Ordinarily I don’t do these on Good Friday, what with the fact that, in my head at least, the only audience for Curios is people so terminally-bored at work that they’ll deign to read even this poorly-birthed mess of stuff if it means that the time in front of the Powerpoint will pass quicker. This year, though, given noone has any idea what date it is or what day it is, and given we are all desperately trying to pass the time in any way we can (NOT LIKE THAT THOUGH FFS), I thought I would make an exception.
BREAK OUT THE SIMNEL CAKE! NAIL THE SON OF GOD TO A TREE! IT’S THE SPECIAL, PASCAL EDITION OF WEB CURIOS!
Yes, that’s right, much like Jesus I too have spent this morning traipsing up my own personal calvary; fine, he might have been burdened with a massive wooden cross that was to be the final instrument of his mortal death, and, fine, he might also have been burdened with the not-insignificant psychic load of his simultaneous status as a tripartite deity and an actual human, but did HE have to wrangle over 100 links into some sort of semblance of order and coherence? DID HE FCUK! Also, I have outlived Jesus by seven years and counting, and therefore I am better.
(NB – let me here briefly apologise for the blasphemy; to any of you of the Christian faith who might still be reading, I wish you a very happy Easter and intend no offense. Rest assured that my Italian grandfather is condemning my mortal soul to hell as I type).
Anyway, here we are again. IT is still happening; we are all increasingly bored of IT, we will get through IT together. Now, though, find a quiet place, get comfortable and prepare to have a moment of transcendental joy as I once more attempt to fit all of the week’s internet into your head via the medium of what increasingly feels like some sort of word-sledgehammer.
I, as ever, am Matt; this, as ever, is Web Curios; please take care and have a nice weekend and try not to behave like a total selfish cnut should you leave the house.
By Nancy Fouts
THE SECTION WHICH APPLAUDS JACK DORSEY FOR HIS CHARITABLE DONATION – NO, REALLY, IT IS A GOOD THING – BUT WHICH WOULD EQUALLY LIKE TO EXIST IN A WORLD WHERE IT’S NOT NECESSARILY IN ONE MAN’S GIFT TO DONATE $1BN AND THAT STILL BE ONLY 25% OF THEIR INCOME, OR WHERE THIS HAPPENS INSTEAD OF THEIR COMPANY PAYING, YOU KNOW, REASONABLE AMOUNTS OF TAX ON ITS GLOBAL OPERATIONS:
- Facebook Expands Data-for-Good Offering: It’s really hard on me, all this ‘write nice things about the companies you’ve spent the past decade slagging off’ stuff. Facebook, again, continues to behave like a big, responsible corporate, now expanding all the datastuff it makes available to include (anonymised, obvs) location change data from across the world, to help researchers analyse how factors such as human movement within defined geographical areas are contributing to the spread of COVID. Genuinely useful, although I would like to point out that this is just a benign application of the fact that YOUR PHONE AND EVERYTHING ON IT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF THE DAY, which is still creepy enough to be worth mentioning if you ask me. Still, anyone working in or around data will find this stuff interesting – I also wonder to what extent this sort of information is going to be used as a slight punitive/shaming mechanism in the washup, with countries or peoples which can be shown to have been less stringent in their adoption of travel restrictions and social distancing being somehow censured post-virus. SO many interesting things to look forward to and speculate on!
- FB Launches Quiet Mode: Odd in some ways that Facebook chooses to launch a ‘turn off notifications for a set period’ setting for its main app just as literally everyone earth has decided to stop caring about how long we’re staring at our screens for because the alternative is looking out of the window and that is simply too miserable to contemplate. Anyway, that’s what it’s done – perhaps worth looking at if you’re worried that your parents are getting a little bit too into that “5G COVID VAMPIRES STOLE MADDIE!” Facebook Group. It’s not necessarily new stuff – these are all features that have been more-or-less available in the general ‘time spent on Facebook’ settings of the app – but it’s had a refresh and a bit of a PR boost so, well, here it is.
- Facebook Launches Tuned, for Couples: Are YOU in a couple? Are you perhaps distant from each other? Do you want a channel where you can send each other messages and gifs and photos and lovenotes and those unpleasantly-sticky videos that you know it would be disastrous to ever allow to be seen by the eyes of another human? Quite possibly, and yet it’s unlikely that that you need another one, because this is what literally every single other chat or messaging app lets you do! Still, that hasn’t stopped Facebook’s experimental NEP skunkworks from punting this new product out of the door this week; I have literally no idea why anyone would choose to engage with this, unless they had a very specific desire to share literally all the data about their romantic interactions with Mark Zuckerberg, but perhaps that thought adds an extra frisson to your filthy exchanges. You perverts.
- Facebook Gaming Launches Tournaments: Another week, another feature added to Facebook which feels like an aggressive move towards one of its theoretical platform rivals; last week it added all that ‘series’-type autoplay collection gubbins to Watch in a play for some of YouTube’s creators; this time it’s a boost to its Gaming offering, with Facebook users now able to create eSports tournament infrastructure within Facebook, with all the associated assistance for seamless streaming of said competitions. The quality seems very good, though that might be because it’s currently massively undersubscribed vs Twitch; if you’re doing online gaming and want a seemingly-simple way of managing tourneys, you could do worse than this.
- WhatsApp Limits Message Forwarding: You will have heard about this, I presume, and it’s another move that can only be seen as A Good Thing; it is worth looking at it a bit closely, though, as a) it’s a pretty limited limit, kicking in only when an individual message has been forwarded 5 times previously, and even then only introducing a degree of friction to sharing rather than stopping it entirely; and b) that still allows for an awful lot of sharing of absolutely mad rubbish before any sort of slowing measures kick in. I’m personally waiting to see one which makes a spurious Corona/Koran link, at which point I might declare us done as a species and go and do a self-immolate or something.
- COVID-19 Mobility Data from Google: Not unlike Facebook’s data, linked above, but a bit more user-friendly from Google; you can download datasets by country and then get information about the change in movement over time among the populace on a city-by-city level. Might be useful for coming up with some reactive, tactical comms ideas to send to your clients to remind them that you exist but that they will probably ignore because, well, *all this*.
- Cannes We Not: I like this initiative. Cannes We Not is a simple idea – can all agencies doing stuff with clients around the current pandemic thing please all agree not to make awards season capital out of it when this is all over, please? I think this is a sensible and good thing – it doesn’t really feel quite right that work done in the face of a significant number of people doing quite a lot of a die should then be subsequently used as part of an inter-agency p1ssing contest or an excuse to get back on the gak again (“we deserve it”). Also, and I’m not going to name names because that would be VERY MEAN, but a special shout out to the agency which recently did quite a lot of proud boasting about the fact it had been using 20% of staff hours during ‘these exceptional times’ to develop little TikTok stickers about clapping for the NHS. It’s cute, it’s ‘nice’, but if you try and pretend to me that that’s anything other than a self-aggrandising bit of autofellatio basically showing off that you can MAKE A DIGITAL then, well, fcuk off mate and pull the other one.
By Christopher Espinosa Fernandez
NEXT, ENJOY THIS SUPERB FUNK AND BREAKS AND BEATS MIX BY MIKE ‘MARCELLUS’ WALLACE!
THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.1:
- The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: No apologies for featuring this again; it’s a growing and fabulous selection of resources now being collaborated on by people from literally across the world, and which this week got official endorsement from NESTA as being A Good Thing. Seriously, there’s stuff in here for almost everyone, from tips on homeworking, resources for parents and teachers, information about local initiatives around the globe, stuff on how to make masks, distractions and mental health tips…If you’ve yet to take a look at it, please do – whether or not it’s something you can add to, there’s almost certainly information linked to that will be of use to you or someone you know. Huge props to the team at Newspeak House for kicking it all off.
- Donate Your IT Equipment: This is a nice idea – a campaign to get people to donate old or unused IT to hospitals in London to help patients who might not have access to devices to be able to maintain contact with their families and loved ones. The link here’s to an online form to share details of what you’re able to donate – thanks to Kate Bevan at Which? who pointed out that donating iOS stuff is mostly fine, but old Android kit should be researched a bit based on the fact that it can constitute a not-insignificant security risk. This article gives you a bit of a rundown on stuff that is likely to be more or less safe to donate, should you have any to hand. Or you can put a sticker on a TikTok. It’s basically the same thing.
- CovidSounds: A research project being undertaken by Cambridge University which is asking people – both those with COVID-19 and those without – to record the sound of themselves coughing to help researchers develop better methodologies for determining infection from sound data. I mean, if you’re coughing anyway you may as well; I look forward to this not only helping to halt the spread of infection, but also being used to create ‘This Cough Does Not Exist’, a website which will generate realistic-but-totally-AI-imagined sounds of mucal distress.
- The COVID-19 Consumer Data Tracker: That SOUNDS pretty grandiose, doesn’t it? It’s probably not quite as fancy and all-encompassing as the name might suggest, but it is a really interesting overview of how consumer habits and interests are being impacted by virageddon. It’s by Glimpse, which is a data platform and is annoyingly opaque about exactly what signals its using to gauge its assessment of shifting levels of consumer interest (I imagine it’s slightly more complex than ‘we just pull in Google Trends’), and presents a selection of graphic visualisations of consumer interest (at a global level) in topics such as ‘paintbrushes’, ‘jigsaws’, ‘sourdough’ and ‘creative ways to masturbate once you have basically reached the end of w4nking’. You can filter it by stuff trending up or down, and by broad category, and frankly if your job involves making largely-spurious-yet-serious-and-analytical-sounding predictions about WHAT WILL HAPPEN and WHAT STUFF MEANS then you can probably get at least three hour-long webinars out of this. Oh, if you like this sort of stuff then you may also like this, very similar, dashboard thingy by Pulsar too, which offers the same type of information across a different set of topics.
- All The VirusNews From Google: Not from Google, fine, but aggregated by it. Probably won’t be too much use if people you know have gone full Icke about this sort of thing, but if you’d like to direct friends and family members to a reasonably-well-fact-checked source presenting verified information from a range of outlets then this probably isn’t too bad.
- Open Source Recipes: See, this is the collaborative effort I like to see – the COVID Cookbook! Ignore the slightly-weird, tie-dy psychedelia of the homepage – click the web link and it takes you to a Google Sheets document which anyone can contribute to via email; submissions are vetted by a central team and then added to the cookbook on approval. I think this is AMAZING and should one day be in libraries everywhere; there are about 80-odd recipes in there, up from 40-odd when I found it, and whilst they are VERY American (how many flavours? WHY???) they’re also a really interesting mix of styles and levels of complexity, and are nicely-divided by recipe type. Ooh, seeing as I’m here, have a cocktail recipe I sort-of invented last week: blend some (look, measurements are TOO HARD) coriander stalks with lime jiuce, lime zest and caster sugar til, smooth; pass through a sieve or muslin into a shaker with ice, vodka, st germain and a pinch of salt. Shake, strain & serve and imagine you are somewhere better. CHEERS YOU FCUKERS!
- LikeLike Online: Oh oh oh this is so lovely! LikeLike is, apparently, a sort-of arcade in Pittsburgh, specifically dedicated to indie and artgames; under lockdown, they have built this virtual version of their arcade, in which users pick an 8-bit avatar and a name and are then dropped into a smol, gamelike arcade world, with different rooms containing different – playable! – little games, and with the ability to see other people’s avatars wandering around, and chat to them if you like. It’s so simple, but perfectly-formed; it genuinely does feel a bit like stepping into a small, unfamiliar arcade in a new town (a sentence which I appreciate will mean nothing to people below a certain age), and is a properly charming way of passing an hour playing tiny games by some stars of indieworld (Porpentine’s got some stuff in there, for example).
- I Miss The Office: Do you? Do you really? I know that the whole chat about ‘HOW THE WORLD WILL CHANGE AFTER…ALL THIS’ is long and overblown and almost-entirely based on a series of personal biases and prejudices and fears and hopes rather than anything resembling rational analysis, but one thing I think we can all probably agree on is that, unless you’re fcuking someone you work with, going to work is crap (and even then it’s still not the best use of one’s time). It’s been fascinating watch people realise ‘hang on – if I don’t spend two hours a day travelling to a place where I dislike almost everyone and where there is no actual practical need for me to be, I actually have…quite a lot more free time!’, and I can’t see fulltime office attendance coming back in the same way. Still, if you find that the sepulchral silence of your own doubtless-beautifully-arranged home office is a bit lonely, and that you miss the aural smorgasbord of working like, you might like this site – a lovely, minimalist little audiotoy which lets you toggle various sounds of the workspace off and on at a whim. Special shoutout to the art style here, which is quite lovely, and kudos to agency The Kids who built it.
- Google Stadia Is Now Free: For a bit, at least. For those of you who don’t know, Stadia is Google’s VERY FUTURE videogames setup, which lets you stream console games to your TV using nothing but your phone or laptop and your internet connection. In theory, this is incredible; in practice, the experience hasn’t always been hugely whelming; I do wonder whether this is going to work at all given the increased strain on domestic bandwidth being caused by literally everyone now being online all the time at present. Still, if you or anyone you know has half-decent internet and isn’t able to permit themselves a fancy games machine, this is definitely worth a try – he might not thank me for saying this, but I know James Whatley has been using this for months and might be a useful person to ask if you want to know the pros and cons. GO ON, ASK HIM! (sorry James xxx).
- Digital Fashion: Of course, perhaps After All This Is Over we will no longer want to go outside into meatspace at all, preferring to stay within our hypoallergenic, hermetically-sealed bubbles and interacting only via the medium of haptics through fullbody suspension suits (or something). In which instance, we’ll become far more invested in the development of our digital avatars – which is where Leela (or Digital Fashion – the website’s a bit confusing) comes in! Let the site take a photo of your face – it’s a bit picky, you might need a few goes – and then watch as it creates a genuinely-hideous Lawnmower Man-style avatar for you, with a terrifying, early-00s videogame face, which you can dress in a series of very, very silly digital garments which all look rather too much like ‘what George Lucas seemed to think everyone in space would be wearing circa 1977’. Honestly, I can’t stress quite how unsettling the results are – please, do make one of these of yourself and let me know what you look like. This, for example, was me. I PROMISE I DON’T REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT.
- Integration Loop: A collaborative art project by Robin Sloane, itself based on the decade-old work ‘Disintegration Loops’ by William Basinski, which originally took a recording of a found piece of music and played through its gradual digital disintegration as a sort-of elegy. It’s worth reading the full text of Sloane’s explanation about his own interpretation of the work, but this version involves the collaborative recreation of the melody contained in the original loop by an anonymous choir of individuals from around the world. Anyone can contribute – just record the melody snippet and upload it, and your recording will eventually form part of the completed piece, which will layer the constructive voices of human collaboration over the original, degrading deconstruction of the melody brought about by digital decay. Which, I know, sounds w4nky as you like, but I promise it makes sense if you read the description. I think this is lovely.
- Modern Day Jobs: Or, HUSTLE HARDER! Sorry, maybe I’m being unfair, but there’s a piece in the longreads this week about the ‘hustle’ and how it’s going to become even more encoded as a way of life in a post-COVID landscape and how that’s actually quite sh1t, and this rather speaks to that. This site is ostensibly a good idea, offering a selection of ways in which individuals who might need income can earn money online; from research gigs to remote customer service jobs, freelancer portals to piecework sites, there’s a lot of stuff here, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is very much the bottom of the employment barrel and that even these jobs are going to go before too long because, honestly, there’s not a fat lot of work here that you imagine will still be a human gig in
- An Old French Guide To Drawing Animals: This is a whole kids illustration guide from (I think) 19th Century France; honestly this is superb, with clear guides on how to draw a vast range of animals, including peacocks and rhinos and monkeys…if you’ve got an artistically-inclined kid, there’s definitely an ‘animal a day’ drawing task you can eke out of this, with the added bonus of them learning how to say ‘anteater’ in French.
- The COVID Shopping List Generator: I can’t vouch for the measurements on here, so caveat emptor, but this site lets you input the number of mouths you have to feed, how long you have to keep them fed for, with toggles for specific elements that you may or may not want to include; it then spits out a series of quantities of stuff you might need to buy to be able to stay full of tum and clean of bum for the duration of your specified lockdown period.
- Dyson’s Challenge Cards: James Dyson – another talented man who’s seemingly revealed himself to be a bit of a prick over the course of the past few years. Still, this is a nice idea by the company that bears his name, with the Dyson website making available a bunch of STEM-y challenges for kids to complete whilst on lockdown and bored, using the sort of things that you probably have lying around the house (this is a guess – do people with kids just sort of randomly have balloons and pipe-cleaners knocking about?). “Dyson engineers have designed these challenges specifically for children. Ideal for home or in the classroom, they encourage inquisitive young minds to get excited about engineering” – whether or not your ‘inquisitive minds’ will pay a blind bit of notice to your exhortations to ‘put that fcuking phone down’ is, however, outwith my control.
- Paper Polyhedra: MAKE BEAUTIFUL POLYHEDRAL SHAPES OUT OF PAPER!! Perhaps one to save for Week 22, when the evenings are starting to draw in again.
- TableTopia: I know I featured another boardgame site on here a few weeks back, but that one’s been getting absolutely slammed with traffic and so you might want to check out this alternative instead; a slightly smaller collection of games, but the interface seems to work well and there’s a matchmaking facility so you can find games to join with strangers should you so desire. Also, there’s a game on there called ‘Secret Hitler’, which may well be famous and a classic of the genre but which also made me laugh quite a lot.
- The Other Art Fair: Art fairs – something else perhaps unlikely to survive after all this. At least not the smaller ones – you imagine Basel and Frieze will be fine, because money finds a way, but stuff like the sub-£500-a-piece Other Art Fair might struggle to make it. This year’s Fair was scheduled to be on in London soon-ish, but, for obvious reasons, isn’t – instead, the website offers a nice rundown of all the artists who were due to be featured, with examples of their work; you may not be in the market to spend money on art right now, but even to browse it’s a rather soothing experience. As ever with this Fair there’s a really nice range of styles on display here, and if you’re someone who’s put ‘get back into painting’ on their ‘list of improving activities to undertake whilst mouldering away indoors’ then this could be an excellent source of thematic or stylistic inspiration.
- Bookshlf: I can’t remember the number of variants on this particular idea I’ve seen over the years I’ve been doing Curios, but here’s the latest – curate your interests and your selections within specific categories on your VIRTUAL BOOKSH(E)LF and share these curations with your friends to demonstrate exactly how erudite you are! Why the fcuk you wouldn’t just use Pinterest or any number of other extant platforms which have actual, established userbases already is beyond me, but if you’d like a shiny new space online for you to use to showcase exactly how many of THE CLASSICS you’ve burned through whilst also perfecting your yoga and your ab curls and your startup idea then this may well be for you (now fcuk off).
- The Wildeverse: If you’ve got little-ish kids I reckon this looks ACE. The Wildeverse is an AR game-type-thing which basically lets you explore a jungle via your phone, and find and help wild apes within said jungle via the magic of augmented reality. It’s a project by not-for-profit organisation Internet of Elephants, and is designed to raise awareness of conservation efforts to protect endangered species, in this specific case simian ones, in jungle habitats, and it’s really very cute indeed. The AR is, as with all AR, a bit hit-and-miss, but the models of the apes themselves are charming, and the didactic stuff is very light-touch, and it works without needing to go traipsing around outside, If you’ve got kids who are familiar with Pokemon Go or Minecraft’s AR offering, this is worth a look.
THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.2:
- Beautiful Photos of Jupiter: I confess that I am not 100% that these are real, so mind-screwingly gorgeous are they; is Jupiter’s surface really that iridescently-beautiful? Let’s, for the sake of this weekend at least, agree that yes it is.
- The Girl Museum: Got daughters? Try this! “Girl Museum is the first museum in the world dedicated to girlhood. We are a virtual museum for exhibitions, education, and raising awareness about girls and girlhood globally. We are also an information platform for social/cultural dialogue and investigation. We research and collect cross-cultural historic and contemporary images and stories from and about girlhood around the world. Through exhibitions, publications, and projects, we explore and document the unique experience of being born and growing up female.” This is less po-faced than that rather staid explanation might suggest; browse the collections and you’ll find lots of themed ‘exhibitions’ that take you through the achievements of women and girls across various fields, throughout history. If your kid(s) devoured that book about awesome female role models a few years back, they might well find this a nice place to deepen that knowledge.
- Dispatch: Thanks Jay for drawing this to my attention; Dishpatch is a service for Londoners which helps you find local restaurants which are still open for delivery or takeaway across the city; tell it where you are and it will tell you all the independents who are still delivering to you. You can search by category, and it’s a genuinely useful service – not least if you’re interested in helping to keep local restaurateurs in business. It’s hard, though, with these things; you can’t equally help but see this as a classic example of how money, as always, can buy you out of this. If you can afford to pay £20 for an organic chicken you can get one tomorrow; if you can only afford a 3-quid battery bird, see you next month. Turns out it’s not only the future that isn’t equally distributed, it’s the apocalypse too.
- You Probably Need a Haircut: I don’t – I let my girlfriend loose with the clippers, safe in the knowledge that with this face the aesthetic damage was done a long, long time ago – but you may do; if so, this is a GREAT idea. The website matches ‘world class barbers’ (their words) with people who need a haircut; for a fee, they’ll videochat you through how to cut your own hair (or perhaps more sensibly, they’ll videochat someone else through how to cut your hair). This is a US thing, so I’m not sure if there are any timezone-friendly hairdressers on this, but I quite like the idea of staying up til 4am just so I can get a slot with some bloke in LA telling me how to do my fade (NB I don’t actually know what a ‘fade’ is, I just know it’s a hair term).
- Laterdate: OH I LOVE THIS. Laterdate is sadly only available as a thing in LA or NYC, but the premise is so, so beautiful. I’m going to copy the whole statement thing here, as it’s a neater description than I’d probably manage: “I THINK ONE DAY WE WILL BE ABLE TO GO OUTSIDE AGAIN. HONESTLY, I AM FANTASIZING ABOUT THIS LATER DATE. SEEING YOU. REACHING OUT AND TOUCHING. SHARED SURFACES. BREATHING, TALKING, ANYTHING REALLY. THIS IS A PERFORMANCE IN TWO PARTS. IN THE FIRST, WE WILL CHAT ONLINE. WE WILL IMAGINE TOGETHER OUR FIRST MEETING. WHERE WE’LL GO, WHAT WE’LL SAY, WHAT WE’LL DO. THIS FUTURE PLAN WILL BE SAVED AS A SORT OF SCRIPT. ONE DAY, WHEN WE ARE ALLOWED OUT AGAIN, YOU WILL RECEIVE A REQUEST TO MEET AND WE’LL ENACT THIS SCRIPT. THAT WILL BE PART TWO OF THE PERFORMANCE.” Whilst obviously this could turn out to be a terminally-bad idea, I really hope it isn’t; I would watch the fcuk out of these meetings, and I think there’s a lovely, wider penpal-type project to be found in something like this; the idea of creating an anonymous connection with someone via writing or photography, with a commitment to meet, just once, when this is done, is quite, quite beautiful to me.
- How Low Can Your Logo?: Designers! Have you ever wondered ‘what is the sh1ttest logo I can design?’ WONDER NO MORE! This is a project – entirely legitimate and a real competition, it seems – inviting designers from around the world to present their worst-possible response to a design brief, to be assessed by a panel of actual, proper design professionals. There’s a Pinterest mood board, a creative brief, and the wonderful, terrible designs are already beginning to pile up. Glorious – if you know any designers, send this to them as I reckon it could be a fun thing to fcuk around with for a couple of hours. Also, you can buy all the designs on tshirts, which could be an interesting and bold direction to take your wardrobe in in 2020.
- Tapebooks: I featured a Kickstarter last year which involved pictures woven from discarded cassette tape; this is another one from the same team, this time selling notebooks whose covers are woven from old musical tapes. The poster I bought was genuinely great, and I have no hesitation in recommending this which is a charming way of reusing old plastic and might make a lovely present for someone should you be in the market for such a thing.
- Beepbox: I think ‘web-based synthtoys’ run at a rate of about one a month here on Curios – still, there always fun and this one’s a nice example of the genre, with your compositions saved in the URL meaning they’re easy to share – and, actually, which makes them perfect for a back-and-forth compositional game, where you send the track to each other with instructions to add 4 bars at a time and see what happens. LOOK I JUST INVENTED A GAME! Admittedly a bad one which will lead to the creation of a LOT of unlistenable music, but still. Everything comes out sounding chiptune, but if you’re ok with that then this is a reasonably-complex little soundtoy to play with.
- Whichbook: I barely know where to get book recommendations these days – I tend to just burn through the ‘books of the year’ lists from the Guardian, NYT and a few other places,supplementing this with whatever interesting-looking bits I can find from charity shops – but this website seems surprisingly good if you need a non-algorithmic or non-media recommendation. There are a selection of sliders on the left, letting you choose whether you want the recommendations to be more or less ‘funny’, ‘disturbing’, ‘romantic’, ‘bleak’, etc; adjust the sliders, hit ‘show me some books’ and VWALLAH! A host of recommendations based on your spec. I obviously turned all the dials all the way to ‘miserable, sad, violent and deviant’ just to see what would happen, and the resulting selection included some old favourites (hello, Stewart Home!) and some stuff that I had never heard of before, which is a reasonable sign that it works at least halfway-properly. Worth a look if you’re struggling to pick a new novel.
- Primer: Stuff you are probably doing now – hoping against hope that your partner doesn’t get it into their head that ‘now’s a really great opportunity for us to do that extensive remodelling work on the house that we’ve always talked about!’. Honestly, can you think of anything more miserable than embarking on a massive domestic renovation project when you’re stuck inside?! You’d be homicidal within hours. Still, Primer might be a way of pretending to do the work without actually having to do it – it’s a neat little interiors-AR-toy (if we didn’t have houses to redecorate virtually, would AR ever even have existed?) which allows you to see swatches of wall in different finishes and fabrics, all from actual, proper retailers like…er…actually I’ve only heard of Farrow & Ball, but I presume the other ones are real and posh too. Save yourselves the pain and keep it virtual, eh?
- Eating Utensils: Who doesn’t want an entire website dedicated to the unique and fascinating history of eating utensils throughout history? NO FCUKER, that’s who! Honestly, I know I am possibly feeling a bit fragile right now, but there’s something just heartbreakingly sincere about all of this, and the section on ‘facts and statistics from the world of utensils’ which I clicked on just now caused a very real lump in my throat for reasons that I don’t adequately understand (it may be because the syntax is oddly reminiscent of Latvian Jokes, possibly).
- CollabVM: This is, I’m sure, designed for a serious purpose, but I have no idea what it is. Click the page and you can choose from one of 5 actual computer desktops which you can control remotely via your browser; Christ alone knows why you would want to mess with a virtual desktop, but, should you desire, you now can. Users’ IP addresses are all logged, so please bear that in mind should you have a vague idea of using one of these machines to do something very illegal – you can, though, just do small, gentle things to improve the lives of future users, which I would very much encourage – when I checked it earlier, someone had added a gigantic Ainsley Harriot, peering malevolently from over the green hills of the Windows XP background – see, that’s what this is for!
- The Daily Mailer: Random comic panels from The New Yorker, combined with comments from below-the-line at the Daily Mail. These are almost entirely perfect, and surprisingly-unhateful (there’s also an excellent secondary game in trying to imagine the headline of the story that elicited the original comment in the first place).
- TV Too High: A beautifully-specific subReddit dedicated to photographs of wall-mounted televisions in people’s houses which are clearly mounted far, far too high for anyone to comfortably watch. What is the psychological explanation for all these men (look, of course it’s men here) wanting to be looked down on by their telly ffs?
- Nature Relaxation Films: I can’t promise that these will be the anxiety-removing panacea that you’re searching for, but it’s hard to imagine not feeling a bit better after putting on a 12-hour video of a beach in the Maldives. Two hours of lovely tropical turtles swimming? An hour-long panoramic fight over the fjords and coastlines of Norway? It beats trying to count your neighbours’ toilet roll mountains, I guarantee you.
- Impressions: Remember at the beginning of the year, when this Chinese app did the rounds which let you transform yourself into a limited number of famouses via some slightly-shonky GANfoolery? Well, that! Except this is by a different outfit – although as with all of these I wouldn’t particularly trust anyone making this sort of app with your face data – and features a different roster of famouses, with the app promising to add new people who you can morph yourself into every Monday. Your mileage with this will be limited, but they have Jennifer Aniston and Morgan Freeman and a bunch of other proper celebrities loaded in (which makes me wonder whether it will be legalled into oblivion within days, but still), which means that you can have ‘fun’ acting out sketches from Friends or Shawshank (ha!) to your heart’s content.
- Today’s Day Today: A Twitter bot which reminds you what day it is today, because that apparently is what we are reduced to.
NEXT, ENJOY AN EQUALLY BANK HOLIDAY-ISH MIX OF HOUSE AND TECHNO COURTESY OF ASH LAUREN!
THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.3:
- The Ninja Tune Thread of Online Concert Footage: There was about a five-year period during which I bought literally everything I could find put out on Ninja Tunes (which I imagine gives you a pretty good sense of exactly the flavour of ‘tedious w4nker’ I was for a good swathe of my late-teens/early-20s), and this Twitter thread reminded me of why I love the record label; there are a literally HUNDREDS of gigs linked to or embedded in here (not their own artists – ALL the artists!), featuring a huge range of musicians from Massive Attack to Kraftwerk to Nina Simone to Fila Brasilia…honestly, this is a fcuking treasure trove, and you should bookmark it NOW (and, er, maybe start ripping some of the YT vids in case they get copyright-fcuked).
- Cryptohack: On the one hand, this advertises itself as ‘a fun platform for learning modern cryptography’; on the other, there’s nothing to say that it’s not a secret kiddie recruitment portal for GCHQ. Still, whether you want to get a gentle introduction to the principles of codebreaking or whether you’d like to embark upon a superficially-exciting but fundamentally sedentary career as a government cryptowonk, this site should see you right; it’s quite hard and a little technical, and requires some small familiarity with coding concepts, but, equally, it’s approachable enough that even someone as code-inept and anti-mathematical as me can vaguely understand what’s meant to be going on (although, to be clear, I could not decrypt myself out of a paper bag).
- Better Zoom: Has there ever been a product arc like that enjoyed by Zoom over the past fortnight – from ‘hot new videochat sensation’ to ‘probably spyware’ in circa ~12 days! Still, the company’s response to all this has largely been pretty good – certainly faster and more responsive than, ooh, almost any instance of Facebook being called out for being a massive panopticon, for example – and there are now services such as this popping up around the platform. It’s called ZMurl, and offers a few different features including a nice invite card for your meetings and, most importantly, improved security which helps prevent anyone from jumping into your meeting with their wank a-swinging (amongst other potential pitfalls). Alternatively, if you prefer using Gchat (or Hangouts, or whatever the fcuk Google has decided to call its videochat software this week) then you might like this plugin which gives you the opportunity to use it in Zoom-style grid view.
- Towel Animals: A subReddit devoted to celebrating animals crafted from towels, in the manner of the sort of thing they do in a certain type of hotel. It’s a weird mix of high-end towel elephant design and some quite baffling collisions of towel art and obscure meme culture, but it’s not about virus or death and as a result is eminently-worthy of its place.
- Morse Typing Trainer: Stuff you can do with all this time on your hands – learn Morse Code so that you can leave helpful, mysterious or vaguely-erotic messages in coded language across your city to baffle, confuse or arouse other Morse-literate passers-by. Or, er, you could make your whole family learn it and move all domestic communications from now until the end of lockdown to a purely dots-and-dashes-based system; this last idea is improved immeasurably if you exclude one family member from the project, fyi.
- The Museum of Portable Sounds: God I love a single-interest online museum. Except this one exists in the real world too, and it is TINY, and in non-lockdown times you can go on one-on-one visits where someone will take you (ONLY YOU!) around the museum and explain it all to you, and now you can do the same online and OH GOD THIS IS SO CUTE I MIGHT DIE. “In these extraordinary days of social distancing and isolation, our original guidelines for visiting the Museum of Portable Sound – in person, listening to our sounds from a single shared mobile phone – are no longer feasible. Therefore, we have decided to rethink the way we engage with our audience and share our collections with the world. Beginning today, anyone in the world with access to an internet connection and a web browser will be able to visit our museum – via video chat. Simply fill out our Contact Form and we’ll get back to you to schedule your visit and provide you with info on exactly how it will work.” Fine, so they lose points for the use of ‘extraordinary times’, but, well, it’s a minor quibble. Go on, book yourself in for a guided tour of the history of portable sounds – this sounds like a truly lovely way of spending an hour, in exchange for a small donation to the museum.
- Routehuffle: I was totally convinced I’d featured this before, but Google suggests otherwise; even if I have, though, I can’t imagine it’s ever been more useful than this. It’s a really simple idea – tell it your starting point, what your method of transport is (walking, running, biking), and how long you want to travel for, and it will spit out a circular route for you to take that covers that specific distance. Even better, it will create a new route EVERY TIME, meaning you can maybe do a little bit to limit the crushing boredom of doing laps around your local park each day. I have to say, whilst my lack of physical exercise throughout my life will almost certainly condemn me to an earlier grave than I might otherwise expect (though, come on kids, does this currently look like an experience worth prolonging? I posit that it does NOT), it’s been a blessing over these past few weeks in terms of not now missing my 15k runs and my squat-thrusts and bench-pressing. I am obviously going to be fcuking jealous of everyone who emerges from this all hench though, obvs.
- Opera Vision: You might have ‘get into opera’ on your ‘list of improving activities’ – if so, try this out, which currently has 30 full operas available to view online, performed by different companies from across the world. Were it not for the fact that I genuinely can’t stand it (cloth-eared philistine that I am) I would absolutely check a few of these out, not least to see how production styles vary from nation to nation. The costumes in opera inevitably bang too, in my limited experience, should you want an additional reason to take a look. Oh, hang on, here’s MORE opera – honestly, I’m spoiling you.
- The Retro Learning Pack: SO GOOD! This is 667 old MS-DOS educational games, available to download via torrent, and including such classics as Oregon Trail (“You died of a snakebite”) and Carmen Sandiego and Mavis Beacon and OH MY! It’s not hugely user-friendly to set up, and it’s obviously designed for people who are already a bit familiar with torrents and stuff, but this could be a GREAT bundle of software if you’ve got kids with a high tolerance for shonky graphics and explicit didacticism (and WHO DOESN’T, right?).
- 60 Logic Puzzles: Everyone’s nana, and my friend Mo, loves puzzle books – so here’s one for lockdown. PDF’d and printable, this contains 60 logic puzzles and, ok, whilst I haven’t done any of them I am going to trust that that is exactly what they are, that they are benign and kind and not secretly hiding awful racism or scat-bongo or anything like that in the numbers. If you have access to a printer and a nana, this is pretty much a match made in heaven – they are all very much of the Su-Doku style, though, rather than verbal, just so’s you know.
- Chesses 2: Pippin Barr, Curios favourite, returns with a new series of small games riffing on the concept of chess – each of these is a tiny, lovely variant on the standard game, and each of them is worth trying out to see what the tweak or the joke is. My personal favourite is ‘Musical Chess’, in which the position of the pieces on the board determines the melody being played in the background which shifts and modifies based on the ebb and flow of the game, but all of these are inspired.
- Let’s Go Build A…: A daily LEGO building challenge on this website, which every day offers you a new building challenge – make a certain thing, as specified by the site, with a maximum of 20 LEGO blocks: GO! The idea is that people share screenshots of their creations with the community on social media each day – I don’t have the level of visual creativity required to be anything other than tediously-mediocre at this, but more artistically-minded people could find quite a lot to enjoy here.
- Strange Key World: Oh, this is very smart. A simple platformer, where on each screen you can only use the controls that are presented; you might be restricted to left and right, you may not be able to jump, and you have to work out how to navigate the obstacles and hazards. Very simple, very clever and very satisfying to work out.
- Crittermound: Finally this week, a clicker game! If you know what that means, you’ll know what to expect; if you don’t, then this is a simple, process-driven toy which will slowly progress without you needing to do much to it but which will, I promise, suck you in like few other things after about 30 minutes of having it on in the background. This one’s about breeding insects, except, as with all these games, it’s not actually about that at all. So, so good – now, let me get back to my hatchery.
LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, MINIMAL TECHNO FOR OUR NEWLY-MINIMAL LIFESTYLES, COURTESY OF PACH!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS WHICH THIS WEEK IS IN FACT JUST TUMBLRS!:
- ArtStreetechture: Thanks to the lovely people at Present & Correct for sharing this Tumblr of Brutalist & Modernist architecture as seen through Google Streetview.
- Cozy: Tumblr is curating this specific new, er, Tumblr, pulling in all sorts of homely, ‘cosy’-type stuff to provide comfort and succour in these EXCEPTIONAL FCUKING TIMES DEAR GOD NO MORE. Ahem. Sorry. It’s fine, if very much at the Kinfolk/Airbnb-aesthetic end of the ‘cosy’ scale, but after three weeks of this I do rather wish that ‘twee’ wasn’t the prevalent coping aesthetic of much of the web.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Dave Towers: A London-based stencils-and-spray lettering artist, doing rather cool-looking work and also taking commissions.
- Manhattans Project: I think this is a cocktail bar in Margate – regardless, right now it’s a bloke doing cocktail recipes from his kitchen, and I love him immoderately. It’s not fancy at all, but it’s very charming nonetheless and frankly there are worse things to do with your time than getting into cocktail making.
- Piecework Puzzles: Jigsaw puzzles as Instagrammable lifestyle accessory. Presented not necessarily as an endorsement, but more to ask the question ‘is there anything that can’t be fitted in to the Insta aesthetic? Could I make photos of colostomy equipment *POP* with the right filter and a shot-from-above framing?
- Objects of my Isolation: Not an account but a hashtag – this is collecting people’s 3×3 Insta grids of nine objects that are defining their lockdown. A lovely project and something I think could be taken and reinterpreted and remixed in a variety of interesting ways.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- Year Zero for Britain: I’ve features lots of stuff by Clive Martin in here before – there was a time a few years back when I was convinced he was very much a ‘next big thing’ in British journalism, but it never quite transpired and he’s fallen slightly off my radar in recent years; he’s still a fantastic writer, though, and the way in which he writes about modern Britain and its culture and cultures is without peer. This is him looking at how the country is transforming, and may yet be transformed, by The Events – “Part of the reason we haven’t properly been able to grasp climate change in this country is because we don’t really know what it looks like, how it feels on our skin. But what the coronavirus has done in no time at all is give us a sneak preview of the end; of the language and aesthetic of disaster, of the formats we’ll use to call out the dead, of the technology, the uniforms, the tone used by HR directors as they cull the workforce and the made-up laws the police will use to keep us still.” Superb.
- Pandemic Stories: Another link to Jason Kottke after last week – this time, he collects emails he’s had from his readers across the world, sharing their experiences of the pandemic. As he points out, these necessarily skew to people who can read and write in English and who knew about his website already, meaning it’s a selection of stories dominated by middle-class experience, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful collection of stories, some more hopeful than others but all offering a unique perspective on what we are all going through. When this is all over (phrases I must ban myself from writing), I would love to see a narrative exhibition of the Corona stories, weaving fragments of story and audio and news and images and video together to paint an ever-changing picture of the world’s response to the crisis.
- How Coronavirus Misinformation Spreads: Or, more specifically, how it avoids moderation by social media platforms despite their apparent commitment to removing lies and deliberate untruths around the pandemic. More excellent explanatory reporting from Bellingcat, and an unwelcome reminder that just because I never see his crap on my Timeline it doesn’t mean that P*ul J*seph W*tson isn’t still peddling his unique brand of damp-lipped sub-Alex Jones lunacy to credulous millions worldwide.
- The White House Corona Briefings: David Eggers writes for McSweeney’s – I’m including this mainly as it’s very funny, but also because, from an anglo point of view, reading this does make one feel marginally better about the current situation over here. Until, that is, you pause and remember that whilst the language is Eggers’ own in this piece, the actual things that the principles are saying are all broadly based on actual transcripts of actual press conferences, which all of a sudden might make you feel a tiny bit worse.
- Gendered Domesticity and COVID-19: My girlfriend and I are lucky insofar as we both like cooking, are both about as good as each other at it, and are both reasonably tolerant of filth, meaning that, so far, the chores have mostly been shared equally (obviously that’s just my perspective; she might have a totally different opinion)(please don’t ask her). This piece suggests that the current domestic situations being experienced by families worldwide are serving in many respects to reinforce and entrench established gender roles when it comes to domesticity, and that in fact women are shouldering a disproportionate burden of labour when childcare, etc, is factored in. Obviously I’ve got no data to bring to this at all, but I can certainly imagine a lot of women I know nodding in stony-faced assent as they read this.
- This Was Supposed To Be An Introvert’s Paradise: I half-agreed with this article, but am also including it as part of my lockdown mission to collect articles by every single fcuking niche self-selecting group of people on the whole fcuking internet describing how this is particularly bad and painful for people like them (honestly, if this sort of event proves anything it’s that we must all stop characterising millennials as the age group obsessed with its own precious and privileged status – we are all like that, always). This is the introverts, complaining that actually there are now all these people filling up their calendars with VIRTUAL DRINKS and how it’s impossible to make up excuses so now you can’t refuse and and and and…look, on the one hand I am very much here for ‘the normies are ruining online for people like me’ chat; on the other, look, NOONE is enjoying this, just suck it up ffs. I did like the stuff in here about the edge-limitations of videochat, though, and how people will start to get frustrated with them sooner rather than later – I wonder whether this is going to see innovation in terms of low-latency emoting or similar as an adjunct to video?
- Musicians Flock To Twitch: Apologies, it’s a Kotaku piece and so not brilliantly-written; still, though, another interesting example of a new set of artists moving to Twitch as a potential avenue for digital versions of their real-life output. I particularly enjoyed the musicians’ frustration and bemusement at some of the odder community aspects of the platform – the baffled reference to foot fetishism in particular is lovely – but overall this does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that Twitch is the most interesting of the platforms to keep an eye on right now in a ‘future of entertainments’ sort of way.
- Coronart Virus: I’m really sorry, I couldn’t resist. This piece is about the pandemic’s likely impact on the art world – specifically, fine art – and how it will likely affect events and the market in the coming year or so. As I mentioned up top somewhere, it’s likely to kill art fairs; small galleries are likely to suffer too, whilst online portals will benefit from the removal of onsite sales. What’s harder to gauge is the extent to which this will be beneficial for smaller artists; I’ve never been clear, and artist friends of mine have never seemed certain, whether the ‘gallery, show, fair’ cycle actually works particularly well for them, so perhaps its dismantling or reimagining will prove a boon for the people who make work.
- Photographers, Inside: How some of the world’s top photographers are responding to the creative challenge of not being able to leave the house. For those interested in this sort of thing, Rankin’s running weekly simple photography challenges on Instagram at the moment, details of which you can find here if you fancy it.
- Hong Kong Protests Come to Animal Crossing: It’s fascinating to remember exactly how much stuff was still happening worldwide before we shut everything down; Hong Kong was still a city in the grip of popular protest, and whilst that’s obviously stopped in meatspace now the pandemic’s in effect, if we’ve learned one thing in the past month it’s that there’s nothing that you can’t do offline that you can do online. In this year’s most bizarre crossover event to date, Hong Kong kids are congregating inside popular cutesy-farm-type simulator game Animal Crossing to carry on their protests against the Chinese regime in digital space – as ever with this stuff, I am in awe of the lengths people go to to bend digital space to their will, and at the flexibility and malleability of said space to enable that to happen.
- Vittles 2.3: I am including this because I imagine there are possibly some of you for whom cooking is less a fun activity and more ‘something I need to do so I don’t die’; if you fall into that camp, and you are a regular, high-volume consumer of instant noodles, this article – all about how to pimp them to the nth degree – will basically be your new bible.
- Quibi Reviewed: Quibi, the new, mobile-only hyper-funded, Jeffrey Katzenberg-helmed entertainment platform launched in the US this week, with a star-studded roster of new programmes, each shot to be viewed on your phone in landscape or portrait and each clocking in at
- Eating Casu Marzu: If you’ve spent any time at all around listicle internet, you’ll be aware of Casu Marzu, the (in)famous Sardinian cheese which has all the maggots in it. This article is more interesting on the subject than most, delving a little more into the history of the cheese but, more compellingly, that of the island itself, speculating as to what it is that makes it the sort of place where people will still, even in 2020, break the law to produce a foodstuff that pullulates with larvae.
- Stone Age Life: You might have seen this one already this week – it’s had a viral moment, which was perhaps to be expected of a profile of a modern-day cavewoman shaman-type person called ‘Lynx’ – but, if not, it’s a really interesting read. Lynx, the protagonist, is a fascinating subject, obviously committed to the lifestyle she lives but equally not averse to getting on a plane to run ‘caveman retreats’ around the world, and not exactly un-self-aware about her image and, I get the impression, how to use it. Also (and I know that this makes me less of a good person – HA!! – but I couldn’t help it), I did rather get the whiff of ‘child of minor European aristocracy’ from her backstory, though that might just be me. Regardless, this is a really good read and an excellent piece of profile-writing.
- Imaginary Legal Systems: Far more interesting and thought-provoking than the title might suggest, this is Slate Star Codex, AKA Scott Alexander, writing about some alternative legal systems he has imagined. I promise you, this really is so, so interesting – each of these is plausible and sort-of logical, and yet leads to such interestingly divergent outcomes. It does rather force one into thinking about all of the radical and often-times unconsidered effects of the systems and strictures we’re used to – MAYBE IT’S TIME TO RIP EVERYTHING UP AND START AGAIN???
- The Wolves of Stanislav: I have read everything Paul Auster’s ever written, or at least I’ve tried to; there are a few missteps, but overall he’s a consistently beautiful writer and this article, written about a visit to Ukraine a few years ago to investigate his family history, is a wonderful example of his instantly-recognisable style, intimate and familiar and conversational and old and weirdly avuncular. I could have picked this out of a lineup within two sentences; obviously your tolerance for Auster will determine your response to this, but if you’re unfamiliar with his work I’d urge you to give this a go.
- We Are Living in Ballard’s World: If you know JG Ballard you can, probably, imagine what this piece has to say and can probably skip it (though being reminded of his work is always a pleasure); if, though, you’re not, then you owe it to yourself to read this piece, explaining exactly why he’s the most relevant author to RIGHT NOW other than perhaps Gibson or Chiang that there is (yes, I know, there are others). Honestly, there’s probably never been a better time to get right into late-period Ballard; this feels like the perfect weather and weird ambience to get right into Super Cannes, Cocaine Nights and Millennium People, if you’ve not already.
- Breaking Bread in Lyon: This is, on the one hand, an absolute grab-bag of ‘Anglo in rural, foodie France’ cliches (no matter that the anglo in question is on this occasion a yank) – the decision to ‘follow the dream’ and move to France (Lyon, in this case); the unfriendliness of the locals, the difficulty in assimilating, then one day the breakthrough, and the understanding, and the local acceptance…so far, so tediously-Mayle, but the piece is redeemed by truly excellent writing, a focus on cookery rather than the cliches of a certain type of imagined-Frenchness, and the final quarter of the piece which becomes something rather different, sadder and far better. Honestly, this is a beautiful piece of writing.
- The Prophylactic Life: Thanks to Katie for sending this to me; it’s a New Yorker short essay by Gary Shteyngart (by the way, if you’ve STILL not followed my recommendation and picked up a copy of Super Sad True Love Story then WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU WAITING FOR??) on his current pandemic experience in the US. Wonderful, mainly because of how he says what he says than what he says.
- The White Man’s Liberation Front: A superb short story by Bernadine Evaristo; imagining the poor frustrated male victim of a gender-switched society in which it’s the male academics who are bullied and passed over for tenure and whose achievements are ignored and deemed insignificant. Except, of course, for many men like the male lead in this story, this isn’t a satirical gender-switch at all, but instead a clear-eyed portrayal of How Things Really Are. Superb, and very funny.
- Nostalgia Is A permanent Condition: Finally in the longreads this week, a jaw-droppingly good piece of near-fiction writing, imagining a slightly changed (but still very recognisable) post-Corona world. It’s part of the Indoor Voices project for fiction writers which I featured last week, and it’s…honestly, it’s so, so good, and the most interesting and, oddly, sad thing I have read about all this all week. Which I appreciate might not appeal to you, but this does that very rare trick of managing to combine Transmetropolitan-style ‘that’s practically already here’-type future=imaginings with a poignancy that’s a slight punch in the gut. Read this, and then save it to read again in a few months’ time.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: