Webcurios 18/03/16

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH A MIXTAPE OF ASSORTED BEATS BY KWAKE BASS? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SICK OF ALGORITHMS, FRANKLY, AND SORT OF WISHES THEY WOULD JUST GO AWAY AND LEAVE US ALL ALONE FOR A BIT:

• Instagram To Introduce Newsfeed Algorithm: And LO!, it came to pass that Facebook looked at Instagram and they saw that people were using it and that it was good, but that they weren’t quite squeezing the platform hard enough in terms of making people (read: brands) pay for CUT-THROUGH, and so did Facebook decide to replicate the FB newsfeed algorithm in Instagram, thus meaning that users will no longer see posts in their feed in chronological order but instead in an order determined by some arcana and unknowable assessment of the posts’ validity to YOU and YOUR LIFE and YOUR INTERESTS. Which horribly long sentence simply means that, just like on Facebook, you’re going to start getting served a more curated selection of ‘Grams from people you follow; which means that if you’re a brand you will need to accept that, given you’re unlikely to be assessed as an organically CRUCIAL part of most users’ feeds, you’re going to have to pony up for ads if you want anyone to actually see the rubbish you’re posting. Hardly surprising, but hopefully a small nail in the coffin of the ‘INSTAGRAM STRATEGY’ bulletpoint in every single pitch ever.

• See Exact Dates On Instagram Posts: Oh, and now all posts on Instagram will be tagged with the exact date they were posted in the past, rather than the annoyingly loose ‘xx weeks ago’ information that was previously available. So, you know, reporting’s going to be marginally easier (even if noone’s going to see or care about your posts).

• Tips On How To Use Facebook Messenger For Brands: To be honest, this stuff is so obvious as to be almost insulting BUT, should you be in the invidious position of having to cobble together some sort of PLAN as to how your brand is going to integrate Facebook Messenger into your communications and customer service function then you can probably just copy and paste some of this as noone will actually read what you write anyway.

• How Newsfeed Works: Slightly odd that this is (seemingly) a new thing seeing as Newsfeed’s been operating for years, but anyway; this is a Facebook site designed to explain the process by which its Newsfeed operates, highlighting its algorithmic nature and the way in which users can tweak and optimise it to best suit their needs. Notable mainly for the fact that it’s a useful tool to explain to normals how this stuff functions (worth bookmarking for the more luddite amongst your relatives, for example), but also for the fact that it’s a rather nice piece of comms; the site’s well-designed and explains the whole system reasonably clearly and simply. WELL DONE, FACEBOOK!

• Buzzfeed Launches New Ad Unit: SWARM, it’s called, and it’s basically like a non-useless Thunderclap; the idea being that you pay Buzzfeed a metric fcuktonne of money and in return they will produce sponsored content for you and spaff it out across all their social channels in one messy-yet-coordinated burst. Which, in terms of REACH and EXPOSURE, is a pretty big deal. I would imagine that the cost of this is pretty violent, though, so deep pockets only for this one.

• Pizza Hut Does Pi Day: Monday 14 was, as you will know if you spent any time at all online, Pi Day (American date notation, innit). Amongst all the slightly tedious attempts by brands to cash in on this fleeting annual moment of popular webnerd culture, this year’s effort by Pizza Hut stood out for being SMART – they worked with actual proper mathematician John Conway to devise three maths puzzles (HARD maths puzzles) which would grant the first people to solve them 3.14 years of free pizza. Obviously they were all solved within 24h (one of those slightly humbling moments when you’re forced to confront the fact that there are an awful lot of people out there who are far, far cleverer than you are (or you are if you’re me)) and so the whole thing’s done and dusted, but I just thought it was a really nice little PR move. Well done, Pizza Hut.

• Paper Peninsula: Last up in this section (I know! SO BRIEF!) is this gorgeous website for some property development in Greenwich. If I were attempting to make a new residential/commercial build look appealing I would totally rip this style off, it’s lovely.

LET’S START THIS SECTION WITH RAF DADDY’S PLEASINGLY CAMP MIX FOR KITSUNE FROM THEIR VALENTINE’S DAY BASH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PLANNING TO STOCKPILE ‘MY MUM’S COLA’ AND PANDA POPS TO SECURE ITS FUTURE COME 2018, PT.1:

• Waffle: You know what everyone needs? Well, yes, fine, you’re right, a sense of hope and a belief that everything isn’t fundamentally just getting worse and more complicated and scary every waking second would of course be nice, but that’s not what I meant. No, I meant ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK! For reasons known only to them, Samsung have launched ‘Waffle’ (I think primarily to the Asian market), a platform which lets users share photos, doodles, notes, etc, in collaborative grids – so a bunch of your friends can make you a big collage of messages to show you how much they love you, say, or (and let’s just imagine which is more likely) a bunch of people can pool their energies to make you a giant, collaboratively-drawn dickpic. Actually, snark aside, it does look rather cute – you can download it here should you wish (Android only, natch), though you almost certainly don’t need a strategy for it just yet.

• Quickrant: Another one of these occasional ‘Look! The ID of the world!’ Websites which crop up every now and again, Quickrant is an anonymous platform allowing people to…er…have a quick rant about something. Which obviously means it’s about 70% horrid, but you will find the odd poignant gem amongst the racist idiocy. I’m oddly drawn to these things – there’s just something so poignant about the idea of people flailing into the ether like this, fully knowing that all their getting is (at best) a mild sense of cathasis.

• Phonvert: It sounds, I accept, like a website devoted to fans of telephonic erotica, but I promise it’s entirely safe. It’s actually a really sensible idea – to repurpose old and unused smartphones as IoT sensors, letting anyone (in theory) turn their boring old dumb fridge into a SMART FRIDGE (yes, OK, dreadful example), and it’s the sort of thing that if you’re interested in playing around with the idea of IoT stuff might be really useful. I can’t stop laughing at the website, though, which encourages users to “Just stick your smartphone to household objects to smartify them”, which just makes me think of a slightly annoyed cat with an iPhone strapped to its back.

• May 1 Reboot: Apparently May 1 is the day when all webdesigners and illustrators and people of that ilk are meant to collectively relaunch their websites. So, you know, no pressure then.

• Start.me: Another of those ‘roll your own homepage’ websites, which works a little bit like Netvibes (remember when that used to be the future?) in that you can pull together a variety of ‘widgets’ pulling feeds from your favourite and most useful website, or put all your favourite links in one place. You may find this HUGELY useful or, like me, you might just find it a bit fiddly, but its persistent across devices and might be helpful if you have a fairly rigid digital routine.

• Have You Seen Eric?: Darryl Jones is a photographer who, for reasons only he can adequately explain, has chosen to devote what looks like an awful lot of time to photographing a small toy stormtrooper he has chosen to call ‘Eric’ in a variety of different settings. Much as I am indifferent to all things Star Wars, these are really rather cute – of course, there’s an accompanying Instagram too because it’s 2016 – i don’t doubt there will be a fcuking coffeetable book by the time the year’s out, too (wow, that got me riled quickly; sorry Darryl).

• TV Transcripts: A pretty extensive collection of scripts from film and TV shows – almost all US, and not all the big shows are on there, but if you think that you have what it takes to pen a few episodes of Eastenders then you could do worse than looking at these for tips and inspiration and STUFF. Aside from anything else, they seem to have every single script from the early series of The Simpsons, so that’s a pleasant way to waste a few hours should you need one.

• Riff.tv: This is INTERESTING. Riff is basically a cross between Twitch and Gogglebox (yes, I know, but bear with me); the site lets users pick a show to watch and then pairs the video with reaction videos shot by ‘famous’ (not to me, but) YouTubers, so you can watch the programme in question in ‘realtime’ along with the commenter. It sounds headache-inducingly concentration-heavy to me (I can barely focus on one show at a time, let alone two), but apparently watching reaction videos of people responding to TV is a thing online. The service cleverly pays the dues to the networks so the shows are all streamed legally; I can imagine this being the sort of thing that Sky might integrate into their digital offering at some point soon (but I obviously know nothing about the TV industry, so).

• Excellens: A whole font, made in Excel! Included solely because it will delight the two accountants who I know read this (and because it looks surprisingly cool and weirdly Mexican in style).

• Pigeon Air: I had to check the date with this one, as it seemed to wonderfully preposterous to be anything other than an April Fool, but it is TOTALLY REAL so hats off to the LBi folks for the idea and execution. Pigeons! With little backpacks! Monitoring London’s air quality levels as they fly! SO CUTE! Also a really nice way of promoting a wider project to get Londoners involved in monitoring the city’s air pollution levels themselves, so we can find out exactly how many years of our lives are being chipped off the total every day as we breathe in the unique miasma of the City.

• Choo Choo Bot: One of those occasional whimsical Twitter feeds which brings nothing but pleasure, Choo Choo Bot does nothing other than Tweet out sporadic, procedurally-generated ASCII pictures of trains travelling through imaginary landscapes. Utterly pointless, but I think that there’s probably something in this aesthetic and its automation for a certain brand – competitions, Twitter treasure hunts, that sort of thing. Maybe. Am I talking tripe? I’m rather tired.

• Splash!: Older male readers will be disappointed to discover that this is in fact nothing to do with Daryl Hannah, but is instead an app which my lazy notes describe as ‘360 degree Snapchat’. It’s not, obviously – what it is is a system which lets you record 360degree videos using your phone (literally hit record, spin around, and it stitches together a short clip which is viewable on mobile, desktop and via Cardboard, etc), which frankly probably results in less cool results than you might hope but which is also almost certainly the sort of thing which Snapchat is working on integrating RIGHT NOW and so you should probably be aware of it as a coming thing.

• Teen Idols: Tavi Gevinson’s excellent Rookie Magazine collects a bunch of pages from scrapbooks made by teens in the early 00s – bookmark these, creatives, because in a couple of weeks’ time when we’re doing noughties revivalism this is basically everything you’re going to be doing, visually. LOOK AT THE LITTLE OLSENS!

• Belybel: These should be sort of kitsch and horrible, and yet these chairs made out of the repurposed chassis of old scooters (Vespa/Lambretta-style) are pretty great. Also, presages the arrival of the most preposterous mode of transport yet devised – the VESPA SEGWAY! Seriously, this is apparently going to be a thing. What would the Ace Face think?

• Podcat: Basically this is IMDB for podcasts – you can search by guest or theme, and it pulls you a list of podcasts featuring (or about) said guest or theme. Useful if you’re researching or if you are simply an absolute completist about…er…the sort of person who features on a lot of podcasts.

• Brigade: There should be a word for the feeling you get when you suddenly realise that a friend who you’ve always quite liked and got on with holds at least one opinion so earth-shatteringly wrong-headed that you just want to hold them by the shoulders and shake them whilst shouting “BUT YOU SEEMED SO NORMAL!!!”; the sort of opinion that gets revealed during election season, for example, or when they’re talking about ‘ethics in games journalism’. Brigade is an app which will make it a lot easier to weed these people out EARLY – it will also, if I’ve understood it correctly, start more feuds and arguments than almost any other app I’ve seen. Basically, you give the app a statement – say, “all men are rapists”, or “a woman’s place is in the kitchen”, something nice and uncontroversial – and it then asks all your contacts to say whether they agree or disagree, thus simply dividing your friendship group into a binary split between the right and the wrong. Effectively takes the very worst bit of Facebook and distils it into something which could probably be the first step in a minor genocide. GREAT!

• vTime: Do you remember those halcyon mid-2000s days in which companies everywhere rushed to set up offices and virtual spaces in Second Life, believing that it was going to revolutionise remote working and that everyone would start meeting in the VIRTUAL WORLD and interacting via their blocky, lagging avatars rather than in person? God, they were GREAT. Anyway, this is basically a massive flashback to those simpler, more innocent times – vTime is a service which basically provides meeting facilities in a variety of virtual locations in which upto four people’s avatars can sit and chat and interact whilst the real people wear a smartphone strapped to their face like idiots. I am calling this – this is not going to catch on in this incarnation.

• Play Basketball in Facebook Messenger: Because you probably need a break about now. Go on, try it out, I’ll wait for you here.

• Logo Maker: Small business? Need a logo? You could do worse than try this website, which provides a bunch of tools to let you cobble together something a few orders of magnitude better than something you’d knock up in MS Paint.

• Troll Busters: A service for women (although to be honest the gender-specificity here’s sort of missing the point) which offers support and encouragement to people being harassed on Twitter (women? Being harassed on the internet? NEVER) by sending them a load of positive messages and words of support to dilute the horror. A nice idea, this, particularly the fact that you can nominate anyone to receive the support; a nice thing to do for anyone you know who’s getting the sh1tty end of the internet on any particular day.

• The Festival Year: Shonky-but-useful website which collects information about ALL (well, maybe not ALL, but certainly a lot) of UK festivals happening this year, along with links to buy tickets. Rather helpful if you’re attempting to decide which of the seemingly infinite number of genericmediawankerfests you’re going to head to in 2016.

• Parisian Floors: You don’t know it right now, but this Instagram account featuring nothing but photos of pleasingly tiled Parisian floors may well be the most soothing thing you will see all day.

• Enough Walls: Small project, begun in Puerto Rico, to protest against ignorant discourse around immigration; it collects photos of walls, basically, to highlight the fact that, you know, building more of them to keep people out is perhaps not necessarily progressive policy (naming no names here).

• My Burrito Finder: Want a burrito, no matter where you are in the world? This seemingly MAGICAL service maps all nearby burrito outlets based on your location, pulling the results from Yelp. This sort of needs to be extended to encompass all categories of fast food, surely; I reckon you could do REALLY well out of combining this, pizza and fried chicken, so, er, get on it.

• Refugees Deeply: A really rather excellent resource, Refugees Deeply collects news and information on the refugee crisis – to quote their launch blog, “Refugees Deeply will systemically present the topic through the drivers, actors and events shaping this new era of migration, through a mix of original reporting, analysis and views from journalists, experts and practitioners. We will also strive to provide a platform for those experiencing displacement to tell their own stories in their own words.” Laudable.

• Homes of the Jungle: Less laudable was Airbnb’s slighly po-faced takedown on this project, which aimed to raise funds for refumigrants being held in camps by making fake listings on the site (although the properties listed in the Calais ‘Jungle’ were all too real) which, when booked, would donate the funds directly to relevant charities. A really nice, simple execution which for reasons known only to Airbnb they chose not to engage with. Seemed like quite an easy PR win for them, personally, but what do I know? As ever, rhetorical.

• Iodine: Useful resource which gathers information on prescription drugs – positives, negatives, side-effects, usage indications and patient feedback – in one place. Helpful if you’ve been prescribed something and want to start looking into exactly what it is and what it might do to you (DISCLAIMER: other sources of information are available, Web Curios takes no responsibility for all of the stuff on here being totally wrong. Which, on reflection, should probably accompany every single link we ever post; the unofficial Curios motto really ought to be Caveat Emptor. Perhaps I’ll have a crest designed).

• Train Your Own Alpha Go: Now that we’ve taken the first steps on the long journey towards acceptance of our own inevitable species-level obsolescence (on which this is an interesting discussion between AI people about what it all MEANS), why not try building your very own world-beating Go-playing AI? Techy, insofar as it requires you to install Darknet and then do some command-line stuff, and possibly the sort of thing that if we all did it would lead to the creation of some sort of boardgame-fetishising AI superarmy, but why not give it a try anyway – what’s the worst that could happen?!

• Celebs on Sandwiches: The only Instagram account featuring finely-wrought drawings of famouses sitting on a variety of different sandwiches. George Takei standing triumphantly atop a ham and cheese croissant? Yep. Drake on a Canadian bacon and cheese sarnie? Got you covered. Inexplicable.

• Criswell Predicts: The art of prediction, it’s fair to say, is one with a pretty much universally unsuccessful heritage. It’s not like Nostradamus actually got anything right, is it? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of end-predictors scattered throughout history, from Heaven’s Gate to all those unpleasant idiots who believe the Rapture is JUST AROUND THE CORNER. One of the daddies of the whole ‘rubbish at seeing the future’ scene was one Jeron Charles Criswell, who admittedly did predict that ‘something’ would happen to JFK in November 1963 which would mean he wouldn’t run for reelection, but who also predicted some truly BRILLIANTLY mad and wrong stuff, all of which is collected here for your enjoyment. The ‘gay cities’ thing made me laugh a LOT.

• Trumpsults: It’s sadly impossible to get through a Curios without mentioning the bloody man (well, I could, but the web loves him and Curios is the web, so). This is a soundboard of the man’s insults, should you require one.

• MelodyJams: So this doesn’t actually exist yet, but it looks SO COOL. MelodyJams is an app/toy/thing which is effectively a simple synthesiser tool – you pick the instruments you want from a selection and it uses some magical tricks to sync them all into a nice-sounding composition, based on the sounds you select, whether they’re background or foreground, etc. The whole thing can be changed on the fly, which is obviously pretty clever, but the LOVELY thing is the graphical style and animations which accompany it. Each instrument is its own character, and the illustrations are full of personality in a sort of Moshi Monsters (remember them?) way. If you have kids I’d keep an eye on this.

• Girl Grey: Instagram’s full of impressive makeup artists, but this person is AMAZING. The lip work if nothing else is quite startlingly good – LOTS of inspiration here, should you require some.

• Letter Kit: A Pinterest collection full of letterforms, arranged alphabetically. Font enthusiasts, typographers and designers may find this useful.

HOW ABOUT A RATHER EXCELLENT MIX OF LEFTFIELD UK STUFF FROM SXSW BY CYBER69?

THE SECTION WHICH IS PLANNING TO STOCKPILE ‘MY MUM’S COLA’ AND PANDA POPS TO SECURE ITS FUTURE COME 2018, PT.2:

• The Moby Dick Big Read: This is a few years old, I think, so apologies, but I only stumbled across it this week. It’s every single chapter of Moby Dick, available to listen to for free, each narrated by an actor. There are some STELLAR names on there, from Swinton to Cumberbatch to the ubiquitous Fry, and the whole project strikes me as something rather nice to send yourself to bed to (depending on your tolerance for Melville and whales).

• In Space We Trust: Gorgeous little art project walking you through the history of space exploration; navigate by moving the character along the timeline, pausing beneath key events to get more information in the shape of audio clips and explanatory texts. The design of this is beautiful, I think.

• Rock N Poll: ANOTHER really very nice piece of webwork, this, this time designed to explain why political polling is often so inaccurate. The interface is simple and the graphics used to explain the concepts are beautifully clear – this is a sort of object lesson in how to deliver tedious information in simple and engaging fashion.

• The 2016 Name of the Year Selection: It’s that time of year again, when Deadspin run their ‘what is the best, most ridiculous actual person’s name in all of America this year?’ selection. You will not be disappointed by these, I promise you – bear in mind these are ALL REAL PEOPLE. Imagine if you were Dr. Shark Bird. Just IMAGINE. Excellent fodder if you have a lot of pregnant friends and want to be a touch more imaginative with your naming suggestions.

• Five Thirty Eight Projects: Collecting all of the interactives from Nate Silver’s datageek mecca, these are all examples of really good digital design in their own way, and pretty much essential viewing for those of you involved in dataviz-type things.

• Sonnet Signatures: Shakespeare’s sonnets, visualised based on their letters – this produces a series of unique designs, one for each, which look weirdly beautiful despite being abstract scrawls. Depending on who you are and who you know, this could be a gorgeous present for someone.

• Awkward Metal Bands: All metal is sort of camp and ridiculous (I’m sorry, but really), but this selection of photographs of metal bands is probably the acme of that. Contains a LOT of Manowar, which is reason enough for me to include it.

• Prison UK: SO much interesting stuff in here, this is the blog of a former inmate of a UK jail, writing about life behind bars in all its aspects. Seriously, this is GREAT if you’re in any way interested in the country’s criminal justice system – even if you’re not, there’s just about enough REAL LIFE BANGED UP TROOFS in there to keep you satisfied. Potential to lose your whole afternoon in this one.

• Songwig: So SXSW is over for another year, and this time there appears to have been no breakout success – no Meerkat or Foursquare or Twitter for us all to fawn over and get excited about. What there was, though, was this, which almost certainly justified the £20,000 it probably cost to send your head of digital and creative director to get spannered in Austin for a week.

• Falter: One of the more incredible newspaper websites I’ve ever seen, this is simultaneously great and hyperbolic and ridiculous and I LOVE it. Austrian paper Falter has produced this EXCELLENT and rather mental site taking you through its history in a weird, semi-animated son-et-lumiere extravaganza; you can’t really imagine the Telegraph doing this, can you?

• Famous Deaths: Startlingly macabre discovery of the week, this is a Dutch (obviously) project which seeks to recreate the…er…ambience around famous deaths by biuilding olfactory dioramas to represent them (I’ve just made up the term ‘olfactry diorama’ – it makes me sound like a dick, doesn’t it? Sorry). Cut grass and gunpowder? That’ll be Kennedy taking one! Really odd.

• Mini Materials: I have literally no idea whatsoever what the market is for these miniature breezeblocks and palettes, but there are LOADS of people cooing over them. If you’re one of those people who has a miniature sandpit and rake on their desk as a stress reliever, then you might perhaps be attracted by the prospect of being able to build a tiny, tiny wall out of tiny, tiny bricks and mortar. You oddity.

• Planet Licker: ICE CREAM BRANDS – STEAL THIS NOW. Planet Licker is a brilliantly silly project which basically lets people control a simple videogame through the act of licking an icelolly. Seriously, if this isn’t ripped off by Walls or someone over the Summer I will be VERY disappointed in all of you.

• DumbPhone Case: KitKat – STEAL THIS NOW. Dumbphone case is a case for your smartphone which basically handicaps it, preventing you from using it as anything other than a phone. Which, if I wanted a ‘have a break’-type gimmick I would be all over like the sky.

• The David Niven Jazz Motherlode: Literally thousands of hours of old jazz tapes digitised and online. If you’re into oldschool jazz – none of this modern crap, oh no – then this will be your heaven.

• Do: Potentially SUPERUSEFUL product from IFTTT, which basially lets you set up a whole load of rules for your photos – take a pic and have it automatically upload to a particular Facebook album, say, or post to Instagram, or to a Slack channel. Worth investigating as there’s a lot of potential for clever executions here.

• Tomato Sushi: A preposterous idea which will nonetheless appeal to those of you who a) care about the wellbeing of the oceans; and b) buy into all that ‘wellness’ schtick, this is a proprietary method from making ‘sushi’ from tomatoes. EXCEPT IT’S NOT SUSHI, IS IT? IT’S A TOMATO ON SOME RICE. ‘VEGAN TUNA’???? THERE’S NO SUCH SODDING THING AS VEGAN TUNA, IT’S A NECESSARY OXYMORON. Jesus.

• Hot Migrants: Eliciting the ire of people all over the web this week is this Instagram account, highlighting some of the FIT men who are risking their all to get into Europe. In an uncharacteristic burst of charitability, I’m going to go out on a limb here and hope that this is in fact just a clever front for something else and is designed to expose the shallow nature of Western engagement with the refumigrant crisis. Except, obviously, it might just be a bit vile. Not sure really, it’s all quite confusing.

• GoSexy: Depressing app of the week! Do you feel that you’re not spending enough time obsessing about how you look in photos on the internet? Would you like to add an extra layer of artifice to the already-artfully composed lifestyle shots you spaff all over the networks? Would you like to join in in perpetuating the sort of unrealistic body and beauty standards that are the blight of young women’s lives across the Western world? GREAT! You’ll love GoSexy, then, which lets you photoshop the fcuk out of your selfies, whilst exhorting you to look ‘skinny, slim and fit’. Which is nice. They also offer a service where, for $1 a time, they’ll get a pro to ‘shop your selfie for you. I had a brief exchange with the appmakers on Twitter earlier this week, which went about as you’d expect – am I being a liberal tosser about this? Feel free to let me know.

• Unfiltered News: Best site I’ve seen all week, this, and with SUCH a simple premise. Unfiltered News shows you what’s trending in the news around the world – in particular, all the stuff that isn’t being reported in a particular country. It works by comparing news which is trending globally with those topics currently in the top 100 for any given country and pulling out the discrepancies – a fascinating insight into the geographical filter bubbles we all inhabit, and a very well-made site to boot.

• Don’t Be A Puppet: Slightly incredible website from the CIA, purporting to educate kids as to how to spot those malfeasants attempting lead them into a life of jihad online. “Which of the following is likely to be a post from a potential terrorist recruiter?: A) “Good game! Go Panthers!”; B) “Wow, what a touchdown!”; C) “Come and join us in our bloody struggle!”. No, that is not even a slight exaggeration – it’s breathtaking.

• The Weirdest Subreddits Out There: I get literally no data about who clicks on which links here, so I have no clue which, if any of you, prefer the slightly more ‘Hmm, this is a touch questionable’ NSFW-type links. Anyway, for those of you who do, this is the MOTHERLODE – a Reddit thread collecting all the oddest subreddits out there. From the generally incomprehensible memes, all the way through to the seriously unpleasant – if it says ‘pedo’ in the title, I’d suggest you probably really don’t want to click on it is all I’m saying  – this has some startlingly weird stuff on there. As you’d expect, because rule 34, much of the weird stuff is sex-based. I had literally NO IDEA that there was a small but dedicated community of men posting slow-motion clips of themselves ejaculating over small plastic anime figurines, for example. I’m not sure that my life is improved by this knowledge, and yet here we are. BONUS WEIRD SUBREDDIT OF FILTH: Bongo, in audio form, in the shape of Audio Gone Wild. If nothing else it’s worth clicking to check out the VERY VERY ODD titles of some of these clips.

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Pop Punk Problems: I imagine if you’re about 14 and into pop punk then this might mean something to you. Me? Not so much.

• Bandicoot Mania: A lovely obsessional Tumblr dedicated to retro game legend Crash Bandicoot.

• Me & My ZX Spectrum: People and their Spectrums (spectra?), photographed. Touchingly, they take submissions should you have anything you wish to share with them.

• Fuzzberta: Potentially supplanting Web Curios favourite Sugar Bush Squirrel as ‘the best rodent reluctantly dressed up and photographed on the web’, this is…er…Fuzzberta, a guinea pig whose owner really, really likes playing dress-up with the poor creature. The expression in the eyes screams “HELP ME”.

• Noirlac: Gorgeous 16-bit style artworks (or small screenshots from old games, it’s quite hard to tell – either way the aesthetic is lovely).

• Things On Bike Lanes: German, but doubtless cyclists the world over will recognise the blood-boiling rage induced by people parking in cycle lanes. Cyclists, you really are an angry bunch.

• Cecile Dormeau: Beautiful little cartoon illustrations of a slightly feminist bent.

• Only Clyde: A tumblr dedicated to celebrating a tortoise called Clyde, who as far as I can tell is Holmes’ pet in the US Sherlockalike ‘Elementary’. Proof that there is no detail so small that a fandom won’t fetishise it somehow.

• We Donald Ralph Stuff: Donald Trump, captioned with Ralph Wiggum. This stuff is going to stop being funny pretty soon, isn’t it?

• A Helpful Diagram: A series of Venn diagrams which the designers amongst you will, I think, appreciate.

• Emotion Inside: All the photos of the sadly departed Leonard Nimoy anyone could possibly want, and then a few more besides.

• Art on Tumblr: Curated by Tumblr, this is EXCELLENT for finding new and interesting art and artists. Really worth a browse, this, both to find talent and for your own inspiration.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Poem of SXSW Panels: In what is apparently an annual tradition, a poem created solely from the titles of panels at this year’s SXSW. Almost criminally good.

• Alfred E Neuman In History: Whilst not having anywhere near the resonance that it does in its parent country. MAD Magazine is sort of internationall famous, not least because of the lovable bumpkin who’s been its mascot since its very earliest days. This is a really interesting look at how that mascot came to be, and (more broadly) about memes and their propagation back before the internet. You don’t need to know or care about MAD to enjoy this, honest .

• LA’s Coolest Girls On Facebook: Fascinating piece about the rise of the secret group as a ‘thing’ on Facebook – virtual members’ clubs, by invitation only, which serve as sounding boards and support groups and gossip cliques and…well…all sorts of things. As someone said on this topic this week, it’s not that the cool kids have left Facebook – it’s just that they’re doing stuff on there without you and you’re not invited. No, don’t worry, I’m not either.

• The YouTube Music Star: A really interesting profile of a series of modern YouTube musicians – those whose audience exists only on the platform and who’ve yet to explode into the real world. Basically it’s not really changed all that much since Tay Zonday.

• The New Man of 4Chan: I don’t particularly care for the way this is written – it gets bogged down in its pseudo-academic approach a bit too much for my tastes, although I’m hardly one to be complaining about prose style getting in the way of a good story – but the subject is interesting. On the rise of the self-described beta male as a ‘thing’ in both online and offline worlds, and how that intersects with the particularly hateful brand of misogyny so prevalent on- and offline these days. Gets bonus points for pointing out that Milo is a tosser.

• No Cellphone: A pleasingly un-smug account of the author’s life without a mobile (he does this all the time, not as a one-time gimmick). Made me actually look at and reevaluate what I use the bloody thing for and why I have it, although obviously it’s still sat by me as I type this, blinking like a needy cyclops.

• Witnessing Live Brain Surgery: I’ve had quite a neuroscience-y week, what with attending some lectures about it and finally finishing watching the excellent David Eagleman series on brain; this is, despite my oft-stated aversion to Knausgaard’s prose style (SO flat! SO affectless!), a wonderful account of his watching celebrate brain surgeon Henry Marsh at work. Not a great read if descriptions of, you know, brains are liable to freak you out, but otherwise this comes highly recommended.

• An Oral History of the 1996 Chicago Bulls: Another one for those ‘greatest team of all time?’ arguments, this interviews many of the major stars in the side talking about how they remember it all playing out.

• American Psycho Today: I’ve read American Psycho an unhealthy number of times – in fact, so in its thrall was I as a teenager that my college English teacher actually took my then girlfriend to one side to make sure I wasn’t trying to, you know, skin her or anything (NB –  to those of you reading this who’ve never met me, let me assure you that I am in fact an entirely pleasant and generally placid man, honest, and that I have never entertained any murderous fantasies about anyo…oh, no, that’s probably not strictly true. Still, I’m NORMAL, honest). This is Bret Easton Ellis responding to the oft–asked question “What would Patrick Bateman be doing NOW?” Interesting both for fans of the novel (and the film), and on the general question of how characters exist independently of those who create them.

• Life And Death In The App Store: Next time you hear anyone suggest that you build an app, make them read this and then go away and have a long, hard think.

• Google Is Not What It Seems: Or, at least, so says IN NO WAY CONTROVERSIAL Julian Assange. Leaving aside your opinion of the man, thisis a VERY interesting look at Eric Schmidt’s long-standing relationships within the US State Department and what that says about Google’s relationship to the US, privacy and us.

• The Man Who Sold The Eiffel Tower, Twice: I love this piece – a real ripping yarn in the grand tradition, it tells the tale of ‘Count’ Victor Lustvig – conman, fraudster and bon vivant, whose exploits were legend and whose raffish demeanor and charm are beautifully illustrated here. If you’re not drawn in by stuff like the fact that he had “a sidekick named “Dapper” Dan Collins, described by the New York Times as a former ‘circus lion tamer and death-defying bicycle rider’” then there’s little hope for you.  

• How Michelle Obama Does Social Media: Probably one for the advermarketingpr people, but interesting nonetheless – on how the team around her manages to make the First Lady sort of almost cool.

• Blood Ties: An epic piece of writing, looking at the life of Juan Ponce de Leon, the man who discovered Florida and was responsible for some pretty dreadful crimes against the indigenous populations, from the point of view of one of his descendants – fascinating both for the history and for the way it addresses how we relate to our ancestral pasts. Good stuff all round.

• Vinbook: This is just about the community on Vin Diesel’s Facebook Page, but I defy you not to feel all happy and warm once you’re done reading it.

• The Cry of Machines: Best piece of writing of the week, this is the story of a migrant to the US, his work in a factory with other nationals, and the past and loss and cultural identity and and and and. Gorgeous writing, please read it.

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, a pleasingly ramshackle song and video which really, really reminds me of girl-fronted bands I loved to distraction in the mid-90s. This is by Skating Polly, and it’s called ‘Pretective Boy’ (sic):

2) Next up, if you like John Hopkins then you will LOVE this. The track’s called ‘Disco’, and it’s by Ralph Hildenbeutel – the video, consisting of an animation made of a load of hand-painted sketches in differing styles, is genuinely gorgeous:

3) Second video of the year to be featured here from the fabulously-named Your Gay Thoughts. This track’s called ‘To Disappear’ and features a confused ape:

4) I know, I know, I have featured drone racing before, but watch this and tell me that F1’s days are numbered. THIS LOOKS SO FUN!:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is industry veteran F Virtue with ‘Saturday Night Dead’, and it’s one of the best tracks I’ve heard all year (your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for his vocal, but I’ve acquired the taste):

6) Bit of obscure (to me at least) indie now, in the shape of the dreadfully-named Sundara Karma. Special props to the lead singer for his hair – this is called ‘A Young Understanding’:  

7) Proving that it’s not only the lunatic conspiracy theorists who have a monopoly on eye-bleedingly odd and slightly unsettling photoshop work (let’s take a moment to say another big Web Curios HELLO to David Dees!), this is a pretty rubbish track all about how HATEFUL the tories and the Murdoch press and stuff all are. The video, though – OH ME OH MY. This is called ‘All For What’ by Micky Dacks:

8) Last up this week, truly brilliant and unexpectedly vocal jazz by Takeshi Nakatsuka with a BRILLIANT animated video. If you saw and enjoyed ‘Whiplash’ you will really like this, I think. BYE HAPPY EASTER BYE HAVE FUN BYE!: