This is all quite long, isn’t it?
HELLO EVERYONE ARE WE STILL HAVING FUN? Ready for another three (ahahahaha) weeks of this? GREAT! I know that obviously it’s not possible to gain any sort of accurate impression of This Fcuking World We Live In via the medium of spending all one’s waking time on the web, but, if I were attempt to offer you some sort of capsule take on ‘wot i done a learn up’ online this week it would probably be along the lines of ‘you know all that creative, we’re all in it together, heartwarming energy that was wafting around a month or so ago? Sort of…gone, hasn’t it?’
It does rather feel like we’re approaching the metaphorical Wednesday of this incarceration, where everything seems neverending and a bit, well, much (and even better the joke’s on us; it’s barely teatime on Monday if we’re doing that sort of temporal scale!). Don’t worry, though, WEB CURIOS IS HERE! Feel like you’re approaching the ‘hump’ of your personal inceratory marathon? LET ME DRAG YOU OVER IT WITH WORDS AND LINKS!
I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and frankly I’m going to struggle to keep finding interesting or even varied ways of saying “what the fcuk else have you got to do other than click the links?”.
Oh, and your quick weekly reminder that ISSUE 3 OF IMPERICA MAGAZINE IS OUT NOW – a mere £3, and this week one of the articles featured within it got an actual, real-life endorsement from ACTUAL BRITISH NATIONAL TREASURE KATHY BURKE! Which, frankly, ought to be all the inducement you need to get right on an snap one up while you can (it will never run out, it’s a digital publication, but I wondered whether the introduction of illusory scarcity might make some of you click out of some sort of residual capitalist impulse)!
THE SECTION WHICH EXPECTS THAT BY THE TIME THIS IS ALL OVER LITERALLY EVERY FCUKER IN THE WORLD WILL BE STREAMING THEMSELVES LIVE AT ALL TIMES:
- Facebook To Alert Users Who Interact With COVID-19 Misinfo: On the one hand, a simple and seemingly-sensible initiative, whereby Facebook will alert users who have commented, shared or ‘liked’ a post on the site which subsequently gets fact-checked into oblivion, letting them know that something that they engaged with was a bit iffy, truthwise, and directing them to more authoritative sources of news that perhaps don’t bang the 5g drum quite so hard. On the other, there are a couple of caveats to this – first, you may (or may not – I forget that the rest of you don’t have the same pointless compulsion to recall all this crap) remember that Facebook trialed something very similar around FAKE NEWS, labelling posts that contained links to rubbish with a FAKE NEWS label and linking to Snopes entries debunking the lies; that experiment lasted only a few months, as it turned out that Facebook’s own studies showed that this made literally no difference at all to the opinions of those people targeted, and in some cases merely reinforced their belief in the previously-peddled lies. Secondly, if you’re sharing information that you believe is being kept from the herdlike masses (DO NOT WAKE THE SHEEPLE!) and which The Powers That Be don’t want you to spread, there’s nothing like getting ‘censored’ by the world’s largest communications network to make you think ‘Hm, hang on, maybe Ickey’s onto something here!’. Still, here’s hoping this stops some of the stupid (but it probably won’t).
- Insta Tries To Make IGTV Happen, Again: Maybe this is the event that finally makes IGTV a thing? I mean, if this drags on too much longer there will be some people who finally reach The End Of Telly and will therefore be forced to turn to Insta’s ‘Creators’ for entertainment, meaning perhaps all of these updates will be worthwhile. Look, it’s not very interesting, but here’s the story: “[Insta]’s completely redesigned the homepage to feature a creator up top, tailored to each user based on who they follow and whose content the app thinks might be interesting to them. The app is also getting a Discover tab to surface new and relevant IGTV content as well as a hands-free recording mode…The company’s also issuing a small but likely impactful update to the Instagram app; users can post their IGTV content in their Stories, and instead of a freeze-frame, 15 seconds of content will play. This could get people to click through and watch the full video, thereby giving creators more views.” See? You thought lockdown was rubbish and now there’s this AMAZING NEWS to cheer you up!
- You Can Now Send DMs On Insta Via The Web Interface: Nothing to say here beyond the headline, other than that I saw several sites report this this week with a variant gag about ‘sliding into your DMs’ and, well, I know times are hard, but really.
- You Can Now Livestream On Insta Via The Web Too!: Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a bored human in possession of camera equipment must be in want of an opportunity to broadcast that boredom to an audience, we now have the ability to livestream to Insta from the web interface, meaning it’s marginally easier to rig together a lighting setup that doesn’t make you look like a weird, thumb-faced novelty-gonk puppet, or to concentrate on something other than the exact angle of your hand/wrist as you hold your phone. It won’t make anything you have to say more compelling, but, well, let’s celebrate the small things.
- YouTube Offers Easy Video Ad Creation Services: I confess that I was sort-of convinced that this was already a thing, but turns out not. You know that feature that Facebook’s had for years and which will create a slightly-shonky ‘video’ ad for you out of a series of short clips and still photos, all lightly-manipulated to make them look like a semi-coherent video ad? Well, now you can do the same on YouTube. I know I sound like a terrible agency shill typing stuff like this – and two days a week, that’s exactly what I am! Terrible! At my job! – but it’s a really good time to persuade your clients to enjoy some of the comparatively-dirt-cheap ad inventory out there right now, if only to give you something to do with all these looming hours between now and a future in which you may one day be allowed outside again. Anyway, for small businesses this is a useful thing; for the sort of people who used to make a living cutting short YT ads for local companies, probably less-so.
- TikTok Rolls Out Parental Controls: Pretty sure that these were trailed a few months back and that this is just the secondary ‘and now it’s live!’ announcement, but wevs. Oh, hang on, I just checked and this is a global rollout of something that was launched in the UK about 6 weeks ago – still, if you are worried about what your kids are getting up to on TikTok then you might be reassured by the following: “The suite of features includes screen-time management controls, limits on direct messages and a restricted mode that limits the appearance of inappropriate content. According to TikTok, parents who want to enable Family Safety Mode must first create their own account on the app, which is then linked to the teen’s account. Once enabled, parents will be able to control how long the teen can spend on the app every day; turn off or limit who the teen can direct message; and choose to turn on TikTok’s “restricted” mode that will limit inappropriate content.” Obviously if you’re kid’s a standard, moderately-devious teen then it will have a secret account that you don’t know about where all the filth happens (HELLO MISS GOVE! Ooh, that’s interesting – that story really wasn’t been picked up at all by the press, wonder why?), but why not pretend that that’s not the case? Great!
- Reddit Updates Political Ad Rules and Transparency: Small tweaks to the way political ads work on Reddit – advertisers now need to leave comments on for 24h, which, well, oh dear – and you can now see records of all political ads posted on Reddit since 2018, which will be maintained into the future. I wonder whether this will see the site expand political advertising outside of the US – would make a lot of sense. I am personally amazed that Governments aren’t working with the site to use it to distribute official information, but I’m sure the smart people in No.10 comms know what they are doing.
- The COVID Retail Dashboard: Sort-of interesting, this collects data from the global fashion industry since the pandemic – it’s only relevant if you work in fashion, but I found the sales trend stuff it has access to really interesting (if limited). Including this mainly as I’d be fascinated to see this sort of thing for other sectors if anyone knows of similar dashboards; the fact that sales of bras are actually going up globally blew my tiny little mind just now.
- Airbnb Experiences: Annoyingly this landed last week and I only saw it post=Curios, which means it’s a whole seven days late and you’ve all already seen it. Still, Airbnb’s pivoted to VIRTUAL EXPERIENCES, attempting to stay relevant as its business gets eviscerated by the fact that noone’s staying anywhere that isn’t their own actual house right now. The idea’s just an extension of the pivot that it has been trying for a year or so now – to lifestyle brand and entertainment company rather than just a place for the rich to rent out their second and third homes and to help landlords gouge out the heart of a city in exchange for a better return on their buy-to-let – but done virtually; some of the stuff on offer is genuinely fascinating, like ‘spend an hour learning about the life of an Olympic bobsledder’ (though I think she’s short-changing herself at $21 per hour, personally). Good luck, though, to the person offering ‘podcast training’.
- UFC Staredown: I imagine UFC is one of those things that’s not really enjoying a great time right now, what with the idea of getting sweatily-grapply with someone and potentially covered in their blood being something of a health no-no at present (unless you’re the WWE); still, if you’re missing your fix of unpleasantly-brutal violence delivered with all the pomp and bombast of a dictator’s coronation ceremony, you might like this site, which invites you to attempt to STARE DOWN other UFC fighters to show them how hard you are. Er, from the comfort of your own home. I would personally like someone to make a variant on a site like this that actually records the facial expressions of all participants and then releases them in a gigantic “you look like a fcuking moron, mate!” supercut about a month after the campaign’s finished, so can someone sort that for me please?
THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR GOVE’S KID BECAUSE, REALLY, IMAGINE HAVING THOSE PARENTS, PT.1:
- A Lovely 3d COVID-19 Tracker: Haven’t you just been crying out for a nicely-presented, 3d modeled little webpage that presents the most up-to-date information about infection rates and associated data in a pleasingly-designed manner? Would you like to see global and national numbers around deaths and recoveries and stuff shown you slightly-fancy style, as you might imagine from a sort of Government datavisualisation designed for the KS5 schools programme? GREAT! It won’t make any of the information contained in the numbers any less troubling, but it will give a pleasingly-molecular sheen to the way you consume it.
- COVID-19 World In Data: This does much the same job as the above link, except in far more prosaic and far more useful fashion. Each day at midday BST the data in this presentation will be updated, meaning it’s always reasonably current; it’s your standard tracker covering relative rates of infection per country per capita, death rates, that sort of thing, but if you’re after a resource that collects all this stuff in one place and which is easy to find, read and clip, then it’s potentially very useful. It is though, equally, a rolling tracker of horror, so perhaps don’t stare at this too long lest you start to go a bit apocalyptically ‘funny’.
- The COVID-19 Dreams Survey: I was speaking to some friends this week and one of them mentioned she’d been having very odd dreams of late; this isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone mention their unusually-active REM-time since this all started, and made me wonder whether there’s any sort of subconscious commonality of response to the species-level threat we’re all coping with. OR, if you’re feeling a bit fruitier and want to speculate more wildly, MAYBE THE ARCHONS ARE TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH US THROUGH SHARED DREAM MESSAGES???? Thing is, we’ll never know the answers to either of those questions (oh, ok, fine, perhaps the second one’s a bit obvious) unless you all fill in this survey, which is tracking people’s dream states around the world during the pandemic. I forget where I found this, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere moderately-reputable, and it doesn’t seem to be collecting anything other than non-personal information so feel free to fill it in if you’ve been having coronamares (I hope you haven’t). If you are struggling with bad dreams, by the way, can I suggest annihilating your subconscious with weed every night? It kills mine stone dead, and can’t possibly be having any sort of negative effect on my brain at all, no sirree.
- Culture Fix: I’ve featured LOADS of cultural online stuff over the past three weeks of LockdownCurios – this is a great site which is seeking to act as a searchable portal of Stuff That Is Happening On The Web from a culture point of view; honestly, it’s GREAT and there are literally hundreds of things on here, from art to music to museums to poetry. Even better, it’s not hideously US-centric, meaning there are links to live events actually happening in your timezone and when they say ‘football’ they actually mean ‘football’. It’s such a good resource – they invite cultural institutions to flag their events to the site owners, so if you’re involved with something coming up and want help getting the word out, this is a good place to start. Please, if you work in the arts or adjacent to it, do share this with everyone you know; it’s so useful, and the more people populate it with things to do, the better it gets.
- Everywhere School: Similar to the previous entry, this site collects online educational resources happening around the world, day-by-day, arranged by time. So for example I can see that at 10am Myleene Klass is doing some sort of classical music thing on Insta, whilst at 3pm there’s an Animal Learning-type thing being done by a zoo at 3pm. If you’re struggling a bit for how the fcuk to keep the kids doing something vaguely improving, this could prove an excellent and useful helping hand.
- Online Town: Oh SO GOOD. Here’s the site’s official spiel: “Online Town is a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and walk in, out and around those conversations just as easily as they would in real life.” What this means in practice is a near-perfect example of how videochat and chatrooms could work better than they currently do – users enter into a virtual ‘town’ (there’s a public version which at the time of writing is offline but which should come back soon; you can also create private ‘towns’ which you can share with friends so you can have a closed-off area of the web in which to interact), which is presented to them as a simple, top-downish space in which their avatar, and that of other users, move around as though in a videogame. This allows you to experience conversations in a far more natural and human way – rather than seeing and hearing the feeds of everyone in ‘town’, you instead get clearer connections with people who are closer to you in virtual space, meaning that conversations can cluster, splinter and merge in a far more organic way than with a more standard videochat interface. THIS IS SO INTERESTING – it’s not 100% unshonky, fine, and the interface would, I imagine, give off far too much of a whiff of geek for some, but the interaction possibilities it affords are really very cool. Not only that, but this is the first videocalling platform that allows you to literally walk away from someone as they are talking to you – and which makes it perfectly clear that that is what you’re doing – which I think is something of a watershed moment in online interactions and ought to be baked into EVERYTHING from hereon in (in fact, can someone add some sort of ‘flounce’ emote into this? Ta).
- The NHS Charity Auction at Bonhams: This closes in 12 days from the time of writing, and OH MY GOD are there some amazing lots on here. Obviously the main thing here is raising money in support of our health services but, if I’m honest, that noble aim pales into insignificance when compared to the fact that someone is going to buy the right to have lunch with JOAN FCUKING COLLINS and CHRISTOPHER FCUKING BIGGINS (and, I think, Joan’s husband, but let’s ignore him) at Claridge’s, with a suite thrown in for you to continue the afterparty in. Just imagine the stories – now that would be a way to celebrate the end of lockdown, elbows-deep in the trough with Biggins. There’s loads of other stuff in here, though, if that for some reason doesn’t have you reaching for the remortgage button; it’s all towards the spenny side, but there’s some genuinely-interesting art that one wouldn’t ordinarily get the opportunity to bid on (few Kapoors, and one thing specifically that I am totally bidding on and which I am not telling you about in case you get any ideas), and some truly mind-boggling ‘offers’. I know he founded Carphone Warehouse and is VERY RICH, but lunch (and ‘business consultancy’) with John Caudwell for a starting bid of £10k? On the other hand, ‘get cnuted with Helen Lederer at the Groucho’ could, I think, be a lot of fun, and is currently only at £180. SO MANY GREAT (odd) THINGS IN HERE!
- 3d Reddit: This website turns Reddit into a 3d-navigable art gallery, with all the posts arranged like pictures on its pristine white walls. Which, when you click this link and it takes you to the default sub (/r/pics), is really rather soothing; you navigate with WASD and the mouse to look around, and I think that there’s VR support for the three of you who’ve invested in the tech. What’s even better (not better: odder, stranger, more unsettling) is when you select your own subreddit to browse in this style – add ‘/r/XXXXXXXXXXX’ to the end of the url, where XXXXXXXXXXXXX is the name of any subReddit of your choosing, and it will pull the images from said sub. Which means that browsing /r/monstercocks becomes a very different sort of experience and, to me, a very funny one (I perhaps need to leave the house).
- Goat 2 Meeting: This is a fcuking great idea and one that I am hugely annoyed didn’t even begin to speculate about the possibility of crossing my mind before I saw this site. Sweet Farm is a, er, farm – a non-profit ‘sanctuary’, apparently, designed to educate people as to the evils of factory farming and the like – which whilst the pandemic is on is offering a truly wonderful and unique service; to whit, for a small donation to the farm, they will get one of their goats to join one of your videomeetings. “Oh, hold on, someone’s trying to dial in; it’s probably Angelic-” “MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH” – I mean, what’s not to enjoy about that? Alternatively you can pay a bit of extra cash and get a guided Zoom tour around the farm to meet the animals – which is lovely, but, honestly, fcuk that and just book a goat to attend all your company meetings from here til this is over. Based on my professional interaction with colleagues over the past four weeks, there is no way that the caprine insights you’ll be privy to won’t put at least three of your co-workers to shame, intellectually-speaking.
- Avatarify: Unfortunately, my resident AI video wizardry expert Shardcore informs me that this requires access to some not-insignificant computing power to run, meaning that it will be out of the reach of most of you; for the few of you who have a Cray (guess my age!) vibrating noisily next to you, though, this will be the best thing to happen to you all week. Avatarify is software which lets you map a digital avatar to your face and then use that as a live ‘mask’ on videocalls – so you could dial into your next Teams call with, say, Elon Musk’s face rather than your own, with said face tracking your eye and mouth movements, and broad expressions, with a troubling degree of fidelity. This links to the Github repo for the code, but scroll down and you’ll see some examples of it in action – it’s jaw-dropping, honestly, and is another of those ‘hm, I wonder how long it will take til there’s a halfway-convincing browser-based version?’ things that make me simultaneously quite excited and quite miserable about the future. PREDICTION: in not-too-long there will be a blossoming market in the creation of bespoke avatars for videochat just like this, in the same way in which digital artists can now rake it in for creating depictions of people’s avatars, fursonas, etc, online, except this will be semi-mainstream and a lot more fashion. Digital masks designed by McQueen? A limited-edition SUPREME-themed white mask responsive face with the logo across the cheeks and forehead? You can see this coming too, right?
- Boomer.Email: MSCHF’s latest, this is a simple and only funny-ish gag, but I forgive them as they have brought me a LOT of joy this year already. Boomer.Email is a newsletter MSCHF will send out sporadically, featuring some hand-curated content shared by ACTUAL boomers on ACTUAL email threads. Which on the one hand is literally just laughing at old people, but on the other is basically the last thing that GenZ appear to have left so let’s not take that away from them too, eh? Oh, as an aside, I have heard three separate conversations this week about ‘The Corona Generation’ or ‘Generation C’ or ‘Corennials’ (no, really), so prepare yourself for this because.
- Secret Sofa: I don’t like Secret Cinema as a thing – it was a nice idea, if not my cup of tea, that over the past couple of years has become everything I hate about ‘formerly-cool-but-now-popular-in-Clapham’ stuff in London – overpriced, oversubscribed, unimaginative and grifty. Still, this – their LOCKDOWN PIVOT – is a cute idea (and the brand partnership is spot-on); sign up to the email list and get bombarded with spam til you d…no, hang on, that’s not it. Sign up to the email list and get alerted every Tuesday to that week’s ‘watch along at home’ movie classic; you’ll get suggestions for dress-up things you can do, games you can play, food and drink you could consume that’s suitably-themed, all that sort of jazz. I presume there’ll be some sort of ‘let’s all chat on this hashtag!’-type community gubbins too, or Discord chats, and if you like the idea of watching Withnail & I or something similarly ‘cult’ with a bunch of other people simultaneously then it might well be up your street.
- Quarantine Penpals: Lockdown letter-roulette! Except, sadly, this is a US-only thing at the moment, which momentarily bummed me out. Still, I don’t think there’s any reason why you can’t just sign up with a totally made-up US postal address and thereby send oblique, puzzling anonymous postcards to anyone else in the site’s database – whilst I’d hope that they do a moderate degree of moderation in order to prevent death threats winging their way across the country on cheery postcards, I reckon you can probably get away with quite a lot of boderline-unsettling prose. I was thinking of something along the lines of “The men have awoken; the time is now. Meet at the crossroads – you know the one – and bring the shovel. The Unearthing is upon us”, but you feel free to use your imagination and see where it takes you.
- Vemos: I think I put Netflix Party in here a month ago, but if for whatever reason you’re not a Netflix user but still fancy the idea of co-watching films with a friend over the web then this will be of use. VEMOS offers the ability to watch a film or show concurrently with another user on separate screens, with sidebar video chat and other gubbins. The site works with Netflix but also Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube, and as a way for people to watch stuff with kids especially sounds rather lovely.
- TeenTechCity of Tomorrow: Many, many years ago, when I was still allowed to speak to clients, I worked with the Tech City initiative in London; one of the things we did was a partnership with Teen Tech, which is an organisation designed to help get kids in the UK into STEM subjects and which is fronted by Maggie Philbin, who old people will remember as one of the hosts of Tomorrow’s World and who I was genuinely starstruck by and was LOVELY. Anway, this is by way of a sideline to Teen Tech – if you’ve got kids of between 8-13, and they are interested in building and making stuff, you might want to get involved: “Working to the brief of “smarter, kinder, safer” young people, individually or in small teams, have to design and construct architectural models of buildings to sit on the footprint of an A4 card – but buildings can go out as well as up. Together they develop ideas for the connected city and consider how to use technology and the internet of things to improve how we will live, work and play in the future. Once we’ve received your registration details, we will be in touch with a link to download the Parent Pack, along with details on how you can take part in one of our Live Build Days online!” Worth a look, could be fun.
- Zooooom: A screensaver which mimics Zoom, pulled together from lots of people who’ve submitted recordings of themselves as though on a work call for the collective lols. It’s moderately-amusing for a few minutes, though it’s amazing how quickly after that you realise that you are beginning to genuinely hate seeing people’s faces when arranged in a grid format. Still, potentially useful if you want to convince your family that you’re on work calls even when you’re not (no idea why you might want to do that, I’m sure you have your reasons).
- Grain: Other than the Zoom music video from last week, we’re (or, more accurately, I am) yet to see any hugely-interesting uses of videocalling as a medium; we can only be a few days or a week at most away from the first film which takes place entirely via a mass, at-home videocall, no? If you’re interested in perhaps exploring this sort of thing – or, maybe more accurately, you’re instead interested in piecing together a post-lockdown supercut of your colleagues looking and sounding like the remedial untermenschen you are increasingly certain they in fact are for when this is all over – then Grain might be worth a look; it’s early-access only right now, but it’s a Zoom plugin that lets you record, edit, share clips, etc; which, actually, if you’re planning a new career as a videocalling comedian or magician or something (please God no) and want to capture reactions to your ZINGERS, etc, then this could be hugely useful. If nothing else this could end up ushering in a whole new era of jump-scare pranks. Ooh, there’s an idea. If we’re still here in October, someone remember to credit me for this idea.
- Audiorooms: For those of you, like me, who find the prospect of being on video this much a calvary the like of which you’ve never before experienced, this service lets you create private ‘rooms’ for audio-only communication for upto 5 people. If you’re on a crap internet connection (or are just deeply body-dysmorphic) and want a lo-fi way to connect with people, this is potentially useful.
- Help Identify Spiral Galaxies: I’ve featured several projects on collaborative piecework website Zooniverse before – the idea is that they tend to collect projects that require a lot of repetitious image classification by humans to achieve a wider good. In this case, that image classification involves helping to identify and track the shape of spiral galaxies around the cosmos – the site shows you a succession of images of galaxies and you just have to trace around the shape of its spiral formations to help train an AI to better spot them using machine learning. Fine, it’s a bit dull, but it’s also a very soothing way to switch off your brain for an hour whilst probably doing some vague good, and that’s not to be sniffed at right now.
- XOXO Fest: I’ve mentioned XOXO Fest on here before – it’s run by occasional Curios reader Andy Baio, and it’s widely-considered one of the best festivals of ‘stuff about web culture and digital things’ out there. Under lockdown, the Festival has made its archive of talks freely available to everyone – if you’re after a selection of interesting, discursive, wide-ranging and genuinely smart lectures, delivered by a bunch of names which will tick a lot of your extremely-online boxes, you’re in luck. This is a really, really good selection of interesting and informative stuff, I promise, and very much worth exploring.
- Storytag: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is made by my friend Fritha (and some other people who I don’t know), but I promise I would have included it anyway as it’s such a lovely idea. The premise is hugely simple, and is basically an online version of exquisite corpse; you sign up, and will get occasional emails prompting you to contribuute a few hundred words to an existing story; when the stories are done, after 5 segments have been penned, you’ll get an email so you can read the final piece. It’s designed for kids – the idea is that parents sign up with their emails and then let their children know when it’s their turn to write a bit – and should be treated as such; honestly, though, it’s a great concept and the site, whilst simple, works perfectly. Give it a go, tell your friends.
NEXT, HAVE THIS LOVELY, DREAMY, AMBIENT SELECTION COMPILED BY BRODER IBRAHIM!
THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR GOVE’S KID BECAUSE, REALLY, IMAGINE HAVING THOSE PARENTS, PT.2:
- Ghibli Zoompapers: Videocall backgrounds from Studio Ghibli – all official and stuff, from their actual website! Useful if you want to ensure that you are correctly identified as ‘the one who’s fcuking obssessed with Manga’ in all future workplace interactions.
- Vittles: I featured an essay from this a few weeks back without realising it was a newsletter – it is, and if you like food and food writing then it’s pretty much a must-subscribe. (I think) Run by self-described beef king of London food Jonathan Nunn, it’s not very old but is already one of my favourite places to read good, passionate, non-standard writing about food and food culture. Really interesting, regularly excellent (so far at least), and worth a click and a sub if you’re someone for whom the absence of restaurants and eating out is weighing heavy.
- The Webpage: This would be loads better were it customisable (says the entitled linkmonkey – FFS MATT YOU DON’T MAKE ANYTHING SHUT UP!), but as a proof-of-concept-type experiment it’s rather fun. It’s an RSS reader, essentially, but arranged to graphically reflect the design of a newspaper front page, with feeds arranged into columns, slightly grainy art style (the way it renders images is GREAT), and thematically-arranged sections. Honestly, I reckon there are people who would pay cashmoney for the ability to make their own version of these.
- The OpenAI Microscope: On the one hand, I don’t really understand what these are purporting to show me; on the other, they look cool and that’s basically the only criteria for inclusion in this sh1tshow, as if I limited myself to ‘stuff I actually understood’ this would be a very short newsletter. And, er, almost certainly a better one. Hang on, is that the secret?! Anyway, the OpenAI Microscope is a visualisation of a series of different machine learning models, seeking to graphically-demonstrate how neural networks, well, work. That’s about the point at which my brain starts to slide off the edges of this, like so much fried egg off hot car bonnet, but if you’re better at understanding the complex esotericism of machine ‘thinking’ then this is worth a look (as it is if you simply want to look at some quite-pretty visualisations of what a computer’s ‘brain’ looks like).
- Burning Man Is Going Virtual: Every year I mention Burning Man, and every year I say something like “it looks sort-of interesting, but the idea of being physically trapped and quite possibly on a lot of drugs for several days with those people makes my skin and teeth itch”; this year, though, Burning Man is going VIRTUAL, meaning perhaps I might try and check it out after all (that way I can overdose on mushrooms at home!). No clear details on how it’s going to happen, but here’s the spiel: “We are, however, going to build Black Rock City in The Multiverse. That’s the theme for 2020 so we’re going to lean into it. Who’d have believed it would come true? We look forward to welcoming you to Virtual Black Rock City 2020. We’re not sure how it’s going to come out; it will likely be messy and awkward with mistakes. It will also likely be engaging, connective, and fun.” Personally-speaking I can think of no more Burning Man place to host this than in Second Life, but let’s see.
- DJ 3dio: Another ‘watch this YouTube video – TOGETHER!’ service, but one which charmingly lets you and whoever you want to share the experience with exist as tiny little cutesy avatars in a 3d-navigable space in which whatever video you pick appears as a sort of giant floating screen you can run around in front of. There’s literally no practical benefit to this at all, but there’s something gently wonderful about seeing your little 3d person gazing up in (what I imagine to be) awe at whatever you play up there.
- False Signatures: Is there anything more irritating in the modern world than having to print, sign, scan and return documents? Yes, lots of stuff, but most of that can’t be fixed whereas with this specific problem someone’s managed to create a workaround! Here’s the code for a sneaky bit of script which just needs you to do the sign&scan thing once and which will then let you CHEAT THE SYSTEM forever by adding it electronically to PDFs. Obviously Web Curios bears no legal responsibility whatsoever for any long-term consequences of your legal documents being rendered invalid as a result of fraudulently-applied signatures (does my saying this make it legally true? Let’s hope so!).
- All of the Online Family Games: I have no idea who has compiled this, but they are a lovely person and deserve some sort of small reward – this is a GDoc with thematically-arranged links to all sorts of family-friendly games to play online, from chess and chequers and draughts, to trivia and word games, to puzzles and more videogamey-type things – honestly, this is a fcuking GODSEND if you feel like you or your family or your kids have reached the end of the internet, and for finding age-appropriate family entertainments to enjoy together (or to slowly raise the temperature under the simmering pot of boiling domestic rage, either/or).
- The Quarantine House Selector Randomiser: Given its prevalence this week, it’s entirely possible that this meme might well be dead by the time you read this; still, doesn’t mean you can’t rinse it on Facebook! This will automatically-generate a selection of quarantine houseshares full of famouses for you to choose between; sadly it’s American, and I am quite bad at famouses, meaning i recognise approximately 40% of these; someone ought to make a FIAT500-Twitter-friendly UK version of this – sample famouses to include Dean Gaffney, Jamila Jamil, Joe Suggs, Actual Suggs and Lindsay Dawn Mckenzie – for about a week of vague, traffic-related joy.
- Which Is The Best Thing?: This website presents you with two things – you have to decide which of them is the best. That’s it – the idea is that, eventually, as a result of millions and millions and billions of these choices, we’ll end up with a final, defined, once-and-for-all ranking of STUFF, from best to worst, and who can argue against that as a noble aim? NO FCUKER, that’s who! At the moment it’s asking me to choose between ‘thread’ and ‘coal mines’, to give you an idea of the sort of crazy dilemmas it places you in.
- Elevator Party: Do you miss small talk? No, of course you don’t, because we’re now forced to do it on every single fcuking call, while we wait for everyone to show up. Look, can we not just accept that we have no greater desire to talk to most of the rest of the world than we did a month ago, and that that includes our colleagues, and that, honestly, whilst I hope you and yours are doing ok that doesn’t mean I want to spend any more time discussing the weather or last night’s telly with you than I did when we were forced to share meatspace? CAN WE??? Ahem. Anyway, Elevator Party is billed as a ‘smalltalk simulator’, offering you the now-exotic-seeming experience of being stuck in a lift with someone and trying to engage them in inane chatter. It’s not particularly deep, but as a nice reminder of the things that we should perhaps be grateful not to have to experience it has its merits.
- The Pitt Rivers Museum: Absolutely my favourite museum in all of the world, the Pitt Rivers in Oxford is an absolute marvel and I recommend it unreservedly. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s effectively a massive, sprawling cabinet of curiosities, set over two floors, which includes everything from tribal masks to trepanned skulls, terrifying-looking weapons to Inuit snowshoes, drinking gourds to penis-sheathes; it is hands-down one of the most interesting and packed spaces in the UK, and this link lets you do a tour around it and WOW I could spend hours on this. Seriously, give it a go, you will be mesmerised (and find at least one thing that makes you think slightly less of humanity as a species; seriously, some of the weapons are so imaginatively horrible they boggle the mind rather).
- Apples and Snakes: Apples and Snakes is an organisation which organises and promotes spoken word around the UK; each Wednesday evening for the next few weeks they’re doing readings and performances by some of the UK’s best and brightest. A great company doing great work, there are some superb names coming up in the next few weeks; worth diarising if you’re into poetry or simply curious.
- Russians Recreate Classic Paintings: A whole (Russian) Facebook Group dedicated to people recreating classic artworks from the comfort of their own home (dacha); you will have seen some of these collected on roundup sites, but it seems like a friendly enough community should you wish to get involved yourself.
- The Quarantine Concerts: ESS is the Experimental Sound Studio, which has existed in Chicago since the mid-80s; it’s something of a storied institution, and every night for the foreseeable is putting on Quarantine Concerts by a range of artists which include a massively-eclectic range of people from singers and musicians I’ve never heard of to people like Thurston Moore. I know lockdown gigs are ten a penny, but this is one of the more interesting and musically-diverse setups I’ve seen in the past few weeks and looks like it might be worth a listen.
- Musicals On YouTube: I once wrote a musical, you know, with some friends; it was called ‘Payday!’, and it was set on a Friday night/Monday morning in an office not a million miles away from the PR company at which we all worked, and the songs were objectively pretty good (I had very little to do with those bits, apart from the lyrics to a few of them – you will never know what you’ve missed by not getting to hear ‘Sex in the Office’, you poor things). Despite this, I fcuking hate musical theatre as a rule – still, if you feel the opposite way to me, you might like this link – every Friday at 7pm GMT a new recording of a musical will be put online for 48h, for free. Tonight, it’s Phantom – if this is your sort of thing, go for your life.
- Pillweights: These are concrete paperweights, made and shipped from Australia, in the shape of a variety of different ecstasy pills, the idea being that you can pick your ‘favourite’ to have a permanent, stylish reminder of the days back when you used to be ‘cool’. Leaving aside the fact that the designs on pills were only representative of their composition and likely effect for about a week after launch, after which they could have been any old sh1t (see: my friend Dave, who always used to say things like ‘this batch of mitzos is really smacky’, as though a) he had ever done smack; or b) there was ever ANY consistency in what that week’s grab-bag of bottom-of-the-barrel chems might make you feel/do/think/vomit), or the fact that owning one of these is basically a ‘Take Me To Your Dealer’ poster for people with a Dezeen login, some of you might think they look nice. Gustibus non est disputandum, etc.
- Water: Finally this week, a small gametoyartthing in which prolific creator of artygamestuff Pippin Barr presents a gallery of different water effects as presented in a range of small 8-bit games created in the Pico engine which will be familiar to any of you who ever click the links at the end of the miscellaneous section of Curios (like where we are now); it’s soothing and oddly-meditative, and you can dip in and play the games in question if you want, and, honestly, if you need a bit of time to just sit and zone out, this is a really nice little way of so doing.
By Craig Oldham
LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, A CHEERFUL, HOUSILY-DANCEABLE MIX BY JAN KRUEGER!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:
- Cinematic Literature: Only one Turmblr this week, but it’s a great one – Cinematic Literature celebrates the appearance of novels in cinema, screencapping shots of books in movies and sharing them here. If you fancy picking your next read based on how stylish it looked on celluloid, start here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Bichopalo: The Insta account of a Spanish museum who’s recording a new album using all sorts of wonderful, beautifully-constructed, home-engineered tape-and-wood-type instruments; I can’t do them justice at all, just click the link and look at how BEAUTIFUL this all is (and how great it all sounds).
- Tape Measures: Collecting photos of the ways in which tape is being used across the world to help enforce distancing measures. Weird, beautiful, and the first time I’ve realised what a potent visual signifier of These Times We Live In we will all see this sort of thing as in the future.
- Proyectos Ultravioleta: Proyectos Ultravioleta is a museum in Guatemala. Its Insta feed has gone full weird since lockdown, and I am very much enjoying it.’
- LEGO Lost At Sea: A weird example of how brand affinity manifests itself – whilst I will always and forever refuse to capitalise or ™ the term ‘photoshop’ (IN YOUR FACE ADOBE YOU PRICKS), I will simultaneously slavishly obey LEGO’s diktat that their brand need always be in block caps. WHY? Anyway, unrelated to questions of brand identity is this Insta feed which presents beautifully-composed shots of LEGO which washes up ashore, much of it thought lost from the wreck of a Japanese cargo ship which was struck by a rogue wave in the mid-90s. Lovely, beautiful pollution.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:
- Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting: This has very much done the rounds this week, and I’ve seen it almost universally-lauded; I’m a little less stunned by its brilliance (the writing’s not totally my cup of tea, and it’s a bit too US-focused to feel universally-applicable), but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here about how, when/if we all eventually start to return to whatever version of ‘normal’ we aim for, we are likely to see a concerted effort among certain parts of the world to chivvy us back along to the pre-pandemic state of business as though nothing had happened. It’s interesting how this week I’ve started to feel the first stirrings of corporate impatience at how long *gestures* this is all taking, and how we probably need to start moving onto recovery and business as usual chat…not totally sure that that’s how things are going to play out.
- Supply Chains: Slightly-technical but broadly-interesting exploration of what the pandemic and its aftermath might mean for supplychains, and in particular the recent model of ‘get everything shipped from China as that’s where manufacturing is all centralised’; effectively it posits a shift from this sort of model as the standard go-to for the majority of goods production and distribution to a more ad-hoc, agile and small-scale model based on D2C commerce. Honestly, if you ignore all the actual horror and real-person dread that surrounds everything right now, there are so many questions to be asked about how we can, should and could tweak systems and processes to be better, fairer, kinder and cheaper; every single element of industry and business could stand to be interrogated right now. Why not?
- Spatial Software: Abslutely one of the most fascinating things i read this week, this article looks at the concept of ‘spatial’ software – that is, software which offers an element of (the illusion or impression of) physical space alongside other elements. So, for example, that chat website I linked to up there, which lets you move around in virtual space and use that to determine which user or groups of users you can chat to – or something like Minecraft, or Second Life – which I found as I was reading this was in fact referenced in the piece. Honestly, this isn’t hugely easy to get into, but is so conceptually-fascinating; do make the effort to get past the first section and it becomes genuinely interesting; this might well change the way in which you think about the utility and potential of virtual spaces (though, equally, it might not!).
- Why Do We Listen To New Music?: On the neuroscience of aural novelty; this piece, in Pitchfork, explores what it is that happens at a neurological level when we listen to music, and how that changes dependent on our familiarity with said music. Fascinating, not least on the concept of neuroplasticity and how the pandemic and lockdown are potentially hugely-valuable opportunities to maybe rewire a bit of your mental circuitboard should you be so minded (obviously this only applies to people like me who are living the ‘no kids in my prison’ lockdown dream; those of you with children to cope with, feel free to ignore all this self-optimisation w4nkery and focus on keeping yourself sane and them just the right side of feral).
- Animal Crossing Is Political: And so, the Animal Crossing thinkpieces began to roll in this week – evidently they’ve all wrung Tiger King dry and so are moving on to the next cultural juggernaut of lockdown. This piece is a look at how the game’s mechanics embody certain specific politico-economic ideologies or tropes; it’s not quite a ‘Tom Nook’s a fcuking capitalist cop pigdog’ hatchet-job, but it does raise a few interesting points about what it teaches younger people about economics and society. It also, though, feels rather like the author ends the piece desperately struggling to find some sort of broader societal relevance to the whole thing, which is, on reflection, perhaps why there haven’t yet been too many of these thinkpieces.
- I Am Not Relaxed by Animal Crossing: I found this piece in WIRED more interesting than the last one, mainly as it helped concretise something I find slightly weird and troubling about the AC phenomenon as expressed online and across social media; effectively the game is a small microcosm simulation in which the player completes tasks to unlock rewards and new gameplay experiences. That’s it. Except the game is built elegantly enough that it allows for strategy and tactical experimentation in order to optimise the completion of tasks in order to accrue the greatest number of rewards at pace; which then basically turns it into a min/maxing exercise, of the sort you might attempt during the automation of rote process in programming, say, or when you’re ploughing through a boring task at work and want to work out how to do so most efficiently. Much of what I see online around the game effectively takes the act of gameplay and attempts to spreadsheet it into efficiency oblivion, which I find a fascinating reflection of a certain type of younger person’s mindset at the end of the first quintile of the 21C – hustle? Grift? Life optimisation? Biotracking? Do you see? I don’t quite know where I’m getting with this, which perhaps suggests that the answer is ‘nowhere’, but it feels like there’s something in this.
- The Rise of the Virtual Gallery: An interesting article looking at which aspects of the museumgoing experience currently work better and worse in virtual space, from the presentation of works to their overall curation and everything inbetween. If you work in or around digital culture, this is a useful read on what’s currently considered ‘state of the art’.
- Corona and Arab Pop: This is JOYOUS – a wonderful article taking you on a tour through some of the Arab world’s musical responses to COVID-19, from the insanely-catchy Egyptian ‘wash your hands’ songs, through perfectly-coiffed Iraqis, all the way to some genuine bangers from Sudan, with a healthy selection of the referenced tracks embedded throughout. Honestly, tell me you don’t want to hear this number: “the story reaches a climax with the boy, who the singer explains wanted to travel and planned to come back and get married eventually and settle down, calls his dad and says, “Dad, I’m sorry to tell you that you won’t be hearing my voice ever again, I’m sorry to hurt you like this… I got Corona, and there’s no cure.” BRUTAL.
- The Etiquette of Videodating: This is all about the current, nascent do’s and don’ts of videodating – do you ‘lock’ the room on Houseparty or does that feel a bit weird? Do you have music on that you share? Who chooses the playlist? Is it rude to plaintively ask ‘look, all you need to do is help a bit, you don’t even need to look at the camera?’ towards the end when things start to get steamy? Oh, ok, fine, it doesn’t address the last of those, but if you want a brief primer on how people are attempting to bring dating kicking and screaming into the pandemic lyf, this is it.
- The Virtual Nightclubs of Zoom: If this article proves anything it’s that there will ALWAYS be people stupid enough to pay a premium for a good or service, however rubbish that good or service is, if you place it behind a big barrier that reads “VIP BOTTLE SERVICE”. This is a piece about nightclubs setting up parties in Zoom and charging people money for the access codes; the idea is that the clientele will be exclusive and beautiful, so you can pay $20 to spend an hour sitting in a virtual room typing “where the modelz at honeyz holla at me $$$$” to a roomfull of other similarly-desperate men while a procession of suspiciously-plastic-faced ‘models’ rotate in and out every 10 minutes. This is mental, and quite dispiriting (though not as dispiriting as virtual strip clubs, oh me oh my).
- When Chinese Streamers Fall In Love: Honestly, were this not from the generally-reputable South China Morning Post I would have thought it was made-up; I don’t think I have ever read something in a newspaper that read so much like something from a near-future-scifi novel (specifically Super Sad True Love Story – look, there’s a reason I always wang on about that book; it’s because it predicts the world we live in and which is just about to come with a degree of prescient accuracy that is legitimately terrifying). It’s the story of a female Chinese livestreamer, how she got in with the ‘in-crowd’ of fashionable young streamers, and how the web then chewed her up and spat her out, and it contains so many details that are just DIZZYING; I mean, read this: “With both their phones live streaming the evening, Jiang and Nai Nai cruised into the trendiest part of Shanghai, where they met up with another pair of live-streamers – who also arrived by white Ferrari – and ate dumplings. While Nai Nai was unmoved by Jiang, she was overwhelmed by the success he brought her. In a few short hours, her followers shot up to more than 12,000, a number that would generate enough income to pay her living expenses in China’s glittering city.” I have read this book, honestly.
- Movies Based On Articles: You want another 25 bits of bona-fide classic longform journalism? GREAT! Here’s a list of pieces from the past 30-40 years which have been adapted by Hollywood – so if you want to read the original writings that birthed Almost Famous, say, or Adaptation, or Boogie Nights, here they all are. SUCH a great collection, every single one of these that I’ve read has been superb.
- Confessions of an Obsolete Actor: An account by Becca Brown of what it’s like to be a minor part in a hit film when you’re a kid; not great, turns out! Brown’s an engaging writer, and her story of what happened after she was in School of Rock is pleasingly un-self-pitying and matter-of-fact.
- The Darien Gap: Superb journalism – both written and photographic – from California Sunday Magazine, telling the story of migrants attempting to arrive in America by crossing the Darien Gap, a jungle pass that covers the Colombia-Panama border. So much of this is striking, but the thing that most struck me was the international profile of migrants; South Americans are mentioned, but the main protagonists of the story are Cameroonian and Pakistani, which gives you some idea of the motivation these people feel to make a new life for themselves.
- What Happened To Lee?: Warning – this made me cry quite a bit, but I am possibly a bit closer to someone with a neurodegenerative illness than I hope you are so it might not do the same to you. Lee Holloway was by all accounts a genius-level coder and a generally nice guy, who was the main tech brain behind internet giant Cloudflare and who, following surgery on a heart issue, became a completely different person. This is about Lee, his wife and his colleagues, and the condition that has seen the bits of Lee that make him ‘him’ slowly being whittled away; it’s very, very well-written, but it’s also incredibly sad.
- The World’s Most Insane Coffee Drinker: This, by contrast, is very, very funny. I don’t normally feature stuff that can be filed under ‘hatchet job’, but I’ll make an exception for this; this essay by Dan Ozzi takes a frankly-obsessional look at the coffee drinking habits of the New York Times’ Jerry Staltz, the paper’s Senior Art Critic. It’s fair to say that Staltz’s habits make Ozzi…angry, but it’s the joy and forensic detail he takes in breaking down why Staltz’s coffee-drinking habits make him a bit of an ar$ehole that make this piece borderline-perfect.
- American Humbug: The New York Review of Books reviews a couple of biographies of celebrated circus impresario and massive fabulist PT Barnum (people who know him only from ‘The Greatest Showman’, WOW are you in for an unpleasant surprise!) – this is wildly entertaining, as any account of Barnum’s bound to be, but also offers a few interesting reflections on how Barnum in some respects can be said to have ushered in certain aspects of modernity, not least in his attitude and approach to the press. This paragraph in particular struck me as very apt right now, in an era of mast-burning and darkly-muttered conspiracies about the ‘msm’ and secret government cabals and DID BORIS REALLY DIE??: “The great danger to democracy today comes not from marks slow to spot a humbug but from a public made cynical to the point of believing that everything, and everyone, is a humbug, especially the humorless class of credentialed experts whom Barnum took such joy in ridiculing. In the end, though, it’s a distinction without a difference. Too credulous or too incredulous—you’re a sucker either way.”
- 10 Years of Miracles: Ten years ago, I was working at H+K and the great Pampers crisis that was about to ruin ¾ of my year was just starting, and I remember EXACTLY the day on which I first heard ICP’s ‘Miracles’ and how happy it made me – this is a look back at that STONE COLD CLASSIC a decade on, and, honestly, if you have any recollection of the track then you owe yourself to read this (there are some CHOICE quotes, too, including this absolutely truth-bomb: ““Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?” Violent J responded to Jones’s video in a fall 2010 profile in the Guardian. “A fcuking elephant is a miracle. If people can’t see a fcuking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fcuking miracle. So is a giraffe.” See? See the delivery? These people are legitimate geniuses.
- The Female Gays: A gorgeous short story by Ali Smith, whose writing I adore; I think in many respects this is perfect – short, sweet, tart and precision-wrought.
- So Much Cooking: Finally this week, this is five years old but resurfaced this week due to the fact that it feels, well, a bit uncanny. So Much Cooking is a short story from November 2015 by Naomi Kritzer, in which she writes from the point of view of a food blogger writing from a world in which a flu pandemic is just starting to look like a possibility…obviously if you’re feeling anxious about everything then this probably isn’t one for you to hunker down with, but otherwise the prescience here is jaw-dropping. Let’s…let’s hope that not everything in here comes true, though, eh?
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK FEATURES ONLY TWO VIDEOS BECAUSE THERE WASN’T THAT MUCH THIS WEEK THAT GRABBED M TBH)!: