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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Shaun Tan

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

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

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

By Jolene Lai

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

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

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

By Stas Kalasnikov

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Oriana Ingber

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

You want a summary of the past week? Here you go. Listen, IT’S ALL TRUE. 

 Yes, whatever the opposite of perpetual motion is we in the UK seem to have invented and perfected it. What’s going to happen next week? What? Nothing meaningful, but an awful lot of pointless hot air and rhetoric? Nah, thanks mate, I’m alright actually. 

Thank God, then, for the neverending torrent of content that the web provides – hold your breath as I raise you by the ankle and dunk you bodily into this murky, digital Styx, imbuing you forever with the power of webspaff like some sort of Poundland Achilles of modernity. WATCH OUT FOR YOUR HEELS! This, as ever, is Web Curios!

By Edoardo Ramon

ANOTHER WEEK AND ANOTHER FANTASTIC MIX BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE, WHO REALLY IS RATHER GOOD AT THIS DJING THING!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T REALLY CONTAIN ANY ACTUAL NEWS THIS WEEK AND WHICH YOU CAN PROBABLY SKIP UNLESS YOU HAVE A VERY, VERY STRONG PROFESSIONAL DESIRE TO KNOW ABOUT SOME FRANKLY VERY MINOR PLATFORM CHANGES:

• FB Allows Live VR Streaming: Do you know anyone with a VR headset? An actual person, I mean, not one of us? No, of course you don’t, and nor does anyone else. Still, in the unlikely event that you or one of your friends is one of the seven people who’s actually bought the kit, you’ll now be able to stream whatever underwhelming VR experience you’re having straight to your Facebook feed, for the enjoyment of all your normie friends! I have spent a good minute or so trying to think of an application for this and I am coming up with nothing, but if anyone has any ideas I am ALL EARS.  
• You Can Now Schedule Insta Videos: Well, you can if you’re using an approved third party Insta management tool, like Buffer or Hootsuite. If those words mean nothing to you, please, spare yourself the pain and skip straight to the next section and forget you ever read this.
• Twitter Set To Launch Marginally-Improved Analytics: This is what I’m reduced to writing up, FFS. This is a ‘coming soon’ announcement – basically Twitter will, at some point in the future, start giving users better data on post engagement and the like (although detail on exactly how this is likely to manifest is…patchy at best – as per usual with this stuff, I am slightly in awe at how TechCrunch have managed to spin this into 500 words of deathly prose), as well as creating an ‘events dashboard’ where users will be able to see major events happening that day, or in the future, and see Tweets and additional information about said events in one place through the app; part of the platform’s continuing mission to make itself the default “What’s going on?” app worldwide. “The thinking behind the events dashboard will allow the publishers to figure out — in advance — how they want to participate in that conversation on Twitter — either in terms of the content they publish, or (more hopefully, perhaps) through advertising and promoting content.” Good, eh?
• YouTube Now Lets Users Swipe Through Videos: There is nothing interesting about this ‘news’ at all, but it is a nice example of the ridiculously hypocritical nature of all these companies. Do you remember that time way back in 2018 when all the platforms started adding in features designed, at least ostensibly, to address their inherently addictive nature and to help users track how much time they were spending on pointless digital timesinks? How does that square, do you think, with the development of a feature designed solely to make it easier for users to skip mindlessly through an infinite number of videos? It doesn’t, does it? Anyone would think that these companies don’t care about us at all!
• YouTube Updates Rules On ‘Dangerous Challenges and Pranks’: ‘Pranks that can cause or have caused deaths have no place on YouTube’. GOOD TO KNOW! Obviously this is directed at idiot YouTubers rather than you, you loyal brand custodians, but it’s worth knowing just in case you fancy attempting to create some sort of VIRAL YOUTUBE CHALLENGE SENSATION as part of your next marketing campaign – be VERY CAREFUL not to make it fatal.
• Unproductive Social Year: I do LOVE a pointless agency site, and this is very much a pointless agency site. Grand Bain is a French ‘Creative Design Studio’ based in Paris – this is their showcase site for all the work they did last year, presented month-by-month. It’s very slick and shiny, though simultaneously a touch on the incomprehensible side – I have many favourite bits, including the fact that they seemingly went on holiday for the entirety of February and choose to illustrate this with a bunch of photographs of practically-naked Instagram exhibitionists. The very BEST thing, though, is their actual ‘official’ website which you can find here. Click on it, take a look – what do you notice? That’s right! NO CONTACT INFORMATION. Such a bold, powerful move that I think I might start advising all clients to follow suit – in fact, all websites I consult on from hereon in will be hyperminimalist white-on-white, because form must NEVER be subservient to function!
• Skittles: The Musical: Are YOU a frustrated artist, only working in advermarketingpr because the cruel vicissitudes of fate denied you the chance to pursue your real vocation? Do you feel you have SO MUCH MORE TO CREATE than pointless ads for biscuits, or campaigns to flog more sugarwater? OF COURSE YOU DO! All of us advermarketingprdrones like to think that we’re better than this and that we could do proper creativity given half the chance – in the case of the team doing Skittles, though, they’ve backed themselves fully by deciding to put on an actual musical, about, er, Skittles, instead of buying a Superbowl ad this year. Proceeds will be donated to an anti-AIDS charity, which is A Good Thing, and one would imagine that they will turn it into EXCITING ONLINE CONTENT in some way. But, well, this just sort of smacks of massive agency hubris, doesn’t it?
• Microsoft By The Numbers: Noe hugely exciting, fine, but a decent example of a shiny ‘LOOK AT OUR CORPORATE STORY’ website – this presents a whole bunch of statistics and information about Microsoft’s business, delivered through simple, chunky design; as a way of potentially presenting a corporate report, say, this is rather nice.
• Pinterests Trends for 2019: By way of contrast to the p1ss-poor effort from Snap last week, Pinterest’s trend predictions for the year are really rather good – 100 things that the platform predicts we’re going to see more of, based on search data from the site. So expect to see ‘godparent proposals’ as the latest performative wankery clogging up your socials, and dig out the corduroy from your wardrobe as that’s what you’ll be sporting as the 2019 rolls by. Just accept it, THE DATA HAS SPOKEN.
• The Imperica Predictions Bucket: Lovely Editor Paul (to give him his full, official title) has once again gone through a whole bunch of 2019 predictions documents to see what the common themes are. Apparently EVERYONE thinks that personal data is going to be a big thing this year – can you believe that people get paid for this?  

By Joka

NEXT, TRY THIS SLIGHTLY ODD AND ANGULAR AND MODERATELY SPIKY SLICE OF…ER…HARD-TO-CLASSIFY BUT STILL RATHER GOOD MUSIC BY CASIMIR!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE THAT GILLETTE ADVERT A LOT MORE IF IT DIDN’T LOOK SO MUCH LIKE A GILLETTE ADVERT, PT.1:

• Google’s Game Of The Year: Three weeks into 2019, and already I’m looking back at last year with the sort of wistful nostalgia normally reserved for treasured childhood memories. Come back, with your deepfakes and bum implants and Fyre Festival! If you, too, are scared and unnerved by all the ceaseless, unending novelty of 2019, why not wallow in the comforting funk of the past, courtesy of Google’s Game of the Year, which asks you a bunch of questions about the past 12 months based on Google search trends. What did people search for more, or less, in 2018 than in years past? This is totally pointless, obviously, but it’s sort-of fun.
• Ambrosia: Reasons why 2018 was better than 2019, part x of a series of y – last year, I didn’t know that Ambrosia was a thing. Reader, take a moment to imagine what you might dream up were someone to challenge you to invent a service or product which best encapsulated the dreadful inequalities and perverse power dynamics that maintain here at the pointy end of late-stage capitalism. Done that? Good, now click the link and discover that even your imagination probably couldn’t match up to the creepy, wrong oddness of Ambrosia, a service which – and please, take a moment to savour the horror of this – is offering rich people the opportunity to inject themselves with the blood of the under-30s for $8,000 a litre. That’s right! The ACTUAL BLOOD (well, fine, plasma, but still) of a young person, transfused into you for a few paltry grand so that you can NEVER DIE. Obviously the ‘science’ behind this is iffy at best – this is the very definition of fools being parted from their money – but the whole concept is so cripplingly, staggeringly awful. You know who else liked messing with the blood of young people? The charming Countess Bathory. Is that really whose memory you want to be channelling, rich people? Oh, by the way, if anyone from the creamy Devonian dessert business of the same name is reading this, PLEASE can you make a comic riff on this offering people the opportunity to replace their blood with rice pudding? Weirdly, the Ambrosia website is a lot less sinister if you imagine all the copy being spoken aloud in a West Country accent.
• The Best Subreddits: A EXCELLENT and very useful (if by ‘useful’ you mean ‘procrastination facilitating’) Reddit thread in which a bunch of the site’s admins share their favourite subReddits. There are a HUGE number listed here, many of which I’d never heard of before, and (whilst I’ve not clicked on all of them) as far as I can tell they’re all SFW, meaning you can basically spend the rest of your afternoon clicking happily through a random and varied selection of webspaff on topics as diverse as Black Labradors, satisfying lathework and reflective cake decoration. My personal favourites are all the ones that used to be devoted to bongo but have now been repurposed to feature wholesome cat content, but you will doubtless find your own.
• The Year in Band Names 2018: Once again, the AV Club pulls together its list of the best band names it came across in the course of 2018, and once again there are some truly titanic efforts. Special mentions to Nelson Bandela, Adolf Shitter (it’s not big, it’s not clever, but it is quite funny) and Cave Bastard, but I think my personal favourite is probably Fcuk Face Ricky and the Motherfcuking Cnutpounders for their fairly clear decision to eschew commercial success in favour of maintaining their artistic integrity. Well done Ricky! Never sell out!
• There Is A Bot For That: A bot database. But, er, a good one! This effectively functions as a search engine for bots across platforms – it covers FB, Telegram, Twitter, Slack and a few other platforms, and whilst the search function is a bit iffy it’s a useful way of seeing what others have built around a particular theme. Are we going to attempt to make bots a thing again in 2019, now we’ve all accepted that this still isn’t the year of VR? No? Oh well.
• Security Checklist: Per the Predictions Bucket up there, issues around personal data and security are going to continue to be BIG this year. Given that, this is possibly a useful website to take a look at and maybe share with people – it’s a list of things that one can do to ensure one’s online security, such as installing a password manager, or using a VPN, with links to helpful services and free products and explanations of what all the terms mean and why they are important. It’s the sort of thing you could usefully send to relatives who maybe aren’t quite as good at this stuff as you are, basically, though be aware that there’s an outside chance that it will freak them out to the point that they just unplug the internet forever and go full luddite (which, look on the bright side, will probably stem the tide of appalling, unfunny memes they send you on Whatsapp).
• Project Alias: Did you get an Amazon Echo thingy for Christmas? Are you now one of the millions of homes worldwide being surveilled by MechaBezos and his evil empire? Do you, well, rather wish you weren’t? You’ll like Project Alias, in that case, an art project by Bjørn Karmann which offers you the instructions to make your very own home assistant blocking device. Effectively Project Alias is a small box that sits atop your Alexa or Google Home device and confuses it with white noise to ensure that it can only pick up audio inputs at the point you tell it to and not before. “Alias acts as a middle-man device that is designed to appropriate any voice activated device. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant when placed on top of it. The speakers of Alias are used to interrupt the assistance with a constant low noise/sound that feeds directly into the microphone of the assistant. First when Alias recognises the user created wake-word, it stops the noise and quietly activates the assistant with a sound recording of the original wake-word. From here the assistant operates normally”. One the one hand, it’s a very good idea; on the other, it really oughtn’t need to exist. STOP LISTENING TO ME, JEFF! STOP IT!
• Infinite Frustration: Modernity, in a Twitter account. You will feel very, very seen by this feed.
• The Startup Playbook: If I’m perfectly honest with myself, I don’t imagine for a second that any entrepreneurs read this – they’re all too busy GRINDING and HUSTLING and LIVING THE STARTUP LIFE and drinking coffee and working out exactly how much of their souls they’re willing to sell to the VC to waste time on webspaff. Still, should you be contemplating the personal pivot from ‘webmong’ to ‘startup businessmong’, you might find this a useful resource; it’s compiled by Sam Altman of Y Combinator, and is a starting guide for entrepreneurs and founders to some of the things that they might want to consider, particularly from the point of view of securing investment. Should you take inspiration from this and end up starting a business which ends up floating for a billion then, well, please remember where you found the link, eh?
• An Amazing SmartMirror: I was slightly disappointed by the cavalcade of pointless tech emerging from CES this year – aside from the neon smart toilet, there was a general absence of truly preposterous stuff, and I didn’t see anyone attempting to persuade the public that their fridge really needs an internet connection. This is by far and away the most impressive thing I saw online over the course of the show – a smart mirror set up to allow the user to experiment with different hair colours on the fly. Obviously it’s a very specific single use case, but the tech is VERY slick – the first transition made me do an actual, proper little gasp, and the whole effect is very much Hollywood SFX-level. If you’re a younger person than me and your entire cultural frame of reference is Harry fcuking Potter, this may remind you slightly of something from the series.

By Jesse Mockrin

NEXT, ENJOY A NEW YEAR HIPHOP MIX BY DJ CHERRYSTONES!

• Inspirat.io: Have we reached peak newsletter? It does rather feel like it (and not just to you reading this crapzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) – I subscribe to about 40 of the damn things (you honestly have NO IDEA of the amount of stuff I consume, honestly – I know it doesn’t feel like there’s any selection process applied at all to the stuff in here, but, really, you should see the stuff I leave out) and it seems like there are a dozen new ones being announced every week and, look, can someone just do a newsletter of newsletters and save me the time, please? Anyway, Inspirat.io is another app which does the whole ‘create a separate inbox for your newsletter intake so that you can free up your main email and stop being guilted out when you see all those unread editions of Web Curios’ thing; you might find it useful (thanks to whoever it was who pointed this out to me earlier this week – I have unaccountably totally forgotten who it was but, well, know that I love you immoderately).
• Design Camera: Are you a graphic designer? Do you often have to create mocked-up images and videos of websites or apps seen on phones? Are you BORED STIFF of doing that? Would you like some software that makes it really easy to create a 3d model of a phone that you can manipulate and export as images or video and integrate into a website or keynote or whatever? No? You fcuking ingrates.
• World’s Writing Systems: This is honestly fascinating. “This web site presents one glyph for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 146 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode.” If you’ve ever wanted to obscure the written form of some pretty obscure languages then MY WORD are you going to enjoy this – my personal favourite’s probably proto-Elamite (the hipster’s choice) but pick your own! Oh, and you can even buy a poster of all the languages if you’re a proper enthusiast.
• Mirrors for Sale: Come for the mirrors, stay for all the people who seemingly don’t know how reflections work.
• A Collection of Tights: One of those webthings which really does throw up more questions than answers. Do you have £30k burning a hole in your pocket? Do you have an obsession with hosiery? Do you have space to store an entire shipping container of assorted tights, stockings and suspenders? Well aren’t you in luck? This is a truly bizarre eBay listing – “Everything is either a small or medium. Collected over 15 years from various sources”. WHY THOUGH?! WHAT SOURCES?!  “What isn’t clear from the photo is how many there are here. This is a 50sqft container and they take up most of the space in there. The pile is almost 6 feet tall. The photo doesn’t do it justice – the collection has to be seen to be believed.” I quite want to see AND believe. Can we organise a trip to Salford to see the tights? I want to see the tights. But, and I mean this with no malice, I probably don’t want to meet the seller.
• Heads of Psychopaths: Sebastian Onufszak is a German designer and illustrator – he’s created a series of film posters for movies featuring psychopaths (Taxi Driver, Eraserhead, etc) with a particular, unsettling and rather effective collage/head-type aesthetic. These are gorgeously sinister, and I would rather like one as a print.
• The Diss List: Thanks to Dan for the tip – this websites collects BEEFS and keeps a running vote open about who’s winning. Special props to XXXTentacion, who despite being dead appears to still be in running beefs with half a dozen different people, which is some strong dedication to the thug life.
• Play.ht: We’re all so busy, aren’t we, and so short of time, and there’s so much to know and digest and learn. One solution is to just accept that you’re pretty much guaranteed to just exist in a state of perennial perplexed confusion for the rest of your days and so you may as well just accept it and retreat into a world of videogames and reality TV; the other might be to OPTIMISE YOUR TIME by using something like Play, which is another text-to-speech app which will take whatever articles you feed it and convert them to audio files which you can then listen to through the app. As is now essential, you can listen back to the pieces at 2x or 3x speed, meaning you can cram War and Peace-length content into your lunchbreak. Whether or not you’ll understand, learn or remember anything this way is moot – YOU ARE CONSUMING INFORMATION AND THAT’S WHAT COUNTS.
• Papier: A note-taking app as a Chrome extension – open a new tab and you can take notes right in the browser, which will be saved and persistent across browsing sessions. Which, obviously, you can just do with an open Gdoc, but if you’re some sort of Google refusenik PERVERT then you might find it useful.
• Square Off: This is quite amazing, but I almost didn’t feature it due to being made unconscionably furious by the site’s tagline: “It’s Alive. Literally!” NO NO NO FFS THAT ITS LITERALLY WHAT IT IS NOT – THIS IS NOT ALIVE. IT IS A CHESS SET. Still, it’s a very remarkable chess set, with a proper wooden board and carved pieces and a 20-level opponent for solo play, and FCUKING MAGNETS in it which makes the pieces move on their own (seriously, this is basically magic as far as I’m concerned), and you can play with an actual other person through a variety of popular chess apps and, basically, if you know someone who’s an enthusiast this is potentially the best present you will ever get them.
• Industry Secrets: This is a GREAT Twitter thread, compiling all the industry secrets that @girlziplocked received when she asked people to DM her ‘things that you know of in your line of work that the general public would be scandalised by’. Who do you think the Guardian columnists who don’t get anywhere near as much traffic as you’d expect are? Who’s that MENDACIOUS LIAR suggesting that all the metrics in advertising are made up? Alternately scary, depressing and very funny, there are revelations in here that will shock you to your very core. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE DOMINO’S PIZZA TRACKER IS A LIE?!
• Bad Movies: This is an OLD website, and all the better for it – a wonderful repository of writing about genuinely bad cinema, featuring reviews of literally hundreds of appalling trash cinema. If you can click on this and not find at least half a dozen films you HAVE to watch then, well, I’m not sure I like you; can someone please help me track down a copy of ‘Count Chockula’ (a vampire who hates blood but loves chocolate), please? Have any of you seen ‘Please Don’t Eat My Mother’? I reckon at least half of these will be on YouTube somewhere, should you want an idea of what to do with the rest of your afternoon.
• Cooking By Ear: This is a genuinely excellent idea and one I’m sort of annoyed I didn’t think of; Cooking By Ear is a cook-as-you listen podcast, in which the host and a guest chef presenter talk you through the preparation of a dish, in realtime – the idea being that you can listen to prep instructions and general cheffy chat while you prep your dinner. For the right brand this is SUCH an easily stealable concept, so, er, get stealing – this is crying out for a version that doesn’t use the infuriating and STUPID (yes, STUPID, I’m standing by this) ‘cups’ measurement system which America persists with in perverse and pigheaded fashion.
• Gofukuyasan: This site is, selfishly, all in Japanese, but use Google’s ‘translate’ feature and then dive blissfully into the world of Japanese fabric – this shop sells kimonos and other Japanese textile products with over 4,000 different designs. You want a kimono featuring cats who all look a bit like your SPECIAL LITTLE GUY (o hai Leboswki!)? No problem! You want one featuring a variety of, er, vaguely anthropomorphised Samurai fruitbats? I mean, why not? Honestly, were it not for the fact that I would look unpleasantly like a very, very seedy skaghead in a kimono I would buy the fcuk out of some of these things.
• A Collection of Truly Awful B-Movies: Full versions of some genuinely appalling ‘classics’ of mid-20thC cinema here, from the fabulously-named Hyperspace Gremloids (seriously, HOW have we never heard of this before?) to the lost Harvey Keitel ‘masterpiece’ ‘Star Knight’. Wobbly scenery, rubbery monsters, and scenery-chewing performances abound – go on, head to a meeting room with a pot of coffee and some biscuits and pretend you’ve got a pitch rehearsal on or something, I won’t tell.
• Whores of Yore: Genuinely amazed that I’ve not featured this before, but anyway. Whores of Yore “aims to give voice to the voiceless, to start a much-needed conversation on the history of sexuality, the plight of modern sex workers, and, ultimately, to extract the prudish stick from the arse of society. The archive provides a platform for academics, activists, sex workers, and archivists to share their experience, research and stories around sexuality and sex work. The purpose of this archive is not to create a goldfish bowl for others to stare into, but to provide a platform and invite academics, activists, sex workers, and archivists to share their experience, research and stories around sexuality and sex work. The history of sexuality will be placed side by side with sexuality today in the hope we can join up some of those conversations.” Hugely interesting on the history of sex work, with a wonderful archive of vintage erotica to boot -SFW in the main, though probably avoid the pinup galleries unless you want to have a full and frank conversation with the nice people in HR.
• Teletext Babez: A collection of pages from German and Dutch Teletext, advertising sex lines, strip clubs and the like, complete with BEAUTIFUL blocky 8-bit representations of STUNNAHS and HUNKS – weirdly, it seems like the clone/leather daddy look works far better in Teletext than your standard Page3-type pinup. Technically sort-of NSFW, but, really, the idea that anyone could become in any way titillated by the imagery on this page is sort of ridiculous to me (though if any of you should feel a sudden tumescence on perusing the garish pixelflesh then, well, know that I don’t judge you).
• Asciipr0n: In a similar vein, this is a whole website devoted to bongo rendered in ASCII. On the one hand, yes, much of this is technically pr0nography. On the other hand, well, look at the standard (I promise you, this one is ENTIRELY SFW). I know that it’s not right or nice or kind to look at this sort of thing and make assessments about the people who make it but, really, WHO is dedicating themselves to making smut out of keyboard characters? How does one discover that this is one’s particular kink?
• Handulum: This is simple, addictive and INFURIATING – Handulum’s a little game on Newgrounds in which you have to get a ball from one end of the map to the other, by swinging. If you can get beyond level 7 you have my admiration and respect (and, I guarantee, you will have wasted a good hour of your employer’s time).
• Cleaning House: Finally this week, this is a tiny little short storygame about cleaning a house of a former inhabitant’s belongings. You have no context, you have no backstory, just the observations of you character as it moves around the environment, and it is BEAUTIFULLY done; I’m not ashamed to admit that this made me FEEL quite a lot, but in a quietly beautiful and sad way. I think this is a gorgeous piece of work, give it a quick go.

By Janna Yotte

LET’S FINISH UP THE MIXES WITH THIS PLAYLIST OF EVERY SONG THAT JOEY COSCO, WHO I HAVE NEVER MET, GOT STUCK IN HIS HEAD LAST YEAR!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Burgers in Anime: Lovely, beautiful, tasty cartoon hamburgers.
• Stairs in Anime: Lovely, beautiful, tasty cartoon stairs.
• Exonauts: A lovely retroscifi moodboard.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Only one this week, weirdly, as about 99% of the insta stuff I came across was incredibly tedious travel influencer tat
• If You High: Still, the sole Insta here is a good one this week – If You High is a feed sharing a variety of weird, cool, odd video clips, some of which you might have seen before but the majority of which are new to me. Big fan of the space shuttle bong here, fyi.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class: Yes, I know, and I’m bored of it too. I know you’ve probably told yourself that you don’t need to read anything else about Br*x*t this week – and, really, you don’t; there’s NOTHING ELSE INTERESTING TO SAY – but make an exception for this NYT piece which is the best articulation of the general sense of angry bafflement that I like to think most people are experiencing right now, and makes a series of comparisons between the current situation and Britain’s disastrous exit from India which you may find pleasing – if anyone writes a better sentence about this whole sh1tshow than “an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers” I’ll be impressed.
• Traditional Masculinity Hurts: I don’t want to talk about the Gillette ad (other than to reiterate the point that it’s so HORRIBLY shiny and P&Gified that it’s hard to take it very seriously), but this piece in the Washington Post, about the idea of ‘traditional’ masculinity as a potentially damaging concept does rather get to the heart of a lot of the masculinist whinging about the brand’s pivot – as the author points out, “in a society in which gender roles have historically been rigid — and that rigidity has placed the lion’s share of power in the hands of one of the genders — it’s possible for the rulers to be harmed right along with the ruled. But that’s what bad systems do. They mess up everyone.” Worth sharing with anyone you know who’s been made irrationally annoyed by a multimillion dollar brand trying to sell more overpriced plastic razors.
• The Public Media Stack: Very much one for those interested in publishing theory or FUTURE OF MEDIA stuff, this is a smart essay by Matt Locke looking at how one might go about building an ecosystem for public media projects, and what infrastructural layers and elements are necessary to create a sustainable public media ecosystem.
• In The Shadow of the CMS: Another slightly techwonky publishing-type piece, this looks at the way in which CMSs impact published content, and how the consolidation of these systems actively affects the way in which the web is presented and structured and, to an extent, what it comprises. Works a bit as a companion piece to the above, touching as it does on the need for a more diverse and less monopolised infrastructure.
• That Jack Dorsey Interview: This came out overnight and, well, WOW is it a zinger. It’s a truly remarkable interview, one which makes its subject look, simultaneously, stupid, blinkered, selfish, out of touch, myopic, ignorant, closed-minded, petty…There are a lot of great quotes in here (if by ‘great’ you mean ‘the sort of thing that you read through your fingers’), but my personal favourite comes in the opening paragraph: “A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound like they should probably mean something, too. Dorsey is just hard enough to follow that it’s easy to assume that any confusion is your own fault, and that if you just listen a little more or think a little harder, whatever he’s saying will finally start to make sense. Whether Dorsey does this all deliberately or not, the reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.” Is everyone running a tech business a total fcuking cnut? They are, aren’t they? Christ.
• Amazon Stands for Nothing: From one colossally unappealing tech bro to another! This piece contrasts the prevailing Silicon Valley orthodoxy of companies with a MISSION or a VISION to IMPROVE THE WORLD (Facebook’s ‘better connected’, Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ and indexing all the world’s information, etc) with Amazon’s fairly simple “we just want to be in charge of every single sale that happens in the world, ever, and want to become violently, preposterously wealthy in the process’ worldview. The observation that Amazon’s end goal is in many respects to disappear is an interesting one – you can see it with Prime, AWS and various other elements of its service, that exist solely to remove friction from the customer experience; Amazon doesn’t so much exist as embody an idea of ease, and, as the article points out, “There’s no backlash if there’s nothing to really think about.”
• Dropgang: On the rise of the dead drop in online marketplaces – that is, rather than getting your drugs mailed to you taped into a cassette box or something, it’s now more likely that you’ll be told to go and look under the third park bench on the left to find a package. This is fascinating – I had no idea that you could integrate beacon technology into this stuff for relatively little cost, but the ability to create fairly complex networks of drop points that can be activated and deactivated remotely depending on circumstances is really quite cool, and there is a LOT of stuff that you can learn from this for fun, non-nefarious activities, even if you’re not planning on setting up your own powderflogging business on Telegram.
• A Strange Argument for the Commonplace: I’ve mentioned Peter Singer quite a lot in here, I think, and my weird obsession with the consequences of utilitarian theory (sorry about that) – this is a discussion of Tyler Cowen’s recent essay ‘Strange Attachments’, in which they argue for a form of utilitarianism unconstrained by temporal difference – that is, a system whereby one should act to achieve the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, regardless of how far in the future those people may live, which by extension means we ought always prioritise the needs of future generations over our own as there will, as a matter of mathematical certainty, be more of them than us. Fascinating stuff and genuinely one of the more interesting expansions of Singer’s original premises I’ve read in years.
• Ultimate Millennial Marketing: A new drink has been launched in the US. It’s called ‘Recess’ and its fizzy and nonalcoholic and has vague connotations of wellness, and its marketing is basically every single millennial touchpoint you’ve ever heard of, from the flavours to the colour of the can to the slight air of ironically-detached sincerity and mild anxiety inherent in the copy…You might want to bookmark this just to see how many of the tropes it covers off you see in other, parallel product launches over the remainder of 2019.
• Pre-Raphaelites and the Wombat: I can honestly say that I had no idea whatsoever of the pre-Raphaelites obsession with the wombat. Did you? This is a GREAT article, full of wonderfully silly detail and presenting Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the rest as, well, really quite daft people. I would like to see more of this, please – historical greats recontextualised as kooky oddballs with obscure mammal fetishes. One does rather feel for the pet wombats, though.
• A Flower For Your Thoughts: A brief history of floriography – that is, the practice of delivering coded messages in bunches of flowers as a means of secret communication. Such a wonderful concept, and it reminded me of this website which my friend Ed made back in the day and which offers you the opportunity to buy coded bouquets from selected florists. Send someone a coded message of hate TODAY!
• The True Story of Brainstorm: Brainstorm was going to be a big film – starring Natalie Wood, Christopher Walken and others, it had big studio backing and big names and technical innovation, and all the signs suggested it was going to be a hit…until Wood went on a sailing weekend with her husband Robert Wagner and Walken towards the end of filming, and died. This is one of those crazy Hollywood stories that crop up every now and again and on which Walken has, unsurprisingly, remained tight-lipped – the article deals not only with the story of Woods’ death, but also with what happened to the film in its aftermath; this is a genuinely odd and slightly creepy tale.
• The Nike Smart Shoe: So Nike have announced they’ve made a smart self-tightening trainer controlled by your phone – which, frankly, I’m not hugely interested in. This WIRED piece as part of the promotion is, however, an object lesson in how to do this sort of comms; you can see the thinking behind it all the way (or at least you can if you have the misfortune to do PR for a living at all), and the access they granted to talent shapes the piece perfectly. It’s basically a 3,000 word puff piece on the brilliance of Nike and its design team, which I imagine is exactly what the brand was going for – oh, and if you’re interested in magic, self-lacing trainers there’s a lot about those in there too.
• Academic Freedom: A superb essay in the LRB by Sophie Smith, an Oxford Fellow at the same college as John Finnis, emeritus professor of law and legal philosophy. Finnis, you may be aware, has been the subject of a petition by students to remove him from his position as a result of his public-stated views on homosexuality which he considers immoral and ‘akin to bestiality’. Smith, who is herself gay, writes clearly and cogently about the arguments for allowing free expression, and quashes them equally cogently by the end: “Academic freedom is a principle worth defending, but it is foolish to ignore its costs, and who (disproportionately, quietly) bears them.”
• How PUAs Morphed Into The Far Right: Finally, someone’s done an essay (well, a comic in this case) detailing the intellectual links between the PUA (pick up artist) movement and the Far Right. Loses points for not giving Neil Strauss the shoeing he deserves in terms of the normalisation of a lot of this stuff, but in general this is a strong explainer of how the ‘hey, we’re just trying to get laid!’ lads of the early-00s ended up swapping the fedoras for swastikas.
• Instagram Husbands Are No Longer Ashamed: Aren’t they? Really? WHY NOT? The Insta husband is a long-standing trope, but this piece suggests that they are willing to BREAK OUT and CLAIM THEIR RIGHTFUL POSITION as, er…well actually it’s not really that clear, but there’s lots of talk about them being business partners rather than ‘just’ camerapeople, and about the importance for influencers to have a strong presence in their life to keep them GROUNDED and CENTRED and REAL and oh god a plague on all their houses. I mean, really “In September, Ramirez launched The Instagram Husband Podcast, which is focused on telling the stories of the men behind the camera and redefining what it means to be an Instagram husband. Despite the fact that more partners are taking on this role, Ramirez worried that no one was examining the people who play the more behind-the-scenes role in an influencer’s life.” OH GOD HEAVEN FORFEND THAT ANYONE NOT GIVE THE POOR MEN ENOUGH ATTENTION. Mate, NOONE CARES ABOUT YOU. GIVE IT UP.
• When Cat Person Went Viral: I can’t believe it’s been a whole ye…actually, no, I can, Cat Person already feels like an age ago – can you imagine people having serious conversations about that now? No, it would be shouting and firebombs within 5 minutes. Anyway, its author Kristen Roupinian has her debut short story collection coming out soon, and so revisits her memories of her breakout moment in this New Yorker article. There are some interesting observations here on the odd nature of something so personal being so widely discussed, and the sense of ‘self splayed on the slab’ that this inevitably engenders, although I bridled slightly at this line: “Here’s the catch: when you read a story I’ve written, you’re not thinking about me—you’re thinking as me. I’ve wormed my way inside your head (hi!) and briefly taken over your mind.” Hubris, sweetheart, hubris – please don’t tell me how I am thinking when I read, and please don’t presume that your voice and vision are so unique and powerful that they can displace my pretty well-entrenched id.  
• Caroline Calloway and the Influencer Workshop: The first, but certainly not the last, ‘influencers wow wtf’ story of the year – Caroline Calloway is an odd character, a bit Walter Mittyish by all accounts, having secured and then lost a book deal whilst at university based on her Insta feed and then pivoted into wellness bullsh1t as befits her ilk. This is the story of her attempting to flog ‘Influencer Workshops’ – on the one hand, this woman is obviously grifting really hard; on the other, if you’re stupid enough to believe that anyone who does this a) has a SPECIAL SECRET to their success that anyone can replicate; and b) if that SPECIAL SECRET exists they would share it with you, then, frankly, you deserve everything you get. As a coda to this piece, it turns out that as of yesterday the workshops are BACK ON, proving that you can’t keep a good scammer down.
• What It’s Like To Be A Woman Online: Hopefully not all women get their identity stolen by a weirdo fantasist creep. This is a proper, jaw-dropping WTF-er of a tale, which thankfully has a happy ending – read and be amazed.
• How Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job To Them: McSweeney’s, painfully on the nose as ever. I was at a funeral this week and gave up attempting to explain the precise definition of ‘nonspecific webmong’ to my confused relatives reasonably early on (unrelated, but I also realised that the main people have children must be so that they have something to talk to extended family about in situations such as these).
• The Weight I Carry: This did the rounds last weekend, but if you’ve yet to read it then I recommend it unreservedly. The author, Tommy Tomlinson, weighed 460lbs in 2014; he has written a book documenting his efforts to save his life through weight loss, of which this is a chapter. It’s honest and painful about the practical realities of being a man of that size, and Tomlinson is sanguine about the cause of his condition, but at the same time I can’t help but be slightly angered by this section: “Losing weight is a fcuking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides: The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends, who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve. On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of donuts couldn’t fill.” Mate, I will take the final two explanations at face value, and consider economic factors too, but to attempt to pass responsibility for one’s diet onto the marketing machine feels like a bit of a stretch. Still, a very well-written piece.
• Bees: The story of how the author turned to beekeeping in the wake of postpartum depression and divorce. Excellent – by turns emotional and practical, on apiaries and hives and heartbreak. I don’t normally say this about the subjects of these sorts of pieces – and I am not really in a position to take huge moral high ground on a lot of this sort of stuff, to be clear – but this woman’s ex sounds like a genuinely awful piece of work.
• Fighting for your Father: A gorgeous piece of writing in which the author takes her dying father to a balloon festival for an outing. I’ve been thinking a lot about old age and death this week – it’s a cheery way to spend my time! – and this has nagged at me repeatedly; I think this is beautiful, and if you’re dealing with ageing relatives yourself then it may prove some small comfort.
• Meet Doctor Rapp: Finally this week, the brilliant, happy, heartwarming tale of Dr Rapp, the man who had a stroke and realised that he could rhyme. From a career as a physician to hanging out with KRS-One, this is a BRILLIANT story; Dr Rapp died a few years ago, but the obvious warmth, affection and respect everyone in this piece still feels for him is palpable. You will, I promise, not read a nicer story all week.

By Zack Oldenkamp

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. First up, a short pixelart scifi animation called ‘A Theory of Flight’ – part of a wider series of scifi shorts commissioned by The Verge, which you can see the rest of here:

2) Next, enjoy Laibach doing John Cage’s “4’33” – because, well, WHY NOT?

3) This is called ‘Feet’, and it’s the new one from the fabulously scuzzy Fat White Family, The video here is ACE:

4) Strand of Oak is a genuinely appalling name for a band, but this is a very lovely song indeed and it almost compensates:

5) DEUTSCHE HIPHOP CORNER! I have no idea what this song is saying, but I checked with my internet friend Marcus who lives in Germany and he assured me it’s not fashy or anything so, well, enjoy! Oh, and, well, BYE! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK! BYE! I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND OR INDEED WEEK DEPENDING ON WHEN YOU ARE READING THIS, AND THAT THERE IS SOMETHING FOR YOU TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN THE SHORT TO MEDIUM TERM AND THAT THERE IS SOMEONE WHO YOU CAN ASK FOR A HUG AND THAT THEY WILL GIVE IT TO YOU AND THAT IT WILL BE A GOOD HUG BECAUSE IT DOES RATHER FEEL LIKE WE COULD ALL DO WITH ONE ANYWAY IT’S TIME FOR ME TO DO ALL THE TEDIOUS END-OF-CURIOS GUBBINS LIKE SORTING THE MIXES AND ADDING THE PHOTOS AND WRITING THE OPENING AND OH GOD IT’S MIDDAY I OUGHT TO HURRY UP BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!

AND SO IT COMMENCES ANEW! The days and the nights and the work and the fear and the grind and the…

NO! No more! ENOUGH! You don’t need this! It’s hard enough for you, isn’t it, with the glow of the holidays naught but a distant memory and the unwelcome return to wageslavery, without me wanging on about how dreadful everything is. 

Consider this, then, a gentle reintroduction to the world of the web as seen through my jaded, myopic, tear-clogged eyes; I promise I’ll go easy on you as, well, this is all probably going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Prepare to take me inside you once again for the first time in 2019 – here’s hoping you’ve not become allergic or anything. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and, honestly, it’s nice to have you back.

[SMALL BIT OF OFFICIAL BUSINESS: The nice people (well, person) who publishes Imperica has a Patreon. If you think that websites that feature stuff like Web Curios are A Good Thing, if you want to read more stuff about digital and tech and culture and things, and perhaps fancy an actual printed magazine of that sort of stuff, you could possibly consider bunging them a quid or two. THANKS EVERYONE]

By Alejandro Cartagena

LET’S KICK THIS YEAR OFF WITH A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST COMPILED FROM ALL MY PICKS FROM THE NOW-DEFUNCT WEBSITE ‘THIS IS MY JAM’ WHICH I WAS REMINDED OF THIS WEEK – HONESTLY, THERE IS SOME GREAT STUFF HERE EVEN IF I DO SAY SO MYSELF!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS COBBLED TOGETHER THE SECTION OF ‘NEWS’ FROM A WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF FROM THE PAST MONTH, MUCH OF WHICH YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN BEFORE AND WHICH, AS A RESULT, IS EVEN MORE PHONED IN THAN USUAL:

• Facebook Launches Additional CTA Functionality For Stories: Well that’s an underwhelming bulletpoint to open 2019 with. Still, the only way is up. This is the ‘news’ (don’t worry, I’ll settle down soon and stop with the tedious truculence) that Stories posted by Pages on Facebook will now allow for the inclusion of a load of additional ‘Call to Action’-type features, such as ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Book Now’ stickers. Which, obviously, makes them more useful from the point of view of tatflogging. Happy? No.
• Facebook Canvas Renamed to ‘Instant Experiences’: Even less interesting than the last point, but a useful reminder that a) Canvas exists; and b) that you can do loads of stuff with it as a format, if you have the high-quality assets at your disposal. Anyway, the revamped guide to Cana- sorry, ‘Instant Experiences’ is now quite useful in terms of explaining how they work and what you can do with them; this is, as I’m sure you’ll recall, ONLY available as a paid-for type of content, but it’s definitely worth a look as a refresher.
• New Features for Messenger: These are pretty dull tbh – native Boomerangs, background blurring and, more interestingly, AR stickers – but I felt it was something that you needed to know about. Was I right?
• Insta Now Lets You Post To Multiple Accounts Simultaneously: Instagram is “adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling them on within the composer screen”. Which, let me remind you, is exactly the functionality that Twitter disabled last year in an attempt to clamp down on content being spammed onto the platform by bot farms – now, given Instagram’s well-publicised travails with ‘authenticity’ in the past year, given the revelations about Russian propaganda getting more traction on Insta than Facebook, and given the increasing move towards Insta as the platform for shilling to impressionable idiots, does this look like a good or sensible move? Reader, I would posit that it does not. Anyway, I honestly can’t see the benefit of this to anyone other than peddlers of virality like The Social Chain, with their sockpuppet accounts and Tweetdecking practices and all the rest. Someone explain to me why I’m wrong.
• You Can Now Do Stories on WeChat Too: Here’s a guide to how the format works there – insert your own comment about the importance of thinking about Stories as a content format, as I am bored of doing so.
• Snapchat Launches Lens Challenges: In an attempt to stop children migrating to TikTok, Snap’s launched Lens Challenges – this was from before Christmas, but is worth being aware of as I’m pretty sure that they would bend over backwards to make these for the right brand (with deep enough pockets), and as such this could be worth thinking of (if you think that there’s anyone still using Snapchat). To quote: “Lens Challenges are exactly what they sound like: themed challenges that incorporate a special Snapchat Lens, which can then be featured for the app’s community. The first challenge [was] tied into the holiday season. Snapchat users could select a specific Lens that allowed them to sing a version of “Jingle Bells” performed by Gwen Stefani.” God, it sounds GREAT, doesn’t it?
• Snap’s Trends Document: To qualify my slightly snarky comment about Snapchat just now, let me just show you this – their ‘trends report’ based on what users of the platform are going to be most into in 2019. What do they reckon THE KIDS will be clamouring for? What bandwagons ought brands jump on to secure the attention of the YOUTH? Why, Mincraft! And Fortnite! And, er, Airpods! And memes! Look, lads, if this sort of fatuous non-insight is the sum total of everything you have learned about the kids using your platform then, well, you’ve just demonstrated that your value to advertisers is round about 0! This has me feeling somewhat bearish about Snap’s 2019’s prospects, if I’m honest.
• Building A Handy Data Pipeline With (mostly) Free Tools: If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to become better at knowing how stuff works, and making more digital things yourself rather than just passively consuming other people’s work like some sort of lazy, fat, parasitic slob then, well, you’re a better person than I am. You might also find this post by Mat Morrison useful / interesting – Mat is good at wrangling data, and this is a really useful beginner’s guide to setting up some simple-but-useful datascraping and cleaning mechanisms. Which obviously sounds criminally dull, but hang in there – the frivolous stuff is just round the corner, honest.
• Tools: I’ve got a strange feeling this was also via Mat – anyway, you might want to bookmark this selection of social media data tools as they are potentially VERY USEFUL; there’s stuff here to track meme growth, the spread of hoax news…much of it, fine, can be done with paid-for stuff, but there are elements here which I’ve not seen elsewhere.
• Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2019: The latest edition of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s annual report into THE STATE OF THE MEDIA AND TECH is, as ever, worth a read – if you’re too lazy to read all of it (or, er, if you’re a busy person with multiple competing commitments and finite time, either or) then it’s worth just checking out the first section around predictions and trends. Note that even these people say that Stories are everywhere and will become increasingly ubiquitous – SEE, THEY AGREE WITH ME! Why won’t anyone pay me for my ‘insights’? What’s that? Because I give them all away for free in this stupid blognewsletterthing? Oh.

By Audun Grimstad

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT TIME-TRAVELLING A DECADE OR SO INTO THE PAST AND ENJOYING AN HOUR-LONG MASHUP OF THE GREATEST HITS OF 2008? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO MAKE A CONCERTED EFFORT TO KEEP A TIGHTER REIN ON THE LINK CURATION IN CURIOS THIS YEAR, OR AT LEAST IT WAS BEFORE IT STARTED COMPILING THIS WEEK’S LIST BUT WHICH AT THE TIME OF WRITING NOW REALISES THAT IT IS LOOKING AT AROUND 100 OF THE BASTARD THINGS AND OH GOD I HAVE A PROBLEM, PT.1:

• 2018 In Pictures: I know that we’ve moved on and that 2018 is all played out and that now shiny, exciting 2019 is the new hotness, but let’s be clear – the demarcation between years is an entirely arbitrary one, and 2019 is, so far, exactly the same as 2018 (but perhaps already marginally more frantic). It’s therefore an excellent time to peruse this selection of images, posted without comment on Medium by Joel Veix and titled, simply, ‘Some Images I Saved On My Laptop in 2018’. They’re not all images from 2018, but as a snapshot of what being alive and extremely online feels like then, well, it’s hard to top. TAG YOURSELF, as the kids used to say.
• Meditation Games: By way of absolute contrast to the above link, Meditation Games is a new project for 2019 by a collective of over 350 artists and game makers; the idea is that each day in 2019, the project will post a new ‘game’ to play, each designed as a small, meditative exercise – the blurb reads as follows: “What if every day, there was a small message from the past with a small game or toy to play with? Meditations is a launcher that, every day, loads a small game and an accompanying text as a meditation, distraction, lesson, or inspiration for that day.” It’s a lovely idea – it requires a download, but then it just gently reminds you each day to take a minute or two to experience the latest meditation and it’s very unintrusive – each day’s experience takes a couple of minutes at most. It may not surprise you to know that I have little or no interest in practices of meditative self-improvement (YOU CAN’T FIX ME), but even through my cataracts of cynicism this is clearly a rather lovely endeavour. The games are only ‘games’ in the most abstract of senses, but the ones I’ve tried have been thought-provoking and well-constructed; this is worth doing, I think.
• Year of Colour: Hobby project by Stef Lewandoski which takes your Insta feed and derives from it the most-featured colour from the past month or year (or any date range you choose). It’s very neatly done – the only downside is that you can only use it with Insta accounts you own, meaning I’m unable to go through the cast of current reality TV to ascribe each of them their own shade of teak based on their selfie compulsion. If you think you use Insta too much, that maybe it’s taking over your life and making you a narcissistic obsessive shell of a human, then plug your account into this – if the dominant colour is a skintone then, well, maybe stop taking so many fcuking self portraits. Or don’t! Live your best life! Let’s see how long I can keep up this non-judgmental facade.
• Play 2019: This is by Mazarine, which is apparently ‘a creative platform for luxury, the arts and culture’ (no, me neither) – as a promo, they’ve built this selection of small, simple, nicely-designed games to play with to usher in the new year. What any of this has to do with 2019 is beyond me, but the webwork is neat and the games will distract you from that presentation for approximately three minutes or so.
• Babeyes: Well, this is the first ‘Christ, really?’ thing of the year, and we’re only a few links in. Do you somehow worry that your newborn child isn’t really, well, pulling its weight when it comes to content creation? Do you feel that you’re not managing to fully and authentically capture the joy and genuine wonder of the experience of young life for your followers and fans? WORRY NO MORE! Babeyes is basically a bodycam for your infant child – now they can start their own YouTube channel! It’s technically nothing more than a clip-on camera, recording 20s of video at a time which gets Bluetoothed to a paired device for editing, saving and (inevitably) uploading. “Babeyes records, analyzes, classifies and saves forever the first moments of a baby’s life (from the baby’s point of view). How did my mother look at me? What was the emotion of my father when he saw me for the first time? With what tenderness did my grandparents welcome me? Thanks to Babeyes, all these moments, filled with love, will be watched later by the grown child, as if he remembered the scene.” Take a moment to digest all that, and then think of the inevitable therapy bills that would result from the child watching the footage back in adolescence. This is basically a lowtech version of one of last season’s episodes of Black Mirror, which is a sentence I confidently predict I’ll be writing again before the year’s out. Anyway, watch as some dreadful person turns first-person videos of their toddler’s development into a $1m+ YouTube brand within the next 12 months.
• David Bowie Is: The David Bowie app, released on the anniversary of his death last week, is an interesting artefact. It’s a digital companion to the V&A’s exhibition on his life, work and art, and it’s undeniably technically fantastic – the AR works well, in the main, and there is SO MUCH stuff in here; I’m by no means a Bowie obsessive and to be honest found it a touch overwhelming, but more committed fans and enthusiasts will find an awful lot of brilliant stuff in here. The nagging issue I have with it, though, is one that’s common to all of this stuff – the simple truth is that this is yet another example of AR not really being necessary, or indeed really making anything better. Still, if you want to be able to see  bunch of Bowie memorabilia floating on your desk whilst Gary Oldman talks at you, this is nigh-on perfect.
• Mystery Brand: Hot on the heels of Babeyes comes the second of this year’s ‘FFS modernity’ moments – Mystery Brand is, basically, lootboxes IRL. Lootboxes (for those unfamiliar) is the term given to the videogame grift whereby users are invited to spend real money for virtual rewards in a ‘box’ – the grift here being that the contents of the box is random and as such you’re basically playing a fruit machine, which as any amateur behavioural psychologist can tell you is exactly the sort of Skinner Box mechanic which gets people addicted. Anyway, Mystery Box is exactly that, made physical – you pay them money and they will ‘open’ a ‘box’ and you will win…something, guaranteed! The boxes are themed – some will offer the promise of techy rewards, others Supreme gear, others makeup – but the constant in all of this is the promise that you might win something AMAZING for 0 outlay. Add the fact that this is being shilled by charmingly toxic YouTubers like Jake Paul and you have a Daily Mail moral panic waiting to happen – it’s worth having a dig through the site, as whilst it’s obviously evil it’s also brilliantly so, with options to customise your own boxes (setting your own desired rewards), share your boxes with others (so you get a tiny cut every time someone buys one of your ‘creations’), and sell back unwanted rewards to the site for a fraction of your outlay (see? You’re making your money back!). Honestly, this is EVIL.
• UBeBot: This looks interesting, but the app was so shonky when I downloaded it that I couldn’t get it to work at all – you might be luckier, though. Anyway, the idea is really interesting and the sort of thing which SOMEONE this year will doubtless nail – the app creates a 3d animated avatar of YOU, based on photos of your face, which you can clothe and animate however you desire, and which you can then use in your Stories and elsewhere. It looks shonky, a bit like the Sims from two generations back, and it’s obviously pretty janky all round, but the principle is interesting and I can totally see the appeal. Beautifully – and, obviously, appallingly – the app also advertises that you can make and animate avatars of other people too, just upload some photos! So, er, be aware that we are now at a point when anyone can create a little digital puppet with your face and make it do whatever they want – don’t imagine for a second that we’re any further than about 18 months away from some sort of really unpleasant miniature digital bongo puppetry (a sentence I was hoping not to have to write this year, but, well, here we are).
• Penistrator: Draw anything on this site – literally anything – and it will magically be transformed by the power of software into a simple, two-dimensional cock. WHY NOT, EH?
• Special Relationships: The Pudding finished 2018 with another wonderful piece of dataviz – this is their analysis of the world as seen from the US, taking foreign countries mentioned on the front page of the New York Times and seeing which garnered the most namechecks each months since 1900. The site lets you see the context of the mentions, but the main pleasure comes in seeing how the focus of American interest (at least, as defined by the NYT) shifted from being almost entirely UK-centric at the turn of the 20th Century to being dominated by the Far and Middle East in the past decade or so. This is a wonderful example of visual communications, as it seemingly always is with these people. Oh, on a semi-related tip, this visualisation of shifting power across recorded human history is old but equally wonderful.

• Hexbot: WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE! Witness this, a just-funded Kickstarter which looks like it’ll break the £1m mark before it expires in two months and which promises to deliver AN ACTUAL ROBOT ARM to your home for the piddling sum of about £270. Which, honestly, is amazing – obviously all sorts of caveats apply, per all Kickstarter projects, but the theoretical power of this thing is mind-boggling. Obviously the promised 3d printing, self-sufficient maker future never really came to pass, but if you’re looking at improving your home workshop in advance of us going full Mad Max then this might be worth your time.

• Rainbrow: You remember how Snap launched games last year, with a range of slightly crap distractions where you could do things like, I don’t know, play keepy-uppy by wiggling your eyebrows or somesuch? Well this is that, but for iPhone. Certainly not any good, but worth knowing that you can do this stuff off-Snap.
• Black Women Too: “Lifetime’s ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ shows what happens when being Black and a woman and working class render our truths inconsequential. This interactive site—created by and for Black women and allies—visualizes the systems that put our minds and bodies at risk.” This is a US site and as such the issues it addresses – cutting across politics, the media, the law, girlhood, the justice system and the rest – are presented through the prism of modern America, but as a systematic deconstruction of structural racism within society it’s pretty universal. Worth reading, particularly as a demonstration of exactly how widely and deeply racism impacts the lives of those it affects, in ways those fortunate enough not to experience often can’t even imagine.
• Lovot: Love isn’t dead, it’s just been outsourced! Say hello to ‘Lovot’, the latest in the long line of ‘technological innovations that make me want to cry just thinking about them’ – Lovot is a small, wheeled, soft, huggable robot companion, designed to be loved. Read that back to yourself again, go on. Designed to be loved. If that doesn’t make you have a weird sort of rushing reverse-zoom moment about how incredibly, spectacularly lonely the future looks for many billions of people then, well, I envy you because that’s exactly what I got from this. Here’s their schtick: “Our goal is simple: create a robot that makes you happy. When you touch your LOVOT, embrace it, even just watch it, you’ll find yourself relaxing, feeling better. It’s a little like feeling love toward another person. That’s because we have used technology not to improve convenience or efficiency, but to enhance levels of comfort and feelings of love. LOVOT will react to your moods, and do all it can to fill you with joy and re-energize you. It may not be living a creature, but LOVOT will warm your heart. LOVOT was born for just one reason – to be loved by you.” Now obviously this isn’t a bad thing per se – the design is rather nice, the principle is sort-of laudable, and you can imagine people for whom this sort of thing is useful and genuinely helpful. There are a few things, though, that give me pause – the range of clothing and accessories they suggest they’ll offer, and the ‘dress up’ mode that you can put the robot into, made me think a little of Michael Ende’s ‘Momo’, in which children are enslaved into consumerism by talking dolls who substitute the acquisition of accessories for imaginative play. LOVE THE ROBOT! BUY MORE THINGS FOR THE ROBOT! FEEL HAPPIER! Erm, look lads, I’d sort of made a mental promise to myself that I was going to try and be more upbeat this year but, well, it doesn’t seem to be going so well as of 8:49am; I’ll give it another go.
• Remove: This is simple but HUGELY useful – a web-based tool that will remove the background from any image you give it. This works really, really well and is practically indistinguishable from magic (or, er, decent photoshop).
• Generation 1 Pokemon Cry Generator: Would you like a website that lets you generate the horrible sounds made by the original Pokemon on the first Gameboy? Are you sure? They sound fcuking horrible on a PC speaker in 2019, but ok!
• The Magic Sketchpad: This is basically exactly the same thing as that ‘this webpage turns whatever you draw into a crudely-drawn cock’ site up there, except it’s the more serious and grown-up version – tell it whether you want it to create cats or tigers or ladders or whatever, start drawing, and it will try and complete your drawing in such a way that it looks like whatever you tell it to draw. If that makes sense. Look, just click it, it’s a lot simpler than that ham-fisted description might suggest.
• Japanese Adult Video Titles: A Twitter account which simply shares the titles of Japanese bongo films. Not really NSFW, although the account’s header image may give the more prudish amongst your employers pause (I’m not saying it’s an image of anilingus, but I’m equally not not saying it’s an image of anilingus). Still, if you occasionally want the joy of titles like “Getting Punished By My Voluptuous Mom Made Me Hard – Right In Front Of My Dad!” popping up on your timeline (and WHO DOESN’T?) then follow away.
• DOOMBA: Niche, this, but sort of brilliantly clever/geeky – DOOMBA is a hack that lets you take spatial data from your Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and export it as a .wad file (that’s the in-game maps, for those of you whose early teenage years weren’t spent shooting demons in a virtual hellscape), meaning you can turn your house into an in-game map. Sort of totally pointless, and all the better for it.
• Interesting Esoterica: An almost-perfect Curios website, this one – Interesting Esoterica is a wonderful personal collection of odd and interesting academic papers, found and compiled by the fabulously-named Christian Lawson-Perfect (really, what a name). If you want to lose yourself in such mongraphs as ‘Factoring the Chicken Nugget monoid’ (no, really) then this will be right up your street (this is, quite often, hard maths and science, so your mileage might vary depending on your facility with, and ability to laugh at jokes about, Euclidian geometry).
• Music For Nothing: Musician and composer Joel Corelitz has made a whole load of his music available for free, for commercial use – if you’re after some backing tracks or ambient music this is a LOT better than the majority of stuff you’d find in music libraries.
• Mapping and Visualisation: Scott Reinhard is a graphic designer based in Brooklyn (of course they are!); this site collects some of his work around maps and cartography, and it is BEAUTIFUL. Honestly, these are glorious and quite unlike most other map-ish stuff I see online, in the main.
• Our Number One Album: A podcast! Which I will never listen to! Still, the premise of this one sounds rather fun, if you’re into music or comedy or both (is there anyone who dislikes both music and comedy? WHO ARE YOU, JOYLESS HUSKS?) – “What do “Losing my Religion” by R.E.M., “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and “Chandelier” by Sia have in common? They were all written in under an hour, and so were tons of other classic songs. Have you ever wondered what would it be like to be a fly on the wall during one of these songwriting sprints? Well, what if the songwriters weren’t quite as talented, but they were really funny? Our Debut Album is the podcast where two comedians have one hour to write a hit song. Once a month, Dave Shumka and Graham Clark of Stop Podcasting Yourself get together and write a song they hope will be a hit. After 12 months, they’ll have a debut album.” This is an excellent idea.
• Compass: Are you one of those people who buys their Christmas presents in the January sales (these people do exist, trust me)? Or do you just LOVE online shopping and BARGAINS? Either way, this Chrome extension might be of interest – the idea is that it provides you with realtime price comparisons as you browse – it’ll detect product names and prices and run searches in the background to pull price comparison data from other vendors as you shop, offering you click-to-buy links to cheaper options. Super smart idea, though I’ve not had a chance to test how it works in practice.
• Basepaws: Do you have a SPECIAL LITTLE GUY in your life? Would you like to get to know them better? Are you a mad enough cat person to spend $100 on giving your pet a DNA test to ‘get to know it better’? Well LUCKY YOU! Basepaws is a service which lets you submit a sample or swab from your feline companion, analyses their DNA and sends you a report about, er, I don’t know, whether they have any Siamese in them or something. There’s a lot of guff in here about disease prediction and the like, but very little about exactly how or why knowing any of this stuff will make your, or your pet’s, life better. Still, if you’d like a whole host of new reasons to worry for the long-term health of your furbaby (I know, it’s awful isn’t it?) then perhaps this is for you.

By Oleg Vdovenko

IT’S 2019 AND INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE IS BACK WITH A NEW MIX OF EXCELLENT RARITIES FROM HIS LITERALLY KILOMETRIC RECORD COLLECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO MAKE A CONCERTED EFFORT TO KEEP A TIGHTER REIN ON THE LINK CURATION IN CURIOS THIS YEAR, OR AT LEAST IT WAS BEFORE IT STARTED COMPILING THIS WEEK’S LIST BUT WHICH AT THE TIME OF WRITING NOW REALISES THAT IT IS LOOKING AT AROUND 100 OF THE BASTARD THINGS AND OH GOD I HAVE A PROBLEM, PT.2:

• The Harbin Ice and Snow Festival: The annual Festival of Ice and Snow in Harbin, China, has just been on – this is a beautiful gallery of photos of some quite incredible ice palaces and sculptures, though I can’t help but think that the Instagramification of the aesthetic has rather lessened the impact of some of the work here (/pseud).
• Gamequitters: This is interesting – Gamequitters is a site designed to offer support to people who are addicted to videogames, or to their family members. It asks you to answer some questions about your gaming habits (using fairly standard addiction measurement metrics, as far as I can tell), and then presents a range of literature and resources designed to help people take steps towards getting treatment. I’m pretty sure that anyone aged between 10-16 (certainly any boys) will pretty much tick every addiction box here, but this is an increasingly problematic issue and all resources to address it are probably A Good Thing.
• Dartboards of Film & TV: A Twitter feed. What do you think it posts photos of? THAT’S RIGHT!
• Evernote Design: If you’re a designer, bookmark this NOW – a huge, seemingly free, repository of design resources – vectors, graphics, icons, UX guidelines, all sorts of collections of inspirational materials from newsletters to UI…it’s honestly a GOLDMINE if you do this sort of stuff for a living (or even for fun).
• The Yellowstone Park Sound Library: As America’s National Parks suffer under the Government shutdown – it’s testament to the dark Satanic power of that man that he manages to make the degradation of thousands of square miles of some of the most beautiful natural land on earth a minor side-effect of his sh1tty administration – it’s nice to be reminded of how lovely they are. This is a wonderful collection of sounds recorded in Yellowstone Park – if you want to hear the frankly terrifying huffing of a Grizzly Bear, say, or the screech of a Bald Eagle, or just some soothing waterfalls, then here you go fill your boots.
• Jeffsum: Lorem Ipsum, but all about Jeff Goldblum, in case you didn’t think we’d taken his online fetishisation quite far enough yet.
• 40 Favourite History Objects: A TOP QUALITY Twitter thread compiled by Dr Lindsay Fitzharris, all about her favourite 40 historical objects. Come for the weirdly macabre exploded skulls, stay for the utterly terrifying ‘dental phantom’. There is so much interesting in here, and the thread branches into some very cool tangents at points; this is a goldmine for anyone vaguely interested in odd ephemera (which, I would hope, is most of you, otherwise what the shuddering fcuk are you doing here?).
• Stoop: Do you find newsletters an annoyance, clogging up your inbox and presenting you with a threatening and seemingly-insurmountable volume of links and words and STUFF to get through each week? I mean the other newsletters, obviously, not the perfectly-sized and easily-digestible Web Curios, no siree. Anyway, if you do then you might like Stoop, which basically pulls your newsletter subscriptions into an app for ease of reading. The only caveat is that the newsletter needs to be added to the app, which limits the range you can experience – still, if it grows this might develop into something quite useful.
• Etienne Jacob: Mesmerising, black-and-white gif work. Geometric, abstract, particulate…all sorts of types of animation here, but the constant is the quality – these are sort-of perfect.
• Very Sharp Knives: As we prepare for the Mad Max-esque reality of the post-March 29th future, stuff like this is worth knowing. This YouTube channel presents an incredible range of videos on one, single, solitary subject – how to make the sharpest knife possible from unusual materials such as resin, cardboard, glass and, er, milk. You may laugh, but when we’re all desperate for the sweet release of death as the food shortages bite and the Traitor Punishment Squads roam the countryside (well, fine, maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic) you’ll be grateful for something that shows you how to turn your cat’s femur into a passable shiv.
• A Map of US Gun Violence: Mapping recorded instances of gun crime in the US, over the past 5 years – this takes in over 150,000 individual crime reports, and is a fairly sobering reminder of exactly what it looks like when any old nutter can have access to a firearm. Atlanta and Chicago look like particularly fun places to be, based on this evidence.
• The Terrible Camera Club: This is a lovely idea, and sort of the antithesis of Insta culture. The Terrible Camera club is a Twitter thing, where each week the account will present a crap photography challenge and ask for submissions – the inaugural one was “a picture of the most miserable, LEAST instagram-friendly meal/food possible please! So a dirty fry-up with a fag stubbed out in the egg, a bean on toast, microwave porridge that’s exploded, a cold pot noodle in the rain – that kinda thing.” Worth a follow for the inevitably glorious results.  
• Recipe Filter: A Chrome extension which automatically looks for recipes on a webpage and presents them at the top, so as to save you scrolling through 700 words of appallingly-written food blogger self-aggrandisement and faux-influencer rubbish. This is HUGELY useful, I promise you.
• Record Them: A WONDERFUL idea, this, and a truly great present for a grandparent or ageing relative or, frankly, anyone interesting – this basically lets you buy the Desert Island Discs experience for anyone you like, with the subject of your choice being interviewed by the team and the resulting audio being recut with their favourite songs, archive audio to illustrate whatever they’re talking about, etc. One of my great regrets is that by the time I was old enough to understand that my grandfather had had an incredible and fascinating life, he was in no position to tell me about it; I would have LOVED to have something like this about him (although quite what they would have made of an irascible old fascist incapable of speaking English is another thing entirely).
• Bandito: The first ‘immersive interactive musical experience’ website of the year is this one, for the song ‘Bandito’ by Twenty One Pilots – you ‘fly’ through a 3d landscape, looking for SECRET GLYPHS and stuff like that; it’s all quite pretty, but, well, a bit pointless – I quite want someone to do something different with the ‘single serving music promo website’ thing this year, although obviously like the pathetically demanding value-sponge I am, I can’t for the life of me think what that might be. The song’s ok, if you want a reason to click.
• Coding is Fun!: Because it’s the end of the first full week back at work and I know how bad that feels, the end of this section of Curios is going to be filled with FUN, TIMEWASTING GAMES! The first is this simple but VERY CUTE proto-coding toy – it’s a very basic initial primer on how code is effectively a series of stacked commands, in which your job is to get a small, winsome robot to its destination by inputting a series of commands. The levels slowly become more complex but they’re never exactly challenging; for you, this is probably a bit easy (but did I mention how CUTE?), but for your kid/nephew/godchild/whatever it’s probably a really nice 20 minutes.
• Isotopium: This, though, is AMAZING. Imagine a game in which you could pilot little buggies around a real-life 1:20 scale model of Chernobyl, picking up radioactive materials and discovering EXCITING MUTANT SECRETS – sounds good, doesn’t it, a bit Crystal Maze-ish. That is EXACTLY what this is, and you can do it through your browser and, honestly, it works SO WELL; you might have to queue a bit to get in, and obviously you need reasonable bandwidth for it to work well, but the fact that this works so perfectly is a bit magical to me. Inexplicably, this seems to be a prototype for an actual game that they want people to pay for – no idea how that would work, but this is honestly brilliant and you must try it.
• Hatetris: Tetris, but where it only ever gives you the worst possible pieces. As you’d expect, this is AWFUL but sort of compelling at the same time.
• Smooch: This is honestly lovely – a short piece of interactive fiction, exploring kisses. You play as someone who is going to kiss another someone (gender is very fluid throughout here); as you play through, the story can branch in hugely varied ways, with the eventual kisses being happy, sad, short, long, regretful, joyous, creepy, transcendent…there’s a wonderful poetry to this, and I’ve played through it about a dozen times now and will happily do so again. Please give it a go.
• Paper: An excellent little ‘capture the territory’ Snake-ish game with a rather pleasing paper-type aesthetic. Infuriating and incredibly addictive, you will find yourself rapidly developing some fairly strong feelings of hate and resentment towards the other players which is basically what this is all about, isn’t it?
• The Treasure: Finally this week, an exquisite ‘escape the room’ game in the style of Myst or similar – this is slow, simple and yet fiendishly hard (to me at least), with crisply beautiful graphics that very much remind me of early-00s game aesthetic. Depending on your patience, you can happily get a good hour out of this I think – go on, finish the first working week of 2019 with a bold challenge to your employers by just playing this brazenly for the rest of the afternoon and challenging them to sack you!

By Can Pekdemir

LET’S FINISH THE MIXES WITH THIS WRAPUP OF SOME OF 2018’S BEST HIPHOP!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Marion Tapes: Marion Stokes taped thousands of hours of US television during her lifetime. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today. This Tumblr shares screenshots from a different video each day, presenting a rather wonderful snapshot of the 20th Century as seen through the CRT.
• The 1959 Project: The history of jazz, one post at a time. Very much one for the jazz enthusiasts, but if you’re into the music then you will learn LOTS here.
• The Obscuritory: Probably not a Tumblr! Still, this is a blog-ish site dedicated to playing and writing up obscure games from the past, and if you’re a veteran of the 90s/00s gaming scene then you’ll probably find a lot to interest you in here.
• A Thread of Tumblr Threads: A collection of Twitter threads highlighting some of the best stuff from Tumblr over the past year or so – these cut across the arts, history, cats, memes and much more, and if you want a one-stop-primer as to why Tumblr continues to be one of the most interesting online communities anywhere then this is an excellent place to begin.

