HOW ABOUT KICKING OFF WITH A CONTEMPORARY SELECTION OF TRACKS PICKED BY GERMAN MAG ‘NERDCORE’?

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT, WHEN WE AS A SPECIES ARE TOO LAZY TO EVEN TRY AND TYPE WORDS PERTAINING TO THE TYPE OF BONGO WE WANT TO WATCH, WE MAY WELL BE ON SOME SORT OF SLIPPERY SLOPE TBQHYWM:

• Facebook Tweaks Newsfeed Algorithm (Again): BREAKING NEWS! Or at least it is if you’re reading this hot off my fingers (wow, that sounds wrong doesn’t it? Sorry!); if you’re getting it from the CurioBot then maybe less so. Anyway, Facebook just announced that the Newsfeed is once again going to behave slightly differently – now prioritising content based on the likely amount of time it thinks you’re going to spend looking at it, as well as seeking to minimise multiple posts from the same source in your feed. As ever, they maintain that brands will see minimal disruption – which considering the near-0% status of organic Page reach is probably about right AMIRITE KIDS?! Although actually if you’re a prolific publisher then this is perhaps rather more important (cf the New York Times, regularly taking up ⅔ of my feed with its NEWS, dammit).

• Facebook Testing Differentiated Newsfeed: It’s a REALLY slow news week when I’m reduced to posting speculative Mashable links like this one. RUMOUR HAS IT that Facebook…oh, I’m just going to quote here: “Facebook is experimenting with a new layout on mobile that highlights multiple news sections, with topics such as World & U.S., Sports and Food. However, the primary (and presumably default) section is still the classic news feed we’re accustomed to seeing.” Interesting idea, though whether test users will find it overwhelming remains to be seen. Just think of all the differentiated ad options this will allow for, though!

• You May Soon Be Able To Monetise EVERYTHING on Facebook: I mean, realistically you probably won’t, and ‘soon’ is frankly a massive red herring, but. SOURCES suggest that they’re floating the idea of being able to apply a sort of virtual tip jar to posts, letting your ‘friends’ contribute pennies to reward you for the pithy bons mots about your idealised children and relationship you choose to spaff all over Facebook. Perhaps more probably, it seems they are also canvassing people about their willingness to shill on behalf of brands – direct influencer marketing with Facebook raking in a potential cut of any fees paid, thereby cutting out agencies? WHY NOT?

• Group Calling Launches in Messenger: Basically just that; you can now start group voicechat through FB Messenger, with the ability for others to drop in mid-call. The idea of speaking on the phone on a one-on-one basis scares me enough, frankly, but you may be more socially ept than I am.

• Facebook Lets You Buy Video Ads A Bit More Like You Do On TV: Yes, that’s a bit clunky, but what do you want? It’s vaguely factually accurate – you’ll soon be able to buy Facebook video ads in time blocks, so to air between specific times of the day, and (in the US at least) match your ad targeting on Facebook to your TV targeting, allowing for consistent campaigns (and, I suppose, better compare/contrast benchmarking of ad performance across platforms). So there.

• YouTube Introduces 360-degree Livestreaming: Hot on the heels of Facebook attempting to OWN live video last week comes this update from Google, announcing that (with the right kit) you can now stream video in 360. It’s currently only available in YouTube Space locations, but London’s one of those so if you work for the FA or similar I’d probably start talking to them about your next big live event thingy.

• Google Also Tweaking TV Integration: I know that I am supposed to at least pretend, but I have to confess that I find stuff about ad buying and placement and programmatic and all that jazz INTENSELY dull, so I’m just going to leave this here and you can do what you like with it: “Today we are taking big steps to bring new addressable advertising capabilities to TV Broadcasters and Distributors by announcing DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion. This makes ads hyper relevant for viewers across any screen that they watch. By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today. And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.” Exciting, eh?

• Snapchat Stops Charging for Replays, Launches Additional Faceswap Capabilities: The fact that the newly announced ability to swap your face with that of ANY photo on your camera roll is news is strangely comforting in the middle of all this celebrity death stuff. Anyway, that is now a thing, as is the fact that Snapchat’s given up trying to monetise replays of Snaps. Seeing as we’re on Snapchat, this Prince tribute is nice and a just-in-time antidote to MarleyGate; this is how you make Snapchat Stickers on video (announced last week; DO KEEP UP) work; and did you know that they are bringing back MTV Cribs as a Snapchat show? YES THEY ARE! Actually makes a lot of sense, that last one; when Through The Keyhole takes the same step then we’ll truly know that the platform’s adoption by the mainstream is fully complete.  

• Shazam For Brands: Slightly odd one, this, as there’s not 100% detail on what this actually means; from what I can tell, though, Shazam for Brands effectively indicates that the platform is going to start adding more Augmented Reality capabilities and wants to persuade brands to partner with them to create AUGMENTED ADVERTISING EXPERIENCES linked to packaging, etc. So basically fancy logo/packaging-based QR codes a la Blippar, maybe; this isn’t a bad idea actually, given the high install base the app has, although whether anyone actually wants to, say, scan biscuit for content is another thing entirely.

• Quora Introducing Ads: Which, if you’re targeting Silicon Valley types or people in India, is potentially BIG NEWS.

• The Future of Bots: You know how Facebook announced bots for Messenger last week? This is what the future of that is going to look like – brand-owned bots, butting into your conversations unbidden, shouting about special offers and GREAT DEALS. “Meet outside Starbucks at 6…” “I NOTICE YOU SAID STARBUCKS; WOULD YOU LIKE A VOUCHER FOR A HOT CAFFEINATED BEVERAGE REDEEMABLE ONLY TODAY” “Fcuk off, Starbucks”.

• The Public House Failed Pitch Emporium: Dublin-based agency The Public House is selling off unsuccessful creative from pitches on eBay.  A rather nice idea, I think, although you sort of hope if anyone does buy and use these successfully that they’ll chuck the agency an additional few quid as a thankyou (you won’t, will you? GITS).

• Press Release Bullsh1t: Generate your own and see how many people you can get to sign it off.

• Emoji for Bongo: Pornhub are GREAT at PR, there’s no doubt about it. Although the less charitably minded among you might suggest that there’s no easier job than peddling bongo, you have to concede that they do it with imagination. This is the latest iteration of the “order X with emoji” bandwagon which we saw last year with pizza and film and stuff; in this case, users just text an emoji to a certain phone number (works in the UK too, kids!), and they will receive back a particular style of bongo based on the emoji they sent – you can see a list of commands at the link, but brilliantly there are a whole load of secret ones they don’t tell you – and because you pay (and they earn) per text, they earn pennies every time you experiment with the more esoteric of the unicode characters. Really rather smart, although make sure your teenage children don’t hear about this as the potential phonebill consequences could be ruinous, not to mention the hairy palms.

SHALL WE PROCEED WITH A TRULY SPECTACULAR DUB/REGGAE/DANCEHALL MIX IN TRIBUTE TO THE LATE, LAMENTED DJ DEREK? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY CONVINCED THAT CARTOONS WERE BETTER IN THE 90S, PT.1:

• Reuters TV News: Obviously not TV as it’s on the web. STUPID REUTERS. Although obviously that’s an increasingly meaningless distinction, so, er, stupid me. (parenthetical aside – I once had a client who, in an early meeting about website design, asked me the following question with a very serious face: “But, Matt, what is news? What is blog?” I was plunged into a pretty serious taxonomical tailspin for weeks, I tell you). Anyway, a clever idea from Reuters whose TV news site will stitch together a bespoke selection of video news stories HOT OFF THE CAMERAS based on how long you tell it you have; 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, etc. The idea is superclever – you can imagine with a combination of geolocation and really smart software in the back you could produce very slick bespoke reports on the fly – although at the time of writing it’s not seeming to update quite as quickly as you’d want (it was still leading with Japan’s earthquakes after Ecuador’s had happened, for example). Still, interesting idea and slick site.

• The NASA Standards Manual: NASA’s design handbook, available for sale next month, has a beautiful-looking website teasing all the lovely, lovely branding. If you’re a designer then you may want a copy of this – it’s *ahem* ‘iconic.

• Hello World In Esoteric Programming Languages: Included for no other reason than that I had no idea that there were so many joke coding languages. Who made these? You probably have to be a certain type of person to enjoy these (ie a coder), so feel quite free to skip this one if you’re not.

• The Motherlode of Skating Brands: An encyclopaedic compendium of brands pertaining to skateboarding and skater culture, with logos and information about who they sponsored as well as a selection of their ads. Brilliant if you’re looking for logo / design inspiration, but also as an look at how a culture has evolved (or hasn’t, depending) over time. I had no idea there was a skate brand called ‘Bitch’, for example – the logo’s, er, nice.

• Holonumber: You want to be able to set up a whole load of numbers across the world all feeding into one place? You can, apparently, with this service. Yes, OK, not a superexcitingfunsoundingthing, but it might be REALLY USEFUL for some of you, and there’s probably some sort of fun international prank you can set up. It’s launching at the end of this month; you can sign up if you’re interested.

• We Stay: Well, we might; let’s see how the next couple of months pan out, shall we? Anyway, this is a campaign site by the Lib Dems (remember them? They were all the rage back in 2010), exhorting people to share their memories and photographs of how ACE being in the EU is, with the promise of Eurostar tickets as a potential prize. Which is nice. It’s all so EARNEST, though, the site, with all the smiling politicos and activists. Whilst Web Curios FIRMLY ENDORSES staying in the EU (in case you were wondering), we also firmly endorse getting involved with this and, er, livening up the submissions a bit. Got a nice picture of MAD BARRY on some stag do in ‘Dam? CHUCK ‘EM ON THERE!

• HOVR: Standing desks were a THING for a while last year, if you recall – good for your health, keep you thin, convince your colleagues that you’re some sort of indestructible uberworker whose dedication to both your toned calves and the wellbeing of the company is unparalleled amongst the workforce. The only downsides were all the standing up and the fact that, well, you look like a bit of a weirdo. Here, then, is the new solution to the problem of how to work off the Graze box at your desk – HOVR is, basically, a set of pedals you shove under your desk to let you simulate walking whilst sitting down in white-collar servitude. Much like Diet Coke, if you spend all your time at work scoffing cake and crisps this probably isn’t going to be the solution to your waistband issues, just FYI.

• World Of Waterfalls: Literally THE only website celebrating the waterfalls of the world you are ever going to need. There is much to love about this, not least the breathless enthusiasm for these crazy conjunctions of water and gravity, but I think my favourite line is that the author and his wife “Love chasing waterfalls”; mate, they don’t move, you shouldn’t have to chase them. Or is that a TLC reference? Either way, I LOVE THEM.

• Love Clock: Would you like a Chrome extension which gives you a beautiful, animated clock each time you open a new tab? Yes, of course you would.

• Cyark: You’ll doubtless have seen the story of the recreation of the Arch of Palmyra in Trafalgar Square this week; Cyark are a company which goes around the world 3d scanning global heritage sites so that they can be preserved and in some cases replicated. A wonderful project, and the tech behind it is really rather interesting; if I were a really rich brand I’d look into working with them in some way (or, you know, just throw money at them because they do GOOD THINGS).

• Happy Dude: Absolutely my favourite moneymaking scheme of the week; Happy Dude is a website selling ‘units of happiness’ online for $1 (Canadian) apiece. You buy a unit of happiness, you get, well, marginally happier, as well as a digital representation of your Unit of Happiness to demonstrably prove that you’re marginally happier on Facebook. Give this person a medal, they are a BUSINESS GENIUS (I have bought three, and can confidently state that I feel several orders of magnitude happier than I did when I first woke up this morning – in case the site owner is reading this, you can totally use that endorsement for, say, $3 (Canadian)).

• Basically One Of The Games Off Tron In VR: Setting a new low bar there for the descriptors, I am aware, but seriously, I have no idea how to describe this and the details are pretty iffy at best, and frankly it may never arrive, BUT…this is created by the people who make giant spaceship spreadsheet simulation EVE Online, and is basically their prototype eSport which, using Oculus and other tech, lets you play a frankly BRILLIANT-LOOKING neon 3d game which involves you and an opponent flinging weird future lightfrisbees at each other, just like in Tron. Take a look – this really does look very fun indeed.

• Brilliant Mashup: A Twitter account generating ideas for pop-culture mashups, many of which may well prove legitimately decent inspiration, but which generally does a terrifyingly good job of capturing the tone of all this “look, it’s a steampunk Mario!” posts. “I want this! It’s a Twitter account that has pictures from The Dark Knight but with quotes from Aladdin” – actually, that’s almost certainly already out there. Ah, culture!

• Jasper St Aubyn West: I really hope that that’s his real name. Anyway, this is an Instagram account featuring photos which have had small cartoons drawn over them, illustrating everyday scenes with cute monsters and flourishes. Not superoriginal, but the execution is nice and I think that there’s a nice reactive brand Instagram thing you could do with some artists over a week – share your pics on Instagram with a brand using a particular hashtag, some get picked to be drawn on by artists and sent back to the submitter who then obviously reshares them, BINGO BRANDED CONTENT REACH ENGAGEMENT. God, this is wasted on you, isn’t it? Christ.

• The Raycat Solution: This is…odd. Imagine a future in which we need to warn people about potential radiation outbreaks. Done that? Good. Now imagine a world in which that’s easy to do because our predecessors thought to genetically engineer cats so as to change colour if they’re exposed to degrees of radiation. “Alan, the cat’s turning pink – what does that mean?” “TO THE BUNKER, SHEILA!”. You know, that sort of thing. Anyway, this is a seemingly serious community of people dedicated to discussing issues around genetic engineering and biology and stuff, and the cat thing is just a starting point, but still – GLOWING RADIOACTIVITY-SENSITIVE CATS!

• IconSpeak: A really nice piece of design, this; a tshirt which is covered in a series of icons designed to work as universal signifiers for a bunch of things which travellers might need to communicate when in a foreign land; ‘hungry’, ‘thirsty’, ‘imminently in danger of spectacularly voiding myself in public if you don’t help me find a bathroom sharpish’, ‘a goat has eaten my passport’, that sort of thing. I imagine that this is already getting ripped off left right and centre all over the world, but maybe the right brand could partner with them for something. Perhaps.

• An Online Metronome: Look, it might be useful for you.

• Online Speech-to-Text Tool: If you need one, this is actually pretty good – as with all these things you’ll need to speak slowly, but suggest you have it open in the background whilst attempting to lure colleagues into saying something personally or professionally compromising, just in case.

• Wander Round Don Draper’s Apartment: Yes, I know that Mad Men finished years ago, but it’s not my fault that this software developer’s only decided to make this now. Anyway, this is a nice promo for some 3d modelling service which creates interactive models based on floorplans; you can stroll through Don’s apartment and, er, add loads more furniture to it, should you so desire.

• Timeular: Timesheets are HORRID, aren’t they? Not that I’d know, to be honest – I never really did them, even when at a PROPER BIG AGENCY, and even when I did they were entirely fictitious (YEAH! TAKE THAT, THE MAN!). Still, I’ve had enough experience to know how unfun the general premise is; this is meant to take the pain away. Timeular is a die-like thingy which links to the web and times your activity – you position it with a certain face facing upwards and the clock starts ticking, assigning your time to whatever you’ve determined said face corresponds to;when you switch to another task, you switch the device so that the appropriate face is uppermost and the whole thing begins anew. The idea being that having a physical object there will remind you to log your time properly, and that this is somehow less onerous than clicking a button. Hm. Well it looks nice, at least.

• OurMix: A N Other music suggestion toy, this one with the gimmick that it uses what your friends are listening to on Spotify to select and suggest new listens for YOU. Except, and this is a pretty significant flaw, just because I like someone and am friends with them it doesn’t mean that I share any musical tastes with them whatsoever (in fairness this is something my friends, or at least those of them who I have ever shared a house with, are far more likely to say about me).

• Mighty TV: Clever idea, ripping off the Tinder interface to let you swipe through films and TV shows in order to teach it what you like and provide recommendations based on algorithms and STUFF; there’s ‘Watch Now’ functionality built in, and you can link it with your various streaming accounts. A nice idea which I could see being coopted by Sky or someone similar.

• Skute: Slightly shamefully I think this is a) London-based; and b) not in any way new, and yet this is the first I’ve heard of it. Skute is an interesting idea – physical…thingies (yes, yes, I know) which can be used as little dead drops for digital files; you use NFC tech to transfer files from your phone to the…thingy…which can then go with you as a sort of phone-compatible USB, or be left somewhere in the physical world for anyone to tap-to-download the stuff on it. As with all these things – this is not, obviously, an entirely new concept – the potential for some really rather fun executions is big – music especially strikes me as really fertile territory for this one.

• The Simpsons Brand IDs: Like the Simpsons? Like branding? OH GOOD! These are really rather odd, and all the better for it.

• The Latest Crazy Magic Leap Video: In case you didn’t see it already next week, the latest in the series of ‘is it vaporware? Is it magic? NOONE KNOWS!’ promos from Google-backed purveyors of AR trickery Magic Leap is, as per the previous ones, simply jaw-dropping. Raises a lot of questions – namely, HOW DOES IT WORK? – but the most future thing you will see all week, hands down. Other AR tech is of course available, but it’s not anywhere near as stupidly impressive.

• Colordot: A really useful little iOS app for picking colours and associated palettes; the interface in particular is really rather impressive.

• Name That Blue: All tech / web companies are blue. ALL OF THEM. See how many different shades YOU can identify in this surprisingly fun pseudogame.

• Slitscanner: Tweet gifs at this Twitter account and it will (eventually) tweet them back at you, having run them through a slitscanner filter which will make them look all streeeeeetched and glitched and generally weird and sort of cool if you like that sort of thing.

I WENT TO SEE NONKEEN THIS WEEK AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY LOVELY; LISTEN TO THEM HERE AND MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY CONVINCED THAT CARTOONS WERE BETTER IN THE 90S, PT.2:

• Losswords: OH THIS LOOKS FUN! Kickstarter campaign which just got funded to produce a mobile game which is all about playing with words; users get given passages from literature and are tasked with finding the words within words – “ass” within “passage”, that sort of thing – these then get turned into other puzzles which challenge yet other users to reconstitute the passages. Annoyingly hard to explain, you can click the link and watch the video for a far more cogent explanation – this looks GREAT.

• DoGooder: Interesting set of online tools for campaigning purposes, letting you do a whole load of stuff you’d traditionally have to pay an agency for for a fraction of the cost. Email systems, simple websites, political targeting…this is potentially really quite powerful, and is set up to work in the UK. If you’re a small campaigning body with limited budgets this is DEFINITELY worth a look, I think.

• PostLoudness: The latest in a series of sites which seek to shine a light on some of the more diverse corners of the podcasting world, PostLoudness showcases podcasts by women, POC and queer-identified hosts; doesn’t mean that the topics have anything to do with gender or identity politics, mind, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in getting some slightly more diverse opinions on stuff you’re interested in.

• Source CodeVHS: In the unlikely event that you know anyone who wants a VHS recorder beautifully customised to recreate the artwork of VHS covers from classic horror movies then THIS is for you. Or if you’re looking for an artist to commission to beautify some other electronic gewgaw, perhaps – you can probably think of something, can’t you?

• Take A Look Back At 1986: This was the world as of 30 years ago, as reconunted in pictures on The Atlantic. Such wonderful shots – absolute time travel here.

• Electmeme: Picking the favourite memes of the US Presidential contest so far; this site is a depressing reminder that the memes have been a rare moment of light in what’s been an almost uniformly toxic and depressing process. Oh, and it links to voter registration too, so well done them – you want to mobilise the young vote, Stay in the EU-type people? This sort of thing might be a better bet than that Lib Dem site up there. Just saying.

• MOON!: I have no idea who actually wants one of these in their house, but judging by the success of the Kickstarter campaign there are LOTS of people who desire a beautifully-realised scale model of the moon, complete with accurate lighting to depict lunar phases and stuff. If you want to make some sort of moon-based space epic, on reflection, this could actually be the most cost-effective SFX solution out there. Also, it is called MOON, which is rather lovely.

• Hunch.ly: This is REALLY interesting. If you’re a reporter or a muckraker I can imagine it coming very much in handy – Hunch.ly is a Chrome extension which stores webpages as you browse, creating an archive of all text and images you’ve viewed as you’re looking into something, tracking names, etc, that crop up. It’s all stored locally – if you’re a journalist I’d suggest having a play with this as it sounds VERY useful.

• The Gear Award: A gallery of digital art experiments, mostly in WebGL. I love this sort of stuff; there’s LOADS in here to check out and play with.

• Our Unfinished World: Unfinished World is a London-based project which leaves cards around various locations in the city and invites people who find them to leave their own reflections on London around the web. Whimsical and lovely, and some of the writing on the site is really rather nice. Still in its infancy, but the seeds of a nice piece of art here.

• The Hovercart: Hoverboards were so 2015, weren’t they? Do you remember that brief vogue for the things, thousands of which are now gathering post-Christmas dust beneath teenager’s beds the continent over? Well DRAG THAT PLASTIC BACK OUT, kids – this attachment lets you turn your staggeringly unsafe and flammable personal transportation device into an in-no-way-equally-unsafe GoKart! What could possibly go wrong?

• The Black Dahlia: Obligatory 420 post of the week, pt.1 – The Black Dahlia is a special box which appeared on Indiegogo this week designed to keep your weed fresh for ‘up to a year’; I might suggest that if it’s lasting you a year you should perhaps just buy less of the stuff, but it’s your money.

• Tony Greenhand: Obligatory 420 post of the week, pt.2 – another of those ridiculous weedporn Instagram accounts, the blunts and joints on display on here are sort of preposterous. The one shaped like a T-Rex, for example, is adorable (and looks like a marijuana suicide waiting to happen tbh).

• The Pyongyang Metro: Until recently, tourists to North Korea were only allowed to experience one stop of the Pyongyang Metro – this only changed a few weeks or so ago, and these are the first pictures to ever be taken by a Westerner and show the slightly crazy grandeur of their tube network. The mosaics alone are GLORIOUS.

• How To Operate Your Frog: Can someone explain this to me? Seriously, I know that this is a joke, but I simply cannot for the life of me understand what it is about. Anyone? Bueller?

• InkHunter: As I discovere when on holiday earlier this year, I am now in a minority when it comes to ink (insofar as I don’t have any). Maybe I should finally get that mid-life crisis tattoo done, on reflection; I’ve always rather fancied having a reassuring “It probably doesn’t matter” in small letters over my wrist, to look at in times of emotional distress. Anyway, were I to be considering such a thing I could use this app to get a reasonable idea of what it could look like; InkHunter lets you superimpose tattoo designs on a photo, changing the orientation, size, etc to give you an idea of exactly how INCREDIBLY COOL you’ll look with the teardrops on your cheekbone or whatever you’re considering. I once saw a bloke at Highbury many years ago who had the Arsenal cannon tattooed on his face, which I always thought was an impressive commitment to the cause (if a potentially career-limiting one outside a few select North London postcodes).

• ManyGolf: Multiplayer infinite golf game, which if you ignore the fact that you could be playing on a BBC Micro circa 1988 is actually quite a lot of fun.

• GRAPHIC Novels: Bike safety is a hugely important thing, obviously – a position with which the city of Phoenix REALLY agrees, judging by this frankly astonishing selection of comics promoting cycle safety to kids which really do put the ‘graphic’ in ‘graphic novel’. Effectively a 2d analogue to the PSA films of the 70s in which simply looking at a kite stuck on a pylon was enough to get you a few million volts to the craium, these present a series of short vignettes which demonstrate exactly how much bone, muscle and viscera can and will be exposed if YOU, CHILD fall off your bike whilst wearing inadequate protection. HILARIOUSLY overblown.

• Exploring The Cosmic Web: The most amazing ‘oh my God we are tiny and insignificant’ thing you will see all day, this – have a wander around inside a visualisation of the universe. To quote: “The concept of the cosmic web—viewing the universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity—is deeply ingrained in cosmology. Yet, little is known about architecture of this network or its characteristics. Our research used data from 24,000 galaxies to construct multiple models of the cosmic web, offering complex blueprints for how galaxies fit together. These three interactive visualizations help us imagine the cosmic web, show us differences between the models, and give us insight into the fundamental structure of the universe.” This is AMAZING.

• Visual Art Sessions: Lovely Chrome experiment which lets you participate (sort of) in the creative process of six different visual artists making work using 3d painting and sculpture tools – you can watch, and zoom around, them as they go about creating artworks in VR environments. The tech’s pretty beta, so the end results look very much like the sort of Kinect scans you were seeing in music vids a few years back, but the window into the creative process is a gorgeous one.

• Naked Fit: There’s a reason I tend not to look a myself in the mirror very often, let alone do so when I’m unclothed (in fact there are many reasons, most of which would require more expensive psychoanalysis than I’m willing to put myself through); I don’t understand why ANYONE would want to engage with any technology that gave them a better understanding of what they really look like with their clothes of. And yet, here we are – Naked Fit is a piece of tech which basically looks like a full-length mirror with a special stand in front of it, and which will scan your entire body, head to toe, in 360 hi def so that you can, over time, track how it’s changing. I KNOW HOW IT’S CHANGING, YOU BASTARD, IT’S IRREVOCABLY DECAYING TO THE POINT WHERE THE SIGNS OF MY MORTALITY WILL BE ETCHED IN EACH AND EVERY SINGLE SAGGING, DYING MILLIMETRE OF MY EPIDERMIS. Thanks for the reminder.

• Tootz The Unicorn: A crowdfunding campaign to raise money for an internet-connected model unicorn which will actually fart rainbows when certain predetermined conditions are met (you get an email; someone ‘Likes’ your photo; you get the idea). Sadly not even the most preposterous internet of things-thing I’ve seen this week.

• SwearJar: SUCH a good idea and ripe for reappropriation. SwearJar is a Slack bot which you can set up to automatically charge users $1 each time they use any of a list of proscribed terms in the channel and donates them to a charity of your choice. SO many applications here, both for brands and for charities and for campaigns – the possibilities are HUGE, particularly if you build this as a Facebook bot instead.

• Livia: I don’t have a womb, and have never had a period, so am probably in no way qualified to discuss the brilliance or otherwise of this, but nonetheless. Livia is a…thing…which you can attach to your stomach and which will, it maintains, MAGIC your menstrual cramps away. I mean, there’s some purported science on there but the description doesn’t fill me with confidence that it’s any better than, say, magnetic bracelets to prevent headaches – to whit, “It tunes into the wavelength frequency of your menstrual pain and blocks the pain from registering in your body.” Oh, right, OK then. Also, and this is incidental, not sure of the branding behind naming it after Augustus’s famously unpleasant and machiavellian (can one be machiavellian before Machiavelli? Hm) wife.

• Fantastic Vocab: Adorable project which uses a bot to create and define new words. If you love language you will love this – some of these are beautiful, some are silly, but the whole list is just a joy to dip into.

• Replace Tube Ads With Cats: Crowdfunding campaign to replace ads in a tube station with cat pictures. Fine, great, but could we maybe do it with something better than cat pictures? Please? You can read a proper writeup here should you so desire (you should desire).

• Google Creative 5: Google Creative 5 is an annual project giving people the chance to apply for a year-long paid position at the Google Creative Lab – they welcome people from all disciplines with a cxreative artistic bent, and the website through which you apply is lovely, featuring as it does a fun design-based challenge riffing on the Google logo. Try it out.

• Peggy: I have just realised that this is a washing powder promo gimmick (for OMO, which was, trivia fans, used as a signifier of a housewife’s availability for extra-marital affairs bitd; a packet of OMO on the windowsill signified ‘Old Man Out’ and that the lady of the manse was open to solicitations, or at least so Jonthan Meades told me in Pompey), but nonetheless it’s STILL the silliest IoT thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s an internet-connected clothespeg, FFS. A CLOTHESPEG. It will tell you when it’s likely to rain, for example, or if it’s started raining; OR YOU COULD LOOK AT THE WEATHER FORECAST, OR OUT OF THE WINDOW.

• Helena: Take a look at this. It’s a startup, apparently, with a view to…er…MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. “Helena is an organization of thirty global influencers who work together to achieve positive world impact. The group collaborates to create breakthrough ideas, then leverages its collective reach, strategic partnerships, and network to make them happen.” Wonderfully, this seems to be a collection of rich children of rich businesspeople who have secured funding for a nonspecific project designed to let them play at philanthropy in an ill-defined, outcome-light sense. THANKS, BENEVOLENT CHILDREN OF THE GLOBAL RICH, FOR YOUR ALTRUISTIC MUNIFICENCE! Truly, without initiatives like this the world really would be hurtling hellwards in the proverbial handcart.

• My Colour Me Book: Take your Instagram pictures and turn them into a colouring book, courtesy of this service. Smart idea which costs next to nothing to produce and I really, really wish I’d thought of myself. Perfect for any of the shallow narcissists in your life!

• Slither: Like snake, but for an infinite number of simultaneous players. Moderately diverting for 10 minutes or so.

• The Cavalier Challenge: A series of pretty fun 3dish minigames inviting you to complete a variety of knightly tasks like riding horses through a dark forest and that sort of thing; really quite slickly made, and worth playing with for 15 minutes while there’s noone looking at your screen.

• Choose Your Own Adventure Fallout New Vegas: You know those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type videos using YouTube annotations that were sort of vogueish a few years ago? Well this is one of those, but using Let’s Play vids of Fallout New Vegas to create a truly impressive adventure game. Obviously slightly improved if you have an interest in / knowledge of Fallout, but even if you don’t the scope and ambition here is laudable, and might give you some ideas if you fancy making something like this yourself.

• The Album Cover Special: An INCREDIBLE opportunity to own some original South African art; Marks Sign sells handpainted artworks from South Africa, and for a limited time only will, for the knockdown sum of $200, reproduce your favourite album cover in their own inimitable style. You want to know why you should consider this? JUST LOOK AT THE WORK! JUST LOOK AT IT! Your office refurb will look SLICK with some of this on the walls.

• DOS Emulator: Finally, this *sounds* dull but in fact is a one-stop site letting you play Wolfenstein 3d, the original Civ, or Monkey Island on a PC emulator in your browser. Go on, do it, they will NEVER sack you. Never.

FINALLY FOR THE MIXES, HAVE THIS BY METALHEADS AND TURN IT UP LOUD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Supper Mario Broth: More Mario-related stuff on here than you could shake a stick at. Also, I love the title.

• STNW: I don’t ordinarily feature Tumblrs collecting odd images, etc, without an overriding theme, but the stuff on here is just so good in general. Gently weird.

• Ru Is My Rabbi: I was going to try and write a description for this and then I read their own and I thought ‘sod it’: “daily wisdom from jewpaul: supermohel of the world”. EXACTLY.

• Star Wars UI: User interfaces from the original Star Wars. Some really quite cool design in here.

• Fakepics: Not actually a Tumblr – SORRY – but still wonderful, this blog collects pictures doing the rounds which are doctored in some way and debunks them. Decent place to search if you’re suspicious about some vintage photo or another and want to check its provenance.

• Diego Cusano: Combining food and illustration to charming effect. Hire this man for a food-related ad campaign, someone.

• Listing To Port: I really don’t know what this is, but some of the writing on here is lovely and silly and whimsical (like properly whimsical, not like that fcuking boat).

• Text-Mode: ASCII-ish graphics and animations, 8-bit-style art and generally great retro-giffery collected here.

• Morten Just’s Experiments: Morten Just occasionally undertakes small experiments in building techthings and posts them here. Some of these are really clever and could serve as excellent ‘inspiration’ (*ahem*) for campaigns, etc, should you need some.

• Brutalist Websites: Websites which don’t really do ‘pretty’. Great design examples if you’re into this sort of aesthetic.

• East Like A Duck: Recipes from the Simpsons, made and eaten, with photos. A noble endeavour, although you feel that the author may end up with the same sort of physique and complexion as one of the characters if they continue in this vein.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Disney Songs Ranked From Worst To Best: Depending on the sort of place you work, this list could potentially shut down the office for the rest of the day. If nothing else will give you a decent excuse to belt out the Beauty & The Beast soundtrack at the top of your lungs to your oh-so-grateful deskmakes (yes, I’m talking to you).

• Inside Magic Leap: As a companion piece to the Magic Leap promovid up there, this kilometric puffpiece in Wired suggests several things; firstly, that they have some GREAT PR; secondly, that the bloke from Wired was really very impressed with it; and thirdly, that they are either completely unwilling to give away ANYTHING AT ALL about the tech, or indeed what it actually is, or that this is the biggest tech=based prank ever devised. Because really, indescribable technology which noone has ever seen working in the wild, based on completely new systems which noone can seemingly adequately explain, delivered to the user…er…somehow? You can forgive me for being perhaps a touch on the sceptical side here.

• A Primer For Mushrooms: A clear, well-written and crucially pretty funny guide to doing mushrooms. Not that we’re suggesting you should, obviously, but in case you were ever tempted. Web Curios just wants you to be SAFE.

• Using Foursquare To Predict Sales & Share Prices: So this is long and is also about s*c**l m*d**, for which apologies, but if you’re interested in DATA and predictions and stuff then this is not only a really interesting writeup of how Foursquare checkin data around Chipotle stores in the US was used to predict what was going to happen to the brand’s shareprice, but also contains lots of food for thought about other uses for data of this sort. Smart, if technical.

• Plays For Normal People: Excellent comic writing around the theatre and how people involved in the theatre often think about it as opposed to ‘normal’ people. Thespy sorts among you will particularly appreciate, I think.

• How Food Became Pop Culture: A BRILLIANT essay by US celebrity chef and general personality Mario Batali, about the rise of food as a ‘thing’ in culture, the elevation of the chef to a position of festishised commodity, and how our relationship with what we eat has changed as a (Western) culture over the past few decades. Obviously from an American perspective, but this is a lovely piece of writing about food and what we eat and how we eat it and who we are.

• 27 Things That Concern A Millennial: Is this a joke? I think it’s a joke. I hope it’s a joke. Anyway, it made me laugh. BONUS MILLENNIAL!: If you can pass this off as a real thing to anyone you work with, you win a million(ial)(sorry) points.

• When Rape Is Broadcast Live Online: When Periscope and Meerkat first appeared last year, I confess to this sort of thing not even crossing my mind. Fast forward 12 months and we have our first spate of horrorstories about non-consensual sex being broadcast over the web, live and in realtime, for people to watch. So much horror/questioning in here – why do people watch, and how do companies who run these services set up systems whereby people stumbling across these feeds can quickly report stuff to appropriate authorities? Seriously though, the horror of the idea of thousands of people passively watching this and doing nothing about it.

• Explaining The Alt Right: The alt right is the name given to a loose coalition of post-internet groups all coalescing around strange and amorphous ideas of economic and social liberty, allied with small-c conservatism of all stripes, and united by a shared hatred of political correctness and, sadly often, non-whites, women and a whole host of other groups of people. This is a pretty exhaustive look at the factions and elements within it, which will leave you feeling sort of exhausted and a bit grubby by the time you’re through.

• I Have No Idea What This Startup Does: I linked to the company in question – Helena – up there; this is the piece through which I find out, in which the author gets a press release about this mysterious philanthropic company and tries to find out a little more about what it is and what it’s for. And fails, completely. Partly sort of amusing and partly just a little sinister; where is the money coming from? What is it for? Is it performance? Is James Franco going to end up appearing in promo videos for it? Literally no idea at all.

• Meet Richard Prince: The title of the piece refers to him as ‘The Warhol of Instagram’, which is perhaps about right; both artists are interested in the reappropriation of contemporary culture by art (establishment) as art (product), and both have a ‘loose’ relationship to their eventual output (studios et al doing a lot of the heavy nonconceptual lifting). Prince got internet famous a few years back when controversy erupted over the ‘plagiarism’ inherent in his instagram images, where he takes screencaps of Instagram pictures that he has commented on, and then prints and resells them as canvases; this is an interesting profile of his career and his place in the contemporary pantheon. I’m not qualified to comment on the artistic validity on display, but I will say that a lot of the people quoted here as his friends sound like dicks.

• Our Well Regulated Militia: You probably don’t need to read another piece about why the availability of firearms in North America is, you know, not always a great thing, but this is superbly written about gun culture and history and all sorts of other things.

• I Don’t Care About Your Life: A brilliant skewering of the stylistic trend towards imbuing all critical writing with a clear, distinct and often intrusive authorial voice and perspective – the elevation of the ‘I’ in criticism, if you will. Obviously something of which I am totally guilty (this sentence being a fabulous demonstration of exactly that, which is pleasingly reductive), this gets bonus points for the tone, which is fair and measured, and for recognising the influence of DFW on all of the writers in question.

• The Bifurcation of Social: Very smart essay talking about the essential difference between the phone and the phonebook in contemporary digital / social culture, and how this distinction embodies what Facebook is, and is becoming. Clever thinking.

• Meet The Man Who Owns 8chan: 8chan, the place where a bunch of dreadful people off 4chan fled when Moot decided that doxxing people sort of wasn’t ok, is owned by some bloke who lives in the Philippines. This is all about him, why he bought it and what he wants to do with it – did you know you can buy ads on 8chan for $5? Terrifyingly I was quite tempted to give it a go – should I advertise Curios on there? I bet they’d love the vaguely pinko worldview.

• The KFC Sandwich That Ate Pakistan: One of those wonderful pieces which gives you a totally new perspective on a country or culture, this is a wonderful look at how the ‘Zinger’ has become ubiquitous in Karachi and beyond; awesome on food and culture and (sort of) semiotics. Also, you will CRAVE a zinger biryani by the time you get to the end of this, I guarantee it.

• The Only Wild West Town In England: This is Laredo, a fully-functional replica of a Wild West town. In Kent, in 2016. So wonderfully eccentric and peculiarly British, and all the nicer for the fact that it’s a self-contained community rather than a tourist cash-in machine.

• Inside The World Of Offstage Touring Musicians: When I worked at Buckingham Palace many years ago, the bloke who ran the ticket office was a lovely queen called Kevin, an acid-tongued veteran of the West End who taught me the immortal phrase “my throat is as dry as a nun’s cnut”, and whose regular job involved sitting in the wings in BIG West End musical productions, being vocal cover for the more storied performers who could guarantee a sellout with top-billing but whose vocal range wasn’t quite up to the task. Anyway, this is a portrait of people who fulfil the same role for touring rock bands. WEIRD GIG.

• Being Metro Boomer: A profile of one of the hottest producers in US hiphop right now, painting a picture of an endearing and talented kid, backed by a lot of drive and ambition and a seriously understanding mother, who, by the time you get to the end of the piece, you’re sort of getting a touch worried about. You hope that the throwaway segment about his having recently bought a gun isn’t unpleasant foreshadowing.

• On Open Marriage and Illness: A glorious essay about coping with a partner’s long-term sickness and navigating the choppy emotional waters of an open marriage. It sounds pretty awful, to be honest (the open marriage rather than the illness, which obviously is awful), but whatever your feelings on polyamory this is an excellent piece of writing.

• Cork Is A Male Place: A confession: I really don’t get on with professional Irishness, the nonspecific fug of ‘craic!’ and lyricism and blarney which swirls around so much that comes out of the country (to my mind). This, from Granta, about Cork, is about as far from that as it’s possible to be; I’ve never visited, but having read this it feels like I have. One of the best evocations of place through prose I’ve read in years, this deserves a cup of tea and some proper concentration. Enjoy it, it’s fabulous.

• The Internet Has Changed Everything: Finally, a piece looking at how growing up in the middle of nowhere is different in the online era. For everyone who was ever a teenager stuck in a personal hell from which you couldn’t wait to escape.  

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is called The Others and it’s by Hiroshi Kondo and it’s the best video I’ve ever seen of people crossing the road:

2) Next, a fabulous piece of animation to accompany the pleasingly funky ‘Freaking Out’ by Magnetic Skulls. Basically a Saturday morning cartoon in 3.5-minute music video form:

3) This is called ‘Your American Girl’ and it’s by Mitski, and I LOVE the song but possibly love the video even more for its odd awkwardness and the handkissing which is just SO poignant:

4) This is by Kangding Ray, it’s called ‘These Are My Rivers’ and it’s a nice slice of techno with a wonderful video taking nature and glitching it all out in geometric black and white:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! I’m obviously a prude (what?) but I tend to get a little bit embarrassed at overtly explicit hiphop; this track by Run The Jewels is no exception, and I find the whole thing quite silly, but it’s catchy as all get out and the video, featuring extreme hi-res insect-and-flower bongo, is LOVELY:

6) I don’t know what this is AT ALL, but it seemed to me like the audiovisual equivalent of an icecream headache. It’s “あなくろノイズ” by tilt-six:

7) This, by contrast, is soothing in a wonky sort of way, although the video’s another slice of CGI weirdness. It’s called ‘Wiik’, by Yllis:

8) Have you ever watched ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’? If you have, you may recognise this woman, who’s apparently on it; no matter if you don’t, though, as the song and the video stand alone as the most awful/brilliant musical thing I have seen in ages. It’s called ‘How Many Fcuks?’ and it’s like a laser-guided missile to the heart of bitchy hi-camp. ENJOY!:

9) Finally this is the weirdest thing I have seen all week, by miles. Stick with it, it’s worth it. This is ‘A Prank Time’. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

LET’S START WITH THIS SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT ALBUM, IMAGINING THE LIFE OF PABLO BY KANYE HAVING NEVER HEARD IT BEFORE! NO, WAIT, IT’S GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY HAVE DONE WITHOUT THE FACEBOOK F8 STUFF THIS WEEK, FRANKLY, BUT HERE WE ARE:

• Facebook F8 Overview: I’m chucking this at the top because I appreciate that you might want a general, actual journalist’s summary of all of the things that Facebook wanged on about this week, but I swear, if you just click on this and ignore all my carefully (ha!) crafted prose that is coming up then I will cut you (I won’t, obviously; I have no idea who you are or where you live, and frankly it’s not like my readership’s large enough to start alienating any of you with bladed physical assault, but I hope you understand that at the very least I’ll be hurt. Good). Oh, and if you’re interested in the BIG FUTURE stuff, this is a great piece of writing about what this all actually MEANS with regard to Facebook and the world (so frightening that that’s a totally legitimate sentence in 2016). (There is also our writeup – “Facebook’s F8 – Release the Zuckerbot” – Ed).

• Facebook Rights Manager: Facebook finally addresses the  issue of content theft on the platform, or at least the video-based side of it; content creators / publishers who see their videos getting ripped and reposted by others for FRAUDULENT NUMBERS can now use Facebook Rights Manager to tag videos to which they own the copyright; Facebook will then, using what frankly sounds a bit like magic, attempt to spot the same images being played on different videos – so spotting when someone’s just ripped and reuploaded stuff. There’s a lot of quite deep functionality here about rights and permissions, which if you’re a brand which publishes a lot of video is, I’m sure, very welcome indeed. Oh, and semi-related, it’s now easier to get integrated analytics for videos posted across multiple Pages, which is useful for multi-Page brands to see which of their properties are driving the greatest ‘engagement’ (sorry, but it’s early) with any given piece of ‘content’ (I’M SORRY).

• Instant Articles Really ARE Here For Everyone: I’m sure we’ve been saying this for MONTHS. Anyhow, they are now OFFICIAL, with their own website and everything; here’s Facebook’s prosey explanation of the things, again, and this is a really useful guide to setting them up. If you do lots of long-ish form written stuff then you might as well have a play with this, although I’m sort of ideologically opposed to us all blithely playing along with moves that cement the Hotel California-like status of The Network (as I am increasingly calling it, with caps, in my head).

• Welcome To Bots On Messenger: Or at least, BOTS FOR EVERYONE! After Kik and KLM last week, the floodgates open – watch every single ON TREND brand churn one of these fcukers out in the next couple of weeks, to questionable actual public utility but a great fanfare of self-aggrandising press screed. Anyway, this is some of the technical stuff about how to make them, in case you want to start bullying your tech team about it right now. Unsurprisingly, it took about seventeen minutes for this to be complemented by an announcement about, guess what, ADVERTISING! (in fairness, not 100% new information, but) – not yet open to all, but you’d bet your next of kin on this being a big line item in revenue projections for the next few years. Early reports suggest that they’re, well, a bit rubbish at the moment – the lack of standardised command vocabulary means that we’re sort of in a weird retro 80s limbo whereby we’re trying to second-guess the vocabulary the bots have at their disposal, like some sort of tedious, shopping-and-news-focused Infocom adventure. If you care, though, here’s a list of all the current Messenger Bots for you to play with – LOOK THEY HAVE ZORK!

• Facebook Live API: There’s a whole load of really rather interesting stuff buried in here if you’re the sort of person who wants to integrate Facebook Live into your existing broadcast and filming schedule – I can see TV going HUGE on this come the Autumn.

• Create Looping Facebook Profile Pictures From 3rd Party Apps: Basically you can now have a Vine as your profile picture, should you so desire. Look, I didn’t say that the quality of updates from F8 was consistent.

• Better 360-degree Video On Facebook: A set of updates designed to help users get more out of 360 vids (including a whole set of signposts to help them understand how the sodding things work), as well as an interesting update to analytics which shows publishers heatmaps of exactly where in the video people are focusing on, which if you did consumer product-type stuff is probably hugely significant in gauging potential consumer interest in a particular thing.

• Facebook Social VR: This gave me a headache and a not-insignificant jolt of future shock when I read it, I have to say – it sounds DREADFUL. Anyway, FB also debuted its weird sort of remote Second Life ‘let’s all wear Oculus and interact with our ‘Friends’’ avatars in some weird virtual third space through Facebook-thing; this is it, see if it makes you feel as uncomfortable as it did me.

• Autotagging Friends In Videos Is Now A Thing: Another reason to ensure that people don’t in fact capture your face on film, ever. I’m losing enthusiasm for this, can you tell? COME ON WE CAN DO THIS TOGETHER!

• The Facebook Save Button: I made that Hotel California reference up there as a sort of throwaway, but I’ve been thinking about this as I type and it’s weirdly, creepily accurate in a way. Additional proof: the Facebook Save button, which already exists on the platform but is now being rolled out to developers across the web – you can add a ‘Read Later on Facebook’ button to anything now, letting you go back to it to read through the Facebook app at a later point. Leave Facebook? Why would you ever want to leave Facebook? It’s so nice here; everyone’s so friendly! Noone ever leaves; you don’t want to leave, do you? No, that’s right, you don’t! Now, take a sip of your calming, warm drink and settle down while we show you another set of slightly stale memes and some of your loose acquaintances’ baby photos, and more targeted adverts than any sentient being should ever have to experience. Good. Good.

• Facebook Quote Sharing: I think this is really clever; simple, integration to share quotes from Kindle titles directly to Facebook. This is going to become a thing EVERYWHERE on the web, I can confidently predict.

• Sponsored Posts On Pages: Not actually part of the F8 jamboree, but BIG NEWS this; brands can now pay other publishers for posts on their Pages, and therefore leverage (sorry) said Pages’ reach and audience for BETTER CONTENT REACH AND DISTRIBUTION. There are rules and guidelines, but as an extension to your local market influencer outreach stuff, this is BIG NEWS. Will also come as a relief to all those Pages who have been trousering cash to post things for months on the sly and who were technically breaking the rules.

• Buy Tickets Through Messenger: It’s another bot, basically, this one from Ticketmaster. Which means it should be up there, really, but my whole sense of how this is all fitting together has been absolutely SCREWED by all this Facebook stuff, sorry. Anyway, think this is quite interesting particularly w/r/t touting / bot marketplace stuff (cf Facebook’s REAL PERSON policy).

• Dropbox Now Integrates With Facebook Messenger Too: So there. Potentially useful for filesharing with customers, etc, if you’re looking for a customer services solution, maybe.

• Facebook Changes The Rules On Text On Images: For those of you whose professional lives involve worrying about whether or not you have too much text overlaid on an image to comply with Facebook’s Page guidelines, I am so, so sorry. But also, you should probably know that it’s a bit different now. Not better, just different.

• Instagram Rolling Out Suggested Videos: Coming soon, to the Instagram Explore tab! You know what this means? What’s that? A better-curated selection of video goodness from your favourite people and brands, pumped straight to your phone? Well, er, possibly, but what it also almost certainly means is A NEW WAY TO ADVERTISE! *sighs*

• Twitter Launches First View Adverts: No idea how much this costs, but I’d wager it’s LOTS – Twitter announced a new ad unit the other day, which lets a promoter pay £lots to ensure that their promoted video is the first thing that targeted users see when they fire up the app or website – with autoplay video, that basically works as a preroll for Twitter, which now I think about it sounds so fcuking irritating I’d probably avoid any brand that did that to me on principle.

• Twitter Moments Now Work With Soundcloud: Effectively turning Moments into a potential playlist vehicle. Which is of little or no use to you seeing as Moments is still a ‘curatorial’ exercise and this open to all, but if you’re a brand with a lot of money and a link to music then I would expect Twitter to start making fluttery-eyelash ‘come hither’ gestures at you and then nicking all your money for a piece of this.

• Watch Vines Like Telly: Vine introduced a new ‘Watch’ feature this week, which I saw described somewhere as a sign that ‘old people’ had won – the feature creates a constant flow of new Vines from any given channel, one after the other, like some sort of exhausting stream of 6-second “You’ve Been Framed”-type LOLs, which sounds dispiriting in the extreme to me, but there is DEFINITELY something in here in terms of new ways of storytelling (again, sorry) or interesting things you can do with the ordering of your films.

• Twitter Doesn’t Drive Traffic: WHO KNEW?! Oh, we all did. Sorry.

• Snapchat Launches Stickers On Video: Christ alone knows what the children will do with this; I feel so OLD and so TIRED. If you do too, this is a potentially helpful / useful guide to Snapchat and how to do stuff on it, although to be honest it’s almost certainly too late for you. YOU’VE BEEN LEFT BEHIND, GRANDDAD.

• Tesco Launches IFTTT Channel: I think this is really smart; Tesco’s had an API for YEARS, but it’s now linked to IFTTT – meaning you can now set it to, say, drop items into your basket should they fall below a certain price threshold (Casillero at £5? EMPTY THE SHELVES!), or purchase eggs on a Thursday. Interesting antidote to the EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ON FACEBOOK new bot ecosystem.

• A Wonderful Tourist Site: After a frankly overwhelming tsunami of s*c**l m*d** news, this is a balm to the soul. A REALLY lovely piece of webwork by Humboldt County tourist board, letting you watch a series of short video vignettes of lovely places in the area tourists could visit; you can hit space whilst watching to add anywhere you like the look of to your personal itinerary, which is then saved as a map with directions, places of interest, accomodation and dining suggestions and the like. The UI here is really rather good – take a look.

• BUPA and the FutureHeads: I was late to this last week, but this is the best healthcare digital thing I have seen in YEARS, except possibly that sexual health game from Nottingham NHS Trust which featured that supervillain with penises for arms shooting sperm at people. This uses the band to showcase the importance of having a working body to keep the SWEET MUSIC OF LIFE playing; I can only say that, personally, I currently feel like I’m down to the triangle and the castanets and even they’re flagging.

LET’S TRY SOMETHING FROM LIL’ KIM (YES, HER) WHO IS BACK WITH A NEW MIXTAPE WHICH IS ACTUALLY PRETTY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR WHITTINGDALE IS A DEVOTEE OF THE MUIR ACADEMY (WHICH I AM AT PAINS TO POINT OUT IS, LET US REMEMBER, NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB CURIOS’ AUTHOR), PT.1:

• Chatty Maps: After all the naked commercialism of the above (how DARE companies attempt to be successful and make money, eh? Christ, what a predictable, teenage lefty bore I am), this is a nice antidote. Chattty Maps looks to…er….map city streets based on their sounds, classifying each depending on its prevalent audio profile and creating colourised city streetmaps as a result. Now, I’m not going to claim that it’s 100% accurate in its aural assessments (the street opposite me, for example, doesn’t sadly sing with the sounds of nature as the map seems to currently suggest), but the outputs and the idea are lovely. Take a look.

• The French Meter: This is such a good idea, to the extent that I don’t think it can be 100% new, can it? Anyway, the French Meter is an app to help with your French pronunciation; you speak into your phone, and it compares your strangled attempts at gallic insouciance with the recordings of actual French people to gauge exactly how atrocious your accent is. I sent this to the only Frenchman I know (HI NICO!) this week to see what it made of his accent, but as yet I don’t think he’s tried it out yet.

• The First Choose Your Own Adventure Book: Called ‘Treasure Hunt’, and from…er…ages ago, this is a wonderful hit of nostalgia – far more of the Enid Blyton school than the Ian Livingston, it’s interesting to see how little the mechanics of these things have changed. Also, frankly, playing this is going to be more interesting than whatever professional tasks you have on your plate right now, so indulge yourself. Let the inner child FREE!

• BitBonkers: Another audiovisual representation of the IMMENSITY OF BITCOIN, creating a cascade of different sized and coloured balls to represent all the transactions going on around the world RIGHT NOW. Oddly reminiscent of those strange magnetic ball sculpture things that were popular in the 80s (YOU KNOW), I could watch this all day. Mesmerising.

• Good Email Copy: A whole load of examples of ‘good’ email copy from companies around the world, giving examples of how to do ‘Hello, welcome’ mails, confirmations, etc. Skews very much towards the tech/startup world, and the tone of a lot of this stuff veers quite sharply away from what I might turn ‘good’ and instead towards ‘cloyingly cheery and frankly a little too much like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation for my liking’.  

• Do You Speak Tourist?: I love that this exists. A great website set up by (I think) the Parisian administration designed to help Parisians deal…better with tourists coming to visit. Containing useful hints and tips about what different nationalities like, and are like, this is actually really rather sweet and nowhere near as comedically stereotypical as one might initially have hoped. All in French, obviously, so the degree to which this will amuse you will depend on your ability to read foreign; can we just take a moment to imagine how WONDERFUL something like this would be for Londoners? CAN SOMEONE PLEASE WRITE ONE?!?! Anyone from VICE reading this, seriously, this would be GOLDEN.

• The Mushroom Ninja: No ninjas (although on reflection they might just be hiding), but lots of mushrooms – an Instagram feed of uncommonly pretty mycology. Loads better than you’d think, and really quite interesting.

• The Start Page: A website collecting a whole load of different booting up animations from a whole load of old operating systems; if you’re nostalgic for the sound and visuals of your PC rebooting in 1997 then this will give you an unparalleled hit of retro. Take the least tech savvy person in your office, put this on their browser on fullscreen, and watch them get very confused indeed.

• Flappy Vape: After the bloke who programmed it into Super Mario the other week, it now appears that programming Flappy Bird into unlikely places is a THING. Witness this (very impressive in a sort of pointless and hypergeeky fashion), whereby someone somewhere has programmed a vape pen to play Flappy Bird on its little LED readout screen. I wish I used my spare time this productively (the most pathetic thing about that statement is that it’s not even really a joke).

• More Tracks Like This: A N Other music recommendation service, this one mashes Spotify and Pandora. Simple, but might throw some semi-interesting recommendations your way.

• Webkay: A simple website which tells you EVERYTHING that your current browser knows about you. Which is sort of weird – on the one hand, it’s a bit creepily impressive and a useful reminder of how much we are being tracked everywhere we browse (and if, like the majority of us, you’re on Chrome, how much information we’re giving Google just by being online); on the other, this pales into insignificance when compared to what we’re telling Facebook every second we browse the web whilst logged in. The upshot? EVERYONE IS WATCHING US.

• Botlist: BOTS! WE NEED A BOT! WHAT IS YOUR BOT STRATEGY! Seriously, go into a meeting with a client TODAY and drop that bombshell – you’ll have a speculative white paper gig within MINUTES, guaranteed (free consultancy there, kids!). Botlist is a(n almost certainly already out-of-date) website listing all the bots currently available across all the platforms – Kik, Facebook, etc. Useful if you want to see what other people are doing, and what’s currently IN VOGUE in the world of slightly shonky automation.

• Calm: What is it with the scions of the OLD startup web (Acton Smith, Tew et al) all getting BIG into mindfulness over the past few years? The coke ran out? Middle-age kicked in? Regardless, ANOTHER online tool to help come to terms with, you know, LIFE and modernity and stuff comes in the form of Calm – a website which lets users set up a MEDITATIVE SPACE with a peaceful background and audio track, which can then be shared with other users online through Twitter and other networks to create shared meditations online. Because NOTHING, and I mean nothing, says I AM A CALM AND CENTRED BEING like having one tab out of 19 displaying a photo of a Japanese temple and some panpipes. Obviously.

• Kite: This may be good, this may be awful – as a non-coder I really couldn’t tell you. Kite sells itself as a ‘coding companion’, delivering assistance and suggestions to help coders as they…er…code. This will either be superuseful, pulling in suggestions on publicly available solutions to coding problems from the web on the fly, or the most irritating thing in the world, like Clippy for JS. YOU DECIDE!

• Quantify: This looks REALLY clever; an app which lets filmmakers tag footage as they film it – meaning you can timestamp and rate clips as you go, leading to LOADS of time saved in the edit. This is such a smart idea, and if you spend lots of time making films then I’d definitely give it a go.

• Lorem Dimsum: You can probably work out what this is without me explaining it to you; if you’re designing a website for a new oriental eatery then this might be for you.

• Natural Cambodia: It’s really easy, if you’re me, to get all cynical about the web, and people, and Facebook in particular (bloody Facebook *shakes fist, impotently*); occasionally, though, you find projects which just make you think “oh, everyone’s just quite nice really aren’t they?” – this is onesuch. Natural Cambodia is a Facebook Group where people post photos of nature they have taken in Cambodia but which they can’t identify; the community then works to tell them exactly what that bug/plant/strangely-toothed marsupial might be. That’s it! Nothing else! A lovely example of community development which brands could probably learn a thing or two from in terms of harnessing the power of interested individuals to help, etc.

• 2001 A Gif Odyssey: You want over 500 gifs depicting pretty much the entirety of Kubrick’s 2001, from start to finish? OH GOOD! Suggest you pick one colleague and simply reply to every single one of their next 500+ communiques using nothing but loops cribbed from this site, just because.

• Lightwork: So this is actually pretty shonky, but bear with me here as there is an IDEA. It might be a crap idea, but. Lightwork is a site which lets you set up an LED array using something called Flickerstrips (basically a programmable strip of LEDs for the home); you use the interface to choose the colourpattern you want, and you can then watch this pattern come to life on an actual LED array in some bloke’s house somewhere in the US. Which is about as dull as it sounds, frankly, BUT the site also lets you download the short film of the pattern as a gif, which is where the IDEA comes in – I REALLY like the idea of something like this which lets you set up and create real-world gifs; is there some sort of fan service thing that can be done here? Live gif studio with INFLUENCERS making them for you on the fly? Something in conjunction with the ability to make looping animations as your FB profile shot? Has this been done before? I’m wittering, aren’t I? MORE TEA!

• Urban Rail: Statistically speaking, it’s likely that at least one person reading this is a secret, closet railway network enthusiast. This site, collecting maps and information about urban railways the world over, is for YOU. Don’t be ashamed (but, at the same time, please feel free to never talk to me about your hobby, ever).

• Rage Yoga: A rare instance of something being featured in Private Eye before Curios (I am slipping), Rage Yoga is either satire or madness but I’m unsure which. Purporting to be a form of yoga which actively encourages cathartic anger and profanity, if you’ve ever wanted to scream whilst yog-ing then this is possibly for you.

• The Finnish Wartime Photo Archive: A wonderful collection of wartime photography from the Finnish WWII archives, featuring pictures both from at home and at the frontline, and the best collection of military reindeer you or I will probably ever see.

• Obscura Day 2016: Obscura Day is a THING, apparently, and it is happening TOMORROW! Organised by Atlas Obscura, and sort of an adjunct to thinks like Open House day, the idea is that places around the world open up to be explored. It’s mainly North American, but there are a couple of London things at Westminster and Tower Hamlets cemetary, and it’s a generally lovely idea should you wish to get involved.

• GUM Play: The unfortunate side-effect of capitalising GUM is that it invariably puts one in mind of ‘genito-urinary medicine’, which lends the concept of ‘GUM Play’ a slightly different air. However, if you’re able to keep your mind away from that sort of thing (sorry) you will discover that this is in fact the latest iteration in the SMART TOOTHBRUSH market; basically, a thingy that you stick on the end of your brush which tracks movement to determine whether you’re cleaning your teeth properly and lets you play games, etc, while so doing. Not novel per se, but I really like the musical application (brush to play songs), and the news idea is quite clever (brush to get headlines in the morning read out to you). Looks slick, though obviously just a gimmick.

• A Neural Network In Your Browser: This is quite (read: very) techy, and sort of more interesting in theory than output, but if you’ve ever wanted to get a better understanding of how neural networks actually operate, with some simple visual examples of how they parse information, then this is pretty good. COMPLICATED, mind – this stuff is quite…*hard*.

• Photographs From Obama’s Visit To Cuba: As far as I can tell, this is SPONSORED CONTENT from some camera manufacturer or another (hence the brand name write massive in the headline); that aside, though, these photos of contemporary Cuba are rather lovely – and one or two of the pictures are phenomenally framed.

• SpaceX Photos: Seeing as we’re doing pictures, have this selection from last week’s triumphant SpaceX ‘Oh, wow, this really is the future’ rocket-landing-on-a-drone extravaganza.

• Behind The Name: A website which will give you all sorts of information about the background, history, geographical spread and etymology of any given forename; wonderfully, it also gives you translations of any name you give it, which means if you want to start annoying people by referring to them by their name in a variety of foreign languages then you now can.

MORE NEW HIPHOP, THIS TIME FROM TATE KOBANG WITH HIS MIXTAPE ‘SINCE WE’RE HERE’!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR WHITTINGDALE IS A DEVOTEE OF THE MUIR ACADEMY (WHICH I AM AT PAINS TO POINT OUT IS, LET US REMEMBER, NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB CURIOS’ AUTHOR), PT.2:

• Lewk: Are you a man? Do you HATE shopping? Would you like to outsource all responsibility for your wardrobe to a mysterious algorithm which will, if you let it, send you clothes up to the value of $XXX each month based on what it thinks your taste is? I mean, to be honest I’d be totally up for that (other than the suggestion that I might have a monthly clothing budget – HA! Biennial, morelike). I would love to know whether there’s actually any software behind this, though, or whether it’s actually people pretending to be software (this happens, you know, lots. Back in the mid-90s, I once spent a summer in a windowless room, working for Nationwide Building Society. They couldn’t afford voice-recognition call-routing software in the mid-90s, so instead hired me and two other poor fcukers to sit wearing headphones, listening to calls coming in, hearing people say ‘one’, ‘two’ or ‘three’ after a series of menu prompts, and then pressing the appropriate button whilst the customer was fooled into believing that there was some high-tech magic at play. It’s rare that you can *actually* define a job as ‘kafkaesque’, but I think that counts).

• I Grew Up Star Wars: Pictures of people back in the day enjoying Star Wars stuff. Depending on the point of view, the fact that this is happening for a whole new generation nearly 40 years hence is either a lovely example of the enduring power of popular culture or a terrifying example of the power of advertising. Your choice there.

• Hippo: You know that asking the web to help you by photoshopping stuff is such a guaranteed route to LOLs that even marketing departments are onto it and are gaming it now (really, this was not a naive mistake)? This is sort of the antithesis of that; Hippo lets you submit your photos to a ‘community of photoshop experts’ through the app, for them to improve them however they see fit; these pictures are then available for others to view, including steps taken by the artists to apply the effects seen. Actually a nice idea, particularly for aspirant photo editors, but I’m buggered if I know what the ‘shoppers are getting out of the experience as the whole thing is free.

• The Wine Project: You know that feeling you get when you’re drinking but you’re not drunk, but the booze has just taken the edge off and you’re feeling NO pain, and you already know that you are going to have another and it is good, and everything’s funny and light and full of, you know, possibilities, and maybe you WILL have that cigarette because fcukit, it’s the weekend, and you DESERVE it, dammit, and maybe I will text Darryl because it’s been weeks since I last scored and…ahem. Sorry. This photoseries captures the photographers friends at four stages – after 0,1,2 and 3 glasses of booze. The worse abstinence-promoter you will ever see; I mean, it’s 9:26am as I type this and this has made me WELL want a booze (I am resisting the siren call of the fridge, mum, in case you’re reading this).

• The Poetic Router: I could explain this, but they do it SO much better: “It is a middleman router designed on a Arduino Yun (readily available as one of the favourite IoT module running openWRT). It connects to your home router and then creates an Access point for other devices to connect to it directly. Once connected, it now knows the ip address of the machines(computer) and can monitor the traffic going to them from servers. On click of a button it does that. Then it scrapes the data for finding the server links. Once it lists down the links , then with the help of a terminal based browser it pings each one of them and downloads the text on their html page. From the created corpus it generates the poem and runs it through a speech engine which then is passed through an USB audio channel to a FM transmitter. That’s when you hear the poet recite.” Lovely.

• Le Grand Bazar: SUCH an aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed, this one. Really very calming indeed.

• Book In A Box: Interesting idea, this one. Internet relic Tucker Max (remember fratire?) has stopped getting drunk and writing about it for thick-headed fraternity lunks, which is reasonable given he’s over 40, and has instead started a company which productises ghostwriting. Aimed squarely at the deluded, arrogant business guru end of the market, Book In A Box charges around $20,000 for the whole process of writing your bestseller for you – from outline to finished manuscript, based on a series of interviews with you, the author. The part of me that actually likes books and thinks that writing is actually a sort of proper talent (yes, yes, not one that I possess, fine) is appalled by this; the part of me that admires someone who can spot a market is really impressed. I can imagine this becoming really rather successful.

• Velocipedia: Can you draw a bike? Go on, draw one now. I’ll wait. *waits* Ok, so look at it – would it work? This is the premise of this project, in which drawings of bicycles from memory are rendered in 3d by Gianluca Gimini, showing how rare it is that we can actually recall something properly. Some of these are GREAT, if totally impractical – I would like to see this as a real-world exhibition, please, thanks.

• Virus Trading Cards: Pharma companies looking for SHAREABLE CONTENT – a) here you are; b) pay this nice Phd student actual proper cashmoney to make more of this stuff for you.

• Film Dialogue Analysis Motherlode: Alongside the Guardian’s good-if-expectedly-depressing look at who gets the most crap in the comments section (spoilers: WOMEN! whodathunkit?), this is the best example of data journalism this week; the visualisation and the way it all just fits together is beautiful, and (another) great example of how far this stuff will go if you take the time and trouble to make it look good (yes, fine, films are a popular topic, and sexism always gets teh clicks, but this was EVERYWHERE this week, which considering the site itself is a new publisher is pretty good going).

• Habito: FULL DISCLOSURE: my friend weird Scott off the internet works on this, BUT it’s good even without that fact. Habito is a really rather interesting company which is seeking to automate the mortgage application process, automatically scanning all available mortgage deals, seeing which you’re eligible for, getting in touch with the provider…all within a matter of minutes. Very smart, with an indication that they will be automating more of the services (renewals, etc) as the product matures, this could be really very big indeed. DISRUPTIVE, as I believe the kids say.

• The Umbrella Cover Museum: In the same manner that there is, inevitably, bongo of everything on the internet, there should be a parallel rule around the fact that there is nothing so niche or ostensibly mundane that someone, somewhere, won’t collect and display it. So it is with the Umbrella Cover Museum – you had no idea, did you, that those little waterproof sheaths (not, on reflection, a pleasant word, that – sheath) were so pregnant with stories and interest? It’s been going 20 years and is, according to the homepage, raising money to BRING THE MUSEUM TO ENGLAND. I think that that’s a project which Web Curios can firmly get behind, so consider this an OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENT (you can quote me on that, Nancy).

• Glued: A common problem of family life (I say this as though I know anything about it; I am so not into such concepts as to have once had the following statement rhetorically shouted at me by my mother as I prepared to go out one night: “What do you contribute to family life, Matthew? FCUK ALL, that’s what”. She had a point) is that everyone is so busy staring at their magical internet distraction boxes that they simply don’t communicate any more. O NOES! What better way to fix that than with a smartphone app? Erm. Anyway, Glued basically gamifies (haven’t used that word in a while) the process of not looking at your sodding phone, awarding points for inactivity and letting families compete with each other. I’m going to hazard the opinion that maybe, just maybe, if this is the best ruse you can muster to get your family to prefer spending time with each other than with the infinite distraction boxes then you might have one or two other problems.

• Kids Drawing Necklaces: These are BRILLIANTLY dreadful. You know those ‘we will make a soft toy from your kid’s amusingly shonky drawings’ websites? This is like that, but for jewellery. You too can own a necklace which looks like the distressingly deformed depiction of ‘mummy’ spazzed out by your jam-fingered progeny! Suggest you buy one of these for a parent in your life and then film their reaction as they open it, for the lols like.

• 90s Indie Film Polaroids: SO SO GOOD. Jason Rail, who was obviously *someone* in 90s indie cinema, is INstagramming a load of old polaroids from way back when. Featuring all sorts of GREAT shots of 90s stars (seriously, a quick scroll will net you Beyonce, Heather Graham, Lisa Kudrow, er, Roseanne Barr…), these are brilliant. You could spend a long time here, be warned.

• Spoil Me: I presented this on Twitter as something for people who didn’t actually like films very much so that they could talk knowledgeably about movies with people who do, this presents a series of spoilers for any film you care to mention. Want to know what the BIG TWIST in the latest blockbuster is without having to go through the tedium of actually watching it? This is for YOU.

• Photobomber: Simple but poleasing quiz which invites you to complete sentences with hints based on the top-rankedFlickr photo for certain particular words. Look, just click, it’s actually pretty self-explanatory and it’s not MY fault I’m struggling with the descriptors (again) this morning.

• WikiHow Guessing: Guess the title of the WikiHow article from the cartoon illustration accompanying it. Some are obvious, some are obscure, all will convince you that WikiHow is a deeply odd website that contains some…questionable advice.

• Happy Couple: Apparently the secret to a happy relationship is communication; what better way to communicate with your partner, then, than via the medium of faceless tap-tap-tapping on a mobile phone? NONE! This is Happy Couple, which lets you and your partner answer various questions about each other and your life together, sort of in the style of Mr & Mrs, and then discuss your results. This sounds HIDEOUS, frankly, but your mileage may vary.

• MarkMaker: There was an automatic logomaker in here last week, but this blows that one out of the water. MarkMaker is a site which lets you type in the name of your company or business and then spits out a variety of logos for you – you tell it which you like, and it automatically develops and refines these based on your preferences. I’m not suggesting for a second it can replace a designer, but frankly I now have an EXCELLENT Matt Muir logo which I am going get tattooed forthwith (if you would like to get the Matt Muir logo tattooed, please get in touch).

• Public Information Films: The BFI continues its crusade to kill productivity in workplaces everywhere by putting a whole load of brilliantly retro public safety films online. From Charlie Says to all those terrifying ones featuring mop-haired 70s children of the corn getting electrocuted after carelessly flying their kite into a substation, I would personally happily attend an evening screening of a few hours of these.

• Barbie Savior: Barbie, on Instagram, in the guise of a white woman going to SAVE AFRICA through her high-profile charitable works. Insert whichever celebrity you feel most appropriate as the butt of this one.

• Warm Presents: Sadly it’s now practically summertime and so you’re unlikely to need these for a few months yet, but it’s probably worth buying a load now in advance of the inevitable November cold snaps – knitted pants for men, with conveniently knitted…er…cocktubes (sorry, but that’s what they are). Coming, inevitably, to a stag party near Ljubljana, soon.

• Koze: Kickstarter for an inflatable, go-anywhere hammock. Included almost entirely because, well, is it just me or does it look awfully labial? Please say it’s not just me.

• The Centre for Corporate Studies: An excellent website skewering startup and business speak. The most terrifying thing is that the following sentence, describing the fictitious institute, could well be lifted verbatim from an actual website: “The Center for Corporate Studies is a best-of-breed, high-level institute with a core competency in leveraging the power of language to develop personal, synergistic paradigm shifts within each of our students. You’ll learn how to champion mission-critical learnings across all verticals resulting in high-yield growth, for both your organization and your personal brand. “ Fess up; we’ve ALL written something like that.

• Smarttress: Most depressing link of the week! You know how the internet of things is going to connect everything we own to the web, so we ca monitor it and track it and know exactly what temperature our sofa is at every single moment of the waking day? In the spirit of that comes Smartttress, a mattress with inbuilt sensors which can track how people are using it and when – so that you can in theory tell if it’s being used for sex when you’re not there. Take a moment to let that sink in. Your mattress can spy on a partner you suspect of infidelity. Welcome to the bleak, bleak future, my friends.

• Nosajthing: Web Curios favourite Nosajthing has a website for his forthcoming No Reality tour, where you can listen to his EP and play around with a variety of simple geometric animations for each track. It is GREAT, play around with it.

• Almost Forgot Me: Mobile only, this one – load up the website and use your phone’s camera to track your heartbeat and determine the pace of the track and the accompanying animation. A nice idea and use of tech, but a special mention has to go to Anders from the developers, who saw on Twitter that I was having trouble making it work and emailed me to ask what phone I had and what exactly the problem was, and then looked at recoding the site to fix it. Which is a stellar attitude, and which means I now recommend Hello Monday as GOOD PEOPLE.

• Morning Makeup Madness: I have never tried to apply makeup whilst on the tube, but I imagine this game is a pretty accurate representation of what it’s like.

• Play Zork in Facebook Messenger: Look, men in your 40s, I’m not going to judge you for this. Go on.

LAST UP, LET’S HAVE A BIG WEEKEND HOUSEY MIX FROM LEE FOSS – THIS IS GREAT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Vomit Inducing: One of the best collections of horrific inspirational rubbish culled from Facebook. So good that you might be tempted to start posting one a day to see how people react – possibly a good experiment should you be feeling like culling a few ‘friends’ from your life.

• Ben Affleck Looking Sad: He’s looking at the Captain America reviews.

• Pls Revert: More horrific corporatespeak. Sadly now dormant, but there’s some wonderful horror in here.

• Dan Smith Pointing At Things: A cursory Google suggests that this is Dan Smith of slightly-dull pop people Bastille with the pointy finger; it’s stuff like this that makes me get some small inkling of how odd it must be to be a famous. Imagine living in a world where someone wanted to make something like this about you.

• Fake Buddha Quotes: No, Buddha did not say “dance like noone’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt”. He really, really didn’t.

• Texturings: A really rather useful repository of texture files. If you do graphics and design this is worth bookmarking.

• Pokemon Sketches: Sketches, of Pokemon. Because it is a trend that will NEVER DIE (seriously, Pokemon is like Star Wars for a whole generation of kids – seminal, and around forever. Just imagine).

• Classic Programmer Paintings: If you code then this will be SIDE-SPLITTING. If you don’t, send it to the people in your office who do and watch them split their Red Dwarf tees with mirth (SORRY SORRY SORRY).

• Dirty Zootopia Confessions: You know that Disney film that’s out now about the version of our world with no people, just animals (it’s called something different in the UK, isn’t it? Zootropia?)? This is a site compiling all the filthy things that some furries thought when watching it. Sort of NSFW, and almost certainly NSF your sense of childlike innocence and wonder.

• Mime Academy: Absolutely the best VR gag yet, hands down.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• 56 Women Writes Everyone Should Read: A brilliant selection of nonfiction pieces by women over the past 56 years, there are some classic pieces in this list and some all time great authors. Worth putting all of these into your ‘read later’ pile; aside from anything else, there’s a really interesting ‘changing role of women / perceptions of gender’ thread running through these if you read them chronologically.

• Emoji Miscommunication: It turns out that perhaps emoji aren’t the solution to human communications after all, and that those little yellow blobs can, by dint of their differential representation based on your phone’s OS, cause quite a lot of confusion. WHODATHUNKIT?! Has anyone created an Urban Dictionary equivalent for emoji yet? That’s a GREAT stunt for Collins, in case anyone from there is reading.

• The Death of 3Pac: Strange and sad story about the life and death of Ryan Harryman, a kid who gained 4chan fame by rapping, poorly but committedly, under the name ‘3pac’ (better than 2pac, do you see?); really interesting on the nature of microfame and community and, tangentially, about performance art and hiphop and the internet.

• How Empowerment Became Purchasable: A great piece about how the term ‘empowerment’ has come to have a multivariant meaning in popular culture, particularly as it pertains to women, and how it’s now as much something packaged and sold as a commodity as it is anything ‘real’ per se. Addressing the plastic (to me, at least) versions of the concept peddled by entities as diverse as Sandberg and the Kardashians, it’s smart if a little disheartening.

• How Boots Went Rogue: An excellent piece of longform by the Guardian this week, taking as its starting point a pharmacist at a Boots store in the midlands and uses it to tell the story of how private equity buyouts have transformed the nature of the business and, by extension, the lives of those who work for it. A brilliant microcosm of how capital at scale works, globally, in 2016, and how it defines the lives of all of us in ways we probably don’t spend enough time trying to understand.

• 1993, The Greatest Year In Rock History: In case you’ve missed the recent spate of people claiming ‘No! The year I turned 21 is the greatest in musical history’ (as someone who turned 21 in 1990. I am unlikely ever to make this claim), here’s an argument for 1993 as the greatest year in Chicago’s rock history. A great, slightly fuzzy look back at the growth and spread of grunge, and some top-class 90s rock royalty anecdotage for good measure.

• When Radiohead Built A Bot: they were 14 years ahead of the curve, the gits, when they built GooglyMinotaur.

• The Minecraft Generation: Seems a touch late to the party, this piece on Minecraft, but it’s a brilliant piece of writing and it really does nail what makes it a special piece of software, particularly for the under-11s; the manner it feeds off and rewards curiosity and experimentation is wonderful, and the breadth of application of the lessons it can teach shouldn’t be underestimated. If you have kids who are, or were, in its grip, you will very much enjoy this. Similarly, you should probably also pre-order the lovely Keith Stuart’s forthcoming debut novel ‘A Boy Made Of Blocks’, which will explore many of the same themes.

• Welcome To The Terrifyingly Convenient Future: A really smart look at what the bot ecosystem might actually mean to how we consume things, and who exactly controls what it is that we choose to consume. The points it makes about the Amazon Echo service (you know, the speaker that sits in American homes, eavesdropping on their conversations) are fascinating and frightening – our choices will be constrained by the bots, or more accurately those who program them. Not great news for market pluralism.

• Lunch With Farage: Look, none of you will ever vote for him (will you?), but you can’t deny he makes an entertaining FT Lunch profilee. Strong boozing, and just enough caricature euroscepticism to make it endearing. You probably wouldn’t have actually wanted to be there, mind.

• Small Supa Tough: A year or so ago I featured a VICE piece about the nascent Ugandan film industry, which since that piece has become something of a cause celebre online, much as Nollywood did a few years back. This is a far better, far more in-depth look at the industry and how it’s developing in light of all the attention – several bits made me laugh out loud, not least the quotes from the VJ overdubs of the films (“YES IT IS TRUE UGANDANS LOVE SUPER ACTION!”) which I maintain should TOTALLY be done here by someone; seriously, red-button alternative soundtracking with genuinely funny people riffing over classic films? GOLD, I tell you. Anyway, this is great – but it’s also sort of sobering when you consider the fact that it’s easier for these people to make CGI helicopters on their laptops with cracked software than it is for people in Uganda to get 24h electricity or, you know, afford a fridge.

• When Bitcoin Grows Up: John Lanchester in the LRB on Bitcoin, its history and its evolution. The best thing I’ve yet encountered explaining how it works and why you should care about it, this is really very useful indeed.

• The Crazy World Of Post-Production CGI Facelifts: And body lifts. Basically all about the fact that we simply don’t really need actual actors anymore, at least not beyond facial and physical mocap. Imagine – it’s actually someone’s job to airbrush the wrinkles and cellulite from every single frame of AN Other famous’s latest film. What a time to be alive.

• How Famouses Get Paid For Club Appearances: Or, ‘Being a minor-league Kardashian’. It’s MADNESS.

• The History Of Content Moderation: A really interesting piece about the history of moderation of online communities, looking at all of the big player s(YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and asking a series of really interesting and important questions about the degree to which the usage guidelines of these platforms – and their enforcement – determine cultural discourse to a staggering degree. Will make you think about the extent to which mores are defined by these gatekeepers/arbiters.

• How To Be The Shakespeare of Facebook: I mean obviously not that, and this is basically a guide to writing better posts on The Network, but it’s ALSO a really interesting 101-style guide to a whole load of literary concepts such as rhetoric and is actually far smarter than you’d expect. If you’re interested in writing and language then this is a surprisingly good refresher/primer, honest.

• The Iceberg: One of the week’s most beautiful pieces of writing, this is an excerpt from Marion Coutt’s memoir ‘The Iceberg’, about discovering that her partner has a brain tumour. It’s gorgeous and sad, as you’d expect, but the prose is truly wonderful. Give it a go.

• The Ferryman: Strong contender for longform piece of the week, this is the story of a man in Afghanistan, retrievig and burying bodies for money on behalf of US forces. Touches on the war, the Taliban, religion, respect and much else, and paints a picture of the area so evocative you can feel the dust on your lips. Beautiful.

• The Great IP Address Fcukup:A great piece of real-world, present/future dystopia, all about what happens when millions of IP addresses get attributed to your real-world location (spoiler: nothing good).

• Exposing the Crimes Of Assad: Ah, Syria! The enemy of our enemy is our friend! Bashar, old pal, old mucker, you’ll help us out with those IS people, won’t you? Great! We’ll…er…gloss over the past few years in exchange for you helping us maintain an illusion of control in the region, right? Great! Long and extremely depressing account of the Assad regime in Syria, and how people have been working to smuggle evidence out of the country about exactly what has been done to people over the course of the past 3-4 years. Chilling – and whilst the rhetoric is ‘we’ll have enough evidence to out-Nuremburg Nuremburg’, you do sort of wonder what type of bargaining’s been done with dear old Bashar behind the scenes.

• BONUS MIDDLE EAST HORROR: Probably the best writing of the week, though, is this piece, which ranges across the whole of the region and presents a series of vignettes from Libya, Syria and elsewhere which simply serve to illustrate just how many unpleasant shades of grey are involved in everything happening in the region. Wonderful writing, incredibly depressing.

• The Suicide Survivor Stories: A reddit thread containing stories of people who survived suicide attempts, and how they felt when they realised it hadn’t worked. I found this almost unbearably hard to read, but if you are feeling very, very sad then I recommend that you take a look – the overwhelming feeling amongst survivors is “thank fcuk that didn’t work” so, you know, take a moment.

• Being Thrasher: Finally my favourite piece of the week – not the best written, but the most fun – is this profile of the editor of skate bible Thrasher – a 50something year old big punk kid, who embodies the spirit of the mag and its culture like few other editors I can imagine (the Anna Wintour of the vert ramp). This is a great piece, will make you smile (whether or not you know or care about skating) and will also make you feel incredibly, terribly square.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is called ‘Threads’ and it’s by a band called ‘Once Upon A Dead Man’ which may or may not have something to do with Charlie Simpson who used to be in Busted. Anyway, the song’s rather nice but the video, featuring all sorts of CGI…er…threads, is great. Also, interestingly / depressingly the video’s been done by a marketing / branding agency. ODD:

2) Next up is this, by Zulu. It’s called ‘Your Grace’ and the animation is brilliant, stylised and contains some of the finest handheld-vacuum eroticism you will EVER see. Nice track too:

3) I’ve always quite liked Death Cab For Cutie, though I appreciate they’ve also been a byword for a particular type of cardigan-wearing hipster faux–miserablism. This is their latest, called “Good Help (Is So Hard To Find)”, which is seemingly all about the difficulty of finding REAL FRIENDS as a famous (boo hoo). The accompanying video animation is brilliant and I love it rather:

4) Probably the least effective music video ever, seeing as you can’t actually hear the song or the (imaginary) video, this wins ALL the points for being annoyingly clever-clever – the song you don’t really hear is called ‘Day Wave’ by Stuck, and instead of actually showing a video, the video is Mark Hoppus of Blink182 fame, being filmed ‘watching’ and commenting on the ‘actual’ video (if you see what I mean). So arch it might actually fall and hurt itself:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! It’s been TIME since I had a Fire in the Booth on here, so take a listen to this effort from the commendable Miss Banks – it’s very good indeed:

6) MORE UK(PSEUDO) HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Prince’ and it’s by Jorja Smith, and it features Maverick Sabre who I ordinarily think is pretty mediocre, but her vocal here is wonderful and the video’s great and I think she will be FAMOUS (is she already? Not to me):

7) Best animation of the week is this, to accompany this rather beautful French pop song called ‘Ma’agalim’ by Jane Bordeaux. Watch it all the way through, it’s really gorgeous:

8) A slice of the mid-90s now, with the most triphoppy track I’ve heard in years. This is Shura with ‘The Space Tapes’, and this took me back all the way to the Beta Band and Portishead and the like. It’s GREAT:

9) Finally the most internet video of the week – by Gerald Casale of DEVO, for the track ‘It’s All DEVO’ – it’s ODD. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

* = Note: We have decided to remove the names of the alleged celebrities involved in this incident to avoid being furnished with legal threats. But it’s OK, we’re still standing. – Ed

LET’S KICK OFF WITH AKIRA’S LATEST LIVE MIX FROM LA SHALL WE?

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT IF WE JUST GRIT OUR TEETH ALL THIS S*C**L M*D** STUFF WILL BE OVER SOON, HONEST:

• Facebook Goes Big(ger) On Live Video: I keep reading stuff about how one of the BIG THEMES of this year in terms of social is the mover from filtered and carefully created glimpses of our lives towards a more raw, untramelled glimpse at the fascinating nuances of our existence – less Instagram, more Snapchat. Obviously this is rubbish – noone, believe me, wants to see the unvarnished reality of my existence, let me tell you – and yet here we are. Facebook this week announced a whole load of tweaks to its Live Video streaming service, including the ability to include comments and interactions in Live Video replays, streaming to Groups, better discovery, the ability to scrawl doodles over your livestream (which you can also now do on Periscope, but), etc. Depening on your audience, this suddenly makes Live Video a really, really strong alternative to Periscope – certainly, if anyone says the word ‘webcast’ to you ever again, you can probably slap them – and people who have experimented with this have suggested that reach from Facebook Live Video beats that from Persicope into a cocked hat. Have a play.

• Facebook Launches Video Search: Basically another great big landgrab on YouTube – you will now be able to search for videos and livestreams on Facebook, results showing both standard vids and stuff recorded as live. I could imagine this becoming really rather popular – and, let’s be clear, this is TOTALLY going to open up another ad revenue stream (what’s that? You want your videos to place highest in Facebook video search for ‘food’? That’ll be $millions, thanks!). Oh, and there’s a whole load of new video metrics too which you can use to track exactly how much more popular this makes your thrilling branded content moments.

• Facebook Launching Video Ads In Instant Articles: This. It’s all about sodding video this week. I don’t like video. What’s wrong with reading, you PHILISTINES?

• How Facebook Ad Auctions Work: A simple, clear explainer of an admittedly skullcrushingly tedious topic, this is a decent primer as to how ad targeting and buying on the platform works. Probably won’t be news to you, you clever thing, but others may benefit.

• Instagram Gets Easier To Use On The Web: I thought this was reasonably big news, but noone else did which suggests my opinion may well be bunkum. Nevertheless, this is the ‘news’ that notifications, etc, have all been launched on the web browser version of Instagram, basically meaning that it’s now possible to get the full app functionality from desktop – which, by extension, means that it’s a lot easier for brands to manage an Instagram feed. Oh, not really related but I don’t think it warrants its own bullet; you can now also easily search through a user’s followers/following on the platform, which is useful when it comes to manual influencer mapping.

• Instagram Launches 60-Secondd Videos: Have you seen the flurry of Instagram video ads and thought to yourself “you know what would make this advertising content I am happily consuming on Instagram even better? Yes, that’s right, MORE OF IT!” then truly, these are wonderful times to be alive. Ostensibly designed to make the platform more appealing to entertainment brands punting film trailers, etc, this is going to usher in some absolute HORRORS of self-regarding brandspaff, mark my words.

• Snapchat Basically Becomes The ur-Messenger: Pretty punchy move from Snapchat, this, effectively turning itself into a very feature-rich one-size-fits-all communicator solution incorporating chat, video, photos, etc. The on-the-fly switching between video and audio calls is really impressive and quite scifi, although I think that most of this stuff is focused on the user-to-user experience rather than being automatically significant for brands (no, brands, most of you are not any normal human being’s idea of a favoured interlocutor, STOP TRYING TO TALK TO US). Oh, and it’s rolled out longer captions on pics (upto 80 characters!)! And here’s some information about how most users actually…er…use it (clue: most of it is people talking to each other rather than diving deep into the crystalline azure pool of exciting branded messaging via Stories or Discover or the like).

• Twitter’s Going To Stream Some NFL Games Live: Interesting from a media point of view, It will be fascinating to see how this works – both in terms of how live broadcast optimised for social media actually works, but also how the monetisation / advertising part of it spins out, as this is where the real game is.

• Twitter Makes It Easy To Add Alt Text To Images For Accessibility: Facebook does it with AI, on Twitter it’s manual. Sort of sadly indicative, really. Anyway, as it’s manual you need to know about it to take advantage of the feature if you care about the visually impaired being able to experience Twitter properly, which you ought.

• Take a Tweet Straight Into DMs: Now with ONE CLICK you can move a Tweet from your main stream to a DM conversation – ostensibly designed to streamline the customer service experience (make a conversation with a customer private with just one click), but basically just the starting point for a whole LOAD of snidey shade as you all immediately take your snarky side-beefs into your DMs and slag each other off on the hush. I know what you’re like.

• Tumblr Brings Back Replies & Improves Notes: I’ve literally just re-typed the article headline here as I can think of literally NO way in which I can gild this particular lily. Look, it is what it is. It basically brings back some of the community features which some recent updates had stripped back. Happy now? Christ.

• Pinterest Launches ‘How To’ Pins For Brands: HUGELY interesting if you do foodstuff or interiorsstuff or DIYstuff or makeupstuff on Pinterest (and frankly what else is there?) – this is a build on existing Rich Pins, available to brands for a while now, which effectively helps them create tutorial sequences. Not open to everyone as yet, just BRAND PARTNERS, but I imagine this will be extended to other paying customers at some point.

• Medium Gets Better For Publishers: LOADS of stuff in here which is beg news for publishers and which make Medium a significant option for all your content repository needs on the web. Integration with Facebook Instant Articles, ease of migration of archive content from old platforms to Medium, and, of course, the addition of new ad units – Promoted Stories, effectively shunting content from SELECT BRAND PARTNERS onto the end of select articles from select publishers, like a less single-mindedly turdy Outbrain (this may not be a great comparison, but), and the ability for publishers to set up a sort of members-only gated area to offer EXCLUSIVE CONTENT to paying punters. Makes Medium worth a serious look as a publishing platform for everyone, I think.

• The KIK Bot Store: Look, I’m not suggesting that any of you need to get your brands on KIK (you don’t, really, probably) – this is just interesting as the precursor of things to come on Facebook in a few weeks. This is the page showcasing the bots which are currently available on the platform – automated content delivery and sales drones, all up in our chats, EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY. You watch how mental all this gets when Facebook really starts punting this hard to the public.

• Etsy Pattern: If you sell ribbon-wrapped, glitter-adorned hand made artisanal STUFF on Etsy then this might be of interest – effectively it lets any user with an Etsy store turn said store into a simple, standalone website, all powered by Etsy. Really rather useful if you’re a small seller and want to synchronise your sales on and off Etsy – costs $15 per month, but that doesn’t strike me as a bad deal to be honest.

• Reddit Launches Mobile Apps: On Android and iOS. Community Managers! Journalists of a certain stripe! YOU ARE SAVED!

• Best Practice For Bloggers Reviewing Stuff, From Google: If you do influencer work with bloggers, you need to read this – a whole load of info about what Google’s current stance is on linking-for-goodies, basically, which if your clients are the sort of people who stand with spittle-flecked lips in update meetings repeatedly screaming “HOW MANY BACKLINKS THIS MONTH????” (they are, some of them, aren’t they?) is quite important to know.

• Google Search Will Let You Vote In Talent Shows Direct From Search Results: Yep, that. I have nothing more to add.

• KLM Launches Facebook Messenger Integration: This is the future. From the blurb: “KLM is offering a new way to receive your flight documentation: Facebook’s Messenger service. After booking your flight on klm.com you can choose the option to receive booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass and flight status updates via Messenger. This makes your travel information easy to find in a single place, available at the airport, en route or at home. Any questions? No problem. Ask away and contact us directly through Messenger, 24/7.” Really rather smart, though it made me nostalgic for the days of Flynt.

• ANOTHER Great KLM Site: Noone from KLM has paid me for these endorsements, more’s the pity, but this is a gorgeous piece of webwork and just a really nice experience. An online anniversary edition of KLM’s travel mag, this showcases 50 lovely places around the world, coincidentally all reachable with KLM flights, with photos and videos and STUFF, as well as links to get flights straight from the site. Not groundbreaking by any means, but just so nicely made.

• Smart Use Of Preroll By Netflix: Really, really clever, this – creating preroll ads which contain clips from Friends, said clips relating to YouTube searches, and then delivered to users based on said searches. So, you search for “cat” and you might be served an ad featuring a Netflix preroll shilling Friends and showing that bloody character singing that bloody song (it wasn’t funny the first time around). Very nice idea.

• Zurich’s True Love Maps: Included mainly because I find the idea of the link between insurance and love a pretty hard one to swallow – how did the agency rationalise this one? “Insurance is about security, yeah, and the foundation of love is security, so, you know, the Zurich brand equity is totally compatible with love!”. Or something – this is why I’m not allowed to work on anything proper. Anyway, this site lets you mark the location of your first ‘x’ (kiss, dinner, chat, etc) with a significant other on a map, play with some filters, and then send a short romantic video to said person commemorating the historic moment. The Google Maps integration is actually quite nice, but I just can’t get over the utter unromanticism of receiving a video commemorating your first kiss with your husband, say, emblazoned with the strapline “Zurich Insurance: For Those Who Truly Love”. I mean, really.

• The Internet Marketing Workshop: A very smart and almost sickeningly selfless offering from Stephen Waddington of Ketchum, looking at how to use a host of free digital tools for campaign planning. The sort of ACTUALLY PRACTICALLY USEFUL stuff that you rarely see round here, so take the time to look through it as it’s very helpful indeed.  

SPEAKING OF AKIRA, THIS IS A WHOLE ALBUM COMPOSED OF SAMPLES FROM THE FILM AND IT’S ACTUALLY REALLY RATHER GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE GLUT OF GENUINELY QUITE INTERESTING AND GOOD WEBSPAFF WHICH IS TO FOLLOW MAKES UP SOMEWHAT FOR THE MESS OF WORKSTUFF WHICH WENT BEFORE IT, PT.1:

• Digging Into HipHop: A really rather nice timewaster which is worth playing with, this creates a browser-based recreation of the experience of digging through crates of vinyl in a record store devoted to old hiphop records – you can flick through them, play tracks, and generally have a gently exploratory meander through the stacks. Obviously a totally inefficient way of discovering music, but sometimes efficiency isn’t everything DO YOU HEAR THAT, ROBOT OVERLORDS? I DEFY YOUR ALGORITHMIC INSISTENCE ON EVERYTHING BECOMING FASTER AND MORE CONVENIENT! (I don’t, obviously).

• Romesco: A slightly trippy and largely pointless webGL thingy which basically produces psychedelically coloured shapes that look a little bit like trippy cauliflowers. No, look, seriously, most of the stuff in here this week is better than this, honest,.

• SonikPass: Basically tech which uses audio signals as passwords, the idea being that users will be given unique audio signatures whose playback will act as an access code. Designed to work in both physical and online worlds, this is quite an interesting idea I think.

• The Interactive Punchbag: This is a really nice experientialidea for a Dutch Cancer charity, taking the ‘fight cancer’ idea and literalising it with a punchbag which, once it’s been told your age, gender, and some lifestyle details presents you with a visualisation of the cancer you’re most likely to end up getting offed by and, well, invites you to beat the sh1t out of it. You get shown how well you’ve done at the end and invited to make a donation – although the one slightly jarring note on the site is that suggesting that punters will be told if they’ve ‘won’ or ‘lost’, which makes me think that being told that you have failed to beat up the cancer which might one day kill you might be a somewhat sobering moment. Still, really nicely done.

• Lipstrike: If you were a woman who enjoyed playing online shooter Counterstrike, what would be the BEST way of really, really irritating all the idiots who believe that your gender means that you shouldn’t play games like that? How about setting up things so that you can trigger shots in the game by applying lipstick in real life and then streaming the display over Twitch? Yeah, that’ll work. Generally applauseworthy, not least because I love stuff which turns unusual things into controllers.

• The Panama Papers: So obviously we’ve spent all week getting really angry and uppity about this – and rightly so, if somewhat Cnutishly in my opinion (that’s a reference to the king of legend rather than a bowdlerisation, just fyi) – but I get the feeling that most people haven’t checked out the website containing all the materials. Well you should, it’s GREAT – not only because  it’s full of interesting and infuriating stuff (click the ‘Power Players’ section), but also because it’s a textbook case of presenting an awful lot of dense info in a rather nice way, and even MORESO because it actually contains a small game-type element which shows that just because you’re participating in one of the biggest whistleblowing events of the new(ish) millennium you can’t have a light-touch sense of humour about it.

• The History of Electro/Electronic Music, 1937-2001: A pretty astoundingly comprehensive archive of electronic music from throughout the 20th Century. Any DJs reading this, if you can somehow incorporate something from 1937 into your next set I will never know but be aware that I approve immeasurably.

• Songbranch: Totally pointless website which does lyric visualisations; you plug in a song and it will create a weird little floaty flowchart of its lyrics, which is, strangely, much more appealing that you might think. Or at least it is to me as I type this at 751am, addled by lack of sleep and on the fourth cup of tea already.

• Skakespeare’s Sonnet Generator: Cobbling together new works from the Bard’s existing oeuvre, this is included solely in the hope that one of you out there is in a new relationship and can use this to temporarily fool your paramour into thinking you can just knock out sonnets at the drop of a hat. Actually, why not try using these as opening gambits on Tinder and seeing how you get on? Please?

• Hipster Sounds: Ambient sound generators are nothing new, but this one simulates the soundscapes of hipster-friendly destinations like Parisian cafes. Loses points for its lack of insistence that these are artisanal soundscapes.

• Make A Song From Your Face:Traditionally, the best way to make music using ones face was to mash it repeatedly onto a piano keyboard, or to append a selection of small bells from one’s extremities and then violently shake one’s head – OH PROGRESS! This very neat site uses your webcam to scan your face and, based on a few simple datapoints like the distance between your eyes, the height of your ears and the like, cobbles together an algorithmically-determined piece of music which you can then download and keep forever. Impressive, not least because it managed to turn even my mangled features into a semi-pleasing piece of audio.

• The Swedish Number: Such a nice idea, although it indicates a degree of confidence in their people that I’m not sure we could match over here; the Swedish Number is a project whereby anyone in the world can call the number on the site and be connected to an ACTUAL SWEDE who they can chat to about herrings or saunas being comfortable with familial nudity or any number of other lazy national stereotypes you care to mention. Such a lovely idea, and so heartwarmingly positive in its fundamental belief in human nature – let’s be honest, you know EXACTLY how this would probably work out if there was a UK version.

• Data USA: A pretty incredibl collective of data and associated visualisations, encompassing all sorts of information about each of the US’s states – employment data, crime, civil engineering, the lot. Sort of an object lesson in how you might want to make this sort of stuff publicly available, and should you be reading this from the US or have US clients it’s also potentially a really interesting provider of ‘insights’ for planning. Maybe.

• The Hong Kong Sky Project: We’ve all stopped being excited about large-scale projection mapping onto buildings, which is a shame as when it’s done well it’s still truly jaw-dropping. This is one of the best examples I’ve yet seen, a high concept art piece about TIME AND DEATH AND STUFF, all projected onto Hong Kong’s tallest building last month.

• Meet Another Day: Want to look busy so that people don’t book up your time with FCUKING MEETINGS? Use this to fill up your Google calendar with fictitious appointments. Or, you know, just do it yourself, manually. Or say you’ll turn up, but don’t – just pop outside to the park and start walking and keep walking until you can no longer hear the voices in your head and the office is just a distant, bad memory. Go on. You can do it.

• The Techies Project: Documentary project looking at issues of diversity in Silicon Valley, and profiling some of the people working there who are from non-traditional (ie not white and straight and male) backgrounds. Not just a nice idea, the interviews with participants are genuinely illuminating and (much as I hate the term) maybe even a touch inspirational. Oh, and the site’s nicely designed too.

• Slidebox: Really, really easy to use photo organising app, ripping off the Tinder UI to excellent effect to allow you to quickly filter, delete, group and file pics off your phone with a few judicious swipes. Slick.

• Claimdog: I was SO excited when I found this. Claimdog is a site which, if you type in your name, pulls up a list of people with your name who are owed ACTUAL CASHMONEY – if one of them is you, you can get the site to get it for you and they take a small fee once they’re returned the cash to you. Sadly, it transpires, this is only a US thing – there’s some weird stuff going with people being owed Government rebates or something that I don’t really understand, but imagine my chagrin when I realised that I wasn’t one of the Matt Muirs owed hundreds of dollars by the US state. Bastard other Matt Muirs.

• Netflix Party: Lets you simultaneously watch stuff Netflix via the web client with other users anywhere else, so you can carry on streaming your favourite box set with your significant other even if they are on the other side of the world. I think there’s something in the idea of a large-scale variant on this, with mass-viewing parties around sporting events and stuff, but I’m too tired to think it through properly.

• Tell Me Elliott: One of a number of really good projects I saw for Autism Awareness Day the other week, this one’s a French site which uses fullscreen video and simple gesture-based interaction to help communicate the experience of being – and dealing with – an autistic child. It’s all in French, obviously, but you should be able to get the gist of what’s going on even if you only vaguely remember who Claude LeClochard was.

• Bomber Jackets: A great Flickr collection of photos of customised bomber jackets worn by pilots in WWII.

• Articoolo: Is this a real thing? I honestly can’t tell, but it’s being presented with an entirely straight face, so let’s assume. You know how last year there was a whole raft of ‘robots will steal our jobs’ chat? Well this is the first step in that process for us CONTENT PRODUCERS, being as it is a service which purports to basically automatically write copy on any given subject given a few prompts and a bit of time. Unfortunately the output’s only visible once you’ve ponied up some cash and I was feeling a little tight at the time I found it so I can’t vouch for the quality, but judging by half the stuff you read punted out on corporate blogs and the like you might consider it worth a punt.

• Beecaster: A wonderful-if-pointless/doomed idea to create entirely crowdsourced radio, Beecaster lets anyone upload audio files from anywhere on the web, or alternatively record up to five minutes of audio through a mic, and then upload it to the station, which plays a live collage of everything submitted to it. When I tried it the other week it was a weird sort of stream of consciousness of 4chan and memes and people sounding a touch confused, which was charming in and of itself, but just be warned that the likelihood of hearing something a bit iffy is reasonably high – a SAFE SPACE this is not.

• Soundslice Licks: A different short bit of musical instruction every day, presented as audio and video and animated sheet music to help you learn the notes A really nice idea, and the fact that all the video tutorial bits are posted as Instagram videos each day is a good extension.

• Is This Prime?: More diverting than any maths-based game about prime numbers has any right to be.

• Smartwatch Sonar: So clever, this – using smartwatch (or phone, but the watch thing looks more impressive) microphones to effectively let you use your finger as a gestural interface away from the screen (so by moving it across your arm, or over any surface you care to mention). Yes, I know that that’s a rubbish explanation – click the link then, instead of complaining at me.

• Gaze: Trippy little Chrome experiment which takes your webcam and mic and uses them to create psychedelic pictures. Pretty cool results – have a play.

• JPEG Bot: Posting pictures of JPEGS which have been saved 100 times, with each save reducing the quality until they weird, bleached and pixellated and sort of ghostly and otherworldly. Webarty / new aesthetic fans will approve. Oh, and if you’re interested in the aesthetic theory behind digital picture degredation (and who isn’t, amirite kids?!) then you’ll like this piece too

• Capsula Mundi: What would YOU like to happen to you when you die? If your automatic answer is ‘actually, you know what, I’d like to be scrunched into the foetal position and then buried in a strange little capsule thing with a tree planted on top of me so that my decaying corpse can provide much needed nutrients to a beautiful living organism and thereby contribute to the ineffable mystery that is THE CIRCLE OF LIFE’ then this will be WELL up your street.

• Purristan: Almost certainly the best and most comprehensive website about a fictional nation state ruled by cats that you will see all week. I don’t really understand whether this is satire about the US election or whether it’s meant to be a means of interesting people in politics generally, or whether it’s honestly just a really, really extensive joke about what government by communist cats might be like, but there’s an awful lot of it.

• Shootlr: This week’s “Really? You think people need or want this?” app comes in the shape of Shootlr, which takes the concept of the self-taken photograph and allies it with an in-no-way-annoying demand mechanism. The premise is that you can use the app to request a photo of someone at any given time – they get a notification, and the app automatically takes a snap of them and sends it back to the requester. WHY WOULD YOU LET THIS INTO YOUR LIFE?!?!? And, aside from anything else, when was the last time you thought “You know what I really want? A poorly-lit cameraphone snap of person X, that’s what!”? Well, quite. Stupid idea. Obviously it’s now going to be MASSIVE and I’m going to feel like the dumb one, but I’m going to enjoy the temporary feeling of superiority and righteousness whilst ignoring the fact that it’s not like I make anything so perhaps I should pipe down with the ivory tower criticism.

THIS SELECTION OF PIANO MUSIC CURATED BY NILS FRAHM FOR PIANO DAY 2016 IS ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS AND I SUGGEST YOU BOOKMARK IT FORTHWITH!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE GLUT OF GENUINELY QUITE INTERESTING AND GOOD WEBSPAFF WHICH IS TO FOLLOW MAKES UP SOMEWHAT FOR THE MESS OF WORKSTUFF WHICH WENT BEFORE IT, PT.2:

• Sesame: An interesting addition to the messaging landscape, Sesame is a service which purports to let you closely manage people’s permissions through the platform – you can set who can save, forward, screenshot, etc, your conversations and who can’t, who you can share files with and not, all under encryption. The white labelling side of this is interesting if you’re after a secure corporate messaging solution, I think.

• Cast: Potentially rather useful end-to-end podcasting solution, encompassing recording, mixing, editing and publishing, which comes at a cost of $10 a month which seems pretty reasonable if you do the podcast thing properly or with any degree of commitment.

• Gendered Baby Foods: SATIRE about how kids are, you know, FORCE FED gender tropes from a young age. Nice design work here, in fairness, even if it’s a touch heavy handed. Reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Ben about designing slogan baby clothes for parents who didn’t want to brag about their kids’ potential – “Probably Not Oxbridge Material”, or “Slightly Malcoordinated But Still Loved”. On reflection, that’s still a great idea, we should totally sell those.

• Juicero: This…this has to be a joke, no? Juicero is basically Graze (you know, that service whereby you get sent a preposterously overpriced cardboard box full of snacks and fcuking goji berries which will then moulder on your desk until the next one arrives) but for juicing. Juicing. You’ll get a bunch of stuff to juice sent to you on a weekly basis, all packaged up to use with the SPECIALLY DESIGNED JUICING MACHINE you also have to buy. FFS WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IT’S JUST FRUIT AND SODDING VEG BEING SOLD AT A REPELLENT MARKUP TO IDIOTS WAKE UP SHEEPLE TONY B LIAR NEW LIEBORE. Sorry, don’t know what came over me there.

• Vivaldi: An actual new web browser! Vivaldi is designed for ‘power users’, which I think means ‘people with a tendency to have over 20 tabs open at a time’, and has all sorts of neat features around grouping tabs, bookmarks and the like which, having played with it a bit this week, are genuinely useful if you find yourself having to do lots of online research and the like. Worth experimenting with, and persevering with – once you get over the jarring shock of the new, it’s rather good. Obviously I’m still working in Chrome as I type this, though, so we’ll see.

• Sayable: You know that service which has been knocking around for YEARS and which ascribes a three-word phrase to every single physical location in the world in an attempt to make postcodes redundant? You know, this one. Well this is like that, but for urls – plug in a web address and it spits out a three word phrase which, when typed into the site by someone else, will redirect them back to that website. Sort of largely pointless except if you REALLY like the idea of Famous Five-style password secrecy and intrigue, which is obviously totally fine with me.

• Ridezum: A chauffeur service, a la uber, for kids. For parents who don’t have the time or inclination to pick their kids up but don’t feel comfortable with public transport and who for some reason feel an ordinary cab is somehow unsafe. Fcuk’s sake, everyone, really?

• Linify: Turn any picture, from a file or URL, into a rather nice line drawing version of itself. Quietly aesthetically pleasing, I think.

• Ostensibly Ordinary Pyongyang: A GREAT set of photos and commentary smuggled out of Pyongyang earlier this year. Better photos and a more interesting range and selection than your standard ‘OMG Kim Jong LOL’-type fodder.

• Subdivision: Rather cool geometric imagery, available for download. The sort of thing that can make you feel a touch *funny* if you stare at it too long, just so’s you’re aware.

• Paperback Paradise: My favourite Twitter account of the week, this Tweets out doctored images of imagined old paperbacks. If you’ve ever wanted to live in a universe in which the Sweet Valley High series contained such classic titles as “I Want This Date To End So Badly” then this is for YOU.

• Profilehopper: I don’t imagine that this is goingto stay up that long as I’m pretty sure it violates the LinkedIn T&Cs; profile hopper basically automatically visits a shedload of people’s profiles on LinkedIn based on whatever critieria you give it, making it look to those poor, unwitting dupes that you were interested in them, and, based on their understanding of human nature, probably getting them to look at your profile. Personally speaking, my immediate reaction to anyone looking at my LinkedIn profile is “wow, you must be really, really bored”, but perhaps you feel differently.

• Autonomous Track Day: Someone’s organising a race for self-driving cars in California. This is one of those harbingers of the singularity that we’re all going to really kick ourselves for not noticing at the time, isn’t it?

• Podcasts In Colour: A decent repository of links to podcasts from the non-white community, should you desire such a thing. Very US-centric, but.

• Daylui: A GREAT idea, this, currently in Beta, Daylio lets users rent out their stuff for cashmoney – basically a rental eBay. WHY DID I NOT THINK OF THIS? Although on greater reflection the potential to get really, really screwed over is pretty strong; still, I think the core of a decent idea exists here.

• Typevoice: A nice gimmick by Ogily in the US for the Webby Awards, this takes your vocal patterns and turns them into a unique typeface JUST FOR YOU. Sadly the fonts look universally dreadful (or at least they do for me, no matter WHICH hilarious accent I affect), but your mileage may vary.

• Design Facts: Er, facts, about design. Presented rather prettily, but still, there’s not really much more to say about this one. Christ, look at the state of me. Sorry.

• The Champagne Gun: Coming soon to a Rich Kids Of Instagram-type thing near you IMMINENTLY (or possibly more accurately, to Geordie Shore), the champagne gun is a device which you attach to a bottle of champagne (or possibly more accurately Asti Spumante) which lets you press a trigger and spray the stuff all over the place. There will be exactly ONE music video in which these are used to spectacular comic effect and then they will be OVER.

• Halo: Nice theoretical design project by MIT Media Lab which has created a portable self-lighting rig which you can place around your neck or head to give you whatever sort of nice warm glow you desire in your inevitable self-taken portraits. There’s probably some sort of low-rent gimmick ripoff the right makeup brand could do here for SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER CONTENT CAMPAIGN purposes if you can be bothered to think about it a bit.

• Thington: You know how in the future, right, all of our STUFF will be on the internet and it will all talk to each other and to us and the world will just be one jabbering cacophony of NOISE and DATA as fridges speak unto shoes speak unto supermarkets speak unto people? Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it? Well Thington cemented my belief that this is all AWFUL BUSINESS when I spotted it this week – effectively it’s selling itself as the ‘concierge for your smarthome’, creating a signle interface through which you can administer all your IoT gadgets. YES THAT’S RIGHT ANOTHER LAYER OF BETA-ISH SOFTWARE IS EXACTLY THE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM. I want the world to stop.

• Soundgifs: Can you imagine just how irritating an everlooping soundclip could be? You are TOTALLY RIGHT! Torment your colleagues with this, starting NOW.

• These Memories Won’t Last: A truly beautiful webcomic, both in design and execution, about the author’s grandfather’s dementia. The way the scrolling works to tell the story is really gorgeous, as is the art style. Highly recommended.

• Narro: This is potentially REALLY useful – Narro takes all your longread links (you know, the ones you save up from the last section of this and then never get round to reading, until they are all piled up and you just feel guilty for looking at them and so just go back to Tinder or Instagram again) and converts it to audio, so you can listen to them being read on the move. Obviously has all the limitations of stuff using text to speech engines, but if you can get past that then it is a GREAT idea.

• Grime Writer: A pen designed specifically for you to scrawl stuff in the dirt on the back of white vans. May I suggest “I wish my dad was as dirty as this” for maximum headscratching pervolols? No? Ok.

• Vintage Beauties On Postcards: No, I don’t like the term ‘beauties’ either, but that’s just what the collection is called. Questionable milady-ish titling aside, these are great – a collection of pictures of woman of all sorts of ethnicities and aesthetics taken from vintage postcards. Some great faces in here. Totally SFW, though there is the occasional glimpse of stocking.

• Logoshi: Surprisingly really rather good logo generation toy – you scribble something in the appropriate box on the site, and it generates a logo free for you to use based on your hamfisted scribblings. Really quite impressive.

• PowerPuff Yourself: So you too can create a PowerPuff Girls-styled version of yourself for use in your SOCIAL CHANNELS. TBH they all look the same to me, but I appreciate I may not quite be target audience here.

• Phone Stories: I LOVE THIS IDEA SO MUCH. A project by Pop UP Magazine, whereby every few weeks they will record someone reading a contextually appropriate story for a particular event or situation – the idea is, you call a number when you find yourself in that situation (getting dressed, in a park, etc) and listen to the story and get TRANSPORTED BY ART. I think that this is a great concept which could easily be lifted for brand LOLs and joy.

• Fukushima No GO Zone: A site collecting photography and audio captured in Fukushima since the disaster there by Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bression. Lovely, haunting shots and a nicely curated selection in the galleries – the audio layer really does add something, too, which isn’t always the case with these things.

• Sound of Change: A really nice project. The idea behind Sound of Change is to help street musicians get their music out to a wider audience on the web – the idea being that anyone can upload footage of a street musician playing, including information about who they are, where they play and any contact details they have for them, thereby making them discoverable by the wider global community of music lovers. It’s really new and there are so far only 5 musicians on it, which seems a shame for a project which has obviously been put together with a lot of care – spread the word, it’s a lovely idea.

• My Sharona: What would you do if you were the inspiration for The Knack’s hit single My Sharona? Why, you’d set yourself up as an estate agent in the US and have this rather wonderful website, is what.

• The NRA Family: Another to file under ‘should really be parody but sadly for everyone currently living is actually real’, this is the National Rifle Association (you know the ones, they who think that you’re a fool and a communist if you think that perhaps there’s a causal link between easy access to lethal firearms and the depressing litany of gun-related deaths we see every single week across the US) giving it the whole FAMILY thing. It’s FULL of heartwarming things, by far and away the best of which are the fairy tales rewritten to feature MORE GUNS. Brilliant. Well done, everyone involved in this, you FCUKING IDIOTS.

• The Most Incredible Phone Case Prototype You Will See All Week: Seriously incredible theoreticalfuturetech, here.

• Luminescent Labs: A rather beautiful website letting you explore the glorious world of undersea bioluminescence. No, wait, come back, it’s GORGEOUS and will make you want to go night diving or at the very least to watch some ultra-HD sealife documentary type stuff.

• Apollo 17: Space stuff is generally some of the best out there in terms of interactivity design and stuff; this is no exception. A brilliant site letting you explore the Apollo moon mission as it happened, using radio transmssions and photos and all sorts of other stuff. As an example of how to pull together a whole load of stuff and present it in an ‘as it happened’ sort of way this is pretty much peerless.

• Pause: An app designed to help with relaxation and meditation and MINDFULNESS and stuff which does so by encouraging users to sit with their finger pressed against their phone screen, thereby encouraging CONTEMPLATION. I’m leaving this here without comment, but see if you can imagine the expression on my face as I’m typing this, go on.

• Things You Shouldn’t Google: A GREAT Reddit thread which is full of temptation. Suggest that you send it round all of the people in your office as a tacit test of self-control; I guarantee that within ten minutes you’ll have heard a variety of strangled cries of revulsion, which cannot fail to satisfy.

• Camera Club: Spectacularkly grubby photo series, capturing images of photographers who are in turn taking photos of young women who’ve been duped into posing in various states of undress by men pretending to be fashion photographers. Seedy as you like, but there are some great shots here.

• Burner: An app to create as many fake, throwaway phone numbers as you could ever want or need. No idea why you might need such things, but just in case you ever do.

• The Humanion: The best utterly mad website I have seen in a long time, this one sort of has to be seen to be believed. You think you’ve seen mad on the internet before? This is up there with Time Cube in terms of sheer force of weird. Oddly, despite the ‘straight out of Geocities’-style aesthetic, this was actually only made last year, which suggests that there’s possibly more going on here than meets the eye as it’s actually not that easy to make something this wonderfully bad-looking in 2016. Go on, lose yourself in it, it’s spectacular.

• Blandly: The best spoof agency website I have seen in a long time. Your agency’s not like this, is it? Nah mate, course it’s not.

• Next Rembrandt: The subject of much sniffiness from Jonathan Jones this week, I still very much like the concept and the output here. This is the website to accompany the recent project to 3d print a ‘new’ ‘Rembrandt’ painting, based on machine analysis of the painter’s extant body of work and the subsequent creation of a new work based on learned stylistic and aesthetic principles; leaving aside the art/not art question (fwiw, I say art), this is a lovely site for a fascinating project.

• Vagina Beer: The only thing about this which I can feel positively about is the fact that it looks very, very unlikely to meet its funding goal.

• I Can’t Make You Love You: This week’s single-serving music video website comes with a FRESH GIMMICK! To watch the video you need to sync your mobile with the site, and consistently double-tap your phone’s screen in the manner of a simulated heartbeat to keep the track going; you stop, it flatlines and ‘dies’. I have to say, there’s obviously a high concept here about the song’s themes and stuff but I got really bored about halfway through. Sorry, songpeople.

• Life Is Life: It’s been AGES since I’ve seen a decent Facebook scraper – thisis like going back in time a few years to that era when people made all sorts of websites pulling in FB data. This takes EVERYTHING you have ever posted to Facebook – I mean everything – and presents it as some sort of overwhelming cascade of data and images and videos and comments and Likes and frankly it’s sort of dazzling and brilliant, even if, like me, you rarely actually say anything on Facebook. Great digiart, this (YES, ART I TELL YOU).

• Every Single Issue Of Select EVER: I used to think I was WELL COOL for reading Select Magazine. So much so, in fact, that I occasionally responded to personal ads in the mag with a resounding 0% success rate, which fact really troubled me at the time (what was it about the poorly focused polaroid of myself that I included didn’t entice you, 15 year old Dodgy fan from Nuneaton? No, don’t answer that). This is every single edition, scanned and made available for your reading pleasure, which if you enjoyed this week’s #indieamnesty thing you will almost certainly find pleasing and comforting.

• Future Sex: The BEST magazine archive, though, comes in the form of this selection of scans of the sadly short-lived FUTURE SEX magazine – basically a WIRED for teledildonics. There is SO MUCH great stuff in here – from the weird photoshoots that are like a cross between Hackers and Reader’s Wives, to the articles confidently claiming that there is a VIBRANT DIGITAL EROTIC UNDERGROUND exploding all over the UK, to the classified ads for CD Roms full of bongo…it’s all pretty much entirely NSFW, but I reckon you can pass this off to your boss as cultural anthropology or something. Immerse yourself in the neon latex world, which reminded me an awful lot of THIS great film incidentally.

• Science Combat: Remember those lovely 8-bit gifs of scientists as Street Fighter-style game characters which did the rounds a few weeks back? Well this is the game they were designed for. Surprisingly fun for a 5-minute afternoon distraction – ENJOY.

SHALL WE CLOSE OUT WITH THIS EXCELLENT TRIBUTE TO THE LATE PHIFE DAWG WHICH CLOCKS IN AT NEARLY TWO GLORIOUS HOURS? OK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Samsara Termonucleara: Literally no idea AT ALL what this is about, but it’s wildly odd and very NSFW in a pleasingly all-inclusive sort of way.

• Confirm Shaming: Examples of those really, really annoying ‘Would you like to sign up to our newsletter?’ Popups where one option is ‘yes’ and the other is something like ‘no, I actually prefer slavery to knowing stuff’.

• The Gif Connoisseur: Really EXCELLENT gifs./

• Video Game Densetsu: All sorts of interesting concept art and behind-the-scenes material from videogame studios, primarily Japanese.

• Otomblr: Celebrating the art of Akira illustrator Katsuhiro Otomo.

• Art, Innit: Exploring the idea of Rule 34 and imagining the sort of bongo mags you might have found in skips if there had been magazines about, say, chocolate fetishism back in the 70s and 80s. Totally SFW, honest.

• 90s HipHop, Rap & R&B: All SORTS of stuff on this from performances to interviews. If you’re into that era of hiphop this will be CATNIP to you.

• Stephen King’s Boners: Apparently Stephen King talks about penises a LOT in his books; here’s a Tumblr collecting some of those mentions. Is this a horror writer thing? I remember once sneaking a look at Rats by James Herbert when I was about 7 and being VERY CONFUSED about one particular explicit fellatio scene, which for a few years had me convinced that urolagnia was a lot more commonplace than it in fact probably is.

• Dating App Fails: Submissions from the horrible, grimy coalface of human sexuality.

• The Sock Covers; Classic album covers, recreated with socks.

• Animated Chronicles: Lovely animated gif illustrations. There’s a beautiful aesthetic to all of these, I think – really very pretty indeed.

• Deadscripts: Scripts for adverts which for whatever reason never made it to production. Whether or not these are real or false, there are some actual proper gems in here.

• Loopism: More stylised animated artygifs, these channeling quite a lot of the more surreal and trippy bits of the Sorceror’s Apprentics or that acid dream scene in Dumbo (you’ll get it if you click, honest).

• Look Into The Lens: Photos of people being a bit rubbish at using their cameraphones for narcissistic purposes.

• Men of Designer News: Collecting the heartwarming comments left by men under the articls on Designer News. Some top-quality meninist horror, right here.

• One Week, One Band: This is GREAT – each week, a different author goes DEEP on a band they love, posting songs, essays, etc, about JUST that band and their music. A really great way of discovering new music as well as a lovely collection of paeans to favourite artists.

• That’s Not Shakespeare: Quotations misattributed to Shakespeare. A bit depressing after a while tbh.

• Of Sparrows: MORE gifed artworks. Again, lovely and distinctive style here – the cartoon of the tattoo blossoming is really rather nice.

• Y2K Aesthetic Institute: Curating the turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic. So much great lookbook material here if you need that sort of thing.

• Finals Fantasy: Speculative projects for game art students. There are possibly two or three of you who will like this, I think, but you sort of need to know a little bit about game design to derive any value from it, I think.

• Prattle En Route: This is a GREAT idea. An Uber driver in the US interviews his passengers on a dashcam and posts the resulting clips here. It’s an EXCELLENT content idea – if I were a brand that regularly had access to famouses I would totally speak to Uber about getting an occasional driver ID that they could use for this exact purpose -imagine the excellent reaction vids you’d get from people getting into car and realising they were being driven by…er…some famous person. In fact, you could livestream the whole things. DO IT, SOMEONE, MAKE ME PROUD!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Day of the Dre: OOOOOLD piece from Rolling Stone interviewing Dre (and Snoop, a bit) just before Doggystyle dropped back in 1993. Great nostalgia piece about a very, very different musical landscape – also, LOOK HOW YOUNG SNOOP LOOKED!

• On Genius and Text Annotation: Genius (you know, the lyric website) also lets people annotate any page on the internet, however they want. You only see the annotations if you choose to, which is why most people have no idea that it’s an option; this article looks at what the growing use of such annotations means for debate and freedom of speech online. Interesting as much for the theory as the practice here.

• Branding in the Age of Social Media: Only really worth reading if you do this sort of thing for a livin (and seriously, you have my sympathies), but this is a pretty smart look at how brands might wish to consider themselves and what they do when trying to ENGAGE on the web.

• The Weapons Bazaars of Facebook: Given the insane reach of Facebook it’s probably no surprise that there are all SORTS of illegal marketplaces on there; this is a look at the ones you can use to buy, say, rocket launchers. I do rather like the whole ‘hiding in plain sight’ aspect of this – reminds me of someone I found on eBay back in the mid-90s who was comfortably selling a LOT of weed over the site by pretending to sell GREEN laser pointers (cunning, eh?).

• The Rest Is Advertising: A sort of poignant account of what it’s like being a sponsored content writer at a major publisher, and how the author comes to terms with the fact that he will never earn as much money doing proper journalism as he will for churning out a few thousand words of puffery which masquerades as editorial. Welcome to the glorious future of the written word, kids!

• My Mum Ran My Tinder: Not mine – I’m not on Tinder, and my mum would not, I don’t think, enjoy the experience. No, some American bloke who decided to hand over the keys to his Tinder account to his mum. Funnyish, but actually more interesting in the way in which it lays bare the frankly slightly weird nature of the courtship dance when conducted over magical pocket internetboxes.

• Why The Internet Of Things Is Going To Be  A Nightmare: This might look techy, but that’s not the important bit. The important bit is the implication when you realise how easy it was just to hijack a bunch of printers all over the world, and then extrapolate that into a future in which everything is online. Just IMAGINE how much fun it will be when the script kiddies on 4chan work out how to fcuk with your home’s power supply from their mum’s basement in Delaware!

• My Year In Startup Hell: A brilliant account of the lunacy of one man’s year working at startup Hubspot as a middle-aged former journalist. Ticks every single startup cliche in the book, and will make you quite glad that this isn’t your life.

• Crowds On Demand: Inside the slightly odd and surreal world of paid-for crowds, hired to pretend to be paparazzi or journalists or fans or whatever else you might need. Part of me thought that it would be quite fun to do this; part of me then thought of all the wonderfully nefarious uses you could put it to. Does anyone know of a UK-based equivalent they could put me in touch with please? I promise what I have in mind is (broadly) legal.

• Hunter Thompson On The Art of Journalism: Another piece from the Paris Review archives, this is a great interview with a surprisingly toned-down Thompson, focusing less on the myth and more on the works and the history. If you’ve ever read the Doctor’s output then this is pretty much a required companion I think.

• Lost In Trumplandia: We’ve not been short of campaign trail and op-ed pieces on the Donald’s campaign, but this is one of the best that I have read.

• How ISIS Is Winning The Social Media War: A fascinating analysis of how the group is harnessing digital communications platforms to spread their less-than-cheery worldview. I’m slightly disappointed that this has yet to spawn a raft of ‘10 things marketers can learn from so-called Islamic State’ thinkpieces on LinkedIn, but the year is yet young.

• On Using the HTC Vive: It’s a standard product review from Kotaku, this, so not stellar prose by any means, but if you’re interested in what it’s like spending a lot of time hooked up to one of these new-fangled VR machines then this is a very comprehensive rundown of the pros and cons of the kit.

• Pascal’s Cryonics: A REALLY interesting breakdown of the cryonics business – you know, freezing your head/body in the hope that one day people in the future will be able to unfreeze it and magically restore you to life – which rather effectively comes to the conclusion that you might as well give it a go if you can afford it, because, well, why not, right?

• The Hatton Garden Heist: A truly excellent piece on the diamond robbers from Vanity Fair, which is so redolent of a 60s crime caper that you can almost see Michael Caine mugging furiously to camera in one of the lead roles. Read this, and save yourself the trouble of watching the inevitably disappointing film of the whole thing which I’m sure will be out in the next year or so.

• The Voyeur’s Motel: The most astonishing thing I’ve read in a while, this – writer Gay Talese spills the beans on a secret he’s held for decades, about a motel owner in the US who for many years shared with Talese the stories he’d accrued from spying on his guests having sex. Astoundingly grubby, but perhaps the weirdest thing is the general air of authorial detachment about the whole thing – there will be many, many instances in this where your inner voice quizzically goes “and so this is when you went to the cops, right Gay?”, and where you don’t really quite understand how he didn’t. Great, great writing, though.

• The Bridge to Sodom and Gomorrah: A brilliant piece of journalism about the slums of Accra and the people who survive there (‘live’ frankly seems like a bit of a stretch). Great writing and a picture of a city I knew next to nothing about, this one’s very much worth taking the time on.

• The Ballad of George Galloway’s Campaign Bus: Finally, the semi-obligatory Joel Golby link; this thing about George Galloway and his mayoral campaign bus is the funniest thing I read all week.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this EXCELLENT and horrifying depiction of office life, cobbled togther from stock video and providing an excellent visual companion to the Tame Impala track ‘’Nangs’. THIS IS YOUR LIFE!:

2) Next up is this, by Emma Louise. It’s called ‘Talk Baby Talk’ and I adore the vocal. Video’s not bad either – he is very pretty, isn’t he?

3) This animation is called ‘The Old New World’ and it is SO CLEVER. Using old photos and smart editing, I’ve not quite seen anything like it before. One for the ideas scrapbook, probably:

4) Resolutely uncool but WHAT a great tune – this is called ‘Men Without Hats’ (no idea why) and it’s by The Burning Hell:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is A$AP Ferg, featuring ScHoolboy Q with ‘Let It Bang’. Doesn’t really get going til the second minute, so give it a chance, eh?:

6) This is a few months old, but I only heard it the other week and it TOTALLY stuck in my head and even now I’m listening to it daily because it is SO GOOD. It’s called ‘Your Old Man’ and it’s by a band called Partybaby and it is EXCELLENT:

7) I’ve got a real soft spot for work that combines projection mapping with dance, and this is phenomenally good. It’s called ‘Levitation’, and it’s beautiful (also, this was performed LIVE. Cripes):

8) This week’s helping of ARTPOP comes in the form of this, called ‘Human Female’ by Bloodboy. It’s rather good, and I do love the aesthetic of the video – oh, contains BARE BREASTS at one point, in case that’s problematic for you:

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH A MIXTAPE OF ASSORTED BEATS BY KWAKE BASS? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SICK OF ALGORITHMS, FRANKLY, AND SORT OF WISHES THEY WOULD JUST GO AWAY AND LEAVE US ALL ALONE FOR A BIT:

• Instagram To Introduce Newsfeed Algorithm: And LO!, it came to pass that Facebook looked at Instagram and they saw that people were using it and that it was good, but that they weren’t quite squeezing the platform hard enough in terms of making people (read: brands) pay for CUT-THROUGH, and so did Facebook decide to replicate the FB newsfeed algorithm in Instagram, thus meaning that users will no longer see posts in their feed in chronological order but instead in an order determined by some arcana and unknowable assessment of the posts’ validity to YOU and YOUR LIFE and YOUR INTERESTS. Which horribly long sentence simply means that, just like on Facebook, you’re going to start getting served a more curated selection of ‘Grams from people you follow; which means that if you’re a brand you will need to accept that, given you’re unlikely to be assessed as an organically CRUCIAL part of most users’ feeds, you’re going to have to pony up for ads if you want anyone to actually see the rubbish you’re posting. Hardly surprising, but hopefully a small nail in the coffin of the ‘INSTAGRAM STRATEGY’ bulletpoint in every single pitch ever.

• See Exact Dates On Instagram Posts: Oh, and now all posts on Instagram will be tagged with the exact date they were posted in the past, rather than the annoyingly loose ‘xx weeks ago’ information that was previously available. So, you know, reporting’s going to be marginally easier (even if noone’s going to see or care about your posts).

• Tips On How To Use Facebook Messenger For Brands: To be honest, this stuff is so obvious as to be almost insulting BUT, should you be in the invidious position of having to cobble together some sort of PLAN as to how your brand is going to integrate Facebook Messenger into your communications and customer service function then you can probably just copy and paste some of this as noone will actually read what you write anyway.

• How Newsfeed Works: Slightly odd that this is (seemingly) a new thing seeing as Newsfeed’s been operating for years, but anyway; this is a Facebook site designed to explain the process by which its Newsfeed operates, highlighting its algorithmic nature and the way in which users can tweak and optimise it to best suit their needs. Notable mainly for the fact that it’s a useful tool to explain to normals how this stuff functions (worth bookmarking for the more luddite amongst your relatives, for example), but also for the fact that it’s a rather nice piece of comms; the site’s well-designed and explains the whole system reasonably clearly and simply. WELL DONE, FACEBOOK!

• Buzzfeed Launches New Ad Unit: SWARM, it’s called, and it’s basically like a non-useless Thunderclap; the idea being that you pay Buzzfeed a metric fcuktonne of money and in return they will produce sponsored content for you and spaff it out across all their social channels in one messy-yet-coordinated burst. Which, in terms of REACH and EXPOSURE, is a pretty big deal. I would imagine that the cost of this is pretty violent, though, so deep pockets only for this one.

• Pizza Hut Does Pi Day: Monday 14 was, as you will know if you spent any time at all online, Pi Day (American date notation, innit). Amongst all the slightly tedious attempts by brands to cash in on this fleeting annual moment of popular webnerd culture, this year’s effort by Pizza Hut stood out for being SMART – they worked with actual proper mathematician John Conway to devise three maths puzzles (HARD maths puzzles) which would grant the first people to solve them 3.14 years of free pizza. Obviously they were all solved within 24h (one of those slightly humbling moments when you’re forced to confront the fact that there are an awful lot of people out there who are far, far cleverer than you are (or you are if you’re me)) and so the whole thing’s done and dusted, but I just thought it was a really nice little PR move. Well done, Pizza Hut.

• Paper Peninsula: Last up in this section (I know! SO BRIEF!) is this gorgeous website for some property development in Greenwich. If I were attempting to make a new residential/commercial build look appealing I would totally rip this style off, it’s lovely.

LET’S START THIS SECTION WITH RAF DADDY’S PLEASINGLY CAMP MIX FOR KITSUNE FROM THEIR VALENTINE’S DAY BASH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PLANNING TO STOCKPILE ‘MY MUM’S COLA’ AND PANDA POPS TO SECURE ITS FUTURE COME 2018, PT.1:

• Waffle: You know what everyone needs? Well, yes, fine, you’re right, a sense of hope and a belief that everything isn’t fundamentally just getting worse and more complicated and scary every waking second would of course be nice, but that’s not what I meant. No, I meant ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK! For reasons known only to them, Samsung have launched ‘Waffle’ (I think primarily to the Asian market), a platform which lets users share photos, doodles, notes, etc, in collaborative grids – so a bunch of your friends can make you a big collage of messages to show you how much they love you, say, or (and let’s just imagine which is more likely) a bunch of people can pool their energies to make you a giant, collaboratively-drawn dickpic. Actually, snark aside, it does look rather cute – you can download it here should you wish (Android only, natch), though you almost certainly don’t need a strategy for it just yet.

• Quickrant: Another one of these occasional ‘Look! The ID of the world!’ Websites which crop up every now and again, Quickrant is an anonymous platform allowing people to…er…have a quick rant about something. Which obviously means it’s about 70% horrid, but you will find the odd poignant gem amongst the racist idiocy. I’m oddly drawn to these things – there’s just something so poignant about the idea of people flailing into the ether like this, fully knowing that all their getting is (at best) a mild sense of cathasis.

• Phonvert: It sounds, I accept, like a website devoted to fans of telephonic erotica, but I promise it’s entirely safe. It’s actually a really sensible idea – to repurpose old and unused smartphones as IoT sensors, letting anyone (in theory) turn their boring old dumb fridge into a SMART FRIDGE (yes, OK, dreadful example), and it’s the sort of thing that if you’re interested in playing around with the idea of IoT stuff might be really useful. I can’t stop laughing at the website, though, which encourages users to “Just stick your smartphone to household objects to smartify them”, which just makes me think of a slightly annoyed cat with an iPhone strapped to its back.

• May 1 Reboot: Apparently May 1 is the day when all webdesigners and illustrators and people of that ilk are meant to collectively relaunch their websites. So, you know, no pressure then.

• Start.me: Another of those ‘roll your own homepage’ websites, which works a little bit like Netvibes (remember when that used to be the future?) in that you can pull together a variety of ‘widgets’ pulling feeds from your favourite and most useful website, or put all your favourite links in one place. You may find this HUGELY useful or, like me, you might just find it a bit fiddly, but its persistent across devices and might be helpful if you have a fairly rigid digital routine.

• Have You Seen Eric?: Darryl Jones is a photographer who, for reasons only he can adequately explain, has chosen to devote what looks like an awful lot of time to photographing a small toy stormtrooper he has chosen to call ‘Eric’ in a variety of different settings. Much as I am indifferent to all things Star Wars, these are really rather cute – of course, there’s an accompanying Instagram too because it’s 2016 – i don’t doubt there will be a fcuking coffeetable book by the time the year’s out, too (wow, that got me riled quickly; sorry Darryl).

• TV Transcripts: A pretty extensive collection of scripts from film and TV shows – almost all US, and not all the big shows are on there, but if you think that you have what it takes to pen a few episodes of Eastenders then you could do worse than looking at these for tips and inspiration and STUFF. Aside from anything else, they seem to have every single script from the early series of The Simpsons, so that’s a pleasant way to waste a few hours should you need one.

• Riff.tv: This is INTERESTING. Riff is basically a cross between Twitch and Gogglebox (yes, I know, but bear with me); the site lets users pick a show to watch and then pairs the video with reaction videos shot by ‘famous’ (not to me, but) YouTubers, so you can watch the programme in question in ‘realtime’ along with the commenter. It sounds headache-inducingly concentration-heavy to me (I can barely focus on one show at a time, let alone two), but apparently watching reaction videos of people responding to TV is a thing online. The service cleverly pays the dues to the networks so the shows are all streamed legally; I can imagine this being the sort of thing that Sky might integrate into their digital offering at some point soon (but I obviously know nothing about the TV industry, so).

• Excellens: A whole font, made in Excel! Included solely because it will delight the two accountants who I know read this (and because it looks surprisingly cool and weirdly Mexican in style).

• Pigeon Air: I had to check the date with this one, as it seemed to wonderfully preposterous to be anything other than an April Fool, but it is TOTALLY REAL so hats off to the LBi folks for the idea and execution. Pigeons! With little backpacks! Monitoring London’s air quality levels as they fly! SO CUTE! Also a really nice way of promoting a wider project to get Londoners involved in monitoring the city’s air pollution levels themselves, so we can find out exactly how many years of our lives are being chipped off the total every day as we breathe in the unique miasma of the City.

• Choo Choo Bot: One of those occasional whimsical Twitter feeds which brings nothing but pleasure, Choo Choo Bot does nothing other than Tweet out sporadic, procedurally-generated ASCII pictures of trains travelling through imaginary landscapes. Utterly pointless, but I think that there’s probably something in this aesthetic and its automation for a certain brand – competitions, Twitter treasure hunts, that sort of thing. Maybe. Am I talking tripe? I’m rather tired.

• Splash!: Older male readers will be disappointed to discover that this is in fact nothing to do with Daryl Hannah, but is instead an app which my lazy notes describe as ‘360 degree Snapchat’. It’s not, obviously – what it is is a system which lets you record 360degree videos using your phone (literally hit record, spin around, and it stitches together a short clip which is viewable on mobile, desktop and via Cardboard, etc), which frankly probably results in less cool results than you might hope but which is also almost certainly the sort of thing which Snapchat is working on integrating RIGHT NOW and so you should probably be aware of it as a coming thing.

• Teen Idols: Tavi Gevinson’s excellent Rookie Magazine collects a bunch of pages from scrapbooks made by teens in the early 00s – bookmark these, creatives, because in a couple of weeks’ time when we’re doing noughties revivalism this is basically everything you’re going to be doing, visually. LOOK AT THE LITTLE OLSENS!

• Belybel: These should be sort of kitsch and horrible, and yet these chairs made out of the repurposed chassis of old scooters (Vespa/Lambretta-style) are pretty great. Also, presages the arrival of the most preposterous mode of transport yet devised – the VESPA SEGWAY! Seriously, this is apparently going to be a thing. What would the Ace Face think?

• Podcat: Basically this is IMDB for podcasts – you can search by guest or theme, and it pulls you a list of podcasts featuring (or about) said guest or theme. Useful if you’re researching or if you are simply an absolute completist about…er…the sort of person who features on a lot of podcasts.

• Brigade: There should be a word for the feeling you get when you suddenly realise that a friend who you’ve always quite liked and got on with holds at least one opinion so earth-shatteringly wrong-headed that you just want to hold them by the shoulders and shake them whilst shouting “BUT YOU SEEMED SO NORMAL!!!”; the sort of opinion that gets revealed during election season, for example, or when they’re talking about ‘ethics in games journalism’. Brigade is an app which will make it a lot easier to weed these people out EARLY – it will also, if I’ve understood it correctly, start more feuds and arguments than almost any other app I’ve seen. Basically, you give the app a statement – say, “all men are rapists”, or “a woman’s place is in the kitchen”, something nice and uncontroversial – and it then asks all your contacts to say whether they agree or disagree, thus simply dividing your friendship group into a binary split between the right and the wrong. Effectively takes the very worst bit of Facebook and distils it into something which could probably be the first step in a minor genocide. GREAT!

• vTime: Do you remember those halcyon mid-2000s days in which companies everywhere rushed to set up offices and virtual spaces in Second Life, believing that it was going to revolutionise remote working and that everyone would start meeting in the VIRTUAL WORLD and interacting via their blocky, lagging avatars rather than in person? God, they were GREAT. Anyway, this is basically a massive flashback to those simpler, more innocent times – vTime is a service which basically provides meeting facilities in a variety of virtual locations in which upto four people’s avatars can sit and chat and interact whilst the real people wear a smartphone strapped to their face like idiots. I am calling this – this is not going to catch on in this incarnation.

• Play Basketball in Facebook Messenger: Because you probably need a break about now. Go on, try it out, I’ll wait for you here.

• Logo Maker: Small business? Need a logo? You could do worse than try this website, which provides a bunch of tools to let you cobble together something a few orders of magnitude better than something you’d knock up in MS Paint.

• Troll Busters: A service for women (although to be honest the gender-specificity here’s sort of missing the point) which offers support and encouragement to people being harassed on Twitter (women? Being harassed on the internet? NEVER) by sending them a load of positive messages and words of support to dilute the horror. A nice idea, this, particularly the fact that you can nominate anyone to receive the support; a nice thing to do for anyone you know who’s getting the sh1tty end of the internet on any particular day.

• The Festival Year: Shonky-but-useful website which collects information about ALL (well, maybe not ALL, but certainly a lot) of UK festivals happening this year, along with links to buy tickets. Rather helpful if you’re attempting to decide which of the seemingly infinite number of genericmediawankerfests you’re going to head to in 2016.

• Parisian Floors: You don’t know it right now, but this Instagram account featuring nothing but photos of pleasingly tiled Parisian floors may well be the most soothing thing you will see all day.

• Enough Walls: Small project, begun in Puerto Rico, to protest against ignorant discourse around immigration; it collects photos of walls, basically, to highlight the fact that, you know, building more of them to keep people out is perhaps not necessarily progressive policy (naming no names here).

• My Burrito Finder: Want a burrito, no matter where you are in the world? This seemingly MAGICAL service maps all nearby burrito outlets based on your location, pulling the results from Yelp. This sort of needs to be extended to encompass all categories of fast food, surely; I reckon you could do REALLY well out of combining this, pizza and fried chicken, so, er, get on it.

• Refugees Deeply: A really rather excellent resource, Refugees Deeply collects news and information on the refugee crisis – to quote their launch blog, “Refugees Deeply will systemically present the topic through the drivers, actors and events shaping this new era of migration, through a mix of original reporting, analysis and views from journalists, experts and practitioners. We will also strive to provide a platform for those experiencing displacement to tell their own stories in their own words.” Laudable.

• Homes of the Jungle: Less laudable was Airbnb’s slighly po-faced takedown on this project, which aimed to raise funds for refumigrants being held in camps by making fake listings on the site (although the properties listed in the Calais ‘Jungle’ were all too real) which, when booked, would donate the funds directly to relevant charities. A really nice, simple execution which for reasons known only to Airbnb they chose not to engage with. Seemed like quite an easy PR win for them, personally, but what do I know? As ever, rhetorical.

• Iodine: Useful resource which gathers information on prescription drugs – positives, negatives, side-effects, usage indications and patient feedback – in one place. Helpful if you’ve been prescribed something and want to start looking into exactly what it is and what it might do to you (DISCLAIMER: other sources of information are available, Web Curios takes no responsibility for all of the stuff on here being totally wrong. Which, on reflection, should probably accompany every single link we ever post; the unofficial Curios motto really ought to be Caveat Emptor. Perhaps I’ll have a crest designed).

• Train Your Own Alpha Go: Now that we’ve taken the first steps on the long journey towards acceptance of our own inevitable species-level obsolescence (on which this is an interesting discussion between AI people about what it all MEANS), why not try building your very own world-beating Go-playing AI? Techy, insofar as it requires you to install Darknet and then do some command-line stuff, and possibly the sort of thing that if we all did it would lead to the creation of some sort of boardgame-fetishising AI superarmy, but why not give it a try anyway – what’s the worst that could happen?!

• Celebs on Sandwiches: The only Instagram account featuring finely-wrought drawings of famouses sitting on a variety of different sandwiches. George Takei standing triumphantly atop a ham and cheese croissant? Yep. Drake on a Canadian bacon and cheese sarnie? Got you covered. Inexplicable.

• Criswell Predicts: The art of prediction, it’s fair to say, is one with a pretty much universally unsuccessful heritage. It’s not like Nostradamus actually got anything right, is it? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of end-predictors scattered throughout history, from Heaven’s Gate to all those unpleasant idiots who believe the Rapture is JUST AROUND THE CORNER. One of the daddies of the whole ‘rubbish at seeing the future’ scene was one Jeron Charles Criswell, who admittedly did predict that ‘something’ would happen to JFK in November 1963 which would mean he wouldn’t run for reelection, but who also predicted some truly BRILLIANTLY mad and wrong stuff, all of which is collected here for your enjoyment. The ‘gay cities’ thing made me laugh a LOT.

• Trumpsults: It’s sadly impossible to get through a Curios without mentioning the bloody man (well, I could, but the web loves him and Curios is the web, so). This is a soundboard of the man’s insults, should you require one.

• MelodyJams: So this doesn’t actually exist yet, but it looks SO COOL. MelodyJams is an app/toy/thing which is effectively a simple synthesiser tool – you pick the instruments you want from a selection and it uses some magical tricks to sync them all into a nice-sounding composition, based on the sounds you select, whether they’re background or foreground, etc. The whole thing can be changed on the fly, which is obviously pretty clever, but the LOVELY thing is the graphical style and animations which accompany it. Each instrument is its own character, and the illustrations are full of personality in a sort of Moshi Monsters (remember them?) way. If you have kids I’d keep an eye on this.

• Girl Grey: Instagram’s full of impressive makeup artists, but this person is AMAZING. The lip work if nothing else is quite startlingly good – LOTS of inspiration here, should you require some.

• Letter Kit: A Pinterest collection full of letterforms, arranged alphabetically. Font enthusiasts, typographers and designers may find this useful.

HOW ABOUT A RATHER EXCELLENT MIX OF LEFTFIELD UK STUFF FROM SXSW BY CYBER69?

THE SECTION WHICH IS PLANNING TO STOCKPILE ‘MY MUM’S COLA’ AND PANDA POPS TO SECURE ITS FUTURE COME 2018, PT.2:

• The Moby Dick Big Read: This is a few years old, I think, so apologies, but I only stumbled across it this week. It’s every single chapter of Moby Dick, available to listen to for free, each narrated by an actor. There are some STELLAR names on there, from Swinton to Cumberbatch to the ubiquitous Fry, and the whole project strikes me as something rather nice to send yourself to bed to (depending on your tolerance for Melville and whales).

• In Space We Trust: Gorgeous little art project walking you through the history of space exploration; navigate by moving the character along the timeline, pausing beneath key events to get more information in the shape of audio clips and explanatory texts. The design of this is beautiful, I think.

• Rock N Poll: ANOTHER really very nice piece of webwork, this, this time designed to explain why political polling is often so inaccurate. The interface is simple and the graphics used to explain the concepts are beautifully clear – this is a sort of object lesson in how to deliver tedious information in simple and engaging fashion.

• The 2016 Name of the Year Selection: It’s that time of year again, when Deadspin run their ‘what is the best, most ridiculous actual person’s name in all of America this year?’ selection. You will not be disappointed by these, I promise you – bear in mind these are ALL REAL PEOPLE. Imagine if you were Dr. Shark Bird. Just IMAGINE. Excellent fodder if you have a lot of pregnant friends and want to be a touch more imaginative with your naming suggestions.

• Five Thirty Eight Projects: Collecting all of the interactives from Nate Silver’s datageek mecca, these are all examples of really good digital design in their own way, and pretty much essential viewing for those of you involved in dataviz-type things.

• Sonnet Signatures: Shakespeare’s sonnets, visualised based on their letters – this produces a series of unique designs, one for each, which look weirdly beautiful despite being abstract scrawls. Depending on who you are and who you know, this could be a gorgeous present for someone.

• Awkward Metal Bands: All metal is sort of camp and ridiculous (I’m sorry, but really), but this selection of photographs of metal bands is probably the acme of that. Contains a LOT of Manowar, which is reason enough for me to include it.

• Prison UK: SO much interesting stuff in here, this is the blog of a former inmate of a UK jail, writing about life behind bars in all its aspects. Seriously, this is GREAT if you’re in any way interested in the country’s criminal justice system – even if you’re not, there’s just about enough REAL LIFE BANGED UP TROOFS in there to keep you satisfied. Potential to lose your whole afternoon in this one.

• Songwig: So SXSW is over for another year, and this time there appears to have been no breakout success – no Meerkat or Foursquare or Twitter for us all to fawn over and get excited about. What there was, though, was this, which almost certainly justified the £20,000 it probably cost to send your head of digital and creative director to get spannered in Austin for a week.

• Falter: One of the more incredible newspaper websites I’ve ever seen, this is simultaneously great and hyperbolic and ridiculous and I LOVE it. Austrian paper Falter has produced this EXCELLENT and rather mental site taking you through its history in a weird, semi-animated son-et-lumiere extravaganza; you can’t really imagine the Telegraph doing this, can you?

• Famous Deaths: Startlingly macabre discovery of the week, this is a Dutch (obviously) project which seeks to recreate the…er…ambience around famous deaths by biuilding olfactory dioramas to represent them (I’ve just made up the term ‘olfactry diorama’ – it makes me sound like a dick, doesn’t it? Sorry). Cut grass and gunpowder? That’ll be Kennedy taking one! Really odd.

• Mini Materials: I have literally no idea whatsoever what the market is for these miniature breezeblocks and palettes, but there are LOADS of people cooing over them. If you’re one of those people who has a miniature sandpit and rake on their desk as a stress reliever, then you might perhaps be attracted by the prospect of being able to build a tiny, tiny wall out of tiny, tiny bricks and mortar. You oddity.

• Planet Licker: ICE CREAM BRANDS – STEAL THIS NOW. Planet Licker is a brilliantly silly project which basically lets people control a simple videogame through the act of licking an icelolly. Seriously, if this isn’t ripped off by Walls or someone over the Summer I will be VERY disappointed in all of you.

• DumbPhone Case: KitKat – STEAL THIS NOW. Dumbphone case is a case for your smartphone which basically handicaps it, preventing you from using it as anything other than a phone. Which, if I wanted a ‘have a break’-type gimmick I would be all over like the sky.

• The David Niven Jazz Motherlode: Literally thousands of hours of old jazz tapes digitised and online. If you’re into oldschool jazz – none of this modern crap, oh no – then this will be your heaven.

• Do: Potentially SUPERUSEFUL product from IFTTT, which basially lets you set up a whole load of rules for your photos – take a pic and have it automatically upload to a particular Facebook album, say, or post to Instagram, or to a Slack channel. Worth investigating as there’s a lot of potential for clever executions here.

• Tomato Sushi: A preposterous idea which will nonetheless appeal to those of you who a) care about the wellbeing of the oceans; and b) buy into all that ‘wellness’ schtick, this is a proprietary method from making ‘sushi’ from tomatoes. EXCEPT IT’S NOT SUSHI, IS IT? IT’S A TOMATO ON SOME RICE. ‘VEGAN TUNA’???? THERE’S NO SUCH SODDING THING AS VEGAN TUNA, IT’S A NECESSARY OXYMORON. Jesus.

• Hot Migrants: Eliciting the ire of people all over the web this week is this Instagram account, highlighting some of the FIT men who are risking their all to get into Europe. In an uncharacteristic burst of charitability, I’m going to go out on a limb here and hope that this is in fact just a clever front for something else and is designed to expose the shallow nature of Western engagement with the refumigrant crisis. Except, obviously, it might just be a bit vile. Not sure really, it’s all quite confusing.

• GoSexy: Depressing app of the week! Do you feel that you’re not spending enough time obsessing about how you look in photos on the internet? Would you like to add an extra layer of artifice to the already-artfully composed lifestyle shots you spaff all over the networks? Would you like to join in in perpetuating the sort of unrealistic body and beauty standards that are the blight of young women’s lives across the Western world? GREAT! You’ll love GoSexy, then, which lets you photoshop the fcuk out of your selfies, whilst exhorting you to look ‘skinny, slim and fit’. Which is nice. They also offer a service where, for $1 a time, they’ll get a pro to ‘shop your selfie for you. I had a brief exchange with the appmakers on Twitter earlier this week, which went about as you’d expect – am I being a liberal tosser about this? Feel free to let me know.

• Unfiltered News: Best site I’ve seen all week, this, and with SUCH a simple premise. Unfiltered News shows you what’s trending in the news around the world – in particular, all the stuff that isn’t being reported in a particular country. It works by comparing news which is trending globally with those topics currently in the top 100 for any given country and pulling out the discrepancies – a fascinating insight into the geographical filter bubbles we all inhabit, and a very well-made site to boot.

• Don’t Be A Puppet: Slightly incredible website from the CIA, purporting to educate kids as to how to spot those malfeasants attempting lead them into a life of jihad online. “Which of the following is likely to be a post from a potential terrorist recruiter?: A) “Good game! Go Panthers!”; B) “Wow, what a touchdown!”; C) “Come and join us in our bloody struggle!”. No, that is not even a slight exaggeration – it’s breathtaking.

• The Weirdest Subreddits Out There: I get literally no data about who clicks on which links here, so I have no clue which, if any of you, prefer the slightly more ‘Hmm, this is a touch questionable’ NSFW-type links. Anyway, for those of you who do, this is the MOTHERLODE – a Reddit thread collecting all the oddest subreddits out there. From the generally incomprehensible memes, all the way through to the seriously unpleasant – if it says ‘pedo’ in the title, I’d suggest you probably really don’t want to click on it is all I’m saying  – this has some startlingly weird stuff on there. As you’d expect, because rule 34, much of the weird stuff is sex-based. I had literally NO IDEA that there was a small but dedicated community of men posting slow-motion clips of themselves ejaculating over small plastic anime figurines, for example. I’m not sure that my life is improved by this knowledge, and yet here we are. BONUS WEIRD SUBREDDIT OF FILTH: Bongo, in audio form, in the shape of Audio Gone Wild. If nothing else it’s worth clicking to check out the VERY VERY ODD titles of some of these clips.

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Pop Punk Problems: I imagine if you’re about 14 and into pop punk then this might mean something to you. Me? Not so much.

• Bandicoot Mania: A lovely obsessional Tumblr dedicated to retro game legend Crash Bandicoot.

• Me & My ZX Spectrum: People and their Spectrums (spectra?), photographed. Touchingly, they take submissions should you have anything you wish to share with them.

• Fuzzberta: Potentially supplanting Web Curios favourite Sugar Bush Squirrel as ‘the best rodent reluctantly dressed up and photographed on the web’, this is…er…Fuzzberta, a guinea pig whose owner really, really likes playing dress-up with the poor creature. The expression in the eyes screams “HELP ME”.

• Noirlac: Gorgeous 16-bit style artworks (or small screenshots from old games, it’s quite hard to tell – either way the aesthetic is lovely).

• Things On Bike Lanes: German, but doubtless cyclists the world over will recognise the blood-boiling rage induced by people parking in cycle lanes. Cyclists, you really are an angry bunch.

• Cecile Dormeau: Beautiful little cartoon illustrations of a slightly feminist bent.

• Only Clyde: A tumblr dedicated to celebrating a tortoise called Clyde, who as far as I can tell is Holmes’ pet in the US Sherlockalike ‘Elementary’. Proof that there is no detail so small that a fandom won’t fetishise it somehow.

• We Donald Ralph Stuff: Donald Trump, captioned with Ralph Wiggum. This stuff is going to stop being funny pretty soon, isn’t it?

• A Helpful Diagram: A series of Venn diagrams which the designers amongst you will, I think, appreciate.

• Emotion Inside: All the photos of the sadly departed Leonard Nimoy anyone could possibly want, and then a few more besides.

• Art on Tumblr: Curated by Tumblr, this is EXCELLENT for finding new and interesting art and artists. Really worth a browse, this, both to find talent and for your own inspiration.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Poem of SXSW Panels: In what is apparently an annual tradition, a poem created solely from the titles of panels at this year’s SXSW. Almost criminally good.

• Alfred E Neuman In History: Whilst not having anywhere near the resonance that it does in its parent country. MAD Magazine is sort of internationall famous, not least because of the lovable bumpkin who’s been its mascot since its very earliest days. This is a really interesting look at how that mascot came to be, and (more broadly) about memes and their propagation back before the internet. You don’t need to know or care about MAD to enjoy this, honest .

• LA’s Coolest Girls On Facebook: Fascinating piece about the rise of the secret group as a ‘thing’ on Facebook – virtual members’ clubs, by invitation only, which serve as sounding boards and support groups and gossip cliques and…well…all sorts of things. As someone said on this topic this week, it’s not that the cool kids have left Facebook – it’s just that they’re doing stuff on there without you and you’re not invited. No, don’t worry, I’m not either.

• The YouTube Music Star: A really interesting profile of a series of modern YouTube musicians – those whose audience exists only on the platform and who’ve yet to explode into the real world. Basically it’s not really changed all that much since Tay Zonday.

• The New Man of 4Chan: I don’t particularly care for the way this is written – it gets bogged down in its pseudo-academic approach a bit too much for my tastes, although I’m hardly one to be complaining about prose style getting in the way of a good story – but the subject is interesting. On the rise of the self-described beta male as a ‘thing’ in both online and offline worlds, and how that intersects with the particularly hateful brand of misogyny so prevalent on- and offline these days. Gets bonus points for pointing out that Milo is a tosser.

• No Cellphone: A pleasingly un-smug account of the author’s life without a mobile (he does this all the time, not as a one-time gimmick). Made me actually look at and reevaluate what I use the bloody thing for and why I have it, although obviously it’s still sat by me as I type this, blinking like a needy cyclops.

• Witnessing Live Brain Surgery: I’ve had quite a neuroscience-y week, what with attending some lectures about it and finally finishing watching the excellent David Eagleman series on brain; this is, despite my oft-stated aversion to Knausgaard’s prose style (SO flat! SO affectless!), a wonderful account of his watching celebrate brain surgeon Henry Marsh at work. Not a great read if descriptions of, you know, brains are liable to freak you out, but otherwise this comes highly recommended.

• An Oral History of the 1996 Chicago Bulls: Another one for those ‘greatest team of all time?’ arguments, this interviews many of the major stars in the side talking about how they remember it all playing out.

• American Psycho Today: I’ve read American Psycho an unhealthy number of times – in fact, so in its thrall was I as a teenager that my college English teacher actually took my then girlfriend to one side to make sure I wasn’t trying to, you know, skin her or anything (NB –  to those of you reading this who’ve never met me, let me assure you that I am in fact an entirely pleasant and generally placid man, honest, and that I have never entertained any murderous fantasies about anyo…oh, no, that’s probably not strictly true. Still, I’m NORMAL, honest). This is Bret Easton Ellis responding to the oft–asked question “What would Patrick Bateman be doing NOW?” Interesting both for fans of the novel (and the film), and on the general question of how characters exist independently of those who create them.

• Life And Death In The App Store: Next time you hear anyone suggest that you build an app, make them read this and then go away and have a long, hard think.

• Google Is Not What It Seems: Or, at least, so says IN NO WAY CONTROVERSIAL Julian Assange. Leaving aside your opinion of the man, thisis a VERY interesting look at Eric Schmidt’s long-standing relationships within the US State Department and what that says about Google’s relationship to the US, privacy and us.

• The Man Who Sold The Eiffel Tower, Twice: I love this piece – a real ripping yarn in the grand tradition, it tells the tale of ‘Count’ Victor Lustvig – conman, fraudster and bon vivant, whose exploits were legend and whose raffish demeanor and charm are beautifully illustrated here. If you’re not drawn in by stuff like the fact that he had “a sidekick named “Dapper” Dan Collins, described by the New York Times as a former ‘circus lion tamer and death-defying bicycle rider’” then there’s little hope for you.  

• How Michelle Obama Does Social Media: Probably one for the advermarketingpr people, but interesting nonetheless – on how the team around her manages to make the First Lady sort of almost cool.

• Blood Ties: An epic piece of writing, looking at the life of Juan Ponce de Leon, the man who discovered Florida and was responsible for some pretty dreadful crimes against the indigenous populations, from the point of view of one of his descendants – fascinating both for the history and for the way it addresses how we relate to our ancestral pasts. Good stuff all round.

• Vinbook: This is just about the community on Vin Diesel’s Facebook Page, but I defy you not to feel all happy and warm once you’re done reading it.

• The Cry of Machines: Best piece of writing of the week, this is the story of a migrant to the US, his work in a factory with other nationals, and the past and loss and cultural identity and and and and. Gorgeous writing, please read it.

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, a pleasingly ramshackle song and video which really, really reminds me of girl-fronted bands I loved to distraction in the mid-90s. This is by Skating Polly, and it’s called ‘Pretective Boy’ (sic):

2) Next up, if you like John Hopkins then you will LOVE this. The track’s called ‘Disco’, and it’s by Ralph Hildenbeutel – the video, consisting of an animation made of a load of hand-painted sketches in differing styles, is genuinely gorgeous:

3) Second video of the year to be featured here from the fabulously-named Your Gay Thoughts. This track’s called ‘To Disappear’ and features a confused ape:

4) I know, I know, I have featured drone racing before, but watch this and tell me that F1’s days are numbered. THIS LOOKS SO FUN!:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is industry veteran F Virtue with ‘Saturday Night Dead’, and it’s one of the best tracks I’ve heard all year (your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for his vocal, but I’ve acquired the taste):

6) Bit of obscure (to me at least) indie now, in the shape of the dreadfully-named Sundara Karma. Special props to the lead singer for his hair – this is called ‘A Young Understanding’:  

7) Proving that it’s not only the lunatic conspiracy theorists who have a monopoly on eye-bleedingly odd and slightly unsettling photoshop work (let’s take a moment to say another big Web Curios HELLO to David Dees!), this is a pretty rubbish track all about how HATEFUL the tories and the Murdoch press and stuff all are. The video, though – OH ME OH MY. This is called ‘All For What’ by Micky Dacks:

8) Last up this week, truly brilliant and unexpectedly vocal jazz by Takeshi Nakatsuka with a BRILLIANT animated video. If you saw and enjoyed ‘Whiplash’ you will really like this, I think. BYE HAPPY EASTER BYE HAVE FUN BYE!:

By Michael Pederson

LET’S KICK OFF WITH SOME SUPERQUEER HIPHOP COURTESY OF THE ‘FAGGOT’ EP BY MR WALLACE!

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES THAT THIS WEEK’S REPORTING OF APPLE OPENING A TWITTER ACCOUNT AS ‘NEWS’ IS AN ABSOLUTE NADIR FOR JOURNALISM, NOT THAT ANY OF YOU CARE:

• More Stuff About Facebook At Work: Despite it appearing on Product Hunt as an ACTUAL NEW THING the other week, it seems I might have been a *touch* preemptive in announcing the OFFICIAL LAUNCH of [email protected]
  – looks like it’s still in only semi-open beta, according to this piece at least. Anyway, the BIG NEWS here is that apparently it’s going to go paid-for pretty quickly, which sort of makes sense – after all, given the amount of cash companies spaff on nightmarishly unweildy intranet-type systems, a few quid for something which you know people will use is probably pretty reasonable. Look, I know that this is a staggeringly dull piece of ‘news’ to open with, but it’s a slow week on the s*c**l m*d** front, thank Christ.

• FB Launches Spotify / Messenger Integration: Interesting less because of Spotify than because of the broader implications, Facebook Messenger now lets users share links to tracks on the music platform directly – like SO: “Inside the Messenger “More” section in chat threads, all iOS and Android users will now find a Spotify option. Tap it and they’ll be shuttled into Spotify’s app where they can “Search for something to share.” Once they select a song, artist or playlist, they’ll be popped back to Messenger with the option to share the photo of the cover artwork. When a friend taps that photo, they’ll be bounced over to Spotify to listen.” The fact that there’s no playing tracks straight from Messenger is a bit rubbish, but the point here is about the growing trend of services to integrate with Messenger (or the chat app of your choice). Money people Transferwise have started the integration with WeChat in Asia to let people transfer cash on the fly via Messenger – obviously that’ll come to Facebook to pretty soon. Basically you should all be thinking about how you can use this stuff – here’s a really smart piece of writing about why that’s the case, should you need more convincing than me just repeatedly shouting “CHAT INTERFACES ARE THE FUTURE” at you.

• Your Business Story: FB this week launched a service helping small businesses pull together simple-but-shiny (and oddly soft-focus) videos about what their businesses sell and why they are awesome. Basically it uses the same sort of mechanics used to create the ‘Your Amazing Year of Joy & Fun’ photocompilationthings, which means the end result is marginally better than you might make on your own but still oddly and slightly creepily budget in finish. Still, if you’re strapped for time and money it could be useful.

• How To Make FB Canvas Ads: Remember those? CHRIST IT WAS ONLY LAST WEEK, PAY ATTENTION. Anyway, this is a wonderfully comprehensive and helpful step-by-step guide to taking advantage of Facebook’s new IMMERSIVE AD UNIT THINGY – the good thing about this is also that it sort of forces you into thinking “Hm, actually, do I have enough decent assets for that?” which will hopefully prevent too many stock photography-packed horrors from coming into being.

• How Live Video Works In The Newsfeed: You hear that? That’s the sound of the bottom of the Facebook newsbarrel being given a very thorough scraping indeed. This explains that Live Video on Facebook will be prioritised when it’s actually live (shocker) – so might be worth playing with it now to see whether it gets you that EXTRA ORGANIC CUT-THROUGH you need (it probably won’t, FYI).

• Instagram’s Stopping People Linking To Other Social Profiles: Really not that interesting or noteworthy at all, other than to those who are attempting to cross-promote their Snapchat presence via Instagram (or their Telegraph presence, but really). Also interesting in terms of the fact that those are the platforms which Instagram considers enough of a threat to link to – poor the inconsequential Twitter.

• Snapchat Debuts Live Stuff On Web For Oscars: Snapchat moving further towards positioning itself as a LIVE PLACE FOR LIVE THINGS with the extension of the ability to check of-the-moment feeds on desktop rather than just through the app; steps towards the mainstream, albeit baby ones. Here’s the TechCrunch blurb on it, and here, more interestingly, is a really rather good piece on the platform as a business which is worth a read if you’re still trying to get your head around it.

• Whatsapp Launches Document Sharing: Combine this with the web version (still hugely underutilised, I think) and it starts to become quite an interesting internal comms option, not to mention the obvious customer services angle. THRILLING, EH? I’m sorry, this bit is almost over I promise.

• Slack Launches Video Calling, Etc: Despite the fact that we all decided this week that we’re OVER Slack, it continues to launch new features – this, allowing for video and audio calls from directly within the platform, is a pretty big thing (if you’re doing internal comms stuff). If you’re not, it’s just another way to waste time at work.

• Mountain View Playable Prerolls: SUCH a clever idea, even if the execution is inevitably a bit shonky – this is a really, really smart use of YT annotations to make ‘playable’ preview ads, in the classic ‘YT choose your own adventure’ YouTube game sort of way. Thieve this QUICKLY.

• Reebok Speedcam Billboard: Feels like a bit of a cheat featuring two case study videos, but this is another great piece of work. Not really internetty, but fcukit – to launch a new line of pseudo-scientifically designed overpriced athleteslippers, Reebok set up a billboard in Stockholm which challenged users to run past it at a certain speed; if they hit target velocity, the billboard disgorged a free pair of kicks. SO NICE, and not a million miles away from an idea Seb had for Adidas 5 years ago which they were too shortsighted to buy. MORE FOOL THEM, EH? Oh.

• The Unicef Tap Project: I featured this a few years ago when it launched, but it’s such a nice idea that it’s worth mentioning again; money gets donated to fund clean drinking water in the developing world based on how long the site is open on people’s phones without them touching them; rewarding you ignoring your device, basically. Smart and simple and SURELY pregnant with other possibilities, no?

• Disney Is Targeting Furries: This basically opens the door to us all doing whatever we like, doesn’t it? I mean, if Disney are comfortable using a community of people who like to dress up as animals for occasionally sexual ends to market their new kids’ film, I expect to see you ALL rinsing Pr0nhub for your next campaign.

By Lina Scheynius

HOW ABOUT SEGUEING (SEG-WAYING? RUSS?) INTO SOME SUPER-80s STYLE SOUNDS WITH PRINCE RAMA? HERE!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK REMEMBERED HOW MUCH HAVING A SEMI-REAL JOB MESSES WITH READING ALL THE INTERNET AND WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU THAT IT WILL HAPPILY ACCEPT DONATIONS TO ALLOW IT TO DO NOTHING MORE THAN WEBMONG ALL DAY, PLEASE, THANKYOU, PT.1:

• Google Trialling Hands-Free Payments: As we move rapidly towards a point where we consider any effort greater than, say, wobbling our left eyelid a great and injurious degree of effort to have to expend to get stuff we want, so Google announces its trialling hands-free payments in California. Basically it links a photo of you with your bank details, with the idea that eventually a camera placed above the till will recognise your unique facial physiognomy and release funds based on that recognition. Which is all well and good until someone kidnaps you and basically does the FACE/OFF thing with you and WHAT THEN, EH, GOOGLE???

• All Roads Lead To Rome: Whilst I could get all pedantic and start talking about how all roads will eventually lead everywhere if you just keep on walking them enough I figure that I’ve already tested your patience enough here today. These are a really nice series of images, available as static graphics, interactives and posters, which show the arterial nature of major routeways around the world. Aesthetically pleasing and GREAT if you’re some sort of…er…motorway obsessive, I guess.

• Kiddle: Are you worried that Google Safe Search isn’t quite…safe enough for your children? Are you worried that they may end up learning about troubling concepts like, I don’t know, DEATH or SEX or SUICIDE by typing those words unguarded into our 21C oracle? Would you prefer to shield them from such concepts and pretend that, you know, the BAD STUFF (or just the stuff that you find a touch uncomfortable) doesn’t exist? Well GOOD FOR YOU! Let’s not dwell too long on the potential long-term effects of that sort of mollycoddling (EVERYONE DIES, CHILDREN – Christ, I would be a dreadful parent) and instead head straight to Kiddle, a bespoke kid-friendly search engine which combines Google Safe Search with a host of other filters to stop kids from seeing anything ‘icky’. Or indeed from learning about, say, their bodies or drugs or a whole load of other stuff. STAY IGNORANT! STAY SAFE!

• Emoji Life: Want to find out what your MOST USED EMOJI on Twitter is? No, I didn’t either, and yet here we are.

• Logo Dust: Need a logo but strapped for cash, and don’t fancy exploiting the second world through Fiverr? Logo Dust may well be of use, then. This site takes a bunch of unused logo proposals by design agency Fairpixels and places them online for others to use, for free, every week. SUCH a nice thing to do, well done them.

• Just Not Sorry: A Chrome extension which analyses the text of your emails as you write them and alerts you when it thinks you’re not being assertive enough. Sounds like a nice enough idea, but from what I can tell it just seems to berate you for using works like ‘just’ or ‘sorry’ or basically anything which doesn’t make you sound like some sort of intensely type-A arsehole. I say this as a man whose email style is so utterly passive-aggressive and self-deprecatory that it basically consists of little more than pre-emptive apologies for potential future fcukups, but what of it.

• Billskip: This seems like a really good service, which probably means that there’s a hidden vig of vertiginous proportions buried in here somewhere. US-only at present, Billskip basicaly pays your bills for you and then gives you 6 months to repay the debt, at a fixed rate of interest of 4%. Which, if this is actually true and not a massive scam, is a BRILLIANT rate and should be done over here asap (feel free to tell me why it couldn’t work).

• Serial Reader: I love this idea. Serial Reader is an app which takes classic works of literature which are out of copyright (basically the ones you can get free on Amazon) and repackages them as short, bitesize chunks, delivered to you on a daily basis for a short shot of story each day. I think there’s a lot in this model, not least the way it harks back to the serialisation which allowed Dickens et al to write so much of their output and would be really interested to see whether it worked as a publishing model (so, er, if someone wants to try it out and let me know that would be great, thanks!).

• Fileship: Basically, holding your work to ransom. Made something digital but the client is withholding payment? NO MATTER! Just chuck it up on here and it won’t be unlocked until they’ve paid a specified amount to you via PayPal. There doesn’t appear to be a detailed Ts&Cs page explaining what the deal is if the service is actually used for proper extortion, so, you know, ABSOLUTE LEGAL WILD WEST HERE. Actually now I’ve typed that I can think of a host of really unpleasant scenarios for this – erm, please don’t do that, any of you.

• I Am Cube: Ever wanted a digital version of a Rubik’s Cube that you can play with to your heart’s content? OH GOOD! Sadly with this one there’s no option to peel all the stickers off and then put them back on again in completed configuration, thus giving yourself the classic shameful feeling of the CHEAT. Ah, such sweet, sweet nostalgia.

• Galaxy Science Fiction Archive: Rather wonderful archive of Galaxy Magazine, a US scifi title which ran from 1950-80. Not just interesting from the point of view of the stories (and the concomitant shifts in what we imagined the future would look like which they point out) but also the cover art which is a treasure-trove of pulp-art aesthetics.

• Phil’s Book: Have you ever lain awake at night dreaming of a website which pulls together a series of photographs of recording studios around the UK in the 60s-80s? I KNOW, RIGHT? If you’re a certain type of muso bloke / sound engineer, this will be THRILLING. If not, then I concede that its charms may be a touch harder to discern, although it’s quite fun imagining some of the debauchery that went on in the otherwise staid-looking brown-panelled rooms.

• Puppy Name Generator: Perhaps I don’t really understand pets, but I would humbly suggest that if you’re struggling so much with what to name your dog that you require the assistance of a name generator then you’re possibly overthinking this. Still, stealable if you’re a Pedigree Petfoods functionary – my preferred use for this, though, is to bookmark it and to use it when having baby name conversations with expectant parents. “Have you considered “Freckles”? What about “Button”? I’M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU”.

• Guess The Karma: Simple but super-addictive Reddithackgame which takes two pictures posted to the site, displays them side-by-side and then asks you to guess which got the most upvotes. Careful, this is a bit timesinkish – if nothing else, it’s an excellent way to nick POTENTIALLY VIRAL images off Reddit for use on your brand’s moribund social channels when you’ve run out of your own tedious content to foist on people.

• Plane: Another week, another unwanted social app designed to somehow address the crushing and persisting feeling of loneliness which seeps from the screens of our magical internet boxes and into our eyes and souls every minute we spend gazing at the world through pixels. Ahem. This one’s called ‘Plane’ and it’s specifically marketed as an icebreaking app – the idea being that you’re in a new place, you want to meet people, you fire up Tind…oh, no, sorry, you fire up Grin…oh, no, sorry, you fire up Plane, leave a slightly needy message (“I am new to the city and alone, please do not kill me and wear my skin as a dressing gown I just want to be friends”) and then wait for the offers of companionship to flood in. The kicker is that it’s anonymous until both parties choose to share details, making it safe(ish). Launched in Denmark about a month ago I think, and doing surprisingly well. I’m going to Copenhagen in a few months so will give it a go and, if I don’t die, let you know how it works.

• Gifbattle Zone: I rather like this. Based on the premise that the best thing about Slack is the ENDLESS GIF CONVERSATIONS, this strips interaction back to just that – two people compete to out-gif each other over the course of a minute, whilst others can watch and vote on who’s won. Add this sort of thing to Snapchat and you would have a KILLER THINGY (technical term) on your hands, I reckon.

• Unreddit: Apparently, according to the creator of this site, Reddit is a HOTBED OF CENSORSHIP. Hm, anyone who’s spent any time on any of the more contentious threads might argue that that’s pretty patently false, but regardless – this site lets you input the url of any thread of your choice to show you all the comments which have been deleted from it by the THOUGHT POLICE or whoever. Your mileage will vary depending on how much of an internet tool you are, I get the impression.

• DUNSÖNs & DRAGGANs: A Twitter account mining the rich comic territory which exists between dungeons and dragons and IKEA furnishings. Almost certainly the geekiest thing on here this week, which is saying something.

• Thimble: We’ve all sort of given up on the ‘everyone must learn to code NOW’ utopia, haven’t we? If you’re still hoping to learn your way around HTML et al, though, this from Mozilla is a pretty useful set of tools which basically let you edit a variety of web templates on the fly with a pretty simple WYSIWYG interface. It’s not going to teach you to code in a day (SPOILER: NOTHING WILL) but it’s a decent way of learning some basic principles about which things do what.

• A Map Of The Internet In 2015 (And Before): So pretty!

• Science Combat: A rather wonderful series of gifs imagining what some of the world’s greatest scientists would look like were they characters in an 16-bit videogame circa 1996. The Stephen Hawking one is GENIUS – wonderfully, the game is actually being produced by the fantastically-named ‘Super Interessante’ magazine – more details (minimal and in Spanish) here.

• Whatsapp Stats: Have you ever wanted to get a whole host of largely pointless information about your Whatsapp conversations – average length, most Whatsapped friends, how often you start chats vs your mates, etc? No, I can’t imagine you have, but just in case there exists this website – NB Web Curios isn’t 100% certain that this one’s not a touch dodgy, so caveat emptor as ever.

• QAlizer: Not the first playlister for online services I’ve found, but a really easy to use interface which lets you queue up videos from YouTube along with tracks / playlists from Soundcloud into one continuously playing chain of SOUND. Is there a better / more comprehensive version of one of these out there anywhere? Do tell if so, enquiring minds need to know.

• Visual Dictionary: Such a great language learning app from the British Council to help people learn English. Take a picture of anything you like – the app uses image recognition tech to work out what it is, and then tells you the word for the thing in English along with a guide to the word’s pronunciation. SO helpful, and should be available in every language under the sun. Were I the Japanese tourist board I would be ALL OVER this (although on reflection this is exactly the sort of thing that the Japanese tourist board probably brought out 4 years ago and which is now on its 17th hentai upgrade, so perhaps best to just ignore me).

• Vandelay Industries: I’m not really sure to what extent Seinfeld is a ‘thing’ for any of you, but on the offchance this is a Slack bot which contains every single line of dialogue ever uttered in the show and which will post gifs of said lines of dialogue to Slack on your command. I like this idea, but am slightly worried about the fact that the basic extension of this is that we will eventually be able to conjure audio and video from every single tv show ever at the press of a few keys, meaning that those dullards whose idea of comedy is to mindlessly repeat catchphrases over and over and over and over again, those who think Little Britain was the zenith of comedic achievement, will become intolerable digitally as well as in person. Another reason to look forward to the future there – you’re welcome!

• Vibby: A service which lets you easily link to specific bits within a YouTube video, with annotations – particularly useful if you’re discussing potential edits, etc, with a wider team of people (although, and you can have this for free, for most videos produced by agencies and brands the only thing you need to bear in mind is “It doesn’t matter because noone is going to watch this outside of the client and this agency!”).

• Huffduffer: Neat little tool to make your own podcasts simply and easily – effectively it’s sort of like Pocket for audio (I mean, it’s not really, but) insofar as you can just feed it links to audio files and it will bundle them up into one for later listening at your convenience, or for you to create your own roundup of found sounds from around the web. If you’re interested in doing a podcast version of Curios, for example, this would be quite an interesting tool to start playing around with (also, YOU OWE ME).

• Insta-Trump: Look! Markov Chain-generated Trump speeches! Just as appalling  as the real thing! What’s astounding about these is quite how well they replicate the cadence of The Donald’s delivery, although that suggests less of a coding genius at work than it does the fact that the source material is less than sophisticated. Oh, and if you like that then you might like this Twitter bot which does much the same thing based on a neural network feeding off Trump speech fragments. While we’re here, have a Chrome extension which changes the Facebook Reaction buttons to Trump’s face. And a Trump buttplug. Are we done with the idiot for this week now? Yes, yes we are.

• Stock Images Of Women Using Computers: You may want to bookmark these for future presentational use. Vintage shots which frankly could easily have been taken from office–based bongo of the 70s and 80s (not sure that that observation reflects that well on me to be honest, but let’s move swiftly on).

• Anime Maru: The Onion, for anime. If you’re into Japanese cartoons and the culture which surrounds them then you will TOTALLY get this; if you’re not, it will make little to no sense and you should probably just move on.

• Beacodes: Not the first of these, but the first I’ve seen positioned in this particular way – Beacodes is a service which broadcasts data over inaudible audio frequencies – effectively like a silent QR code. That’s a really shonky description, I realise – imagine that you’re a retailer and you want to send discount codes to people in your shop, for example, to incentivise purchase of a particular line. Get it? Obviously only of use if people adopt it, but I could imagine this sort of tech becoming baked in to a whole host of other things and becoming quite popular (and also, just parenthetically, really quite intrusive – unstoppable silent push notifications, you say? How delightful!).

• The Most Dangerous Writing App: Exactly like the Flowstate app from the other week (forces you to keep writing; deletes your output if you pause for more than 5 seconds before hitting your word goal), except this is web-based whereas that was Mac only. Go on, SCARE YOURSELF when writing that RFP.

• Awesome Pictures of Iranian Architecture: The most impressively geometrically beautiful Instagram feed you will see all week, no doubt.

By Aaron Tilley

LET’S HAVE SOME DJ FOOD MIXING NOW, AS AN ANTIDOTE TO ALL THAT SLIGHTLY DAYGLO STUFF!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK REMEMBERED HOW MUCH HAVING A SEMI-REAL JOB MESSES WITH READING ALL THE INTERNET AND WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU THAT IT WILL HAPPILY ACCEPT DONATIONS TO ALLOW IT TO DO NOTHING MORE THAN WEBMONG ALL DAY, PLEASE, THANKYOU, PT.2:

• The Butter Sprayer: End-times Kickstarter of the week comes in the form of this already-funded piece of crap, which will take a piece of butter and atomise it into a sprayable mist at the touch of a button, thus eliminating the tedious requirement to a) ensure the butter is warmed to the point of spreadability; b) make that oh-so-onerous spreading motion with your wrist which is the bane of so many otherwise pleasant breakfast times. LOOK, RIGHT, LET’S GET SERIOUS FOR A SECOND. What is WRONG with you all? Leaving aside the laziness of the sodding idea, this will NEVER achieve the sort of consistent butter-on-toast coverage that a discerning consumer would require. Have YOU ever tried getting consistent coverage on a surface using a spraycan? Well QUITE. I have no idea why this has exercised me so much, sorry about that.

• TLC K-9 Services: If you had a teenage child who you suspected of using drugs and stashing them in the house, would you a) talk to them about it like an adult; b) observe their behaviour leaping to conclusions; c) hire a sniffer dog to case the joint before sending them to reform school? If you answered c) then CONGRATULATIONS, this is the service for YOU. Included not just because of the slightly mad nature of the service offered, but also because of the agency’s logo – seriously, WHO thought that up? I’d perhaps get the sniffer dogs round to their place, is all I’m saying.

• DSCOVR_EPIC: A Twitter bot sharing gorgeous photographs of the Earth from space, taken by the DSCOVR spacecraft. A lovely thing to occasionally have pop into your feed, this.

• Evertoon: Do you remember a few years back there was a service which let anyone create really crap videos with voice synthesisers and a stock cast of poorly-animated CGI characters? Like this sort of thing? Well, for reasons known only to the creators of this app, that is BACK! Except now you can record your own audio rather than relying on the Hawking-voiced synths. It still looks INCREDIBLY pony, but you might get some low-grade lols from it if you can script something half decent.

• Remote: Kickstarter of the week #1: Remote is a work-in-progress play by Coney (DISCLOSURE – they are friends of mine, but they pay me no money, honest guv) which blends storytelling and tech in a really fun way, creating something halfway between a Choose Your Own Adventure story and a piece of theatre. It is FUN, and they are already nearly halfway funded, and they only need £3k, so if you have a couple of spare quid then I urge you to chuck them at it. THANKS!

• Sweatt: The neverending cavalcade of niche dating apps continues apace; this time, one which lets you match people based on your shared love of musclepain, lycra and isotonic sports drinks. Tell it your workout regime and it will apparently pair you with someone similarly obsessed with fending off death via the medium of exercise. I would imagine that this is some sort of crazy hotbed of narcissism, and that conversations are simply a succession of escalating shots of people’s ‘guns’, but then, as previously explained here, I am confused by the desire to exercise in much the same way as others are confused by the desire to experience most of life through a screen rather than through actual interaction with other human beings (no YOU’RE weird).

• Dylesxia: Really nice bit of code which simulates the effects of dyslexia on the text appearing on the page. Were I a charity dealing with dyslexia and related issues I would TOTALLY pay this person to turn this into a Dyslexify plugin for Chrome – go on, please, someone do that, it’s a really nice little bit of PR I think.

• Go Cubes: You’re a BUSY PERSON! You have SO MUCH TO DO! YOU NEED CAFFEINE TO FUNCTION! But, and this is the rub, you’re too BUSY to waste those seconds making a coffee or, more probably, waiting for the bemoustached Australian to do something incomprehensible with a fancy coffee machine andsome milk (seriously, you can get a good coffe in Italy in a matter of literally seconds – what the actual fcuk are you hipster idiots doing that make it takes so fcuking long?! Hm, interesting, didn’t know until I started typing that how much it in fact riles me). Well FEAR NOT, because now you can get your caffeine hit in small, chewy sweet form. These actually sound like they might be rather nice, though the potential to give yourself an horrifically jangly caffeine comedown is pretty strong – sadly they’re currently only shipping in North America, though I imagine somewhere in Peckham will stock them within a few weeks.

• Knuckle Tattoos: A gallery thereof. Shout out to the woman who has ‘Buff’ and ‘Ting’ across her hands, which is going to be a hell of a look in her wrinkly dotage.

• Windows On Earth: All the photos from space taken by recently returned astronaut Scott Kelly. So, so beautiful – the nocturnal city shots alone are just stunning.

• Cell F: This is quite insane, and I don’t 100% understand how it works, but it sounds AMAZING. Basically (VERY basically) this is a meat-based music generator – an actual biological…thing (yes, I know), using skin cells from the artists body to create a basic neurological network which then is plugged in to some music and then…er…sort of remixes it. A BRAIN IN A JAR MAKING MUSIC!!!! This is so mind-flayingly scifi I don’t really know what to make of it and so am going to just leave you to click and gawp.

• Tio: Kickstarter of the week #2: Tio is a really interesting toy project which provides users with the tools to take old toys, other objects, 3d printed bits and pieces, etc, and turn them into connected toys – effectively letting you frankenstein together a whole load of bits and pieces and then turn them into a smartphone–controlled internet-enabled THING, Lots of potential here, sort of like a Meccano with knobs on, and worth a look if you or your kids are into engineering-type toys and games.

• Klangmeister: Like music? ‘Get’ programming? You might like this then: “Klangmeister is a live coding environment for the browser. It lets you design synthesisers and compose music using computer code – without having to install anything on your own computer.” So there.

• Resting Bitch Face Test: Settle those arguments once and for all, or more entertainingly start brand new ones, by letting this rudimentary software assess a photo of you to assess whether you suffer from RBF (I don’t, in case you were wondering).

• No More Voicemail: Does anyone actually use voicemail any more other than perhaps your parents? It’s a HORRIBLE thing – that flashing light rarely if ever presages good news, like the phone ringing off the hook at 3am – which is why this service to turn it off for good is a very welcome one indeed.

• The Skateboard Soundtracks: An incredible resource, this, collectiong a seemingly infinite collection of musicc used on skateboarding DVDs (I know they’re all digital now, but it still feels right saying that) and listing them video-by-video. There’s a LOT of stuff here and the archive goes back years; as a resource for finding tracks from old vids it is AWESOME.

• Russian Rich Kids: Basically ‘Rich Kids Of Instagram’ with a narrower geographical focus, if you want to see a whole bunch of pictures of people who are younger and richer than you having a really nice time then this is the feed for you. The only consolation (and it’s a scant one) is in thinking of the inevitable incarceration / cirrhosis which awaits many of them in later life. Actually, I’ve just scrolled through some of these again, and that probably won’t make you feel any better at all. Sorry.

• The Y2K Aesthetic: One of several great Imgur collections in here this week, this is 800+ photos embodying the particular aesthetic of the late90s/early00s. Given the revivalism we’re seeing all over the place at the moment for this sort of era, expect this to become a go-to for moodboards over the next few months. Wasn’t everything shiny and metallic-looking – er, why?

• Glass Action: Inexplicable and wonderfully shonky, this Etsy retailer sells small stained glass portraits of famous people which you can use as…er…bedroom nightlights of the sort you plug into the mains. You want a really, really weird-looking stained glass effigy of David Bowie watching over you, glowing softly, as you sleep? YOUR PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED! A great source of presents for the right person, this.

• The Adipositivity Project: A photo project celebrating the larger body. Lots and lots of naked fat people, basically – presented without judgement other than to say that there’s something really quite aesthetically interesting about the play of light and shadow on really massive people’s bodies (and there are some REALLY massive people in here). Moderately NSFW depending on your employers’ tolerance for acres (in this case literally) of exposed flesh.

• Wikipedia Nearby: One of those hidden gems of Wikipedia, this – tell it where you are, and it will present you with locations of notable interest in your immediate vicinity. TIME OUT – STEAL THIS FOR YOUR APP (presuming you still have one). This is SO excellent – worth adding as a link to your phone’s homescreen if you’re a Londoner as it’s such a good way of finding interesting curiosities in your vicinity.

• Watchmen Portraits: Truly brilliant collection of shots from the movie Watchme, both press shots and behind the scenes. Wonderful style in these.

• Miserable Men: An instagram feed collecting photos of men sitting on chairs whilst shopping, looking miserable. Absolutely an ad campaign waiting to happen, for any of you who need ‘inspiration’ this week.

• Your Past Is Part Prison: I love this art project. You call a number which connects to a phone and answering machine; you leave a message on the answering machine; the tape is then removed from the machine and buried in concrete, sealing your secret away in perpetuity (or until the concrete gets excavated and all the rotting horror of the past is exhumed). Someone do this here, please, or a variant thereon.

• Reddit 3016; An incredibly involved gag imagining what Reddit might look like 1000 years hence. Apparently several years in the making, this goes SO deep – try clicking on all the individual threads and be amazed at the wealth of fake articles, websites and the rest which have been created to back up the idea. Terrifyingly obsessional, but also quite funny in a netgeekhumour sort of way.

• The Book Of Thug: Following last week’s profile of him in the long reads section, this is an insanely detailed website breaking down Young Thug’s musical output – from tempo to key to rhythm to lyrics, every single aspect of his music is analysed to forensic and frightening degree. Interesting not only if you’re a musician – and if you are, it’s really worth a look – but also as an exercise in making a single-topic website; the navigation’s really rather nice. Worth a play, whether or not you ‘get’ the music.

• Every Playboy Playmate Centrefold Ever: Yes, ok, so this is just an incredibly large collection of photographs of naked women BUT it’s also a really interesting cultural document. No, hang on, wait! Starting back in the mid-50s and going all the way through to February 2016, this presents all the Playboy centrefolds in chronological order – it is FASCINATING. Witness the first full nude, the changing trends in pubic topiary, the point in the 80s where the models stopped looking like women and instead started looking like terrifying shiny sex robots (seriously, there’s a point in the 90s where there is so much photoshopped sheen on the skin that they actually look like CGI versions of themselves, it’s horrid), the slow encroaching of bongo-level standards of aesthetics into the world of cheesecake…it’s a compelling journey through all sorts of stuff. Also, and let’s just be very clear about this for the avoidance of doubt, it’s a collection of hundreds of pictures of naked women and as such is pretty much entirely NSFW. By way of balance, here’s a link to loads of naked men too.

By Yolanda Dominguez

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC WITH THIS RATHER NICE INSTRUMENTAL HIPHOP ALBUM BY QUELLE CHRIS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Git Animals: This is a whole load of animal-based gags around coding that I really don’t understand at all.

• Ensalada De Lengua: An EXCELLENT collection of gifs culled from film and TV, amongst other things.

• Wing Manning: Photobombing people who kiss in public. Childish and yet consistently a lot funnier than you think it ought to be.

• Victorian Humour: A collection of ‘gags’ from the victorian era, drawn from the digital archives of the British Library. Proof positive that we are funnier than our great grandparents.

• These Boots Are Made For Walking: Do you have a strange and unshakeable obsession with the Nancy Sinatra classic? Would YOU like a collection of 200 covers of it, all in one place? OH GOOD!

• Short Fingers: I lied, sorry – more Trump. This is dedicated to propagating the ‘short fingers’ meme, about whose origins you can read more here. “Short fingered vulgarian” is a timeless cuss, fwiw.

• Glitch News Network: I featured the Twitter bot here last week; now Shardcore’s made a Tumblr collecting the output of his Glitch News bot, scraping the Buzzfeed News homepage for images and turning them into sickmaking gifed collages demonstrating exactly how mad the world is. Sort of dizzyingly brilliantly horrible.

• Clinton Loves Pizza: Baffling collection of pizza-related STUFF.

• Vintage Occult: Brilliant collection of tacky occult-related stuff from the 70s,80s and beyond. It’s amazing, judging by this, how often ‘occult’ seems to be a synonym for ‘featuring a naked large-breasted woman and maybe a goat skull or two’ – moderately NSFW for those very reasons.

• Gifs of the 80s: An AMAZING resource of clips from old music promos and adverts and stuff – if you’re looking for source materials from the 80s to splice into things, this is a GREAT place to start.

• Gabber Eleganza: Comfortably the most aggressive music ever invented (death / black / speed metal is just a bit too camp, even with the murder and church burning side of it), Gabber’s never celebrated for its style so much as its relentlessly pummelling audio aesthetic. Which is a shame, as there are some SWEET THREADS on display in this wonderful style Tumblr. BONUS! Why not put this on LOUD for the rest of the day and then lock your computer and leave the office? GO ON!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH OFFER YOU THIS YEAR’S BEST FILM OSCAR SCRIPTS AS A BONUS!

• The Chris Rock Oscars Transcript: Worth reading even if you’re bored to the back teeth of the whole celebrity shebang – the whole bit is really very good indeed, and a little more interesting and nuanced than the pull-quotes served up by the media suggested on Monday.

• Please Don’t Get Murdered At School: Another great piece by the inimitable McSweeney’s, this time imagining a monologue from an American parent to their child exhorting them to please take care not to get all shot up in the classroom. It’s funny because it’s practically true!

• The Deactivation of the American Worker: The ‘American’ in the title is redundant – the issues apply to any developed economy, pretty much. Taking as its starting point the practice of notifying employees of terminations by severing their Slack accounts, the piece examines how changes in company tech usage mean that in fact workers are more expendable than ever, and how knowledge no longer guarantees utility as it’s such an transferable commodity. Hugely reassuring! (not really reassuring at all, sorry).

• Weird Facebook: It’s been underexplored, I think, but it’s worth remarking what an astounding job Facebook’s done of turning perceptions of the platform around in the past 2 years. You may recall a couple of years back the spate of ‘IS FACEBOOK DEAD?’ articles, opining that it had lost its cool and that the kids were all going elsewhere – now witness this piece, talking about how it’s THE place for hot digital takes on the big cultural issues du jour, and is supplanting ‘Weird Twitter’ as the place for all of the freshest memes, etc. The truth is somewhere inbetween, but I personally reckon that FB Groups have made all the difference to the platform’s success. So there, it’s TRUE.

• The Propaganda of Pantone: Partly interesting and partly ridiculous essay looking at the subcultural appropriation inherent in Pantone’s selection of Rose Quartz and Serenity as the colours of the year for 2016. Basically looks at how brands find subcultural tropes and then RUIN them through appropriation (WE FOUND THE CONCH!). Contains an awful lot about Seapunk and Vaporwave, so your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for both those concepts (and a bit of light cultural theory).

• A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon: They’re not lying when they say ‘complete’, I promise you. Exhaustive, and to this reader at least exhausting, but a certain type of geek will adore this.

• Analysing US Presidential Campaign Websites: A really interesting piece looking at the different design choices taken by the sites of each of the major players in the US Presidential race, notable less for the politics than for the really smart thinking about audiences, UX and the like. Worth reading for any of you who do comms-y type stuff, honest.

• An Exception Occurred: Startlingly clear-eyed and honest account of the author’s serious bipolar episode, which (based on what I know from dealing with people going through this sort of thing) is pretty much bang-on in terms of describing the delusional end of the condition. Remarkable not only for the dispassionate clarity with which its presented, but also for the positive tone – had this happened to me, I will happily confess I would most likely still be terrified.

• The Architect of the Reich: Fascinating profile of Albert Speer, whose designs were intended to immortalise the eventual victory of the Third Reich and who got away with it an Nuremburg. It never ceases to amaze me that they imagined on such scale – the dimensions of the planned buildings are just mind-buggering. Interesting on the extent to which it can be now shown that Speer was entirely complicit in the final solution – it’s also really good on some of the madder bits of Nazi obsession (I appreciate ‘madder’ is a relative qualifier in this context), including the stuff about them placing concentration camps based on how they would give them access to more marble; such a terrible combination of mad and dreadful and high camp.

• A Girl’s First Date: Preparing for your first date as a 14-year-old American girl. I know I always say this, but it looks AWFUL being a teen right now. Poor the kids :-(.

• MFA vs CIA: What it’s like being interviewed, and then offered a job, by the CIA. Spooky, basically.

• The Conspirasea Cruise: What would it be like being stuck on a boat with a bunch of people who believe 9/11 was an inside job, that MMR jabs cause autism, and that we are all hurtling towards a moment of cosmic enlightenment as predicted by grand masters from ages past? Pretty mental, is the answer – this is a surprisingly kind-hearted look at some of the…*ahem* esoteric folk aboard the recent conspiracy theorists’ seabound jamboree.

• The Simulated Battlefields of the US Army: Did you see the photos this week of the tube disaster simulation exercise? Imagine that, but extended to cover a whole living village in the Middle-East, going on for EVER. This is a really, really interesting picture of how these simulations work, complete with wonderfully surreal pictures of tourists wandering through the faux-villages and slightly shattering the illusion. If you’ve ever read ‘Remainder’ then you will find a lot to love here (and if you haven’t, you ought to).

• Minecraft’s Most Obscene Server: I confess that much of the technical stuff here meant nothing to me as a non-Minecraft person, but as a portrait of a weird online subculture / community this is GREAT.

• The Final Hours of Chariots: Perhaps unsurprisingly I had no idea that Chariots Shoreditch had shut down. This is a lovely portrait of the place, it’s place in gay culture, its patrons, and the sauna scene in general – a really good and elegiac read whether you’re gay or straight (or bi-, or a-, or pan-, or tri-, etc etc etc).

• A Guy Walks Into A News Cycle: The second McSweeney’s link of the week, this time to absolutely the only dissection of the way modern media works that you will ever need to read, ever. SO GOOD! SO TRUE! SO DEPRESSING!

• The Accident: A lovely essay looking back at a car accident involving teens in a small town, and how it changed the author’s life and outlook and STUFF. Brilliantly evokes that first time that someone you’re at school with dies – you all had it, whether it be car accident or drug overdose or just unexpected embolism or whatever – and all of a sudden everything is just DIFFERENT.

• Why Your Music Is Worthless: Absolutely kilometric essay on the music industry and creativity and art and economics and the market and all sorts of other things besides. Eminently readable, whether or not you’re someone with an interest in the future of the industry, and frequently very funny, this is a brilliant read which will make you smarter if you read it or your money back (but pay me first, eh?).

• By The Time You Read This I’ll Be Dead: Wonderful and sad and hopeful and brilliant essay by Canadian John Hofsess, who before taking his own life in Switzerland last month had helped 8 other Canadians take their own life gently and peacefully. Excellent on the mechanics and morality of assisted suicide, and contains a lot of rather useful information if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

• Why You’re Not Quitting Twitter: Finally, a very, very funny piece (again) by Sam Kriss, on why none of you (ok, US) will be quitting Twitter anytime soon. GOOD LUCK ESCAPING, -ISTS OF THE WORLD.

By Louis Debelle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, INCLUDING LINKS TO ALL THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS!

1) First up, that kinetic sculpture / rube goldberg machine / musical instrument thing involving marbles which I’m sure you’ve all seen and which will almost certainly be ripped off by Maltesers some time soon:

2) Next up, ageing rockers Devo do the 360 video thing – the song’s tripe (IMHO), but I like the fact that the video actually makes proper use of the format – there’s a real invcentive to rewatch it a few times to clock everything going on (possibly with the sound off, mind):

3) This week’s slice of female-fronted indie-schmindie comes in the shape of the VERY lovely ‘How’ by Daughters. This is gorgeous, I think:

4) This sort of sounds like a cross between all sorts of stuff – Iggy and the Velvet Underground and a bit of Lou Reed and some other things thrown in – and it is a GREAT song. Parquet Courts with ‘Berlin Got Blurry’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Another Curios favourite returns – this is the ever-excellent and sadly under-famous Manga St Hilare, with the rather lovely emogrime (my appellation, not his) ‘GPRS’:

6) Next up, music made to be performed underwater. This is called Aquasonic, and someone somewhere should steal this for an ad or an installation or something:  

7) It’s always nice when I get to refer back to C86 and ‘TWEE AS FCUK’ and that sort of stuff – if that means anything to you then you will LOVE this track. ‘Is It Possble’ by Frankie Cosmos:

8) Penultimate thing this week is this intensely awkward-sounding song by AS Chingy, which is accompanied by a really odd and uncomfortable-making video apparently made using a PS4 and Oculus Rift. Whatever it is, it gives me the right heebies:

9) Last up, the campest thing you will see all day. SO SILLY, and yet so fun – this is called ‘Turbo Killer’ by Carpenter Brut. BYE HAVE FUN SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

By Isidro Blasco

SHALL WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH AN EPIC SELECTION OF ELECTRONICA ALL MADE BY WOMEN? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T KNOW WHETHER TO LAUGH OF CRY BUT WHICH IS SO, SO GRATEFUL TO ZUCKERBERG FOR AT LAST GIVING US THE OPTION:

• Facebook Reactions Are Finally Here!: I don’t doubt that each and every one of you will have had your own excited series of conversations on Facebook this week marvelling at your newfound emotional range, so I’m not going to dwell on this. Only observations really worth making are that a) Christ does it feel a touch infantilising; b) You can actually get reasonably useful analytical breakdowns of the different reponses through Post Analytics; and c) wouldn’t it be nice if for the next few weeks and months everyone responded with the ‘angry’ or ‘sad’ face to every single advert they see, purely so that the people responsible for reporting the performance of the ad buys have to explain exactly why they spent all those thousands of pounds to make people feel sad or angry. Think of it as a really small, slightly rubbish rebellion against the inevitable, and then cry to yourself about just how much worse everything is going to get.

• Facebook Canvas is Finally Here!: Facebook Canvas, in case you have unaccountably forgotten, is the new type of ad unit Facebook’s rolling out as of TODAY which is basically like Instant Articles for ads – the units don’t cost any more, apparently, but are effectively rich media equivalents of the sort of ad-specific mobile site that you might once have sent users to; basically it’s another THING inside Facebook’s walled garden. These actually look rather swish, I must say, and I’d expect to see these everywhere in a week or so. Definitely worth playing with if you have lots of EXCITING CONTENT to show people, although we all know that even those with nothing whatsoever in the way of EXCITING CONTENT will jump on the bandwagon and start spaffing their dull rhetoric into our eyes in RICH MEDIA fashion. So it goes.

• Facebook Video Birthday Messages: It’s a 21C truth universally acknowledged that the lazy reflex action of writing ‘Happy Birthday’ on Facebook is pretty much the lowest rung of the friendship ladder; effectively the equivalent of saying “I am marginally more positive than base-level ambivalence about your continued existence, but I do not care enough to attempt to interact with you in a manner which requires any more than the minimal level of effort, and I have no actual desire to ever interact with you in real life so don’t get any fcuking ideas mate” – now Facebook’s going to start exhorting us to record short video messages to bestow these light-touch wishes. Interesting more because of the potential extensions – I can imagine competitions and the like being run like this from a brand point of view, although now I’m typing it that sounds like a dreadful idea so maybe just forget I started this.

• Snapchat On Demand: For those of you with a legitimate reason to be on Snapchat as a brand, this is (I think) BIG NEWS. Basically it’s opened up the creation of geofenced filters to anyone – brands or, you know, ACTUAL PEOPLE. They’re incredibly simple to set up as this piece illustrates; if you have an event going on, or a set of physical locations to which you think MILLENNIALS will be flocking (cf fashion and food brands, I speak to YOU) then why wouldn’t you experiment with this – effectively anyone Snapping from within the geofenced area will be presented with the option to put YOUR branded filter on their Snap, which seems like a pretty good deal. The best thing? At the time of writing there is absolutely NOTHING brands can do to prevent other brands from creating geofenced areas around their rivals’ geographical properties, so if any football club digital people are reading this may I suggest a SICK BURN on your greatest rival’s stadium? £50 by PayPal, please, for that one.

• Automatically Blur Moving Objects On YouTube: Really dull, this, but useful if you need to blur the face of the one person who didn’t give consent to be filmed and who irritatingly is always in shot.

• YouTube Next Up: YouTube is now taking applications to join the next round of its STARS OF THE FUTURE programme. I don’t really know why I’m including this here – I mean, I’m not convinced that, of the tens of you reading this, any of you are shiny-haired, dazzling-toothed anodyne narcissists with a webcam and a fairly messy psychological breakdown lurking in your futures (though I may be wrong), and those of you with teenage kids probably wouldn’t necessarily want YT stardom thrust upon them, but nevertheless.

• Pinterest Rich Pins Get Richer: Well, for films and recipes at least. If you’re a cinema chain or do food stuff, you will now be able to have film showing times on your movie-related Pins, and recipe information on your food-related Pins. HUZZAH!

• Twitter’s Missing Manual: Not ‘news’, but actually a really interesting document (and a useful one) on how Twitter practically works as a platform – reading this you get a feel for exactly how daunting people find the platform on first entry. Useful in case you still need to educate people about how starting a Tweet with an @reply means basically noone sees it, which I for one am so fcuking bored of telling people that I’ve taken to doing it in borderline-offensive sign language.

• La French Touch: What do you think of when you think of cognac? You think of snifters, don’t you, and maybe rappers ostentatiously brandishing immense bottles of the stuff before unaccountably mixing it with cough syrup…maybe a cigar or two, a Napoleonic hat… Until now, you’d probably never thought of a strangely blocky CGI swift flying through the streets of a virtual Paris before landing in a swanky nightsport to great acclaim, and yet that is EXACTLY the experience offered by this site from swanky boozepeddlers Martell, which uses the now-old hat ‘use your phone as a controller’ gimmick to let you fly said virtual swift through the virtual French capital. I know I say this almost every week, but again – WHY DOES THIS EXIST?!? What is it meant to say about brandy? WHY THE SWIFT?! I mean, if Martell had decided to produce a range of ortolan-inspired bottles each containing a dead swift, drowned in delicious brandy and ready to be lightly grilled before being consumed whole so you can taste the hot booze flooding your mouth as you puncture its tiny little lungs with your canines, then that might make sense, but as it is this seems like an AWFULLY fancy website which exists for no purpose whatsoever. Maybe the marketing head’s kid works for the dev agency or something.

By Helen Levitt

NEXT UP, IT’S THE RETURN OF SOCIAL-MEDIA-ESCHEWING FORMER INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE TO RETURN WITH ANOTHER EXEMPLARY ECLECTIC MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS TRYING TO WORK OUT WHETHER THIS ‘DANIEL’ MEME HAS HAD A SHORTER LIFECYCLE THAN THAT FIT BLOKE IN TARGET FROM LAST YEAR, PT.1:

• Rent a Minority: There used to be one of these from a few years back about renting a black friend for white people with a displeasingly caucasian friendship set; this is the 2016 version, when instead of your friendship group being mocked it’s your event panel, because these days it’s actually impossible to see things outside of the tech/startup community (in fairness they also reference adverts and stuff, but it feels like a tech industry gag). Anyway, SATIRE!

• The Glitch News Network: Another EXCELLENT piece from Shardcore, this; the Glitch News Network presents occasional snapshots of the state of the world in glitched-out gif format. The bot scrapes the pictures from (I think) the frontpage of Buzzfeed News and then messes with them, giving a brilliantly scifi dystopian roundup of what is going on RIGHT NOW. Actually a little scary when seen in bulk, and oddly reminiscent of what happens when you listen back to shows on the BBC Radio app and they seem to always start by clipping in a sentence from a recent news report which are almost universally terrifying when taken out of context (seriously, it breaks in with stuff like “…millions could die in the next decade”, or “…the most powerful laser ever built”. Stuff of nightmares).

• A Unicode Heart For You: Really, it’s for YOU.

• Timecall: This is not a new concept – Timecall is a service where users can pay by the second to speak to ‘experts’ over the phone in a variety of fields. The question on my lips is HOW DO I SIGN UP?!?! I want to become an internationally renowned expert on webmonging, offering my counsel for pennies over the phone. Seriously, this sounds like a GREAT way of stopping me from ever having to have a proper job ever again – in fact, if anyone fancies giving me a call to get my INSIGHTS and WISDOM I will do it for the price of a pint, so get in touch on Twitter and let’s DO IT.  

• Either: Utterly pointless app / website which, unless they are lying about their numbers, seems to be getting an unconscionably large amount of traffic, Either’s premise is simple – users post binary questions of the ‘would you rather…?’ type and then anyone else can vote on them. Strangely and terribly addictive, in a sort of ‘just one more’ sense – so far noone appears to have asked any of the really BIG ones, though, like “would you rather be incontinent or have those permanent snot trails on your face that 3 year old kids always seem to have?” (Answers to me, thanks).

• Slavery Footprint: Beautifully designed and functional survey website, pointing out exactly how much each of us contribute to the global slave trade based on our personal lifestyle choices (what we own, mainly, but also our diets and the like). Fundamentally really, really depressing, which obviously is the point, but on a purely design-based level also a very nice way of presenting the survey and its findings.

• Instaminiseries: An Instagram account which shot to fame this week when they started pimping the fact that they were going to run a series of very very short shorts inspired by Bowie’s last album Blackstar, featuring all sorts of MILLENNIAL INFLUENCERS and stuff. The first one debuted yesterday, and, er, well, I’m just going to personally reserve judgment and leave it here for you to form your own opinion of.

• How To Use Chrome Extensions To Bypass Paywalls: Technical-but-useful, though OBVIOUSLY we should all pay for quality content. Obviously. Web Curios PROTIP: I am presuming you all know that you can bypass quite a few paywalls by just using Chrome’s incognito mode, right? Ctrl+Shift+N. EASY.

• Frontiers of Peace: Photoproject by Valerio Vincenzo looking at peaceful borders around the Europe; these are rather gorgeous, as well as being a decent illustration of the utter arbitrariness of physical national boundaries. Sort of makes me want to cross as many of these as I can, possibly whilst breaking minor laws. Maybe I could do it naked. Is that a good idea? It’s not, is it?

• Revenge Dioramas: This is GREAT, it’s just a shame it’s on Facebook. Revenge Dioramas is a Page which responds to submitted tales of injustice by setting up elaborate revenge fantasies enacted by small toys. The woman whose doctor was an arse gets to see him being devoured by a giant toy squid; a feckless ex-husband gets eviscerated by scorpion woman and spider lady. Wonderfully satisfying and VERY silly.

• The Shortest Murder Mystery EVER: Really clever gimmick, this – Vine superstar Origiful (see Curios passim) has created this INCREDIBLY dense 6-second animation which invites viewers to piece together all the visible clues to solve a miniature whodunnit. You can read more about it here (spoilers), but any brands looking for some creative to rip off could do worse than think about what they could do in a similar vein (inevitably any brand-type variants of this sort of thing will be joyless and horrible, but that’s YOUR problem not mine).

• Still Life in the Zone: Photos of old women (mostly) in the area surrounding Chernobyl. Less about NUCLEAR DEVASTATION than it is about people maintaining old lifestyles in the face of immense change, although there’s a persistent subtext of everything being violently radioactive which is sort of bleakly awful. No, hang on, come back, these are GREAT!

• Your Post As A Movie: Fun Redditgame where a poster takes other people’s creations from the site and turns them into film posters with wonderfully creative titles and taglines (and, occasionally, suggested stars). Based on some of these, Hollywood could do worse than adopting this as an accepted part of the development process; I would watch the fcuk out of this one, for example.  

• Jobbatical: Do you ever dream of running away and leaving it all behind? Of course you do, but you’re weak and scared and probably won’t ever take the necessary leap to break out of the personal and professional rut you find yourself in. That said, you can always dream – Jobattical isn’t quite an ‘escape your life’ website, but it does offer an interesting selection of international job opportunities; the idea being that these are temporary positions which allow people to go and work abroad for a brief time to learn new skills and see new stuff. Depressingly light on bartending gigs in the Caribbean, but worth a look if you’re looking to make a (small, reversible) change.

• Twitter Goggles: Like the Instagram thing from last week which lets you experience someone else’s timeline; this is exactly the same for Twitter; it’s a script which basically pulls all the people someone’s following into a List which you can then view. Interesting exercise in digital empathy; try it with politicians to see exactly how dull the internet can get if you try hard enough.

• Explore the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: Probably the best way to spend your working afternoon, this – have a wander through the insects! Marvel at the sabretooth tiger! Spend some time visiting the geology section, which is always the most poignant part of natural history museums because they are always so utterly neglected (why does nobody care about rocks? WHY??)! Really quite soothing in the manner in which actual visits to museums never are what with all the children and stuff (yes, yes, HARK AT THE CHILDLESS GROUCH).

• Verona: When you think about ‘what has the internet ever done for us, eh?’ it’s fair to say that most people’s go to response probably wouldn’t be ‘ushered in a new era of harmony and mutual comprehension, enabling humans from across cultural divides to connect and arrive at a shared understanding of the importance of differing perspectives and how these can peacefully and happily coexist’. Which is a shame. Verona is an app which is trying to undo some of the horror; it’s designed specifically to connect people from supposedly opposing viewpoints via a Tinder-like interface; Trump supporters and Latino voters, Israelis and Palestinians, etc. A lovely idea, and one which I would personally really like to see implemented for pro- and anti-Brexit people, please, particularly if they can guarantee that the woman off that video will be on it.

• Papercraft Birds: So, so impressive, whether or not you’re a closet Twitcher.

• Nimble Notes: Were flash cards a thing 20 years ago? I mean, obviously they had been thought of, but were they something which normal people used? Anyway, never used the things but if you’re the sort of person who studies or has kids who study or is interested in learning and STUFF then this might be of interest. Nimble Notes is an online tool which semi-automates the making of flashcards, making them apparently really quick and simple to create and then letting you test yourself using them and gives you analytics on your performance. Frankly this sort of thing scares the hell out of me – imagine being that academically organised! – and almost smacks of the Arnold J Rimmer revision timetable, so beautifully and meticulously constructed that it creation and maintenance leaves no time for actual revision, but then I am long past the point of having to pretend to care about exam success.

• Profile Page: A photography project contrasting the Facebook Profile pictures of its subjects with their living spaces, juxtaposing the private with the public to pleasing effect. I think there’s actually an interiors / homewares campaign here if you’re an IKEA or something, should any of you be in the market for this sort of thing.

• Play The Imperial March On A Toad: I mean, not really – this is just a cute piece of YouTube trickery which at least one brand is going to rip off in the next couple of months; why shouldn’t it be YOU?

• Gigbloc: Another ‘what music is on in the city today?’ mapwebsite, this, with the rather nice gimmick that you can turn today’s gigs into a little radio station powered by Soundcloud. You can also see a genre heatmap of what is popular where in London if that’s your thing, which is nice.

• The Rosa Parks Papers: The US Library of Congress has published a collection of all its documents and images relating to Parks online; in a week which saw the genuinely heartwarming spectacle of that 106 year old woman meeting Obama (something about which, it turns out, it is entirely impossible to be cynical (and God knows I tried)), it’s salutary to remember how that particularly journey sort of started.

• Polymail: Pretty powerful-seeming email shell which pulls all sorts of useful functionality into one place, letting you do workflow management and pull in additional info on contacts, etc, all within the single app, combining the functionality of a host of plugins. Obviously INCREDIBLY dull but potentially pretty useful if you’re in the market for this sort of thing.

• Stripe Atlas: This is, I think, quite a big thing for small businesses. Stripe, the payments system, this week announced its Atlas programme, which as far as I can tell basically will let businesses from anywhere in the world set up and incorporate in the US – the service will help you out with all the legal stuff, creating bank accounts and the like, freeing them up to access all the sorts of benefits and facilities (including Stripe, obvs) which companies in the US can. If you’re a startup this could be pretty interesting.

• Sense: Inevitable rise of the bots, pt.1: Sense is a service which you can text to get Netflix recommendations; it’s a bot which will have a rudimentary conversation to point you in the direction of the sort of film you think it might like. US-only, sadly, but a really interesting application of bot / messenger tech; I am sort of astounded that Domino’s haven’t yet built the ‘what pizza do you want?’ bot given that they seem to be the ‘pointless early adopters of emergent stuff’ kings (cf emoji pizza ordering, etc), but it can only be a matter of time.

By Richard Feynmann

HOW ABOUT TRYING OUT THIS DJKICKS MIX BY MOODYMAN NEXT? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS TRYING TO WORK OUT WHETHER THIS ‘DANIEL’ MEME HAS HAD A SHORTER LIFECYCLE THAN THAT FIT BLOKE IN TARGET FROM LAST YEAR, PT.2:

• The Macbook Selfie Stick: Think we can declare the selfie stick jokes pretty much done now and just move on with our lives.

• Socio: Social connectivity app whose gimmick appears to be ‘shake your phone to find contacts who are physically near you’, and whose ultimate purpose must surely be to cause said contacts to hide or run at the sight of some idiot making the universally acknowledged sign for masturbation and then looking quizzically at their phone.

• Mar Cerda: Another incredibly impressive papercraft artist to follow the birds up there, this is the website of Barcelona-based Mar Cerda who makes incredibly detailed, tiny scenes from paper. Should you need some dioramas making you could do worse than look this person up – these are stunning.

• Etrigg: This is a great idea, and whilst looking pretty shabby it also seems to work rather well. The idea is that you let it have your location and it tells you what’s going on nearby – the neat thing is that it only displays stuff in the future, in chronological order, and also tells you how far away from you the event is, making it great for impromptu decisionmaking. This is basically how Time Out’s website should work but totally doesn’t – LEARN, TIME OUT PEOPLE.

• Knownbot: Inevitable rise of the bots, pt.2: Knownbot is a faintly mysterious service awaiting its beta launch which purports to provide off-the-shelf bots for publishers – the idea being, I suppose, that you could get a chat interface to help people source CONTENT from your site, run polls, etc. Welcome to the next step in the data-driven robot future, curated by machines for YOUR (actually almost certainly not your) pleasure.

• Art Decider: Is your Tweet art? Let this arbiter decide! The obviously semi-infinitely-recursive question that this raises is whether this account itself is also in fact art, but to be honest it’s far too early in the morning for that sort of next-level DEEP THINKING.

• Daily Burn: I have been to a gym three times in my life in total, forced away by the humiliation of having laughing, burly men putting all the weights back on the machines after I’d stopped using them (and the fact that I am yet to encounter anything quite as stultifyingly tedious as repetitive musclework), and so am probably not the target audience for this. Daily Burn offers a LIVE WORKOUT streamed every day for 30 minutes; I’m not, obviously, an exercise fanatic, but I don’t quite understand the appeal of this (surely there must be shedloads of this stuff on YouTube already?), but maybe there’s the germ of an idea here for a Virgin Active or similar.

• Sex Dolls: I will never, ever get bored of the creepy horror of photos from the RealDoll factory. LOOK AT THE TEETH! LOOK AT THE TEETH! Seriously, why would anyone want to put any part of themselves inside any part of one of these things?

• The Playthings Musical VR Playground: Sadly just a video demo, but LOOK how much fun this looks! Who doesn’t want to play gummi bear drums in a junk food-hued virtual environment? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO. This sort of stuff makes me genuinely quite excited about the potential for VR experiences in a way that no number of branded experiences ever could.

• YouTube Poop: NB nothing to do with actual scat, don’t be afraid. Occasionally I stumble across stuff which makes me realise that the internet is SO VAST that there are bits of its culture which can pass even an obsessive by – so it is with YouTube Poop, a term for remixed videos of existing pop culture properties which apparently has been around for ages but which was new to me until this week. SOME WEBMONG I. Anyhow, if you fancy falling into a weird YouTube oubliette for a few hours then this is an EXCELLENT place to start.

• Graphing When Your Facebook Friends Are Awake: Technical, but worth looking at to get an idea of exactly how creepy some of this stuff can be when you peek just a little further than usual under the hood. Read this and bear in mind that this is the sort of information that is being collected about you ALL THE TIME, EVERY DAY, by the magic little machine you carry so close to you.

• Mienfield: Want to play an infinitely sized, massively multiplayer version of Minesweeper in your browser? OH GOOD!

• Hololens Demo Video: Hololens, lest you forget, is Microsoft’s own exciting VR tech thingy; this video, showing how easy it is to make multi-avatar VR/AR experiences which map onto the real world, is just sort of incredibly impressive. Good luck getting tomorrow’s kids to want to do anything other than play videogames, seriously.

• Succulent Jewellery: Jewellery with actual, living succulents (you know, those plants with the fat leaves which miraculously live off nothing but air) on them – they grow as you wear the pieces, to the point where you can detach them and keep them as plants whilst still having the accessory. Obviously a preposterous idea, but the concept made me very happy indeed although I couldn’t quite explain why.

• Workhouse: Included solely because of the fact it made me REALLY ANNOYED when I saw it this week and hence I feel compelled to share it with you too, this is a clothing brand from London which seeks to mimic the aesthetic of the impoverished Victorians, so YOU TOO can dress like a malnourished urchin from the mid-19thC but, in true 21stC fashion, you can pay a violent amount of modern day cashmoney for the privilege. Oh, and the name – NICE TOUCH, GUYS! This could only be improved by the inclusion of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ as their tagline.

• The Oz Archives: Oz Magazine, for those of you too young to have heard of it, is synonymous with freedom of speech in the UK (and Australia where it originated) – the sort of pop-culture equivalent of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which broke down some of the barriers the UK had in the middle-20thC around freedom of expression and what could (and couldn’t) be published without falling foul of the country’s then-archaic obscenity laws. The University of Wollagong has digitised all the magazine’s issues and put them online – this is just BRILLIANT. Reading them feels like a proper step back in time, and like you’re peeking in on something genuinely subversive and dangerous and EXCITING, in a way that very little does in the oh-so-permissive 21stC. Great design, too, aside from anything else – seriously, check the collection out.

• MSQRD: Basically the Snapchat Facemorphing tech spun out into its own app. Suggest that you start using this to deliver all important pieces of information you need to share with your family, friends or colleagues – difficult news is far easier to take when it’s delivered by someone wearing a CGI sloth’s face, after all.

• The Rave Tapes: ANOTHER exceptional collection of 90s rave tapes – Helter Skelter, Hysteria, One Nation, all the big names – here presented for your listening pleasure. Took me RIGHT BACK to that period at school where literally EVERYONE wanted undercuts to go with their curtains, and the NAF NAF / Technics bomber jacket was ubiquitous (along with Dready/Spliffy jeans), despite the fact that this was Wiltshire and we were all about 13. GREAT DAYS.

• Emojini: Basically a MAGICAL service which analyses any picture that you plug into it and suggests the best emoji to accompany it. Plug in your Instagram account and up your emoji game in minutes (or don’t; in fact, please don’t)!

• Unique Flow: This is technically a promo for some car or another, but the connection is SO TENUOUS that I’m just going to present it as a rather curios webart project and ignore the branding altogether. I mean, come on, this is how the explain it – come on, mate, you’re not fooling anyone, this is BUNKUM: “HA Unique Flow is a continuous forward movement that travels on elegant calligraphic lines tracing along the features of the C-HR. You’re taken on a luminous interactive journey through minimal architectures and spatial drawings. The lines of the art which you influence mimic the signature shapes and curves of the C-HR and day and night driving moods are reflected through lights and colour palettes. With every key press the experience enrichens, triggering audio-visual events along the road. And the moment you let go? You get carried by the flow.” Well quite.

• You Are George Lucas: Or at least you are in this EXCELLENT and not a little epic Choose Your Own Adventure-style game from the clever people at Clickhole. Can YOU get Star Wars made? Very, very funny, and the best way to kill 15 minutes whilst laughing you will see all day.

• Can’t Get Enough Of Myself: Finally this week, ANOTHER single serving website music video THING, which does the whole ‘your face HERE’ thing so popular 5 years ago but jazzes it up for the NEW AGE by using live footage from your webcam to put you into Santigold’s latest vid. Really, really slick, this, and the first time I’ve seen live-video-within-video integration done in this manner (so expect to see it all over the place to the point of total tedium in the next quarter).

By Rose Lynn Fisher

LAST UP IN MUSIC THIS WEEK, HAVE THE NEW ALBUM BY HEY COLOSSUS – ENJOY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Found: Excellent Tumblr by National Geographic Magazine, punting out obscure or forgotten photos from the magazine’s archives. Endlessly interesting.

• Keelayjams: The Tumblr of digital artist Kyle Matthew F Williams, collecting his slightly surreal pop-culture inspired gifs and things.

• Music PR NOPE: The travails of being a music PR (in my experience literally THE lowest form of life in the already millimetre-shallow talent pool that is the communications industry, fwiw).

• The Lady Badass: Women being badasses in history. Much fierce imagery in this one.

• Words By Women Awards: A reaction to the overwhelmingly male nature of nominations for this year’s Press Awards, the Words by Women Awards are designed to highlight the achievements of women in print journalism – details about the awards, how to nominate, etc, are all on here, so get involved if there are female writers you think worthy of greater recognition.

• The Kitten Covers: Album covers recreated with kittens. Of COURSE.

• Matthew Healy and Jaden Smith Worry: Just brilliantly niche and oddly obsessional, this Tumblr is dedicated exclusively to pointing out the similarities in the worried faces of Will Smith’s male progeny and the lead singer of The 1975. People are ODD.

• Bisous Les Copains: Weekly animated gifs of uncommon style and beauty by Guillaume Kurkdjian. So, so gorgeous and VERY satisfying to watch.

• Primitive Technology: This week’s ‘not a Tumblr but it should be’ is this blog in which some bloke spends loads of time doing things like cavemen would have done – building primitive huts, making fire, etc. Into ‘paleo’ bullsh1t? Try some of this to make it ‘realer’.

• Triple 9: Tumblr for the film of the same name. Interesting more in terms of ‘look how flexible Tumblr is as a platform’ rather than because of anything to do with what’s on there, sadly.

• Baby Scully Caps: For those of you who’ve been disappointed by the XFiles revival, here is a selection of pictures of Gillian Anderson from the original series looking SO YOUNG.

• Fcuk Yeah Fluid Dynamics: Who doesn’t love fluid dynamics? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!

• The Setup Wizard: A funnier than its one-note premise would suggest, this Tumblr chronicles the travails of a Muggle IT technician at Hogwarts (SUCH a Tumblr description, that).

• Depressing Fridge Poems: So bleak. So good.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The NYT On The Life Of Pablo: Have to be entirely honest with you, dear readers; I find Kanye West more interesting as a persona than as a musician (IKR!?) and the Life of Pablo left me pretty underwhelmed (he would, I am sure, be devastated at this assessment). This piece on the album’s genesis and almost iterative post-release development in the NYT, though, is fascinating – in part because of the hilariously po-faced tone it takes, but also because of what it has to say about creation in the internet age and the weird confluence between artist, performance, personality and product which Kanye embodies (/pseudery).

• In Search Of The Hawaiian Orgasm Mushroom: Is there a mushroom found in Hawaii which will induce orgasm in women solely via its smell? Well what do YOU think? Regardless of the idiocy of the question, this is a brilliant piece charting the author’s quest to find said mushroom and put it to the test – part travelogue, part debunking, part introduction to mycology, this is VERY funny and consistently entertaining whilst also being remarkably educational.

• The Teens Are Alright: Both an interesting article and a clever piece of webwork, this piece on Vox lets you tell it when you were born and then presents its article – about how teenagers today are on balance more sensible then they have ever been – with relevant comparative data based on your generation. Christ alive, though, do these kids sound DULL.

• The New Generation of Airships: Now granted, airships aren’t the most obviously fascinating of subjects for a piece of longform writing, but I promise you’ll enjoy this if only for the weirdly steampunk air pervading the whole thing; it puts you in mind of an alternate reality in which we all engage in stately transatlantic travel in giant, luxurious blimps, which sounds frankly GREAT.

• The Sex Bot Scams: As we continue to plod through the official Web Curios-designated YEAR OF THE BOT, have this piece in the (currently EXCELLENT) Rolling Stone exploring the industry of sex bot software – those fake women (because, oddly, women don’t seem to get trapped into this sort of stuff anywhere near as much as men – funny, that) which populate dating sites in an attempt to get men to sign up. Grimly fascinating.

• All Of Amazon’s Data: A lovely piece of writing about BIG DATA and the fact that we don’t really know what to do with it yet. Excellent, even if you’re not in any way interested in datageekery.

• The Uncomfortable Power of Pop Music Cruelty: Interesting look at the prevalence for oddly emosexually affectless lyrics in modern pop, primarily with reference to ambulant haircut The Weeknd. Not only interesting on current attitudes to sex and relationships – the overall vibe of the article being ‘look at the evil fuckbois’ – but also in the context of previous generations’ handwringing over the authorial voice and authenticity in music (cf Eminem, Tyler, misogyny, etc).

• The Kesha Thing: Speaking of cruelty in pop music, this piece by Lena Dunham of why the Kesha thing is reprehensible and sort of jaw-droppingly horrific is very good indeed. WELL DONE, MUSIC INDUSTRY, YOU SHITBAGS.

• My Tuscan Tinder Disaster: Funny if you’re a woman and / or if you know anything about Italian men (and probably still funny even if neither of the above things are true), this is a great piece of comic writing about the gulf between myth and reality in the world of the theoretical zipless fcuk (sorry, Fear of Flying was just on Radio 4 and it obviously had an effect).

• Love On The Spectrum: A beautiful piece exploring the author’s autistic brother’s search for love despite his condition. Stuff like this RUINS me, I have to say – the questions it raises about autonomy and consent when it comes to love and the mentally ill are fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time.

• La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A modern interpretation of Keats’ ballad which made me laugh more than any other single thing I saw this week, and requires no prior knowledge of Keats whatsoever. If you don’t find the term ‘titviolence’ funny then I gently submit that there is something broken inside you which may never be fixed.

• Videogame Rehab: Because this is obviously a thing now, and is almost certainly only going to become more of a thing as our digital toys get shinier and better at exploiting the Skinner Box. It does, though, make you wonder about the sort of lack which is motivating this type of behaviour, though, and how that might be addressed.

• Thinking Harder About Dickpics: A great essay about taking pictures of your wang and what that means. I can honestly say I have NEVER done this, which is an interesting sort of way of ageing someone I guess (a bit like tree rings, but more, well, phallic).

• Chatting With Eco: Even if you never read any of the man’s writing, this is a great interview. Seriously, check this excerpt out – SO TRUE: “If culture did not filter, it would be inane—as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor. For you and for me it is enough to know that Einstein proposed the theory of relativity. But an absolute understanding of the theory we leave to the specialists. The real problem is that too many are granted the right to become a specialist.”

• My Last JDate: This is practically novella-length, be warned, but it’s a beautiful piece of writing about a woman’s experience of dating in her 50s and how she found love and what happened. It’s honest and funny and sad, and you need not be a woman, or Jewish, or in your 50s, to enjoy it.

• The Fencing Master: Excellent essay by novelist David Treuer about his experience of both learning to fence and learning to write at college. It’s SO good, and made me sickeningly jealous – imagine being able to write like this, AND fence, AND being taught by Toni Morrison. What a git.

• New Rave 10 Years On: 10 years! Ten years ago when this was all going on I was working at a now-defunct PR agency in East London (shout out Idea Generation; we’ll always have the breadbin cocaine!) and living something of a heinously Nathan Barley lifestyle amongst which the growth of this scene was clearly visible – from the press meeting with Super Super (literally THE WORST people; idiots, seriously) to the Stuart Semple launch party with the models and the fauxcaine in the windows to the terrifying squat parties with people who even to me at that relatively tender age looked like children who really shouldn’t have been doing that much K. This piece by Curios favourite Clive Martin looks back at New Rave and the weird bridging point between indie supremacy and dance ubiquity that it occupied in youth culture. Bet it inspires at least one of you to dig out Golden Skans – don’t bother, it was and still is DREADFUL.

• Here Comes The Donald: The best thing I’ve yet read on the US elections on how Trump has ended up where he is. Particularly good on the fact that it’s EVERYONE’S fault – the media, the Democrats, the GOP, the internet…Look, I am still maintaining that it’s impossible for him to win (please God let me be right about this), so let’s enjoy the frisson of potential terror while we still can. This can’t be the future, can it? Anyway, this piece is FULL of great writing and is pleasingly vicious about the Donald’s intellectual and physical shortcomings, which makes a nice change from him slagging everyone else off. The dick.

By Youngho Kang

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Ever imagined what it might be like to have an army of flying creatures which swarm at your bidding? It would be like this. SO FRIGHTENING AND YET SO COOL:

2) This is called ‘Undercurrents’, and is really quite creepily weird:

3) The NBA’s annual slam dunk contest is an annual fixture and totally built for YouTube, Vine and the rest – this video, though, is a GREAT example of what you can do with lots of cameras and lots of budget and some top athletes – the bullet time (yes, yes, I know, 1997) stuff here is GREAT:

4) This is called ‘The Shiny’, amd it is a JAW-DROPPINGLY good piece of stop-motion work. I know that the idea itself (clothes animating across the floor) isn’t new, but this is by far the most impressive execution of the concept I’ve ever seen. Genius:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! Well, not really hiphop so much as spoken word-type stuff, this is Saul Williams with the new single from his latest album ‘Martyr Loser King’ – this is called ‘The Noise Came From Here’:

6) Next up, enjoy the EXCELLENT new Massive Attack song and video – this is ‘Voodoo In My Blood’:  

7) This one’s a bit divisive (to me at least) – the song’s a touch on the cheesy side for my usual tastes, but at the same time I have enjoyed it each time I’ve listened to it; the video, though, is a great piece of choreography and storytelling. See what YOU think – this is Jacob Banks with ‘Unknown’:

8) No idea what I should call this genre of music, but I LOVE this track. It’s by Ryan Playground and it’s called ‘Folders’:

9) Last up, this is a terrifying example of what YOU TOO could do with the faceswappy app linked to above. Don’t have nightmares, and see you next week!

By Jordan Eagles

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH A MUSICAL TRIP BACK TO THE MID-90s WITH A WHOLE HOST OF D’N’B MIXES BY LTJ BUKUM? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS FACEBOOK’S PLANS TO INTRODUCE ADS TO CUSTOMER SERVICE FUNCTIONALITY IS PRETTY DARK WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT; “CAN YOU HELP ME FIX THE THING I BOUGHT FROM YOU?” “YES BUT ONLY AFTER YOU WATCH 3 MINUTES OF ADVERTS FOR OTHER THINGS. BUY MORE THINGS CONSUMER AHAHAHAHA”:

• Ads Coming to Facebook Messenger: In a move which should surprise a grand total of no people at all, leaked documents suggest that FB is planning to monetise its Messenger product by letting brands chuck ads into Messenger conversations. The CUSTOMER-FRIENDLY NUANCE to this (ha!) is that brands will only be able to advertise at you through messenger if users have initiated chat with them; which is why the leaked document contains the lovely snippet of advice to brands that they should encourage people to message them in advance of this being launched so that they already have a lot of tacit permissions in the bag. Which is lovely. Nothing earthshattering about this, but the cynicism of the last bit is wearyingly familiar. The platform’s also launched a deeplink button thingy (TECHNICAL!) which brands can put on Pages which will let users open a chat dialogue with said brand in a single click to better facilitate these IMPORTANT CONSUMER BRAND INTERACTION TOUCHPOINTS, which is kind of them. DO NOT TALK TO THE BRANDS. THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS.

• Better Metrics For Facebook Video: All sorts of new numbers available to publishers about their vids on Facebook, which basically came of age recently with OK GO’s decision to put their new video exclusively on the platform. Oh, and they also announced that you can now do autocaptioning on video ads in the UK, which is probably quite a useful thing to explore given that everyone browses Facebook on mobile with the sound off and therefore can’t hear your ad’s schtick AT ALL.

• Facebook Live Being Rolled Out Everywhere: SOON! SO SOON! It’s a real shame that Facebook’s architecture won’t allow for Periscope Roulette-style webapp builds, as the mass-market nature of Facebook would make for some really interesting ‘THIS IS WHAT THE WORLD IS DOING RIGHT NOW’-type observations. Hey ho.

• Instant Articles Coming To All On April 12: Facebook Instant Articles, whereby publishers can punt articles directly onto Facebook and we readers thereby have NO REASON TO EVER LEAVE, are being made accessible to all in mid-April. So there.

• Facebook for Non-Profits: See? THEY ARE A NICE COMPANY! This is a new site which offers tips and hand-holding for not-for-profit organisations worldwide to maximise the impact of their use of Facebook in awareness and fundraising, with guidance on how to use some of the sectorally specific site features (‘donate’ mechanics, etc) and some more general stuff. I shouldn’t scoff, really – it is A GOOD THING – but it’s not like they’re giving away ad inventory for free or anything so let’s not go too far overboard on Zuck’s philanthropy.

• Twitter Tweaks Customer Service Offering: In an interesting parallel with the Facebook thing, Twitter’s made some changes to how brands can use the platform fo customer service; not least, the possibility to put a link in a Tweet which will, if clicked by a customer, automatically take the chat to a DM thread. There’s also a whole host of stuff which lets brands collect data about users’ experiences with customer service, which ties into Net Promoter Score and other tracking services, which tbh makes my eyes glaze right over but which you might actually find sort of useful if that’s your idea of ‘fun’.

• Share Videos In DMs: It sort of feels like it’s just playing a horribly belated game of feature catch-up, doesn’t it? Poor the Twitter.

• Search Gifs in Twitter!: Expect the share price to arrest its ruinous decline any day now. Also, expect the percentage of BRAND FUNNIES which include gifs to increase by a factor of about 3000%.

• Instagram Ups Length Of Ads To 60 Seconds: Continuing the apparent aim to squeeze all the joy from Instagram.

• Imagining Snapchat’s Future: Interesting-if-long thinkpiece looking at UX/UI/functionality changes which the platform could implement as it hurtles towards mainstream ubiquity. Useful not only as a series of speculations but also as part of developing an understanding of how people might and do actually use the platform (NOT YOU ADAM JOHNSON).

• The Battle For Live Events: An interesting comparison of how the ‘LOOK AT THE FAMOUSES LOOK AT THEIR FAMOUS FACES AND FROCKS” excitement at the Grammys played out on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Mainly tonal in its focus, but worth a read if you have to do live stuff for a living (not ‘realtime engagement’, thogh, that’s SO 2014).

• Strava Cycle Tracks: To be honest there are a few branded websites which I should chuck up here this week, but they’re all so NICE that I want to forget about the branded aspect of them and just lump them in with the good stuff down there. So I will – Curios’ increasingly laughably inconsistent taxonomy be damned. Anyhow, you don’t care about that and, as it turns out, neither do it. This is a promosite by some company called Amplifon, which I think make hearing aids, which rather brilliantly takes data from mental cycling obsessives’ routes on Strava and turns them into music. I would LOVE to know what the ‘insight’ was that got them to spunk the cash on this – is there a massive crossover between ‘hearing aid wearers’ and ‘committed, self-quantifying cycling nuts who spend more money than necessary on Rafa gear’? I’m going to guess ‘no’, but feel free to tell me otherwise.

By Seung Hawn Oh

HOW ABOUT A STRAIGHT-UP PARTY MIX BY AKIRA ALL THE WAY FROM LA? HERE!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PAY ACTUAL CASHMONEY TO BE INVOLVED IN THE APPROVAL PROCESS FOR KANYE’S TWEETS, PT.1:

• Anchor: It’s a REALLY lazy description, but it’s quite early and I’m sleepy and, frankly, if you’re looking for anything other than glib summaries with no actual depth or analysis then you’re reading the wrong thing. Anyway, Anchor is basically like Twitter for audio – you create an account and post short audio clips, which others can listen to and respond to, conversationally, with their own audio clips. To me, it sounds like a pretty huge waste of time – after all, it takes far longer to record, post and listen to a 10-second audio clip than it does to write a Tweet containing exactly the same volume of information – but judging by the number of people I saw over the past few weeks whilst on holiday using Whatsapp? as some sort of voicemail/chat hybrid I know nothing and should probably be ignored at all costs.

• Over The Top Gear: A little graphic gif thingy showing how mind-fcukingly large the budgets for the new Amazon incarnation of Top Gear are, and what that could buy the creative team in terms of how much they spend doing stuff on the old show. Included mainly as it’s a REALLY stealable way of presenting information which you should consider…er…taking inspiration from next time you have some eye-gougingly tedious numberstuff to gussy up.

• The Life of PabLOL: Kanye album cover generator, in case you want or need one for any reason.

• Buy Me Once: The annoying thing about doing this weekly is…oh, who am I kidding, there are too many to list. ONE of the annoying things about doing this weekly is finding something on Sunday and then the sodding Guardian running it on Thursday. I FOUND THE CONCH, DAMMIT. Anyway, if you missed the rest of the media getting all frothy about it this week, Buy Me Once is a site which sells stuff which you should, in theory, not need to replace every 12 months – conspiracy theorists amongst you might well worry for the founder’s wellbeing, as she will almost certainly be murdered by the shadowy consumerist manufacturing cabal within a matter of weeks (NB – Web Curios in no way actually believes in the existence of any shadowy consumerist manufacturing cabal).

• Yarn: I don’t really take photos, because I’ve basically got some sort of low-level beauty blindness which means that if I do ever take them they look like the sort of thing that happens when you give a 4 year old access to a lens. That said, if I did this service would probably be quite useful – Yarn takes your photos from all the different places they may exist (FB, Instagram, Dropbox, your desktop) and lets them all be organised in one place, with the opportunity to create albums, share them, etc. Not entirely novel, but from what I can tell it’s pretty functional and easy to use and so worth a go.

• Walla: I really want this to take off, though it probably won’t. Walla is an app which lets users basically ‘tag’ real-world locations with digital graffiti  – these tags can be sent to other users using the app who get a map showing where the tag is. They then look at the wall in question through the app on their phone and see the tag as a sort of AR-light overlay – simple and cute, and there are all sorts of fun applications for games and stuff here, as well as a whole host of more nefarious ones for burglars (“THEY ALWAYS LEAVE THE KEYS UNDER THE GNOME”). Have a play. Actually, that crime idea is GENIUS. Obviously Web Curios bears no responsibility for any eventual incarceration or prosecution. Obviously.

• Yes That Was The Joke: For all those times you (in this case, sadly, it’s quite likely that the ‘you’ in question will be a woman, because that’s just how the internet works ok?) make a joke on Twitter only for a bunch of people to leap into your mentions explaining exactly what the joke you just made is. Some of you may want to bookmark this, as you may be using it rather a lot.

• The Long and Short: A really interesting online magazine, backed by NESTA, about how the world is CHANGING. Tech and sociology and STUFF – there’s loads of really interesting articles on here if this is your thing. If you like Imperica – and you fcuking well should, you ingrates – you’ll like this too.

• Iris AI: TED talks have become sort of hideously uncool in the past few years, and seem to have been tarred with the line once applied to Stephen Fry (“a stupid person’s idea of a clever thing”); this site, though, might go some way towards making them useful again. Aside from anything else, it’s a really interesting AI project – the deal is that you plug in the url of any TED talk and Iris analyses it, quickly spitting out a series of breakdowns of key themes in the talk and eventually linking you to academic materials on or around said themes, moving from the often charismatic-but-shallow TED template to something far more rigorous. You can read the science behind it here – it’s fascinating stuff.

• Book Scarves: Scarves (not the winter sort, the fashion sort) designed to look like classic books. Are scarves fashionable at the moment? I have literally NO IDEA, though if you’re the sort of person who would like one of these I imagine that you’re also the sort of person who would be similarly nonplussed by their status in the sartorial zeitgeist.

• Textfiles: An incredible collection of old text files culled from bulletin boards in the EARLY days of the web. All pre-95 stuff, and if you’re of a certain age this is a pure hit of webnostalgia. Even if you’re not, as a piece of cultural timetravel this is fascinating; you can trace a direct line from this stuff to Reddit (some of the content is pretty much identical, despite the 25+ year gap).

• EAR/ONS: VERY odd and obsessional website about a series of unsolved murders in California by someone going by the moniker of ‘The East Area Rapist’ or ‘The Original Night Stalker’. Interesting partly because of the slightly wild-eyed fervour with which it’s all pursued, but also because of the beautifully hopeful exhortation on the homepage – “If you are the East Area Rapist, click here!”. Hm, interesting entrapment technique there.

• Smell Dating: This MUST have gone mainstream this week, so apologies, but it’s such a wonderfully silly idea. You know those speed-dating-type-events which got loads of press about 12-18 months ago, whereby you base your assessment of a potential partner’s attractiveness on the pheremones on an old tshirt? Well this is that, but mail order. You get a package containing a slightly malodorous garment in the post; you sniff it; you decide whether or not you want to meet the pheremonecarrier in question. I can’t help thinking that this is something of a retrograde step in our evolution, but hey ho. NYC only, but obviously soon-to-be-replicated over here because OBVIOUSLY.

• 3d Object Scans: LOADS of them, all available for free, should you like that sort of thing.

• Cardboard Tents: These are SUCH a good idea. The website’s all in Dutch, so I have no idea whether there’s a hidden catch, but it seems like a really sensible way of getting round the whole ‘oh god I’m coming down so hard that the thought of wrestling the tent back into the bag makes me want to cry and I haven’t had a poo in 3 days I’m just going to leave it all here and cry in a ditch I am never doing Glastonbury again’ feeling.

• Sci-Hub: Basically Wikileaks for scientific papers, making them freely accessible to those of us mere mortals who don’t have academic credentials. Niche, but there’s almost certainly some really interesting stuff in here if that’s your bent.

• Semantic Analysis of Reddit: This is really rather interesting, not just as a linguistic / academic exercise but also as a keyword identification tool for search and adbuying. Basically you plug in a term or phrase and the site will spit out a host of other stuff which, according to Reddit, relates to said term. Obviously its effectiveness is skewed heavily towards Reddit-y topics (it was depressingly good on ‘Manosphere’, for example) but it’s pretty fun to fiddle with and I think with some lateral thinking could actually prove rather useful.

• Dabbl: Described as ‘The New, Simple Way To Start Investing’, this also strikes me as a truly fantastic way to lose loads of money REALLY QUICKLY. The tech’s very clever-seeming – you see something cool, you snap it, the app tells you info about the company and its share performance, and gives you the opportunity to buy in one-click – but you’d sort of hope there might be a bit of safeguarding to stop idiots from bankrupting themselves in minutes. Or actually, maybe not – maybe this is investment natural selection. Either way, caveat emptor and all that jazz.

• Lorem Pixel: An easy way to get stock placeholder images of a variety of sizes / proportions. Superuseful, this.

• The Handheld Spectrum Emulator: Can we all please stop with the retrofetishisation, please, and accept that whilst many of us remember old videogames fondly because they hark back to a more innocent time, they were mostly absolutely atrocious and, you know, the medium has moved on a bit? Oh, no, we can’t, because the internet is now seemingly run by a bunch of late-30/early-40something manchildren (eh? oh) who are incapable of LETTING GO. Ahem. Anyway, this got funded in like 10 minutes so will be gathering dust on your husband’s shelves within the year.

• A Simple Response: One of those global projects which makes you feel momentarily a bit warm and fuzzy until you stop and think coldly and rationally at exactly how much difference it’s going to make to stuff like this and you realise the answer is ‘ooh, about none at all as it turns out’ and you go back to being glad you’ll be dead before any more future happens. A Simple Response is, to quote, “a non-for-profit, publically-compiled, Interstellar Radio Message due to be transmitted from Earth on a one-way journey to our North Pole Star in 2016…A Simple Response invites individuals from anywhere on the planet to consider and freely contribute their own unique [text-based] perspectives to the posed question; “How will our present environmental interactions shape the future?”” Add your own fiddle to the chorus as Rome continues to blaze around us!

• Nottda: Want to know when dawn, sunrise, dusk, etc, are going to happen today wherever you are? OH GOOD!

• Music Mappr: I am about as musical as soup, and therefore this is a TOUCH beyond me, but as far as I can tell this lets you plug in any MP3 or Soundcloud link and then analyses the track, breaking it down into its constituent audio parts, visually grouping them into clusters of similarity, and then allowing users to play with these constituent parts to explore common themes, etc. If you make sample-heavy music I reckon this could actually be pretty useful and rather fun.

• Search Hillary Clinton’s Emails: Things I learned from this: Cherie Blair’s email style would induce a pretty spectacular episode of mouth-frothing rage in me within about 3 rounds of correspondence.

• Tonescope: Website which picks up audio and tells you what note it is – ostensibly for tuning instruments or even your voice, but I mainly used it to discover exactly how incredibly hard it is to hold a note and to thereby remind myself why I should never, ever do karaoke.

• The Patents Colouring Book: I reacted rather snarkily to a TREND REPORT last year which suggested that colouring books for grown-ups were going to be a thing; once again, I proved myself spectacularly incapable of seeing the future, as this Christmas they were the stocking fillers of choice for idiots (sorry, but). Anyway, this is a WHOLE BOOK to colour in, featuring weird US patents from history. No idea whether this will help you with MINDFULNESS, but then again if you use that word in conversation then I disdain you utterly (see also ‘blessed’).

• Alternative Scouting Merit Badges: If you have a particular type of kid, godchild, nephew/niece, they will ADORE these.

• Visualising Punctuation in Novels: Novels with all the words taken out. This blogpost analyses the diversity and frequency of punctuation types in a number of classic pieces of literature – the frequency diagrams at the end are rather lovely, and should probably be made available as posters for literary snobs and obscurantists the world over (I would totally buy one :-().

• NASA Posters: A beautiful series of posters by NASA, all free to download and print, presenting imagined tourist destinations around the galaxy. Beautiful graphic design – were I a teacher and doing SPACE STUFF I would a) be really bad at my job; b) have these all over the classroom.

• Answer The Public: This is SO USEFUL (potentially). Plug in any word you like and it will spit out a whole load of analysis drawn from Google and Bing searches around that word, in the form of questions and prepositions. If you’re doing bullshit insight work for a pitch, this is GOLDEN – if you’re not, it’s just a really interesting and fun way of exploring what people think about STUFF. Really rather good indeed.

• Building The Butterfly: This is ODD. Apparently, “Really Useful Products is a UK based business that designs, develops, manufactures and distributes an innovative range of plastic storage products to help our customers save time through being better organised.” They are also building an office in the shape of a butterfly. Their website is really, really quite strange – take a look, it doesn’t seem to be a joke.

• Amygdala: Another iteration of the ‘We Feel Fine’ mechanic (I will never stop linking to it, just FYI); this one takes sentiment data from Twitter (based on sentence parsing rather than keyword analysis) and turns it into a live light show. I’d rather like to see something like this applied to photos, please – we’re now at  point where rudimentary machine analysis of pictures is totally possible, so it would be fun to see what you could do with that plus Instagram for the artLOLS.

• Soylent Dick: A penis made of soylent which ejaculates Soylent when people Tweet annoying phrases about how great Soylent is. Pointless and yet FULL OF MEANING (and unpleasantly thick, opaque pseudojizz).

• The Malware Museum: A collection of old viruses which can be safely run in the browser to let you experience the spine-chilling terror of what eventually happens to your PC when you spend too much time looking at pirated bongo shared around the playground on 3.5” floppies (there may be some of you reading to which that sentence is literally incomprehensible, for which apologies).

• The Plum Guide: Interesting idea adding a layer of additional curation to London’s Airbnb market – The Plum Guide purports to select only the BEST apartments for rent in the capital, separating the wheat from the chaff so you only get top-notch accomodation. As things currently stand, their perception of ‘best’ seems to equate with ‘most likely to induce frothing antiphipsterrage amongst those people inclined to such emotions’, but if you know people who want to come and stay here for a bit and their idea of a good time involves long, humourless conversations about denim and coffee, you know where to point them.

By Travis Huggett

WHY NOT GIVE THIS SELECTION OF PSYCHEDELIC JAZZ MASHED TOGETHER FROM YOUTUBE CLIPS BY KUTIMAN A GO?!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PAY ACTUAL CASHMONEY TO BE INVOLVED IN THE APPROVAL PROCESS FOR KANYE’S TWEETS, PT.2:

• Falling Fruit: Surprisingly GREAT website which maps places around the world where you can forage for fruit and veg and stuff. Not sure how up to date it is, but I am totally going scrumping round the corner this afternoon based on the info here – there is LOADS of London stuff.

• 50s Hong Kong Photos: SO gorgeous, it’s hard to believe that these aren’t film stills. Absolutely from another era (erm, which I appreciate is a fairly spectacularly obvious thing to say, sorry).

• Gastropod: A really interesting-looking podcast for those of you interested in food and science and stuff.

• Tweexy: I don’t tend to paint my nails – mainly as they are so appallingly bitten-down that there’s about 1cm of real-estate on each one to play with – but if I did I would be ALL OVER this piece of design, which is SO CLEVER that I was left a bit speechless at its genius when I saw it the other day.

• The Unsent Project: To quote: “The Unsent project is a collection of text messages submitted under the prompt  “State your first loves name and type what you would say if you sent them a text message. Also include the color that you think of when you think of your first love. The submissions are used in collages which are visual representations of the diversity and unmistakable similarities between submitters feelings toward their first loves. The submissions are also created into stickers that can be purchased and are put up everywhere for the public to read.” These are absolutely as good as you would expect.

• The Captured Project: Billed as ‘people in prison drawing people who should be in prison’, this collates a selection of portraits drawn by US prisoners of people who perhaps should be in jail for their rather more socially acceptable white-collar crimes, usually of a financial nature.

• Turtle Call: Look, I am really sick of featuring stuff like this and then having to point out that it’s US-only. WHERE IS OUR INNOVATIVE PHONEPRANKING GAME, UK PEOPLE? Hmph. This is a service which, for the meagre price of $2, will call up anyone you choose and pretend to be a turtle at them for up to two minutes. No, I have literally no idea whatsoever what that might entail, but it’s part of the joy (we’re all about finding the joy here at Curios).

• Point and Clickbait: The Onion for videogames sites, basically. If the phrase ‘ethics in games journalism’ means anything to you then you will find a lot to laugh at here.

• Infinite City: Procedurally generated cities which go on FOREVER and which you can fly through to your heart’s content. Strangely soothing with the right soundtrack (Nils Frahm worked rather well for me).

• Photos From Vietnam Taken By The Winners: These are just wonderful. The one of the woman in a headscarf cradling the rifle’s particularly awesome, but the whole selection is brilliant.

• Keep Alive: I love this – art project by Aram Bartholl which consists of a fake rock with a WiFi router hidden inside it, placed in a German park; the gimmick being that if a fire is lit under the rock, the heat powers the router which then turns itself on and makes available a whole bunch of PDF survival guides to download to anyone nearby. There are SO MANY applications for this – imagine the fun you could have with the same tech designed to work only when it reaches a certain temperature in direct sunlight which gives icecream vouchers or something (yes, ok, the physics here may be wonky and the idea’s a crap one, but YOU try coming up with stuff after you’ve been typing solidly for three hours).

• Covenant Eyes: SO SAD. Covenant Eyes is a service whereby you, you WEAK WILLED SACK OF TEMPTATION AND GUILT, agree to have a report of your web browsing activity mailed each week to a nominated significant other, the idea being that this will SHAME YOU into looking at less bongo (I mean, they mention something about keeping track of your kids’ browsing habits, but the Christian rhetoric onsite makes me think it’s more about helping people master their SINFUL URGES). Imagine the sort of life you must have, just imagine.

• Deleted: Want to make your life on social media even more nervous and approval-chasing and generally unhealthy than it already is? Install this, then, which will tell you who’s unfriended/unfollowed you on Facebook this week. Christ alive.

• Clue: I get the impression there are probably LOADS of menses-trackers available, but this one seems not only really functional but also beautifully designed; if you’re into the quantified self and all that jazz you might find this one of interest (but of limited use if you’re a man).

• World Press Photo 2016: These are all stunning.

• Being: A really interesting idea, this one – Being is an app which lets you see the Instagram feed of anyone else as they would, effectively letting users experience a degree of ‘empathy’ (I use the word advisedly) for the experience of others on the platform. All it’s doing is presenting the stream of all those they follow, of course, but it’s an interesting experiment and is actually probably quite interesting in terms of researching how differing types of users experience the medium. Or something.

• The Evolution of the Browser: Use the left and right arrow keys to explore how the way we view stuff online has changed in the past few decades. Children, THIS IS WHAT WE USED TO HAVE TO PUT UP WITH.

• Follow: Wonderful NYC-based art project, whereby you apply to have an actual, real-life follower for a day. They will follow you, unseen, and at the end of the experience take a picture they snapped of you whilst they were trailing you. There’s almost certainly a big old high concept behind this, but I don’t care about that – I just love the gamelike element and the manner in which knowing you’re being benignly stalked will necessarily change the nature of your interactions with the world for that day. If anyone would like to stalk me for a day, you are WELCOME (I am often in my kitchen, should be pretty easy tbh).

• Flowstate: An incredibly brutal app for writing productivity, Flowstate basically forces you to write continuously with no more than a 5 second pause between keystrokes for a predetermined amount of time – you stop, or pause longer than 5 seconds, before your time has expired and the app will delete EVERYTHING. There’s actually quite an interesting experiment in form and stuff that you could do with this if you were a proper writer.

• The Magic 8ball Buttplug: I leave this here without comment.

• Codeology: This is in fact a promosite for some payments company called Braintree, but it is SO LOVELY. It takes code from Github and turns it into beautiful images, each as unique as the code they’re derived from; the results are beautiful, and you can of course plug in your own code for a bespoke artthingy. Really gorgeous stuff.

• Mmorph: One of the best and shiniest browser-based synthtoys I have seen in AGES. Have a play, it’s really very satisfying indeed and it’s surprisingly easy to make unshit musics.

• Famous!: Do you remember ‘Stolen’? Waaaaaaay back in the early days of 2016 it was the first controversial app casualty of the year, pulled from circulation as people’s concerns over how, well, creepy it sort of was gained traction. But it’s BACK! Except now it’s called Famous, and it’s opt-in (your Twitter handle won’t be on it unless you opt in), and it has the backing of one of the most harassed people on the internet, so it’s probably all going to be fine this time. You can read more about the pivot here – it’s an interesting example of how to unfcuk a situation in smart fashion, I think.

• That Leonardo DiCaprio Red Carpet Game: This has received an ASTONISHING amount of coverage for a pretty standard retro buttonmasher – well done the devs.

• Infinite Sunset: There’s an exhibition which has being doing the rounds of galleries worldwide for a few years now called Suns by Penelope Umbrico, which collects prints of photos on Flickr tagged ‘sunset’ and displays them as a sort of overwhelming collage (it’s rather beautiful if you ever get the opportunity to check it out). Anyway, this is basically that but pulling images tagged #sunset from Instagram in what appears to be realtime. It’s HUGELY soothing, and a useful reminder that it’s always time for a booze somewhere in the world.

• The Garden of Earthly Delights: the best piece of webwork in here this week, this is admittedly a few weeks old but it is SO GOOD that if you’ve not yet seen it you should drop whatever you are doing and have a play. An interactive exploration of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by renowned painterly madman Hieronymous Bosch, this is a zoomable scrollable interactive which contains SO MUCH information about the painting, the context behind individual elements, the sociological background to the work and much more besides, all presented through audio and video and text…I would like every massively dense historical artwork to be presented like this online, please. Thanks.

• Heart Music: But this is my FAVOURITE thing of the week. Unexpectedly from Puerto Rico (no offence, but it’s never struck me as a hotbed of digital innovation before), and a project by its largest hospital, this lets you tap along with your heartbeat and then creates music based on that rhythm JUST FOR YOU. My Spanish is sadly not up to translating the story behind the site’s creation (I think it’s a memorial to a particular patient), but I adore the fact it exists.

• The Labia Library: Look, this is a GOOD THING, ok? Produced by the Victoria health service in Australia, the site is designed to show that labia come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and all are totally normal. I can’t quite imagine the NHS doing this, which is a damn shame imho. The only room for improvement here is the name – their reluctance to call it ‘The Labiary’ is, frankly, baffling. You are two clicks away from pictures of labia, FYI.  

• Zebra: An FPS to give you a massive headache. Sort of beautiful, but best not to try it if you’re epileptic I’d have thought.

By Andrea Castro

LET’S FINISH BY GOING BACK TO THE 90s AGAIN WITH JERU THE DAMAJA’S FIRST DEMO PRODUCED BY GURU!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Pop Culture Died In 2009: This is GOLDEN. Dispatches from mid-aughts pop culture, just in case you wanted to remind yourself what celebrity looked like all those years ago.

• Every Album Is Aerosmith: A project seeking to seemingly reimagine every single album cover ever produced as an Aerosmith record (in this case ‘Sweet Emotion’).

• Celebrity Close Up: Because famouses have ropey skin too.  

• Made This For: A Shardcore project which scans the web for fan art posted on Twitter with the text “I made this for you” and autoposts it here. There is some WONDERFUL ‘content’ to be had here.

• Protobacillus: My new favourite maker of arty abstract gifs. Part biological, part tech art, all wonderful.

• Cronenburg Valentines: Yes, I know, but bookmark it for next year.

• Seattle Volvos: No idea what the deal is with the city and these cars, but here are some volvos (some from Seattle, some not).

• Upside Down N: Not technically a Tumblr, but hey ho – this collects all the many, many instances worldwide of people placing the letter ‘n’ upside down in signage by mistake (or perhaps as an act of strange typographical subversion, who knows?).

• Algopop: Algorithms in popular culture. Lots of stuff about AI, machine learning and STUFF, if that’s your thing.

• 69 USA: 69 USA is a clothing label from LA which purports to be gender-free – properly unisex in the truest sense. Whatever you think of the clothes, the Tumblr’s got an AWESOME aesthetic to it (and I like the fact you can pointlessly reposition the tiles).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Hunkering Down With the Survival Moms: I confess that I had thought until a few yeas back that the cult of the prepper had died along with the millennium bug, but it seems not. This is a great piece exploring the growing subculture of preparedness amongst otherwise mainstream(ish – I mean, they’re almost certainly all pro-gun pro-life Republicans, but) US mothers. It’s obviously a bit hatstand, but there was a bit in this when I was forced to confront the reality that in the event of some sort of breakdown in urban civilisation I would be all sorts of screwed *stockpiles Andrex*

• A Very Good Buzzfeed Profile: Part of Fast Company’s series of profiles of its ‘most innovative companies’ list, this profile of Buzzfeed is fascinating and not a little scary – it feels a touch ‘resistance is futile’ by the end. Two main takeaways from this, though – firstly, next time your client asks you to make some COMPELLINGLY VIRAL VIDEO CONTENT, point them at this and ask them to take particular note of the sort of resources Buzzfeed throw at their vids; and secondly, even with some of the most sophisticated network analysis and tracking tools in the business, even they have to accept that making shareable stuff is at its simplest just really unpredictable and sort of hard.

• People as Particles: I can’t really summarise this as, well, I’m not clever enough; suffice it to say that it is a VERY smart piece of writing about how concepts in physics map against concepts in economics and subsequently to models of human behaviour (and, equally, how sometimes they don’t and we should probably pay more attention to these things). Particularly interesting if you’re slightly sceptical of the ‘economics as science’ viewpoint.

• Strokes of Genius: This is by no means a great piece of journalism, but I’m including it because there is SO MUCH unintentional hilarity in this tale of a ‘Christian’ (my inverted commas, because really) couple who are trying to build a future from teledildonic porn. Really, please do read this – the catalogue of misadventures would be sort of saddening were it not for the mental image it presents of a pair of tattooed, toothless rednecks with a BIG IDEA.

• Trend Piece: The New Yorker channeling quite a lot of McSweeney’s to good effect here with this ur-example of the archetypal trend piece. Terrifyingly accurate.

• An Oral History Of THE PUDDLE: Obviously methuselan in online terms, many of you will look back on that glorious afternoon many weeks ago as the pinnacle of the internet. Here, Vice dot com’s Joel Golby gives the Drummond Puddle the sort of in-depth investigative treatment it no doubt merits, talking to the key players in the year’s biggest news story to date (but disappointingly offering no editorial judgment on the bloke from Domino’s being really proud of sending a pizza to a fcuking puddle in the name of PR).

• Neurogastronomy: Yes, fine, it features Heston, but this piece on how neuroscience can impact the manner in which we experience flavour is more than just the standard “and you listen to the sea whilst eating cockles!” guff recycled from a decade ago, honest.

• Youth Hunting Season: A story about taking your 11 year old daughter deerhunting for the first time. Whatever your stance on hunting, it’s a good read – not least because it’s a pretty alien perspective on all sorts of things for a pinko liberal lefty like me (and probably you too, if my less-than-rigorous analysis of Curios’ demographics are right).

• Young Thug Profile: Properly fascinating profile of Young Thug, a top-5 biggest in the game right now rapper from Atlanta (take a listen to Slime Season here for a taste) and someone whose lifestyle can politely be termed ‘uncompromising’. The article basically implies he’ll be dead or jailed in a decade, though TBH I could seem him being creative director at Topman too with those threads.

• Inside TMZ: Exhaustive profile of the world’s biggest gossip site and the supersized ego behind it. If nothing else will teach you what TMZ actually stands for, which was news to me.

• Everyone’s Offended These Days: Following Mr Fry’s latest decision to absent himself from Twitter, this is a brilliantly even-handed look at the culture of offense online, mob mentalities and the rest. Sample quote which gives a flavour – it’s really worth the time to read, though: “The subtext here is that cretinism is acceptable, but being a target is not. If you’re a total dick who only uses the Internet to seek out strangers and ruin their day for kicks, you are absolutely welcome. If you happen to be one such sought-out person, there’s the door. What kind of reasoning is that, and what kind of society does anyone think it’s going to create?” Well, quite.

• Gore Vidal In Paris Review: Another classic piece of interviewing from back in the day, Vidal is always good value – familiarity with his work is a bonus, but even if you’ve never read him his waspish assessments of the literary world of the 70s make this a wonderfully bitchy and entertaining read. The arrogance of the man is quite startling – see, kids, people were doing this schtick waaaay before Kanye.

• The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens: Making money and ruining lives in the Tumblr Jungle. Interesting look at the ecosystem as it matures, and at teen culture in general – still nowhere near as frightening as that Snapchat piece from the other week, though.

• Infinite Jest Turns 20: Because it is still my favourite novel of all time and I will never stop suggesting to people that they really ought to read it because, I promise, it is not as hard as you may have heard and it rewards the hours you will put into it and it contains a dozen of the greatest passages of prose ever published in English, no hyperbole whatsoever. Go on, you know you want to.

• The Bieber Profile: How fun does it sound to be Justin Bieber on a scale of 1-10? I would argue that it’s no higher than a 3. POOR THE LONELY BIEBER! Although I don’t have many friends either and am considerably less attractive, rich and talented than him, so Justin can conceivably still say he’s winning, should he care (he doesn’t care).

• Why Men Fight: Finally, the best bit of writing of the week, about training for a white collar boxing match as a transman, and what that teaches you about masculinity and identity and yourself and stuff. Really, really lovely, in that occasional way that writing about boxing can achieve – do please read this one, it’s excellent.

By Richard Finkelstein

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) It can only be a matter of time before someone is televising drone racing, no? I mean, look at this – it is MENTAL, and about 3billion times more exciting than F1. If I were sponsorships director for a certain type of brand I would be VERY interested in this stuff:

2) A nice, bracing bit of pop-punk for you now, with this retrogame inspired lyric video for DVP by Pup:

3) I don’t normally bother with these mashed audioclip videos, but this one really is excellent – not least because of the inflection and timing of some of the clips. This is Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’ as stitched together from an unconscionably large number of sources:

4) This is called ‘Spitting Image’ by the wonderfully-named Your Gay Thoughts; there’s something beautifully drawling and sloppy about the vocal on this which I find hugely appealing:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! I’ve featured NYC outfit Ratking on here quite a lot over the past couple of years – this is a track by one of their number, Wiki, from his recentish mixtape (available to stream free here). It’s called ‘Patience’ and it is EXCELLENT, as is the whole album – been playing this a LOT this week:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new one from Aesop Rock, which is typically excellent. It’s called ‘Rings’:  

7) Lovely lowfi indie from Spanish outfit Hinds now – this is ‘Bamboo’:

8) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is a bit of a weird one – it’s not ‘good’ in any way I’d expect you to acknowledge, but it’s surprisingly pleasing an sort of catchy, and it feels like it’s one decent remix from being an actual proper BANGER, as I believe the kids might once have said. It’s called ‘Don’t Like Going Out’ and it’s by The Manor:

9) Last up, this is a vision of hell in Simpon’s form. 500 episodes, at once, in 360-o-vision. Terrifying. BYE!!!!!

By Jo Broughton

SHALL WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MUSIC WITH SOME REALLY UNEXPECTEDLY BRILLIANT SCIFI-ISH NYC/KOREAN HIPHOP? LET’S!

THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T FEELING TOO BULLISH ABOUT TWITTER’S 2016 PROSPECTS AND SORT OF FEELS IT MIGHT HAVE DODGED A BULLET BY NOT JOINING THEM ALL THOSE YEARS AGO:

• Facebook Quarterlies AGAIN: Just in case any of you need to pretend to know or care about the BUSINESS STUFF, here’s a brief rundown of all of the EXCITING STATISTICS Facebook punted out this week. Topline: STILL REALLY, REALLY POPULAR EVERYWHERE! There is something implacably and bleakly impressive about their dead-eyed brilliance at monetising every single last aspect of the service. WELL DONE, FACEBOOK!

• Facebook Reactions Coming Everywhere SOON: This is actually a pretty long and rather interesting read about Facebook Reactions in general, and worth reading in full if this is your THING – the nugget, though, is the information that the 6 ‘Reaction’ emoji they have been trialling in Ireland and a few other places will be rolled out worldwide ‘in the next few weeks’. Cue some pretty frantic ‘strategising’ from mediocre agencies about how they can tweak their meaningless metrics slightly to take into account all this NUANCE and sell their clients more exciting community management opportunities (come on, you all know it’s true).

• FB Launches Audience Optimisation for Organic Posts: I’m sort of surprised that this hasn’t received more attention; I thought it was rather big news, but then my position as a largely unemployed webmong suggests that perhaps my opinion is worth less than I may have once thought. Hey ho. Anyway, Facebook las week announced that they were giving Page admins the opportunity to target their non-promoted posts in much the same way that they can target promoted posts – that is, selecting a variety of interest categories whose members will be more likely to see a post than others. Want to optimise your THRILLING UPDATE about your brand’s sponsorship of AN Other footballing event? Choose to target it specifically at football fans, then. Similarly, you can also use the service to exclude people by demographic data, which is obviously hugely useful for multi-territory pages, etc. Obviously this in no way changes the central tenet of the platform (cf GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY FOR ADVERTISING YOU PEONS), but it’s nice to see them at least paying lip service to the long since discredited concept of organic reach. Here’s quite a good post about how to use it.

• Facebook Livestreaming Coming To EVERYONE SOON(ish): I’m sure I wrote this last year. Anyway, it’s COMING (to iOS users. In America). Here’s how it works.

• Facebook Sports Stadium: Sort of like Trending Topics or Twitter Moments, but, er, on Facebook and for sports. Basically sporting events will start to get their own aggregated pages where people can kep up with what a bunch of other people are saying about a sporting event on Facebook. Which, let’s be honest, is just going to turn each and every one of these things into a repository for horrendous sponsor content and endless, soulless BRAND BANTER between Budweiser and Barclays while the actual real people who still care about sport slowly come to the crushing realisation that none of it is really about them any more.

• Facebook Canvas Coming To Everyone SOON: It’s a big, immersive ad unit, basically, and I think I wrote about it last year when it was announced. Anyway, it’s apparently rolling out to everyone SOON, but you can sign up for more news here if your life’s really that void of other joy.

• I really can’t be bothered to write anything about the Twitter 10k character thing. We’re done with that, right? We all understand that it’s basically like Facebook Instant Articles and is simply a move to attempt to replicate Facebook’s ‘walled garden’ approach to the internet, and probably won’t actually change the way Twitter looks and feels for most users? Ok, good.

• Twitter Conversational Ads: Old, but still moderately interesting – Twitter’s launched a new ad unit which works a little like polls, in that it gives users the opportunity to…oh, sod it, I’m just going to lift from the article here: “the modified promoted tweet presents people with one or two buttons for branded hashtags that look similar to the interactive polls Twitter has been letting people include in tweets. After someone clicks on a branded hashtag button, a tweet box will appear pre-populated with the message the brand wants the person to tweet, including the hashtag and photo or video that appeared in the brand’s promoted tweet. The person can change that message, including removing the brand’s photo or video, or leave it alone and then tweet it out to his or her followers.” I mean, obviously I can’t personally imagine any real people actually wanting to do this, but I’m increasingly learning never to underestimate humanity in the face of POSSIBLE BRAND ENGAGEMENTS. Although, now I think of it, does this mean advertisers will still get charged if people click the button but then replace the message and picfture with, say, “I HATE COKE” and a thumbnail of some bongo? COUNT ME IN.

• Twitter Will Let You Turn ‘Fan’ Tweets Into Ads: This is rather smart, I think – a potential new ad unit whereby brands can pick nice Tweets from REAL PEOPLE to turn into ads; Twitter will do all the tedious legal legwork of contacting said users and getting their permission before turning the Tweets into an ad unit for you. Great if you’re an occasionally well-loved brand; almost certainly of less interest if you’re a UK train operator (TOPICAL!).

• Vine Trends: Want to know where the latest HOT MEME on Vine started, and enough information out of it to support your brand’s late and lame attempt to hijack it for commercial gain? You’ll want this site, then. Brought back horrible memories from 18 months or so back of that dark time in which pizza companies started saying that things were ‘on fleek’, which we should never allow to happen again.

• Periscope Now Embeds On Twitter: But you knew that, right? Unrelated, but I will personally award a prize to the first one of you who puts a twist on that brainstorm classic of ‘LET’S FLOAT IT DOWN THE THAMES!’ by adding ‘AND WE CAN LIVESTREAM IT ON PERISCOPE LIKE THE PUDDLE!’ (not joking – if you can prove you said this in a meeting, and ideally capture the reactions of the others in the room, there’s a prize for you).

• Twitter Toying With 30-Second Skippable Preroll Ads: They really, really don’t understand user need, do they? Still, based on the article’s prediction of autoplay and a 3-second ‘view’ categorisation it will probably help a bit financially.

• Tesco Does A Promoted Moment:This was bang slap in the middle of the ‘Moments’ tab all day yesterday, making Twitter the first brand in the UK to pony up the cash for the ad unit. Given that initial reports suggested that the ad buy for promoted Moments was $1million or thereabouts, and that the ‘Moment’ itself consists of 10 gifs, I’m going to say AHAHAHAHAHAHA TESCO YOU MUGS. Obviously I’m pretty sure they didn’t pay anywhere near that much, but still – I mean, this is pretty fcuking pony, right? Oh, and if you’re one of those people who unaccountably really hates even SEEING the ‘Moments’ thing you can kill it with this extension. You’re welcome.

• YouTube Creators Can Now Let People Donate Straight From Their Videos: Through a neat little payment popup. This is surely a precursor to more sophisticated ecommerce within the platform, right? I mean, it’s not going to stay this small.

• Snapchat Planning Audio & Video Calling: Because it’s not enough that everyone wants to be Facebook; now we all need to be Skype as well. Useful to know, particularly if you deal with a lot of kids and want to put together some bullsh1t, never-to-be-activated plans around customer service on Snapchat for your MILLENNIAL USERBASE. Oh, and seeing as we’re here, Snapchat will probably start ruining itself with self-service ads soon FYI.

• Pinterest Considering Video Ads: Just FYI really, but I still think Pinterest is somewhat underexploited by advermarketingpr folk here in the UK.

• Uber Trip Experiences: File under ‘coming soon, and we won’t like it’, this is potentially a hugely interesting extension of the Uber API which would allow third party developers to create ‘experiences’ for Uber users based on journey data (where you’re travelling, journey duration, etc). So you could get BRANDED CONTENT (adverts, innit) tailored to where you’re going and stuff. SLIGHTLY sketchy about whether this is being delivered through the Uber app or through the third parties, but either way I think it’s quite a big (evil) opportunity.

• State of the Union and Digital Comms: Yes, fine, he is Obama and you are a BRAND, and people care about him and noone cares about you. That aside, this short post on how the State Department approached the State of the Union address from a digital point of view is sort of a masterclass in digital comms. See where your audience is; put out stuff appropriate to each individual platform; I mean, it’s hardly groundbreaking but it has the benefit of being eminently sensible.

• Goldman Sachs and MILLENNIALS: Disappointingly it doesn’t seem that we’re quite over the sodding MILLENNIALS thing. If you’re going to have to spend some time in the next few weeks waffling aimlessly about this oh-so-VITAL demographic, you could do worse than pull some bullsh1t stats from the noted finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-youth Vampire Squid that is Goldman Sachs. It’s quite nicely presented too, fwiw.

• We Are Social’s Digital Motherlode 2016: As ever, they do this sort of thing very well indeed. A whole load of stats about how FCUKING MASSIVE social media is all around the world, presented in a nice, easy to steal Slideshare for your delectation and pleasure.

• The Best Swanky Corporate Website Of The Year So Far: Yes, fine, it’s about train engineering, and yes, fine, it has the temerity to be all in French, but this is so, so impressive from SNCF (or more accurately some agency or another on their behalf). The mobile/desktop integration alone is probably the slickest I’ve seen to date – contrast with this effort from Peugeot, which simply doesn’t work anywhere near as well (also, an aside – is there a law that French brands have to have preposterously overblown web experiences? There’s a LOT of this sort of stuff with a very gallic flavour ATM).

By Maxi Cohen

HOW ABOUT A JOHN COLTRANE/TERRY RILEY MASHUP TO CONTINUE WITH, WHICH IS REALLY PRETTY GREAT YOU KNOW? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY GRATEFUL TO GET SOME OF THIS INTERNET OUT OF ITS HEAD BECAUSE FRANKLY IT WAS ALL STARTING TO LEAK OUT AND SLOSH AROUND A BIT AND WHICH HAS REALISED THAT IT SORT OF NEEDS WEB CURIOS AS A PURGE, WITHOUT WHICH IT STARTS TO GO A BIT ‘FUNNY’, PT.1:

• Slinger: SO 2016! Slinger is an app designed explicitly for the discovery of vertical videos – yep, ONLY vertical videos. Actually rather interesting if you’re on your phone and have time to kill, and pretty useful if you’re after a quick and dirty way to find some Snapchat or Periscope INFLUENCERS to shill on your brand’s behalf. Having played with this a little bit, I can only say that from my perspective all this vertical video makes me feel OLD.

• Fabulous Beasts: FULL DISCLOSURE – I know one of the people behind this reasonably well. That said, I’d be plugging it anyway because it is SUCH FUN. Fabulous Beasts is a game whose Kickstarter launched this week; the lazy, crap non-journalist in me (which sort of implies that there’s a dedicated, talented, real journalist also in me, a fact which is so painfully false that its contemplation has just caused me some small early morning soulpain) wants to describe it as ‘Jenga For The 21st Century’, which sort of explains it a bit. It’s a game where you stack shapes in the real world which affect the development of the world you are building in the virtual, and it is a LOT of fun. If you can spare some money, chuck them a few quid.

• Songlink: Really clever idea, this – you just plug in a song url from YouTube, Spotify or wherever and this punts out a shareable URL which lets whoever clicks on it play the song from anywhere it’s available (including Apple Music, Google Music, Deezer, etc). Simple but quite clever, am sure this can / should be wrapped up in something Slack-like.

• Status: Do you worry that social media doesn’t quite let you share your movements and activities with your friends in forensic enough detail? No, thought not. Nonetheless, Status exists – an app which effectively lets anyone share details of what they are doing, where, at ALL TIMES. Described in one of the made-up quotes on the website as being like ‘a real-life marauders’ map!’ (TERRIFYING), it also apparently lets users receive alerts when certain specified contacts move or change their status. Want to know when someone is leaving work, or when they leave the house? Well, now you can! Think there’s anything creepy about that? Nope, me neither!

• FriendsFeed: I found this weeks ago and was sort of expecting it to be shut down by now; nonetheless, it persists in persisting. FriendsFeed is a Chrome plugin which basically strips your Facebook Newsfeed back to the bare bones, eliminating all promoted posts and ‘your friend liked this, you might too’-type activity. Unless you actually like being reminded of which of your remedial acquaintances are playing Virtual Hair Salon, this is  godsend.

• Reality Editor: Pretty incredible tech, this – a differential interface for physical objects which…oh, sod it, here’s the blurb: “The Reality Editor is a new kind of tool for empowering you to connect and manipulate the functionality of physical objects. Just point the camera of your smartphone at an object built with the Open Hybrid platform and its invisible capabilities will become visible for you to edit. Drag a virtual line from one object to another and create a new relationship between these objects.” So basically your can turn your phone into a remote control for anything built on this tech. Obviously this version of this stuff will never catch on, but as an illustration of future potential this is sort of amazing.

• The Land of the Magic Flute: I rather fell in love with this – it’s actually almost a year old, but seeing as THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE (if I keep repeating it, will it make it true?) and noone else seemed to notice it then either I think I can probably get away with chucking it in here. I think it was built to accompany an animated film version of Mozart’s piece, but it works wonderfully as a standalone digital experience. A wonderful interactive cartoon, presenting the music and the story of the opera as a part-animation, part-graphic novel, the whole experience is just gorgeous and well worth 10 minutes of your time.

• Alice: Alice is a rudimentary facial recognition AI. Draw a face and Alice will attempt to work out what emotion is being displayed on said face. Based on limited experimentation, Alice is at present incapable of adequately distinguishing between ‘happiness’ and ‘abject terror’ (or maybe, on reflection, I am; that would explain one or two awkward moments from my past); with YOUR help, though, she could learn.

• Make Me Pulse: I don’t know what this is for or why it exists, but it’s soothing and it made me feel happy and I rather like the music. Little WebGL (I think) experiments themed around gently ‘inspirational’ words (no, wait, come back!), it’s very nicely made indeed.

• Tinder Me Cards: Brilliantly silly idea, this. Plug in your Tinder username and this creates a card you can hand out to people in REAL LIFE MEATSPACE with a QR code on it (did you not hear? We’re not allowed to laugh at them any more. THANKS, BANKSY) and a ‘Find me on Tinder’ call to action. Included mainly because I can’t think of anything as simultaneously flattering and mildly offensive as handing someone a card which basically says ‘Hi! Would you like to join the kilometric list of people I might one day consider sharing erogenous mucus with but which equally I might decide I can’t really be bothered to interact with?’.

• The Fantom: An app to accompany Massive Attack’s new EP which uses the same tech as now-defunct app RJDJ (which I did the PR for, really badly, back in the day) to take ambient data from your phone’s sensors (accelerometer, mic, etc) to create bespoke, on the fly remixes of the tracks. When I first saw this sort of tech about 7-8 years ago it was MAGIC, and it still sort of is – I’m convinced there’s a lot more which can be done with the idea, though obviously my thinking doesn’t go beyond that because I am a fundamentally glib and shallow person.

• My First Insta: Want to see the first thing that someone posted on Instagram, ever? Well this lets you. Its sole purpose, as far as I can tell, is to quickly make a call as to how curated someone’s profile has become since they joined and to then CALL THEM THE FCUK OUT on it, because, you know, that’s how we apparently work in 2016. Jesus, the future.

• How To Find All The Films on Netflix: I mean, this has been everywhere, but I like to think of Curios as a public service so I’m just leaving it here in case you missed it in the Metro and stuff.

• Blindspot: Probably the most ‘really, you actually think this is a good idea do you? You DICKS’ app of the year to date, Blindspot lets users anonymously message anyone in their phonebook. Because there’s obviously NO WAY in which this could ever be a bad idea, ever. Although, and I’m slightly ashamed to admit this, I have been VERY TEMPTED to engage in some low-level social terrorism, so I can understand its dark appeal. DON’T DO IT, KIDS.

• Vina: Are you a woman? Do you feel ALONE and FRIENDLESS (or, possibly, just a touch curious)? Well this app is here to help. It aims to match women with others who share their interests and passions – not ostensibly in a sapphic sense, but there’s a sensation that it might be a little like this one for men seeking men. Anyone want to give it a try and tell me what it’s actually for? Thanks.

• Spotcaller: Gigfinders are ten a penny online, admittedly, but this one seems pretty good – it was able to pull out a pretty comprehensive list of stuff going on around where I live, including all the slightly fist-y clubnights under the arches. In fairness I can’t speculate as to how good it is if you’re after more bass and less fisting, but there’s no harm in giving it a go.

• You Are Dog Now: You’ve all seen this by now, right? £20 to the first of you to suggest that a client does the same thing but replacing dogs with whatever thing it is that they shill (PIZZAS!).

• The 100 Best Infographics: I don’t ordinarily care for these sorts of things, but it’s actually a pretty good rundown of different styles and levels of interactivity; the filtering system is pretty good too, letting you quickly narrow down your selection by style, most-covered in the media, etc. Oh, and while we’re here, let me put out once again my annual plea for agencies to STOP MAKING DREADFUL GRAPHICS PLEASE. Noone, and I mean noone, will use them. It’s not worth the time, I promise you.

• Astrometry: Weirdly I know several people who are planning to get into astronomy this year – the Tim Peak effect, perhaps (lovely, lovely Tim Peak). Anyway, this site lets you upload any photo you take of THE MAJESTY OF SPACE (imagine that delivered in Brian Cox’s dulcet Lancashire tones, as he compares the universe to an egg or somesuch) and will then tell you what exactly it is that you have captured (some stars, is the short answer).

• Concepter: Actually, this might be slightly more chilling than the other horrible apps I’ve featured already this week. Concepter, launching next month, purports to let you track and monitor the amount of time you spend with different people in your life, thereby optimising your free time to make sure you’re not spunking it on the wrong people. Because that is in no way a horrible or dehumanising way in which to approach the relationships in your life. “Fancy a coffee?” “No, sorry, I’ve already spent my allotted 15 minutes with you this week and frankly the additional time investment simply isn’t worth it”. Actually, on reflection, perhaps I’m coming round to the idea.

• The Political Ad Archive: Tracking and filing US political ads in the run-up to the elections later this year. American politics, in case you ever need reminding (and after this, you shouldn’t), really is utterly mental.

• That Weird Floating Bonsai Thing On Kickstarter: You all saw this, right?

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Online: The whole collection, or at least nearly 1/2million pieces, presented online. SO MUCH FASCINATING STUFF IN HERE.

• OpenBazaar: Coming soon to a ‘The New Silk Road’ thinkpiece near you soon, OpenBazaar is a soon-to-launch marketplace whose USP is its peer-to-peer nature; you download an program which connects you directly with a potential buyer or seller on and lets you set the terms of your transactions directly. There’s no website, no trace, and it’s all done through Bitcoin. This will NEVER be used for anything illegal, ever.

• The Tor Data Map: Speaking of the potentially illicit, this is a rather wonderful visualisation of all the data being passed across the Tor network worldwide. Abstract glowing data representations are BEAUTIFUL, aren’t they? This should, but won’t, be the year in which a major financial institution builds one of these showing money flows around the world in beautiful and semi-interactive fashion.

• Portraits of Burlesque Dancers: These are GREAT – some of the outfits here on display are amazing, and show a level of art and industry far removed from the gussied-up stripping which often passes for burlesque. A wonderful range of body shapes and sizes and genders, which deserves a special shoutout for featuring Mat Fraser who’s been something of a hero of mine for time.

• Blume: When I was in Amsterdam before Christmas, my friend Chris (who is YOUNG and therefore still entitled to do this sort of thing) showed me the array of dating apps on his phone, an experience which was as giddying as it was vaguely enevrating. How DO people do this stuff all the time? Anyway, if YOU feel like Tinder or Bumble or whichever of these bloody things you use isn’t quite doing it for you then you might want to give this one a go; Blume’s gimmick is that users match via ‘freshly taken’ selfies, meaning you can’t spend time filtering and tweaking your pictures to fool someone into letting you get within three feet of your pants. I’m going to throw this out there – humanity is too vain for this EVER to catch on.

• This Changed Me: Part of me thinks that this is almost unspeakably twee, but maybe I’m just an incurable cynic. This Changed Me is an app which lets you share experiences which…er…changed you, along with a picture and some blurb about, oh, I don’t know, how it helped you GROW or somesuch guff. Oh, look, sorry, I’m sure it’s a really nice idea and some of you might find some joy in it, but let me be very clear with my position here – that which does not kill you does not in fact make you stronger; it is simply working in close concert with that which eventually does.

• The Robot Beauty Contest: Odd, this. I found it a few weeks back and have been keeping an eye on it – the idea was that it would be the first beauty contest to be judged solely by AIs. They were looking for people to submit algorithms to judge the contest, as well as entrants to be judged by the pitiless, inhuman aesthetics arbiters; judging by the site, I’m not sure that they got either of those things. Still, there is definitely the germ of a VERY thievable idea here if you happen to work for one of those dreadful, mendacious cosmetics companies which pretends to care about people’s feelings and self-image just enough to persuade them to buy a shittonne of cosmetics that they don’t in fact need *cough*DOVE*cough*. Oh, and in case you missed it here’s that Swiss site that tells you how hot you are (I am ‘OK’. I’m fine with that, honest *cries*).

• Swiss Design in CSS: Wed developers / designers, you may like this. Not sure it’ll mean much to the rest of you, but it’s sort of gently soothing.

• MeetingsBot: I am by no means the first person to say this, but the seemingly inexorable rise of chat software (cf Messenger, Slack, etc) means that I’m pretty confident in predicting that 2016 will see an absolute shedload of bots being developed for increasingly mainstream purposes. X.ai is onesuch bot, designed to take the hassle out of arranging meeting times and places for a group of people; give it access to your calendars and it does EVERYTHING as if by magic. What with Facebook recently announcing it was opening up the Messenger API, any and all large brands should be all over this sort of stuff like the sky. LOOK, FREE CONSULTANCY! God, you’ve missed this gold eh?

• Arq: I have no idea whatsoever whether this steering wheel-shaped synthtoy is actually any practical good or not, but LOOK HOW COOL IT LOOKS!!!!

• The Reddit Recap: I confess to having found this during my 6am trawl this morning and as such not been able to actually listen to it, but the premise is intriguing. A podcast which somehow (magic? probably) creates daily podcasts summarising stuff in the ‘Things I Learned’ subReddit. An intriguing idea, more in terms of the automation than anything else.

• Rebtel: Really clever, this, if it works – it purports to offer internet free cheap international calling. I can’t be bothered to explain how it works, to be honest – if you’re interested in this sort of thing, click the link and read all about it.

• Sort By Dislikes: Find the most disliked video on any YouTube channel. God knows why you might want to, but there’s some interesting rabbithole potential if nothing else.

• Doc Club: Like documentaries? Want to watch more of them? WELL GOOD! It’s  subscription service, but if you want high-quality curated documentary programming it looks like a pretty good deal at about £2 per month.

• Pathetic Motorways: Because you never knew that you wanted a website all about the UK’s forgotten transport infrastructure, but it turns out you really, really do!
   

By Juana Gomez

LET’S PRESS ON WITH THIS PRETTY ESSENTIAL ESSENTIAL MIX BY MARIBOU STATE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY GRATEFUL TO GET SOME OF THIS INTERNET OUT OF ITS HEAD BECAUSE FRANKLY IT WAS ALL STARTING TO LEAK OUT AND SLOSH AROUND A BIT AND WHICH HAS REALISED THAT IT SORT OF NEEDS WEB CURIOS AS A PURGE, WITHOUT WHICH IT STARTS TO GO A BIT ‘FUNNY’, PT.2:

• The Dicture Gallery: Penises, dressed as famous dictators. I can’t really beany clearer than this – this link takes you to a selection of photographs of penises, wearing tiny costumes to make them look a little bit like megalomaniacal leaders from history. I probably don’t need to stress this, but it’s a touch on the NSFW side (but if your employer can’t raise (*ahem*) a small smile at the sight of a slightly unimpressive dong wearing a Napoleonic tricorn then you should probably quit).

• The Forecaster: Martin Arnstrong was a notable economic analyst in the 1980s who is also the subject of a forthcoming documentary about market manipulation and economic forecasting and the like. This website has been produced to accompany the film, and it’s unlike any other movie promo site I’ve ever seen – the depth of information in here is STAGGERING, and I love that they’ve aped the FT in its design look and feel. Really very impressive indeed, I think.

• The British Museum With Google: Following on from them giving the Museum the StreetView treatment last year, this is an interactive dive into the institution’s collection which is presented SO beautifully that you may get a little lost in it. Processor heavy, so perhaps might not work on your creaking office machine, but worth persevering with until you can make it work properly as it is GORGEOUS.

• Men Wearing Beards Made Of Bubbles: Surely one of you can rip this off for something.

• Browse Reddit Whilst Pretending To Code: For all the developers out there who plan on getting the sack in the second month of 2016!

• A Wonderful Model Railway on Google Streetview: I have a real thing for model villages and stuff, in particular really shoddy ones; there’s a set of model houses in Vauxhall Gardens which are SO shonky that they actually make me come over all emo every time I see them (I am unsure why this is so, and don’t really want to investigate these feelings too deeply). Anyway, this is Google Streetview doing its thing on a BRILLIANT model railway in Hamburg, which is very cool indeed (if you take a particularly elastic conception of the term).

• SampleStitch: This is a lot of fun. Samplestitch lets you play around with the constituent elements of three tracks by J Dilla, 9th Wonder and Kanye to see exactly how hard it is to make things sound like they do. Will make you really appreciate the skill involved in hiphop production, but will also make you realise that it’s surprisingly easy to make stuff that sounds sort of OK by just pressing stuff.

• Lutheran Insult Generator: Just in case you’re feeling bereft of interesting and creative ways to slag off your friends, family and coworkers, this occasionally spits out some gems. “You are the white devil and a glittering Satan.”, for example, is going on The List.

• A Short Journey: No idea what this is for or why it exists, but it’s a nice piece of webdesign showcasing some simple-but-pleasing design and interaction techniques in telling the ‘story’ (I mean that very loosely) of someone going somewhere and then coming back again. Christ, that’s a really piss-poor description, sorry, I’ll try a bit harder from now on.

• Screensaver Jam: Screensavers are now totally pointless, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check these ones out – submissions to a recent design competition, some of these animations are GREAT.

• Bitpoem: Aside from the fact that it has introduced me to the term ‘iPhoneographer’ which made me briefly consider just stopping with the internet forever, this photoediting app for iPhone actually looks rather powerful and quite useful if you do a lot of that sort of thing.

• The Void 2: When I wrote about the first of these last year, I wrote something about it being slightly baffling webart with no discernible purpose but a very pleasing aesthetic. I’ve not got much more to say about its second iteration, other than to add that it’s really worth clicking around as it’s oddly compelling.

• Guesstimate: REALLY clever and potentially very useful indeed, this. Guesstimate is a spreadsheet service which works with fuzzy values, helping you calculate likely ranges of STUFF using Monte Carlo modelling (that’s basically where you run a bunch of simulations of an event to work out probabilities, risks etc). Sounds boring, and actually sort of is, but potentially really helpful for…er…people who deal with numbers and stuff.

• I Hate Butterflies: Do YOU hate butterflies (or moths)? Have YOU longed for a community in which you can safely discuss that hatred? OH GOOD!

• Cheateo: Let’s be clear at the outset – Web Curios IN NO WAY ENDORSES this sort of black hat activity. That said…Cheateo is a portfolio of services which effectively sets up networks of bots to send fake traffic to your website, upvote pages on social media, etc. HUGELY dodgy, but I’d be quite interested to see quite how far this goes and to what extent it can dodge Google’s police.

• The Public Domain Project: Literally THOUSANDS of media files from old times, digitised and made freely available to do with as you wish. Images, audio and video of all SORTS of stuff, from Chaplin clips to old newsreel footage, eminently remixable should you desire. If you’re a filmmaker of any sort this is probably worth a peruse.

• Pilot: I tend not to do Podcasts here, mainly as I never listen to the bloody things and therefore feel like a fraud recommending any. I’ll make a rare exception for Pilot, though, mainly as I think the gimmick is cute; each episode is a pilot for a fictitious new podcast series, letting the creators experiment with all sorts of genres and styles and things. Your mileage may vary, but it’s a nice conceit – they’re also quite happy with anyone taking any of the concepts they come up with and running with them, which I think is a nice touch.

• Stock Photos of Sexual Harassment: Presented mostly without comment, although the fact that this category even exists is cause for no little sighing and headshaking.

• The AutoHelply: SUCH a great idea, this. A project which encourages people to donate their Out of Office replies to a helping to find missing persons – it provides you with suggestions for people missing in your local area, and provides you with the code/copy and instructions on how to apply it to Outlook or Gmail or whatever. Someone steal this and win yourselves a Lion, go on.

• 1080 Plus: I love this – PURE INTERNET, right here. 1080 Plus is a site which lets you collaboratively view YouTube videos and chat around them, all delivered through a bafflingly and wonderfully 80s fake-console interface. Try it – all the buttons ACTUALLY WORK, and there’s some real rabbithole pleasure to be found in watching whatever it is that a selection of internet oddities are choosing to stream and discuss with the world.

• Le Dernier Gaulois: ANOTHER swanky French site, this one to promote a new French TV show about, er, The Last Gaul (I confess to not having researched this particularly thoroughly, sorry). Very slick indeed.

• The Grey Tales: A beautiful passion project sharing four stories about the lives of elephants. So, so lovely, this, from the music to the illustration to the navigation – really excellent webwork.

• Call To Wait: Wonderful gag / webart project which invites people to call a number and stay on hold for 7 years at which point SOMETHING will happen. Please, please, please can someone set up an office phone to do this, ideally at a tobacco company for maximum phone bill lols? Thanks.

• Cybersquirrels: Mapping all the instances worldwide of animals fcuking up internet connections. This is, it turns out, so common that the more paranoid amongst you might start wondering whether they’re conspiring against us (they almost certainly are, FYI).

• Fiera: Ever wondered what ‘Beforeplay’ was? No, me neither, but now I know and I feel compelled to share it with you. Apparently it’s pre-arousal sex play, so pre-foreplay-foreplay. No, me neither, but Fiera is a new sex toy which purports to help with that sort of thing should you so desire. I’m passing no judgment here – hey, whatever works for you – but can I just point out how utterly horrific the business end of the machine looks? Wouldn’t put it anywhere near anything of yours were I you.

• Literally THE Most Hipster Musical Toy You Will See All Year: ETA to appearance at a Deptford rave? I reckon WEEKS.

• Babypod: Ok, this is from WAY back in week one of 2016, but it’s so utterly mental I couldn’t not remind you of its existence. In case you missed the Mail’s inevitable coverage of it, this is the device which lets women play music to their unborn foetus through the judicious insertion of a speakerdildo into their vagina. I was all sorts of baffled by this when I first saw it, and this hasn’t changed one iota.

• Make Your Own Pet Planet: Look, realistically this trumps anything else you’re likely to achieve this afternoon, so get modelling. It is really, really soothing and beautiful, and should really be an app – I would love to have my own planet complete with mini ecosystem etc on my phone, although the size of your personal God complex may vary.

• The Earth From Space: 24h of the earth from space on one website. Hypnotic and gorgeous.

• We Feel God: Not technically called that, but this is basically We Feel Fine but using mentions of God (Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, etc) to populate the visualiser. The audio on this makes it about tenmillion times more sinister than it would otherwise be; no real idea about why it creeps me out so much, but it properly gives me the heebies, this.

• Eagle Fine Art: Now, I’m no art historian but I am pretty sure that the stuff being sold on this site is, perhaps, not QUITE kosher in terms of its relation to its stated maker. Is that really a Modigliani? HMMMMMMM. Kudos to them, though, for their admirable chutzpah.

• B Sensory: Closing out this week’s array of questionable sexual aids is this PEACH of an idea, which syncs your vibrator with the book you’re reading to provide appropriate stimulation during the right passages. I CANNOT EVEN IMAGINE. How is this meant to work? How does it know how fast you’re reading? How do you teach it which bits you like and which you don’t? Can you hack it to work with, say, the FT website? SO MANY QUESTIONS.

• Seadope: Ever wanted to explore the story of the zombie apocalypse via a really quite insanely deep fake 90s computer desktop interface? OH GOOD! This is really rather impressive if you can plough in the time – give it 5 minutes and see how you like it. Text adventure fans will get a kick, I think.

• The History of Billboard Hiphop #1s: Best thing of the week, this. An interactive history of all the hiphop #1 singles on the billboard chart from the mid-90s onwards, with audio and info and links and…oh, it’s just SO GOOD. Click and play and ENJOY.

By Filip Hodas

TO CLOSE OUT THE MUSICAL SELECTIONS, HAVE THIS ACTUALLY FANTASTIC HIPHOP MIX BY ERYKAH BADU NO LESS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• MRA Dilbert: Contrasting the gentle office satire of the strips with the often jaw-droppingly stupid meninist rantings of creator Scott Adams. Oh, Scott!

• Real Businessmen: All business, all of the time. LOOK, SO BUSINESS!

• Polish Priests Blessing Things: Just that, really.

• The Villa of Ormen: A collection of incredibly creepy and gothy photos from all over the place.

• Scenic Design: Photos of theatre and film set design, which is sort of niche, admittedly, but more interesting than you might think (although I appreciate that based on this SCINTILLATING writeup not enough for you to click the link. Sorry, there are LOTS of these this week and time’s a wasting).

• Ugly Belgian Houses: Apart from in one or two very specific matters and cases, Belgians have NO TASTE WHATSOEVER.

• Bat Labels: Labels on stuff from the original Batman TV Series. If someone doesn’t start selling ‘Henchman’ and ‘Goon’ sweatshirts off the back of this I will be very disappointed.

• Recent Google Searches: This smacks of fake to me, but apparently these are all real and collected by a bot. See what you think. We can’t be that thick, can we?

• Ask Cat: Text Cat with your problems, and she’ll post her advice here in the shape of an animated Gif. I am WELL using this – see if you can guess which problem is mine in the next week or so! (please don’t).

• Instagram Husband: A tumblr for that meme that briefly blew up four weeks ago but which I bet none of you can now remember OH GOD WHY IS IT ONLY I WHO IS CONDEMNED TO REMEMBER ALL OF THIS CRAP?

• Black Shops, White Writing: If you haven’t already noticed this trend, prepared to now see it EVERYWHERE after clicking this link.

• Calming Manatee: Everybody needs some help sometimes.

• ECDs With Folded Arms: For all you adland wageslaves out there.

• Pokemon Pickup Lines: There’s at least one of you reading this who will read these and laugh but secretly inside think “when I can use one of these on someone, I will have found true love”. That’s ok, you know.

• Sloppy UI: Pointing out bad design. I’m sure nothing YOU’VE worked on would ever feature here, though, obviously.

• SwearyBox: Swearing is obviously neither big nor clever, but this small site selling very profane cards made me laugh more than it probably should have done.I’m closer to 70 than birth; I probably should at least attempt to grow up a bit really.

• Masa Photo: Gorgeous photos of Tokyo and other Japanese locations. Really beautiful shots.

• Crazy Walls: Screencaps of the wall-mounted mind maps ofCRAZY PEOPLE from films and games. Makes an EXCELLENT point about the prevalence of red string in many of these shots, which now they mention it is sort of baffling.

• Making A Murderer Hairstyles: Celebrating the hairstyles which are the REAL secret behind the series’ popular appeal.

• Nitrate Diva: The best collection of gifs sourced from films I’ve seen in AGES. Bookmark this for all your HOT ZINGING COMEBACK needs.

• Trudeau P Milf: Celebrating the hotness of the Canadian premier.

• Cool 3d World: A collection of some of the more disturbing 3d animated Vines you are ever likely to see. I LOVE THESE SO MUCH.

• Mondays: I don’t normally do failgif collections, but some of these really are spectacular.

• Cat Cosplay: WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE DRESSING UP THEIR CATS?

• MDMA Team: I have to applaud the chutzpah of this page, which basically showcases the insane variety of pill shapes and colours and sizes currently in circulation. If you’re a certain type of person, this will make you VERY GLAD it’s the weekend (as an aside, this is a new thing, right? When I was a kid, the stamp was about as exotic as it got; last year there was some stuff going around which was shaped like massive green Heineken cans and which was so strong I actually thought my hair was vibrating. I’m probably too old for this).

• Butts: This page promises one butt a day, and so far it has AMPLY delivered. Drawings only, so perfectly SFW.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Facebook Loving Farmers of Myanmar: Brilliant piece of writing about how the mobile phone is changing the lives of people in Myanmar. Less about the tech than the social aspects, it nonetheless offers a really interesting picture of the progress of digital in the developing world, and should give you a reasonable set of arguments as to why Facebook’s numbers were so crazy good this week (and why Twitter really needs to sort itself out).

• How The Facebook Newsfeed Works: Basically a massive puffpiece for Zuck’s engineers, this talks about how the Newsfeed filters what it shows you through its unique and unfathomable combination of algorithmic and human intervention. If you read this and don’t get the slight frisson of filter bubble fear then you are, sorry to say it, an idiot.

• No Filter February: My friend Fritha (I know, but she’s a Kiwi) penned this about something she’s experimenting with next month – presenting a more realistic portrait o her life to the world through social media. As someone who never posts photos anywhere and doesn’t use Instagram this is all moot to me, but some of you children might find some inspiration here (and there’s an obvious brand tie-in if you’re looking for something to sponsor next week).

• My Life as an Atrocity Tour Guide: I’ve mentioned old school shock sites like Ogrish and Rotten (as per, strongly advise you going much past the homepage on either of those FY) – this piece examines what it’s like to run one of these things, and what it feels like to have a seemingly neverending cavalcade of mutilated corpses passing before your content-hungry eyes.

• 2050 Demographic Destiny: Interesting bit of futurology from the Wall Street Journal looking at how the world’s set to change over the coming three decades across a variety of areas (labour, environment, etc). As will all of this stuff, the value of the predictions is questionable at best, but it’s all an interesting read and it’s very nicely presented in classic WSJ longform interactive fashion.

• On Website Obesity: Not super new, but a great piece of writing about the bloat in website size we’ve seen since the web’s inception, why it’s bad design, and what we should do about it. If you make websites, or get other people to make them on occasion, you ought to read this.

• The Robin Hood Strippers: A great yarn about strippers taking advantage of dumb clients by means fair and not-so-fair, this feels like a TV movie in the best possible way – like being a touch drunk in the mid-afternoon whilst snacking on bad food and wearing tracksuit bottoms. You get me, right? Good.

• The Custodians: This is a wonderful piece about the art of art curation and restoration, and the manner in which this has evolved over time and is continuing to do so as digital artworks transform the nature of the relationship between artist, curator and audience. Really, really fascinating and very highly recommended, even if the description makes you want to gnaw your own hand off with boredom.

• On That Dragon Cancer: That Dragon Cancer is a ‘game’, recently released on PC, about two parents’ experience of seeing their young son die slowly of cancer; this piece in Wired tells their story and how they transformed their experience into art. This made me do quite a big sad, FYI, so be warned.

• The Search For The Killer Bot: Included in part to bolster my ‘this is the year of the bot’ argument above, and in part because it’s a really interesting look at how the communications ecosystem in the West is slowly evolving to match what already exists through WeChat et al in the East.

• A Brief History of Books Which Don’t Exist: About books and worlds and authors and imagination and coincidence and STUFF, this is a lovely read for the literarily inclined amongst you.

• A History of the Occult in Rock & Roll: Terrifyingly encyclopaedic in its comprehensiveness, this will teach you stuff even if you’re an absolute music bore who knows EVERYTHING about this sort of stuff. I had no idea whatsoever that so many people were so into Crowley, for example, or that Black Sabbath fans were quite so…well…stupid (although I might have guessed the latter).

• Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies: A beautifully written piece about the hitherto-unexamined explosion in suicides in Northern Ireland since the end of the Trouble, and what it might tell us about NI society and the manner in which people sublimate grief.

• Lolita Turns 60: I found this at the tail end of last year, but thought it worth saving – a brilliant analysis of the novel, from a variety of different perspectives, which I found particularly illuminating about the tricky final act. Reminded me quite how much I love the book, and quite how many phrases from it I have basically lifted wholesale to use in conversation (I am, I acknowledge, a dreadful pseud).

• How Meeting Lemmy Saved My Life: I’ve featured Jeremy Allen’s writing quite a lot recently, and this is another great piece on how Lemmy offered some surprising encouragement to a man a few days into nascent sobriety. What a lovely-sounding man.

• Bowie Vs Burroughs: Whereas this paints a far less sympathetic portrait of its subjects. A sort of amazing treasuretrove, this, in which Rolling Stone basically just sits Bowie and William Burroughs down together and transcribes their conversation. There is SO MUCH in here, but my overriding impression was of two overwhelmingly cold people, detached from both their work and their audience – overly analytical of the former and borderline-contemptuous of the latter. Bowie’s line about people being basically too stupid to ‘get’ his stuff is a killer. There’s a lot of gold in here, too – they are obviously both super smart and get off on the intellectualising, and the line about ‘the picture of you’ that Bowie comes out with is one for the ages. Still, a really interesting counterpoint to the somewhat one-sidedly hagiographic post-mortems coronations.

• How Wil-E Coyote Explains the World: Wonderful deconstruction of the gags in Road Runner which is incredibly instructive about rules and exceptions in storytelling and joke creation.

• The Eleven Most Boring Conversations I Can’t Stop Overhearing: Tim Rogers on particularly excellent form about some of the irritations of modern living (if you’re, like him, an educated straight white man living in San Francisco). As ever, Rogers is just a brilliant prose writer.

• The Fcuk Off Fund: What one is and why you need one. Brilliant piece.

• Holding The T: Finally, the best piece of writing of the week – this piece about playing squash as a middle-aged man is sort of about squash but also, mainly, about middle-age and a certain degree of acceptance and LIFE, and should be read by everyone mainly because it’s just so effortlessly clean and well-constructed. Would that I could write like this, seriously.  

By Christina A West

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s kick off 2016 with a very early contender for best, oddest video of the year. This is The Chickening, and it is SO GOOD that I am practically demanding that you watch it all (I’m obviously not demanding anything, I’m just pathetically grateful you’re hear at all DON’T LEAVE ME):

2) This is probably on balance less ‘good’ but equally odd. It’s called The Summoning of the Skylark, and no, I have no idea whatsoever:

3) Let me just say upfront that I think the song here is REALLY GOOD and is worth listening to; now we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s focus on the video which is all the WTF you could possibly hope for and more. This is Yeasayer with ‘’I Am Chemistry’:

4) Cheers to Shardcore for the tipoff on this one – it is MESMERIC. Trust me, give it a minute or so and you will be hooked – this is called ‘A Brief History of Time’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Well, garage I guess. You will all have heard this already, obviously, but I’m chucking it in because Web Curios has been a fan of Narstie for TIME and is very happy to see him getting a bit of proper success on this. Craig David x Big Narstie with When The Bassline Drops:

6) MORE UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is a cracking track from Kano and Giggs – it’s called ‘3 Wheel -ups’:  

7) This is SUCH a nicely made vid, even if the idea’s not 100% fresh. All done by hand too, which is crazy. This is ‘Cliche’ by Hierophant:

8) Next up, the latest video for B3ta alumnus Cyriak whose star just keeps on rising – this time he’s knocked out this feline oddity for El-P and Killer Mike (aka Run the Jewels); this is Meowpurrdy:

9) Last up, an oddity that’s sort of sleazy hiphop in a way which reminds me a bit of Boyfriend (Can we just take a moment to recall how great this song is, by the way? Good) but which is rather good in its own right. This is by Louis The Child, feat. K.Flay and it’s called It’s Strange. See you in a few weeks, everyone.

By Tim Tadder

LET’S OPEN PROCEEDINGS WITH THIS SELECTION OF THE BEST SONGS of 2015, ALL DOWNLOADABLE!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHY WE HAVE TO HAVE ALL THESE DIFFERENT FCUKING PLATFORMS IF ALL THEY SEEM TO WANT TO DO IS REPLICATE EACH OTHERS’ FEATURES AND WISHES WE COULD JUST AGREE THAT FACEBOOK HAS WON SO I CAN STOP KEEPING TRACK OF THIS RUBBISH BECAUSE REALLY: 

• Facebook Launches Live Video & Collages: You know how upsetting it was when Facebook decided to give famouses the opportunity to livestream their every move on the platform but denied it to the little man? I know, right? Well weep no more! EVERYONE can now share live video of their existence to a largely indifferent audience thanks to this recent update; not only this, but we can all now make nice little grid-type collections of photos and videos for our profiles, too. This will be briefly diverting as people discover the opportunity to record and stream their mad Friday night chipshop bants, and then will join the oubliette of other forgotten features that noone wanted or needed in the first place. Or at least I hope that’s the case, as frankly the alternative, in which this becomes a THING and everyone starts livestreaming their trip to the shops and suchlike, is too unspeakably tawdry to contemplate.
• Facebook Trialing Selling Tickets Through Event Pages: You don’t really need much more of an explanation that this, do you? It’s only being trialed in the SF Bay Area, so it’s not like it actually means anything to you, in any case. 
• FB Tweaks Ads in Instant Articles: Potentially – but only potentially – of interest to those of you working on the publishing side of things (“But Matt,” you cry, “we’re all publishers now!”. Know that I wish you nothing but ill), Facebook have rejigged the ads inside their Instant Articles to make them marginally less of a screw for publishers – aside from anything else, the stories will now give the opportunity to link to other content from the same outlet from an Instant Article, which goes some way towards remedying the ‘no, you can’t have any traffic from us, sorry ahahahahaha’ situation which was punitively affecting those using the service. Oh, and it’s launched in Asia, too, look!
• The Year on Facebook: All of the things the world cared about! Or at least those things that were most discussed by people with a Facebook Page. Unsurprisingly, given the overall tenor of the year as a whole, it’s not hugely cheering.
• Twitter Experimenting With Non-Chronological Timeline: Twitter continues to make baffling business decisions on an almost weekly basis; this one’s been in the pipeline for a while, but it’s the first time I’ve seen reports of it in the wild. Only a trial at the moment, and only for certain users, this is the shift towards an algorithmically-curated Twitter stream rather than the existing ‘newest stuff at the top’ version which exists now and which has led to the platform becoming the darling of media without actually needing the user numbers to back it up. You know how many people want a platform that does exactly what Facebook and Instagram do but with fewer people they know or care about using it? None! 
• Twitter Introduces Non-Cropped Photos To Timelines: So that’s at least one less thing that Community Managers have to worry about when posting pictures – you no longer have to content with a potentially humiliating letterbox effect blacking out some of your carefully-sourced BRANDED IMAGERY. I mean, you also won’t get much more than one tweet per mobile screen with this sort of image-heavy setup, which sort of kills the point of the platform as a way you can quickly and easily scan for stuff that is happening right now, but let’s not worry about that right now. Oh, and you can make collage-type things on Twitter too, much like the Facebook announcement above, because why not eh?
• Advertise on Moments For $1million A Go: Or at least that’s the figure that’s being bandied about, which is pretty mental really. 
• Promoted Tweets To Be Served To Logged-Out Users: This is actually pretty smart – Twitter’s testing the ability to punt ads at people who aren’t logged into – or don’t have an account with – the platform, by serving promoted Tweets to people checking out a users’ timeline or a search, etc. Clever, and actually a potentially useful targeting option given the fact that the Venn diagram of ‘people who use Twitter’ and ‘normal, everyday folk’ doesn’t actually offer that much crossover. 
• The Year On Twitter: Really, really dull, but I’m a completist. Guess what? Everything was rubbish on Twitter too!
• Google Makes It Easy For Everyone To Make 360-degree VR-type Photos: Actually pretty cool, this, and if you’re a brand with good photo opps (sport, fashion, etc) then you might want to take a look. Google last week released an app which lets any Android user take a 360-degree panoramic-type photo which can then be viewed through Google’s Cardboard viewers as a whole sort of immersive VR-type EXPERIENCE, complete with an audio track and stuff. You could have some fun with this. 
• Google Potentially Sort of Doing Pinterest: This didn’t get a lot of pickup when it was announced a week or so back, which is perhaps because it’s never going to take off. Still, it’s an interesting move and one which I’d be a touch nervous about were I Pinterest – Google’s basically going to let users save images from a Google Image Search in collections, exactly as you can do on Pinterest (but without the avocado fetish, presumably). Aside from anything else, this is an excellent opportunity to sell your stupid clients a VISUAL SEO STRATEGY because they won’t know that it’s all made-up rubbish (probably). 
• YouTube’s Ads of the Year: Seemingly the only good ads this year were aimed at white Westerners, or at least that’s what the work here presented would largely seem to suggest. A tedious and uninspiring collection of agency spaff which you’ve either already seen at Cannes or which you haven’t seen because it’s so North American. Thanks, Google!
• Snapchat Deeplinks Now Possible: If you put stuff on Snapchat, you can now link directly to that stuff on Facebook, Twitter and the like. Which is of little or no interest to normal people, but if you, like me, spend a lot of time fretting about whether or not your multiplatform content strategy is as joined up as it should be then you will be rubbing yourself raw in excitement at this SEISMIC ANNOUNCEMENT. 
• BOW TO THE FOUNDERS: Just as we’ve all become heartily sick of the word ‘Millennial’, so comes another generic and largely meaningless term to encapsulate the behavioural and emotional patterns of a whole generation of people – thanks, MTV, for bringing us the concept of ‘Founders’, the post-millennial generation, whose adolescences have been lived through the prism of social media and who can’t imagine a time without smartphones and who are all about MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. Apparently they are going to REBUILD SOCIETY once the millennials are done disrupting it. Great, I’ll look forward to that, then. The most chilling thing about the piece, and there are lots of pull-quotes I could have gone for here, is the line about them being ‘slightly more risk-averse’ than there millennial forebears, meaning we can look forward to a continuation of the media’s obsession with generic, safe, floppy-haired, kind-eyed androgynes for the foreseeable future. It’s a great time to be a YouTuber. 
• The FKA Twigs Shop: Included solely because I adore the UX on this site, and because someone referred to her this week as dressing a bit like someone on their way to a mid-90s rave, which I liked very much indeed. 
• The MS Paint Billboard: A nice idea, in a sort of ‘hey, look, let’s do something really INTERNET and then the INTERNET will wang on about it in the INTERNET’s charming self-referential way’ (which, er, is exactly what I’m doing, so I suppose it sort of worked), but one which was slightly stymied by the fact that they obviously couldn’t afford the prime Shoreditch billboard placement which would have made the most sense and instead were forced by budgetary constraints to erect it in…er…Millwall. 
• YouTube Sidebars For Charity: I LOVE THIS IDEA. Not sure if it ever actually got done or whether it’s just an agency concept, but either way it is eminently stealable by any charity that cares to do so, this is a beautifully simple premise; given that so many videos are uploaded to YouTube which have been shot vertically on phones, and given that this leaves large amounts of screen real-estate blank, why not give charities the opportunity to use said blank real-estate to raise awareness of their cause. It’s SUCH a nice idea – you upload a video via the website and it uploads it to YouTube with the blank bits used as a canvas for charity campaigns. Seriously, someone (anyone) take this and make it a BIG THING. 

By Lola Dupre

A MIX OF STAR WARS AND NOTORIOUS BIG SHOULD BE DREADFUL, AND YET THIS IS GREAT – TRY IT!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THERE NOT TO BE ANY MORE SADS THIS YEAR, PLEASE, IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, PT.1:

• Your Spotify Year In Music: You want it to be all grime and electro, but it will in fact be Adele and Bieber. You know it, just embrace it. The idea of a ‘guilty pleasure’ is for cnuts, anyway.

• Christmas For Syria: I am aware that this marks me down as a dangerous pinko lefty liberal – this may not be a surprise to you, in fairness – but I’m sort of the opinion that there’s not that much about bombing a nation that could really be described as redolent of the Christmas spirit, such as it is. This site suggests a cash donation to the people of Syria rather than one of BAE Systems’ finest, based on a percentage of the likely value of your meal or your gifts.

• Common Sans: A typeface which replaces the word ‘refugee’ with the word ‘human’ in everything you write, because refugees are people too DO YOU SEE????

• Crack & Cider: SUCH a dreadful name for this campaign, which is a shame as the idea is a lovely one. Inspired by the common trope that there’s no point giving money to the homeless as all they would spend it on is crack and cider – and, frankly, what of it? That’s mostly what I spend my wages on, after all, and noone has the temerity to give me crap about it (or if they do I am too boxed to tell) – this site lets you give money to buy specific articles for London’s homeless which will be distributed to them over the Christmas period. A Good Thing.

• Shiftwear: Trainers with customisable lights in them – or at least the idea of trainers with customisable lights in them – were very much a THING this year; here’s the latest crowdfunding initiative, which basically looks like total vaporware because, really, how long could the batteries potentially last on these multicoloured LED kicks? That was a rhetorical question, by the way – I don’t care in the slightest.

• Breadfaceblog: The Instagram feed EVERYONE is talking about (ish, sort of), in which a woman inexplicably faceplants into various different types of bread, over and over and over again. The sort of thing I can imagine Marina Abramovich or Yoko Ono being slightly irked that they didn’t come up with first.

• The Noise Archive: A truly VAST collection of audio, this – a huge collection of torrentable files of old ‘noise’ – as the description puts it, much of the stuff in here is on the…er…’avant garde’ end of the spectrum, but if you fancy a whole host of stuff to play around with then this is a truly BRILLIANT collection of oddities from the 80s and 90s.

• The Rave Tapes: This week’s second incredible treasure trove of music for old people, this is basically every single one of the old 90s rave cassettes in one place – Dreamscape, Helter Skelter, Pandemonium…all the ones you remember from the puffa jacketed, Naff Naff-clad days of yore. If you’re over 35, this is basically a time capsule to when you had an undercut and not a care in the world; if you’re under-35, consider this proof that the drugs really were good back then because, seriously, some of this is truly DREADFUL.

• Google’s Santa Tracker: Where is that fat lie? Well, he’s not taken off yet, but while you wait you can play all sorts of festive games and timewasters on Google’s very nicely-made, if preposterously saccharine, Christmas gimmick. New CONTENT every day between now and Christmas, should you need something to distract your sticky-fingered, jam-faced progeny from asking for yet more STUFF from you.

• WhatsBot: This is really clever, and I can see it (or things like it) very much becoming a THING – it purports to be the first WhatsApp? AI personal assistant, which may or may not be true, but the idea’s really smart. Add it to a conversation between multiple parties and the bot will suggest somewhere mutually convenient for you all to meet up, based on triangulating your locations and pulling recommendations from 4sq (how quaint, right?). If I were McDonald’s or Nando’s or Starbucks I would TOTALLY rip this off (which is probably why I work for none of those people).

• The Eliketion: Yes, OK, it’s US politics, but this is a really interesting piece of datascraping ad analysis, using data on each Presidential nominees Facebook likes to trak their popularity and their visibility across the varying debates. Oh, and seeing as we’re on it, it is literally impossible for Trump to be elected President so can we all PLEASE STOP GIVING THAT DREADFUL CNUT THE PUBLICITY HE SO EVIDENTLY CRAVES? He is a sideshow, a distraction; a horrendous one, yes, but he is not politically relevant.

• WripWrapWrop: Dreadful name, but if you want to get a little bit of revenge on your employer for another year of tedious, underremunerated wageslavery then you could do worse than this, which lets you map wrapping paper designs onto A3/A4 and print them using a standard laserjet and, inevitably, utterly rinse the toner from the workplace machine. YEAH! Take THAT! You will of course look like a total cheapskate, but you will also have saved literally pounds, so who’s laughing? EH????

• Open Prescribing: Bit dull, this, sorry, but it’s sort of interesting as a case study. UK prescription data, made available online – look, everyone, it’s BIG DATA in action! If nothing else you can probably make some GREAT spurious correlations around the increase in certain drug prescriptions and unrelated social trends. Has there been a marked increase in prescriptions of antidepressant medication in the UK as the popularity of Facebook has increased? I BET THERE HAS YOU KNOW.

• Making Video Calls In Minecraft: I am in AWE of this. So incredibly geeky, and so incredibly clever. Also smart sponsorship of the vid by the phonepeople.

• Pico8: Basically a miniature virtual console which lets you program tiny, pixellated little games into it which can then be shared with other users. If you’re a maker of games, the limitations inherent in the platform may make for an interesting design challenge.

• The Best Gifs of 2015: Look, I have no idea if these are the actual best, but they are all very nice and the animation styles are lovely and a bit whimsical and they sort of have that pastel-y 2d cut-out aesthetic that is very BIG right now, so just enjoy them and shut up and leave me alone.

• The Self-drying Jacket: You may be thinking ‘hang on, don’t ALL clothes dry themselves eventually? The people backing this on Kickstarter must be IDIOTS!’, and you’d be right, but let’s not let that small issue stop us from marvelling at the sheer preposterousness of an article of clothing which is apparently being designed with a built-in hardryer (effectively). Back To The Future has SO MUCH to answer for.

• Bobbugs: Each and every day, this man posts a photo of himself to his Instagram feed with a different ‘disguise’ (if you can call, for example, being covered in post-it notes a disguise). The ingenuity here is impressive, as are the pictures themselves.

• The Art Baby Gallery: An online space for artists working with the internet s their primary medium, there is a LOT of stuff buried in here. They take submissions, so you if you do that sort of spangly seapunky internet art thing you may well find a home for it.

• Performing Arts With Google: Continuing the rollout of the Google Cultural Institute, this site collects all of the 360degree videos and other webgubbins from a variety of performing arts organisations worldwide, from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). It’s sometimes hard to remember amongst all the privacyhorror and tax evasion that Google still does truly remarkable stuff like this.

• Sello: Either a great or a terrible idea, not sure which (and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sort of trenchant analysis which brings literally tens of you flocking here every week), Sello is an online sales platform which lets you flog stuff to your friends on social media. Chuckup a picture, a price and a description, and watch as your ‘BUY MY STUFF NOW’ spam gets punted out through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (and a whole load of other platforms too). Quite a lot of potential here for post-breakup LOLs if nothing else.

• Gay Pulp Paperback Covers of the 70s: There’s a brilliant uniformity of style to this collection; LOOK AT THE SEXY 1970s GAYS! Some of the titles are, it’s fair to say, not hugely subtle in their message – ‘Big Pipe’, anyone?

• Small World In Motion: Nikon do an annual ‘Small World’ photo competition which I have featured on here before, showcasing ultra-closeuyp photos of microorganisms and the like – this is the video equivalent. If you like the idea of videos of wobbling bacillae, then this will be RIGHT up your street (and even if you don’t, these are very cool indeed).

• Slide Camera: SUPER-NEW iPhone app which lets you easily take those slightly wobbly 3d-effect pictures – you know, the ones which give a crazy depth-of-field illusion whilst simultaneously making you feel a bit sick with their wobbling. Really easy to use, by all accounts – just tap the screen and move the phone a bit and HEY PRESTO, a 3d gif. Worth playing with if you’re running out of gimmicks for your Instagram feed.

• How A Car Works: If your kid wants to be a mechanic, this is a GREAT site. Alternatively, if you’re taking the bastard vehicle to Quik Fit this weekend and want to be marginally less intimidated by the grease-covered menials muttering significantly about the ‘big end’ or similar then this might be of use.

• Higher Tides: A really slick website which wins this week’s ‘Oh-So-Ballardian’ award for dystopian satire, Higher Tides is the website for a fictitious estate agency whose usp purports to be its approach to investment in property in areas which will be affected by global warming – the idea being that you can invest in a (tall) house in an area which is likely to suffer from flooding, with a view to your property appreciating vastly in value as everyone around you starts to drown. Obviously a joke, but not quite obviously enough to stop engadget and a few other sites reporting on it as if it were true, this is an excellent example of how to make a really well-put-together piece of satire – the rabbithole is DEEP with this one. Also, and I know I keep on saying this but it bears repeating,additional proof that we now live in a society where it is almost impossible to come up with something so ridiculous and dreadful that it is obviously a joke; EVERYTHING is plausible, which I’m sure is a situation that deserves its own nomenclature. A post-satirical society or something, I don’t know, you do the thinking for once, I am so, so tired of it all.

• The Information Is Beautiful Awards: Every year I link to these and every year I say something like ‘those things you keep calling infographics and datavisualisations; they are neither, they are just ugly pieces of shit you’re making to justify the existence of your content calendar’ and every year the same old crap keeps getting made and would you all just STOP PLEASE? Ahem. Anyway, some great work on display here, as per usual – this, for example, is almost breathtakingly lovely and just WORKS.

• Dewdrop: Ephemeral filesharing. Upload a file to the page, it generates a download link which only exists for as long as the uploader wants it to; you can turn off the link whenever you choose. Not only good for sharing sensitive information without a trace, but also lots of potentially funn implications for dead letterbox-style game-type things.

• OldWeb Today: Work with a bunch of CHILDREN? Why not milk your status as an old timer of the internet by showing the kids exactly how rubbish the internet used to be, with this website which allows you to view any page as it would look on a selection of old browsers (from Netscape onwards). If you’re one of the aforementioned kids, check out what we had to put up with. It’s a miracle this internet thing took off at all, frankly.

• 25 Days Of…: Rendered almost completely useless by the fact that I only found it a week into December, this is still a rather slick little ‘make your own bespoke advent calendar site with gifs and stuff’ toy which frankly can and should be repurposed to be a non-Christmas thing as the effects you can pull together are surprisingly fancy-looking.
   

By Karl Holmqvist

ON THE SUBJECT OF MASHUPS, THIS KANYE/QOTSA ONE IS ALSO RATHER GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THERE NOT TO BE ANY MORE SADS THIS YEAR, PLEASE, IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, PT.2:

• The Emoji Sentiment Ranking: One of the main problems with emoji-only communication, aside from the fact that it marks you down as an intellectually deficient mouthbreather, is that it’s so AMBIGUOUS. What did your bae mean when they sent you the aubergine followed by the smiley poo? Oh God, the mere fact of writing that phrase made me feel a very real sense of futurepresenthorror. Anyway, eliminate all possible misconceptions of your emoji-ing thanks to this objectively compiled ranking of all emoji by their perceived sentiment, from happy to sad. Based on an actual academic paper so, you know, OBVIOUSLY REAL AND TRUE.

• Playlist Buddy: Turn any Spotify playlist into a YouTube playlist. No, I don’t know why you’d want to do that either, but maybe you’re planning on having a party and need something for people to stare at when the drugs kick in or something.

• Weather Is Happening: Categorically, hands-down the best weather-related website to ever be featured on Curios. PRETTY BIG KUDOS THERE.

• The 5,000 Colour Puzzle: This is pretty much the Everest of jigsaw puzzles, I think (except from those weird masochistic ones that are all white or all black) – each piece is a different colour, and when arranged they form one of those lovely gradient palette things. Easier to understand than explain (it’s not just me being a terrible writer, honest), this is potentially the greatest gift ever or actual torture, I’m undecided.

• QR Life: Finally, a purpose for QR codes – scan them with this app and turn them into pleasing games of Life. No, I realise that it doesn’t magically make them useful, but there are limits.

• The NASA APIs: Make stuff with spacedata. If nothing else, the potential for Deep Space bots is pretty big – maybe you could create something that sends pictures of the infinite incomprehensible majesty of space to anyone who mentions One Direction, say, just to broaden their horizons a bit.

• The Belly Bump Ball: Giant raspberry suits, designed so that grown men and women can hurl themselves at each other without fear of damage. Obviously totally ridiculous, but made even more so by the description which suggests that they were designed as a way for adults and children to explore confrontation in a safe and non-violent manner. IMAGINE THE FAMILY THERAPY SESSIONS THAT WOULD RESULT! I suggest you buy a few forthwith for the awkward drunken arguments that will doubtless ensue over Christmas.

• An Incomprehensible And Odd YouTube Channel: Whoever this woman is, she appears to upload on average 3-6 videos a day, some of which are honestly really unsettling. Can someone, anyone, please help me work out what in the name of Christ is going on here please? WHO ARE YOU, RUSSIAN MAD LADY, AND HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?!

• Pinrose: A nice gimmick, this site purports to identify the perfect scent for you based on a series of questions – they will then sell you your perfect stink based on its reading of your personality. Obviously it’s a fudge – a bit like those lifestyle questionnaires from women’s magazines in days of yore, or the Facebook profile analysers beloved of double-figure-IQ revenants from your long-forgotten schooldays, but I think there’s a market for this faux-personalisation which could be explored by lots of other brands with moderately customisable products.

• Illusions of the Body: A series of photos illustrating the difference posture can make to a person’s attractiveness. Lovely shots, though they’re all nudes and so I suppose NSFW (but, as I always say at this point, if anyone you work with finds this offensive you should probably get another job as your colleagues are DICKS, mate).

• Another New Beautiful Tube Map: Gorgeous, and available as prints and posters. Can’t make head nor tail of it, personally, but it is very pretty indeed.

• Aerocene: A…perplexing art project, which as far as I can tell is seeking to create a host of giant sort of bubble-type things and float them around the world like gigantic solar-powered sky jellyfish (which is what I would have called the project, personally. From the blurb: “Aerocene manifests as a series of air-fuelled sculptures that will achieve the longest, emission-free journey around the world: becoming buoyant only by the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the surface of Earth. The sculpture floats without burning fossil fuels, without using solar panels and batteries; and without helium, hydrogen and other rare gases.  Aerocene holds a message of simplicity, creativity and cooperation for a world of tumultuous geopolitical relations,reminding us of our symbiotic relationship with the Earth and all its species.” What’s not to love about that?

• 10 x 2015: A lovely project, taking artists’ selection of the ten ‘best’ albums of the year and inviting said artists to create new covers for them. If nothing else, a lovely source of visual inspiration (and a decent source of music recommendations because, as you’d expect, there’s a lot of wilful obscurantism going on in the selections).

• The Privacy Gift Shop: A collection of posters, available for sale, which highlight concerns around online privacy. I am a particular fan of the one which reads “Fcuk My Like”, should anyone want to purchase it for me.

• Turning Everything Into Manga With Deep Dream: The Trump one is sort of incredible.

• Fractal Gears: Erm, just that really.

• All Of Estonia’s Library Checkouts: Hot on the heels of the Japanese library controversy (WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU MISSED IT???) comes yet another startling booklending-related project; Estonia’s continuing quest to be the most digital country in Europe continues apace, with this simple website showing a live map of library books being checked out across the country. I would love to see this for the UK – can someone make it for me please? Ta.

• Figma: Launching next year, this is a collaborative interface design tool which I imagine several of you working in digital studios might find quite useful.

• Deep Forger: Send this bot your pictures and it will Deep Dream them into the style of a variety of artistic masters. Pretty amazing stuff.

• Woobots: OBVIOUSLY this has been funded already, OBVIOUSLY. Wooden versions of Transformers for mid-30s hipsters? What could be more Kickstarter, right? Anyway, including this here as there are just over two days left for you to get in on the ground floor of this INCREDIBLE THING. I personally think that the robots look quite shonky tbqhwy, but I’m feeling a touch curmudgeonly this week and may not be in the best position to appreciate their unique aesthetic qualities *checks again* no, they really are pretty rubbish.

• 83 Free Albums!: I mean, ok, yes, you only get them on Christmas Day, and you won’t have heard of any of them, and yes, they do all appear to be Quebecois, but come on, FREE MUSIC! This is actually a really nice idea, giving away music from a variety of Francophone Canadian labels as a Christmas gift and musical primer – one out of 83 sort of has to be good, doesn’t it? Oh.

• A Lover Sings: The Billy Bragg fan community that you never knew you wanted or needed, this is shonky and yet all the more lovely for it; memories and anecdotes and stories about Bragg’s songs and their lyrics and what they mean to people. God, I love the wonky-faced bastard.

• Santa’s Shed: I think I have featured this on here in previous years, but in case you missed it last time around this is once again the creepiest Christmas thing on the internet – a live feed of a mechanical Santa, in what looks like a shed somewhere in the US, which you can get to ‘say’ things by typing into the textbox. Right now it’s 3am wherever Santa is, and I just had a diverting few seconds of getting the horrifying spastic puppet (no, really, I am using that word absolutely appropriately I assure you) to say “Save me” and “I hate Christmas”. You too can share my joy!

• Boris Ignatovich: The most beautiful website dedicated to a 20th Century Russian avant-garde photographer there has probably ever been, this is actually fascinating both from the point of view of webwork but also as a lens through which to view Soviet history and the development of an aesthetic movement. Rewards spending a bit of time with it, this one.

• The Unpack: This is quite a brilliant lazy rich person’s service. Subscribe to The Unpack and each time you travel you can forget about bothering to take luggage with you – the service will provide you with a suitcase full of laundered designer gear, dropped off at your destination to meet you, all appropriately selected for the prevailing weather you’ll be experiencing and supposedly all hand-picked to make you look hot. Items can be purchased at discount rates if you like them, or simply returned at the end of the trip. This is SUCH a rich person’s service, but I can totally see the appeal – I could very easily see single brands doing something similar (a TopShop version would KILL, I reckon).

• Luncher: You know that tedious joke where people say “I’m not on Twitter because I don’t care to know what you had for lunch” and then laugh like Boycey off Only Fools and Horses because, invariably, it’s people like that who say those sorts of things? Well now you can say “AHA! Well actually there’s a specific app for that and it’s called Luncher so IN YOUR FACE” and then turn a bright shade of red and realise that you actually despise confrontation and will now be too embarrassed to ever actually speak to that person ever again. Erm. Luncher is a network which actively encourages people to upload photos oftheir lunch, which can then be voted on to find the day’s BEST MEAL, which then wins points and prizes. The sort of thing which feels more like an overzealous attempt to get ENGAGEMENT amongst a multi-office employeebase than an actual thing that real people might want to use, but what do I know?

• The Yule Log 2015: A selection of Christmassy animations, all in one place. I mean, many of them have nothing at all to do with Christmas that I can see, but the standard is pretty high overall and, look, you’re going to need stuff to distract you over the coming weeks so take what you’re damn well given, ok? OK????

• Tagzaa: Fun little Instagram-based game which shows you a selection of pics culled from the platform and asks you to guess which hashtag they have in common. CLUE: It’s probably fcuking ‘wellness’ or somesuch anodyne lifestyle crap. IT WILL NOT STOP YOU DYING YOU KNOW.

• Slap Kirk: Absolutely the most satisfying website on here this week. You’re welcome.

• Tunity: I think this might actually be magic. Tunity is an INREDIBLE app which lets you ‘scan’ any muted TV with your phone, identifies the channel that the TV is showing, and then lets you stream that channel’s audio on your phone – meaning you can listen to a muted TV on your headphones. The site makes all sorts of claims for usage in bars, etc, but surely this is the best solution EVER to domestic arguments about people who have the volume up too FCUKING loud and who don’t understand that reading is better than watching TV and that they should just please be quiet please oh god why won’t everything just be quiet the noises.

• Speak Up And Stay Safe: A depressingly necessary guide to dealing with online harassment – techniques to protect yourself and your family from the unwanted attentions of internet hatemobs, because, whether you like it or not, if you don’t do this stuff then noone else is going to help you.

• Cook Your Pet: I mean, this has to be a joke. Doesn’t it?

• A 60s Guide To Sex From Japan: Based on this, it’s a miracle that anyone got born at all in 60s Japan. There is some nudity in here, true, but it’s SO staid and awkward. The guide to handholding actually made me do a bit of an emosad, it’s so poignant.

• Drunk Series: Short films, written and performed by drunk people. Funnier than you’d expect, though I get the impression that they are playing up the boozing a bit for effect (either that or they are total lightweights).

• The Top 100 News Images of the Year: These are about exactly as harrowing as you would expect, based on the complete and total shitshow that has been 2015. Some great shots, but don’t expect there to be a barrel of laughs once you click. Oh, and here’s a bonus selection from The Atlantic while we’re about it.

• The Tamagotchi Singularity: What would it look like if a rudimentary AI were designed with the sole purpose of keeping a selection of Tamagotchi alive and happy indefinitely? It would look like this, is the answer. Weirdly sort of conceptually chilling, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. BONUS: Twitch Plays Tamagotchi!

• ZType: Type words, blow up spaceships. The best little typing game I have played in ages, and the music is gorgeous.

• Jukedeck: Another one to file under ‘possibly magical’, this site will automatically generate surprisingly tuneful original compositions based on your selection of genre and duration. You will be amazed at how listenable this stuff is, trust me.

• Si Le Soleil: The most accomplished website of the week by a MILE, this is truly wonderful stuff. Charting a boat journey from Brittany to the Canary Islands, this is a beautiful fusion of audio and video and stills and a glorious interface and even if, like me, you care not a jot for a life on the ocean waves it is utterly beguiling. Have a play, it’s very much worth exploring.

• Because Recollection: I think that Because Music is a French label. It doesn’t matter – this site, taking a look back at music from the past 20 years, made me really happy in what, if I’m honest, has been a week pretty much entirely free of fun. I hope it distracts you as much as it distracted me – turn up your speakers and play around with it.

By Daniel Catalano

HAVE A 100-TRACK MIX BY KOOL AD TO ENJOY THE TUMBLRS WITH!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Tumblr’s Year In Review: What did the Tumblr community care about in 2015? Which artists and fashion labels were big? Possibly because of the slightly odder nature of Tumblr as a community, this is several orders of magnitude more interesting than the parellel ‘year in review’ efforts from Twitter and Facebook linked to up the top.

• Shit Duolingo Says: Odd translations requested of users by language learning app Duolingo. “I am tired of your smile” is a particular favourite of mine.

• Chas and Dave in New York: Photos of Chas and Dave’s hitherto-unreported voyage of self-discovery in the Big Apple at the dawn of Punk. Seminal.

• Graffi-Tips: Tips for graffiti artists, illustrated in cartoon form. Surprisingly practical, if you’re considering dusting off the aerosols and the shell-toes over Christmas.

• Zines of the Zone: Photos of the front covers of zines. Just that. Rather nice.

• Hectocotylus Everywhere: A tumblr, named after the technical term for an octopus’ penis, all about weird looking animals. VERY weird looking animals, it turns out.

• Women Reacting TO Harsh Noise: So many excellent reaction shots here for you to use. Suggest bookmarking this as you will find MUCH fodder for office email BANTZ.

• Pretty Puke: I think that this belongs to an artist in LA, but frankly it’s included because I’m a sucker for this sort of deliberately weird acid aesthetic and some of the photos are ODD.

• Formt: Fonts and design and STUFF.

• Dear My Blank: A collection of unsent letters, texts, emails and the like. All the things you might have wanted to say and now it’s too late and OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

• GOP Dildos: Republican party politicians holding guns, except the guns have been replaced with giant, colourful wangs.

• The Forest Is Real: A promo Tumblr for a forthcoming film about a Japanese forest famous as a destination for suicides, there is something pretty astonishingly tasteless about the ‘EXPLORE THE ACTUAL SUICIDES’ narrative that they have going on here, I think. Still, slick website guys!

• Tintin In Innsmouth: Where Herge meets Lovecraft.

• Composers Doing Normal Shit: Pretty much exactly that. Philip Glass filing his taxes, that sort of thing. Unrelated, but I walked past Sadler’s Wells this week and saw that they were advertising Swan Lake as ‘MATTHEW BOURNE’S SWAN LAKE’ and then, in far, far smaller type beneath, the legend ‘music by Tchaikovsky’. Hubris, much, Matty?

• My Day With Leo: Phototricks with cut out heads of famouses and perspective.

• Chain Texts: An incomprehensible (to me at least) collection of filthy chain texts with a Christmas theme. Are these real? Is this a THING?

• Confused Travolta: A growing collection of that meme of a skagged-out Travolta from Pulp Fiction looking all lost which has exploded over the past week or so.

• Male Feminists of Tinder: GUYS GUYS GUYS YOU ARE TRYING TOO HARD GUYS.

AND AS A SPECIAL CHRISTMAS BONUS, HAVE THE NEW AESOP ROCK ALBUM TOO!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK OFFER YOU FOR YOUR SUPPLEMENTARY READING PLEASURE A LIST OF THE BEST LONGFORM WRITING OF 2015, MUCH OF WHICH I AM PROUD TO SAY I PICKED FOR THIS SECTION OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS:

• Making and Breaking Mork and Mindy: I loved this programme as a child; it was my first introduction to Robin Williams, and will always remind me of being small and wondering why you would call a place ‘Boulder’. Obviously it’s aged pretty dreadfully, but this oral history-type piece about its genesis and eventual decline is a lovely piece of TV nostalgia – I particularly love the fact that it sprang from an episode of post-sharkjumping Happy Days whose plot was suggested by a network exec’s kid – does that sort of stuff still happen in TV? I’m going to guess not.

• How Elmo Ruined Sesame Street: A classic piece of internet writing, this, applying a degree of rigorous analysis to a topic that probably, on balance, doesn’t really merit it all that much. The author’s totally right, though; that little red bastard is insufferable and could do with being retired.

• The Cult of Bill Murray: A N Other hagiographic piece about the patron saint of the internet age, this one’s no more critical than many of the others you’ll have read, but contains a better ratio of Murray anecdotes to the page than most. The one about “FRANCIS!” in Cuba is pretty astonishing and is worth reading the piece for alone.

• Living in the Cult of Likeability: Bret Easton Ellis, a man for whom being liked hasn’t necessarily been a guiding principle, opines on how the ever-present culture of online approval – from Likes to the Uberification of everything – is making everything anodyne and pat and safe and homogenous and dull. He’s right, it is.

• Transhumanism in 2015: A really brilliant piece of journalism, looking at the transhumanist movement in the US (you know, the people who believe that we will all be uploading ourselves to the cloud and living forever in a meatspace-free utopia where every whim is fulfilled and we need never know pain or suffering ahahaahaha pull the other one mate it has got bells on), and in particular its leading light, the charismatic-but-clearly-quite-odd Zoltan Istvan, whose hoping for a swing at the White House. Does a reasonable job of being skeptical without being too mocking, and is actually a pretty decent look around the outer edges of this most scifi of belief sets.

• Tech and the American Teen: Yes, ok, so this is another ‘look at the teenagers in their natural habitat, clutching their smartphones and whispering in their strange, guttural dialect, what can it all MEAN?’ anthropology pieces, and yes it’s a US perspective, but it’s actually much better than most what with being neither particular u- or dystopian and instead painting a reasonably balanced picture of the impact of always-on tech on the post-smartphone generation. Poor little fuckers.

• Access and the Media: The latest in The Awl’s consistently excellent series on modern media and publishing, this takes a look at how social media has altered the manner in which access (to news, to events, to famouses, to information) works for publishers, and the knock-on effect it subsequently has on reporting. Effectively, if you want a decent explanation of the rise of the HOT TAKE this is a good one.

• China and the Memeufacturers: As the LUCOZADE SWEGWAY DICK TURPIN overnight cemented the hoverboard as the must-have Christmas gift for yoot all over the country – yoot imagining chirpsing a girl, gliding by as swag as you like on a self-correcting set of neon-glow wheels; yoot imagining literally running RINGS around the other crew in the next big playground beef – here’s a look at where this stuff all gets made (China, for avoidance of doubt). Aside from anything else, it’s an interesting look at the connection between ephemeral internet popularity and people actually making stuff on the other side of the world. Just think, next time you reblog that dank Pepe meme on Tumblr you’re making it exponentially more likely that a warehouse full of plush versions of the bastard frog will be hastily stitched together by a bunch of children with failing eyesight and bleeding fingertips. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

• I’m Comic Sans: Typical McSweeney’s, but I’m a sucker for the style. See also, ‘Decorative Gourd Season is OVER’.

• Your New Influencer Motherlode: Forget YouTube, forget Vine, it’s all about YOUNOW. I mean, it’s not, yet, but this is one to drop into your planning and predictions ‘deck’ (IT’S A FUCKING POWERPOINT YOU PRICKS) for 2015; this is a pretty interesting look at the platform, although I warn you against watching any of the actual ‘content’ unless you’re under the age of 15 as it will make you appreciably more stupid (or at least that’s what it felt like yesterday).

• Star Wars 1: The big Rolling Stone feature on the film which you have probably already devoured if you’re into that sort of thing, but which is actually pretty interesting even if you’re not a monomaniacal slavering fanboy.

• Star Wars 2: Far more interesting is this piece, talking to Anthony Daniels,  the man inside the camp robot suit. He sounds GREAT, and far more fun than you’d expect.

• On Deen & Stoya: The whole James Deen thing is all sorts of bleak and creepy and sad, whatever the actual truth of the matter is; this is a decent look at it by the Guardian. I know that it’s accepted these days that working in bongo is a valid career choice undertaken by intelligent adults with autonomy of choice and the like, but it’s quite hard not to draw the conclusion that there are…well…quite a few quite damaged people doing it, whatever they might maintain about their absolute mental fortitude.

• The Toughest Man In Cairo…: The first of three MUST-READ pieces at the end this week, this account of war and cigarettes and friendship was recommended to me by Simon (thanks Simon) and is almost certainly more fiction than fact, but I don’t care; the quality of the writing is superb, and the payoff in the last line had me doing a little applause. Do read it, it’s AWESOME.

• Jury Duty: A great piece of writing, genuinely brilliant, about the author’s experience of doing jury duty in the US. So, so erudite and smart, and entertaining with it – and, of course, deeply depressing and evocative of all of the failures inherent in the US criminal justice system (and, doubtless, in juries the world over). Superb.

• Vomit is not an Emotion: I’d be including this if this week hadn’t been characterised by death, but as it is it’s an apposite one to end on. Buzzfeed’s resident ‘death and oddities’ correspondent (not her official title, I appreciate, but there’s a theme to her work…) Hayley Campbell writes about the death of her grandparents a few weeks apart, how their joint funeral coincided with her birthday this year, and all sorts of other things besides. Might make you a little weepy, even if you haven’t had quite as monumentally shit a week as I have.

By Alessandro Calabrese

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, WHICH LEAVES YOUTUBE’S ROUNDUP OF 2015 HERE WITHOUT COMMENT FOR YOU TO WATCH OR IGNORE AS YOU SEE FIT!

1) First up, the annual event that is DJ Earworm’s United States of Pop, mashing some of the biggest tracks of the year into…well…a perfect example of the fact that all this stuff sounds basically the same, no? Contains a lot of the Weeknd, some Bieber, some Adele, and loads of other stuff besides (including, inexplicably, Pitbull – come the apocalypse, that man will still be poorly rhyming like some sort of superannuated provincial bouncer three weeks into a lottery win):

2) This is called ‘Manic’ by Prince Innocence. It is not manic at all, it is LOVELY:

3) There’s a story in the video that I didn’t quite get the first time, and you might not either as I found the song distractingly good; it’s got shades of lots of hypersuccessful pop of the past 18 months about it, but feels like its own beast with a slightly cold 80s-type vibe around the chorus. This is called ‘Romeo’ by Chairlift:

4) The simply isn’t enough Hebrew hiphop in the world, I don’t think – this is an attempt to rectify that, by Darshan. It’s called Aleph Bass – happy Hannukah and all that to those of you for whom that’s a thing:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! As long as Wiley keeps making music, I will keep featuring it. His output is PHENOMENAL – this is his new track, called ‘P Money’. Also, the jacket he is wearing in the video is GREAT:

6) Ever wanted to get an upclose and personal look at Bjork’s mouth? OH GOOD!:  

7) This sort of made me think of a French Sade, which may not sound like a recommendation but is, I promise:

8) Last new track of the week, this is the most astonishingly NSFW video I have seen all year. It is by Peaches, it is for her song ‘Rub’, and it features lots of full-frontal nudity, a bit of pissing, the odd bit of cockwaving and quite a good, if sleazy, tune. You know how I said something up there about what PRUDES your colleagues would be if they complained about you looking at artistic nudity? Yeah, well, they’d probably have a point with this one:

9) Given that there’s a degree of confusion as to whether I’ll be in a position to do a Curios next week or not, I’m closing out this week with the WEB CURIOS SONG OF 2015, which is ‘Here’ by Alessia Cara. Doubtless she will be bowled over by the accolade – she is, I think, going to be quite famous. Anyway, I may be back next week, I may not. If I’m not, let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years – I hope they involve as little death as is possible. Take care of yourselves.

By Kyle Thompson

IN CELEBRATION OF NINJA TUNE BEING 25, LET’S KICK OFF WITH A COLDCUT ‘JOURNEYS BY DJ’ MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH, AS A RESULT OF AMERICA SPENDING MUCH OF THIS WEEK IN BREATHLESS, FEBRILE ANTICIPATION OF THEIR ORGY OF TURKEY AND PRODUCT CONSUMPTION, IS LIGHTER ON S*C**L M*D** NEWS THAN USUAL AND WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GIVE THANKS FOR THAT IN PARTICULAR (GOD BLESS US, EVERYONE!):

• Facebook And Google Make Friends (Sort Of): This is actually a few weeks old, meaning that noone ACTUALLY cared enough to write it up / notice (other than We Are Social, who I should probably thank for bothering to alert me to its existence), but I think it’s worth noting. Obviously most of what goes on on Facebook is still stuck behind the Great Wall, but as a result of an update from a few weeks back, non-privacy-locked info is getting indexed by the GoogleBots, meaning it actually becomes slightly more useful for companies and brands to have at least some publicly available info about themselves on Facebook if only to, you know, OWN THEIR SEARCH PROFILE and stuff like that.
• Facebook Testing Ephemeral, Snapchat-style Disappearing Messages: Facebook might be aping Snapchat even more than it does already. I mean, they’re only testing this feature, but as Web Curios has previously observed, the great platform consolidation is now well underway and this is basically a nailed-on cert, right? Because the only certainty we have for 2016 is that all of these fcuking platforms will do exactly the same thing but with small, maddening variations which will serve only to make the lives of digimongs like us marginally more complicated than they in fact need be. There, that’s my prediction for next year, bank it. 
• Facebook At Work Gets Own Messenger: Not that the majority of us peons have had a chance to play with the bloody platform (aside from those of you working for RBS or whichever other corporate behemoths have been earmarked as guinea pigs), but when you’re writing up your speculative ‘things we might want to consider in 2016’ roundups, be sure to note that Facebook At Work, looking like it will launch in January next year, will have its own messenger app, to give office monkeys an alternative to Communicator for sending lewd and potentially libellous opinions about the Accounts team to colleagues without leaving a paper-trail. Thanks, Facebook!
• YouTube Adds International / Translation Tools: Google this week announced a raft (well, three) updates to its translation services for videos, which is worth a look if you do stuff that you’d like to potentially spread to more people than just those who have the common decency to speak English. A small note – there’s something sort of awful about their case studies being VICE and TED – two multi-million dollar media brands – waxing lyrical about how the community helped them double their reach by translating their videos FOR FREE. Without wishing to come over all self-help here, if you can contribute to a translation project then you can probably afford to charge for it, you DICKS. STOP GIVING LARGE CORPORATIONS THIS STUFF FOR NO MONEY PLEASE. Aside from anything else, how am I meant to charge extortionate freelance rates for anything when you lot are doing legitimately useful things for nothing?
• Snapchat Story Explorer: As the slightly undignified scramble to OWN SOCIAL NEWS continues apace (so ugly, really), Snapchat is launching another feature – a feature so new, and so US-only, that the sole piece of coverage I have seen on it is this truly appalling piece on Mashable, a website which has long been the yardstick for lazy, poorly-written tech ‘journalism’, but which has of late actually surpassed itself when it comes to the sheer horror of its prose (thanks, Mashable!). Basically this is me apologising for the fact that, as a result of this, it’s actually pretty hard to find out exactly how it actually works or what it is going to do when it is rolled out wider than just LA & NYC (the two cities it’s launched in) – basically, though, it’s going to aggregate Snaps in a sort of ‘BREAKING NEWS!’ format for your city. Here’s the spiel, in case you care enough to read it: “…will offer users a closer look at significant events in their city as they happen, via the city’s Live Story. Snapchat is rolling the feature out to New York City and Los Angeles at first, but says it will make it available in more cities “very soon.” When browsing a Live Story for either city, you’ll see a new “Explore” tab at the bottom of certain Snaps. Swipe up and you’ll be able to see more Snaps about the same event.The goal, the company says, is to allow users to see breaking news and other important moments from more perspectives.” So there. 
• Choose Your Own Adventure Vines: I think that this is a rather nice twist on the standard CYOA Twitter game which we’ve all seen rather a lot of and are probably a touch bored by (although it IS about football, for which apologies). As is this, too, by Azeem Anzhar and experimenting with the use of Twitter polls as a mechanic for filtering people through the story. Have a play, they are fun. 
• Spotify Thanksgiving: I’m largely ignoring Thanksgiving stuff because, well, America has managed to foist Hallowe’en hysteria on us, and Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, and a whole host of other things, and I am buggered if I am going to be complicit in making their sodding festival of candied yams (THAT IS NOT AN ACTUAL FOODSTUFF, I AM SORRY) a ‘thing’ here too, but I rather liked this and so am breaking my own embargo. A really nice little idea from Spotify – input the weight of your turkey, select your preferred genre, and Spotify churns out a playlist designed to match the ideal cooking time for the bird. Sort of like the cooking playlists from last week, there’s a lot of ‘inspiration’ potential here, I think. 
• Target Does Star Wars: Can Star Wars please fcuk off? Eh? Oh. Fine. This is sweatshop retailer Target’s own attempt to get in with the BUZZ, included mainly because it is sort of pretty – OOH LOOK AT THE LOVELY FLOATING STAR WARS FACES! – and because of its utter pointlessness. Visit the site, express your preference for a particular moment / character from the Star Wars mythos, claim your place in the star system where your anodyne little message (“I LOVE BOBA FETT LOL!”) will live forever…I mean, yes, fine, it’s nice to look at, but WHY IS IT THERE? My favourite sort of poignant part is that all of these pathetic little thoughts have a ‘share’ functionality built-in, so you can spread your “I LOVE BOBA FETT LOL” message to all your friends, who will doubtless be thrilled. A wonderful example of some obviously talented internet makers phoning it in really hard. Oh, and look, here’s exactly the same thing but done for the new Halo game. Can you all stop making these, please? 
• Content Marketing Guidelines 2016: Included solely because a) it’s about TRENDS!; and b) it purports to be a guide to content marketing (can we stop using that phrase now? Thanks) with all sorts of useful tips and tricks and hints and trends, but it then just talks about companies doing content who have access to stuff that people actually like and are interested in already (sport, food, fashion, etc). GYAC GUYS THESE PEOPLE DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE CONTENT THING SO MUCH; WHY NOT FOCUS ON THE POOR BASTARDS WORKING FOR A MAJOR INSURANCE COMPANY OR SOMETHING? What’s that? Because noone in their right mind is ever going to want to consume ‘content’ from a major insurance company, however many ‘tips and tricks’ slideshows marketers may read? Ah, right, ok. Can everyone stop filling the web with branded sh1t, please? PLEASE?

HOW ABOUT A RATHER GOOD TECH-HOUSE MIX BY DAN T TO CONTINUE?

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK HAS BEEN INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT EVERYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING AT THE MOMENT IS GOING TO APPEAR ON ONE OF THOSE ‘STEPS WE TOOK TOWARDS APOCALYPSE’ TIMELINES IN TEXTBOOKS IN A FEW YEARS’ TIME AND WHICH IS A TOUCH TROUBLED ABOUT IT IF IT’S HONEST, PT.1:

• Netspeak: I was slightly blown away by this; it is VERY clever. Netspeak is a sort of online…er…pseudothesaurus-y thing with knobs on, which effectively helps you find words for any occasion using a very, very clever and surprisingly flexible Googl-style interface. type in a phrase with ‘?’ characters where you want word suggestions and the site will spit out a raft of potential linguistic solutions – along with usage examples, frequency data, all sorts of stuff. As a tool for helping people learn English this seems SUPER-useful, and it’s actually quite fun to play around with if you’re a bit of a word-obsessive.

• Thanksgiving For Syria: Yes, ok, fine, it’s ANOTHER Thanksgiving link, but. This one lets you tell it what you’re cooking for Thanksgiving and how many people you are cooking for, and then gives you a nice per-person donation figure that you can donate to assist the Syrian people through what it’s fair to describe as a somewhat trying time (OR IS IT??? That was some pretty heavy foreshadowing, for those of you immune to this sort of stylistic horrortick). Suggest someone do something similar for Christmas, please, but with a choice of charitable cause.

• Voter: As we labour through one of the more morally and politically ambiguous periods in the history of international relations, and as we struggle to make sense of the various positions being held by our elected leaders, are we not all crying out for a better way of making sense of this crazy, messed-up world? We are, right? What we need is TINDER BUT FOR POLITICS! Yes, that’s right, Voter uses the Tinder-style left/right swipe to let users indicate their support or disdain for a variety of policies, eventually spitting out a recommendation as to who they should vote for based on their preferences. Actually, this is just a slicker and more cosmetic variant of the old-style ‘political compass’ toys, so I’m just being a bit reactionary in my disdain for it (though expect me to get all upset about it again when it expands to the UK).

• This Is Miles: I don’t know who Miles is, or who his dad is (it’s not going to be a woman who made this, is it? This is a total father’s vanity project), but this is a 3d scan of him on the internet to celebrate the fact that he exists. I think that everyone should have one of these done for them – I would like us all to have a website which collects scans of us at various points in our life, please, to exist in perpetuity.

• The Raspberry Pi Zero: Chances are that if you’re reading this then you’re probably already well aware of the AMAZING news that they are now selling an actual computer for about £5. There is literally NO excuse for not getting one for your kids to mess around with – seriously, the pricepoint and size and weight make this latest iteration of the Pi series an almost must-own for anyone who wants to apply a little bit of creativity to their computing.

• The Poco Supercomputer: In what is possibly a slightly pre-emptive bout of predictory hubris, I am calling this as vaporware RIGHT NOW. Ok, so it has a semi-famous behind it (one of the Sinclair dynasty, a heritage amusingly referenced on the crowdfunding page with notes on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the watches, the stereos, but not, sadly, the C5. WHY YOU NO MENTION THE C5, GRANT??), but the promise looks FAR too good to be true – a Rasberry Pi-powered minisupercomputer which does games and photos and 18x better than MP3 music playback…I mean, this is NEVER going to exist. Until it does, obviously, and I am forced to eat my words. Tasty, tasty words.

• The Museum of Online Museums: All of the links to all of the museums on the internet (oh, ok, not ALL of them, but a shedload and frankly you’re not going to click on all the links because I know you’re lazy like that so what does it matter, eh? EH????).

• Old Maps: A website containing all of the links to all of the old maps on the internet (may not in fact be ALL of the old maps on the internet, but it’s not like you’re going to now go and check so frankly it might as well be you dreadful pedant).

• Urthecast: RIGHT NOW, the international space station is zooming around overhead, snapping pictures of everything and everyone (but not in a creepy way, honest) and generally being all amazing and future. Urthecast is the online portal for the ISS’s camera, through which you can see a pretty amazing gallery of spaceshots of earth as well as playing with the API which opens up all sorts of fun possibilities of hacks you can pull together using this awesome photography. I’d really like the ability to get a photo from space on my phone of wherever I am standing RIGHT NOW, for example, pointless as that might be. I’m sure you have better ideas, what with you being all CREATIVE and stuff.

• Spotificator: With Rdio shuffling off to the great online graveyard in the Cloud, there’s probably a need for this service – Spotificator will export your playlist from Rdio and Deezer (do they know something we don’t about its likely longevity) and punt it into Spotify. Useful.

• TemplateMaker: If you, unlike me, are the sort of nice person who actually bothers to wrap presents nicely rather than just getting some old newspaper and making some sort of sellotape-enabled mummy out of whatever old tat you’ve bought someone, then you might quite like this website – tell it the dimensions of your gift and it will produce a printable, downloadable box template to fit it. Might distract the recipient from the fact that you’ve bought them something painfully generic and anodyne because you don’t care about them enough to think about their actual desires.

• Would You Rather…?: Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly? Would you rather know when or how you are going to die? Would you rather leave your home and family forever in the attempt to find a better life, or stay put and hope that you aren’t imprisoned and tortured by a corrupt regime? A rather nice mechanic to raise awareness and funds to help prevent human trafficking – clever, and another example of a site which tricks you into caring by misrepresenting itself, which after last week’s North Korea-LOLs I am now officially calling a THING.

• Google Streetview in Jordan: I realise that saying stuff like this is pretty much demanding a slow handclap and the world’s smallest violin sonata, but I had one of the worst holidays of my entire life in Jordan about 9 years ago – it was WELL TRAGIC, mate, and included getting caught in an actual, proper blizzard whilst attempting to get a look at the awesome place from Indiana Jones. Anyway, I spent a few minutes earlier this week looking at it all again on Google Streetview’s new exciting JordanViewer and it made all the horrible memories come flooding back – THANKS,GOOGLE!

• The Jules Verne Tropy LIVE: LIVE map showing progress in the slightly mental round-the-world boat race. Admittedly the nature of round the world boat racing means that the map isn’t all that dynamic, but points for effort and all that. Note to developers – some things, perhaps, don’t lend themselves to the LIVE thing quite so much.

• Terrifyingly Realistic Celebrity Tie-in Dolls: You know how whenever a famous gets cast in a franchise these days they have at least one stop on the interview junket circuit where a presenter will pull out the hilariously dead-eyed representation of said famous from the film’s cash-in toy range for some lazy LOLs? Meet Noel Cruz, an artist who takes those dolls and through what I think can only be dark voodoo remodels them so that they look like their actual famous counterparts. On the offchance that any researchers for Jonathan Ross / Graham Norton read this, commission him to do one for a guest and get a good 10 minutes of chummy BANTZ out of the whole thing.

• Forecast Lines: A lovely little weathersite, which not only tells you what the weather is like and what it is going to be, but which does so through a gently beautiful linear visualisation of how that is going to vary over the coming hours. Simple but really nice.

• Tilt-shifted Space: You remember tilt-shift photography, right? That technique that was really popular about 5 years ago which made everything in a picture look like it was a tiny little model version of itself? This is that, applied to photos of space, which makes nebulae look like weird splashes of paint in water and is a generally wondrous effect. Gorgeous, these.

• Mancan: This week’s example of a brand going hard on the ‘no publicity isbad publicity!’ front is ManCan – WINE IN A CAN FOR MEN! Because NO MAN could possibly drink wine in a bar from a glass – that would be ruinous to their masculinity, and lead to all sorts of not-so-gentle ribbing from THE LADS – society has seen fit to invent wine in a can, for REAL MEN. And tramps, probably. Is there anyone else who thinks that this feels a little bit like Richard Littlejohn continually going on about the homosexual practices he purports to be so disgusted by (ie trying a little too hard to assert one’s machismo)?

• Telepromptor: Free teleprompter kit from this website, which may well be used to those of you less comfortable with public speaking or presenting but which I am including mainly so that you can all spend the afternoon using it to script workplace conversations in the style of a political press conference.

• Bongolicious: Included solely because the URL made me laugh in a childish and prolonged fashion.

• Pokemon or Big Data: Literally no idea at all what the demographic crossover between data people and Pokemon fans is, but just in case.

By Paolo Porto

BACK TO COLDCUT NOW WITH THE FIRST HOUR OF THEIR ‘TWO HOURS OF SANITY’ MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK HAS BEEN INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT EVERYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING AT THE MOMENT IS GOING TO APPEAR ON ONE OF THOSE ‘STEPS WE TOOK TOWARDS APOCALYPSE’ TIMELINES IN TEXTBOOKS IN A FEW YEARS’ TIME AND WHICH IS A TOUCH TROUBLED ABOUT IT IF IT’S HONEST, PT.2:

• Unmade: Unmade is a London-based clothing startup which sells clothing whose patterns you can choose and warp using their LOVELY web interface. I can’t stress enough how much I like this website and the idea of being able to apply / shift your own pattern onto the clothes; it uses the same sort of basic interface as an Oreos promo I linked to the other week, but to lovely commercial effect. I am too ugly and unfashionable to wear any of the clothes, of course, but perhaps you are a beautiful clothes horse with glass-cutting cheekbones and posture to die for, rather than a pasty, hunched webmong with ragged cuticles and incipient male-pattern baldness. I really hope you are, to be honest, because the alternative’s pretty bleak, let me tell you.

• DigitTatts: This is a proof-of-concept video rather than an actual thing, but all sorts of amazing still – these are electric ‘tattoos’ (made from conductive ink and circuitry) which, the idea is, could be applied on an annual basis to allow for the monitoring of certain health indicators on an ongoing basis, removing / reducing the need for patient / doctor interaction. SO FUTURE! I mean, obviously there’s a whole load of questions as yet unanswered about, you know, showering with these things and stuff, but still.

• The Case Study Club: One for the designers, a lovely selection of case studies to browse through and STEAL THE IDEAS OF.

• TypeMedia: TypeMedia is a Masters programe in typography which takes place in the Hague – this is a website collecting the outputs of this year’s students, original typeface families created specifically for the course. If you are into fonts and things, you will very much enjoy these. The one called ‘Emil’ is particularly lovely, I think.

• VR-Enabling iPhone Case: Yes, I know that that’s an ugly descriptor, but the thing’s called ‘Figment’ which is just silly. Anyway, this is a smartphone case which has beaten its Kickstarter target with over a month to go – the gimmick is that it has a flip-out viewer attachment which you can use to enable VR-type stuff through your phone. Designed for those of you who think Google Cardboard just looks a touch too povvo.

• Addressage: A really interesting idea which will NEVER catch on, Addressage takes the same basic principle as that other website whose name I have temporarily forgotten and which applies a unique three-word descriptor to every single 5m square patch of land on earth (oh, this one) and gives an ‘inbox’ to every single address on the planet – the idea being that, if everyone uses it, you can send a message to anyone you like as long as you know where they live. Which, obviously, is a pretty terrible idea if you’re a woman. THANKS, MEN!

• Readbug: Spotify for magazines, basically, but a really good resource if you’re the sort of person who likes occasionally dipping into hipster rags such as ‘Oh Comely’ and the like. My mate Paul once went into Smiths and complained, loudly and angrily, that there were “too many magazines on the shelves” – he was right, there are.

• The iHit: Have you ever wanted a smartphone case which has a hidden compartment in which you can store some pre-rolled spliffs? Hm, you are obviously 15, but OH GOOD!

• Millennial Insights: An auto-insight generator about Millennials. Which is sort of funny, but nowhere NEAR as good as the Thought Leadership one that my friends made and which I am going to plug here again because, well, I can.

• Peephole: This looks like a gag site, but it appears to be straight and so I will present it as such. Do you get frustrated at the lack of CONTENT at your fingertips as you are waiting for a webpage to load? Do you wish those dead 5 seconds could be filled with MORE STUFF? Then this Chrome extension is for you. Peephole basically shows you THINGS while your webpages are loading up – from Facebook statuses to news headlines. There’s actually quite a nice idea at the kernel of this – and perhaps an interesting ad-funding model, maybe – but it’s a little too shonkily made and presented to work here, I think. HARK AT THE CRITIC.

• Kiskiloszki: Annoyingly this is an Instagram feed rather than the Tumblr it ought to be, but this is a wonderful source of slightly odd classical art-inspired gifs.

• The Edit – Reply Yes: SUCH a clever idea – is anyone else doing this? The Edit is a service which offers you the chance to build a curated collection of classic vinyl, one step at a time. Sign up, and each day the service will send you a text with a suggestion as to a record to buy for your collection; simply reply ‘yes’ to purchase said record and to have it delivered to your house. SUCH a smart, low-friction sales idea I am amazed I haven’t seen it used before.

• Porcelain Figures With Insect Heads: I have no idea whether this is the sort of thing you might like, but it ought to be. Why WOULDN’T you want one of those porcelain figures like your grandmother used to have on her mantelpiece only with the friendly balloon-seller’s face replaced by that of, say, a praying mantis? NO REASON!

• The Cassini Photos: 11 years of space photography from the Cassini probe, presented in beautiful fashion on this rather lovely page from the Wall Street Journal. All the shots have been turned into short films, tracking the probe’s progress through space, which turns the otherworldly experience of looking at Saturn and her moons into footage reminiscent of the early days of silent movies. Which is a weirdly really cool, in case you were wondering.

• Darth Vader Everyday: Because it’s apparently against the law not to include something about St*r W*rs in every blog at the moment. This is Darth Vader, photographed being ordinary.

• Nailbot: Included mainly because it’s a masterclass in spin, this is a crowdfinding campaign for a nail art robot that will print designs onto fingernails in 5-seconds flat. It’s using two GREAT zeitgeisty hooks as part of its campaign – first, EMOJI FINGERNAIL PAINTINGS (fcuk’s sake), and second, TEACHING GIRLS ABOUT TECH! I mean, fcuk knows exactly how they figure that a shopping centre machine which prints a smiley face on your fingers is going to do for women in STEM, but fair play to them for the chutzpah here.

• Inside Russia’s Closed Cities: Quite remarkable photography of old, hidden Russian cities. From the descriptor: “Closed cities (known in Russia as ZATOs) were established in the Soviet Union from the 1940s to serve as nuclear weapon development or disposal sites, and were home to the navy and missile forces. These cities were not on any maps, had encrypted names and were called “mailboxes” by analogy with the classified institutes or secret manufacturing facilities situated in them. The residents were told not to mention their place of living, but to use the name of the nearest major city instead.” Weirdly beautiful.

• Faceparty: Interesting little app which lets users create four-panel collages of Gifs. Not sure how embeddable, etc, they are, but the potential aesthetic outputs are rather cool, I think. I particularly like the idea of being able to make standardised 4-panel gif comics in series. Can someone go and do a load of them please? Thanks.

• Banter Ventures: A VERY slick joke (it is a joke, right) lampooning VC culture here in London’s TECH CITY STARTUP MEGALOPOLIS. If you do anything startup-ish then you will find a lot to LOL at in here. Really nicely presented, and I particularly like how deep the rabbithole goes – there’s a lot of thought gone into the other sites and pages they’ve built around it.

• Rabbit: SUCH a clever idea, this one. Rabbit is a simple premise – so simple that I can’t believe it’s not been done before – whereby two users, on smartphone or desktop or any combination of devices, can screenshare to be able to watch a film, say, simultaneously. Lots of applications, and if this works slickly then this could be a very useful thing indeed. If you’re a parent who travels a lot, this could be a really nice way of doing bedtime stuff with your kids, say. Jesus, what an INCREDIBLY saccharine thought, sorry.

• Magic Transistor: One of the best online radio stations / playlist curators I have ever seen. This is honestly WONDERFUL, bookmark and enjoy.

• Blab: An interesting online video discussion platform, Blab lets 2-4 people have an on-camera chat, filmed with webcams and presented in a 2×2 grid of talking heads with attendant chat functionality and the rest. Potentially a really useful way of recording discussion shows, etc, as evidenced by the very high-profile guineapigs they’ve already had using it (Scoble! Er, Heidi Montag!).

• Shareable Readymades: Want to get someone a beautiful, 3d printed version of a classic Duchampian readymade? OH GOOD! Actually really nice gifts for art lovers, these.

• Headliner: God, the news, eh? Bleak! Sad! Lacking in LOLs! What would improve it, do you think? I KNOW! I KNOW! How about consuming the news not from an actual news outlet but instead through this app, which presents a bunch of people sharing their HOT TAKES on the news! Headliner lets anyone (seriously, anyone) record their own ‘funny’ takes on whatever news event they fancy, which can then be browsed, commented on, upvoted, etc, by other users. The creators obviously want this to become a breeding ground for comedians in training, but can you IMAGINE the dross you’ll wade through in the search for 30 seconds of genuine funny? Probably a GREAT place to find dreadful internet wannabes, mind.

• Behind The Scenes of Taxi Driver: Great collection of photographs. Man, Scorsese was COOL, eh? Bastard.

• Neural Talk And Walk: Brilliant and slightly jaw-dropping video showing what happens you take a laptop running visual recognition code out onto the streets of Amsterdam and ask it to tell you what it’s seeing. It’s almost cute in a weird way – like a little kid pointing out of the window of a moving car at everything they see. Also, though, proof that we are actually really not that far away from this being an ACTUAL THING – take a moment to think about what this will mean for surveillance culture and then have a little cry.

• Kaos Edge: Excellent and weird website which has apparently been created as a promo for Oneohtrix Point Never’s new album (see last week’s vids and quite a few other Curios for more of his stuff). It’s perfectly odd and VERY loud.

• Good Music: This is the website for Kanye’s record label, which as far as I can tell does nothing other than play a track on clicking which loops back to the beginning when you stop clicking. I LOVE IT.

• Holiday Christmas Music: Literally the only website you will need to drive at least one of your colleagues to the brink of homicide in the coming 4 weeks.

• Teleport: Is this really necessary? I mean, ordering a cab is PRETTY EASY, right? Anyway, Teleport makes it EVEN SIMPLER, by offering a one–click service to order a cab to take any of your friends to wherever you are right now, courtesy Uber. Is this a thing now – the elimination of even microfrictions from already simple webservices? GREAT, LET’S ALL LET OUR THINKING FACULTIES ATROPHY SOME MORE!

• Luna: Are YOU a witch or a werewolf? OF COURSE YOU’RE NOT, THAT STUFF IS MADE UP YOU IDIOT. Ahem. If you are, then this app about lunar calendars is probably quite useful.

• The Infocom Cabinet: If you are of a certain age, you will recall Infocom text adventures with a mix of fondness and very real horror (“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND “USE”????”) – this is a WONDERFUL archive of many of the design documents, etc, from the golden age of text adventure development, with notes and maps and all sorts of other things. Includes, wonderfully, all SORTS of stuff from the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, which is not only great for fans but is a wonderful insight into how these things were built in general (spoilers: apparently very haphazardly).

• Battlecoin: Play Bomberman online, win REAL BITCOIN! Tiny, tiny amounts of Bitcoin, but, you know, every little helps. Has only worked about 50% of the times I’ve tried it this week, but when it does it’s a lot of fun.

• The Realtime Map of Berlin Public Transport: Hypnotic. Look, there’s one for Vilnius too! WHERE IS OUR LONDON VERSION, TFL? Come on,sort it out please.

• Hire Peter: 100% the weirdest, most future thing I saw this week, Hire Peter isn’t, as far as I can tell, a joke, or indeed a tie-in to Amazon show Mr Robot as somone online speculated. It is, instead, an ACTUAL VIRTUAL LAWYER, who can notarise documents and fulfil base level legal functions, given legal validity (in the US only, as far as I can tell) through permanent Blockchain records. I can’t even BEGIN to get my head around this in terms of questions of personhood, the law, guarantees and recourse…I am boggling, EVERYWHERE. LOOK AT ME BOGGLE (my eyes are always like this, I’m afraid).

• Lovely Interactive Music Website Thingy #1: Beautiful interactive vid for this track by Livyatimin from…er…somewhere whose language I can’t readily identify, which lets you gaze around a gorgeous, monochrome landscape rendered in pointillist-ish wireframey minimalism and featuring some pretty sweet floating whale-type dolphin things. I’m really selling this, aren’t I? Sorry.

• Lovely Interactive Music Website Thingy #2: This, though, is WARPED. You have to try it  – you need a headshot of yourself to plug in, and a strong enough sense of self to not get too weirded out by what it subsequently does with your face. Go on, TRY IT!

• The Best Google Trends Timesink Of The Year: I lost HOURS to this this week. I hope you do too. A simple game which asks you to identify a particular search trend from Google, based on looking at its Google Trends graph. Is that searches for “miley cyrus” or “teen milf creampie”? WHAT EVEN IS THE DIFFERENCE? (NB there is, insofar as I have yet seen, nothing even vaguely rude in any of this, so feel free to play it at work with impunity).

By Crystal Morey

LET’S FINISH UP THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTION WITH ANOTHER RETRO MIX, THIS TIME BY THE PSYCHONAUTS FROM ‘96!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Relatable Pictures of a Tiny Whale: Small, cute pictures of a small pink whale. Sometimes it’s helpful to look at things like this.

• Suzie Q: Beautiful pen & ink illustrations of naked women (and some other things, but also lots of naked women).

• Fiver Fun: Nice idea, this – just a collection of fun stuff on Amazon UK available for under £5. Combine this with push notifications and the simple ‘text yes to buy this’ mechanic above and I reckon you have a GREAT and simple presentbuying hack.

• JSTOR: For those of you who have an inexplicable but real nostalgia for those days spent plagiarising other academics’ work in pursuit of a largely pointless MSc (was that just me? Oh).

• Sheila Ford: Sheila Ford is a Canadian artist who posts simple line portraits on her Tumblr, all of which are available for sale for $50. I really, really like the style of these – you might too.

• Bookshop Dogs: I met a bookshop owner this week whose dog has its own Twitter account. APPARENTLY THIS IS A THING NOW. Anyway, if you like dogs and bookshops then this might well please you to some degree.

• When You Work At A Museum: Anecdotes and frustrations of museum workers, in Tumblr form. People are IDIOTS, it turns out. WHO KNEW?

• What Are Millennials Doing?: Collecting bullshit statements and headlines about Millennials. Things I would like to see in an idealised version of 2016 – an absolute moratorium on the use of fcuking bullshit made-up terms like ‘millennial’.

• The Triumph of Postmodernism: Just a lovely collection of photos of postmodernist architecture, which is particularly useful if, like me, you weren’t 100% certain exactly what postmodern architecture was in the first place.

• Pundemonium: Illustrated puns. Silly, but if you don’t laugh at at least one of these then there is almost certainly dust where your soul should be.

• The Sisterhood of Females Ruined By Chris Evans: Occasionally I stumble across a corner of Tumblr fandom that is so joyously unabashed in its slightly pervy sexualisation of A N Other Hollywood star that I am slightly entranced. This is such a Tumblr  – some of the erotic fanfiction on here is GLORIOUS. Enjoy!

• The Last Message Received: This weeks dose of massive emofeels comes in the shape of this Tumblr, which collects the last messages received by people from A N Other person in their lives. Breakups, deaths, lost friendships, all are here collected in what is, as you’d expect, an occasionally intense set of textfragments.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH IF YOU ARE AFTER SOME READING RECOMMENDATIONS SUGGEST THAT YOU CHECK OUT THIS LIST OF 2015’S BEST BOOKS PICKED BY TYLER COWEN:

• 7 Things We Learned From Reading The ISIS Magazine: I don’t normally go to Cracked for political analysis and commentary, but this piece analysing what can bel learned by scrutinising IS’s own propaganda materials is legitimately fascinating, not least as it debunks that whole ‘Call them Daesh’ thing which I put in here last week (I say ‘debunks’ – as per with this conflict, noone actually appears to have the first idea about anything at all on this and seems to be making it up as they go along. RIGHT, DAVE?.

• Magical Thinking About IS: This week’s must-read thinkpiece about the horror is from the London Review of Books, where Adam Schatz cogently runs through a lot of the misconceptions and how we have arrived where we are. Again makes the point, as raised in the Esquire piece linked to last week and increasingly being taken up across the liberal left, that we need to look at the region as a whole for responsibility for the rise of the bastardy.

• A Trip To The Caliphate: It’s quite hard to know what to make of this – on the one hand, I’m sort of automatically inclined to dismiss it as IS propaganda; on the other, why shouldn’t it be true? The piece, from Syria Comment, paints a picture of life inside the caliphate which is far from the tyrannical horror we might imagine, and suggests that the refugees we’re seeing streaming from Syria aren’t in fact running from IS at all. No idea WHAT to think here, but it adds an interesting spin to the general ‘Clash of Civilisations’ narrative.

• The Gruesome Tale of the Galapagos: This is a film or novel waiting to happen – the crazy story of the first people to colonise the Galapagos islands, and how basically they were all MENTAL. If you’ve been yearning for a good tale of snobbery, murder, madness, disease, conspiracy, minor aristocracy and madness then this will be all of your Christmases come early – seriously, if you’re after some writing inspiration then this story has everything.

• The Women Of Hollywood: A great, if depressing, New York Times piece interviewing a variety of Hollywood’s most high-profile and successful women about the fact that the whole movie industry still seems to treat their gender as some sort of weird novelty whose sole purpose is to cry, bankroll Jennifer Aniston’s film career and provide breasts for blockbusters. Not brilliant for maintining a positive worldview about gender politics, mind.

• How Nike Sold Us Air: Fascinating history of the Air Max trainer, and proof (admittedly 20 years too late, but still) that I was RIGHT in the playground when I said that the air bubble didn’t do anything and that everyone who bought them was a gullible idiot and which sort of makes it ok that everyone made fun of me for having significantly less cool trainers than that. Oh, who am I kidding, the scars have NEVER HEALED. Parents – buy your kids whatever they need to fit in, lest they turn into the sort of pathetic misanthrope who is forced to read all of the internet every week in some sort of desperate, doomed search for personal and professional validation.

• The Upsides Of Being 25 And Having A Crapsack: The author’s term, not mine – ‘crapsack’ refers to a colostomy bag, which the 25 year old author will shortly be fitted with and which she will have to wear for the foreseeable future. The funniest set of observations you are likely to read this week about having to carry your fecal matter around with you in a small bag at all times, the line about looking someone right in the eyes while defecating made me laugh and wince in almost equal measure.

• Can Women Build A Better Tinder?: You’ll be unsurprised to learn that this piece doesn’t actually answer that question, but it’s an interesting look at the world of female-focused dating apps. It also contains a lot of stuff about how most dating apps and services are designed to meet very particular male needs, which is an interesting perspective that I as a man had obviously NEVER thought about. I realised the other day that the fact that I have never used a dating app or website or anything actually makes me pretty anomalous in 2015, which is pretty much the direct opposite of a decade ago.ODD.

• On Who Framed Roger Rabbit: God I love this film. Roger is 20 years old this year, and if you’ve not seen it recently I urge you to revisit it – it’s still charming and funny and the techniques used to splice Bugs and Donald et al into shot with Hoskins actually all stand up surprisingly well after all this time. This is a comprehensive look at pretty much all aspects of the film, including an interesting set of diversions on the gender politics of Jessica Rabbit (a sentence I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have expected to write) – go on, read this and then watch it this weekend, it will make your life better.

• NinjaTune at 25: When I was 17, Ninja Tune was probably the coolest label on the planet. I religiously spunked my grant money (yes, I am THAT OLD) on their compilation CDs, got ruinously stoned and went and shuffled to DJ Krush’s live sets at Dry Bar, made my mum listen to Funki Porcini, much to her tolerant bemusement…I was an irritating prick. Anyway, you don’t care about any of that – if you too, though, were a Ninja fan BITD then you will very much enjoy this 25 year lookback at the label and the people behind it (Coldcut, basically). Also, there’s a new Coldcut album in the works, for which REJOICE.

• The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art: The best art collection you have never seen or heard of resides, apparently, in Tehran. Another interesting perspective on Islam’s relationship with Western culture when you consider the amount of column inches which have been devoted to examining the East’s supposed issues with Western culture.

• Your Social Media Posts Are Fueling Police Surveillance: Creepiest piece of the week. You think that you need the NSA or GCHQ to be able to see what everyone’s doing? NOPE! I had no idea that companies like Geofeedia existed – they effectively provide geodashboards for law enforcement professionals to monitor everything that’s being posted from a certain physical radius – but now that I do I for one WELCOME the increased security that I know this sort of intelligence can provide!

• The Problem With R Kelly: With thanks to Rich for the tipoff on this, proof if any more were needed that R Kelly is absolutely the creepiest man in music at the moment – or at least the creepiest man in music who unaccountably doesn’t seem to need to pretend that he’s anything other than a massively predatory sex criminal (COME ON R KELLY LET’S SETTLE THIS OUT OF COURT I COULD DO WITH THE MONEY TBH). Noone ever mentions the Aaliyah thing anymore, but HE MARRIED HER WHEN SHE WAS 15. Crazy, and pretty skincrawly on all counts.

• Driving In Greater Noida: One of the top three pieces of writing in here this week, this is a wonderful essay in Granta about the Greater Noida suburb of New Delhi, which is both a picture of urban India I’d not seen before and also THE most Ballardian piece of writing I have read in ages. Superb on the sense of place/no-place engendered by the sort of megacity development which you see so much of outside the UK.

• David Beckham – The Sexiest Man Alive: I was in stitches reading this. Reimagining People’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ poll as some sort of dystopian coronation of horror, this is SO GOOD.

• Dialed Up: Last up, a truly excellent scifi short story imagining a world in which we all take smart drugs to cope with LIFE and WORK and STUFF. Just on the edge of near plausibility, and all the better for it, this is very good indeed.

By Jeffrey De Keyser

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, WHICH THIS WEEK OFFER AS A BONUS THE TRAILER FOR THE CHINESE TUPAC BIOPIC YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEEDED!

1) First up, Rube Goldbergish techno. No, wait, it’s REALLY GOOD, honest – I was expecting to hate it, but the gimmick really does work:

2) Do you remember amongst all the Deep Dream stuff a couple of months ago there was a program which took photos and displayed them in the style of various artists using neural networks? No? Oh. Anyway, this video, to a rather gentle breakbeat soundtrack, does that with video. The results are rather beatiful, I think:

3) This is a short film called ‘Hide’, which shows money decaying in ultracloseupslowmo. I am sure there’s a lot of DEEP STUFF here about capitalism and things if you care to look for it, but I just rather like the imagery which is sort of bleakly hypnotic in its own special way:

4) This is called ‘Borrowing’ and it is by Thomas Rosenthal and it is BEAUTIFUL. What a voice:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! I didn’t think much of this brag track by Stormzy on first listen, but it grew on me LOTS. You will like it, honest – it’s called Standard:

6) Fair warning – this is a DREADFUL song, but the papercraft animation is lovely. Hang on, I think it’s dreadful but maybe I’m just old. Can someone who’s not tell me if I’m right? Thanks. It’s by the laughably named Kill The Noise and it’s called, equally laughably, “Kill It 4 The Kids” (their ‘4’ there – so cool!):  

7) I really, really like this CGI what with all the SKIN and stuff. It’s called Diffusion:

8) Finally this week, this is an OLD song, but I am having some big nostalgia kick this week and the video is BRAND NEW and very very cool indeed, and, let’s be honest, EVERYONE loves Born Slippy. See you in a couple of weeks; try not to die: