to follow. “The Lesser Bot of Solomon offers you endless pages from a text in the style of Ars Goetia and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.” – it’s all sigils full of DARK PORTENT. Friday Fun! Why not take some of these and print them up – maybe A5 size – and stick them in unexpected and hard to find places in the office (maybe at the bottom of the paper drawer in the printer), and then send HR an email asking if they know who the Satanist is?

• Make Barnes Dance: In the time-honoured tradition of every single football tournament since 1990, we must hark back to World In Motion and John Barnes. This is a toy which lets you make a little dancing John Barnes doll, which is totally pointless but included because it’s still better than any other brand stuff I’ve seen over the Euros this year (seriously, has anyone seen anything good? It’s all dreck, isn’t it?).

• Green Screen The Queen: God, do you remember the Queen’s Birthday? How full of innocent patriotic hope we were then, before seemingly everything went to tits. Anyway, this site, built by FRIEND OF CURIOS Shardcore, lets you superimpose any YouTube video you want onto the Queen’s helpfully greenscreen-hued dress. Works particularly well with any of the Deep Dream stuff, imho, though frankly anything’s good here.

• Google Hands-free Payments: These are actually live RIGHT NOW in Southern California – Google’s now letting users pay for goods in certain outlets simply by SCANNING THEIR FACES. It’s not quite that simple – there’s another layer of ID and security which involves Google knowing that your phone is in the store, along with your face – but it’s the closest I’ve seen to magic this week. ETA to rollout worldwide? I reckon 2018, if it works in the pilots.

• Good Finds: Another website which proves to me that there is a market in piggybacking on Airbnb, Good Finds offers a regularly-updated selection of ‘curated’ (BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS CURATION NOW – am I allowed to call this curation? Probably not if I don’t want to sound like a total prick, on reflection) Airbnb listings a few hours from New York City and (eventually) San Francisco, promising TRENDY VIBES and suchlike. This seems like a natural brand extension for someone like, say, Mr & Mrs Smith, or even a Net a Porter (if you squint) – is anyone doing something like this here?

• Club Soda: As a man whose relationship with Casillero del Diablo ranges on a spectrum from ‘deep, abiding affection’ to ‘worrying degrees of dependency’, I’m always agog at people who are able to take a responsible attitude to their boozing rather than simply emptying it as much of it down their gullet as is humanly possible every evening. Club Soda is a website designed to help people who want to drink a bit less, or even stop at all, by giving encouragement, tips, suggesting meetups and the like. Effectively like the sort of resources which have existed for ages for people looking to kick the tabs, this is a great idea and is ripe for sponsorship by one of those ‘sophisticated fizzy drinks you can theoretically order instead of wine in the pub but noone ever really does because, well, they taste like pop’ such as Schloer or somesuch.

• All The World’s Fictional Holidays: A calendar plugin which, if you wish, will add every single (well, maybe not EVERY SINGLE, but) fictional holiday to your diary. If you’ve ever wanted to chance your arm with your employer and demand time off for, say, Katniss’s birthday, here’s your chance. Again, such a great idea for a publisher which you can probably get away with ripping off if you’re smart about it – maybe let people pick their favourite characters in literature (Gatsby, Hal, Baldini, etc) and have those birthdays appear in-calendar, perhaps with links to resources about the characters or something. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Do it, Penguin.

• Hello Jarvis: Not, sadly, the now-legendary personal assistant which Zuck’s purportedly constructing, this is a far simpler messenger bot which can be set to give you reminders about stuff in the future. Simple and not very useful, it’s included here more as a nudge to remind you how easy these things can be to cobble together – i refer you back to that flowxo botbuilder from the other week.

• The NYC Drone Film Festival: Now in its 3rd year, the NYC Drone Film Festival is a celebration of…er…films made with drones (what did you expect?). You can see a load of them on the Festival’s official site; this one’s my favourite, but you should check the whole site as there’s some truly inventive cinematography there.

• The First Law: Brilliant and deeply sinister idea, this. You remember Asimov’s First Law of Robitics? In case you don’t, it’s “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” This is a robot which can choose to ignore that edict – to cite its creator, “The first robot to autonomously and intentionally break Asimov’s first law, which states: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The robot decides for each person it detects if it should injure them not in a way the creator can not predict. While there currently are “killer” drones and sentry guns, there is either always some person in the loop to make decisions or the system is a glorified tripwire. The way this robot differs in what exists is the decision making process it makes. A land mine for instance is made to always go off when stepped on, so no decision. A drone has a person in the loop, so no machine process. A radar operated gun again is basically the same as a land mine. Sticking your hand into a running blender is your decision, with a certain outcome. The fact that sometimes the robot decides not to hurt a person (in a way that is not predictable) is actually what brings about the important questions and sets it apart.” Brilliantly sinister.

• Hemingboard: A keyboard for desktop or mobile, helpfully designed fro seemingly every platform out there (apart from Windows Phones, obvs), which acts as something of a poetic assistant, making suggestions as to rhymes and synonyms and stuff. Download this and see whether it improves your chances on Tinder, Grindr or whichever tailchasing app you prefer – but be aware that you will effectively be letting a machine play Cyrano for you, which is pretty much as pathetic as it gets, romance-wise.

• Joachim Time: MASSIVE WOODEN CLOCKS! A whole range of designs, many of which are pretty cool, and they will plant 100 new trees for each one you buy, which seems like a pretty good deal. If you work in a COOL OFFICE and you need a new timepiece, or if you want your flat to look like something out of Oh Comely magazine, this might well tickle your fancy.

• Wholi: Currently in private Beta, Wholi is a service which offers itself as person-finding tool par excellence; effectively Google for people (professionals, specifically), designed to be a way of building networks within specific areas of expertise (for example, UK software development). Its utility will stand and fall based on the quality of its database, but it could be a pleasing alternative to the horror that is LinkedIn search.

• Keyboard AR: Using augmented reality tech to teach the piano. Light on tech details, but a rather cool proof-of-concept if nothing else.

• Kristina Lechner: Kristina Lechner takes photographs of small things that aren’t food arranged to look like actual food in miniature. Which clunky description suggests that last night’s insomnia is catching up with me, and we’re starting that long, slow slide into what regular readers will know is the low point of Curios (there are highs? I hear you all ask, incredulously. Fcuk off, you ingrates); don’t worry, I’ll power through and this will be behind us soon enough, honest.

• FastDocs: Dull-but-useful, this – a webpage which contains icons which take you direct to new Google Docs with a single click. Pleasingly, these are also customisable so that you can add one-click shortcuts to your Google Apps for Work – workplaces using Google Docs should consider this as a standard browser homepage, or at least until Google sort their shit out when it comes to the Docs UI.

• Startup Breeding: All idea for new companies are “It’s like X for Y!”, or “It’s like A + B!”. Eliminate the tedious process of coming up with your own ideas for new companies by using this handy websites which generates these constructions for you. Just, you know, remember where you saw it first when you’re a multimillionaire holidaying on Necker with laughing Rich.

• Addressable: WORTHY and DULL, but actually pretty smart and the sort of thing that you could reasonably rip off to useful effect for the right brand. Addressable is a service (I think) by or in conjunction with the US Postal Service, which effectively guides you through the process of updating your address when you move home, helping you tell all your utility providers, etc, and ensuring you don’t forget to tie up any loose ends. If you work for an estate agent then you’re obviously scum, but you may also find this the sort of thing which you could present to customers as ADDED VALUE or somesuch crap.

• Zungle: I can’t work out whether this is a cool idea or something a little akin to a mobile phone holster in pleather – YOU DECIDE! Zungle is a Kickstartable project, nearly funded, which will bring to market sunglasses which double as bone-conducting headphones, bluetooth-enabled so you can stream straight from your phone to…er…your cranium. Which creeps me out something chronic, but then I am basically uncomfortable with the concept of sunglasses (I know, I know, but they make me feel like everyone is looking at me, which I appreciate is odd, but) so probably not target audience.

• CalendarBlocker: Another Euro 2016 thing, and another Calendar app, and another example of something a brand should have done but didn’t (Carlsberg, I’m looking at you – this is a supercheap extension to that full-page ad you took out yesterday around the England game); this automatically fills your calendar with fictitious apppointments which happen to coincidentally coincide with England’s games in the tournament. Could be more comprehensive, but it’s a nice idea and an opportunity missed. Which is easy for me to say, as all I do is sit here in my pants and snark from the sidelines; I should probably shut up and get a real job or something. Sorry.

• My Script Font: Make a font out of your handwriting. Ugly and vain, but I would like at least one of you to do this and then set it as default on all your workplace machines as an act of supremely narcissistic digital vandalism. Thanks. Also, if you’re a famous I reckon you could TOTALLY get away with using this to make a font of your handwriting which you could then sell.

LET’S GO BACK TO 1977 AND A SELECTION OF TUNES FROM JOHN LYDON’S PERSONAL COLLECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PLEASE LIKE YOU ALL TO SPEND THE NEXT FEW WEEKS JUST BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER AND MAYBE NOT SHOUTING AND ARGUING SO MUCH ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON’T MIND, THANKS, PT.2:

• Vigils for Orlando: Photographs from vigils which took place the world over to commemorate the victims of Sunday’s shootings in Florida. Every time I look at these they absolutely ruin me.

• An Interactive Map of Voting Patterns In The US: Not only a lovely and mesmerising piece of dataviz, but a pleasing and timely reminder that psephology is against Trump.

• Unspeaking Likeness: These are chilling. I’ll take their description, as it’s better than mine would be: “Unspeaking Likeness is a series of photographs of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures. These sculptures are commissioned by various law enforcement agencies and used for the purposes of establishing the identity of victims of suspected violent crime whose soft tissue facial features have been obliterated by either trauma or the passage of time.” Incredible, and quite incredibly creepy.

• The Internet Creators Guild: An interesting idea, born out of the fact that there are now hundreds of thousands of people worldwide monetising their creativity via the web, whether that be minor YouTubers pulling in a few k a month from ads, or the vapid, dead-eyed teen stars filling your tween children’s every waking thought. The idea is that this will be a loose network looking to represent these creators, giving them a collective voice and sticking up for their interests – you can read the pseudo-manifesto here, but it seems, broadly, like A Good Thing.

• Kanye’s Making A Game: Or, more accurately, this studio is, under his doubtless close instruction. I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by revealing the premise to you: “You’ll play as Kanye’s mom, Donda, flying [ON PEGASUS!] through the gates of heaven.”. Yep.

• Bumpers: Really rather cool and very, very easy to use audio recording and editing app; this makes it very easy indeed to make relatively polished-sounding audio output, whether it be your own voicenotes or something morepodcasty – it’s worth a try if you’re into that sort of thing (and remember, kids, that as Shingy said, “Audio’s going to be big in the future”) (he really did say that, you know).

• Behind The Scenes Polaroids From Blade Runner: Yep, that. Some of these are excellent, though; in particular, I’m in love with this shot.

• Flugjefellet: This is all in Norwegian, and so I can’t really tell you anything about it, other than a) it’s about the Northernmost tip of the country; b) there’s a lighthouse there; c) it appears to be a guide to the area’s birdlife; and d) it contains a really, really rather beautiful 3d model of a Norwegian island, and quite a lot of footage of puffins, which given the week we’ve all had I think we should celebrate as the generally positive thing it is.

• Circulation Zero: You’llhave to download these as they’re not available to broswe as embeds on the site, but this is a great collection of the collected runs of three seminal punk magazines from the West Coast of the US in the 70s and 80s – Damage, Slash and No Mag. If you are into the scene, or just like looking at design and typography and photography from that era, these are some great respources.

• Draw With (On) Bob Ross: Continuing with the general theme of ‘Matt’s soothing antidotes to the Week of Horror™’, this is a site which plays a seemingly neverending selection of Bob Ross vids (you know Bob Ross – the beafroed hippy with the most soothing voice in the world who is catnip to the ASMR community, and whose mission to gently teach everyone in the US to paint made him basically the slightly less camp Tony Hart of across the pond), which if you so desire you can paint over with your cursor. Don’t do that, though – just put on your headphones and let Bob paint the pain away.

• Curtsy: Interesting idea, this. Curtsy is a peer-to-peer clothing rental app, only in the US at present, which lets you hire hipsters’ dresses for an evening at knockdown rates. Could totally work over here were anyone minded to port it over.

• Peanuts In The Desert: First of two links for the comic book (THEY ARE GRAPHIC NOVELS DAMN YOU) aficionados amongst you, this is a brilliant project which takes French cartoonist Moebius’s strip ‘40 Days In The Desert’ and redraws it using characters from Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’. Some familiarity with the source material helps here, admittedly, but the art style is nailed on.

• The Neu Jorker: This is SUCH a labour of love. A full edition, start to finish, of the New Yorker – except this is a satirical parody taking a very well-aimed shot at all the things that make the New Yorker the New Yorker – cartoons, pretence, preposterously long, self-indulgent articles, the whole nine yards. I can’t recommend this enough – there’s loads of it, but it’s consistently funny, and you can print it off while you’re at work and then take it home to enjoy over the weekend.

• Memions: It’s hard to think of an adequate response to how fcuked everything seems this week, so I’m not even going to try. Instead, I’m just going to leave this here – a website which collects hundreds, maybe thousands, of cripplingly lame and generic and unfunny and INSPIRATIONAL Minions memes in one place. Maybe by communicating solely via the medium of these we can restore some sense of balance and order to the crazy, messed-up world in which we live. Maybe. Alternatively, just spend the next few days communicating solely via these, to the increasing irritation of everyone you know.

• Marky: This got right on my tits earlier in the week, but I’m finding it hard to get quite so exercised about it now. Still, let’s try. Marky is basically like Graze or any of those ‘pay a premium to get some ingredients or small things delivered to you, which would be loads cheaper if you just bought them yourself but you are too busy and important to even contemplate doing so’, except it’s for craft materials you can use to have INTERACTIVE PLAYTIME with your kids. You sign up, and every X number of weeks they send you a box with a bunch of, say, beads and pipecleaners and other assorted crap, along with instructions on HOW TO BE CREATIVE with your child. If there’s anything that says “carving out some precious time with your offspring!” and “creativity!” it’s having a bunch of tat delivered in a fancy box for $50 a pop so you can follow the instructions on how to BE CREATIVE and then put that creativity back in a box til the next mandated CREATIVE PLAYTIME, right? Oh, look, it annoyed me again.

• Netcees: One of the odder online communities I’ve found in recent times, Netcees celebrates the weird world of text-only rap battling. You know “Don’t Flop” and all those other now-infamous rap battle nights? Well this is like those, except, er, these people just type stuff at each other. Some of these are truly DREADFUL – there’s a real rabbithole here, as there are literally millions of words on this site.

• Smile Vector: Photos of famouses, digitally manipulated to either give them the creepiest smiles you ever did see, or to remove the smiles that were once there. All done by algorithm, this Twitter feed has given me some of the more unsettling imagery I’ve seen this week.

• The Most German Thing I Have Ever Seen, Possibly: I mean, can you imagine any other nation having one of these as a tournament tie-in?

• Free Cerebus: This week’s other BIG THING for comic fans (GRAPHIC NOVELS), you can now download the first two Cerebus books in their entirety, for free. For those of you who don’t know, Cerebus is the longest-running graphic novel in history; it started out as a weird sort of swords and sorcery pastiche featuring a talking aardvark, but evolved over its lifespan to become one of the most interesting explorations of power and politics ever committed to the page (no, really, it did). Sadly it also descended quite far into misogynistic lunacy in its later years, as creator Dave Sim battled with drug addiction, mental health issues and the breakdown of his marriage, but the work still stands overall as a hell of an achievement (and in Jaka’s Story presents one of the most beautifully-rendered love stories I’ve ever read in the medium). Anyway, if you like comics (GRAPHIC NOVELS) then check these out, they might appeal.

• NIMB: This week’s ‘Christ, I wish this didn’t have to exist’ thing, NIMB is an internet-enabled ring of reasonably pleasing (if chunky) design which will, if pressed in a certain way for a certain amount of time, send an automatic alert to a predetermined set of individuals based on a user’s preferences. Not yet in production, but you can sign up to be alerted when it goes on sale.

• Luxoperon: Have YOU ever wanted to navigate prehistoric seas in a weird sort of browser-based game in which you search for fish and explore the depths? No, I hadn’t either to be honest, and yet this game proved a pleasing distraction for 10 minutes or so.

• 51 Sprints: This is really rather cool. Taking as its starting point the idea of the sprinter as an athletic ideal, this is part documentary and part interactive tool which lets you pit sprinters from the past and present against each other in your own version of the 100 metres, letting you apply equalising filters to different variables (gender, ethnicity, social class) to see how these were – or were not – factors in athletic performance. Feels more like an academic / sociological study than anything else, but it’s a fascinating project and rather well realised.

• Mass Migrations: Generate your own weird little 3d robot insect thing, and set it to play in its own little weird 3d virtual playground, soundtracked by some rather nice music. No reason why, just give it a go.

• Recently: A gift for the biggest narcissist you know, Recently is a service which, for $9 a month, will turn anyone’s INstagram feed (or the best thereof) into a monthly magazine, printed and shipped to them so they can have an actual coffeetable lifestyle magazine to house all their coffeetable lifestyle magazine shots. I hate EVERYTHING about this, and yet am forced to concede it’s pretty smart and there’s a whole load of obvious things brands could do along these lines. Still, though, if you desire this in any way then I actually hate you, just FYI.

• The New Tate: This is GORGEOUS, as you’d expect from a collaboration between the Tate and Sigur Ros. To celebrate the opening of the extension to the Tate Modern this week (well this week at time of writing, at least), they released this videomusicwebtoything, which lets you view different video representations of the new gallery; four different perspectives are available, which you can switch between at will, each revealing a different layer to Sigur Ros’ weirdly claustrophobic soundscape. This is beautifully done.

• An Deiner Seite: This, though, is my favourite thing of the week. A truly WONDERFUL interactive music video for German…er…rapper, apparently, Kontra K, this uses the same technique as the ‘switch between two videos’ Honda ad of last year, and invites you to help a fisherman find the clues to what happened by a sinsiter lakeside. This is SO SLICK and the song is SO GOOD – I cannot recommend it highly enough. Press and hold space to switch narratives and just enjoy.

LET’S FINISH THE PLAYLISTS WITH THIS SPOTIFY MIX  BY MOFGIMMERS OF GOOD, HAPPY TRACKS TO HOPEFULLY WASH SOME OF THE WRONG AWAY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Women Burning Things: For when you really, really need some gifs of women setting fire to stuff.

• Ruby, etc: Wonderful little cartoon vignettes from London-based artist Ruby, who draws small but perfectly-formed cartoons exploring depression, loneliness, anxiety and, you know, LIFE. Not in any way miserable, despite the subject matter – these are lovely.

• Fuck Yeah Studio Porn: Photographs of recording studios, the more pimped the better.

• They Can Talk: Small, slightly whimsical comics imagining what animals might say if they could in fact talk. This sounds like a range of really shit greetings cards, I’m aware, but I promise that they’re better than that.

• Barbie Movies: A Tumblr celebrating the VERY PINK world of the CGI Barbie cartoons. I had no idea these things even existed, possibly unsurprisingly, but if you have small children and you have no problem with the whole GIRLS=PINK PRINCESSES thing, then they might be into this. Alternatively, there’s something sort of seapunk/vaporwave about the whole aesthetic here (yes, yes, I know) which might be ripe for ripping off, maybe.

• Panini Cheapskates: This week’s “Not actually a Tumblr” comes in the shape of this, which I have probably featured before on reflection but which is worth reupping as THE FOOTBALL IS HAPPENING. Panini Cheapskates is basically a load of really rubbish drawings of footballers, all being done to raise money for good causes. Funny and worthwhile.

• CL Terry Art: Great little animations in a sort of 2d Pixar-ish style.

• Watermelon Prices: Sadly inactive for a year, I PLEAD with whoever is behind this to bring it back. We’re having an awful Summer – for some reason I think that this would make it marginally better (no, I can’t explain why). This is a Tumblr recording the variety of prices of watermelons in the rubbish local shops of London, and I want it back.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• What Are The Odds We Are Living In A Simulation: A piece sparked by Elon Musk’s comments in an interview the other week in which he stated it was statistically improbable that this was the ‘top level’ universe, based on the pace of improvement of computational power, this takes a good long run up at the classic Cartesian questions (“But how do I know I’m not a brain in a vat?”), swings and…well…sort of misses. Interesting enough, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of depth here. Though after this week, I’m sort of with the Gnostics on this one.

• In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club: A short, poignant essay about being gay and Latino and going out, and what places like Pulse meant to members of a community who found it harder than some others to embrace their non-heterosexuality. This is really rather beautiful, and captures (one of the many reasons) why last Sunday was such a sad event.

• Carrozo Gets Mad: More on Orlando and associated things, this time from Matthew Carrozo, whose Twitterstorm earlier this week he kindly collated for me into this Storify and which you should all read; it’s brilliant, on all sorts of things including opinions and social media, gay identity and belonging, how we define ourselves publicly and privately, and how events and the tenor of conversation are always, always shaped both by a prevailing narrative as well as all those things left unsaid. Made me a bit weepy, I’m not ashamed to say.

• Kris Kristofferson: By way of light relief, this profile of Kris Kristofferson paints a picture of a truly remarkable man and life. I had no idea he had done SO MUCH. Blimey, I feel quite small by comparison (not uncommon tbh).

• -ass as a Modifier: Students of linguistics – or, you know, anyone who reads or listens to the Englis language, pretty much, will be aware of the evolution of the suffix -ass as a modifier. This is a brilliant and brilliantly straight-faced, exploration of what it MEANS and how it works, and why, for example, “…while you can say “I run quickly” you can’t say “I run quick-ass”. I love this stuff.

• Reviewing Flume’s New Album: Which analysis segues rather nicely into this, which is hands-down one of the oddest music reviews I’ve ever read anywhere, not least in the pages of the Independent. Is Justin Carissimo a real person? Is this performance art? Whatever, he can…er…sort of write (although I’m pretty much certain he misuses the -ass suffix at least once here). Want a taste? “To be frank, this is the type of music that fuels interracial relationships, cause when the hook sinks and the beat drops, hundreds of years of oppression, and your bigoted parents completely fade away for a moment.” It’s safe to say he likes it. Oh, just FYI, Flume’s latest track was on last week’s Curios if you want a taster.

• On Icons: On icon design, and why we use them instead of labels. Yes, I know it sounds boring, but I promise you that you don’t have to be a designer to find this interesting – all about communication and language and visual signifiers and STUFF, this is really interesting (particularly w/r/t the rise of the emoji, imho).

• The 10 Biggest Gun Manufacturers In America: If you want something to make you actually angry today, can I recommend this? A rundown of the finances and business operations (and NRA-enabled lobbying activity) of the ten biggest gunmakers in the US. The sums of money being bandied about here are astounding, not least those being spent on buying politicians – let’s not beat around the bush, that’s exactly what it is – to support whatever position the NRA deems most advantageous to the manufacturers. Absolutely filthy, the whole thing.

• Satyricon: A portrait of this weekend’s Roman mayoral elections, in which it’s at the time of writing) likely that the candidate from the ‘outsider’ party (the Movimento 5 Stelle, or 5 Star Movement) will emerge triumphant. You don’t need to know or care about Italian politics to find this interesting – it’s a good overview of a democracy which has been pretty fractured for half a century, and a country where, despite nothing working and everything being a corrupt mess, things still just about limp along regardless. Until yesterday I was going to make some crack about ‘and we think we’ve got it bad!’, but that’s not really funny any more.

• The People’s Republic of WeChat: A really comprehensive (and, I’m told, accurate) overview of how WeChat (China’s catch-all social media /messaging platform which basically does EVERYTHING) works and is built in to every facet of Chinese society. You want to see what Facebook wants to become with this year’s Messenger updates? Read this and then project forward 4 years.

• The Dystopian Future Of Silicon Valley: What happens if DeLillo and others are right and cryogenics are actually going to work? This essay takes a look, and sees a future which is dominated by the same old white men as right now – a pretty chilling (no pun intended, but, y’know, LOLS) extrapolation of what will almost inevitably occur if you grant longer and longer life to those at the top of the tree who can afford to pay for it. Watch as today’s elites entrench themselves into perpetuity!

• Minnesota’s Meat Raffles: Apparently in Minnesota, a decent evening’s entertainment can consist of going to a bar and buying a raffle ticket which might entitle you to win some meat. This is just sort of weird, and I’m including it mainly because I find myself laughing to the point of distraction at the repeated phrase “Who doesn’t love a good meat raffle?” Who indeed?

• My Heart Belongs To Daddy!: If you’ve spent any time on Twitter of late, you’ll have seen the almost unstoppable trend of any male celebrity of a certain age being bombarded with exhortations from thirsyty kids of all genders to “choke me, daddy!” or similar such constructions (even the Pope wasn’t immune, although I imagine Francis secretly probably rather enjoyed it). This (not entirely serious) piece looks at the semantics of the ‘Daddy’ meme, and the issue of daddy sex in general. PROTIP – if you have teenage daughters, maybe don’t read this one.

• Sad!: This is a great read, if you’re a little bit of a politicowonk. Campaign managers of three of the Republican presidential candidates discuss with a reporter from the Huffington Post what it felt like to lose to Trump, why they think it happened, and how the campaigns worked behind the scenes. Genuinely fascinating, whether or not you’re into the US Presidential race.

• Before Kanye Was Kanye: A portrait of the geeky, enthusiastic kid with the slightly shonky flow who would grow up to be the self-proclaimed GOAT. Awesome reminiscence here.

• More Seduction Than Friendship: A brilliant, beautiful piece of writing about the sort of intense friendships that people form in their 20s and which can with surprising ease vanish just as quickly as they are born. The whole piece is a startlingly good piece of writing, but the final paragraphs got me right *here*. Fiction, but you’d never guess – this is wonderful.

