By Matthias Heiderich

SHALL WE KICK OFF THE WEEK WITH A BIG SQUELCHY ELECTROHOUSE MIX? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT PRETTY MUCH NONE OF THE 1.55BILLION FACEBOOK USERS WORLDWIDE CARE ABOUT YOUR EXPENSIVELY-PRODUCED BRANDED CONTENT:

• Those Numbers: 1.55billion is a LOT of humans, so WELL DONE Mark et al. All the Facebook numbers this week were pretty terrifyingly impressive, to be honest, and only serve to reinforce the fact that, whatever you might think about the platform, it’s not going away as an advertising necessity anytime soon. Just remember that the 1.55billion figure means nothing other than ‘that is how many people you can now advertise to’ – it is still VITAL to recall that absolutely none of them want to be ‘friends’ with a bank, or share BRANDED MOMENTS OF TRUTH with you. Sorry about that. 
• Better Local Facebook Ads in the UK: Interesting in particular for larger retailers, this, the announcement delivers a pretty significant upgrade to large companies’ ability to do all sorts of clever things with local ads nationwide – like autopopulating store contact details at a local level for ads bought nationally, changing copy based on target location, that sort of thing. Analytics are also improved, and will now show you Facebook user traffic around your physical location, broken down by day and time, so you can see exactly what the best time is to FIRE ADVERTS AT THEIR EXPECTANT FACES (clue: it is always a good time. Always. The advertising must never stop). 
• Facebook Detailed Ad Targeting Launches: I may potentially have missed this the other week, sorry. Basically there have been some tweaks to the Facebook Ads Power Editor which mean that you can do smarter targeting with more Boolean-type structure – so you can now choose to target not only middle-aged men who like Star Wars and LEGO and anime, but also to specify that they also be into erotic anime AND single (lazy ‘humour’? Yes, ok, fine, sorry. It’s effectively giving you AND, OR, and AND NOT qualifiers, which is useful. 
• Facebook Launches Music Stories: Noone’s really managed to nail the ‘integrate music with social’ thing yet; I’m sure analysts are having all sorts of opinions about whether this will help Facebook crack it, so if you want to read a whole load of speculation about that sort of thing I invite you to Google yourself silly. Anyway, this is basic functionality which lets users of Spotify or Apple Music share what they they are listening to at the moment; this cues up a 30-second preview of the song or album in the Newsfeed, playable through Facebook, with the option to click through and listen to the whole thing or buy / download the music in question. Bound to be an audio ad unit in this somewhere soon, no?
• All The Facebook AI Stuff: Facebook is going to be the Starbucks of the scifi future, isn’t it? Unavoidable, ubiquitous and just a bit rubbish. Anyway, this is all the scarily future stuff that they are working on at the moment – image recognition, AI systems, etc. Personally speaking, I found their slightly blithe announcement about their GO-bot the most interesting; GO is famously one of the few games in which AIs still don’t tend to do as well as people, I think, and for them to say as a throwaway “Oh, we knocked this one out a few months ago and it’s already as good as the best ones out there and it’s still learning” is the sort of FORESHADOWING that you’d kick yourself for not noticing in the first act of the dystopian scifi film of legend. 
• You Can No Longer Say You Are ‘Maybe’ Going To An Event: So there. 
• Instagram Launches Curated Video Stream: I wrote something earlier this year about how tedious it was that all the bloody platforms were converging to the point where they all do basically the same thing for marginally different audiences – this trend continues apace with the announcement that Instagram’s basically rolling out something which is quite a lot like Twitter Moments or Snapchat Discover. It’s only been done in the US so far, and only over Hallowe’en weekend, but it’s going to go global soon and this will OBVIOUSLY be a paid channel so watch this space for EXCITING ADVERMARKETING OPPORTUNITIES!
• All The Materials From Twitter’s Developer Conference: If you’re a developer-type person, this is worth a look – all of the talks from the recent Flight event. If you’re not, ONWARDS!
• The Bloody Heart / Star Thing: I know, I know, complaining that people are spending too much time focusing on a trivial issue on the internet rather than spending their time talking about WEIGHTY ISSUES and making the world a better place is stupid and annoying and futile. I know this. Still, though, the amount of space and time dedicated to people debating the cultural significance of an icon change was preposterous – REALLY? NOTHING BETTER TO DO/SAY? Christ alive. Anyway, in case you did have better or more important things to do, the ‘Fav’ button on Twitter, used either as a bookmark or a gentle ‘yes, well done’, or a slightly ironic ‘WEVS’, or indeed in a host of other ways, has been replaced by a heart icon and renamed a ‘Like’. Which, yes, is weirdly retrograde seeing as Facebook has just about realised that that’s a very blunt way of interacting with a story, and does potentially alter the UX of the platform slightly, but probably didn’t need all the WORDS around it which I am just adding to so let’s stop there shall we? Yes we shall. Oh, you can apparently change the hearts to any emoji you like with a bit of tinkering – here’s a Chrome extension which turns the icon into a bottom.
• Twitter’s Public Policy Transparency Page: Quite interesting move, this – a page on which Twitter is laying out its political donations, etc, in the US, which is pleasingly transparent, as well as its policies on privacy, user safety and security and the rest. It would be nice to see this sort of thing as standard. 
• Snapchat Does First Sponsored Lens Thing: The Snapchat lenses – you know, the filters that let you puke rainbows out of your face and stuff on Snapchat – are also obviously going to be an ad product. And lo, it came to pass that the marketing spend on the Peanuts film, which appears to be VAST even by the normal standards of Hollywood, has in part been spaffed on being the FIRST ones to do it – they ran a campaign over Hallowe’en in the US which let users overlay Peanuts-themed graphics on their videos. Christ knows why anyone would want to have a poorly-animated CGI Snoopy capering on their head in a video, but it seems they did. Like the really early rubbish days of AR (which, on reflection, are still here) – I also imagine that this was VIOLENTLY expensive, if Snapchat”s general ratecard is anything to go by. 
• The Really Confusing Snapchat Privacy Thing: The reporting around this was SO BAD over the weekend – they will steal all your photos!/they WON’T steal all your photos! – which if nothing else suggests that a) this really is a nadir for UK journalist (on which subject, this); and b) that their privacy policies really are clear as mud. FWIW, as I understood it their whole ‘we can use your images for whatever we like and will keep them for that purpose’ thing applies to stuff posted on the public channels (events, etc) rather than stuff sent peer-to-peer, but I have never sent a dickpic and so don’t really care tbh. 
• Buyable Pins Coming To Android: You want to sell stuff on Pinterest? This is a Good Thing for you, in that case.
• Google Launches VR Videos on YouTube For Android: That’s a sentence I would LOVE to see someone from the early 90s attempt to get their head around. Anyway, this is an upgrade to the Android YT app which enables it to play VR vids – enhanced 360 ones, basically – which means that Android users will also be able to enjoy the (apparently underwhelming) world of Google Cardboard. The fact that the NYT gave away shedloads of kits the other week will be interesting in terms of gauging mainstream(ish) appetite for this sort of thing; I’m not convinced anyone actually wants 3d video that much, but maybe I’m wrong. You can try out a load of the Times’ own efforts at VR reporting hre, should you so desire.
• Google Launches Terrifying Mind-Reading Email Software: Does the fact that Google have invented script which can REPLY TO YOUR EMAILS FOR YOU make you feel a little…well…unsettled? If not, WHY NOT? Am I the only person who upon reading this immediately leapt to a near-future in which brands couple pay a premium to have themselves inserted into scripted responses penned by an AI – “Yes, I will be there – just got to finish my LOVELY REFRESHING DIET COKE first”, etc? Hm, maybe I am becoming a touch paranoid. 
• Skype Sharing Buttons Announced: You can now add a ‘Share on Skype’ button to your content, which is actually a sensible idea which you should implement as of the now. 
• New Yorker Email Reminders: This is a really smart use of email, I think. The New Yorker, a magazine even its devotees concede can be a bit on the chunky side, is now pinging people an email when they leave an article halfway through, reminding them that they didn’t finish it and providing a link back to the bit they’d got up to. I should TOTALLY institute this for Curios, although by so doing I would get actual insight into the dropoff rates as the sodding thing goes on and on and on and on, so perhaps on reflection I might just not. 
• Tracking Offline Conversion In Google Analytics: This is just a smart and useful overview which you should probably look at if you fancy being able to demonstrate your professional worth beyond the standard ineffectual bleating about ‘engagement’ and ‘brand equity’ and stuff. 
• Save The Rainforest: A site for a Telethon campaign in (I think) Norway which is now finished but which allowed people to sponsor a section of rainforest, learn more about the area, etc etc. Included mainly because I really like both the navigation and the virtual parrots. More virtual parrots, please, on all websites.
• The Kooples’ Blackout App: I begrudgingly really like this idea, much as I’m nearly always of the ‘no, realy, you don’t need an app’ school of thought. Weirdly (to me) creepy and cult-like clothing retailer The Kooples has released this app designed for couples – the idea is that it’s a single user to single user interface which lets you share messages, pics, etc, with just one other person (your husband, mistress, etc), as well as tracking the amount of time you spend together, etc. I really wish that this had been an art project rather than a brand thing, but it’s not. Balls. BRANDS AS PATRONZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

By Ed van der Elsken

HOW ABOUT MOVING ON TO THE DARK AND SURREAL SOUNDS OF THE CHIPMUNKS ALL SLOWED DOWN, WHICH WEIRDLY ACTUALLY SOUND PRETTY COOL, HONEST? HERE!  

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SINCERELY THANK ITS MOST RECENT EMPLOYER FOR LETTING IT SPEND A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF THE DAY LOOKING AT THIS WEBSPAFF, AND WOULD LIKE TO MODESTLY SUGGEST IT’S OPEN TO OFFERS SHOULD ANYONE ELSE LIKE TO MAYBE DO THE SAME, PT.1:

• Vice Launches VICEland: Not, sad as it is to report, a VICE themepark (just IMAGINE! The centrifuge which replicates the sensation of being on an ayuhuasca binge with your Peruvian shaman! The acid party vortex! The hipster tattoo bar! They would be rolling in it, I tell you), but instead their own new 24h TV channel in the US, all Spike Jonze-endorsed and edgy and stuff. Someone I know just left MTV to join this, and she’s very smart and capable, so I don’t doubt it will succeed, but it will be interesting to see to what extend the already slightly watered-down VICE brand makes the transition to cable. Sorry, that was a bit MEDIA NEWS, wasn’t it? I’ll make the rest more frivolous, I promise.
• Purrcasts: The sound of cats, purring. I’m sure there’s a market for this but I am buggered if I know what it is; if you work for Pedigree Petfoods, though (and I’m sure some of you poor sods must) this is the sort of idiot gimmick you can totally rip off for momentary brand-LOLZ. What a world this is.
• FACEYOU!: I don’t know why, but the name of this makes me think of a slightly manic person shouting that phrase at you over and over again. Weird. Anyway, this is a faceswapping app by Baidu which lets you do live facemapped imageswapping with pretty much any image at all, which as you can imagine is SUPERCREEPY and actually sort of fun. Outside the gimmick, the tech actually seems rather robust and I can see this catching on amongst THE YOUTH.
• Popcorntime FREE: Popcorn time, the torrent streaming site which seemingly refuses to die, is BACK; no idea how long this is going to stay up, but you can stream a LOT of films in-browser here. Which, yes, is stealing, and I appreciate the absolute hypocrisy of being someone who expects to get paid for stuff like this whilst at the same time linking to a website which effectively advocates stealing from the mouths of hungry creatives. What can I say, I’m a complex and multifaceted individual and anyway, I wouldn’t link to this stuff if I didn’t know that deep down you WANT IT.
• Super-easy Image Sorter for Social: You want / need a site which lets you REALLY EASILY upload images, resize them for different social platforms, add captions, etc? OH GOOD! This is actually really very useful indeed, particularly if you want to make a job-lot of anodyne pictures with crap inspirational quotes on them, which if you work on social for Weight Watchers is, I think, what you must spend your whole day doing, you poor, poor creature you.
• Luma: If these work as well as they purport to, they could be SO useful. Luma is a wifi-boosting system for the home, basically, which advertises itself as being a simple, one-stop solution to the weird wifi blackspots which afflict every home. Not only do they boost signal, but they also double up as content blockers for individual devices – meaning they can do the whole ‘don’t let this phone get on Pornhub in this house thankyouverymuch’ thing – as well as adding its own additional layer of net security and the like. Pre-order only, but if they work then these do look rather good.
• Circle: Seeing as we’re doing home internet stuff, this is Circle by Disney – here’s the blurb, as I can’t be bothered to paraphrase: “Circle is a smart device and app that allows your family to manage all of your home’s connected devices. With Circle, parents can filter content, limit screen time and set a bedtime for every device in the home. Circle can even pause the Internet.” So there – outsource your parental discipline to the Mouse, why don’t you! Sorry, that’s unfair – I appreciate that sometimes you might want to just have some third party setting boundaries and limits to your sticky, jam-smeared progeny rather than having to deal with them yourselves.
• Surname Mapper: Map where people with your surname live, worldwide. There are fewer than 60,000 Muirs worldwide, it would seem, which momentarily made me feel somewhat endangered.
• Who’s Down?: This is basically ‘Netflix and Chill – The App’ from Google. I mean, ostensibly it’s a very simple and clever idea – you use the app to set your status as either being busy or being free for X amount of time (so, say, you can say you’re available for the next few hours); your other friends using the app can then see who’s around and who’s available to DO STUFF. Except I can’t see past this being used as a casual hookups thing, though maybe I’m wrong and it’s only going to be for trips to the bowling or somesuch. Yes, that’s probably it. It’s currently US-only and, interestingly, like early Facebook requires a school/college name to download, suggesting they’re being clever and trying to get a young install base before rolling it out. It’s actually a really smart concept, so let’s see if it works.
• The Poseable David: Michelangelo’s David, as a poseable toy. You’re restricted to buying three at a time, but I think you could probably do a roaring trade in these on eBay in a year or so’s time if you’re that sort of forward-thinking BUSINESS MAVEN.
• The Ginvent Calendar2015: I have previously spoken of my disdain for the whole “I LOVE GIN, ME!” trope which infects Twitter like some sort of twee AIDS; if you know one of those people, though, then this is probably a good gift for them (but after that maybe just step away and suggest that they take a good long look at themselves).
• The ProtoPiper: This just looks FUN; if I had kids it would be a terrifying ordeal which would be fundamentally damaging to everyone involved, but I would also really like to get them one of these to play with. It’s basically a sort of ersatz 3d-printing gun which lets you make sculpture-type things from loops of tape, and if you click on the link and you see the amazing dinosaur sculpture they made with it you’ll want one too. If you make stuff I can totally see how this would be amazingly useful for prototyping and the like.
• In The Crowd: I really, really like this. Simple but really useful website which flashes a variety of colours depending on the setting you select – the idea being that you can load it up on your phone and hold it up in a crowd so that your friends can see the flashing green phone in a sea of other digitards and come and find you. The sort of thing I can imagine being really helpful at festivals, and which I might think about co-opting into next season’s festival apps were I that sort of person.
• To Reddit: Site which lets you schedule Reddit posts and (sneakily) also lets you autodelete and repost them if they don’t get enough traction the first time. Actually useful if you want to do promotion across timezones, though I imagine exactly how well the Reddit community would react to advermarketingprtwats using this sort of stuff (WHERE’S THE AUTHENTICITY MAN???).
• Grammarly: Were I to rule the world, everything would be a total fcuking mess but the one small benefit would be that everyone would be forced to install this Chrome extension which automatically picks up when you make a grammatical error in your writing, wherever said writing might be taking place online. Basically like having a really annoying pedant prodding you ALL THE TIME, it’s actually pretty joyless but I can see it being useful if you’re trying to teach someone grammatical rigour (or if you just want to irritate someone a LOT).
• Get Close: Effectively providing a messaging-based customer service solution for small businesses, this is totally redundant as soon as Facebook Messenger gets its act together and rolls out its business-friendly functionality everywhere – until then, though, it might be worth checking out. You sign up as a business – users can then use the app to contact you with questions using the messenger interface. Simple, useful, and soon to be totally obsolete.
• MomentaryInk: This is a really, really good idea. Get your ideal tattoo designed, send it to these people and they’ll print you a temporary decal which you can use to see exactly how much of an idiot you’ll look with the Triforce stamped on your bicep (or something). Not supercheap, but much cheaper than both the tattoo and the eventual cost of removing it when you realise that having “Netflix and chill?” along with a winky face permanently branded on your calf isn’t funny now and certainly won’t be funny in 6 months’ time.
• Teforia: The note for this that I made for myself reads, simple, “tea-wats”, which isn’t in any way funny but which describes exactly how I feel about this £100+ TEA INFUSION SYSTEM which is basically designed to turn tea drinkers into the sort of crushing bores who wang on about coffee like it’s Proust and who have been responsible for the fact that it’s impossible to get an espresso in London which doesn’t in fact taste like licorice (this is a FACT, check it out – WHY CAN YOU NO LONGER GET DECENT ITALIAN-STYLE COFFEE IN THIS CITY??? I blame the Australians, personally). Ahem. I grudgingly accept that the website’s very nice, and the actual machine is pretty space-age, but REALLY, come on, you need a robot thingy to make a cup of tea now? Reading that sentence aloud in my head, I weirdly sounded like an old Jewish man. Oy!
• Earbud: If you like podcasts, this is a wonderful repository of some of the best, curated by NPR. Worth bookmarking if you need a regular new fix of this stuff.
• Plag: This is not a new concept – I’ve seen at least three things like this which work in a similar fashion over the last few years, none of which have ever got the sort of tractino which means I’ve ever heard of them again – but I still adore it as a sharing mechanic. Plag is a social network which works around physical proximity; users share CONTENT (sorry) which is distributed to users who are reasonably physically proximate to them; these users can, on viewing said content, swipe up to share it further with people near them, or swipe down to stop it from going anywhere. ACTUAL, REAL VIRAL FUNCTION! I think that there’s an excellent set of toys/games you can build around this idea – there’s an obvious chinese whispers-type application, for one – but I’m sure you can think of other applications. I would love to see this sort of thing added as a play-layer to other networks, not that it ever will. Anyway, try it, it’s quite fun I think.
• The $1m Hauly: You know in films when people are moving around large numbers of banknotes for potentially nefarious purposes and they’re all in these bags and it looks really SINISTER and SERIOUS? You ever wondered where you get those from? Here, it turns out – bags to hold upto $1million in CASHMONEY. Were they not 200-odd quid I’d totally want one, just for the ‘maybe one day’ thought.
• Parcl: Smart idea, this, designed to deal with the problem of seeing something cool online that you want to buy but then finding that it doesn’t ship internationally (I say ‘problem’…). You sign up to Parcl and use its network of people to forward you parcels across the world – you get your stuff, they get a small commission, everyone wins. Actually very clever indeed, and particularly useful as we approach the bloody season of bloody goodwill.
• Unnecessary Censorship: If one of you doesn’t steal this for an ad campaign I will be very, very disappointed indeed.
• Artistic Shower Curtains: Because I refuse to believe that none of you want to adorn your bathroom with a shower curtain depicting Munch’s ‘Scream’.
• The Emoji Keyboard: It’s not possible to show you the sneer on my face as I am typing this, but rest assured there’s a degree of lip-curl happening that Elvis in his pomp would have acknowledged with no little respect. Anyway, here you are, this is the communication technology we deserve – a keyboard which lets you easily add emoji to ANYTHING YOU WRITE. You will never have to bother with clear, unambiguous prose ever again, you lucky, lucky twats.
• Simple Politics: This is a great site – if you are curious about politics and policy but find its reporting confusing, tedious and / or depressing, this could be very useful indeed, breaking down as it does the main votes and issues du jour in simple, easy to navigate fashion. As they say, it’s not about gossip or opinion so much as fact as to the mechanics of the UK’s political process, in theory and in practice. Really very clear communications – I like this a LOT.
• Instasnoop: I don’t really use Instagram (is that allowed? I feel like a pariah) so not 100% certain how useful this is, but the gimmick is that it allows you to browse people’s profiles and pics with an interface which doesn’t let you like, regram, etc, any of the shots – so you can’t accidentally out your stalky tendencies by inadvertently clicking on something and alerting your stalkee to the fact that you were cranking over their bikini selfies again. I mean, do you all have really fat fingers?
• Paperhouse: No real idea how many of you are planning to design and build your own houses, but in case you are this is a GREAT database of open source architectural plans which you can browse to your heart’s content. Really rather good from a domestiporn point of view.

By Matthew Plummer-Fernandez

BACK TO HOUSE/TECHNO NOW, WITH A CHICAGO AFTER DARK MIX WHICH IS EXCELLENT FODDER IF YOU ARE GOING OUT LATER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SINCERELY THANK ITS MOST RECENT EMPLOYER FOR LETTING IT SPEND A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF THE DAY LOOKING AT THIS WEBSPAFF, AND WOULD LIKE TO MODESTLY SUGGEST IT’S OPEN TO OFFERS SHOULD ANYONE ELSE LIKE TO MAYBE DO THE SAME, PT.2:

• Shelfie: Lazy description for this one is ‘Shazam for books’, which is actually pretty accurate so I don’t feel too bad. You take a photo of your bookshelf – the app scans the spines and lets you know which of the titles you’re entitled to a free digital copy of, and lets you grab the files. Not 100% certain it works in the UK, but why not do my research for me and let me know? Thanks!

• Flowers of Meat: A thing in Japan, apparently, though I’ve long been of the opinion that Japanese media owners are mostly just making up weird shit to see what the Western media will blithely report as fact with not even the bare minimum of due diligence. Look forward to seeing a spread of these on Mail Online within the week.

• The Prankophone: Read this description and tell me you don’t want an app/website version of this: “the main principle of the object’s functioning is as follows: depending on the current mode, the apparatus calls to random or pre-defined recipients and plays them algorithmic melodies created from their phone numbers. The speakers transmit both the synthesized sounds and the sound from answering person. The common sound layer is involving a random recipient who doesn’t suspect anything. The person who answers the phone can’t hear any other sounds except for the synthesized ones.” See? Sounds GREAT.

• Go Elevator: An interesting idea, though one which I have a sneaking suspicion was inspired by some sort of geeky conversation along the lines of ‘man, imagine trying to put together a superhero team! wouldn’t it be great if they all came as a package from the start?’. Go Elevator lets colleagues advertise themselves for hire as a team, which is actually probably really useful for people in the ad industry who tend to come as a package in any case. This is the sort of feature I can totally see LinkedIn nicking in the next 12 months, maybe, possibly.

• Eternime Redux: A quick Google suggests that I first featured Eternime in February 2014 – over 18 months later, they have a short video describing how their tech’s evolving. In case you don’t recall (WTF is wrong with you? Alzheimer’s?), this is what I said at the time: “Eterni.me is (or, more accurately, aims to become) an extension of your online persona which will exist after your demise – taking cues from your social media profiles built up while you’re alive and creating an ‘AI’ (my inverted commas – it’s unclear what sort of ‘intelligence’ they’re aiming for here, or how Turing Test-y it will bet) from the posts you’ve made which can continue interacting with your loved ones and friends after you’re dead. So basically if you affect the persona of a double-figure-IQ moron online, expect that to be the version of you which persists into eternity online.” So there. NOw that there’s a video of the tech in the wild, I’m pretty confident in saying that this is going to stay vaporware for a long time – this is far, far too uncanny valley creepy for anyone to want to have anything to do with at present, and the AI tech is still so far from being able to deliver anything other than a very stilted simulacrum of personality. They obviously read Neuromancer and thought ‘Hm, the Count’s construct; interesting idea, let’s make it real’, but I’m not expecting my Gibsonian future to arrive just yet.

• Amsterdam Prive’: Photos of Amsterdam’s ‘sexy’ nightlife in 1979/80. As anyone who’s ever visited Amsterdam can attest, there’s not really anything sexy about it at all, but there are some VERY GOOD fcuked faces in this collection, as well as some penises.

• 100 Paintings: A lovely project, taking 100 paintings which have been divided into 5 ‘layers’ each; this website recombines these layers at random, resulting in a collection of around 9billion randomly generated new works, each available as a download. The only thing which could make this better, I think, would be to make the works available for sale – I love the idea of each being a unique original which will only ever exist in the real world once. Can someone make that, please? Ta.

• Kibo: This week’s ‘Well this is obviously only going to be used for totally above-board purposes, honest’ app comes in the form of Kibo, an app which adds a layer to messenger conversations which allows for the transmission of hidden messages between two users. You type the message you really want to send, then hit a button – Kibo then creates some anodyne message along the lines of ‘Yep, great!’ and sends that in chat, the gimmick being that the intended recipient, who also has Kibo, can tap the message and see the ILLICIT COMMUNICATION that was in fact the real message. Great for people conducting affairs and THROWING SHADE, probably, though I quite like the idea of turning it into a game in some small way (no idea how, not going to think about it any more, really quite tired now).

• 1995 Regi: A brilliant Instagram account which is effectively telling a comicbook story via the medium of drawings designed to look like the sorts of things the main character would post to Instagram were she a real woman. I love this conceit SO MUCH, not to mention that the art style is fantastic. I also adore the way in which the comments on the pictures contribute to the story – brands looking at how to do ‘storytelling’ on the platform, look at this and LEARN (and then ignore it all in favour of shoving your brandspaff down our gullets like you always do).

• Logiplaces: I WANT THIS SO MUCH. Crowdfunding campaign for these gorgeous-looking minimal 3d jigsawsculptures of cityscapes and natural landscapes around the world – they’re quite hard to describe, or at least they are for me, so I suggest that you click the link and check them out and back them and then go to the poll on the site and ask them to do London next because HOW cool would that be? Seriously, if you’re a designer-y type person you will love this, guaranteed (not actually guaranteed).

• Collectible Home Computer Cards: A now-funded Kickstarter for a set of trading cards all about old home computers, which I ordinarily wouldn’t bother with but, you know, it’s nearly Christmas, and I am pretty confident that I know my readership pretty well by now and that there will be several middle-aged men out there for whom this ticks all sorts of boxes. Go on, don’t be ashamed.

• Twitch In The Shell: So geeky that it’s pretty much entirely beyond me, this is the Twitch community attempting to collectively install Arch Linux, an operating system whose installation process is famously unfriendly and which therefore should take approximately 7 years to complete based on the mechanics, which are the same as the previous ‘Twitch Plays….’ series of experiments. Seriously, if none of the above meant anything to you then don’t click the link, it will just confuse and possibly depress you.

• Operator: ANOTHER concierge service, this one which works via a simple in-app messaging system and lets you ask a series of ‘experts’ for their advice on products, services, restaurants, etc etc…except that the service is free, you don’t pay any premiums, and the ‘experts’ are paid from money paid by brands who want their stuff recommended. So effectively it’s not so much a concierge service as one which lets you ask a bunch of faceless strangers ‘so, what stuff are you being paid to promote today, then?’, which sounds rubbish tbh.

• The Monster Project: This made me quite annoyed. Last week IKEA got lots of press for doing a stunt where they made real toys from kids’ drawings – a service which has been available from a small shop online for YEARS, but which got nary a mention. Now this Kickstarter project, through which a bunch of artists are asking for money to do the same thing but by taking kids drawings and turning them into cool, high-quality artworks reinterpreted by ‘proper’ artists. Which is EXACTLY what The Monster Engine by David Devries has been doing for a decade or so. DeVries doesn’t seem to be involved with this, but at no point does it acknowledge that it rips him off wholesale. Gits, don’t give them any money.

• Serendipity: OH I LOVE THIS. Once a month you will get paired with a random stranger over email. No more, no less. THE FUN! Ostensibly there’s some buillshit rationale about it being a good way to network, but ignore that and just think of it as a way of potentially meeting interesting new webmongs to be friends with. There’s a brandsteal opportunity here should you want to take it, I think.

• Pastcards: Interesting idea, this – you give it access to your Instagram feed, and each month (for a small fee, £3) it will send you a nicely-printed card in the post taking one of your Instagram pics as the image. Gives you a nice hit of unexpected nostalgia, though probably worth purging your feed of all the pictures of your ex or your suicided family member before you do, unless you want to be moved to gut-wrenching sobs when you open your mail.

• ROAR: One to file under “I wish this didn’t have to exist but I am sort of glad it (almost) does”, this project has smashed its crowdfunding target with over two weeks to go. Basically it’s a small combined rape alarm and transmitter which can not only make a really fcuking loud sound but can also text people when you press it, tell them where you are when you press the alarm, etc. Sensibly, you can also turn off the alarm bit and only send the silent text alerts; it’s a very nice piece of design indeed

• CrowdHaiku: Using the ‘wisdom’ of the crowd to collaboratively write haiku, you submit a word and the community votes on which one will be added the the composition next. The poems that result are, because this is the internet, frequently obscenely scatological, but there are odd moments of beauty (but mostly people writing “Poop” and “butt” over and over again – thanks, North America!).

• The Cryptaris Mission: A slick, polished, graphically impressive and CHILLINGLY COLD website from the US Army, designed to show people how much killing people in real life is like playing videogames (yes, I know that the Armed Forces in the UK do this stuff as well) – it’s a really very nicely made piece of webwork indeed, but there’s something so utterly inhuman about the way it all looks and feels, which maybe is the point. Poor Private Pyle 🙁.

• Sons of Gallipoli: Interactive documentary of the week #1 – this is from Turkey, and is all about the soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, their families, the history of the area and its strategic importance…it’s nicely done, but it’s included mainly as a comparative illustration to demonstrate what REALLY GOOD online documentary work looks like. To whit…

• Empire: This is brilliant from the Netherlands; a great interactive documentary about the history and impact of the Dutch colonial machine, which (as you’d expect from the Dutch) is pleasingly un-rosy tinted when it comes to examining the effects impact of the slave trade, etc. So much to love about this, not least the interface, but I particularly like the manner in which they use non-traditional video formats (slidey splitscreen, 180 degree flips, etc) in a way which isn’t gimmicky but instead makes narrative sense. Really nice, but not as nice as…

• The Universe Within: So after mentioning in passing the other week that I’d not seen anything from the National Film Board of Canada in a while, this crops up and it is STELLAR. The Universe Withing pieces together stories from residents of high-rise blocks around the world through video, audio, photocollages, CGI, etc, to explore how the web is used by people in high-density accomodation to create a sense of personal space and identity. I cannot stress enough how good this is – if you care one iota about ‘DIGITAL STORYTELLING’ then you owe it to yourself to have a play.

• The Processing Foundation Shop: You can buy really rather cool unique digitally designed clothes here. You sort of have to look / play to work it out, but some of the tshirt designs you can spin up are awesome.

• Brightwild: This is FUN – part album launch website, part small 8-bit game, you play through the levels to hear more of the music. It is pretty ridiculously processor-intensive, so don’t try and do it when you have 213 tabs open as I just did as it will crash EVERYTHING and you will swear a lot and then go and make a cup of tea and try and calm down but it won’t really work and your mood will subsequently be all soured and noone wants that.

• Trippingbot: Ever wondered what an AI on acid would be like? Like this, it turns out. The latest project by Friend of Curios (it’s an official designation, you can get a badge and EVERYTHING) Shardcore, you can read all about its creation / high concept here should you so desire (you should).

• Sprayprinter: If this is a real thing, it will change graffiti FOREVER – or at least mean that a certain type of idiot narcissist will have a field day spraypainting their own likeness all over the place. As far as I can tell, this is claiming to be tech which lets you upload an image and will then enable you to spraypaint a version of that image onto a surface automatically. I mean, that’s witchcraft, right? Is this even possible? I am so confused.

• 100 Balloons: A LOVELY project which I exhort you all to get involved with, 100 Balloons is by Simon White and it will involve 100 people sharing stories with each other via the medium of balloons, and you should all get involved if you can (well, upto 100 of you, in any case).

• Scrote & Tote: Because there’s literally no other link to end on this week. Make your own ‘ballbag’ joke as I really just can’t be bothered.

   

By Daniel Alford

LAST UP, LET’S GIVE A WARM WELCOME TO FAT BOB WHO RETURNS WITH ONE OF HIS ACCLAIMED HOUSE MIXES UNDER THE DREADFUL DJ GUISE OF ‘JALUCINE’!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Sad MGTOW Apartments: I am so, so happy that I had to look up MGTOW – apparently it means ‘men going their own way’, and is some sort of men’s rights organisation with all the standard The Game/Alpha-Beta/Gamergate/Redpill/Bluepill rubbish you’d associate with it. This is a collection of webcam shots of people from this community, gently pointing out that the domestic situations revealed in some of the pics don’t necessarily bespeak so much of men going their own way as men struggling with certain basic aspects of personal grooming and hygiene.

• News Cat Gifs: Journalistic travails, illustrated with cat gifs.

• Cartographers Without Borders: A collection of imagined or impossible or altered maps.

• North Korean Interiors: Photos of North Korean interiors, which are absolutely as creepy as you’d hope / expect.

• Resn Experiments: I’ve mentioned Resn before on here – they are a SUPERWANKY but very cool New Zealand digital agency who I am probably deep down sort of jealous of. Anyway, this is a collection of code.text experiments by them, which are all lovely if you like code-led digiart.

• Such A Cnut: Nowhere near as confrontationally provocative as the title would suggest, this is a collection of feminist cartoons. I suggest that women who spend any time arguing with men on the internet may wish to save / bookmark a few of these for quick-linking.

• Quiet Desert Failure: My favourite art project of the week, this Tumblr is very quietly working to fill itself up with pictures of deserts taken from Google Maps, the creator’s manifesto states: “I programmed an Internet bot to traverse the datascape of Google Maps in order to fill a Tumblr blog and its datacenters with a remapping representation of the whole Sahara Desert, one post a time, every 30 minutes. The whole performance will approximately take 50 years to be completed, but it is still not clear if the audience, the Google’s servers, the tumblr archive or the Internet itself will last enough to see the end.” So there.

• ITunes&c: Another lovely one, this – a Tumblr which takes the incomprehensible Ts&Cs we all blindly sign up to when we use iTunes and creates an illustrated comic from them, adding one new page a day. The copy is still obviously still just legalese horror, but the illustrations add a brilliant feel to it; it reads like a story, despite not being one at all. Very cool.

• Too Many Guys, One Girl: Large groups of men winning awards, along with a token woman. Can anyone tell me what the Jack Whitehall-compered event which features so prominently on here was, please?

• Fcuk Yeah, Trudeau!: Celebrating the beauty and liberal-friendliness of Canada’s premiere, who for the first 24h of his election I managed to totally confuse with iconic cartoonist and Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau, which is not funny but is sadly true.

• Chinatown Pretty: Street fashion blog focusing on senior citizens from San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s probably patronising to say that these people are all old and cute and awesome, but I don’t care as none of them are ever likely to read this.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH SUGGEST THAT IF YOU ARE HUNGRY FOR EVEN MORE WRITING YOU CHECK OUT THIS YEAR’S INTERACTIVE FICTION COMPETITION FOR SOME HIGH-QUALITY PROSE WITH ADDED GAMELIKE QUALITIES:

• Different Class, 20 Years On: When Different Class by Pulp came out, I was living at college in Oxford and I was WELL HEARTBROKEN. Laura Martin-Robinson totally didn’t fancy me and fancied my best mate instead – IKR? SO MIZ – and I went into town on the day this came out and bought it and then spent 4 hours walking around Oxford in the rain and listening to it on repeat until the batteries on my walkman died and smoking cigarettes and, embarrassingly, weeping quite a lot. It’s still amazing to me what part of that wasn’t attractive to her. Anyway, that’s of no relevance at all, but this piece by Luke Young of The Quietus on the social context within which the album was released, and the weird feeling of being Piggy in Lord of the Flies which descended upon all the weedy nerds who’d loved Pulp since His’n’Hers (the far superior album, fyi) and before when they saw their outside idols being feted by the same Ben Sherman-clad, crispy-fringed neanderthals who’d spent much of the past years making fun of you for liking that geeky music in the first place (it’s STILL RAW you know) is GREAT, and anyone who remembers the mid-90s with a sort of awed horror should read it.

• King Troll: Ken M is one of the funniest people on the internet. I was in actual tears after about three paragraphs of this article about his long-running aim to be the stupidest commenter online EVER. Read if you want a pick-me-up, it is guaranteed to amuse.

• The Four Horsemen of Gentrification: McSweeney’s once again demonstrate why it’s the best place for satire on the web (sorry, The Onion) with this LOVELY piece of hipster-bait. US tropes abound, but anyone who’s been to Peckham in the past five years will know the score.

• Every Day I Want To Quit Social Media: A great piece of writing which captures almost perfectly the spiralling need for dopamine hits and approbation engendered by all this stuff (not in me, obviously, I’m totally above the banal quest for better numbers) (which is pretty lucky really otherwise I’d be devastated), and which is particularly timely given this week’s big old “OMG SO FAKE”-gate going on with Essena O’Neill.

• Mourning Grantland: Grantland getting canned made me rather sad, I must say – it’s provided smart longform sports writing which even appealed to people like me who don’t like or care about sport at all. This piece on the Observer is a smart look at why it got shuttered and what it means as regards the way in which CONTENT (sorry) works in modern publishing – it’s got rather a lot of interesting stuff to say about the dangers of the flat, postmodern approach to cultural value and relevance which I rather enjoyed.

• The Art of the Witness: A wonderful piece from a month or so ago in the New Yorker, looking at the life and writing of Primo Levi, his humanity in the face of atrocity and how his prose communicated his ideals. There’s some wonderful analysis of his style in here, which is really worth reading if you’re familiar with his work. If you’ve not read ‘If This Is A Man’ then please click this link and remedy that fact now.

• The ‘True’ Story Of Zola: Did you read the epic ‘strippers’n’hos do Florida’ tweetstorm which was all over the web last week? No? IDIOT. Anyway, if you did you may enjoy this followup piece from Caitlyn Dewey at the Washington Post, which attempts to piece together what might actually have happened. Seems that it was mostly legit, and there was a LOT of other weird stuff too. This story truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

• The Witches of Papua New Guinea: The first must-read piece of journalism in here this week, this is a mad (and maddening) account of the strangely modern practice of hunting down witches in what sounds like the truly terrifying mean streets of modern Papua New Guinea. It feels like a VERY dark and far away place – an impression reinforced by some very good reporting in the piece.

• The Rise of Franco-Arabic Rap: Great piece by Paris-dwelling Londoner Jeremy Allen all about the burgeoning Franco-Arabic rap scene in France, how it relates to the increasing simmering racial tensions which have been present in the country for…well…50-odd years, tbh, and how the scene’s developing in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders earlier in 2015. Interesting, and with the added bonus of being a great source of new French hiphop if you’re in need of some.

• How Uber Has Made Us Awful People: Not just Uber – ratings culture, and the increasing sense that, much as we believe we are now entitled to read top-quality writing for free, we are also entitled to (to paraphrase the piece) Ritz-level service at McDonald’s-level prices. The more I think and read on this stuff, though, the more I’m darkly of the opinion that we’re almost inevitably going to end up with some sort of all-pervasive Peeple-style solution whether we like it or not. Which is a bit rubbish really.

• The Sad Fading of the Refugee Crisis: Because we have all forgotten again, haven’t we, really? Depressingly, a politico friend of mine told me the other day that the referendum on Europe is almost certain to be held in the Winter months because the powers that be don’t want the issue becoming mixed up with pictures of dying people fleeing warzones in search of a better life, which we tend to have more of in the Summer. How lovely!

• The Soft War On Drugs: Fascinating and wholly depressing piece on how the war on heroin abuse in the US has taken a distinctly more touchy-feely and non-punitive turn as the demographic profile of abusers has shifted towards the white middle-classes; effectively a demographic whose family, friends and parents are more likely to be able to equipped to navigate the bureaucracy of the police and judicial systems and therefore make them work more in their favour. Really interesting on how long-standing power hierarchies can manifest themselves in unexpected ways (SJW AND PROUD).

• On Romantic Regimes: Brilliant piece about theories and concepts of romance and how these, and their associated milestones and tropes, differ from country to country. The author’s own anecdotes, about the differing conceptions of romance in her native Russia and her adoptive US, are beautiful (but leave one with the impression that having an affair out there is…er…tricky and complicated).

• ISIS Are Idiots Too: LOOK AT THEM ARGUING ON TWITTER! This is very, very funny indeed, in a sort of ‘Four Lions’ sort of way.

• The Future of Oil & Gas: No, wait, bear with me here. This is a VERY ODD thing indeed – a piece of future fiction written for Siemens, looking at some potential technologies which could arise in the coming years in the oil and gas industry, which for reasons known only to the author seems to think that the best way to propose these is to couch them in a story involving a dysfunctional couple who’s relationship is being undermined by her AI assistant. No, really. STRANGE CORPORATE WEIRDNESS HERE, for which thanks to Alex Wilson for the tip.

• The Sad and Beautiful World of Mark Linkous: Sparklehorse are still one of my favourite bands – Linkous’ death a few years ago was one of the few celebrity suicides which properly *got* me. This profile of the man, the band and their music is one for the fans, but if you remember them fondly then this will be a lovely reminder of how beautiful each and every single one of their albums was. If you’re not familiar, I suggest you start here.

• Boys In Zinc: My personal pick for best writing in here this week, this collection of anecdotes from soldiers and family members involved in Russia’s war in Afghanistan in the 80s is properly tearjerking, astonishingly well-crafted, and a horrifying and timely reminder of exactly the sort of proxy-war horror into which we’re seemingly now stuck in Syria. So really cheerful, then.

• That Adele Profile: I mean, she does seem like a really nice, normal person, so well done her. Don’t quite understand the fuss, but I feel honour-bound to include this as, you know, POP CULTURE and the aforementioned postmodern flat nature of cultural value. Er, innit.

By Sarah Sitkin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, WHICH THIS WEEK AS A BONUS OFFERS YOU THE TRULY HYPNOTIC SUN VIDEO YOU NEVER KNEW YOU WANTED BUT REALLY MUST WATCH!

1) First up comes this, which I meant to feature last week when it was all NEW AND FRESH but then forgot, at which point it got picked up by Popjustice meaning that I’m now behind the times, dammit. Anyway, this is Halia Jack with The Absence of Love, the production and vocal of which I adore, and would do anyway if I wasn’t good friends with her big sister:

2) Do you remember that Real Life FPS video from a while back, showing people playing a live-action FPS-style game through Chatroulette? Well they are BACK, and this time they are channelling Alien. This is both still SO SLICK and eminently ripoffable from a brand point of view – at the very least, I’d expect a theatre company to do somethingf experimental along these lines:

3) Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an appendix? No, me neither, but the answer according to this surprisingly excellent song and very odd CGI video is ‘a bit rubbish’:

4) This is a bit of a hateinclusion, tbh. Hannah Diamond is described in the blurb here as being a ‘popstar and professional image-maker’, signed to the oh-so-Tumblr label PC Music – the song and video are almost achingly saccharine and polished and Tumblr-perfect, with accents of K-pop sweetness, and the tie-up with both ID mag and Baby-G watches makes me think it’s going to be an aesthetic and vibe which will be getting pushed HARD in the next 12 months. Let’s see, shall we. This is called ‘Hi’ – the lyrics, fwiw, are also sort of bleakly awful in an ‘oh god, I don’t understand modern culture and life at ALL’ sort of way:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! I love Akala, he is GREAT. This is his new track and video, called ‘Mr Fire In The Booth’ (reference to his three appearances on Charlie Sloth’s R1 slot of that name, which you really ought to check if you’ve not heard them):

6) This is short and beautiful and haunting and LOVELY and deserving of the overused descriptor ‘ethereal’. This is Julien Baker, and the song is called ‘Sprained Ankle’:  

7) This is all sexy and French and is called ‘Leonardo’ by Bonnie Banane and I like it very much indeed:

8) Last up this week, this should have been included for Hallowe’en but, er, I didn’t see it in time. Here it is instead, though – ‘Oz vs Eden’ by Lawrence Rothman, which is a cracking song. Enjoy, and see you next time. BYE!:

By Fernanda Uribe

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THIS WITH SOME MOS DEF / MARVIN GAYE MASHUPS?

THE SECTION WHICH IS A LITTLE LIGHT THIS WEEK, PERHAPS DUE TO THE FACT THAT THE WORLD OF SO*IAL M*DIA IS STILL REELING IN SHOCK AT THE NEWS THAT MULTI-MILLIONAIRE LILY COLE RECEIVED £200,000 OF FUNDING FROM THE UK GOVERNMENT FROM HER DOOMED-TO-FAILURE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ WEBSITE – THANKS, GOVERNMENT!:

• Twitter Testing ‘Favourite People’ Feature: Twitter Lists are one of those things which are really useful but a massive pain in the arse to actually use (obviously they’re not THAT much of a pain in the arse, but we live in an age in which anything which is any more complicated than pressing a button is greeted with frenzied eye-rolling and whinging by entitled idiots like me). Apparently Twitter’s testing out a ‘favourite people’ service which allows mobile users to add people to a list simply by ‘starring’ their profile; it also lets people choose to be alerted to when said selected people tweet. Potentially useful for CRISIS-type scenarios and stuff, although frankly it’s more of a cosmetic change than anything else (but really, there’s not much going on here this week so I was sort of clutching at straws really). 
• How Twitter Made The ‘State Of The Union’ Interactive Infographicy Thing: You remember that thing Twitter did for the latest ‘State of the Union’ address in the US where they let users see what people were saying on the platform at any point during the POTUS’ address? It lives here, in case not. Anyway, this is a reasonably detailed account of how it was built, which is sort of interesting if you make / are interested in datavis-type stuff. 
• Twitter May Remove @s And Hashtags From Tweets: This is just a cosmetic thing really. Not much to see here. 
• Twitter Testing One-Tap Video Playback On Mobile: Erm, that. Only really interesting because of the fact that it’s currently being tested for people who are part of Twitter’s ‘Amplify’ ad scheme, which suggests that maybe this might end up being a potential ad format – you know, pay money to have your vids appear more clickable in feeds. Or maybe not – frankly I have no idea and, at this time in the morning, very little interest one way or the other. 
• NEW UK STATS ABOUT FACEBOOK AND MOBILE!!!: Here! Have a load of numbers which show that loads of people in the UK use Facebook on their mobiles! To be honest none of this is interesting or surprising, but you can never have too many statistics – right, kids? To which end, here’s some MORE statistics all about how mums in the UK use Facebook (clue: they use it fcukloads, it turns out – whodathunk Facebook’s own data might suggest such a thing?). Have I ever told you how my Summer of 2010 was ruined by working on a Europe-wide NAPPY-RELATED CRISIS for Pampers? It was hideous, and means that even now I have a knowledge of mothering messageboard slang which is slightly disturbing for a childless man in his mid-30s. 
• How Many Likes / Shares: This was made by Mat Morrison a few years ago, and is a useful little bookmarklet which lets you see how many likes/shares any individual page on the web has received on Facebook. Quick, dirty, but potentially VALUE-ADDING. 
• Android Watches COMING SOON: I have little to no personal interest in the concept of ‘wearables’, but this week’s announcement of Android watches from Google is interesting mainly due to the fact that they’re opening up the software to developers – for brands which like to consider themselves at the forefront of all this digibollocks it might be worth thinking about what sort of hacks you can pull together so as to take advantage of this AMAZING TECH.  
• Kenzo Does Gifart: Possibly the final nail in the coffin of the credibility of the Tumblr/gifart-type aesthetic, this website by Kenzo sort of almost gets it but not quite (it’s not quite odd enough, imho). Not sure whether to give them imaginary points for trying or whether I should just throw my hands up in horror at the commercial world’s ceaseless appropriation of all creativity in the world (or just, you know, not really give one either way because frankly it doesn’t matter). 
• Playstation ‘First To Greatness’: I rather like this. Part of the seemingly neverending promo for the PS4, this lets users compete to be the first people worldwide to unlock particular in-game achievements and claim ‘immortality’ on this virtual leaderboard; you can explore all the achievements, watch clips of them, etc, on this very slick site – the Lou Reed soundtracking works surprisingly well, and the whole things surprisingly compelling if you’re some sort of gamegeek. 
• Jonathan Cape 3-second Mysteries: I really like this – a little game-y site by Jonathan Cape to promote their graphic novels line. Not particularly techy, but I like the way if focuses on the panel-by-panel nature of sequential art. 
• CLARKS AS PATRON!: Well, sort of  – I’m not sure how much DOOM actually needs Clarks’ money, but this is another ARTISTS dancing to a brand’s tune in exchange for some pennies; this time, resolutely ‘underground’ hiphop star DOOM offering up a remix of his track ‘Bookhead’ using sounds from the machinery of the Clarks factory. Not a bad fit – Wallabies by Clarks are sort of iconic footwear in the SCENE – but it still sort of saddens me a little.
• Brilliant (Again) By Coke: You know that bus stop billboard which featured an artist modifying people’s images live on Photoshop to their SURPRISE AND DELIGHT? Yes you do, it was this one. This is Coke’s take, and in typical Coke fashion they do it SICKENINGLY well. This is so impressive – taking the same concept and just making it bigger and better. Oh, and just so they don’t feel left out, this billboard by Pepsi’s also very good indeed. 
• The Themes Of SXSW: So SXSW is over for another year. What have we learned? Personally I learned nothing as I wasn’t there (did I mention that? I think I might have done), but thanks to JWT I can pretend that I was by spouting all these AMAZING INSIGHTS from this year’s beardywankfest. To be honest none of these things should really be anything other than ‘hm, yes, and?’ moments, but in case you need something to rip off and pass off as your own observations I include this here. 
• Literally The Worst Load Of Advermarketing Balls I Have Ever Read, Ever: Having been quite nice about Coke 2 links ago, I feel entitled to point out the HORROR of this piece in Marketing week, all about Coke’s EXCITING WORLD CUP MARKETING PLANS. I’m sure the quoted executive is a nice person and all that, and perhaps they didn’t even say / write any of the quotes in this piece, but literally NOTHING that is quoted in this article means anything at all. I mean it’s literally ALL rubbish. “Share a Coke is a great example of how we engage with consumers in what we describe as a real liquid and linked way”? WHEN DID YOU HAVE THE THINKING PART OF YOUR BRAIN REMOVED AND REPLACED BY ONE WHICH SPOUTS THIS SH1T? WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS? CAN WE ALL STOP PLEASE? Seriously, who thinks that talking like this makes one sound like anything other than a total moron? Jesus wept.

By Ino Zeljak

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THIS WITH A 7=HOUR MIX OF HOUSTON RAP?

THE SECTION WHICH IS TRYING TO DECIDE WHICH OF THE BELOW LINKS IS GOING TO BE THE SUBJECT OF A POORLY-THOUGHT-OUT DAILY MAIL ARTICLE IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS (AND HAS DECIDED THAT IT WILL PROBABLY BE ‘CLOAK’, IF IT’S NOT ALREADY BEEN DONE) BECAUSE, TERRIFYINGLY, “LOOK, THEORETICAL NEW APP!” IS NOW ‘PROPER’ NEWS WHICH IS SORT OF CRAZY REALLY ALTHOUGH IF IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE WILL ONE DAY PAY ME MAIL WORDRATES TO WRITE THIS CRAP THEN MORE POWER TO THEM (YES I KNOW THAT THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT), PT.1:

• Cloak: So, yes, Cloak. What this does is, once linked with Instagram and Foursquare, allow users to track the whereabouts of certain other individuals whom they are linked to on the service based on checking and geotagged info on pics which they take, ostensibly to allow people to avoid others whom they would rather not see for whatever reason (clue: AFFAIRS!). Of course, based on that one could ALSO use it to stalk and follow people, which isn’t really quite so cool and future at all. 
• LifePrint: Remember those cameras which were really popular in the 70s, 80s and 90s which let you take pictures and then immediately printed them out like MAGIC? Yes, that’s right, POLAROIDS! Well technology has basically eaten itself with LifePrint, which is a small printer designed to print Instagram pics on demand – so basically like a Polaroid but significantly less convenient. It’s actually little cleverer than that – I do like the fact that pics can be printed at distance – ie leave the printer at home, go out and take pics, find them all printed when you get back – but let’s be honest, this isn’t as good as what we had in the past (ludditic hyperbole). STOP THE FUTURE IT’S RUBBISH.
• Ello – ANOTHER New Social Network: There are literally NO details out there about this one, other than it’s another which is selling itself on its ad-free status. Sign up for beta access if you’re so inclined. 
• NoTrace: Another week, another service purporting to allow users to communicate in anonymity. This one lets people send emails and texts which self-destruct – so far, so like a few others we’ve seen in the past few months. The nice thing here is the additional functionality – the ‘unsend’ idea is good, as is the fact that messages don’t have a ‘to’ or ‘from’ field when they display, which works to minimise the ‘yeah, but you can just screencap it you IDIOT’ issue. 
• Geopieces: I’m going to take the bold move of stating right at the outset that this is NEVER going to catch on. Geopieces effectively looks to sell virtual geographical real-estate – dividing the world up into millions of ‘pieces’. each of which is effectively a square which can be purchased and ‘owned’ on the platform and which owners can subsequently attach digital CONTENT to – so you could own the Geopiece for your house, business, etc, and then attach info to it which other people will see if they are also using the service. I can see the rationale for the concept – the idea of tagging data to physical locations isn’t a new one – but there are far too many barriers to entry here and the fact that they expect people to pay…? HMMMMM. (obviously this prediction means that it will be a world-changing technology and I am going to look like an idiot – hey ho). 
• Google Glass Diaries: A nice Google Glass project  – various people in Myanmar and Thailand (so far) make short Glass vids talking about their professions and lives. One of those lovely things which gives you a glimpse into the storytelling potential of the tech (sorry for using the word ‘storytelling’, by the way, which is fast rising to the top of my personal list of ‘words I really wish agencies would stop using now please’ for 2014). 
• Fort McMoney: This is all sorts of good. I think that this is by French Canadian TV, but I’m not 100% sure – Fort McMoney is a pretty incredible technical achievement which I really do recommend you check out RIGHT NOW (but not if you’re on mobile – this requires a sit-down computer and a cup of tea). It’s half documentary film, half point-and-click videogame and ALL awesome, telling the story of Fort McMurray in Canada, the third largest oil reserve in the world, and the people who live there. I can’t stress enough how incredibly well-made this is, as well as being a brilliant example of how you can do interactive educational stuff in a truly compelling fashion. Tellypeople in the UK – learn. 
• Flappy Arms: The nth in the infinite line of Flappy Bird-inspired hackyartthings, this one’s beautifully absurd. The website links to your iPhone, should you have one, and lets you control a Flappy Bird ripoff by…er…flapping your arms in real life. Coming soon, inevitably, to a hipster art gallery near you.
• Mod Notebooks: I don’t really get thi, I must confess. So this is a service which sells you notebooks into which you can draw, scribble, etc, your innermost hopes and dreams (or, more likely, an increasingly psychotic-seeming set of cubic doodles created as you slide slowly towards peak existential despair in interminable ‘loop meetings’); once full up, you can send it back to the vendors who will scan it, page by page, and then send you a link to the digital version of your scrawlings. Which is nice and all that, but surely you could just take a picture of each page and chuck it on Evernote, no? God we’re LAZY. 
• Burgers For Stories: A lovely project. London startup-y person Andrew Mcdonaugh recently backed a new burger restaurant on Kickstarter, to such a degree that they gave him 1000 burgers in exchange for his donation. He’s now looking for other London startup-y people to share those burgers with him – he’ll give people a free lunch in exchange for interviewing them about their experiences of entrepreneurialism and London and stuff. Just NICE. 
• The Gif Firehose: A livestream of all the gifs being posted…er…somewhere (someone on Twitter suggest that it was all the gifs being posted on…er…twitter, but that struck me as unlikely as it doesn’t seem to move quite fast enough). Anyway, it’s as hypnotic as these ‘Look! It’s the ID of the internet!’ things tend to be, although it’s obviously MASSIVELY NSFW due to the fact that about 1 in 7 gifs is pr0n (the rest seems to be animals and J-/K-pop stars, which is basically the web in a nutshell really). 
• Tribeca Film Festival Vine Competition: Fancy yourself as a genius filmmaker within the confines of the 6–second medium? You’re probably not, you know. Still, if you really do think you’re special then you could do worse than entering the second ever Vine competition at the Tribeca Film Festival. There are Ts&Cs and stuff, but it’s a good opportunity for aspirant filmmakers – and, of course, for brands looking for talented creatives who they can approach when they don’t win the top prize to exploit their talent for far less money than its worth!
• Love Ever After: If you don’t feel a little bit warm inside looking at these then you’re in quite a bad way and should probably nip outside and get some fresh air and maybe an icecream to cheer yourself up and recalibrate. A series of pictures of couples who’ve been together for 50+ years, kissing. So, so lovely, as are the accompanying written vignettes – now go and call your grandparents. 
• Thingcharger: Such clever design, this – once we finally reach that utopian moment when all bloody devices have the same charging port, this is going to be HUGE (maybe) – it’s easier to look at than to explain, but rest assured that it’s VERY CLEVER. 
• EmotiKarl: A suite of emoticons/emojis inspired by famous fashion fascist and almost-certainly dreadful human being Karl Lagerfeld. I’m not sure who this is for, but perhaps YOU are the target audience.
• Turn Your Instagram Pics Into Nail Art: This is on Kickstarter and hasn’t reached its goal yet, so it’s up to YOU to make sure that you will one day be able to turn all your sepia-tinted pictures of food into stickers you can put on your nails. Actually a very clever idea indeed, and the app/interface looks rather slick – I imagine you’ll see a lot more of this. 
• Drone Delivery Coming To San Francisco: IN YOUR FACE, AMAZON! This may or may not be real, but it’s San Francisco so probably is – QuiQui is a ‘coming soon’ service which offer residents of the city’s Mission district the option to have items from pharmacies delivered by drone within 15 minutes for a $1 surcharge. HUGELY theoretical, but this sort of local thing could actually work quite well – you just need one person at the store and another piloting the vehicle, although obviously there’s no money in it on this basis. Can someone set this up in SW8 to do booze, fag and rizla runs, please? Thanks.
• Rorschmap NYC: Taking footage from New York city Department of Transportation webcams and making live, moving kaledioscopes of them. Pointless but soothing and should be ripped off for London as part of an installation somewhere please thankyou. 
• Factbot: Web Curios favourite Shardcore has made this artbottwitterthing which plays on the fact that you can literally trust NOTHING you read online any more – Factbot tweets algorithmically generated facts paired with suitable images every 4 hours. Some of these facts are plausible, others patently false, but the overall effect is funny and ridiculous and a sort of wonderful deconstruction of our relationship to ‘information’ online. 
• Stupid Things Clients Say To Designers: Available as posters for you to hang in your studio and gaze at as your read the 19th email from a client asking you to make ‘it’ ‘pop’ more. 
• First Tweet: A service from (I think) Twitter itself which allows you to see what the first tweet from any given account is. No purpose whatsoever beyond the frivolous, although I’m sure it will be used to UNMASK the latecoming arrivisme (is that a word?) of all sorts of people by smug twats. 
• Uncomfortable Design: Cool little project reimagining every day objects so as to render them functional but sort of unpleasant to use. The saucepan is a work of evil genius – I quite like the idea of creating a house where all the tools and furniture are built on these lines and then forcing someone to live in it OH HANG ON NEXT SERIES OF BIG BROTHER! Can someone please get in touch with the production team, as this would make it the fabulous cross between reality TV and the ‘Saw’ films that I for one have been waiting for for YEARS. 
• Super Hi Res Face Pics: You know how when you’re in love with someone you can look at them really, really close and for the most part sort of forget that they are made of meat, and not really look at / focus on the rheum and sebum and stuff? Well this is a bunch of people you probably don’t love, in really uncomfortably close detail – MMMM, PORES! Not great if you’ve got a touch of the bodyhorrors. 
• Play Me Dating App: Another week, another unnecessary attempt to reinvigorate the dating game – this time by making it a…er…game. Play Me is actually quite a clever conceit, asking you a series of questions about the sort of stuff that your stalkee is into – the more popular that person is, the harder the questions are – the idea being that you need to demonstrate a degree of interest compatibility before it allows you to begin harassing them. Although surely google sort of makes this quite easily gameable? YOU’RE ONLY CHEATING YOURSELVES. 
• Speed Reading App Bookmarklet: Remember Spritz from a few weeks back, an app which let coders turn their webpages into superspeedreadable horizontally scrolling textfountains? No? Jesus. anyway, this is a little bookmarklet which basically does the same for any webpage you happen to be on – it’s a little janky, but it does prove that the system really does work. 
• Popular vs Actual Frontpages: A really interesting experiment in which actual newspaper front pages on March 5th are positioned next to how they would have looked had they reflected the most popular stories on said newspapers’ websites. A little facile as there are all sorts of factors which determine ‘popular’ stories online, but interesting to see the discrepancies / changes. 
• How To Kill Yourself With Household Goods: NB – Web Curios in no way advocates suicide, but who knew that 40 teaspoons of cinnamon could be fatal? Not this webmong. 
• Holipics: The annual collection of awesome pics from the Indian festival of colour (and, less commented on but equally true, the festival of getting absolutely off one’s nuts on criminally strong bhang lassi, or so people tell me). Anyway, as ever the Atlantic delivers some gorgeous photographs.
• Weird Digital Music Video Thingy: I honestly have no idea whatsoever what this is – some sort of ambient music visualiser thingy in 3d graphics. It’s strangely soothing, though, and I just lost about 3 minutes looking at it which means it’s either really compelling or that I am starting to feel the effects of not quite getting enough sober sleep last night. 
• The Museum Of Bad Art: This is actually a real-life physical place in America (of course), but it’s online archive is a thing ofincredible non-beauty. If nothing else, this will provide you with a WEALTH of brilliant crap pictures for your next soul-sapping powerpoint crapshow. 
• Soundslice: What looks to be a very sophisticated virtual sheet music and tab notation service, which if you or your kids are learning an instrument could well be superuseful. 
• The Greatest Titles In Dance Music: When you’re making ambient techno I imagine it’s hard to come up with a suitably evocative and descriptive title for what is basically 8 minutes of low-intensity bleepy woobles. All the kudos, then, to the people whose creative endeavour is immortalised in this list – my personal favourite is the deliciously sinister ‘Gift Wrap Yourself, Slowly’ (it’s the comma that makes it) – what’s YOURS?
• Relay – Gif Texting: An appwhich lets its users communicate to each other solely via the medium of gifs. If you’re a certain type of person, and your friends are too, then you might well like this quite a lot. I’m not judging, honest. 

By Erik Jones

THE SECTION WHICH IS TRYING TO DECIDE WHICH OF THE BELOW LINKS IS GOING TO BE THE SUBJECT OF A POORLY-THOUGHT-OUT DAILY MAIL ARTICLE IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS (AND HAS DECIDED THAT IT WILL PROBABLY BE ‘CLOAK’, IF IT’S NOT ALREADY BEEN DONE) BECAUSE, TERRIFYINGLY, “LOOK, THEORETICAL NEW APP!” IS NOW ‘PROPER’ NEWS WHICH IS SORT OF CRAZY REALLY ALTHOUGH IF IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE WILL ONE DAY PAY ME MAIL WORDRATES TO WRITE THIS CRAP THEN MORE POWER TO THEM (YES I KNOW THAT THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT), PT.2:

• Nipple.io: My other pick for ‘app most likely to be written about by the Mail in the next 72 hours’ is this one – Nipple is basically a quantified self project, applied to sex – the idea being that you are gently encouraged to diarise and annotate details of your SEXY ENCOUNTERS to…er…learn more about your sex life, I presume, although I do sort of question what it’s likely to tell you that you don’t know already. It’s made by a pair of Italian guys which means that the site is full of minor linguistic idiosyncracies and makes the whole thing quite a lot less odd than it might otherwise be as a result. 
• Nepalese Dog Portraits: Apparently in Nepal painting portraits of canines on bits of metal is a ‘thing’. You too can get a picture of your dog, painted on a bit of metal by a Nepalese person, thanks to this website. I’m simultaneously happy and disappointed that this appears to have missed the Doge bandwagon. 
• Fake Albums and Fake Reviews: There was a timewaste-y game which did the rounds a few years back  in which people were encouraged to take a random image from flickr and a random sentence from Wikipedia to create fake albums (look, that was sort of how it worked, don’t bugme for details). This takes that idea and runs VERY FAR with it, featuring not only made-up albums by made-up artists but also imagining what the music on said albums would sound like and offering critical reviews. The next step is for someone to record said music – come on, what are you waiting for?
• A Synthesiser in Javascript: This is quite fun – play with it. 
• They Will Eat You: A first person zombie survival game – the game itself isn’t that great, but I really like the design / aesthetic of the site overall, and especially the opening animation.  
• Bear Simulator: Hot on the heels of goat simulator comes this Kickstarter project, which puts you in the leather vest and jeans combo beloved of Vauxhall’s hairy man community and deposits you at the door of Hoist!…oh, no, hang on, the other sort of bear. Sorry. (AND THEN I GOT OFF THE BUS). 
• Mark Ditto Mark: I REALLY LIKE THIS. Wanky as you like, Mark Ditto Mark is a broser extension which turns the whole web into a conceptual novel where the main character is a mysterious man named Mark Ditto. Install it, and every name you read online will magically become Mark Ditto, which makes spending 10 minutes reading the news a truly bizarre and disorienting experience. 
• Iconic History: Your recent browsing history, displayed as a massive collection of those little tab icons you get in your browser. Really interesting way of seeing what sites you look at most often, and almost certain to be ripped off at a modern art fair near you VERY SOON INDEED. 
• The World’s Heaviest Phone Case: Have you ever wanted an iPhone case which turns the device into a massive, unwieldy dumb-bell? OH GOOD!
• Some Ancient Maps: A lovely collection of scanned maps from between 1000 and 1300. No more, no less. 
• Gifs Paired With Music In Fullscreen: The most interesting thing about this is how it chooses which music to pull. It throws up some great combinations. 
• Dead Colours: All of the colours from the palette which feature the hexadecimal number ‘DEAD’. For some designer somewhere this is going to form the basis of a really satisfying in-joke which their client will never, ever get. 
• Free Fonts For 2014: Look! Free fonts!
• The Fuji Cannon: The whole ‘pics now embedded in tweets’ thing has meant you can now do quite interesting stuff by tweeting images in sections, quickly, so that they appear one after the other in users feeds to ARTISTIC effect. This little toy automates that – plug in a picture and it automatically slices it into 3 and tweets it in one, three-tweet burst. Just because you can, really. 
• Randomised Map Design: Algorithmically fcuked-with maps; these are lovely. 
• Briibe: An interesting idea, although there’s no evidence that it works AT ALL. Briibe lets users send messages to famouses on Twitter and pledge money to a good cause (UNICEF) if they reply – basically so 1D fans can potentially pay to get Harry Styles to send a disinterested one-word response to their marriage proposals. Sort of amazingly desperate, really. 
• Post-Apocalyptic Jungles On Streetview: Little hack for Google Streetview which lets you see what your street (or anywhere really) might look like when humanity’s all but extinct and the plants have taken over – SEX IS MY ADVENTURE (that’s a very obscure joke that only one person who I know might get; sorry about that). 
• Listen To Buttcoin: An incredibly childish website which makes fart noises of varying pitch and duration to track Bitcoin transactions in realtime – the differing pitch/length correlate to the size of the transaction. Human ingenuity, eh?
• Knolling: I had NO IDEA that knolling was a thing (it is a thing) – this is a guide to why it is GOOD. What? Oh, right – knolling is the practice of arranging things at 90-degree angles to each other to pleasing aesthetic effect – OCD sufferers will probably get a massive kick out of this. 
• Sesame Street Pi Day: For Pi Day last week Sesame Street invited kids to send in their drawings of numbers – this site is cycling through the digts of pi, theoretically FOREVER, using these illustrations. Very cute, and features The Count who is indisputably the best Sesame Street character EVER. 
• Weird Gifs: A collection of them, no less.
• Old Screensavers In CSS: Just in case you want the flying toasters on a modern computer (and why wouldn’t you?). 
• Plink Collaborative Music Maker: This is a lovely interface and it makes rather nice sounds – it’s just a shame nooone seems to be using it. I think you could have quite a lot of fun with this with a few people collaborating – have a play. 
• Photos From Aleppo: The mess in Syria’s been going on 3 years now. This is a selection of pictures of life in Aleppo by photojournalist Pablo Tosco.
• Al Qaida – The Magazine: This is quite incredible. Apparently now in its 12th issue, this is Al Qaida’s monthly propaganda publication – or at least that’s exactly what it appears to be – featuring articles on jihad, the iniquities of the West’s involvement in the Middle East, the evils of the international Jewry…all the usual things you’d expect. And, er, a couple of pages of bomb-making instructions at the back. I am fully expecting a knock in the door from the authorities VERY SOON. 
• LIVE FROM SPACE!!!: The space stuff on TV was quite amazing this week; this is National Geograohc TV’s chanel which shows all sorts of remarkable stuff like where the ISS is at any given point, and live vidfeeds from it and is basically amazing in every way possible. 
• Custom Bongo Service: Wow. A company which will make whatever pr0n you want, on spec. You tell them what you want and they quote you for it – you pay, and eventually you presumably get your dream bongo. Obviously they are clear that nothing illegal will be countenanced and no models would be made to do anything they don’t want to, but if you really need an explanation of exactly why this is a bit weird and creepy and potentially wrong, let me remind you of The Terrifying Story of Swap.avi.

By Eli Horn

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Wes Anderson Palettes: Colour palettes derived from shots from the films of Wes Anderson. BONUS ANDERSON – here’s a short film detailing exactly how much Anderson likes to use symmetry in his films.   
• Creepy White Guys: A collection of messages received by (as far as I can tell) mostly Asian/oriental woman from white men on the internet. About as classy and uplifting as you’d imagine. 
• Games & Food: Food in videogames.
• Videogame Birds: Birds in videogames.
• Start To Crate: Crates in videogames.
• Beargames: Videogames featuring large, hairy men in sweaty Vauxhall nightspo…oh, hang on, that wasn’t funny earlier either. 
• Christian Nightmares: Let’s be clear – Web Curios has no problem at all with your religion, probably. This though is a brilliant collection of some of the more patently ridiculous / bigoted / mental examples of the Christian faith – we’re talking the spittle-flecked lunacy of the Chick Tracts, that sort of idea. Linked here in non-loving memory of everyone’s favourite bigot Fred Phelps who died yesterday. 
• I Too Am Soas: Another week, another bunch of students doing the Harvard thing themselves. I’m rather trepidatiously waiting for the near inevitable WHITE RIGHTS riffs on these which probably exist already but which I don’t really want to search for.
• All The Records: Probably the best idea on here this week, this Tumblr documents one woman’s attempt to listen to and appreciate every single record in her husband’s MASSIVE collection. A brilliant project, and refreshingly unwanky reviews of classic and not quite so classic albums. 
• Stand Up Comic Gifs: Just in case you need a go-to resource for gifs of comedians doing their comedian thing.
• Yves De Camps: Creepy, surreal little cartoons with a slightly unpleasant edge. I LIKE. 
• Why Do I Online Date?: Screenshots from sad online dating lives. There is always someone whose love life is bleaker than yours, ALWAYS. 
• Humanea: My second-favourite tumblr of the week, this one collects pictures of people and matches them to Pantone numbers. Lovely selection of portraits, too, with some fascinating faces.
• iPhone Oil Paintings: Fingergrease pics on iPhones. Strangely quite good. 
• Heds Will Roll: Newspaper headlines editors WISH they could have used. Contains real contributions from ACTUAL JOURNALISTS. 
• Build A Bird: Choose your images and make your own Flappy Bird clone. Interesting mainly as I didn’t know you could build this sort of thing on Tumblr (what do I know?). 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND AT LEAST ONE OF WHICH WILL HAVE YOU IN TEARS I WARN YOU:

• Working At The Bookies: An incredibly bleak portrait of one frustrated writer’s life working in a betting shop. The style’s very good, to the point where part of me did rather ignobly wonder whether it wasn’t in fact a work of fiction; you get a very real sense of despair, and you can almost smell fag ash and tears.
• The Punishment Of The Future: There have been quite a few articles in the PROPER press off the back of this this week; it’s worth reading the original, though, as it’s sort of horrifying. Looking at what a potential future of criminal punishment might look like, the article quickly descends into a dystopian vision of a world in which incredible degrees of psychological suffering are inflicted on prisoners with a degree of creativity which would be applause-worthy were it not also so utterly barbaric. Also contains a lot of interesting philosophy about personal identity over the course of extended lifespans, and to what extent one can be considered to be a single personality (and as such entity) over the course of a multicentenary lifespan. 
• Short Stories About Self-Checkouts: A selection of shortish fictions based around the slightly surreal landscape of the supermarket self-checkout. This is in totality VERY LONG, but each piece (by JW Vorvick) is brilliant in its own right; I particularly recommend the Chris Martin monologue and the conversation between Marx and Locke about the wider phiosophical implications of the whole self-checkout system, which I promise you is LOADS funnier than I realise I have just made it sound. 
• LRB On The Branson Takedown: If you quite like the idea of a book exploding some of the mythology around Virgin’s relentlessly self-promoting founder but don’t actually fancy reading the whole thing then this LRB review/summary is a pretty good alternative. 
• Things That Noone Tells You About Having Kids: A Quora thread whose quality or veracity I am in no position to judge but which struck me as rather a nice, if a touch sentimental at times. 
• Invisible Children – 2 Years On: Hey! Hey! Remember Joseph Kony? Remember KONY2012, and everyone you ever went to school with suddenly becoming passionately interested in Ugandan politics and Central African issues? Probably not, because we all have the memories of gadflies. Anyway, this is a really interesting look at the slightly suspect Invisible Children charity behind the whole thing, and the bloke who had the breakdown and ended up naked and screaming by the LA freeway in the aftermath of his unexpected (but evidently much-sought) fame.
• Internet Predators Are Not Everywhere: An interesting and important piece about how exaggerating paedogeddon on social media is actually a very bad idea and in some respects even counterproductive. 
• An Interview With The King Of Weird Cinema: Read this and then go and order some mushrooms and the Jodorowsky back catalogue. Seriously – how can you not love a man who fired George Harrison from a film mid-shoot because the actor refused to bare his anus on camera? A very good interview with a truly unique mind. 
• Not Getting By In The Gig Economy: Now that we have sites like Taskrabbit and the like offering to connect people who will do piecemeal tasks for piecemeal pay with those who need, say, their laundry collecting and the dog walked we’ve ushered in a whole new era of excitingly flexible employment opportunities, right? Er, not so much. A rather depressing look at how these services actually work for those who use them (clue: they don’t, really). 
• On Ugliness: Collector’s Weekly on the impossibility of an agreed definition of ‘ugly’ as an aesthetic concept. Properly interesting, honest.
• The Best Juggler Ever: A truly fascinating article profiling a man called Anthony Gatto, widely acknowledged as being the most talented juggler ever to have lived, and how he gave it all up. Shows you a very particular world you’ve probably never even thought of and makes it real, which is sort of the hallmark of all great feature journalism. 
• Profiling The Wu: A 10-part portrait of the 20 year old hiphop collective. You may want to listen to Enter The Wu Tang 36 Chambers whilst you’re reading this. 
• My Dementia: This is the one that will make you cry – I read this yesterday morning and had tears streaming down my face by the end (then again I’m a sensitive soul). A VERY LONG but startlingly well written account by author Gera Saunders of how it feels to be slowly succumbing to dementia. Saunders’ lucidity and linguistic prowess is outstanding – even moreso as you read through and begin to realise how difficult the mere act of committing these thoughts to paper must have been. Touching on her mother’s struggle with the disease, the manner in which dementia affects one’s sense of self,coping strategies and all sorts of other things, this is basically required reading if you know anyone who’s suffered from or is suffering from the condition. Tissues at the ready, though, seriously. 

By Babak Hosseiny

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

By Jason Yarmosky

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR BERNERS-LEE FEELS A SLIGHT SENSE OF REGRET AT THE FACT THAT WHILST HE BEEN INSTRUMENTAL IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TECHNOLOGY WHICH HAS CHANGED HUMAN EXPERIENCE MORE THAN ANY OTHER SINCE THE PRINTING PRESS SAID INVENTION IS ALSO RESPONSIBLE FOR FACEBOOK AND THEREFORE ALL SORTS OF DREADFUL SADNESSES:

• FACEBOOK PAGES TO LOOK MARGINALLY DIFFERENT SOON!: Another week, another aesthetic tweak implemented by Facebook based on doubtless-terrifying volumes of information about Page usage. This one brings insights for Page admins into a slightly more user-friendly configuration, allows better and more efficient ways in which to worry about why your competitors’ posts about pugs are getting more shares than your posts about pugs, and sort of completely kills the functionality of Tabs on the Page. Actually building stuff to live on Facebook’s sort of over, isn’t it? Poor the shovelware FB app development shops :-(. 
• PREMIUM VIDEO ADS FOR FB ALMOST HERE, LIKE REALLY ALMOST NEARLY: Has there ever been a more-trailed ad format than the EAGERLY AWAITED Facebook autoplay video ads (rhetorical)? Anyway, I know that many of you have been champing at the bit to get your hands on this exciting new opportunity to force users to see your THRILLING BRANDED MESSAGES – reassure yourself that it’s superimminent. There’s actually something quite interesting buried in the announcement about Facebook’s plans to pre-assess the ads based on standard benchmarks for things like ‘engagingness’ (yes, I know it’s a made-up word but come on, it’s not like this is an industrial sector which is afraid of neologisms), etc, which feels a bit like the first step in Facebook eventually selling a service to optimise your content for MAXIMUM STICKINESS (for a fee). I could be wrong, of course. Who knows. 
• How Facebook Lookback Worked: Quite techy, but actually very interesting in terms of the sheer scale of stuff which FB’s designers and engineers had to consider when sending the lookback thing live. Worth a read if you have to do BIG SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION stuff. 
• Facebook F8 Announced: Facebook’s running another big developer conference at the end of April – the first one in a few years, which probably presages a huge, world-changing announcement of some sort (last time they did one of these it was Timeline, I think). If you’re the sort of person who feels they might want to go, fill your boots. 
• Twitter Experimenting With ‘Click-to-call’ Buttons: May come to nothing, but an interesting potential step following the recent talk about them also experimenting with in-tweet payment options. This is a feature which would let users click a button within tweets to be put in touch with the organisation or venue (or, I presume, individual) behind the tweet – the example they use is of local restaurants using Twitter to promote discounted offers to local residents, and residents who see said promotion being able to contact the restaurant to make a booking by simply clicking a button. FUTURE!
• Twitter Fiction Festival On RIGHT NOW: We’ve mentioned this before, but right now it’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING! A series of experiments in storytelling and narrative using Twitter as its base, there are little games and stories and experiments happening almost hourly, and they’re documented on this central site. I’m not sure whether any of this is being recorded somewhere central – you’d hope so, but maybe the ephemerality is part of the point (/pseud). 
• Twitter Museum Week On Its Way: For the week of March 24th, numerous museum institutions across the world will participate in Twitter museum week, which promises to offer EXCLUSIVE CONTENT from museums, behind the scenes info and inevitably all sorts of tedious hashtag pun games. It’s a nice idea – will be interesting to see whether this sets a precedent for multi-organisational / sectoral collaborations; I think Open House on Twitter could be quite fun, for example (no, hear me out – participating buildings / institutions sharing photos of the stuff that people don’t normally get to see for those people who can’t schlep around and queue for 4 hours to see inside the Lloyds building, etc? See, I’m RIGHT). 
• Tinder Launching Verified Accounts: Tinder is making it easier for famouses to flaunt their famousness and, inevitably, get laid more (do they really need the help?). The main upside to this will be for gossip rags, who will doubtless be getting a few more kiss & tell stories out of the inevitable rise of hookups between verified famouses and civilians; the main reason I’m including it here, though, is that there’s probably a brand application – no, really. Clothing brands, etc, might want to consider paying famouses to wear their stuff in their verified Tinder profile pic, for example. Maybe. Actually, on reflection that’s a crap idea. Sorry. This probably didn’t warrant inclusion after all. Hey ho. 
• Tinder AIDS Awareness Project: This, though, is a very clever campaign indeed and should frankly be ripped off by Durex or similar asap. Clever use of the app’s mechanic and the fact that it causes people to swipe without really thinking too much about the fact that there are an awful lot of other people swiping too, and that some of you may all be swiping the same people (I’m sort of using the word ‘swipe’ as an analogue for ‘fcuk’ in that last sentence, in case it was unclear). 
• Pinterest Gift Feed Announced: Apparently this has been around for a few months but has only just been officially announced. The Gift feed will only show items on Pinterest which are available to buy – and which use the site’s ‘Product Pins’ functionality (the code which lets pins carry data about pricing. Good for users in terms of utility; if you are a brand which sells STUFF, this is a significant incentive to make sure that you use the special code to make sure said ‘stuff’ shows up in this feed. 
• Google Adds Consumer Ratings Data to Ads: Small but worth knowing.
• Clever Man Utd Google + Stunt: Nice idea, this, allowing United’s legions of global fans to get the chance to be ‘present’ at Old Trafford this weekend for the game against Liverpool; Google Hangouts will be beamed to certain pitchside hoardings, ‘bringing fans closer to the action than ever before’ (or somesuch marketingspeakrubbish). 
• There’s A New Video App Called Wonder: Let’s come right out and lay our cards on the table now – THE WORLD DOES NOT NEED THIS, I DON’T THINK. Why would anyone want to download an app to watch SPECIAL BRANDED CONTENT? Maybe I’m just being cynical, but I can’t see this really catching on in a mainstream sort of way; perhaps I’m missing something, in which case feel free to explain to me exactly what. It’s from London, though, and features quite a lot of posh food-y, lifestyle-y brands at launch which may make it more useful / relevant. Oh, who knows? I’m not a bloody seer. 
• That Bloody Kiss Video Which Was An Advert You Know: You’ve seen it, I know, but worth mentioning as it’s the most successful ad of the year so far by MILES. Although, er, the fact that noone necessarily knew it was an ad possibly obviates that. Anyway, the handjob parody made me laugh quite a lot. 
• Another Ad Video, This Time By Subaru: If you are a man, this may well speak to some childish part of you that was into remote control cars and stuff when you were younger. If you couldn’t care less about remote control cars, watch it for the filming which is BRILLIANT.
• Impossible Sleep: This is a really nicely made site. The video looks good, the interface is decent…but WHY WAS IT MADE? Ibis Hotels decided for some reason that the best way to promote their rooms was to…er…send an ‘adventurer’ and his mate to an exotic jungle location in Brazil to experience the perfect night’s sleep on some ridge or another. It’s obviously tongue in cheek, but it seems like an awfully expensive not particularly funny gag with a preposterously overlong setup and no real payoff. Unless of course it’s not a joke, in which case everyone involved needs to take a very serious look at what their doing with their expensive educations. 
• The IBM Cognitive Food Truck: VERY clever promo by IBM, which has designed a system to autogenerate recipes on the fly from a fixed base of ingredients and based on some algorithmic stuff about taste, etc, and chucked it into a US food truck. Smart example of making maths and processing interesting (though I’m not 100% sure I’d trust all the recipes). 
• Clever ‘Don’t Text And Drive’ Site From Holland: Sites which link up with your phone are the new hotness, it would seem. This is another one of those, following that storytelling one from the other week, which does a good job of what (as a non-driver) it’s like to drive whilst also receiving texts and things. Processor-heavy, but cleverly made.
• Cheap Tickets To Ad Week: WE HAVE ALL OF THE DISCOUNT! ALL OF IT!  

By Michael Wolf

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THE NEXT SECTION WITH A MIX OF SHOEGAZEY MUSIC COMPILED BY SLOWDIVE?

THE SECTION WHICH I’M REALLY BORED OF TRYING TO COME UP WITH A CREATIVE DESCRIPTION FOR EVERY WEEK AND WHICH I WISH I HADN’T PAINTED MYSELF INTO SOME SORT OF DREADFUL ‘RUNNING GAG’ CORNER WITH, PT.1:

• Seeing As It’s The Web’s Birthday: This is a site which is collecting people’s first memories of going online. Navigate using what was described rather beautifully by Adam Sweeney as the ‘Miro-esque’ sidebar, and lose yourself in reminiscence of how innocent and naive we all were back then. 
• Omlet: Another week, another app purporting to offer all of the convenience and functionality of your favourite chat-enabler but with none of the slightly creepy surveillance worries which in 2014 appear to permeate every moment of our online existences. Omlet has a few nice features inbuilt – the gifmaker’s cute, for example – but the main draw will obviously be the ‘we won’t sell your data’ promise. We’ve probably reached peak ‘slightly more friendly Whatsapp? clone’, though, so can noone make any more please? Ta.
• Secret At SXSW: Obviously I’m not at SXSW because I’m not even good enough at being a generic media wanker for anyone to pay for me to go; I have to say that it looks a touch underwhelming from this side of the Atlantic, but that might be the bitterness talking. Anyway, HOT APP DU JOUR Secret.ly, the one which lets people share anonymous status updates with people in their phonebook, is running a feed of stuff people are sharing on the platform about SXSW. It’s less interesting about SXSW, to be honest, than it is as a chance to let non-North Americans see how the service works – I can see how it could be dangerously compelling, I have to say. MMMM SWEATY-PALMED VOYEURISM. 
• Selfie World Rankings: Time Magazine did a bit of datascraping on Instagram, pulling the geodata from pics tagged ‘selfie’ and then determining which were the most narcissistic cities in the world (take a bow, Makati City in the Philippines – Manchester was 7th, before we get too smug). Very clever use of open data – and the sort of thing which brands can exploit. SMALL PROBABLY SH!T EXAMPLE IDEA: makeup brands! Why not take this ‘insight’ and set up a stand at the Trafford Centre offering a selfie makeover for the women of Manchester to allow them to take the ultimate self portrait? Ugh, I felt dirty just writing that. Sorry.
• Beyonce Trader: I’m sure that someone somewhere is writing an academic study about what Beyonce’s rise to the status of ‘most famous and iconic woman in all of the world’ means for us as a CIVILISATION (I’m equally sure that it’s a study I will never want to read); the latest step in pop culture’s attempt to link EVERYTHING to Mrs Carter is this site which analyses stock performance on the US markets and pairs stocks with an appropriate Beyonce gif to illustrate their performance at any given moment. BECAUSE WHY NOT?
• I Am An Idiot, Sorry: So last week I featured an app called LIVR designed for boozers and which basically encouraged people to get wasted and do stupid stuff. It was a fake. I AM SORRY. In my defence, a) I’m not a proper journalist; and b) I did start the writeup with ‘this can’t be real, can it?’, but still. I felt silly. There was another one this week – this time a fake ‘turn water into decent wine in 3 days’ kit designed to promote a water charity or another; can people stop lying about things, please, please? IT IS VERY CONFUSING TO BOTH ME AND THE POOR DAILY MAIL JOURNALISTS.
• 5by Video Concierge: Hang on – video concierge? What does that mean? Sorry, I just noticed the stupid strapline and got momentarily annoyed. Anyway, 5by is a site which collects videos under different themed headings (sport, fails, bloopers, comedy, animation, etc) and purports to develop a degree of semantic understanding of the sort of stuff you like / are into. I’m not convinced, personally, but if you’re a community manager and after a source of HILARIOUS CONTENT for your Facebook Page which noone will ever see due to previously mentioned reach-shrinkage then this may be of use.
• Mapstr: I really like this. Simple-looking map-based site which shows music which is being listened to all over the world, and then lets you play the songs in question – users can sign up to let it track the music they play (I am a bit sketchy on the tech details, I confess). As I type this I am listening to some African folk music which was streamed in Mali yesterday, which is sort of wonderful really. Very fun to play around with.
• Animated Infographics: Some nice examples of animated infographic design – the person responsible’s available for hire, but it’s a generally decent source of minor inspiration and the sort of thing you can point at when you’re trying to persuade your client to do something marginally more interesting than another poorly-designed non-infographic which noone is ever going to run however much they demand that you SELL IT IN BECAUSE CONTENT. 
• The Best Typefaces Of 2013: Sorry, this is HORRIFICALLY late – although it’s their fault for not publishing it until this week. Anyway, if you’re a designer or typography nerd then this list will probably be the human equivalent of a cat getting a really good scratch behind the ears. 
• HTML5 Audio Editor: Potentially useful in-browser audio editor with waveforms and all that jazz. Worth bookmarking if you occasionally need to make quick edits to audio and don’t always have the software to hand. 
• The FBomb Map Of Twitter: Supposedly in real-time, but evidently not given the disparity between my feed right now and the paucity of ‘fcuks’ being registered in the UK. Anyway, utterly pointless but weirdly hypnotic. Although it does make you a little concerned at how many people seem to be shouting ‘fcuk you’ into the void with no context or apparently visible cause. CHEER UP EVERYONE!
• Routine Gifs: Julien Douvier is a French artists who has made this series of gifs called ‘Routine’; it’s a selection of looped images of people hurrying through a scene, presumably on the way to work, and they are all weirdly beautiful and sort of incredibly depressing. Save this and send it to your favourite colleague every Monday morning until their inevitable breakdown and emotional collapse. 
• Collection of Lovely App Design: This is an old site but I don’t think I’ve featured it before – it’s a selection of beautiful examples of app design, UX & UI which is probably useful inspiration for designers, developers and the like. 
• Frequency 2156: This is an odd site. Ostensibly a post-apocalyptic radio station, it feels very much like marketing for the Fallout series of games but apparently is just a very well-designed fan project. Anyway, you can go around the world listening in to radio signals from various people struggling to survive in a horrible, irradiated future. Obviously it’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but it’s a really interesting example of sustained fiction and world-building through audio.
• Bill Drummond – ASK HIM QUESTIONS: Would you like musical art terrorist Bill Drummond to answer one of your questions? Well click that link then. 
• Weird Underwater Aquarium Simulator Thingy: This may be something to do with a new brand of tea which Nestle is launching in Japan. Whatever it is, it is BAFFLING – you just sort of float through an oddly surreal underwater landscape with no real point or purpose, but it’s very nicely made indeed. If someone can work out what the point is, other than to be vaguely soothing, could you let me know please? Ta.
• A Surrealist Dinner Party from 1972: You probably won’t have been to a dinner party quite like this one. Baffling and very cool set of pictures from Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s Surrealist Ball of 40+years ago. Obviously features a bit of Dali, the hack, but the overall effect is like stills from a particularly hallucinatory Dario Argento flick – ODD.
• Meet Stacey Nightmare: Your new favourite Vine superstar.
• ANOTHER New Way Of Doing Music Videos: Actually that’s ridiculously hyperbolic – it’s not so much  new way as a new platform on which to build them in sort of interactive fashion. I mentioned to.be the other week as a site which let you make weird, slightly arty, gify collages – now hipsterish musicians Djemba Djemba (is it possible to make a full XI of players who’ve had bands named in their honour?) have made a sort of videothing for their song ‘Coma’ on there. It’s a bit dull, frankly, but points for FIRST. 
• The Cheesecake Artwork Of WW2 Planes: A great collection of the paintings of women which often adorned the nosecones of bombers and fighter planes in WWII. There are some REALLY BAD ones in there which are sort of poignantly cute. 
• The DIY Weapons of Ukraine: It’s all a bit too scary to think of over there at the moment – this weekend’s going to be ‘interesting’, in any case. Wired have collected a selection of images of weapons wielded by some of the protestors in Maidan which make the whole thing seem horribly real. VICE did a similar thing with the molotov cocktails being used which you can see here, if you want additional slightly terrifying weaponporn.  
• The Internet Of Things Will Be Beyond Parody: So, yes, the internet of things will be…er…a ‘thing’, and yes it will have all sorts of fascinating applications which will doubtless change the world in all sorts of ways which we can’t even begin to conceive of right now, but it will also spawn rubbish like this – an egg tray containing sensors which send alerts to your phone when your eggs might be going off. REALLY, CIVILISATION?
• Pornburger: This is food porn. A collection of ridiculously complicated and elaborate and fancy (in the American style, you know?) burger recipes accompanied by some truly GREAT photography. You will want meat for lunch. Unless you’re vegetarian, in which case you may not care so much. 
• The Bulletproof Diamond-encrusted Suit: This doesn’t seem real either, but it’s sort of remarkable as a concept even if it doesn’t exist. What James Bond would wear if he had literally no taste whatsoever (although the tie made of REAL GOLD is a nice touch). 

By Romain Jacquet-Lagreze

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THIS WITH ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE MINIMAL TECHNO-Y MIXES WHICH SOME OF YOU SEEMED TO QUITE LIKE?

THE SECTION WHICH I’M REALLY BORED OF TRYING TO COME UP WITH A CREATIVE DESCRIPTION FOR EVERY WEEK AND WHICH I WISH I HADN’T PAINTED MYSELF INTO SOME SORT OF DREADFUL ‘RUNNING GAG’ CORNER WITH, PT.2:

• Interview-ly: Like the idea of the Reddit AMA but hate the site’s fairly horrendous layout and design? Well lucky you, for this is a new site which takes some of Reddit’s best / most popular AMAs and cleans them up with a proper Q&A format, vague chronology, etc. Also a nice place to just browse through a very wide selection of conversations with a variety of interesting people. 
• Skrillex New Album App Thing: I feel a bit sorry for the bloke who calls himself Skrillex – I mean, the music’s not to my taste but he does get an awful lot of rage and hate which seems a little bit unfair; not only that, but he looks so unwell, the poor man (I’m feeling weirdly maternal as I type this, which is puzzling for a variety of reasons and something I’m going to now try not to think about any more). Anyway, he has an album coming out and has released a game to preview it – downloading the app gets you access to the album which will stream through it for a limited time. The accompanying site, linked to here, is an odd little dubstep jukebox thing which is diverting for 5 minutes (but you can also get the app from there). 
• CV Dazzle: We’ve had ‘clothing to confuse cameras’ before (2-3 years ago, in fact, by some artist who I don’t have time to Google right now), but this is a slightly more deeply realised variation on the same theme. Coming to next London Fashion Week as a ‘thing’ for a big fashion house’s show, almost certainly. 
• The Toilet Sarlacc: Decals for your toilet to make it look like…er…the Sarlacc pit from Star Wars. Not sure who this is aimed at, but I’d hazard a guess that they live alone or that if not they met their partner at a convention. 
• The World Science University: A great repository of standalone videos and longer courses on all aspects of science. So much stuff in here, and presented in a very easy-to-understand format – if you have kids doing GCSEs then this might be a useful resource. Or, you know, if you just want to learn what string theory actually is so that you can drop really pretentious allusions to it into conversations which frankly could quite easily do without (I may or may not be slightly self-flagellating here). 
• Sketchdeck: Have I mentioned before that I hate Powerpoint? I hate powerpoint. I hate it for many, many reasons (not least because I have literally no aesthetic sense whatsoever and as such whenever I’m forced to make one of the bloody things it inevitably looks like it was designed by a visually impaired person with ADHD), in particular when people use it to write documents (THERE’S A REASON THE OTHER PROGRAM’S CALLED ‘WORD’ YOU IDIOTS) and also for the fact that people call them ‘decks’ for no reason I have ever been able to adequately understand, ever. Ahem. Anyway, Sketchdeck is a service which for a small fee will design your presentations for you – I don’t know whether the pricing’s competitive or not, but might be worth a look in case you need this sort of thing.
• Popcorn Time: DISCLAIMER – THIS IS ILLEGAL AND MAY CONTAIN ALL SORTS OF WEIRD MALWARE. But, er, if you don’t mind the morality and are confident in your virus protection, then Popcorn Time might be very appealing, being as it is a service which acts as a streaming platform (a la Netflix) for torrents. So you can stream stuff which ordinarily you’d have to wait to download. Obviously PIRACY IS THEFT and all that, so I’ll just leave this here and not judge.
• Photographs of Rainbow Gatherings: Rainbow Gatherings are, according to Wikipedia, temporary spontaneous collections of people – basically loosely organised hippie festivals (probably horribly reductive – sorry, Rainbow Gatherers). Anyway, these are some awesome photos of some of the people who attend them – the text at the bottom’s interesting on the whole concept, if you’re interested. 
• Soundwalls: Wow artwork as speakers. Soundwalls lets you get anything you want printed onto a canvas which acts as a speaker – I think there’s a LOT of interesting potential here beyond the obvious aesthetics around theatre and art installations and stuff, but aside from anything else I sort of want one in my house now. 
• Paralym-pics: Sorry about that. Anyway, awesome pictures of athletes at the Paralympic Winter Games.
• They Rule: This is a really interesting project from the States – it’s potentially a bit David Icke / they are all LIZARDS-y, but doesn’t seem too conspiracytheoryish – which seeks to map the connections and linked interests of senior members of major US corporations. Would love to see this done for the UK. 
• The Food Porn Index: A site tracking mentions of different food related topics online to show which particular aspect of Western civilisations collective greed is top of mind in the global consciousness RIGHT NOW. Actually this is a promo site for some US food retailer and so should have gone up there, but it’s not like any of you care so why should I?
• Messages In Bottles: A project on Twitter by Nathania Hartley, documenting messages in bottles left on the public transport network. Such a lovely idea – I am going to do one this afternoon, I think. 
• Musical Toy Bracelet Kickstarter Thingy: This is either going to be really col or exceptionally irritiating. A Kickstarter for Moff, which is a snap-on bracelet which connects to an app and tracks the wearer’s arm movements and translates them into sounds – guitar riffs, sword clashes, that sort of thing. You could imagine kids having LOTS of fun with this, and parents wishing the damn things had never been invented within about 3 minutes of activation. 
• The Analogue NT: Have you ever wanted to own a NES and SNES packaged together in one beautifully overdesigned high-end aluminium package? OH GOOD!
• Somewhere: Another Instagram/location hack which takes users to random locations around the world via the medium of pics lifted from the site and information from Wikipedia. 
• Random Hotel Furniture: A blog (which ought to be a Tumblr but I’ll let that slide) which documents the strange phenomenon of hotels leaving soft furnishings in a variety of weird and seemingly pointless locations. 
• Photojoiner: A site which lets you put two photos together side by side as one image. Erm, just in case you’d need to for some reason. 
• The Showgirls of 1950s NYC: A beautiful slideshow collecting pictures of New York showgirls shot for a 1958 LIFE Magazine special on the US entertainment industry, and detailing the backstage life of burlesque-style entertainers from the era. 
• We Can Now 3d Print Shoes: They remind me of the sort of massive, ugly trainers which were briefly popular in the early/mid-90s and looked like weird footwear spaceships or orthopedic shoes. Anyway, FUTURE!
• Dishy Literature: I love this – a blog which collects recipes as featured in novels, with proper cooking instructions. Which reminds me of The Debt To Pleasure, which is still one of the greatest novels sort of about food ever written ever, and which you should all go and read NOW. 
• Bleepify: Turn any website into music. Really, really bad, atonal bleepy music, but music nonetheless. 
• The Ewok Sex Den: I don’t really know what to say about this, other than wondering yet again at how it is that people with this sort of fetish first discover it – I mean, at what point do you respond to a vague sense of dissatisfaction with your sex life by thinking ‘oh, you know what will make it better? dressing up in a crotchless Ewok costume’?
• Memeoirs: A service which offers the ability to take Facebook messages and turn them into a book – so you could, in theory, immortalise a relationship from first chirpse to tedious, workaday conversations about whose turn it is to regrout the bathroom. I was sort of baffled as to why this existed, and then Anna Madeline suggested that it might be useful, for example, for couples who wanted to prove that theirs was a real relationship to immigration services. Which is quite a good point, although I’m still not convinced – nice name, though. 
• Street Wars Returns: Water pistol assassination-fest Street Wars is BACK this Summer after a hiatus of several years. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, it’s a game which lasts for 3 weeks or so in June, and involves players trying to assassinate each other with water pistols across London. The game is always on, you are never safe, and it can take over your life. There will be a few of you reading this who will LOVE IT. 
• Free Golden Age Comics To Download: AMAZING collection of Golden Era comics all available for free download. 
• More About Bongo Searches: Italian social media data expert Vincos has produced this rather nice look at how all this data about what people are looking for, skinflick-wise, internationally cross-correlates by country; these are some rather nice visualisations of that research.
• The Adventures of Business Cat: This comic made me laugh a LOT on Wednesday, but I was admittedly quite tired. 
• The Identity Project: Pairing photos of LGBT people from San Francisco with their own self-ascribed identifiers, this is not only a collection of really beautiful pictures of a whole array of people, but a small window into the STAGGERINGLY COMPLICATED world of gender-identity. It’s mindboggling how many descriptors there are in here. 
• Old Polish Film Posters: You know the drill by now  these are lovely examples, though.
• Play Android Games On Your PC: Just in case you ever wanted to, really. 
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Text Adventure: One of the funniest games ever written gets a 30th anniversary refresh on th BBC website – with text by Douglas Adams himself, the Hitchhiker’s game is probably the best text adventure ever written, in no small part due to the fact that it contains several thousand words of totally original Adams prose. It’s also INCREDIBLY hard, but I cannot urge you enough to have a go – you’ll want to smash the computer at the babelfish bit, though.
• The View From The Reconstructed WTC: Quite amazing really. 
• 2048: Another sickeningly addictive browsergame with which to ruin your prospects of doing any more work today. 

Design for 22nd July Memorial by Jonas Dahlberg

WOULD YOU LIKE TO LISTEN TO A STREAM OF BANDS WHO ARE PLAYING SXSW THIS YEAR? OH GOOD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Animals Sucking At Jumping: Animals are MASSIVELY overrated, basically, and quite rubbish at jumping.
• Wolf & Unicorn: So much love for this. A tumblr telling of the unlikely, and frankly a little bit disturbing, relationship between wolf and unicorn through the medium of slightly janky CGI gifs. Much better than it ought to be.
• Matteo Renzi Fa Cose: To the 5 people from Italy who read this, have a blog featuring pictures of Italy’s latest PM doing stuff. The captions are better than usual for these things – I give him til Christmas, personally, poor sod. 
• I Too Am Oxford: A week after last week’s I Too Am Harvard comes this, which is the same thing but for Oxford. I like the project, I agree with the ethos, but the capitalised use of the term ‘othered’ in the preamble really, really annoys me. 
• Drawings of Girls on Tumblr: Erm, drawings of girls from tumblr. This is going to be a PROPER EXHIBITION at a PROPER GALLERY in a few weeks’ time, should you be interested in checking it out. 
• Shares From Your Aunt: The stuff that OLD PEOPLE who don’t spend every single moment of every working day eating the internet see as memes.
• Fit To Print: I didn’t realise this, but the New York Times has a ‘no profanity’ policy – almost certainly the only reason why they have yet to approach us about syndicating Curios. Anyway, this Tumblr collects the more convoluted knots the paper can occasionally tie itself into whilst sticking to said policy. 
• Un Gif Dans Ta Geule: Really wonderfully surreal loops, these. 
• Dormouse Said Feed Your Head: Whereas this is just generally really creepy stuff, all told, in a sort of ‘malign Victoriana’-type fashion.
• Hello Let’s Date: Purporting to be screencaps of conversations the author has met through Tinder, this is probably all fake but is still very funny if you like the whole 27bslash6-type thing. 
• Paul Ribeira: Paul Ribeira draws portraits of what characters from 90s children’s television might look like if they had discovered hard drugs and gone a bit off the rails. Say goodbye to those happy memories of the Rugrats, Doug, Catdog et al which you may still be holding on to. 
• The Jogging: A rather excellent collection of ART (very wanky, for the most part, but I quite like that). 
• Jeans and Sheux: Photographs of men wearing dress shoes with jeans, in the manner particular to people from the Middle East. Hot styles. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG BUT WHICH YOU SHOULD ALL READ JUST TO PROVE THAT THE WEB HASN’T TOTALLY DECIMATED YOUR ATTENTION SPAN IN THE PAST 25 YEARS DESPITE WHAT CERTAIN SNOOTY ACADEMICS MAY BE WONT TO SA….OH, HANG ON, SQUIRREL!:

• On Being A ‘Civilian’ At The Oscars: Well, sort of civilian – the author is Jennifer Lawrence’s apparently non-famous best friend, but she was there with an UBER-FAMOUS so it’s not quite bottom of the pile stuff. Anyway, this is a really charming little account of what the whole ridiculous orgy looks like from the inside, and contains some nice observations as well as the sick-making information that Brad Pitt smells really, really amazing as well as being all hot and rich and stuff. You bastard, Brad – I hope you’re wildly impotent or something, because otherwise it’s just all too unfair for words. 
• Watching Nymphomaniac (So You Don’t Have To): Lars ‘Chuckles’ Von Trier’s latest has received surprisingly good press overall – this piece on Jezebel is notable mainly because it made me laugh quite a lot and because of the comparison between Stellen Skarsgaard’s character and Bubba from Forrest Gump, which I’m pretty sure won’t have been made anywhere else.
• Inside Brooklyn’s Barista Class: You don’t have to be a Brooklyn hipster to read and enjoy this (which is good, as I don’t imagine any Brooklyn hipsters read this) – it’s about working in a coffee shop and the service industry as a whole and people’s relationship with those who serve them and the idea of work as vocational vs work as functional and all sorts of other things besides, and it’s a good read.
• The Odd World Of Puddles The Clown: You may know Puddles from this video – his cover of ‘Royals’, which blew up at the end of last year. This is a very odd piece of writing indeed which does an awful lot of blurring of fact and fiction around the ‘character’, but which leaving aside verisimilitude is actually a great feature in its own right; it sort of makes you wish that every city had its own gigantic, terrifying, benign singing clown mascot. Sort of.
• An Obsessive & Exhautsive History of Aphex Twin: If you’re a musician or a fan of Richard James’ music, this will be GOLDEN. If you’re neither of these things, then I’d probably just sip this one as it’s a bit niche.
• What It Feels Like When Your Son Shoots Up A School: 18 months ago, Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook high school, after having murdered his mother, and then took his own life. This is an interview with / profile of his father, Peter Lanza, and a look back at Adam’s life. Hugely sad and quite horrifying in many ways, but a very good piece of writing.
• Miniature Crimescene Dioramas: A fascinating look at the weird world of crimescene modelling – the creation of small 3d representations of crime scenes used for training detectives in the mid-20th Century. No, really, it’s LOADS more interesting than it sounds, I promise, and the pictures are good too. 
• The Beastmasters of Buzzfeed: I don’t know whether it’s that more and more writers are channeling a sort of homage-y Foster Wallace-ish vibe deliberately (or maybe even unconsciously) or whether there’s something about the general incomprehenible oddness of the world in 2014 which just sort of creates that tone, but this piece on the men and women who make Buzzfeed’s cute animals content has exactly that warm-but-distant-and-sort-of-confused-whilst-still-being-very-clever-and-analytical-about-everything vibe which DFW perfected in a lot of his non-fiction writing. Anyway, it’s excellent.
• London Is Servile: You’ll have seen this piece referenced all over the media this week – just in case you didn’t read the original which prompted the polemic, here it is (for what it’s worth, I think this is pretty spot-on in many senses). 
• That Dong Nguyen Interview: Rolling Stone gets the first interview with Flappy Bird man. Frankly he sounds LOVELY and I sort of wish everyone would just leave him in peace now. 
• Morgellons, The Mystery Disease: WARNING: READING THIS WILL MAKE YOU ITCH. Morgellons is, apparently, a condition which many people worldwide claim to suffer from but which as yet has no recognised medical cause and which doctors tend to see as evidence of mild psychosis. WHO IS RIGHT? Really good piece, this, which seems to take a liberal dose of inspiration from Jon Ronson and is no worse for that. 
• Geek Love: A great piece on a remarkable cult novel which weirdly never makes the lists of ‘cult novels you must read’. Geek Love tells the story of a family of circus freaks – read this, about the novel’s genesis and cultural legacy, and then buy a copy. 
• Street Fighter The Movie – What Went Wrong: Everything, basically. This is a good read overall, but especially worth reading for the JCVD anecdotage. 

By Hyungkoo Lee

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

By IDA4

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY HOPING THAT WE CAN ALL STOP TALKING ABOUT THE BLOODY SUPERBOWL ADVERTS NOW AND MOVE ON WITH OUR LIVES, BECAUSE FRANKLY IT’S BAD ENOUGH HAVING TO SEE ADVERTS MOST OF THE TIME WITHOUT THEM BEING TREATED LIKE SOME SORT OF CANONICAL SERIES OF TEXTS TO BE PORED OVER AND ANALYSED AS THOUGH THEY ACTUALLY MEANT SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT BEYOND OUR RAVENING, NEVER-TO-BE-SATED DESIRE FOR MORE STUFF:

• Twitter Commerce Is Coming: Not that it matters, obviously, because Twitter’s ALL OVER. Maybe they’ll roll this out before we all forget about Twitter and go back to sending smoke signals or, you know, actually talking to each other. Anyway, this is all speculation BUT it’s based on seemingly solid information and isn’t hugely surprising – the theory is that Twitter”s working on infrastructure which will enable product purchase from within Twitter with one-click (ie a ‘buy this’ button or similar), along with product recommendations, etc. There are a lot of people who will end up spending a lot of money they don’t have if this feature is as easy to use as it could be – it’ll make drunk eBaying look minor by comparison.
• Thomson Reuters Adds More Twitter Data To Financial Markets Desktop Service: An incredibly dull headline which masks quite an interesting story – Thomson are basically adding in a whole load of additional Twitter data to the info they feed into the infohungry maws of people who make a lot of money by effectively betting on how popular stuff is. ‘Financial professionals’ (traders?) will get all sorts of interesting information on how the world feels about key stocks in near-realtime; you can see how this can give competitive advantage. I’m always hugely skeptical about sentiment analysis – or at least the crap, superficial sort which is packaged with your standard monitoring software, which is mostly rubbish – but I’m guessing that Thomson Reuters, along with Goldman Sachs who I know are doing a lot on this, have developed something a but better than usual to underpin this. Oh, and they’re doing it for music too. 
• Twitter Data Grants: If you’re an academic or work at a research-led institution, you can now apply to Twitter for access to A LOT of its data. You won’t get the firehose, but they’ll give you lots more than would ordinarily be available to the average punter. 
• On Facebook Paper: As trailed last week, Facebook launched Paper on Monday (or at least they did in the US – there are workarounds to get it if you’re outside America, though); this is The Verge’s review of it (minor spoilers: they like it). Interestingly the reviewer suggests that there’s no reason why they would go back to using Facebook ‘traditionally’ after having tried Paper – it’s ad-free status can only be temporary, surely.
• Facebook Allows Page Admins To Comment On User Reviews: Only really of interest if your Page is linked to a place, but if you own a venue then this is worth knowing; Page owners can now respond to reviews left of their bar/restaurant/whatever on Facebook rather than just having to sit and silently fume as they read the latest whinge by a bunch of entitled consumers who somehow believe that ‘good service’ means acceding to their every whim and desire. Inevitably this is going to produce some GREAT reasoned debates. 
• You Will Soon Be Able To Edit Your Facebook Lookback Narcissismfest: In case you felt that the Facebook Lookback film produced for you this week didn’t adequately reflect the AMAZING BRILLIANCE of the past few years of your life, you’ll soon be able to hack it so that it presents exactly the sort of view of yourself that you want it to. Whilst we’re obviously all sick to death of / inspired and uplifted by (delete as applicable) the neverending stream of these which have filtered through the newsfeed since Monday, I’ll be interested to see how the edit function works – there’s got to be the inspiration for some sort of Storify for Facebook in here somewhere, no? Hang on, does that already exist? *Googles* No? *refines elevator pitch and prepares to be millionaire*
• Some Data About What Advertising On Instagram Gets You: An interesting overview of how ads on Instagram do in terms of comments, shares, etc. If you can’t be bothered to read it, they boost ‘likes’ but seeing as no one really knows what that’s worth the value of them’s still a little bit nebulous. So now you know. 
• All Of The European Social Media Statistics In The World: You want to know how many people in Greece are spending all their time distracting themselves from the parlous state of their economy by sending sexy pictures on Snapchat? YOU GOT IT. Well, not quite, but there’s a LOT of information here which you can use to persuade your clients to spend more moneyzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….oh, look, you all realise that you can just make this crap up, don’t you, because we live in an era where attribution and footnoting is practically dead? Good. 
• Why What People Are Saying On Social Media Is Not Necessarily Representative Of The Real World: This really shouldn’t be in any way suprising or revelatory to anyone, but it’s a salutary reminder that not everyone in the world is on Twitter, and that just because SOME people are saying stuff there that doesn’t mean that that’s the way EVERYONE feels. 
• Lays Flavour Creation Competition: The idea is in no way original or exciting (crisp manufacturer gets people to suggest new flavours, offers prize to most popular one), but I think they’ve been quite clever in including a mocked-up packaging creator as part of the mechanic. Obviously there are LOTS of people making ‘funny’ flavours, but it’s actually pretty difficult to create anything too offensive (I have tried) and as such the mechanic has led these comic masterpieces being shared quite a lot. A decent way of taking people’s propensity to try and be subversive and subverting it in turn for your own nefarious capitalistic ends.
• Sunday Times ‘Icons’: By far and away the best piece of BRANDED CONTENT I’ve seen all year (I know, I know, it’s early), the Sunday Times’ short featuring ‘iconic’ (I know, I know, I’m sorry) cultural stuff is not only beautifully made but they win additional points for making the ‘making of’ stuff almost as interesting.
• Paypal Poems: Next week this section’s probably going to contain one or two examples of brands attempting to wring the last drops of revenue out of an already hideously commercialised made-up celebration, as the Hallmark Holiday once again darkens our collective doors. I can, however, fairly confidently predict that none of them will make me feel quite so sad inside as this service from Paypal, which lets people without the talent or imagination to compose poetry themselves get one of several wordsmiths to compose some verse on their behalf, courtesy of everyone’s favourite online payments provider. Yes, this is part of the plot of the film ‘Her’, basically. Oh hi, semi-dystopian future!

By Francesco Albano

WANT A MIX BY ATOMS FOR PEACE TO GO WITH THIS BIT? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES TO PRESENT YOU WITH AN INTERESTING, AMUSING AND EDUCATIVE SELECTION OF LINKS FROM ACROSS THE WEB, BUT WHICH THIS WEEK AFTER SOME FAIRLY INTENSE SELF-EXAMINATION IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT ALL IT IS DOING IS ADDING MORE NOISE TO WHAT IS AN ALREADY CACOPHONOUS UNIVERSE, PT.1:

• The Sochi Corruption Map: This is by a Russian anticorruption agency and is a pretty startling catalogue of allegations about misappropriation of funding and general shady behaviour. Ah, those Olympian ideals!
• The Sochi Schedule And Results Visualiser: Of course, if all you care about is the sport then you might be more interested in this, which is a cute little interactive which lets you explore the schedule and results for each event taking place over the course of the snowfest. 
• A Beautifully Deatiled Map Of The Internet: The work of Jay Simons, this is another in the long, long series of cartographic interpretations of the mess that is the internet – this one, though, is beautifully detailed and you really can lose yourself scrolling around its corners. Also, prints are available should you want such a thing, although I’m fairly sure that having one of these on your wall is pretty much the map equivalent of having a room full of replica weapons and armour from Lord of the Rings, or a full-sized mockup of the Enterprise in your basement. 
• Wingman: Imagine you’re sitting on a plane and you spot an incredibly attractive person a few rows ahead of you. You could just sit there and silently imagine the future life you could have together and what your children might look like, whilst doing nothing about it at all as you get increasingly drunk on poor-quality white wine miniatures and berate yourself for your lack of chirpsing chutzpah, OR you could whip out your phone and use this app which will, apparently, let you chat up people who are on flights with you (presuming they’re using it too, of course, which is a fairly massive assumption but we’ll gloss over that for now). Details on how it will actually function are sketchy (read: nonexistent) at the moment, but I’m including it largely as my friend Tinni had this idea about 5 years ago except she’d have called it ‘Dates On A Plane’ which is a MUCH better name. 
• That One Song: I really like This Is My Jam, the music service which encourages people to choose the ONE song that they’re obsessing over each week and share it with the world. This is a supersmart extension to that service, using a few years’ worth of user data to define the most popular song for each artist and packaging it as ‘if you only listen to one song by this person/these people, the song you should listen to is…’. A really nice way of introducing yourself to new artists, and it fits very well indeed with the BRAND ETHOS of the platform and all that guff. 
• Secret.ly: All I could think of when I came across this earlier this week is how incredibly easily it could ruin friendships and sow mistrust. Secret.ly is a newish app (currently only available in the US and Canada) which once installed allows users to send completely anonymous messages to everyone in their phone’s addressbook who’s also on the app. So you can say anything you like to people you actually know in the real world without anyone knowing who said it. Now just think about that for a second – imagine the sort of traumatic/amazingly voyeuristic stuff you get on PostSecret, except that you know it’s come from someone you ACTUALLY KNOW. Seriously, would the temptation to just write stuff like ‘I lie every day to the person who thinks I love them best’ and ‘I have found a way of cutting which no one sees’ JUST TO MESS WITH PEOPLE not be overwhelming? Erm, no? Oh God, I’m a dreadful person. Erm. Hm. I think I’ve probably just discovered something quite unpleasant about myself. You can probably apply all sorts of fun gameplay mechanics to it to, of course – see, that’s a nice, light-hearted application. I’m not a bad person, honest. 
• Your Ad Here: I like this project. Your Ad Here is looking to connect East London artists with small businesses in their local area to create billboard ads for them – these ads will then be displayed on specially selected ad hoardings in suitable locations for upto 3 years. Part of Create London, which is a generally brilliant arts organisation doing great stuff, it’s already got some big names including Jeremy Deller on board. 
• Easy Text Analysis: A free textual analysis tool which purports to spot patterns and do a degree of sentiment analysis too. I can’t claim to have played with this too much, so I can’t vouch for its power, but the case studies on the homepage seem interesting and I think that if you crunch a lot of data you should probably take a look. 
• The Outernet – The Internet IN SPACE: There’s quite a lot of scifi-ish stuff out there this week, none more than this project which aims to create a universal cheap broadband network across the world using satellites. Actual satellites, in space. I’m not going to pretend to understand the tech at play here because…well…I really don’t, but it’s all sorts of mind-boggling. 
• A Map Of All Of The Weather: We’re having a lot of weather at the moment, you may have noticed. This is a gorgeous globe-based map of wind and ocean currents around the world, using realtime data from a variety of sources. It’s sort of beautiful and hypnotic, and would make quite a nice installation in and of itself.
• What Appears To Be Another Teledildonics Site: This is SUCH a horrible website (sorry, but it really is), but I think it’s for a load of tech which is trying to bring teledildonics into the mainstream (really, I don’t think that this is going to happen any time soon, however clean and attractive and normal-looking the models you use in the ads are). What’s interesting about this is the design and positioning of it – sleek, affluent-appearing…and yet the v/o’s mention of ‘female to multiple male’ connections makes me think of webcam workers and pro-sex. Which, really, is ALL SORTS of creepy and horrible, as is par for the course with this sort of stuff. 
• Scanvine: This is another ugly-ish site, but one which I think is probably a lot more interesting and useful than the previous one (for most of you, at least – and who am I to judge, really?). Scanvine takes data from a very wide variety of news and information sites across the web, both mainstream and less so, and explores which of their stories are being most-shared across the web; a sort of virality-tracker for news. It’s American-focused, being as it is a US site, but I think you can get quite a lot of interesting information from the API about views vs shares across sites, etc etc etc. Useful for datawonks and students of the new journalism, I think (is ‘the new journalism’ even a thing? I think I might be talking crap). 
• Playing Tekken On The Piano: A friend of mine did something similar with Pong a few years back; this is a clever little hack of the game Tekken, which allows users to play the game by using a piano keyboard as controller, thereby winning by playing music. Admittedly the music created is only barely worthy of the name, but I like the work they’ve done on creating a musical interface for the game.
• Manhattan Booze Delivery: Are these things coming back? This feels VERY bubble-ish…anyway, back in the days of the first dotcom boom, there were several startups which rose and then spectacularly fell, predicated on the concept of online ordering and delivery of EVERYTHING for 0 markup (see the flaw in the business model?). Anyway, this one’s just for booze and just in Manhattan – but do they not have 24h boozeshops there? Are people really that lazy that they can’t stagger to the cornershop at 4am to pick up another 3 bottles of filthbooze? Jesus, show some commitment to your alcoholism. 
• Beta Online Streaming / Sharing Service: This is called Tiplii and based on the ‘signup – we’ll be giving beta access VERY SOON’ page it looks like it might be quite interesting, purporting as it does to allow easy streaming/sharing of video and other stuff from mobile to webwide audiences. Not the first service to promise this sort of thing, but worth keeping an eye on as it seems quite slick (though obviously that means very little if it falls over every 5 seconds). 
• Your Online Self Need Never Die: Were it not for the fact that there are some very real-seeming MIT people named and pictured at the bottom of this, I’d be inclined to think that this was part of some sort of elaborate promotion for some film or another. It’s not, though, unless it’s VERY well masked. Eterni.me is (or, more accurately, aims to become) an extension of your online persona which will exist after your demise – taking cues from your social media profiles built up while you’re alive and creating an ‘AI’ (my inverted commas – it’s unclear what sort of ‘intelligence’ they’re aiming for here, or how Turing Test-y it will bet) from the posts you’ve made which can continue interacting with your loved ones and friends after you’re dead. So basically if you affect the persona of a double-figure-IQ moron online, expect that to be the version of you which persists into eternity online. There is so much here that is scifi and weird and questionable – not least on a technical level, as this stuff is HARD – and I’m personally sort of convinced that it will be a long, long time until this is anything other than a mirage, but it’s a wonderful conceit (and to return to a perennial Web Curios obsession, is very reminiscent of Neuromancer – in this case, the McCoy Pauly ‘constuct’). 
• The Sony World Photography Awards: Just incredible, some of these. Although the one of the wildebeest does to me look ‘shopped to the point where it no longer even tries to resemble actual photography, which once again raises the question of the extent to which digital manipulation has rendered it something sort of other; can we PLEASE have a ‘no photoshop’ photoprize somewhere, please? Oh.
• A Truly HUGE Collection Of Ascii Art: I hope that at least one of you will find this useful – if nothing else, if you’re a geeky brand then you could do worse than making a load of ascii valentine’s cards from them for distribution (don’t say I never do anything for you). 
• The Future Timeline: This is quite an odd website, featuring HUGE amounts of futurology, arranged year-by-year. No idea who’s collating all of the information, but whoever it is is keeping it reasonably well-updated and reactive; looking at the stuff for the next few years, there’s nothing particularly outlandish or unbelievable but quite a lot more which is seemingly quite sensible. Bookmark this for when you’re all doing your inevitable 2015 predictions presentations for speculation-hungry clients in 10 months’ time. 
• Really Creepy Slinky-like Sculptures Of Heads Made From Paper: Watch the video – there will be a point where you sort of involuntarily recoil, I promise you. It’s not gross, don’t worry, just…unsettling, for reasons I don’t really understand. Sort of reminds me of the work of Bill Plympton, more because of my reaction to it than the aesthetics. 
• Projection-mapped Guitar Show: This is a now-funded Kickstarter, but it’s worth a look as the concept – a one-person guitar show accompanied by projection mapping onto both the instrument and the background – and using the music to generate live mapped projections over the course of an hour-long performance. A beautiful idea – would love to see this. 
• 15-Second Cookery Shows: This is one of the best uses of Instagram video I’ve yet seen – this bloke has created a series of nicely filmed 15-second films of him showing people how to cook various sorts of fish. Simple, well-made and useful, this is either going to be commissioned by a brand soon or ripped off by one (on your marks, get set…). 

By Matt Groening

WANT A MIX BY SOME CORNISH BLOKE WHICH IS REALLY RATHER INCREDIBLY ECLECTIC IN A NICE, DOWNTEMPO SORT OF WAY? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES TO PRESENT YOU WITH AN INTERESTING, AMUSING AND EDUCATIVE SELECTION OF LINKS FROM ACROSS THE WEB, BUT WHICH THIS WEEK AFTER SOME FAIRLY INTENSE SELF-EXAMINATION IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT ALL IT IS DOING IS ADDING MORE NOISE TO WHAT IS AN ALREADY CACOPHONOUS UNIVERSE, PT.2:

• Google’s Devart Challenge: Very exicting if you’re a digital artist – Google, in partnership with The Barbican, is offering a developer the chance to have a large-scale installation in the space, alongside existing, recognised digital artists. There’s obviously all sorts of questions around the entry / selection criteria (I promise not to get into a tedious ‘but what IS digital art?’ conversation with myself, honest – you can read a non-tedious open letter on the subject here if you like), but the initiative is great and I’m rather looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. You can read more about it here, should you so wish.
• The Seattle Space Needle: I have no idea if this is a new website (though I think it is, what with it being all HTML5 and shiny and stuff), but I rather like the gimmick – go on, click and see for yourself. 
• Crowdwish: A site made by people in London, asking people to submit wishes, getting the community to vote on them and choose one ‘winning’ wish ecah day, and then doing ‘something’ to make those wishes closer to reality. I sort of feel like I should really dislike this, but the approach to the ‘winning’ wishes so far has been pleasingly esoteric, from buying Euromillions tickets to arranging bulk-buy deals for purchasing iPhones, and the tone of the whole thing is well-pitched. The wishes are a mixture of the nakedly commercial and the pleasingly whimsical,and overall it’s just a nice project. Have a look.
• Race Yourself With Glass: Another week, another Glass app – this one’s a fitness hack which tracks your time over distance and allows you to race yourself, in a real-life equivalent of the ‘ghost mode’ from car racing videogames. Basically you’ll see a virtual representation of your previous time over a course in your Glass display, which you’ll be encouraged to beat, earning points for so doing. Glass will be the thing which resurrects the concept of gamification, I think. More’s the pity. 
• Rats With Teddy Bears: This is the sort of thing which may well have been in the Mail this week – if so, apologies. If not – LOOK! RATS HOLDING TINY TEDDY BEARS!!! Look at their little twitchy plague-carrying snouts!
• Beautiful Photographs of Sea Caves: Truly amazing photos of the striations and rock formations of sea caves, ordinarily inaccessible except by boat but rendered walkable thanks to extreme temperatures and frozen seas. Gorgeous. 
• The Virtual Theremin: If you’re unlucky enough not to have your own owl theremin, you could do worse than to have a play with this virtual equivalent. Tell you what, why not try communicating with the colleague opposite you solely via the medium of theremin noises this afternoon? They’ll relish it, I promise. 
• Vintage Posters From Oldschool Skinflicks: Notable not only for the artwork, but also for the often baffling straplines. I’m a fan of the double entendre, and often the single one, but really – what does ‘Her Garden Of Eden Was Under ANY Tree’ even mean?
• Terrible Wordsearches: Community managers! Do you hate your jobs and the idiots who you interact with in the name of BRANDED ENGAGEMENT on Facebook? Well why not spend the next week trolling them by posting nothing but these dreadful wordsearches under the guise of ‘fun games we can play’? The best thing is that there’s a generator buried on the page somewhere which lets you create one using whatever word you choose – perfect for game-based branded moments of truth. 
• Subtle Patterns: Free-to-use tileable, textured patterns for web developers, all under Creative Commons. Useful for some of you, perhaps. 
• Life Once Removed: A photoproject by artist Suzanne Heintz, photographing herself around the world with her mannequin family. The artist states that it’s a commentary on spinsterhood and singledom in modern America, and who am I to argue – they’re deeply sad pictures, in any case, but beautifully composed. 
• 3d-Printed Popeye: Just terrifying. Will be interesting to see the development of 3d printing in the context of sculpture over the course of the next 12-18 months, I think.
• All Of Prince’s Hairstyles: Prince this week has created one of those moments, like the Stone Roses at Spoke Island or the Beatles in Germany, where far more people will claim to be at his gigs than could physically ever have been. No matter – this little illustration documenting the diminutive human erection’s hairstyles over the years may provide some scant consolation if you’ve yet to see one of his AMAZING SECRET (NOT SECRET) GIGS. 
• A New HTML5 Game Each Week: Thomas (I can’t find his surname on the site) has set himself a task – to build a new game, from scratch, in HTML5 each week for a year. He’s 8 games in at the moment – it’s a fun collection of toys, and (if you’re interested in coding AS WE ARE ALL MEANT TO BE THIS YEAR (an aside – really, it’s NOT possible to learn to code in a day, whatever the Government may find it convenient to tell people)) a useful diary of the learning process he’s going through. 
• Electric Sheep: There have been quite a few projects over the years using the collaborative power of ‘sleeping’ computers to work on large, complex projects; this is the art equivalent. Electric Sheep uses hibernating machines to generate morphing, abstract animations which over time are refined and ‘evolve’ based on user review and voting. An interesting project, and a very hypnotic thing to download onto your tablet-type device. 
• Vintage Work Safety Posters From Holland: As non-scaremongering as you wold expect, and some great art styles and design amongst the collection here. 
• Only The Best Recipes: A recipe search website which limites resulst to the top 1% of results from a selection of popular peer-reviewed recipe sites. A nice idea, and this sort of layered metacuration is going to become more and more popular (DUH!). Annoyingly all the sites are American and so they use STUPID measurements (sorry, Americans, but ‘cups’?), but the idea’s good. 
• Images Of The French Revolution: A collection of 12,000+ images from the Stanford archives from the French Revolution – etchings, engravings, satirical cartoons…there’s a treasure-trove of stuff here, if you’re a scholar or just generally interested. 
• Easel Is An In-Broswer Web Design App: Basically lets you do webdesign in a VERY BASIC but helpfully simple / visual way and then export the code. It’s not hugely powerful, but it’s quite useful and could actually be a helpful learning aid for people trying to get their heads round HTML/CSS.
• The Analog(ue) Memory Desk: A brilliant piece of design, this desk is designed to enable you to record everything you could ever possibly want to record, in analogue fashion. Just lovely. 
• Dave Benson Philips Will Do Things For Stuff: 30somethings across Britain seem to have a weirdly close relationship with kids’ TV star Dave Benson Philips – now that so many of us are in POSITIONS OF POWER (ie churning out brand-related rubbish as we all did pointless arts degrees back in the boom years and have no real skills or talents beyond a vague feel for popular culture and a rough understanding of postmodernism), why not indulge that nostalgia and book Dave for a brand-related engagement (or indeed for anything)? He’s available for public appearances in exchange for…er…a Nando’s meal. Or some trestle tables. Seriously, Dave, you’re better than this. 
• Yung Lennox Draws Album Covers: If you want to buy a representation of a famous album cover as drawn by a talented 7 year old, then this is the website for you. They’re actually pretty good, and I quite want the ODB one. 
• Macedonia Has The World’s Most Terrifying Carnival: This is called ‘The Carnival of the Vevcani’. It happens every January. Imagine doing acid and then going to this. 
• Poolside FM: A site which streams a selection of 80s pop hits in conjuction with a series of videoclips showing beach/poolside scenes from a variety of 80s films and shows. Big hair and bikinis, basically.
• The Creepiest Gifs Ever: Jesus, they’re not lying. 
• LOVE XXX: I literally have no idea what this is, beyond the fact that it’s obviously some sort of art project and that it occasionally throws up male and female nudity as it cycles through pictures. It’s quite rabbithole-y, though, so go and click around and see what oddities you find. 
• Brand New Garbage Pail Kids: Readers of a certain age will get all nostalgic about these – younger people, take note! This is what we got excited about in the playground when we didn’t have the ability to send pictures of our genitals to each other via the medium of mobile telephony. 
• Google Trends For Pr0n: Yep, that very thing. Porngram has taken the titles of skinflicks (over 800,000 of them) and lets you look at trends of keywords featured in the titles. Really interesting from a social psychology point of view, and also quite depressing depending on what you choose to search. Totally SFW. 
• Dumbstruck: This is going to end badly. Dumbstruck is an app which allows users to send messages to others – these others have, to see the message, to allow their phone to access the front-facing camera, thus taking a short video of their face as they read the message. Expect this to lead to a rash of prank texts where people send their parents / partners really horrible revelations and film their reactions FOR THE LULZ!
• I Have Something To Tell You: On that very note, let me leave you with this. A photoproject by artist Adrain Chesser, in which he tells his friends and family that he’s HIV positive and then photographs their reaction. Yes, quite. I know, I know, ART, but still. There are quite a few of these where the person’s expression is a mixture of shock, sadness, and eyes that say ‘you total and utter prick, Adrain’.
• Horace And Agnes: Actually no, I’m not going to leave this section there as it’s just too sad. I’m going to leave you with the somewhat perplexing love story between Horace and Agnes, as told in photographs. Enjoy. 

By Tejal Patni

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Citation Needed: A collection of oddities and seemingly un-factchecked Wikipedia entries. 
• WikiPicks: More Wikipedia, this time in the shape of some of the more esoteric facts which you can dig up from the site. 
• Girls Giving Compliments: A collection of those ‘your hair is lovely’, ‘no YOUR hair is lovely’ conversations which you occasionally see women having on the internet (look, it’s true, come on. Not everyone, not all the time, but you’ve all seen this stuff on Facebook and you’re lying if you say you haven’t).
• Millennial Gospel: I don’t really know what this is, but it does contain some great pro-Jesus imagery and inspirational quotes and stuff, as well as the BEST religious streetwear outfit you’re likely to see in 2014.
• Love For Sale: Valentine’s illustrations inspired by the music of Talking Heads. Pretty damn niche, even by Tumblr standards. 
• Slapped For the Very First Time: I KNOW THAT THIS ISN’T A TUMBLR BUT IT REALLY SHOULD BE. One person’s quest to listen to a new album every day and to write up their thoughts. Nice project and a decent pointer towards some stuff you might not know yourselves.
• Lush Sux: Lush is, I think, a Spanish graffiti artist who does quite a lot of pseudo-disruptive stuff. This tumblr collects his more guerilla-ish projects – I’m quite uncomfortable about the homeless art dealer idea, but there are some interesting other ones on there. 
• Who’s Daft Punk?: WHO ARE THE MEN BEHIND THE MASKS? A series of speculations can be found here, should you wish to look. 
• Art Of The Rap Logo: A collection of logos designed for and used by rap acts. Ah, personal branding, it’s a beautiful thing. 
• Figure Skating Costumes: TOPICAL.
• Newsgames: A Tumblr promoting a conference taking place in March to investigate and discuss the development of game-type techniques in news (cf Us Vs Th3m, etc). 
• The Design Of Stephen Wildish: Amusing Venn diagrams and flowcharts and generally good design
• Post Libertarian: Artworks ‘hacked’ to provide SATIRICAL COMMENT on neoliberalism. A bit of a blunt instrument, but the Ayn Rand one made me laugh quite a lot. 
• We Invent You: More arty gifs, by the people who made the rather excellent conference call simulator from a few weeks ago.
• Contemporary Art Event Generator: In Peckham.
• Computers On Law And Order: Screencaps of computers as featured on the TV show Law & Order (which is actually part of this project here which is all serious and academic and stuff)
• Pornhub Comments On Valentine’s Cards: The logical conclusion of the recent trend for the juxtaposition of bongo comments with non-bongo imagery. Obviously all the text is total filth, but I challenge you not to laugh. 

LONG READS WHICH ARE LONG BUT WHICH MAY FORM A PLEASING ANTIDOTE TO THE INCREASINGLY SHRILL WHISTLING OF THE MEDIA AS IT SWARMS ABOUT US LIKE SOME SORT OF HIDEOUS ILL WIND BRINGING NOTHING BUT STRESS AND ANGST WITH IT WHEREVER IT GOES:

• The Buzzfeed Style Guide: It’s very easy to be sniffy about Buzzfeed, and God knows I’ve spunked enough words doing that very thing (I’m just bitter and jealous really), but their style guide is actually a really, really interesting snapshot of contemporary Western web culture and a very comprehensive document indeed. A genuinely interesting thing to flick through, although they are VERY WRONG about some things (in particular the spelling of ‘chocolatey’, which DOES have an ‘e’, whatever they may say. Or, er, having googled it just now, whatever anyone else may say either. Oh, damn, I’m wrong about this, aren’t I?
• A History Of The Selfie: The article which should have been written last year when the term got dictionaried (I know, not a word – I’m having a bad morning in that regard) but which no one did write because it would have taken longer than an hour to pen and, you know, SPEED. Anyway, it’s a rather more in-depth look than you might expect at the concept and generally an interesting read, placing self-portraiture in artistic/cultural context rather neatly. 
• The Typography of 2001: The first post on a new site looking at the use of typography in science fiction, this looks at the manner in which fonts and type-design are utilised in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Far more interesting than you’d expect, I promise, although obviously you’ll get more out of this if you’re a designer or Kubrick/fonts obsessive.
• On Katie Hopkins And The Danger Of Obverse Journalism: It’s not really stating anything other than the obvious to assert that one-woman outrage bomb Katie Hopkins is A Bad Thing for reasoned, intelligent debate (although you do wonder what sort of point an individual’s life must have reached when they really will hold any viewpoint, no matter how utterly hateful, on television in exchange for money) – this piece from VICE, though, is a decent look at why defining any debate in binary, oppositional terms is also A Bad Thing. BONUS – babyfaced scion of the left Owen Jones on his recent appearance on FIGHTNOTDEBATETELLY.
• A Truly Weird Interview With Michael Keaton: Yes, that Michael Keaton – he’s promoting several films including the bound-to-be-dreadful Robocop reboot – the one who was the first Batman. This is a sort of remarkable profile of him in US Esquire in which he comes across as really quite mad, in a sort of nice, helpful fashion. Great read. 
• A Brief History Of Class And Faeces In India: Sanitation in India is a very complicated business, not least because of the caste system. This is a VERY long but equally interesting examination of said caste system and the steps that are being taken by some to try and change the manner in which the lowest rung of Indian society relate to the waste products of the highest. WARNING: contains quite a lot of talk about faeces. 
• Too Poor For Pop Culture: Probably the best individual piece of writing on here this week, this is a Baltimore academic’s essay about the people he lives and grew up with, and what it’s like being part of a culture which simply doesn’t have the luxury of understanding what all the ephemeral crap which makes up 90% of the media, and indeed this blog, is. 
• Street Fighter 2 – An Oral History: A kilometric remembrance of the origins and development of the daddy of all beat’em’ups Street Fighter 2. Obviously one for the gamers, but I promise that it’s interesting even if you’re not a fanboy (although I concede it probably does help). 
• Posters And Stories From The Golden Age of Magic: ANOTHER great piece on Collector’s Weekly, collecting images of posters from the days when Houdini was king, and people really did used to believe in bulletcatching. If you’ve ever read Carter Beats The Devil (and it is very good indeed), then you will love this. 
• Things That Sound Like Bullsh*t But Which In Fact Aren’t: If even 20% of these things are actually true (and it’s Reddit, and it’s the internet, so large ladlefuls of salt are advised) then you will be SURPRISED and AMAZED.
• The Homophobia Of Men’s Figure Skating: It’s nothing new to comment on how…well…camp much of the Winter Olympics sporting panoply is; this is a slightly sad look at one of the more obviously flamboyant sports and the strange and old-fashioned homophobia which exists around it. 
• Making A Living From YouTube: It basically looks like NO FUN whatsoever, is the upshot – there’s quite a lot of GOOGLE IS EVIL subtext (not even that sub, to be honest) in this, but the main thing I got from it is that these poor buggers are just trapped in an endless cycle of having to dance EVERY DAY for the watchers if they want to eat. Which is a bit grim, really. 
• American Football – The Review: American Football, reviewed as if it were a videogame, at great length, by the inimitable Tim Rogers. You sort of need to like either games or American Football to get this, otherwise you can skip it without fear. 
• On Tour With The Sex Pistols: Anecdotes from their 1978 tour of Texas. My favourite line is the one about them all having skin ‘like lizards’ – even by the standards of late-70s Britain, these are some PROPERLY unhealthy looking young men.

By Seung Hoon Park

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

2) Next, an animation which struck me as sort of appropriate in the wake of the Superbowl and all the adgasming which followed. This is called ‘Love In The Time Of Advertising’, and it’s just charming – beautifully animated, and the song/narration is really very good indeed. Take 8 minutes while you have a cup of tea and enjoy it:

3) This is an advert. Sorry. It’s for a Norwegian company that does filming with drones – JUST LOOK HOW GORGEOUS THIS STUFF IS. It’s almost worth accepting 24h airborne surveillance in exchange for this sort of video (it’s really not, I promise):

4) This is really quite mental. So below is a video by what is apparently a subversive, non-officially-sanctioned alternative Winter Olympics mascot, all trippy and countercultural…except, as this article explains, it’s actually a faux-countercultural mascot supported and bankrolled by the Russian administration. I know we’re living in a BELIEVE NOTHING era, but even by those standards this is pretty creepy:

5) More American Football – this is called Game Day, it’s by Uncle Funkle (no, me neither), and it’s sort of half song and half poem and it reminds me of all sorts of rather good Americana and basically I REALLY LIKE IT, and I hope you do too:

6) Another week, another application of the Doge meme to another corner of popular culture. This time it’s gender politics and pornography, as brought to you by Bright Desire, a company which apparently makes female-friendly / focused bongo (the site’s not very SFW, as you might expect). The video below examines the prevalence of the male gaze in mainstream pr0n, with Doge-ish commentary. It’s obviously really not at all safe for work, despite the Doge heads helpfully obscuring the erogenous zones, but it is funnier than it ought to be. Honest:

7) By contrast, this isn’t pr0n but is still the sexiest thing I’ve seen in ages and ages. Telling the story of a pair of former lovers who see each other again on the tube when they’re with their new partners, it accompanies a song called ‘Alternate World’ by a band called Son Lux, and the performances by the leads are really rather excellent. Or at least I think so; feel free to disagree:

8) Another animation, this time for the song ‘Son’ by Concorde – I’ve just realised that there’s quite a lot of sex or at least nudity in here this week, for which apologies, but this also contains (cartoon) breasts from the outset, so caveat emptor and all that. Anyway, it’s a good song and I think the video tells a story very well (admitted;y not a very happy one) – the artwork’s apparently based on that by this man, in case you like it:

9) WARNING: THIS ISN’T IN ANY WAY FUNNY OR ‘WEIRD’ OR IN ANY WAY NICE. Bit conflicted about posting this, but it’s by far the most powerful thing I’ve seen in ages. I know that on many levels this is propaganda, and I also know that the conflict in Syria is complex and horrendous and none of the main factions involved are in any way blameless for the mess that the country finds itself in, but with those caveats in place…this video’s called ‘Assad Barrels’, and is in two parts – the first shows barrels full of TNT being dropped on Damascus, over and over and over again, with a very minimal backing score. It’s just relentless and incredibly, incredibly sad. The second part then shows some of the aftermath of said barrels – I strongly advise that you don’t watch past 5:30 if you’re feeling sensitive, as there’s some very graphic stuff there. Happy Friday. 

THAT’S IT FOR NOW

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Happy Year of the Horse! By The One Cam

THE SECTION WHICH, DESPITE CONTINUING TO RAIL ABOUT HOW POINTLESS MUCH OF THIS STUFF IS, THIS WEEK TOOK A LOOK AT FACEBOOK’S 2013 RESULTS AND JUST FELT SAD INSIDE (AND, LET’S BE FRANK, NOT A LITTLE WISTFUL ABOUT WHAT IT MIGHT BE LIKE TO BE REALLY, REALLY WEALTHY) WHILST AT THE SAME TIME NOT REALLY DOING ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE TO IMPROVE ITS LOT IN LIFE:  

• What Brands Can Know About You When You Login To Facebook: Sorry, this is a link to a picture in a tweet which is a bit crappy, I know. Anyhow, this is actually quite a useful list of information about Facebook users which Apps can use; useful as a little aide memoir as to what is and isn’t possible with Facebook’s APIs. 
• Facebook Launches Improves Retargeting Ads: This is quite big and potentially useful. I think I trailed this in October when it was announced, but apparently FB’s rolling this out to everyone(ish) as of the now; you can now target ads at people based on their actions on your website or mobile app – so you can take all the people who came to your website and DIDN’T buy anything with video ads displaying the tearful CEO repeatedly asking “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE US?’ whilst crying and smearing their naked body with KY. Or, er something like that. Sorry. Erm, you can also add call-to-action buttons to ads as well (“BUY MORE STUFF”; “PLAY MORE GAMES”; “LIVE MORE”; “STOP CRYING”, etc). Powerful and, whilst not revolutionary or groundbreaking, also sort of saddening. 
• FB To Flog Data About TV ‘Chatter’: Facebook’s increasingly unsubtle ripping of leaves from Twitter’s book continues apace, with the announcement this week that they were partnering with social TV data company SeconSync to give people (aka advertisers) access to anonymised information about how people use Facebook whilst watching certain TV shows in the UK, US and Australia. Obviously if you work in TV, or want to do something smart around FB use in ad breaks, then you should probably be paying attention to this. WAKE UP. 
• Facebook To Launch Paper: So on Monday 3rd Feb, Facebook is launching Paper, a new app product (I think) which effectively seems to turn your Facebook newsfeed into Flipboard or similar. Click the link, and be impressed at the very nice webpage they’ve set up to promote it, and how frankly GORGEOUS the UX/UI of the thing looks. And then take a step back, and ask yourself why everyone in the promo video seems to be some sort of weird analogue-fetishising hipster-Jesus craftsperson; how everyone in the video is a grown adult (have they just given up on teens?); how there’s no immediate sense of how the everliving fcuk all you wonderful advermarketingpr folk are going to push out your MESSAGES and CONTENT to people through this (although admittedly the ‘discover new stuff’ bits could offer one route, but a VERY congested one – advertisers wanting to promote stuff through this will, I imagine, pay top, top dollar); and how noone in the clip is paying anything more than very cursory attention to anything (it basically looks like Tinder for information, sort of). Anyway, this is all just fluff as we won’t have proper details til Monday. Speculate away until then as to how this will work and how it will let humanity’s primary narcissism engine make even more eye-watering amounts of money.
• Twitter Search Gets Marginally Better: Erm, basically that. You can now do better searches from the Twitter website, allowing you to search by media type, account type and from within your followers. Actually, the media-differentiated searching is very useful indeed, I shouldn’t scoff.
• Twitter Partners With Dataminr (Again) For News: Very big news, this – Twitter partnered with Dataminr previously to provide bespoke information feeds from the Twitter firehose to financial services organisations and the public sector (ie Governments); they’re now extending this service to news organisations. Think of this as some sort of major Tweetdeck-on-steroids offering, which if you’re the Guardian or NYT or BBC or Sky is pretty useful. It will be available globally ‘soon’ – £10 says that a similar product for advermarketingpr behemoths (hello Sir Martin! Hello Publicis people!) will be on the shelves before the end of the year.
• Twitter Mobile Apps Improve Photosharing (But Also Recommendations): Nice little tweaks to the way in which the Twitter mobile app lets users interact with photos (crop, rotate, zoom, etc) before posting; useful for community managers ON THE GO. Also in this update, which is maybe more significant, is the fact that users who refresh their feed and for whom no new Tweets are queued will now be served trending topics, suggested articles, suggested follows and…yes! That’s right! Almost certainly some ADS! In terms of a way to serve ads which places them front-of-mind, this is quite powerful I think. 
• Twitter Visualises the State of the Union: Very nicely done by Twitter’s data team, this takes Obama’s speech from earlier this week and runs analysison it, paragraph by paragraph, as to what was being said on Twitter at each stage, where in the US. I expect to see this becoming standard for all big political speeches sooner rather than later, even if it’s only Government collecting this for internal use WHICH THEY MAY WELL BE ALREADY. 
• Best Branded Vines of 2014: There are some very good ones here, much as it pains me to say so. 
• Tumblr Updates Terms of Service: Boring, but useful to know. You’re now meant to attribute reshares, and it’s also explicitly not allowed to impersonate companies or famouses, which might be useful if you’re a brand with a lot of people pretending to be you on the platform. 
• Order Food Through 4sq (In The US): I’m not 100% sure why I’m bothering to include this as a) there’s no guarantee it will ever come to Europe; b) 4sq. Anyway, in another sort of pivoty-feeling move, 4sq users in the States can use the app to order food from restaurants on the platform. Just FYI really.
• Pinterest Surpasses Email For Sharing? REALLY?: I’m including this because this is a stat which some of you may find that you can bend to your purposes (and I’m nice like that), but really? REALLY? I don’t believe this for a second. US-only data, but still – it just screams ‘bollocks’, frankly. 
• The Relative Size of Social Platforms: Clever old Mat Morrison has played around with platform usage data and done some analysis as to which platforms are largest AND stickiest. You can read the whole thing on his site, but SURPRISE Facebook (at least in the West) wins. STOP CHASING THE SHINY SHINY NEW ALL THE TIME. 
• The Snapchat Pitch: Are you a young, hungry student, eager to make your way in the world of advermarketingpr? If so, it’s not too late to change your mind and pursue a worthwhile career – save yourselves! Failing that, take a look at this competition by DDB Oslo which invites students to submit an idea in 10 seconds via snapchat for the chance to win…a job interview. Hm. 
• Chipotle’s Content Budget Is Bigger Than Yours: Brands have ‘done’ indie films; now they’re branching out into comedy series. Chipotle, purveyor of (I’m told) sub-standard tex-mex fare and of cutesy narratives about their sustainable food production practices, have paid what looks like an INSANE amount of money to create an original comedy series, to air through Hulu in the US, called Farmed & Dangerous – all about the ‘outrageously twisted and utterly unsustainable world of industrial agriculture’. FUNNY PROPAGANDA, starring a bloke from Twin Peaks. From what I can tell, the branding’s actually pretty light – it doesn’t air til mid-February, and it will be interesting to see if the millions invested (because it will be millions) were well-spent. Oh, and next time someone says something about NEEDING QUALITY CONTENT, gently mention this and ask about budgets.
• Oh Alright Then, Have The Bloody Superbowl Ads If You Really Want Them: THEY’RE STILL JUST SODDING ADVERTS, THOUGH, OK?

By Ezo Renier

THE SECTION WHICH CONTAINS ALL THE LINKS YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT, AND AT LEAST THREE OR FOUR WHICH YOU REALLY DON’T; I LIKE TO IMAGINE THAT IT MIMICS YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR WORKPLACE OR YOUR FAMILIES OR SOMETHING, AND IS IN SOME WAY A STRANGE AND AFFECTING METAPHOR FOR LIFE ITSELF ALTHOUGH IT’S VERY POSSIBLE THAT THAT’S JUST THE FEVERED IMAGINATION OF A MAN WHO DIDN’T GET QUITE AS MUCH SLEEP AS HE SHOULD HAVE DONE LAST NIGHT AND, FRANKLY, IS STARTING TO FLAG A LITTLE (SO ADVANCED APOLOGIES FOR WHAT FOLLOWS), PT1:

• How The Chinese Move For Chinese New Year: Happy imminent new year, China! This is a rather nice visualisation of human movements within the country in the leadup to the NYE celebrations, tracking short-term migrations as people head to visit friends and families. What’s interesting here isn’t just the viz, which is nice enough, but also how Baidu (for it is they) got the data – it’s tracking where people have been logging into stuff and how that’s changed day by day. There’s stuff you can do on the site to cut the data in different ways, but it’s obviously all in Chinese and therefore I have no idea what it says. Imagine what Google could do in this vein (and then turn off GPS tracking on your phone). 
• Make LEGO Models In Chrome: You’ve seen this by now, right? This is a Chrome/LEGO collaboration, extended globally after its previous Australia-only incarnation, which lets users build stuff with virtual LEGO in Chrome. So much loveliness here, from the simple fact of LOOK, LEGO! to the fact that you can choose your own ‘plot’ of land, mapped on Google maps, on which to build – which creation will then be browsable by other users. Surprisingly few towering phalli so far, which is pleasing. 
• Some Rather Nice Photos From China: Sina’s the parent company of Weibo, China’s closest analogue to Twitter and a massive media powerhouse – this is its selection of the best images posted by its users in (I think) 2013. Oh, ok, I don’t really understand what this is because my aforementioned inability to read Chinese, but I think that’s what it is, and I like that explanation so I’m sticking with it. Anyway, there’s loads of really great photos in there if you click through, and it’s actually a really interesting window into Chinese life and culture and mores and STUFF. 
• The New Awards: Voting’s now open for this year’s Net Awards, celebrating cool/interesting/technically great webstuff. It’s a really, really good source of *ahem* ‘inspiration’ if you’re a deisgner, developer or ‘creative’, and there’s some truly excellent stuff if you dive down within the categories. Web Curios would personally exhort you to cast a vote for Cachemonet, one of my favourite web-art projects of 2013. Thanks!
• Reasons To Live: A website which collects people’s REASONS TO LIVE in one place. It’s not particularly great in terms of either design or idea or execution, but I’m including it because the occasional juxtaposition of Hallmark-style aphorisms, utter idiocy and occasional poignancy is quite curious. 
• Scratchy Grooves: Crate-digger types should love this. Bill Chambles hosted a local radio show for nearly 20 years in Delaware in the US which he called Scratchy Grooves, playing music from 1900 to the 1940s from vinyl (hence the name of the show). Following his death, his son’s putting the recordings online – there’s some crazily great stuff buried in these, and I say that based on a relatively superficial perusal. Come on, someone, invent flappercore with this stuff.
• Sexualitics: What do you get if you cross Big Data with bongo? This is what you get! Sexualitics is a project by a group of Frenchmen which seeks to take large data from pr0n sites and apply academic rigour to it in an attempt to understand more about human sexuality. They’ve published one paper already, outlining their approach and some of the techniques they plan to use – just FYI, there is literally NOTHING erotic about any of this, but if you’ve got a Kinsey-style obsession with people’s sexquirks and a bit of a datafetish then you might like this. 
• Phone My Phone: Years ago, when I was doing work for the soon-to-be-defunct Tech City Investment Authority, I met a very young man who was coding as part of a project called Apps for Good. He is called Dylan, and he was terrifyingly smart and is part of the generation of people who will laugh cruelly at 45-year-old me’s attempts to find a job. He’s made this, which is a really, really useful site which calls your phone if you can’t find it. If you’re like my ex-flatmate this may well be the most useful thing on here this week. 
• Oscar-nominated Scripts: PDFs of Oscar-nominated scripts, from this year and years past, going back to 2007. Cinemascholars should appreciate.
• Oculus Rift + Game Of Thrones = Wow: There’s something slightly odd about the amount of attention Oculus Rift is getting from the mainstream, to the extent that it feels a little like it’s 1994/5 and The Lawnmower Man has just come out and we’re all excited about Virtual Reality again. Except this does actually look really cool, and this stunt/demo by HBO to promote the latest series of GoT to media is both very clever and a fairly incredible trail for the sort of stuff which people will eventually be able to do with repurposed CGI content and an immersive viewing rig. BETTER THAN LIFE!
• The Ninth Floor: These, let’s say it upfront, are some properly harrowing pictures. Telling the stories of a group of addicts who squatted in an abandoned rich person’s apartment in NYC, it’s a fairly unflinching portrayal of exactly how degrading the life of a fulltime needlejunkie can be. Pretty much the opposite of glamourising intravenous drug abuse. 
• The Sensory Book: Have you ever read a novel and thought whilst doing so ‘you know what would really enhance this literary experience? Wearing a mechanical vest which would whirr and clunk and move and stuff in order to better help me FEEL the emotions this book is supposed to be provoking’? No, me neither funnily enough. That sad, that’s exactly what this prototype does – obviously this looks clunky and terrible, but there’s an interesting set of augmented reading ideas which you could spin out of this…OOH, HERE’S ONE – whoever it is who makes those ghastly plugin scent thingies (Glade?), how about releasing limited-edition ranges designed to complement certain books, authors, etc…tobacco and whisky and horses for Hemingway, linen and halitosis for Austen, etc etc etc. YOU’RE WELCOME!
• Dipify: I think that this might be genius. Dipify is an app which connects users based on shared media consumption; that is, if two users are watching the same video, reading the same article, sharing the same links, etc, it will put them in touch. It’s both slightly more limited and slightly more complicated than that, but effectively the premise is as described. SO MANY POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS. It’s not a wholly novel idea, but I don’t think that this particular execution, which seems to make a lot of sense, has been done before. 
• Men Looking Sad Whilst Shopping: This should be a Tumblr, but it’s not. Anyway, an Instagram account collecting images of men looking sad whilst shopping. Why not take this base concept, PR/marketing people, and make it the basis for the next inevitable idea you present in a pitch which involves some sort of surprise experiential activity in a shopping centre? Oh, what’s the use.
• James Edition Luxury Marketplace: This seems to be real, from what I can tell. James Edition (their lack of possessive apostrophe, not mine) appears to be a sort of eBay for really, really rich people who like fast cars and white leather sofas and stuff like that. They’re selling an urban camo Lamborghini Gallardo for 60k Euros, which seems like a steal to me. GO ON! RUIN YOURSELVES!
• Copy Characters: I couldn’t work out how to do the Euro sign in that last entry. I should have used this – very useful website which contains all the esoteric non-English language punctuation characters you could hope for on one easily C&P-able page. Useful. 
• US Book Covers Vs UK Book Covers: A more-interesting-than-you’d-think comparison of book marketing on both sides of the Atlantic. We get better covers overall, I reckon.
• Sand-Writing Robot Machine Thingy: Skryf is a project by Dutch artist Gijs van Bon, which is a sort of sand-dribbling bicycle contraption which can write BEAUTIFULLY on flat surfaces using sand. The video explains this better than I ever could, but this is beautifully ephemeral (and if you’re looking to publicise holidays, messages written in golden sand could be a nice way to do it. Maybe). 
• Beautiful Macro Photos of TERRIFYING SPIDERS: Apparently jumping spiders are ‘insatiably curious’ when it comes to humans. Insatiably’s not a word I feel wholly comfortable with when discussing arachnids, I must say, but these pictures are rather lovely if a little bit formication-inducing to anyone even a little bit arachnophobic (ie me). 
• Convert Webpages to PDF: Exactly as tediously practical as it sounds. 
• TL;DR: This is basically the anti-Curios, or Twitter for people who think that Twitter’s too verbose. TLDR is a site which lets people curate and share links, with the simple caveat that each is accompanied by a short explanatory summary and no more. I think this is actually very, very useful, damn them. OBVIOUSLY you’d all rather read my prose, though. Obviously. Hello? HELLO? 🙁
• Human Skin Couture: Obviously, er, not real human skin – this is just an art project by Nicola Costantino which creates handbags, shoes, etc, with human-sized nipples, etc, as though they were made from human skin. I find the arsehole shoes particularly appealing, personally, although your mileage may vary. 

By Sarah Renard

THE SECTION WHICH CONTAINS ALL THE LINKS YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT, AND AT LEAST THREE OR FOUR WHICH YOU REALLY DON’T; I LIKE TO IMAGINE THAT IT MIMICS YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR WORKPLACE OR YOUR FAMILIES OR SOMETHING, AND IS IN SOME WAY A STRANGE AND AFFECTING METAPHOR FOR LIFE ITSELF ALTHOUGH IT’S VERY POSSIBLE THAT THAT’S JUST THE FEVERED IMAGINATION OF A MAN WHO DIDN’T GET QUITE AS MUCH SLEEP AS HE SHOULD HAVE DONE LAST NIGHT AND, FRANKLY, IS STARTING TO FLAG A LITTLE (SO ADVANCED APOLOGIES FOR WHAT FOLLOWS), PT1:

• Set This As Your Least Favourite And Least Internet-Savvy Colleague’s Homepage TODAY: No need to thank me. 
• The Doge Shipping Forecast: Despite my confidently predicting the death of this particular meme at the start of the year, it continues unabated – this did make me laugh, though, so it’s sort of OK. Website which doge-ifies the shipping forecast – SUCH VEER.
• Electromagnetic Table Science Madness: I’m not sure quite how amazingly groundbreaking this is, but when I first saw it I got quite excited and OWOWFUTURE-y, so here I share it with you – basically an electromagnetic table which produces a field which can light flourescent tubes at distance with no contact required. Time required until electromagnetic pavements? 30 years. 
• A Truly Odd Artist’s Website: I’ve featured Geoffrey Lillemon’s work on here before, but I don’t think I’ve ever linked to his hugely odd (but actually quite well-coded) website before. Lillemon is an artist who operates primarily in digital media and who attempts to bring certain elements of classical style to life through interaction with technology. This is called ‘She Hisses’, but go and check out the rest of the site as well; it’s a hell of a weird timesink. 
• My Abandonware: If you were a teenager in the 90s (and probably a man – sorry, but on balance men were more into videogames BACK IN THE DAY than women) then this website may well be the end of you. Featuring free-to-download copies of all sorts of 90s classics including Doom and Sensible World of Soccer (it’s still really, really good, fyi), this could make your weekend (if, er, you’ve nothing better planned which I sort of hope you do to be honest). 
• The Poetry of Sims Patching: Remember the surreal world of Sims patch updates as revealed in last week’s Curios? No? Jesus, what’s WRONG with you. Anyway, for those of you who were paying attention, someone has turned them into poetry which makes me rather happy. 
• Play/Create Particulate Webcam Art: A site which uses your webcam to create a sort of moving particulate effect based on your movements. Weirdly and upsettingly it keeps making me look like sort of some sort of grinning skull-creature, which I hope isn’t some sort of dreadful portent of doom. OH HERE’S AN IDEA – given that the effect sort of mirrors the way that Guinness looks as a pint settles, why don’t the Guinness people take this and apply it in some way – for Hallowe’en! Your spooky face in a settling pint of Guinness! What’s that? Noone from Guinness or their agencies reads this crap, and that’s a terrible idea anyway? Oh. Ok. 
• The Ministry of Magic: Bit of a puzzler, this one. It’s a Harry Potter site for the Ministry of Magic, which appears to be quite new (like a month or so), yet it doesn’t seem to be linked to Pottermore or anything and there’s no new film to promote. SO WHO MADE IT? Oh, it’s a fansite made by a bloke called Andy Brown apparently. Anyway, my friend Catherine who is probably the biggest Potter fan I have ever met says it’s good, so there’s your endorsement. 
• A Collection Of 100s Of Webcams: None of which, as far as I can tell, are of the creepy / ‘sexy’ sort, although I confess to not having looked at any of them. There’s still something strangely compelling about webcams in public places; I lost about 10 minutes when I found this on Monday looking at what was happening in a Hungarian shopping centre (I believe that this is what is referred to as ‘living the 21st Century dream’), so who knows what will tweak your metaphorical nipples?
• 3d Printed Flowers Which Sort Of Inflate: Another slightly mental futuretechy invention, this. Not so much the flowers themselves, which are cute and quite cool, but the fact that 3d printing is now able to create components which can move like this. 
• How Much Time Have You Wasted On Facebook: I’m not sure I’d 100% agree with anyone who considers ‘looking at photographs of ex-girlfriends, past schoolmates and former colleagues whilst simultaneously crying and masturbating’ as a waste of time, but still – analyses your Facebook profile for number of posts, etc etc, and throws out some totally made-up number based on your activity on the site. By Time Magazine, weirdly enough.
• The Digital Streaker: A website which, for no discernible reason, allows you to send a fat, naked man cavorting across any website of your choice. I can think of no conceivable use for this, but I sort of hope that one of you might be able to.
• Authentic Weather: A weather app (and website) for Android and iPhone which confronts you with fairly stark assessments of exactly what it’s like outdoors. Amusing for about 5 minutes, although I think there may be a crowdsourcing elements to the descriptions which could improve it immeasurably. Or we also have Doge Weather, if you’re so inclined. 
• Fishy Film Titles: Fishfinger are a digital creative agency in London, apparently. In a piece of nakedly link-baity marketing, they’ve created a whole page of film posters based on fishy title puns – I am linking to this largely because ‘Anenome at the Gates’ made me laugh like a drain. 
• Silence The Shadows: I think that this is just another agency promo, this one of the slick HTML video variety. I don’t quite see the point of it, though – it’s meant to be sort of scary, but isn’t’; it’s well-made, but not amazingly so, and the supposed Facebook integration (presuming that that’s what they were going for with ‘Connect with Facebook’ doesn’t seem to do anything. Can one of you take a look and let me know if I’m missing something? Ta.
• Beautiful Photos of Methan Bubbles Trapped in a Frozen Lake: So cold in America. SO COLD. Pretty, though.
• GoPro Heroes: It’s hard to tell whether this is affiliated with GoPro or not – if it’s not, they should sign whoever’s behind it up asap. Nice collection of the best GoPro recordings on YouTube, seemingly updated pretty regularly – nice both if you’re an EXTREME SPORTS junkie and if you’re after some decent videos. 
• Gallerrit: A very clever little Reddit hack which takes any subreddit of your choosing and turns it into an infinite feed of all the images linked to in said subreddit. If you’re testing this at work, can I suggest you exercise a degree of judicious caution as to which subreddits you choose to experiment with? You’re welcome. 
• Objects in Faux-2d: Cynthia Greig is an artist who takes 3 dimensional objects and paints / outlines them to make them look 2d. Not only a cool effect, but the sort of thing which could prove the basis of quite a cool trompe l’oeil vidoe I think.
• The Virtual Steel Drum: Let’s be honest, does anyone REALLY like the sound of steel drums? They don’t, do they? Anyway, this is a digital version with which you can upset your coworkers this afternoon. 
• A Truly Staggering Collection Of Weird Documentaries: There are literally dozens linked to from here, and they are all sort of insane. Worthwhile if you’re into yoga, meditation, conspiracy theories or, let’s be honest, smoking eye-gouging quantities of weed and watching weird stuff on the internet. 
• The Last Photo Project: A rather lovely little artproject in which artist Ivan Cash goes round US cities asking passers-by to share the last photo they took on their phone. Watch at least one of them, they are BRILLIANT and I would like this to come to London please thankyou someone. 
• Dating App Which Kills Romance: You know how lovely it is when you are going out with someone and they do things for you which they have really thought about, or arrange things which you know they’ve put a lot of consideration and effort into? Yeah, well, screw that – Delightful describes itself as a ‘date concierge’, and effectively allows TIME POOR couples to outsource the effort of putting the spark back into their relationship by letting a piece of software pick ‘interesting’ dates for them. I’m possibly being a little unfair here, but it strikes me as sort of soulless and horrible (although my girlfriend could well argue that it’s not like I’m a stellar example of romance myself, to which I’d probably just grunt and scratch my testicles or something). 
• How Do Websites Make Money: Just that – page explaining the revenue models of a variety of sites. Actually full of stuff that’s quite useful to know. 
• The Sounds of London’s Waterways: Such a lovely project and a couple of years old now; a London Underground-style map of London’s canals, with accompanying sound recordings. If there are any musicians reading this, there’s probably quite a nice EP project to be made from this; use the samples from each waterway asthe basis of themed tracks for each one. Maybe. Or maybe it would be terrible? Bob, I know you’re bored – the world needs the Boella Ambient Waterways Series.
• 3d Printing With Lego Blocks: More 3d printing cleverness, this is a very smart little hack which lets users input their designs into a programme which then shows them which bits need to be 3d printed – and does so – and which bits can be prototyped in LEGO. The clever bit is how it works out which LEGOS are needed to make the prototype – look, just watch the video and it will make sense, I promise. 
• Really, Russia?: I don’t normally do ‘WTF?’ picture collections, but this one (purporting to be a collection of oddities from Russia, but it’s hard to tell provenance) really is quite weird (SFW). 
• A Parody Red Hot Chili Peppers Song Which Is Frighteningly Plausible: It’s only the fact that it doesn’t sound like Kiedis singing which makes you certain it’s a parody.
• Forgotify: This was on the Today programme this morning (which is quite odd really), so I’m presuming you all know about it already. Anyway, Forgetify plays songs from Spotify which have had 0 plays, ever. Quite an esoteric internet radio station, as I’ve discovered whilst writing this. 
• The Grand Budapest Hotel Website: I have to confess that I really don’t like the films of Wes Anderson. They look beautiful, and I can appreciate the craft and the artistry and all that, but they are cold and lifeless and lacking in anything resembling human affect (which may well be the point, in which case well done Mr Anderson). I feel much the same way about this website for his latest effort, which is beautifully made and full of rich backstory and CONTENT but which didn’t really compel me to dig as much as I felt it should. Oh, and as pointed out by someone else who’s smarter than me, the UX is a car-crash. 
• Project Makeout: Jedediah Johnson has an amazing down-South name. He also takes photographs of strangers after he’s just kissed them whilst wearingh much lipstick. I’m unclear as to whether these facts are related, although I suspect not. In any case, the pictures are GREAT. 
• The Taxonomy of Tagging: Maybe my favourite site of the week, this is a gorgeous piece of design – you can explore all sorts of evolutions and variants on graffiti tags from around the world, exploring the development of artists’ styles and the like. The only thing it’s missing is some sort of geographical indicator as to where they were found, but it’s so nicely made that I forgive them (they will be thrilled).
• Silhouette Letter Heads: No real idea why this exists, but it’s nicely made and plays with shadow quite cleverly (sorry, it’s quite hard to describe – imagine a digital inetractive-ish version of those artworks which form shadow panoramas from collections of seemingly randomly placed objects. That help?).
• Amazing Long-Exposure Pictures Of Dancers: Incredible technique, and I would love to see this applied to moving images too. These are gorgeous shots, particularly (I imagine) if you’ve done ‘proper’ dance yourself at any point in the past.
• The Philosopher’s Mail: I was convinced that this was a joke when I found it, and then I read last night’s Standard which suggested that it was a REAL THING and not just some sort of slightly snobbish undergraduate snook-cocking at the Daily Mail. Scratch that, I don’t care if it’s real and whether it’s by philosophy caricature Alain de Botton – it’s still undergraduate snook-cocking. Made me laugh quite a lot, though I really can’t see anything beyond parody here. 
• Fuzmo: Have you ever wanted a social network which exists solely for the purpose of sharing cute animal pictures? OH GOOD. 
• If You Like Sudoku, You’ll Like This Game

By Egon Schiele

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Dimly Lit Meals For One: It’s been all over the place this week, but there is SO MUCH POIGNANCY in here. I would really love to know where this person’s getting the pictures from (and maybe find the man in question and stage some sort of intervention). 
• Embed With Games: This is a bit of an unusual Tumblr – rather than being the throwaway home of a one-note gag, it’s the home of games journalist Cara Ellison’s series of writings where she goes and hangs out with some of the world’s best game developers and gets under their skin. Or at least it will be, once she starts doing more. Anyhow, if you’re in or into the games industry this is very good indeed. 
• Matching Monsters: Maybe my favourite site of the week, this invites people to submit photographs which will then be subtly altered to include a drawing of a monster which the illustrator feels fits / matches the original image. SO CUTE. 
• Scrap PDX Finds: Weird stuff donated to a creative reuse dump in Portland, Oregon. 
• The Art Of Truck Torrance: The weirdly-named Mr Torrance does a very nice line indeed in cutesy illustrations. I’d commission the fcuk out of him if I had anything to commission for. 
• Architecture of Doom: A collection of photos of depressed, distressed and depressing architecture from around the world. Ah, brutalism!
• Too Long, Didn’t See: Fun project in which Henry Davis gets given descriptions of films he hasn’t seen and then turns them into comic strips based on his interpretation of said descriptions. Or rather used to, as it’s not been updated for ages, which is sort of a shame.
• Adidas Originals: Hugely tedious unless you’re an Adidas fanboy/girl, but I’m including it because I absolutely adore the way it scrolls.
• Me And My ZX Spectrum: Kids in the 80s, photographed with their supercomputers. All of the hair and the fashion you’d expect. Oh, and if you want to play Jet Set Willy then you can do so here.
• LOL MY Thesis: Students post short, mocking descriptions of their theses, as they prepare for a long life of intermittent work and fundamental disappointment. 
• Animals Riding Animals: I’m not offering any further description, you don’t need it.
• Fat Animals: See previous link.
• Hey, Are You Cool?: Documenting the other players met by one person playing post-apocalyptic zombie shooter DayZ (details here if that means nothing to you). Seroiusly, art based on in-game experience will be BIG in 2014, mark my words (please don’t remind me about this when I am wrong). 
• Metal Albums With Googly Eyes: See animal links passim.
• DBA Reactions: I’m including this mainly as proof that every single profession has its unique thrills and crosses to bear. This is one of those ‘when a client’s like X and you’re all like Y’ tumblrs which did the rounds last year for the PR, advertising, marketing, etc etc etc industries, but this time for the (it’s fair to say) less ‘glamorous’ world of database administration.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH YOU SHOULD READ AS SOME SORT OF HEDGE AGAINST THE INEVITABLE MENTAL DECLINE WHICH WILL SOON SET IN AFTER YOU’VE CLICKED ‘LIKE’ ON THE 356000th PICTURE OF FUNNY ANIMALS OR YOUR MATE’S FAT KID ON FACEBOOK:

• Desert Island Graphic Novels: A series of luminaries from the world of scifi and assorted geekery pick their favourite graphic novels. There are some great recommendations on this list, and some equally obscure ones – if you’re into the medium, this is a wonderul place to find new recommendations; if you’re not, it’s a good place to start (and you should, dammit, they are ART). 
• On Being The Writer of Mega Shark VS Mecha Shark: A great interview with Jose Prendes, who has written some of Aslyum Films’ ‘best’ output. Really interesting, and it’s nice that the man is refreshingly sanguine about the value of his output. Probably the only film–related interview you’re likely to read this month which contains the question “Was there ever a point during the process when you thought “I just don’t see how I’m going to get this shark to destroy the Sphinx”?”.
• Remembering Days Of Thunder: Such a good piece of writing, and a wonderful skewering of not only the film but the whole Tom Cruise ouvre as well. Part of a regular series in which The Dissolve looks back at forgotten films, this is a merciless look at the sheer idiocy of a film which even at the time was described as ‘Top Gun with planes’ and is now chiefly remembered for that bloody ‘Show Me Heaven‘ song (which I now have earworming all over the place, dammit). 
• Demon Camp – An Extract: The most powerful (read: sort of upsetting) read of the week, this is an extra from forthcoming book Demon Camp, which speaks to US veterans of the conflict in the Middle East and seeks to investigate what exact common factors combine to contribute to the insanely high suicide rate amongst vets. This is seriously good, and not a little creepy, writing. 
• What It’s Like Being The World’s 13th Best Donkey Kong Player: Apparently there’s been a boom in competitive Donkey Kong playing in the wake of King of Kong’s release a few years back (which is weird, as it didn’t exactly paint the ‘scene’ in a flattering light. Anyway, this is a look at the life of a man who’s very good at the game, but not quite good enough – I’ll be honest, I’d hazard a guess that his life’s lacking something in some way. 
• Why Beats Music Matters: This is sort of a review and sort of a puff piece of new Spotify-beater Beats Music, but it’s really interesting if you are into curation and the automation thereof. Or, you know, if you just want to know if Beats Music is any good. 
• The World Of Bespoke Drug Design: A facsinating look at the history of designer drug creation, which then segues into a slightly jaw-dropping account of quite how easy it is to get a lab in China to manufacture quantities of whatever you want with very few questions asked. Seriously, the journalist basically sends them an email saying ‘can you synthesise me something with this sort of chemical profile, please?’, and then gets a baggie full of white powder fedexed to him a few weeks later. Madness.
• Medical Horrors of Reddit: Do you want a Reddit thread which is full of medical professionals recounting the most stomach-churning experiences of their careers? OH GOOD. No joke, these are quite vile and should be approached with caution. 
• PRing the Pope: Probably the first and last time that something from PR Week gets in here, but this look at the man behind the best PR campaign of recent years (because really) is actually quite interesting, as is this fairly hagiographic profile of the Pontiff in Rolling Stone (See?!).
• Disney and Datatracking: A look at the future of datagathering with Disney’s latest innovation – armbands for visitors to its US parks which are loaded with data about you – birthday, gender, age, predetermined preferences, etc – and simultaneously collect information about what you do on your visit. Ostensibly helping create a better, more personal experience, this is also sort of intensely creepy and simultaneously inevitably going to be EVERYWHERE in a few years. 
• William Burroughs In Profile: I must confess to never having really got on with Burroughs’ writing – I always preferred his son’s, which probably says very little good about my literary sensibilities. This, though, is a great piece profiling a fascinating and fairly dreadful man – worth a read just for the ever-incredible and tragic ‘William Tell’ episode. 
• The Perils Of Social Interaction: A consistently funny webcomic look at social awkwardness in its many multifarious forms. 
• The Rob Ford Story: So we all know that Rob Ford’s a crack-taking drunk. This, though, is the first part of the Toronto Star’s EXHAUSTIVE recap of their mayor’s story, and it’s just…mental, really. It’s very, very long – and this is only the first part – but it’s car-crash compelling and gives you the context and backstory which the videos of a cracked-out Ford don’t quite give you. It almost makes you feel warmly towards Boris for a second or two, until you actually listen to the man. 
• The Bot Poetry of Darius Kazemi: Interesting profile of web artist Darius Kazemi, who’s made all sorts of projects which seek to find beauty in the random nature of the web, and draw it out through automated processes. About as wanky as I just made it sound, but there are interesting parallels with broader literary / artistic traditions which I found interesting. 
• I Bought The Brixton Academy For £1: Basically a big trail / plug for the guy’s book, but this is a crazy story. Doesn’t explain why the soundsystem’s always been so ropey, though. 

By Johan Thornqvist

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

By Eric White

THE SECTION ABOUT WORK-TYPE THINGS WHICH, I AM AFRAID TO SAY AFTER A FEW LEAN WEEKS, IS RATHER BIG THIS TIME AROUND AND WHICH I WILL TOTALLY UNDERSTAND IF THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T HAVE SOME SORT OF SILLY MEDIA JOB SKIP OVER AS, QUITE FRANKLY, NO ONE SHOULD READ MOST OF THIS STUFF UNLESS SOMEONE SOMEWHERE IS PAYING THEM FOR IT:

• Facebook! Facebook is DYING! Oh, Wait, Hang On, Maybe It’s Not After All (Although Perhaps Journalism Is): This week’s ‘FACEBOOK IS DYING’-bleating came in the shape of a report from academics at Princeton, who published a paper suggesting that, based on analysis of what happened to MySpace, Google Trends, and some rather half-baked comparisons with epidemiological data, Facebook is destined to lose something like 80% of its userbase in the next 24 months. You don’t need to be some sort of massive academic datanerd to be a little sceptical about this claim – the most obvious rebuttal comes from the simple fact that comparing MySpace in 2007ish with Facebook in 2014 is a little like comparing apples with machetes, and that correlation does not equal causation – and yet this didn’t stop quite a few sections of the global media spazzing out about this left right and centre. Read this rebuttal for the full, academic-ese version of why it’s rubbish; or alternatively read this one, for unexpected proof of Facebook actually having a sense of humour.
• FB Newsfeed Tweak Penalises Brands: Well, it does a bit. In the never-ending quest for QUALITY CONTENT (sigh), Facebook’s slightly altered its newsfeed algorithm so as to mean that text-heavy posts from brands will be de-prioritised, whereas textual posts from actual real human beings will be given a bit of a boost. In practice, what that means is a) if you’re a Page and your updates are text-heavy, (even) fewer people will see them; b) if you’ve hired an expensive copywriter to pen your Page’s prose, you may want to reconsider that; c) Facebook are effectively telling brands to spam people’s walls with even more crap pictures and image macros. QUALITY CONTENT!!!! Thanks, Facebook!
• FB Launches New App Insights: If you make / shill Facebook apps, this is useful to know – more data on how, where, when, etc, people are ENGAGING with your app. 
• Deadline Approaching For Facebook Studio Awards: If you’ve done anything to make the world a better place using Facebook in the past year, then y…ahaha, who are we kidding? If, on the other hand, you’ve made something shiny and exciting which has got a lot of other industry people frothing at the mouth with glee, you may want to nominate your work for a Facebook Studio Award – deadline for entries is next Friday, so get to it. 
• Google Makes Changes To Guestblogging / SEO Stuff: So this is searchgeeky but worth knowing – Google announced this week that it was going to start penalising websites which consist solely of low-quality ‘guestblogging’ posts; obviously this doesn’t mean that having guest blogs per se is bad, just that it needs to be decent copy. Frankly if this announcement screws you in any way you were probably doing something a little shady already, so I’ve minimal sympathy. 
• Google Adds ‘Extra Info’ To Search: Google’s going to start offering expandable ‘more info’ bits in its search results, apparently, meaning you can click on a link to get a little expandable dropdown of additional details on any site before clicking through. It’s not 100% clear where this info is going to come from – the example on the Mashable (sorry) piece suggests Wikipedia, but I doubt this will be the sole source. Anyway, worth knowing from a reputation management / PR point of view. 
• Twitter To Launch TV Ratings Info In Europe (But Not UK) (Yet): This already exists in the US courtesy of Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen; this is the European equivalent, launching in the Netherlands, Austria and Germany and giving TV networks (and advertisers, obviously) a whole load of extra data on people’s Twitter usage during and around specific TV shows (themes, reach, INFLUENCERS, etc etc etc). The ad potential for this is obviously huge; I imagine it will come to the UK before the end of the year. 
• Analytics Now Available For Twitter Cards: Remember Twitter Cards, the things which let you do all sorts of ‘exciting’ things within tweets like email signups, ‘watch later’ buttons, RICH MEDIA EXPERIENCES, etc? Well you can now get SUPER IN-DEPTH analytics for them. Useful / interesting, and even more of a rationale to explore the possibilities afforded by cards – details here, in case you need reminding.
• Vine’s 1st Birthday: Who can remember what the world was like a whole 13 months ago, before we were granted the almost infinite power of being able to make 6-second looping videoclips with our mobile devices? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Anyway, in celebration of their service’s 1st birthday, Vine (aka Twitter) has released this rather nice collection of some of the highlights from the service. 
• A Guide To Analysing LinkedIn Ads’ Performance: In case you might need / want such a thing, here it is. 
• Pinterest Testing Ability To Pin Gifs: Not really much more to add to this, to be honest. Sorry. 
• Pinterest Also Testing Personalised Homepages: This is a bit more interesting; Pinterest is looking into giving users a personalised Home/Landing page based on stuff they have previously pinned, accounts they have followed, etc etc etc. What does this mean? That’s right, kids, more exciting opportunities for ADVERTISING! Watch this space, and be sure to recommend that your clients set aside another £300,000 or so NOW to fire their promoted pictures of pugs wearing their clothing into the eyes of impressionable consumers of visual content. 
• Brands Using Jelly: Biz Stone must be delighted that, just two short weeks from his new Q&A service Jelly launching, brands have already swarmed onto it to fill it with such ENGAGING and RELEVANT questions as ‘Do you like KitKat?’ or ‘How Do You Eat Yours?’. Truly, we live in a blessed age. 
• Brand On Snapchat: This is purportedly a site to help people find popular accounts on Snapchat. It’s not great for that, but it does link to quite a few branded accounts which is quite interesting / useful from a ‘look, let’s see what other people are doing and try and derive some sort of half-hearted inspiration from it’ point of view. 
• Oh, And There’s A Snapchat Variant For Desktop Macs Too If You Need One: Just in case, you know. 
• Arsenal Reach 1/2 Million Followers On Soundcloud: Just a little aside here – audio is QUITE POPULAR, you know, despite the fact that no one ever seems to consider it as part of the CONTENT MIX (perhaps because it doesn’t go viral). Anyway, maybe worth thinking of next time you’re wanging on about this stuff. 
• Brand As Patron pt 3029387 – The Dove Edition: First it was Grolsch teaming with Harmony Korine and VICE (did anyone actually see the film that resulted?) a few years back, now we have Dove, bringing its ‘real beauty’ schtick to Sundance courtesy of a film all about ’empowering the selfie’ (Jesus) directed by an Oscar-nominee. Leaving aside the slightly queasy nature of the premise, it’s quite a neat concept which ties into Dove’s BRAND IDENTITY and stuff – they have spent a LOT of money on this, though.
• Macklemore, On A Bus, For The Grammys: It’s the Grammys on Sunday, apparently – as part of the buildup for it, the ceremony released a video of Mackelmore performing on a bus. That in and of itself is cute, but not revolutionary; what’s interesting about this piece is the fact that it was all filmed on cameraphones and hidden GoPros, which meant that (leaving aside what you’d have to pay for any talent), this sort of thing is actually really quite cheap to do. 
• VISA Annual Report: Obviously VISA Europe’s Annual Report is a work of skull-crushing tediousness to the average punter, but I’m noting it here simply as the manner in which its been presented online is actually quite nice; clean, fresh, and slightly less painful to look at than your more traditional 157-page PDF. It really is dull, though (sorry). 
• All The Old Spice Prank Websites: Another year, another concerted bid for Lions glory by W&K, presuming it’s still them, on the Old Spice account. This year they’ve gone for a selection of spoof websites promoting hideous, tasteless products – all of which when visited eventually morph into a video of the now familiar bare-chested Isiah Mustapha berating users for their lack of taste and distinction (this lack of taste and distinction can, of course, be rectified through judicious use of P&G’s stinkgel). As ever, these are really nicely made and the writing’s actually very good throughout. Although I am sure that they have lifted the one with him on rollerskates from Shadrack and Abendigo. 
• Newcastle Brown Spoof Admania: Last week I railed against the obsession with Superbowl ads, and the weirdness of people watching trailers for adverts. The people at Newcastle Brown Ale OBVIOUSLY read Web Curios (they don’t), as they’ve made this the centrepiece of this rather nice piece of work for the US market. Amazing that ‘bollocks’ really doesn’t seem to be a profanity in the US. 
• Denham Jeans ‘Does’ American Psycho: In case you’ve not seen this already, this is very, very good indeed – great ‘content’, guys! Although I do worry that it makes its target audience out to be complete cnuts. Well, ‘worry’ is a bit strong, but you know what I mean. 
• Canal+ Offers An Interactive Greeting Card for 2014: STROKE THE PONY! This actually rather nice, although eerily reminiscent of the mental Shakira perfume website from last year. 
• Good Campaigns Of 2013: A good Slideshare, this, pulled together by Gregory Pouy and containing some decent and not overexposed examples.
• 70% Of Marketing / Marketers Fail To Drive Sales: You have to laugh, don’t you? Don’t you? Stop looking like that. It will be fine, honest. 
• Imperica New Horizons Event – Lineup Now Confirmed: It’s looking very good indeed. Get your tickets at that link there, and don’t spare the horses. 

By Mary Pratt

WOULD YOU LIKE TO LISTEN TO A MIX BY GERMAN SUPERSTAR PRODUCER DJ KOZE? OH GOOD

A COLLECTION OF OTHER THINGS WHICH WILL HOPEFULLY ACT AS SOME SORT OF PALATE-CLEANSING ANTIDOTE TO THE BRAND-ISH-TYPE STUFF UP THERE AND WHICH, I PROMISE, CONTAINS AT LEAST THREE REALLY, REALLY GOOD LINKS THIS WEEK, HONEST, Pt. 1:

• Clever API-Scraper For Any Website: This is potentially very useful indeed if you’re a developer; called ‘Kimono’, this apparently ‘lets you turn websites into structured APIs from your browser in seconds’. To the 9 of you for whom that is any use, you’re welcome. 
• The Huffington Post Launches WorldPost: Just FYI, really – the Huffington Post this week announced its foray into what they hope will be a truly global journalistic offering (at Davos, no less). We’ll see how this goes – lots of grandiose rhetoric from Arianna in the announcement, but time will tell…
• Everyone Attending Davos This Year: Well, the delegates at any rate – it doesn’t mention all the assembled flaks, flunkies and other parasites rooting around the tables and waiting for the metaphorical crumbs to fall (bitter at not attending? Me?) – but this is still interesting not only for the way in which it presents the information (which is rather lovely) but also when you start to drill down into the demographics of attendees. WHAT GLASS CEILING?
• A Drone You Can Fit In Your Pocket: How do you feel about the idea of a future in which people can carry tiny flying robots in their pocket, which they can unleash at any time to fly around recording stuff? Well it doesn’t matter, because they’re coming anyway and there’s probably nothing at all that you can do about it other than hope that this Kickstarter doesn’t meet it’s fu…oh, no, too late, it’s coming. On one level this is all sorts of ‘ooh!’ and ‘wow!’ and ‘so future!’ (sorry for the dogespeak), and on several others it’s a bit scary. Let’s not think about that, though. 
• The Ticking, Knitting Clock: This, though, isn’t creepy at all; quite the reverse. Designed by Siren Elise Wilhelmson, a Norwegian designer, this is a clock which, as time passes, automatically knits. It doesn’t admittedly, knit anything other than a  massive tube, but I don’t think this detracts from the loveliness of it. Anyway, hipsters, this could be this season’s onesie. Get on it. 
• BBC Launches ‘iWonder’: This is the BBC’s proprietary template for creating multimedia articles on-site, a la Snowfall (The NYT’s now-legendary multimedia page which sort of kicked off the increasingly ubiquitous longform multimedia parallax HTML-style presentation of journalism). Anyway, they’ve obviously created a back-end for journalists to use which relatively easily creates these sorts of things – expect to see other publishers following suit. Anyone who can create a white label-able one of these for brands and others will do quite well, I think. 
• Typeface Glasses: Designers will, I think, like these. Spectacles designed to mimic core elements of Garamond and Helvetica; rather wanky, but I can imagine that there are quite a few people out there who would secretly (or openly; who am I to judge?) like a pair. Wait for the inevitable ‘comic sans glasses’ comedy variant. 
• Gorgeous Cut-out Book-type Paper Art Things: An early contender for clunkiest descriptor of the week, these are, in my defence, quite hard to describe. Japanese artist Yusuke Oono makes these gorgeous works which are a cross between books and papercraft dioramas, telling stories through intricately cut-out paperscapes. Click on the link and marvel at the beauty; if I had kids, this is exactly the sort of thing I would buy them and which they would absolutely fail to appreciate, the jam-fingered little ingrates (it’s such a good thing I don’t have kids). 
• A World Map Displaying Viral Outbreaks Which Could Have Been Prevented Through Vaccination: This takes us from 2008 to the present. Aside from the fact that this is another example of BIG DATA being mapped quite well (I know, I know, so 2013), this is just here so we can all look at Big Pharma and applaud their neverending altruism (and for Big Pharma to summarily ignore our disapproval and carry on making unconscionably large sums of money each minute). 
• Tennis (The Band) Have A Nice Website: I have no idea whether this has been this way for ages, and I don’t really care. I found it this week and I like it, so it’s going in. Tennis, featured in the videos section of Web Curios passim, have a rather nice conceit on their webpage which is done out to look like Windows 95. Cute, and actually still pretty good functionally. 
• Metagaming In GTA V: Now that all the fuss has died down around GTA V (a game which, on reflection, I didn’t actually enjoy playing anywhere near as much as I feel I ought to have done – I blame the horrendous protagonists and the on-reflection sub-par radio stations, but maybe I’m just not the target audience any more) and the online component is sort of working OK, we’re starting to see some interesting stuff emerging – not least this trend, identified via this sub-thread on Reddit, of people playing the online game as journalists, simply running around documenting the madness through screenshots and photos. What’s particularly interesting is the meta-game developing within it, with people role-playing being hacks down to driving around in particular vans, etc. Expect to see this stuff, or something VERY close to it, at at least one art fair in 2014. MARK MY WORDS (unless I’m wrong). Although someone mentioned online that this has actually been going on for a little while, so what do I know?
• 8-bit Music Cover Version Motherlode: You want a whole YouTube channel dedicated to cover versions (vocal and instrumental) of some of your favourite music in chiptune style? OH GOOD. 
• The Tate Wants Your GIFS: Following from the Rijksmuseum the other week, now it’s the turn of the Tate to get people messing with its archives. On this occasion, the venerable institution is asking that people make gifs of some of its catalogue works and submit them to their website. These will then be screened, along with some commissioned works by ACTUAL ARTISTS (not that you’re not actual artists, but, you know), at a LATES event on 7th Feb. I like this idea, and I hope you do too – they’re taking submissions for another 10 days, so have at it. 
• Glass And Sex: We’re now on wave 2 of the sexyapps for Google’s imminent facecomputer, but their not getting any less creepy. This one’s from the UK, though, so GO TECH CITY. The website really does seem rather parodyish (to stop the app from working, the vocal instruction is apparently ‘Ok Glass, pull out’ – REALLY?!?) but is apparently all real; it allows partners to stream the glass-view of their coitus, see each other’s perspective on the whole event, etc. Leaving aside the peculiar sort of narcissism that would compel someone to have their partner’s view of sex whilst having sex (“sweetheart, how would you like to get off this time?”; “Well darling, what I’d really like to do is for you to wear these glasses so that I can look at what I look like when we have sex while we’re having sex”; HMMMM), this is very clearly just a promopuffsite for something which will probably never be made. Something like it will, though, so don’t stop feeling a little bit grossed out by the whole thing. 
• Wellcome Images: Have I mentioned on here how much I love the Wellcome Collection? I love the Wellcome Collection. They have SO MUCH interesting stuff there – it’s worth a trip for the shrunken heads, antique false limbs and slightly peculiar 18th-century Japanese sex toys alone. Anyway, as is now increasingly the norm for museums and archives, the Wellcome have put 10,000 images of their collection online; have a browse, there’s some awesomely odd stuff in there. 
• Translate Upworthy Headlines With This Plugin: Downworthy takes clickbaity headlines (“Think you know about cheese? You won’t know what to think after you’ve listen to this fish sing the blues”. Hang on, that one doesn’t seem quite right) and de-clickbaitifies them. More novelty than anything else, but there’s definitely an idea in here somewhere for some decent satire (mabe). 
• Cross-Platform Music Search: Quite a useful little toy which simultaneously searches for songs across YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify and others. 
• Odd-flavour Doritos From Japan:Japan is a country which quite evidently doesn’t have the same anti-MSG prejudices as we do. This is a collection of frankly mental flavours which Doritos have released in Japan over the years. Caramel? Sweet Christ. 
• Strange Image Manipulation Toy Thing: I’m going to quote the blurb here: “Utilizing the infinite resources from the internet as a medium and WebGL as the canvas, Club Rothko Builder gives users the chance to build, experiment and share online digital sculptures”.  So there. You can actually produce some rather interesting images with this, although playing around with your webcam with it at 7am does, as I discovered this morning, lead to quite a lot of soul-searching about quite how bad you look when you first wake up. 
• App Signals Death Of Romance: Those of you who have ever been in a relationship will know that receiving messages from your partner at odd times of the day saying they are thinking of you is rather nice (except a) when those messages come at 5am when they are obviously jacked off their tits on drugs; b) when you’re with the person with whom you’re having an affair; or c) when you’ve got to that point in the relationship where the mere thought of your significant other makes you physically shake with revulsion). Now take that idea, and imagine that rather than coming from your partner, these messages are automated by an iPhone app. How does that make you feel. Yes, well, quite. 
• Google Image Colouring Book: Simple but rather nice little site which searches Google for line-drawings and then presents them as things to be coloured-in. As with almost everything these days, there’s an MS-Paint-style art project waiting to be made of this (I am ashamed to say that one of the first thing I checked is whether it defaults to Google safe search – it does). 
• Pictures of Britain From Above: Feauturing images captured between 1919 and 1953 and held in the Aerofilms collection, a repository of aerial photography which contains pictures up until 2006 (apparently – I suppose Google sort of superseded it from that point onwards). Anyway, this is brilliant as a look at what the UK looked like during and immediately post 2 World Wars – as with the National Archives War Diaries project from the other week, this also invites people to identify certain areas / details to assist with the classification and mapping of the pictures. So much good stuff in here. 
• Shazam For Samples, Basically: Samplify (hideous name) is a clever mobile app which will listen to whatever song’s playing on your mobile at any given time and, apparently, identify the individual songs which it’s sampling. Good for DJs, musos and copyright lawyers, I would imagine. 
• Teju Cole’s RT Narrative: Teju Cole is one of those people on Twitter who tells very short stories very well indeed. You should follow him. The link back there is to a piece about a little storytelling game he played the other day, building a story fragment by fragment from RTs of other, unconnected, users’ tweets. Does that make sense? Sorry if not, the article explains it better I promise. Anyway, trhe first brand to copy this / rip this off in some way is officially hideous and an enemy of all that is beautiful and pure.
• Arctic Snow Trees: Trees in very cold weather look AMAZING. 
• Drake Weather: Ever wanted to know / see what the weather’s like where you are via the medium of an oil-painting of musician Drake’s head, in profile, with a backdrop showing the meteorological conditions currently prevailing around your computer or mobile device? OH GOOD. 
• The Chandelier Of Lost Earrings: I love love love this. An art installation currently on display in St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, this takes hundreds of single earrings, donated by women who’d lost one of the pairs, and crafts them into a rather beautiful chandelier. Each earrings of the earrings is attached to a small tag, telling a tiny story about who and where it’s from. SO MANY FEELS. 
• Design The Perfect Logo: Despite regularly wanging on about design and related things on here, the amount I actually know about the practice can be written on the back of a very small envelope., As such, I have no idea whether this set of instructions for creating a perfect logo is bollocks or not; it..er…looks quite nice, though.
• WTF Is My Wearable Strategy: This is a whole week old now, so I imagine you’ve all seen it; if not, though, some zeitgeisty 2014 agencyLOLs for you, right here. 
• Beautiful Fcucking Sh1t: If you’re a designer (see ignorance caveat above) who wants a repository of slightly trippy graphics, or if you’re a psytrance head who had their heyday in 1996, this website will be right up your street. Oh, the same applies if you still make club fliers and want a whole host of psychedelic backdrops. 
• Your Name On A Spaceship: NASA is, apparently, sending a spaceship on a round-trip to visit the asteroid Bennu (a great name for an asteroid – say it aloud, go on; does’t it sound pleasingly Tellytubby-ish?) – if you want, you too can have your name etched onto the outside of said spaceship. Web Curios bears no responsibility for what may happen should alien life forms intercept the craft and decide that the names on it are the list of ‘chosen ones’ earmarked for abduction. 
• Twitter ‘Flashmobs’: This is silly and childish but did make me laugh quite a lot. The idea is that someone with rather a lot of Twitter followers takes a mundane tweet from a total stranger, tweets it to their followers and encourages them all to RT / favourite it, to the utter bafflement and confusion of the initial person. Obviously this is only funny if people are NICE, which given that this is THE INTERNET (sorry, Evgeny) is pretty unlikely. Still, the concept amused me and I’m pretty sure that there are twists on this for brands should they want to employ them.
• Nice-looking Beta Recipe Site: This is called Counter Chef, and whilst it’s not yet live you can see enough of how it looks / works to get a feel; it uses a rather nice visual representation of ingredients, etc, which I think make recipes a lot easier to scan; imagine this will be very good for in-kitchen tablet use. Clever UI. 
• TINY BATMAN ACROSS THE WORLD: Look at his little ears. LOOK AT THEM.

Not sure who this is by, but found it here

A COLLECTION OF OTHER THINGS WHICH WILL HOPEFULLY ACT AS SOME SORT OF PALATE-CLEANSING ANTIDOTE TO THE BRAND-ISH-TYPE STUFF UP THERE AND WHICH, I PROMISE, CONTAINS AT LEAST THREE REALLY, REALLY GOOD LINKS THIS WEEK, HONEST, Pt. 2:

• A Selection Of Images From Kiev: It’s not been a great week in the Ukraine; this Livejournal page has collected some pretty amazing photos of the civil unrest that’s been seen there this week. Obviously I can’t read Russian so I have no idea what the accompanying text says; apologies if it’s anything dreadful. Here are some other excellent pics from The Atlantic, while we’re about it. 
• Buster Keaton Was Amazing: He did all of these stunts himself. All of them. Tom Cruise can do one, frankly.
• Marijuana-based Fine Dining: You know what, I personally can’t think of anything worse than getting stoned out of my gourd with a bunch of strangers as I’m confronted with a selection of elaborate marijuana-based dishes; the intense couchlock I can imagine kicking in around the third course, and the subsequent conversational ‘issues’ that might entail’ make the whole exercise sound like an exercise in horror. Nonetheless, this website for an LA-based stoner dining experience offers exactly that – come on London, don’t let illegality stand in your way.
• Yeezianity: Were this website dedicated to anyone else I would suggest it’s a not particularly funny gag; the fact that it purports to be about Kanye West’s status as a godhead, though, there’s every possibility that West’s actually behind it himself in some small way (seriously, read the interview with him down there. The man’s self-confidence is INCREDIBLE). 
• Diabetes Deutschland Has The Website Of The Week: Diabetes is obviously a serious issue, but this website makes me laugh SO MUCH. The video which loops on the homepage is amazing – check out the woman on the left, getting increasingly perplexed as to exactly why she’s holding a couple of apples. 
• The Selfie Police: Quite a nice idea, encouraging people to donate money to charity to atone for their narcissism, and encouraging their friends to do the same. There’s a charity spin on this for Comic Relief or similar waiting to be exploited, although obviously I haven’t bothered to think through the mechanics as frankly that’s your job. 
• NYC Audio As Sculpture: Tying with the earring chandelier for the title of ‘best artthing I found this week’, this project by Erica Sellers takes sound files from New York locations, turns them into 3d wave models, and then grinds those 3d wave models into wood which has been reclaimed from the same area as the audiofiles were recorded to make sonically-influenced sculptures. Aside from the clever-clever HIGH CONCEPT, they look lovely too. 
• Abandoned Italian Discos Of The 80s/90s: This brings back memories of me being on Summer holidays in Italy in the mid-90s and being just too young to really feel comfortable in these sorts of places. It also brings back memories of seeing Italian men dancing AT THEMSELVES in the mirror of a club in Perugia a few years later. 
• The GIF-y Awards: There’s an awards ceremony for GIFS, it turns out. Inevitably it’s an ad agency side-project, but it’s actually a cute idea although if I’d pulled my finger out 12 months ago this would have existed then instead (but I didn’t, obviously). 
• Impressive Art On Coffee Cups: This man draws some rather incredible things on standard coffee cups. Costa / Starbucks / Nero / AN Other coffee chain – this one’s just waiting for you to jump all over it and shower the man with the monies. 
• Nursing Home Residents As Film Stars: I’m not 100% sure why these exist – they’re from Germany, but I don’t know whether it’s a promo for anything or simply a lovely initiative from a senior residential home – but these pictures showing senior citizens dressed as film stars are lovely. Also a lovely alternative to Bill Hicks’ ‘Let your grandma meet Chuck Norris‘ bit. 
• NYC Really Was Scary In The 80s: There was an article the other week about how there’s a lot of false nostalgia about for THE GOOD OLD DAYS on New York, when it was all edgy and real. These photos rather fantastically point out that it was also very, very scary-looking indeed. Would you go on that subway after dark? You’re braver than I am (admittedly not a huge accolade, but still). 
• Fashion For Pregnant People: Not something that I’m personally interested in, but this is a very nicely done website indeed. The homepage in particular is excellent – the video really works well. 
• The Surreal World Of The Sims: Personally I think that this is one of the best things in here this week. The Sims, as I’m sure you all know, is the long-running videogame in which players can create their own miniature people living in their miniature houses with miniature furniture and miniature relationships while you play GOD above them. This is a list of some of the more bizarre software patches which have been released for the game in the past few years; they make the BEST starting point for surreal stories / images I have seen in ages. If you’re not amused / inspired by gems such as ‘The Murphy Bed Has Been Made Less Lethal’ then we probably can’t be friends. 
• Get Your Hallowe’en Mask In Early: Animal masks. Really, really creepy animal masks.
• Instagram Experiments: A collection of cute / clever drawings which integrate real-world objects, photographed and collected. Again, crap description – click the link, it’s actually really quite good.
• An Incredible Collection Of Light Painting Photos: Long-exposure photography of light stuff isn’t really very cool, is it? It always feels a little bit like the photo equivalent of white people with dreads, waving poi. Still, ‘cool’ is something with which Web Curios (or at least its author) has no truck whatsoever, and as such I have no shame in presenting this AWESOME collection; some great stuff and really interesting techniques here, I think. 
• The Machine To Be Another: A really interesting project, using the now-ubiquitous Oculus Rift in order to play with ideas of self-perception and gender. Effectively it uses cameras and the Rift device to present a different first person view to an individual, which presents a different body to their own whilst still ostensibly mimicking their movements, etc. Oh dear God, that was nonsensical – sorry, early start this morning. Just look. 
• The Bum Alphabet: This is more my speed. An app for tablets / phones which attempts to teach kids the alphabet via the medium of a font made up of…er…bums. I imagine small children would find this HILARIOUS (and some adults too, to be honest).
• Behind The Scenes Pictures From Ghostbusters: You know the drill by now. These are pretty good, though, particularly the ones of the Slimer model (they called it Onionhead? Really?).
• Personalised Carved Ice Lollies: Very clever – using facescanning and a carving drillbit, this project aims to create a portable machine which will carve bespoke icelollies into whatever shape is placed in front of it. Coming to a marketing campaign near you later this year, no doubt. 
• Rub Lutter Cycles The World: Rob Lutter’s an OCD man who’s cycling around the world to raise money for charity. It’s an interesting project, and the website which accompanies it is really rather nicely put together; well-designed, clear, and with lots of decent pictures, info, etc. 
• 5TFU: Quite an interesting idea, this one. Sort of like Chatroulette for audio, this site allows anyone to upload an audiofile anonymously; visitors to the site get streamed a file at random, which they can either listen to or downvote in favour of moving on to the next one. All the files are available to download, too, which is obviously legally quite tricky, but a nice touch. I’ve had it on for the past 20 minutes, and there’s some really, really interesting stuff on there, and quite a lot which sounds like washing machines having angry sex. I like it (the website, not the sound of washing machines having angry sex). 
• Edgar – The Story Builder: Another week, another website which purports to let users create multi,edia narratives in an easy, attractive fashion. This one’s called Edgar, for some reason – it actually looks very nice, and the interface is pretty decent. It’s not quite the ‘make your own snowfall in 3 minutes!’ magical doohickey I allude to above, though. 
• Best / Worst Headline Of The Year So Far: Frankly it’s hard to tell how it could be bettered. 
• Wages For Facebook: A manifesto, really, demanding that people start claiming remuneration for the data which they have given up to companies like FB. Obviously that’s not ACTUALLY what it’s asking for – it’s about how we consider value in the context of information, and how we consider labour in a digital age, and all sorts of other things. The unskippable autoscroll irritates me no end, but the prose is actually very interesting whether or not you agree with its central premise.
• A Very Strange Hollwood Photoshoot: Jeremy Cowart is a photographer in the US who photographs famouses. He did a shoot recently for some TV show or another in which he felt a strange ‘connection’ with one of said famouses. I’m just going to leave this here – I have my own thoughts about this, but, y’know, who am I to judge. I just find it all VERY WEIRD as a way of reacting to some pretty bad news. 
• Stork Fountain: Finally this week, a poem. It’s from 2013, but I only saw it this week and anyway, it’s very good indeed. All about online activism and activity and inactivity and clickbait and news and information DOING THINGS and and and. Read it. 

By Louis Draper

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS! (IT’S JUST AS FCUKED AS FACEBOOK, APPARENTLY):

• Animals Sitting On Capybaras: We must surely be fast approaching a point where we’re going to need another addition to the Laws of the Internet which states ‘if it can be conceived of and articulated in writing, there will be a Tumblr of it’. 
• 80s Art: Photos of fine art, often in-situ, in the 1980s. Some quite remarkable stuff in here. 
• 70s Sci Fi Art: Erm, scifi art, from the 70s. These descriptors are sort of redundant really, aren’t they? People who make mood boards and STUFF might find this useful. 
• The Videogame Art Archive: A collection of art from videogames – not concept art, but depictions of art. Interesting and , as  per the GTA thing above, I would be AMAZED if this stuff isn’t actually *ahem* ‘reapppropriated’ by the fine art establishment this year.
• Critical Hand Gestures: See how many you can use at work this afternoon.
• Tate Collectives: Seeing as we mentioned Tategifs above, here’s a whole Tumblr of them (and other things too). Some really nice things on here. 
• Deep Dark Fears: Cartoon depictions of people’s deepest, darkest fears. You can even submit your own, if you like. This is simultaneously sort of cute and funny and really, really distressing in a low-key sort of fashion. 
• The Association Sketchbook: An interesting little project, using word-association through prose, poetry, images and video. Will be interesting to see what results over time, but I like the concept. 
• Then & Now Photos: If these are yet to be in the Mail, it can’t be long. Two English brothers recreate their childhood photographs, to comedic and occasionally slightly creepy effect.
• Truthgraphs: Graphs which…er…tell the truth. Sort of. 
• Datasonfication: Here we go – turning data into sound is officially a THING – it has its own Tumblr and name and everything. Anyway, this collects examples of audiomanipulation of datasets; I was wondering the other day to what extent audio could be used as an predictor of things / alerts system, from a datamonitoring sort of way. Then I started boring myself, so I stopped. 
• The Invisible Men: Finishing on a less than cheery note here, but this is a sobering and rather excellent / sad project. The Invisible Men collects critical reviews written by men who use prostitutes, and presents them as a series of texts pasted onto blank female masks, each with a pricetag showing how much each man paid for the right to complain about his experience. Not going to lie, this is very grubby indeed. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND REALLY, THIS WEEK ESPECIALLY, ARE QUITE EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD AS WELL AS BEING SORT OF INSTRUCTIVE IF YOU’LL EXCUSE MY IRRITATING DIDACTICISM FOR A SECOND:

• Stoya On Sex: Hopefully acting as a slight antidote to the last Tumblr, this is a great piece of writing in the New Statesman of all places by pr0nstar Stoya, who’s moderately famous in the non-bongo world for being a prolific writer and commentator on all sorts of things. Anyway, this is her guide to sex for young people, which I would modestly suggest should be required reading for anyone 12 and above. 
• Bill Murray AMA: Another week, another famous getting intimate with Reddit. This time it’s the turn of internet favourite Bill Murray, who gives a wonderfully candid series of answers; dear God, wouldn’t it be nice if all famouses were able to be this honest and unguarded about stuff, eh?
• The Death Of The Expert: A great piece on the troubling rise of the dilettante in almost every field, and how it’s increasingly seen as somehow rude and patronising to claim a superior or more valid perspective on any issue based on expertise or increased knowledge of said issue (it’s not rude; it’s just true). A great piece, with a slightly depressing overall tone which suggests that we’ve crossed the Rubicon on this one.
• Some TED Talks Are Just Wrong: It’ll be interesting to see whether the mainstream TED backlash gathers any real weight or not; nevertheless, this piece on The Awl neatly skewers one of the reasons why people are often uncomfortable with the format and premise; that is, the presentation of what are at best theories and at worst factoids as fact, in an environment which offers no opportunity to challenge and presents the speaker’s thesis as gospel. Obviously this only looks at a few examples – not all TED talks are like this, obviously – but it’s worth bearing in mind the next time you hear Gladwell or someone else wanging on about something INCREDIBLE and REVELATORY. 
• McQueen Vs Kanye: I do wonder what Steve McQueen, who lest we forget was a visual artist before he was a Hollywood filmmaker, thought of Kanye’s assertion that he was from a tradition of visual artists himself, but that noone had ever been smart enough to see it. Anyway, as ever West gives GREAT hubris here; whatever you may think of the man, personally or in terms of output, he’s very entertaining indeed. I wouldn’t really like to be stuck in a room with him, though, which feeling I am sure would be mutual were he to have any inkling who the everliving fcuk I am.
• The Best Music Journalism Of 2013: The last ‘Best Of 2013’ thing I will post here, honest, but there’s some really good writing linked to from this Red Bull Academy post. 
• Why Friends Ruined Everything: VICE doing what it does best here, skewering popular culture in slightly self-conscious and affectionate fashion. Thing is, and this is why Buzzfeed is less good than VICE, they could have done this too but it would have been ‘7 Reasons Why Friends Killed The 90s’ or something, and it would have been dreadful. In fact, maybe they’ve aready done it and VICE have just ripped it off, which sort of invalidates my thesis. Oh. Whoops. 
• Virtual Girlfriends And Slightly Sad Men: Wow, well this is quite bleak too. All about the increasing number of men in the Far East (although let’s be honest, it’s still a VERY small number overall) who are becoming more comfortable having relationships with virtual girlfriends than with the real thing. Although having recently witnessed a friend trawling through OK Cupid, I can almost begin to see their point. 
• Hacking OK Cupid: Speaking of that…one VERY geeky man applied algorithms to his search for love. Inspiring and a bit saddening in equal measure.
• An Oral History Of ‘Swingers’: Before Jon Favreau made millions directing the Iron Man films, and before Vince Vaughan decided to become th go-to guy for every mediocre romantic comedy made from 2006 onwards (or so it feels), there was Swingers. If you watched this when you were in your teens / early 20s, you probably wanted to be a bit like the characters in it (watching it now, you’re really glad you’re not). This is a really interesting piece, with the principals all talking about how it got made – interestingly, whilst there’s obviously LOADS of hard work and stuff in here, there’s also a healthy slice of familial money – note the passing references to ‘my dad got me a Hollywood scriptwriting course as a gift’, and ‘$200,000 from my father’s business associate’. Every little helps. 
• What It’s Like Being A Drug Dealer: Clue: a massive logistical nightmare, and really not very much fun at all, it turns out. BONUS: a similar but different piece on what it’s like selling through the Silk Road, which frankly sounds LOADS easier. 
• Indian Sex Tourism In Uzbekhistan: This is REALLY long, but very interesting indeed – not least as it shows sides to Indian culture that I personally haven’t read about before, and also tells you quite a lot about Uzbekhistan (it doesn’t sound fantastic, to be honest). 
• The Poignancy of Sad YouTube: Long-term readers may remember Sad Youtube from the Tumblrs section a few months back; anyway, this is Buzzfeed’s in-depth look at the site and the commentors whose poignant memories sparked the whole thing. You want to get poncey, you call it Proustian; you don’t want to, then it’s just a really interesting read. Your call. 
• Obama’s Second Term: Again very long, but SCH good political writing / profiling. Maybe I don’t read as much as I ought, but I struggle to think of profiling like this on UK leaders whilst they’re still in situ, although maybe that’s just because noone cares quite as much. In any case, this is a great look at Obama as he enters the final 2.5 years of his leadership; a very good close-up look at a man doing what I can only imagine is the worst job in the world (slight hyperbole, but only slight). 
• On Not Knowing Anything About Bob Dylan: Esquire, on the absolute inscrutable unknowability of Mr Dylan. Fans will lap this up; others will be slightly perplexed about how it’s possible to write this much about very, very little indeed. 
• The Evolution of Tarzan’s Roar: This is silly and fun and very OLD HOLLYWOOD, and also autplays the roar when you click the link. Go on, go to the toilets and practice it NOW.

By Korneel Detailleur

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!