Webcurios 14/02/14

BUY TICKETS IT WILL BE GOOD AND THEY ARE SELLING OUT

FANCY LISTENING TO A LOAD OF FELA KUTI’S MUSIC? OH GOOD

THE SECTION WHICH IS ALMOST SUSPICIOUS ABOUT HOW LITTLE BULLSH!T SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS THERE HAS BEEN THIS WEEK AND WHICH SUGGESTS WE JUST GET ON WITH IT BEFORE ANY MORE STUFF SUDDENLY APPEARS WHICH I FEEL COMPELLED TO WRITE ABOUT DESPITE A FUNDAMENTAL LACK OF INTEREST: 

• Facebook Introduces More Gender Options: Not actually strictly speaking relationship to PROFESSIONAL social media rubbish, but it is A Good Thing and as such am including it up here. As of the past 24h, Facebook now allows users to self-identify as genders beyond male or female, and to self-select the gender pronoun they would like the site to use on their profile. A small but significant step which, much as I fundamentally dislike Facebook in general, is a damn site more than Google did last week with their pretty-but-passive doodle ‘action’. 
• FB Introduces Admin Identification On Pages: As of next Thursday (so you have a whole week to get used to the idea, more or less) Facebook will display the names of admins who’ve made posts on Pages – but only to other admins. I must confess that when I first read this I didn’t quite take in that important caveat, meaning that I briefly envisaged some sort of communitymanagergeddon in which slavering, doublefigureiq morons who were displeased with the quality of their brand interactions on Facebook would be able to find out the ACTUAL REAL NAME of the admin who had posted something which displeased them and thus track them across the web and make their lives a misery. Obviously the fact that this can’t happen is probably a good thing, but I must confess to feeling a brief, schadenfreude-motivated frisson back there. Anyway, this basically means that if you’re part of a community management team you can no longer write posts on Facebook calling all of your Page’s fans ‘mouthbreathing untermensches’ or similar and then blame it on Barry the intern. That’s all. Didn’t really warrant all those words, really, on reflection. 
• People Use Facebook To Talk About Telly: This isn’t really news (of course they do), but this is the latest salvo in the ‘no WE want to be the place where you spend all your money to capture those second screen eyeballs, tellyfolk’ war between FB and Twitter. There are now actual numbers which prove that people use Facebook to talk about what’s on telly while it’s on. This is sort of meaningless, though – what I imagine would be more interesting data is whether the tenor of conversations and the level of ‘engagement’ (sorry) with the programmes in question differs on Facebook, where people are talking in (relative) private to a closed network of friends, vs Twitter, where people are speeking their branes (sic) to the whole world. But this doesn’t say anything about that. Ho hum. 
• The Labour Party Does That Facebook Anniversary Vid Thing: Long-term readers and people who actually know me in real life will be aware that I’ve been boring on about how NEW JOURNALISM and stuff is going to impact (read: render horrific) next year’s general election campaigning. After Grant Shapps and the Lib Dems both jumping on the Buzzfeed bandwagon in recent months, we now have the Labour party jumping on the SOCIAL CONTENT bandwagon, with their spoof Facebook 10 Year Anniversary vid documenting what the Tories’ narcissismvideo might look like were they a real person. It’s…it’s ok. You know, it’s political propaganda and as such is by definition marmiteish, but it’s not dreadfully done by any means, and it’s a good idea from a certain point of view (although it does sort of beg the question of who it’s talking to), but it fills me with all sorts of dread about having to sit through 20-odd pieces of this sort of crap a week from January-May 2015 (and that’ a conservative estimate). Get ready for the ONLINE ATTACK AD ELECTION, kids – look at what the Republicans are doing in the US for a really quite depressing glimpse of a potential future. 
• Twitter Changes Its Profile Pages (Maybe): Change! Change! Potential change! Twitter’s profile pages have, for some users, undergone a revamp, making them more modular and removing the chronological feed element from the way in which tweets, etc, are presented. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth, and thousands of words expended on websites which specialise in overanalysing this stuff about what this all MEANS. Personally speaking I think it means very little and isn’t really in any way interesting, and if you want to read 10 poorly-considered bulletpoints about WHAT THIS MEANS FOR BRANDS, I suggest you sod off and read another newsletter. 
• Twitter Interactives: Twitter have grouped all their nice datavisualisations in one place. Useful from a creative inspiration point of view, and a nice reminder of all the sort of stuff you can do with Twitter’s massive datasplurge should you be so minded (and have access, obviously). 
• Guardian Partners With Unilever: I think this is very big news, though obviously that’s my opinion alone. Unilever are paying a 7-figure sum to the Guardian for CONTENT which will sit on a special section of the paper’s website and will be all about sustainability and stuff (which at least hopefully means that they won’t be forcing more disingenuous ‘real beauty’ rubbish down our throats). Will be really interesting to see what this looks like, and whether this is proof that Buzzfeed-style native advertising really is THE FUTURE or just a fad. I mean are people REALLY going to read this stuff? HMMMM.
• Facebook ‘Truthers’: An interesting piece on Slate about the not-necessarily-true claims about Facebook which are increasingly being reported as FACT (cf ‘Facebook will lose half its users by Thursday’, or ‘Facebook and Buzzfeed are part of an illuminati conspiracy together’ , etc). Anyway, this debunks a few of the ones which are floating around at the moment, although it doesn’t quite rebuff the current biggie doing the rounds, which suggests that fake ‘likes’ are still a major problem for the site.
• The Crap Autotweet Valentine’s Thingy: I’m only including one brand attempt to hijack the hallmark holiday here, and even this one’s only in here as an example of what to do. Some crap bingo company made a THING which purported to analyse users’ Twitter feeds to see who their Twitter valentine (TWALENTINE?) was based on some bullsh!t metric or another. So far, so nice – except that it rather sneakily autotweeted from people’s accounts when they used it. This shouldn’t really need to be said, but please can people STOP making these things? It may gain a brand exposure, but it also makes them look like spammers and is generally annoying.

No idea, sorry, but from here

FANCY A FRENCH HIPHOP MIX? OH GOOD

THE SECTION WHICH WILL HOPEFULLY PROVIDE YOU WITH ENOUGH DISTRACTION TO MAKE IT THROUGH THE WEEKEND WITHOUT THINKING TOO HARD ABOUT THE FACT THAT, WHEN IT BOILS DOWN TO IT, WE ARE BORN ALONE AND WE DIE ALONE AND THAT EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN MAY WELL BE AN ILLUSION ANYWAY AND THAT AS SUCH ALL THIS LOVE AND ROMANCE STUFF IS AKIN TO PEOPLE CLINGING TO EACH OTHER IN THE FREEZING COLD WATER WHILST THEY WAIT FOR A LIFEBOAT WHICH THEY KNOW IN THEIR HEART OF HEARTS WILL NEVER ARRIVE, PT. 1:

• Cryptofloricon: Very clever idea of the week, part 1. Launched in time for the Hallmark Holiday (OF COURSE), this is by Edward Saperia who was the creative mind behind the Betrayer’s Banquet which recently completed its run in London. Cryptofloricon is a service which lets users order small bouquets of flowers which correspond to coded messages – so a rose, a lily and a dandelion may mean, say, “I’m sorry about the infection; please forgive me”. There are LOADS of messages, and you might be able to get an order in for same-day delivery if you’re feeling inspired. Lovely. 
• 100 Happy Days: Not really my sort of thing – it’s a bit, well, positive – but I can just about understand the appeal. 100 Happy Days is a project which suggests that you sign up and keep a pictorial record each and every day for 100 days (that was probably self-explanatory, on reflection) of things that have made you happy. You can either share these things publicly or just with the people behind the project; you get a small book containing all your pictures and words should you successfully complete the ‘challenge’. Much as the curmudgeon in me wants to scowl at this, it’s actually rather nice I think. 
• Mathograms: Would you like to send someone a mathematical equation which, when graphed, looks like a heart or something similarly romantic? OH GOOD. If you happen to be dating, or just fancy, someone who’s basically a walking Texas Instruments calculator then this may well be perfect for you. 
• Augmented Reality-ish Spatial Storytelling: This is very clever indeed. IDNA is a video/graphics platform which lets users watch something on a tablet or phone, and experience different angles and perspectives on the action unfolding before them by moving the device around – so, say, you could watch a scene from one angle and then look around the room to notice that someone is eavesdropping behind a curtain, or similar, and the story can branch and diverge depending on what piece of the action a viewer is focusing on at any given time. The potential for this is obviously huge – there will be a 6-part series of shorts coming out developed in the format later this year, so keep your eyes peeled. Inevitably it won’t work properly yet, but this sort of thing is the future (NB: Web Curios has no ACTUAL idea whether it really will be the future). 
• The Worst Font Ever: I have no idea why this has been made. It’s called ‘Human Type’, it’s made by this person, and it basically turns the alphabet into a series of unpleasant, fleshy, hairy monstrosities. Seriously, THE HAIRS. Ugh. 
• A Truly Inventive Contact Us Webpage: Admittedly if all you really want to do is get this company’s email address or phone number really quickly then it’s probably quite annoying, but kudos to this lot for doing something which I’ve not seen before and making you play a short game to get to their details. 
• Everything Is Connected: This doesn’t really work 100%, but it’s quite an ambitious project and you can forgive them the technical shortfallings. A project by the University of Gent in Belgium, this is a ‘connect with Facebook’ API-scraper which takes data from your FB profile and uses it to play a 6-degrees of Wikipedia-style game trying to get from your profile to anything else in a series of logical jumps (ie you to testicles = you like Rihanna>Rihanna is a singer>singers have mouths>so do cats>cats get neutered>testicles). It’s a bit janky, but I like the scope of the idea and it’s a little more imaginative than the now-slightly-played-out ‘your photos on an in-video billboard’ thing. 
• European Translation Map: A site which lets you type any word in English and then displays the translations in All (well, most) European languages, overlaid on a map of the continent. It uses Google Translate and is therefore imperfect at best, but it’s quite interesting to see commonalities and therefore etymological connections (and to learn how to say rude words in LOTS of different languages simultaneously). 
• Sesame Fighter: If you were to cross Sesame Street with Street Fighter II and then thrown in a bit of Typing Of The Dead you’d get this very thing – a typing tutor game which features really very nicely drawn renditions of the Sesame Street cast in 2d-fighter style. No idea what the copyright situation is with regards to image usage rights, so this might not be around for too long. Anyway, it’s by this design student to whom all credit and kudos, etc.
• One57 NYC: A very impressive piece of webbuilding to promote new steel-and-glass behemoth One57 NYC, a new skyscraper (is that still what these are called? It feels very 20th century, somehow) development which encompasses residential, commercial and hotel spaces in the now-familiar Shard style. The site is the de rigeur HTML5 multimediascrollyextravaganza that you’d expect, but this is a very slick example of the genre and worth taking a look at. 
• Vimeo In 2013: I know, I know, this is HIDEOUSLY late – anyway, Vimeo’s look back at its 2013 is very nicely put together and actually contains links to loads of really lovely videos of all sorts of types. You can lose an afternoon here quite easily, be warned. 
• 600 Year Old Bottom Music: This is silly but also rather wonderful. A music student from the US noticed a detail in Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ – music inscribed on the naked bottom of somebody being tortured in the ‘Hell’ panel of the painting. They transcribed it in modern notation and played it, and this is the result – possibly the first time in hundreds of years that this has been heard. Sort of wonderful. 
• The Practice Kissing Pillow: I have a strange feeling that this will have been in the papers today, but anyway…should you feel the need to make yourself a pillow with human features on which you can ‘practice’ kissing, then this is the guide for you. I suggest that you don’t do what I just did and dwell a little too long on the other sorts of pillows one could potentially make with Fleshlights and the like, lest you also suddenly be overwhelmed by the need to take a scalding hot bath and scrub yourself clean. 
• Minimum Wage Living In The US: A New York Times interactive which lets users see how far the US minimum wage could take them each month depending on where they live. It’s simple but works well – behind it lies a load of data about average costs of living in various US cities, which allows people to see how people would fare in different parts of the country; would be fascinating (and no doubt as depressing) to see this replicated for the UK. 
• The Story Of Fix’d: This is a bit of an odd one, but bear with me. A website which details the creative process behind the creation of Fix’d, an as-yet nonexistant website/app/community for the fixed-wheel bike community. The team behind it were given the simple brief to create something which ‘informed cyclists and helped them meet their goals’ – this site takes you through the entire creative process, from insight to concept development to creative execution, as they came up with Fix’d, a tool which let fixielovers share their bike customisation strategies. I really like this – the site’s nicely put together, the idea of Fix’d is actually very good and should become a reality, but most of all it’s a really well-thought-through and communicated insight into the whole process of MAKING A THING. Highly recommended, this, honest. 
• Overloaded Chinese Vehicles: Nothing more, nothing less. Some of these are insane; as a non-driver I’m sort of in awe. 
• Eyesight Simulator: As far as I can tell this isn’t made by an optician’s or a charity, but it ought to be. Simple site which lets users type in various glasses prescription strengths and see how that affects people’s sight. Seriously, the RNIB or someone similar really should ‘borrow’ this, unless they have already (I’ve not got time to Google it right now, sorry). 
• Easy Email Encryption: For the paranoid amongst you who can’t be bothered to sign up to Hushmail or get on TOR, this provides what looks to be a decent security solution which can integrate with a variety of existing email clients. Virtru lets users see where emails get forwarded, set limited access times, etc etc etc – and the nice thing is that it’s easy to turn on or off on an email-by-email basis. Seems quite slick, though obviously caution is advised. 
• Kirill Oreshkin Has Been Higher Than You: The VK photo page of one Kirill Oreshkin, who despite his suspiciously beautiful profile pic does actually seem to be a real person and who likes to take photos of himself hanging, apparently with no safety gear, from some preposterously tall structures in Russia. These are the sort of photos that will give you the sweaty-palmed prickling feeling if you’re a bit vertigo-y. For reasons known only to Mr Oreshkin, there’s also a photo of Russia’s filthiest toilet buried in there somewhere (and maybe all sorts of other weird stuff too – I confess to not having gone through all 1,000+ pics). 
• Nefarious Jobs: 13 years ago (!) when I was briefly living in Washington I became mildly obsessed by a website called ‘Cadaver Inc’ (sadly no longer extant – OH NO HANG ON I love the Wayback Machine) which purported to be a service which would clean up dead bodies, no questions asked, for a fee. It turned out to be a very clever front for a Scandi Black Metal outfit called Cadaver, and it came to mind again when I found this this week. Nefarious Jobs styles itself as a revenge service – for a fee, these people will exact some form of retribution on someone you feel has wronged you. It can’t be real, can it? Can someone try it out NOT ON ME PLEASE? Thanks.
• The Biker Women Of Marrakesh: A gorgeous selection of photographs depicting Moroccan women with their bikes. So much to love about this – the colours, the fashion – and the visual style’s going to be used in a photoshoot for a women’s glossy in…oooh…I reckon about 4 months (if this has already happened then forgive me – it may surprise many of you to know that I am not after all a great consumer of female fashion mags and not even Porter is likely to change that). 
• The Best Meme From Japan Of The Week: You sort of almost feel sorry for the potentially unfaithful couple here, but some of the illustrations they spawned are wonderful. I’d love to know more about the cultural significance of some of the art styles / tropes adopted, but it’s generally just a fascinating look at pop culture / meme development from the other side of the world. PROTIP: if you’re out with your illicit lover, don’t get voxpopped. 
• Daily Life In 1970s China: Lovely selection of colourised photos from China 40 years ago. Erm, that’s it really. 
• Drinking Cinema: A website which collects illustrated drinking games to play along with films. The art style’s rather nice (although occasionally a little hard to read) and the selection is pretty vast – there are plenty of cult classics in here, so if your idea of a perfect weekend’s entertainment is watching a quadruple-bill of classic films whilst drinking yourself into hospital then this will be your perfect companion for the next few days. 

By Wim Delvoyes

THE SECTION WHICH WILL HOPEFULLY PROVIDE YOU WITH ENOUGH DISTRACTION TO MAKE IT THROUGH THE WEEKEND WITHOUT THINKING TOO HARD ABOUT THE FACT THAT, WHEN IT BOILS DOWN TO IT, WE ARE BORN ALONE AND WE DIE ALONE AND THAT EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN MAY WELL BE AN ILLUSION ANYWAY AND THAT AS SUCH ALL THIS LOVE AND ROMANCE STUFF IS AKIN TO PEOPLE CLINGING TO EACH OTHER IN THE FREEZING COLD WATER WHILST THEY WAIT FOR A LIFEBOAT WHICH THEY KNOW IN THEIR HEART OF HEARTS WILL NEVER ARRIVE, PT. 2:

• Coding Solutions In Multiple Languages: Apologies to all programmer-types if this is superold, but it seemed useful. Rosetta Code is a website which shows how to programme instructions in a variety of languages simultaneously, hopefully helping to teach people how commands are executed across different code platforms. Does that make sense? Sorry, I’m flagging a little and must make more coffee. 
• COME ON AND SLAM: Although remembering that this exists has perked me right up. A completely pointless website which plays a seemingly neverending selection of remixes of the main song from Space Jam, on an infinite loop. Utterly dreadful and yet strangely compelling – and who knew that there were this many remixes, particularly from Japan. WEIRD. I warn you, you click on that link and you will hear something which is almost certainly a musical aberration. 
• The Rooftops of Dubai: The colours in these are just amazing – I presume they’re done in HDR or something, which I know is a bit divisive amongst photography purists, but these really do look rather beautiful in a sort of ‘space city of the future’ kind of fashion. 
• The Final Statements Of Death Row Prisoners As Portraits: Amy Elkins is an LA-based artist who’s compiled the final statements of death row prisoners executed in Texas over a number of years, turning these last words into shaded black and white portraits of each inmate’s face based on their mugshots. Just sort of infinitely sad, really, and quite beautiful too. 
• The Best $3million House You Will See All Week: If you have a spare $3million+, and you fancy living in a truly incredible house which looks like the sort of thing Lex Luthor might have lived in in one of the original Superman films then this will be right up your street. Even if you don’t fit the above criteria it’s frankly worth a look. 
• A Site For Fans Of Hallucinogens: I discovered this accompaied by the description ‘made by people on acid for people on acid’. Now it’s a LONG time since I’ve done anything like that, but I couldn’t help but think that this would just be a little too much were one in that sort of state. Anyway, I am sure that none of the 17 people reading this would ever countenance doing that sort of thing, but on the offchance I’ll just leave it here. 
• On The Road – The Directional Version: DIGITAL ART. A clever-clever project which takes all the places mentioned by Kerouac in ‘On The Road’ (a novel which the older I get makes me appreciate Capote’s famous withering cuss more and more – ‘it’s not writing, it’s typing‘) and then reinterprets the novel by simply listing the Google Maps directions which would take Sal Paradise and the rest on their JOURNEY OF PERSONAL DISCOVERY (I like this more than this rather sniffy description may suggest). 
• Kissing Ryan: Would you like to be able to take a picture of yourself with your webcam in such a fashion that it makes you look a very tiny bit like you’re kissing Ryan Gosling? OH GOOD!
• Handles – Interactive Twitter Theatre: An interesting idea which I think would be a theatrical carcrash, Handles is a play which showed in Manchester last week, in which the action taking place onstage was ‘augmented’ (not sure if that’s the right term, but I can’t quite think of another right now) by tweets from the audience appearing on a Twitter wall behind the cast. There’s all sorts of pseudy FOURTH WALL stuff you could wang on about here, but I don’t think that without structure or guidance this could be anything other than an ephemeral distraction to the cast and the audience as a whole. The writeup’s interesting, though, so do have a read and make up your own mind. 
• LIFT 2014: LIFT is the London International Festival of Theatre, which happens every two years in the capital. This year’s Festival lineup was announced on Monday – it runs throughout June, and there is some AWESOME stuff in there this year (and I’m not just saying that because I’m very, very tangentially involved in the thing). They’re the people that brought Gatz to London 2 years ago, and there’s plenty of stuff this year which looks just as good. GO AND BOOK TICKETS. 
• Pleasant Places: A map showing ‘pleasant’ places in the US – that is, cities ranked by the number of days of ‘pleasant’ weather they get each year. Included mainly because the interface and dataviz is quite nice rather than because of a personal obsession with median (or is it modal?) meteorology in the continental United States. 
• Symmetrical Breakfasts: Not really sure why this exists, but it does and I here present it to you. An Instagram feed which each day posts pictures of symmetrical plates of breakfast, because why the devil not. Community managers working for cereal brands or similar, here’s next Tuesday’s crap link for Facebook. You’re welcome. 
• We Come Together: Campaign website for the International HIV/AIDS alliance, raising awareness of safe sex this Valentine’s day and offering little boxes of kink for the first 5,000 people to donate £20 to the campaign. A lovely website for a good cause, and the accompanying video is one of the nicest depictions of sex in all its forms that I’ve seen for ages – left me with a smile on my face (not in that way). I’ve included it at the bottom, so you’ll just have to wait (unless, er, you watch it on their website which I’ve just linked to). 
• The ‘Lean In’ Image Collection: I’ve a few issues with Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ manifesto (largely based on the fact that much of it seems to ignore the fact that Sandberg is, regardless of gender, one of those terrifying 0.1% of people who is totally and utterly alpha about everything, massively overachieving with a terrifying work ethic and a very high IQ – SHERYL, MOST PEOPLE SIMPLE CAN’T DO WHAT YOU DO, EVEN IF YOU WRITE A BOOK WHICH TELLS THEM HOW THEY REALLY CAN IF THEY JUST THINK A BIT DIFFERENTLY), but the efforts that she is making and the debate which she’s spread around gender equality are to be applauded. This is her work with Getty Images to create stock photography which presents images of women which are a bit different to the standard sets offered by imagelibraries of mothers, etc – I mean, it’s still stock photography but it’s good to see a slightly better selection. 
• Browse Reddit And Make It Look Like Outlook: Clever little bosskey hack which lets you browse the Reddit frontpage through an interface which looks like Outlook. SNEAKY.  
• The 1936 Winter Olympics: It was slightly overshadowed by the Summer ones that year, but the Winter Olympics in ’36 were also, it turns out, held in Germany. Here’s a rather good collection of pictures of the events, which juxtapose awesome baggy-trousered acts of snowbound athleticism with a LOT of swastikas and zieg heil-ing. BONUS PICTURES: some of the same ones feature in this far more comprehensive set of photos of the first 12 winter games.
• Our Robocop Remake: What happens when a bunch of internet geeks take the Robocop script and decide to remake it, scene-by-scene, using whatever means and styles they choose? THIS DOES. Seeing as there’s currently a mediocre remake currently stinking up cinemas worldwide, it might be a good time to reappraise the original which remains one of the most bleak and depressing examples of that particularly nasty, nihilistic wave of 80s cinema exemplified by Basic Instinct and the like. Although this is significantly less dark, not least because of the BRILLIANT CGI penises in the shower scene (seriously, it’s worth it just for those). BONUS – an oral history of the original Robocop, which is really very interesting indeed. 
• The Time Appsule: This was in the PROPER papers this week (well done Battenhall on the PR) so you’ve probably seen it already, but in case not…Time Appsule allows users to send locked ‘parcels’ of data to other users, which will only unlock on a certain date – like a time capule! DO YOU SEE? Anyway, they’re trumpeting it as THE NEXT SNAPCHAT or something, but all I could think of was how you could use this to really take some superlongtermdishbestservedcold revenge on someone – imagine sending your loved one a message containing documentary evidence of all your infidelities and a short message reading ‘I never loved you anyway’, primed to open on a date of your choosing on which they will discover you’ve left them? Or, er, maybe don’t imagine that at all, that’s just HORRIBLE. Sorry. 
• The NYT Does The Luge: Another great NYT interactive, this time exploring the MYSTERIES of the luge. Really slick (as in fact are all their Sochi interactives, which are all collected here and are well worth a look – both from a ‘wow, sport eh?’ point of view and a ‘wow, webdesign eh?’ one.
• How Do You Code: The official launch of the Year Of Code has been divisive to say the least (on which more later), but regardless of your feelings on the initiative this is a nice site on which developers can share tips and hints on web development, sorted by language, role, etc etc etc. Useful. Oh, and seeing as we’re on coding, this is a Kickstarter seeking funding to publish a book which will teach small kids coding – your level of like/revulsion to this idea will vary, so I’ll just drop it here and move on – though the amount of money it’s raised beyond its goal is pretty amazing. 
• Waste The Rest Of Your Day, Pt. 1: You want a website which serves up a seemingly-infinite set of ad-free broswergames? OH GOOD.
• Vintage Japanese Bond Posters: Illustrated posters to old James Bond films from Japan. These are lovely, and would sell like hotcakes if anyone could get their hands on some prints I think. 
• Star Wars, If It Had Been Set In An 80s High School: I don’t care for Star Wars, particularly, nor indeed 80s nostalgia, but these really are beautifully done. Characters and locations from the original canon, reimagined as concept art for an 80s high-school film/cartoon. Sort of like Mos Eisley meets Ridgemont High. Sort of. Anyway, these really are very good indeed. 
• Never-Before Seen WWI Photos: From an exhibition currently on show in Milan, a slideshow of apparently previously unseen photos of the Great War. These are really, really good – my personal favourite is of the black airman laughing uproariously, not least because the man has a generally awesome face but also because of the innate poignancy in having no idea whether he survived or not. Have a scroll through, these are excellent.
• 7 Cups Of Tea: This might have been around for ages, but no apologies if this is older than the hills. 7 Cups Of Tea is basically an online version of the Samaritans, allowing anyone to be connected to a trained ‘listener’ online who will talk to them, anonymously, about whatever they want. A lovely idea and an important service which I think should be better known than it in fact is. They take volunteers – the only caveat is that you have to be willing to donate 2 hours a week of your time to be available should anyone want to talk, which frankly isn’t much at all. 
• Animated 8bit Gifs of Films & Comics: Like Minipops, but different, these few little animations of cult movies in 8bit style are very nicely done indeed. BONUS – have these illustrations which depict classic films as Ottoman miniature illustrations and which are beautifully illustrated.
• Slightly Rubbish Curses: A Reddit user compiles a rather wonderful selection of slightly rubbish curses – “I hope you wake up 4 minutes before your alarm goes off”, etc. The joy comes in the comments where there are DOZENS of user-submitted variants. Worth saving somewhere and using on everyone at work until they beat you to death for being a one-note comedian who doesn’t understand when a joke’s run its course. 
• Arty Cinemagifs: I am reliably informed that these are inspired by Donna Tartt’s latest novel The Goldfinch, though I have no idea why as I’m yet to read it. Anyway, they are lovely. 
• Let The Crowd Guide Your Date: Or, er, don’t. You may recall a Google Glass hack / art project which I featured a few weeks back, through which a woman went on dates, streamed them to glass and took live suggestions as to what to do / say…anyway, this is the app version. COME ON SOMEONE, MAKE THIS A TV SHOW PLEASE – this is the only good that can come of it, surely?
• Inside Jayne Mansfield’s House: Famously pneumatic 50s starlet Jayne Mansfield was famous for many things (well, some) but the restraint and moderation of her choices in interior design probably didn’t feature. WOW, this house. Such kitsch, much barbie. 
• Endless Bongo Kisses: A website which collects looping footage of people kissing from bongo movies – just kisses, so no nudity on display. Scroll left-to-right to get to the ‘good’ stuff – there’s something actually really creepy about this, which as someone pointed out might be because so many of the kisses on show look more like two creatures trying to actually eat each other rather than any sort of expression of affection. 
• Photoshop Request: This has to be Reddit trolling people, no? Hm. This purports to be a site offering free photoshop work, done by students who need to practice on ‘real’ projects. Come on, this can’t be for real – there’s got to be a prank / art project behind this.
• The Burrito Project Kickstarter: This man started a Kickstarter to fund his purchase of a burrito – inevitably, he SMASHED his target. Now he’s raising money for a bigger project – to try every possible combination of burrito from some chain store’s range, and rate them all. I’m only including this because it seems to suggest that we may now have reached the point where the internet will conceivably crowdfund ANYTHING, and to make you all slightly depressed at the fact that we are still not good enough at giving aid to countries which actually need it. Have any charities set up Kickstarters for individuals as part of a campaign front? Might be an interesting idea.
• Beautiful Photos of Beautiful Dogs: The Westminster Kennel Club dog show is a big deal in the US (I think it’s their Crufts) – these are pictures of the best of breed winners from this year’s show, which if your a…er…dogophile (not going to google the proper term, sorry) will probably make you quite happy. BONUS – Vice sent their reporter to this a few years back whilst on acid, which is almost the archetypal Vice thing to do but which is also quite funny. 
• SneakyCards: I LOVE THIS. Sneakycards is a selection of…er…cards, which urge you to play a wonderful secret game with the world around you. Free to download, share and print, each card is an instruction or a challenge to do something playful in the real world, with the idea being that you can sort of create a low-level network of lovely play all around you. Yes, I know that that last sentence contained an horrific degree of twee whimsy; what of it? THE WORLD NEEDS MORE WHIMSY SOMETIMES, DAMMIT. 
• People Pictured As They Fall: A collection of pictures by Kerry Skarbakka of people captured as they fall. The one in the shower is awesome, however staged it may be. 
• Swarming Effects Set To Music: Quite hard to describe this, but it’s sort of a live demonstration of creating digital art swarming effects to music. It’s a lovely set of effects and you can imagine it being used to very impressive effect at gigs. 
• Waste The Rest Of Your Day, Pt.2: Mining the same proud furrow in the canon of ‘how many buzzwords can we fit into a title?’ as ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ comes this BRILLIANT browser game from Adult Swim. It’s called *drumroll* Bionic Chainsaw Pogo Gorilla, and it’s very good indeed. Enjoy.
• All Of The Flappy Bird Stuff In One Place (almost): I’m only doing this because this is a SERIOUS weekly roundup and thus has an obligation to cover the zeitgeist (or whatever’s masquerading as the zeitgeist this week), but rest assured that I hope to never mention this bloody thing again after this week (except once, in the next section). Anyway, here’s the longform thinkpiece, here’s the Flappy Bird Typing Tutor and here’s the multiplayer version, and here’s the Doge version and here’s the Putin version and here’s the Sesame Street version (which does have legitimately awesome samples) and here’s the minimalist tribute version by the bloke who made Canabalt and here’s the arty, weirdly poignant text game/poem version and now can we just pretend that this all never happened please? Thanks. 

 THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Smarter Every Day: Tumblr of the popular science-lite YouTube show, which collects daily charts and gifs and stuff, telling you INTERESTING and USEFUL facts.
• I Want A Clone: This collects examples of shameless plagiarism in app game development, and the requests from unscrupulous buck chasers for devs willing to rip off someone else’s IP in exchange for a few quick App Store bucks. WARNING: contains more F***** B***. 
• Made Up Words: A project which collects and illustrates the made up words and phrases we use with friends and family. You can submit your own for consideration, and if you ever liked The Meaning of Liff then you will adore this. 
• You Park Like A Cnut: Photographs of people whose parking leaves something to be desired. I’m not sure if I’ve done this one before – it’s hard to keep track – but I don’t care as I LOVE the vitriol. 
• Art On TV: Screengrabs of art as it appears in TV shows – the sorts of fictional artworks and artists you see in sitcoms, dramas, etc. Disappointingly doesn’t appear to feature Brian from Spaced and his cockpaintings, but we can hope. BONUS – if you’re interested in the broader discussion about the manner in which contemporary art is portrayed onscreen then this essay is very interesting indeed. I particularly like the observation that, according to TV, ‘only jerks make video art’. 
• Flappy Bird Thinkpieces: Absolutely the last mention of that sodding game in here this week, I promise, this collects examples of ridiculously overblown analysis of the whole thing and WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE WORLD (clue: it means we’re all morons, basically, and there’s no helping us any more). 
• Pictures of 80s Berlin: Taken and compiled by one Chris John Dewitt, this is an excellent collection.
• Pride Propaganda: Old Soviet propaganda reconfigured as gay pride posters. Lovely stuff.
• Dogs Doing Things: Part Tumblr, part oddly existential art project, this collects people’s tweeted suggestions of things which dogs could be doing. Beautifully surreal. 
• What Love Looks Like: Diagrammatical explanations of the highs and lows of love; these are wonderful and quite sad, and are one of my favourite things on here this week which I hope that you like too. 
• The Secret Lives Of Action Figures: A lovely photoseries exploring what action figures do when they are out and about. The Hulk one is particularly good, I think. 
• Pizza On A Beagle: Not a Tumblr, but it really, really should be.
• Selfies With Homeless People: This week’s OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH US moment (or rather, one of several) comes in the shape of this ‘phenomenon’ (clue: it’s not a phenomenon) of people snapping themselves with the homeless for the LULZ. Nice. 

By Adam Golfer

FANCY A MIX BY AN ODD CORNISH BLOKE? OH GOOD!

LONG READS WHICH ARE LONG BUT WHICH YOU SORT OF OWE IT TO YOURSELVES TO READ TO COMPENSATE FOR ALL THE IDIOCY YOU’VE BEEN EXPOSED TO IN WHAT, EVEN BY THE STANDARDS OF THE INTERNET, HAS BEEN A PRETTY STUPID WEEK:

• On Black Midi, Algorave and Music For Robots: I covered Black Midi in here back in September, I think, but this is a very good look at all sorts of weirdo, obscure, prcedural and/or glitched out musical forms from the Quietus, always one of the best / smartest music sites on the web. There’s an interesting central question here about the sort of music machines would choose to listen to were machines capable of meaningful choice (BIG PHILOSOPHICAL HANGING CHAD, THERE), which obviously doesn’t get answered but still. 
• On The Year Of Code: FULL DISCLOSURE – this was written by a friend of mine, but it’s still good. So the Year Of Code thing, as noted above, has attracted quite a lot of opprobrium, motivated in no small part by the rather carcrashish Newsnight appearance the other week and this piece in which its underlying agenda is questioned and reevaluated as ‘neoliberal’ (I don’t quite agree with that point); anyway, the piece linked to at the start is a defence of the broad concept behind it, based on the fact that someone needs to be doing something and the fact that Government i acknowledging a skills gap and drawing attention to it and trying to do something about it is, in general, A Good Thing. 
• On Tintype Photography: A lovely look at the tintype technique of photographic development, as made briefly famous by those photos of famouses for the Golden Globes or somesuch other filmic awards ceremony the other week. The more I see photos like this, the more I want to go back to a pre-digital camera world. Because I am OLD and a luddite, obviously. 
• GQ Talks Tinder: US GQ gives the longform treatment to everyone’s favourite casual sex app which its makers continue, rather quaintly, to suggest isn’t just for casual sex; all I can think of when I read this stuff, I have to say, is that for everyone having a great, swinging, no-strings experience are 50-odd others who are sitting, alone, every night, swiping right in the hope that someone somewhere will do the same to them and then crying and crying and crying and crying and crying an crying. 
• The Cult Of Raw Denim: Ah, hipsters. Everything you could possibly want to know about denim fetishism, and a piece which may finally explain why the attractive bearded man in your favourite coffeeshop smells ever so slightly of stale, unwashed fabric, even from a distance of several feet. 
• The Year Of The Looking Glass: A rather beautiful futurelooking short story, taking inspiration from the u/dystopian visions of the day after tomorrow we’re getting fed on an almost hourly basis at the moment and stitches them into a few thousand words of creative writing. I’d happily read a novel set here. 
• On Berghain: Even if your days of going to large, dark, sweaty techno clubs are long behind you – I AM NOT TOO OLD TO GO BACK YOU KNOW – you have probably hard of (or even been to) Berghain in Berlin. This is a profile of the club as it deals with being ‘just another stop’ on the European checkbox tourism scene, and is a generally interesting exploration of how mass-market tourism is being reacted to by the city overall. Also contains terrifying descriptions of the names of some of the more extreme Berlin fetish nights which will make you feel a bit wrong. 
• The Grammar Of Doge: A look at the linguistic structure underpinning the ‘Doge’ meme (Such fluidity, much flex, wow) which I promise I am going to stop mentioning soon but I find it SO SOOTHING (question – can someone make me a gif of someone doing the luge with the doge dog superimposed over it, please? thanks). 
• How Music Hijacks Our Perceptions Of Time: An in-depth examination of the neuroscientific rationale as to why we sometimes perceive time differently when listening to certain music. Heavy on the classical, but even if you know nothing about the genre (er, like me) this is an interesting (if reasonably heavy) read.
• On Hair Extensions And Living In LA: A lovely and odd set of disconnected musings by a woman living in Los Angeles. This is not really about hair extensions at all, and is an excellent piece of writing about gender and loneliness and big cities and work and STUFF. 
• The Definitive Philip Seymour Hoffman Profile: From 2008, this New York Times interview with the late actor is a brilliant portrait of a brilliant actor (as an aside, my personal Seymour Hoffman performance came in Love Liza which I have seen three times and each time been reduced to an absolute complete total and utter wreck by – recommended!).
• The Manual For Civilisation: If you had to create a library which would be used to rebuild civilisation after some sort of collapse, what would YOU put in it? An ongoing discussion on that very theme, this is full of interesting books and discussion on what and why to include.
• Esquire On Silicon Roundabout: So I worked on the whole ‘Tech City’ initiative a few years ago, and several people who I know are mentioned in this, but leaving aside personal connections this is an interesting – and at some points, I think, needlessly snarky – portrait of the current ‘state of the tech scene’ in East London.  
• Working At Serco: One of the reasons I stopped being a lobbyist many years ago (aside from the fact that I was crap) was that one of my clients was Group 4 Securicor and they were DREADFUL people. This is an illustrated look at the author’s experiences working for Serco (G4S’s main competitor in private security) in Australia, and as you might expect is less than 100% positive about the benefits of the private sector’s involvement in immigration processing. A beautifully told story. 
• Luna Of Cairo: Another illustrated story, this about being a bellydancer in Cairo in 2014. Gorgeous drawings, and a fascinating insight into Egyptian gender politics, the history of the dance and all sorts of other things besides. 
• Critical Design – A Lecture: SO LONG AND SO GOOD. In my notes it says ‘this is one of the best things about design, tech, art and the future I have ever read. So much info. ESSENTIAL’. I can’t really argue with that – this is immense, and so, so dense. If you have any interest at all in webwork, design, art, programming, culture and where all of those intersect then you really should take a look at this. I’m not exaggerating when I say it makes this blog look lightweight, though. 
• Loved: This is actually a platform game / art piece rather than a piece of writing, but it feels like a short story. It’s a bit janky, but got me emotionally like nothing else this week. Recommened. 

By Silvia Grav

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Excuse the Upworthy-esque title on this video; the content is worth it. Tate Roskelly is a BMX rider whose tricks display a level of imagination which most people, whether on bikes or boards, can only dream of. You will grin at this, I promise:

2) As trailed up there *points*, this is the video to accompany the Come Together anti-AIDS/HIV campaign. It’s SFW, but all about sex so you may want to have headphones in to mask the panting and thwacking – it’s just joyful, though, and a really nice depiction of all sorts of sex amongst all sorts of people:

3) You will have read about this, I’m sure, but it really is worth watching in its entirety if you’ve yet to do so. This week’s VIRAL SENSATION is this French short looking at a world in which men are the victims of persistent sexism rather than women. Very well-made indeed:

4) I don’t understand why this doesn’t have more views. This is called ‘Ghost’ by a band called ‘Mystery Skulls’, it sounds all 70s/80s discoish and is sort of catchy, and the video’s liberally inspired by The Exorcist and features a slightly overweight priest literally DANCING THE DEVIL AWAY. It’s awesome:

5) This is apparently a ‘slowly evolving video sculpture’ which refences the utopian visions of 1960s architecture practice Archigram (so it says in the notes). Whatever, it’s a brilliantly hypnotic piece of CGI with a great backing track; if you like Ballard you will like this, I think:

6) EPILEPSY WARNING ALERT. This is by Mouse on Mars, it’s called Cream Theme, and the video’s apparently based around a single load of footage of one person dancing which has then been extrapolatied into these shifting shape visualisation thingies. Anyway, it’s much prettier than that horrid description would suggest, honest:

7) HIPHOP CORNER! This is a tribute to Rakim in music and video, and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Remind yourself how good really good hiphop wordsmithery can be:

8) This isn’t new, and has quite a lot of views, so (for the second time today) apologies if you’ve seen it already, but it made me VERY HAPPY this week. Some sort of weird Japanese death/black metal outfit with one of the oddest videos I’ve seen in a long time (and the song’s pretty leftfield too). They are called ‘The Maximum Hormone’, apparently:

9) If there were to be an official video for this week’s news, this would be it. A lovely, damp animation to accompany the Notwist’s single ‘Might Kong’:

10) Finally, this – a cross between Transformers and Akira and Pole Position and Kavinsky and some sort of weird anime female revenge fever dream, this is RipTide’s song ‘In The Middle Of The Night’. BYE! 

That’s it for now