• A Brief Catalogue of Minor Sex Scandals: Equally superb writing, this, on being white trash and all that goes with it. I missed this when it was published last year, but it’s beautiful and demands a slow, attentive read.

• The Panel: The final long read of the week, read this before you go and vote on Thursday. Read it all, out loud in your head. It is by Luke Wright and it is a brilliant piece of poetry. It was written for last year’s election, but it bears up for this year’s referendum. READ IT.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s start with a video featuring some mesmerising, beautiful, mo-capped CGI dancing. This is gorgeous:

2) More dancing! This is less mesmerising and more sort of weird, like if you were able to turn yourself into a videogame character. It’s by Cumhur Jay and the track’s called ‘Dyschronometria’ and it’s got GREAT synths:

3) Ghostbusters, done in LEGO, just because it’s cheering and nostalgic and HOLD ME TIGHT SOMEONE:

4 A girl I went to college with (shout out Ivana, you will never read this but I hope you’re well) once got off with Iggy Pop onstage at a gig of his in Belgrade. She said he was an aggressive kisser, fwiw. Anyway, this is his latest, called ‘American Valhalla’ – I think the video’s rather good:

5) No hiphop selection this week, just this rather beautiful slow jam by SilentJay and JaceXL. This is called Rockabye, and the video’s rather beautiful in a slowmo backwards kind of way:

6) Another in the very occasional series of ‘if you’re having a really druggy house party this weekend, try throwing this onto the telly as the backdrop to whatever’s going on at about 4am’ videos – this is Megaplex, the final in a series of longform spliced videos combining 80s classics to massive, disorienting effect. This is ACE:

7) Next, in case you’re yet to see it, the ‘Weird Japanese-style Trump video’ that has been EVERYWHERE in the past 24h – made not by anyone in Japan but by LA artist Mike Diva. Bafflingly, there are people on Twitter nhim if this is anti-Trump; he literally blows up the world, kids, it’s not exactly a pro message:

8) Finally this week, the best video I’ve seen all week. You HAVE to watch this on your phone – yet another example of how vertical vids, when done right, are just brilliant. By spoken word artist Max Stossel, this is called ‘Stop Making Murderers Famous’. See you on the other side, kids.

I KNOW MASHUPS ARE IN NO WAY COOL, BUT THIS SELECTION OF OLDSCHOOL PUNK VS HIPHOP TRACKS ARE JUST INSANELY GOOD, HONEST!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND ITSELF GETTING GENUINELY SLIGHTLY EXCITED ABOUT AN INSTAGRAM UPDATE THIS WEEK, WHICH SUGGESTS IT REALLY DOES NEED TO TAKE A LONG HARD LOOK AT ITSELF:

• Instagram Business Pages Are Now HERE In The UK: You will, of course, recall exactly what this means – the ability to boost existing Instagram posts through ads rather than having to create new ad units, halfway decent analytics, that sort of thing. Not got access to this yet? It’s because Facebook hates you.

• Instagram Introducing Event Channels: Because EVERYTHING HAS TO BE VIDEO NOW (see Curios passim), Instagram is rolling out a new way of categorising video on the platform – users will soon see suggested channels under the ‘Explore’ tab, collecting video from particular events in one place. Imagine a Glastonbury tab, collecting all the on-the-ground and behind-the-scenes footage, for example, or one for Wimbledon – this is going to be BRANDED CONTENT CENTRAL in next to no time, so talk to your Facebook rep TODAY about the exciting opportunities to spend your clients’ cash LEVERAGING THEIR SPONSORSHIP to a highly-engaged, content-hungry audience! Dear God.

• Facebook Messenger Lets Bots Do Promotions And Stuff: This is part of a wider update to Facebook Messenger’s policies around what bots can and can’t do on the platform – see a full breakdown of the policies here (which really is worth a read if you’re interested in making these things). Now, for example, you can build bots which will send people links to promotional vouchers in a chat, for example, enabling you do do all SORTS of fun things, not least do some pretty accurate conversion-tracking from social through to purchase. Users can now also subscribe to bots, giving said bot the right to ping them messages as and when – which, to my mind, is a gentle kick in the direction of email marketing. Oh, in additional bot news, they have also made code to train your bot to learn language better available on Github – for the techies, here, but if you’re on the build/make side of this then this is probably rather useful.

• Snapchat Now Doing 360-degree Video Ads: Christ alone knows how much these cost, but welcome to a world in which you no longer just have to worry about shooting in vertical, but also about making it a 360-degree interactive experience. FUN TIMES, CONTENT MONKEYS!

• Snapchat Expands Opportunities For Advertisers: As in, they’ve opened up the ‘ads between snaps’ format to more brands. Exciting, eh? MAYBE YOUR BRAND COULD BE ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES.

• App For Snapchat Geofilters: This is both brilliantly opportunistic and sort of angry-making; I mean, Snapchat is a horribly convoluted beast to use, fine, but the setting up of Geofilters is an admirably simple process. Nonetheless, here comes an app which guides you through the whole process of making one, and which will, if you pay an additional premium, take you through the buying and approval process too. Potentially useful for small businesses, etc, who maybe don’t have the time or the skill to spend hours perfecting the millennial-friendly image which will make their filter FLY.

• Pinterest Introduces Promoted Video: Every time there’s a new Pinterest update I write some rubbish about how ‘Pinterest is such an underrated tool in the marketing mix, you know’ (except probably with more overwrought shouting in capital letters, and a greater sense of predictable, jaded ennui), so imagine that that’s exactly what I’m saying now. Video ads on the platform are REALLY interesting if you do food, design, DIY, etc – these are available in the UK RIGHT NOW, at least for those with an account manager on the platform. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

• Twitter Introduces Promoted Stickers: When I wrote about this on launch, WAAAAAY back when we were still reeling from Brexit and everything was dreadful – what a difference a(n admittedly sizeable) handful of shiny metal coins makes! – I said “you’re an idiot if you don’t think Twitter is RIGHT NOW talking to brands and events about a pricing model for creating bespoke stickers for them to use around calendar events and the like.” AND LO IT CAME TO PASS! I am intrigued to see what sort of moderation options are here, as the whole ‘stickers work like visual hashtags’ thing would, depending on the sort of troll you are, motivate a LOT of people to jump on the branded sticker bandwagon with, almost certainly, some pretty DARK stuff. Let’s see shall we?

• Twitter Does A Small Thing To Limit Abuse: There’s a longread at the end this week about Twitter’s persistent abuse problems which is well worth a read; the platform just announced that it was introducing the opportunity for users to mute mentions of themselves by people who don’t follow them; meaning that you won’t have to see @mentions by random folk who decide to dogpile you. Which is fine, as far as it goes, though it’s sort of a bandage on an axewound if you in any way care about mho.

• YikYak Does A Pivot: I joined YikYak about 18 months ago as I thought it might be interesting to see what people nearby were doing; what I discovered was that, according to YikYak, they were mostly maintaining a pretty shocking attendance record at college and complaining about morning bus halitosis. Compelling stuff. Anyway, the famously anonymous app for local chatting is no longer going to be anonymous, basically – christ alone knows whether it will pull it back from the brink, but I still think there’s interesting stuff you can do with this if you want to talk to THE KIDS, particularly on a hyperlocal level.

• The Pizza Hut DJ Box: We’ve had the pizza box as projector to watch films on; now the pizza box as playable DJ setup. Classic piece of ad work which will appear in approximately 12 actual pizza boxes in total, but which will nonetheless get entered into 100000001 awards as an example of innovative ways of engaging customers because that’s how this stuff works; I mean, it’s really clever kit, no doubt, but a) how the fcuck is this going to work when it’s covered with a 3mm slick of Pizza Hut grease; and b) I have no idea how much they were paying DJ Vectra to front this video, but even he couldn’t seem to muster any enthusiasm at all for the kit (seriously, watch the video). Still, well done on the idea.

THE SOUNDTRACK TO NO MAN’S SKY IS GLORIOUS, YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO IT!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS PERHAPS HANDING OVER CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE RUN THE CYCLING, PT.1:

• Google’s Olympics:  So obviously I am WELL late to this, for which apologies, but in my defence it’s obviously aimed at locals in Brazil and it’s all in Portuguese, and I’m working a 5-day week for the first time in about 5 years (yes, yes, I know, NO VIOLINS), and frankly I’m knackered. Sorry. Anyway, this is a lovely piece of webwork by Google, pulling together all sorts of information about what is happening TODAY in the ‘Lympics, all with a lovely UI and some nice little animations, and generally all the sort of high-quality design you’d expect from Google.

• Chatbottle: Horrible name, but a useful site if you’re interested in bot building and checking out what other people are doing (and we must all be interested in bots now; Zuckerberg has decreed and his word is LAW). This ranks all the bots it can find, based on a variety of metrics (ranking on ProductHunt, number of features, retention of users, that sort of thing) and is a pretty good way of checking out what’s new and what’s good in botland. What this comprehensively proves at the moment is that most bots are basically shovelwear at the moment – there are a lot of real opportunities for people to make something (anything) that isn’t total rubbish. Maybe one of those people is YOU! It probably isn’t, though.

• Instagram Scheduler and Themer: Probably of most interest to advermarketingpr drones, but there are enough of you now presenting carefully aesthetically curated lies about the quality of your existence on Instagram to make me think that there’s a market for this outside of the hideous professional hell which I inhabit. Unum does a lot of things other apps do – particularly the scheduling of Instagram posts – but the gimmick here is that you can preview how your ‘grams will look on Instagram, letting you arrange and curate them to create a seamless and artificially-lovely vibe. Actually pretty useful if you have some sort of overall DESIGN GOALS thing going on, or if you’re attempting some sort of Pantone-related artistic endeavour (or, you know, if you want to ensure your whole feed accurately reflects your carefully-curated personal palette. You monster).

• Wovns: First of the inevitable Kickstarters this week – Wovn is raising funds to create a bespoke textile sales platform, whereby you’d be able to design…er…some fabric or something in Photoshop or Illustrator, and they will weave it for you and send it to you. Obviously the details are a touch sketchy (and, er, I obviously haven;t read everything on the page, because, well, time is short and frankly I don’t quite care enough about fabric design), but if you’re someone who wants to make their own clothes, say, or who dreams of giving up your tedious wageslave existence in favour of a career making expensive teatowels to flog at farmer’s markets, then this could be right up your street.

• The Best Video Timelapse I Have Seen In An AGE: HOW CLEVER IS THIS? Obviously the quality’s a touch shonky, and it’s not a polished and professional HD cut, but the way the creator has combined timelapse and gifs is all sorts of astounding. Expect to see this being replicated in shinier fashion by some brand or another anytime soon (you can see how you could do an amazing shot of a football stadium filling up over time, for example, with this sort of technique).

• Yes Child Free: Are YOU somehow not interested in having a complete and fulfilled life? Do YOU look forward to growing old with no prospect of support in your old age? Do YOU have some sort of deep-seated personality issue that means that you’re incapable of or unwilling to undertake the base-level activity required of you as a functioning member of the human race? Are YOU some sort of a monster? In short, do you not want kids (because it does sort of feel like that’s what people think sometimes)? Well WELCOME TO YES CHILD FREE, a dating app designed for misanthropes like YOU who have no desire to inflict their progeny on an uncaring, ambivalent universe. No idea how good this is, but it might eliminate at least one of the awkward conversations which torpedoes relationships in your 30s.

• VoteGif: A nice little project presenting a series of gifs designed to encourage people to vote in the US – one animation per State. Simple, cute, clever – rip-offable.

• Dropbox Paper: Do you remember Google Wave? No, of course you don’t; it was weird and impenetrable and noone used it, and it was quietly dropped into the Google oubliette. Apparently, though, it was actually sort of good – a decent co-working app which allowed for seamless sharing of information in persistent fashion between project teams collaborating on a job. Combine that with Slack and you get a vague idea of what Dropbox Paper feels like – there are a lot of rather cool features in here, including in-project collaborative editing, chat, file and linksharing, and a coding interface – if you’re looking for something to use as a collaborative platform this is probably worth a look. Yes, that was dull, I know, sorry, but it’s not all bongo and cynicism round here. I mean, mostly it is, but.

• Photopea: Pretty powerful-looking in-browser photoshop-type tool; it’s not like there aren’t a lot of these out there, but this one looks pretty good I think.

• My Text In Your Handwriting: There are SO MANY brilliantly creepy (and, er, hugely illegal) applications for this. This script by Tom Haines is (to quote) “a method that allows us to replicate the handwriting of anyone for whom we have a sample. Any scan will do – nothing special is required at capture time.”; just imagine what you could do with that. Aside from anything else, there are some lovely potential use cases for, for example, people who have lost the ability to write by hand to enable them to retain the weirdly unique part of their identity that is one’s own cursive script. Oh, and massive, massive fraud, obviously.

• GoGoGrandparent: This is a really nice service and concept, I think. You know those online concierge services which have proliferated in the US over the past few years – you know, where you use a chat interface or similar to order a bunch of stuff that you just happen to need at 3:30am (“what’s that? 2 bottles of vodka, 80 Marlboro lights, 6 packets of Extra and, hang on, another 40 fags? Yep, no problem. No, I’m not judging AT ALL”)? This is like that, except it’s designed to be used by people who for whatever reason aren’t comfortable using smartphones and who’d rather use a nested phone menus to order things. There are so many nice features here, including the ability for individual users to customise the menus to ensure that stuff they will need most regularly sits at the top of the conversation tree; obviously once the Amazon Dash button concept becomes embedded everywhere then this becomes obsolete, but I think there’s something lovely about the extension of this sort of service to the less tech-enabled.

• Ghost Browser: This is a smart idea for people who do stuff across multiple accounts; a browser which lets you sign into the same platform from multiple accounts within one browser session, so for example you can be logged in to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram as several different accounts simultaneously within one browser. Obviously Hootsuite et al still offer the best solutions for multi-account management, but for more specific work – ad buying across multiple accounts, for example – you can see how this might be useful. Oh, and massive, massive fraud, obviously.

• Penmanshipporn: A Reddit community dedicated to sharing examples of particularly beautiful calligraphy, which, in case and advermarketingpr drones from the exciting world of high-end pens are reading, is RIPE for sponsorship by…er…who makes fountain pens these days? One of that lot, anyway. SEE? THIS IS FCUKING GOLDEN, MATE. This is what you come for, isn’t it? This sort of free creativity. Jesus wept, even by my own low standards this is bilge, isn’t it? Sorry, I’ll try harder after another cup of tea.

• Brexit Haikus: A selection of 50 haikus, written daily since The Day The World Went (More) Wrong, by James Ross-Edwards. These are lovely, and a nice sort of light-touch time capsule to travel back through the various stages of post-Brexit emotion we all went through (and which, frankly, we’re still just sort of trying to deal with). I particularly like this one: “On Shoreditch High Street / Two men in shorts and leggings / Hope Corbyn resigns”; find your favourites!

• Snapcut: Another cool toy to make stuff for Snapchat (or Instagram Stories, obvs) – Snapcut lets you customise an animated screen in portrait which you can add text, images and different flashy backgrounds to, which you can then record and use as a title screen to your next Story. Which is, as per the ‘fake yourself having fun’ Snapchat thing from last week, is totally ripe for BRAND APPROPRIATION. Here’s a thought – charity-type folk trying to engender THE NEXT ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE – why not consider making something like this for the Snapchat/Insta kids, to let them join in whilst making their own personalised title cards for their participatory videos with your branding on it (or something – obviously this is a crap idea, but if you can’t do better then SHUT UP AND STOP JUDGING ME).

• Explain To Me: Lovely webtoy – plug in a link to an online article and this will deliver you a summary of the content, in a sentence and then in 10 sentences. It’ll also pull all the metadata from a page, should you desire. Christ knows what it would make of Curios – probably about as much as the rest of the world tbqhwym.

• Hovercards: Rather clever Chrome plugin which pulls in information about any url when you hover your cursor over it; so it’ll pull you a preview of the page in a little hover-over window, say, or if you point at an Instagram or Twitter user it’ll pull up details about their account, their followers and the like. Slick.

• Guide To Computing: Beautiful photos of old computing equipment, taken against gorgeous pastel backdrops. Really gorgeous 50s feel to all these shots.

• The Bauhaus: Wonderful online collection by the Harvard Art Museum of Bauhaus works, giving you not only a brilliant overview of the movement but also access to thousands of digital representations of the school’s work. Art / design-types will find SO MUCH to love in here; this is a pretty amazing treasure trove of early 20C design.

• Steem: I confess to being a touch sketchy on the practicalities here, so forgive the slightly wooly writeup I’m about to give you here (plus ca fcuking change, eh kids?) – Steem is, as far as I can tell, basically a Reddit-type community whose distinguishing feature is that users can receive cryptocurrency payments for posting stuff; this currency (the titular ‘Steem’) can then be exchanged for Bitcoins further down the line, and thereby converted into actual cashmoney. It sounds a little too good to be true, and I’m not 100% convinced its not in fact some sort of smartly techy pyramid scheme to entice people into supporting a nascent blockchain-based currency for the benefit of a few people at the top, but what do I know? NOTHING.

• NYPL Emoji: Simple, lovely, clever twitter bot – you tweet at it with an emoji, it responds with a work from the New York Public Library which ‘matches’ that emoji. Simple, but such a smart/cute way of opening up archive content on Twitter in a frivolous way. Take a moment to go through its replies, and marvel at how subtly well-made this is; whoever did the tagging here has done an excellent job.

• Fake Flag: I love this – take any world nation’s flag and mash it up with the design elements of the flags of any other nation to create your very own bastard-nation hybrid symbol. Any of you married to / in relationships with people from a foreign land, I suggest you spend a morning together making your very own hybrid national emblem and then spamming the fcuk out of it on Facebook, along with possibly an invented name for your new country, in a heartwarming demonstration of your love and a slightly terrifying example of your inherent megalomania.

HOW ABOUT AN ECLECTICALLY WEIRD MIX BY THE BLOKE FROM CABARET VOLTAIRE? YES? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS PERHAPS HANDING OVER CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE RUN THE CYCLING, PT.2:

• Verifly: On-demand drone insurance. Yes, fine, scoff all you like, but I think this is a great idea; fire up the app, tell it where you are and where you’ll be flying, and it offers you an on-the-spot quote for insurance covering you if, say, your drone plummets from the sky and its rotor blades carve interesting patterns into someone’s skull. US-only, I think, so AXA et al have about a month to rip this off before some pesky startup does it. RUN, INSURANCE BEHEMOTHS!

• Smartshot: Yes, fine, there’s nothing exciting about a Chrome extension that’s really good at letting you clip and annotate and easily share screencaps, but it’s USEFUL, OK?

• Icon8: You know Prisma? OF COURSE YOU DO. This is basically Prisma but as a Messenger bot – give it a photo and then select one of several filters to fcuk with said picture in visually interesting ways. Not groundbreaking per se, but a good example of how to create a simple, fun, bot interface from existing tech – this stuff is EASY AND FUN.

• Search Photos By Colour: Except that description, lifted from the site, sort of does it a disservice really. It’s not just about plugging in a shade and getting a bunch of stock photos featuring said shade back; this, far more cleverly, lets you do some scrawling to suggest where in an image you want said colours to be, and then pulls photos with a similar set of colour blocks. You can probably do something VERY clever with this sort of thing – I rather like the idea of a ‘find and replace images in news stories with images which have a similar colourblock profile for potential comedy effect’-type thing, but YOU think about it and see what you can come up with. No, go on, put some fcuking effort in for a change.

• GoGo Stand: Smart little wallet-sized smartphone stand, which would make some slightly less rubbish than usual branded swag for the right company, maybe.

• Morbotron: An awesome site which collects a truly mind-flayingly large collection of gifs and clips from Futurama into a searchable database, which is some sort of crazy labour of love and what, in the future, will exist for every single TV show in the world so that as a species we can communicate solely in perfectly-chosen gifs from each and every single Big Brother ever screened (think Newspeak was frightening? THINK AGAIN).

• Consume Pop Culture: Excellent-if-bleak artistic representations of contemporary pop culture by artist Hal Hefner. Available to buy, some of these, though not really sure what your flat would look like with some of this on the walls (on reflection, actually, like a Supreme store; your mileage may vary).

• Slow Dance: Another Kickstarter, this time for a lovely little art project which is effectively a photo frame which isn’t in fact a photo frame; instead, slow motion encourages you to put a small, light object (a feather, a flower, etc) into the frame, which object gets gently set in very, very slow motion. Which is wanky as you like, but also sort of great imho.

• 10k Apart: One for the coders amongst you – there are PRIZES on offer here for the best and ‘most compelling’ (no, me neither) website which can be built in less than 10kb and without using Javascript. Obviously I can’t code for toffee, but this strikes me as an interesting creative challenge and a pretty fcuking tricky one to boot. NB – if any of you end up entering and winning this as a result of seeing it in Curios, a courtesy bottle of Casillero is always appreciated.

• NES On Hololense: The latest in the line of ‘oh, wow, blimey, this Hololense stuff, eh?’ videos showcasing the most amazing future tech which noone has seemingly actually seen in action yet. Ever imagined what it would be like to play Super Mario in some sort of weird 3d floating projection in your living room? It would be like this, apparently. This is SO MENTAL AND FUTURE I have no words.

• Soundswap: A service which lets users record footage of themselves playing a musical instrument and then share it with ‘professional music teachers’ who will offer feedback and critique on your technique, etc. Lovely idea, and I really like their use of a faux-messenger interface as the explainer tool on the site.

• 7am-7pm: A photoproject which takes photographs of people at 7am when they rise and again at 7pm, presenting contrasting pictures illustrating the toll the day takes. There’s a pretty obvious lift for an ad campaign for a series of brands here which I’m not going to patronise you by explaining further because I really believe you can get there yourselves, go on!

• A Good Book: A supersimple site/project which collects photos of books which have a particularly strong design aesthetic. Literally nothing else – if you like book / catalogue design, you will REALLY like this, but if not then you’ll probably want to skip to the next one which is funny and stuff (Jesus, philistines).

• Bulwer Lytton 2016: Another year, another selection of winners of the annual Bulmer-Lytton contest which annually seeks out the worst imagined first lines from nonexistant novels. So many to love in here – my personal favourite from the 2016 selection is the following gem: “She walked toward me with her high heels clacking like an out-of-balance ceiling fan set on low, smiling as though about to spit pus from a dental abscess, and I knew right away that she was going to leave me feeling like I had used a wood rasp to cure my hemorrhoids.” Who wouldn’t read the sh1t out of that? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO.

• Inflorescence City: I’m not 100% sure what this is, as the site’s got next to nothing by way of explanation, but it seems to be a couple of collections of digitally/ algorithmically created text/image art – oh, no, hang on, here’s the description which actually makes the whole thing make total sense; what a cool project: “this project is by katie rose pipkin and loren schmidt in collaboration with various algorithms and code snippets. the publication is generated live using a variety of different approaches. each time you refresh your browser, it will rewrite itself. the illustrations are visual mirrors of the text: as the document is written, sections of the document are passed to a program which translates them into visual form.” Take a look, it’s rather cool in a strange, otherworldly sort of fashion.

• The Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Amazing piece of old school spykit, this – the CIA’s very own field operative’s guide to messing up a supply chain from the inside. Contains all sorts of amazing tips on how to disrupt your workplace, many of which are weirdly applicable to us as 21stC wageslaves; the section on white collar stuff is particularly illuminating. “Insist on the written delivery of orders”, say the CIA, predicting the organsiation-destroying power of the phrase “can I just have that in an email” a full 30 years in advance of the mass-uptake of electronic communications.

• Funklet: A great selection of drum parts from funk and soul tracks, each with a playalong set of tabs and (and this is the fun bit) the ability to change the BPM of the drum track, which lets you hear the majesty of I Feel Good whacked up to 180 BPM (seriously, try these out, they all sound AMAZING at fast speeds and will make you feel temporarily like some sort of genius music producer).

• Mousetube: I think this exists for the animal testing community, which makes it A Bad Thing, but equally it’s a site which collects mouse sounds in one place, which is sort of weirdly, brilliantly odd. No idea WHAT you would use this for, but there’s got to be some application – maybe to drive your housemates slowly mad in fear of an invisible rodent infestation or similar.

• Haylo: Is this a joke? I went to Catholic school as a kid (Italian, innit; left me with a healthy agnosticism and an almost fetishistic penchant for high church incense, along with the uniquely helpful attitude towards authority figures my employers continue to enjoy to this day) and I was never under the impression that cumulative prayer was a ‘thing’, but it’s not like I was paying that much attention to be honest. Haylo (NICE NAME GUYS!) is basically like Craigslist for prayers – you tell the app what you want other people to pray for you about, and then…er…people pray, I guess. No details on whether there’s a Reddit-style up/downvote system for prayer requests, but I REALLY hope there is.

• Marine Traffic: You’d think that there would be few things more tedious than watching all the world’s ships move slowly around the world in realtime, and yet (whilst it’s noone’s idea of high-octane entertainment, let’s be clear) this is so soothing I can’t quite describe it.

• NouTube: Horrifyingly addictive and compelling site which, each time you refresh it, presents you with the newest video it can find from YouTube – no other criteria, just the freshest video content from…somewhere. This is one of the most incredible tools I’ve ever seen for showcasing the baffling range of stuff posted on there every second; since I started writing this entry, I’ve hit refresh three times and seen a GTAV livestream, some baffling Japanese mood video, and some homemade middle-eastern pop, and frankly I’d be quite prepared to sack off the rest of this newsletter in favour of watching more of those were it not for my legions of adoring reade…ah, yes.

• Someone’s Making A Real-world Pokeball Controller: For those of you still riding the Pokemon hype train, this looks like it would make the game totally unplayable, and make any user look like penis, but I’m guessing the Pokefandom couldn’t give a flying one.

