Webcurios 19/08/16

I KNOW MASHUPS ARE IN NO WAY COOL, BUT THIS SELECTION OF OLDSCHOOL PUNK VS HIPHOP TRACKS ARE JUST INSANELY GOOD, HONEST!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND ITSELF GETTING GENUINELY SLIGHTLY EXCITED ABOUT AN INSTAGRAM UPDATE THIS WEEK, WHICH SUGGESTS IT REALLY DOES NEED TO TAKE A LONG HARD LOOK AT ITSELF:

• Instagram Business Pages Are Now HERE In The UK: You will, of course, recall exactly what this means – the ability to boost existing Instagram posts through ads rather than having to create new ad units, halfway decent analytics, that sort of thing. Not got access to this yet? It’s because Facebook hates you.

• Instagram Introducing Event Channels: Because EVERYTHING HAS TO BE VIDEO NOW (see Curios passim), Instagram is rolling out a new way of categorising video on the platform – users will soon see suggested channels under the ‘Explore’ tab, collecting video from particular events in one place. Imagine a Glastonbury tab, collecting all the on-the-ground and behind-the-scenes footage, for example, or one for Wimbledon – this is going to be BRANDED CONTENT CENTRAL in next to no time, so talk to your Facebook rep TODAY about the exciting opportunities to spend your clients’ cash LEVERAGING THEIR SPONSORSHIP to a highly-engaged, content-hungry audience! Dear God.

• Facebook Messenger Lets Bots Do Promotions And Stuff: This is part of a wider update to Facebook Messenger’s policies around what bots can and can’t do on the platform – see a full breakdown of the policies here (which really is worth a read if you’re interested in making these things). Now, for example, you can build bots which will send people links to promotional vouchers in a chat, for example, enabling you do do all SORTS of fun things, not least do some pretty accurate conversion-tracking from social through to purchase. Users can now also subscribe to bots, giving said bot the right to ping them messages as and when – which, to my mind, is a gentle kick in the direction of email marketing. Oh, in additional bot news, they have also made code to train your bot to learn language better available on Github – for the techies, here, but if you’re on the build/make side of this then this is probably rather useful.

• Snapchat Now Doing 360-degree Video Ads: Christ alone knows how much these cost, but welcome to a world in which you no longer just have to worry about shooting in vertical, but also about making it a 360-degree interactive experience. FUN TIMES, CONTENT MONKEYS!

• Snapchat Expands Opportunities For Advertisers: As in, they’ve opened up the ‘ads between snaps’ format to more brands. Exciting, eh? MAYBE YOUR BRAND COULD BE ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES.

• App For Snapchat Geofilters: This is both brilliantly opportunistic and sort of angry-making; I mean, Snapchat is a horribly convoluted beast to use, fine, but the setting up of Geofilters is an admirably simple process. Nonetheless, here comes an app which guides you through the whole process of making one, and which will, if you pay an additional premium, take you through the buying and approval process too. Potentially useful for small businesses, etc, who maybe don’t have the time or the skill to spend hours perfecting the millennial-friendly image which will make their filter FLY.

• Pinterest Introduces Promoted Video: Every time there’s a new Pinterest update I write some rubbish about how ‘Pinterest is such an underrated tool in the marketing mix, you know’ (except probably with more overwrought shouting in capital letters, and a greater sense of predictable, jaded ennui), so imagine that that’s exactly what I’m saying now. Video ads on the platform are REALLY interesting if you do food, design, DIY, etc – these are available in the UK RIGHT NOW, at least for those with an account manager on the platform. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

• Twitter Introduces Promoted Stickers: When I wrote about this on launch, WAAAAAY back when we were still reeling from Brexit and everything was dreadful – what a difference a(n admittedly sizeable) handful of shiny metal coins makes! – I said “you’re an idiot if you don’t think Twitter is RIGHT NOW talking to brands and events about a pricing model for creating bespoke stickers for them to use around calendar events and the like.” AND LO IT CAME TO PASS! I am intrigued to see what sort of moderation options are here, as the whole ‘stickers work like visual hashtags’ thing would, depending on the sort of troll you are, motivate a LOT of people to jump on the branded sticker bandwagon with, almost certainly, some pretty DARK stuff. Let’s see shall we?

• Twitter Does A Small Thing To Limit Abuse: There’s a longread at the end this week about Twitter’s persistent abuse problems which is well worth a read; the platform just announced that it was introducing the opportunity for users to mute mentions of themselves by people who don’t follow them; meaning that you won’t have to see @mentions by random folk who decide to dogpile you. Which is fine, as far as it goes, though it’s sort of a bandage on an axewound if you in any way care about mho.

• YikYak Does A Pivot: I joined YikYak about 18 months ago as I thought it might be interesting to see what people nearby were doing; what I discovered was that, according to YikYak, they were mostly maintaining a pretty shocking attendance record at college and complaining about morning bus halitosis. Compelling stuff. Anyway, the famously anonymous app for local chatting is no longer going to be anonymous, basically – christ alone knows whether it will pull it back from the brink, but I still think there’s interesting stuff you can do with this if you want to talk to THE KIDS, particularly on a hyperlocal level.

• The Pizza Hut DJ Box: We’ve had the pizza box as projector to watch films on; now the pizza box as playable DJ setup. Classic piece of ad work which will appear in approximately 12 actual pizza boxes in total, but which will nonetheless get entered into 100000001 awards as an example of innovative ways of engaging customers because that’s how this stuff works; I mean, it’s really clever kit, no doubt, but a) how the fcuck is this going to work when it’s covered with a 3mm slick of Pizza Hut grease; and b) I have no idea how much they were paying DJ Vectra to front this video, but even he couldn’t seem to muster any enthusiasm at all for the kit (seriously, watch the video). Still, well done on the idea.

THE SOUNDTRACK TO NO MAN’S SKY IS GLORIOUS, YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO IT!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS PERHAPS HANDING OVER CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE RUN THE CYCLING, PT.1:

• Google’s Olympics:  So obviously I am WELL late to this, for which apologies, but in my defence it’s obviously aimed at locals in Brazil and it’s all in Portuguese, and I’m working a 5-day week for the first time in about 5 years (yes, yes, I know, NO VIOLINS), and frankly I’m knackered. Sorry. Anyway, this is a lovely piece of webwork by Google, pulling together all sorts of information about what is happening TODAY in the ‘Lympics, all with a lovely UI and some nice little animations, and generally all the sort of high-quality design you’d expect from Google.

• Chatbottle: Horrible name, but a useful site if you’re interested in bot building and checking out what other people are doing (and we must all be interested in bots now; Zuckerberg has decreed and his word is LAW). This ranks all the bots it can find, based on a variety of metrics (ranking on ProductHunt, number of features, retention of users, that sort of thing) and is a pretty good way of checking out what’s new and what’s good in botland. What this comprehensively proves at the moment is that most bots are basically shovelwear at the moment – there are a lot of real opportunities for people to make something (anything) that isn’t total rubbish. Maybe one of those people is YOU! It probably isn’t, though.

• Instagram Scheduler and Themer: Probably of most interest to advermarketingpr drones, but there are enough of you now presenting carefully aesthetically curated lies about the quality of your existence on Instagram to make me think that there’s a market for this outside of the hideous professional hell which I inhabit. Unum does a lot of things other apps do – particularly the scheduling of Instagram posts – but the gimmick here is that you can preview how your ‘grams will look on Instagram, letting you arrange and curate them to create a seamless and artificially-lovely vibe. Actually pretty useful if you have some sort of overall DESIGN GOALS thing going on, or if you’re attempting some sort of Pantone-related artistic endeavour (or, you know, if you want to ensure your whole feed accurately reflects your carefully-curated personal palette. You monster).

• Wovns: First of the inevitable Kickstarters this week – Wovn is raising funds to create a bespoke textile sales platform, whereby you’d be able to design…er…some fabric or something in Photoshop or Illustrator, and they will weave it for you and send it to you. Obviously the details are a touch sketchy (and, er, I obviously haven;t read everything on the page, because, well, time is short and frankly I don’t quite care enough about fabric design), but if you’re someone who wants to make their own clothes, say, or who dreams of giving up your tedious wageslave existence in favour of a career making expensive teatowels to flog at farmer’s markets, then this could be right up your street.

• The Best Video Timelapse I Have Seen In An AGE: HOW CLEVER IS THIS? Obviously the quality’s a touch shonky, and it’s not a polished and professional HD cut, but the way the creator has combined timelapse and gifs is all sorts of astounding. Expect to see this being replicated in shinier fashion by some brand or another anytime soon (you can see how you could do an amazing shot of a football stadium filling up over time, for example, with this sort of technique).

• Yes Child Free: Are YOU somehow not interested in having a complete and fulfilled life? Do YOU look forward to growing old with no prospect of support in your old age? Do YOU have some sort of deep-seated personality issue that means that you’re incapable of or unwilling to undertake the base-level activity required of you as a functioning member of the human race? Are YOU some sort of a monster? In short, do you not want kids (because it does sort of feel like that’s what people think sometimes)? Well WELCOME TO YES CHILD FREE, a dating app designed for misanthropes like YOU who have no desire to inflict their progeny on an uncaring, ambivalent universe. No idea how good this is, but it might eliminate at least one of the awkward conversations which torpedoes relationships in your 30s.

• VoteGif: A nice little project presenting a series of gifs designed to encourage people to vote in the US – one animation per State. Simple, cute, clever – rip-offable.

• Dropbox Paper: Do you remember Google Wave? No, of course you don’t; it was weird and impenetrable and noone used it, and it was quietly dropped into the Google oubliette. Apparently, though, it was actually sort of good – a decent co-working app which allowed for seamless sharing of information in persistent fashion between project teams collaborating on a job. Combine that with Slack and you get a vague idea of what Dropbox Paper feels like – there are a lot of rather cool features in here, including in-project collaborative editing, chat, file and linksharing, and a coding interface – if you’re looking for something to use as a collaborative platform this is probably worth a look. Yes, that was dull, I know, sorry, but it’s not all bongo and cynicism round here. I mean, mostly it is, but.

• Photopea: Pretty powerful-looking in-browser photoshop-type tool; it’s not like there aren’t a lot of these out there, but this one looks pretty good I think.

• My Text In Your Handwriting: There are SO MANY brilliantly creepy (and, er, hugely illegal) applications for this. This script by Tom Haines is (to quote) “a method that allows us to replicate the handwriting of anyone for whom we have a sample. Any scan will do – nothing special is required at capture time.”; just imagine what you could do with that. Aside from anything else, there are some lovely potential use cases for, for example, people who have lost the ability to write by hand to enable them to retain the weirdly unique part of their identity that is one’s own cursive script. Oh, and massive, massive fraud, obviously.

• GoGoGrandparent: This is a really nice service and concept, I think. You know those online concierge services which have proliferated in the US over the past few years – you know, where you use a chat interface or similar to order a bunch of stuff that you just happen to need at 3:30am (“what’s that? 2 bottles of vodka, 80 Marlboro lights, 6 packets of Extra and, hang on, another 40 fags? Yep, no problem. No, I’m not judging AT ALL”)? This is like that, except it’s designed to be used by people who for whatever reason aren’t comfortable using smartphones and who’d rather use a nested phone menus to order things. There are so many nice features here, including the ability for individual users to customise the menus to ensure that stuff they will need most regularly sits at the top of the conversation tree; obviously once the Amazon Dash button concept becomes embedded everywhere then this becomes obsolete, but I think there’s something lovely about the extension of this sort of service to the less tech-enabled.

• Ghost Browser: This is a smart idea for people who do stuff across multiple accounts; a browser which lets you sign into the same platform from multiple accounts within one browser session, so for example you can be logged in to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram as several different accounts simultaneously within one browser. Obviously Hootsuite et al still offer the best solutions for multi-account management, but for more specific work – ad buying across multiple accounts, for example – you can see how this might be useful. Oh, and massive, massive fraud, obviously.

• Penmanshipporn: A Reddit community dedicated to sharing examples of particularly beautiful calligraphy, which, in case and advermarketingpr drones from the exciting world of high-end pens are reading, is RIPE for sponsorship by…er…who makes fountain pens these days? One of that lot, anyway. SEE? THIS IS FCUKING GOLDEN, MATE. This is what you come for, isn’t it? This sort of free creativity. Jesus wept, even by my own low standards this is bilge, isn’t it? Sorry, I’ll try harder after another cup of tea.

• Brexit Haikus: A selection of 50 haikus, written daily since The Day The World Went (More) Wrong, by James Ross-Edwards. These are lovely, and a nice sort of light-touch time capsule to travel back through the various stages of post-Brexit emotion we all went through (and which, frankly, we’re still just sort of trying to deal with). I particularly like this one: “On Shoreditch High Street / Two men in shorts and leggings / Hope Corbyn resigns”; find your favourites!

• Snapcut: Another cool toy to make stuff for Snapchat (or Instagram Stories, obvs) – Snapcut lets you customise an animated screen in portrait which you can add text, images and different flashy backgrounds to, which you can then record and use as a title screen to your next Story. Which is, as per the ‘fake yourself having fun’ Snapchat thing from last week, is totally ripe for BRAND APPROPRIATION. Here’s a thought – charity-type folk trying to engender THE NEXT ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE – why not consider making something like this for the Snapchat/Insta kids, to let them join in whilst making their own personalised title cards for their participatory videos with your branding on it (or something – obviously this is a crap idea, but if you can’t do better then SHUT UP AND STOP JUDGING ME).

• Explain To Me: Lovely webtoy – plug in a link to an online article and this will deliver you a summary of the content, in a sentence and then in 10 sentences. It’ll also pull all the metadata from a page, should you desire. Christ knows what it would make of Curios – probably about as much as the rest of the world tbqhwym.

• Hovercards: Rather clever Chrome plugin which pulls in information about any url when you hover your cursor over it; so it’ll pull you a preview of the page in a little hover-over window, say, or if you point at an Instagram or Twitter user it’ll pull up details about their account, their followers and the like. Slick.

• Guide To Computing: Beautiful photos of old computing equipment, taken against gorgeous pastel backdrops. Really gorgeous 50s feel to all these shots.

• The Bauhaus: Wonderful online collection by the Harvard Art Museum of Bauhaus works, giving you not only a brilliant overview of the movement but also access to thousands of digital representations of the school’s work. Art / design-types will find SO MUCH to love in here; this is a pretty amazing treasure trove of early 20C design.

• Steem: I confess to being a touch sketchy on the practicalities here, so forgive the slightly wooly writeup I’m about to give you here (plus ca fcuking change, eh kids?) – Steem is, as far as I can tell, basically a Reddit-type community whose distinguishing feature is that users can receive cryptocurrency payments for posting stuff; this currency (the titular ‘Steem’) can then be exchanged for Bitcoins further down the line, and thereby converted into actual cashmoney. It sounds a little too good to be true, and I’m not 100% convinced its not in fact some sort of smartly techy pyramid scheme to entice people into supporting a nascent blockchain-based currency for the benefit of a few people at the top, but what do I know? NOTHING.

• NYPL Emoji: Simple, lovely, clever twitter bot – you tweet at it with an emoji, it responds with a work from the New York Public Library which ‘matches’ that emoji. Simple, but such a smart/cute way of opening up archive content on Twitter in a frivolous way. Take a moment to go through its replies, and marvel at how subtly well-made this is; whoever did the tagging here has done an excellent job.

