Webcurios 17/10/16

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE LATEST MIX FRESH FROM THE DECKS OF AKIRA THE DON IN LA!

THE SECTION WHICH, YOU CAN IMAGINE, HAS NEXT TO NO INTEREST IN REPORTING NEWS ABOUT S*C**L FCUKING M*D** THIS MORNING:

• Better Facebook Ads For Retailers: If your job involves promoting ACTUALY PHYSICAL SHOPS (how retro of you), this is BIG NEWS. New Facebook Ad units were announced this week, which will allow retailers to point Facebook users to the store nearest to them within a specifically-designed map-advert – effectively a user will see a little map in their timeline with a big arrow saying “GET YOUR CORONARY-INDUCING MEAT BOMB HERE!” or some other suitably enticing exhortation. Combine this with a carousel format which shows you an enticing, glistening picture of said meat bomb and BANG! FOOTFALL! More impressively / scarily, Facebook’s also going to start tracking user movement so as to be able to determine the efficacy of these ads – they are light on technical detail here, but you might want to turn location services off if you’d prefer not to let Facebook know exactly how susceptible you are to photos of glistening meat.

• Enhanced Messenger: More of a thing for people than brands (“But Matt!”, I hear you cry, “Brands are people too!”), this is a host of new features which will be cropping up in Messenger including birthday reminders, prioritisation of your most used contacts and the like. It’s surely only a small step from this to the ability to, say, promote specific deals from specific retailers in the app, with the ability to buy direct.

• The Snapchat Adpocalypse is Coming: OK, so perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but the fact is that as things stand Snapchat is a relatively ad-free place to hang out. NO MORE! As of the next few weeks, Snapchat’s introducing ads inbween Stories – so as you flick between the deliciously vapid windows into your friends’ lives and LOL at their funny puppy ears, you’ll be presented with a variety of slick, full-bleed ads for a variety of exciting commercial opportunities; these ads will let users skip them (thank Christ), but will also include additional links to external websites or MORE CONTENT if said users swipe up. This isn’t quite going to create a free-for-all – much in the manner in which Instagram started, ads are only available through a selection of Snapchat’s accepted creative / commercial partners, which should at least maintain a temporary veneer of quality; I give it 6 months before any old agency twat can start creating hideous, invasive branded content, though. Anyway, if you’re a brand which wants to sell to children then a) I hate you; b) you probably should get on this. Oh, if you’re interested there is a MUCH longer breakdown here.

• Twitter Introduces Emoji Targeting: What, let me ask you, is the ‘good’ thing about emoji (the inverted commas are my own and you can hopefully imagine the tone that they are meant to convey)? Yes, that’s right, it’s their innate context dependence and utter subjectivity, which makes them a hugely flexible (and MASSIVELY INEFFICIENT) means of communicating. Which is why Twitter’s MASSIVE NEWS that you can now use emoji use as another ad targeting variable is such a silly gimmick; unless you make condoms or bongo, in which case fire that CONTENT at anyone using the taco, aubergine or any of the dozens of other ‘comedy’ genital signifiers, you’ll be targeting people who are using a symbol whose potential meanings are so broad that it is in fact no sort of worthwhile targeting at all. Still, look forward to a bunch of brands doing stuff with this and Twitter talking about how ACE it is, because, you know, GIMMICKS. Christ’s sake.

• Twitter May Promote Moments In Timeline: MAY being the operative word here. That said, this strikes me as a move towards expanding the potential commercial opportunities for moments – if they are appearing in timelines then they are necessarily going to be more appealing a prospect to advertisers, and they can be targeted at specific users more easily. Not using emoji, though, please.

• Everyone Can Now Periscope Straight From Twitter: As I wrote that, I had a sudden moment of comprehension that this is a sentence which would have meant literally nothing a few years ago. Weird. Anyway, now all users of Twitter on iOS and Android can do this, should they so desire, making it even easier for people and brands to LIVE STREAM THEIR LIVES (or whatever simulated version thereof they wish to present). Great.

• You Can Now RT Yourself If You So Desire: Remember that FIRE Tweet you posted back in 2011? No, neither does anyone else, and nor indeed do they care, but don’t let that stop you from re-upping all your greatest 140-character hits to a totally disinterested audience. Lucky, lucky us.

• Pinterest Doing More To Track Offline Behaviour: Or at least it will, using a partnership with Oracle Data Cloud. This is more a general ‘this will happen’ thing, but is also an opportunity for me to once again say how underrated I think Pinterest is in the marketing mix, and to point you at this rather interesting interview with its Chief Executive on the occasion of the opening of its London office. If you’d like to debate whether the term ‘social network’ is now dead, feel free to do so (but a long, long way out of my earshot if you don’t mind). Hang on, I just scanned that again and the bastard is 33. 33. You absolute shitbag, Ben Silbermann.

• A Decent Guide To The New Google Map Ads: You know the whole ‘you can now buy advertising pins on Google Maps’ thing from last week or whenever it was? Well this is a 101-ish rundown on how they, and the whole general advertising on Google Maps things works. Useful and helpful.

• YouTube Director: One for the small business people out there, this is a potentially really useful app from YouTube which helps you make professional-looking video ads for whatever it is that you do, using a surprisingly flexible series of templates, fonts, etc, delivered via a bespoke YouTube app. Obviously the end goal of this is to get you to buy pre-rolls on YouTube (OBVIOUSLY), but, you know, still.

• Bumble Integrates With Spotify: Not technically about advermarketingpr, but I find the principle interesting. Dating app Bumble is now integrating Spotify data into its profiles, meaning you can add ‘taste in music’ to the list of superficial criteria you use to decide whether to let someone inside you. I reckon there is LOADS more interesting stuff that can be done by brands with Spotify data, but I’ll let you clever people in the agencies work it out.

• Oh, Yes, Microsoft Bought LinkedIn: A union of two of the most tedious companies on the planet, there’s no actual NEWS here beyond the frankly HUGE price they paid; this is a really smart (and occasionally surprisingly funny) piece listing 9 things that Microsoft could do with everyone’s least favourite social network. It’s hard not to see this as being eventually part of Office and overall a great big hedge against Facebook at Work, but TIME WILL TELL.

• The Cheetos Museum: Included more because I desperately need some sort of frivolity this morning than because it’s particularly great, this is the website for a promo by purveyors of potentially toxic cheese dust Cheetos (NB – WEB CURIOS WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY THINK THAT CHEETOS ARE POTENTIALLY TOXIC, HONEST) which is offering a series of prizes of $10,000 (the world has gone mad) to the people who upload photos of the oddest looking corn snacks they’ve found in their packets. Silly, but I would love a major food manufacturer run something like this across their whole range – “WE ARE OFFERING A MILLION QUID TO THE BEST JESUS FOUND IN ONE OF OUR PRODUCTS”, for example. Take a look at the gallery, and look at how many people have uploaded photographs of misshapen, nuclear-orange snack-foods, though. LOOK. To the one person reading this who I know for a fact spends most of their life covered in a fine haze of orange cheese dust, SORT YOUR LIFE OUT MATE.

• Snapchat Filters for Charity: A nice idea from W Hotels in the US, whereby users Snapping in the vicinity of a few of their hotesl across the country can use a rainbow filter in support of Pride Month, and by so doing date $1 to LGBTI charities. Simple, smart, and the sort of thing which should become a no-brainer for charity partnerships all over the place.

HOW ABOUT SOME ANGULAR INDIEPOP FROM WEAVES’ SELF-TITLED LP? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PLEASE LIKE YOU ALL TO SPEND THE NEXT FEW WEEKS JUST BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER AND MAYBE NOT SHOUTING AND ARGUING SO MUCH ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON’T MIND, THANKS, PT.1:

• Score Assured: Seeing as everything is so utterly, utterly banjaxed, let’s kick off with a website-stroke-service which encapsulates much of what is horrible about 2016. Score Assured is a charming site which will, if these reports are anything to go by, mine Facebook data of potential tenants and employees to allow landlords or potential employers to determine whether or not they should be given houses or jobs. The idea is that it’s part of the background checking process – employers or landlords ask prospective tenants or employees for access to their social media accounts through the site, which then analyses EVERYTHING on it and ‘works out’ whether or not they’re a safe bet for employment or a roof over their heads. Yes, that’s right, an algorithm is going to start determining whether or not you should be allowed to live somewhere – spend too much time talking about getting all messed up at the weekends in your Messenger conversations? ACCESS DENIED! Dystopian present, how do I love thee? Let me count the wa…no, actually, let’s not bother.

• Dango: How will we know when machines have reached sentience? Balls to the Turing Test – emoji are obviously the new benchmark of AI comprehension. Dango is “a floating assistant that runs on your phone and predicts emoji, stickers and GIFs based on what you and your friends are writing in any app. This lets you have the same rich conversations everywhere: Messenger, Kik, Whatsapp, Snapchat, whatever.” The intriguing part here is the idea of its being able to predict which visual signifier is most appropriate at any given time – maybe if this takes off, we can move towards a proper, defined taxonomy of emoji, as defined by machine learning, thereby making Twitter’s ad targeting thing above less preposterous than at present. Maybe.

• The IKEA Museum: Opening on June 30 in Älmhult, Sweden, this is going to be several thousand square feet of flat-pack furniture and meatballs and domestic arguments, celebrating the history of what is simultaneously one of the most convenient and most infuriating retailers in history. Do you think it will have the same sort of intense effect on visiting couples as visiting one of the actual stores will? Actually, there’s quite a fun (I use the term advisedly) art project in this; get a load of couples to reenact arguments based in different eras from IKEA’s past in different areas of the museum. IMMERSIVE THEATRE! Go on, someone, do this.

• Live From A Moon-Shaped Pool: If you’re reading this on Friday 17 June 2016, Radiohead are doing all sorts of interesting livestreaming stuff on this website today. If you’re not, YOU’RE LATE. Oh, and if you’re seeing this on the CurioBot then let’s just agree to ignore it and move on (though they may have archived it, actually, so maybe click on the link just in case).

• Ebooks_goetia: Just in case you wanted a mildly occult Twitter bot to follow. “The Lesser Bot of Solomon offers you endless pages from a text in the style of Ars Goetia and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.” – it’s all sigils full of DARK PORTENT. Friday Fun! Why not take some of these and print them up – maybe A5 size – and stick them in unexpected and hard to find places in the office (maybe at the bottom of the paper drawer in the printer), and then send HR an email asking if they know who the Satanist is?

• Make Barnes Dance: In the time-honoured tradition of every single football tournament since 1990, we must hark back to World In Motion and John Barnes. This is a toy which lets you make a little dancing John Barnes doll, which is totally pointless but included because it’s still better than any other brand stuff I’ve seen over the Euros this year (seriously, has anyone seen anything good? It’s all dreck, isn’t it?).

• Green Screen The Queen: God, do you remember the Queen’s Birthday? How full of innocent patriotic hope we were then, before seemingly everything went to tits. Anyway, this site, built by FRIEND OF CURIOS Shardcore, lets you superimpose any YouTube video you want onto the Queen’s helpfully greenscreen-hued dress. Works particularly well with any of the Deep Dream stuff, imho, though frankly anything’s good here.

• Google Hands-free Payments: These are actually live RIGHT NOW in Southern California – Google’s now letting users pay for goods in certain outlets simply by SCANNING THEIR FACES. It’s not quite that simple – there’s another layer of ID and security which involves Google knowing that your phone is in the store, along with your face – but it’s the closest I’ve seen to magic this week. ETA to rollout worldwide? I reckon 2018, if it works in the pilots.

• Good Finds: Another website which proves to me that there is a market in piggybacking on Airbnb, Good Finds offers a regularly-updated selection of ‘curated’ (BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS CURATION NOW – am I allowed to call this curation? Probably not if I don’t want to sound like a total prick, on reflection) Airbnb listings a few hours from New York City and (eventually) San Francisco, promising TRENDY VIBES and suchlike. This seems like a natural brand extension for someone like, say, Mr & Mrs Smith, or even a Net a Porter (if you squint) – is anyone doing something like this here?

• Club Soda: As a man whose relationship with Casillero del Diablo ranges on a spectrum from ‘deep, abiding affection’ to ‘worrying degrees of dependency’, I’m always agog at people who are able to take a responsible attitude to their boozing rather than simply emptying it as much of it down their gullet as is humanly possible every evening. Club Soda is a website designed to help people who want to drink a bit less, or even stop at all, by giving encouragement, tips, suggesting meetups and the like. Effectively like the sort of resources which have existed for ages for people looking to kick the tabs, this is a great idea and is ripe for sponsorship by one of those ‘sophisticated fizzy drinks you can theoretically order instead of wine in the pub but noone ever really does because, well, they taste like pop’ such as Schloer or somesuch.

• All The World’s Fictional Holidays: A calendar plugin which, if you wish, will add every single (well, maybe not EVERY SINGLE, but) fictional holiday to your diary. If you’ve ever wanted to chance your arm with your employer and demand time off for, say, Katniss’s birthday, here’s your chance. Again, such a great idea for a publisher which you can probably get away with ripping off if you’re smart about it – maybe let people pick their favourite characters in literature (Gatsby, Hal, Baldini, etc) and have those birthdays appear in-calendar, perhaps with links to resources about the characters or something. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Do it, Penguin.

• Hello Jarvis: Not, sadly, the now-legendary personal assistant which Zuck’s purportedly constructing, this is a far simpler messenger bot which can be set to give you reminders about stuff in the future. Simple and not very useful, it’s included here more as a nudge to remind you how easy these things can be to cobble together – i refer you back to that flowxo botbuilder from the other week.

• The NYC Drone Film Festival: Now in its 3rd year, the NYC Drone Film Festival is a celebration of…er…films made with drones (what did you expect?). You can see a load of them on the Festival’s official site; this one’s my favourite, but you should check the whole site as there’s some truly inventive cinematography there.

• The First Law: Brilliant and deeply sinister idea, this. You remember Asimov’s First Law of Robitics? In case you don’t, it’s “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” This is a robot which can choose to ignore that edict – to cite its creator, “The first robot to autonomously and intentionally break Asimov’s first law, which states: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The robot decides for each person it detects if it should injure them not in a way the creator can not predict. While there currently are “killer” drones and sentry guns, there is either always some person in the loop to make decisions or the system is a glorified tripwire. The way this robot differs in what exists is the decision making process it makes. A land mine for instance is made to always go off when stepped on, so no decision. A drone has a person in the loop, so no machine process. A radar operated gun again is basically the same as a land mine. Sticking your hand into a running blender is your decision, with a certain outcome. The fact that sometimes the robot decides not to hurt a person (in a way that is not predictable) is actually what brings about the important questions and sets it apart.” Brilliantly sinister.

• Hemingboard: A keyboard for desktop or mobile, helpfully designed fro seemingly every platform out there (apart from Windows Phones, obvs), which acts as something of a poetic assistant, making suggestions as to rhymes and synonyms and stuff. Download this and see whether it improves your chances on Tinder, Grindr or whichever tailchasing app you prefer – but be aware that you will effectively be letting a machine play Cyrano for you, which is pretty much as pathetic as it gets, romance-wise.

• Joachim Time: MASSIVE WOODEN CLOCKS! A whole range of designs, many of which are pretty cool, and they will plant 100 new trees for each one you buy, which seems like a pretty good deal. If you work in a COOL OFFICE and you need a new timepiece, or if you want your flat to look like something out of Oh Comely magazine, this might well tickle your fancy.

• Wholi: Currently in private Beta, Wholi is a service which offers itself as person-finding tool par excellence; effectively Google for people (professionals, specifically), designed to be a way of building networks within specific areas of expertise (for example, UK software development). Its utility will stand and fall based on the quality of its database, but it could be a pleasing alternative to the horror that is LinkedIn search.

• Keyboard AR: Using augmented reality tech to teach the piano. Light on tech details, but a rather cool proof-of-concept if nothing else.

• Kristina Lechner: Kristina Lechner takes photographs of small things that aren’t food arranged to look like actual food in miniature. Which clunky description suggests that last night’s insomnia is catching up with me, and we’re starting that long, slow slide into what regular readers will know is the low point of Curios (there are highs? I hear you all ask, incredulously. Fcuk off, you ingrates); don’t worry, I’ll power through and this will be behind us soon enough, honest.

• FastDocs: Dull-but-useful, this – a webpage which contains icons which take you direct to new Google Docs with a single click. Pleasingly, these are also customisable so that you can add one-click shortcuts to your Google Apps for Work – workplaces using Google Docs should consider this as a standard browser homepage, or at least until Google sort their shit out when it comes to the Docs UI.

• Startup Breeding: All idea for new companies are “It’s like X for Y!”, or “It’s like A + B!”. Eliminate the tedious process of coming up with your own ideas for new companies by using this handy websites which generates these constructions for you. Just, you know, remember where you saw it first when you’re a multimillionaire holidaying on Necker with laughing Rich.

• Addressable: WORTHY and DULL, but actually pretty smart and the sort of thing that you could reasonably rip off to useful effect for the right brand. Addressable is a service (I think) by or in conjunction with the US Postal Service, which effectively guides you through the process of updating your address when you move home, helping you tell all your utility providers, etc, and ensuring you don’t forget to tie up any loose ends. If you work for an estate agent then you’re obviously scum, but you may also find this the sort of thing which you could present to customers as ADDED VALUE or somesuch crap.

• Zungle: I can’t work out whether this is a cool idea or something a little akin to a mobile phone holster in pleather – YOU DECIDE! Zungle is a Kickstartable project, nearly funded, which will bring to market sunglasses which double as bone-conducting headphones, bluetooth-enabled so you can stream straight from your phone to…er…your cranium. Which creeps me out something chronic, but then I am basically uncomfortable with the concept of sunglasses (I know, I know, but they make me feel like everyone is looking at me, which I appreciate is odd, but) so probably not target audience.

• CalendarBlocker: Another Euro 2016 thing, and another Calendar app, and another example of something a brand should have done but didn’t (Carlsberg, I’m looking at you – this is a supercheap extension to that full-page ad you took out yesterday around the England game); this automatically fills your calendar with fictitious apppointments which happen to coincidentally coincide with England’s games in the tournament. Could be more comprehensive, but it’s a nice idea and an opportunity missed. Which is easy for me to say, as all I do is sit here in my pants and snark from the sidelines; I should probably shut up and get a real job or something. Sorry.

• My Script Font: Make a font out of your handwriting. Ugly and vain, but I would like at least one of you to do this and then set it as default on all your workplace machines as an act of supremely narcissistic digital vandalism. Thanks. Also, if you’re a famous I reckon you could TOTALLY get away with using this to make a font of your handwriting which you could then sell.

LET’S GO BACK TO 1977 AND A SELECTION OF TUNES FROM JOHN LYDON’S PERSONAL COLLECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PLEASE LIKE YOU ALL TO SPEND THE NEXT FEW WEEKS JUST BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER AND MAYBE NOT SHOUTING AND ARGUING SO MUCH ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON’T MIND, THANKS, PT.2:

• Vigils for Orlando: Photographs from vigils which took place the world over to commemorate the victims of Sunday’s shootings in Florida. Every time I look at these they absolutely ruin me.

• An Interactive Map of Voting Patterns In The US: Not only a lovely and mesmerising piece of dataviz, but a pleasing and timely reminder that psephology is against Trump.

• Unspeaking Likeness: These are chilling. I’ll take their description, as it’s better than mine would be: “Unspeaking Likeness is a series of photographs of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures. These sculptures are commissioned by various law enforcement agencies and used for the purposes of establishing the identity of victims of suspected violent crime whose soft tissue facial features have been obliterated by either trauma or the passage of time.” Incredible, and quite incredibly creepy.

• The Internet Creators Guild: An interesting idea, born out of the fact that there are now hundreds of thousands of people worldwide monetising their creativity via the web, whether that be minor YouTubers pulling in a few k a month from ads, or the vapid, dead-eyed teen stars filling your tween children’s every waking thought. The idea is that this will be a loose network looking to represent these creators, giving them a collective voice and sticking up for their interests – you can read the pseudo-manifesto here, but it seems, broadly, like A Good Thing.

• Kanye’s Making A Game: Or, more accurately, this studio is, under his doubtless close instruction. I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by revealing the premise to you: “You’ll play as Kanye’s mom, Donda, flying [ON PEGASUS!] through the gates of heaven.”. Yep.

• Bumpers: Really rather cool and very, very easy to use audio recording and editing app; this makes it very easy indeed to make relatively polished-sounding audio output, whether it be your own voicenotes or something morepodcasty – it’s worth a try if you’re into that sort of thing (and remember, kids, that as Shingy said, “Audio’s going to be big in the future”) (he really did say that, you know).

• Behind The Scenes Polaroids From Blade Runner: Yep, that. Some of these are excellent, though; in particular, I’m in love with this shot.

• Flugjefellet: This is all in Norwegian, and so I can’t really tell you anything about it, other than a) it’s about the Northernmost tip of the country; b) there’s a lighthouse there; c) it appears to be a guide to the area’s birdlife; and d) it contains a really, really rather beautiful 3d model of a Norwegian island, and quite a lot of footage of puffins, which given the week we’ve all had I think we should celebrate as the generally positive thing it is.

• Circulation Zero: You’llhave to download these as they’re not available to broswe as embeds on the site, but this is a great collection of the collected runs of three seminal punk magazines from the West Coast of the US in the 70s and 80s – Damage, Slash and No Mag. If you are into the scene, or just like looking at design and typography and photography from that era, these are some great respources.

• Draw With (On) Bob Ross: Continuing with the general theme of ‘Matt’s soothing antidotes to the Week of Horror™’, this is a site which plays a seemingly neverending selection of Bob Ross vids (you know Bob Ross – the beafroed hippy with the most soothing voice in the world who is catnip to the ASMR community, and whose mission to gently teach everyone in the US to paint made him basically the slightly less camp Tony Hart of across the pond), which if you so desire you can paint over with your cursor. Don’t do that, though – just put on your headphones and let Bob paint the pain away.

• Curtsy: Interesting idea, this. Curtsy is a peer-to-peer clothing rental app, only in the US at present, which lets you hire hipsters’ dresses for an evening at knockdown rates. Could totally work over here were anyone minded to port it over.

• Peanuts In The Desert: First of two links for the comic book (THEY ARE GRAPHIC NOVELS DAMN YOU) aficionados amongst you, this is a brilliant project which takes French cartoonist Moebius’s strip ‘40 Days In The Desert’ and redraws it using characters from Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’. Some familiarity with the source material helps here, admittedly, but the art style is nailed on.

• The Neu Jorker: This is SUCH a labour of love. A full edition, start to finish, of the New Yorker – except this is a satirical parody taking a very well-aimed shot at all the things that make the New Yorker the New Yorker – cartoons, pretence, preposterously long, self-indulgent articles, the whole nine yards. I can’t recommend this enough – there’s loads of it, but it’s consistently funny, and you can print it off while you’re at work and then take it home to enjoy over the weekend.

• Memions: It’s hard to think of an adequate response to how fcuked everything seems this week, so I’m not even going to try. Instead, I’m just going to leave this here – a website which collects hundreds, maybe thousands, of cripplingly lame and generic and unfunny and INSPIRATIONAL Minions memes in one place. Maybe by communicating solely via the medium of these we can restore some sense of balance and order to the crazy, messed-up world in which we live. Maybe. Alternatively, just spend the next few days communicating solely via these, to the increasing irritation of everyone you know.

• Marky: This got right on my tits earlier in the week, but I’m finding it hard to get quite so exercised about it now. Still, let’s try. Marky is basically like Graze or any of those ‘pay a premium to get some ingredients or small things delivered to you, which would be loads cheaper if you just bought them yourself but you are too busy and important to even contemplate doing so’, except it’s for craft materials you can use to have INTERACTIVE PLAYTIME with your kids. You sign up, and every X number of weeks they send you a box with a bunch of, say, beads and pipecleaners and other assorted crap, along with instructions on HOW TO BE CREATIVE with your child. If there’s anything that says “carving out some precious time with your offspring!” and “creativity!” it’s having a bunch of tat delivered in a fancy box for $50 a pop so you can follow the instructions on how to BE CREATIVE and then put that creativity back in a box til the next mandated CREATIVE PLAYTIME, right? Oh, look, it annoyed me again.

• Netcees: One of the odder online communities I’ve found in recent times, Netcees celebrates the weird world of text-only rap battling. You know “Don’t Flop” and all those other now-infamous rap battle nights? Well this is like those, except, er, these people just type stuff at each other. Some of these are truly DREADFUL – there’s a real rabbithole here, as there are literally millions of words on this site.

• Smile Vector: Photos of famouses, digitally manipulated to either give them the creepiest smiles you ever did see, or to remove the smiles that were once there. All done by algorithm, this Twitter feed has given me some of the more unsettling imagery I’ve seen this week.

• The Most German Thing I Have Ever Seen, Possibly: I mean, can you imagine any other nation having one of these as a tournament tie-in?

• Free Cerebus: This week’s other BIG THING for comic fans (GRAPHIC NOVELS), you can now download the first two Cerebus books in their entirety, for free. For those of you who don’t know, Cerebus is the longest-running graphic novel in history; it started out as a weird sort of swords and sorcery pastiche featuring a talking aardvark, but evolved over its lifespan to become one of the most interesting explorations of power and politics ever committed to the page (no, really, it did). Sadly it also descended quite far into misogynistic lunacy in its later years, as creator Dave Sim battled with drug addiction, mental health issues and the breakdown of his marriage, but the work still stands overall as a hell of an achievement (and in Jaka’s Story presents one of the most beautifully-rendered love stories I’ve ever read in the medium). Anyway, if you like comics (GRAPHIC NOVELS) then check these out, they might appeal.

• NIMB: This week’s ‘Christ, I wish this didn’t have to exist’ thing, NIMB is an internet-enabled ring of reasonably pleasing (if chunky) design which will, if pressed in a certain way for a certain amount of time, send an automatic alert to a predetermined set of individuals based on a user’s preferences. Not yet in production, but you can sign up to be alerted when it goes on sale.

• Luxoperon: Have YOU ever wanted to navigate prehistoric seas in a weird sort of browser-based game in which you search for fish and explore the depths? No, I hadn’t either to be honest, and yet this game proved a pleasing distraction for 10 minutes or so.

• 51 Sprints: This is really rather cool. Taking as its starting point the idea of the sprinter as an athletic ideal, this is part documentary and part interactive tool which lets you pit sprinters from the past and present against each other in your own version of the 100 metres, letting you apply equalising filters to different variables (gender, ethnicity, social class) to see how these were – or were not – factors in athletic performance. Feels more like an academic / sociological study than anything else, but it’s a fascinating project and rather well realised.

• Mass Migrations: Generate your own weird little 3d robot insect thing, and set it to play in its own little weird 3d virtual playground, soundtracked by some rather nice music. No reason why, just give it a go.

• Recently: A gift for the biggest narcissist you know, Recently is a service which, for $9 a month, will turn anyone’s INstagram feed (or the best thereof) into a monthly magazine, printed and shipped to them so they can have an actual coffeetable lifestyle magazine to house all their coffeetable lifestyle magazine shots. I hate EVERYTHING about this, and yet am forced to concede it’s pretty smart and there’s a whole load of obvious things brands could do along these lines. Still, though, if you desire this in any way then I actually hate you, just FYI.

• The New Tate: This is GORGEOUS, as you’d expect from a collaboration between the Tate and Sigur Ros. To celebrate the opening of the extension to the Tate Modern this week (well this week at time of writing, at least), they released this videomusicwebtoything, which lets you view different video representations of the new gallery; four different perspectives are available, which you can switch between at will, each revealing a different layer to Sigur Ros’ weirdly claustrophobic soundscape. This is beautifully done.

• An Deiner Seite: This, though, is my favourite thing of the week. A truly WONDERFUL interactive music video for German…er…rapper, apparently, Kontra K, this uses the same technique as the ‘switch between two videos’ Honda ad of last year, and invites you to help a fisherman find the clues to what happened by a sinsiter lakeside. This is SO SLICK and the song is SO GOOD – I cannot recommend it highly enough. Press and hold space to switch narratives and just enjoy.

LET’S FINISH THE PLAYLISTS WITH THIS SPOTIFY MIX  BY MOFGIMMERS OF GOOD, HAPPY TRACKS TO HOPEFULLY WASH SOME OF THE WRONG AWAY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Women Burning Things: For when you really, really need some gifs of women setting fire to stuff.

