Webcurios 07/06/16

FANCY AN EPIC 7-HOUR AMBIENT MIX? OF COURSE YOU DO!

THE SECTION WHICH SHOULD THINGS CONTINUE AS THEY ARE MAY JUST REPLACE ITSELF WITH A HEADING READING ‘EVERYTHING IS MARGINALLY MORE LIKE SNAPCHAT THAN IT WAS LAST WEEK’, BECAUSE REALLY:

• Facebook Brings Back Marketplace: I was never really sure what caused Facebook to shelve the earlier iteration of this service way back in…er…nope, sorry, I can’t be bothered to check the timing on this and I know you don’t care so stop looking at me like that. Anyway, it’s now BACK – you can once again use Facebook to list products for sale and browse available stuff. It defaults to being location-based, prioritising listings in geographical proximity to you, but you can browse all over the place should you desire. No obvious BRAND ACTIVATION opportunities here that I can think of, other than the inevitable WE DID IT FIRST kudos of shoehorning some marketing activation into what is effectively FB’s Craigslist, but I thought you might want to know about it anyway.

• Shopify Lets People Shop Within Messenger: One of the very few pieces of actual news in this section this week; Shopify’s systems which allow retailers to sell through their chat tech are now able to integrate with payments systems, allowing a whole transaction to take place entirely on Messenger. Which is obviously a BIG THING in theory, although there’s still no data to suggest exactly how much people are clamouring to buy stuff through FB. No matter – BUY MORE THINGS, PEONS.

• FB Launches Messenger Lite: So even people with appalling signal strength can avail themselves of the opportunity to swap inanities with their ‘friends’ and have pretend, non-conversations with idio bots. LOOK IS THERE ANY NEED FOR BOTH WHATSAPP AND MESSENGER TO EXIST NOW? IS THERE? HOW MANY DIFFERENT FCUKING WAYS DO WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE IN EXACTLY THE SAME FCUKING WAY? Oh God I feel old this week, so old.

• Facebook Testing What Is Basically Snapchat In Messenger: Look, just read this. I’ll wait for you: “At the top of the Messenger thread list, users see a row of tiles representing “My Day” and friends’ Days they can watch, but there are also prompts like “I’m Feeling”, “Who’s  Up For?” and “I’m Doing”. Tapping on these tiles provides a range of filters “I’m feeling…so blue” with raindrops and a bubbly blue font, “I’m feeling…blessed” with a glorious gold sparkly font, “Who’s up for…road trip” with a cute car zooming past, or “Who’s up for…Let’s grab drinks” with illustrated beer mugs and bottles that cover the screen.” Doesn’t that sound ghastly?

• Whatsapp Also Ripping Off Snapchat Some More, Because Really, Why Not?: You can now draw on your pictures, much like a child decorating the walls with its own scat. Calloo ca-fcuking-llay, right?

• YouTube Adds Paid Promotion Disclaimer Option: This is smart/useful – YouTube channel owners can now add a simple disclaimer overlay to new and pre-existing videos which flag that what viewers are watching contains sponsored content, which is a nice and simple way of getting around all those pesky advertising regs without at the same time having to get your perky, bright-eyed ‘influencer’ to do anything as grubby as disclose a commercial endorsement in the video.

• Automobility: A lovely, lovely site by Ideo, exploring ideas around the future of cars and driving and a whole host of related concepts. The way the site is built and structured and presented is just really slick (and, as a bonus, the actual STUFF on it is pretty interesting, even as someone who has had literally one driving lesson in their life and is still sort of weirdly impressed when people it knows can actually drive cars), and definitely worth examining from a UX/UI point of view.

• The Book of Noodle: Gorillaz – the band still getting the credit for creating the scifi hiphop concept album voiced by a cast of fictional characters despite the fact that two of the same people involved in the original album – Albarn and Del – actually created it a few years previously with the excellent Deltron 3030 project which you really ought to listen to RIGHT NOW – announced a new THING this week, through a series of short videos on Twitter, each of which make up the BOOK OF NOODLE. Which is quite a nice way of announcing stuff, if you like that sort of thing.

WHY NOT TRY THE RATHER BEAUTIFUL, ETHEREAL ELECTRO OF BEN PRUNTY’S ‘CYPHER’ NEXT?

THE SECTION WHICH IS BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT THE UK NEEDS ITS OWN VERSION OF PEPE, SEEING AS WE CONTINUE TO ATTEMPT TO MATCH THE US IN OUR POLITICOCULTURAL RACE TO THE VERY BOTTOM, PT.1:

• The Life Calendar: Burdened as I have been this week with cheery thoughts of mortality, this app which lets you record your thoughts about your life on a week-by-week, colour-coded basis seems strangely apposite. It’s very beautifully designed indeed, and the basic idea – that each week of your life is represented by a square which you can assign different colours and notes – is sort of lovely in a ‘let me build a light-touch patchwork quilt recording the progress of my existence and emotions on a weekly basis’ way. Except I can only begin to imagine the sort of bleak life reassessment you’d have to engage in were you to realise exactly how many of the weeks are a uniform dun colour, stretching to infinity. SMILE, KIDS!

• Sweatcoin: ‘Get paid for walking’  is the basic gimmick here – for every 1000 steps you take, tracked by your phone, you earn a ‘Sweatcoin’ (no, I don’t think it’s a nice term either); accumulation of these will eventually enable you to buy stuff on the platform with your virtual currency. Not sure how many partners they have on board at the moment – this will live or die based on how many recognisable brands sign up to give stuff away in exchange for a bit of marketing.

• The Information Is Beautiful Awards 2016: Another year, another opportunity for me to send the link to this round to people I work with with a note politely explaining that this is how dataviz should look and that frankly the world would be a better place if people stopped churning out sh1t ‘infographics’ as a tick-box exercise and actually bothered to spend some proper time and money making stuff that is actually visually interesting and in fact informative rather than simply instead taking a bunch of statistics out of a report and creating poorly-designed icons to sit alongside some text and pretending that that’s an adequate graphical interpretation of a data source; you can, I am sure, imagine exactly how much colleagues relish this sort of helpful intervention and the high esteem in which I am held in the workplace. Ahem. Anyway, there is *so* much lovely stuff in here so have a browse.

• Biggy Pop: You have all seen this, right? The Instagram feed which shares photos of Iggy Pop’s pet cockateel, which is apparently called ‘Biggy Pop’? Look, just click this link – whatever is happening in your life right now and however hard things feel there is NO WAY you will not be made at least momentarily cheerful by this short video.

• Fonts In Use: An independent archive of typography from all over the place – designers, typographers and fans of excellent kerning will find much to enjoy here.

• Pearl: There is, I’m sure, a wealth of data out there which describes exactly what the main differences are between people who favour macs over PCs – obviously mac users are more creative and brilliant, though. OBVIOUSLY. Also, judging by this mac OS app which lets you basically create a one-click button on your desktop which opens up a little mirror-type thing using your webcam which shows you what you look like, massive narcissists!

• Muspy: I am sure there are other ways of doing this out there already, but I’m buggered if I know what they are and this struck me as a pretty simple and efficient service – sign up to get alerts on when artists release new albums. Simple as that.

• How Big Are Things?: Excellent little album on Imgur showing how big stuff is compared to other stuff, which now I come to write it down obviously sounds incredibly dull but does allow you to answer that age-old question ‘what would it look like if a stealth bomber landed on the pitch at an American Football stadium, so, you know, there’s that.

• Piggyback Driver: Do you ever worry that perhaps you’re letting your kids assume too much control over your lives, directing your movements and, well, everything else really? Do you want to give them even more of a sense of power of you than they already possess? OH GOOD! This is a helmet for parents to wear when they carry their kids on their shoulders which has a pair of handlebars on top, thus letting said kids ‘steer’ their parents, just in case you weren’t clear enough about who’s in charge now. Brilliantly, the handlebars are also linked to servos in the helmet which will make it vibrate to suggest in which direction the tiny dictator on your back wants you to go now, which will be in NO WAY irritating at all, honest.

• Inktober: Obviously this is now a week old, but if you’re minded to start late then who’s going to stop you? NOT I. Anyway, Inktober is an initiative set up by artist Jake Parker in which people make one pen and ink drawing a day through October and share them with the wider community which is a) an excellent way of finding some pretty cool art across the web; and b) the sort of thing which would be quite nice to be involved in for certain types of brand (er, Bic?).

• The Displacement Alert Project Map: To quote: “Dap.Map is a building-by-building, web-based interactive map for NYC designed to show where residential tenants may be facing significant displacement pressures and where affordable apartments are most threatened. ANHD created Dap.Map to provide community groups, local residents, elected officials, policymakers, and the public direct and real time access to vital information on our city’s rapidly changing residential environment.” A London equivalent would be interesting to see.

• We Are All Immigrants: Following this week’s charming rhetoric emerging from the Tory jamboree, a Chrome extension which replaces the word ‘immigrants’ with the word ‘people’. Which is sort of cute, but also strikes me as an excellent way to bury your head in the sand and pretend that NONE OF THIS IS HAPPENING OR BEING SAID.

• Electropollock: I do like this – art project involving a machine which creates Pollock-esque (I mean, not really actually anything like Pollock in terms of output, but there is a lot of abstract paintsplashing going on) canvases whose composition in terms of colour and layout is determined by the ambient audio around it – louder or faster music means different colours and different strokes, painted at a different rate, to create a unique work depending on the track. I’m a sucker for this sort of generative work in general, but the physicality of this really appeals.

• Take On Me Simulator: In case you’ve forgotten, take a moment to remind yourself of the majesty of the video for A-Ha’s 80s classic – go on, WATCH IT. Now go and click on the main link and check out the installation there depicted, which lets punters step through a frame and see themselves as Morten Harkett entering the graphite world of his imagining. I want a go on this very much indeed.

• Aura: Smart frames are still a thing, it turns out – does anyone actually use them? They strike me very much as the sort of thing that was given as a present to family members or pseudo-friends who you don’t really know very well and then left to gather dust in a cupboard somewhere, but that hasn’t stopped this EXCITING NEW VERSION from cropping up. The gimmick with this is that the frame will automatically select pictures from your camera roll to display without you needing to go through the tedious process of selecting and uploading them – to quote, “Aura uses Smart Selection, updating your frame with new photos as you take them. No need to regularly check the app to select photos – your best pictures will just appear on your frame.” Erm, am I the only person who can imagine this going really, really embarrassingly wrong? Ah, ok, as you were.

• Instashare: Superuseful, this – an app which enables easy, seamless sharing of files between devices with just a few taps, letting you throw photos, documents, etc, from your phone to desktop and vice versa with a minimum of fuss.

• Knowsy: Many years ago – Jesus, literally a decade – I had a client called Videojug which did how-to videos and would have CLEANED UP had they not launched at a point when watching videos on your phone was still akin to watching stop-frame animation by candlelight. Knowsy is basically the same thing – a whole load of explainer content aggregated in one place for easy discovery (although, er, Google sort of does the easy discovery bit for you so good luck with that). Christ alone knows why you’d turn to this website of all places to get information about how to kiss someone for the first time, but there you go.

• Volumetric Video: I don’t *entirely* understand this – in fact, let’s be clear, I don’t really understand this at all – but that’s never prevented me from featuring stuff before and it won’t stop me now. This is a demo showcasing video which a user can shift the viewpoint of by moving the viewing device backwards and forwards – effectively letting you ‘step in’ and ‘step out’ of a video simply by, in this instance, moving the tablet forward. Obviously pretty janky now, but you can imagine the impact that this sort of thing could have on VR, right? COME ON, IMAGINE.

• Mylestoned: Another in the seemingly neverending series of apps and services designed to DIGITALLY DISRUPT DEATH; Mylstoned – the name’s a problem here, lads, not going to lie – lets you set up shared memorials for loved ones, which users can contribute memories or pictures to to create a sort of small virtual shrine to the departed; which is nice, but nothing which couldn’t be done with a shared, private Facebook Group. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this works in the funeral industry, though, they’re looking for partners for their Beta so, you know, get in touch for some deathchat.

• Meta: Super, super useful – search tool which lets you simultaneously look for files across Dropbox, GDrive, Evernote, desktop and other places. In no way exciting, but if you’ve ever had the creeping horror of trying to remember exactly which of the myriad online file storage options you left something in then this will strike a chord.

• The Pieous: Because no Web Curios would be complete these days without at least one link to an Instagram account featuring novelty baking of some sort. LOOK! NOVELTY PIES! The Bruce Willis one is seriously impressive, mind (YES, A BRUCE WILLIS PIE!).

• Send D1cks To Donald: A childish, puerile initiative which is therefore entirely in keeping with the prevailing political mood in the US, this site lets you pay $10 to send a penis-shaped lollipop to everyone’s favourite demagogue, in a move which will do nothing other than create additional discomfort to the poor sods who open his mail. But, you know, PEN!SES ARE LOL!!!

YOU SHOULD ALL LISTEN TO THE NEW SWET SHOP BOYS ALBUM AS IT IS EXCELLENT HINDOMUSLIM HIPHOP AND I DON’T GET TO TYPE THAT VERY OFTEN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT THE UK NEEDS ITS OWN VERSION OF PEPE, SEEING AS WE CONTINUE TO ATTEMPT TO MATCH THE US IN OUR POLITICOCULTURAL RACE TO THE VERY BOTTOM, PT.2:

• The Joinery: I bet you didn’t know when you woke up this morning that the most comforting and satisfying thing you would see all day would be this Twitter feed of gifs of Japanese joinery techniques, and yet here we are. SO SATISFYING – if you are a fan of ‘things fitting perfectly with other things’ you will probably have a small braingasm at this.

• Ellis Island Immigrant Photographs: Beautiful shots of people arriving for processing at immigration in Ellis Island, New York, between 1892-1925. SUCH good faces in here.

• The Audit: A website reviewing English-language podcasts – if you’re jonesing for new material then this is an EXCELLENT place to look for fresh voices as there is lots and lots and lots of stuff on here.

• Google Noto Fonts: Google just released an insane number of free fonts in nearly 600 languages, with the stated aim of creating standardised online fonts worldwide which will, they hope, eliminate ‘tofu – that thing where your browser doesn’t support a particular character and instead throws up one of those little blank sqaures (no, I didn’t know that either). Oh Google, so creepy and yet so benevolent!

• Digital Gastronomy: This is a really, really horrid website (sorry guys, but), but it’s worth clicking and watching the video as the ideas behind it are really interesting – it’s a project by the University of Jerusalem to explore combining modern tech and design techniques such as laser-etching, 3d printing and the like with cookery. No idea if any of this tastes any good, but the idea behind it is fascinating; just IMAGINE what Heston would get up to with this sort of stuff.

• Nothing Personal: A photo series depicting the chilling corporate weirdness that is the world of the arms fair; canapes and mortars, shiny suits and tanks…you can imagine. Excellent pictures, and reminded me of how lovely it was when I worked for H+K and they worked for Lockheed Martin and I’d have colleagues coming back from these sorts of events ashen-faced and sort of horrified by the way in which language was used there – lots of talk of ‘IMPACT ZONES’ and ‘RADIUS OF EFFECT’ but, strangely, none whatsoever about killing large numbers of people with chilling efficiency. Weird, that.

• Airline Meals: Given that even BA is giving up on the airline food thing (at least for short-haul povvos like me), Christ alone knows when I’m next going to sample the unique delights of a meal at 40,000 feet. Thank Christ, then, for this site, which documents with a slightly fetishistic degree of detail some of the delicacies available when you peel back the film and inhale that first indefinable but immediately recognisable hit of steamstench. TRIVIA: the best airline food I ever did eat was on Ethopian Airways, which I confess caused early-teens me no little tasteless mirth at the time.

• Brendan Lee Satish Tang: I don’t really know how to describe these sculptures, except perhaps for saying that it looks a little bit like what might happen if some oriental pottery were somehow gene-spliced with a load off stuff from B&Q. Which is an appreciably dreadful description, I know, but click and you’ll see what I mean. Wevs, this is ACE.

• Gouch: Limmy has made the best ecstasy simulator ever.

• The Dictionary of Non-Notable Artists: There’s no way I can explain this better than the artist, so I won’t try: “Every day, people on Wikipedia nominate articles for deletion and discuss whether they should remain in the encyclopedia or not. This is done on a sub page called “Articles for deletion”. A frequent reason for exclusion of an entry is “non-notability”. After I had a look at those discussions, the article about my own person (Gregor Weichbrodt) ironically became nominated for deletion from the German Wikipedia, too. The anonymous person that put me on the list wrote “Completely misses notability criteria for ‘authors’. Unsatisfying notability criteria for artists too.” I wrote a Python script to download the contents of every “articles for deletion”-page from the past ten years and filter the results by artistic occupation. I saw that I wasn’t alone in my fate and that there were many more non-notable artists in this world who also failed to meet the notability criteria. This book is dedicated to these artists.”

• 30 Seconds To Fly: A bot which promises to assist with the creeping horror of the booking of corporate air travel by managing all aspects of the process, tracking your spending over time, etc. The sort of thing which if you’re a PA you might want to encourage your bosses to shell out for (and, for the rest of us, an smart/interesting way of using chatbots).

• Toby: This link is EITHER all about classic mugs OR it’s about a Chrome extension that lets you easily and simply manage tabs and favourites when you’re browsing; YOU WON’T KNOW UNLESS YOU CLICK, although I suppose you might have a reasonable guess.

• Snoopie: ANOTHER Chrome extension, this one letting you see when a webpage you’re on is using behaviour-tracking software to record where your cursor’s moving and that sort of thing. Not, of course, that you can do a blind bit about it.

• Computational Flaneur: OH I LOVE THIS IDEA! Although given it’s very location-specific nature, and the fact that that location is San Francisco, I can’t tell you whether the execution’s any good or not. No matter, the concept’s enough – this is an app developed for this year’s Come Out And Play festival which generates poetry on the fly based on where within the city you’re walking, how fast, etc. How can you not love this? YOU CANNOT.

• Easypoem: Generate really, really rubbish poems based on some simple keyword entry and a few template styles. It calls itself AI Poem, but there’s no AI here – what I love is that there’s a premium option to generate ‘professional poems’, which I sort of wish I weren’t too tight to fork out for as I would LOVE to see the sort of crap it produces.

• 30s Antifascist French Youth Camp Photos: These are so, so good – again, amazing faces. Also, antifascism looks SO FUN, we should all get into it.

• Retro Wave: You know those 80s-style graphics with customisable text you’ve been seeing everywhere this week? Well now you can make your own, just at the point where all the cool kids have gotten bored of it!

• Textanim: Seeing as we’re doing retrotexteffects (strong thematic linkage going on here, well done ME), here’s a site which lets you create the sort of spangly, animated textabortiongifs that used to proudly adorn millions of Geocities Pages and MySpace profiles. There’s something strangely pleasing about making very, very offensive phrases in this style, I find.

• The Bucket Of Scat: Available for sale on Amazon, this is a bucket – a WHOLE BUCKET! – full of fake animal dung. I have no idea whatsoever what use you might put this to, nor indeed do I need to know; I’m just going to provide you with the link and let the rest be a matter for you and your conscience.

• The Playable Cities Awards 2016: Playable Cities celebrates tech / art projects which bring an element of play to the urban environment; they’ve announced their shortlist for this year’s awards, and as ever some of the work here is wonderful; the rhythm bus stops are just genius, and frankly there is an awful lot here that agency people can look and and ‘derive inspiration from’ (inevitably nick outright).

• Trackable Luggage: Kickstarter raising fund for a range of superfancy high-end leather travel kit which comes equipped with tracking sensors, meaning you can check EXACTLY where the fcuk your luggage has ended up the next time Ryanair lose it in transit, which I am sure will be of immense comfort to you.

• Invisible Children: Portraits of kids who’ve fled with or without their families to Beirut from Syria and are now living there as refugees. Gorgeous portraits, and a timely reminder of why that whole ‘citizen of the world? Citizen of NOWHERE” schtick was *quite* so unpleasant.

• Drops: This is a GREAT idea – can someone who does fintech-type stuff please tell me why this isn’t a standard feature of all FS products? The idea is that you hook your credit card up to this service, which then automatically rounds up all your $0.99 costs to $1, donating that extra cent to a charity of your choice. SO SIMPLE! SO CLEVER! Please, UK banks, can you set up something like this? Go on Atom, or Metrobank, or one of you other fcuking ‘challengers’, do something good.

• Github Audio: This is far nicer than it really ought to be – open it up and have a listen. To quote the makers, “This website tracks events happening across GitHub and converts them to music notes based on certain parameters. There are three types of sounds(bell, string pluck and string swell) based on four types of events(PushEvent, PullRequestEvent, IssuesEvent and IssueCommentEvent). Bells represent PushEvents, string plucks represent IssuesEvents and IssueCommentEvents whereas string swells represent PullRequestEvents.” Surprisingly easy on the ear.

• The Scientology Handbook From 1994: Or at least a selection of images from it. These are so, so wonderfully WTF, and they should be added to whatever file or folder you keep your ‘selection of baffling imagery to use as light relief in a skullcrushingly dull presentation about social strategy or trends or somesuch other dreadful wankery’.

• White Lies Album Thingy: Not sure how long this is going to maintain for, so appreciate that if you’re reading this in THE FUTURE then the link might just go straight to a fairly dull band homepage rather than the FEAST OF INTERACTIVITY currently visible there. Well, I say ‘feast’ – White Lies (who I totally thought no longer existed, but am quite pleased to find out do – they are very nice young men, bless them, though probably no longer as young as they were when we spent an afternoon playing StreetFighterIV with the NME) have decided that the best way to promote their new album is to turn their website homepage into some sort of navigable isometric 3d mazegame, moving through which lets users unlock SECRET BONUS CONTENT associated with the new record. Which is fine, except the whole experience is sort of the opposite of any fun at all, and is basically punishing fans for wanting to see more stuff from the band, which seems a bit counterintuitive if you ask me.

• Media Election: Interesting site looking at media coverage of the interminable US Presidential race, examining which candidate receives most coverage worldwide (spoiler: it ain’t Hillary) and looking to see what, if anything, correlations can be drawn between that information and polling data and the results of the eventual election. Frankly I think the premise is bunkum – it’s only measuring volume rather than tone, so is an incredibly blunt instrument – but I do like the way the site’s put together (so that’s ok then!).

• The 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition: All the entries in this year’s jamboree of IF – I can’t pretend to have played more than a handful of these, but each one I did try was a delight. I’m a sucker for IF, and if YOU ARE TOO then you will absolutely lose yourself in here – there are LOTS of ‘games’ to try.

• Insomnobot3000: To quote Amis quoting Nabokov on insomnia, “All nights are giants, but this one was especially terrible”. What would make YOU feel better next time you’re lying awake at 3am with the heartsads and the lifefears and the growing awareness that none of this is probably going to get appreciably better and in fact is only likely to get worse because entropy? Would it be ‘talking’ to a fcuking chatbot? No, probably not, and yet here we are. Even Chatroulette would be a better solution, seriously.

• Pokemasks: Masks, of Pokemon. Pretty sure these aren’t licensed, so I’d get your order in now if you want to be able to dress up as Bulbasaur on Hallowe’en (also, please don’t dress up as Bulbasaur on Hallowe’en; you look like a d1ck).

• Another Hallowe’en Mask: Speaking of looking like a d1ck, for anyone who was tempted by the anatomically correct vagina mask from last week’s Curios will almost certainly want to pick up one of these so that whichever lucky person is on your arm come October 31 will be able to act as the penile ying to your yoni yang.

• Welt: Leaving aside the horror of the name – seriously, guys, naming products after skin disfigurements is a bit, well, gross – this is a STAGGERINGLY pointless product to the point where I actually got quite angry about it. Whilst many of you might think that your belt already performs the simple function of showing you whether you’ve gained or lost weight by requiring you to loosen or tighten it based upon the creeping spread of your waistline, you are WRONG! What your belt has in fact been missing is an INTERNET CONNECTION! Yes, that’s right, Welt is a SMART BELT! It will tell you when your stomach is straining against it – BUT, YOU KNOW, SO WILL THE FACT THAT YOUR SKIN CONTAINS NERVE ENDINGS YOU FCUKING TECHNOPRICKS – and track your steps and oh Christ enough. It has, of course, been funded, because there is no piece of technofutureutopianism too stupid that middle-aged men won’t chuck cash at it.

• Playing Lynch: A really rather beautiful site – and cool project – which takes some of David Lynch’s most iconic (sorry, but) scenes and presents them as reimagined vignettes, each starring John Malkovich. The whole thing is a promo for an album featuring music from some of Lynch’s works, reinterpreted by major artists from across the world – the site, though is, great, and you can tell Malkovich is having a LOT of fun in these scenes.

• LESI: A browser toy / artwork which listens to whatever audio’s being picked up by your mic and produces an INTERACTIVE VISUAL SOUNDANDVISIONSCAPE which you can navigate through / around as you please. Nice aesthetic on this.

• How God Created Animals: I don’t normally link to ‘meme of the week’ type stuff, but this collection of tweets around the [god creating xxx] meme actually made me properly cry with laughter at points. Seriously, some of these are very, very good indeed.

• Sand Ghosts: Not actually called Sand Ghosts at all, obviously, but that’s sort of what the visual effect is like, this is a webcam toy which tracks your image and represents you on screen as a weirdly floaty particulate ghost creature which is all sorts of cool; give it a go, it really is impressive-looking.

• Battle of the Bands: Do YOU like board games? Do YOU like the idea of a board game about the music industry and being in a band? Do YOU want to back a Kickstarter project by a mate of mine which looks really cool? OF COURSE YOU DO!

• My Grandmother’s Lingo: This is lovely. A project by SBS Australia looking at preserving native language, in this instance Marra – the site uses your mic to pick up your speech and ‘teach’ you how to speak the language, whilst telling you about its history and usage through narrative animations. Really rather beautiful.

• Sad Amish Tattoos: A touch NSFW, this, but these are by far and away the sexiest tattoos I have ever seen, ever. The sort of work that you’d probably not want to get in a place where everyone would see it all the time – although that probably just underscores exactly how vanilla I am. I absolutely adore the artstyle here.

• Anarchy: A brilliant interactive site featuring glitchpop music and nosebleed-weird visuals and all sorts of other stuff besides; it’s part of a bigger, wider project about which you can read a little more here if you so desire, but this works as a standalone too. Really rather excellent.  

• The Dragon Sex Calendar 2017: I refuse to believe for a second that you don’t know at least one person whose life wouldn’t be immeasurably improved by receiving this as a Christmas present – maybe that person is YOU!

FINALLY IN MUSICAL TERMS, YOU REALLY OUGHT TO GIVE THE NEW BON IVER ALBUM A LISTEN AS IT IS GORGEOUS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Jeopardybot: Generating Jeopardy questions for the LOLs. Your degree of LOL will be directly proportionate to your understanding of how Jeopardy works, fyi.

• Nick Cave Is Cross: Photographs of Nick Cave looking less than whelmed with life.

• Theresa Dredd: The Theresa May / Judge Dredd Photoshop Tumblr you never knew you wanted and probably still don’t but which now exists.

• Disney Ladies From Last Night: Texts From Last Night paired with Disney princesses to surprisingly comic effect.

• Dirty Robot: This may or may not in fact be a Tumblr, but NO MATTER; this is the site of artist Daniel Isles, who’s posting a new work each day and whose style is, to my mind, very cool indeed.

• The Pumpkin Queenn: Look, that’s how THEY spell it, OK? Literally the only Tumblr of Hallowe’en-type giffery you will ever need.

• Malia Obama Fashion: I had NO IDEA that Malia Obama was considered a style icon, but apparently she is – this is a celebration of that status.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• On Snapchat’s Specs: Not a HOT TAKE, thanks fcuk, but a more nuanced look at what the (probably) mainstream adoption of wearable camera tech might look like and mean for, you know, SOCIETY and stuff. Interesting, smart and pleasingly-unhyperbolic.

• Why The Videogame Culture Wars Won’t Die: Two years on from the seething, vile horror of Gamergate, this piece looks at exactly what it is about game culture that persists in making it so toxically ANGRY about STUFF all the time. It helps if you’ve a passing knowledge of games culture, but there are many analogues here with the manner in which men have reacted to feminist rebootings of films, etc, which make it worth reading from a broader cultural context point-of-view.

• Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny: Fascinating and not-a-little-scary profile of Y Combinator wunderkind Sam Altman, one of the biggest powers in tech right now and yet another of those West Coast white guys who, whether we like it or not, is having a disproportionate influence on the manner in which tech – which increasingly, like it or not, means society – is developing. I have no doubt whatsoever that Mr Altman is a perfectly nice human being and several orders of magnitude smarter than me and everyone I know; equally, I have no doubt that I’d rather people like him weren’t basically running quite large swathes of the world right now.

• On Sonic Branding: A really interesing (no, really, I promise) look at the creation of audio identities for brands – whether it be jingles or tones or things like the never-to-be-forgotten sound signatures of brand such as Intel. Doesn’t explain why the Skype startup jingle makes me think quite so much of having my ears syringed, but I’m conscious that that’s very much my problem rather than yours.

• VR: Your Portal To The Real World: If you have any interest in STORYTELLING and EXPERIENCE and stuff, you really ought to read this; this is a hugely clever and interesting look at how VR technology could, when it’s several degrees closer to the mainstream than it is at present, create an entirely new layer of social interaction in public spaces, and the opportunities that could afford for narrative and play and stuff.

• A Non-Linear History Of Time Travel: I was talking to my friend Hector last night about how there’s a certain level of maths or physics beyond which I simply cannot understand anything – it’s like my brain simply stops working, can’t get traction, and everything just slides off and makes a puddling mess round the edges of my mind. Or something. Anyway, this is an EXCELLENT piece looking at the development of theories around the possibility or otherwise of time travel over the years; I don’t pretend to have understood more than about 50% of the physics in here but the bits I did understand were fascinating.

• The Education Gap: This is a great piece looking at how education can increasingly be seen as one of the largest dividing factors in people’s politics in 2016, and what that might mean for the future of political discourse. Couple this with the inexorable push for EVERYTHING TO BE VIDEO and there are some really interesting potential ramifications for political thought and communication in the future – to be clear, this is very much in the Chinese sense of ‘interesting’.

• Hari Nef, Model Citizen: Transgender model Hari Nef is a really interesting character, thust into a weird ‘mouthpiece for a generation’ role whilst still being very much a kid. This is a good profile of her, tracking her rise to prominence and her context within the growing trans community – more power to her.

• Why Would Someone Choose To Be A Monster: Fascinating and uncomfortable piece about the research of one James Cantor, who is conducting psychological research into paedophiles to ascertain the degree to which their sexual preferences can be said to be pre-ordained and hard-wired and as such not, necessarily, their fault. Which is obviously not a little on the controversial side, but is an investigation worth making as we move towards an acceptance that sexuality is largely if not entirely based between the ears. Not a totally comfortable read, but it will make you think.

• What Your Favourite Childhood Books Say About Your Psyche: This is an ever-so-slightly heartbreaking essay about how the books you love as a kid tell you quite a lot more about yourself than you might have realised.

• Competitive Punning: There are, apparently, competitive punning competitions – events where a bunch of people compete to tell the most puns on a given topic in a series of 1v1 contests until a PUN KING is crowned. Can you imagine exactly how psychologically wearing spending a few hours in the company of 30-odd Tim Vine wannabes would be? EXACTLY, which is why you should read this piece, which contains just enough punning to be lightly amusing, without making you want to stove the author’s face in with a pickaxe.

• How Goldman Sachs Screwed Libya: I mean, we’ve all sort of screwed Libya, so much as I’d like to I can’t really lay the entirety of the blame on the cuddly Vampire Squid this time around; nonetheless, this is a really fascinating picture of the sort of national-level work Goldman does. The numbers are staggering, the cynicism and chicanery and naked, dead-eyed profiteering even moreso. It will be VERY interesting to see how this shakes down – the legal precedents which will potentially be established could have pretty huge ramifications for global finance (no really, it IS interesting).

• Pride & Prejudice & Trump: McSweeney’s on excellent form as ever.

• Buzzfeed On ASOS: Credit where it’s due, Buzzfeed continue to do some excellent investigative journalism; this takedown of ASOS’ warehouse working practices is well-researched and well-written and really in no way surprising whatsoever. Just to reiterate a point I am pretty sure I’ve made before here; if you are buying something and that something is REALLY cheap to the point where you’re minded to think ‘wow, that’s REALLY cheap!’, and that thing is produced / delivered in a manner involving actual human labour, then rest assured that one or more of the humans involved in said labour are getting royally fcuked as part of that process. BONUS BUZZFEED INVESTIGOJOURNALISM: this is a similar takedown this time focusing on US ‘ready to cook meals delivered to your door’ service Blue Apron.

• Life After Dictatorship: This is a hell of a piece, looking at what happened to former Sierra Leone dictator Valentine Strasser after he was removed from power in 1994, having been (according to the piece) the world’s youngest serving dictatorial leader. In part sad, in part just mesmerisingly odd, this is a wonderful piece of journalism.

• A Thing Of Beauty: The second-loveliest piece of prose in here this week; A Thing of Beauty is Leslie Kendall Die’s account of motherhood and friendship and ballet and physical pain and loss and acceptance and all sorts of other things; it is a glorious piece of writing and I recommend it unreservedly.

• My Shattered Istanbul: The best piece of writing, though, is this one – an essay about Istanbul in particular and Turkey in general, giving you a light-touch tour through it’s 20th and 21stC history, from Ataturk to Erdogan, all interwoven with the author’s memories of her mother and grandmother and their ineractions with the changing nature of Turkish society. Just beautiful; grab a cup of tea or a glass of wine and savour this one.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, a beautiful short which uses light and dark and shadow to beautiful aesthetic effect – this is called ‘None’:

2) It is definitely Autumn; ignore that, though, and enjoy the in-no-way-Autumnal-at-all ‘Beach Beach Beach’ by Bosco Rogers, which is not only a lovely slice of Beach Boys-y pop-rock, but has a very nice animated vid to accompany it:

3) Next up, another unseasonally Summerish song with very Avi Buffalo vibes; this is Drugdealer ft. Ariel Pink, with ‘Easy to Forget’. Good video too – the laughing at 1:09 made me very happy indeed:

4) I featured Weyes Blood a few months back, with some comment about how it sounded like about 7 different EXCELLENT folk songs rolled into one; this is once again by them, it once again manages to sound simultaneously like every single female US folky singer from the past 4 decades and at the same time utterly brilliant. I am slightly in love with this artist, whose album’s out at the end of the month in case you are too. The track’s called ‘Generation Why’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is new from Mic Righteous – it’s called Honour Mic and it is STRONG:

6) Last up in this week’s videos, this is a pretty stunning piece of CGI to accompany the slightly odd-pop of OY’s single ‘Space Diaspora’ – the animation here is just BRILLIANT. BYE BYE SEE YOU SOON BYE!!!:

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