Webcurios 06/12/19 – webcurios

Reading Time: 34 minutes

There’s something I need to tell you. It might come as something of a blow. You may want to sit down.

WELCOME TO THE FINAL WEB CURIOS OF THE YEAR AND IN FACT OF THE DECADE!

Yes, that’s right – I would ordinarily do another one next week before turning off the internet for Christmas, but given that I’m likely to be up all night next Thursday, alternately swearing, smoking, drinking, crying, drinking, smoking, swearing, crying and drinking some more, it’s fairly certain that I would be in no fit mental or physical state to do this next Friday.

So, then. Here it is. The LAST ONE OF 2019. 38 editions, approximately 365,000 words (that’s…a lot, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll get help over Christmas), and the fat end of 3,000 links, all for YOU. In a brief moment of actual sincerity, can I take a moment to say thanks to all of you who read any of this rubbish, those who subscribe and those who don’t, those who nick whole chunks of it wholesale and pass it off as your own work, those who don’t tell their colleagues about it because it confers them a tiny modicum of professional advantage, those who hate it but read it anyway because it’s occasionally useful, and those of you who just ctrl-F for your own name and then stop reading when you’re not in it. Thanks, seriously, so much; this is the only thing I do that’s vaguely professional that I actually enjoy (and it’s the one thing I don’t get paid for – go figure), and I really appreciate you all for indulging me.

I hope you all have really nice Christmases and that none of you die. Or that if you do, your final words are ‘Read Web Curios’.

I love each and every one of you immoderately and probably more physically than you’re comfortable with, and I want you to know that deep within yourselves. TAKE ME INSIDE YOU NOW.

By Yanin Ruibal

FIRST OF THE LAST MIXES OF THE DECADE IS THIS NEW SELECTION COMPILED BY ADULT SWIM!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS VERY LITTLE HOPE FOR THE COMING DECADE BUT WHICH, IF IT IS ALLOWED TO WISH FOR ANYTHING, FERVENTLY HOPES THAT IT WILL FOREVER SEE THE END OF PEOPLE BEING PAID TO ANTHROPOMORPHISE MASSIVE, LISTED CORPORATIONS AND CONDUCTING WHIMSICAL OR ARCH INTER-BRAND CONVERSATIONS WITH EACH OTHER ON TWITTER FOR THE BENEFIT OF…WHO, EXACTLY? WHO? PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP:

Facebook Launches Photo Portability Feature: It’s what can only be described as a slow news day here in s*c**l m*d** land, thank fcuk, so we’re forced to kick off with this spectacularly underwhelming nugget of novelty from Facebook – users in Ireland can now easily export their photos to Google Photos (with other services being integrated in the future). This will in theory be rolled out to the rest of the world in the coming months, although it’s worth taking a moment to think about all the other features we’ve been promised by Facebook over the course of the past few years, not least the ‘scrub all the off-Facebook data from its ad targeting databanks’ thing, which you may recall was announced waaaaaay back in Spring 2018 and which, strangely enough, we’re still seemingly no closer to seeing rolled out beyond a few small test markets.
Facebook Updates Crisis Response Features: Absolutely NOTHING to see here from a brand point of view, but just f your collective i’s: Facebook’s post-disaster’s featureset is getting a series of updates, including the ability for Facebook posts to link to Whatsapp when offering or requesting help in the aftermath of a crisis. Perhaps slightly less positively, it “will allow people in affected areas to share first-hand information about what they’re witnessing or think others should know — like building collapses or road closures, for example”; an idea which sounds great in theory until you stop and think about people’s general attitude to truth and responsible communication on the platform as a whole. Prediction for 2020! Someone will use this feature to commit some sort of mid-level fraud in the aftermath of a major disaster, or to disseminate some sort of politically-motivated misinformation!
Instagram Will Now Make Kids Under 13 Lie About Their Age To Use The Platform: I mean, that’s not exactly how they’re describing it, but that’s effectively what’s going to happen. Whereas up til now anyone could sign up to Insta with nary a question about whether they were of a suitable age to be exposed to the weird world of lipfills and sponcon, now the platform’s going to to….ASK PEOPLE HOW OLD THEY ARE! Which will obviously do wonders to improve child safety. This will make no difference to anyone, in practice, apart from brands in regulated sectors who will now find it marginally-easier to advertise on Instagram as they’ll be able to at least in theory exclude the under-age from their targeting, whilst at the same time knowing that it’s all a fcuking joke. EVERYONE’S A WINNER!
Twitter’s Changing Ts&Cs: There’s nothing seismic in the new copy, or at least nothing that I as a non-lawyer can see, but the laws around posting edgy, NSFW stuff have been tightened up a bit; the linked piece goes into more detail, but, basically, if your Twitter account is posting a lot of what Twitter considers to be ‘sensitive material’ then expect to get banned. It’s basically another small step towards the tedious vanilla-ing of the digital commons; l appreciate that the nature of Twitter and its general openness and visibility as a platform means that the rules around bongo need to be a bit more restrictive than elsewhere but, on a purely personal level, I’d be far happier if they allowed the occasional profile that posted nothing but pictures of cartoon horse-men boniing each other and maybe got rid of some of those that spend all their time being needlessly antagonistic to strangers about politics.
A Post Full Of Up-To-Date Stats About Facebook And Instagram: Elsewhere on Imperica, this is a useful list of BIG NUMBERS about how HUGE AND VITAL FB and Insta are. None of these numbers really mean anything at all, but you might find them of some small help when you’re back at work in January and someone, again, asks you to pull together some slides about why ‘digital’ is really important and you stare at your monitor through a film of tears and realise that this is your life, now and forever.
YouTube Rewind: This year’s edition of YouTube’s annual Year In Review, presented on a typically lovely website and featuring a roundup video which, after last year’s backlash-filled farrago in which creators from across the spectrum railed against the sanitised, advertiser friendly version of the community presented by Google, is basically just a commentary-free highlights reel. If you spend any time on YouTube this site probably won’t tell you anything new, but I found it fascinating to go through the individual country-level breakdowns of most-popular stuff from 2019; I am now, for example, one of 192million people who have enjoyed the titular song from Indian smash film ‘Gully Boy’, and my life is all the richer for it.
Tumblr in 2019: My having to do the last Curios of the year a touch early means that I’m sadly (ha!) not catching all of the platforms’ year-end updates, but I very much enjoyed Tumblr’s this year, not least as it demonstrates the sheer breadth of the site’s users and their interests. It also demonstrates the incredible power of specific areas of the entertainment industry; if you want any sort of indication of the incredible global power of the MCU, take a moment to check out the top 50 lists of films, film characters and performers; you can’t move for fcuking superheroes. If nothing else, though, it’s worth spending a moment going through the top 30 Tumblr memes of the year; DOGE LIVES! It’s been a bit of a tough week, if I’m honest, and that particular nugget cheered me more than I’d expected.

By Vava Ribeiro

NEXT, TRY THIS EXCELLENT, GENTLE AMBIENT MIX FOR A COLD DECEMBER AFTERNOON, COURTESY OF COMMAND D!

THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS THAT IT SHOULDN’T ATTEMPT TO LECTURE ANY OF YOU ON POLITICS AND KNOWS THAT IT’S TECHNICALLY NONE OF ITS BUSINESS, BUT, EQUALLY, WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE ANY AND ALL OF YOU THINKING OF VOTING TORY NEXT WEEK TO PLEASE FCUK OFF, UNSUBSCRIBE AND READ ANOTHER BLOGNEWSLETTERTHING IN 2020 THANKYOU, PT.1:

The Best Websites of the Decade: To be honest, I could leave this here and be done with it this week. I featured the href site back in May, along with some gumpf about how it contained a mind-boggling amount of…stuff; its creator and curator, the mysteriously-named Kicks Condor, got in touch with me afterwards and we correspond every now and again, and this week they sent me this, and, well, BLIMEY. Kicks has collected all of their favourite links from the past 10 years into one place, and MY GOD is there a lot of wonderful, weird stuff in here. About 25% of it has been featured by me at one point or another, and there are some all-time classics of the web which you’ll certainly recognise, but there’s equally a load of amazing things I’d never even heard of. From Caine’s Arcade to Porpentine’s incredible, emo interactive fictions, from Frog Fractions to Twitch Plays Pokemon, this is a dizzying, eclectic and, for me at least, oddly-emotional look back at 10 years of online culture and creativity. Honestly, it’s like a museum of quite a large part of my life over a decade – I can’t recommend this enough. If you only click one link this week, make it this one; and save it somewhere, so when you’re desperate for some sort of distraction from the cirrhotic mess that is your family on boxing day you can use it to retreat into the wonderful, comforting, safe digital past.
Hyperlapse Map: This is great; sadly it only seems to feature videos filmed in London at present, although it’s designed to encourage other people to add their own. Regardless, the site mashes Google Maps with YouTube hyperlapse videos of people walking at superspeed around the city. Take a hyperlapse trip along the thames, through Hyde Park, across Hampstead Heath or around St Paul’s; there’s a nice touch here whereby the map shows the exact route of each hyperlapse and tracks where the camera is throughout, which is a rather cool feature for anyone wanting to play hyperlapse tourist in our glorious capital. If nothing else, you could probably do some quite interesting stuff with storytelling using this, dropping in odd little clues or Easter Eggs into these hyperlapses for people to find, or maybe linking them together through small visual connections. Or, you know, you could do nothing at all. It’s been a long year, I won’t judge you.
Drumbot: This week Amazon unveiled its exciting evolution of the Bontempi organ, with its AI keyboard which will let anyone create a hideous, cacophonous audiomess, cobbled together with ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!! Sadly you can’t get your hands on one yet, though, so instead you can make do with Drumbot, which uses similar tech to create a drum pattern for whatever atonal rubbish you play. You can use your keyboard or plug in an actual synth and use that; either way, you bash out a few bars of piano and the software will create appropriate drums to back you up; you can leave the piano line looping and the AI will keep listening and refining the drum track, and you can dial up or down the ‘heat’, increasing or decreasing the degree of leftfield craziness depending on your whims. I can’t play piano AT ALL, meaning this sounded horrific, but the drums still had a sort of skittering, free-jazz, Whiplash-style quality to them, which either means that I’m an unheralded musical talent or, perhaps more likely, that this can make a purse (not silken, but perhaps polyurethane) out of any old sow’s ear.
The AI Dictionary: A Twitter account which spits out new word definition a few times a day, each generated by what I presume is GPT-2. The methodology’s not explained in the bio, and frankly it’s been a long year and I’m tired and I can’t currently be arsed to dig around to read up on it (sorry, but, well, it’s not like you’re paying for this), but I get the feeling that the definitions are created by feeding the machine a few words of the actual definition and then seeing what it comes up with. Regardless, it’s rather good – the majority of these are only slightly wonky, meaning they could probably be passed off as actual, real definitions to people less familiar with English. I mean, look, I’m pretty decent at the language (not that you’d guess from reading Curios, I concede), and even I can’t be 100% certain that the dictionary definition of ‘melon’ isn’t in fact “n. a man’s head. When two men love each other, though, they will push the melon into one another, a smooch of molten love to the heart of sweetness.” I mean, it should be, right?
Boris Johnson Lies: Not that it matters, obviously. My friend Rob wrote this somewhere the other day, and it’s typically smart: “I think you’ll find that most people, when they see their side accused of lying either a) don’t believe it or b) accept it but think everybody does it. Basically lying isn’t the killer argument we all assume it is, and trust is more complex than thinking people are telling the truth.” Still, if you feel there’s any point in attempting to rail against the constant stream of lies spewing from the cakehole of our current Prime Minister, you might want to consider spreading this website, which seeks to act as a comprehensive and fact-checked compendium of all his many, many untruths, as far and wide as you can.
The Best-Selling Singles of EVERY Decade: A nice antidote to the misery of the last link, this is a wonderful Twitter thread in which someone called Archie Henderson (as an aside, what a great name) lists each of the best-selling singles from the past decades. You might think that there would be a point in history at which Archie might need to stop, what with the actual music industry not existing in any meaningful way before, say, the 1800s, and yet he does no such thing. This is very, very silly, but also very funny, and the commitment to the gag includes short audio snippets of each track. You can all find your own favourites, but I’m personally a big, big fan of the Rancid Prince’s 1353 classic ‘Be My Daddy’. Wonderful.
The Cards Against Humanity Challenge: CAH’s annual silly Thanksgiving stunt this year was a genuinely funny one – the game’s makers pitted its writing team against an AI (again, based on GPT-2) trained on the game’s corpus, with the challenge being to see which special, holiday expansion pack sold more. This works beautifully, mainly because the CAH conceit is very much about short, surreal, non-sequiturs, which is basically perfect for this sort of machine learning model, and it’s a really smart way of using AI for PR purposes (which can probably be ripped off at least once and possibly twice, frankly, particularly if you’re in the UK where noone really noticed this happening). I think CAH is a bit of a garbage game, personally, but I can’t fault their marketing which is STELLAR and up there with Pr0nhub’s in terms of consistently doing smart work.
The Best Photos of 2019: Look, it’s not my opinion, it’s National Geographic’s, and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, that’s who! These are, as you’d expect, wonderful; it’s literally impossible to make observations about THE RICH TAPESTRY OF HUMAN LIFE on display here without sounding like a tedious cliche, but, well, LOOK AT THE RICH TAPESTRY OF HUMAN LIFE! There’s one particular shot of a kid in Bolivia eating a watermelon in the back of a pickup truck which stood out for me, but every single one of these is a singularly-beautiful piece of photography.
History Muppets: A Twitter account sharing old clips and photos of the Muppets. I don’t care who you are, it’s physically impossible to feel too bad about anything when contemplating the Muppets; this is basically balm for the soul and you should follow it immediately.
LOLHunt: There is, quite simply, far too much STUFF on YouTube, and it’s getting harder and harder to find the sort of gently-humorous content that made the platform globally massive (when was the last time we saw a nice, U-rated clip like Charlie Bit My Finger, eh? SIMPLER TIMES. BETTER TIMES); hence LOLHunt, which each day lets anyone link a comedy YouTube clip for the community to vote on; it’s basically a subReddit in anything but name, with users up- and downvoting clips on the daily, providing a rolling stream of peer-reviewed ‘comedy’ content. If you’re the sort of person who finds footage of small children falling over to be HILARIOUS then you’ll love this; equally, if you’re in the unenviable position of needing to source bland, inoffensive, lightly-memetic content to populate a pointless social media presence for a brand that doesn’t need to have one, then this could well be a professional godsend. Also, it just taught me that very small comedy actors are very much a THING in Bangladeshi (I think) TV/Cinema, which, well, I don’t quite know what to do with.
Lostcode: A single-serving artprojectwebsitething, which I’ll leave to the creators to describe: “Lostcode is a graphic design project exploring the friction in translation”. Make sense? No, it doesn’t to me either, and yet the slightly weird and frustrating experience of the site – presenting a series of images that you can never quite see fully and which you can’t resize and which are constantly obscured and overwritten by the movement of the cursor across the screen, leaving indelible trails across everything as you try and make sense of what the site is for – absolutely (to my mind at least) conveys the experience of incomplete communication I feel when speaking to someone in a mutual second language. I JUDGE THIS ART A SUCCESS, should anyone involved in its conception or creation give anything resembling a flying fcuk about the opinion of some random webmong.
Liam: You may or may not have seen the wonderful, preposterous news this week that Facebook has created a chatbot (called, bafflingly, Liam) for staff to help them answer awkward questions from friends and family about exactly why they are working for Mark Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory; beautifully, someone’s mocked up a spoof version, which you can play with here and which does a wonderful job of skewering exactly how robotic and humourless the scripted lines provided to employees are. “Grandma: What are you planning to do to lose the baby weight? Chatbot: You rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer. First, though, I want to talk about how we got here.” See? It’s great. Also, it reminded me of the worst CV I have ever seen, owned by a man called Liam who described himself in his opening blurb as ‘an aspirant polymath’ and which made me wish more harm on a stranger than I think I have ever wished before in my life.
Longshot Features: Longshot is a company working in and around film. Their website is GORGEOUS, with all sorts of wonderful 8-bit, noir-ish representations of movies and TV portrayed as you scroll. Honestly, whoever did the artwork on this deserves a medal, this is beautifully-made and really, really slick.
Closer: Do you like techno? Are you a bit too old to go clubbing? DO YOU MISS IT??? If so, you might want to check out Closer, the new app from superstar DJ Richie Hawtin which accompanies the concert series he’s currently doing. “CLOSER is an interactive audiovisual platform designed to bring greater transparency to the underlying art of DJing by exploring Richie Hawtin’s ongoing CLOSE concert series. The unique vertical layout provides three distinct visual perspectives from the performances – crowd view, stage setup and equipment close-ups. Each panel offers different interactions including multiple camera angles, the ability to listen into separate audio channels and real-time track information.” I downloaded this yesterday to have a play, and it’s really very slick indeed, although to be honest more than anything it made me wish I was 20 years younger and about to spend large quantities of the weekend doing speed, so it’s perhaps not totally healthy.
Streetview Journey: Japanese artist Nao Tatsumi paints scenes they have seen on Google Streetview. There’s probably some sort of high concept here about this being two degrees removed from reality, and the oddity of representing a representation of something, but frankly I just really like the style here. The artists promises that they’ll open this out to make it a collaborative project by creating a shared Google Map for people to recommend places they’d like to see painted in the future, so if you’d like to submit, I don’t know, the Streetview of your house for consideration then perhaps consider bookmarking this page.
Chess Roots: On Monday I went to see an interesting play all about the Bobby Fischer / Boris Spassky cold war chess matchup of the early 70s (it could do with having 20m trimmed off the runtime, but it’s definitely worth a look), and it made me wish that I was smart enough to play chess properly. I mean, I know the rules, but I think the last time I tried to play I was beaten by an (admittedly very precocious) 11 year old and I think that might have been the moment when I sulkily resigned my king for good. Anyway, if you’re less of a chess moron than me, you might find this site, which collects a mind-boggling amount of data about chess matches past and uses it to draw inferences about probabilities and lets you model games on a move-by-move basis. I get the impression that this is quite possibly a staggeringly impressive piece of datawrangling and could be hugely useful in the right hands, but, mainly, it just makes me feel really, really stupid.
Parrot VC: A Twitter bot which spits out stuff about venture capital, investment and entrepreneurship, having been trained on a bunch of actual Tweets from actual VCs. It’s remarkable quite how hard it is to distinguish this stuff from the platitudinous guff spouted by actual, gilet-wearing lending partners. I mean, look: “You have to sense the vibe and have mutual respect/credibility on both sides. Not easy in early interactions” – that could literally be lifted from any blogpost on the Index Ventures website.
Esperanto Design: This is a really, really slick website housing a variety of conversations between its creator, Robin Noguier, who spent 2018 travelling around the world meeting designers from across the planet and talking to them about the craft and their work within it. Of most interest if you’re a designer – or aspirant designer – yourself, but worth a look just in terms of the quality of webdesign here; it’s really, really nice.
De Mi Rancho A Tu Cocina: You don’t need that translating, do you? Good. This is a BRILLIANT YouTube channel which apparently has absolutely blown up in Mexico since it launched a couple of months back; the woman who fronts it has become a bit of a bona-fide famous, it seems, and has been profiled in magazines and all sorts. The gimmick is that she presents a series of cooking videos from her farm in rural Mexico, showing how to make traditional dishes in the traditional manner, cooking on a hot stone, grinding everything by hand and demonstrating knifework that makes me wince in genuine fear every time I watch her grapple with an onion. It’s very much in the style of other global smash YouTube cookery hits like those village cookery guys from India, but the presenter has a charm all of her own and you will absolutely want to go and smash about 10million tacos after watching approximately 2 minutes of these.
The Airpod Prank: This is not big and not clever, and frankly is quite a dickish thing to do, but, well, the though makes me laugh a LOT. Art Director Pablo Rochat has created printable, life-sized images of Apple Airpods which you can print out and then stick to the floor to make people think that they’ve dropped theirs. WATCH AS UNSUSPECTING IDIOTS SCRABBLE TO PICK UP A PIECE OF PAPER THEY HAVE CONFUSED FOR AN EXPENSIVE LIFESTYLE ACCESSORY! All your Christmas fun in one place!
Bunnysitting: While you continue to ‘enjoy’ the rest of this, the final Curios of the decade (MOMENTOUS, isn’t it?), why not open this in another tab and enjoy the gentle, faintly-meditative process of ‘looking after’ an 8-bit virtual bunny? There’s literally nothing to do other than occasionally press a button when it needs something (it’ll beep at you every now and again), until it eventually grows up enough to leave the nest and, I don’t know, go to some sort of carrot-filled virtual bunny pasture or something. This is totally, totally pointless, and therefore utterly perfect in every way.

By Rob Kesseler

NEXT, SOME CLASSIC HOUSE FROM THE SEEMINGLY-IMMORTAL SEB FONTAINE!

Ecology Photographs of the Year: Apologies for the slightly shonky slideshow link here, but, bafflingly, despite this being the official selection of the British Ecological Society of the best ecology photos of the year, they don’t actually appear to have published them anywhere on their own site; still, if you don’t mind the slightly annoying slideshow interface, there are 30 gorgeous shots of nature here to enjoy. My personal favourite’s the one of the cow and the bird of prey chilling out together in the Andes, which is a sentence I can honestly say I don’t imagine has ever been written before in the English language, so well done me.
Cloze: Do you sometimes feel that your friendships and personal relationships are, well, fine, but perhaps lacking the rigour and structure of your professional interactions? Do you wish that you were able to manage all aspects of your life in the same way that you do your work? Are you some sort of monster? That’s the only explanation I can come up with as to why anyone in their right mind would want to use Cloze, a service which offers to keep all the information about all your personal contacts and relationships in one place, to let you simply and cleanly manage all your interactions optimally. It’ll keep track of who you see when, what people are interested in, their birthdays and significant dates, and will basically outsource the business about gving a fcuk about anyone other than yourself to a machine, which is…vile, frankly. The worst thing about this – and there are many, many aspects to hate – is the line in the blurb about how the software ‘will learn who is important to you’, which, by implication, means that it will also determine who isn’t. Imagine explaining that to an old mate who you’ve not seen for a while: “yeah, sorry man, my virtual relationship manager algorithmically determined that you’re simply not a high-value stakeholder in my life any more”. Jesus fcuking wept.
The Top 25 News Photos of the Year: As picked by The Atlantic. Number 23 in particular is a masterpiece imho.
The LIFE Photo Archive: Seeing as we’re doing photos, this has been online for AGES but I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly linked to it; Google’s full archive of LIFE Magazine’s photography, searchable and browsable by decade, going back to the 1860s. Lose yourself in the past; staring at photos of the Great Depression is a surprisingly effective way of making oneself feel generally more positive about the state of the world in 2019, oddly enough.
Fund They Work For You: They Work For You is a great website on which a surprisingly-large amount of other webstuff rests; I probably don’t need to explain it to you, but, in case you’re foreign or politically disinclined, it’s a site designed to present an easily-accessible record of the political activity of each member of the UK parliament, from their voting record to their extra-Parliamentary interests. It needs 25k in the next couple of weeks to guarantee its existence into 2020; at a time when the state of this countries political landscape is about as bleak as it’s been since the 80s, you sort of feel it would be a shame were one of the more effective mechanisms to shine a light on the festering sump-pit of our elected representatives to go under. Chuck them a tenner if you can spare it, it’s hugely worthwhile.
Buried Treasure: A brand-new website, set up by John Walker who used to work on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where he’ll review obscure and un-appreciated indie games for the benefit of the wider world. If you play games and want some recommendations for things to play that are, well, a bit more interesting than COD, this is definitely worth a look.
Nothing Much Happens: It’s odd how cultural and social mores shift; a decade ago, the idea of a website or app featuring ‘bedtime stories for grownups in which nothing much happens except some gentle narration of some pretty banal things, delivered in a soothing American burr’ would have prompted widespread laughter and derision; now, though, you’ll all be sitting there stroking your chins and thinking things like ‘ASMR’ and ‘self-care’ and ‘wellness’. Hm. Anyhow, this is exactly that – if you’re after a regular series of sleep-aid audio tracks, this isn’t a bad place to start. Doesn’t quite hit my specific ASMR trigger points, but that’s not to say it won’t tingle you right up something chronic.
Forbidden Snacks: A great subReddit, featuring stuff that looks a lot like appetising food but which really, really isn’t.
The Carpentry Compiler: This is the future of IKEA, or of someone else’s business if they can get there first. Honestly, I think there’s a brilliant idea and business in this just waiting to happen. It’s an academic paper, so I’m presenting it more as an idea for you all to marvel at than something entertaining to click on, but, look: “Our carpentry compiler converts high-level geometric designs made by users to low-level fabrication instructions that can be directly followed to manufacture parts. The compiler performs multi-objective optimization on the low-level instructions to generate Pareto-optimal candidates.” So what that means is that the researchers involved in this have developed a model which will take any 3d design and automatically work out what sort of component parts would need to be manufactured to construct it. Which means, FLATPACK ON DEMAND, sooner rather than later; imagine being able to sketch out a bespoke wardrobe or whatever, sized to your spec, and then in the click of a mouse have software work out the exact number and dimensions of bits of MDF you’ll need to construct your very own personalised Billy. Honestly, this sort of thing will be revolutionary when it comes to manufacturing, although equally you can guarantee that even in this future timeline they will somehow contrive to include an insufficient quantity of tiny dowel connectors.
Andrea Animates: The website of animator (whodathunkit) Andrea Love, who works out of the US and whose work involves the creation of gorgeous, felt-and-wool worlds which are painstakingly animated in stop-motion. The craft on display here is absolutely astonishing, and there’s something pleasingly 70s and Trumpton-esque about the vibe of a lot of the pieces. Love runs a whole animation studio, so I imagine she’s available for commissions should you feel inspired by this – honestly, it’s so, so lovely.
Libro: Christmas is very much a time when it’s quite hard to force myself not to use Amazon – DAMN YOU MECHABEZOS WITH YOUR INCREDIBLY CONVENIENT GIFTWRAPPING AND SHIPPING SERVICE – but I feel marginally-better about my lapses when I find things like this, which offer new and hitherto-unimagined ways to slip the octopus-like grasp of the world’s ‘everything’ brand. Libro is an audiobook platform THAT ISN’T OWNED BY AMAZON! That’s right! Audiobooks, and Jeff doesn’t see a penny! Instead, profits from sales can be allocated to independent booksellers, which is a fabulous idea and one that should be celebrated. I haven’t done an extensive dive into the catalogue yet, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be reasonably comprehensive; please, if you do audiobooks, do give this a try, if not to fcuk Jeff then to unfcuk your friendly neighbourhood booksellers.
The Deep Sea: It’s really, really deep. Scroll though this lovely site as it takes you down, down, down…past the weird anglerfish, past the goblin sharks, past the blobfish, to the very deepest parts of the sea where only the very, very gelatinous can survive. Mesmerising, and it taught me that there is a sea creature whose ACTUAL NAME is the ‘Terrible Claw Lobster’ and now I am full of questions. ‘Terrible’ as in ‘inspiring of terror’, or ‘terrible’ as in ‘not particularly good’? If the latter, how does it fail at lobsterness? Anyone?
Jellycam: You want a livefeed of the jellyfish at Monterey Bay aquarium? Well, click this link during opening hours (try from around 4pm UK time) and ENJOY!
Smash Illustrations: There was a piece in the longreads a few weeks ago about the incredible ubiquity of the flat, cartoony art-style popularised by millennial-targeting lifestyle brands of the late-2010s; this site is doing nothing to reverse that ubiquity, instead presenting a variety of this style of illustration for designers and artists to use as they desire. On the one hand, potentially a really useful and crucially cheap way of getting some decent-looking illustrations for your website; on the other, know that it will look like EVERYTHING ELSE out there. Win some, lose some.
The Powerpoint Game Jam: Which is the most powerful of the MS Office tools (and is there a less-engaging opening conversational gambit that you can imagine?)? Is it Excel? After all, this year we’ve seen a fcuking drum machine built out of spreadsheets. No, no it is not. It is POWERPOINT, because you can literally make videogames in it. Slightly simple games, fine, but still.The Powerpoint Games Jam is inviting anyone and everyone to build a game in Powerpoint and submit it for consideration; it only started on Sunday and runs til the end of the year, so it’s light on entries at present, but there are four ‘games’ there already; honestly, do try at least one of them. With a bit of luck you can probably pass it off as ‘work’; if nothing else, it will give you a few new ideas to enliven your next set of pointless, overthought slides. Here’s an idea – why not present your next ‘deck’ (you fcuks, STOP CALLING THEM THAT) as a piece of interactive fiction? It won’t make you any more likely to win the business but it will make your working life marginally-less stultifyingly dull for the time it takes you to build it.
Shania Twine: A short piece of interactive fiction. I imagine you can probably guess the gag at the heart of this, but, if not, ENJOY!
Curious Expedition: This is just a demo, fine, but there’s enough fun and replayability in this charming tiny, browser-based pixelated exploration-simulator to keep you distracted for a good 25 minutes or so. You play as an explorer, undertaking an intrepid journey into the unknown to find a golden temple or somesuch. Fight your way past wildlife! Meet the natives! Battle hunger, thirst and insanity! Ignore the slightly tone-deaf colonialism of the whole thing! This is, my pointless wokery aside, absolutely lovely (and the full game, also playable in-browser, is only a tenner if you like it enough to shell out).
Push The Button To Win: Finally in this week/year/decade’s selection of miscellania, this is a simple game whose premise you can guess from the title. I didn’t expect it to affect my quite so deeply, though. I’m not joking – it properly shook me in a way few other games have managed this year. I’m not sure if I like it or not, but I am hugely impressed by the mechanic and idea. Try it out, see what you think (and, more importantly, feel).

By Lydia Blakely

LAST UP IN THIS DECADE’S MIXES, A CLASSIC OF FAST BREAKS AND BASS FROM SEVEN YEARS AGO BY MACHINEDRUM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

Graffiti Removal: POSSIBLY NOT A TUMBLR! Sorry, can’t be bothered to check the source code here, but this is a great selection of images and videos of blanked-out, covered-up graffiti, which in each instance creates an odd artwork out of its absence.
Adam Apples: DEFINITELY NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! But very much ought to be, so, well, here! Adam’s Apples involves the titular Adam writing all about different types of apple. Adam, it’s fair to say, is very much an apple enthusiast, and I applaud his indefatigability in attempting to eat every single varietal in the world.
Someone Tell The Boyz: This is great: “I run datasets of iconic feminist texts through a simple textRNN, generating new feminists texts in the legendary words of bell hooks, Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde. Some are funny. Some are poetic. Some make no sense at all and some are way too real.”
Gromm-it: “An art/media project by journalist Paul Lukas, explores the juxtapositions resulting from the installation of metal grommets in unlikely surfaces, especially foodstuffs.” This is…unsettling.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

Lucas Zanotto: Wonderful, pleasing, soothing, cute, whimsical 3d CG animations. Honestly, these really are lovely.
Trees of Rotterdam: Insert your own unfunny horticultural gag about Dutch Elms here.
Kagensound: This is a great feed, by a carpenter who makes those wonderful, intricate puzzle boxes of the sort we all used to keep our drugs in when we were 16/17 til we realised that the more battered we became the more impossible it became to access our stash. I want ALL of these.
Hipdict: Like Urban Dictionary, but on Insta – anyone can submit their own definition for approval, which might get used in a post. The quality varies but there are occasional nuggets of comedy/surrealism gold in here.
Sh1t London Guinness: An account dedicated solely to outing crap pints of Guinness being served in the UK’s capital. Would be immensely improved by explanation of exactly why the pints in question are so sh1t – as a non-Guinness drinker, these all look like the same slurry to me, but I’m sure connoisseurs of the black stuff will get the nuance here.
Laira Maganuco: The most horrible little silicon sculptures you ever will see. Proper nightmare fuel, this, and the sort of thing that will give you a nasty little scare when it pops up in your feed in between dogs of Insta and Rupi fcuking Kaur.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The NPR Book Concierge: Not so much a longread as a longread sourcing tool, this is NPR’s annual service which lets you browse their selections for books of the year, and compile your own potential Christmas book-buying list based on various tags and filters you can apply, from ‘Book Club Favourites’ to novellas. It’s a US list, which has pluses and minuses; on the one hand, it contains loads of things that simply didn’t cross my radar as a consumer of UK book reviews; on the other, there are a few on here which won’t be available in the UK til next year. Regardless, it’s a really good tool for working out which books you’ll be using to avoid talking to your family over the festive season.
52 Things I Learned in 2019: I think this is the third of these annual lists I’ve featured in Curios now, and, as per, it’s once again the best and smartest and most illuminating summary of the past 12 months that you’ll see anywhere. It’s exactly what it says – a list of 52 facts, with citations, which Tom Whitwell has learned this year, connected by no particular theme whatsoever; oddly, though, these 52 things coalesce to create a very real-seeming ‘this is where we are at the end of the 2010s’ feeling about the whole thing. Honestly, SO interesting, and if you’re a planner/strategist type there are at least a dozen things in here that you can cobble a workable ‘insight’ out of (words I never want to hear again in the decade to come: insight).
The Era of the Political Influencer: I don’t want to sound smug here, but I totally called this (admittedly I called it about a month ago, around Twitter’s political advertising ban, and actually this isn’t about Twitter at all, so, er, I should probably shut my maw) – this piece looks at the growth (in the US at least) of politicians and parties paying online influencers to shill their message on their behalf. Want a vague idea of the future in store for us all? Jake Paul delivering pro-Trump sponcon, wearing a MAGA hat. Fine, it may not be him, but just you wait.
The Future of S*c**l M*d**: Or at least an imagined future for it. This is an interesting NYT piece which takes a speculative look at how the next ten years might see our relationship with the platforms and each other change; it’s airy rather than particularly precise, but there’s an interesting line about ⅔ of the way through which alludes to the predicted increased importance of curators and gatekeepers rather than the untrammeled, unfiltered firehose of everything from everyone that characterised the early days of the s*c**l m*d** boom – which, obviously, is great news for me and my continued railing against the inevitable onset of senescence and obsolescence. Curios for ALL!
The Smartphone Election: This is a good piece of reporting by the Guardian, who got people to agree to have their smartphone usage monitored over a short period during the election to show how they consume news and behave online. The findings are largely unsurprising – they get news from Facebook, they consume the reaction gifs rather than the event, they comment without reading and they bait their opponents and, generally, display the same largely-unpleasant traits that we all tend to when experiencing life via a screen. Except, well, the general thrust of this is to generally go ‘look, phones are ruining everything and our politics is just one example’; but, er, isn’t the problem here not the tech but the people? Isn’t it just that we’re (I’m totally including myself and you all in this too) all stupid and lazy and facile and mean and cruel and vindictive and tired and bored and scared and easily-distracted and all the phones are doing is magnifying these traits? Whose fault is it that we’re getting our information on the party manifestos from a 1-minute ‘explainer’ vid on LadBible? I don’t – and, trust me, it pains me to say this – think that it’s Zuckerberg’s.
Jonah Peretti’s Decade: After last week’s chat with Insta’s Systrom, this week we can enjoy a wide-ranging and surprisingly-candid interview with Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, a person arguably as influential in shaping the world we now find ourselves in as many of the silicon valley lot. Peretti’s always an engaging interviewee, and quite obviously a very, very smart person indeed; I found a lot to enjoy in here, not least his thoughts on how the collision and merging of news and entertainment has affected politics and the discourse around it. I did find his comments about VC money somewhat disingenuous, though; Jonah, mate, HOW many hundreds of millions of their cash have you burned through?
Oil Is The New Data: Here’s a cheering article, describing the increasing symbiosis between the big oil and big data industries, and in particular how the big Cloud players have been quietly and effectively building up massively lucrative relationships with Exxon et al to help them continue to extract fossil fuels more effectively than ever before. Couple that with the environmental burden of the huge server farms which are the very physical reality of the whimsical ‘Cloud’ of one’s imagination and we’re heading for a point in the not-too-distant future where I think we’re going to see these companies get an absolute kicking for their planetary impact (for all the difference that will make).
Fact Checking Online: Consider this your annual act of familiar public service – send this guide to every single family member you have. They’ll think you’re a patronisingh fcuk, in all likelihood, but if it lessons the likelihood of even one of them believing some blatantly made-up rubbish on Facebook then, well, it’s probably worth it. This is a genuinely good and clear series of precepts and principles by The Verge, and it’s especially worth sharing with your kids should they be of an age where it’s starting to concern you how much Joe Rogan they’re consuming.
Grindr Worldwide: Honestly, the revamped FACE has been publishing some really excellent journalism of late, credit where it’s due. This is a look at what it’s like using Grindr in countries around the world in which homosexuality is either illegal or still not culturally acceptable, and is a decent reminder of the less-than-perfect status of LGBTQx rights worldwide. It’s full of lines like this, which is lovely but also incredibly poignant: “For the longest time I thought I was the only queer person in my hometown, which is outside Kampala. Then when I was home for Christmas break after I got Grindr, I saw a bunch of people online. I was like: “Where the hell were these people when I was living here?!” My sexuality is easy to spot – I’m like a giraffe in a sea of buffaloes – but no one had ever approached me before.”
A History of the New York Subway Map: A beautifully-designed interactive in the NYT, detailing the history behind their (less good) version of the tube map. Interesting historically, but included here mainly because I adore the art style and page direction (if that makes sense).
Inside Twitch’s Wildest Talk Show: This is fascinating, and absolutely a version of the future. Twitch is doing its best to pivot from just being about gaming to instead being seen as a viable ‘future of TV’ platform; formats like the one profiled in this piece (from gaming website Kotaku), in which a bunch of popular streamers effectively take part in some sort of extremely noisy, borderline-incomprehensible chatshow, very much feel like the sort of thing that mainstream broadcasters are going to be starting to experiment with soon. Seriously, I’d put money on someone at the BBC or Channel 4 currently attempting to pitch a Twitch-based extension to an existing show or as a new talent play.
27 Hours In An Airport: It’s fair to say that Singapore’s Changi Airport has relatively little in common with, say, Luton or Stansted (other than the fact you can presumably fly from there – the piece is light on the actual ‘air’ bits); it’s basically some sort of weird, liminal-international-themepark-boutique-mallspace (a designator which I can already tell is going to catch on – you read it here first!), and this piece, in which the author spends more than a day hanging out there, is weirdly conflicting. On the one hand, it does sound fascinating and future and incredible, and the sort of thing that any self-respecting connoisseur of odd futurestuff very much ought to wander round; on the other, it’s another example of the peculiar flatness of the everynowhere international aesthetic which characterises so much of middle-to-upper-middle-class experience wherever you are in the world, and which is becoming quite boring to me.
The Twitter Art Tshirt Scam: Not particularly long, but very interesting, look at how bots scour Twitter for art to steal to print on tshirts which are then drop-shipped for profit, and how the artists decided to fight back. The extent of the automation of production here is slightly mind-blowing.
Death Stranding: Death Stranding is a game I am comfortably certain I will never, ever play, but one I am delighted exists so that I can read essays about it like this one. Even if you’re not interested in games or gaming, please give this a go – it’s clever, well-written and asks lots of interesting questions about what games are for, what they can tell us about things, and the nature of ‘fun’ as a concept. The game, the author argues, “is a genuine success in asking what empathy is possible in a world where the delivery of commodities by bedraggled and brutalised workers has become the primary means of human contact.” Come on, don’t you want to read all about it?
Pahologic: Another piece about games – sorry, but this one’s great too, and, per the last one, deserves to be read even if you’re not a gamer. Seriously, if you’re any interest in narrative design and systems interactions and user experience then it will be a properly rewarding read; and if you just like reading about videogames, it’s equally good. It’s about an old Russian game called Pathologic, widely renowned as one of the most punishing and un-fun expressions of what a game can be, and at the same time hailed as one of the most unique artistic achievements yet-created in the medium. It’s another game I will never, ever play, but about which I could read volumes; honestly, this is SO interesting, I promise you.
More Pathologic: Ok, so this isn’t an article – it’s, er, a two-hour YouTube dissection of the game described in the last article. It won’t be for everyone – I mean, it’s two hours ffs – but if any of the stuff in the last article appealed to you then PLEASE WATCH THIS. It’s one of the most impressive pieces of in-depth criticism of a work of art I have ever seen, and the way it explains and highlights the amazing narrative design and construction of the game is masterful (no hyperbole, it really is that good). The YouTuber in question is about as pleasant company as a YouTuber can be (although they are still very much a YouTuber and possibly may have watched a tiny bit more ZeroPunctuation than is necessarily good for them); I NEVER watch this sort of thing, but sat mesmerised through the whole thing on Tuesday evening while a rather bemused cat sat on my lap and watched with me (thanks Lebowski). Take punt on this, I promise it’s more interesting than you think (but you do need to be into videogames, probably).
The Clout: A lovely pen portrait of what’s presented as a pretty archetypal US teen – obsessed with their online rep and making it in some way online, in this case through meme accounts on Insta. What’s been interesting over the past few years has been the shift amongst kids from wanting to be YouTubers to now just wanting to be famous – the observations in here about the myth that YT created around ‘being paid to just live your life and be yourself online’ must be one of the most pernicious canards of the modern world (he says, both pretentiously and old mannishly!).
Kunt: Last year, one of my Christmas books was “I, Kunt: How I became (and remained) a minor internet hit singer”, the autobiography of one-man-internet-sensation and occasional chart-botherer Kunt, whose Casio-backed paens to some pretty awful stuff were one of my favourite online things in the early-00s. It is, I promise you, one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life; not, fine, a great work of literature, but I read it all in about three hours and regularly had to stop to wipe the literal tears away. Kunt has jacked in showbiz now and is back to being a painter and decorator, but did this interview with John Fleming and I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. Please, please read this, if you’re not familiar with his work – and then go and check out the best political song ever written, which will give you a feel for the man’s style.
Archiving the 20teens: This is VERY arch-theoretical, but no less interesting for it; a comprehensive look back over the semiotics of fashion over the past decade. This should give you a feel for the style – I love it, but I can see how some might find it a bit hard work: “It’s strange to still participate in the tradition of year end lists, of reviews and summaries, at a time like this. Recollection feels like the ritual of a simpler time, this was a year ignorant of history. 2018 encompassed an era—transformative shifts that typically take much longer to unfold established themselves faster than they were named and traditional record keepers couldn’t be trusted to keep track. Cable news networks were white noise machines. Pundits and columnists debated questions the answers to which are already abundant in the injustices of the world. National papers scrambled to give Nazis the benefit of the doubt, the suits employed at legacy media outlets identified more with the authority of fascists in neckties than with the people targeted by them. In the meantime, the only industry keeping a healthy sense of the times was fashion—an industry rarely credited for having a healthy sense of anything. Perhaps the intuitive collective choices of its community around the world, has yielded a usable record for this era. If the future can be read in tea leaves, the present can be read in how people get dressed.” Regardless, this is a really interesting look at fashion, culture, society and politics over the past 10 years
The Future is Menopausal: This is brilliant, and neatly embodies a lot of what I’ve seen and heard older women saying and writing over much of the past couple of years: “The “arc of history,” as we were all sharply reminded in the wake of Trump’s election, doesn’t bend toward sh1t. Progress will always need a solid push. And the hill is particularly steep right now, with nothing short of the fate of humankind threatened by climate change. Increasingly, as Klein notes, we’re forced to acknowledge that climate denialism and misogyny go hand in hand. As we age into this new feminism, all those women who are embodying their new post-reproductive normal have the opportunity to not just change the future of their aging lives but the future of the world.”
As A Teenager: Megan Nolan is, as I’ve said here before, an excellent writer; this is her latest piece in the New Statesman, about the memory of the intensity of emotions felt when young when contrasted against the pale simulacra you feel as you age. Beautiful, beautiful prose.
63 Up: Last up this decade, and fittingly so, this is from the NYT and it’s about the Up’ series of films which for five decades have followed the lives of a group of people who were selected to take part in a documentary about British society and social mobility in 1964. This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all year, and I’m not ashamed to say I wept copiously at points throughout (it’s been that sort of week tbh). Please, please read it – all of human life is here.