By @Cloudyrhodes

THE SECTION ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA WHICH IS STILL PRETTY SMALL THIS WEEK AND IS LEADING ME TO HOPE THAT PERHAPS THIS MIGHT BE THE YEAR IN WHICH WE ALL COLLECTIVELY DECIDE THAT WE POSSIBLY GOT A BIT OVEREXCITED ABOUT ALL THIS RUBBISH AND THAT WE SHOULD MAYBE LEAVE IT FOR A BIT, TURN OFF THE INTERNET AND GO FOR A NICE LONG WALK TO CLEAR OUR HEADS, BUT WHICH IS MORE LIKELY NOTHING BUT THE OMINOUS SILENCE BEFORE SOME SORT OF CATACLYSMIC FACEBOOK AVALANCHE:

• More Evidence That Facebook Is Just Laughing At The Concept Of ‘Organic Reach’: Another week, another piece demonstrating just how little Zuckerberg’s bland nation-state cares about your ability to reach an audience without spending LOTS of money on ads. Without them, organic reach appears pegged at around 7% – so 7% of all those people who you worked so hard to entice into ‘liking’ your Page will actually ever see anything you write on there. Unless you pay Mark some money. Anyone working client-side who reads this – if you want to really mess up your Community Manager’s weekend, send them this piece at about 430pm today and ask them what strategies they have to address this that don’t involve spending more money (clue: there is no right answer to that question).
• Trending Topics Coming To Facebook: But don’t worry! Facebook’s getting trending topics! In a move which is in NO WAY a copy of Twitter’s own trending topics, Facebook is starting to roll out a ‘what people are talking about’ feature to certain countries. In fairness it is slightly different, as topics displayed will apparently be tailored to a user’s interests, friendship base, etc – which sort of makes me question its utility as a world barometer, but then what do I know? Let’s be honest, this is just going to be A N Other ad product in a few months’ time, isn’t it?
• Google Image Search Adds ‘Usage Rights’ Option: Unexciting but useful, Google Images now lets you filter results by usage options – reusable, reusable for commercial ends, etc. Very useful indeed for anyone who spends a lot of time nicking pictures off the internet to use in other stuff (ie mostly everyone who does anything communications-y), and especially for those for whom the whole Creative Commons thing is just a little too complicated. 
• YouTube Makes Comment Management Easier: Again, dull – sorry, I can only work with what I’m given. YouTube’s now introduced a more streamlined comment-management, flagging and moderation system, which if you’re the poor bugger who has to deal with a herd of mouth-breathers writing “DIE FAGS YOLO” underneath everything you post probably comes as something of a relief. 
• The YouTube SuperBowl Ad Blitz: Well this has served to make me more miserable than I feel I ought to be at 8:06am. We live in a world in which people are meant to be so excited and moist with anticipation at the prospect of FRESH, HIGH-BUDGET ADVERTISING MESSAGES around this year’s display of pituitary meatheads’ athletic prowess that YouTube’s created a whole section for people to see the ads in advance. Leaving aside the total and utter weirdness of this – or, actually, maybe it’s not that weird; the rise of TVOD means that adverts are now an optional watch, which means that we inevitably see them less as something we’re forced to consume and more something we can choose to ‘enjoy’ and thus do so with a critical eye. Or something. Anyway, from an ad/media point of view this is obviously quite big news; expect a similar thing for the parade of Christmas ads come December 2014 (dear Christ, week 2 of Web Curios in 2014 and I’ve already mentioned the ‘C’ word). 
• Twitter Ads Mailing List Ad Targeting: Of course, it’s not just Facebook copying Twitter; Twitter’s now  aping Facebook in allowing advertisers to import mailing lists into its ad sales platform and cross-reference this dataset with Twitter’s own. That’s a horribly clunky way of saying that you can, in theory, target ads on Twitter to just people whose email addresses you have, or to exclude people whose email addresses you have (for example, to prevent card-based datacap tweets being shown to people who’ve already surrendered their email addresses to you), and other stuff like that. Actually quite a big deal.
• Tumblr Adds @Mentions: These were sort of there already actually, but now you get alerts and stuff; from a brand point of view this allows for far more ENGAGEMENT with your FANBASE – makes the whole thing I bit more interesting, I think, and there are some interesting possibilities for competitions and the like, not to mention Tumblr relations (for that is now a thing which will appear in PR agency pitches – I have decreed it to be so and thus so it shall be. Sorry about that). 
• Quite Nice Branded Content #1: Oh, dear God, parallax-scrolling HTML5 is SO 2013. Nonetheless, this little site by Sony is very, very nicely done indeed. Promoting the artistry behind its engineering, the design and build is very, very slick indeed. The underwater bit in particular actually elicited a small ‘oooh’ from me when I first saw it – admittedly it was Monday and it was a pretty dull afternoon, but still.
• Quite Nice Branded Content #2: I like this because I can sort of see the thought processes behind it. Spices are multicoloured. People love seeing multicoloured stuff flying about (witness the rise in interest in Holi over the past 3 years). If we explode spices in slow-motion we’ll have INTERNET GOLD! Anyway, this is cute from Schwartz. 
• Quite Nice Branded Content #3: Guinness are of course old masters at this sort of thing, but even by their standards this short film about the incredibly stylish men (Sapeurs) of the Congo is rather nicely done – designed and filmed to appeal squarely to the fashion/design/culture/hipster crowd, as well as being ON-BRAND and stuff. 
• Lessons In Realtime Content: Some notes on how Buzzfeed ‘did’ the Golden Globes; nothing startling in here, but good, common-sense stuff on how one might approach REAL-TIME ACTIVATION these days. 
• STATS! ASIA-PACIFIC SOCIAL MEDIA STATS!: Do you work for an agency? Do you occasionally need to feign an in-depth knowledge of markets far, far away? How convenient, then, for this 200+ page presentation which gives you exactly those in frankly fatigue-inducing quantities. 

By Dan Arnold

THIS WEEK’S LARGELY UNCONNECTED COLLECTION OF WEBSITES AND STUFF WHICH ALTHOUGH SEEMINGLY SELECTED AT RANDOM ARE IN FACT EVIDENCE OF A SOPHISTICATED AND UNIQUE CURATORIAL INSTINCT, HONEST GUV, IT’S NOT JUST ME LINKING TO WHATEVER’S PASSED ACROSS THE FRONTPAGE OF REDDIT AT VARIOUS POINTS THIS WEEK WHATEVER SOME OF YOU MAY THINK DAMN YOUR DOUBTING EYES, PT1:

• Some Tech Trends For 2014: Are we still allowed to do TRENDS? Hm, I’m in two minds. No matter, here they are anyway – this is actually a pretty decent overview of some stuff you might be seeing more of in 2014, courtesy of Frog Design. The further down the list you go, the more interesting these become; I think the point about art and the internet of things is a very good one, and something I look forward to seeing more of (meaning, inevitably, it won’t happen. GAUGIN UP MY FRIDGE YOU BASTARDS). 
• Crowdsourcing War Diary Analysis: Earlier this week, the National Archives published a selection of WWI diaries as part of its centenary remembrance of the conflict. They make for fascinating reading – do go and take a look – and the Archives are also allowing the public to get involved in classifying and tagging additional scanned diaries through this rather cool interface. It’s a very worthwhile project, and the UI/UX is, I think, excellent for what is a very complex body of work indeed. 
• The Wold Online Orchestra: Another excellent project, this is by the Copenhagen Philharmonic (and partners) and is sort of hard to describe with any sort of brevity whatsoever. As they put it, it allows users to explore an excerpt from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony by allowing them to see it being played by a variety of different orchestral members at any one time; to listen to collages made up of various orchestra members, selected by them; or indeed to upload their own contribution to the orchestra by recording themselves playing some of the 7th and submitting it for inclusion into the project. Collaborative and playful and technically excellent, I really do love this (and I’m not even a fan of the 7th). 
• The Refugee Project: Somewhat more sober in tone, this is a rather good piece of datavisualisation depicting refugee movements worldwide from the mid-1970s to the present day. Taking UN data and adding political backstories and multimedia, it does an excellent job of demonstrating the displacement of peoples, and of showing quite neatly that the countries most affected by refugee movements are not large, affluent ones but instead the oft-times equally banjaxed republics next door. 
• British Ghost Trains From The 70s: So, so creepy. A selection of photographs of ghost train facades from British funfairs of the 70s (and 80s, actually) which give off the sort of vibe which suggests that terrible, terrible things may be about to happen. Maybe it’s just the washed-out colours which put me in mind of those sort of safety at work films in which people lose limbs and eyes through seemingly casual acts of in-work carelessness.
• Making Windows 8 Work: Noone likes Windows 8. It’s horrid. This website is really, really useful though, containing as it does a selection of useful tips and shortcuts for making the thing marginally less awful. It’s still a dog’s dinner, let’s be clear, but this site really does help. 
• The Data Chandelier: This is so clever. Built for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, it’s a collection of lights which move and light up / shut down based on the data which is pushed through them – GDP, birth rates, death rates, etc. There’s obviously going to be some way of taking this and using it in a shopping centre to sell more soap or something, but let’s ignore that for the moment and bask in the temporary purity of an as-yet unsullied concept.
• The Faces Of Shotputters: When I was a kid at international school, there was a very weird American kid called Graham who wore suits ALL THE TIME, liked to think of himself as a pimp, took an awful lot of ecstasy and had a video (VHS! Olden days!) called ‘Faces of Death‘, which were notorious for being like ‘You’ve Been Framed’ clips but where people actually died in gruesome fashion. It was pretty horrible, to be honest – Graham, what were you thinking? Anyway, this isn’t like that at all – it’s people throwing shotputs and looking quite silly whilst doing so. Don’t be scared. 
• Post-mortem Photography: Speaking of pictures of people’s faces and the dead, this is a very macabre collection of shots from (mostly) the 19th Century, where it was reasonably common practice to immortalised the recently deceased in photographic form, often pictured with other family members. This is, let’s be clear, a selection of photos of dead people, often posing (or, more accurately, being posed) with their still-living familials, and it’s exactly as strange as that sounds. 
• Behind-The-Scenes Pics Of Star Wars: How many more of these sets can there be? Anyway, the bloke who played Chewbacca posted a load of them to Twitter last weekend; the link goes to his Twitter media page, so you may need to scroll a bit, but there are some rather nice ones if you’re a Lucas-phile. 
• The Marvel Comics Fitness Guide: Ah, January – the month in which people continue to labour under the mistaken belief that this will be the year in which they turn their lives around and in which they get themselves the miracle body which for years they have been dreaming of. If you are one of those harbouring that particular illusion (don’t worry, reality will kick in in a couple of weeks time and you’ll be back on the cake and meths), why not try out some of the exercises depicted by Spiderman and chums in the Mighty Marvel Strength and Fitness Book from yesteryear? Oh, please yourselves.
• Infinite Seinfeld: Seinfeld appears to be everywhere at the beginning of 2014, what with his AMA and all that. This site claims to be an infinite loop of Seinfeld episodes – I’m not really in a position to comment, having checked it out for a grand total of about 7 minutes – if it turns into wee-based bongo in the 8th, then I am truly, truly sorry. 
• The Visa Mapper: Not flashy, just useful. Select where you’re from and this page shows you what you need to travel to any other country in the world. It’s collaborative too, allowing people to suggest amendments to the data and helpful links. More than anything, though, it’s a pretty stark and distressing realisation as to how little freedom of movement so many people worldwide have – check out what the world looks like if you’re from Surinam as opposed to the UK, for example.
• The Encrypted Phone: The Blackphone is coming, apparently. Available for pre-order a Mobile World Congress next month, this is apparently going to be the first carrier-neutral phone which offers base levels of encryption, etc, as standard. Obviously as with all these things your security is only ever as good as the security of the people you’re communicating with, but it’s an interesting idea; I think we’ll see people swapping reduced functionality for better security more and more in the mobile space, not least as we now know that the NSA is reading our texts ALL THE TIME too. 
• The Colour Magician: Another parallax-y scroll-y site, but this one’s not only sort of well-made but it’s also a slightly obsessional paean to the cuttlefish, which frankly is a cephalopod which doesn’t get enough recognition. 
• Drum Pants: This can’t be real, can it? This is a tool which purports to turn any surface – in this case, you’re clothing – into a touch-sensitive interface and, by so doing, allow users to play the drums by tapping themselves. It’s…it’s…just a bit silly looking, really – you sort of have to watch the video to get it. Of course, the potential is actually pretty big – you could freak people out BEAUTIFULLY with one of these, a hidden speaker and a decent setup, for example…
• The Scariest Rubber Band Gun You Will Ever See: “Oh, rubber band guns”, I imagine you thinking, “what a cute throwback to a bygone age in which everything was analogue and more innocent, and health and safety hadn’t ruined everything”. Hold that thought. Imagine what you’re thinking of when you think ‘rubber band gun’. Now click that link, and think of exactly what would happen if that were to be applied to someone’s face. SWEET JESUS GOD. This is soon going to be on sale, publicly. Don’t buy one for your kids. 
• Origins of Common UI Symbols: Designgeek types will like this, as will webgeeks, as will anyone with a passing interest in language and form and communication. So that should be most of you, then. A nicely made series of slides on how all the UI symbols we see daily arrived at their ubiquity. 
• What The World Is Reading At The Moment: Sort of a bit like a real-time-ish version of StumbleUpon, Reading.am shows people what users who have the plugin enabled are reading online at any given moment. Presuming that the people who use it are a relatively self-selecting bunch, and having spent a bit of time lurking on it, it’s a generally good source for some rather more recherche pieces of writing, but that’s not to say that you might not come across the browsing habits of some slightly distressing / disturbing people. Still, though, that’s got to be part of the fun. I think that there’s an interesting twist on this here for TASTEMAKERS – I think it would be really, really interesting to have a similar sort of thing (possibly in a full ‘I want to see your screen’ sort of way) for a cycling selection of people like Cory Doctorow, Jonah Peretti, etc, showing 24h in their browsing life. Can someone make this happen, please? Ta.
• Make 8-bit Art: Browser-based tool which lets you…er…make 8-bit style artworks. No more, no less, potentially useful, potentially not. Less underwhelming, though, than this particularly flat piece of dialed-in prose may make it seem.
• REAL Citrus Booze: When I was young I was very excited by the concept of Absolut Citron (the power of marketing), and was inevitably hugely disappointed whenever I drank it and it still basically tasted like crap vodka (note to younger self – drinking half a bottle in 10 minutes is a dreadful, dreadful idea and you really shouldn’t do it; you will be picking bits of sick-covered rice from under your bed for weeks). This contraption seems designed to make citrus-y booze properly – can a bar in London set one up please? Ta. 

By Peng Yangjun

THIS WEEK’S LARGELY UNCONNECTED COLLECTION OF WEBSITES AND STUFF WHICH ALTHOUGH SEEMINGLY SELECTED AT RANDOM ARE IN FACT EVIDENCE OF A SOPHISTICATED AND UNIQUE CURATORIAL INSTINCT, HONEST GUV, IT’S NOT JUST ME LINKING TO WHATEVER’S PASSED ACROSS THE FRONTPAGE OF REDDIT AT VARIOUS POINTS THIS WEEK WHATEVER SOME OF YOU MAY THINK DAMN YOUR DOUBTING EYES, PT2:

• 20 Things Off The Internet: The nice people at digital agency Syzygy (they are nice, I have worked with them) have been making these annually for a few years now – this is 2014’s version. A picture within which are captured 20 of the internet’s biggest ‘things’ from 2013 – can you spot them all? I have no idea, that was a rhetorical question, although let it be known that I can’t and given the fact that I spend more time on the sodding internet than most people that would suggest that this is reasonably challenging. 
• The Dodo: A new online magazine featuring news and features about (exclusively) animals. Nothing else. If you are an animal lover, this will be the best site on here this week. If you’re not, this may make you a little bit irrationally cross. Sorry.
• The Rap Pad: Obviously as a white, middle-class, increasingly middle-aged male from the UK I am well into rap. Obviously. Fortunately for the world, though, I have never wished to inflict this interest on anyone in real life. Had I done, though, I might have found this site very useful indeed – contains all sorts of decent resources for people who want to write rhymes (and not just rap – if you’re an aspiring spoken word artist there’s lots of useful stuff in here too). The stuff about polysyllabic internal rhyming structures is really clear, for example, and the syllable counters could be useful. Have a play.
• Crowdsourced Dating: Google Glass + Dating + Feedback mechanisms, basically. I do love this project. Artist Lauren McCarthy has Google Glass, and had an idea – what would it be like to go on dates, stream the footage through glass, and pay anonymous contributors to give her real-time feedback through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project. This is SO BRILLIANT – like the evolution of what Chris Morris used to do on his radio show 20 years ago, where he’d send a man out with a very early mobile phone to have increasingly surreal interactions with shopkeepers as directed by Morris on the other end of the line (“Tell him you don’t want the coin. Tell him it scares you. Tell him it has a harris on it. Tell him the coins are HOT AAARGH IT’S BURNING MY HAND AAARGH” – you get the gist). Anyway, this ticks a lot of my personal boxes and I am pretty much convinced that this is going to be a dating show in 2 years’ time. Let’s see, shall we?
• Children As Golden Globe Nominees: Toddlewood is, apparently, an NYC photographic studio which specialises in taking Hollywood-style photos of little kids. Leaving aside how we all feel about that, these publicity shots they released this week with kids styled to look like the famouses on the red carpet at the Golden Globes are AMAZING. LOOK AT LITTLE CHIWETEL!
• Autogenererated Academese: Textual autogenerator of the week, this creates snippets of faux-academic prose. FUN GAME: know anyone doing a PHd? Mail them bits of this stuff and ask them their opinion. Even better, if you are doing a PHd then see how many of these you can slip into your next update email to your supervisor. Go on (Phil, I’m looking at you).
• The Pattern Library: This makes me very, very happy indeed, though I have no real idea as to why. This is a collection of designed patterns / backgrounds, freely available to use, and collected in a rather nice website (HTML5 again – are we bored of all these now? Not quite, I don’t think) – it’s really pleasing, possibly because it does have the feel of turning pages without actually trying to mimic the feel of turning pages. Maybe.
• Annotating The Margins Of Dan Brown: Two very funny people make annotations in the margins of Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’. It’s true that mocking Brown’s prose style is a bit ‘fish in a barrel’, but this is very sharp indeed. Also I like the project in general – the idea that they will give it to more and more people until there is more commentary than Brown on each page is rather lovely. 
• Chef Goldblum: Have you ever wanted to play Where’s Wally? but instead of looking for Wally amongst a crowd of people you’re looking for a picture of Jeff Goldblum wearing a chef’s hat in amongst a whole load of pictures of Jeff Goldblum not wearing a chef’s hat? OH GOOD. 
• All Of The Buildings In New York City: James Gulliver Hancock is the fantastically named illustrator behind this project, whose stated and impossible aim is to sketch every building in New York. No matter – the drawings are lovely, and Hancock’s style is charming. 
• All The People In New York City: Apparently unconnected to the above, this is Jason Polan’s attempt to draw everyone in the city. Even more futile than Hancock’s, this is every bit as lovely – I am sure that someone is doing something similar in London, so if anyone knows of it can they let me know? Ta.
• Card & Tape Sculptures: Dylan Shields is a sculptor who works primarily in cardboard and brown tape, recreating classical sculptures in unfamiliar media. They look AWESOME. UPS / Parcelforce / Royal Mail / etc – one of you commission this man for your next ad campaign, please, he deserves it (although he may not want to take your filthy money, in which case more power to him).
• No More Vertical Videos: Vertical videos are horrible, it is widely agreed. This little video showcases a new app for the iPhone called Horizon, which gives letterbox-format video regardless of the camera’s orientation; this is going to become standard on all new phones, isn’t it – at the very least an opt-out rather than opt-in? Very clever. 
• The Google Music Timeline: A clever use of Google’s Play data, from all the stuff people have bought and chucked into the cloud, looking at genre and artist popularity over time. Nicely made, as you’d expect, and there’s some interesting information buried in there. This really is one which Amazon should rip off, though, what with their stupid amounts of global music sales info. 
• 40 Maps Which Explain The World: From the Washington Post, a great collection of data maps. There are another 40 here – look at them and learn stuff.
• Aquarium Landscaping: Did you even know that there was such a thing as an annual aquarium and aquatic plant layout competition? I’m guessing not. Anyway, these are the winners of the most recent edition of this contest, and there are some amazing examples of underwater topiary. Obsessional if rather cool – come on, though, do the fish really care?
• One Man’s Backyard Ice Fort: You may have heard that it’s been a touch chilly in the US of late. This is the response of one man who decided that the only right and proper thing to do was to construct a big sort of walled structure made out of coloured blocks of ice and fairy lights in his back garden. Why not, eh?
• Name My Daughter: This isn’t actually as stupid as it at first seems – the people behind this have made no actual commitment that they will in fact accept whatever name for their as-yet-unborn child the internet decides upon. That said, there are some inspired suggestions on there – ‘Streetlamp’ made me laugh out loud, though I am saddened that an early front-runner (‘Slagathor’) seems to have lost traction. I’m pretty sure that this couple won’t be calling their daughter ‘Cthulhu’, though.
• MMO Laserquest: So it’s not really quite that, but almost. Dustcloud is currently seeking funding to bring its vision of mobile, GPS-enabled laser tag gaming to reality. There are quite a few barriers to entry here which makes me think it won’t happen (namely that I’m not 100% convinced that enough people want this to shell out for a bespoke piece of kit), but it does give me the excuse to link to Street Wars, of which this reminded me somewhat and which I am reliably reassured will be coming back after a lengthy hiatus this Summer.
• The Dead Man’s Switch: Another in the growing list of ‘solutions for real life death online’, this is a service which allows you to draft an email, with attachments and a mailing list, and which will then email you every few days to make sure you’re still alive. If it doesn’t hear from you in 30 days, the email gets sent. Obviously massively flawed as an idea for lots of reasons which I can’t be bothered to explore in-depth, but interesting nonetheless.
• A Really Quite Mad Look At The Beatles Catalogue: I am sure that the man (come on, it’s not going to be a woman) behind this is a lovely person with a full and rich social life; nonetheless, this truly insane collection of information and insight into the anomalies and oddities around the Beatles’ work gives off their air of sweaty-palmed obsession like few other sites. If you like the Beatles, though, it may well be sort of Nirvanaish.
• Photos Of Astronauts Taking Photos: You may wish to listen to ‘Space Oddity‘ whilst looking at these. 
• The 500 Worst Rolling Stone Reviews Of All Time: This one too’s pretty swivel-eyed in its one-track obsession; this is an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of the reviews which the author has, subjectively, decided exemplify the worst editorial judgments and weird nepotistic quirks of Rolling Stone magazines reviews history. You’ll need to be a proper muso to get the most out of this, but those of you who are will find much to amuse yourselves with, I think. 
• The Logic Puzzle Motherlode: I know two women in their 30s who are obsessed with the sort of logic puzzle magazines traditionally aimed at octogenarians and traditionally consumed on long train / coach journeys along with a packet of boiled sweets. Neither of them read this, though, which does make me wonder why I’m including it. Hey ho. If you like wordsearches and stuff then this will be GOLD for you. 
• Famous Film Quotes As Charts: Some of these you will have seen before, others not – the design, though, is very nice indeed. These really should be available as posters.
• Guantanamail: Self-destructing email. Which obviously doesn’t work because screencaps, but, y’know, I’m including it for completeness’ sake.
• Habit – The RPG: Remember gamification? Of course you do! Well it’s stubbornly refusing to die – this is a web-based game which applies role-playing dynamics to your life to MAKE YOU BETTER. In fairness, this was funded through Kickstarter and so there’s evidently a market for it – maybe give it a try as you attempt to make it beyond January with the exercise / no booze / no tears / fidelity / whatever goals.
• Life Through A Leica: Art Shay was married for 67 years. Over that time, he photographed many different things, but, most poignantly, his wife. This collection of pictures he took of her will make you tear up a little bit; you simply couldn’t imagine a collection of digital pictures having the same sort of emotional resonance, I don’t think. 
• The Loneliest Town In America: Or at least that’s what they say. Loyalton California has awarded itself this accolade, based on its lack of visitors combined with its proximity to other big stuff. They explain a little more of why they make this claim on the website, which in itself is also INCREDIBLY SAD. It’s sort of the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds. Tell you what, planners who work for mobile brands (or even who work for Coca Cola) – use these people next time you want a ‘connecting people’/happiness-type vibe. 
• Nasty Icons: Free, unpleasant icons for you to use however you see fit. The one of the little man peeing joyously is my personal favourite. 
• The Womb: Last up this week is Project Womb, a fascinating idea which once again has a very direct and explicit connection to the concept of the creation, maintenance and development of the personal ‘Life Story’ (inverted commas intentional, pace Houellebecq. It’s a ‘media-driven’ time capsule, and a beautiful piece of design, which will allow users to upload multimedia content to it and thus allow it to act as a physical and digital memento mori. There is an artist now living whose greatest work will be based on this sort of idea; a work which will not be complete until they die. And on that STARTLINGLY pretentious note, let’s move on.

By Alicia Martin Lopez

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Internet Narcissists On TV: From a project up there which I think should be on TV, to one which apparently will but I’m not sure should be. This is Project Follow Me, a project looking for digital creators (specifically people who make stuff on the internet which GOES VIRAL, I think) to be part of a show which documents one of their projects. I can’t think of ANYTHING I would rather watch less, but then again I’m just a grumpy old sod to whom noone should, or indeed does, listen.
• Internet Poetry: Poetry published as image macros, screenshots, etc, with textual overlay. So internet, much poignant. ARGH BLOODY DOGESPEAK. 
• Popeye Panels: One a day, decontextualised. There’s quite a lot of TRUTH in these, I think. 
• Great Naps: Vintage-ish photos of people napping and seeming quite happy to be doing so. May induce somnolence.
• Tales You Lose: Popular culture figures, painted onto coins, by Frankfurt-based Brazilian artist Andre Levy.
• Lego Albums: Album cover art, remade in Lego. I’m pretty sure that these are made digitally and automatically, as I’m pretty sure that you can’t get Lego in all those shades, but maybe I’m just being miserable (again). 
• Craigslist Mirrors: Mirrors for sale on Craigslist. Almost certainly going to be for sale at Frieze this year for tens of thousands of pounds.
• I Still Shoot Film: A Tumblr all about the art of shooting photos on film, and with hints and tips on how to be better at it. Fcuk off, Instagram. 
• All About Socks: One woman’s obsession with sock design. No, I have no idea.
• Tiny Little Love Stories: I have featured these before, but they weren’t on Tumblr (I don’t think – oh, who cares). Anway, these are brilliant, twisted vignettes of surreal love and sex. Recommended.
• No Wrong Way To Play: A Tumblr collecting examples of people playing videogames in usual ways – no-kill playthroughs, glitch exploitation, etc.  
• Brushes With Strangers: A collection of sketches of strangers, drawn using the ‘Brushes’ app on the iPad. 
• PR Is Difficult: A collection of dreadful promo photos issued by American theatres. Are these all real? If so, Jesus Christ. 
• Life Advice From Machines: More poignancy, juxtaposing the unintentionally profound nuggets of advice occasionally found in technical documentation with wistful pictures. These will be a 2015 calendar (or even 2014, if you hurry). 
• Brutal Knitting: The occasionally distressing knitted art of Tracy Widdess.

THE LONG THINGS WHICH I AM ALREADY SEEING EVEN MORE OF THIS YEAR, SUGGESTING THAT LONGFORM AS A TREND ISN’T REALLY GOING ANYWHERE BUT WHICH, LRB ASIDE, I’M STILL NOT SEEING ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH OF FROM THE UK FOR REASONS WHICH I STILL DO NOT ADEQUATELY UNDERSTAND BUT WHICH I WOULD BE VERY GRATEFUL IF SOMEONE COULD EXPLAIN TO ME PLEASE:

• What Would Yellow Ranger Do?: Kicking off this week with a not-particularly-long comic, this is cartoonist Shin Yin Khor’s exploration of growing up Asian American and role models and racism and all sorts of other stuff. Really rather good. 
• Travel – A Moving Experience: An excellent essay about the essentially lonely and alienating nature of travel, and the false promises we’re sold by the media and the world at large around what it entails and can offer people. 
• An Interview With John Waters: The Wall Street Journal chats with the perennially odd Mr Waters, who as ever has quite a lot of interesting things to say about all sorts of stuff, not least the idea of people in their 60s still being rebellious and ‘angry’ and how ridiculous he finds that idea when applied to successful auteurs. 
• The Archive Is A Campsite: An interesting piece by one of the founders of Longform about how the resurgence in longer writing has meant a more reflective approach to content and as such a renewed degree of importance for archiving. Interesting if you’re in any way into or connected to the world of publishing, writing or curating – and sort of subtextually has a lot to say about the relative value or lack thereof of some of the more ephemeral content providers. What would an archive of Buzzfeed look like? Would we want one?
• Artisanal Toast: This has been everywhere this week, so sorry if you’ve already read it; anyway, this is ostensibly a look at San Francisco’s hipster food culture reaching its apotheosis – $4 toast. In reality, though, it’s more about the woman behind the cafe which pioneered the (ridiculous sounding) concept of artisanal toast and the way in which running the place has helped her sort her life out. It’s far more inspirational and heartwarming than a story about really expensive bread should be, although be warned – it will make you a bit annoyed at points, and the lady portrayed does have tattooed freckles which is just silly really.
• An Interview With The Inventor of Karaoke: The nicest person to be featured in Curios this week, Daisuke Inoue is the man whose fault it was that you now know all the words to ‘I Will Survive’. This interview which him, in which he explains how he came to invent karaoke, is just lovely. 
• Whatever Happened To Tim Tebow: So this one’s less long than kilometric, and not helped by the unnecessary HTML5 formatting, but it really is interesting. You may recall a few years ago that the sporting world, and in particular the American one, was obsessed with a bloke called Tim Tebow, the not-particularly-great quarterback for the Denver Broncos who had unshakeable faith in the Christian idea of God and who, for a few short months at least, seemed to see that faith amply repayed by some really quite spooky last-minute game-winning performances. Tebow was a poster child for a whole swathe of right-wing Christian Americans, and his remarkable rise and subsequent crazy fall are brought to life very well indeed in this piece. You probably need to know a little about NFL for it to make sense, but not too much. 
• The Inevitable Childish Gambino Piece: I’m not obsessed, he’s just about a lot at the moment. A good interview, this.
• The Architecture Of The Incredibles: A slightly obsessive but really interesting look at the architectural depiction of the world in Pixar’s classic animation. If nothing else it will leave you slightly boggling at the sheer amount of thought and detail and STUFF that those guys pack into things which the average viewer will literally never, ever notice. 
• Growing Up Clown: What would it be like growing up in and around clowns, with a mother in greasepaint? Like this, apparently. Brilliantly written and elegiac and sad, this is worth reading for many reasons but mostly for the line ‘sometimes in life one just ends up cuddling on a couch with the ringmaster’.
• The Crucial and Unexpected Role Played By Monopoly in WWII: This one too is very long, but bear with it – it develops into a truly mental boys’ own tale of crazy escape attempts and spies and…er…board games. 
• Hoop Dreams – An Oral History: Hoop Dreams is unquestionably the greatest documentary about sport ever made, ever, and potentially one of the greatest documentaries ever full stop. It’s 20 years old this year, and this piece looks back at the film, the characters and the story behind it in brilliant, loving depth. If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favour and book out some hours this weekend to do so; it really is that good, I promise – you can get the whole thing here.
• Spending 24h In A Dive Bar: The concept of a dive bar is sort of uniquely American – does it mean anything more than ‘a bit scuzzy’? – but this account of a 24h cycle in one such venue’s life is the sort of lovely microcosmic portrait of a Cheers-style boozehole that you will want it to be your local. 
• The Online Avengers Of Anonymous: A great piece from the New York Times looking at some of the (self-styled) White Knights of the anonymous movement, those who make it their mission to track down bullies, abusers and rapists and make their lives hell – you may not be surprised to know that the piece reveals them to be slightly odd bunch, and the world to be a marginally more complicated place than they think it is, but it’s a very good read in any case.
• When Ads Hated Women: More great stuff from Collector’s Weekly, this time looking at ads from the 40s and 50s which basically told women that they stank and that they were ugly (so that’s different from today how, exactly?). Some of these are truly incredible, and the accompanying interview with the collector / curator is fascinating from a cultural / social mores point of view. 
• The Top 100 Things On Medium in December: In case you want more reading. Of COURSE you do. 

By Randy Martin

By BJ Heinley

THIS FIRST BIT IS MERCIFULLY SHORT THIS WEEK DUE TO THE FACT THAT WE’RE ONLY 10 DAYS INTO THE NEW YEAR AND PEOPLE ARE CURRENTLY TOO BUSY GAWPING AT SHINY EXAMPLES OF THE FUTURE IN LAS VEGAS TO CARE ABOUT A MINOR UPDATE TO A PARTICULAR FACET OF SOME SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM’S API, BUT DON’T GET COMPLACENT AS THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY ANOMALOUS AND THERE WILL BE MUCH MORE OF THIS CRAP BEFORE THE YEAR’S OUT, MARK MY WORDS:

• Vine Gets A Web Version: The video-viewing platform for the terminally ADD-afflicted is now even more compelling for BRANDS. Effectively this is just a profile page for any account-holder on the platform, but this means that users (BRANDS) can have their own (branded) page presence on the platform where all their videos can sit, browsable from any where and looking all nice and coherent and with logos and profile descriptions and STUFF. SO EXCITE!
• Vine’s Social Media Superstars: A piece on B*zzf**d looking at some people who have become very popular on the platform. I’m including this up here solely because at some point this year someone is going to mention ‘Vine influencers’ at you in a meeting, and hopefully having read this and had a bit of a think about it will mean that you won’t give in to your initial desire to push their nose through the back of their head in retaliation. I’m doing it for you, dear readers. Look, I’m not condoning this sort of thing, but if you’re doing YOUTH-FOCUSED stuff then perhaps it’s worth thinking about using some of these sorts of people for something. Sorry. 
• Jelly Launches: So this is in here more for completeness’ sake than anything else; this week Biz Stone (and other people, but he’s the only one anyone’s heard of) launched Jelly, a new SOCIAL NETWORK which effectively lets people ask, share and answer shortform questions. It’s all of 3 days old at the time of writing, so I’m going to refrain from making any sweeping statements about it and how BRANDS can and should be using it (actual authorial opinion here: maybe just let actual real people work out how they want to use it first, eh? Oh, no, hang on, here’s the first post from someone who’s already decided it’s pointless) – anyhow, it’s a thing and it exists.
• Fox Uses Tinder To Promote Some Dreadful TV Show: There’s a programme on TV called The Mindy Project – it’s apparently a sitcom, but having never seen it I’m in no position to offer any comment on its quality or otherwise (like you care). Fox in the US has used Tinder to promote it, which is quite smart – they’ve created profiles for the titular character and other bit-players from the show on the media’s favourite shallow ‘you’re hot, let’s bang!’ dating app. Cheap and clever, not unlike the way in which other US TV show Girls has used Snapchat to promote its latest series. Although, now that I come to think about it, isn’t the Mindy thing just going to reach blokes, who (unless I’m massively misjudging the show) aren’t necessarily target audience for it? Oh, what do I know (rhetorical)?
• Rapgenius And SEO: Sorry, this is VERY technical. Rapgenius (the lyrics (and lyrical analysis) site) recently got penalised by Google for what the search engine saw as slightly shonky SEO tactics. The website went off and fixed some stuff to reinstate its search ranking status, and all was then well – this is a look at why they were penalised and what they did to reverse said penalisation. Unless you need to know (or need to pretend to know) about SEO you can probably skip this one, but it’s actually pretty useful / interesting (I use that word advisedly, but still).
• TARGET’s Pinterest Shop: The US retailer of discount homeware and terrible employee relations fame has made this rather nice Pinterest hack to peddle its wares, highlighting products that are most pinned, reviewed, shared, etc on Pinterest and using the network as a curated shop window. Simple and clever and the sort of thing that pretty much any retailer could in theory do and maybe should. 
• The Evolution of Memes: Research from Facebook looking at the manner in which memes move and alter – specifically on that platform, but with findings which are of relevance in a more general context. Interesting in and of itself, but also if you fancy taking a slightly more academic approach to your attempts to invade the popular consciousness with your branded messaging; there’s some quite interesting stuff about the sorts of things which get assimilated / appropriated most seamlessly into general culture which you can probably use if you’re feeling a bit evil. 
• Things To Watch In 2014: There are obviously LOADS of these floating around at the moment – in fact, here’s Imperica’s nicely spreadsheeted collection of predictions for the year – but JWT get the dubious distinction of being the ones featured on here. As with all of these trendlists, this is overlong and hugely repetitious, but it contains some generally interesting things and some decent food for thought, as well as a whole load of stuff that you can use to phone in your brainstorm performances for the next 6-8 weeks.
• STATS MOTHERLODE: Continuing the spirit of 2014 portmanteau collections of STUFF, this post from We Are Social collects a whole load of bullsh1t statistics on social media from around the world in one easy place. You know the drill by now – read, digest, and vomit out to suit whatever half-baked argument you’re making to whichever client at any given time. IT’S THE YEAR OF MOBILE!!!
• Content Is Like Crystal Meth: So much about this annoys me – the use of the term ‘content’, the Breaking Bad theme, etc – but I’m forced to also concede that it contains quite a lot of not-stupid things about making STUFF for the internet; it’s actually a pretty good 101-primer for getting people to look at the stuff that you make. That said, can we just stop with the Breaking Bad stuff now? Thanks. 

By Chill Photographie

WHY NOT LISTEN TO A MIX OF HIPHOP MUSIC WHICH SAMPLES GOSPEL?

THINGS ON THE INTERNET WHICH ARE FOR THE MOST PART TOTALLY EPHEMERAL AND WHICH WILL MAKE NO LASTING DIFFERENCE TO YOU OR YOUR LIFE WHATSOEVER BUT WHICH WILL I HOPE PROVIDE AT LEAST A TEMPORARY DISTRACTION FROM THE CRUEL AND PERSISTENT REALISATION THAT THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER AND THIS  – THIS TEDIOUS, GREY REALITY OF 9-5 DRUDGERY – IS PRETTY MUCH ALL YOU HAVE BETWEEN NOW AND DEATH, PT.1:

• The Instagram Time Capsule: I think that this is very clever and eminently stealable, although I’m not 100% sure to what end. This is an app called Pic Moment which effectively allows users to see images posted to Instagram at certain physical locations across time – so you could, for example, scroll back day by day through pictures taken at, say, the London Eye (god knows why you’d want to, but still). At the very least, some sort of hacked website plugin for venues / locations could be a fun execution, but I’m sure you clever folk can think of other, better ones. 
• FolioShack: Full disclosure – I met the founder of this in the pub last night and he bought me a beer (Web Curios is happy to enter into tentative negotiations around coverage-for-booze hookups). I think it’s a good idea regardless, though – FolioShack is a service which allows people to publish documents online in a responsive, device-neutral way, but the thing that I think is really clever and interesting about it is the analytics you can get from said documents. Users can see who has read what they publish – whether someone’s read it, how long they spent doing so, which page they got to, etc. This is potentially hugely valuable for all sorts of industries, not least PRs; I reckon this could really take off. Which is almost certainly a kiss of death. Sorry. 
• Massive Directory of Online Radio Stations: Pretty much every single musical genre ever is represented on this site,. Can someone explain to me what exactly ‘Quiet Storm’ is, genrewise?
• StoryMap: The homepage of this site has the beautiful descriptor ‘maps that tell stories’; er, thanks guys, hugely helpful. Snark aside, though, this is a rather neat tool which allows users to map narratives using pictures, text, audio and video – it’s very beta at the moment and so isn’t 100% stable, but the concept is neat and if the people at Northwestern University who made it can make it embeddable then they may have a very useful thing indeed.
• Frienlibs: This is a dreadful, Satanic invention which I sort of wish I had thought of. Aside from anything else, it has a truly hideous name. Friendlibs (ugh) is a little webtoy which lets users create their own listicles – yes, that’s right, you too can find out exactly how it feels to reduce anything and everything in the field of human existence to a series of comedic images and pop-culture references! The site plugs into Facebook, letting you pull pics from the site and share with friends (it also has a gif search, naturally). This could become early 2014’s equivalent of those horrible bloody cartoon strips that every fat failure you went to school with has been posting incessantly since late October. GREAT!
•  Your Face On Fantasy Drawings: Have you ever wanted to be immortalised in a pencil drawing with the sort of rippling musculature that would put Conan-era Arnie to shame, or wearing a skimpy chainmail bikini (or why not both simultaneously?)? OH GOOD! A wonderful service from Daniel David Freeman where he, for a fee, will draw a fantasy-style piece of artwork with your face on it. I am very upset I didn’t see this before Christmas. 
• Self-Destructing Texts: On all sorts of 2014 trend lists I’ve seen has been temporary communications – that is, Snapchat-style self-destructing communiques. This is an app called Confide, which does the Snapchat thing with text messages. This is all well and good, but WHERE IS THE TRUST, PEOPLE? Maybe, and this is just a thought, if you’re worried that the person you’re sending super-confidential messages to is going to use said super-confidential messages to somehow incriminate you in the future then you should possibly reconsider your relationship with them. Maybe. Oh, do what you like, see if I care. 
• Replace YouTube Comments With Reddit Comments: Seeing as the much-hyped revamp of YouTube comments last year doesn’t as yet seem to have led to the long hoped for amelioration of the below-the-line ecosystem (wow, that’s an early contender for worst sentence of 2014 – sorry), you may find this Chrome plugin useful – Alientube replaces comments on YouTube videos with comments from Reddit, thereby elevating the IQ of the debate to nearly treble figures on one fell swoop. 
• The Rijksstudio Award: Ah, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. I LOVE IT THERE (small note: it’s a museum which really understands UX and UI in all senses; you can tell this by the fact that all the artwork descriptors are placed at eye level. SO SIMPLE AND YET SO CLEVER). This is a rather nice little project called ‘Make Your Own Masterpiece’, which invites people from all over the world to make their own pieces ‘inspired by’ the existing museum collection. Effectively asking people to remix art, the winning piece will be put on sale in the museum’s shop – entries are open til March 2014. This is going to be replicated a lot, I think. 
• Buy A Replica Batman Cowl: Have you ever wanted to wear a Batman mask EXACTLY like the one which slightly overweight caped crusader Adam West wore in the BIFF!-heavy 60s TV show? How fortunate, then, that I found this specimen for you. 
• Facerig: The tech behind this is really impressive, and the whole thing’s very clever, but all I can think of when I look at it is furry webcam sex. Facerig is a piece of software which purports to be able to create live avatars for webcam chat – that is, it will create a CGI face for you which maps your facial expressions, etc, using a webcam. So you can have a Google Hangout with your mate whilst looking like…er…some sort of weird CGI fox character, or some ‘sexy’ anime princess, or…nope, sorry, I can’t get beyond the furry thing here. Fandom is going to LOVE this. The rest of us maybe not o much. 
• Subway Stories: I LOVE this. A New York project which takes sketches of commuters from the NYC subway (not unlike London’s own Commutoons) and then records inner monologues for each drawing. The makers have turned this into a little art installation thing – watch the video and see for yourself. As an aside, the ‘imagine the inner monologue of your fellow tube passengers’ is a great tube game to play, although you have to guard against developing irrational prejudices against completely blameless strangers (sorry, man in the baseball cap from last night – I’m sure you weren’t really thinking the dreadful things I attributed to you). 
• Be-at TV: Live-streaming (and recording and playing back) DJ sets from around the world. There’s a huge array of DJs and festivals represented here, and the whole site’s a very impressive dance music repository. If classical music is more your thing, the World Concert Hall does a similar job. 
• Vintage Pics of NYC: A truly jawdropping collection, featuring literally thousands of photos of New York from the 1990s, all taken by one man. You can lose yourself in these – highly recommended. Oh, as a bonus you can also have this collection of photos of Brooklyn houses in the late 70s, showing that hipsterdom predated actual hipsters by about 30-odd years. 
• The Strangers Project: A collection of anonymous journal (diary, for non-American speakers) entries, collected in person and written on the spot. There’s some lovely output here, and the fact that these are written by people there and then rather than being done online (with the inevitable editing and revision which that would entail) lends them an immediacy that they would otherwise lack. These are another potential timesink, but a very lovely and intensely human one (so that’s ok then). 
• The Year Of Selfies: A brilliant animation made of one man’s year’s worth of self-taken portraits. Annoyingly slick.
• 2013 In Kickstarter: A bit late, this, but still. This is Kickstarter’s ‘That Was The Year That Was’ recap, looking at the platform’s big success stories in the past 12 months. Notable more for the fact that it’s a nicely made website than for any of the information actually contained therein (or that’s what I think, anyway). 
• National Geographic’s 2013 Review: Seeing as we’re doing 2013 reviews, here’s National Geographic’s. THIS is a slick website – lovely interface, integrated video and SO MUCH good stuff arranged in a manner which is a pleasure to navigate and browse through. Worth looking at and copying. 

By Kris Vervaeke

WHY NOT LISTEN TO THE NEW ALBUM BY DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN?

THINGS ON THE INTERNET WHICH ARE FOR THE MOST PART TOTALLY EPHEMERAL AND WHICH WILL MAKE NO LASTING DIFFERENCE TO YOU OR YOUR LIFE WHATSOEVER BUT WHICH WILL I HOPE PROVIDE AT LEAST A TEMPORARY DISTRACTION FROM THE CRUEL AND PERSISTENT REALISATION THAT THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER AND THIS  – THIS TEDIOUS, GREY REALITY OF 9-5 DRUDGERY – IS PRETTY MUCH ALL YOU HAVE BETWEEN NOW AND DEATH, PT.2:

• Doge For All: So the Doge meme is almost entirely played out, but on the offchance that you want to wring the final few drops of ‘comedy’ from it then you might find this meme generator of use. Much internet, so amaze. 
• Recent Photobucket Uploads: Utterly pointless and as a result pretty compelling, this little hack pulls the most recently uploaded images to Photobucket and displays them on one page. More than anything else, spending 5 minutes with this illustrates that there are some people who really, really, really like uploading pictures of themselves to the internet.
• Headlines Against Humanity: Funny at first, this website very quickly becomes incredibly depressing. Headlines Against Humanity invites users to choose between two headlines to decide which is the real one and which is the fake. There really is a lot of terrible, terrible stuff out there on the internet (yes, I know, part of the problem etc etc).
• Tumblr Argument Generator: A little script which generates a frankly baffling rant in the style of the sorts of arguments you often see on Tumblr. If you need an off-the-shelf rant decrying someones heteronormative cisgendered privilege then this will be right up your street. Here’s a fun game to play in 2014 – why not send these to people throughout your workplace? You can get away with it, because even if they send them to HR noone will have the faintest inkling what any of it means. 
• Olympus Bioscapes: Yet another camera manufacturer runs a competition to showcase impressive microscopic photography, this time Olympus. Unoriginal, but there are some lovely shots in here – not least the one of the embryonic bat, which is simultaneously super-cute and utterly repellent, which is no mean feat. 
• WannaSpend: Things that it would have been really useful to have found before Christmas, part x of y. This site lets users input a cash value (dollars only, sadly, as it’s a US thing) and then spits out a gift suggestion up to that cost, with a link to buy. You can select categories that it will draw products from, and submit your own suggestions – simple but quite clever.
• France In The 50s: A lovely collection of vintage pics of France in the 50s. There is a lot of Gallic brilliance in here. 
• The YouTube Time Machine: I rather like this – a website which lets you select a year and then presents you with YouTube videos featuring content from said year.
• The Colo(u)r Battle: Have you ever wanted to decide which colour is BEST, via the medium of a public internet-based vote? Well of course you have. How fortunate, then, that this website exists  – you can create and name your own colours and let people vote on them, or pull together palettes which can also be judged by colour-nazis worldwide. This seems like the sort of thing that Pantone or Dulux should be doing, really.
• The Twitter Fiction Festival: The Twitter Fiction Festival runs in March, and is a celebration of creative storytelling using the platform. They’re taking submissions now for ideas for stories and ways of telling them – the best ones will be ‘featured’ and promoted over the course of the festival, alongside works by established authors. They’re keen to see MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING, so expect to see lots of slightly tortuous Vine-based submissions – there could well be some really cool stuff coming out of this, though, and if you have any decent ideas you might as well submit them; the potential exposure is huge. 
• Pointless Diagrams: Drawing utterly pointless diagrams for no purpose whatsoever. Please can someone start using these in presentations to illustrate ‘strategy’? Thanks.
• Flat vs Realism: A rather beautifully made page illustrating the great design war between Ive-style flat-look interfaces and your slightly-2011 realism. Takes an age to load, annoyingly, but it’s very nicely put together and the game at the end is a cute touch. 
• Getting Started With HTML5: A simple-but-clear guide to what HTML5 is and what it can do (sort of – it is very simplified).
• 100 Days Of Leake Street: Leake Street is that little tunnel/alleyway by Waterloo, just where the Old Vic Tunnels used to be, which is home to one of London’s best and most vibrant collections of graffiti. This is a brilliant website tracking the way in which the walls there change over a 100-day period, using gif-ed photographs to track the evolution of the work. 
• The Urban Paper Collective: Grown men who like making toys out of paper (let’s be honest, it’s only ever going to be men) – this is your new favourite website. Containing everything you could ever need or want to know about the artful folding of paper into what are basically dolls for adults. 
• Another Learn To Code Thing: What with coding being introduced to the curriculum this year, we can expect to see a whole load of this sort of stuff. Following in the steps of Code Academy, this is a site that provides short, modular lessons on the principles of coding using a game-based interface and using the principle of building blocks to illustrate the processes. It’s quite smart, though I wouldn’t expect it to turn you or your kids into Notch straight away. 
• Discarded Drug Baggies of South London: Possibly the most VICE photoproject ever, this is a collection of pictures of drug bags found across South London. 
• The Space Engine: My girlfriend’s doing a GCSE in astronomy at the moment (NB – she is not 16) – space is MENTAL. Anyway, this is a very cool programme which, when downloaded, lets you zoom through a detailed recreation of the universe. It’s sort of incredible really – a bit like Elite without the game bits. 
• Emulatos Made Easy For Mac: Videogame emulators have been around for ages, but have always been far too complicated-looking for me to ever bother with. This is a download for Macs which, as far as I can tell, makes the whole thing super-easy and user friendly and stuff. I don’t have a Mac, though, so for all I know it could just be some sort of massive malware scam. Someone else try it out and let me know. 
• Crowdfund Your Holidays: I’m not really sure why anyone would spontaneously offer to contribute cash to someone else’s lavish holiday plans, but apparently some people will do just that. Trevolta is a weirdly-named crowdfunding site designed specifically for people who are going travelling – you put details of your trip on the site, set a goal and strangers can donate money towards your jollies. If anyone wants to bung me £10k to go away and not write anything on the internet for a year or so, I’m open to offers. 
• The Bittorrent Trilogy: God, glitch-art is SO 2013. Anyway, this is a trio of videos made using incompletely downloaded versions of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Game of Thrones, and contains all the sort of trippy, glitched-out wonderment I like. We need a new digital art thing, though. Make it happen, artpeople. 
• BattleCats: Nothing to do with He-Man, this – instead, it’s actual leather battle armour for cats. I’m no expert on felines, but I can’t imagine any of them being too impressed were you to try shoehorning them into this stuff. 
• 2003 Receipts: For reasons known only to him, this bloke kept alll his receipts from 2003. He is going through them day-by-day, piecing together his life from a decade past via the medium of purchases. Only 10 days in, but I think I can safely say that this is the mundane website Web Curios will feature in 2014, and I love it for that. 
• Insulting YouTube Vids: This is a YouTube channel whose owner seems to do nothing but record short, offensive statements for people like you and me to use however we wish. Beautifully, he also takes request – just think how satisfying it would be to have a video of a total stranger calling your most favourite colleague, say, “a crapulent waste of skin” which you can send to them over and over and over again. Dear God, I almost wish I still had an office job so that I could do this myself. 
• Speakerblast: This is a clever idea but poorly executed. Speakerblast basically lets you assign an audiofile to a single URL which can then be shared to multiple devices and then played simultaneously – so you can have a whole crowd of people playing the same audio from their phones, all synced. There’s a LOT of potential here, although at the moment I’m just sort of fixating on football crowds. Actually, there’s probably some quite fun interactive stuff artists can do in concert with this sort of thing, as well as the inevitable AUDIO FLASHMOB execution – ugh, actually that’s a horrible thought, pretend I never said it. 
• Ian’s Shoelace Site: I don’t know who Ian is, but he knows a LOT about tying shoes. 
• 3d Printing – The Kids’ Book: Leo The Maker Prince is a book for children which also purports to teach them about 3d printing (I’m unsure as to why kids need to be taught about 3d printing, but no matter). The gimmick here is that the book comes with code to print out the characters on your own home printer, presuming you have one – erm, if you do then surely you can just use the printer to teach your kids? Sorry, I’m being critical – anyway, this is the first thing like this that I’ve seen but it will almost certainly not be the last. 
• The Emotional Baggage Check: A place to leave your emotional baggage, and pick up other people’s. Users can leave details of something that’s weighing them down, or respond to other people’s baggage by sharing a song and a few words. A nice spin on the confessional website, and I like the musical twist. 
• Marvel Calendar From 1975: On the offchance you’ve not yet seen this, here’s a Marvel calendar from the mid-70s whose days match perfectly with 2014. Printable, should you want it on your wall.
• Passweird: A website which generates alphanumeric passwords of questionable taste. Why not, eh?
• The Internet Black Market Comes To Berlin: I think I’ve mentioned the concept of the Internet Black Market on here before – in any case, I’m doing so again as I WANT SOMEONE TO DO IT IN LONDON PLEASE. It comes from Japan, and the idea is that it’s a series of stalls selling small gewgaws which are physical manifestations of the web. SO ART! SO COOL! 
• Disney Princess Lingerie: Because it’s almost Valentine’s Day (NB – under no circumstances actually buy this for anyone, Valentine’s Day or otherwise). 
• Behind The Gifs: A subreddit which is far funnier than it ought to be, this collects the imagined backstories to some of the web’s most famous gifs. Many internetLOLs in here, I promise. 
• The Selfie Olympics: These people’s self-taken photos are more impressive / stranger than your self-taken photos, I guarantee you. 
• The Mad Science Museum: A brilliant collection of truly odd science experiments from history. Includes an experiment involving photographing the exact moment that a mule’s head is blown off by a stick of dynamite, which is a phrase I really didn’t imagine myself typing when I woke up this morning. 
• Frozen Soap Bubbles: SO PRETTY!
• Objective Game Reviews: Obviously intended as a joke, but also at the same time one of the best game review sites I’ve seen in ages, which says nothing good about the current state of most games journalism.
• The Conference Call Simulator: Terrifying and bleak and existential and sad and SO ACCURATE. Welcome back to work, everyone!

By Brendan George Ko

WHY NOT LISTEN TO A MIX BY THAT WEIRD BLOKE OFF TWITTER CALLED SADEAGLE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• The Gap Mannequin Project: One man dresses in the same outfit as the mannequins in GAP and photographs himself next to them. 
• Moviecode: You know when you see people coding in films? Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that that code does? No, me neither, but the person behind this Tumblr evidently did and so has made it their mission to investigate. 
• Emojis In Real Life: Recreating emojis in photo form. Why not, eh?
• Discarded Vegetables: No more, no less. I’m not sure how much mileage this has as a concept, but I like the single-minded pointlessness of it rather a lot. 
• Japan Photographs: Erm, yes, just that really – photos of Japan. All taken by one Lee Chapman, who’s a very good photographer indeed.
• Amazon Critics: Crap Amazon reviews of films, turned into posters advertising said movies. If these aren’t already available to buy, they really should be soon – also, some publisher really should promote their next DVD release like this. Go on, do it.
• 365 Days of Balloons: Stuff made out of balloons. A different one each day. Surprisingly compelling. 
• Cosplaying While Trans: Transgender people, cosplaying. This may be the most Tumblr Tumblr EVER, on reflection. 
• Traceloops: Rotoscoping, tracing and animation. Cool examples of different techniques for those interesting in animation and the like. 
• Problem Glyphs: I LOVE THESE. A Tumblr in which ‘symbolic illustrations are drawn in response to problems sent in by Tumblr users’. If the one for ‘I’m Gay’ doesn’t make you laugh then you’re probably dead. 
• Fcuk Yeah Internet Fridge: This week saw the latest attempt by a company to convince us that fridges that can talk to our phones are THE FUTURE. This Tumblr collects examples of other people telling us the same thing and also being wrong. 
• Mestre Fungo: Acid-coloured animations, with illustrations which very much recall the work of Charles Burns.
• Louis CK One: I don’t really need to explain this gag, do I?
• Romain Laurent: Brilliant, high-quality loop portraits. Someone please create a free way for anyone to make these easily, please. Ta.
• Pentametron: Iambic poetry cobbled together from tweets. Not the first of these machine-generated versebots, but rather a nice one. 
• Ladies Against Humanity: I’m not 100% sure what this is (yes, I know it’s a riff on cards against humanity, I mean beyond that), but there are half a dozen gags that made me laugh out loud so on that basis it’s in (ha, like there’s any sort of editorial filter at play here). 

THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF LONGFORM READS WHICH MAY I HUMBLY SUGGEST YOU MAKE IT ONE OF YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS TO ACTUALLY READ THIS YEAR RATHER THAN JUST SKIPPING THROUGH AS THEY ARE PROBABLY THE BEST THING IN THIS BLOODY MESS OF A MISCELLANY? THANKS:

• Goodbye To Cameras: Pro-photographer Craig Mod writes in the New Yorker about why he may not need an actual camera any more. Interesting if you’re a photographer, but also a slightly sad and elegiac piece on the near-inevitable death of a piece of technology.   
• Sterling and Lebkwosky ‘do’ 2014: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky’s annual back-and-forth on the state of the world, courtesy The Well. Ignore the hideously user-unfriendly formatting and slightly wilful technoobscurantism of some of what they’re talking about – as ever, it’s one of the more intelligent pieces of broad ‘where we are as a civilisation’ pieces of writing (or, more accurately, conversations) you’ll read this year. 
• The Top Quora Answers of 2013: Oh my, there are some truly BRILLIANT things buried in here. You really can lose the rest of the day in here if you’re so inclined – some of them were in Web Curios last year, but most weren’t. The broadest collection of generally interesting stuff you’re likely to see (Curios aside, OBVIOUSLY). 
• The 4 Reasons Viral Content Stopped Mattering In 2013: There have been quite a few Buzzfeed-related pieces so far already this year, but this from Cracked is my personal pick of the bunch. Similar in tone to Esquire’s ‘We Broke The Internet’ rant, but significantly funnier, it’s an excellent look at why endless lists and hyperbole are in the process of breaking the concept of virality. Seeing as we’re on the subject, this Wired piece on Buzzfeed is also pretty good, although scholars won’t find anything particularly new in it. 
• Reddit Talks To The Man With Two Penises: You really do have to click on the link to the picture. It’s not in any way safe for work, obviously, but it’s also incredibly hypnotic. The man’s pleasingly candid discussion of the mechanics of his peculiar anatomy are pretty jawdropping too. I don’t think I’m jealous of him, though. 
• How Netflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood: A really, really interesting look at how Netflix has used data and tagging and categorisation to map tastes and improve recommendations. Much less about cinema and much more about taxonomy (but still interesting, I promise) – if you have anything to do with datagathering and analysis then this is pretty much a must-read.
• The Best Review Of The Beyonce Album You Are Likely To Read: Nico Muhly is a singer, songrwiter and composer, and a massive Beyonce fan. His review of her last album is epic, and very, very funny indeed. 
• The Books of 2014: A HUGE list breaking down 2014’s forthcoming novels, month-by-month. I got very excited about a lot of these, and I imagine you will too. 
• Creepypasta: If you have heard of Slenderman then you will be aware of the concept of Creepypasta – this is a brilliant overview of the phenomenon (basically: creepy folk tales told and shared online), and will give you lots of pointers towards things you can search for to scare the living daylights out yourself. 
• Evgeny vs “The Internet”: A great profile of serial provoker and perennial Curios favourite Evgeny Morosov – a fascinating man with some very interesting opinions, as showcased in this recent essay on the politics of maker culture (and the fetishisation thereof). Read him, he will make you smarter.
• On Online News and Web Design: A very smart piece looking at the New York Times’ recent redesign and how people consume online news in 2014 and what the means for layouts and user flow and STUFF. Honestly really interesting, even if you’re not into design stuff – if you’re in any way in the business of producing CONTENT (sorry), or getting people to read it, you should probably take a read. 
• On Paul Dacre: A brilliant and fascinating profile of Paul Dacre. Whatever you think of the man (you can probably guess my opinion), this is a compelling read. 

 

By Lucy Glendinning

By Deborah Simon

THIS IS THE LAST TIME I AM GOING TO HAVE TO WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA IN 2013 AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE IN WORDS QUITE HOW HAPPY THAT FACT MAKES ME SO INSTEAD ENVISAGE ME DOING AN INTERPRETATIVE DANCE TO CONVEY THE ENDORPHIN FLOODS I AM CURRENTLY FEELING:

• Facebook Launches Autoplay Video On Mobile: And, as it happens, on desktop too. This isn’t new news (I think they first alluded to this over the Summer, although I can’t be bothered to check exactly when). So yes – videos uploaded to Facebook through its own video player (and this is an important point – not YouTube (or indeed any other platform) embeds) will now autoplay as users scroll past them on the newsfeed (although audio won’t automatically play, which is a smart design decision). So, yes, MORE ENGAGEMENT! As I wrote when they announced this: “BRANDS! Here’s your opportunity to do something marginally creative with this! Perhaps people trapped in the videos, desperately beckoning scrolling people to stop and click on a link. Or something. Jesus, I don’t know, you lot are supposed to be the creative ones, I just write this crap. 
• Facebook’s 2013 In Review: Facebook’s wrapup of the year data here, which you will almost certainly already have seen but I include through a possibly missplaced sense of completeness. It’s a lot less interesting than Tumblr’s, I think. You can also do ‘Your Year In Review’, whereby Facebook scrapes your page for those updates and photos that have elicited most slack-jawed clicking from people you no longer remember but which you were ever friends with in real life. Which is cute, but unremarkable. Overall, underwhelming. You’d think that knowing more about humanity’s likes and behaviours than any company in history (bar one) would enable them to say something more interesting.
• Page Yourself Lets You Build Websites Inside Facebook: Well, not quite. What it actually seems to do is enable Pages to create quite rich tabs with website-like functionality, but what’s really interesting is that it’s free. It seems legitimate, but I can’t help but be a little skeptical about the functionality, etc. There might, though, be useful creative applications for it if you play around, and it could be helpful if you’re a small business owner. Maybe.
• Instagram Messaging!!!!: I’m finding it really hard to be anything other than totally indifferent to this news. ANOTHER way in which we can send personal messages through yet another platform? With pictures? Oh god. HOW MANY DIFFERENT BLOODY WAYS? TOP TIP FOR 2014: a service which offers an aggregated message alert service for all 213 separate networks on which people can contact you, including your home phone and doorbell, called “Please, everyone, I just want to find a space where noone can reach me”. Anyway, in a move which is so unsurprising as to feel like it was actually announced last year, Instagram yesterday announced that users will be able to send private picture messages and conduct private conversations on the platform. There’s more info in the link – interesting for brands, though, is the opportunity to allow users to contact them directly with images (competition entries, etc), and the fact that images can be sent privately to up to 15 users simultaneously, which if you are famous or a famous brand ambassador actually opens up some semi-interesting possibilities when it comes to SURPRISING AND DELIGHTING your BRAND FANS (you can lift those words directly, if you want – frankly I feel dirty having just typed them, so you’re welcome to take them off my hands). Oh look, and here’s GAP being the first brand to use it and doing exactly what I said (ie photo submissions).
• 2013 On Twitter: I like this a little more than Facebook’s, largely because the nature of Twitter means that they’re able to show you the way in which the platform was used to share information about significant moments. Anyway, this is their little nifty HTML roundup of the year as they saw it (strangely there’s no apparent mention of anything that’s not English language, which seems a bit odd to me). 
• Twitter Launches Broad Match Ad Targeting: If you buy ads on Twitter (and if you do comms-type stuff on social media there’s really very little reason why you shouldn’t, given they’ve killed the minimum spend) this is very useful. Basically they’ve made it easier to target people who post broadly relevant stuff around an issue – so if you want to target people who ‘love coffee’, you will now also be able to target people who ‘luv coffee’, ‘*heart* coffee’, ‘really need to perhaps apply these romantic feelings to a member of the same species rather than a caffeinated beverage’, etc etc., automatically rather than having to set this stuff up yourself. A move, not unlike Facebook’s simplification of its ad buying process the other week, designed to make it easier for anyone, particularly small businesses, to participate in the promotional jamboree, but which is as useful for larger brands. 
• Send Pictures As Embeds in DMs: Yep, that. Like the Instagram thing, sort of, except it only works on the Twitter website and own apps rather than on 3rd party clients at the moment. 
• They Changed How You Block People On Twitter And People Got Angry So They Changed It Back: There is nothing more to say about this. 
• Tumblr Adds Trending Blogs Ad Option: Starting January, brands will be able to buy trending slots on Tumblr. Starting as a mobile-only ad offer, the ad unit includes the name of the advertiser – or whatever they’re flogging – a follow button and three recent images from the Tumblr in question. It will almost certainly cost A LOT of money. 
• Google + Launches Social Ads: Hm, this confuses me slightly. Basically you can now turn any Google+ post into an ad unit, which you can then pay to be displayed elsewhere on the web. There’s a degree of interactive functionality included in the eventual ads – comments, the option to join a hangout, etc – but it feels quite a lot like this is more an advert for Google+ than for the actual thing that’s being advertised. 
• Google Knows Where You Have Been: For some of you this may be a little bit creepy. Say hello to Google’s location history which, if you’re logged in to your Google account, can show you where you were on any given day based on data collected from your Android phone and other associated data. WE DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR TH…oh, no, hang on, we did, we just didn’t bother reading the T&Cs. Damnation! Anyway, leaving aside the really quite sinister subtext of this stuff, there’s got to be some interesting hacks possible here – I am guessing (hoping?) that the data’s fairly private to you, but would be interesting to see what API stuff you can do with it. 
• YouTube In 2013: YouTube’s nice little self-referential video looking back at the biggest vids of 2013. You read about the 10 most popular here; interesting and impressive that there are two piece of brand stuff in here (the Carrie promo and another sodding creepy baby video by some water brand).
• YouTube Lets Verified Accounts Livestream: Or do on-air hangouts. Useful to know – you can do quite a lot of fun things with this, I think. Just for clarity, you don’t actually need to do very much at all to get a verified YouTube channel – it’s not like Twitter / Facebook. 
• Google Tips: Google launched this yesterday (I think) – a useful guide to some of its consumer facing products and how to get the most out of them. Very nicely put together as you’d expect, and I guarantee that there will be stuff on there that you didn’t know you could do. 
• A Cheat Sheet For Ad Types On Social Media: No more, no less. You probably ought to know this already if this sort of stuff is your job, but in case you need a reminder. 
• Kik Reaches 100million Users: The news in itself isn’t that interesting, but the piece is actually a good overview of the service and has some interesting stuff about how the platform might develop. A useful one to bring out in the first client meeting of 2014 when you’re struggling to remember why it is you do this stuff in the first place and just need something newish to wave at a client.
• WeChat Has 500million Users: This one too – WeChat is a Chinese site which takes elements of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc, and is very popular. Your client won’t have heard of it, probably, and you can make yourself seem all future and stuff by mentioning it. YOU CAN THANK ME IN THE NEW YEAR. 
• Some Social Media Awards Thingy You Can Vote In Should You Be So Minded: I’m nothing to do with them, fyi, I just thought I should include a link to one of the myriad of these things are out there if you are the sort of person who likes to vote for ‘campaign of the year’ and that sort of stuff.
• Oh, and seeing as it’s the end of the year, a prediction – next year will see at least one major global brand leaving Facebook as they consider it to be no longer relevant to their core target audience. Probably. Maybe.

By Tim Bird

THE LAST SELECTION OF LINKS YOU WILL GET FROM ME IN 2013 AND WHICH THEREFORE YOU SHOULD SAVOUR LIKE SOME SORT OF FINE WINE OR SINGLE-ESTATE COCOA BEAN CHOCOLATE WHILST SECRETLY BEING QUITE GLAD THAT YOU CAN SPEND THE HOLIDAYS IGNORING THE INTERNET COMPLETELY (OR AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT I PLAN TO DO – I REALLY COULD DO WITH A BREAK FROM ALL THIS, WEBMONGS, IF I’M HONEST WITH YOU, BECAUSE SOMETIMES I WORRY IT’S NOT REALLY VERY GOOD FOR ME OR INDEED PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY TO READ THIS MUCH INTERNET), PT.1:

• If This Then That Launches Location Triggers For Mobile: If This Then That (IFTT) is a great thing in many respects – if you don’t use it already (although I think that if you’re reading this then you probably do), it’s a service which lets you set up sequential processes using digital social media – so for example you can set it to upload all your Instagram pictures to Facebook, for example. This week they launched a location-based service for mobile, which effectively lets you set up triggers which will make stuff happen when you’re in a certain place (according to your phone). So you could set it to, for example, turn your heating on when you leave the office (if you have fancy housing). I KNOW THIS IS MENTAL IT’S THE FUTURE. There have to be some very cool hacks around this – have a think / play. 
• The 4sq Map: A hack for Foursquare which takes the data the app knows about you and potentially makes it a lot more useful than it might otherwise be, through mapping, etc. Have a play, if you use the service.
• Ampp3d: So this launched – Martin Belam’s next project for Trinity Mirror, applying the learnings from ubersuccessful experiment Us Vs Th3m (profiled on Radio4 this morning, no less) to data journalism. It will be interesting to see how this one compares – the Mirror branding is a lot more overt, and I wonder to what extent they will do paid-for datajournalism from brands. Anyway, you can read the very clever Mr Belam’s thoughts on launching it here – interesting stuff. 
• Mandela’s Walk: Lovely piece of work by the Economist, bringing together a lot of their archived writing about Mandela over the past 70-odd years into a very deep chronology of the man’s life and achievement. Not only a nice piece of webwork, but a very clever way of using its archive and also, subtly, emphasising the publication’s heritage. 
• Because The Internet: The Childish Gambino thing is sort of mind-meltingly meta media (that was unintentional alliteration, I promise) – is it a joke? Is it a legitimate side-project by a very talented man? Is it BOTH OF THOSE THINGS AT ONCE??? Actually I think Donald Glover’s a very good musician so I’m inclined to lean towards the side-project explanation. Anyway, his latest album is called ‘Because The Internet’ and is all sorts of levels of interesting about the web and culture and STUFF – the accompanying website, though, is just crazy – effectively a full-length film script designed to accompany the album, with embedded videos and set directions and all sorts of general meta-commentary (that meta word again) on the album and life. It’s quite staggering in its length and breadth, and I would very much recommend saving this one and having a look through when you have a spare hour or so (do people even have spare hours any more? I can’t tell).
• Circuit Stickers: These are stickers which let you add electronics to anything – paper, fabric, whatever you fancy. Which means all sorts of rather cool potential applications for design and fashion, in a sort of homely, homespun, papercraft-y Etsy-type way. If you like a bit of twee AND a bit of electricity (and who doesn’t?) then these may well be right up your alley. 
• iPet Companion: This may well make your Friday afternoon. A service to promote animal shelters in North America which, thanks to webcams and a few plugins, lets people from all over the world play with kittens in their browswers. That’s right, PLAY WITH KITTENS. Be honest with yourself – you have a stinking hangover (I know you), you’re not going to do any work…why not make yourself feel better with cats? Has the added bonus that they’ll probably just be waking up when you read this (presuming it’s Friday) and thus may well be at peak cute. 
• The NYC Crime Map: Another interesting use of public data from NYC, and another chance for me to whinge about how in London we don’t have anywhere near the same access to and ability to mess with information about the city in which we live (although I am reliably informed by people in the know that this is being addressed – something else to look forward to in 2014, although perhaps ‘look forward to’ is a slight exaggeration). Oh, and if you’re into this sort of thing, this is the US Government’s Open Data archive. 
• The Ex-Boyfriend Revenge Kit: This is just sinister. Effectively this is a just a handbag, but for promotional purposes this Aussie company are packaging it with a whole load of other stuff (crowbar, rope, syringe, truth serum, etc) and offering the whole as a means of getting back at a man who wronged you. Good luck with the legal issues, guys!
• London On Trend: Instagram pics from London, mapped as they are taken onto a Google map. Nice little hack and properly hypnotic in a weird sort of way.
• Autodissociate.me: A web-art project by 19 year-old Mary Bond, which consists of a selection of written elements (composed, sourced and randomly generated) overlayed on a series of webcam-style posted shots (often nudes). Don’t know why, but I rather liked this – the metacommentary (that word again) above the images is a nice accompaniment to them, and there’s something rather compelling about the random juxtapositions which it can throw up. Slightly NSFW, just so’s you know. 
• A Collection Of Virtual Yule Logs: I didn’t know this, but apparently it’s a *thing* in the US for small / local TV channels to show a picture of a burning log in a hearth on Christmas day instead of refgular programming, to allow families to create the illusion of Olde Worlde comfort and warmth in their sterile modern homes. This is a virtual equivalent – a whole load of differently designed and presented vanimations of burning logs, as imagined by artists around the world. There are some very nice designs in here. 
• Pompeiian Graffiti: A collection of translated graffiti from Pompeii. Man, those ancient Romans were a bawdy lot. I’d leave some of these scrawled in the bathroom at work, were I you lot. 
• Crowded VS Empty: A lovely page on the Smithsonian Magazine website collecting pictures and information of the world’s most crowded and most overcrowded places around the world, made mapped and navigable. Simple but does a lovely job at reminding us of how incredibly BIG and diverse the planet is (you’d have thought that at the age of 34 I’d have stopped being surprised by this sort of thing). 
• The Walk: I’ve mentioned game design agency 6 To Start on here many times before – they made the now-legendary fitness game ‘Zombies, Run!’, which introduced game elements to the act of going for a jog in a more sophisticated way than Nike had done at the time. Anyway, they’ve got a new one which launched this week – called The Walk, and developed in partnership with the NHS, it’s basically more story than game; the smart thing about it is the way it uses a compelling narrative and the desire to find out what happens next to drive participation (and thus physical activity) rather than some sort of badge system. Clever – will be interesting to see whether Government looks at this and tries to apply the technique to other things (“Go to the jobcentre to access the next episode of your favourite soap!”? Hm, maybe not). 
• Comics + Music Player: I know that there’s a name for that music whichis presented on big rolls of paper with holes in it and which was fed into old pianos to make them autoplay, but I can’t for the life of me recall what that name is. Balls. Anyway, this is SUPER CUTE – a miniature version of that technology, from Japan, in which the tiny rolls of music also have comic strips printed on them – so as you wind the machine you get to read the comic strip and hear the soundtrack play along in time. It probably doesn’t work *quite* perfectly in practice, but the device itself is adorable so I forgive it any failings (how magnanimous of me). 
• Reverse-Inspiration Band Tshirts: I’ve featured quite a lot of Butcher Billy’s work on here before – his latest project is a collection of pictures of ICONIC musicians, wearing band tshirts depicting the logos of artists who came long after them. Because, you know, SATIRE. I rather like these, and would like to be able to buy them as posters please. You could really, really annoy music purists with them, which is never a bad thing in general. 
• French Subway Etiquette: They’re just so stylish, aren’t they? This is an official document by a French rail company – you couldn’t imagine TFL or FIrst Great Western coming up with something this cool, could you? It’s in French, but if you’re not a Francophone the illustrations will still nice up your eyes. 
• Rijksmuseum Releases Its API: In the wake of the Tate doing the same thing earlier this year, this week Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, one of the most digitally savvy cultural organisations in Europe to my mind, has done the same thing. I would like someone to make something from both, please – perhaps a catalogue-masher which takes descriptions of modern art from the Tate’s collection and applies them to the Dutch museum’s unparalleled collection of 17thC Northern European works for dissonance-LOLs. Shardcore?
• Create Your Own Minute Of Silence: Exactly that, with timer. If it was your office Christmas party last night, perhaps you might need to do this for your dignity.
• Old Vids + New Music = This: Let’s Dance is a webproject by…someone (actually Edward Forshaw, it turns out)…which is collecting videos of people dancing from yesteryear and syncing them with modern music for COMEDY EFFECT. It’s fun, uses Echonest, and could only be improved by letting you select tracks and then trawling YouTube for potential video matches. COME ON ED SORT IT OUT PLEASE THANKS. 

I have no idea, sorry. Anyone?

THE LAST SELECTION OF LINKS YOU WILL GET FROM ME IN 2013 AND WHICH THEREFORE YOU SHOULD SAVOUR LIKE SOME SORT OF FINE WINE OR SINGLE-ESTATE COCOA BEAN CHOCOLATE WHILST SECRETLY BEING QUITE GLAD THAT YOU CAN SPEND THE HOLIDAYS IGNORING THE INTERNET COMPLETELY (OR AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT I PLAN TO DO – I REALLY COULD DO WITH A BREAK FROM ALL THIS, WEBMONGS, IF I’M HONEST WITH YOU, BECAUSE SOMETIMES I WORRY IT’S NOT REALLY VERY GOOD FOR ME OR INDEED PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY TO READ THIS MUCH INTERNET), PT.2:

• The Gif Lenticular: We’ve had the Gif flipbook, and the gif mechanised toy – now we have the Gif lenticular. This service lets you turn any Gif you want into a small lenticular print which you can then order. Use this in pitches as leavebehinds, you know you want to. 
• The Picfair Pics Of The Year: Picfair is one of my favourite things of the year, and it seems to be going well which makes me happy. In case you missed it, it’s a service which allows anyone to upload any of their pics to the site, set a single-use licensing cost, and then lets others buy use of that image under certain pre-agreed licensing terms. Effectively it lets anyone monetise their photography (as long as there’s a market for it), and is INNOVATIVE and DISRUPTIVE and all those other words which we’re all sick of. Anyway, these are their best shots of the year – there are some crackers on there. 
• Pictures Of US Presidents Hanging Out: I love these. A selection of shots from Obama, Bush and Clinton’s trip to South Africa this week to attend Mandela’s memorial (on which note, if you’ve not read the account by the man who took THAT selfie shot of Obama, Cameron and Thorning Schmidt of the context around it, then go do so now) which demonstrates just how staged and agenda-led political photography can be, and that being POTUS is the sort of experience which creates relationships which transcend Democratic/GOP boundaries. 
• The Best / Worst Santa Costume Ever: If you’re yet to have your office shindig, you may wish to consider this. Just imagine it in Extra Large. JUST IMAGINE. 
• A 360-degree Lap With The Stig: I hate Top Gear. Sorry. Anyway, if you like cars and stuff then this video by the bloke in the helmet driving fast might be up your street – it’s one of those ‘look, you can watch in 360 degrees!’ things, and for all I know is quite exciting if you can drive. 
• Ship A Dcik: Have you ever wanted to ship a giant cardboard penis to someone? OH GOOD!
• Examining Technologically Dubious Kickstarter Projects: A website which looks at all those Kickstarters which look SO FUTURE and which as a result are perhaps at best overambitious and at worst outright fantasy. Clever and interesting, but will also in part kill quite a few of your dreams. Also contains at least one thing I have featured on here, which suggests I am an idiot who understands nothing and should apply a little more editorial rigour in 2014 (*adds to resolutions list*). 
• GifWrapping: Artists share animated Gif art projects with each other for Christmas. We get to look at them, which is almost like getting a present ourselves. Almost, maybe, a bit. 
• Cheerify: A website / plugin which lets you CHRISTMASIFY (not a word) any website you choose with WRAPPING PAPER and CHRISTMAS EFFECTS and MUSIC. When I say ‘Christmasify’ I of course mean ‘render dreadful, unnavigable and migraine-inducing’ – as a promo for digital agency AMP I am frankly unimpressed. 
• The Amiga Workbench Emulator: I don’t really know what you’re meant to do with this, if I’m 100% honest with you, but if anyone can show me how I can make it play Sensible Soccer then I will love you forever. 
• Highway One: This week’s ‘best example of HTML parallax scrolling thingy’ is this, a guide to America’s Highway One, made in the style of a road trip. Such lovely design, and it’s informative and functional too. 100,000,000 points. 
• Fred Bassett + Slayer: This should be a Tumblr. Why isn’t it a Tumblr? Anyway, this takes what is officially the least funny strip cartoon IN THE WORLD (seriously though, has anyone ever laughed at Fred Bassett? Is it a dog-lover thing? Maybe you need to be a closed minded, bigoted twat who reads the Mail (and if you ‘only’ read the Mail Online then YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM) to laugh at it – I just don’t know) and combines it with the sensitively poetic lyrics of Slayer in a move which makes the strip both funny and sort of terrifying. 
• The NYC Taxi Calendar of 2014: A calendar collecting the sexy cab drivers of the Big Apple in sexy poses. I use the term ‘sexy’ pretty loosely, but I really do think that Hailo should jump on this and knock one out quickly for London – can you IMAGINE the specimens? 
• The Future Of UI: Not the first of these that I’ve seen, but it’s a pretty comprehensive collection of examples of ‘OH WOW LOOK AT THE FUTURE’ interface design from films. I think that we might see some stuff like this almost starting to nearly become reality in the next 12 months or so (way to hedge my bets) – if the XBox One takes off as a home entertainment / multemedia hub THING, with all its gestural interface stuff, you might start to see web designers experimenting with some of these things for Kinect-specfic browsing experiences. They’ll be horrible at first, obviously, but we’re almost at a point where it could work.
• A Sound Map Of The World: I think that this is an amazing project. As far as I can tell, this is a totally personal project which invites people to send in ambient recordings of their surroundings and then maps them across Google Maps – creating an audiopicture of the world. The volume of contributions is really, really impressive, and I just lost about 20 minutes’ writing time listening to what Germany, France and Japan sound like. Things like this are why the internet is, occasionally, brilliant. 
• Dai Lyn’s Photos Of Old People Wearing B-Boy Clothes: No more, no less. Great pictures. I did a GCSE in Religious Education (Catholic school, had no choice) in which I suggested that the church should combat ageism by getting pensioners into Bhangra and hardcore and dressing them accordingly – God, I was ahead of my time. 
• A Photoessay About North Korea: We’ve learned a lot about North Korea this year – not much of it pleasant, to be honest. This is a great photoessay about the country – loads of great pictures and definitely worth a scroll through. 
• 214 Music Tips for 2014: Selected by website Crack In The Road, this is a truly EPIC collection of recommendations for interesting listening material next year. I have no idea how much of this is good, but the bits I’ve skimmed over / listened to suggest a massively eclectic collection of a whole load of stuff you may not have heard of. Take a punt and see what you hear (wow, that’s a hideous phrase, sorry). 
• The Good Bits From The Comments: It’s a widely held truism that everything that happens below the line is bad and evil and idiotic (and on YouTube that’s still largely true, despite Google’s recent efforts). Blorpy, though, is a (horribly named) website which collects interesting, thoughtful and heartwarming comments from blogs and news articles around the web in one place. Fascinating – there’s loads of really interesting stuff in here about all sorts of things. 
• The 8-bit Selfie: A neat little website, the Interstellar Selfie Station uses your webcam to take a picture of you and then 8-bits the fcuk out of it, with all sorts of contrast and definition filters to make your image look like the loading screen of a ZX Spectrum game circa 1987. Actually looks rather cool, and might be nice if you’re bored of your social media avatar and are of a retro-gaming bent. 
• Why Is The Sky Blue?: I sort of know the answer to this, in a really loose, crap, unscientific way – I really liked this site which explained it to me in simple words and pictures that even someone who’s a bit crap at science could understand. Nice design. 
• Turning A Building Into A Rubik’s Cube: This is just mental really. 3d projection and very clever tech combined – it’s clunky but also very impressive indeed. 
• Crap Gift Picker: I really should have putall the Christmas stuff in its own section, shouldn’t I? Oh well. This is a rather nice little promotoy by interactive agency Traction, which allows you to randomly pick a slightly rubbish gift for someone you ought to get a present for but really don’t care about enough to think about what to get them. 
• Least Helpful: A website collecting the least helpful, most curmudgeonly reviews on Amazon (and other sites, probably). It does make you wonder about the sort of people who actively choose to take time from their lives to post things like ‘FEATURES THE WORD ‘QUEER’. DISGUSTING’ under a review. You hope that most of these are jokes, but fear that they’re not. 
• Your Own Private Video Archive: Mindlogr is a platform which allows people to record video of themselves and then store it in a private archive – the idea being that you will develop a personal, persistent video journal of your life, stored in one place, against which you can map all sorts of other quantified self data (it connects with Nike+, Fitbit, etc) and general information like the news or the weather. For any of you who’ve read Houllebecq’s ‘The Possibility of an Island’, the concept of the LIFE STORY as he defines it is pretty much a variant on this very thing; an interesting idea overall. 
• Buy A Private Island: What to get for the person who has everything. Amazingly this appears to be real.
• World In Love: This is a very sweet project indeed, looking to find examples of couples which cover every single possible match of nationalities available. It’s probably doomed to failure unless it gets a big publicity injection, but I think the ethos behind it is lovely. 
• Aluminium Casts of Anthills: This bloke basically pours molten aluminium into ants’ nests which then solidifies and creates amazing sculptures which match the dimensions of the insane network of tunnels and chambers within. AND ALSO KILLS ALL THE ANTS. I presume the hot metal just sort of disintegrates them on impact – or is your sculpture full of ant corpses. WHY HAS NOONE CONSIDERED THIS?
• Lots Of Little Webgames In One Place: Because you’re not doing any more work between now and Christmas, let’s be honest. 
• The Junk Drawer Project: Picturs of the crap we store and the stories behind why we do so. More interesting than it probably ought to be (at least to me, who has about 17 variants on this around the house which I’m sort of too scared to open in case BAD MEMORIES leap out). 
• Depression Quest: A text and music game about living with depression. Christmas isn’t a fun time for the depressed. Now might be a good time to consider donating some of the money you were going to spend on useless sh1t noone really needs or wants to a charity instead. Try Mind, or maybe Shelter. 
• WikiGif: All of the Gifs from Wikipedia on one website. Man, there’s some odd stuff on Wikipedia. 
• The Vagine Decal For Trackpads: There’s no other way to describe it. It’s purportedly a feminist statement. I’m not really sure what to think. 
• The 50 Worst Things On The Internet in 2013: Finally, a roundup of a load of pictures and Gifs which will make you hope that some sort of meteorite strikes between now and January 1st 2014 and puts a stop to us once and for all. Although I’m surprised that the above-mentioned vagina decal’s not on the list. 

By James Whitlow Delano

MAYBE YOU WOULD LIKE TO LISTEN TO THE NEW BUSTA RHYMES/QTIP MIXTAPE NOW?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Respectful Rappers: What if rap lyrics were a little less angry and misogynistic and a little more feminist? This might be what they would be like, maybe.
• King James Programming: This is VERY geeky. Algorithmically mashing text from the King James Bible with The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmes for ‘comic’ effect. Programmers might like this; the rest of you, skip to the next one which has Macauley Culkin in it.
• The Pizza Underground: What would YOU do if you were former child star Macauley Culkin? Would you descend into a drink and drug fueled hell and set up a dreadful, morally-questionable venture seeking to exploit your former ‘fame’ so as to get into the pants of a lot of desperate women seeking some tawdry variant on fame in the Hollywood hills (HELLO COREY FELDMAN!)? NO YOU WOULD NOT! You would form pizza-themed Velvet Underground tribute band called The Pizza Underground. Of course you would. You can listen to the music here if you want (it’s…er…not great). 
• Sports Balls Replaced With Cats: Erm, that.
• Jaden Is Worried: I always though that John Terry’s resting facial expression was the acme of existential sadness (seriously, check out the massively bleak look he always sports), but now there’s a new champion of worry – Will Smith’s kid Jaden. Poor lad. I hope he’s ok. 
• Cloaque: This is a seemingly infinitely scrolling Tumblr art project which collects all sorts of random imagery, gifs, 3d models, etc, and dumps them all onto the page in a way which is weirdly a lot more visually coherent than it ought to be. Its curators call it ‘digital compost’. I like that. Contains 3d modeled genitalia, in case you care.
• 12 Shoes For 12 Lovers: Sebastian Errazuriz is an artist who has designed 12 pairs of shoes, each of which depicts aspects of one of his former lovers. Each is accompanied by a short vignette from their relationship. This might be my favourite thing on here this week. 
• Stop Senior Selfies: A Tumblr campaigning to get OLD PEOPLE to stop taking selfies as it’s only for the kids, YEAH?! Unfortunately the curator’s definition of ‘senior’ seems to encompass people over the age of 30. The young are TYRANTS. 
• Tom Hanks Animals: Tom Hanks’ face, on gifs of animals. That’s all. The one at the top as I write this made me laugh a LOT. 
• Medieval People Of Colour: A collection of images of people of colour from renaissance art.
• UX Critique: Looking at all the reasons why the new iPhone UX is rubbish. 
• Ineffective Chinstraps: A late contender for most weirdly niche Tumblr or the year, this seemingly collects pictures of people wearing headgear with chinstraps that don’t really fit properly. 
• All Staff All Day: Purports to be a collection of actual emails which have been sent to all staff in companies, accompanied by appropriate images. Some gold in here. 
• Yeezus As Art: Lyrics from Kanye’s ‘Yeezus’ album, illustrated by pics from Bing image search. By Shardcore – you can read about it here if you like. 
• My Earliest Memory: A project by Simon White, collecting people’s earliest memories. Contribute one – it’s a lovely project. 

LONG STUFF WHICH IS LONG BUT WHICH YOU WILL HAVE AMPLE TIME TO READ BETWEEN NOW AND NEXT TIME AND AS SUCH WHICH YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO DIVE INTO LIKE SOME SORT OF HAPPY WORD-EATING CORMORANT (NO, ME NEITHER):

• A Lovely, Long Interview With Bill Watterson: After Calvin & Hobbes got megafamous, its creator Bill Watterson didn’t do many interviews. This, though, is from 1989 before it had become quite the worldwide phenomenon it would eventually develop into; this is a long and fascinating interview with the man, which touches on all sorts of fascinating stuff about the strip. To me, though, the best bits are Wattersons slightly testy responses to questions about whether Hobbes is ‘real’ or not, and what that does to the narrative – it’s a lovely example of a creator wanting to give their work to breathe and live in the mind rather than give people answers on a plate, and how that ambiguity creates a depth to the strip that it could never have had otherwise. 
• An AMA With The Semen Chef: There’s a book for sale on Amazon called ‘Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-based Recipes‘ – if you’ve spent much time on the internet, you’ve probably come across it (sorry). This is a Reddit AMA with the book’s author which is actually sort of legitimately interesting, but which I am including mainly because there are SO MANY QUOTES in here which I suggest that you copy and paste into emails to colleagues over the next week or so. Go on, confuse them a little. 
• Jonah Peretti, Critical Theory and Advertising: I don’t care what Time Magazine says, this was the year of Jonah Peretti, and the year in which the world’s media basically looked at Buzzfeed’s success and just sort of gave up trying to be different (hyperbole, but). This is a fascinating fund, dug out by Critical Theory Magazine (whose summary of it is worth reading if you can’t stomach the academic-ese (not a word)) – an early essay by Peretti on capitalism, queer theory and identity commodification. Read this (or, as I said, the summary) and realise where Buzzfeed came from (and maybe a bit about where we are all going, maybe). Contains the amazing (if you consider the context of who wrote it) observation that we are increasingly obsessing over “isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” – YOU’RE NOT HELPING, JONAH.
• Why ‘Life’ Doesn’t Exist: Not going to lie, this one’s a bit *hard*. A piece from Scientific American in which the author asserts that to assert that there is some quality called ‘life’ which differentiates certain objects or organisms from others is fallacious, and that instead we should understand distinctions in terms of systemic complexity. Which has all sorts of fairly mental philosophical implications, particularly in terms of AI and stuff. Sort of headbending.
• An Interview With The Creator of Cache Monet: This year’s web art sensation Cache Monet has been linked to EVERYWHERE. This interview with its creator Tim Nolan is fascinating on the manner in which it’s started to bridge the gap between a digital and a physical work, and how offline galleries are trying to get in on the act.
• Why Upworthy Headllines Are Everywhere: Short answer – because they work. Longer answer – because of Twitter and Facebook, and there’s nothing at all that we can do about it. This is a very clever look at the deeper media politics behind Facebook’s recent ‘quality content’-prioritising algorithm change, and how that has basically ruined EVERYTHING (/hyperbole). 
• On The Sad Death Of The Quiet Gig: This is a very good and very true piece from Th Quietus on how it’s no longer possible to go to a gig without having it ruined by some idiot(s) talking constantly throughout it. Does this mean I’m getting old? No, it means that the world is becoming increasingly full of arseholes (I am well aware that writing that sentence means that I am in fact getting old). 
• I Had Sex With My High School Teacher: Not me, obviously, the author of this piece. As a girl, she had a brief affair with her mid-20s teacher; this is her account of what it felt like and what happened. A really beautiful piece of writing which is in no way sensational and which is by turns funny and heartbreakingly sad, and may make you think a little differently about a few of this year’s news stories, maybe. 
• Dasani’s Homeless Life: One of the best pieces of journalism I have read all year, this report by the New York Times into the life of one family on the poverty line in the city will at points move you to tears (guaranteed), but is a brilliant and (I think) pleasingly unsentimental look at what it is like to be very poor in a large Western metropolis. Good multimedia, good photography and excellent writing combine to make this worth taking every single minute it takes to read. Sort-of essential, I think. 
• The PTSD Lobotomies of Post-War America: Some 2,000 men were lobotomised by the US Army Veterans Administration, to treat them for conditions that at the time they didn’t even have names for but which now we’d probably call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This piece on the Wall Street Journal is another great piece of multimedia journalism, looking at how and why it happened. It’s, er, not a very happy story, I warn you. 
• The Rise Of Millennial Writing: I love this very much indeed. It’s a nice summation of where we find ourselves as a civilisation with the internet and our senses of self and individualism, all wrapped up in what Bret Easton Ellis called the ‘Post-Empire’ mindset, and in many ways it’s one of the best summaries of what almost everything I have linked to in 2013 has made me think and feel on one level or another. 

By Kei Meguro

By Reuben Wu

  THE SECTION WHICH, IN DEfERENCE TO SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK, I AM THIS WEEK REFERRING TO AS THE MOST IMPORTANT STUFF IN THE WORLD; THE LODESTONE OF TRUTH! THE APOGEE OF EXISTENCE! THE CRUX OF THE HUMAN CONDITION! THE CURE FOR ALL THAT AILS US! THE UNIVERSAL PANACEA! YES, THAT’S RIGHT, SOME STUFF ABOUT S***** M****:

• Facebook Mobile Payments: Dull and practical but important, this is Facebook working with Paypal and others to introdduce one-click payments. Welcome to the future in which you neber need to leave Facebook for anything; coming next week, Facebook partners with Ocado to offer grocery shopping through The Social Network, complete with discounts for those who ‘Like’ bananas and Fray Bentos pies and the like. Probably, anyway. Go on, Fray Bentos, MAKE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO BE.
• Facebook AI: What would you do if you had access to possibly the greatest repository of data about human interests and behavoiur which has ever existed in the history of humanity? THAT’S RIGHT, you would build SkyNet. Which is effectively what FB announced this week, with their foray into advanced machine learning. Don’t worry, though, it’s only nascent tech and so you don’t yet have to be terrified about the fact that the banal utterings you spout on your timeline could be quite easily replicated by a server stack in Colorado (yet. Give it a year). My girlfriend and I were at a lecture this week about neuroscience and there was a lot of talk about human intelligence being, according to current thinking, largely due to the variety and density of neurons in our brains. There’s almost certainly a poorly thought-out analogy between groupings of individuals and the hive mind, and the sort of stuff Facebook could potentially do with the billion+ people on its books. Let’s be honest, this is almost certainly the beginning of the end. Enjoy it!
• Google Change Commenting FOREVER: This is really quite significant, not just from a Social Media point of view but actually socioculturally (no, really, come back). Google are looking to address the swampllike horror of the below-the-video area on YouTube by changing everything, and prioritising comments by people you know (and famouses, because that’s the world we live in). Also, obviously, they’re building G+ into the system; see Skynet quote passim, and all my previous cant about a universal online ID that I used to spout a few years back when I was young and interested. One big thing about this is that it gives brands – even the most risk-averse and unpopular – no reason at all to do the craven ‘no comments’ thing on YouTube anymore, and makes the service FAR more attractive to people who were previously put off by the whole ‘OMIGODBIGGAYFATDYKESCUMFAGYOLO’ horror which was the below-the-line YouTube environment. That, and the more general social point about us having (potentially) reached a tipping point in online culture where the absolute right to say anything you like is outweighed by the importance of not being an absolute tool. Maybe. Anyway, Google aren’t the only people to announce this sort of thing this week – online science journal Popular Science banned comments this week; their rationale is interesting and coherent and worth a read.
• Google Glass Banned Here: This is slightly crazy but also an amazing insight into the world in which we will live, like it or not, in approximately 3-5 years from now. Don’t fight it; just sink into dystopia with a wry smile and a sigh. It won’t hurt a bit. 
• Free Background Music For Videos: Basically just that. Useful for brands, though, as at least it means you won’t have to have that awful conversation with the client where they ask for Pachebel’s Canon as a bed, and you say how much it will cost, and they make you play it on a Bontempi organ to provide the backing and you wonder how your life became this way and where your childhood went. Just me? Oh. 
• Twitter Emergency Alerts: Actually really useful and an interesting development in Twitter’s increasingly core position at the heart of breaking news. This is a service which, although only available to US, Japanese and Korean organisations at the moment, will allow users to subscribe to mobile or email alerts from certain feeds – and then allow said feeds to tag tweets as ‘important’ and have them mailed / texted to aforementioned opt-in users. If you work with an environmental NGO this is potentially huge – also if you’re, say, the Metropolitan Police, or actually even local / regional police forces. Clever by Twitter not only functionally but strategically – make the service essential for globa infrastructure and it can NEVER DIE (hyperbole, but). 
• Twitter Magicrecs: I’m slightly annoyed about this, in a Lord of the Flies ‘I FOUND THE CONCH’ sort of way. Magicrecs is an awesome little Twitter hack that has been running for a couple of months and which alerts you via DM to accounts or Tweets which you may find useful / interesting – effectively if x proportion of people you follow all start following a certain person, or read / RT a certain tweet, it tells you so that you don’t miss out. Clever, but I felt all smug about finding it and using it and now I have to let you all know about it and I no longer feel all special and privileged. 
• Being a Vine ‘VJ’ is Now Apparently an ACTUAL JOB: Actually properly mad, but an interesting piece to reference when beating clients over the head about how vital it is that they pay you more money to make 6-second shorts about car insurance BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE KIDS WANT, YEAH?!
• Pinterest ‘Read Later’ Feature: Interesting largely as an indicator of what Pinterest could become (that is, the universal memory service). Were I the people behind the infinitely more powerful Evernote I would be a little concerned about this stuff. 
• Netflix Spoilerfoiler: Smartest campaign-y thing of the week from Netflix around the finale of that bloody series about meth. Smart because a) it’s a good idea; and b) because it’s totally ripped off from this by some woman earlier in the year which I seem to recall I mentioned on Web Curios and which means that I am basically responsible for the Netflix thing on some level.
• Minecraft OS Maps: Second smartest thing of the week comes from Ordnance Survey, who used their map data to recreate the UK in Minecraft. Tapping into a massive geek phenomenon is helpful fashion (the maps are downloadable and playable for users who feel that way inclined)=massive internetgeeknews. LEARN.
• Not Really Internetty But Still Brilliant: So this really is wonderful. A vending machine-centric stunt by chocolate people Milka, whose vending machine which requires people to form human chains to activate is just *lovely*, and contains so much remarkable INSIGHT that somewhere a planner is reclining on cushions made of pure gold and being fed chocolate grapes for eternity. 
• Remember What I Said About Buzzfeed and Politics Last Week?: No, of course you don’t, you weren’t paying attention. Anyway, this is what I meant.

Literally no idea who this is by, sorry

MUSIC! HAVE A BREAKUP-INSPIRED HIPHOP MIXTAPE BY SOME BLOKE!

A Selection Of Finds From Across The Internet Which This Week I Am Writing Up In Slightly Hurried Fashion Due To Having A Lot Of Things To Do Including Another Wedding This Afternoon Which I Didn’t Mention Up There Because Even I’m Bored Of Me Whining About This Stuff But Really How Many Nuptials Must One Man Attend In A Year (Rhetorical), Pt 1:

• Sh1t PR Ideas: You will have seen this already, I am sure, but it is SO SO TRUE. Although possibly needs more social media wankery.
• The History Of The Internet In Timeline Form: More the techy stuff than the ‘oh look, so that’s when grumpy cat became famous’ stuff, but still interesting – a nicely arranged look at the major milestones in the development of the web, with reasonable annotations and links and stuff. I imagine if you are a teacher this might be useful, but also just generally interesting as a sort of ‘this is how we got where we are oh god how did it get so bleak after all our early optimism’ sort of way. 
• Smart Christmas Lights: I am no particular fan of Christmas (I know, I know, but it’s organised fun and I abhor organised fun – yep, I really am that much of an horrendous curmudgeon), but these look BRILLIANT. Smart LED lighting, with companion app technology which lets you pick any colour from the spectrum at any point for them to display, allows programmable cycling, linking of multiple sets, and all that sort of geeky stuff which might make you care. They’re made in Australia and come out soon, and I really want to put some all over my house and cycle through the most upsetting colours in the spectrum whilst a choir of sinister children sing carols, backwards, at my flatmates. I won’t do that, though, largely as rereading that sentence has made me temporarily question my own sanity. 
• Slowmo Video On The New iPhone: There was a new iPhone launched last week, in case you missed that fact (you didn’t). Apparently it now lets you shoot video in HD slowmo – this is a short video showcasing that, and should serve as an example to all community managers who can jazz up their moribund content calendars with some suitable and brand-linked slow-motion VT. How about this, Dulux – watch paint dry in slow motion! It’s brilliant, I know. That’ll be £500 – ta. 
• Intel Is Bringing Us The Robot Companion We Have Longed For: This is still all very prototype-y, so may never come about at all, but the people at everyone’s favourite (the only one anyone’s ever heard of) chip manufacturer Intel are working on a modular robot which, the theory is, will be printable on home 3d printers and the software for which can be downloaded and manipulated. So, effectively, this is the first step in a process which will see any alienated, dysfunctional middle-class teen with access to the internet and 3d printing make their own army of semi-sentient killing machines in their basement. GREAT! Obviously I am being hyperbolic, and this is simply ushering in an era of us all having a ‘plastic pal who’s fun to be with‘ – you would be a fool and an alarmist communist to think anything other. 
• A Map Of Female ‘Easyness’: Havcing done a bit of digging around this I *think* it might be ‘satire’, but nevertheless it’s sort of jaw-droppingly awful. The key did make me laugh, though, I must confess. 
• Notezilla: Interactive, clickable sheet music. A very clever learning aid for anyone who’s looking to get their head around this sort of thing. 
• The Command-Prompt Radio Player: completely pointless, as most of my favourite things are, this is a Soundcloud hack which replaces the traditional, modern, user-friendly interface with a command-line alternative straight out of 1993. No reason at all that I can see other than sheer bloody-mindedness, but if you’re of a certain age this will send powerful waves of nostalgia washing over you.
• PinSex: This may have been around for ages, I have no clue, but I stumbled across it this week (no, really, I did!) and it made me laugh (not a euphemism) – mainly due to the shameless nature of the way in which this Pinterest-for-pr0n (for that is what this is) is designed. Totally NSFW in any way shape or form – it is BONGO CENTRAL, ladies and gents. I am guessing that the user stats are probably skewed towards men rather more than Pinterest.
• Bicycle Built For 2000: 2,000 random internet users, recorded singing that ‘Daisy, Daisy’ song, and arranged online. INCREDIBLY creepy – but also interesting in terms of how they were recruited (via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service) and where they’re from and stuff. I wouldn’t play this as your children’s lullaby, mind. 
• Sex Lexis: Basically Urban Dictionary but for sex, this is a website which collects information about the meaning of English-language terms for sexual acts in one place. In no way prurient, it’s strangely buttoned-up but also fascinating – 5 minutes on here and you will learn a lot of new phrases for things that you potentially didn’t even know that people actually did or said – feak, for example? Really?
• Postcards from Google Earth: I’m slightly in love with these. A gorgeous collection of glitched-out shots from Google Earth, arranged as hi-res screencaps in traditional postcard size. No real reason for them, but they please me immoderately. 
• Morrissey Christmas Jumpers: I’m genuinely sorry for mentioning the C-word in September. Think of it as getting in early. Anyway, this is a website celebrating that annoying trope which is the HILARIOUSLY TASTELESS CHRISTMAS JUMPER (can you all just stop, please? It’s boring and mass-market and played out). but with Morrissey on them. They are available for sale. Some of you – you know who you are – will find this pant-wettingly brilliant.
• Another Week, Another Webcomic: This one’s called Decrypting Rita, it’s cyberpunky and rather nicely written, and the art-style is (I think) lovely. Enjoy. 
• Spirograph!: This is brilliant (and a bit pointless). A little webtoy that does Spirograph except without the tedium and broken pencils and missing gears and the crying and inevitable feeling of disappointment when you just make a big smudgy mess. You can fiddle with the settings to make different stuff, and the results are strangely lovely. HB Pencils, or maybe Crayola – rip this off NOW and turn it into a Facebook app. Go on, do it. 
• Genius Terrible Inventions: I have no idea who is behind this, but this they are a genius. The toothbrush alone is patent-worthy. 
• What People Watch Where On YouTube: Very interesting tool to compare popular YouTube videos RIGHT NOW in different countries. This allows you to select a country and see what the most-watched videos of the moment are, which other countries have similar tastes to them, and which videos people there are watching that noone else is looking at. This is the sort of thing that will provide a near-bottomless repository of totally spurious ‘insights’ with which to persuade clients to spend money on a 90-second clip of a dancing cat or somesuch – you can thank me later. 
• California Law Lets Kids Erase Their Digital History: This is potentially HUGE, and weirdly underreported. As of 2015, California law will require web companies to listen to and comply with requests from minors to remove content about them from the internet. OK, so it’s riddled with holes and flaws (how you do apply this if the servers are elsewhere? Oh, whoops, the people drafting this don’t actually understand the internet!), and it only applies to self-created content (so you can ask FB to take down that appalling status update about how high you were aged 15, but not the video of you self-penetrating with your ex’s toothbrush which your best friend kindly chucked on Vine), but as a test case this is very much worth watching. 
• The Winners of the Google Science Fair: Read this and realise that there are teenagers now living who are smarter than you will ever be. Simultaneously brilliant and depressing; these kids are SO IMPRESSIVE, though, and will give you a momentary glow of hope for the future of the human race (until you realise that you will still die old and alone). 
• Jurassic Park / Dr Seuss: Models of dinosaurs made up to look like characters from Dr Seuss. No real reason for this that I can see, but why would there be? JUST ENJOY IT!
• MapDive: This was presented by Google at one of their keynotes in May this year, but I don’t think was playable to the public until now (anyway, what do I care – the internet is not a race, after all (it totally is)). Anyway, this is a game/hack using Google Earth / Maps data to create a fun little playable sjydiving game which will be sort of familiar to anyone who ever played Pilotwings on the SNES. Enjoyable, and very nicely coded. 
• The Naked Scare House: So ‘Haunted Houses’ have been a thing in the US for a few years now, and have yet to translate to the UK for reasons I don’t entireky understand but am actually sort of happy about. Basically the premise is that organisers create a sort of immersive theatrical experience for people who want to have a really, really deeply unpleasant evening – these can involve physical and verbal abuse, borderline torture scenarios, and, in one memorable account I read, being buried alive (do read that link, seriously – WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!?!). Anyway, this lets you have all the scare-based fun in the world, but…er…naked. Because why not?
• 300 Sandwiches: This is a blog by a woman who a) has convinced herself that her boyfriend will propose to her after she has made 300 sandwiches for him; and b) obviously thinks there’s a book deal in this. I really, really hope that he ends their relationship when he’s done eating – the sandwiches look lovely though, and there’s a lot of good stuff in here for foodies – just don’t read the ‘about’ bit unless you want to get irrationally angry about all sorts of genderpolitical issues thrown up by the project.
• The National Selfie Gallery Comes To London: Art week is almost upon us – calloo, callay, etc. I do rather love art week – it’s actually lots better than Fashion Week for people watching, particularly at Frieze opening night which is the only place I’ve ever seen actual people wearing couture in the wild (so to speak). Anyway, this is one of the NYC galleries coming to London to flog their wares in mid-October who are presenting an exhibition based around the concept of the selfie – there are so many potential ideacues for certain brands here (anyone cosmetic-related, for example) that I can’t really be bothered to do your creative work for you. Just think., ok? Jesus.
• Hometown:  A truly lovely photoproject from the New York Times, which collects pictures by American teenagers of life in their home towns. Gives a thumping reminder of how massively BIG the US is, and how culturally diverse – I would be fascinated to see this replicated for India, China, Russia and other megapopulous nations. The UK would, let’s be honest, just be a little less interesting.
• Another Colour Website For Designers: This is called ‘Colourhexa’, and gives information about colours – complementary shades, scales, etc. Probably only useful for designers / developers, but maybe also if you’re decorating the spare room and want to minimise the arguments you’ll have over the best match for that particular shade of duck egg blue you’ve chosen for the spare room (KILL ME NOW). 
• Casual Misogyny On A Friday!: This website is called ‘Return of Kings’, and is a men’s interest ‘magazine’ for (as far as I can tell) the PUA community. It’s just HORRIBLE, but strangely compelling at the same time. I don’t really know why I’m linking to this other than to share the pain that I experienced when reading some of the stuff on here. It’s slightly embarrassing being a man sometimes. 

By Jeremy Olson

MUSIC! HAVE DELTRON 3030’s LONG-AWAITED (BY ME) 2nd ALBUM!

A Selection Of Finds From Across The Internet Which This Week I Am Writing Up In Slightly Hurried Fashion Due To Having A Lot Of Things To Do Including Another Wedding This Afternoon Which I Didn’t Mention Up There Because Even I’m Bored Of Me Whining About This Stuff But Really How Many Nuptials Must One Man Attend In A Year (Rhetorical), Pt 2:

• I Love The Civil Service: I had a brief and very ill-fated/considered stint working at DWP a few years ago. Jesus, it was bleak. Anyway, this image, captured at the Foreign Office at Open House last weekend, neatly encapsulates the wonderment of our very own bureaucratic clusterfcuk.
• Minimalist Philosophy Designs: Philosophical precepts given the minimalist book cover treatment. Gorgeous designs, and if you too spent 3 years at university smoking marijuana and attending approximately 6 hours of tuition a week you will find these reminiscence-inducing.
• The Hackalizer: If you are an engineer or a DIY-er or just a bit of a construction geek, this will rapidly become your new favourite website. A new tip every day designed to make life easier – each of which requires a degree of effort and technical ability which is frankly baffling to me. My mate Tom will LOVE this (hello, Tom!). 
• The 7 Deadly Sins, Visualised: By Spanish designer Jose Bernaba. I think ‘Lust’ is particularly fine. 
• Buy Stuff Off That Meth Show: Blah blah blah best TV show EVER blah pinnacle of the medium blah blah blah. Anyway, if you’re into it you can bid for ACTUAL REAL-LIFE PROPS (is that an oxymoron?) from the programme to grace your very own home. 
• Crowdfunded Funerals: Wow, this is actually a thing. You can, it transpires, submit your own or a loved one’s funeral or memorial service to this website and raise money for the send-off of dreams. I’m in two minds about this – on the one hand, I’m sort of glad that it exists; on the other, there’s something so, so sad about the fact that it has to. Not to mention the slightly distasteful nature of the vig placed on each fundraiser to pay the webmasters’ mortgages. Hey ho. 
• The Woman Who Inspired Jessica Rabbit: No, not Veronica Lake – this lady. All the faded Golden Era glamour you will need today, and a salutory reminder of the transitory nature of the fame monkey. Hear that, Miley?
• Tintin In Scotch: Tintin’s first adventure, The Dark Isle, rewritten in the style of Irvine Welsh (not actually in the style of Irvine Welsh, obviously – there’s no asphyxosex or casual violence that I can see) with PROPER SCOTS VOICES. Kind of brilliant, and will give a warm glow to anyone who ever read Oor Wullie. 

• Learn To Code (again) With Bentobox: Another week, another ‘hey, you too can make millions from your own revolutionary web-based project after just a few weeks of cursory nibbling at the edges of learning!’ website (clue: you can’t). Anyway, this one’s called Bentobox and is actually rather well put together- also links to loads of other stuff which is sueful in the same space, so worth checking out if it’s still on your list of ‘things I wanted to do in 2013 but didn’t quite get round to’.
• Pictures Of BodyBuilders: To those of you who have never met me, this is basically what I look like. Except less mahogany, obviously. 
• Short Films Featuring Beautiful People: Beautiful series of short films (very short) featuring gorgeous people doing…things…It’s quite hard to describe, but there’s a series of Dogme-esque rules in play here which govern the composition of each short, and some rather nice animation / FX work going on around the beauty. Seriously, though, there’s something almost uncomfortable about looking so closely about people who look like this. It feels a bit odd. 
• The 2013 Beard & Moustache Championships: These took place a few weeks ago in the US, and the photos are AMAZING. As a man whose ability to grow facial hair is comparable to that of a 13 year old, I am immoderately jealous of these men. 
• The Constitutions Project: The constitutions of the world’s nations, searchable and comparable online. Interesting and useful and you could lose HOURS in here making up your own constitution for the governance of your theoretical nation state. Or maybe that’s just me – Mattistan will be a utopian paradise, though, should anyone with a spare island be reading. 
• Misandrist Lullabies: These are brilliant – and, as a man, really quite unnerving. Gentlemen – read these and then imagine every single woman you interact with this weekend secretly thinking these lines and BE AFRAID. 
• I Think We May Have Reached Peak HTML Page Design: I can’t quite work out whether this is technically impressive or just an awful, busy mess – probably both, to be honest. 
• Where’s Your Money?: I occasionally do this thing, when I remember, of writing my phone number on banknotes with a bland exhortation to get in touch and tell me who you are. I now have a dozen or so Facebook ‘friends’ who I’ve met this way, and it’s curiously pleasing to have brief conversations on the phone with (inevitably drunk) strangers who just so happen to have handled the same currency as you. Anyway, this is a website that does much the same thing but with no need to hand out important personal information to a nation of strangers, which is probably better.
• Pen & Ink Drawings Of Muslim Prayer Carpets: Jonathan Bréchignac makes large drawings of Muslim prayer carpets using ballpoint pens. It takes him up to 8 months to finish one drawing. I think Jonathan may be a touch *strange*, but these are incredible. 
• The Maddest Thing You Will See All Week: I don’t mean mad in the sort of ‘wacky’ way – I mean in the sort of gimlet-sharp, starey, lunatic way. Click on this link, and keep clicking and then have a think about how deep it goes and then get a little bit scared. Just mental.
• Mapping Country Metaphors: This website tracks metaphors people make about countries or regions – you know, Cumbria is the Syria of the UK and stuff like that. Not particularly well-made, but actually really interesting if you dig a little bit.
• The Best Worst Website I’ve Seen In Ages: RJ Greengard is an industrial painter and his website is Flash-heavy and quite incredible. It also quite possibly hasn’t been updated in a couple of decades. 
• Games Part 1: Pong is like pinterest but for online games. It will EAT YOUR AFTERNOON. As will…
• Games Part 2: Retro games, again all browser-playable. An INCREDIBLE selection which includes Metal Slug and which cost me a large chunk of Tuesday. You’re welcome.
•  

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• The Swinging 60s: Just a great collection of pics from the 60s. No more, no less. 
• The 2 Heads Gallery: Curated by G Bernard, this is just a gorgeous collection of photography, mostly in black and white. Mildly NSFW in parts, but not in a way that should upset any but the most prudish of employers.
• Pr0n Comments On Instagram Pics: Juxtaposing the trenchant commentary of the commenters on the myriad of porn clip sites with the heavily-filtered photography of Instagram. Byturns amusing and just sort of sad, really. I do wonder what motivates people to write this sort of stuff after finishing a (one hopes) pleasing session of self-love. 
• Newspaper Blackout: I love this so much. A tumblr collection of examples of blackout art – that is, works which take the printed page and their starting point and then black out the text leaving only a few remaining words visible and creating a sort of combined textual/visual poetry. I could read this stuff for HOURS. Also, they take submissions – go make your own.
• What The Hell, Facebook Ads?: Collecting the most WTF?-y examples of Facebook advertising. People choose to promote some very, very odd things. 
• Windows High As Fcuk: I don’t really know what to make of this. It’s weird.
• Goppelldangers: Nell Frizzell dresses up as famous people and takes photos of the result. 
• Carved Crayons: No, really, that’s exactly what these are. Seriously impressive work. 
• This Is Not An Insight: As alluded to above, all the best insight and analysis from Social Media Week London in one place. All the better due to my friend Aden’s appearance on it. YOU GURU, ADEN!

By Meghan Howland

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG BUT DUE TO THE WORRYINGLY RAPID PASSING OF TIME THIS MORNING ARE ONLY GOING TO GET A FLEETING EXPLANATION FOR WHICH SINCERE APOLOGIES BUT, YOU KNOW, I HAVE A SODDING WEDDING TO GET TO AS I MAY HAVE MENTIONED UP THERE:

• I Was A Hipster Meme: One man’s account of what it was like when a picture of him in Central Park became a popular culture shorthand for hipster douchery. Interesting and sad and may make you think a little more about who the person is in the funny picture that you are sharing with your friends for mockery purposes (it won’t though, will it? Jesus, you people).
• Cracking One Off On The Subway: I’m not sure if this is the sort of journalism Cosmo would have punted out a decade ago – I detect a certain ‘We Wish We Were Vice’ vibe (excuse the pun) about the piece. Anyway, this is a very funny account by Anna Breslaw of her attempt to masturbate on the NYC subway, as recommended by some rubbish self-help book or another. No idea about the finer points of this, what with being a man and all, but it made me laugh LOTS. 
• Why Nickelback Are Rich: Noone likes them, they don’t care – BECAUSE THEY HAVE ALL THE MONEY. Contains the oh-so-depressing line “They have applied 100 percent corporate efficiency to rock ’n’ roll. It’s so cool to see.” This may well be the day on which the music died.
• Doing Your Kid’s Homework For A Week: As a childless (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) man I have no idea how accurate this is – nonetheless, this account of a parent’s attempt to do the same amount of at-home work as his daughter is frankly terrifying. Is this the same in the UK, parents? I never did homework as a kid (no really) and I turned out fi…oh.
• The Zero Hours Future: The best piece of writing I read all week, this is a scifi short imagining the day in the life of one zero hours labourer 10 years hence. Really well written and full of incredibly believable details – do read, please, it will make you think.
• Obligatory Reddit Thread of the Week: 60 year old Redditors dispense advice to the younger generations. Terrifying – from what I can tell, my future is going to be full of pain. 
• Working At The Genius Bar: Helping people like you unfcuk their Apple devices sounds like no fun at all, frankly. 
• What It’s Like Being On ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’: Brilliant piece of writing about the experience of being on a high-stakes gameshow. You will get a bit sweaty-palmed just reading, I promise. 
• Second Life After 10 Years: Jesus, it’s only been 10 years? Anyway, this is a look at Linden Labs’ oft-forgotten virtual world and the people who still hang out there. Interesting for a variety of reasons, and also contains a mention of LAMBDAMOO which made me happy and reminded me of this book, My Tiny Life, which is still by far and away the best piece of social research and analysis into the dynamics of online communities that I have ever read. 
• A History of Myst: More nostalgia – for some of you I am sure that Myst brings back all sorts of memories. Get all nostalgic, go on.
• LONG Joss Whedon Interview: If you like the man’s work, you will LOVE this. Actually very interesting insight into the man’s creative inspirations, amongst other things. 
• Horse_ebooks Fooled Us All: I think I first wrote about this in January 2012…and now the big reveal that it was an art project. Which frankly shouldn’t be seen as weird or upsetting, as this piece points out. Anyway, if you’re into internetty culturestuff this is all rather interesting, as is this chat with the people behind the whole thing. As is this, which is another one of their projects and which I can safely say after spending an hour with it last night is brain-fryingly odd an a lot deeper than it at first appears. 

By Jessica Harrison

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
1) This is called Nuance – it’s a digitally enhanced dance project and it’s probably the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all week. Mesmerising: 

2) Although this runs it a close second. It’s done the rounds quite a lot this week, and rightly so, so apologies if its old hat, but the combination of projection mapping and realtime movement is HUGELY impressive – the implications for theatre and dance and performance art overall are very exciting, and you can imagine Punchdrunk doing something really cool with this next time out (as an aside, if you’ve yet to see The Drowned Man yet then do get tickets – it’s wonderful):

3) This is The Smiths’ ‘Please, Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want’, cut with a selection of infomercials. It’s AMAZING, for reasons I can’t quite explain. You will either laugh or cry, but you won’t be left unmoved:

4)  Sexual violence against women in India has been getting a lot of attention this year; this sketch by Indian comedy troupe AIB 365 looks at the attitudes behind it. Actually really quite horrible and sad, but it’s interesting to get a flavour for Indian society and culture and the way that intelligent women are reacting to culture:

5) I’m not a massive fan of this song – it’s fairly generic jump-up D’n;B with an uninspiring female vocal over the top (though I concede it’s earwormy). The video, though, laying out a 5 year relationship in statistics, is GENIUS and will be ripped off by advertisers in literally MINUTES (oh, ok, I know that it is itself a collation of ad tropes that ave been around for ages, but it’s very very well-observed and put together):

6) Mega Plush is the best piece of animation I saw all week. Technically faultless – someone give this man a big budget. Gang war between soft toys, in hyper-HD choreographed brilliance:

By Xooang Choi

BITS OF INFORMATION WHICH LARGELY PERTAIN TO THE MAKING OF MONEY VIA THE MEDIUM OF ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS (OR THE PEDDLING OF SNAKE OIL – FEEL FREE TO CALL THIS WHATEVER YOU WANT, TO BE HONEST, AS I AM PAST THE POINT OF CARING) ARRANGED IN A CAREFREE FASHION WITH NO APPARENT TAXONOMICAL GUIDELINES BECAUSE, WELL, BECAUSE I CAN:

• How Machine Learning Will Make Glass Useful (and the future a terrifying dystopian nightmare): I’m starting with this one largely because it sort of scared the bejesus out of me, and in the spirit of SHARING I want it to scare the bejesus out of you too. Maybe everyone else had thought of this stuff already, but this piece about how machine learning (that is, pattern recognition, etc) will be applied to Google Glass is properly scary. The bits at the end about the tech being able to automatically detect when a user is looking at, say, a human face or something – HUGELY CREEPY for so many reasons. Not least the censorship / control stuff – let’s hope that wearable tech never takes off (and maybe that we all decide that everything past, say, bulletin boards was actually a terrible mistake and we go back to 1998 when everything was safe and we were young and my hair wasn’t falling out in clumps and my skin had the lustre of youth and OH MY GOD I FEEL SO OLD). 
• Glass For Fashion: Seeing as we’re talking about it, and seeing as it was Fashion Week this week (impossible to miss – were aliens to have taken a cursory glance at media this week they would have been reasonably convinced that all we cared about were unfeasibly tall, skinny women wearing moderately ridiculous clothes, and videogames), this piece is about some Glass hacks which pertain particularly to fashion. Some clever ideas here, and if you think about them enough they almost make you forget the scary machine learning horror of the last link. Think of it as a mental palate-cleanser. 
• Google Does Health: Just FYI, really – the CLEVER PEOPLE are looking into the healthcare market and pumping money into research to preemptively sort out the problems of 20 years hence. Do you know why they are doing this? SO THAT WE WILL NEVER DIE AND THEREFORE CAN BE SOLD ADVERTISING FOREVER. Trufact.
• Watch YouTube Videos Offline: Come November, YouTube will let people watch videos offline for a short period. Details are sketchy, but I presume it will mean short-term downloads of stuff. Anyway, there’s the potential for some clever usage of this – I quite like the idea of fourth wall-breaking allusions to where something is being watched, or the creation of videos that are designed to be watched solely on the Tube, say. It’s probably a dreadful idea, though. 
• Subway Dress: What’s the most Fashion Week thing you can think of? THAT’S RIGHT! Hypercalorific fast food with a strange and oddly unsettling chemical smell! Subway commissioned some designers at New York Fashion Week to design and make dresses using materials from the horrible chain restaurant. “THIS IS NOT INTERNETTY!”, I hear you cry…well, it sort of is, isn’t it – a prime example of someone, somewhere, thinking “Oh, ‘the internet’ (sorry Evgeny) will go nuts if we dress models up in sandwich wrappers – LET’S DO IT, and then webmongs will write about it in their webmongy blogs!”. And lo, it came to pass. 
• People Are Quitting Facebook For Reasons of Privacy: Hey look! Some research you can quote to prove to people that they should spend their money in a certain way! This is moderately interesting, although it’s also important to note that the people who are surveyed here are, like me, 30somethings. Do THE KIDS care about the privacy stuff in the same way (clue: no)?.
• Brand Pages Coming To Etsy: Crafty, folky marketplace Etsy is going to launch brand pages. I have literally no idea why this is happening, I have to say, and neither does the article I’ve linked to. Anyway, chuck this into your next presentation to any client whose target demographic is a little bit hipster. “Yeah, we’ll, like, pull together a collection of the best artisan craftsmanship to really anchor the brand identity to the craft movement, yeah?” stabstabstabstabstab.
• Pinterest Ads Are Coming: This makes a bit more sense. Again, details are a little sketchy but this seems to be planned to work by placing promoted pins in search results and category feeds – so if you work for someone selling interior design stuff or anything to do with weddings then get on this now.
• The Oddest Marketing Campaign I’ve Ever Seen For A Place: This is quite bizarre. Canadian island province Nova Scotia is promoting itself via a campaign which purports to be for a phone and then turns out to be for…er…a place. Leaving aside what they thought the link was between people who’d stumble across a phone called ‘Pomegranate’ and people who’d want to go to a snowy, cold, remote destination, you will finish this wanting the phone quite a lot, but feeling relatively ambivalent about Canada. The website’s quite nice, though – click on ‘release date’ for the big reveal.
• The Specsavers Crime Novel: I do rather like this, though. Specsavers is running a campaign whereby they’ve commissioned some (fairly big name) crime authors to pen a series of tales based on fragments of plot suggestions sourced from the wider world through Twitter, etc. Apparently this is borne out of the ‘insight’ that ‘people realise their eyes are a bit messed up when they struggle to read’ – I love the way agencies do that! – which is obviously a bit tenuous, and frankly the benefit to Specsavers here is somewhat unclear, but there’s something really rather nice about how people are engaging with the concept online. Check out the Twitter search – it’s actually rather cool. 
• Beer Brand Blocks Mobile Signal: I was in Regent’s Park the other week and was talking to someone about how long it would be before places with signalblocking fields would become an attractive thing – you know, the opportunity for proper disconnection, etc (actually, that’s quite a nice gimmick for a venue – signal near the entrance, where you can wait for others, text them to say you’ve arrived, etc, fading to no signal in the back where you head when you just want to talk to an actual person, face-to-face). Anyway, this beer brand’s made a beer holder thingy that blocks mobile signals within 1.5 metres, doubtless due to some total bollocks ‘INSIGHT’ that people want to drink their beer without interruptions from their phones (you know what, if they want that then they can TURN THE THINGS OFF). Cute, although KitKat did it with benches a year or so back, so no giant FIRST! award for these people.
• 240+ Slides on ‘Native Advertising’: This is FAR TOO LONG, but actually quite a useful read – basically it’s a whole rationalisation of why it’s really important for brands to do editorial partnerships with Buzzfeed. Obviously there’s a bit more to it than that, but effectively that’s the big takeout. 
• 160+ Slides on THE FUTURE OF MARKETING!: Again, far too long (why it couldn’t have been a Word doc escapes me), but not totally stupid and contains several examples of sensible stuff on brand behaviour online, etc, which you can lift – helpfully, it’s written in gratingly corporate language which means you can seamlessly integrate large swathes of it into your next meaningless presentation.
• Significantly Less Slides On What ‘Digital’ Is: This, on the other hand, really is quite smart. Clever overview of what digital is within an agency / organisation – if you have anything to do with running or growing digital business within a company this is probably worth a quick look. It’s much shorter than the previous ones, I promise.
• The Gif Is Dead: The United States Committee on Energy and Commerce has made this. I’m actually quite impressed with the creativity – you wait until the next election where EVERYTHING gets presented in Buzzfeed-style gif format. Including the manifestos. Seriously, you could actually start making these now. Labour, have this for free – “when the coalition first got into power, we were all like [INSERT RELEVANT ‘HUMOROUS’ REACTION SHOT OF SOMEONE LOOKING INCREDULOUS] and then they started with that austerity stuff and we were all like [INSERT RELEVANT ‘HUMOROUS’ REACTION SHOT OF AN INDIGNANT LOOKING CAT]…etc…etc…and that’s why we’re going to vote Labour – because AIN’T NONE OF US GOT TIME FOR THAT! [INSERT EMBEDDED SWEET BROWN VIDEO]”. You may think I’m joking, but I am TOTALLY going to be resurrecting this post come 2015.
• The Living Piano: I really, really like this. Simple and well-done and strangely happymaking. Go on, steal it and make it tawdry and horrible. GO ON. 

By James Blair for National Geographic

SOOTHING MUSIC INSPIRED BY THAT VERY POPULAR TV SHOW ABOUT THE DRUG DEALER!​

SOME THINGS I HAVE FOUND ON THE INTERNET THIS WEEK OH GOD I HAVE JUST LOOKED AT THE LIST AND I REALLY, REALLY NEED TO APPLY A LITTLE MORE EDITORIAL RIGOUR TO THIS OTHERWISE I’M GOING TO HAVE TO START WRITING IT ON TUESDAYS IF I’M GOING TO GET IT OUT ON FRIDAY LUNCHTIMES, PT. 1:

• A Small Piece Of Very ‘This Is The Future’ Graffiti From Twitter: Go on, save this in your ‘pics I am going to use in a presentation about digital sooner rather than later’ folder. I know you want to. 
• No-upload Image Hosting: This is quite clever, and also quite a convenient idea. Snag.gy is, as far as I can tell, a service which allows online image hosting with no upload or account – you can just cut & paste an image onto the webpage, whereby it will MAGICALLY APPEAR with its own shareable URL. Quite good for a variety of purposes, some of them potentially nefarious…
• Minimalist Football Team Logos: Some of these work better than others, but there’s something quite cool about the concept. You can make your own joke about Jonny Ive / Apple – I’ll just wait here til you’ve finished (judging you). 
• This Is What It Looks Like When Insects Bite You: Entomophobes, I suggest you don’t click this one. Photographer Alex Wild specialises in taking pictures of insects in superHD close-up. This is a selection of pictures of those insects feeding from him. Even if you’re not entomophobic you’ll probably wince a bit, particularly at the ones of the massive pincers quite clearly embedded in skin. They’re technically awesome photos, though, honest – I fear I’ve put everyone off now, sorry.
• Dating for Ghosts: As far as I can tell, this is just something that someone knocked up for fun, but there’s a surprising amount of depth to it for a single-serving joke site. Purporting to be a dating site for the ectoplasmic, it’s strangely compelling. A bit of digging revealed it to be one of a series of websites built for no visible purpose by some 39 year old mormon bloke – there may well be WEIRD religiosity buried in there somewhere.
• Hugely Impressive Origami: I know that these come around comparatively often, but these really *are* spectacular, not just for the technical execution but also for the imagination behind some of the designs. Also, there’s an origami poo – if at least one of you doesn’t spend the afternoon hiding by the printers and secretly using reams of A4 to try and recreate it I will be VERY disappointed.
• Posters For Villains: Scroll down a bit and you will find some great posters of film villains with apposite quotes. In fact the rest of the work on there’s pretty good too – take a look.
• Great Fashion Week Webwork: This is excellent, and a really good example of webdesign. The New York Times fashion editor’s picks of the catwalk shows, arranged in a beautiful, navigable way. I particularly like the thematic annotations beneath each fashion house’s selection, and the way the hover-over works (I really hope I’ve used semi-recognisable terminology there, as otherwise that last sentence was largely incomprehensible). 
• Totally Pointless But Rather Lovely: Move your mouse around. Then click, and HOLD. Keep holding. It’s lovely and will properly relax you, I promise. 
• Decals For Escalators: It’s boring and cliche to talk, as a Londoner, about the unique anger inspired by people standing on the left on escalators (but OH MY GOD IT’S INFURIATING WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU DO YOU HAVE NO SELF-AWARENESS AT ALL YOU SELFISH GITS?) – instead, let’s all quietly get behind this wonderful design innovation by Yoni Alter and make it happen.
• Drawing on Skin: Not tattoos, just ink drawings, but incredibly impressive technique. Maybe one of you who wants a tattoo can get this person to do the sketches? Go on. Get Thom Yorke on your left thigh, you know you want to.
• Man Makes Infographic For Own Wedding: In fairness, it’s sort of what he does, but I’m still quite unsure about this. It’s maybe just a little bit too internet for its own good. Is that unfair? Am I a loveless curmudgeon? Quite possibly, BUT I DON’T CARE. 
• YouTube Doubler: Tool to create YouTube mashups. Actually quite good, in a low-tech, ugly sort of way. The one linked to is a good example of how it works – community managers, that’s your Friday afternoon sorted. 
• Looney Tunes Characters Made Of Typography: Erm, that, basically. Very nicely done, though, and were it not for the horrific rights / licensing issues, the sort of thing which would make a nice ad campaign for….er…something which I can’t at present quite identify but which I’m sure will come to me this afternoon in some sort of crap esprit de l’escalier moment. Oh well. 
• Folding Is Like SETI But For Biology: Everyone should sign up to this. Much in the same way as SETI did with SETI@home, coopting the processing power of home computers to help the agency find aliens, this project aims to use collective computational resources to conduct data-intensive research into protein folding – the rearranging of proteins which, when it goes wrong, is a major cause of serious illness. I think that there should be a corporate charter thingy where large companies all sign up to this stuff automatically. Go on, WPP, BE THE CHANGE (ahahahahaha).
• Wikipedia’s Guide To Internet Phenomena: A wikipedia page listing some of the biggest memes of recent years. If, like me, you spend far too much time looking at this sort of stuff this will be a lovely trip down memory lane full of nostalgia and long-forgotten earworms. By no means comprehensive (Y NO SCUMBAG STEVE?), but interesting – and actually potentially useful for any students of web culture, or people who want to see if they can define any common themes in what’s memeworthy (good luck with that, though).
• Symmetrical People: Photograher Julian Wolkenstein takes portrait photos of people and then mirrors their faces on both sides. The results are as unsettling and borderline-creepy as you might expect.
• Add Cookie Monster To Everything: Like that ‘Add Ryan Gosling to every website’ website from the start of the year, except with Cookie Monster. Surely there must be a fairly easy script which can make these on demand? Go on, make one for me (I keep on writing stuff like this – it NEVER happens. God you’re cruel).
• Star Trek Next Generation vs Old School: A slightly odd project, largely because of the volume of pics and the quality of the photoshoppery – someone has taken the time to drop a load of characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation into stills from the original Shatner vehicle. No idea why – fans are STRANGE – but they’re actually rather well done. 
• Miniature Pop Culture Paintings on Coins: Yes, I know this was on Us vs Th3m, LEAVE ME ALONE. Anyway, technically marvellous miniature pictures of pop culture icons painted onto coins. Does this mess with their status as legal tender? If not there’s a variety of ways in which you can take this as *ahem* inspiration for campaigns…
• Generating Utopia: Interesting project creating shifting 3d maps of cities based on 4sq checkins. Its high concept is to imagine what cities would look like if their topography responded to a resident’s activity (leave out what it would look like, it would be TERRIFYING) – watch the video and read the blurb, it’s very clever indeed in an artytechcity sort of way.
• Sylvia Plath In Comic Form: Another week, another link to Zen Pencils, whose work continues to impress. This time it’s a piece from Plath’s The Bell Jar, illustrated in poignant fashion. WARNING – it’s Plath, so unlikely to make you feel all that sunny and warm.
• Multicolour Search for Flickr: Really clever search engine. Choose upto 5 colours, choose how much of each you want, and hit ‘search’ – the page then trawls Flickr for pictures that best match the colours and proportions you requested. Also it only searches Creative Commons images, so it’s properly useful too.
•  The Encyclopaedia of Life: Huge and incredible resource which effectively acts like Wikipedia but for biology. The world’s flora and fauna, classified and arranged into a website. I had NO IDEA that this even existed until yesterday – things like this are why the internet is wonderful. If you have kids who are interested in animals and nature and stuff, this might be a useful thing to plug them into for a while.
• Favimon – Pokemon With Websites: Erm, yes, that. Pick a web url and this site turns it into a Pokemon-type creature and lets you battle other websites. No idea why you’d want to do this, but Pokemon are still REALLY popular (no, really). My brother met his fiancee thanks to Pokemon, and they’re moving to Canada to live happily ever after, so it MUST be a good thing.
• Code The Star Wars Opening Text: You’ve probably got a small window where this is ok to do. This website gives you step-by-step instructions on how to code the whole ‘A long time ago…’ scrolling text from the start of the Star Wars films. Brands – noone wants to see your ‘funny’ takes on this (or at least I don’t).
• Meowmania: This week’s frivolous cat-related website. Click for cats and meows. Funnier than it ought to be.
• Picasso Superheroes: Your favourite superheroes as they would have appeared had they been drawn by stumpy Spanish genius (has he ever been so dismissively described? Sorry, Pablo) Picasso. Also the website of a very talented graphic designer who might sell the prints to you if you ask nicely.
• USB Condoms: Oh, the future, you give us so much. I had not even begun to imagine why such things will be necessary, but one day they will be – these are devices which will protect your device’s data integrity when you plug it into a ‘strange’ USB port. Makes perfect sense as we move towards a world in which we will use more and more public / shared USBs, but it’s also a bit sad.
• Dreamspace: A clever, well-written little dystopian cyberpunk webcomic with some very nice artwork and gif-y animation. Takes about 5 minutes, and it’s really rather nicely made.

By Robert Longo

A 200-SONG MASHUP BY SOME BLOKE CALLED MELKER!

SOME THINGS I HAVE FOUND ON THE INTERNET THIS WEEK OH GOD I HAVE JUST LOOKED AT THE LIST AND I REALLY, REALLY NEED TO APPLY A LITTLE MORE EDITORIAL RIGOUR TO THIS OTHERWISE I’M GOING TO HAVE TO START WRITING IT ON TUESDAYS IF I’M GOING TO GET IT OUT ON FRIDAY LUNCHTIMES, PT. 2:

• Google Mechview: Have you ever wondered what the world would look like as seen through the cockpit of a giant mechanical robot-type thing? OH GOOD. It’s weird how much superimposing a cockpit onto Google Street View images changes the way you see them.
• The Most Hipster/Artwanker Sunglasses EVER: You will see someone wearing these soon, and you will want to hit them, but you will also secretly want to have a pair yourself and the sense of self-loathing which this will provoke in you will stay with you for several hours. 
• Crime Scenes Then And Now: This is a brilliant photoproject taking old crime-scene photos of New York and seamlessly merging them with modern photos of the same locations. Very clever idea, and incredibly well-executed.
• The Best Response To A Customer Complaint In A Restaurant I Have Seen In Ages: Just brilliant. Take a bow, Chester’s The Sticky Walnut (dreadful name, though). 
• Make Better Websites: Inspiration, should you need some, for web design. Some very nice examples on the site; worth scrolling through to see if anything catches your eye.
• Secret Images From The Stasi Archives: Incredible, and really rather sad, photographs from an upcoming book looking at the Stasi. Your first instinct will be to laugh at the disguises – you have never seen secret policemen in disguise who look quite so much like secret policemen in disguise – but the shot of the bed and the child’s toybox, and the accompanying text, is chilling. I prefer my surveillance to be faceless and inhuman, thankyou very much – thanks, NSA!
• Speaking of the NSA, Get Caught By Them!: Another one of these – this week it’s Flagger, a Chrome plugin which automatically puts trigger keywords like ‘Semtex’, ‘Jihad’, etc, into the url of any web address you visit. Which I’m sure seems really funny now, but won’t be so much of a laugh riot when you’re serving year three of your infinite sentence in virtual Gitmo. 
• Reading ALL of the Penguins: A laudable but slightly unhinged project to collect and read every single Penguin paperback of which there are 3000. MENTAL. There’s a blogpost about each book – it’s actually a great site to browse if you’re looking for new, high-calibre reading material.
• Hulk’s Essential Reading List: As is this, actually – some very good recommendations in here. 
• The Most Hipster Arts Grad Job EVER: Middle Class? Arts degree? No direction or ambition, but an overweaning sense that you deserve a good life? Oh hi, nice to meet you, we’re exactly the same. Also, you could be a book therapist, apparently. CRAZY.
• Transmit Sound Through Touch: I don’t even pretend to understand how this works, but it seems to be tech, developed by The Mouse, which lets people transmit sounds to each other through touch alone. Or indeed can transform anything into a speaker with no need for modification of the object in question. The possibilities are HUGE – although the first thing I thought of was stuff that tells you off for touching it, which is really quite sad actually. I should have a word with myself.
• Disney Princess Magazine Covers: Speaking of Disney, this made me temporarily quite angry when I found it. This is basically everything that’s wrong with female-oriented publishing / marketing – and a really horrible example of how small children get indoctrinated without anyone really noticing. 
• Slyphone: Have an iPhone? Want to take pics of people without them knowing you’re doing so? You’re probably a pervert, in that case, but you may also like the Slyphone, which is a little clip on attachment which lets the phone take pics at 90 degrees. You can get one free by interacting with them on Twitter and telling them what you’d do with the tech (I’m guessing the most likely answer, ‘upskirts’, is probably not going to get you a freebie, though). 
• Utopia: A short story told through text and sound and 8-bit animations. Rather lovely, and will only take you 5 minutes. 
• Welcome To Fear City: In the 1970s, New York was quite a crime-ridden and scary place. This pamphlet, produced by the City in 1975, is intended to scare the living bejesus out of anyoe potentially visiting the city, and makes it sound like you would die within literally seconds of leaving your hotel room. Can someone paraody this for modern London, please? Thanks.
• The Guccione Collection: The incredibly hubristic website collecting the GENIUS of pronographer and publishing magnate Bob Guccione. There’s actually a lot of really intreresting stuff on the site, but the tone’s pretty offputting. Great photography, though. Anyway, I only discovered it as a result of THIS piece on VICE, which is an eye-opening account of the alleged sexual appetites of Chuck Berry, and which I wouldn’t read whilst eating. 
• A Quite Remarkable Obituary: Wow.
• License This Picture, Turn It Into Cards, Make Millions: I will take 3% of lifetime earnings, thanks.
• Keynes For Kids: This is AWESOME, and, it appears, just done for the love of it. An introduction to everyone’s favourite economist JM Keynes, designed for kids. It’s just brilliant, and made me spend a good 20 minutes playing around on it and dimly remembering the IB Economics I did 17 years ago (OH GOD 17 YEARS). Really well designed, the content is spot on…aside from your interest or otherwise in the subject matter, it’s worth a look from a design point of view alone.
• Bicycles Made Of Lobster: No more, no less.
• A Sick But Entertaining Ragdoll Sim Game: GTAV? PAH! THIS is a torture simulation. Also, really quite worryingly fun.

By Raphael Dallaporta

A MIX COMPOSED OF VINTAGE PR0N SOUNDTRACKS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Bad Estate Agent Photos: If you have ever looked for property in London, this will resonate unpleasantly (and yes, I know you have already seen this this week GIVE ME A BREAK). 
• Glitches: Daily glitch art. Nice, if you like that sort of thing (which I do).
• Calvin And Dune: Another week, another pop cultuer Calvin & Hobbes mashup. This week it’s text from Frank Herbert’s Dune making the strip all DARK and EXISTENTIAL and stuff. 
• Awesome Posters: It’s quite hardto glean anything about who’s behind this, but no matter – this Tumblr collects posters designed by…er…someone, and they are AWESOME. In particular, they’ve designed posters for each and every episode of Star Trek, which is mental (see mad fans comment passim) but also rather cool. 
• Men Taking Up Too Much Space On The Train: I never do this, fyi. I am a lovely commuter. 
• JS Apps Failing Horribly: This is a very, very geeky joke. Sorry.
• Daily Otter: An otter a day to lift your mood and calm your nerves.
• Poetry Mashups: you’ll have to look a bit to find them, but on this Tumblr are a selection of readings of classic poems mashed up with modern pop music. The person behind them suggests that the purpose is to highlight the lyrical quality of poetry to young people – whatever, the results are AWESOME. No, really – go and listen to Dylan Thomas vs Miley Cyrus (I am not shitting you) and then feel your world change forever. 
• Things In Charlotte’s Mouth: I have literally NO IDEA.
• Bartkira: Akira + The Simpsons = this. One for you, Adam. 
• Sad Desk Lunch: Images of depressing food eaten at the desks of office monkeys. Go on, treat yourself today, you deserve it, you’ve had a long week. 
• Project Unbreakable: This has been going for a couple of years now, but the Tumblr is, I think, newish. Project Unbreakable aims to highlight issues surrounding sexual abuse and public reaction to it – it collects images of women who’ve been victims of abuse, holding cards showing things which were said to them by friends, family, the police or the perpetrator. It’s often incredibly uncomfortable, as it should be, and it will probably make you want to go and donate to these people or someone simliar. 
•  

A MIX OF MUSIC WHICH IS REALLY HAUNTINGLY BEAUTIFUL AND WHICH I RECOMMEND UNRESERVEDLY

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND OF WHICH THERE ARE A LOT THIS WEEK SO GET A BIG POT OF TEA READY OR MAYBE SOME WHISKEY:

• Inside Nintendo’s Treehouse: An incredibly detailed look at how Nintendo make games, and the role of writers and translators in that process. Obviously if you like videogames this is going to be more interesting than if not, but the piece is actually worth reading as a more general look at the importance of integrating writers into each stage of the creative process. 
• Ladies! Control Men’s Minds With Your Vaginas!: No, really. The Hairpin (which, as a man, I think is one of the best women’s interest blogs on the internet and which I heartily recommend) takes a look at Copulins, which are basically pheremones, and how these can be used to CONTROL MEN. Just…just weird, really.
• On Being A Dominatrix: Really interesting piece on what it’s like to abuse and humiliate people for a living – or as it’s more commonly known, BEING THE CLIENT!!!! Oh God, I’m so sorry. 
• The Papal Interview: An astonishingly long and detailed interview with Pope Francis. Whether or not you are Catholic, or Christian, or religious in any way at all (or if you think that the Pope’s the leader of some giant illuminati-style paedophile ring which has been going for centuries), this is worth a skim – if nothing else, the Pope is still one of the most powerful people in the world (whatever Richard Dawkins might want) and it’s useful to know in what sort of direction he’s likely to point his several hundred million followers. Contains some positive noises on women and gays, which is A Good Thing in general. 
• Soho in 1983: Words and pictures from the seedy part of London back when it still was a bit seedy. An interesting slice of historyand OH MY GOD 1983 was 30 years ago. Jesus.
• On Jim Henson and Making Money From Art: Fascinating not only as a look at Henson’s early life and work, but also as a discussion / meditation on how artists can and should make profit from their output, and in so doing how they can avoid diminishing the quality of the work. 
• A Truly HUGE Piece On Post-Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush US Politics: Obviously if you’re in any way interested in US politics, this is a good read – even if not, though, it’s worth a look as a general look at what voters of a certain age are drawn to in terms of ideology, policy, etc, and the manner in which the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have shifted in meaning in the past 30-odd years. 
•  The Boris Bike After The Apocalypse: A very weird piece of writing, imagining the role of Boris Bikes (well, actually Citibikes as it’s American) in a post-apocalyptic world. They do look sort of indestructible, come to think of it. 
• The Life Of Joyce: A brilliant story about how a class of schoolkids uncovered the life story of a truly remarkable 20th Century man. Read it, and then go and take a look at the website they put together archiving all the materials from the story. It’s BRILLIANT. 
• Do We Still Care About Syria?: This brilliant and slightly harrowing piece in the New Statesman is a convenient reminder of why we should, and why the whole place is such a potentially intractable mess.
• A Portrait of a 10 Year Old Girl: A wonderful portrait of what it’s like being that age and gender in a Western country – in this case Canada, but I would imagine applicable to here too. Would be fascinated to hear the thoughts of those of you with kids on this one. 
• The Cage Fighter, The Bad Debts and the Fake Death: Well this is a film waiting to be made. Also, the way the page is designed is wonderful – I love the HTML graphic novel-type panelling. 
• On Why It’s Hard Not To Look Like A Hipster As A 30 Year Old Man: Not actually long, but quite funny. My tip for avoiding this problem, incidentally, is to dress really, really badly. 
• The Poetry of the NYC Probation Department: This is a collection of verse by employees and clients of the New York City Probation Department. Some of it’s tripe, admittedly, but there are some genuinely affecting pieces in there and I am very much in favour of the idea (not that anyone cares what I think, but still). 
• A Chat With Norman Spinrad: I’ve had a looooooooooong relaionship with the work of Norman Spinrad, sci fi novelist and contrarian who wrote some AWESOME books that you really should read, in particular Bug Jack Barron (which basically did reality TV in the late 60s and is like Big Brother crossed with Austin Powers crossed with Superfly (no, really, it is)), The Iron Dream (which is a sci fi novel written as if by Hitler and is brutally brilliant) and The Men in the Jungle which I read when I was 10 and I’m pretty sure scarred me in some fairly deep-seated fashion. Anyway, Spinrad is always an interesting read, and this interview with him’s got a lot of interesting observations in it. Go read. 
• Why You’re Unhappy: If you’re in your 30s, at least. ENJOY!

By Andy Gillmore

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, there’s a LOVELY montage of the final shots from a variety of films. Sounds boring, really isn’t – put on headphones and take 5 minutes to watch this through. Web Curios takes no responsibility for tears shed as a result (contains MASSIVELY EMO STRINGS): 

2) This is Majical Cloudz with their song ‘Bugs Don’t Buzz’. It’s a haunting and gorgeous track which I am 99% sure does some pretty serious ripping off of some other song, but no matter – it’s LOVELY. The video, on the other hand, gave me the formicating heebiejeebies and should only be watched if you’re not in any way creeped out by insects crawling all over people’s faces and similar stuff. Another one best avoided by the entomophobes :

3) Photographer Gioacchino Petronicce has taken a load of his photos and turned them into a video and it is a thing of gorgeousness and gorgeosity. Watch, it’s only 2 minutes and it will make you happy I promise:

4)  Yamantaka Sonic Titan is, apparently, a collective art project established in 2007. It’s largely baffling to me, but I stumbled across this song and video this week and fell in love with it. The music is really, really good, in a sort of dirty rock way and the video’s rather cool too what with all the dancing and slowmo and stuff. It’s called ‘One’:

5) This, on the other hand, is just a lovely slice of slightly jangly indiepop. Eleanor Friedberger, with ‘When I Knew’:

6) I think Kn1ght are French – it’s electro, anyway, and it seems to be something of a law that all electro artists must be French in 2013. Anyway, I LOVE the video for this – all 80s and neon, and it feels like a short action film which is never a bad thing. The song’s called ‘Last Moon’, should you care:

7) More electronica here, although this is a little more WARP than the above. The video is brilliant – glitchy, techy animation which gets progressively more angular and broken down as the song progresses. This is Aleph with Fourth Way:

8) I LOVE WATSKY. I keep saying it because it’s TRUE. Anyway, this is his new one, ‘Kill A Hipster’, from his very good album Cardboard Castles. I love him so much I’ll even forgive him for the zombies thing, as it sort of makes sense in this context:

9) Scarlet Chives are Danish, I think. This is their song Some Days Stay, which features a LOT of girl-on-girl and probably isn’t safe for work – the reason I’m including it is not, as some of you might be thinking, that I’m some sort of pathetic peddler of low-rent lesbongo, but more because the song’s lovely, and the video has the air of something which features two people who actually know and like each other rather than actresses, and has the sort of weirdly innocent vibe of 1960s documentaries on nudist camps:

10) Last up we have this, by FKA Twigs. It’s called Papi Pacify, and the video is beautifully shot and quite ambivalent about the relationship between the two protagonists and I think it’s gorgeous. I’m off to ANOTHER wedding now – bye, happy Friday, etc:

 
That’s it for now
See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

No idea who first made this, sorry 🙁

THE BIT ABOUT S*CI*L M*D*A WHICH THIS WEEK IS MERCIFULLY SHORT, PERHPAS AS A RESULT OF THE WEATHER BEING BETTER AND VEREYONE REALISING THAT ALL THIS STUFF IS SIMPLY A COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME AND WHICH AS A RESULT I’M NOT EVEN GOING TO BOTHER TO SUBCATEGORISE SO YEAH, TAKE THAT, INDUSTRY!:

• Noone Looks At Your Facebook Posts: So the fact that Edgerank means that noone actually sees the crap that you spew out on The Social Network is nothing new, I don’t think, but this article on Buzzfeed was moderately interesting insofar as it highlighted the extent to which this is a problem for personal rather than professional users and the fact that it asks why Facebook won’t tell you, ever, what percentage of people who are your ‘friends’ have actually seen what you post. Anyway, this isn’t surprising in itself – what is AMAZING, though, is the insane article linked to in the heading which Techcrunch ran, which is effectively a puff-piece written by Facebook’s PR people saying ‘but people don’t want those numbers! It would make them sad!’. Journalism, eh? A dying art.
• Channel 4 Use Twitter Cards: After that insanely tedious furniture shop, this week we have something marginally more interesting (but only marginally) – C4 news using Twitter to allow people to sign up to John Snow’s daily ‘funny’ teatime email (I am aware of the insane lack of self-awareness contained within those inverted commas, fyi). I’m only including this as a final ‘look, you really ought to start using this stuff, it’s probably quite useful’ pointer – promise that it will never be alluded to EVER AGAIN. 
• Google Glass – This Is How It Can Work: I didn’t know this, bit Sarah Willis is an INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR horn player, who plays with the Berlin Philharmonic. Anyway, she’s one of the Google Glass ‘explorers’ (sorry) and has a pair of the cyborg specs to play around with. This is a video which she made of her going on tour, and all of a sudden the whole thing just makes sense. There’s a very real, very exciting sense of being inside someone else’s head with this, and it’s the best example I’ve yet seen of why Glass is exciting from a storytelling point of view. Take a look. Oh, and as a bonus here’s a rather shonky but technically interesting example of how AR might work with glass. Ignore the UGLY visuals and think of the tech opportunities. If you want, obviously – alternatively just skip to the videos like everyone else. See if I care. 
• The Newswires Are Quicker Than Twitter (sometimes): Look! Sometimes, just sometimes, we can all agree that TRADITIONAL MEDIA STILL WORKS!!!! Except obviously this is still on the internet, so not that traditional – but an interesting point nonetheless insofar as the spread of information and INFLUENCER HIERARCHIES go.
• Twitter Verified Users – Visualised: Speaking of ‘influencers’ (SEAMLESS!), this is a viualisation of the links between all of Twitter’s verified users. Eye candy rather than useful, but it does, if nothing else, highlight both the insanely incestuous / closed network of the FAMOUS, and also how many people you’ve never, ever heard of who have verified accounts. 
• Use Instagram As A Shopfront: So this should really be in the LONG STUFF bit at the bottom (it’s a really interesting interview with New York-based, Senegal-born and Kuwaiti-raised artist Fatima Al Qadiri), but I’m shoehorning it in here – basically there’s a VERY SMALL mention of people in Kuwait using Instagram as an e-commerce shopfront in para 3, which if none of you steal as a ‘WORLD’S FIRST’ brand exercise I am going to be very, very disappointed in you. You whelps. 
• A Thing About Big Data: A nice little website by Ogilvy which wangs on about BIG DATA (so bored of that term) and how people like you can use it to make more money for Sir Martin Sorrell. 
• How Nordstrom Is Using Pinterest To Inform Real-World Shopping: This is very clever, in a slightly evil sort of way – the piece looks at how retailer Nordstrom is using the popularity of certain articles on Pinterest to determine how they should window dress their shops. Simple, but an excellent example of using digital to inform the physical and applying digital data analysis to the pursuit of filthy real-world lucre. 
• Why Paid Search Is A Waste Of Time – LOOK, ACADEMICS!: Do you work for an advermarketingpr agency whose clients are increasingly choosing to spend their budgets on search ads rather than your AMAZING creativity? FEAR NOT! Just send them this link to a dry-but-still-interesting paper on why paid search ads don’t work, at all, and then watch the pennies roll in (Web Curios accepts no responsibility for the non-arrival of aforementioned pennies). 
• A Load Of Slides With Stats And Case Studies: Next time you need to do a presentation with loads of numbers and examples of AMAZING SOCIAL MEDIA, take a long, hard look at your life / career – and then steal everything from this one. Valid for at least a month, I reckon, before it’s all hopelessly out of date.
• Tinder Now Being Hijacked By Brands: Tinder is the latest HOT dating app, which basically uses FB pics to let you make snap-judgements on the attractiveness or otherwise of complete strangers based on nothing more than the fleeting glimpse of one photo of them. Anyway, this is the latest platform to get people all sweaty with venal excitement about how they can use it to SELL MORE STUFF – TV networks in the US are starting to experiment with marketing through it. Look, this won’t work – noone wants to be sold television when they’re casually scrolling through a list of people who they could quite possibly have a really tawdry, disappointing and empty sexual experience with in a matter of hours. Can people not browse for partners for casual sex in peace, without being sold crap? OH GOD THE HUMANITY.
• Bet On Breaking Bad: Seeing as we’re talking about TV (SEAMLESS!), here’s a genius little app which will no doubt be ripped off by a betting company in the not-too-distant. This basically allows people to place bets with their friends as to what will happen in the final series of Breaking Bad – no actual money changes hands, but you can very easily see this being coopted by a big gambling conglomorate (Bob, this one’s for you).
• The Best Advermarketingpr Thing I Saw All Week: Just amazing by WWF – such a clever idea, brilliantly executed. LOOK AT THE ANTS! CARRYING BRANDED MESSAGES! WATCH AS WE BEND NATURE TO OUR WILL!!!!! Actually, on reflection, maybe it’s not that nice after all.

By Ben Dehaan

A Miscellany Of Summer Curios, Pt.1:

• The First Posts: A cute little Wayback Machine variant, this takes you waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in time and shows you the first EVER posts on a variety of BIG NAME websites. A strangely melancholic little bit of time travel, which has served to remind me just how old I am and how young the internet is.
• What 3 Words: A really clever solution to the problem of sharing map-links and directions online. Each and every location on a map corresponds to three words, which you can then share with someone else to give them the exact directions of where to be. Which, if you’re having an affair and think that someone’s on to you and want to arrange secret assignations with the object of your desire without anyone knowing where you’re meeting (look, it was the first thing that sprang to mind, ok?), could be really useful.
• How A Wife Should Undress: From LIFE magazine in the 30s. Go on, married men, send this to your wife and see exactly how well it goes down. 
• Rent Arcade Machines: As pointed out to me by someone when I linked this on Twitter, it’s an annoying tease as it’s only available in the US. BUT! Come on, kids – we can make this happen here! This service allows users to rent arcade cabinets – the whole things, delivered to you in your home – for a month at a time, for the incredible price of $75 per month. For men (look, we all know it’s most likely to be men, it’s ok) of a certain age, this is possibly one of the best things ever invented and a surefire passport to singledom / divorce. 
• Share Hotel Rooms With Strangers: Travelling alone? Want to save money on the exorbitant rates that hotels charge for single rooms? Well, why not use this website to find a complete stranger to share your hotel room with? What’s that you say? BECAUSE THEY MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE A PSYCHOPATH???? Fie on you, you paranoid ninny! When I posted this earlier this week, the people behind it got in touch rather sniffily suggesting that I was being unfair and misrepresenting the service. I felt bad for a bit, but then remembered that this was a truly dreadful idea which screams “HELLO DAHMER, PLEASE EAT ME”.
• The Art of Pi: This is gorgeous, if mathematical – some beautiful visualisations of Pi and the numerology around it. In the interests of honesty, I’m going to have to confess that I don’t really understand how they make the pretty pictures; the more numerologically-inclined of you may fare better. But look, PRETTY COLOURS!
• The Best Maths Website Ever: Staying on the mathematical tip (SEAMLESS!), this is a truly BEAUTIFUL website (also available as a mobile app) which takes you through 30 of the most exciting concepts in maths. Really, really clever, beautifully designed, and comprehensible even to a mathtard like myself. Worth a look.
• Probably The Worst Tshirt In The World: I don’t really have anything to add to this.
• Encrypted, Secure Phone Messaging: Heml.is is a clever little app which provides secure, untraceable phone-to-phone messaging, which is delivered in a really user-friendly and simple manner and with a friendly interface. Noteworthy as it delivers a service which is only usually available if you’re a bit techy and can cope with a properly hardcore UI; if you’re doing something you shouldn’t and are a bit of a luddite, this may well be of use to you. 
• Font Comparator: For those of you who LOVE your typography, this may be of interest. A neat little site which allows you to compare different fonts and see what the practical differences between them are. 
• London In Flickr: And, in fact, a whole load of other cities too. This is a wonderful project, and a total timesink if you let it be. Taking publicly visible Flickr images and mapping them across cities, this lets you see what people have snapped where. A really lovely way of seeing the city in which you live through someone else’s eyes, and there are some great photos on there too. Go, play, lose yourself for the rest of the afternoon.
• Picture Of Animals In Snappy Outfits: No, really, that’s EXACTLY what these are. No more, no less. Available to purchase too, should you suddenly decide that what your home really needs is a portrait of a parakeet wearing an orange velour hoodie. 
• Life In 5 Seconds: A cute project which takes some of our greatest stories / legends and reduces them to very, very short infographical representations. Some work better than others, but if these haven’t already been used in an ad (they have, haven’t they?) it can only be a matter of time. 
• SuperEmoFriends: Small, sad portraits of characters from popular culture. Far more affecting than it really has any right to be. LOOK AT SAD RONALD MCDONALD! 
• The Worst Portfolio Ever: An astute takedown of the current trend for online portfolios for designers, and the most egregious examples of their crapness. To be honest, this could be applied to all industries and the increasing propensity towards ‘clever’ online CVs. Although maybe I’m just bitter as I can neither design nor code. USELESS ME. 
• Beautiful Old Photos of Cincinatti’s Public Library: You can almost smell the dust. Takes you back to a happier time, when the internet hadn’t even been thought of yet and there was…er…malnutrition, sexism, racism and homophobia everywhere. God, it’s saddening when you look back and realise that being born any time much before the past 50 years would have been genuinely dreadful. 
• The New York Bench Library: Another book-based thing (SEAMLESS!), this is a gorgeous bench / library hybrid in New York that made me very happy when I saw it. Here’s an idea – brands, why don;t you just do loads of stuff like this with a little logo on it. Bollocks to the idea of whether it ‘fits’ with your ‘strategy’ – it will be a nice thing that people appreciate and like you for, and will be a whole load more valuable than a bunch of CONTENT that noone needs, wants or cares about. Go on. Do it. You arseholes.
• DJs, Back This Kickstarter: I don’t DJ (Jesus, this is turning into a litany of personal inadequacy), but for those of you that do this pocket mixer on Kickstarter might be just the thing that you want to pledge a lot of money to. 
• Snow Tunnels: I have literally NO idea what the text on these pictures says, but they are amazing. Some sort of crazy snow tunnel, somewhere in the world (look, I know that this is a dreadful description but my knowledge of Cyrillic is pretty patchy at the best of times).
• Eel Slapping: A small, pointless website which allows you to slap a man in the face with an eel. Cathartic (also, screencaps of this will be ENDLESSLY useful in what I believe we’re now honour-bound to call OFFICE BANTS!).

By Flora Borsi

A QUICK MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS: If you like Web Curios and what we do here at Imperica, then we would love to hear from you in our annual Imperica Reader Survey. The Survey helps us to find out how to improve our magazine, and what we should be doing in the coming year. It also helps us to make informed decisions as to how Imperica can remain commercially sustainable. We would be really grateful if you could take a couple of minutes to fill it in. It’s quick, honest. If you want to tell them to pay me loads more money, by the way, then please feel free x http://www.imperica.com/reader-survey-2013

A Miscellany Of Summer Curios, Pt.2:

• Quiet Places in NYC: I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s a lovely thing to get people to share their favourite quiet places in a large metropolitan city; on the other, by so doing you’re basically killing them. I think there should be some sort of secret version of this for London, which basically only my girlfriend and I have access to. That would be nice. Maybe I’ll let you in too, I’ve not decided yet. We’ll see.
• Worried About Aging, Wrinkles? TRY THIS: This is apparently a real thing. I think I’m going to buy it and see how it works.
• Course Texts For A Porn Postgrad: A wonderful imagined collection of 70s-style academic textbook covers for imagined tomes which might be used as part of a University course on the theory of pornography. I really, really want to read ‘New Directions In Squirt Sociology’.
• Hire My Friend: A great idea, this – taking the whole ‘My Single Friend’ concept (by the way, WHY isn’t that site called ‘Date My Mate’? SO MUCH BETTER) and applying it to the world of work and allowing people to advertise themselves for hire without actually advertising themselves, if you see what I mean. Currently skews towards tech, unsurprisingly given its genesis in East London, but still smart.
• The Best Wikipedia Entry Ever, No Joke: Look, you have to read this one. Really. Just incredible, and proof if it were needed that your life really is fundamentally unexciting and beige compared to that of Adrian Carton de Wiart, who is probably the greatest boy’s own hero ever to have lived. I’m going to paste one of the opening bits as a teaser – seriously, do take a look: “He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War; was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; survived a plane crash; tunnelled out of a POW camp; and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He later wrote that “Frankly I had enjoyed the war” when describing his service in the WWI.”
• Sand As An Executive Toy: I don’t doubt that the chemistry behind this is mind-boggling, but all I can think is how much I want some. Just MENTAL.
• Crosswords. Really Hard, Inexplicable Crosswords: I don’t really ‘get’ these, I have to say, but they look interesting and I think that if you’re a logician or similarly mindeed then it may all make sense to you. Anyway, the crossword clues are defined using regular expressions – if that means something to you then congratulations!
• See Your Folks: Need a website to make you feel guilty about how long it’s been since you spoke to your parents? OH GOOD! This is a brilliant thing to send to a sibling to make them feel really, really bad about themselves. Or, in fact, your kids if you have any. Go on, troll your family.
• Missing Kids On Stamps: This is a heartrending little project, encouraging Canadians to take advantage of their postal service’s ‘Custom Stamps’ service to put pictures of missing children on your stamps. The sound effects on the website almost reduce me to tears each time (I’m not ashamed of this AT ALL). 
• Air Freshener FOR MEN: Are you upset because Glade or Airwick or whatever other sickly olfactory horror show you use to mask your home’s miasmic funk isn’t quite masculine enough for you? Help is at hand in the shape of Archer, the apparently-not-a-joke air freshener for MEN. With MANLY SCENTS. It looks like a parody, it smells like a parody, but it appears that they really do offer sprays with the scent of ‘Hunting Lodge’, ‘European Sports Car’ and, er, ‘Distillery’. Weird.
• Photos of NYC’s Drag Queens: Just wonderfully happy-making pictures. Each image links to its own slideshow, so have an explore as there are some great shots in there.
• Universal’s Kickstarter For Vinyl: I can’t remember if I linked to the Ninja Tune version of this earlier this year (OH MY GOD I DID); anyhow, now Universal are doing a similar thing but BIGGER. Interesting trend here for back-catalogue stuff being resurrected due to popular demand – watch this extend to food, etc, in the next year or so. Seriously – you think, say, Cadbury’s wouldn’t run a Kickstarter around bringing back some sort of limited edition thing? GUARANTEED MONEY, KIDS.
• Visualising Texan Executions: Following on from the Texan Last Words database from the other week, this is a project visualising the stats behind the deaths. As miserable as you’d imagine, really. HAPPY FRIDAY!
• Men Who Visit Brothels: Another one from the cheery side of the web, this is an excellent photoseries taking portraits of German men in the brothel they frequent, with short interviews with them as to why they’re there. Actually less depressing than you might have initially thought, honest. 
• Fuds: I like this. Mocking foodie idiocy in simple fashion. The menu is almost credible.

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Bad Kids’ Jokes: I think that this one’s quite old, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, but it make me laugh so fuckit. Bad jokes from a moderator of a kids’ jokes website. 
• My Old Man: A new project collecting essays and thoughts about people’s fathers. You can submit stuff, if you’re so minded – it could develop into something rather lovely. 
• The First Vine ‘Album’: Lucky Pierre is Aidan Moffat’s solo project (it’s also a slang phrase for the middle-man in an all-guy three-way, but we won’t worry about that right now). Aidan used to be in Arab Strap and this is his take on what purports to be the first Vine ‘album’. It’s not quite an album, of course, what with the restrictions of the medium and all that, but it’s an interesting idea and some of the music is LOVELY, particularly with Vine’s autolooping which I suppose is the point. BONUS! Have what is apparently the first ACTUAL Vine song which is all about Ben Fogle’s involuntary acid trip and is pretty weird.
• What’s Your Ex Doing Now: Want to be reassured about how badly your ex-partner is doing without you, but in a softly whimsical fashion? OH GOOD!
• Epic Pukes: Pablo Iranzo has put together a collection of pictures of musicians, screaming, and painted massive jets of technicolour vomit emerging from their gaping maws. The ned result if vastly more aesthetically pleasing than it has any right to be. 
• Super Magritte: The paintings of Rene Magritte, recreated through the graphical style of Super Mario Brothers. What the everliving fcuk did we do before the endless creative outlet afforded us by the internet, eh?
• Famouses Wearing Black Flag Tees: You now how it’s now de rigeur for any famous who wants to appear a bit rock’n’roll to wear a Ramones tshirt or similar? Here’s a whole site dedicated to photoshopping Black Flag logos onto famouses tshirts. WHY NOT, EH?
• Visual Poetry: Erm, well, that really. It’s visual textual mashup poetry STUFF. Depending on your level of pretentious pseudery you will either love or hate this (clue: I love it).
• This Is Thin Privilege: Because being life-threateningly obese and having people perhaps react to that is simply ANOTHER example of how thin people ruin EVERYTHING. This privilege stuff would be funny were it not so deeply depressing.
• Sleeping Models: Male models snapped with their eyes closed. Basically a collection of really, really ridiculously good-looking people looking a tiny bit silly.
• Tinder Rejections: I mentioned Tinder up there (SEAMLESS!) – here’s a nice collection of screenshots of one person’s failed chat-up attempts on it. Basically it proves that being facile works on online fcukbuddymatching sites.
• One Star Reviews of Strip Clubs: Generally just a little disheartening, but the line about being thrown out for being deaf made me laugh like a donkey for about 5 minutes. 
• Your Barrister Boyfriend: Currently doing the rounds of every Chambers in the UK, this frankly incredible (in the ‘is this a parody? Oh sweet Christ it’s not, is it?’ sense) site collects London’s ‘hottest’ barristers in one convenient place. And rates them, in prose which is a bit creepily damp-palmed. Oh, who am I kidding – I’m just jealous because I’m nowhere near as successful, rich or handsome as these people. If anyone wants to set up ‘Your Webmong Boyfriend’ then feel free.

By Johannes Grutzke

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• On The Society Of Spectacle: Wow. One of those pieces that makes you realise that there’s nothing new under the Sun, and that we’re all simply racing around in circles around the same fundamental principles as we always have (maybe just racing a bit faster, and looking at stuff through different prisms). This is an essay by Guy Debord from 1967, looking at how society is focused more on the representation of things than the things themselves. Leaving aside the Platonic elements, this is incredible – look how little things have moved on (or, if you prefer, how incredibly prescient Debord was). Oh, and I know that this is Marxist philosophy but come on, THINK for once. 
• A Really Nice Interview With The Lovely Dave Grohl: Because if you read the above, you deserve it. Really interesting interview, though, and proof positive (if any further were needed) that Grohl really does come across as the nicest man in music.
• And Daniel Craig Interviews Thom Yorke: Well, yes, quite. I have no idea why this happened, but it’s actually a surprisingly good read if you discount the slightly ‘oh, we’re both kind of amazing’ vibe which permeates the whole thing.
• Russell Brand Is Quite Clever: I never really ‘got’ Russell Brand – his whole ‘Dick Emery meets Dot Cotton’ schtick always left me cold, and I found the serial shagger stuff very tedious indeed (again, probably jealousy). Increasingly, though, I’ve been forced to concede that he’s a very smart man – recent essays on drugs, race, politics, liberalism and Islam have been well-thought out and cogently argued. This piece looks at the man as a commentator rather than a comedian, and is a decent overview of why he maybe deserves a little more respect from useless armchair critics like me. 
• What Foxconn Workers Do In Their Downtime: How Apple’s slaves ‘enjoy’ their time off. Look, I know that no commissioning editors read this (WHY NOT??? Rhetorical, btw), but on the offchance can we all agree that this is a wonderful photo essay waiting to happen? Good. Now go and make it happen.
• The Prancersise Lady: You remember Prancersise, don’t you? You all got really excited about it a couple of months ago. This is a profile piece on the woman behind it, and what happened to her when she went megafamous. As per the norm with these sorts of stories, it will make you really hope that you never become internet famous (unless you’re a mental). 
• A Series Of Things On Trayvon Martin: There’s nothing funny to say about any of this. Here’s an interesting piece in the Atlantic looking at the whole thing from a PURELY legal perspective; here’s a piece on the whole affair with some really, really interesting comments (I know, this is UNHEARD OF on the internet, but they really are worth reading through), and this is Questlove of The Roots’ take on the whole thing, which is probably the saddest thing I’ve read all week. God, what a mess.
• Peggy Paula: The best short fiction I have read in a long, long time. Save, read, enjoy. 
• The Theory of Pixar: Have you ever, when watching Pixar’s films, thought to yourself ‘Hm, I think that there’s an overarching narrative superstructure here with a fairly bleak post-apocalyptic narrative at its core’? No? More fool you, then. This VERY LONG essay is either genius or madness (I think I’m leaning to the latter), but its comprehensive knowledge of the films is insane. I would love to see pictures of Pixar people’s reactions on reading this.
• The Confusing Merry-go-round Of Gay Identity Politics And Nomenclature: This is actually an essay about the word ‘Twink’ and its pejorative meaning, but sort of segues into a whole load of other stuff about gay subcultures and identity. I only found this because I had a haircut this week which basically makes me look incredibly twinky. 
• Clive James Takes Down Dan Brown: Ok, so it’s not really a fair fight but James, as ever, writes like God. 
• We Get The Films Which We Deserve: On Asylum, the film studio which is responsible for Sharknado (LOL!!!) and other memetastic favourites. Basically this is a pointer to a future in which EVERY SINGLE FILM EVER PRODUCED is ‘Snakes On A Plane’. Hi, future!
• The Third Golden Age of Television: We’re currently living through the third golden age of television, or so this article posits. A really interesting look at why this might be.
• The Bad Things Kids Do: A Reddit thread collecting examples of the worst things that people did as kids. The best argument for sterilisation I’ve read all week (but also dreadfully, awfully, guiltily funny in places).

By Dina Litovski

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS! (OH, AND IF YOU’VE NOT YET SEEN IT HERE’S THE AMANDA PALMER DAILY MAIL TAKEDOWN):

1) Corey Feldman! Have you ever done porn, Corey Feldman? (sorry, that’s a line from this AMAZING interview that I know I’ve linked to about 30-odd times but which I will never tire of) Anyway, 80s teen heartthrob Corey Feldman now makes MUSIC, of a sort. This is the awe-inspiring video for his latest track ‘Ascension Millennium’. There is SO much WTFery in here that it’s hard to know where to begin. Just watch. Oh, and if you want to make yourself feel a bit sad, this is the website for Corey’s…er…well I’m not sure what it is, but it seems to be his attempt to do a Hugh Hefner with ‘Corey’s Angels’. SO GRUBBY and you can almost smell the coke sweat: