Webcurios 07/02/14

By IDA4

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

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

By Francesco Albano

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

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

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

By Matt Groening

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

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

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

By Tejal Patni

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

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

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

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

By Seung Hoon Park

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THAT’S IT FOR NOW

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