• Tony Greenhand: I’ve featured some pretty insane joint building on here before, but I think Tony Greenhand may well take the (hash) biscuit; these…I mean, I hesitate to use the word ‘spliffs’ here, maybe combustible sculptures is more apposite, but they’re just crazy. MARKETING FOLK! Get him to make you a joint in the shape of YOUR PRODUCT for stoner-friendly competition swag!

• Permanent Records: Each day in August, a different tattoo design is being posted on here by a different artist, each with an accompanying song. Lovely work, lovely idea.

• You As A Star Wars Figure: You know someone who would REALLY like to be immortalised as a 3d-printed Stormtrooper? You think they’re worth spending about £1800 on? GREAT, as that’s what this will cost you. Frankly INSANE given that you could just hire a stormtrooper costume and then go to A N Other 3d printing shop and get the same thing done for a fraction of the price, but WEVS.

• Cronzy: Do you remember that pen on Kickstarter? The one which promised to be able to capture any colour in nature and instantly mix ink to match that colour, so you could pluck hues and palettes from thin air and draw with them on the fly? Remember how it turned out to be total bollocks? Well LOOKY HERE, there’s a new version! No information whatsoever as to whether this is any less vaporwareish than that one was, but maybe hold on to your readies until this is a little further down the line, eh? Still looks like absolute witchcraft to me, this.

• Dicklatte: Whoever’s running this Instagram has a simple but clear mission – to take photographs of penises drawn in coffee foam. That mission is, so far, proving a resounding success.

• Hikea: I stumbled across the first video in this series the other week, but it now appears that it’s a series of some sort – Hikea is a series of videos of people on various drugs (so far acid and mushrooms) attempting to assemble IKEA furnishings; the amount of joy you get from this will entirely depend on how funny you find it to watch other people laughing like idiots whilst boxed out of their trees on hallucinogens; expect this to spark a slew of copycat series, though, as people attempt to get some short-term fame from, say, popping to Homebase on PCP (that I’d actually quite like to see, at least until it descended into snuff).

• Picture This Clothing: Your kids are GREAT! You know what’s especiallly great? Their artwork! So much so that you can now have it made into clothing that your kids can then wear, inflicting their unique aesthetic sensibilities on the wider world rather than just your kitchen. The resultant clothes on show are as shonky and twee as you’d expect; though now I think of it I rather like the idea of this being used as punishment “You call that a drawing? THAT??? Let’s see how proud of it you are when you’re forced to wear it as a dress and everyone mocks you, eh?” Christ, I must never breed.

• Wikiverse: This reminds me so, so much of No Man’s Sky in a weird way – this is Wikipedia presented as an explorable galaxy of topics and the relationshsips between them, and it’s just sort of dreamily wonderful to navigate and explore. It’s all pretty beta, and rather confusing, and totally useless in terms of actually finding anything out, but it’s also BEAUTIFUL and dizzying and sort of glorious, all at the same time.

• Castles Made Of Castles: Intensely headfcuky little webtoy which lets you build shapes out of shapes which are the same shape as the whole shape. Look, I know that that makes no sense but just click the link and you’ll get it soon enough. Quickly becomes mindbending and a little frightening, like you’re being sucked into an infinitely recursive mirrorworld (just me? oh).

• The Seinfeld 2000: An entire series of bits and pieces from online magazine thing ‘Extremely Good Sh1t’ presented as a navigable experience inside Jerry Seinfled’s computer from around 2000. No reason at all why, just a fun thing to do. Click EVERYTHING, there’s some great stuff buried in there.

• Adult Swim Tracks 2016: Adult Swim is once again presenting a new track each week for 25 weeks, with accompanying little web animation and posters and tshirts for each; good music, good webviz stuff, and as all the tracks are downloadable it’s an excellent way to get some new music from some rather cool artists (this week’s is Earl Sweatshirt, for example, and it’s a great song).

• Clever Music Video Interactive Thing Pt1: This is both a music video and a promo for the French Yellow Pages (no, me neither), which at each point in the video lets you explore all the different artists (makeup, costume, video, etc) who were involved in its production, see their details, etc…the gimmick being that they’re all in the Yellow Pages! Really no idea how this came about, but I really like the interface and the whole project’s sort of cutely laudable.

• Clever Music Video Interactive Thing Pt2: Except on reflection it’s not actually that interactive, but hey ho. What it is, thought, is brilliantly clever – it takes the lyrics of the song and for a certain number of key phrases plugs them into Giphy to pull gifs associated with said key words and phrases and stitch them into a video, meaning that each time you watch you get an entirely different experience. I wish I had thought of this – it’s BRILLIANTLY smart and very well executed, and I very much like the song too, not least for its pithy line about having ‘cum on my jeans’. TELL IT HOW IT IS, MATE. This is excellent.

LET’S FINISH THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS LOVELY DOWNTEMPO CRATE–DIGGING SET FROM ARGENTINA’S PABLO GROSSI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Discarding Images: Seemingly infinite selection of clips from medieval manuscripts, featuring a LOT of strange animals and little devil things, which might be useful for something though I can’t in all honesty think what that might be.

• Nietzsche Ralph Wiggins: The best pop culture / philosophy mashup since the still-excellent Kierkegaardashian account.

• McMansion Hell: Exploring the peculiar stylings of the McMansion, those massive, ugly new build properties for the nouveau riche across the US which sprang up from the 90s onwards. Whoever writes this knows their architecture.

• Raven Kwok: Excellent little black and white gif animations involving geometry, generative art styles and a whole load of talent.

• Ugly Belgian Houses: Don’t think too hard about what happens within them.

• Captcha Comics: Captcha requests paired with images or used in comics to make weirdly effective gags. Some are better than others, but these are mostly pretty funny (FAINT PRAISE!).

• Critical Hand Gestures: This is WEIRD, Collecting a series of gifs of people using sign language to engage in critical discussion, this feels like I’ve stumbled across a weird academic in-joke. Beautifully, though, these gifs all seem to be available as those weird lenticular rulers which show looping animations via some sort of magic trick – for at least one of you, this is Christmas, SORTED.

• Vintage Girlie Mags: Not a Tumblr, and sort of a bit NSFW (but only a bit, honest), this is a collection of covers of bogo mags from the 50s and 60s – mags with names like ‘KNAVE’ and ‘CAVALIER’ and quite possibly ‘SERF’ and ‘OPPRESSED PAWN OF THE FEUDALIST SYSTEM’. What’s remarkable about these is quite how many of the women on the cover look quite frankly smashed on booze – is this what was considered a woman’s most alluring state half a century ago? Bit troubling, that.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• I Ate My Own Tooth: Kicking off here with a piece which is basically guaranteed to really, really freak out anyone with dental anxiety issues. So, er, be warned. The rest of you, though, this is a very funny journey of misadventure involving a tooth, its replacement, and how one deals with said replacement’s journey through the digestive tract. Enjoy!

• Sex, Lies and YouTube: Stories about the NEW STARS OF NEW MEDIA (in particular YT and Vine) being, occasionally, dreadful, predatory arseholes who abuse their position of fame in egregiously sexual manner are nothing new; this is a slightly broader look than normal at the issue, though, which raises some interesting questions about the weird effect that this sort of fame – this ultra-HD, close-up, forged-on-contact-and-personal-connection fame, far removed from the teen idol status of your Beatles and Biebers – has on those whom its visited upon. It sounds, as I’m sure I’ve said before, hideous, and there’s not really any manual orset of guidelines telling people how to cope with it.

• Meet Joanne The Scammer: Semi-companion piece to the above; Joanne the Scammer is the SO HOT RIGHT NOW alter-ego on YouTube of Branden Miller, a young gay guy in the US who invented the persona of an ultratrash thief (basically) and is now living out his 15 minutes in the internet’s field of vision. Interesting on the mechanics of this level of stardom – Joanne is a BIG DEAL in certain sections of US online culture – but also on the fact that Brandon is obviously a pretty nervous, not hugely sophisticated kid who’s navigating all this quite alone; there are several points in this where you sort of want to give him a hug and maybe make him eat some vegetables, and just sort of be his friend a bit.

• Twitter and the Troll Problem: We all know that Twitter’s got a problem with abuse – I took a quick look at the @messages field for a few of the BBC accounts this week and my days is there some material on there, and that’s just a bunch of nutters shouting at a corporation – and this Buzzfeed piece is a decent look at how that’s been allowed to happen. Perhaps the most interesting element of it, though, is the light it sheds on the extent to which Twitter’s failure to have any sort of actual corporate philosophy or overriding ethos (as opposed to Facebook, say, which whatever you think of the actual concept has always been pretty clear than ‘connect the world’ is its thing); I usually can’t stand the idea of ‘corporate philosophies’, but this is an interesting argument for their importance.

• Meet Benjamin Kickz: What were you doing at 16? If you were anything like me, you were smoking a lot of week with your mates and wondering why this wasn’t helping you get laid; if you’re like Mr Benjamin Kickz (not, you may be amazed to learn, his birth name), you were building up the largest trainer resale empire in the world. Fascinating piece of voyeurism into the world of business and branding as practiced by DJ Khaled et al – it’s not so much having a thing, it’s having a thing around the thing. ‘Boomin!’, as the kid might well say.

• Every Type Of Female Character In An Action Movie: These are depressingly spot-on, and very funny. BONUS MOVIE SEXISM – this piece, on all the gender-swapped films that the author would like to see and what they might be like, is ace.

• Why We’re Post-Fact: There have been several essays written on the post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-fact world in which we now seem to operate, where ‘truths’ are more malleable and less necessary in popular discourse than ever before; this take, in Granta, is the smartest I’ve seen to date – basically, it’s all postmodernism’s fault. So that’s ok then.

• A Brain Without Fear: This is just crazy. When you or I see something scary, we have a direct response from a particular part of our brain which causes the typical symptoms; nausea, sweaty palms, increased heartrate, etc. When insanely good free climbing nutter Alex Honnold experiences stuff that would give normal people the howling fantods he gets…nothing. Literally nothing – the bits of his brain which in normal people light up upon fear-led stimuli simply don’t register. This is a truly fascinating read about climbing and neuroscience and fear and all sorts of other things besides.

• This Is Your Life In Silicon Valley: A lovely short piece of writing, skewering the endlessly aspirational and nowhere-near-as-clever-as-it-thinks culture of the latest dotcom boom. No matter if you’re not acquainted with the culture it describes – you will recognise enough of this from general metropolitan modernity, trust me.

• Genius On Hamilton: Bear with me here – Todd Van Der Werff, a critic from Vox, wrote an almost painfully hagiographic piece on the musical Hamilton the other week, describing it as something akin to a religious experience. Then the community at Genius got hold of it, and went through annotating each and every single hyperbolic piece of purple prose with a savage hivemind pen; the resulting document is BRILLIANTLY funny, and weirdly shows the great potential for narrative storytelling inherent in the annotations medium – there’s definitely some sort of belletristic (sorry) game you could employ here if you were so minded. Anyway, read this – whether or not you know the first thing about Hamilyon, this is ace.

• On Kik and Anyonymity and Sex: Good piece by Chelsea G Summers on the beauty and pain of anonymous encounters, and how KIK works, and lots of other stuff besides; think I’ve featured her stuff on here before, but she’s a really excellent writer.

• Becoming the Chipotle of Pizza: How people are vying to turn pizza into a fast-turnaround fresh-made fast food option, in the same vein as burritos. If you have any sort of shred of love or affection for pizza, this ought to appal you (but if you’re interested in food and the business of its production and sale, this is all kinds of interesting). Still, though, I don’t care what the shape is – if the base sauce you use is fcuking barbeque, it is not pizza – it is an abomination. THIS IS CURIOS CANON.

• David’s Ankles: On Michelangelo’s David, and his fcuked ankles – also, though, on the unique status of the David in sculpture and the particular effect it has on those who see it (particularly, it must be said, Americans on European tours who seem to universally view it as the ne plus ultra of art in absolute, which frankly seems a touch hyperbolic to me – but seriously, read the comments), and (most interestingly) the history of the piece through the ages. Rather beautiful overall, if you can endure the slightly tortuous “WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN I HAD A FLORENTINE EPIPHANY” under(over)tones.

• Learning To Love In French: Lauren Collins writes about taking French lessons to fit into her new life in Switzerland, and how by so doing her relationship with her husband is brought into new light as she discovers how his language has forever shaped their communication. Beautifully written, and if either you or your partner is conducting your relationship in your second language, this is a truly essential read – it’s SO GOOD on the weirdly idiosyncratic way in which language confines expression and hence thought (the ‘word prison’, as football manager Jurgen Klopp rather beautifully calls it).

• My Virtual Brunch With Dolly Parton: Gloriously written personal memoir of the author’s experiences growing up queer and Southern, and how Dolly Parton’s music has soundtracked her life. Formally really interesting – the way the narrative jumps around through time is unusual in this sort of piece – and really personally affecting; this is really very good indeed, whether or not you care about Dolly.

• The Most 2016 Thing I Have Ever Read: And from the same site as the last piece comes THIS. It’s sort of hard to explain, but basically: There is a film called ‘Sausage Factory’, out now in the US, which is a crude cartoon about talking foodstuffs. It contains a character voiced by Salma Hayek – a (female identifying) taco which expresses attraction during the movie towards a similarly female-identifying hot dog. This film was reviewed on the LGBTQI-interest website Autostraddle. People found the review ‘problematic’ and complained. This is the Autostraddle editor’s apology. Look, Web Curios is not about to get into discussions of privilege and ownership and offence as, frankly, I don’t care enough about this stuff to deal with the rage. But can we just take a moment to acknowledge that RIGHT NOW, we live in a world in which the following sentences can be written without any sort of apparent irony: “We heard from readers who questioned the consent of the sexual encounter between the taco and the hot dog bun”. and “I was blinded by my own whiteness existing inside a system of white supremacy.” IT’S A FCUKING STUPID ANIMATED FILM ABOUT TALKING FOOD HAVING SEX WITH OTHER TALKING FOOD! I mean, I get the whole ‘apres moi le deluge’ thing, and obviously bad intentioned bad stuff is bad regardless of context, but really?

• Why Am I So Fat?: This essay, by comedian Sarah Benincasa responding to a question online, is probably the best ‘FCUK YOU TROLLS’ response I have ever read, ever. Read this and LOL, and then do a small applause as she totally deserves it – this is actually laugh-out-loud brilliant.

• Hanging with the Mensans: What’s it like visiting a convention of the super-clever – not only the super clever, but the particular category of the super clever who felt the need to have their supercleverness validated by a third party organisation so that they can advertise their supercleverness to others and join an elite community of other superclever people? Sounds FUN, doesn’t it? This is a lovely – and gentle, honest – look at a Mensa convention in the US. There are some characters in here, I promise you.

• Summer Camp For Adults: US Summer Camp has a sort of mythical air to it not quite matched by any teen right of passage in the UK (other than maybe the first time you’re sick in a park from too much cider); this piece looks at the recent trend in summer camps for adults, replicating the experience except with people in their late-20s and a lot of booze. This sounds DREADFUL – not least because of the massively rapey undertones of much of the thing, but also because of the people. As the author points out in a line which you may be unsurprised to know resonated with me A LOT: “If you, like me, made friends by being sarcastic and unwilling, these are not your people. These are the people who love participating so much that they’ve made it cool.” ACTUAL SHUDDER.

• Enjoli: Finally, the best piece of the week. Enjoli is by Kristi Coulter, and is about women and drinking and sobriety, but also so much about modern living and pace and STUFF. It’s truly excellent, and will probably make you take a bit of a little look at yourself (and maybe really make you want a booze too).

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, yes, fine, this has 1.5million views, but if you’re a man and you have not yet seen this then you need to watch it NOW. A GoPro, on a HotWheels car, on a track. I appreciate that the appeal of this will be largely impossible to understand for those didn’t play with toy cars as a kid but this is basically what you were imagining in your head every time you played. ACE.

2) It’s been a while since I’ve featured a bit of musical spoken word, so let’s rectify that – this is the talented Omar Musa, with freedom, halfway between soul and hiphop and poetry, this is rather good:

3) Another week, another band I had never heard of (there are a lot of them out there, you know) – this time it’s Weyes Blood. This song absolutely blew me away – it’’s reminiscent of so many things and yet totally it’s own thing; it’s ballad and pop and folk and hymnal, and it’s totally uncool, and it’s had me mesmerised for a few days now. It’s called ‘Seven Words’:

4) This is also just a lovely slice of indiepop, with what sounds an awful lot like a young Rod Stewart on vocals. This is called ‘1000 Times’, and it’s by Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! New Loyle Carner – you know how I feel about Loyle by now, he’s just BRILLIANT. This is called ‘NO CD’:

6) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,2! Now something a lot more STREET; this is from Giggs’ new album, which is excellent by the way, but the real standout on this is the guest part from Cas – it is EXCELLENT. It’s called ‘501’:

7) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,3! Last track in what’s not been a vintage week for music and videos – this, though, is the much-appreciated return of London MC Rinse, with an excellent SBTV session. It’s rare you get someone with as unique a style as this – it’s properly distinctive, and genuinely excellent, ENJOY BYE HAVE A NICE WEEKEND BYE!:

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