• Fake Flag: I love this – take any world nation’s flag and mash it up with the design elements of the flags of any other nation to create your very own bastard-nation hybrid symbol. Any of you married to / in relationships with people from a foreign land, I suggest you spend a morning together making your very own hybrid national emblem and then spamming the fcuk out of it on Facebook, along with possibly an invented name for your new country, in a heartwarming demonstration of your love and a slightly terrifying example of your inherent megalomania.

HOW ABOUT AN ECLECTICALLY WEIRD MIX BY THE BLOKE FROM CABARET VOLTAIRE? YES? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS PERHAPS HANDING OVER CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE RUN THE CYCLING, PT.2:

• Verifly: On-demand drone insurance. Yes, fine, scoff all you like, but I think this is a great idea; fire up the app, tell it where you are and where you’ll be flying, and it offers you an on-the-spot quote for insurance covering you if, say, your drone plummets from the sky and its rotor blades carve interesting patterns into someone’s skull. US-only, I think, so AXA et al have about a month to rip this off before some pesky startup does it. RUN, INSURANCE BEHEMOTHS!

• Smartshot: Yes, fine, there’s nothing exciting about a Chrome extension that’s really good at letting you clip and annotate and easily share screencaps, but it’s USEFUL, OK?

• Icon8: You know Prisma? OF COURSE YOU DO. This is basically Prisma but as a Messenger bot – give it a photo and then select one of several filters to fcuk with said picture in visually interesting ways. Not groundbreaking per se, but a good example of how to create a simple, fun, bot interface from existing tech – this stuff is EASY AND FUN.

• Search Photos By Colour: Except that description, lifted from the site, sort of does it a disservice really. It’s not just about plugging in a shade and getting a bunch of stock photos featuring said shade back; this, far more cleverly, lets you do some scrawling to suggest where in an image you want said colours to be, and then pulls photos with a similar set of colour blocks. You can probably do something VERY clever with this sort of thing – I rather like the idea of a ‘find and replace images in news stories with images which have a similar colourblock profile for potential comedy effect’-type thing, but YOU think about it and see what you can come up with. No, go on, put some fcuking effort in for a change.

• GoGo Stand: Smart little wallet-sized smartphone stand, which would make some slightly less rubbish than usual branded swag for the right company, maybe.

• Morbotron: An awesome site which collects a truly mind-flayingly large collection of gifs and clips from Futurama into a searchable database, which is some sort of crazy labour of love and what, in the future, will exist for every single TV show in the world so that as a species we can communicate solely in perfectly-chosen gifs from each and every single Big Brother ever screened (think Newspeak was frightening? THINK AGAIN).

• Consume Pop Culture: Excellent-if-bleak artistic representations of contemporary pop culture by artist Hal Hefner. Available to buy, some of these, though not really sure what your flat would look like with some of this on the walls (on reflection, actually, like a Supreme store; your mileage may vary).

• Slow Dance: Another Kickstarter, this time for a lovely little art project which is effectively a photo frame which isn’t in fact a photo frame; instead, slow motion encourages you to put a small, light object (a feather, a flower, etc) into the frame, which object gets gently set in very, very slow motion. Which is wanky as you like, but also sort of great imho.

• 10k Apart: One for the coders amongst you – there are PRIZES on offer here for the best and ‘most compelling’ (no, me neither) website which can be built in less than 10kb and without using Javascript. Obviously I can’t code for toffee, but this strikes me as an interesting creative challenge and a pretty fcuking tricky one to boot. NB – if any of you end up entering and winning this as a result of seeing it in Curios, a courtesy bottle of Casillero is always appreciated.

• NES On Hololense: The latest in the line of ‘oh, wow, blimey, this Hololense stuff, eh?’ videos showcasing the most amazing future tech which noone has seemingly actually seen in action yet. Ever imagined what it would be like to play Super Mario in some sort of weird 3d floating projection in your living room? It would be like this, apparently. This is SO MENTAL AND FUTURE I have no words.

• Soundswap: A service which lets users record footage of themselves playing a musical instrument and then share it with ‘professional music teachers’ who will offer feedback and critique on your technique, etc. Lovely idea, and I really like their use of a faux-messenger interface as the explainer tool on the site.

• 7am-7pm: A photoproject which takes photographs of people at 7am when they rise and again at 7pm, presenting contrasting pictures illustrating the toll the day takes. There’s a pretty obvious lift for an ad campaign for a series of brands here which I’m not going to patronise you by explaining further because I really believe you can get there yourselves, go on!

• A Good Book: A supersimple site/project which collects photos of books which have a particularly strong design aesthetic. Literally nothing else – if you like book / catalogue design, you will REALLY like this, but if not then you’ll probably want to skip to the next one which is funny and stuff (Jesus, philistines).

• Bulwer Lytton 2016: Another year, another selection of winners of the annual Bulmer-Lytton contest which annually seeks out the worst imagined first lines from nonexistant novels. So many to love in here – my personal favourite from the 2016 selection is the following gem: “She walked toward me with her high heels clacking like an out-of-balance ceiling fan set on low, smiling as though about to spit pus from a dental abscess, and I knew right away that she was going to leave me feeling like I had used a wood rasp to cure my hemorrhoids.” Who wouldn’t read the sh1t out of that? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO.

• Inflorescence City: I’m not 100% sure what this is, as the site’s got next to nothing by way of explanation, but it seems to be a couple of collections of digitally/ algorithmically created text/image art – oh, no, hang on, here’s the description which actually makes the whole thing make total sense; what a cool project: “this project is by katie rose pipkin and loren schmidt in collaboration with various algorithms and code snippets. the publication is generated live using a variety of different approaches. each time you refresh your browser, it will rewrite itself. the illustrations are visual mirrors of the text: as the document is written, sections of the document are passed to a program which translates them into visual form.” Take a look, it’s rather cool in a strange, otherworldly sort of fashion.

• The Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Amazing piece of old school spykit, this – the CIA’s very own field operative’s guide to messing up a supply chain from the inside. Contains all sorts of amazing tips on how to disrupt your workplace, many of which are weirdly applicable to us as 21stC wageslaves; the section on white collar stuff is particularly illuminating. “Insist on the written delivery of orders”, say the CIA, predicting the organsiation-destroying power of the phrase “can I just have that in an email” a full 30 years in advance of the mass-uptake of electronic communications.

• Funklet: A great selection of drum parts from funk and soul tracks, each with a playalong set of tabs and (and this is the fun bit) the ability to change the BPM of the drum track, which lets you hear the majesty of I Feel Good whacked up to 180 BPM (seriously, try these out, they all sound AMAZING at fast speeds and will make you feel temporarily like some sort of genius music producer).

• Mousetube: I think this exists for the animal testing community, which makes it A Bad Thing, but equally it’s a site which collects mouse sounds in one place, which is sort of weirdly, brilliantly odd. No idea WHAT you would use this for, but there’s got to be some application – maybe to drive your housemates slowly mad in fear of an invisible rodent infestation or similar.

• Haylo: Is this a joke? I went to Catholic school as a kid (Italian, innit; left me with a healthy agnosticism and an almost fetishistic penchant for high church incense, along with the uniquely helpful attitude towards authority figures my employers continue to enjoy to this day) and I was never under the impression that cumulative prayer was a ‘thing’, but it’s not like I was paying that much attention to be honest. Haylo (NICE NAME GUYS!) is basically like Craigslist for prayers – you tell the app what you want other people to pray for you about, and then…er…people pray, I guess. No details on whether there’s a Reddit-style up/downvote system for prayer requests, but I REALLY hope there is.

• Marine Traffic: You’d think that there would be few things more tedious than watching all the world’s ships move slowly around the world in realtime, and yet (whilst it’s noone’s idea of high-octane entertainment, let’s be clear) this is so soothing I can’t quite describe it.

• NouTube: Horrifyingly addictive and compelling site which, each time you refresh it, presents you with the newest video it can find from YouTube – no other criteria, just the freshest video content from…somewhere. This is one of the most incredible tools I’ve ever seen for showcasing the baffling range of stuff posted on there every second; since I started writing this entry, I’ve hit refresh three times and seen a GTAV livestream, some baffling Japanese mood video, and some homemade middle-eastern pop, and frankly I’d be quite prepared to sack off the rest of this newsletter in favour of watching more of those were it not for my legions of adoring reade…ah, yes.

• Someone’s Making A Real-world Pokeball Controller: For those of you still riding the Pokemon hype train, this looks like it would make the game totally unplayable, and make any user look like penis, but I’m guessing the Pokefandom couldn’t give a flying one.

• Tony Greenhand: I’ve featured some pretty insane joint building on here before, but I think Tony Greenhand may well take the (hash) biscuit; these…I mean, I hesitate to use the word ‘spliffs’ here, maybe combustible sculptures is more apposite, but they’re just crazy. MARKETING FOLK! Get him to make you a joint in the shape of YOUR PRODUCT for stoner-friendly competition swag!

• Permanent Records: Each day in August, a different tattoo design is being posted on here by a different artist, each with an accompanying song. Lovely work, lovely idea.

• You As A Star Wars Figure: You know someone who would REALLY like to be immortalised as a 3d-printed Stormtrooper? You think they’re worth spending about £1800 on? GREAT, as that’s what this will cost you. Frankly INSANE given that you could just hire a stormtrooper costume and then go to A N Other 3d printing shop and get the same thing done for a fraction of the price, but WEVS.

• Cronzy: Do you remember that pen on Kickstarter? The one which promised to be able to capture any colour in nature and instantly mix ink to match that colour, so you could pluck hues and palettes from thin air and draw with them on the fly? Remember how it turned out to be total bollocks? Well LOOKY HERE, there’s a new version! No information whatsoever as to whether this is any less vaporwareish than that one was, but maybe hold on to your readies until this is a little further down the line, eh? Still looks like absolute witchcraft to me, this.

• Dicklatte: Whoever’s running this Instagram has a simple but clear mission – to take photographs of penises drawn in coffee foam. That mission is, so far, proving a resounding success.

• Hikea: I stumbled across the first video in this series the other week, but it now appears that it’s a series of some sort – Hikea is a series of videos of people on various drugs (so far acid and mushrooms) attempting to assemble IKEA furnishings; the amount of joy you get from this will entirely depend on how funny you find it to watch other people laughing like idiots whilst boxed out of their trees on hallucinogens; expect this to spark a slew of copycat series, though, as people attempt to get some short-term fame from, say, popping to Homebase on PCP (that I’d actually quite like to see, at least until it descended into snuff).

• Picture This Clothing: Your kids are GREAT! You know what’s especiallly great? Their artwork! So much so that you can now have it made into clothing that your kids can then wear, inflicting their unique aesthetic sensibilities on the wider world rather than just your kitchen. The resultant clothes on show are as shonky and twee as you’d expect; though now I think of it I rather like the idea of this being used as punishment “You call that a drawing? THAT??? Let’s see how proud of it you are when you’re forced to wear it as a dress and everyone mocks you, eh?” Christ, I must never breed.

• Wikiverse: This reminds me so, so much of No Man’s Sky in a weird way – this is Wikipedia presented as an explorable galaxy of topics and the relationshsips between them, and it’s just sort of dreamily wonderful to navigate and explore. It’s all pretty beta, and rather confusing, and totally useless in terms of actually finding anything out, but it’s also BEAUTIFUL and dizzying and sort of glorious, all at the same time.

• Castles Made Of Castles: Intensely headfcuky little webtoy which lets you build shapes out of shapes which are the same shape as the whole shape. Look, I know that that makes no sense but just click the link and you’ll get it soon enough. Quickly becomes mindbending and a little frightening, like you’re being sucked into an infinitely recursive mirrorworld (just me? oh).

• The Seinfeld 2000: An entire series of bits and pieces from online magazine thing ‘Extremely Good Sh1t’ presented as a navigable experience inside Jerry Seinfled’s computer from around 2000. No reason at all why, just a fun thing to do. Click EVERYTHING, there’s some great stuff buried in there.

• Adult Swim Tracks 2016: Adult Swim is once again presenting a new track each week for 25 weeks, with accompanying little web animation and posters and tshirts for each; good music, good webviz stuff, and as all the tracks are downloadable it’s an excellent way to get some new music from some rather cool artists (this week’s is Earl Sweatshirt, for example, and it’s a great song).

• Clever Music Video Interactive Thing Pt1: This is both a music video and a promo for the French Yellow Pages (no, me neither), which at each point in the video lets you explore all the different artists (makeup, costume, video, etc) who were involved in its production, see their details, etc…the gimmick being that they’re all in the Yellow Pages! Really no idea how this came about, but I really like the interface and the whole project’s sort of cutely laudable.

• Clever Music Video Interactive Thing Pt2: Except on reflection it’s not actually that interactive, but hey ho. What it is, thought, is brilliantly clever – it takes the lyrics of the song and for a certain number of key phrases plugs them into Giphy to pull gifs associated with said key words and phrases and stitch them into a video, meaning that each time you watch you get an entirely different experience. I wish I had thought of this – it’s BRILLIANTLY smart and very well executed, and I very much like the song too, not least for its pithy line about having ‘cum on my jeans’. TELL IT HOW IT IS, MATE. This is excellent.

LET’S FINISH THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS LOVELY DOWNTEMPO CRATE–DIGGING SET FROM ARGENTINA’S PABLO GROSSI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Discarding Images: Seemingly infinite selection of clips from medieval manuscripts, featuring a LOT of strange animals and little devil things, which might be useful for something though I can’t in all honesty think what that might be.

• Nietzsche Ralph Wiggins: The best pop culture / philosophy mashup since the still-excellent Kierkegaardashian account.

• McMansion Hell: Exploring the peculiar stylings of the McMansion, those massive, ugly new build properties for the nouveau riche across the US which sprang up from the 90s onwards. Whoever writes this knows their architecture.

• Raven Kwok: Excellent little black and white gif animations involving geometry, generative art styles and a whole load of talent.

• Ugly Belgian Houses: Don’t think too hard about what happens within them.

• Captcha Comics: Captcha requests paired with images or used in comics to make weirdly effective gags. Some are better than others, but these are mostly pretty funny (FAINT PRAISE!).

• Critical Hand Gestures: This is WEIRD, Collecting a series of gifs of people using sign language to engage in critical discussion, this feels like I’ve stumbled across a weird academic in-joke. Beautifully, though, these gifs all seem to be available as those weird lenticular rulers which show looping animations via some sort of magic trick – for at least one of you, this is Christmas, SORTED.

• Vintage Girlie Mags: Not a Tumblr, and sort of a bit NSFW (but only a bit, honest), this is a collection of covers of bogo mags from the 50s and 60s – mags with names like ‘KNAVE’ and ‘CAVALIER’ and quite possibly ‘SERF’ and ‘OPPRESSED PAWN OF THE FEUDALIST SYSTEM’. What’s remarkable about these is quite how many of the women on the cover look quite frankly smashed on booze – is this what was considered a woman’s most alluring state half a century ago? Bit troubling, that.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• I Ate My Own Tooth: Kicking off here with a piece which is basically guaranteed to really, really freak out anyone with dental anxiety issues. So, er, be warned. The rest of you, though, this is a very funny journey of misadventure involving a tooth, its replacement, and how one deals with said replacement’s journey through the digestive tract. Enjoy!

• Sex, Lies and YouTube: Stories about the NEW STARS OF NEW MEDIA (in particular YT and Vine) being, occasionally, dreadful, predatory arseholes who abuse their position of fame in egregiously sexual manner are nothing new; this is a slightly broader look than normal at the issue, though, which raises some interesting questions about the weird effect that this sort of fame – this ultra-HD, close-up, forged-on-contact-and-personal-connection fame, far removed from the teen idol status of your Beatles and Biebers – has on those whom its visited upon. It sounds, as I’m sure I’ve said before, hideous, and there’s not really any manual orset of guidelines telling people how to cope with it.

• Meet Joanne The Scammer: Semi-companion piece to the above; Joanne the Scammer is the SO HOT RIGHT NOW alter-ego on YouTube of Branden Miller, a young gay guy in the US who invented the persona of an ultratrash thief (basically) and is now living out his 15 minutes in the internet’s field of vision. Interesting on the mechanics of this level of stardom – Joanne is a BIG DEAL in certain sections of US online culture – but also on the fact that Brandon is obviously a pretty nervous, not hugely sophisticated kid who’s navigating all this quite alone; there are several points in this where you sort of want to give him a hug and maybe make him eat some vegetables, and just sort of be his friend a bit.

• Twitter and the Troll Problem: We all know that Twitter’s got a problem with abuse – I took a quick look at the @messages field for a few of the BBC accounts this week and my days is there some material on there, and that’s just a bunch of nutters shouting at a corporation – and this Buzzfeed piece is a decent look at how that’s been allowed to happen. Perhaps the most interesting element of it, though, is the light it sheds on the extent to which Twitter’s failure to have any sort of actual corporate philosophy or overriding ethos (as opposed to Facebook, say, which whatever you think of the actual concept has always been pretty clear than ‘connect the world’ is its thing); I usually can’t stand the idea of ‘corporate philosophies’, but this is an interesting argument for their importance.

• Meet Benjamin Kickz: What were you doing at 16? If you were anything like me, you were smoking a lot of week with your mates and wondering why this wasn’t helping you get laid; if you’re like Mr Benjamin Kickz (not, you may be amazed to learn, his birth name), you were building up the largest trainer resale empire in the world. Fascinating piece of voyeurism into the world of business and branding as practiced by DJ Khaled et al – it’s not so much having a thing, it’s having a thing around the thing. ‘Boomin!’, as the kid might well say.

• Every Type Of Female Character In An Action Movie: These are depressingly spot-on, and very funny. BONUS MOVIE SEXISM – this piece, on all the gender-swapped films that the author would like to see and what they might be like, is ace.

• Why We’re Post-Fact: There have been several essays written on the post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-fact world in which we now seem to operate, where ‘truths’ are more malleable and less necessary in popular discourse than ever before; this take, in Granta, is the smartest I’ve seen to date – basically, it’s all postmodernism’s fault. So that’s ok then.

• A Brain Without Fear: This is just crazy. When you or I see something scary, we have a direct response from a particular part of our brain which causes the typical symptoms; nausea, sweaty palms, increased heartrate, etc. When insanely good free climbing nutter Alex Honnold experiences stuff that would give normal people the howling fantods he gets…nothing. Literally nothing – the bits of his brain which in normal people light up upon fear-led stimuli simply don’t register. This is a truly fascinating read about climbing and neuroscience and fear and all sorts of other things besides.

• This Is Your Life In Silicon Valley: A lovely short piece of writing, skewering the endlessly aspirational and nowhere-near-as-clever-as-it-thinks culture of the latest dotcom boom. No matter if you’re not acquainted with the culture it describes – you will recognise enough of this from general metropolitan modernity, trust me.

• Genius On Hamilton: Bear with me here – Todd Van Der Werff, a critic from Vox, wrote an almost painfully hagiographic piece on the musical Hamilton the other week, describing it as something akin to a religious experience. Then the community at Genius got hold of it, and went through annotating each and every single hyperbolic piece of purple prose with a savage hivemind pen; the resulting document is BRILLIANTLY funny, and weirdly shows the great potential for narrative storytelling inherent in the annotations medium – there’s definitely some sort of belletristic (sorry) game you could employ here if you were so minded. Anyway, read this – whether or not you know the first thing about Hamilyon, this is ace.

• On Kik and Anyonymity and Sex: Good piece by Chelsea G Summers on the beauty and pain of anonymous encounters, and how KIK works, and lots of other stuff besides; think I’ve featured her stuff on here before, but she’s a really excellent writer.

• Becoming the Chipotle of Pizza: How people are vying to turn pizza into a fast-turnaround fresh-made fast food option, in the same vein as burritos. If you have any sort of shred of love or affection for pizza, this ought to appal you (but if you’re interested in food and the business of its production and sale, this is all kinds of interesting). Still, though, I don’t care what the shape is – if the base sauce you use is fcuking barbeque, it is not pizza – it is an abomination. THIS IS CURIOS CANON.

• David’s Ankles: On Michelangelo’s David, and his fcuked ankles – also, though, on the unique status of the David in sculpture and the particular effect it has on those who see it (particularly, it must be said, Americans on European tours who seem to universally view it as the ne plus ultra of art in absolute, which frankly seems a touch hyperbolic to me – but seriously, read the comments), and (most interestingly) the history of the piece through the ages. Rather beautiful overall, if you can endure the slightly tortuous “WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN I HAD A FLORENTINE EPIPHANY” under(over)tones.

• Learning To Love In French: Lauren Collins writes about taking French lessons to fit into her new life in Switzerland, and how by so doing her relationship with her husband is brought into new light as she discovers how his language has forever shaped their communication. Beautifully written, and if either you or your partner is conducting your relationship in your second language, this is a truly essential read – it’s SO GOOD on the weirdly idiosyncratic way in which language confines expression and hence thought (the ‘word prison’, as football manager Jurgen Klopp rather beautifully calls it).

• My Virtual Brunch With Dolly Parton: Gloriously written personal memoir of the author’s experiences growing up queer and Southern, and how Dolly Parton’s music has soundtracked her life. Formally really interesting – the way the narrative jumps around through time is unusual in this sort of piece – and really personally affecting; this is really very good indeed, whether or not you care about Dolly.

• The Most 2016 Thing I Have Ever Read: And from the same site as the last piece comes THIS. It’s sort of hard to explain, but basically: There is a film called ‘Sausage Factory’, out now in the US, which is a crude cartoon about talking foodstuffs. It contains a character voiced by Salma Hayek – a (female identifying) taco which expresses attraction during the movie towards a similarly female-identifying hot dog. This film was reviewed on the LGBTQI-interest website Autostraddle. People found the review ‘problematic’ and complained. This is the Autostraddle editor’s apology. Look, Web Curios is not about to get into discussions of privilege and ownership and offence as, frankly, I don’t care enough about this stuff to deal with the rage. But can we just take a moment to acknowledge that RIGHT NOW, we live in a world in which the following sentences can be written without any sort of apparent irony: “We heard from readers who questioned the consent of the sexual encounter between the taco and the hot dog bun”. and “I was blinded by my own whiteness existing inside a system of white supremacy.” IT’S A FCUKING STUPID ANIMATED FILM ABOUT TALKING FOOD HAVING SEX WITH OTHER TALKING FOOD! I mean, I get the whole ‘apres moi le deluge’ thing, and obviously bad intentioned bad stuff is bad regardless of context, but really?

• Why Am I So Fat?: This essay, by comedian Sarah Benincasa responding to a question online, is probably the best ‘FCUK YOU TROLLS’ response I have ever read, ever. Read this and LOL, and then do a small applause as she totally deserves it – this is actually laugh-out-loud brilliant.

• Hanging with the Mensans: What’s it like visiting a convention of the super-clever – not only the super clever, but the particular category of the super clever who felt the need to have their supercleverness validated by a third party organisation so that they can advertise their supercleverness to others and join an elite community of other superclever people? Sounds FUN, doesn’t it? This is a lovely – and gentle, honest – look at a Mensa convention in the US. There are some characters in here, I promise you.

• Summer Camp For Adults: US Summer Camp has a sort of mythical air to it not quite matched by any teen right of passage in the UK (other than maybe the first time you’re sick in a park from too much cider); this piece looks at the recent trend in summer camps for adults, replicating the experience except with people in their late-20s and a lot of booze. This sounds DREADFUL – not least because of the massively rapey undertones of much of the thing, but also because of the people. As the author points out in a line which you may be unsurprised to know resonated with me A LOT: “If you, like me, made friends by being sarcastic and unwilling, these are not your people. These are the people who love participating so much that they’ve made it cool.” ACTUAL SHUDDER.

• Enjoli: Finally, the best piece of the week. Enjoli is by Kristi Coulter, and is about women and drinking and sobriety, but also so much about modern living and pace and STUFF. It’s truly excellent, and will probably make you take a bit of a little look at yourself (and maybe really make you want a booze too).

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, yes, fine, this has 1.5million views, but if you’re a man and you have not yet seen this then you need to watch it NOW. A GoPro, on a HotWheels car, on a track. I appreciate that the appeal of this will be largely impossible to understand for those didn’t play with toy cars as a kid but this is basically what you were imagining in your head every time you played. ACE.

2) It’s been a while since I’ve featured a bit of musical spoken word, so let’s rectify that – this is the talented Omar Musa, with freedom, halfway between soul and hiphop and poetry, this is rather good:

3) Another week, another band I had never heard of (there are a lot of them out there, you know) – this time it’s Weyes Blood. This song absolutely blew me away – it’’s reminiscent of so many things and yet totally it’s own thing; it’s ballad and pop and folk and hymnal, and it’s totally uncool, and it’s had me mesmerised for a few days now. It’s called ‘Seven Words’:

4) This is also just a lovely slice of indiepop, with what sounds an awful lot like a young Rod Stewart on vocals. This is called ‘1000 Times’, and it’s by Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! New Loyle Carner – you know how I feel about Loyle by now, he’s just BRILLIANT. This is called ‘NO CD’:

6) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,2! Now something a lot more STREET; this is from Giggs’ new album, which is excellent by the way, but the real standout on this is the guest part from Cas – it is EXCELLENT. It’s called ‘501’:

7) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,3! Last track in what’s not been a vintage week for music and videos – this, though, is the much-appreciated return of London MC Rinse, with an excellent SBTV session. It’s rare you get someone with as unique a style as this – it’s properly distinctive, and genuinely excellent, ENJOY BYE HAVE A NICE WEEKEND BYE!:

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