The Trough of (Insta) Feeds!:

• Vincenzo Spina: Infra-red photography, which looks pretty cool almost regardless of what is actually being snapped.
• Doors of London: Not pictured – the increasing numbers of homeless people seeking refuge in said doorways.
• Pomme Queen: You want an Insta feed packed with photos of REALLY FANCY APPLES? Yes you do!
• Naohiro Yako: Excellent photos of Japan, although perhaps a touch heavy on the HDR for my tastes.
• James Hetfield’s Mustache: One of the blokes out of Metallica, and his mustache. Over and over and over again.
• Terrible Maps: You probably don’t need me to explain this one.
• Film Tourism US: Sharing photos of famous film locations from around the States, but in real life. If you ever wanted to see a photo featuring a parking lot from American Graffiti then, well, you’re going to love this.
• Icarus Mid-air: You think you know origami birds? I promise you, you know NOTHING. These are astonishing and make my head hurt slightly thinking of how they’re made.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The State of the World 2019: I try and remember to link to this every year – this is Bruce Sterling and friends’ annual discussion about What The Fcuk Is Going On, which they’ve been doing at the start of January for years and which, this year as every year, is one of the best and clearest-headed conversations about What The Fcuk Is Going On you’ll read anywhere. As ever, it’s hugely wide ranging and covers tech and politics and economics and the environment and society and, well, everything, and this year one of the contributors is James Bridle which makes the whole thing exponentially more interesting. There is a LOT of thinking here, and it’s not presented in the most user-friendly way, but it’s absolutely worth your time to read it. The stuff around P3 about ‘The New Dark’ captured my imagination in particular.
• Millennial Burnout: You’ve all read this one, right? The big ‘Why does everyone between about 20-40 just feel so utterly fcuked by life all the time?’ piece that’s had everyone talking? No? Well go and read it then, I’ll wait. *waits* Done? God, that was overlong, wasn’t it (yes, I know, pottle, etc)? The overall point it makes – that everyone feels burnt out and exhausted and dissatisfied and tired – feels broadly correct, but simultaneously not anything specific to ‘millennials’; I’d argue that this is a post-internet feeling, and that it’s another example of anomie, a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals” and which “evolves from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community”, and which is prevalent in societies in which “there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life.” Sound familiar? You can be anything! You’ve never had it so good! The world has never been a better place for humanity (and to any Pinker acolytes reading this, the fact that you can derive data from human experience does not therefore automatically mean that the reverse is true and that you can define the human experience via data)!  So why aren’t you crushing it? Why haven’t you written that novel? Started that business? Gotten that degree? Found the perfect work/life balance? See what I mean?
• The Dark Future of Advertising: Jamie Bartlett writes about how advertising is likely to become even more creep, intrusive and personal as we move into the glorious algorithmically-determined future – as he points out, the fact that we’re all already embedded with datagathering systems that we simply don’t understand added to the growth in language processing and associated/semi-related tech makes it very likely that regardless of our attempts to claw back control of our data and keep it out of the hands of advertisers we’re going to be more surveilled and sold to than ever. This theme’s also explored by Charlie Warzel over at Buzzfeed in this piece – still, #deletefacebook!
• Noone Is At The Controls: On the subject of algos, here’s another cheering look at the fact that we’re increasingly controlled and managed by software that we simply don’t understand, and that we’re at the point whereby it’s perfectly possible that we will never understand it, or indeed that it’s actually impossible for us to understand it. Which is…lovely. I was talking to someone the other day who described San Francisco as “a sad and fairly brutal segregation between people who tell computers what to do (generally all clad in those thin body-warmers) and people desperately chasing round the place bringing the first group take-aways, packages and dry-cleaning, all being told what to do by computers” – now imagine that as the future of the whole Western world, and one in which noone really seems to understand why the computers are telling us to do stuff; HELLO SUNLIT UPLANDS OF TOMORROW!
• AOC and the New Political Reality: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a bona-fide political phenomenon, a welcome breath of fresh air in US politics and, as this piece astutely points out, a master at social media communication. The article looks at the way in which she communicates using Insta, and the way she’s been able to draw back the curtain around some of the more obscure elements of US politics to explain and expose how it works – it also points out that this is rapidly going to become the new normal, and we should look forward to seeing literally every single politician in the world pursue the holy grail of ‘relatability’ via the medium of Stories. You’ve seen it a bit already in the UK, with the increasing use of Insta by politicians on both sides of the House to attempt to present themselves as anything other than barely-competent dullards; I predict we will soon pine for the good old days of WebCameron (god, that seems positively quaint, doesn’t it?).
• The Scourge of ‘Relatable’: On which note, a timely piece of invective against the trope of ‘relatability’, that bland, catch-all quality that the article beautifully summarises as “quirky but smart, introverted but friendly, shaded with a charmingly pathetic love of spreadable cheese.” ‘Relatable’ is the tedious ubiquity of the lower-case social media register, the ‘I’m an ordinary person and one of the PEOPLE’ fetishisation of Greggs and Spoons, and the piece closes with this glorious line which sums it all up better than I ever could: “Not only the social value of something but also its economic viability depends on how shareable it is. And if what we share is a reflection of our identity, then the greatest value comes from sharing something that could validate our existence to as many people as possible, to constellate ourselves across the sky so that others may gaze up at the stars and whisper, “It me.””
• The Oscar Season Screenplays: The annual collection of award-baiting scripts, this years selection includes Colette, Black Panther, Green Room and a bunch more.
• The Future Book Is Not What We Expected: A really interesting exploration of why the book has remained largely unchanged in the past three decades of technological upheaval – despite the advent of the e-reader, other than digitisation there’s not been any sort of qualitative shift in the way in which books are written or consumed – but the way in which the term ‘book’ now comes to perhaps cover a range of media that wouldn’t previously have been considered, from a range of people who would never previously had access to the means of production.
• How To Lose Thousands of Dollars on Amazon: Or, “Look, really, there honestly is NO WAY to earn $10,000 a month without actually doing any work, however much that shiny-suited man with the nice hair wants to persuade you otherwise”. Another exploration of the weird ecosystem of ‘how to’ sales, in which people can get rich at a thing solely by selling other people really inadequate guides on how to get rich at the thing. You won’t believe that people can be this stupid, and then all of a sudden you really will believe it after all.
• On A Black King Kong Heroine: I had no idea that there was a stage adaptation of King Kong currently playing on Broadway, nor indeed that the role of the damsel in distress/heroine is for the first time being played by a black actress; this piece examines why that is slightly weird and problematic, and looks at the broader question as to whether it’s ok to recast every single role in drama or whether there are some that are male, female, cis, het, black or white for specific narrative reasons and therefore that these roles must remain as such if the work isn’t to be robbed of something intrinsic to it. I can’t pretend to have anything resembling an answer by the end of the piece, but it made me think a lot, not least about the massively racist tropes at the heart of Kong.
• What It’s Like To Deliver Packages for Amazon: Not a journalist slumming it for a piece; instead, this is a journalist who’s employment prospects have become reduced to the point where ‘Amazon Courier’ is now their job. A spare, honest and clear-eyed evocation of what it’s like to be a slave to the little navigational device in your hand, and the particular difficulties that this sort of service work can present, and what it feels like when the job that conferred you social and economic status isn’t your job any more. Superbly written.
• Kids & Emoji: This piece looks at studies into how children use emoji at different stages in their development, and how this potentially maps onto existing theories of linguistic development. There’s nothing hugely conclusive in here, but I’d honestly never even considered emoji as part of the language-learning process, or as a communications bridge in the pre-linguistic phase. Which is unsurprising given I don’t have kids or work in pediatrics, but still.
• Birdwatching in Red Dead Redemption 2: I finally finished RDR2 this week, and I’m not ashamed to say I shed a small tear at a couple of points in the endgame. This is a wonderful article that shows quite what a remarkable achievement it is – Audubon, a magazine by the US society of the same name which promotes the appreciation of birds and the science and ecology around them, has written a whole article about how amazing it is to go virtual birdwatching in the game. This is basically the North American equivalent of getting props from the RSPB, and the whole piece is just sort of wonderfully appreciative and yet gently baffled by the whole thing. Glorious.
• An Oral History of the Hamster Dance: This is long, but WONDERFUL – take yourself back to the early days of the web, and one of the first global memetic sensations, the HAMSTER DANCE (if you don’t know what that is then, well, WHY ARE YOU SO YOUNG DAMN YOU? And, er, it’s all explained in the link). This is fascinating and wonderfully bonkers, and a reminder of those wild west days of the old web in which it was possible to make serious money from literally any old crap (see also, Million Dollar Homepage) – the bit where they start talking about film rights and stuff is just mental.
• Gorbachev: A truly fascinating profile of Mikhail Gorbachev in the years since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – this is wonderful, both as a reminder of the immediate aftermath of his resignation and the weirdly chaotic feeling of the time, and of the even weirder Yeltsin years. The stuff about his wife will make you well up if you have any sort of sentimental bone in your body; this is a wonderful portrait of one of the last major figures of the post-Communist era.
• Sally Rooney Gets In Your Head: A profile of Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends and last year’s LITERARY SMASH HIT (oxymoronic, but) Normal People, in which she discusses her work, the style of her writing, the web, Ireland and more. I found Conversations with Friends spectacularly irritating for the first 50 pages and then spent the rest seething with jealousy at what a spectacular writer Rooney is; Normal People confirms that, and this piece is threaded with exactly the sort of clear observation that characterises her novels.
• Rockstar Cooks: A piece in praise of the ‘Rockstar’ short-order cooks of US chain Waffle House, specifically one of them, called Charles. This is a great piece of (food) writing, and remarkably clear-eyed about the author’s own privilege and prejudices in regard to his subject. There’s something so wonderful about reading an account of people performing tasks skillfully and with precision, and this has that in spades.
• Intimacy Coordinators: In the wake of Me Too last year, there was a brief flurry of stories about how theatre companies and film studios were beginning to employ ‘intimacy coordinators’ to assist actors in preparing intimate scenes in a manner which all participants were comfortable with; this article looks at the practical work involved in doing the job, and why it’s necessary, and once you’ve read it you will be amazed and astounded and not a little disgusted that this wasn’t standard practice in the past.
• Father Time: David Sedaris, being David Sedaris, on his father’s ageing and inevitable eventual senescence and death. As per with Sedaris, this is very, very funny (though it is obviously very much a David Sedaris piece and as such you need to quite like David Sedaris), but it’s also incredibly poignant about dealing with the weakening and vanishing of one’s loved ones.
• A Woman’s Work: “Carolita Johnson catalogues her efforts to maintain her appearance from about 1970 to 2018.” Brilliant – as an account of inhabiting one’s physicality and watching it change, it’s superb, but it works equally well as a piece of feminist writing about the labour demanded of women by the aesthetic demands of the 20th and 21st Century. Very good indeed.
• I Was A Cable Guy: Finally this week, a superb first person essay about the author’s experience being a cable repair person in the US and what it taught them about blue collar work and society in modern America. Funny, dry, angry and brilliantly-written, this really is very good indeed.

By Ole Marius Joergensen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, if I see a better piece of stop motion work in 2019 I will be very impressed. This is called ‘In a Nutshell’ and it is MESMERISING:

2) This one’s called ‘I Know’, and it’s by The High Curbs and it reminds me a little bit of early Titus Andronicus or weirdly early Weezer and I love the video and I hope you like it too:

3) Lovely, simple, catchy-as-you-like indiepop from The Coathangers next, with ‘Bimbo’:

4) This is called ‘Juice’, and it’s by Lizzo, and ordinarily it’s not my sort of thing at all but it’s infectiously happy and upbeat and the sort of thing I reckon might do you all good given it’s January and work has started again and everything appears to be made out of kale:

5) Why? have been one of my favourite bands for years – this is a collaboration between none-more-hipster lead singer Yoni Wolf and Lillie West, and it’s called ‘Siren 042’, and it’s distantly beautiful and unexpectedly reminds me rather a lot of the song ‘Boss DJ’ by Sublime, which may not mean anything to you but, well, I don’t care:

6) I don’t know what is happening AT ALL in this song by Japanese noise metal outfit Otoboke Beaver, but if someone could maybe explain it to me that would be ace thanks:

7) Finally this week, this is an ASTONISHINGLY good song. It’s by Sharon van Etten and it’s called ‘Seventeen’ and I adore it unreservedly and I hope you do too and OH LOOK IT’S THE END OF CURIOS YOU’VE MADE IT SEE THAT WASN’T TOO PAINFUL IT’S SO GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK I HAVE MISSED YOU AND MY LIFE HAS BEEN EMPTY AND DEVOID OF MEANING WITHOUT YOU SO LET US PLEASE NOT SPEND SO LONG APART AGAIN I LOVE YOU HAPPY FRIDAY AND HERE’S TO A LOVELY GENTLE WEEKEND SAFE FROM THE COLD AND THE WIND AND THE BREXIT AND THE POLITICS AND THE PAIN I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!:

 YOU HAVE TO LAUGH, DON’T YOU, EH? EH???

You know what? Fcuk it, neither you nor I want to read anything about the news or the state of the world right now. It’s almost Christmas, and I am tired. I imagine you are too. 

This is the last Web Curios of 2018 – in a rare moment of genuine sincerity, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who subscribes and reads and shares it, to everyone who sends me tips, and to everyone who’s work I’ve featured on here in the past 12 months and without which there wouldn’t really be much on which to hang this appalling prose. 

It’s been an incredibly long and jagged and grinding year, and the likelihood is that it’s now always going to be like this, til we all die. Still, while you’re all waiting to fall victim to the terminal illness that is MODERN LIFE, get right into the festive spirit with this, THE FINAL WEB CURIOS OF 2019! 

(happy christmas, everyone)

By Tim Schutsky 

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A CELEBRATION OF 30 YEARS OF NINJA TUNES’ SOLID STEEL SESSIONS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO VERY MUCH ENJOY IGNORING ANYTHING TO DO WITH S*CI**L FCUKING M*D** UNTIL JANUARY:

• Instagram Testing ‘Creator’ Accounts: Facebook wants Instagram to be YouTube. It’s not going to be YouTube, at least not anytime soon, but that’s sort of immaterial – MARK WANT! So it is that it continues in its almost certainly doomed attempt to persuade all those floppy-haired, blindingly-toothed children to migrate from Google’s platform to its own. Basically this is the introduction of the sort of simple features for serious ‘creators’ (honestly, I don’t know how many times I can keep typing that word in this context) that YouTube’s offered them forever – “growth insights such as data around follows and unfollows; direct messaging tools that allow users to filter notes from, for example, brand partners and friends; and flexible labels that allow users to designate how they want to be contacted.” Thrilling, eh?
• Insta Introduces Voice Messaging: You know how there’s nothing worse than someone sending you a voicenote on Whatsapp? Yes, well, those deviants will now be able to ruin your life on Instagram as well. Another reason to stop using this stuff, frankly.
• Google + Now Shutting Down Even Earlier: I know, I’m upset too, but it turns out that G+ is even more of a security nightmare than was previously thought – thank GOD noone’s ever used it, eh? – and as such is going to be shutting its virtual doors in April of next year. I will, honestly, be sad when it finally dies; it’s never served any purpose to me whatsoever, but I will always fondly remember my abortive attempts to troll pseudo-fancy pizza chain Firezza into giving me free food in exchange for boosting their engagement numbers on G+. Raise a toast in its memory this festive season.
• 360 iFly: On the one hand, this is a really nice and shiny website by KLM which presents a series of travelogues (or it will when the campaign’s done – there’s only one live at the moment) hosted by…er…some bloke who I presume is an ‘influencer’, in which he goes to interesting and picturesque places around the world to EXPERIENCE THINGS, which experiences are captured in 360 video for the edification and entertainment of viewers. On the other hand, let’s be realistic, there is no way in hell that any actual, real people are going to spend 6-10 minutes of their lives watching a slightly banal piece of travel journalism which is pretty much identical in tone, style and feel to the sort of thing you might see on BBC2 at 8pm. I mean, look, this obviously cost an reasonable amount, what with the location shoots and the talent and the webdev and the 360 gubbins and yet there is no discernible reason for it to exist whatsoever, other than to give the production team and the marketing people and the presenter an income. Look, can we make a pact? Can we agree something together? Can we MAKE CONTENT STOP in 2019? THERE IS TOO MUCH STUFF AND NEARLY ALL OF IT IS MEDIOCRE.
• Gift Rapper: Having said all that, of course, this is a totally frivolous piece of disposable non-culture and I think it’s ace. Ticketing company StubHub have partnered with (excellent) rapper Murs to produce this site which encourages you to buy tickets to an event for a friend or loved one and then accompany it with a ‘bespoke’ (not actually bespoke) rap song. It’s a slick piece of digital sleight of hand – you go through a series of questions about the type of tickets you’re giving, who you’re giving them to, etc, and at the end you get a personalised rap track which reflects your choices, frankensteined together in pretty seamless fashion, to send to the recipient. Cute.
• The Year in Bongo: We’ll close out the ‘professional’ section of Curios for 2018 with the now-traditional look at the globe’s bongo consumption over the past year, which gets a nod in this section due to the fact that they just do this sort of thing really, really well. You can scoff and titter all you want, but the level of detail and granularity they go into with this information is why it always does so well for them; from the point of view of data-led comms, this is sort of an object lesson in how to do it. Of course, it’s also a whole bunch of statistics about what people like to wank to, and as such is utterly compelling – there’s nothing in here to rival the sheer weirdness of Giantess Porn being the big breakout hit of 2016 (please tell me I’m not the only person who remembers that), but it’s still a fascinating read. Shame on the 34million+ of you who searched for ‘Bowsette’-related smut (if that means nothing to you then I envy you) and all of you who attempted to crack one off to ‘Sexy Fortnite’); you could spend an eternity attempting to derive some sort of significant insight from all of this, but my main takeaways are: 1) the fetishisation of Asian bodies is a genuinely global phenomenon; and 2) there was an essay I linked to a few weeks back about how we’re all having less sex and how there’s an argument to suggest that porn consumption backs that up, based on the increased interest in non-human (videogame/cartoon) bongo, and this data absolutely backs that up; honestly, there’s something genuinely interesting about the near-global rise in the popularity of videogame-themed smut, hentai, futanari and all the rest although I’ve no idea what it all means. Anyway, have a read – if nothing else it will give you ample fodder for Christmas lunch conversation.

By Roberto Ferri

NEXT, HAVE A SEEMINGLY INFINITE MIX OF AMBIENT NOODLINGS BY SIGUR ROS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD HONESTLY LIKE TO SAY THANKS FOR READING ALL OF THIS AND WHICH HOPES YOU ALL HAVE NICE HOLIDAYS AND STUFF, PT.1:

• The Most Future Thing I Have Ever Seen: It’s fitting, I think, that the final Curios of 2018 opens with something that left me honestly agog when I saw it last night. I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but I seem to recall that way back in January I made some sort of prediction about fake video becoming a problematic thing by the end of the year in terms of our ability to discern truth from fiction; whilst we’ve not yet seen the first ‘world’s media fooled by GAN-generated footage’, the pace of technological improvement over the past 12 months has been spectacular, and this is the most impressive implementation of ‘imagined’ video I’ve seen. Honestly, just click the link; I’ll wait here *waits* OK good, you back? OH MY GOD WASN’T THAT AMAZING?!?! Fine, Christ only knows what sort of computational power it’s using to generate all that stuff, but you take this and multiply it by Moore’s Law and you’ve got tech which will let anyone create near-photorealistic video of fake people and things, outputting at a quality good enough to easily fool a cursory glance. You remember last week there was a longread about some of the ways you can spot GAN-generated faces? Yeah, well this tech has already outpaced that. This honestly feels watershed-ish, like the first talkie or colour film, and like it’s going to presage a very, very interesting time indeed (perhaps in the Chinese sense, fine, but still).
• Fake Face Recognition Test: You think you can tell real from fake? You reckon you know what a real person looks like? GREAT! Take this test, being run by MIT researchers, which assesses one’s ability to identify fake faces generated by GAN software; there are a series of different ‘games’ which ask you to determine whether the face you’ve just been shown belongs to a real person or whether it’s a computer-generated fizzog. Each round of the quiz asks you to make the call after being shown the faces for less time – what’s immediately apparent is that it’s already very, very hard to tell the real humans from the CG renders when you’re only exposed to them for half a second or so. Welcome to the future, in which we’re simply not biologically equipped to distinguish fact from fiction any more!
• Christmas Experiments: A sort of advent calendar of WebGL toys, each vaguely Christmas-themed. I am pretty sure I’ve featured this in previous years, but the work for 2018 is generally great and in a few specific instances honestly incredible; there are a couple of these that are truly beautiful, and if you only play with one of them can I recommend ‘Plume’? Thanks.
• Towwwwwwwwwer: Utterly frivolous websitetoything, which lets you take a photo of yourself and turns it into an image which it adds to the INFINITE TOWER OF SCROLL on the site; the ‘about’ section suggests it’s a meditation or reflection on the disposable nature of online content and ART, but to my mind it’s just a pleasingly-designed Geocities-ish piece of webwork. See what you think.
• The AI Art Gallery: A curated collection of AI-generated artworks, collated by Luba Elliott. This is a genuinely great site if you’re interested in the intersection of computation and art; the works featured are collected by general theme, so there are standard (ha! The very fact I can refer to machine-imagined artworks as ‘standard’ in any way is honestly boggling to me) GAN pictures but there are also AI music experiments and design experiments, and there’s a whole host of stuff collected here that I’d never seen before. If you’re looking for a convenient primer on who’s doing what with all this tech this is a decent place to start finding out.
• Lensa: I’m featuring this with a very heavy caveat that it is A Bad Thing and you oughtn’t use it, but, well, who am I kidding? Lensa is made by the same people who developed Prisma, that style transfer app that was all the rage a couple of years ago and led to a weird spate of people having Picasso-tinged interpretations of themselves as their avatar; this new app, though, is basically an incredibly powerful auto-Photoshop analogue which can do frankly incredible things to your face with a couple of taps. You want an instant unblemishing? You got it! You want to make your eyes stand out more, or give yourself a contoured face without the need to paint weird panda stripes all over your actual countenance? All yours! We’ve seen auto-retouching apps before, but nothing quite this impressive – it’s honestly staggering how good the finish is on the effects, which on the one hand is just an impressive technical achievement but on the other is yet another nail in the coffin of our ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Yet another reason to never, ever believe that someone looks anything like the photos they put on the internet.
• The Worst Things On The Internet in 2018: Buzzfeed have been running these for 6 years now, and looking back through the 2012 edition just now gave me a genuinely warm sense of nostalgia for a time in which ‘echidna penis’ had even a chance of being named one of the 50 most cursed online things of the year. 2018 has, it’s fair to say, been another year that’s felt not unlike being placed in a tumble drier with a load of rocks – relive some of the best (really not the best) things that have done a bit of a viral, and try and unsee the mousemat (you will never, ever be able to unsee it).
• Eyezon: Bafflingly described as an “Аll-new on-demand LIVE streaming tool for tailor made peer-to-peer reviews for shopping and lifestyle decisions in real-time” (catchy, eh?), Eyezon is the sort of thing which you can sort of half-see the point of but which you know is literally never going to take off (sorry, but). The idea – based on my interpretation of the slightly garbled descriptions onsite – is that it’s a platform which connects people who want to know about a place with people who are in that place, so that the physically present can share their view with others who want to see it. That’s an AWFUL description, I know, but you click on that link and try and see if you can make head or tail of it. Basically, imagine a situation when you’re in a restaurant; you take a photo of said restaurant and upload it to the app; the backend tech analyses what’s in the photo and adds searchable tags to it, along with your location, etc, meaning anyone who’s looking for information on restaurants of a particular type or in a particular area can in theory find your pic and (and here’s the gimmick) request that you share a livestream of the place so you can see it. You can interact with the person streaming (and they with you) with text, voice or on-screen scrawls, and you earn virtual currency for interacting with others, which currency can be redeemed for…er…no, there’s no indication of that. It’s not a terrible idea, but it does rather seem to have forgotten that there’s a really very good visual search engine called Google Images, and that literally the least efficient way possible to find out about a place is to ask a stranger to stream you grainy footage of it over an iffy 4g connection.
• Moodify: A nice little Spotify hack which lets you login to your account and then generate a mood-based playlist simply by moving a few sliders around to denote what sort of vibe you’re after. Simple, but nicely made.
• The NYT Year in Review 2018: Want to remember all the GREAT THINGS that happened in the news over the past 12 months? Of course not, it was mostly terrible! Still, the New York Times has put together this cheery jaunt down memory lane, so the least you ingrates can do is click on the link. This site presents a succession of news stories, presented in pairs, which does an excellent job of showcasing exactly how mad and schizophrenic 2018 has been. Someone on Twitter this week observed that this is the first December in a few years which hasn’t been characterised by people giving a general ‘well thank God that one’s over’ sigh of relief, and that’s because we’ve all come to the realisation that this is just what it’s going to be like all the time. Merry Christmas!
• Make Your Own Die-Hard Christmas Ornament: Is it a Christmas film? I don’t care! It can be if you like! Anyway, if you want instructions on how to make your own tediously pomo pop-culture-referencing John McClane bauble then consider this my gift to you.
• Mikhail Larionov: Larionov, I learned this week, was a Russian artist born in the late-19th Century and who is credited with founding Russia’s avant garde movement in the early 1900s. I’d never heard of him before, but I very much like the style of his work and the site, which accompanies an exhibition of his work in Moscow, is lovely and a beautiful showcase for his paintings.
• Old Apps: This is a fascinating time machine – Old Apps is a site that collects old Windows software for download, so if you want to fiddle around with an antediluvian version of Firefox then, well, you’re a strange and lonely-sounding person but you’re also one of us and you are welcome here.
• HTTPBey: Beyonce gifs representing HTTP status codes. Unless you’re a developer there’s a large chance that the only part of that that made any sense to you is ‘Beyonce gifs’, but there’s no shame in that. Those of you who do get it, though, please can you start employing these on every site you build from hereon in, please? Thanks.
• Rocky Bergen: The fabulously-named Mx Bergen makes very, very impressive papercraft models of stuff like ghetto blasters and old computers, and if you’re likely to need some sort of simple, meditative pursuit to help you get through the coming weeks of familial ‘joy’ then this may well be the thing that keeps you from murder.

By Xuebing Du

Is it all going to be over on Tuesday night? Is it? CAN WE FINALLY STOP TALKING ABOUT THE FCUKING B WORD ON TUESDAY NIGHT???

‘No’ is the short answer, but let’s pretend we didn’t hear it and instead envisage a glorious future where I open next week’s final Curios of 2018 with some sort of heartwarming and genuinely optimistic shortform essay about how the year, whilst looking like an absolute sh1tshow throughout, managed to salvage itself at the last and the whole Br*x*t debacle, whilst painful, has in fact shown us how well we can rally together as a nation when we really have to. 

Imagining that? Good. Hold that image.

What I imagine will happen though is that in exactly 7 days time I’ll be wrapping up the year in Curios with some sort of ‘AND AT THE END OF IT ALL IT’S LIKE THE PAST 12 MONTHS NEVER OCCURRED’. Still, while we wait for that to happen – it’s nearly over! we’ve nearly done it! – let’s crack on with this week’s edition, the last into which I’m going to put anything resembling any effort (I plan on phoning next week’s in even more than usual). Pick a friend, grab one end each, close your eyes, grimace and PULL! – who knows what sort of tempting gewgaws and hackneyed gags and ‘comedy’ accessories will be released? And who’s going to clean up the mess? This, as ever, is Web Curios! 

By Adam Birkan

SHALL WE KICK OFF THE MIXES WITH THIS EXCELLENT RECENT SET ON SOLID STEEL RADIO? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO RAISE A SYMPATHETIC GLASS TO ANY OF YOU WHO WORK FOR O2:

• Facebook Becomes QVC: You mean always-on, tedious, a bit common, and the sort of thing that noone outside of communities of rural shut-ins in the Midwest would ever admit to engaging with? AHAHAHAHAHAHA. SATIRE! Leaving aside my EXCELLENT ZINGER at the expense of po’Facebook, this is…odd. Look, here’s the summary: “Facebook is testing a new element in its slowly evolving eCommerce tools with a dedicated Facebook Live mode that enables Pages to showcase products in their stream, which viewers can then easily purchase via screenshots.” This is…weird. I mean, I can’t for the life of me imagine this being the sort of thing anyone will ever actually want to engage with, but then again that’s exactly what I think of QVC and yet here we are. I don’t doubt there will be at least one big brand using this to SURPRISE AND DELIGHT (sorry) customers in the next year, and I can totally see how you could use the right sort of ambassador to do something fun and visible around one of the next big orgies of popular consumption (“The Cards Against Humanity Black Friday 24h Facebook Telethon ft. Gary Busey” – you read it here first, kids!).
• Facebook Becomes Pinterest: You mean a weird digital fantasy world where people can construct a version of reality which suits them b…no, this wasn’t funny the first time. This is an extension of the Facebook feature letting users create ‘collections of stuff on the platform – it launched last year, keep UP – which now makes said collections shareable, meaning you can now spend hours pulling together your ultimate ‘trashy wedding inspiration lookbook’ from all your childhood friends’ photos and then share it for LOLs with your new, sophisticated, big city crowd (they can all see through you, you know, you don’t fit in and you’ll ALWAYS be that weird, smelly kid in the playground).  
• You Can Now Watch A Bunch of Old TV Shows on Facebook Watch: Or at least, you can if you’re in the US; not quite clear whether it’s region-locked, but worth a go if you’re inexplicably into Angel.
• Facebook Stories Coming to Groups: I’m running out of ways to whinge about Stories, so I’m going to embrace this instead. Look! Stories coming to Facebook Groups! The possibility to create collaborative content in the Stories format, sourced from all members and moderated / approved by Group admins! There’s actually quite a lot of stuff you could do with this, if you’re the sort of brand with actual, weird ‘fans’ – drop a bunch of clips in a closed group and invite members to collaborate to build the best Stories ‘remix’ of them, for example, with the community voting on the best ones for points and prizes! Invite Group members to make Stories as fan tributes for talent and then share the resulting output with famouses and record their reactions for community love-in joy! Come on, you get the idea.
• Facebook Subscriptions Test Expands to More Publishers: Literally just this, but the whole ‘get people to sign up for a paid content stream via FB’ for publishers continues apace. There’s nothing you can do about it – it’s all invitation-only as far as I can see – but, well, now you know.
• FB Changes App Rules: Worth being aware of, this, in terms of stuff you can build on/around Facebook: “Facebook  will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.”” This suddenly, potentially, lets you build much more interesting stuff on Facebook again – not back to the Wild West days of 2010, fine (oh the THINGS we did with your data!), but still better than the rather limited options currently available.
• Instagram Introduces ‘Cliques’: Oh, ok, FINE, that’s not technically what this update is called, but it’s EXACTLY what this is. In a move almost explicitly designed to undermine or contradict much of its recent ‘no! Ours is not a platform that encourages bullying and let us demonstrate why!’ rhetoric, Insta’s now letting users create lists of ‘close friends’ who will then exist as a discrete sub-audience to whom one can grant privileged access to certain content. So, for example, you could set some stories to ‘public’ and others to ‘close friends only’, thereby gating access to your most intimate thoughts and automatically creating playground drama for DAYS. Obviously there’s lots you can do with this from a SURPRISE AND DELIGHT (again, sorry) point of view, but the main impact will be in schools and colleges and universities, where it will be used by young, popular people to further cement their place in the rigidly-enforced and brutal social hierarchy that shapes and warps their lives. GREAT!
• Insta Lets You Share Multiple Photos and Videos In Stories: It does! All at once! Without having to go through and add them individually one-by-one! Progress! Death is once more kept at bay!
• Pretty Caption: Look, I found this and thought it might be useful to some of you – I don’t judge, I just present. Pretty Caption is a little web service that lets you add decent formatting to Insta captions; yes, I know that that seems entirely pointless but I guarantee that for at least one person reading this the slight differentiator that is ‘a nicely laid out caption on my ‘Gram’ will be the best thing they see in here this week.
• The Social Media Manager’s Guide To LinkedIn: I know that YOU are obviously all masters at LinkedIn, CRUSHING IT and KILLING IT and waking up at 4am to do two hours of hot yoga whilst simultaneously baking award-winning breads and reading the morning papers in seven languages and having a tantric brown and blogging the whole thing incessantly to your legions of content-hungry businessmongs, but in case you’re not, or in case you know someone who could use some pointers, this is a simple-but-honestly-quite-useful 101-type primer to the world’s worst social network.
• How To Get All The Bongo Off Your Tumblr Before 17 December: Web Curios does not judge. Web Curios is here to help.
• Bacardi Instant Jam: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a really good ‘made for adland, no real people have EVER seen this’ digital case study, so a big round of applause here for Bacardi who made what looks like a WONDERFULLY smart Insta hack, using some rather clever coding to turn their US Insta feed into a looping drumpad which you could use to make music alone or collaboratively. This is SO slick and, I guarantee, will have been seen and appreciated by literally noone not working in advermarketingpr because real people have never and will never use Instagram in this way. Still, one for the showreel, lads!
• Nordy Portrait: Nordstrom is a US chain of luxury department stores (isn’t ‘luxury chain’ sort of fundamentally an oxymoron?) and this is some sort of promo thingy for a loyalty scheme they’re running – look, I don’t care, the only reason I’m featuring it is that it does one of those rather nice ‘upload a photo and we’ll turn it into a stylised line drawing’ things, and you can download the image and do with it what you will; if you’re in the market for a new, slightly minimalist avi for the festive season (you are dreadful) then this might do the trick.
• YouTube Rewind: I am including this not as an endorsement and more instead as a sort of appalled nod to what passes for global youth entertainment culture in 2018 (STOP PASSING, TIME!) – this is YouTube’s annual jamboree video celebrating the memes and stars and cultural tropes that have characterised the past 12 months in the vlogosphere (sorry). So, look, you’ve got Fortnite and Drake and Casey Neistat and Will Smith and K-Pop and, oh look, no Logan Paul or Jake Paul because that’s not YouTube, is it, oh no, and LOOK there’s a little segment in the middle about how great it is when people talk openly about depression and marginalised communities WHERE ARE THE FCUKING NAZIS AND MAD RIGHT-WINGERS AND ALEX JONES AND THE KKK AND THE KEKISTANIS AND THE INCELS AND THE DIET-PILL PEDDLERS AND THE ESSAY FLOGGERS AND AND AND AND. Thanks, YouTube! Thanks for 2018! Thanks!
• How Long Left?: The Christmas advert tradition here in the UK is now well-known; a bunch of retailers attempt to gloss over the fact that their business models aren’t 100% adapted to the digital age by spending an inordinate amount of money trying to elicit a flicker of emotion from Britain’s jaded consumers in the hope that it will induce said consumers to spend their last remaining food tokens in their shops. We, though, are AMATUERS when compared to this effort from Spain, in which booze brand Rua Vieja take what is I imagine a fairly standard ‘insight’ (‘Christmas is reuniting us with loved ones!’) and takes it to its logical, CRY YOU BASTARDS ending with an advert that reminds us that we are all going to die and that every moment we share with the people closest to us might be the last. What could be more Christmassy than thinking of the inevitable death of everyone you love? NOTHING! Even better, the accompanying website lets you put in a bunch of data about yourself and a particular loved one and calculates how long you’re likely to have left together based on a bunch of third-party data (if you dig around you can find the hilariously serious-sounding methodology behind it) – is this some sort of joke? I LOVE IT.
• The Best Advert of the Year: Josh sent me this as I was writing a later bit, and I have had to come back and insert it in here. SO GOOD YOU MUST WATCH IT HOW CAN A RAP ABOUT KITCHENS BE THIS LEGITIMATELY EXCELLENT?!
• The State of European Tech: I did a TINY bit of work on this (really, miniscule), but I’m still quite proud of it – this is VC firm Atomico’s annual investigation into the tech sector in Europe – exits, investments, talent, that sort of thing. We turned it into a website last year, and this is the 2018 iteration. It is, honestly, a hell of a piece of work and a quite incredible resource, and credit should go to the immensely-brained Tom Wehmeier of Atomico, honestly one of the smartest men I’ve ever worked with, and the nice people at Studio Lovelock who designed and built the thing and whose work I can recommend unreservedly. Aw, wasn’t that a nice love-in?
• The Predictions Bucket: Finally in the PENULTIMATE s*c**l m*d** bit of 2018, the return of the semi-regular Imperica Predictions Bucket; do us a favour and email / Tweet to any and all 2019 predictions documents that you find to Lovely Imperica Publisher/Editor Paul and he’ll compile them all into an easily-digestible…thing documenting the trends within the trends. We’re basically rooting around in the scryer’s entrails so that you don’t have to. Be grateful.

By Maya Goded

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF SUPERB GUITAR MUSIC FROM NIGER!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS ALL THIS 2018 SH1T TO BE DONE WITH NOW TBQHWY, PT.1:

• The Beat Bot: This is excellent, silly fun. A fairly standard browser-based web/beats toy which does the whole ‘programme a series of inputs which the synth will then cycle through rhythmically’ thing, but with the twist that rather than setting the inputs as, I don’t know, ‘kickdrum 1’ or ‘synth 3’ you instead type in letters or, even better, words, which are then text-to-speeched into existence by the software. So, basically, you can create weirdly complex, multi-layered, vocoder-voiced looping synth raps; I lost a good five minutes on Wednesday building quite a complex loop of disembodied voices saying “take the pain away, bruce” and I can vouch for this entirely.
• Ganvas Studio: Ah, the speed of the web! A couple of weeks ago I feature that site which let you mess around with image evolution through GAN-led image-’breeding’; now, a shop which lets you buy some of the resulting images as prints. They ship from the US so there’s no guarantee of Christmas delivery, and the options for the prints (satin finish or canvas-over-wood) sound a bit shonky to my mind, but the images themselves are sort of weirdly awesome if you’re into computer-imagined angular oddities (and who isn’t?).
• AICan: Of course, if that’s a bit too mainstream and publicly accessible for you then you could always go a level up and buy an original work from AICan. “AICAN is an Artificial Intelligence Artist and a Collaborative Creative Partner. Each artwork AICAN makes is an answer to the question “If we teach the machine about art and styles and push it to generate novel images that do not follow established styles, what would it generate?” This is the software which created the ‘First AI-generated Artwork’ sold at Christie’s the other month, and you can now buy your very own AICan piece for just $20,000 (in fairness there are cheaper options but come on! Go big!) – you too can have your own ‘modern art? EVEN MACHINES CAN MAKE IT!’ conversation piece from a mere $500!
• The First AI-rendered Interactive Virtual World: Add ‘designed who crafts meticulously-designed virtual environments from scratch’ to the list of ‘jobs soon to be rendered obsolete by the inexorable rise of brute-strength machine computation’! This is quite incredible footage, a proof-of-concept by Nvidia, showing not only a streetscape being generated by AI on the fly but also how that streetscape can be rendered navigable in realtime. I can’t wait for Red Dead Redemption 3 where the Old West is built entirely by neural nets trained on the Spaghetti Western canon.
• CreepBay: Would you like a storefront pointing you towards all the weirdly creepy and unpleasant stuff you can find to buy on eBay? Do you know anyone who’d like, say, a necklace in the shape of a strange pink maggot-baby? Or a necklace featuring massive, stainless steel hanging spiders all over it? I hope not, for your sake, but have the link just in case.
• Friends With Secrets: This is honestly wonderful; I love this project, and think it’s such a good idea. “Three friends with different backgrounds participated in online text therapy sessions from January to April 2018. Friends With Secrets captures a slice of their lives — the good, the bad, the heartbreaking — and how they try to process the world around them. The sessions have been refined. The identities of the therapists have been protected.” As a window into what it’s like having therapy, and to how other people think and feel, this is unparalleled; there’s a rawness to seeing the text logs and a vulnerability in the way that each interlocutor expresses themselves that make this feel authentic in a way much of this stuff often doesn’t (I wonder whether due to the fact it’s all text rather than being recorded audio or video). Do have a read, it’s honestly beautiful.
• 10×18: I’ve been doing this so long now that there are certain seasonal web projects that are slightly like old friends each time they come around – so it is with 10×18, “an annual ritual in which a select group of artists create visual interpretations of their favorite albums of the year.” Some of the work is lovely, the links between the album and their visualisation are often fascinating, and you can discover superb work that you would never have stumbled across otherwise (I am now obsessed with the work of Mark Weaver, for example). Wonderful, again.
• The Wigan Pier Project: Slightly surprised that I’ve not seen this before, seeing as I think it’s been around for a few months. This is an historical documentary project, taking the journey travelled by Orwell on his ‘Road to Wigan Pier’ and presenting the modern stories of residents in a selection of the towns and cities in the area; put together by The Mirror and others, it presents a portrait of a region devastated by years of austerity to the point whereby the links between Orwell’s own experience and modernity are bleakly apparent. This is a lovely piece of interactive documentarymaking, combining writing, photography and video into an emotionally resonant piece of social anthropology – this ought to be more famous than it is imho.
• Top Nine: The second of the recurring seasonal projects in this week’s Curios, Top Nine offers you your annual opportunity to see which nine of your MILLIONS of Insta posts gained the most traction this year – you too can get a miserable totting-up of the total ‘Likes’ you gleaned in 2018, in case you want yet another metric against which to judge yourself and find yourself inadequate. Tell you what, everyone, why not not do this this year? OK? Good!
• Projected Capital: Ooh, this is cool. Projected Capital is effectively a combative, artworld version of the Million Dollar Homepage – the gimmick is that, much as per the MDH, anyone can bid to occupy digital real estate within the project, and that said digital real estate will be projected into the physical space at a Zurich art gallery, offering (so goes the high-concept blurb) a democratised alternative to the curatorial tyranny of Big Gallery. Even better, anyone can bid to cover over anyone else’s work whenever the way want; equally, anyone who’s work has been covered over can pay a fee to bring their stuff to the front of the image again – but they can only do it 10 times. SO much to love about this, not least the way in which (wittingly or otherwise) it skewers the ever-so-slightly bloody competitiveness of artland itself. Anyone want to pay to project Curios on there? No, thought not, you fcukers.
• A Tribute to YouTube Annotations: They’re turning off YouTube annotations soon. This is an EXCELLENT post pulling together a bunch of examples of some of the most fun creative applications of the feature – all the slightly shonky CYOA-type hacks, all of the amazing creativity. YouTube Stop-Motion Playable StreetFighter, we will NEVER see your like again. Honestly, this is slightly sad-making; all the times I featured these things in Curios with a hopeful ‘brands! You could do something really cool with this!’ and yet noone ever did. Brands, you cnuts.
• Project Vermeer: Google Arts & Culture’s latest big thing, this is a wonderful way to explore the works of Johannes Vermeer; as with all these things there’s some beautiful stuff in here, but I’m a particular fan of both the virtual gallery (available in-browser or in the app) and the guide that takes you through a guided tour of the Pearl Earring painting in minute, brushstroke-level detail. Whatever you might think of Google, you don’t see Facebook doing this sort of stuff.
• The Al Lowe eBay Sale: One pretty much exclusively for the over-40s men here (yes, I know it’s a stereotype, but if there are any women reading this with a deep and abiding affection for Infocom text adventures then I’ll eat my hat) – (in)famous creator of the Leisure Suit Larry game franchise, and so many other things besides, Al Lowe is putting a bunch of his old memorabilia up for sale on eBay – if you want to bid on the original source code for the first Larry game then you have THREE DAYS.
• Humaans: A lovely, diverse and useful library of vector-based templates for illustrations of people; you can mix and match elements to easily create your own icon or character set, and it’s all free.
• Fishure Price: This couldn’t be any more perfectly aimed at the very core of the ‘muso dad who used to DJ in the 90s and still has a massive vinyl collection and who secretly thinks that playing his small child a bunch of really obscure white-label 7”s will guarantee that they have amazing taste and all the other parents will secretly think that it’s all down to their father’s amazing musical tutelage’ demographic, this. Fishure Price is a project by Daniel Barassi whereby he’s taken those Fisher Price wind-up ‘My First Turntable’ kids’ toys and turned them into actual working decks. There are videos on the site of him scratching with them. PEAK DAD.
• Tiny Follow: Want to keep up with Twitter but don’t actually want to be on Twitter at all because it makes you sad and anxious and nervy? TOUGH. Ha! Only joking! Not actually tough at all! Thanks to Tiny Follow you can keep up-to-date with the HILARIOUS antics of all your favourite follows – the beefs, the shade, the in-jokes, the thirsty pics – via the medium of a daily newsletter; Tiny Follow lets you plug in an account and will email you the highlights of their day on Twitter; the fact that it seemingly only lets you do one at a time basically kills its utility, but there’s the kernel of an idea in here. Maybe.
• The Cube Rule of Food Identification: Honestly, this is REVELATORY. Click the link and prepare to have your whole concept of food taxonomy shaken to its very foundations.
• The LEGO Holiday Building Guides: Would you like a whole bunch of guides to building festive things – models of Santa! Reindeer-faced baubles! – out of some of the three million pieces of LEGO which you just know will otherwise hide all over your house and ambush the soles of your feet in those vulnerable, late-night moments when you’re popping to the fridge for leftover snacking? YES YOU WOULD! This has been going for a while now, so there’s a decent enough archive of designs if you fancy spending the weekend turning your kids into a cheapo festive decorations production line.
• Artie: I’ve seen stuff a bit like this before, I think, but not quite presented in this way. Artie is effectively seeking to become a persistent AR companion – effectively like a Tamagotchi with knobs on. Or at least that’s one potential application for the technology, though one could equally imagine some sort of equivalent to the persistent virtual butler found in early Gibson novels. Anyway, the concept’s interesting and the idea of all the software being low-latency and hyperlink-accessible makes it potentially worth a look.
• Freedom on the Move: “Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitives from North American slavery. With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property.” This is slightly jaw-dropping; it oughtn’t be, of course, but there’s something still shocking about the treatment of humans as livestock which is presented here. The way this is set up – as an open-source archive for students and academics – is nicely done, and the content is fascinating, but it’s also really quite startling and unpleasant.
• Attention You Are Wonderful: A Kickstarter Project, funded with 12 days to go, which will sell unexpected, emotional messages done in the style of those tin roadsigns you see affixed to fences or atop poles. On the one hand, in their original incarnation as pieces of impromptu street art, I rather like these; on the other, as things that you can buy and do with as you will, all I can imagine is the INCREDIBLY stalky and emotionally heavy idea of sending someone a tin sign reading “NOTICE: I never stopped loving you and I never will. I hope you’re happy”. Can you IMAGINE how much you could fcuk someone up by sending this stuff? Please don’t.
• Lost Heritage: “Lost Heritage is a personal project which aims to create an authoratitive and comprehensive list of the many significant English country houses which have been demolished or severely reduced.” You want a database of old stately homes that are now either vanished or in ruins? YOU GOT IT! If you’re the sort of person who likes making historical pilgrimages  around the country to look at old bits of stone in the middle of a field and then enjoys a slightly soggy cheese sandwich in a fusty, condensation-misted Ford then, well, this is ALL YOU.
• Me, Myself and Microbes: “Professor Elaine Hsiao heads the Hsiao Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology at UCLA where she teaches the class “Me, Myself, and Microbes”. Her lab researches how microbes affect our brains and behavior.” Her husband, Leon, works for Google and is part of the team that does the Doodles. He made this website to accompany one of her lectures about gyt microfauna and it is CHARMING – look what you can accomplish when you’re part of a ridiculously smart and capable couple! Why aren’t you and your partner not doing stuff like this instead of sitting on the couch getting gout and smoking too much weed? Eh? What?
• Old YouTube: I can’t believe this is new, but it seems to be new to me – Old YouTube is a simple layer of search that sits atop YouTube and lets you run chronological searches on a year-by-year basis; so you can, say, search ‘redpill’ way back in 2009 and see that it didn’t mean anything at all, and then fast forward to 2017 and marvel / cry at the startling 4chanisation of everything. Potentially quite a useful tool if you’re trying to mine seams of historical trend-type content, I think.
• Optician Sans: A whole typeface made from the letters used by opticians; I didn’t know this, but traditionally there are only a limited set of letters used in opthalmology. Did you know? Why did noone tell me?
• Recomendo: A weekly newsletter which will send you six recommendations of good stuff on the internet every seven days. God, six recommendations is a nice, manageable number, isn’t it? Maybe I ought to try that?

By Lola Alvarez Bravo

I BET YOU DIDN’T REALISE THAT THE  BEST ACCOMPANIMENT TO A WINTER’S AFTERNOON IS SMOOTH JAZZ, DID YOU? WELL IT IS!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS ALL THIS 2018 SH1T TO BE DONE WITH NOW TBQHWY, PT.1:

• The United States of Wonder: Simple-but-fun, this – an interactive map of the US, divided by state; hover over each one and it will throw up a bunch of the most popular suggestions for the state in question drawn from Google, showing you all the innate prejudices and buried hatreds people have towards them. I particularly like that the top result for ‘why is alabama’ is ‘why is alabama so good?’ – strong sense of self-worth there, people. I would like to see this for the UK by county, please.
• Beale HipHop: A bunch of hiphop album covers reimagined with Ian Beale of EastEnders infamy as a central protagonist. Cold War Steve has an awful lot to answer for.
• Reuters Photo of the Year: Reuters’ picks of the year – their best, most powerful 100 photographs from the past 12 months. There is not one duff selection in here.
• The Top 25 News Photos of the Year: Whereas this is the parallel pic from the Atlantic – there’s a bit of overlap, but this is also very much worth a scroll; I had forgotten about Melania’s staggering jacket, but I think that that one wins for me as a microscopic portrait of so much that this year was about.
• Win A Banksy for £2: I have no time for Banksy; I think his work is banal and obvious, and I am bored of him. That said, I would totally like to win an original work of his for a £2 stake for charity and I imagine you would too – this is a raffle in aid of Choose Love, a refugee charity which provides assistance to migrants across Europe, in which you can win a…er…slighly crap Banksy-designed remote control boatload of refugees! Look, you can sell it and give the proceeds to charity, it’s worthwhile.
• Something About Maps: Daniel Huffman likes maps: “It seems to me that maps are as much about art as data, and creating connections between people and stories that happen to have a geography. I worry that the speed and ease of the computer has made it too easy to leave the humanity out of maps — that creative spark that people bring to their unfeeling tools. I am not sure I have yet managed to humanize my own work enough to satisfy me, but it’s something I’m working on.” These are some of the maps he has designed – they are lovely, and I want all of them on my walls.
• More LA: This is a really interesting idea; Los Angeles is currently exploring ideas around urban regeneration and renewal, and this is a website by…er…architecturedesigndigitalstudio (sorry, I have no idea what they actually do) Superspace which asks people to explore different land-use cases in different regions of LA, see what options might be available and what their impact could be, and then vote on their preferred usage based on the modelling. As a way of canvassing public opinion around major public infrastructure projects this is rather good I think.
• Elowan: Elowan is a plant/robot hybrid; basically a plantpot on wheels which can wander around under its own steam to get the optimal conditions for its growth; so it can chase sunlight and rain around, for example, or follow you around all day plaintively reminding you that it hasn’t been watered for weeks and have you noticed how brown its leaftips are lately? Obviously it can’t actually do that, but I look forward to the near future in which all plants are equipped with the ability to make us feel fcuking guilty for letting them die.
• Level: Are we all agreed that Slack is basically only useful if you treat it as a chatroom rather than anything work-related? Good! Level is basically a bit like Slack but promises to be less annoying – realistically, though, you’ll still end up using email, won’t you?
• Who’s She?: Just-funded on Kickstarter and now available to pre-order, this is an excellent idea – a version of Guess Who?, except instead of being a collection of 1970s sexpests (you know all the men in the original game are, well, a bit handsy) all the faces are of notable women from history – so you can not only play a fun game with your kids but also teach them about some of the women who have changed history. Not only a great present, but a wonderful link to share on Facebook in the run-up to Christmas to weed out the sexist pricks in your life who will be infuriated by this.
• Airport Codes: A website collecting all of the airports in the US, arranged by their three-letter code and all accompanied by a photo. There is literally no reason for this site to exist, which is exactly the way we like it.
• The London Medieval Murder Map: You want an interactive map showing all the murders documented in 14thC London? YES YOU DO! Sadly what with it being 1000 years ago South London didn’t exist yet – still, if you work in the City this is an excellent resource which will let you find out exactly how many tradesmen were bludgeoned to death beneath your offices a few centuries ago. As an added bonus, the case notes are reasonably extensive and give some decent colour, included some excellent snatches of murdery medieval dialogue.  
• Animations by Ondrej Zunka: A selection of CG animations – excellent, surreal, technicolour work by Mr Zunka, who looks worth a commission if you ask me.
• Plot Diagrams: These, by Jake Berman, are just wonderful; the plots of a whole bunch of stories (they tend towards the pop cultural, so you’ve got Hamilton, Star Wars, etc…) with their plots mapped out diagrammatically, in the manner of tube maps. I would love to be able to commission one of these, should Mr Berman be reading this.
• The Advent of Code: For any of you who’ve been experimenting with coding this year, or who fancy a small, seasonal challenge, the Advent of Code is a project which presents “an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other. You don’t need a computer science background to participate – just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware.” Worth a look for the codewranglers amongst you.
• Earn a Living: This is GREAT. An interactive documentary series exploring the world of work – like Disneyland, but horrid! – Earn a Living is a 7-part interactive documentary series which aims to use basic income as a lens through which to interrogate our relationship to work, wealth and worth in the 21st century.The series tackles the larger themes and questions related to basic income. Can people be trusted with “free money?” Who should pay to support society’s most vulnerable members? And what might the future of work look like (if such a thing as “work” will even exist)? Really, really nicely made, and I personally love the tone of the voice-over. Take a look – if nothing else, the webwork here is rather lovely.
  • Betamaxmas: I think that this might be 10 years old. 10 years! Flick through a seemingly infinite number of channels streaming random, Christmas-related crap on YouTube, presented as though being screened on a crappy old television because, well, why not?
• All of the Bongo: I don’t ordinarily just straight-up link to bongo on here – I sort of presume you all know where to get it by now should you so desire – but this week I feel I must make an exception. In advance of Tumblr removing ALL THE PR0N from its servers in 10 short days time, a bunch of enterprising Reddit users have scraped the urls of all the Turmblrs in the network containing NSFW content in order to archive them; some 47,000 urls in total. This is all of them, in a list. 47,000 links to MYSTERY BONGO – fine, some of them will be reasonably self-explanatory, but others…? What’s The Physalis Project? An enquiry into Chinese gooseberries? DEAR GOD NO! This is in here less because of all the links to images of people fcuking and more because of its status as a sort of archive of human sexuality – I think there’s honestly something hugely sad about the fact that all of this is going to be deleted (archiving projects aside), and I wish that it weren’t. THIS is the sort of thing that deserves its own museum imho (did I say that out loud?).
• Chat With Me: Last up in the miscellanea this week is this lovely, poignant, beautiful little IF-type game about being in a long-distance relationship. It’s gorgeous, have a play.

By Melissa Spitz

LAST UP, ENJOY ONE MY MY ALBUMS OF THE YEAR IN THE SHAPE OF ‘FUTURE ME HATES ME’ BY THE BETHS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Bonsai Empire: Tiny trees. Lots of tiny trees.
• Feels Like Christmas: Free Christmas music downloads! Almost entirely redundant in an age of streaming!
• Silent Locations: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, as a guide to places where silent movies were filmed – with some EXHAUSTIVE shot recreation around LA, this is rather good.
• Ryan Seaquest: I don’t really understand this.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Albert Chamillard:: Lovely notebook illustrations in a slightly scratchy, geometric pen-and-ink, fine-nibbed style. Does that give you ANY idea of what this will look like? It doesn’t, does it? FFS
• Eddie Argos: You might know Eddie Argos from Art Brut’s one near-hit ‘Emily Kane’, but when he’s not being an artpop frontman he also posts his album cover paintings to Instagram. He also does commissions should you fancy getting him to paint you, I don’t know, NOW 62.
• Gebelia: Slightly whimsical cartoony illustrations.
• Hayk Manukyan: Mr Manukyan is an animator working with Warner Bros. He posts animations, sketches and rough drawings to his Instagram and, honestly, these are so good; it’s like peeking through the window of an animation studio.
• I Am Puma: Yes, it’s the Instagram feed of someone’s pet puma. What of it?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 52 Things in 2018: The third piece of recurring seasonal content this week. We return, once again, to Tom Whitwell’s annual collection of 52 things he learned this year, which, once again, present the absolute best snapshot of the fast-moving future shock we’re all living through on an hourly basis. All of these are great, all of these will be quoted back at you more often than you want them to be in the coming months – pick your favourites! My personal one is “54 percent of Chinese born after 1995 chose “influencer” as their most desired occupation”, but there’s enough bleakly-dystopian goodness in there to go round, trust me.
• The Digital Maginot Line: I’m a week late with this one, apologies, so you might already have seen it; if not, though, I would urge you all to take the time to go through this piece; it’s a wonderfully-written synopsis of The State of Things in terms of the Culture Wars and digital discourse and platforms and prevention, and does the best job I’ve seen in an age of explaining exactly why things feel quite so fraught at the moment when it comes to the intersection of on- and offline power struggles. Possibly the smartest thing in here this week.
• The TM Landry Con: This is heartbreaking, and a quite remarkable piece of journalism. You may have heard of TM Landry, a school in Virginia in the US which in recent years had developed a reputation as the poster-child for poor black children achieving unprecedented academic success – you may have seen viral footage of kids discovering they’ve got into Harvard, say – and which, it turns out, has been a massive con trick for years, involving some quite remarkable intimidation and abuse of students who were bullied into perpetuating the fiction of the school as some sort of outlying bastion of miraculous excellence. Brilliant work by the reporters here, but I very much wish this weren’t true.
• The Palm Oil Catastrophe: A look at how US policy unwittingly led to the global boom in palm oil production and how as a result it set environmentalism back decades. The main takeaway from this – other than that palm oil’s a Bad Thing and that wow, we’re really screwed, aren’t we? – is the degree to which unwitting bad consequences are so often perpertuated by short-sighted or underinvestigated policy decisions which seemed like a good idea at the time OH HAI 2015 CONSERVATIVE PARTY MANIFESTO WITH YOUR COMMITMENT TO AN EU REFERENDUM!
• Prisoners of Memes: Whilst everyone is, unsurprisingly, focused on China as the most frightening ‘terrifying state using digital techniques to control the citizenry’ out there, one mustn’t forget the sterling work being done by Narendra Modi in India; this piece looks at half a dozen young Indians who’ve been jailed or sequestered by the state for posting material on social media critical of the government or local officials. That’s normal and fine, isn’t it? Isn’t it?  
• The State of UX 2019: Do you want a really long and involved investigation into coming trends in UX design? Do you? Unless you’re a webdesigner you almost certainly don’t, but, well, you can have this anyway.
• On Tumblr’s Bongo Ban: Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulous casts a fond, reminiscent eye back at the culture of pr0n on Tumblr – she’s not the only writer to have penned a eulogy for all the furry throbbers that are soon to disappear into the great digital oubliette, but this was my favourite piece. What was interesting about Tumblr, something I’ve seen mentioned by lots of commentors, was that its status as a slightly niche, marginal online community made it a safe and accommodating space for lots of people to explore niche, queer sexual identities for the first time in a way they might not have been able to do anywhere else; personally I think this is another step towards the dequeering of culture – and to all of you those who’ve penned pieces about how 2018 has been ‘the queerest year ever’, well, yes, but you could equally argue that it’s been the most mainstream queer year ever, and you ought to be able to see why that’s potentially problematic. Oh, and if you want an insight into why this is suddenly happening now, this is such a thing.
• Instagram Party Accounts: This week’s despatch from the frontlines of teen culture – apparently if you’re hosting a big party and your a teen, you might consider setting up a special Insta account for that party and using that as a means of creating a guestlist, setting parameters, etc. I love stuff like this, platforms getting bent to fit the shape that users need; I also feel we’re about a week away from a ‘Insta Party Account Highlights’ meta-Insta and this trend dies again.  
• The Best of What’s New: By way of a brief moment of respite from my standard, tired litany of complaint at the state of everything, this is Popular Science Magazine’s list ogf the 100 best innovations of 2018. Some you will have seen, some you will barely be able to believe, all will give you a brief moment of techno-utopian optimism before you realise that this stuff continues to be about as equally distributed as it ever was. Still, SHINY NEW TECH!
• TikTok Is Fun: This is someone else’s observation, but I forget whose (Jason Kottke, maybe?) – every few months, the mainstream media does a piece where they talk breathlessly about a NEW THING that is bringing the CAREFREE FUN back to social media. It’s Instagram, with it’s authenticity! It’s Snapchat, with its ephemerality! It’s TikTok, with its carefree frivolity! Proof that TikTok has BROKEN OUT, this is an NYT piece explaining it to confused 40somethings who still need to feel current and painting a picture of it as a fun, carefree playspace rather than an app which is already being reported as riddled with predators.
• Fifteen Unconventional Uses for Voice Tech: If you have a line item in your ‘2019 prep’ to-do list which says ‘think of some interesting stuff to say to clients around voice tech’ then you could do worse than read this; Nicole He recently taught a course in voice tech at NYU, and this is her writeup of the projects that her students came up with. The breadth of use cases here is superb, from a Google voice assistant with a personality, to a voice-controlled AR pet, and there’s loads in here that you can steal – or, if you’re a better person, hire one of Ms Ye’s students to work on for you.
• Albums of the Year: There are an infinity of these lists out there, as per, but I’m linking to The Quietus’ selection as it’s a wonderful publication with awesome writing and it’s one of the more eclectic lists out there, containing as it does Janelle Monae, Brockhampton, and Tropical Fcuk Storm. Lovely, and contains the added bonus of embedded tracks for each album.
• Bowel Movement: A Guardian longread on the science of sh1tting, inspired by the Squatty Potty, the crapping stool whose unicorn-and-rainbow-turds-featuring ads you’ll doubtless remember from a few years ago. Yes, fine, it’s all about defecation, but it’s interesting and contains the excellent fact that in the 20th Century German toilets used to feature small shelves where one could inspect one’s fecal deposit, which does rather make one wonder about the extent to which national identity is in fact really a thing after all.
• The Way Home: “Where do you feel most at home? Maybe you’re nostalgic for where you’re from. Maybe you couldn’t wait to leave. Maybe home is where you’ll sleep tonight. Maybe you’re still searching. In a year when migrant children have been sent to live in a tent city, rents for a San Francisco apartment reached an average of $3,750, and wildfires destroyed entire communities, the question of how people find and define “home” has never felt more urgent. We asked 34 photographers to travel across the West, capturing stories about home for our first all-photography issue. Look. And listen — audio footnotes invite you to hear from many of the people you’ll meet in these pages.” There’s an accompanying load of supplementary content on the paper’s Insta feed too, along with an accompanying physical exhibition taking place in SF; this is a superb piece of journalism.
• When Did The 90s End?: A forensic exploration as to exactly when the time period we can now look back on as the culturally distinct era ‘The 90s’ ended. Was it 9/11? Was it Sex and the City? This is a bit archly pomo, fine, but it makes some excellent points, not least the one about ‘cool’ being a term that has literally no meaning in 2018 and whose currency’s death can be mapped pretty much exactly against the day the 90s died.
• Overcelebrating Life Events: Hung off the ‘news’ story about that couple who wanted to do an elaborate baby reveal video and ended up setting fire to a large swathe of their State, this piece looks at the increasing trend towards lavish celebrations for events that would previously have gone unremarked. Finding out the sex of your child? CHECK! Getting divorced? CHECK! Baby showers and multiple stag and hen and STEN dos and proms and 21sts and 30ths and 40ths and menopauses? CHECK CHECK CHECK! It’s an interesting read, but can also equally be summarised as ‘because Instagram’ – basically if you work with a brand that can reasonably tie itself to a LIFE EVENT you can probably make a reasonable amount of money out of idiots who are willing to bankrupt themselves celebrating made-up events for the Likes.
• How To Recognise a Fake Image: The best thing about this is that, given the pace of technological improvement in this field, all the advice in here will be out-of-date by the time I finish typing this sentence. Still, if you want a quick primer on what to look out for when trying to spot an AI-generated fake this isn’t a bad place to start – the point about the hair is a genuinely useful one, seeing as I imagine that it will be one of the harder issues to fix.
• Chrissy Teigen’s Anti-Goop: I haven’t quite managed to work out how Chrissy Teigen managed to become one of the most famous people in the West – I mean, yes, she’s obviously funny and smart on Twitter, but what was she known for before that? Anyway, I could Google that and obviously haven’t, so ignore me; this piece is sort-pof about Teigan, but more about the manner in which a certain type of slightly sloppy, relatable ‘authenticity’ is now one of the most powerful brand signifiers you can have. Can we please, please retire the word ‘authentic’? It is so heavy with layered meaning that no sentence can carry its weight any longer.
• That Paltrow Interview: Here’s the contrast to the last piece – if you’ve not yet read it, that yoga quote is as bad as you think it is.
• Bra Theory: This is, fine, a corporate blogpost about the learnings from three years of trying to run a high-tec bra measurement and manufacturing business, but it’s ALSO one of the better ‘founder’s journey’-type pieces I’ve read in an age; it’s full of honestly useful and interesting notes on the mistakes the author made building their business, considerations they wish they’d made, all that sort of jazz, and it also contains all the insights you’d ever want about the customer journey people go through when looking to buy a brassiere.
• Don’t Pretend You Can’t See Us: The best piece I read this week about the Gilets Jaunes in France and what the movement means, to the extent it can be said to mean anything coherent at all. It paints a good picture of the weirdly incongruous political faultlines that exist within movements of this type, as oppositional politics of the traditional left and right find themselves allied together against the nebulous threat of ‘globalism’; it also contains a couple of excellent digs at Handsome Manu over in the Elysee. It works in decent contrast to pieces such as this one in Buzzfeed which have very much gone with the ‘It’s Facebook Wot Done It’ line, in a manner that fundamentally misunderstands the way Groups work on the platform. If you’re a member of a Facebook group then the content from that group is more likely to surface in your feed as of this year, so it’s perhaps likely to intensify group bonds and create more fertile breeding grounds for broader campaigning. On the other hand, the Buzzfeed article implies that stuff from groups – which in these cases are in the main closed – leaches into the newsfeed of others, which isn’t true. I mean, far be it from me to defend Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory, but let’s be fair about it.
• Token: This is a great piece, if depressing. The article looks back at black actors who had bit-part roles in some of the biggest shows of the 90s and hears their stories, of being a marginalised and often invisible part of the very, very white world of network TV in US America. The difference between the situation then and now is striking – and yet even now, representation isn’t what it could or ought to be.
• Remembering Bourdain: Anthony Bourdain feels like a resonant one this year; this is an oral history-style recollection of what it was like working on his TV show over all these years, along with scattered other reminiscences from other parts of his life; what shines through more than anything is the curiosity he expressed for almost every aspect of his life. Read this and then go and eat something tasty.
• Goodbye Rookie: I was honestly saddened by this. I didn’t imagine when I first came across Tavi Gevinson as the prematurely-old-looking precocious child in the frow sitting next to Anna Wintour at NYFW that a decade hence she’d be wrapping up a long-running and acclaimed editorial project she’d started at just 15. Shows what I know. This is Gevinson’s ‘Goodbye’ editorial, and I can’t stress what a good piece of writing it is; professional, personal, funny, sad, she touches on changing culture, the realities of business and online publishing, trends and ephemerality and self and, oh, all sorts of stuff. I am honestly in awe of this child; she writes SO well and SO smartly and everything she does makes me feel like some sort of knuckle-dragging troglodyte by contrast.
• A History of Dance Dance Revolution: I imagine there are some of you who have a degree of DDR expertise hard-wired into your muscle memory as a result of misspent teenage weekends in the arcade. I was just a little too old to catch the craze (and, er, too arryhthmic), but this is a lovely piece of nostalgia looking back at the era when no arcade was complete without an Asian kid with frosted tips making absolute mincemeat of the cabinet.
• Terrible Occult Detectives of the Victorian Era: I didn’t know this, but apparently there was a late-18C craze for oddly-named detectives coming to gribs with THE SUPERNATURAL, all seances and ghosts and ANCIENT RITUALS; this is an overview of some of the best (worst) ones, and contains some true gems. “Sometimes his enemy is the ghost of a jester, sometimes it’s Irish people, and sometimes he splits the difference and it turns out to be a crusty old sea captain hiding in a well and a naked ghost baby.” See? Who doesn’t want to read that?
• Trapped At Sea With The Crypto-Bros: Laurie Pennie does another very good observational hatchet job whilst again seemingly managing to centre herself in the narrative; I don’t know any other writer that can do the whole ‘these are awful people and yet I found myself weirdly at home with them because I too am a strange outsider living in the liminal spaces between accepted social norms and mores!’ thing in quite the way she does, and I’m not 100% sure I like it; still, she does write very well, and the portrait of the madness of the crypto pyramid sales world is sort of charming, although it feels rather as though she’s pulled some punches at various points for reasons I’d be interested to find more about…
• My Beautiful Death: An artist reflects on what her art has done to her. I don’t want to say much more than this; it’s beautiful, but you need to see for yourselves.
• Lunch With My First Love: Beautiful account of meeting up with a significant ex after 20 years of not seeing each other. I won’t spoil what happens, but this captures absolutely the peculiarly happysad feeling of meeting someone years down the line and realising, actually, we could have been happy together. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not sufficiently in the end, but a bit. Made me cry, just in case you were wondering.
• Slaughterhouse: There’s a peculiarly affectless quality, I find, to English prose translated from the Dutch, and so it is with this excellent essay from Granta in which the author Arnon Grunberg visits a number of slaughterhouses across the Netherlands, meeting the workers and killing the animals and all the while observing the mechanics and the process and the oddities. This is…cold, mostly, and yet pleasingly so, like a scalpel or sawblade.
• Favourite Quotations: This is a lovely exercise; Doug Warner has been collecting his favourite quotations for years, and here he arranges them into a roughly-thematically-ordered sequence, working almost as a conversation. SO MANY GREAT QUOTES, and the format makes them sing; this is ace.
• The Empathy Exams: What it’s like to play a medical patient. Except, obviously, it’s really not about that at all. This is a glorious piece of personal writing by Leslie Jamison.
• Dating in my 50s: Finally this week, you MUST read this – it’s funny, wry (yes it is, although I know that ‘wry’ is something very rarely seen in real life) and self-deprecating, and you can read London between every line, and it makes me wonder all sorts of things, about what it must be like being a former beauty, former rockstar, former someone, and what it’s like when all that goes and you tentatively look to see what’s left. Viv Albertine was guitarist in the Slits, and this is an extract from the second part of her memoir published in May this year. Exceptional.

By Frederic Martin

AND FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. This is a 10-minute megamix of the songs of the year, and, oddly, it’s not terrible! Contains 144 songs, so challenge your children to find all of them:

2) This is called ‘Dust on Trial’ and it’s by Shame, and it’s horrible and sinister and PERFECT for cold grey days with flat, low light:

3) Next, this is by Tessa Darling, it’s called ‘Bad Ideas’ and it’s absolutely adorable in a slightly cutesy indiepoplovesong kind of way:

4) Next up, fittingly in THE YEAR OF AI, the first song ever to feature on Curios with an AI vocalist. This is by Holly Herndon, it’s called ‘Godmother’, and the vocal is performed by an AI called ‘Spawn’, “a project two years in the making. The pair first showcased their creation this past April in Berlin, where the artificial neural network reproduced the voices of her parents and interacted with the sounds made by guests at the installation. Spawn improvised and learned from her environment. And now the rest of the world can hear Spawn sing.” It’s, unsurprisingly, HORRIFIC:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is Blaxploitation by Noname – SO, SO, SO GOOD, this:

6) Last up this week, have another AWE-INSPIRING collection of Duplo Thomas the Tank Engine trains doing stunts because, frankly, it’s soothing and we all need it. THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK GOODBYE EVERYONE HAVE A LOVELY COUPLE OF DAYS OFF AND TRY NOT TO GET TOO STRESSED ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING OR THE IMMINENT PROSPECT OF SPENDING TIME WITH YOUR FAMILY IT WILL, I PROMISE, ALL BE OK, SO WHY NOT TREAT YOURSELF TO A MINCE PIE OR MAYBE EVEN A SMALL GLASS OF SHERRY YOU’VE EARNED IT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE TIL NEXT WEEK BYE!:

Can we now officially call everyone who supports UKIP a racist, then? Is that OK? Good! 

I can’t be bothered to get angry about politics today, it seems (more) futile (than normal). I’m also in a hurry, so by way of preamble let me point out that it’s getting very cold, that this country is in the grip of an appalling, embarrassing housing crisis, and that seeing as it’s Bl*ck Fr*d*y and we’re all spending ourselves into penury anyway you might as well give some money to charity as well – Shelter, Crisis, St Mungo’s, take your pick. 

Anyway tedious preaching done with, let me once again lead you, stepping gingerly, towards this week’s looming thicket of prose and links and mystery and awe and, yes, on occasion horror. Careful not to snag on anything; the thorns are sharp and stick in the flesh rather. This, as ever, is Web Curios!

By Pascal Goet

What is it about politics that attracts the world’s worst people? I mean, it’s true isn’t it – look at them this week, plotting and preening and self-regarding and mindwanking themselves raw on the power fantasies whilst only-just-metaphorically sh1tting all over us. Thanks, Conservatives! Thanks! Thanks everyone! I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I spend a few days a week working for a firm of political consultants (I won’t mention them as, well, to be honest they probably don’t want the association) and this week even they – many of whom have worked in politics, and all of whom have an interest in the whole filthy mess that can at best be described as…unhealthy – even they have been wondering around with expressions of barely-concealed bafflement on their faces as they try and make sense of exactly why it would seem that the ruling classes appear to have decided that they once again want to play one of their occasional games of ‘let’s fcuk the electorate with knives, just because we can!.

Christ alive, these people. 

Anyway, you’ve had enough, I’ve had enough, we’ve all had enough. You are bruised and battered and wounded after a long week – I know, sweetheart, I know – and all you want is to rest your weary limbs. Come, then, take my hand and let me lower you gently into the warm, welcoming liquid bath that is this week’s Curios, like a Radox bath except, well, significantly more clotted. Read, relax, and try and forget – this, as ever, is Web Curios, and Jarvis Cocker really was right. 

By Carly Silverman

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Well thank GOD that’s all done with – the culture wars are over!

AHAHAHAHAHAHA NO THEY ARE NOT THEY WILL NEVER END! As we move into a new reality, one in which the ostensibly simple fact of a press conference can usher in a spittle flecked debate about the very nature of truth, it dawned on me this week that, more than anything else, it very much feels right now as though the whole world has a hangover. 

You know what I mean – those very particular hangovers where you’re not in any imminent danger of being sick, but your eyeballs vefy much have that ‘damp orbs rolled in sand and then replaced’ feel about them, and the lights are blinding and angled too low and the grouting in your mouth is coming loose and the sounds have sharp edges and everything is just colossal and jagged and simply TOO MUCH. Those. It feels like the world has one of those. 

So. Ready yourself to receive your weekly panacea, your bromide, the words and links which will once again convinvce you that the bad stuff is only online where in fact online is the only safe place there is, and meatspace is where The Bad Things happen; take this, all of you, and eat it, for these are my words which I have given up for YOU – TAKE MY SOOTHING, SACRAMENTAL CURIOS INSIDE YOURSELVES AND LIVE FOREVER (you will still all die). This, as ever, is WEB CURIOS!

(oh, and by the way, Imperica is launching a Patreon to fund its magazines and other gubbins – don’t worry, I won’t see a penny of this, this is about the website as a whole and not me, so feel free to contribute with impunity. If you’ve ever thought ‘gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to support an art and culture endeavour online with a couple of quid a month then, well, LOOK HERE!)

By Lenz Geerk

LET’S START THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH SOME EXCELLENT DEEP CUTS AND RARITIES AND GENERAL ODD STUFF FROM SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS IT SHOULDN’T HAVE COME AS A SURPRISE TO ANYONE THAT FACEBOOK’S POLITICAL AD TRANSPARENCY STUFF DOESN’T REALLY WORK:

• Facebook Ads Now Support 1:1 Image Formats: It’s…a slow week in s*c**l m*d** news this week, so apologies in advance for leading with an even-more-underwhelming-than-usual story this time around. Still, from the point of view of being able to use the same image assets for your Insta and FB campaigns it’s…no, actually it’s still incredibly boring, isn’t it? Look, I promise it will get better, just bear with me ok?
• Facebook Launches ‘Test Event’ Tool: Have YOU ever suffered the crippling embarrassment of having set up a Facebook Event (NB – this is an ‘event’ in the Analytics sense, as in ‘tracking people who you send to your website from Facebook via the Pixel’, rather than in the ‘hi we might have a party if enough of you say you will attend so please God don’t just do the usual thing and hit ‘maybe’ as a matter of course as then we’ll all be in some sort of horrible party limbo’) and setting it live and then realising that you’ve fcuked something up and OH GOD THE SHAME? No, of course you haven’t, because of course everyone reading this is far too important to do the frivolous executional stuff and instead spends their days huffing on the heady glue of STRATEGY; still, though, you might find this useful to alert the poor Junior Account Executives or your caged code monkeys to this, as it could prove useful and might mean that you don’t have to beat the soles of their feet with the brambles again this week.
• Instagram Prototyping School Stories: On the one hand, Instagram is widely acknowledged as being a dreadful hotbed of bullying if you’re a kid, and Instagram’s attempting to address this through AI moderation and suggestions that maybe one ought to spend less time on one’s phone (see Curios passim); on the other hand, Instagram’s also attempting to get academic institutions on board with using Insta through a specific ‘Schools’ product. What do YOU think Facebook cares most about? HM. Anyway, Insta for Schools is a collaborative creation prototype, the idea being that schools could set up a Story which students could contribute to – security measures to prevent this becoming a total cesspit include only kids tagged as being students at a given school can contribute, and that all submissions would be moderated by a human eye to prevent the predictable series of videos mocking the unpopular kids which would otherwise result. Do you think this is going to be a good thing? Do you? Oh, and while we’re on Insta, it’s also recently launched Hindi language support. And it’s considering allowing Stories on the platform to have a deep-linkable URL for use off-platform. Now you know EVERYTHING!
• Facebook Portal Privacy: Facebook Portal is finally shipping, and Facebook have as a result seen fit to offer this clarification about the exact nature of the data it will collect on users and how it will tie into the ads ecosystem. Except, well, this post is still pretty obfuscatory – whilst it acknowledges that users’ specific Portal usage will be logged and used to tailor ads shown to them on other platforms, it makes literally NO MENTION AT ALL of the fact that the Ts&Cs, when you dig into them, clearly suggest that it will also track information about who you contact, and how, and for how long, to build out the knowledge graph of your connections and to then use that information to build a bigger advertising profile. Given the fact that it’s this specific element of it that various people flagged immediately at the product’s launch, it seems a touch remiss of them imho. Anyway, if you want another way for Facebook to know stuff about you in exchange for, er, a cameraphone in your house then WOW is this the product for you.
• Chrome To Block All Ads On Websites Running Crap Ads: Literally just that, and, as I always like to note, this won’t affect any of you fine folk.
• Tencent Launching Own Version of Snap Specs: It does rather feel like Snap is the small child in the playground, whose lunch money keeps getting stolen by the bigger kids and who’s growing increasingly slim and wan-looking as the malnutrition takes hold. Still, it’ll be interesting to see whether this move from Tencent, and the subsequent promotion of the hardware across China, makes wearable camera glasses any less creepy/ridiculous and any more of a mainstream thing (I don’t think it will, but I have long proven myself to be a know-nothing bozo).
• Data Reportal: Well THIS is useful. Bookmark this, send it your planner and data people, CELEBRATE ITS EXISTENCE. Data Reportal is a…er…portal which acts as a gateway to/repository of all the social media/digital use stats compiled by We Are Social, Hootsuite and Kepios; you know, the ones I occasionally link to in here with some sort of disparaging ‘copy and paste these numbers in order to help you make whatever point you’re trying to make’ line. Anyway, if you want to access numbers on, I don’t know, mobile phone usage in Guam then this is GOLDEN – honestly, so useful.
• Instagram Stories Research Report: It’s a piece of PR puffery, fine, but it’s also potentially helpful; this is compiled by Buffer, who analysed a whole load of branded Insta stories to compile this report which purports to tell you what works and what doesn’t; whilst there’s quite a lot of wooly / obvious stuff here (people look at Stories outside of work hours! Post to hit them on their commute!), my friend Fritha pointed out that this sort of stuff is often really useful to persuade senior people that they might want to try experimenting with A New Type of Thing, and she is right. Anyway, if you want some proof points to suggest that your client or employer might want to jump on the Stories bandwagon, this probably contains said proof-points.
• A Template App for Insta / Snap Stories: This one’s called ‘Unfold’, and it lets you make really pretty Stories really easily. iOS-only, as is…
• ANOTHER Template App for Insta / Snap Stories: This one, which is called Mojo. Seemingly does exactly the same stuff as Unfold, but with a slightly different aesthetic – try both! Try neither! But don’t think too hard about the weird inherent contradiction between the original idea of Stories as a personal, ephemeral communication medium being slowly professionalised and homogenised to the point where everyone’s stuff is going to look the same! Oh, and if you thought ‘hey, you know what, there’s probably a market in apps which help people make less sh1t Stories!’ then you were right and you are now TOO LATE.
• Mish Guru: This, though, is the SERIOUS Stories software – if you are a PROFESSIONAL CONTENT CREATION FACTORY and want a piece of desktop software which will allow you to Storyboard, schedule, edit, export, etc, whilst also offering you project management-type functionality to enable the collation of video from multiple sources, manage uploading and all the rest, then this is probably right up your street. It’s a paid thing, fine, but if you make a lot of this stuff and don’t really want to have to keep editing the bastard things on your phone then you might want to take a look.
• Who Cares?: Another in Web Curios’ occasional series of ‘research reports which have been turned into shiny websites with varying degrees of success’, Who Cares? is a ‘brand empathy report’, whatever that means (it’s all in Portuguese so, er, I’m not 100% certain), but I’m more interested in the website design; on the one hand, it’s stylistically well-defined and has a really strong look and feel, but on the other it’s VERY busy and it’s quite hard to work out what it’s saying, and then you click on the ‘Results’ section and the floaty score map appears and it’s almost lovely but then you realise that you can’t quite read it well enough…I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, is the upshot, but it’s still better than anything I could make so, well, I’ll fcuk off and shut up.
• Big Lavender: Finally in the boring section all about corporate wankery, have some frivolous light relief in the shape of the latest big budget digital webtoy by Old Spice; this time, to promote some new noseflavour of smellgel which apparently is perfumed with lavender (which apparently doesn’t have the same geriatric or queeny connotations in the US that it does here), they’ve created a first-person shooting gallery-type thing, where you have to shoot the lavender and avoid whatever other crap they tell you to avoid. Stupid, obviously, but really well-made; as ever with Old Spice, the production values are superb; it’s odd to think that this is the sort of thing which 20 years ago you would probably have to pay actual cashmoney for on the SNES. Anyway, SHOOT THE LAVENDER (but you might want to mute the slightly infuriatingly shouty sound).

By Ziyah Gaifk

NEXT, ENJOY THIS 25TH ANNIVERSARY BBC ESEENTIAL MIX BY PAUL OAKENFOLD!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD REALLY LIKE SOMEONE TO GET THE WORLD A BEROCCA, PT.1:

• Overexposed 1948: This is lovely and well-made and I LOVE the voice-over work. Overexposed 1948 is a site which tells the story of the B-29 Superfortress Overexposed, which, for those of you less familiar with aviation history than I am thanks to my cursory reading of the site, was a plane which was made famous for its work on the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll in the mid-1940s. In 1948, the plane crashed in Derbyshire leaving no survivors; the site presents a series of 360 photos, which you can navigate through and explore, while all the while giving you the first person account of one Serviceman Alsopp, who was first on the scene of the crash. This is simple but SO effective; the voice over work really makes it, and is an excellent reminder that a lack of decent audio is often one of the (fine, many) reasons why 360 work falls down. If you’re wondering how it works and what to do, just listen and look and you will eventually see interactive points in the images – click them to move around and see the site from different perspectives. I really, really like this.
• Byte: This isn’t launching til next year, but, well, it’s Vine 2.0! It’s going to be a new looping video app, and it’s made by one of the creators of Vine, and it was going to be called Vine2.0 back in the day but now it’s not, and, er, that’s literally all I know! Or all that anyone else knows! But! You can sign up and get alerts! This…isn’t that exciting! Sorry!
• Politics and Design: Thanks to Dan for sending this my way; this is filterable database of every single candidate logo from the recent US midterms campaign. Students of design will find a lot to love in here, but even those such as me with no aesthetic sense whatsoever should find this fascinating. There are…a lot of candidates, and as such a lot of logos, and a lot of really underwhelming graphic design. What’s notable is the extent to which there’s an orthodoxy in terms of palette and font throughout this, so much so that anything that doesn’t vaguely conform to that general template automatically stands out as a little bit mental. Special shout out to Elijah Cummings who ran for Congress in Maryland and thought, for reasons known only to him and his campaign manager, that this would be a suitable font in which to render his surname. Still, he’s doing God’s work, so, well, MORE POWER TO YOU, ELIJAH.
• Birthtube: The web, like the rest of the world, is a rich tapestry of interests, passions, wants and needs, and there are corners of it which, it may well surprise you to know, I have never been (or if I have, I have worn a disguise). The birthing web is one such corner – I’ve never had cause to investigate the world of birth videos and advice and doulas and waterbirths and all that jazz what with being utterly childless and what with the fact that, well, unless you have a very specific reason to watch videos of childbirth there would be something quite weird about watching videos of childbirth, I think. This week, though, all that changed when I stumbled across Birthtube – a site which, for all I know, might well be the go-to portal for anyone looking to get a bit more of a real-world look at the whole messy business, but which I had no idea existed. MY WORD the technicolour glory of the human reproductive experience!  The pinks, the purples, the yellows, the creams, the…the browns! I know all men say this – and if we don’t, we really should – but HOW DOES ANYONE DO THAT MORE THAN ONCE? Or even once, to be honest. This whole site is basically a front for birthing services, presumably in the US, but WHO CARES when you can enjoy the miracle of life happening right in front of you. I haven’t seen a birthing video since I was at school – going to Catholic state school in the 80s meant you got quite a lot of exposure to slightly…iffy things, like an actual video of very late-stage terminations which I don’t advise anyone ever seeing, and a full-on birth video featuring a woman with very 1970s pubic hair and, as I recall with pretty visceral horror, very full bowels. Does this sort of thing still happen in schools? I sort of feel it oughtn’t. Anyway, BIRTH! LIFE! MIRACULOUS!
• For The Web: I love the web. Honestly, it’s obviously a sort of terrible thing for all of use, and in many respects my addiction to online life has rendered me even more of a stumbling inadequate when it comes to interpersonal interaction in meatspace (dirty, smelly, inefficient meatspace) than I would have been otherwise, but at the same time I honestly cannot imagine what I would do with my life were it not for the fact that I was lucky enough to be born (white, male, cis, able-bodied, middle-class, fine) into a generation where ‘I sort of mong around online and I’m a bit better at Google than you’ was enough of a jobdsecription / skillset to get you a job (let’s not call it a ‘career’, for God’s sake, that’s just a job that’s gone on far too long). Anyway, I presume that at least some of you feel the same as me and as such you might be interested in this project; it’s part of the Open Web Project and is seeking contributions and thoughts on how ace it is and how it’s changed your life for the better – “We’re asking web lovers like you to tell us about their web: the good and the bad, in many languages, and from as many people as possible. On the web’s 30th birthday next March, we’ll be releasing a film which tells a wider story about how central the web is to our daily lives and why that makes it worth fighting for.Tell us your story today to help us write ours. Post your video on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to tell us why you are #ForTheWeb.” DO IT!
• More Imagined Famouses: 2018 has very much been the year in which the reality of our post-truth future has hit home and we’ve been forced to confront the fact that in all honesty we’re not going to be able to take anything we see on a screen at face value by 2020 (at the latest tbh). This video is the end result of this paper, all about training a GAN to invent faces out of nothing, having been trained on a massive corpus of famous people’s fizzogs. Just watch the video – it’s 30s long and jaw-dropping and you will be amazed that you recognise these people and yet don’t – and then go and read the paper which you won’t understand but which is worth a look because of the incredibly, almost comically, brief and cursory two-paragraph bit about ‘ethics’. HA! ETHICS! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
• No UFO: Have you ever wanted a website on which you can investigate the history of UFO sightings in New Zealand? Would you like it to be designed in startlingly current hipster minimalist fashion? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN! Sadly lacking in photographic evidence (there’s a shock), there are some wonderfully batshit reports in here of ‘cigar-shaped objects’ (which may or may not be solar sails, as we now know) and the like, though fewer than fans of stereotype might like of sheep abductions. Still, the design work here is really nice and far cooler than it needs to be.
• Notabilia: Another in the occasional series of ‘pleasing dataviz-type projects using Wikipedia data’ which I stumble across every now and again, this collects the longest discussions on Wikipedia which have led to article deletion, creating a beautiful visualisation of the ways in which discussions between editors branch and fork and lead to either a conclusion or a whole new branch of debate; the meat of this will, fine, be largely of interest to Wikipedians, but the viz stuff here is a really interesting way of presenting intellectual shifts and branching patterns of thought which might be useful in other areas or disciplines.
• The Time Machine Atlas: This is a bit slow, but bear with it – this site lets you look at Venice as a map (so far, so less good than Google), but allows you to visualise the manner in which the city’s architecture and layout has changed over the centuries, running you through the years and showing the changing face of the lagoon and surrounding area. When Google invent time travel and we can look at this for the entire world, what a day it will be.
• B-Laze: Do you like smoking weed? Of course you do, everyone likes smoking weed in 2018! Do you like it so much that you’d like to drop over £2k on a device to let you smoke it whilst looking like someone from the mid-90s? If so, GREAT – the B-Laze is a truly preposterous device, claiming to be the world’s first LASER BONG! Let’s take a moment to think about words that shouldn’t probably be concatenated for reasons of health and safety – ‘naked’ and ‘falconry’, for example, or ‘razorwire’ and ‘tightrope’, or ‘tabasco’ and ‘enema’ – and then let’s add ‘laser’ and ‘bong’ to that list. Baffling. Oh, and it’s internet-connected and can be controlled through an app. Just IMAGINE.
• The AI Anchor: One of the classic unfunny gags that people make about people in media is about newsreaders – “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GET PAID TO READ!”, I imagine people (taxi drivers) saying to them all the time, “ANYONE CAN DO THAT!”. Sadly that’s now absolutely true, except it’s not just ‘anyone’, it’s ‘a synthesised digital avatar’ – showcased this week by Xinhua, this is a virtual newsreader who, using what they call ‘AI’ but which isn’t, let’s be clear, AI at all, will read whatever is typed for him to read, with a totally simulated voice and realistic mouth movements; I’m sketchy on the exact detail, but I wonder whether the presumed ‘AI’ element is to do with an eventual ability for software to automate the writing of the digipuppet’s script from AP alerts or somesuch. Anyway, Huw Edwards, Riz Lateef, YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED.
• Public Interest Technology: This is serious and perhaps quite niche, but also the sort of thing that I imagine some of you might find useful; it’s a list of resources and thinking about the role of technology in civil society – to quote the site, ““public-interest technology refers to the study and application of technology expertise to advance the public interest/generate public beneits/promote the public good.” Campaigners, activists, anyone working in or around the intersection of government and tech, will all find it useful.
• Game Changers: This is a LOVELY site by ESPN, taking a series of individual elements from basketball – dunks, three pointers, etc – and charting how different players throughout the history of the sport have evolved and redefined said element, taking the sport in different evolutionary directions. Featuring a lovely interface, nice animations, and some great clips demonstrating each player’s unique take on each element, this is a really cool piece of webwork which I would LOVE to see done for football – imagine how cool this would be to use for analysis of players, say, or specific moves like the trivela or rabona or somesuch. DO IT SOMEONE PLEASE.
• The A-Z of the Designers Republic: In the late-90s, even if like me you could barely draw a circle let alone aspire to a career in graphic design, The Designers Republic was THE coolest graphic design shop in the world. OK, fine, it was also the ONLY graphic design shop you’d ever heard of and that was solely because of the fact that they designed the look and feel of Wipeout on the PS1 and as such you saw their logo every time you sat down at 6am to work through the comedown on a Sunday morning, but. Their influence on a certain type of aesthetic can’t be underestimated, though – that dense, hyperstylised look and feel, ‘borrowing’ so much from Japan and the far East and yet weirdly VERY English – and is still instantly recognisable even now at a distance of two decades. Anyway, this is a Kickstarter raising money for a full-on glossy retrospective book of their work, and I imagine if you work in advermarketingpr and are my age then this is probably the sort of thing you’ll be half-tempted to get. I guarantee that if you do you will end up doing coke off it at least once, BECAUSE THAT’S THE SORT OF PERSON YOU ARE.
• Air Freshener Club: I honestly don’t understand this site AT ALL, but it is fcuking massive and contains, amongst other things, a series of patterns to knit crocheted air freshener covers so, well, here you go!
• Popular Pups: My girlfriend complained that there were no cats in here last week which suggests that she doesn’t really get the vibe here. Still, by way of small compensation, have this Twitter feed of lovely dogs (sorry Saz, slow week for cats).
• Cartoon Collections: Do you want a place where you can browse and purchase cartoons by some of the most famous and successful strip cartoonists in the US, originals from the New Yorker, Esquire and the like? OH GOOD. For the right sort of person there’s probably some excellent present potential in here.
• The Film Reroll: Blah blah blah I don’t listen to podcasts blah blah blah. Anyway, I haven’t listened to this one either, but I heard the premise and fell slightly in love with the concept; the schtick is that each episode involves a classic film script being played out as a D&D-style roleplaying game, managed by a DM, with people playing through – effectively turning old films into slightly weird, geeky improv sessions. The description that REALLY sold me, though, was that of the latest episodes, in which the presenters roleplay Friday 13th – except the players think that they are in fact roleplaying an 80s frathouse comedy. SUCH a perfect idea, and so clever in terms of maintaining character for the horror movie – I could almost be tempted to listen to this (except, realistically, I probably won’t).
• Specification Gaming Examples In AI: Another one of these occasional lists of ‘mad stuff that AI has done which follows the letter of its goal-led programming but in a way that is genuinely surprising or creepy’. Some of the stuff in here is amazing – witness the note on the AI being trained to play Road Runner as successfully as possible, which simply reads: “Agent kills itself at end of level one to avoid dying in level two” which is basically some sort of dark nihilist philosophical credo right there, or the genuinely chilling “In an artificial life simulation which required energy to survive but giving birth had an energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle which consisted mostly of mating to have children which would then all be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children”. What was that we were saying about ‘ethics’?
• Invaderz: A game of Space Invaders in which each wave of aliens is an evolution of the previous wave, based on those types of alien which survive the longest taking their genes forward. It’s a bit crap as a game, but the premise is really interesting – it would be fascinating to see whether this sort of tech could be applied over the course of a proper game, with enemy civilisations developing based on how you fcuk them up over the course of the game. MAKE IT!

By Lucan Coutts

NEXT, HAVE A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF THE ORIGINAL VERSIONS OF FAMOUS COVER SONGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW WERE COVER SONGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD REALLY LIKE SOMEONE TO GET THE WORLD A BEROCCA, PT.2:

• Videogame Clocks: You know that ‘Clocks’ art installation that does the rounds every few years, turning up in a city and giving the inhabitants and tourists the opportunity to marvel at the artistic endeavour that led Christian Marklay to stitch together thousands of film clips into a seamless, second-by-second visual compilation? Yeah, well this is a Kickstarter for exactly that, but using clips from videogames instead. On the one hand, this doesn’t really need to exist; on the other, why not? The man behind it, Duncan Robson, acknowledges that it won’t really work as a clock, but, well, fcuk it, it’s ART. He only wants £1800-odd quid and there’s a month left, so this may well make it – GOOD LUCK, DUNCAN ROBSON!
• 19C Japanese Firework Catalogues: I can’t really tell you a whole lot more about this, largely as the site’s all in Japanese, but if you’d like to browse a selection of scanned catalogues of fireworks manufacturers from old Japan then, well, fill your boots. There’s such a lovely aesthetic to all of these, and they are all available to download as (huge) PDFs in case you want to.
• Women at the Midterms: In case you’re a pinko lefty liberal like me who needs to be reminded that there is a general move towards better representation for women and minorities in politics and public life and that in fact, by certain measures, stuff is getting better (honest guv, don’t cry) then this selection of photos of women winning seats in Congress for the first time will be a balm to your bruised soul. These are genuinely cheering after another bruising week in other people’s politics.
• Demobaza: I am, I think I’ve alluded to here before, a total fashion refusenik, a shambolic excuse for an adult, a man so scared of buying clothes that I basically buy the same stuff in the same sizes off the internet each year and hope noone notices I basically only have three outfits. Occasionally I see stuff like this and I imagine what it would be like to be beautiful and confident and stylish – or, in the specific case of Demobaza, what it would be like to be the sort of person who can get away with dressing almost exactly like what I imagine a future version protagonist of the Assassin’s Creed videogame series would dress like. This is MENTAL fashion, sort of a bit Mad Max-y, a bit Assassin’s-y, a bit…er…shroud-y, and obviously anyone wearing it in real life would probably look like they were trying too hard, but, er, does anyone think I could carry this stuff off? Tell me honestly.
• Bloqboard: Bored of all your cryptocurrency? Have you realised that your 400 Ethereum tokens are NEVER going to make you rich? No fear – now the blockchain has USURY! That’s right, thanks to Bloqboard you can now lend out your crypto at a terrifying vig, although why the everliving fcuk anyone would ever want to take out a loan in crypto – famously illiquid, and even more famously unstable – is absolutely beyond me. Still, CRYPTO!
• Kitchen Butterfly: I’m a sucker for a well-written cookery blog, and this one came across my field of vision this week and I then lost about 20 minutes reading back through the archives. Kitchen Butterfly deals specifically with Nigerian food, so if you want recipes and essays about the culinary classics, food culture, and the like, this will see you right.  
• Notable Changes in North Korea: North Korean photoessays have become somewhat passe in recent years, with access to the DPRK becoming slightly less difficult than it used to be; most typically focus on the weird, staged, empty nature of the cities as seen by tourists, but this collection instead focuses on depicting some of the more modern evolutions of North Korean society, and is as a result far more interesting than your typical ‘oh look at the Kim worshippers’ stuff. The KFC analogue in particular is interesting, as is the use of advertising hoardings to instead display inspirational sunset photography which – and this isn’t something I thought I’d say about Mr Jong-Un’s regime – is something we could do with copying here a bit, maybe.
• Adios: Are you one of these people who simply CAN’T COPE with emails and distraction and stuff, and who are CRIPPLED with anxiety every time that new mail sound/indicator pops up on your desktop (PROTIP: TURN OFF THE ALERTS YOU MORON)? You might, then, find this useful – Adios is a Gmail plugin which lets you set specified times during the day at which your new emails will come through, in theory granting you some respite from people’s tyrannical demands for your attention.
• Factcheck.me: An interesting project, launched last week, aiming to explore and examine manipulation of news and issues by third party actors. The initiative’s mission statement reads as follows: “Today, we’re launching launching Factcheck.me to empower those who check the facts. In the midst of a crisis, Factcheck.me can be deployed to start listening and give a birds eye view of the digital battlefield.As of today, Factcheck.me tracks bot activity, amplified images, and viral links.” Anyone can suggest a topic for them to track using their software and investigative techniques – it’s a US initiative and so their initial work has been focused there, but it’ll be interesting to see if this gains traction whether there’s demand for wider investigations. I do wonder whether they’ll reveal more about their methodologies as time goes on – regardless, if you’re interested in journalism and news and veracity and related issues (and, really, you probably ought to be a bit), then this is worth keeping an eye on.
• Funkis: Funkis is a font designed in 2015 which has been updated as a customisable webfont here in 2018 – “The most exciting aspect of this new version is the possibility to customise its design according to common principles found in geometric sans serifs. Funkis A references strict geometric designs with pronounced circular forms and closed apertures. Funkis B has softer curves and open forms that end at approximately 45°. Funkis C harkens back to architectural designs with straight, horizontal transitions and finials. Each of the three basic variants can be outfitted with sharp corners. Furthermore, you have the choice between circular and square dots for punctuation and diacritics. A final option is the possibility to add ink traps for using Funkis in smaller sizes.” Look, YOU might not think this is exciting but I guarantee that somewhere there is at least one designer who’s rubbing their hands across their thighs in barely-contained erotic reverie at the thought of this – I do this for THEM, not YOU.
• Learning To Dress: Another ‘wow, machine learning really is mad, isn’t it?’ moment – watch in this video as vageuly humanoid CG figures, equipped with arms and heads, ‘learn’ how to put on CG jumpers, just like real people. There’s something so hugely uncomfortable and uncanny-valley about watching these virtual entities develop skills; I think we’re probably about two or three years away from a version of The Sims in which all character development happens like this, with environmental learning – just IMAGINE how creepy and awful and brilliant that will be.
• The CG Society: This is, apparently, a networking platform for CG artists – if you want a showcase of some truly incredible examples of computer-generated art and design, this is the place to look (not least as you can contact them if you sign up for membership, making it a decent place to commission work if you’re into that sort of thing).
• Tweets Will Save Us: Silly/clever game which takes Tweets in realtime and places them into a simple browser version of Missile Command – you have to blast the tweets out of the air before they impact on the Earth’s surface and kill us all. The gimmick here is that different types of Tweets have different impact – Tweets from verified users cause more damage than Tweets from us normies, Tweets containing angry or violent language cause more damage than those without, etc. DO YOU SEE THE POINT IT’S TRYING TO MAKE?!? Not subtle, fine, but it’s fun for a few minutes and the point it makes is valid if not startlingly original or insightful.
• Chinese Whiskers: O LOOK IT’S LOTS OF PHOTOS OF CATS AND DOGS TAKEN IN AND AROUND HONG KONG OH RUFF OH MAOW!
• The New York Municipal Archives Gallery: Ahem. Let me defer to the site here: “Welcome to the New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery of over 900,000 images. Selected from the world-class historical collections of the Archives, most of these unique photographs, maps, motion picture and audio recordings are being made accessible for the first time. Visitors are invited to explore and search the collections individually, or across all collections by keyword or any of the advanced search criteria. The gallery includes many complete collections; for others, only representative samples are currently on display. Visitors are encouraged to return frequently as new content will be added on a regular basis. Patrons may order reproductions in the form of prints or digital files; most images can be licensed for commercial use.” A wonderful resource to get lost in, especially if you have any familiarity with NYC.
• Eve’s Robot Dreams: Last up in this week’s selection of miscellaneous weblinks is this Twitter feed, representing this quite incredible Indiegogo fundraiser. Let’s take a look at the copy: “Eve’s Robot Dreams is the first consent-focused robot brothel in the world. Guests can visit in the futuristic cafe where they can get to know the world’s first companion robots. After they have met, guests have the option to spend time with their favorite robot in a private room. Guests can begin building a relationship with their new companion by downloading the Realbotix app on their phone. When they visit Eve’s they can either interact with the companion bot that they have already started to get to know, or with one who they haven’t yet met. Founded by Unicole Unicron, a robot ethicist and writer for Realbotix’s Real Doll X product Harmony, Eve’s is a conscious endeavor. Eve’s interior will be designed by artist Marina Fini as a healing space.” There is…SO MUCH TO LOVE (and despair at) in here; the idea of a robot brothel as ‘a healing space’, the idea that this can in any accurate way be described as ‘consensual’, or that ‘consent’ is a meaningful concept for an inanimate object, or indeed that there’s a whole subset of men who, apparently, will only want to fcuk a robot if there’s a possibility that that robot might, in another world, have made the choice not to fcuk them…MY MIND, IT BOGGLES! Anyway, the Twitter feed is about as SFW as you’d imagine, but I’d advise you at the very least to click the Indiegogo fundraising link and see the thumbnail image they’ve chosen for the promo video. It…it really screams consent, doesn’t it?

By Guodong Zhao

FINALLY, WHY NOT GIVE THE NEW, ORCHESTRAL HANSON ALBUM A GO? YOU WILL BE PLEASANTLY SURPRISED!

THE (VERY EMPTY) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Somenerv: Digital art, illustration, and motion design by Nataniel E. Rodriguez-Vera. Nice work in here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Dennis Muragari: Muragari is a Kenyan artist, working in woodcut and depicting contemporary scenes with traditional techniques. He’s ace, and this is a genuinely cheering feed.
• Tinyhat Skatelife: So apparently this is a ‘thing’ in skater culture – that is, the habit of wearing a tiny beanie perched on top of your head – and this Insta feed takes that and effectively uses it as a starting point to parody some of the more basic skating tropes. Basically a lot of skateboarding jokes, which you may or may not find funny depending on whether you in fact know anything about skateboarding.
• Chris Henry: This feels a bit influencer-y, and I don’t normally feature stuff like this, but LOOK how well-curated Henry’s grid is here. It’s an aesthetic marvel, damn him; sit back and admire the consistency of colourpalette in play here.
• Julian Baumgartner: An AWESOME feed, this, by Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration – apparently “the oldest and now second generation fine art conservation studio in Chicago, established in 1978.” A perfect use of the medium, this posts slow demonstrations of the restorer’s art, which are SO satisfying to watch that I might do nothing else for the rest of the day.
• VICE Reports: This is interesting – a new feed from the VICE stable, which as far as I can tell is set up as a new reporting vertical purely on Insta, focused on getting young people’s opinions and thoughts on issues of the day. Launched just over a week ago, it’s light on content at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see if they keep it up and if they do anything interesting with the format.
• Tattooed Face Squad: People with tattooed faces. Man, there are a LOT of people with tattooed faces.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Underrated Websites: An EXCELLENT and kilometric Reddit thread featuring people’s recommendations for the most underrated and yet essential websites out there. Aside from my genuine baffled hurt at the fact that NOONE saw fit to mention Imperica and Curios – IT’S LIKE NOONE READS THIS STUFF OR CARES, AT ALL! – this is a great resource of new, classic and weird stuff, some useful, some not, but definitely worth a browse if all these links aren’t ENOUGH for you, you INGRATES.
• Fascism Is Not An Idea To Be Debated: It does feel rather that we ought to have come to the end of this debate by now – and yet, here we are. Still, if you want a reasonable, well-written and cogently argued antidote to ‘we must give these views exposure so we can vanquish them in the marketplace of ideas!’ rhetoric then this might serve you well; take a moment to think back at the past week, month, whatever, in global or local politics, and then read this: “It is frightening to think we could be entering the civil war mode, wherein none of the differences and disagreements can be hashed out in discussion. It is quite possible that there is no resolution to the present situation until one side is thoroughly destroyed as an ideological power and political entity. If that is the case, the inescapable struggle requires that anti-fascist forces clearly identify the enemy and commit to defeating them, whoever they are, whatever it takes.”
• Orban and Press Freedom: Another piece pointing out what a genuinely terrifying regime Hungary is currently labouring under – you don’t think we’re seeing a very real resurgence in actual, proper fascism? Honestly? Take a close look at this, and at Salvini, and then have a close read of this article and read the lines that talk about how it’s not that journalists are afraid they’re going to be shot, just that they are going to lose their jobs, and then look at the way Trump tries to treat the press, and join the dots a bit. Crikey.
• How We Got To Yemen: Seeing as we’re at the top end of the longreads, where I tend to concentrate on the serious and real-life stuff, it’s worth also linking to this superb overview of how the Yemeni conflict arrived at the point we’re currently at; it’s…not a cheering read, obviously, and it’s very long, but as an explainer as to the nature of the proxy conflict it’s a comprehensive one. In common with much else this week, it doesn’t feel like this is going to stop anytime soon.
• The Right on LinkedIn: To be honest I don’t really believe this – it feels like a bit of a reach – but I despise LinkedIn with a passion and as such the idea of its self-publicising GaryVee fans being overrun by Trumpian rhetoric makes me very happy indeed. Apparently – according to this piece, at least – Trump supporters are struggling to find traction on Facebook and as such are turning to LinkedIn to share their MAGA memes and their pro-Donald guff, thereby discomfiting all those who are only there to CRUSH IT and SUCCEED and stuff. I might start experimenting with some Ickeian conspiracy theory stuff on there to supplement my ceaseless self-promotion; I’ll let you know how I get on.
• How Hiphop Learned to Pose: Not so much of an essay as a photoessay, this is nonetheless a lovely exploration of photography in hiphop, presenting contact sheets from some iconic (sorry) photoshoots from artists past – from the full series of shots from which the infamous ‘Biggie wearing a crown’ cover was taken, to the various version of the Stankonia cover that OutKast took, these are wonderful.
• New Apple Maps: I’ve featured a previous entry in this essay series before, but this is a new, in-depth look at the differences between Apple and Google’s mapping technology, based on analysis of the latest edition of Apple Maps which was recently released. Whilst on the one hand I can imagine that the thought of reading a few thousand words about different mapping methodologies doesn’t appeal all that much, on the other this is a genuinely interesting series of explanations about how the two companies are both doing the mapping and then using AI to turn it into digitally viable product, and contains some smart observations based on this on who’s likely to win the mapping race.
• The Decivilising Process: This is SUCH a wonderfully English, snobbish, curmudgeonly piece of writing, by Adrian Wooldridge who writes Bagehot in the FT and who, in this column for 1843 Magazine, laments the decline of civilised society. It’s obviously massively tongue-in-cheek, except that it isn’t, at all; this is pretty representative of the tone, so if you can’t laugh at/with it then I suggest you skip this one: “I recently had the misfortune to sit next to a quivering man-mountain on a train who proceeded to slurp a Coke, demolish a Big Mac, munch fries and spill ketchup onto his beard while giggling at a film on his super-sized iPad. His only concession to the fact that he wasn’t in his own sitting room was to wear headphones.” BRING BACK THE CANE!!
• The Rise of Voice Texting: About three years ago I featured a Motherboard piece in here about the popularity of WhatsApp voice messages as an alternative to texting in Brazil (this one, in fact! Except it was Argentina, dammit); this piece looks at the rising global popularity of ‘voice texting’ something which, let’s be clear, if anyone ever tries to do to me results in them getting a 24 communications block because WHAT SORT OF PERVERT DOES THAT?! Unless there’s a very specific reason that requires you to speak to me, there is no way in hell I want to have to listen to a meandering recording of you um-ing and ah-ing your way towards NOTHING WORTH COMMUNICATING WHATSOEVER. I’m right about this, aren’t I? I know I am.
• The Tech Gap of Internet-Connected Schooling: This is obvious when you come to think of it – I just hadn’t thought of it. This article looks at the growing problem of the tech divide along class/poverty lines resulting from the increased reliance on digital technology for homework – when you’re expecting kids to have internet and computer access to complete homework, you’re making automatic assumptions about access to these services which vary massively across economic lines, and even though everyone has a phone with reasonable internet access these days, not everyone has limitless data and not everyone has access to a keyboard-enabled device to write on…I’m slightly ashamed that I hadn’t thought of any of this before.
• Can You Curate A Town: God, this is SO New York Times – a profile of the people who are taking it upon themselves to ‘curate’ the regeneration of a dying town in upstate New York. Artists, the idle rich, cultural influencers, all banding together to inject money and a defined aesthetic to an otherwise unremarkable and faded small suburban community, much to the bemusement of the local residents. It’s so PERFECTLY rich Manhattan, this – the slightly patronising ‘but we’re helping!’ wide-eyed incomprehension at criticism, the tone-deaf lack of understanding of the invasory nature of their actions, the fact that you just know that this is going to become a rich person’s THING in coming years…Amazing.
• Where Do Sex Bots Go When We Die?: I feel reasonably safe in my assumption that most of you won’t have given too much thought about what might happen to someone’s sexy robotic companion when the type-2 diabetes finally overcomes them. Well, it depends, is the answer – this (actually very sensitive and fairly-written) article interviews various sex doll owners about their plans for care of their significant other after they’re gone; I started reading this doing the usual sniggering-behind-the-hand that tends to come with this sort of article but, honestly, it’s surprisingly affecting (but obviously still very, very odd).
• You Are A Goddamn Adult: YES TO THIS PIECE. A scathing review of internet sensation Jonny Sun’s latest ‘book’, written in collaboration with Lin Manuel Miranda, which is nothing more than a collection of twee life affirmations repurposed from Sun’s Twitter feed and which, as the article points out, continues the seemingly neverending and exceeedingly patronising trend of famous, rich and successful people telling us ordinary peons how important it is to PRACTICE SELF-CARE and MINDFULNESS and TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT and FCUK OFF YOU FCUKING CNUTS LEAVE ME ALONE AND STOP PRESUMING THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE ATTAINED A DEGREE OF WEALTH AND INFLUENCE IN ONE SPECIFIC AREA OF YOUR LIFE THAT YOU THEREFORE HAVE INFINITE WISDOM TO IMPART TO THE REST OF US. This, basically: “It’s difficult for me not to identify a heaping dose of cynical smarminess in media that infantilizes the reader to this extent, particularly when it adopts the same cloying tone that Zoloft commercials and millennial-targeted ads have been using for years. Increasing openness about mental-health struggles in media and entertainment has had the unfortunate side effect of creating an opening for marketers to superficially “raise awareness” about depression on branded fast food Twitter accounts while maintaining plausible deniability that their sole intent isn’t to manipulate and exploit. Miranda and Sun’s foray into self-help stretches this plausible deniability to its absolute limit; when a book’s lesser-known co-author’s biography includes the phrase “currently a doctoral candidate at MIT, an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a creative researcher at the Harvard metaLAB,” and they are trying to sell you eight-word tweets and shaky line drawings of children tying their shoes, how can you not feel pandered to?”
• The Skimm: An interesting profile of violently successful daily news digest email newsletter lifestyle brand thing The Skimm, which if you’re an under-30s woman you are probably already a fan of already. If you’re not aware, The Skimm is a daily digest email presenting the things you NEED to know that day to present the normal, functioning adult’s facade you’d like people to think came naturally to you, all packaged in hyper-millennial language and with a healthy dose of brand/lifestyle selling woven in to boot. It’s a VERY smart operation, and I can’t begrudge its creators their success, but there is a line in this piece about it being aimed at a generation who treat their lives as an exercise in successful project management which ran very true and depressed me no end.
• Death of a Bookman: This is a fabulous portrait of a London that no longer exists, a publishing industry that no longer exists, an arts landscape that no longer exists…Philip Dosse was the owner and publisher of dozens of art industry magazines, from Books & Bookmen to Plays and Players, and a true eccentric, and this is a beautifully-written memory piece about him and his life and London publishing in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and how it all fell apart. Beautiful and elegiac and sad and weird, this is a perfect piece of history.
• James Mclean and the Poppy: A profile of Northern Irish footballer James Mclean and his refusal to wear a poppy on his kit for personal, religious, political reasons, and how that has led to him being the most vilified man in the Eglish game for a few weeks each year. Every year around Remembrance Sunday, and increasingly as we get further away from the great wars of the 20th Century, I become convinced that we have a deeply unhealthy relationship with the conflicts we’ve been involved with; this piece does nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Seriously, imagine reading this as an outsider and thinking anything other than ‘this is MAD’.
• One Month In The LA Betterness Cult: A brilliant piece on the oddity of the LA wellness scene, in which the author finds himself being initiated into a rebranded health cult from the 1970s and meets some genuinely mad people. Last time I saw my friend Adam I asked him in passing whether he’d seen any weird, dark stuff up in the Hollywood hills and he said in somewhat blase fashion that he’d been at this party once where people kept on popping to the basement and NEVER COMING BACK and there was a definite The Informers-style vibe about the anecdote is all I’m saying. This is funny but also very, very odd.
• Joel on Red Dead Redemption 2: Do you want to know what I have been experiencing in my journey into the life and world of the virtual cowboy? Joel explains it better than I ever could – if you don’t understand how or why videogames exert this pull on people, this is one of the better explanations.
• On The Edge of 17: An essay in which the female author remembers her teenage tearaway boyfriend, and all the things she didn’t tell herself, or let herself know, about him. Superb writing about being young and stupid and in love and how sometimes you only realise things about the person you were and the things you were doing with a distance of decades.
• Psychopaths and the Rest of Us: You have, I am sure, read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson – imagine if that book had had a better editor and a sensible word cap and you’ll have an idea about this article, describing the author’s encounters with psychopaths online, in a specific psycho chatroom (I am genuinely devastated that he doesn’t reveal the url at any point), and then subsequently on prison visits. Per everything ever written about psychopaths, expect to interrogate yourself quite hard after this one.
• My Posessions: Lee Randall, friend of Curios, and I were discussing last week’s piece all about the Museum of Human Memory on Twitter the other day, and she mentioned that she’d written this for Aeon about possessions and identity and memory, and I love it and you should all read it to. A gorgeous piece of writing about the extent to which stuff defines us, and, by contrast, about how without stuff we can occasionally appear somewhat inchoate, to others and to a degree to ourselves.
• I’m Black So You Don’t Have To Be: On blackness, and code-switching, and the differences in the concept of blackness and black identity across generations in the UK. I am, obviously, not black, so can’t speak to the the veracity or otherwise of the experiences here outlined, but it’s a superbly-written essay by Colin Grant.
• The Crisis of Intimacy: Superb, on the web and who we are and how we relate to each other: “The crisis of intimacy is not some accident, some coincidence with the rise of smartphones and social media. It is so hard to see the specific outlines of the relation, and not just because of the standard difficulties of establishing the true meaning of statistics. Who can see their own distortion clearly? Amara’s Law, which states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run, is true of human fate in general. In history, as in our intimate lives, the decisions we don’t consider are the ones with the most profound consequences. A mother’s off-handed remark. A party attended at the last minute. These shape us in ways paralyzing to contemplate. Kranzberg’s Law — “Technology is neither good nor bad, neither is it neutral” — has the good sense to acknowledge the inevitability of misunderstanding. It’s why time is the ultimate twist ending. It’s why the consequences of technology are never what anyone thinks they are.”
• Waugh: Finally this week, a long short story by Bryan Washington, about a group of male prostitutes living and working together in New York. This is so good, and a perfect way to spend 30 minutes this afternoon with a cup of tea. Go on, you deserve it.

By Maisie Cousins

AND FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s start with something old but which I have only just found. Long-term readers may recall my slight obsession with some VERY old-school internet content in the form of a series of stories about one man’s obsession with the idea of Roy Orbison being wrapped in clingfilm. There is now a short film on the same subject. WATCH IT:

2) Next, have a 90-minute film of the Earth, shot from orbit, in realtime. Put this on a big screen, get the laser bong out and, y’know, EXPAND YOUR MIND:

3) Next, this is the most incredible Rube Goldberg machine I have ever seen. No hyperbole, this is INSANE – watch and marvel:

4) Hiphop corner! Atmosphere’s album ‘When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint That Sh1t Gold’ is still one of my favourites of the 00s, as well as being one of my top 10 titles; this is his latest single – bit of a slow burn, but give it a minute or so and you’ll get the vibe I think. I am very much a fan of this man’s style – this is called ‘Graffiti’:

5) UK GRIME CORNER! MORE MANGA! This is a whole 37 minutes of him all over the RinseFM grime show and he is, as ever, superb:

6) Last up this week, a hymn and an exhortation and an excellent lesbian pop love song – this is by King Princess and it’s called ‘Pussy is God’ and BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK AND IN THE MEANTIME YOU TAKE CARE AND WRAP UP WARM AS IT’S STARTING TO GET COLD OUT AND MAYBE YOU COULD SPEND THIS WEEKEND MAKING A BIG VAT OF NOURISHING STEW AND PERHAPS STARTING TO MAP OUT YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING OR WHATEVER IT IS THAT WILL MAKE YOU HAPPIEST HERE IN EARLY NOVEMBER, BECAUSE THE MAIN THING IS THAT YOU FEEL OK AND RELAXED, OK? OK! I LOVE YOU! BYE!:

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I know this has been a tricky week, with all sorts of stress and pain and difficulty and quite a lot of general ‘wow, everything seems really quite messy and terrible, doesn’t it?’-type vibes knocking about, but, well, I have spent much of it being a digital cowboy and frankly that’s been enough to ensure that I’ve not really spent too much time thinking about it. It turns out that THIS is how to cope with the massive centrifuge of horror that is 2018 – simply hunker down and pretend that you’re in fact living an outlaw’s life in the late-19th century.

So sadly I have little to say about America’s racist President and his continued attempts to disfigure the US political landscape to the point of permanent scarring, or Comedy Phil Hammond’s largely theoretical Budget, or poor old ‘Handsy’ Sitwell and his swordfalling, or indeed much else – I have a supermarket trip to do (I know that you live for these occasional insights into my life) and then I am getting RIGHT back in the saddle. 

While I do that, why don’t you take a deep breath, travel to that special safe place within yourselves where you keep your reserves of courage and pluck and spunk, and prepare to take a walk back through the week online; the seemingly inexorable word inflation that seems to be afflicting Curios at the moment means that this one’s touching just shy of 10k words which means that probability suggests at least some of them ought to please you. Take my kilometric musings and let them inside you – THIS, AS EVER, IS WEB CURIOS!

By Chen Fei

LET’S KICK THINGS OFF WITH AN EPIC 40 MINUTE GRIME SET BY MANGA AND A BUNCH OF OTHER MCS!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERED BRIEFLY WHETHER THE ABILITY TO PROMO INSTA STORIES WILL LEAD US TO A POINT AT WHICH ORDINARY PUNTERS WITH A THIRST FOR INSTAFAME START BOOSTING THEIR STORIES IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT OF GETTING CAST ON LOVE ISLAND NEXT YEAR AND THEN REALISED THAT OF COURSE IT FCUKING WILL:

• The Facebook Numbers: Another set of quarterlies and another reminder that despite what we all might think of Facebook and its impact on our lives it remains a terrifyingly successful product which is nowhere near done insinuating itself into every single corner of the world. User numbers rose again (though once more stayed stagnant in the US and Europe), and there was lots of exciting (not exciting) talk about how Whatsapp and Stories are the next frontier in the great drive to full monetisation; a Facebook exec was quoted in Indian media this week as saying that ads were coming to Whatsapp’s ‘Status’ updates soonish, so, well, look forward to that one! The upshot here is that Facebook isn’t looking like it will stop being horribly ubiquitous anytime soon, basically.
• New, Better Instagram Analytics (and Promoted Stories!): Currently in beta and being tested with various usergroups worldwide (you can request access via the page here), this will nonetheless be rolled out all over the place SOON. This is big stuff, and presaging the imminent rollout of promotion for Stories – there are full details in the piece, but the information available to Page owners will include Story view numbers, swipe-ups, etc, for full conversion tracking, etc. They’re also making some tweaks to Facebook Analytics, though slightly less seismic ones. You can read more about the changes in this piece, but it leads with the FAR more exciting news that Instagram is currently running limited tests of the ability to PROMOTE YOUR STORIES! Effectively offering a similar functionality to the ‘Boost Post’ button on a FB Page, this is obviously VERY much aimed at the ‘normies’ market, with a high degree of automation in the targeting options, from simple lookalikes of your existing followers to basic geotargeting. So get ready for the parade of local ‘celebrities’ boosting themselves into your consciousness as they attempt to parlay being ‘big in Chelmsford’ to a slot on next year’s reality TV fleshfest.
• Share InstaTV Videos To Insta Stories: Insta continues to attempt to make its TV offering fly, this time by introducing the ability to cross-promote content from IGTV into your Instagram Story; although, bizarrely, it’s not a particularly well-realised integration and means (like the Soundcloud integration from last week) that you will simply be able to insert a still image of the InstaTV video into your Story which will then link to the full content on InstaTV rather then presenting it as a native part of your story. Which is significantly less good than one might have hoped, and makes me wonder why they bothered. (also, semi-related but I am really sorry about how ugly the writing here is, but I promise you that descriptions of products from the Facebook stable really don’t lend themselves to sparkling prose).
• Facebook Offers a Bunch of New Ad Formats In Advance of Black Friday: This is actually OLD NEWS, but I only saw it this week (and even then only courtesy of the even-more-complete-than-Web-Curios news roundup by We Are Social, which you ought to keep an eye on if you care about this stuff as they pick up the stuff that I miss or which, quite often, I am simply too bored or underwhelmed by to write up) – anyway, if you have actual physical products to flog and you want to do so on Facebook with a selection of EXCITING NEW AD UNIT TYPES then, well, it’s like all your Christmases have come at once. There’s some quite interesting stuff buried in here about automatic video creation too, should you care about being able to make mediocre product showreels from existing stock imagery.
• Facebook ‘Breaking News’ Expands to UK and Elsewhere: Facebook’s ‘Breaking News’ functionality (whereby select publishers have the opportunity to tag posts as ‘breaking news’ a couple of times per week, thereby giving their post a special designation within FB and, from what I can tell, granting it a small in-feed signal boost to boot) is now rolling out to a range of other countries including the UK. Which will only be of relevance if you work for a news org (although I wonder how loosely they’ll apply this – will ‘Closer’ make the cut? Love It? One can but hope).
• Snap Launches Desktop AR Camera: Following some…slightly iffy numbers in the latest earnings report, Snap’s latest announcement seems another step on the path to ceasing being a messaging platform and instead being the de facto AR layer in other companies’ tech stacks. “Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom and more, plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can browse through Snapchat’s Lens Explorer to try on AR face filters. And through its easily equipped new Twitch extension, streamers can trigger different masks with hotkeys.” So there. This is potentially a really interesting development.
• You Can Now Integrate LinkedIn Ads With Google Campaign Manager: A perfect headline; I literally don’t have to write anything else, thank fcuk.
• Promoted Carousel Comes To Pinterest: Has your professional existence been rendered awful by the lack of sufficient ad units on Pinterest? Have you been lying awake of a night wishing that there was a way that you could promote five images at once to your eager audience of cake fetishists and West Elm fans and wedding planners? YOUR PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED.
• Twitch Launching Karaoke Product: They’re launching this in beta to a ‘select’ number of creators, but I will be fascinated to see how this works and whether it takes off; for certain types of artists/streamers, the prospect of offering your fans a direct, in-broswer singalong opportunity is HUGE, and there has to be some sort of ‘world’s biggest singalong’ or ‘largest online choir ever’ stunt that you could pull…basically I think this is a MASSIVE PR opportunity for the right brand / streamer, so, er, go and do it! There’s a bigger, more in-depth dissection of how it works here should you desire one.
• New Google Docs Shortcuts: Fine, it’s not really about s*c**l m*d**, but it is work-ish and so it sort of fits here. You can now create new GDocs, sheets, etc, directly in-browser simply by typing ‘new.doc’ or ‘new.form’ or ‘new.sheet’ or whatever. Which is nice.
• Moon AR: I really, really like this idea; I had quite a few conversations this year with people about using large-scale environmental points as AR markers, but at no point did I think ‘hm, you could actually use the moon as a marker, couldn’t you, wouldn’t that be interesting and fun?’ which is why I am not doing some sort of highly-paid and exciting marketing gig for a film studio and instead am wild-haired and baggy of face in a South London kitchen at 7:26am on a Friday morning. Anyway, this is a promo for the newish film about the moon landings, which will show you COOL STUFF via in-browser AR if you visit the site on your phone and then point it at the moon. DO IT.
• The World’s First FB Messenger Novel: On the one hand, innovation! On the other, unnecessary and awful! This is the latest book by one-man thriller production line James Patterson, the sort of author whose heavily-embossed surname you have almost certainly noticed in passing as you stride purposefully past WH Smith towards the Wetherspoons at the airport, and you can ‘enjoy’ it through FB Messenger, which gives you all sorts of exclusive content and features which basically take the BORING old concept of the novel and make it shiny and exciting – video and audio clips! Photos! An exclusive FB discussion Group! An Instagram profile for the main character (imagine how sad that will look in about a month when they get to the end of the planned content calendar and the budget runs out)! This is…unnecessary, I think.
• The 2008 Pepsi Rebrand: A decade ago, Pepsi did a rebrand. This week, the design document setting out the branding agency’s thinking did the rounds online; this is, as far as I can tell, genuine; it’s also an absolutely mental, Brass Eye-level, beyond parody example of brandwankery which I urge you all to look at and try and make sense of; honestly, by the time you get to the end this has basically become the PDF version of the ‘Galaxy Brain’ meme.

By Thomas Hart Benton

NEXT, TRY STREAMING THE NEW RECORD BY OPEN MIKE EAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS SO MUCH LIKE A COWBOY THAT IT’S BEEN WRITING THIS WHILST WEARING NOTHING MORE THAN A PAIR OF BACKLESS CHAPS, PT.1:

• The Facebook Junk News Aggregator: A prpoject by Oxford University which is looking to track and measure the quantity of what it terms ‘junk news’ being shared on Facebook, specifically in the runup to the US midterms; the study defines ‘junk news’ as being “various forms of propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, or conspiratorial political news and information. The term includes news publications that present verifiably false content as factual news. This content includes propagandistic, ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, or conspiracy-oriented news and information. Frequently, attention-grabbing techniques are used, such as lots of pictures, moving images, excessive capitalization, personal attacks, emotionally charged words and pictures, populist generalizations, and logical fallacies. It presents commentary as news. The term refers to a publisher overall, i.e. based on content that is typically published by a publisher, rather than referring to an individual article.” This is…sort of staggering, really. I mean, obviously anyone who’s spent longer than 30s online in the past 3-4 years is reasonably aware of what an incredible cesspit of idiocy Facebook can be, but looking down this list (which in its default view presents ‘junk news’ in reverse-chronological order, showing you the newest links first) you get an impression of the sheer volume of this stuff, and the range of weird, shonky ‘news’ sites punting it out. There’s a better and more comprehensive look at the study and how it works here, but do have a poke around for yourself (just be careful what you click on, there is a LOT of frothy-mouthed lunacy here).
• Voiceroulette: Have you ever thought ‘you know, what I really want is a service exactly like Chatroulette which connects me with random strangers online at the press of a button, but one which drops the ‘video’ part of the experience to prevent me from having to see a succession of overweight men masturbating tenaciously into their webcam’s eye with the sort of steely determination ordinarily reserved for endurance athletes’? No, you probably haven’t, and yet Voiceroulette STILL exists! I rather like this actually; when I played with it earlier this week I had a really nice chat with an English tutor in Warsaw who was using it to help his clients learn conversational English and he didn’t attempt to talk to me about his penis even once, so, well, RESULT!
• Guns In America: In another week in which Americans once again sadly trotted out that Onion article which stopped being funny about twenty mass shootings ago, Time Magazine published this superb interactive profiling a variety of Americans and their relationship with guns. The webwork is really nice, interactive and shiny without being showy for its own sake.
• Plink (Redux): This is a VERY RARE Web Curios moment in which I feature a link for the SECOND TIME EVER (quick everyone, the internet is running out!). I have just checked, and I first wrote up Plink in March 2014 (in which edition of Curios I opened by making some weak gag about George Osborn’s budget and wow don’t those look like innocent, halcyon days by contrast) – that’s 4.5 WHOLE YEARS, webmongs, that I’ve been doing this . Anyway, for those of you without the encyclopaedic recall of all the links I have ever featured that I seemingly have, Plink is a webtoy which lets you make surprisingly good musical compositions in collaboration with other strangers online, simply bly clicking and wiggling your mouse a bit. It’s super simple, and they have just revamped the interface meaning that it looks all shiny and nice, and, well, go and have a play, it’s a lot of fun.
• Gluckauf: There’s meant to be an umlaut in this word but, well, life’s too short. Have YOU ever wanted to take a (surprisingly shiny) 360 video pseudo-VR interactive tour around a German mine? No, you probably haven’t, but why not take one anyway? “At the end of 2018, the last coal mine in the Rhine-Ruhr region will close. An era that shaped the whole country economically and socially will be over forever. But, even after the last pit is closed, you can still experience this impressive underground world, with your own eyes in our Virtual Mine.”  You can experience this in-browser or with a VR headset, and the production values are really very high indeed, although, well, it’s….oh God, I feel bad saying this, but, well, it’s really dull – I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, fine, but after about 5 minutes of looking round at damp walls and industrial boring machinery I was about ready to escape. I can imagine if I did this in full VR I would get quite claustrophobic quite quickly; on reflection, there’s probably some quite fun horror stuff you can do playing on that specific feeling (although, er, totally unrelated to German mines).  
• Gifaanisqatsi: Jesus, I’m not typing that again. You might have seen this this week – either in B3ta or elsewhere as it’s done the rounds – but in case not, it is GREAT. I can’t explain it any better than its creator, Monkeon, so in their words: “Koyaanisqatsi is a 1983 wordless documentary primarily made up of slow motion and time-lapse footage. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the trailer here. I wondered how easy it would be to make an internet version using random Giphy ‘gifs’ which have been tagged as slow motion or time-lapse, playing them along with the Philip Glass soundtrack.” The random juxtapositions it throws up are genuinely wonderful, and I could see a version of this being taken absolutely seriously as a piece of generative art.
• 1150 Free Films: I mean, you can’t say fairer than that, can you? Open Culture presents this INCREDIBLE selection of links to freely available films online; most of them old, many of them classics, subdivided by category. Seriously, if you’re a fan of crap kung fu movies then MY GOD will you be happy with the selection laid out here, but enthusiasts of any genre should be pretty well served. Look, who doesn’t want to watch ‘Vegetarian World’, a 1982 documentary in which”William Shatner walks us through the history, benefits, and misconceptions of adhering to a vegetarian diet.” NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO (apart, perhaps, from Handsy Sitwell (topical!)).
• Turtle Audio: This is a fun toy. You know that ‘Turtle’ thing that so many people learned to do basic coding with back in the day? You remember – that programmable drawing toy which you could instruct to move in simple patterns with the base commands of forward, turn left, turn right, etc? This is that, except a) it’s virtual; and b) you can ascribe different notes to various points on the route you program, turning the whole thing into a music making game. It looks very simple, but if you click on the tutorial explaining how to make more interesting patterns you can see that with a bit of work you can create reasonably complex, multi-layered compositions. Fine, it’s not the most efficient way of composing your next symphonic masterpiece, but it’s an excellent way of somehow filling all these empty, dragging hours between birth and death.
• Feedfilter: This really annoyed me when I found it, not least because some friends and I came up with this EXACT idea about 9 months ago and then obviously did nothing with it because we are a) lazy; b) incapable of coding; c) but mostly lazy. Feedfilter is a service into which you can plug your Twitter feed in order for it to show you all the ones that could be considered ‘offensive’; it also gives you the opportunity to go through and prune all the ones it picks up from your feed. Which is…fine, but it only seems to pick up on the major swears, and it’s all a bit po-faced. Look, OUR version was going to be called ‘milkshakeduck.me’ and it was going to tell you exactly how likely it was on a percentage scale to get Milkshake Ducked in the future based on your Twitter history, and we were going to use the full BBC moderation list of banned words as part of the analysis, with different terms given different badness weightings and GOD IT WAS SUCH A GOOD IDEA. I am now in an AWFUL sulk, sorry, will try and snap out of it.
• Time Traveler: I was CERTAIN I’d done this one already, but seems not – Time Traveler is a lovely idea from US dictionary publishers Merriam-Webster which lets you select a year from a drop-down and then presents you with a list of all the words which were first introduced to the dictionary in that year; so, on checking the year of my birth, I can discover that 1979 was the year in which ‘first world problems’ was first granted official ‘real term’ status, and the year in which ‘hip hop’ first earned a place (which absolutely backs up the lie I most like to tell my friends’ small children, to whit that I invented hiphop). Fascinating linguistic history, well-presented.
• Soul Machines: I was pretty much convinced that this was a promo site for a fictional corporation from a new film or game when I first found this, part of some sort of transmedia marketing effort, and yet it seems to be entirely sincere and REALLY COLDLY CREEPY (although they are Kiwis so probably not all bad). “We use neural networks that combine biologically inspired models of the human brain and key sensory networks to create a virtual central nervous system that we call our Human Computing Engine™. When you ‘plug’ our engaging and interactive artificial humans into our cloud-based Human Computing Engine™, we can transform modern life for the better by revolutionizing the way AI, robots and machines interact with people.” It’s not 100% certain what the company actually, practically does, but a look at the website with all its photorealistic CGI renders of eerily perfect human faces does rather suggest that they’re helping usher in a future full of smooth-faced, dead-eyed AI companions. Great!
• Fridge Detective: a subReddit dedicated entirely to people posting photographs of the content of their fridges, for other people to use to guess what sort of person they are. “Show me a man’s fridge and I will tell you the very essence of his soul”, as the old saying goes, this is oddly and perversely fascinating – there’s something weirdly intimate about seeing these, though I’m at a loss as to why I feel that, and even BETTER is the chance to look at the madly calorific fridges of North America, where it’s not unusual to see a selection of food which contains NO natural ingredients whatsoever.
• Glyph Drawing Club: A very involved glyph-based image creator, which lets upi pick from upto 100-odd elements which you can combine on a grid to compose fonts, images, etc, to your heart’s content. Fiddly, but if you’re a design-y type person then you might find quite a lot to enjoy in here.
• The Art Institute Chicago Collection: Another wonderful museum archived digitised for the enjoyment of the curious, this is a really nicely-done piece of digital curation, offering the ability to search by a wide and flexible range of criteria and presenting the works in a clean, easy-to-browse manner. The variety of work on display here, from an extensive pop-art collection to a significant body of work from the African diaspora, is impressive, and you could happily spend a few hours disappearing down rabbitholes; why not do that instead of working on that Powerpoint thing you’re supposed to be doing, the one that you know deep down is a total waste of time and exactly the sort of crushing busywork that we all know robs us of our dignity and eats away at what remains of our ‘souls’? Go on.
• Picular: This describes itself as ‘Google, for colours’, which, frankly, I can’t really improve upon. You type in your colour palette inspiration (say, vomit, or pustule, or wound) and it will present you with a series of colours which it associates with that keyword, based on (as far as I can tell) running a hex analysis on the Google Image results for that term. Potentially helpful if you’re looking for A N Other site to assist when pulling palettes together.
• Request A Woman Scientist: Do YOU have a need for a speaker, panellist, board member or similar? Do YOU need that person to be a scientist? Would YOU like to ensure that you at least pay lip service to diversity by ensuring that you book a woman? GREAT! This is a smart and useful tool created as part of the 500 Woman Scientists initiative which lets you either sign up to a database of female scientists worldwide or to search said database, by discipline, interest, degree status and geography to ensure that you never again have an excuse for having a scientific debate undertaken entirely by middle-aged men.
• Naked Mole Rat Cam: Naked mole rats – creatures once memorably described by someone who I can’t for the life of me recall as looking not unlike flaccid caucasian penises with teeth, which I defy you to ever forget – are REALLY odd looking little buggers, but apparently they’re also quite interesting for a variety of zoological reasons, which is why the Smithsonian has set up this webcam letting you observe these tiny, penile creatures going about their daily business. At the time of writing there is literally NOTHING going on, but I guarantee that if you check in around about now (does this attempt at reaching forward into the future in which you’re reading this work as an authorial device? I’m not sure it does) then you’ll see all sorts of writhing pink fun happening. If that’s your thing.
• Art Connoisseur: An excellent Twitter bot which Tweets out images of old art and offers up its own critique of the pieces in question; you can read about how it works here, should you so desire, but it’s good, clean, silly, artwanky fun.
• Aqua Dew: The lovely thing about the now and the coming future is that, thanks to our phones and digital tracking and voice assistants and smart homes and the like, there are very few places and times in our lives when we’re not intimately connected and communicating with one of the tech behemoths. One of the few times, in fact, is when we’re in the shower – or at least that used to be the case, but now, thanks to the just-funded miracle of Aqua Dew on Kickstarter (I don’t know why, but the weirdly low and very specifi funding target makes me a little suspicious here), you can take Jeff Bezos, or at the very least his omnipresent digital avatar, into the shower with you! Aqua Dew is a shower-mountable, waterproof, voice-activated Alexa unit which you can use to…er…well, almost certainly just listen to music, but who knows? Maybe you’ll want to dictate your novel or your shopping list or just ask Alexa what the news is today, or do some shopping….you know, I feel I ought to write something vaguely ‘WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO?!’-ish about this, but why bother? This is what the world is coming to; it just feels clunky because we still need the boxes, but fast forward 15-20 years when voice assistant tech is just ambient reality and we will think nothing of chatting to Alexa v.4.0 whilst voiding our bowels or ‘making love’. So it goes.
• Magic UX: Ooh, this is very interesting. Magic UX is a project by…er…Special Projects Studio which prototypes a really novel and rather smart user interface based on navigating between browser windows via the physical movement of your handset. It’s hard to explain, but imagine that all the windows you have open on your phone are arrayed as an invisible row, left to right, and you can switch between them by physically moving your phone along said virtual row, copy and paste between them with ease, etc. You sort of have to watch the promo video to get a feel for it, but the opportunities seem huge – take a look and see what you think.
• Make Yourself Great: God this site made me miserable. It’s all part of the SELF-IMPROVEMENT and PERSONAL GROWTH movement, and asks you to tell it how much time you spend doing ‘distracting’ things (social media, gaming, watching TV, ‘going out’, etc) vs how much you spend doing ‘productive’ things (by ‘productive’ it means learning, making stuff, etc etc); it then shows you how much more time you could have to do GOOD THINGS if you cut out some of the distractions, and how that would enable you, over time, to be more productive and successful and stuff. This is, at its core, exactly the same sort of horrific, LinkedIn-friendly, GaryVee-style strugglepornwank that I despise so much; such a pathetically narrow definition of what is ‘good’, such a total lack of understanding of the mental space afforded by doing certain ‘distracting’ things, such a pathetic and miserable obsession with SUCCESS and ACHIEVEMENT and GOALS and QUANTIFICATION and dear God you awful people just relax for fcuk’s sake.

By Charlotte Abramov

NEXT UP, TRY A VERY NON-WINTERY SET BY MOVE D FROM LAST YEAR’S SONAR!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS SO MUCH LIKE A COWBOY THAT IT’S BEEN WRITING THIS WHILST WEARING NOTHING MORE THAN A PAIR OF BACKLESS CHAPS, PT.1:

• Dark Studio: There’s nothing wrong with this at all, to be clear – a new darkroom in East London which will help you learn to shoot and develop your own prints – but the absolute (post-?)hipster fetishisation of ANALOGUE all over this site did make me laugh rather. Still, if you fancy spending some money on learning how to do your own photo prints in the company of the sort of people who I am fairly confident in predicting will get into this because of the fakeness of Insta (“it use to be so much more real back in the day, yeah, but now it’s all influencers and it’s just, well, so artificial,, you know?”) and yet then go on to take photographs of their eventual prints to put on that very platform. The twats.
• Giant Poppy Watch: A Twitter account tracking the annual madness around Remembrance Sunday and the culture wars around the poppy / no poppy / white poppy debate. If you ever momentarily let it slip your mind that there is something very, very odd and not entirely healthy about this country’s relationship to the World Wars, this will very much remind you.
• Hundreds of Thousands of Copyright-Free Vintage Graphics: I’ve done that thing where as a result of writing a very comprehensive and descriptive title here I’ve not really got anything else to say about the link in question. Erm, onwards!
• Chroma: This bills itself as an AR Piano tutor, and in theory this is a very smart idea indeed – you fire up the app, select the piece you want to play, then point your phone at your piano keyboard to see an AR representation of the notes flying off the relevant keys in time, giving you a visual cue as to where your fingers are meant to be and when. Except, and this is the kicker, HOW ARE YOU MEANT TO PLAY THE PIANO IF YOU ARE HOLDING YOUR PHONE TO LOOK AT IT THROUGH THE CAMERA? IS NOT POSSIBLE! Either I am being an idiot here and not really understanding how this is supposed to work, or someone here has dropped something of a ricket.
• 190 Free Online University Courses: Look, despite what I often write here about being avowedly anti-effort I’m not against self-improvement and stuff – you want to better yourselves academically? GREAT! More power to you! Look, here’s a whole bunch of free online courses from a load of Universities around the world, meaning you can start thinking about which of them you’re going to start in a burst of optimism in January before giving up disillusioned in March! These skew towards engineering and computer science, but there are a dozen or so arts courses which might be of interest, amongst other things.
• Macbook Alarm: Simple-and-clever, this is tool for Macs designed for people who ‘work’ in cafes and who want to be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that someone’s going to half-inch their computer; you set up the alarm and it will SHRIEK if someone unplugs it or closes the lid, along with sending you a message on Telegram. Clever, this.
• Great Minds Auction: There is currently an auction taking place at Christie’s in London, in which you can bid on the papers and ephemera of some of the greatest scientific minds ever produced; Darwin, Newton, Einstein and Hawking. You want a signed note from Newton repaying a loan? Christ knows why, but OK! You want a letter from Darwin saying he can’t attend an event due to ill-health? Fine, you weirdo. You want…er…one of Hawking’s electric wheelchairs? WHY DO YOU WANT THAT? I sort of feel whoever buys that ought to be on some sort of list somewhere, but perhaps I am being unfair (when I Tweeted about this, Internet Oddity Sadeagle asked me whether it had been washed, which suggested that he ought to be on a list somewhere).
• Book Errata: Fabulously pedantic site collating book errata – those mistakes that make it to publication despite the best efforts of editors – and offering a classification of books based on how many mistakes they contain (it’s wonderfully sniffy, with ratings veering between, ‘Sloppy’, ‘Very Sloppy’ and ‘Horrendous’). I am very, very glad that this site exists, but simultaneously I wouldn’t really want to spend too much time with the people who contribute to it.
• Word Mine: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is made by Sensible Object, the games company that make Beasts of Balance, whose founder Alex I know a bit; regardless NO MONEY HAS CHANGED HANDS in exchange for me featuring this link (although if anyone wants to discuss the possibility of SPONSORED CONTENT in Curios then, well, I can’t say we wouldn’t consider it). Anyway, Word Mine is a fun free game for Alexa which merges anagrams and puzzles and light discovery – “Crack the anagram by digging deep into the Word Mine. Your handy canary will help you discover the letters needed to master the mines. You are an explorer on a mission to piece together the forgotten words of the world. Your canary assistant guides and helps you navigate the mines, she looks out for your safety and helps you read the letters, but it’s up to you to solve the anagram in time before the mine collapses in on you” – into a cute experience which might appeal to those of you with linguistically-curious kids. Worth a look imho.
• Blloc: You already have a phone. You almost certainly don’t want to buy this, a model specially designed to minimise distractions and intrusions by making the interface monochromatic and generally unappealing, and splitting apps and notifications into a separate part of the interface to minimise their ability to mess with your focus. There are, though, a few rather nice design features to this – the toggle for colour vs monochromatic view at the touch of a button is really quite clever I think, and the way in which the UI works so as to minimise the number of times you’ll have to actually open apps rather than just browsing their information via the homescreen is neat; if you’re the sort of wilfully obscurantist weirdo who would rather have a phone that NOONE ELSE uses (ie me, who even had a bloody Windows Phone for a couple of years because, well, it was different (and really, really sh1t, turns out)) then this could be of interest.
• Poetryscript: Creating sonnets from individual lines taken from the 57,000 novels available as part of the Gutenburg project. Silly, but the outputs are surprisingly good and it has a decent ear for rhyme and meter which a lot of these toys don’t always possess.
• The Caselaw Access Project: This is a SPECTACULAR resource – “CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States. Our scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Our earliest case is from 1658, and our most recent cases are from 2018.Each volume has been converted into structured, case-level data broken out by majority and dissenting opinion, with human-checked metadata for party names, docket number, citation, and date.” So basically the entire recorded history of US law, made available for you to mess with – just THINK of what you could do with this stuff with access to a decent RNN and some computational heft; I reckon we’re going to see some really interesting analyses of how race and gender have played out in the courts, for a start, along with some fascinating stuff about the changing language of the law, but for starters here’s a toy which turns fragments of case law from the archive into limericks because, well, why not?
• Miniature Calendar: A truly astonishing labour of love which has, incredibly, been going on for nearly 8 years(!) – since 2011, this calendar presents one photo per day of tiny little dioramas. Why? WHY NOT? “Everyone must have had thoughts like these before: Broccoli and parsley may sometimes look like a forest of trees, and tree leaves floating on the surface of water may sometimes look like little boats. Everyday occurrences seen from a miniature perspective can bring us lots of fun thoughts. I wanted to take this way of thinking and express it through photographs, so I started to put together a “MINIATURE CALENDAR.” These photographs primarily depict diorama-style figures surrounded by daily necessities.” So cute I might die.
• Maquette: This is potentially interesting for those of you who work in VR or who want to work in VR – Maquette is a free set of tools launched recently by Microsoft and currently in Beta which are designed to let anyone create assets for VR in reasonably simple fashion; far more practical than the rather more arty Tiltbrush and the like, this feels a lot more like the sort of thing that engineers rather than artists might enjoy (a neat encapsulation of the difference between Microsoft and Google there). I haven’t tried it, but the videos give a reasonable degree of clarity as to what it can do, and as a flexible tool to model for VR environments it seems pretty powerful and intuitive. At least one of you will use this to make a big, geometric VR penis, and I am probably ok with that.
• Walpurgis: There is nothing about women’s footwear that doesn’t strike me as part of a cruel and unusual punishment – look, now that fashion and footwear design is no longer the preserve of men, why aren’t shops flooded with women’s shoes that aren’t mad and murderous to wear? Are you all secretly footwear masochists? I demand to be told. Anyway, of all the mad and horrifying footwear things I have seen, these potentially take the metaphorical biscuit – you want clogs designed to look like hooves, angled so vertiginously that you almost expect them to have the red soles of Louboutin? GREAT! These are really, really sinister, and frankly the rest of the site – Japanese, obvs, and which seems to sell…odd silken Elvish ears? – gives me a touch of the fantods.
• Websites In 2018: Very well observed, but will make you immediately notice exactly how incredibly fcuking annoying almost all websites are right now.
• Amazing Mazes: This site features hand-drawn (and computer-generated, but it’s the hand-drawn ones that are the real…er…draw) mazes of a degree of brow-furrowing complexity so great that you wonder as to the creator’s sanity. These are all available as hi-res JPEGs, so why not print a selection out on A3 paper and spend the afternoon getting increasingly frustrated and cross-eyed as you try and solve them sitting on the floor by your desk (ideally with your tongue poking out of the corner of your mouth, for the full ‘concentrating idiot’ look).
• The Autoblow AI: You may recall that several years ago I featured the Autoblow on Kickstarter – a weirdly R2D2-reminiscent machine into which men would, it was assumed, push their erections in order to experience a sad, lonely and almost certainly unrealistic representation of fellatio. Those were good times, weren’t they? Anyway, now times have moved on and so has the Autoblow – now they’re crowdfunding a version with AI TECHNOLOGY! Yes, that’s right, the power of artificial intelligence (not, in fact, AI or anything like it) will allow you to receive 10 different types of sad, lonely and almost certainly unrealistic representations of fellatio! If you want a brief glimpse of just how bleak this is, can I just quote from the campaign site – “FLUIDS REMAIN INSIDE THE SLEEVE! Because your penis naturally plugs the opening of the sleeve, all fluids remain inside. Ejaculte freely without messy consequences!” SO BLEAK. However, if you want a (slightly dark) laugh, I can’t recommend this enough – there’s even a pseudo-academic paper about the science of the blowjob that they use to underpin their wankmachine’s tech. You don’t need to read it all – in fairness, it is actually a proper paper with proper maths and stuff – just click the link and scroll a bit til you get to the animated gif (you’ll know the one I mean) and take a moment to realise that, yes, men really ARE this obsessed with their penises.  
• Sorry: Finally this week, a powerful little ‘game’ made by Dan Hett which details the his experiences of media intrusion in the wake of his brother’s death as a victim of the Manchester bombings. All the messages from media you see here are real, which makes it all the bleaker – it’s not a ‘fun’ game, but it’s an excellent example of using ludic mechanics to make a point hit home, hard.

By Catrin Welz-Stein

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS AMBIENTY, NOODLEY ONE BY LEONID NEVERMIND!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Mere Pseud: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a really interesting project; a fictionalised autobiography, in diary form, of a young man in early-80s England. SO evocative of a certain time and place, so much so that you can almost see the dogsh1t-brown Datsun Cherry parked outside.
• Angular Merkel: In honour of Mutti.
• Sherlock Topz: Absoolutely no idea why the person behind this Tumblr – which celebrates the Sherlock/Foster ship in very explicit fashion (the drawing at the bottom is…remarkable, and very NSFW) – decided to start it this week, but damn fandoms are odd and wonderful things.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Japanese Sandwich Bags: Sharing photos of the plastic bags in which Japanese people keep sandwiches. WHY NOT EH?
• Sandwich Monsters: Making monsters out of food, primarily sandwiches; if you want to feel inadequate about the amount of effort you put into amusing your kids at mealtimes then this will do it.
• Subway Ads: Collecting examples of subway advertisements in New York which have been modified by the public; these prove, much as it pains me, that commuters in NYC are funnier than those in London.
• Subway Creatures: On the one hand, I think that taking photos of people in public without their knowledge and then posting said pictures to the web for the numbers is a crappy thing to do; on the other hand, these are REALLY funny and tbh if you’re going to actually urinate on the tracks then, well, perhaps you deserve to be shamed.
• Please Hate These Things: Collecting appalling examples of interior decoration from the world of US property adverts. Some of these are just ASTONISHING.
• Mediugh: I imagine that this is made by one of you, seeing as the associated Twitter account started following me at launch – in any case, Mediugh offers up beautifully-illustrated examples of the small things that annoy journalists and PRs (if you’re a journalist, the existence of PRs; if you’re a PR, the fact that your job is a joke and noone respects you).
• Spongenuity: An artist working on algorithmically-generated portraits which are drawn by a doodline machine. These are BEAUTIFUL and there are prints for sale which I am totally going to buy one of right now.
• Sarah Sitkin: There is quite a lot of body horror here, including full skinsuits. You have been warned.
• Fecal Matter: But I promise you it’s nowhere near as unpleasant as this, which honestly creeps me out something chronic and is basically what I think would happen if someone crossed the aesthetic of Hellraiser with Vogue.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How We Radicalised The World: It’s not been a great week for those of us increasingly concerned that we’ve spent the past decade effectively creating conditions designed specifically to facilitate the rise of extremist views, it’s fair to say, what with shootings and racism on the campaign trail and Italy and Germany and Brazil…this Buzzfeed piece is a general sort of ‘look how we’ve messed this all up’ piece, but presents an interesting chronology of the past few years and all the ways in which online activity has bled into real life politics and, well, WOW when you set it out like this is there a compelling argument to be made that perhaps we ought to just turn off the internet and maybe hibernate for a few decades.
• Bolsonaro In His Own Words: Obviously it’s unfair to judge a politician until they take office, and obviously it’s impossible to assess the likely impact of any leader until you see how they behave once power is in their hands, but, well, reading through this list of official quotes from Brazil’s lovable new leader, it’s fair to say that I’m not hugely convinced that he’s going to be a force for good in the world.
• Screens and Kids in Silicon Valley: You may not be hugely surprised on reading this piece to discover that Silicon Valley’s elites are somewhat disinclined to allow their kids to binge on screentime ,instead being of the opinion that it’s, well, not very good for them. Leaving aside the bleak ‘comedy’ of this, the piece paints a somewhat worrying picture of an additional potential divide developing between the rich and poor – of course if you don’t have any money and limited time you’ll be more likely to default to parenting-by-screen based on the near-infinite degree of mostly-free distraction it provides vs the expensive and finite (by contrast) pleasures afforded by books or travel or whatever. Welcome to a future in which people at the lower end of the income scale eat worse food, have worse health and consume more infojunk than people at the top, and in which the chances of doing anything about the poverty gap start to look significantly more remote the harder you squint.
• Self-Driving Ethics: You may recall that a year or so ago a link did the rounds online which presented a series of dilemmas based on the idea of a self-driving car; you were asked to choose, in a variety of differing scenarios with different actors, whether you would prefer a vehicle under AI control to risk the lives of driver and passenger or of pedestrians, given a range of different variables. Millions of people worldwide participated in the experiment, meaning MIT is now able to publish the findings which throw up some fascinating variations in morality around the world, particularly related to the relative value placed on young and old lives in different parts of the world. This is a genuinely interesting read, not least on the extent to which we can be said to share a moral perspective as a culture.
• Online Hate in the Real World: A sort of companion piece to the first article linked to here, this is another Buzzfeed writeup looking at the way in which online vitriol is increasingly translating to real-world action, from pipebombs to synagogue shootings, and which argues that part of the problem is the extent to which we’re now so inured to people saying awful, extreme things online that we aren’t able to accurately predict which of the hate-spewing nutjobs on 4chan is actually going to grab the automatic and which is just going to continue rubbing themselves insensible to tentacle hentai. Not cheering.
• School Shooting Survivors: A wonderful piece of photojournalism / interviewing by New York Magazine, which profiles 27 Americans who have survived high school shootings since 1946; beautiful photos, brave people, very sad stories. The first recorded instance of a high school shooting in the US was in 1840, by the way.
• Making Money From Mindfulness: I’ve spoken before about how irritated I am by tech people who spend much of the late-00s/early-10s exploiting the Skinner Box-like design principles of social media for commercial gain before pivoting into mindfulness apps in later life as they discovered that it was SO STRESSFUL being really rich and, actually, maybe all this tech isn’t that good for us after all, hey? Not to mention the specific London ones who spent much of their time making cost with Milo (O HAI MICHAEL ACTON SMITH). Anyway, this is about how people are monetising mindfulness – the numbers here are staggering, and there’s obviously a market for it, but there’s something unpleasantly surface level (ironically) about it all, and there’s a good point buried in here about how perhaps this is all just, well, keeping us compliant: “That meditation and mindfulness have entered the repertoire of global capitalism isn’t surprising: In the face of stagnant wages and an ever-deteriorating boundary between work and whatever we do outside it, why not shift the responsibility of finding peace to the individual? Put another way: Next time work makes you feel less than human, should you gently speak truth to power, or should you use mindfulness to self-regulate and maintain function in an oppressive system? And should you choose to self-regulate, are you tacitly thanking the oppressive system for giving you the tools of self-regulation to begin with? “
• All Magazines Go To Heaven: A profile of James Hyman and his remarkable Hyman Archive, something which I featured in one of the very first Web Curios back in the H+K days and which I am delighted to find is still very much a thing. For those of you unfamiliar, James Hyman used to work at MTV and started collecting magazines for professional purposes; this soon grew into an obsession, to the point where he now owns and administers the largest collection of magazines from around the world. If you’ve never had a poke around it, can I suggest you take a moment to visit the website because, honestly, it’s an incredible feat.
• Memory of Mankind: This is, honestly, one of the more oddly beautiful and touching things I read this week – I found myself thinking about it far more than I would have expected. Martin Kunze is a 50 year old Austrian man who has established the Memory of Mankind in a salt mine near his home; the project involves taking information about people, their lives, their hobbies, their learnings, about science and art and maths and medicine, and etching it on ceramic tablets to be kept, forever, in a cave in the salt mine where, over aeons, the levels of salt will rise and eventually expose them to the outside world again. This is SUCH an incredible project, effectively seeking to provide a snapshot, microcosmic as it will necessarily be, of the human experience for future civilisations. The wonderfully postmodern flattening of context this engenders is particularly wonderful – the juxtaposition of personal blogs and scientific journals and photos and…look, just read the piece and then go and visit the museum’s website; for a relatively small cost you can submit your own data to be etched and stored, which personally I would LOVE – I might submit a few Curios, as I feel certain that future civilisations will be THRILLED to bathe in my webspaff.
• Boyscouts in a Warzone: I read this and I confess did a little bit of a weep at how INCREDIBLY sweet it is – the Boy Scouts of the Central African Republic fulfil a particular and unique function in the country, riven as it is by warring factions, corruption and a barely-functioning infrastructure, taking the idea of ‘doing good’ to pretty significant conclusions. A fascinating portrait of a very, very fcuked country.
• The Petty Hall of Fame: A BRILLIANT list of the 60 pettiest moments in human history – obviously incomplete, as I personally have witnessed at least three instances that deserve to be on here – including such gems as Lord Byron’s insistence in keeping a domesticated bear as a pet in order to thumb his nose at his College’s rules against keeping dogs, and the brilliant story of the Iran-Turkey conflict sparked by a piece of furniture. A truly wonderful compendium of people being, well, just a bit dickish.
• Robert Drury’s Diary: The London Review of Books has a regular ‘Diary’ column, with various writers sharing details of their lives, however mundane. This is Robert Drury, who writes about his trip to investigate corruption in the oil industry in Kazakhstan. It’s ostensibly quite dull – he goes to Kazakhstan, he investigates a bit, he leaves Kazakhstan – but the writing is just perfect; it’s spare and cold and precise and, I don’t know, engineered, almost, and it made me quite jealous of how good it is.
• On The Nose: A profile of a quite remarkable-sounding woman; Sissel Tolaas  is one of the world’s foremost authorities on scent and the science of smell, a ‘nose’ who preserves an archive of scents and who regularly works with large companies and brands to help them solve olfactory problems (and, honestly, this is just her third-stage career; the section at the beginning of this piece which blithely recounts her life to date doesn’t quite display enough awe for her achievements in my opinion; this woman is INCREDIBLE); the article does a  very good job of describing the very particular world in which she operates, and the fascinating business of analysing and preserving scents.
• Post Malone: I don’t like the music of Post Malone; I find it facile and stupid and it all sounds the same. Then again, I’m a nearly 40-year-old man, so perhaps I shouldn’t like the music of Post Malone. Regardless, this is a review of his recent ‘homecoming’ gig in Dallas combined with a profile of the artist – it is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most savage takedowns of a musician I think I’ve ever read, a really enjoyable brutalising not only of him but of the culture that he embodies. Fine, maybe its alternative headline could be ‘out-of-touch critic doesn’t understand kids’ but this paragraph encapsulates the thesis rather nicely: “It is true, after all. Post Malone has won. He’s received wealth and fame with little accountability. He’s reaped the extreme benefits of a system that allowed him to flourish yet asserts his privilege to remain purposefully ignorant. He knows he won the lottery but doesn’t understand that it was rigged in his favor. This is what the zeitgeist demanded as the latest whole-milk hip-hop avatar: a proud non-voter, a nonreader of books, the type of person who gets a JFK tattoo without knowing about Kennedy’s role in the Voting Rights Act while bizarrely claiming that he was “the only president to speak out against the crazy corruption stuff that’s going on in our government nowadays.””
• Making Hot Sauce At Scale: A really interesting series of observations from the author about what she learned trying to build her hot sauce startup; honestly, it’s far more interesting than you’d think, even if you have no desire to read about someone’s entrepreneurial struggle; just the breadth of considerations involved here was an eye-opening detail.
• Colony Collapse Disorder: An essay comparing the manner in which colonies of bees react to stress and adversity, and how said colonies can simply fall apart under too great a degree of strain, and how one might argue that we can see that replicated within human communities too and how, perhaps, we ought to think of the rise in child suicide and self-harm as a potential indicator a a significant societal malaise. I mean, it’s not a cheery read but it’s a well-written and necessary one.
• A Diary of Life, One Day in 2018, For My Future Self: Author Tom Cox has a rather good personal blog, and this essay, published a couple of weeks ago, is a delight; a sort of free-form, disconnected diary entry taking a snapshot of his life right now for an imagined time capsule into the future. I think when people talk about the death of blogging in nostalgic terms it’s stuff like this that they mean; it meanders, it doesn’t exist to make big points or to get clicks, it’s just a snapshot of a mind in a place in a moment and it’s all the better for it.
• Six Glimpses of the Past: This is GLORIOUS. Janet Malcolm takes 6 photographs from her past and uses those to frame this six-part essay, part personal memoir, part family history, which throughout explores (both explicitly and not) the peculiar relationship between photography and memory, the pavlovian way in which images can evoke past events and the gaps that necessarily remain…honestly, this is a superb piece of writing and a genuine slow pleasure to read.
• New Words for the New World: I just want to give you the first three paragraphs and then hopefully you’ll be tempted to click. This is superb: “When your sleeves bunch up while putting on your coat it’s called a scrauntlet, or malsleevance. Gripping the shirt sleeve to keep it from bunching is called cuffling. Saying the same word at the same time as somebody else is a jinxing; trying to get past someone at the elevator door is a juggling, a side-step, a beshuffling. Not getting enough likes on social media is being screenied, and when a less important post than yours gets more shares it’s an inter-rage.” Like ‘The Meaning of Liff’ but beautifully, poignantly written.
• Late Life Love: Finally this week, I wept like a child as I read this account of the author’s home life with her ageing husband – as a depiction of what love is at heart, , and what it evolves into, and ageing and senescence, it’s unparalleled. It’s an extract from a book of the same name which is set to be published next year and which I am now massively anticipating – this is, honestly, so gorgeous.  

By Fia Cielen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. Excellent animated geometric book covers:

2) This is by Haelos, it’s called ‘Buried in the Sand’ and it sort of reminds me of Gus Gus in a way. Anyway, it’s great and the video is shot WONDERFULLY:

3) This is called ‘Claudion’, it’s by Helena Deland, and it’s a lovely slice of synthpop with a stupendously retro-tinted video to accompany it:

4) I can’t work out if I like the song particularly or not – I mean, it’s not bad, it just leaves me a bit cold – but WOW the video is EXCELLENT and SO INTERNET. Watch it – I promise you won’t be disappointed, it’s really very clever. This is called ‘Material’ by Flesher:

5) I used to have a very loved Pedro the Lion tshirt. I wonder where that is. Anyway, this is said band Pedro the Lion and their new song ‘Yellow Bike’, a typically excellent slice of indiepop Americana:

6) Finally this week, this is apparently the first time a band commissioned a Line Rider artist to do them an official music video. This is SO GOOD – honestly, every part of it is perfect, not least the way they depict the pitch shifts through the changing track. Practically perfect – this is called ‘Hard Times’ and it’s by Guster and OH THAT’S IT ISN’T IT I AM DONE WITH THE VIDEOS AND THUS WITH THIS WEEK’S CURIOS BYE THEN BYE I LOVE YOU BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND AND TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER AND TRY NOT TO SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ONLINE IF YOU CAN AND MAYBE GO FOR A WALK OR CALL A FRIEND OR ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT JUST DO WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY AS YOU PROBABLY DESERVE IT ANYHOW I AM OFF NOW TAKE CARE AND SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE BYE!:

Does this mean we now have to stop lauding the Saudi regime for its incredibly progressive decision to let women drive cars? Does this mean that they’re the bad guys again? What? They were always the bad guys? GOD IT’S ALL JUST SO HARD.

Welcome to yet another week in which once again we have been shown that if you’re rich enough you really can seemingly get away with anything, because said wealth means that you are ‘strategically important’ to others. Cheering, isn’t it? At least the disappearance of poor Mr Khashoggi has given us a fresh new horror to distract from this week’s idiocy Olympics in Brussels, so his (probable – let’s give those lovely guys in Riadh the benefit of the doubt, eh?) death hasn’t been totally in vain. 

Anyway, I need to brace myself physically and spiritually for the prospect of spending 45 minutes in a confined space with a naked performer later, so I’m off to deodorise my nooks in preparation – while I make with the cotton buds, you make yourselves comfortable and let me gently lube you up with this week’s steaming, fresh, slightly gelatinous helping of webspaff. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and YOU ASKED FOR THIS. 

By Robin Cerutti

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE INSTRUMENTAL VERSION OF TYLER’S CHERRYBOMB ALBUM!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURPRISED THAT YOU’RE SURPRISED ABOUT FACEBOOK’S METRICS FOR AD SUCCESS BEING ANYTHING LESS THAN 100% ACCURATE:

• Facebook Expands Lead Gen Forms: To be honest, there are probably more interesting stories I could have led with in this section, but this is just the way that the links have fallen this week and I know noone really cares. Anyhow, this is the FASCINATING news that Facebook has now expanded its Lead Gen ad functionality (you know, those ads that let you harvest emails from willing idiots direct from Facebook) to include ad types focused on brand awareness, reach and traffic rather than only allowing it as a discrete unit type. Oh, and the feature’s now called ‘Instant Forms’. That…that was underwhelming, wasn’t it?
• Facebook Launching Creative Compass: This is COMING SOON, or at least at some point in 2019 – this is a service which will analyse your FB ads and tell you how effective they’re likely to be, based on the system’s analysis of your image, copy, etc, though obviously it won’t tell you exactly how much Facebook is inflating your ad’s performance to make its platform look more effective than it in fact is (TOPICAL!).
• ‘Scraped’ Content To Be Downranked On FB: Links to crap content will be downgraded on FB, with the platform suggesting that links will be less likely to travel on the platform “if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait headlines or landing pages overflowing with low-quality ads”. Which obviously doesn’t affect you, with your high-quality content, but, you know, might be useful to know nonetheless.
• Facebook Expands Retention Optimisation To All Advertisers: Do you advertise apps? No? WELL MOVE ON THEN. For those of you that do, though, this might be interesting – FB is expanding the ability to target users most likely to return to your app after two or seven days with ads, to lure them back to the siren call of your generic shovelware. What a time to be alive!
• Facebook Updates Branded Content Policy: A couple of minimally interesting updates to FB’s ‘Branded Content’ partnership functionality (you know, that bit of Facebook which lets Pages tag individuals in their updates and mark them as a paid partner shilling tat for money) – this is BIG NEWS: “Today we are adding more clarity and context to branded content posts, updating the language on the label from “Paid” to “Paid Partnership.” While the creator or publisher will continue to tag “with” the brand, people can now also learn more about the two tagged Pages and the partnership by clicking on a new informational “About this Partnership” icon.” Seismic, eh? Oh, and Pages will now be able to comment on / tag other Pages as Pages – just think of all the exciting brandter opportunities (I know you haven’t thought about that word since 2015, but it’s important to occasionally resurrect the horrors of the past as a salutary lesson for all our futures).
• Political Ad Transparency Comes to the UK: It’s been live in the US for nearly a year now, and here it is in the UK – us Brits will now also have the opportunity to explore the ad buys and targeting of ads deemed to be ‘political’, with any organisation wanting to run promotions of this type required to provide additional information about their location and identity in an attempt to prevent BAD ACTORS from messing with the purity of our democratic process. Although, in a departure from the US model, this only applies to ads which are explicitly promoting a specific individual or political party rather than being extended to a broader range of issues which could be deemed ‘political’, which does rather de-fang the system imho. Still, it’s a step in the right direction (albeit a small, slightly uncertain one).  
• IGTV Academy: It’s no secret that literally not one person actually cares about Instagram TV or believes that it’s a good thing with a reason to exist. Still, Facebook have punted hundreds of millions into attempting to make it happen, meaning that they’re not going to let it sink without a fight – witness their latest attempt to make it cool, the IGTV ACADEMY! Snark aside, if you’re a ‘creator’ (don’t worry, I’m not going to rant spastically about how much I hate that term, that was last week) then this is perhaps worth looking at – it’s happening in Shoreditch (like it’s 2005!) next week, and places are available on application, so if you want to learn how to shoot vertical and make BETTER MORE ENGAGING CONTENT then you could probably do worse than take a look.
• Instagram Story School: Or, alternatively, you can check out this suite of instructions direct from Insta on how to optimise your Story creation – it’s VERY basic, but if you need to explain to your grandfather what Stories are and how he can use them to create thirst traps for all the Instagroupies out there then this will be INVALUABLE.
• Twitter Testing Annotations for Moments: It’s slightly unclear whether this is a feature available to anyone who creates ‘Moments’ on Twitter or whether it’s only something that those created by Twitter will feature (actually I have just reread the article and that’s exactly what it is – Christ, but I’m a p1ss-poor ‘journalist’), but the opportunity to add ‘annotations’ (that is, little explainer text between featured Tweets in a Moment) is being experimented by Twitter, the idea being that it will offer context and a degree of fact-checking to the feature. Although given that Moments have gone desktop-only there’s no guarantee that they’ll even be a thing in a few months time – nor, frankly, do I care.
• Snapchat Launches Lenses for Cats: This is, apparently, news. Look, if you work for Pedigree then perhaps this of interest to you; otherwise, you and your special little guy can carry on largely as before.
• YT Changes ‘Engagement’ Criteria For Action Ads: Literally this: “YouTube will now count an ‘Engagement’ whenever a user clicks or watches 10 seconds or more of a TrueView for action ad when using maximize conversions or target CPA bidding. That’s a change from 30 seconds.” It’s…it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for this.
• YT Launches New Ad Targeting Option: You’ll now be able to target YouTube viewers based on where they’re watching YT – users casting the service to a TV will now be a discrete targeting group, which is potentially hugely useful; I don’t wish to make sweeping generalisations here, but I think you can infer a reasonable amount about the sort of person someone is based on their propensity to watch old TV series thrown onto their telly from their phone, for example.
• If This Then Domino’s: Domino’s continues its policy of making digital innovations which, at best, three actual people will ever use but which act as excellent little pieces of PR because idiots like me write them up as though they are ‘news’. This is a very smart – and simultaneously very, very silly – idea which applies the basic principle of IFTTT to pizza ordering; the service lets you set up some simple conditional parameters which, if met, will trigger the ordering of your favourite pizza, for example if your GE dishwasher starts leaking, or if it’s snowing outside. As an extension of Domino’s overall ‘we are the pizza brand that owns silly tech gimmicks’ this is absolutely perfect, and the integration of multiple brands’ IoT functionality is smart, and the breadth of pre-scripted recipes is pretty staggering. I am grudgingly impressed.
• Adidas Yung: I promise, I’m not picking on Adidas (like the brand would care if I was, obvs), but this is another marketing initiative that I can’t help but get slightly annoyed by; this site for it’s Yung range is, for reasons known only to Adi’s marketing team, designed to look like an exact replica of a Geocities-era late-90s site, complete with tiled backgrounds and 90s slang and…look, WHO IS THIS AIMED AT? Are they finally acknowledging that the only people who care enough about trainers to visit this webpage are old people who can remember when the web actually looked like this? Are any young people actually nostalgic for an era of web design that they are too young to actually practically remember? They’re not, are they? This absolutely feels like the sort of project which was greenlit because a bunch of middle-aged blokes fell into a memoryhole and spent a drunk hour shouting ‘WAZZZZZZUUUUUUUUP?!’ at each other. Still, the rhythm game on here is quite fun so, you know, points for that.

By Jeanie Tomanek

NEXT UP, AN OLD-BUT-EXCELLENT JAZZ MIX BY DJ WRONGTOM!

THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME A UK BUSINESS OR POLITICIAN MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ‘SHARED VALUES’ WE HAVE WITH SAUDI, PT.1:

• Who Paid $0.99?: The latest in the near-infinite parade of ‘ideas on the web that I am genuinely angry I didn’t think of myself’, this is so simple and so brilliant that it makes me a bit sick. There is only one gimmick to this site – you pay 99 cents to its owner to find out who else has been stupid enough to pay 99 cents to find out who else has been stupid enough to pay 99 cents to find out who else has…you get the idea. It’s an almost perfect piece of pointless webart, and I bet it’s already made hundreds.
• Building Hopes: This is cute, and in its AR incarnation reasonably impressive as a piece of dataviz, but I am sort of baffled as to why it exists (WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED A REASON? Christ, Matt, can’t you just uncritically enjoy something for a change without having to scry for meaning and purpose in EVERYTHING you joyless prick? This sort of rhetorical, fourth wall-breaking flourish is exactly the sort of authorial device which really elevates Web Curios above other weekly linkdump newsletters, I find). Building Hopes is a Google News Initiative artproject which exists as this website and an associated AR app – users pick from a selection of issues, choosing four or more, and indicate how hopeful they are about those issues seeing ameliorative change in the future; this creates a sort of virtual balancing stone sculpture which exists in perpetuity, either on the website or in the AR app. The ‘sculptures’ are a datavisualisation of your picks – there are a variety of indicators on each of the ‘stones’ which show how the general public feel about it, using data taken from Google search trends and the like, and when viewing it in AR there’s a really nice UI to the whole thing allowing you to explore the general direction of feeling around, say, renewable energy. Overall it’s a really well-made digitoy, as you’d expect from Google, though it does an even worse job of explaining itself than I have just done. Just fire it up and have a play.
• Skills From Videos: This is AMAZING – this YouTube video offers a short demonstration of how these researchers have created software which can ‘learn’ movement from ‘watching’ videos. So, for example, they can train a virtual figure in a simulated environment to do backflips by showing it a bunch of YouTube videos of people doing backflips. This is, seriously, quite remarkable – the idea that we have managed to create software that can apply learned skills to a virtual puppet and refine said skills based on repeated viewership is insane, and presages a future in which we’ll basically be able to train our robots to do anything they can watch us doing. I give it less than two months before we see the first application of this to bongo – honestly, combine this with Deep Fakes and we’ll have the first entirely computer generated pr0n movie before you can say ‘is it weird that I’m masturbating to something that is entirely machine-generated?’.
• Tortoise Media: YOu’ll have read about this already this week, I’m certain, but here’s the Kickstarter that EVERYONE (or at least everyone vaguely connected with the media in the UK) is talking about; Tortoise has smashed its funding target with a month to go, suggesting that there really is appetite for some sort of SLOW NEWS organisation. To be honest, the interview in the Standard yesterday will tell you more than I possibly could about this, but the idea is that Tortoise will offer a smaller number of in-depth articles per day, eschewing the churn and pace of the modern newsroom in favour of a more considered and less click-hungry approach to news. The idea of the ‘collaborative conference’ as a forum for discussion and to shape the agenda is fascinating, although imho perhaps a touch utopian, and it will be interesting to see whether or not it can sustain readership once the initial hype has died down; whilst there’s obviously a market for longform, quality journalism online (*ahem*), I’m curious as to whether there’s going to be enough output to keep this moving. Still, the people behind it seem a lot smarter than I am and I’m sure they’ve thought this through.
• Wearspace: You will, I’m sure, have seen a visual of these doing the rounds this week – Panasonic’s prototypical concentration visor, designed to ensure that you, worker drone, are deprived of your peripheral vision so as to be able to better focus on the glowing, flickering screen in front of you. NO! DO NOT LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW! DO NOT BECOME TEMPORARILY DISTRACTED BY THE LOVELY HUMAN COUNTENANCE OF YOUR CO-WORKER! YOU ARE HERE TO PRODUCE! YOU ARE ON OUR CLOCK! WORK FOR US!  Anyway, this is the Crowdfunding page for said prototypical design – it’s all in Japanese and so may well say that it’s all an elaborate joke, but why not chuck them a few hundred Yen in any case? This is set to become a must-have niche fashion item in 2019, mark my words.
• Oobah: You’ll recall moon-faced peroxide prankster Oobah Butler’s viral restaurant prank from last year, in which he managed to get a totally fictitious restaurant, called ‘Shed’ (because it was his shed), to #1 in the London Tripadvisor rankings – as a result of the scam, Oobah has spent the past 12 months being bombarded with interview requests by the world’s media and understandably got a bit fatigued by the whole thing. He decided to see whether he could get away with outsourcing his media duties to a succession of slightly iffy lookalikes – you can read the (excellent) writeup here, but the upshot is that he totally managed it. He has now launched ‘Oobah’, a service which purports to allow anyone to enjoy the same sort of liberating doppelganger army effect on demand; it’s a joke, fine, but I also get the impression that there’s probably some sort of deeper gag at play here – you can sign up, say what you want the lookalikes for, and….well, we will see. I’ve asked for a lookalike to help me achieve stratospheric Instagram fame, so if I abandon Curios for a career as a speedy lollipop-flogger you’ll know why.
• MAKERPhone: There’s a line in Houllebecq’s ‘Atomised’ in which one of the protagonists launches into a fairly typical miserabilist riff about how they are an entirely useless example of parasitic humanity because they exist in a world that they simply don’t understand surrounded by objects and artifacts that they couldn’t possible recreate themselves. If you too are afflicted by this peculiarly anthropocene malaise you might want to invest in the MAKERPhone, now 10x funded on Kickstarter, which will deliver to you all the components you will need to make your very own smartphone. This sounds BRILLIANT, for the right type of person – you’ll be able to hack it together, customising the look and the software and the like, and you’ll learn loads about electronics while you’re about it. This is the sort of thing that the slightly whimsical part of me likes to envision parents and kids doing together, while I cry imagining the sort of childhood I never had.
• Seven Square Miles: Aerial photographs, culled from Google Maps, showing areas of seven square miles from around the world. A truly beautiful reminder of the wonderful diversity of the planet and the weird beauty of semi-abstract landscapes.
• Sociality: An online art project focused on the ways in which technology is increasingly being used to control and manipulate in covert, concealed ways. “Paolo Cirio identified classes of patents, then collected, aggregated and sorted the data on the website https://Sociality.today where thousands of patents of problematic technologies are exposed. On Sociality’s website everyone is able to browse, search, submit, and rate patents by their titles, images of flowcharts, and the companies that created them. Both the artist and the online participants perform oversight of invasive inventions designed to target demographics, push content, coerce interactions, and monitor people.” Interesting and incredibly bleak once you dig into it – you can read a proper writeup elsewhere on Imperica, but it’s worth a delve around inside the archive; it will take you about 3-4 minutes to find something that makes you feel uncomfortable.
• Big Mac Data: The Economisty is making the data underpinning its famous Big Mac Index – its regular tracker of the price of McDonald’s most famous product as a measure of global economies – freely available. You can do ANYTHING YOU LIKE with it, so I look forward to seeing all sorts of excellent data projects mapping the cost of a Big Mac against, say, the volume of Pr0nhub searches for ‘Vore’ or similar. Whilst correlation doesn’t equal causation, I bet you can show some VERY odd things with this stuff.
• Personas: A simple, lightweight cartoon avatar generator, letting you create an easily customisable digital…er…persona for yourself to download and use as you please. You can probably spend an enjoyable few hours this afternoon creating your entire office out of these and then replacing their photos on the company website (this is a GREAT idea, please can someone give this a go? You almost certainly won’t get sacked).
• Colourblindly: A Chrome extension which enables you to see what a webpage would look like if you suffered from colour blindness. Not only really useful from an accessibility and design point of view, but also the sort of thing which you could use to really mess with someone’s head – try setting it to run on your deskmate’s computer and see whether you can convince them they’ve got some sort of unexpected and inexplicable ocular degenerative disorder!
• Maniac Pumpkin Carvers: Carving pumpkins is HARD, or at least it is if you’re me and have all the artistic elan of Helen Keller. Maniac Pumpkins are apparently something of a New York institution, and make the whole process look incredibly easy – these people will, for a fee, provide you with professionally-carved gourds depicting whatever you prefer, from faces to abstract designs to everything inbetween. Obviously this is of no use to you whatsoever unless you happen to be in New York, but the gallery of work on the site is astonishing and worth a look and, who knows, maybe one of you reading this will be motivated to start your very own ripoff pumpkin carving business. I feel so inspirational.
• Piano Genie: Another project which is sort of akin to magic. This is a bit tricky to explain, but imagine a system which would let you improvise on a piano using 8 simple buttons rather than the 88 keys which you’d usually have to use, and which would allow you to do this with literally no musical talent whatsoever. You imagining? GOOD. This is exactly that – you can see the whole site here, which details how the tech works in proper detail and lets you see the code and the rest, but the main link here takes you to the webtoy version which, honestly, is incredible. It looks like crap, fine, but you will be amazed at the oddly melodious tunes you’ll be able to spaff out just by mashing your keyboard. I’m going to add ‘Jingle Composer’ to the list of ‘jobs that the robots are going to steal’.
• Macaw: Macaw’s an interesting idea, designed to make your Twitter feed a little more interesting – it basically tracks the things that people in your network ‘like’, and presents you with a daily curated roundup of said things; the idea being that it will surface content and Tweets which are considered ‘good’ by people whose opinions you presumably respect but which wouldn’t necessarily have been surfaced by the algo. Of course, this could simply expose all of your Twitter network as people with appalling opinions and taste, but that’s part of the fun!
• Asaro: This is one of those occasional things one stumbles across online which makes you realise quite how mad the lives of the super rich must be. Do you own a yacht? Are you bored with the endless sailing and discovery and exploration and diving and eating and sealife and sunsets and booze and the like? Of course you are – who wouldn’t be jaded? Why not employ Asaro – as far as I can tell, basically the Punchdrunk of the superyacht community – to create a bespoke theatrical interactive EXPERIENCE for you and your guests? Whether that be a Pirates of the Caribbean-style adventure, some sort of zombie-themed island escape or maybe something involving Atlantean aliens or suchlike, they will do it for you (for a doubtless eye-watering price). I would LOVE to see the sort of thing they can do, so if any Curios readers happen to have access to a yacht and 5-6 figures disposable income then, well, I am ALL YOURS.
• Fold’n’Fly: I think it’s half term next week – I imagine those of you with kids are practically FRANTIC wondering how in the name of Christ you’re going to keep your progeny occupied in the schoolless downtime (look, just accept the fact that you’re going to leave them in front of Fortnite for a week and be done with it – it’s ok, they’re probably beyond saving), so I offer this as some sort of potential solution. This website presents schema for a bewildering variety of paper planes to fold and fly – there’s at least a morning’s entertainment in this. For those of you reading this at work, go and raid the printer RIGHT NOW and start folding.
• Slowly: This is a lovely idea. Slowly is an app which connects strangers from around the world to be penpals – the gimmick here is that your messages get delivered…er…slowly, with the length of time it takes to deliver a missive dependent on the real-world distance between two correspondents, mimicking the time taken for a letter to make its way around the world back when people actually sent physical letters to each other. Honestly, this is so, so cute.
• Vidometer: A potentially neat little app which lets you record video and export it with a small dynamic map in the corner; the idea being that if you’re a cyclist or motorist or whatever, you can record your first-person video and combine it with a routemap, showing exactly where you are at any point in the film. Look, this might be useful, it might not, you decide.
• Times New Romance: Beautiful embroidery. Not really got much else to say here, this is gorgeous work with a lovely, fourth-wall-breaking side to it.

By Devan Shimoyama

NEXT, HAVE SOME MORE JAZZY STYLINGS COURTESY OF THIS PLAYLIST CURATED BY HARUKI MURAKAMI!

THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME A UK BUSINESS OR POLITICIAN MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ‘SHARED VALUES’ WE HAVE WITH SAUDI, PT.2:

• Journey to the End of the Cast List: Kickstarting an artbook celebrating and commemorating the unsung actors who fill such small-but-vital roles in films like ‘Puking Girl’ or ‘Man with Teeth’; “From ‘Exuberant Mourner’ (Analyze This) to ‘Arthritic Cowboy’ (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), ‘Sad Woman with Horns’ (Guardians of the Galaxy) to ‘Man Shot in Head 3’ (The ABCs of Death), movie history is replete with curiously named characters bringing up the rear of the cast list. And Introducing is a survey of those bit-part and background character credits, organising them into almost 100 categories—some predictable (men, women, bystanders, henchmen) and some more surprising (screaming characters, toothless characters, characters whose names are simply their one line of dialogue).” Awesome.
• Books For The Visually Impaired: The Internet Archive really is a superb resource – not just for things like last week’s archive of C64 games, but also for stuff like this, an incredible selection of digital books designed specifically for people with degrees of visual impairment, available for free.
• Dress Code Shirts: I can’t quite work out whether these are sort of cool or the naffest things ever (probably the latter, based on that) – Dress Code make shirts which are, as the name suggests, designed around code; so you’ll have patterns based on cursors or binary or whatever else. If you want to advertise the fact that you’re a massive nerd via the medium of tailoring, then this is perhaps a marginally less embarrassing way of doing so than that faded Star Wars tshirt with the curry stains on it (THROW IT OUT).
• Shoe for Virtual Feet: An offshoot of the Virtual Reality Photo Project, which takes high-res arty photos from within videogame worlds, this is a photo series depicting videogame characters’ footwear. No more,no less, just digital shoes from a wide range of titles. As an aside, if you can name more than about 5-6 of the games featured here just by looking at the characters’ shoes, you have a very real problem and probably need to get out more (I got 5).
• Insta Story Templates: This is a clever idea, and I think we’ll see more of these sort of template-y creativity-facilitating hacks for Story production as they move ever-closer to being the only way in which people are allowed to communicate with each other online. These are a useful series of template formats into which you can drop images, gifs, video, etc, and stitch them together into a Story which you can then export to Insta (or, one would imagine, Snap or FB or WhatsApp or whatever else you choose). It won’t, let’s be clear, instantly make your content interesting, but it will mean that you can combine a bunch of crap images from your camera roll in marginally more innovative ways than your other basic friends.
• The NPC Snap Filter: This is apparently being co-opted by lefties as a joke reaction to the ‘SJWs are NPCs’ trope (see last week’s Curios, or this article, if that means nothing to you) – this filter replaces people’s faces in Snap with the blank, 2d NPC avatar for ‘comic’ effect (your mileage may vary).
• Butterfly Wings: Quite incredible macro photography of butterfly wings – these are AMAZING and beautiful and sort of awe-inspiring, whilst at the same time putting me very strongly in mind of really, really bad velvet print artworks (honestly, you will know exactly what I mean, just click).
• Anigay: Included in no small part because the name made me giggle childishly, this is a website exploring queer issues in anime – “Our mission at AniGay is simple: To let you in on our conversations about queer anime! We have a ton of thoughts, and we want to present them in a slightly more polished form than is possible on Twitter. So AniGay will host our interpretations, analyses, and theories as well as glimpses into our adjacent research, and anything else we feel like writing and publishing, as long as it’s related to queerness in anime.”. It’s all actually quite serious in a gender studies academian sort of way, but, well, ANIGAY!
• Destination Reads: Such a good idea, this, to the point that I’m amazed that I’ve not featured it before (Google says I haven’t and that’s good enough for me). A really simple premise, the site lets you tell it where you are travelling and then suggests novels for you to read which are set in your holiday destination. That’s literally it, fine, but it’s a hugely useful service for people who like a bit of literary immersion along with their travels. There are only 8 cities served so far, which is a crying shame – it feels like this needs some sort of Wiki element to allow for the crowdsourcing of a proper list; they are actively soliciting contributions and suggestions, though, so perhaps it will grow over time.
• The LGBTQ Game Archive: This week’s ‘you saw it last week on B3ta, now get it on Curios!’ link, this is “a resource for researchers, journalists, critics, game designers/developers/publishers, students, gamers and/or people who play games and anyone else who is interested in learning more about the history of LGBTQ content in video games.” Honestly fascinating to see how the depiction and representation of non-cis gender identities has developed through four decades of videogames, as well as the ways in which the queer community has seen and embodied itself through the medium of games.
• All The Games of IGF: All of the trailers from all of the games at this year’s Independent Games Festival. There are over 200 videos here, which will take you through to hometime seamlessly if you start watching them now.
• Birds Aren’t Real: This is excellent, and SO well done. Birds Aren’t Real is a spoof truther movement, perfectly mimicking many of the more rabid conspiracy theories of the web, which seeks to expose the fact that birds are, er, NOT REAL. Yes, that’s right, we’ve all been tricked into thinking that these flying things are organic creatures whereas in fact they are specially designed covert surveillance machines. THE BIRDS ARE A LIE! There is so much to love about this, not least the tone which oscillates between concerned and informative to absolutely screaming batsh1t, and were they not sold out I would absolutely purchase a ‘Birds Are A Lie’ tshirt.
• O-Face or Ow-Face: I have been waiting to write that for 6 whole days now, it’s been a struggle to keep it in I tell you. This is wonderfully bizarre – a video accompanying an academic research project seeking to examine the differences in facial expression produced when people feel pain versus when they feel pleasure. Have you ever wanted to see an animated representation of exactly how someone’s orgasm face differs from the face they pull when they smack themselves with a hammer? OH GOOD!
• Updated Public Service Announcements: “Between 1936 and 1943, artists working for the Works Progress Administration designed more than 35,000 posters—of which the government printed over 2 million copies—promoting local and national programs, travel and tourism, and WPA-funded cultural programming, as well as doling out health-and-safety advice.” – this site presents a selection of new posters, updated for modernity. These are wonderful and I would buy them all in an instant.
• The Andy Warhol Photography Archive: 3,600+ photos from the Warhol photo archive, free to browse online. Absolutely wonderful (the site logs you out after about 15 minutes, which is annoying, but you can browse freely outside of that small restriction).
• Hallowe’en Whimsey Mask: Do you have a Hallowe’en costume yet? No? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN (this is a *bit* NSFW, but, honestly, live a little!).
• The Greatest Bear: Finally in this week’s miscellania, absolutely the gayest game you will play all week. A Streets of Rage-style side-scrolling beat em up, The Greatest Bear puts you in the shoes of Joe, a repressed, beaten-down office drone who one night after work stumbles into a mysterious (and VERY GAY) bar – cue you fighting your way through several levels representing various areas of Joe’s subconscious, complete with muscle daddies, massive cocks and an awful lot of…well, not to put too fine a point on it, an awful lot of jizz. This is VERY funny, hugely stylised and an awful lot of fun – it’s also hugely NSFW, although to be honest if you can get away with playing a very obvious 90s-style videogame on your work computer then I don’t imagine anyone will care too much if said videogame includes a large number of massive, veiny throbbers.

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS CELEBRATION OF 70 YEARS OF BLACK MUSIC IN THE UK!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Loko: Gorgeous, glorious geometric baking by the hugely talented Lauren Ko.
• Isabel Peppard: :Peppard is a sculptor and animator whose work tends heavily towards the grotesque and macabre, and her Insta feed is a lovely (not that lovely on reflection) collection of slightly horrifying models in progress.
• Matti Varga: The feed of photographer Matti Varga, whose work has a particular millennial-palette-aesthetic to it, and a wonderful feeling of distance (he said, pseudily).
• Watching Mr Bingo: Cartoonist, artist, animator and adland escapee Mr Bingo curates this Insta feed, where he posts photos of him taken by other people spotted in the wild. Proof that he really does seemingly only ever wear shorts.
• Kazu Studios: Feed of the work of Kazuhiro Tsuji, who makes Ron Mueck-style giant, hyperrealistic heads. These are UNCANNY.
• The Cheeky Blog: The Insta feed of the website of the same name, this shares illustrations and observations about being a woman. No idea how relatable or whatever these are what with my being a man, but the latest one, about leaving your bra in the fruitbowl, made me laugh.
• Conservatory Archives: Photos of conservatories and greenhouses across East London, because plants ALWAYS make things better.
• Cams Dins: Submitted by Curios reader Tom Lawrence (THANKS TOM, WHO I HAVE NEVER MET! It’s always nice when I get reminded that people other than my immediate relatives occasionally read this), this is a feed documenting the meals of one Cameron Sharpe. I have no idea who he is, or who runs this feed, but the quality of the food photography here is…upsetting.

By Joon Lee

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Other Blog: A collection of experiments with Deep Dream tech, in the main, often using it on videogames to trippy effect.

• The Blog That Celebrates Itself: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a collection of albums of cover versions – no idea who compiles these, or where they are sourced from, and some of them are DREADFUL (I am listening to a very odd, slightly shoegazy cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Disarm’ right now and rather wishing I wasn’t), but, hey, it’s weird and it’s on the the internet and so I present it here for your ‘pleasure’.
• She Said I’m A Robot: LOTS of drawings, illustrations, renders, etc, of mech-type robotics.
• Joel Remy: Arty gifs. Lovely, lovely arty gifs.
• The Styles Gifs: Lots – too many? – gifs of Harry Styles. Look at his lovely hair!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• What Happens Next?: Confession – I haven’t read all 50 of these essays, exploring the potential future of a variety of different sectors and industries, but I have read some of them, and the ones I have read were fascinating and thought provoking. As we hurtle towards the annual predictions season, this is a smarter roundup of some coming trends than we usually see.
• Escape From Fantasy: If you work in advermarketingpr you might well have seen this this week, but in case not it’s very much worth a look – Martin Weigel here presents a talk (it’s in slides, in the main, but perfectly comprehensible) about the terrible problem that the ad industry has – to whit, we only talk to ourselves and we know the square root of fcuk-all about anyone outside of London media land, whatever we might try and tell ourselves. Compellingly argued – if nothing else, this is a masterclass in how to structure and present an argument.
• Why Isn’t InstaTV Working?: Fine, it’s a bit premature to call it a flop, but it’s clear that InstaTV hasn’t exactly been a rip-roaring success either (when was the last time you opened the app? I just did, for the first time in about three months, and immediately wished I hadn’t – man there’s some dross on there). This piece presents a reasonably clear-eyed look at how it’s doing so far, some of the reasons it might not quite have taken off (indeterminate format is an issue – there’s no evidence that there’s a market for vertical video longer than 2-3 minutes, for a start), and what it might need to do to fix its issues (discovery being the big, screaming, obvious thing). Obviously we’ll all look back on this with quaint disbelief when we all have IGTV streaming direct into our frontal cortex in 2027.
• //medium.com/@MSF_USA/creating-a-comic-at-one-of-the-busiest-maternity-wards-in-the-world-7d255a9f393c“>Hila: This is superb. A comic created on behalf of Medecins Sans Frontieres by Aurelie Neyret from her illustrations sketched during a nine-day stay in an Afghan hospital,  Hila is about the war and recovery and womanhood and birth and death, and is absolutely superb. Do have a read.
• Male Coworkers: A Reddit thread in which women detail some of the things that their coworkers do which creep them out a bit – MAN there are some examples of some incredibly sketchy behaviour here. Who thinks its ok to spontaneously give their colleagues back rubs, ffs? And, er, why is noone offering them to me? Seriously though, this is bleak.
• Reflecting on Reddit: A revealing, and depressing, interview with former Reddit product head Dan McComas, who talks about his time at the platform in less than glowing terms – his statement that his work there made the world a worse place is unusually clear-headed for someone in tech, and his assessment of the fundamental problems facing social media platforms (that is, the VC-driven obsession with growth as the single most important metric of success) is a smart one. He’s also interesting on the dominance of Facebook and its likely continuation – it’s sobering to see someone who knows about community building at scale basically suggest that Facebook’s scale means that anyone else out to basically give up. Er, don’t give up!
• Instagram’s Harassment Problem: Following on from a piece last week, another article focusing on the fact that – SURPRISE! – Instagram is an undermoderated hole of people being mean to each other! It follows on rather perfectly from the above piece – the problems here described are absolutely a function of prioritising user growth above all else, and not stopping to think about scaling a service to deliver a decent experience for said swelling mass of users. Obviously AI is going to solve all of this – OBVIOUSLY – but til it does you might as well get used to everywhere on the web being an absolute horrorshow in terms of abuse. Great!
• Palm: This very much feels like a joke, but seemingly isn’t one – Verizon is launching a new product in the US next month, a mini-phone called ‘Palm’. The idea is that it’s a smaller smartphone with fewer apps and features which you can take out with you at times when you don’t want the distraction or hassle of your full-featured beast. WHAT??? THIS IS MENTAL. People are going to spend $350 on an additional phone that doesn’t do as much stuff as their existing phone because they don’t have the strength of will not to fiddle with New Star Manager throughout dinner? ARE WE ALL UTTERLY MAD?! This is possibly the most pathetic thing I’ve read all week.
• This Is How Amazon Loses: Obviously it’s not really about that at all – Amazon, and by extension MechaBezos, will never lose – but instead an interesting explanation of some of the UX/UI tricks that Amazon uses to promote its own products and encourage buy-in to Prime and other subscription categories. Diabolically smart, damn them.
• The Google Pixel 3: A review of a new phone that really isn’t a review of a new phone at all, this is a surprisingly brilliant piece of writing and a weirdly accurate representation of where our relationship to technology feels like it’s at here in Q318.
• Meet The Steak-Umms Twitter Guy: And so after the Tweetstorm and the analyses, we get the inevitable interview with the mid-20s bloke who writes Tweets for a processed meat products brand. What, as they like to say, a time to be alive. The very BEST thing about this – the thing which will cause ulcers in a lot of brand and social media people – is the whole ‘yeah, there’s no real tone of voice or coherent strategy here. I just write stuff’. IN YOUR FACE, OVERPAID SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY W4NKERS! Oh, er, hang on, that’s me.
• Dallas at 40: Dallas! Shoulderpads! J.R.! The dream series! Hair! Oil! Shooting! Hats! You may or may not be old enough to remember Dallas – I have fond memories of the theme tune, and watching the show with my mum despite not really having any interest in the power-hungry machinations of a fictitious family of Texan oil barons – but this is, regardless, a fascinating oral history of the programme’s genesis and rise to become one of the most famous entertainment properties in the world. Lots of lovely details here, but the bit that most struck me is the really rather poignant line from Larry Hagman’s daughter where she reflects on her dad’s character: “At least in his conversations with the press, Dad would distance himself from the J. R. character. He wanted everybody to know that he was a nice guy. But in truth, it wasn’t all that different. Dad loved secrets, and he was very good at deals. Only after his death did I realize that he had had multiple affairs. That’s a very J. R. kind of thing.”
• Depression Diagnosis By App: There have been a spate of articles this past week about patents for Alexa and other platforms which will, it’s hoped, assist in the diagnosis of depression and other mental conditions; this piece specifically looks at an app called Mindstrong which claims to be able to assess users’ mental states based on factors such as their typing speed, the amount of time they spend on certain apps and pages, scroll speed and the like. This…doesn’t sound great, does it? I mean, fine, the theoretical idea of being able to better diagnose people who are sad is positive, but the idea that your devices are constantly monitoring you for the slightest sign of emotional instability is…well…troubling. I’d want to give the Ts&Cs of anything like this a fairly thorough frisking before trying them out, in summary.
• Extreme Haunts: Last weekend I found myself at an ‘Immersive Horror Experience’ in Brentwood – I went because I thought it would be theatre-ish and because I am a sucker for immersive, interactive stuff (I will be doing this in a few hours, which may or may not be good), not because I particularly wanted to be waterboarded – and spent an evening being forcefed maggots, shouted at by large, intimidating men, locked in a small cupboard with a very worried stranger, subjected to some sort of ‘I’m a Celebrity’-style ‘head in a perspex box of critters’ experience, dragged along a concrete floor by my ankles, doused in ice-cold water and, finally, having electrodes attached to my neck, nipples, hips and scalp. It was….it was horrid, to be honest, and I don’t really ever want to do it again (and to compound my humiliation I was forced to tap out in pain right at the end and so didn’t even get the celebratory photo which you win for butching out the whole thing. My girlfriend did, though, and was smugly unbearable about it for the rest of the night, although I note that at no point did they attempt to put a few thousand volts through her tits. Anyway, this piece is all about the growth of the haunted house experience in the US – frankly some of the experiences detailed here make my Saturday sound like an afternoon at soft play; does this sound like fun to you? You weirdo.
• The Wasteland Weekend: An incredible photo essay, this, about the Wasteland Weekend, which is a Burning Man-style weekend festival in the California desert, with the gimmick here being that everyone dresses up like some sort of post-apocalyptic warrior and roleplays some sort of Fallout/Mad Max-style world for a couple of days. This sounds SO much better than Burning Man, not least as you get the feeling that Sir Martin Sorrell wouldn’t be welcome here; the cage fighting sounds a touch brutal, mind. Amazing photos.
• The Magic Leap Con: A brilliant and brutal takedown of the Magic Leap, whose technology is pretty far away from what its creator promised throughout its development process and whose software is seemingly little more than a tiny collection of mediocre games and cutesy toy experiences, all for £3k. This gives you a taste of the arguments: “I met one developer who’d flown from Singapore to retrieve his goggles and attend the event, and another who said he’d scrimped and saved before managing to buy the device, which left him broke. “I made the Leap, I guess,” laughed Brian Wong, a 30-year-old who says he is self-funding a brain-computer interface project. “I’m still paying it back. I had to really scrape every penny I got to come up with $2,400, you know. But honestly, no regrets.” The thing about the first iPhone analogy is that while, sure, it was imperfect, there was a UI paradigm and several elements that were immediately gripping, that “just worked” as a certain late turtlenecked guru might have said. It was immediately clear why a touch-based Google Maps app or a graphics-rich mobile web browser was something you’d want to have in your pocket all the time, or that scrolling through an address book with the flick of a finger made sense—Magic Leap One’s appeal beyond entertainment is almost entirely abstract. Cuteness and whimsy only go so far.”
• Every Building in the US: More of an interactive than a longread, if I’m being taxonomically picky, this is a staggering piece of work by the New York Times, mapping almost every man-made structure across the United States. Honestly, this is AMAZING – read, play, and marvel at the oddly beautiful, semi-abstract aesthetic of the stripped back landscapes.
• Eartha Kitt in Istanbul: For reasons I’ve never adequately understood I was sort of obsessed with Eartha Kitt when I was a kid (pretty sure I was one of only a couple of 7 year olds in Swindon who knew who she was); I hadn’t given her any thought for years til I stumbled across this article this week, which tells of Kitt’s trip to Istanbul as a young woman and how she came to record the album of Turkish music which first broke her internationally. This is a beautiful portrait of an era and a city – Istanbul’s always had a magical appeal for me, and this piece very much evokes the wonder of an era when the foreign was even moreso by dint of being unknowable.
• Stet: My friend Katie found this a bit coldly performative when I sent it to her this week, and I can see what she means, but I am an absolute sucker for writing that plays with form and convention like this, and the use of annotations and footnotes in this short story pleased me greatly. It’s about autonomous vehicles and morality and agency, but more than anything it’s a (to my mind) fantastically realised stylistic experiment.
• The Life and Death of a Mexican Hitman: A profile of a hitman for Mexican Narcos which manages to tell his story dispassionately whilst at the same time presenting its subject as a real person rather than some sort of soulless gunman. I honestly didn’t expect to find this quality of writing on the website of the charity International Crisis Group – this is superb, particularly when you consider it’s not technically journalism.
• The Franz Kafka Marriage Manual: Finally in this week’s longreads, an essay about Franz Kafka and marriage and arsehole men; this is a wonderful, personal essay with a lovely subtext about art and the author, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

By Oregon Zoo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. You may know They Might Be Giants from ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ – this is their new song, and it’s ACE and literary and smart and wordy and lefty, and it’s called ‘The Communists Have The Music’ and the video is AWESOME:

2) Weirdly, despite this having 30million views, it doesn’ appear to have crossed over into my bit of the internet at all – this is VIRAL SENSATION Skibidi with ‘Little Big’ and it is basically a 2018 Macarena:

3) This is called ‘Rat Kid’, it’s by Suzie True and it’s a lovely jangly piece of indiepop that is just perfect for a cold, Sunny October afternoon:

4) Bands I had forgotten about until this week – The Ting Tings. Turns out their new song is REALLY GOOD and makes me almost forgive them for ‘That’s Not My Name’. This is called ‘Estranged’, and, honestly, it’s lovely:

5) UK HIPHOP (GRIME) CORNER! New track and visuals from Manga featuring guest verses from JME and Frisco – this is called ‘True to Me’:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is odd, in a good way, and sort of reminds me a bit of CLOUDDead and similar stuff. It’s by Planet B, and it’s called ‘Crustfund’ and it features Kool Keith and it’s very good indeed:

7) Last up this week, this is bratty pop punk and I love it. It’s by Antarctigo Vespucci, it’s called ‘Freaking U Out’ and BYE BYE HAPPY FRIDAY I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK UNLESS SOMETHING VERY WEIRD HAPPENS AT THIS THEATRE THINGY THIS AFTERNOON IN WHICH CASE LET ME SAY THANKS SO MUCH FOR SHARING WEB CURIOS WITH ME IT HAS BEEN A PLEASURE AND I HAVE LOVED EVERY SINGLE WORD I HAVE WRITTEN FOR YOU AND PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THEY ARE ALL WRITTEN FOR YOU, EVERY SINGLE ONE, AND YOU SHOULD FEEL SPECIAL AND LOVED AND OK THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK AS I SAID HOPEFULLY SEE YOU AGAIN SAME TIME AND PLACE NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!: