Webcurios 06/03/20 – webcurios

Reading Time: 34 minutes

HELLO AGAIN I MISSED YOU!

That said, I’m somewhat up against it this morning what with needing to wash the stench off the fetid meatsack I call ‘corporeal reality’ and get myself to a lunch reservation; let me just say, though, that I hope none of you are currently infected and that you manage to stay alive at least as long as I do in the coming pandemic; I wouldn’t want to think of you missing any Web Curios, after all.

This, then, is your regular weekly dose of words and links; it won’t protect you from infection, but I do like to think of it as something of a prophlactic against stupid if nothing else.

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, let’s all try not to die (unless, honestly, we’re just tired and have had enough, at which point I think dying’s actually a pretty legitimate choice, all told).

By Ethan Gill

LET’S START THIS OFF WITH THE FULL TWO-HOUR SOUND OF COVID19 AS CREATED BY SHARDCORE AND WHICH HONESTLY IS ONLY A SMALL REMIX AWAY FROM BEING A PROPER TECH/TRANCE BANGER IF YOU ASK ME!

THE SECTION WHICH WAS UPSET TO FIND ITSELF USING THE TERM ‘FLEETS’ YESTERDAY IN WRITTEN CONVERSATION LIKE IT WAS THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD BUT WHICH IS MAKING AN INTERNAL PROMISE TO NEVER UTTER THE TERM OUT LOUD OUTSIDE OF ITS TRADITIONAL, NON S*C**L M*D** USAGE:

Facebook Tweaks Messenger: It really isn’t much more interesting than that; the app’s now smaller (huzzah!), and rather than promoting bots to interact with through the ‘discover’ tab it’s instead going to focus on Stories as the content to promote instead (presumably the idea behind this being that noone in their life has ever opened a messaging product and had the first thought of ‘oh, what I’d like to do most right now is have an unsatisfyingly-scripted interaction with a nested conversation tree!’). This makes little practical difference to how bots work on Messenger – they’ll still be there, still working, but to get people to find them you’ll have to SPEND TO ADVERTISE!! Or, you know, promote them via your website or something. Anyway, you can read the whole announcement post here – it’s really not that interesting.
FB ‘3d’ Photos Can Now Be Taken With Any Phone: This is of no practical professional interest at all, as far as I can see, but it’s technically very impressive – those pseudo-3d ‘tilt to get an illusion of perspective’ images you can create on Facebook now work with photos taken on old, single-camera phones rather than newer, fancier, double-camera devices. Which is great!
Better Insights to Facebook Workplace: I worked somewhere last year (a big company, all international and stuff) which used both Facebook Workplace AND Microsoft Teams AND email AND, in the case of certain teams, Slack, and, well, WHY? I DO NOT WANT TO TALK TO MY COLLEAGUES IN THIS MANY PLACES PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE. Aside from my own misanthropy, though, it also seemed a colossal waste of money – I haven’t, in my dealings with it, been super-impressed with Workplace, or seen much of a point to it when you’re on the MS or Google stack, but perhaps I’m missing something obvious. Anyway, this is by way of typically longwinded preamble to the news that you can now get better data on how your staff are using Workplace – what they’re doing, for how long and with whom. On the one hand, DATA!; on the other, I am immediately suspicious of software that tracks interactions between coworkers like this as being step one towards the creation of the office Stasi (but I concede I may be more antagonistic to the concept of employment than most).
The Workplace Academy: Oh, and there’s this too – if you use Workplace or if you’re responsible for ensuring that others do, “The Workplace Academy is your new Workplace training hub, where you’ll find free live interactive training, self-paced courses, learning videos and guides. The Academy is available to all Workplace users, so anyone can get up to speed quickly and get the most out of Workplace.” Sounds ghastly.
Twitter Testing ‘Fleets’: Or, ‘Stories for Twitter’! Or, ephemeral Tweets! A feature that literally noone has been clamouring for is being tested in Brazil, with users there being granted to the ability to create multi-part Tweets – largely text-based, though you can include gifs and photos at this point – called ‘Fleets’. These will last for upto 24h (though I presume one will be able to delete them earlier), won’t appear on your main TL, can’t be linked to or embedded (in part or in full), and will only be visible to your followers – users will see Fleets from those they follow appear as little icons at the top of the feed (a la Insta), with mutuals showing up first followed by other follows. This is…interesting; there’s obvious stuff you can do with this as a brand to rewards followers who pay close attention to your output, and the ‘you can’t RT or QT or link to or embed this’ thing is good from the point of view of minimising the weaponisation of Tweets…but the fact that replies come straight into your DMs sounds like a recipe for disaster, and were I a less-scrupulous person who was better at coding I would totally be spinning up a plugin called ‘FeedCapper’ to export individual elements of a fleet as images for sharing and posterity. Worth watching – I have a feeling this could be quite interesting.
Twitter’s ‘Hide Replies’ API Opens to Developers: This basically means that it’s now easier to code solutions to hide horror from your Twitter replies, basically, and the article links to at least one new plugin designed to help you do exactly that. Potentially useful.
Twitter Expands Hatespeech Guidelines: The platform will now police content of a derogatory or offensive nature about disease, disability or age. Which we can all agree is good, and which I’m sure won’t affect any of you, but which I can imagine being tested when all the old people find out and start reporting anyone replying to them with ‘OK Boomer’ as being guilty of hatespeech.
Stories Are Coming To LinkedIn!: Maybe. MAYBE. Still, they are being tested, and that was enough to give me a cold chill of horror. IMAGINE – Stories about people’s exciting time delivering the Keynote at the annual Sales offsite (“Kev, can you just make sure you get a good video of me doing slide 24 – the one with the joke, yeah, that one – but MAKE SURE IT’S IN VERTICAL ffs”), Stories about how it’s only your non-growth mindset that’s stopping you from CRUSHING IT…no, I must stop, this tumescence is redirecting too much blood from my brain and I’ve still got about 7000 words to go. One serious point – presuming this becomes a thing, and presuming Twitter Stories does too, and presuming that they end up being primarily image/video led like on Insta…this sort of makes it ridiculous that most agencies aren’t set up to produce vertical content at all. THERE IS AN OPPORTUNITY HERE FFS.
Reddit Offers Mental Health Support: Joining Snap and TikTok as the latest platform to set up safety nets for those feeling…less than sunny, Reddit this week announced that it was launching a (US-only at present) partnership with an organisation called Crisis Text Line to let users flag posts that they believed to be indicative of mental distress. “The partnership makes it possible for a Reddit user to flag someone they feel is struggling with serious self-harm or suicide. That will trigger an immediate private message from Reddit to the person in distress. The message will include mental health resources and a suggestion to use their phone to text the phrase CHAT to connect with a Crisis Text Line counselor.” Which on the one hand sounds sensible, but on the other makes me wonder whether they’ve got some checks and balances in place here, because otherwise they are quickly going to be overwhelmed by people on The_Donald reporting ‘the libs’ as in need of support and counselling because of being ‘butthurt.
Miu Miu Twist: Finally in the section noone reads, a nice little 5-minute platform-based distraction from Miu Miu; run along, jump collect the perfume bottles, get to the, er, premiere or something. This is very simple but th pixelart style’s nicer than it needs to be, and there’s something pleasingly-floaty about the jump mechanic for connoisseurs of the genre.

By Jules de Balincourt

NEXT, TRY THIS SLIGHTLY THROWBACKISH MIX OF BREAKS AND BASS AND ALMOST-DUBSTEP BY BLUFURY!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT WOULD BE VERY 2020 FOR US ALL TO BE WIPED OUT IN A VIRAL EPIDEMIC AS WE ALL DO #CORONADANCE CHALLENGES ON TIKTOK FOR THE CLOUT, PT.1:

The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: I’m going to put all the ‘species-ending outbreak’ stuff uptop, so if you’d prefer not to click any links about THE OUTBREAK then skip down about 5 and I promise normal service will be resumed. The rest of you, though, might find this interesting as an overview of digital projects currently being run around the Coronavirus; from a variety of live local maps of infection – this one from Singapore is particularly impressive – along with links to datasets, technical tools, forecasters…what’s notable about this global health scare compared to other global healthscares I have known is the extent to which the impact of data is really being felt; not necessarily in a positive way, one might argue. More, more open, data means better collaborative efforts to track, manage and address the spread of the virus, but it also means SO MUCH NOISE as everyone and their dog decides to bring their early-21C data expertise to bear on the issue (mate you work in marketing and know the difference between ‘quant’ and ‘qual’, calm down). Still, this resource – by the nice people at Nwspk House – is the best rolling tracker of all the available techy resources out there at the moment, and if you’re in any way interested in open data-type stuff there’s a lot to explore in here. Don’t get scared.
Don’t Touch Your Face: This is hard for me; I’m forever worrying at my increasingly-saggy, Droopy-like countenance – don’t you find it fascinating how the elasticity just…goes? – and so the perfectly-reasonable public health recommendation to keep your grubby mits away from your facial orifi is proving…tricky. Still, thank GOD for this browsertoy which lets you train a system to track when you aren’t, and by extension when you ARE, touching your fizzog, and which will then shout at you every time it sees you bringing fingers to face. This is sort-of amazing – the fact that it’s just running off the web, and it learns in about 15s, is pretty remarkable when you think about it – but it’s also, due to the slightly stentorian nature of the barked commands, very funny as well.
Is It Canceled Yet?: A convenient way of tracking whether that work conference (the one that you really didn’t want to go to but which at the same time you were slightly looking forward to because it meant six nights away from the kids and that means at least one proper night of decent, uninterrupted sleep and NO, CHRIST, OF COURSE I’M NOT COMPLAINING BUT YOU SNORE, TONY) has been cancelled yet due to the bat AIDS. I do wonder what Cannes will do with all of the millions if it’s forced to cancel this year – I’ll put my money on something performatively worthy but fundamentally empty, like buying a billion facemasks for the world’s poor that turn out to be non-biodegradable or something.
100 Women of the Year: This is GREAT. Time Magazine, famous for its yearly bestowing of the ‘Person of the Year’ honorific (do you remember, by the way, when they made it ‘You’ in 2006? Doesn’t that feel a long time ago, and that maybe we didn’t deserve an award at all?), changed the designation from ‘Man of the Year’ in 1999; there were 72 years when the award wasn’t open to women at all. “This project is an exercise in looking at the ways in which women held power due to systemic inequality….To recognize these women, we have created 89 new TIME covers, many of which were designed by prominent artists” – the project also includes the 11 women who’ve been named ‘Person of the Year’ since 99. This is so cool – nice interface, nice covers, a reasonably-international selection of women (although it skews US), and short essays introducing each honoree. The churlish, never-satisfied whelp inside me might argue they could have gone a bit harder on the links out to additional information on each of the people in question, but I appreciate that that’s a lot of additional work and that I should probably just shut up and enjoy the beautiful, free bounty of the open web while I still can.
Disappear Yourself: The person who made this says it’s code, but I don’t think it is – I think it is witchcraft, pure and simple (it’s not; he’s posted the code and everything). Turn on your webcam, step back so that your entire body is in its field of vision, walk around…and watch as the machine slowly learns to see you and then, gradually, erase you from its field of vision and the video output it produces. Honestly, this is (fine, a bit clunky, but) astonishing, and the sort of thing that will be an installation at the Serpentine by the end of the year, no question. Tweak the code to be able to recognise either gender or skintone and there’s a ‘powerful digital installation about the silencing and erasure of traditionally oppressed peoples’ in there waiting to be set up (to be clear, I’m not being facetious; I can totally imagine that, and it not being sh1t).
The King’s Tattoos: I don’t, let me make it clear, particular care about the royals, but it’s impossible not to have a vague impression of the weird media war being fought between varying bits of the family, particularly with this week’s slightly pointed-feeling press shots of Charles and William and Kate doing NORMAL THINGS like ‘going on a bus’ or ‘visiting a school’ or ‘baking a loaf’, all with nary a logo or brand consultant in sight. It makes you rather wish that our Royal Family could be a touch more like the Danes’ version – for one, you can’t quite imagine The Firm being too happy about a website like this one, which (brilliantly, bafflingly) allows you to explore the denuded body of hypertattooed monarch Frederick the 9th to see all of his ink. This is GREAT – scroll down and a weirdly-lumpy, burns victimish model of Fred appears, smoking a tab in sailor garb, and then WOAH there he is in his pants, all be-tatted, striking a Putin-ish strongman pose in his pants – the site gives you an explanation of the provenance and significance of all his ink, personally and historically, and it’s a GREAT piece of webwork and far, far better than my slightly stupid writeup suggests.
Million Dollar Metropolis: Every few years on here the Million Dollar Homepage comes up – kids, look it up – and I am minded to wonder what Alex Tew is doing with himself these days. I just did, and remembered that he’s now a mindfulness app grifter and wish that I could forget again. Still, his one great legacy is that people will never cease attempting to rip off his original, excellent idea – the latest version is the MILLION DOLLAR METROPOLIS, which is again selling off virtual real-estate but this time in a slightly cooler-looking way, with buyers being afforded the opportunity to purchase space on virtual skyscrapers in a virtual little city, which their virtual logos can sit on in perpetuity for a minimum spend of $100. I…I quite like this, and there is a part of me that wants to ask Editor Paul if he can advertise Imperica there just to see what happens (then I remember that $100 is literally the server money). This is, potentially, quite a cool way to announce or leak something, depending on your audience.
The Most Depressing Trivia Game Ever: Ok, this is too hard for me to explain here in the limited space and time available to me, but you can read a proper technical description of how it works here. Basically a machine was trained on a bunch of factual data and is now able to do natural language parsing of trivia questions; this site lets you pit your general knowledge skills against that of a machine learning programme. Reader, I lost – I lost repeatedly. Look, there’s a lot of really quite remarkable tech and stuff behind this, but know that what it is at its heart is a means by which you can have your trivia ar$e handed to you on a plate by a few lines of code. It’s the beginning of the end, lads.
JS Paint: MS Paint, but in your browser, in Javascript. You may think that this is just a silly proof-of-concept coding exercise, but, honestly, there’s still no better or faster imagecropping tool out there. DESIGNERS! Why not try frustrating your colleagues by setting yourselves the challenge of ONLY using this for all design requests submitted to you between now and hometime?
Judy: Or, SURVIVAL PREP FOR MILLENNIALS! Older millennials, though, ones who perhaps now have a young family and are more likely to be concerned at keeping said family safe, but which are, at the same time, still SUCKERS for a well-packaged product with a nicely-designed logo. JUDY (sorry, it’s an all-caps brand) offers a range of SURVIVAL PREPAREDNESS KITS (my caps here, but it feels important to shout about these things), containing things like torches and firelighters, nutrition bars and maps and compasses and stuff, presented in a sturdy, vaguely-apocalypto-fashion backpack or box in Cillit Bang orange. Even better, it’s INTERNET CONNECTED, with purchase also granting you access to some slightly vague-sounding ‘survival guide content’ which they’ll send you at semi-regular intervals. So, to be clear, that’s 200 quid for an ugly rubber backpack in bright orange with the name JUDY emblazoned on it, which comes with a couple of flashlights, a power bar and some chlorination tablets? FFS EVERYONE. Still, I admire the grift here – “what if survival preppers, but designed in Brooklyn?” is a strong elevator pitch to VC.
All The Music: You’ve almost certainly read about this by now – it’s been around for a while – but in case not: “Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued…To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it’s considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.” This is SUCH a clever idea; can someone do it for words too, please, just to see what happens? Although based on the old Arthur C Clarke short story, the answer is possibly ‘apocalypse’.
MSGGIF: God I love this. There was something a few years back called ‘REALLY BIG MESSAGE’ or similar – it was a website where you could type in whatever you like and it would create a REALLY BIG version of that text on eye-bleeding backgrounds that you could send to people. This is a bit like that, except it creates an animated text gif of whatever you tell it to – you can then download it and use it wherever you like (Twitter, FB, Insta, etc). I think this is PERFECT for some low-key shade-throwing, personally, or for you poor community managers to find a new way of expressing your feelings to the unthinking, unfeeling mass of the unwashed online – just imagine the poignancy of one of these reading “I am typing as myself now Karen; I don’t like this any more than you do” appearing on your feed from Utterly Butterly or whatever.
Loki: Is there anyone out there right now who looks at Western society and thinks ‘you know, we’re simply not recording enough of our daily lives; we’re simply not obsessional enough about documenting the minutiae of every single fleeting second that passes and sharing it with a doubtless-fascinated world’? No, probably not, and yet here’s Loki, an app which encourages you to take 10 seconds of video a day – RAW video, UNFILTERED video, the REAL YOU – which at the end of the year it will compile into a PERSONAL MOVIE for you which you can then edit and share on the socials as you desire. Leaving aside the fact that the idea of a six-minute film composed entirely of disconnected 10s clips seems like the type of idea every film student has had during a 6am khole epiphany and then rejected when the pints kicked in around 11, there’s actually the kernal of something interesting here; I do like the concept of constant personal documentarymaking (there was something called the Viconrevue about 10 years back which I was briefly obsessed with the concept of). Maybe there would be something interesting to be gained by taking 100 very different subjects, asking them to do this and then splicing the footage in interesting ways. Basically I think this is a lot more interesting than I did when I started writing this link, which says a lot about the DEEP THOUGHT that goes into the Curios ‘curatorial’ (HA!!) process.
Miniature Pop-Up Books: Would you like a smol shop in which you can buy smol pop-up books to order? OH GOOD! If they did commissions – which potentially they do, for a fee – this could be an EXCEPTIONAL personalised gift for someone of a certain type (I’m not judging, I promise).
This Is Spotify: Spotify offers to take users on a JOURNEY TO THE PAST with this ‘3d musical exploration experience’ – which isn’t actually that 3d, fine, but is a nicely-scrolly bit of web interactive which lets you choose from a selection of ‘retro’ artists (Louis Armstrong, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Metallica, Whitney Houston, Linkin Park, er Shakira????) and then do a bit of a dive into their history,etc. It’s VERY shallow but there are a few nice touches in there – the way you can scratch on the record playing the artist’s most-streamed track is a lovely little gimmick.
NYC Neighborhoods: A Google Map featuring all NYCs neighborhoods with the boundaries clearly marked – both useful if you’re visiting the city, but also there’s something about the fact that it looks quite a lot like it’s from Sesame Street. Invaluable if you want to get a vague handle on where the fcuk all the places in Jonathan Lethem’s novels actually are.
VC Brags: Oh I do like this. VC Brags is a Twitter account with one simple gimmick – it RTs tweets from Venture Capitalists in which said Venture Capitalists are not-so-subtly applauding themselves for their brilliance and perspicacity and performance and the skill and endeavour with which they CRUSH IT every day. Stuff like this, which manages to tick both the “cloth-eared failure to gauge the global mood when it comes to flying” and the “probably didn’t actually happen” boxes simultaneously: “Just got an announcement at the gate from @united for hitting a million miles. Got a round of applause. Gate agent says to expect a “surprise” on the flight.”
The VHS Vault: The Internet Archive really is the gift that never stops giving; in this specific corner, you can find over 20,000 old videos digitised from VHS and roughly categorised by theme…you can, I promise, lose entire weeks in here, as there is a truly astonishing volume of stuff – weird old promo tapes, whole films taped off the telly, complete with adverts and bowdlerised swearing…honestly, it’s almost worth being self-isolated for.
2019 in Illustration: A superb collection by the NYT pulling together some of its favourite examples of design work from the paper over the past year. This is glorious, not least as it shows the breadth of styles that they employ – pleasing in an era of increased homogeneity of design and illustration styles – as well as giving a much-deserved platform to the people whose names you almost never notice when reading an article online. Aside from anything else this is a really nice place to scope out potential art styles you might want to consider for forthcoming projects.
The Opera Database: The opera database is…a comprehensive database of operas! That’s right – ALL OF THE OPERAS, searchable by date, country and whether or not there’s a PDF of the libretto available online. If you’ve ever need to do a deep-dive into the historical significance of opera in mid-20th Century Armenian folk culture then this is very much the website you’ve spend days and nights praying for.
Numode: DADS! THIS ONE IS FOR YOU! Ok, fine, not ONLY dads – potentially mums too, it’s just that I didn’t spend quite so much time in the 90s/early-00s with women who desperately wanted to be DJs as I did with men. Anyway, if your days of spinning vinyl are behind you – until the glorious day when your kids are old enough to have a proper big party and appreciate music and you can FINALLY do that Detroit techno set you’ve been practising since you saw Derrick May at FABRIC that time – then you will LOVE Numode, which is basically LEGO-esque kits which let you build turntables and speakers and mixing desks that you can keep on your desk at work as a throwback to the times when you were up at 6am because of speed and not because you have a client presentation and your kid’s been sick and oh god the school run.
Eggdog: Speaking of kids, I bet yours watch any old sh1t they can find on YouTube don’t they? I’m not judging them, to be clear, I do too. Still, why not try them on Eggdog – a CG cartoon dog, in the shape of an egg! You may lose them forever – I get the feeling that this might be a bit like crack for small children – but it’s still better than Jonny Jonny Papa Papa or whatever the fcuk that was.
The Simpsons in CSS: My God this is some impressive coding – LOOK THEY ARE EVEN BLINKING FFS!
The Taco Bell Quarterly: I was convinced when I first saw this that it was a stunt by Taco Bell – in a way I wish it was, as there’s something perfectly po-mo about a fast food chain establishing an academic journal to collect critical theory pieces about its significance in modern culture. Sadly, though, this is just artschool stuff – “T aco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to literary, artistic, important, and elite…First and foremost, TBQ is about great writing. We think great writing can be about Taco Bell. We think trash can be beautiful.” So there – if you have some low-culture, hi-trash musings that you’d like an outlet for, have at it. I would love someone to submit a heartfelt piece about Wimpy to this fwiw.
Javelina Running: The purest thing I have seen online in the past fortnight, this is footage of a Javelina (which I understand to be a type of pig) running by the roadside in Texas, tweeted every few hours in sync to a different backing track and OH MY GOD every single one is perfect but I could watch this particular version for the rest of my natural life. Honestly, scroll back and find your favourite, these are GLORIOUS.

By David Palumbo

NEXT ENJOY THIS ABSOLUTELY CRACKING TECHNO MIX BY TARAVAL – HONESTLY THIS IS GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT WOULD BE VERY 2020 FOR US ALL TO BE WIPED OUT IN A VIRAL EPIDEMIC AS WE ALL DO #CORONADANCE CHALLENGES ON TIKTOK FOR THE CLOUT, PT.2:

Do You Know Darkness?: How Goth are you? Are you just a bit goth – a few black clothes, a bit of a penchant for the more obscure writings of Alan Moore and maybe a bit of the sort of industrial grind of some Skinny Puppy or something – or are you FULL GOTH – Sisters of Mercy tatts and appearances at the infamous weekenders and a childhood full of trauma at the hands of cider-drinking normies flicking Embassy Number 7s at you as you tried to hide in doorways at the precinct? Would you like to find out? Well back this boardgame on Kickstarter, then! Basically this is a slightly-occult-themed trivia game, with all the questions being based around ‘dark’ themes, which I am hoping tends more towards the occult, horror movies, maybe a bit of Bathory, and less towards requiring you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the names of Ed Gein’s victims. I reckon that this looks like a lot of fun for the right sorts of people – are YOU that sort of person? If so, thanks for reading Web Curios, please don’t curse me.
Woodwork by Henk: This is, I think, genuinely lovely – this is the Facebook Page of a New Zealand woodsmith, started this year, which has achieved a degree of online virality by dint of the quite incredibly magical designs. Honestly, if you’ve got a small kid who’s into magic and wizards and witches and stuff then look at these and just IMAGINE how excited they would be to have something like one of these in their room – the chests that look as though they’re bursting portals to another dimension, the twisted bookcases…SO good. There’s currently no online sales or international shipping, but the degree of attention this has deservedly received suggests that will probably change before too long.
The Best Year in Music: Another superb piece of work by The Pudding, this one letting you choose ANY month since the 60s on the US Billboard charts and then play through time seeing how the composition of the top of the charts changed as time past; even better, it plays you the number one as you go, fading songs in and out as they jockey for position at the top. It’s beautifully-presented, and gives you an interesting sense of sonic trends that you probably couldn’t pick up just by looking at the data on its own. They are SO SO GOOD at this stuff, honestly, and this is an absolute delight to play around with and explore.
The Pwn College: An interesting resource for any of you looking to learn more about hacking from the ‘White Hat’ point of view – Pwn College is a beta programme which teaches the rudiments of hacking and, by extension, online security. To be clear, you REALLY need to want to learn about this, and you need to have a degree of familiarity with Linux and that sort of stuff if you’re even going to make sense of the first lesson, but if you’re committed to getting more of an idea of how this stuff works and are willing to put the hours in then this could be super-useful.
Maev: Dog wellness in New York. Look, let’s just leave it there sha…no, actually, no, let’s not. DOG AS A SERVICE! DOGFOOD AND TREATS AND VITAMINS AND TOYS AS A SERVICE! I know that people living in cities have busy lives, yes, and that that can negatively impact their ability to do things like shop for groceries and, I don’t know, wait in line for the next Supreme drop, and that’s why we can now employ people to do those things for us, but, well, IF YOU HAVE A FCUKING DOG THEN YOU HAVE TIME TO WALK IT, MEANING YOU HAVE TIME TO WALK IT TO THE FCUKING DOGFOOD SHOP YOU FCUKING CRETIN YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY A PREMIUM FOR THESE PEOPLE TO DELIVER PREMIUM DOGCHOW TO YOUR LOFT APARTMENT. Even better, the ‘holistic diet advice’ for your dog is ‘tailored to your health goals’. WHAT ABOUT YOUR DOG’S HEALTH GOALS??? WHAT IF HIS HEALTH GOALS CONSIST SOLELY OF ‘EAT SOME DOG CHOW’?? This virus can’t come soon enough, frankly.
Smithsonian Open Access: I can’t describe this any better than they do: “Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.” ALL OF THIS IS USABLE! You can take, use, cut, play, remix…this is superb, and almost makes up for the dog thing.
Underwater Photographer of the Year 2020: These are always superb, but this particular image struck me this time around; as ever, though, this is an absolute treasure trove of gorgeous marine photography- the ‘behaviour’ category in particular is stunning.
The Cinema Club: This is such a lovely project. The Cinema Club presents a different film each week, for free, to audiences all around the world – actually turns out it’s funded by Chanel, which is a lovely piece of sponsorship by the legacy Nazi business – with a focus on short cinema. There is a VERY heavy arthouse vibe to the whole thing, which is no bad idea imho; looking through the archive suggests that there’s a real commitment to digging out slightly more unusual or challenging works, and if you’re a student of the medium (he says, like a dreadful fcuking pseud; sorry about that) then you’ll probably really enjoy this. There’s a newsletter too for those who want to be alerted to each new film – overall, this is a just a bit great.
Switching Software: A useful guide to the alternative software products available if you decide that you’d like to migrate yourself off the big tech stack for a bit. Featuring alternative for everything from MS Office to Google to Amazon to the Adobe Creative Suite, this is a really useful resource; be aware, though, that the reason that all the massive behemoth tech products are massive behemoth tech products is because they are so, so easy to use, in the main; honestly, Gimp is a lovely idea but I don’t think I’ve ever hated a UI more in my life, for example (for those of you who don’t know, Gimp is not only a sex slave in a latex dungeon but ALSO a free Photoshop equivalent – do not, unless you’re very patient, attempt to do any significant image editing with the former.
Songs That Sound The Same: A series of YouTube videos exploring those songs that basically are exactly the same except NOT QUITE. These are uncanny and will make you want to fire up that old copy of garageband or whatever it was that you used to make mashups with back in 2003.
BBC Earth Kids: I’m sure that all of you with kids will know this exists already, but on the offchance that you don’t…er…it does! BBC Earth Kids is a YouTube channel launched a couple of weeks ago by (full disclosure) part of a team I used to work with; it’s SUCH a nice idea, and definitely worth bookmarking if you’re looking for something to take your kids’ minds off Eggdog (for which I am now starting to feel a creeping sense of guilt and regret, and for which I feel I ought to apologise a bit).
The Coolest Websites You’ve Never Heard Of: I like to think that I provide a sort of window onto the rest of the web for some of you – a sort of ‘there by the grace of God go I’-sort of thing for those of you less-inclined to waste 7 hours a day staring right into the guts of the human machine than I am. Still, I have NOTHING on the people on this Reddit thread, which is a truly astonishing rabbithole of excellent, weird web. Trust me when I say that I spend more time online than you do – I am not proud of this, it is not a boast, it is simply an almost-certain fact – and I had heard of at best about 40% of these sites; there’s no rhyme or reason to them, just a collection of people recommending odd little web places that you might not have heard of, and it is just PERFECT. If I ever go on holiday again – and I will – consider bookmarking this and using it as the methadone to Curios’ full-on skag.
Fraidycat: I’ve featured Kicks Condor on here before – their roundup of the best of the past decade of the web was a glorious, weird compendium of online culture over the past decade, and they’re obviously committed to rooting out the odd online as they have just released the latest version of their STUPENDOUSLY useful Fraidycat programme. It’s a bit hard to describe, but basically Fraidycat lets you organise EVERYTHING you want to keep track of in the web in one place, sort of like RSS but…well…not-RSS. You can follow content from websites, social feeds, Twitch, Soundcloud…so many places. Honestly, if you’re the sort of person who has a well-organised regimen of web research that uses a large-but-defined selection of sources, this is potentially gold dust; as a journalistic research tool it also has vast potential. So, so clever, and not a little daunting.
“What fetish will you keep a secret from the people you know IRL?”: Thanks, Reddit! This sounds like it would be awful, but instead ends up being a genuinely lovely celebration of kink and difference – look, I have no idea what you’re into and it’s unlikely that I’ll judge (but, look, just keep it to yourself), but if you ever feel a bit, well, weird about it then please read this thread and reassure yourself that there is nothing so diverse and wonderfully-multifaceted as human sexuality – I mean, look, there really is something out there for everyone: “Floor Tiles. I don’t know why I just really like how clean they look and the colors and lines. The more detailed the pattern, the better. I get really upset when the tiles get dirty.” That last line SLAYS me.
Swyp: THIS IS A LINK TO ACTUAL BONGO DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK AT WORK. Also, it’s mobile-only so you’d be wasting your time on desktop. This is YouPr0n’s attempt to ruin teenagers forever by effectively creating a TikTok-esque interface for its video; users are presented with a seemingly-infinite selection of bongo clips across genres (I would bet a significant amount that it always defaults hetero/male gaze, though), swipe to flick to the next, with the promise of an underlying algo that learns your preferences and keeps feeding you what you like and, well, basically this is just a Skinner box for 14 year old boys, isn’t it? That sound you hear? That’s the sound of millions of them voluntarily self-isolating til they need skingrafts on their palms. On a more serious note, I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything hugely great about making a neverending stream of porn available with this much ease, especially if, like TikTok, it’s designed to keep you there for as long as possible via a hidden recommendation engine – still, it gives us something to do with all those gallons of hand sanitiser I assume we’re all sitting on.
Beat That: This is a promo game for…I think some motoring company – anyway, it’s basically a browser-based version of Outrun and it is SO MUCH FUN – seriously, I lost 15 minutes on this around 625am this morning and am still suffering for it now.
Play Emulator: Finally this week, as a special present to all of you and as an apology for having been away last week, have THIS. You remember the Internet Archive’s PC games selection, with EVERYTHING you remember from when you were a kid playable in-browser? Well this is that, but for console games. You want Mario64? You want MarioKart64? You want Metal Slug? OH MY GOD THEY HAVE EVERYTHING AND THEY ALL WORK. Honestly, find a corner where noone can see your screen and stay there for as long as you can – this is a GOLDMINE. Man was Metal Slug a bit racist, though, turns out.

By Julie Fisher McCarter

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THIS LOVELY RELAXING AMBIENT-Y SET BY ATLAST!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

Homophone Weakly: Not in fact a Tumblr, but it’s a single-serving website that talks about homophones and so it’s basically spiritually one at least.
Shifty Thrifting: Excellent tat found in charity shops. My girlfriend is now the proud owner of a mug which, inexplicably, reads “I HEART MUSTARD” – you too could be so lucky if you spent more time hanging out in Marie Curie Crouch End!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

I Don’t Give A Seat: Fabric patterns from seats on public transport around the world. Makes you appreciate the understated magnificence of Tfl.
Cecile Davidovici: Beautiful embroidered art; portraits and landscapes and still lifes, rendered in thread with uncommon, occasionally almost-impressionistic, skill.
Unfinstory: Oh this is SO GOOD! The artist who runs this – known only as Damian as far as I can tell – turns popular meme formats into comic strips. His ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ strip is honestly a work of genuis, but you will be taken on SUCH A JOURNEY by the four-part story of salad cat and the shouty women than I urge you to go and check it out RIGHT NOW.
Subpar Parks: US National Parks often receive reviews online – some of those reviews are bad, featuring such comments as ‘too many bugs’ or ‘just google ‘national parks sunset’ instead and save yourself the hassle’. Artist Amber Shares has taken to making promo posters for the parks in question, depicting them as described in these reviews. Beautiful.
The Dazzle Club: Makeup strategies to confuse surveillance equipment. As per the clothing lines that do the same, I would be amazed if this sort of aesthetic wasn’t coopted by proper fashion in the next couple of months.
Boys Who Can Cook: These boys CANNOT cook. The very definition of cursed food imagery.
David Henry Nobody Jr: I have no idea who this person is, but their aesthetic is basically my life now.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

The Robots are Already in Charge: Much of the talk over the past three years or so has been about the impact that automation will have on the workplace and, by extension, the workforce, specifically in terms of the potential drop in jobs available for us meatsacks as the robots slowly become better and cheaper and more efficient. This piece effectively explains why to be honest the robots are already in charge and have been for a while, talking you through the ways in which software is already being used to determine things like supplychain management, shift patterns, optimal performance standards, etc, and how these choices are then being imposed on workers, for better or oft for ill. Honestly chilling, not least the very real sense that noone seems to be paying too much attention to the fact that the numbers – the ‘units’ – being administered by machines are in many cases people, and people are perhaps less good at being optimised for manufacturing efficiency than, say, things made of metal and plastic.
The Future is Here: Along similar lines, and taking as its starting point the famous-but-possibly-apocryphal Gibsonism about the future’s uneven distribution, this is a smart, short essay looking at how much the differing pace of adoption of modern technologies, and differing usage, tells us about the equally different pace of progress. It also, as an aside, has an interesting rebuttal to the Pinker-ish utopianists who insists there’s never been a better time to be alive; that’s just what it looks like from where you’re sitting, bucko, and that’s not evenly-distributed either.
The Cost of Poverty: I thought this was fascinating, and deserves to be reas and discussed more widely – in it, Rutger Bregman investigates various studies that have been done on the impact of poverty on cognitive function and, conversely, the reverse impact of that poverty being lessened. Citing several studies, including one in India and one in the US, Bregman suggests that being poor has real, demonstrable impact on individuals’ ability to make effective decisions, process information and deal with stress – effects which are reversed when the conditions of economic hardship are removed. Which, it would seem, makes a pretty convincing argument against any sort of suggestion that poverty is in any way linked to a necessary lack of ability or intellect.
Manny for President: This was remarkable to me – I had no idea that Manny Pacquaio, the most famous Filipino in the world and one of the greatest boxers ever, a man who is still boxing – was also a Senator in the Philippines and is thought by many to be the most-likely successor to famously-awful dictatorial loony Rodrigo Duterte when the country comes to elect its next leader. ESPN sent a reporter to hang out with Pacquaio at home for a few days, seeing his lavish birthday party and his donation of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor outside his house, and it’s hard to read this and come away with any other impression than that a) it’s quite likely this man’s going to be in charge in a few years’ time; and b) it might not be a fantastic idea. This piece is, I presume, written by a boxing correspondent, and it reads that way (which is very much a compliment).
This Brand Is Late Capitalism: “I CALL THEM “THIS THING IS LATE CAPITALISM” ESSAYS. There are several variations on this genre of lifestyle writing. They don’t always invoke the “late capitalism” phrase explicitly, but all offer a critique of a popular brand or product in terms of its relationship to the system. Some are formulated as takedowns of companies that market themselves as millennial-friendly, or environmentally focused or, most often, feminist. In these essays, a writer will explain that, while this brand claims to be offering you empowerment, it is selling you a product at the end of the day: the enlightened brand is actually capitalist, but you might be fooled into thinking otherwise.” As a Web Curios reader you will doubtless be familiar with this very 2020 style of writing, and you may also be sick of it; this piece does a good job of explaining why, in both cases.
Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?: Sort of a companion piece to the above, this explores the ubiquite of the very particular millennial aesthetic – sans serif, pink, green, grey, sincere-but-not-too-much – and how there’s seemingly nothing that can’t be designed up to be sold to young people as a packaged ur-ideal (see the survival kits from a bit earlier as a prime example). Basically, it had me at this line: “The millennial aesthetic promises a kind of teleology of taste: as if we have only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at the objectively correct way for things to look.”
It Doesn’t Matter if Anyone Exists: Oddly enough, despite all the chatter about how exciting it is that GANs can now generate seemingly-infinite imaginary faces of people who’ve never existed, this is the first article I’ve read that asks what that might mean. It does, and its answer is the slightly depressing “it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean anything to us, because a necessary condition of the online life – whether extremely or otherwise – is to basically forget that all the people at the other end of the internet pipes are fully-realised individuals because if we didn’t do that we’d go mad. As such, these people who don’t exist are just another set of imaginary people populating our singular, solipsistic realities”. The actual essay’s loads better than what I just wrote, though, promise.
Post-TikTok: TikTok’s having a WILD lifecycle – we’ve already seen the first ‘WE MUST QUIT’ missive from a teen, and now we have the first piece about the formerly-famous who get left behind by the caprices of the algo. This is less about the poor kid and their feels – though I do feel a bit sorry for them – and more about how the necessary side effect of the algo is ALWAYS towards homogeneity; it’s worth noting that the creator themselves speaks of the shift away from ‘goofy, silly, spontaneous’ content towards the sort of polished choreography of the beautiful that’s increasingly coming to dominate the platform; once the pretty and stage school get hold of it, their inexorable gravitational pull will always necessarily distort any platform, especially one that’s trained on human feedback.
Why Restaurants Are Closing: If you have any interest at all in food and the business and economics of eating, this is a must-read; it’s all about the US, fine, but the parallels with the UK and London in particular are striking, not least the boom in delivery and the likely impact it will have on the trade when we’re all conditioned to think we can get whatever food we want whenever we want wherever we want, and that we don’t even have to leave the house or talk to anyone to get it. This is a fascinating read about one of the most brutal sectors to make a living in, and despite everything I would still love to work in food.
How Google Changed Diets: Another excellent food piece, this one looking at how Google used small bits of nudge-y psychology to change its staff’s eating habits in its canteens. I found this really interesting – in part because of the fact that these things quite obviously work, but also because I wonder how they would work in an environment where most of the people didn’t quite fit the profile of your typical Google employee and weren’t on the same sort of salary as your typical Google employee, and how this feels rather like an example of that unequal distribution of future benefit that we were talking about a few pieces back.
The Athletic: A bit ‘inside media’, but this is an interesting piece looking back at the UK lanch of sports website The Athletic in the UK last Summer – I was working at the company’s PR agency when it launched, and I remember thinking at the time that the fact that it had hired a comms shop before launch marked it out as…different from your standard media event. Anyway, this explores how they went about poaching a bunch of senior staff writers from across the UK press and how the operation functions – it also functions as a useful reminder of the way in which football journalism in the UK works. The number of women mentioned in the piece? One, I think.
Watching Magnus: Magnus Carlsen is widely considered to be the greatest chess player ever, effectively akin to a Bach or a Picasso or a Maradona – this piece explains how humanity’s best chess brain is amusing himself by messing around on various chess lifestreaming sites, playing all-comers under pseudonyms and generally just sort of goofing off and having fun with his community; there’s a lot in here about slightly arcane chess in-jokes, but the main point of interest to me comes at the end when people talk about the privilege of being able to see someone’s brain work as they strategise and plan; effectively this is like having access to a genius’ creative marginalia in realtime, which is, I think, something I’d not considered before. Imagine Lucien Freud’s studio on Twitch – I am frankly AMAZED that Koons or one of the other more media-savvy artists hasn’t already setup a constant livestream as a work in itself tbh.
The Llamas and the Dress: This is a whole article looking back on the day on the internet when those llamas escaped and the dress happened. I don’t like this article, I don’t find it particularly interesting, and I am including it solely so that I can point at it and say “look, look at this – THIS IS PEAK CONTENT WE DO NOT NEED ANY MORE CONTENT WE ARE MAKING CONTENT ABOUT THE HISTORY OF CONTENT NOW THIS IS THE END LET US PLEASE GET ONE DAY ESCAPE THIS RECURSIVE HORRORSPIRAL PLEASE’.
The World of Extreme Metal Logos: A very wholesome and slightly-heartwarming interview with someone who designs those spiky, largely-illegible logos that bands with names like “Bleeding Endoscopy” or “Necrotic Fistula Explosion” like to have; this is honestly quite charming, and I would absolutely commission a new logo for Web Curios in this style if I thought he took commissions.
Hideo Kojima: Hideo Kojima’s a neat little cipher for the world of games in general, and their relationship to the mainstream. If you’re into games you will know who he is and have opinions on his work; if you’re not, though, you will have NO IDEA. Contrast that with cinema, where even I, pretty much the opposite of a cinephile, know who Niklas Winding Refn is, for example. Anyway, Kojima’s basically a proper auteur in the old school sense, and this profile communicates much that is fascinating and baffling and frustrating and brilliant about his work – if you’re a fan, you might find this a bit superficial, but anyone else, especially non-gamers, really should read this; if nothing else, I promise you it will change your idea of what games are in 2020.
Shell Is Looking Forward: Malcolm Harris spoke at a meeting at Shell in London last year during which the company was ‘strategising’ about its future; this is his writeup of his experience in NY Magazine. It’s not, you won’t be surprised to hear, glowing in its praise of Shell, but it is surprisingly clear-headed about everything else; about how the fact is that Shell’s approach is just enough to keep them going in the face of what really ought to be far greater public opprobrium, and how their long-term vision – which they are currently executing surprisingly well – is to move to a position where they are seen as being at the vanguard of saving the planet whilst at the same time wringing the last drops of blood from all the bits of the selfsame planet whose extraction by people like Shell is killing us. It’s brilliant really, in a fcuking awful way.
Improvements Since the 1990s: A corrective to some of the more generally gloomy tone of much of Curios – a list of stuff that has gotten better since the 1990s. You will, I promise, feel a bit better about EVERYTHING after reading this; or alternatively, you will once again think that this stuff only applies if you’re middle-class and living in the affluent west, and that it’s meaningless for a good 70% of the world’s population. Your choice!
Crispy: On the massive industry built around making foods crispy. Crispy sells. Crispy plus salty plus fat plus sweet is basically what’s diabetes-ing us all into an early grave. This is SO SO INTERESTING, and I guarantee that by the end of this you’ll be craving one of those chicken sandwiches, despite yourself.
Homeless in Hampstead: Finally this week, a rare Guardian link – but this story is too good to miss. Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath Hampstead Heath to live in – this is his story. A beautiful piece of writing by Tom Lamont.