• Ruby, etc: Wonderful little cartoon vignettes from London-based artist Ruby, who draws small but perfectly-formed cartoons exploring depression, loneliness, anxiety and, you know, LIFE. Not in any way miserable, despite the subject matter – these are lovely.

• Fuck Yeah Studio Porn: Photographs of recording studios, the more pimped the better.

• They Can Talk: Small, slightly whimsical comics imagining what animals might say if they could in fact talk. This sounds like a range of really shit greetings cards, I’m aware, but I promise that they’re better than that.

• Barbie Movies: A Tumblr celebrating the VERY PINK world of the CGI Barbie cartoons. I had no idea these things even existed, possibly unsurprisingly, but if you have small children and you have no problem with the whole GIRLS=PINK PRINCESSES thing, then they might be into this. Alternatively, there’s something sort of seapunk/vaporwave about the whole aesthetic here (yes, yes, I know) which might be ripe for ripping off, maybe.

• Panini Cheapskates: This week’s “Not actually a Tumblr” comes in the shape of this, which I have probably featured before on reflection but which is worth reupping as THE FOOTBALL IS HAPPENING. Panini Cheapskates is basically a load of really rubbish drawings of footballers, all being done to raise money for good causes. Funny and worthwhile.

• CL Terry Art: Great little animations in a sort of 2d Pixar-ish style.

• Watermelon Prices: Sadly inactive for a year, I PLEAD with whoever is behind this to bring it back. We’re having an awful Summer – for some reason I think that this would make it marginally better (no, I can’t explain why). This is a Tumblr recording the variety of prices of watermelons in the rubbish local shops of London, and I want it back.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• What Are The Odds We Are Living In A Simulation: A piece sparked by Elon Musk’s comments in an interview the other week in which he stated it was statistically improbable that this was the ‘top level’ universe, based on the pace of improvement of computational power, this takes a good long run up at the classic Cartesian questions (“But how do I know I’m not a brain in a vat?”), swings and…well…sort of misses. Interesting enough, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of depth here. Though after this week, I’m sort of with the Gnostics on this one.

• In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club: A short, poignant essay about being gay and Latino and going out, and what places like Pulse meant to members of a community who found it harder than some others to embrace their non-heterosexuality. This is really rather beautiful, and captures (one of the many reasons) why last Sunday was such a sad event.

• Carrozo Gets Mad: More on Orlando and associated things, this time from Matthew Carrozo, whose Twitterstorm earlier this week he kindly collated for me into this Storify and which you should all read; it’s brilliant, on all sorts of things including opinions and social media, gay identity and belonging, how we define ourselves publicly and privately, and how events and the tenor of conversation are always, always shaped both by a prevailing narrative as well as all those things left unsaid. Made me a bit weepy, I’m not ashamed to say.

• Kris Kristofferson: By way of light relief, this profile of Kris Kristofferson paints a picture of a truly remarkable man and life. I had no idea he had done SO MUCH. Blimey, I feel quite small by comparison (not uncommon tbh).

• -ass as a Modifier: Students of linguistics – or, you know, anyone who reads or listens to the Englis language, pretty much, will be aware of the evolution of the suffix -ass as a modifier. This is a brilliant and brilliantly straight-faced, exploration of what it MEANS and how it works, and why, for example, “…while you can say “I run quickly” you can’t say “I run quick-ass”. I love this stuff.

• Reviewing Flume’s New Album: Which analysis segues rather nicely into this, which is hands-down one of the oddest music reviews I’ve ever read anywhere, not least in the pages of the Independent. Is Justin Carissimo a real person? Is this performance art? Whatever, he can…er…sort of write (although I’m pretty much certain he misuses the -ass suffix at least once here). Want a taste? “To be frank, this is the type of music that fuels interracial relationships, cause when the hook sinks and the beat drops, hundreds of years of oppression, and your bigoted parents completely fade away for a moment.” It’s safe to say he likes it. Oh, just FYI, Flume’s latest track was on last week’s Curios if you want a taster.

• On Icons: On icon design, and why we use them instead of labels. Yes, I know it sounds boring, but I promise you that you don’t have to be a designer to find this interesting – all about communication and language and visual signifiers and STUFF, this is really interesting (particularly w/r/t the rise of the emoji, imho).

• The 10 Biggest Gun Manufacturers In America: If you want something to make you actually angry today, can I recommend this? A rundown of the finances and business operations (and NRA-enabled lobbying activity) of the ten biggest gunmakers in the US. The sums of money being bandied about here are astounding, not least those being spent on buying politicians – let’s not beat around the bush, that’s exactly what it is – to support whatever position the NRA deems most advantageous to the manufacturers. Absolutely filthy, the whole thing.

• Satyricon: A portrait of this weekend’s Roman mayoral elections, in which it’s at the time of writing) likely that the candidate from the ‘outsider’ party (the Movimento 5 Stelle, or 5 Star Movement) will emerge triumphant. You don’t need to know or care about Italian politics to find this interesting – it’s a good overview of a democracy which has been pretty fractured for half a century, and a country where, despite nothing working and everything being a corrupt mess, things still just about limp along regardless. Until yesterday I was going to make some crack about ‘and we think we’ve got it bad!’, but that’s not really funny any more.

• The People’s Republic of WeChat: A really comprehensive (and, I’m told, accurate) overview of how WeChat (China’s catch-all social media /messaging platform which basically does EVERYTHING) works and is built in to every facet of Chinese society. You want to see what Facebook wants to become with this year’s Messenger updates? Read this and then project forward 4 years.

• The Dystopian Future Of Silicon Valley: What happens if DeLillo and others are right and cryogenics are actually going to work? This essay takes a look, and sees a future which is dominated by the same old white men as right now – a pretty chilling (no pun intended, but, y’know, LOLS) extrapolation of what will almost inevitably occur if you grant longer and longer life to those at the top of the tree who can afford to pay for it. Watch as today’s elites entrench themselves into perpetuity!

• Minnesota’s Meat Raffles: Apparently in Minnesota, a decent evening’s entertainment can consist of going to a bar and buying a raffle ticket which might entitle you to win some meat. This is just sort of weird, and I’m including it mainly because I find myself laughing to the point of distraction at the repeated phrase “Who doesn’t love a good meat raffle?” Who indeed?

• My Heart Belongs To Daddy!: If you’ve spent any time on Twitter of late, you’ll have seen the almost unstoppable trend of any male celebrity of a certain age being bombarded with exhortations from thirsyty kids of all genders to “choke me, daddy!” or similar such constructions (even the Pope wasn’t immune, although I imagine Francis secretly probably rather enjoyed it). This (not entirely serious) piece looks at the semantics of the ‘Daddy’ meme, and the issue of daddy sex in general. PROTIP – if you have teenage daughters, maybe don’t read this one.

• Sad!: This is a great read, if you’re a little bit of a politicowonk. Campaign managers of three of the Republican presidential candidates discuss with a reporter from the Huffington Post what it felt like to lose to Trump, why they think it happened, and how the campaigns worked behind the scenes. Genuinely fascinating, whether or not you’re into the US Presidential race.

• Before Kanye Was Kanye: A portrait of the geeky, enthusiastic kid with the slightly shonky flow who would grow up to be the self-proclaimed GOAT. Awesome reminiscence here.

• More Seduction Than Friendship: A brilliant, beautiful piece of writing about the sort of intense friendships that people form in their 20s and which can with surprising ease vanish just as quickly as they are born. The whole piece is a startlingly good piece of writing, but the final paragraphs got me right *here*. Fiction, but you’d never guess – this is wonderful.

• A Brief Catalogue of Minor Sex Scandals: Equally superb writing, this, on being white trash and all that goes with it. I missed this when it was published last year, but it’s beautiful and demands a slow, attentive read.

• The Panel: The final long read of the week, read this before you go and vote on Thursday. Read it all, out loud in your head. It is by Luke Wright and it is a brilliant piece of poetry. It was written for last year’s election, but it bears up for this year’s referendum. READ IT.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s start with a video featuring some mesmerising, beautiful, mo-capped CGI dancing. This is gorgeous:

2) More dancing! This is less mesmerising and more sort of weird, like if you were able to turn yourself into a videogame character. It’s by Cumhur Jay and the track’s called ‘Dyschronometria’ and it’s got GREAT synths:

3) Ghostbusters, done in LEGO, just because it’s cheering and nostalgic and HOLD ME TIGHT SOMEONE:

4 A girl I went to college with (shout out Ivana, you will never read this but I hope you’re well) once got off with Iggy Pop onstage at a gig of his in Belgrade. She said he was an aggressive kisser, fwiw. Anyway, this is his latest, called ‘American Valhalla’ – I think the video’s rather good:

5) No hiphop selection this week, just this rather beautiful slow jam by SilentJay and JaceXL. This is called Rockabye, and the video’s rather beautiful in a slowmo backwards kind of way:

6) Another in the very occasional series of ‘if you’re having a really druggy house party this weekend, try throwing this onto the telly as the backdrop to whatever’s going on at about 4am’ videos – this is Megaplex, the final in a series of longform spliced videos combining 80s classics to massive, disorienting effect. This is ACE:

7) Next, in case you’re yet to see it, the ‘Weird Japanese-style Trump video’ that has been EVERYWHERE in the past 24h – made not by anyone in Japan but by LA artist Mike Diva. Bafflingly, there are people on Twitter nhim if this is anti-Trump; he literally blows up the world, kids, it’s not exactly a pro message:

8) Finally this week, the best video I’ve seen all week. You HAVE to watch this on your phone – yet another example of how vertical vids, when done right, are just brilliant. By spoken word artist Max Stossel, this is called ‘Stop Making Murderers Famous’. See you on the other side, kids.