I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, and one thing all of us content monkeys have in common is we all hate writing this upfront bit. This week it’s…uniquely hard.
Obviously Web Curios is a deeply cynical, miserable and ennui-soaked mess of my own neuroses and deficiencies as a human, but, just for once, let me try and be positive here. This is awful and hard and will hurt so many people, some physically, some not, but, if you’re looking for a silver lining, at least it’s happening now. We – I know, I know that this isn’t evenly distributed, and my privilege is based on another’s pain, I know – live in a world in which we can have entertainments piped to our hands, the sum-total of human knowledge accessible at a few clicks, an accumulated couple of millennia of culture and learning and art to draw on, accessible to us in literally seconds, on demand…look, all I’m saying is that this had happened at almost any other point in human history this would have been immeasurably worse.
Anyway, this week’s Curios is slightly different, with the miscellania divided into three sections rather than 2, and no videos at the end as, well, I couldn’t find any interesting ones and frankly I imagine you’re all consuming quite enough as it is, what with Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and stuff. Think of Web Curios, then, as the fibre in your digital diet as a shut-in, the chewy stuff that you may not enjoy quite as much as TikTok but which will give you a slightly easier ride next time you’re trying to sh1t some ideas out of your mouth. As it were.
I am Matt, and as usual I am at home in my pants – the only difference is that this week, so are you. Please take care.
By Rishi Dastidar, whose new book, Saffron Jack, you can pre-order here.
THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE MERCIFULLY SHORT THIS WEEK WHAT WITH LITERALLY NOONE GIVING MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT S*C**L M*D** PLATFORM UPDATES THIS WEEK:
- The Facebook Small Business Grants Programme: I think it’s fair to say I’ve been…critical of Facebook in the past, but its response to all this has been genuinely good in the past week or so (I’ve read a bit of analysis which suggests it’s a result of this being an unambiguous problem and therefore easier for a data/science-leaning founder (and by extension corporate culture) to parse, which seems plausible), from its efforts to stem disinformation (see, Mark, it is possible to be better at that!) to its efforts to secure staff. This is another initiative that it’s hard to see as anything other than positive – “Facebook is offering $100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses in over 30 countries where we operate.” There are limited details about which countries, or how to go about applying, but you can sign up for updates which will emerge in due course; it won’t be a lot of money per business, but every little helps. Brief moment of sincerity here – I know several people who run businesses and are staring down the barrel at the moment, with responsibility for wages and staff and suppliers; good luck, and, if you can, try and support small companies where possible while we’re all stuck.
- Brand Communications in the Age of Corona: Ordinarily a header like that would make my teeth itch something chronic, but this is an actually not-terrible series of principles, posted by Twitter’s comms team, which is all sensible and, based on some of the fcuking calls I’ve had to sit on this week, the sort of thing we might all want to remind our clients of on a regular basis. No, I’m sorry, this isn’t a good time to go on an aggressive customer acquisition programme for your online casino (I mean, fine, from a certain (cnuty) angle it obviously very much is, but come on ffs).
- Reddit Metrics: Super-useful tool showing which bits of Reddit are trending hardest at any give moment. Depending on what you or your clients do, Reddit is SO worth a look as a way gauging how your customer base feel and what they might need from you right now (apologies in advance, but I’m going to try not to mention the C-word too much this week; this may well lead to some fairly unpleasant linguistic contortions but, well, you’re used to that).
THE SECTION WHICH IS FOCUSED SOLELY ON PROVIDING YOU WITH AS MANY HELPFUL AND INTERESTING LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO HELP YOU PASS THE TIME AND STAY INTELLECTUALLY EXERCISED AND WOULD LIKE TO EXHORT READERS TO PLEASE SHARE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY GREAT THAT YOU FIND FOR INCLUSION IN FUTURE WEEKS’ EDITIONS BECAUSE, REALLY, IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN LINKS WERE BASICALLY A CURRENCY, THIS IS IT, PT.1:
- The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: I’ll continue to plug this this week – Ed’s done a truly incredible job coordinating this, and in many respects it’s an object lesson in how to do quite difficult, decentralised information coordination at scale. It contains links and information and data about the spread of the virus, but also to lists of volunteering organisations and support groups worldwide, tips for educators and medical staff on what online resources are available to help them, and loads more besides, and it’s being added to all the time from all around the world. It’s the absolute BEST of the web, this, and the sort of thing people in the ivory towers of academe dreamed of in the early days of bulletin boards and before the normies came in and ruined everything with the cats and the bongo and the nazism.
- Tech Support for Old People: FULL DISCLOSURE: I know Mike, one of the people behind this initiative, a little bit. But only a little. Regardless, this is a great idea and something you might want to get involved with if you’re in the UK – a project seeking volunteers to act as free tech support for older people who might need a little help navigating this exciting new reality of webcams and screensharing and NO GRANDDAD THERE ARE NO SINGLES IN YOUR AREA LOOKING FOR FUN DOWN’T DOWNLOAD THAT .EXE FILE FFS (both my male grandparents are dead and so incapable of embarrassing bongo-related fcukups, but yours might need the assistance).
- Handmirror: There is SO MUCH I am excited to see in the coming weeks and months, not least how social attitudes around certain mores are going to shift. How will our perception of human aesthetics change as we slowly drop all standards and start appearing on conference calls in three-day pants? Is this the first step in the WALL-E-fication of our species? Will we all slowly, imperceptibly, start to drop a shade in skintone as Vitamin E withdrawal kicks in? Anyway, while we still care about things like ‘do I have a cornflake on my cheek?’ when videocalling people, this is potentially a godsend – Handmirror is a Mac-only app which puts a button on your taskbar which, with one click, lets you check on how hideous you currently are via your webcam. It seems like a small thing, but the ability to start a conference call without the initial 2s of fear when your face shows up and you see that, no, you really couldn’t get away with not coming your hair, has significant quality-of-life benefits. Oh, on this, it’s always worth remembering DFW’s riff on videocalling from Infinite Jest.
- The Social Distancing Festival: We’ll be seeing LOTS of this in the coming weeks – I know for example that people are talking variously about 24h streaming comedy marathons with comedians doing sets from their houses across the world – but this was the first to cross my path this week; The Social Distancing Festival launched this week, and is a project by Nick Green in Toronto. Green had a new musical opening cancelled as a result of all this, and so decided to source as much upcoming artistic performance and put it on virtually through this hub – this is now a hugely-useful hub to find a huge selection of arts content, from theatres and opera houses and art galleries and people’s bedrooms – each day, with links to streams, details of timings, and basically everything you could need to enjoy a certain type of cultural life despite lockdown. So, so good, and worth sharing with anyone who’s less into YouTube videos and more into, I don’t know, Dvorak.
- Get Vibey: Sanderson Jones founded The Sunday Assembly a few years ago – I know Sanderson a bit, and he’s a genuinely remarkable man, whose positivity and energy make me occasionally think he’s a different species from me. His latest project is this, Get Vibey, which takes the hugely popular ‘Secular Singalong’ bit of the Assembly mornings and takes it into quarantine. Starting Monday at 5pm GMT, Sanderson hopes to start a global singalong, with anyone anywhere invited to log on and belt along with whatever tune they’re singing that day. On the one hand, you might think you’d feel a bit weird sitting in your kitchen with the second wine of the day belting out “I Will Survive”, but, trust me, this will be literally only the very tip of the veritable iceberg of weird you will discover within yourself as time passes.
- Last Year’s Rent: A hardship fund for the arts in the UK. I appreciate obviously that not everyone has any cash to spare right now, but, just in case you do, this mightn’t be a bad place to chuck a few quid.
- The Quarantine Book Club: I think this is a lovely idea, though I can equally imagine that perhaps it might be a touch stressful for authors. Quarantine Book Club affords authors the opportunity to chat with fans over chat in Zoom – there’s a reasonable selection coming up, and whilst they’re all US and I’ve not heard of any of them, they cover a lot of bases in terms of themes of their work and diversity / representation. The individual chats are ticketed, which is an interesting approach; I suppose limiting numbers for something like this keeps it workable, and authors’ have to eat, but, equally, in the midst of lots of people doing and giving stuff away for free, this jars slightly. I do wonder how the economics of this sort of thing will develop – will we see small cottage industries of individual experts in specific things offering piecemeal training and instruction in small, closed groups like this? I obviously have no fcuking idea.
- Become A Theme Park Designer: This…this is it! This is the moment! THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!! Look, we’re all going to be at home for ages, and after a while you’re going to complete Netflix and run out of cookery hacks to watch on Facebook and you’ll need something to stimulate your brain again – why not make it learning a new profession? WHY NOT LEARN TO DESIGN THEME PARKS??? Fine, there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever be able to actually visit theme parks again – I don’t mean this, by the way, I am fairly confident I will get to go to Alton Towers – or indeed that this course, called ‘Imagineering in a Box’ and offered by Khan Academy, will necessarily mean that you’ll be the architect of the inevitable Quarantine Studios Experience, but you’ll get a grounding in the principles of ride design, character design and the rest. If you’ve got a certain type of kid, I can think of worse projects to undertake in isolation than this tbh.
- Virtual AI: I hadn’t considered AT ALL the impact of lockdown on people who are used to attending meetings; if you or anyone you know is in AA, NA or any of the other As, you might find this useful – this site gives you a searchable database of virtual meetings happening worldwide, along with timings and the main language used by participants, so people can take the steps (no pun intended) needed to maintain their sobriety in what I can only imagine must be pretty challenging circumstances.
- Run Your Own Social: I like to think I’m OK at social media, at least in terms of making it do what I need it to – as a result, my Twitter feed’s largely free of rage and hatred, and I only use Facebook for Groups (and to publish a link to this once a week to almost universal silence). I would imagine, though, that that might not be the same for everyone. Whilst isolation is amply demonstrating the huge benefits the web brings in terms of being able to maintain specific, discrete conversations and contacts, it’s also perhaps demonstrating that what works at small-scale doesn’t always work at large scale; if you and yours are finding that the socials are all just TOO MUCH at the moment, why not take this opportunity to spin up your own, local social platform for you and whoever you want to use as you see fit? I featured this in July last year, but it seems germane to link to it again – there’s no technical reason why you’d need to do this, unless you’re very much a big-tech refusenik, but, well, you probably need a hobby, right?
- The Virtual Background Awards: At the time of writing you have 23h to enter (that’ll be 18 by the time you’re reading this, HURRY UP!), but if you think you can design the BEST ZOOM BACKGROUND EVER then, well, you go girl! There’s going to be a public vote to decide the winner once entries close – I for one am tumescent with excitement!
- Talkbeat: If you’re still exploring communications options for the new world order, and you don’t have access to Teams, and you don’t like Slack (noone likes Slack – it’s tolerated, at best – although, actually, the Slack I’m in with friends now has a !covid command which pulls the latest figures on the outbreak from public data sources and is the most terrifyingly-brilliant future thing I’ve seen all week tbh) then you might want to try Talkbeat. It is, I think, free, and seems to operate like Slack but with the wonderful addition of built-in ephemerality, thereby neatly eliminating the awful Slack fomo you get when you see that you’ve got 612 messages from the past 24h to read – in Talkbeat, all content vanishes after 24. This might be a nice, easy way of getting lots of family members together in one place to communicate textually, maybe.
- The Great Coronavirus Meme Survey: There are, I’m sure, more immediately-important-seeming pieces of academic work happening at the moment, but please let’s all take a moment to acknowledge the University of Amsterdam’s diligence in making sure that we properly track the memes that are spewing out of the culture faster than you can say “please, stop with the distracted boyfriend now”. You can’t see any of the memes here, sadly, but you can upload whatever you deem worthy of recording and analysis on this Page; fine, I know it seems silly, but I honestly think this is a really important piece of cultural work to document the creation and emergence of cultural ephemera around this. Lots of the most interesting commentary on historical events is through personal accounts and marginalia, and the famously-flaky nature of the idea of ‘permanence’ online means it’s vital to save this stuff while we can.
- Around: Yes, we’re ALL Zoomers now! Except, well, the software’s a bit iffy (I keep hearing the word ‘spyware’ being bandied about) and it does have some slightly annoying and creepy features (did you know that bosses using it can turn on an ‘attention tracking’ feature to monitor your attentiveness during calls? LOVELY!), and you might want to look at this new calling platform called Around as an alternative. It does all the things you’d expect, but does some clever stuff with face tracking to just isolate your fizzog to display rather than showing everyone how sh1t your kitchen is (stuff I have learned this week – my colleagues seemingly have nicer houses than I do) and uses AI to, so they claim, clean up all the audio. Might be worth a look.
- VOIP Cards: I LOVE THESE. As I wrote on Twitter: “Slightly pass-agg little notes you can load onto your phone and hold up when muted on a conference call. Please can we make this a thing? “Your complete failure to ever use the word ‘strategy’ correctly is making me murderous, Alan”. Honestly, as someone who has had to keep video off most of the week so that various people couldn’t see me mouthing “dear God you are so, so stupid” at them on calls (if you are reading this, by the way, I am definitely not talking about you), I am very much hear for this. Even if this site doesn’t have exactly what you want to communicate as an option, remember you can always use sites like BigAssMessage to create whatever you like – honestly, I am absolutely doing this later on and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop me.
- Netflix Party: You almost certainly know about this already, but in case not – LOOK! An official, sanctioned-by-Netflix way of doing shared viewing on laptops! It’s a Chrome-only plugin, but given that’s what 99% of the world uses you should basically be fine – it lets you watch something in-sync with other users anywhere, adds groupchat, and basically turns watching films at home into a social experience. Combine with Zoom or the video chat app of your choice to absolutely ruin the filmwatching experience for yourself and everyone else involved!
- Jqbx: Spotifysharing! Anyone can be a DJ! Jqbx lets you basically set up a stream of your Spotify, allowing anyone else to listen in and experience whatever you’re listening to as you listen to it. Perfect for listening to albums with friends while you chat, say, or for pretending that you’re running your own postapocalyptic radio station out there in the wastelands (YOU ARE NOT THREE-DOG) (hello to the three people who got that reference). Interestingly, you can also get data on what the most-streamed tracks were each week using the app – nice way of seeing how we’re all choosing to soundtrack a species-level incident.
- Popcorn Time Is Back!!!: Obviously I never want anyone to stop reading Curios halfway through – I like to imagine that you open all the tabs as you read in a game of chicken with your computer; who’ll expire first, the CPU or your attention span? – but I would very much encourage you to take a break now, click the link, download the software and GET DOWNLOADING; Popcorn Time, the service that made torrenting easy enough that any normie can do it, is BACK (first featured in Curios way back in March 2014 – man, that is a LONG six years; why not travel back in time and experience it for a moment?)! And it’s still very illegal, and will get shut down quite quickly I think, so get it while you can. Using this you will be able to download basically any film you can think of (it skews heavily hollywood and modern, fine, but still) – yes, lots of these are on Netflix or other platforms, but for those who perhaps can’t afford 30+ quid a month on subscription entertainment this is potentially a godsend. GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT.
- Free Audiobooks For Kids: You may have noticed over the years that I don’t like Amazon very much as a company and that I try and avoid linking to their works insofar as is humanly possible (not that far, turns out). Sometimes, though, they do good things – like now, when they’ve made a whole load of stories for children on their audiobooks platform Audible free to stream. This, honestly, is a total godsend if you’ve got kids but maybe need a break from storytime for a bit (or, er, if you want to listen to the Harry Potter series; I don’t judge, I just report).
THE SECTION WHICH IS FOCUSED SOLELY ON PROVIDING YOU WITH AS MANY HELPFUL AND INTERESTING LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO HELP YOU PASS THE TIME AND STAY INTELLECTUALLY EXERCISED AND WOULD LIKE TO EXHORT READERS TO PLEASE SHARE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY GREAT THAT YOU FIND FOR INCLUSION IN FUTURE WEEKS’ EDITIONS BECAUSE, REALLY, IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN LINKS WERE BASICALLY A CURRENCY, THIS IS IT, PT.2:
- The Berlin Philharmonic: Another institution which has made all its output free, you can, for the next month, access the entire digital archive of all the orchestra’s recordings, complete with video and all sorts of in-depth stuff if you’re into…er…orchestral music (I, as you may be able to tell, am not into orchestral music and so struggle to describe it better than this. Sorry). Oh, and if this is your thing, here’s a list of other streams and shows being put on for free in the classical music world over the coming weeks – there’s a LOT of stuff.
- Visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites: God, Google Earth is amazing – this link takes you to the ‘overview’ page, where you can see all of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites on the global map, and select which one you want to go on a virtual tour of. From the pyramids to Pompeii to Kew Gardens, get out of the house and stretch your virtual legs and try not to think too hard about the fact that your likelihood of ever visiting a lot of these in person is dropping by the day.
- Google’s Museums: One of the other things that Google’s been quietly getting on with over the past decade or so has been creating virtual equivalents of some of the world’s best and most significant museums and art galleries, meaning that, lockdown be damned, if I want to nip down the road to the Tate and look at my beloved Epstein, I can! Fine, it’s not quite the same – I don’t get to experience the peculiar joy of the Vauxhall gyratory, or the view of all the cranes down by Battersea that always elicits the same question in my mind (to paraphrase John Lanchester in the LRB a few years ago, who the fcuk is going to pay £6m to live in Vauxhall?) – but it’s the best we’re likely to get. So, so much to see in here, honestly.
- Artland: It’s not quite as impressive as the Google work, but from a more nakedly-commercial perspective Artland does a similar job, allowing you to take small, 3d tours of exhibitions currently going on at a range of small commercial galleries across the world (but mainly in the US, as far as I can tell). A perfect website to accompany a dry Martini as you sit, fag in hand, polo neck on, and decry the shameless dilettanteism of whatever concept-monkey’s currently showing at Tribeca Gallery. Just because we’re on lockdown doesn’t mean we should let standards slip, after all.
- Quarantinechat: I got curious yesterday and checked Google Trends to see how Chatroulette is doing – there’s been an uptick in interest over the past few weeks, but what really puzzled me is that there are spikes in searches every morning – do people wake up thinking “Christ, I wonder whether that service that let me be w4nked at by strange men still exists?” Anyway, this isn’t Chatroulette, it;s QUARANTINECHAT! Actually it’s far more benign, pairing you with strangers over your phone on a voice-only basis: “Once you sign up, you’ll be subscribed to periodic calls. Your caller ID will always say “QuarantineChat” when your phone rings. After a brief moment on hold, you’ll match with another random person. You don’t have to pick up if you’re busy—your partner will be automatically matched with someone else. And you can join and leave the line whenever you’d like. It’s private. You use your phone number to sign up for Dialup, but your matches will only ever see your username.” It’s open to people all over the world – I confess not having not tried it, as I enjoy talking on the phone almost exactly as much as someone who hides behind the written word as me might be expected to, but it seems like a fun idea with only one or two VERY SMOL potential side-effects. Who knows, maybe you will FIND LOVE?
- How Much Toilet Paper?: HOW LONG WILL YOUR STOCKS LAST??? This needs more dietary variables, to my mind, but if you want to assuage any creeping sense of bum-tissue panic then, well, great! Just as an aside, I wonder whether this will usher in the bidet revolution in the UK? It…probably won’t, will it?
- Island Generator: All this website does is generate sweet little names for imaginary places, designed to tie in with Animal Crossing (the idea being that it will create a cutesy name for your island) but which I reckon could be repurposed for some imaginative play with your kids if you were so inclined. By the way, I realise that I am doing a lot of ‘hey, here’s a thing that you can do with your kids!’-type links this week, and I also realise that I, er, don’t have any kids, or indeed know the first thing about what it would be like to have to take care of one or more of them in these sorts of circumstances, so forgive me if I appear to have some sort of weird, rose-tinted, Swallows And Amazons-type view of what it’s like, at odds with the stark, snotty, ADHD reality.
- Amazing Educational Resources: There is a LOT on here. Far too much to list, but, honestly, if you want an online learning resource than this website probably contains a link to it. Being updated on a regular basis, so worth bookmarking.
- Isolated Magazine: This is an interesting idea, though I’m not 100% certain it will ever work – as far as I can tell, it’s an initiative designed to crowdsource a ‘magazine’ for isolated living, written by people all over the place from the comfort of their own isolation crawlspace; this links to a Google Doc, containing ideas for articles and details for getting in touch if you’d like to participate. Obviously projects like this are difficult because…well…people, and I have a slight fear that the community around this might end up getting a bit Mumsnet (you know what I mean – nothing to do with mothers or women, more than there’s a certain type of online community can get a bit…spiky). Still, it’s a fascinating idea and if you like the idea of trying your hand at article-writing for a magazine of the new era.
- Photos of Shopping Carts: I popped to the shop the other day to get some milk and it was, as doubtless your local shops are too, something of a wasteland, with locust-ravaged shelves and, amazingly, a couple of people wandering about in what looked like shellshock, muttering (I am not making this up, I promise) “nah man, I thought they was joking”. I mean, WOW. Anyway, this is a series of photos of people’s grocery carts from around the world, showing the different purchases that people are prioritising as we all prepare for the Big Global Hunker of 2020 (that sounds SO much nicer than quarantine or lockdown, can we change the wording please?).
- Flatter Me: If you’re in the market for a card game to play to while away the hours but think Cards Against Humanity might not be the best thing for your general mood and demeanour over the coming months of NO OUTSIDE, you might want to consider backing this little project called ‘Flatter Me’, which is basically a card game that involves players attempting to agree on what positive words could best be used to describe other players. Which, fine, might sound twee, but I promise you that by mid-May the idea of someone describing you as, I don’t know, ‘elegant’ will reduce you to fcuking floods.
- Multiverse: Another Kickstarter, this one for an RPG system and ruleset which is designed to make super-flexible games playable by anyone, using videogame tech. It’s hugely ambitious in scope, but the target seems eminently reachable with a month to go – the idea is that it will combine editable game mechanics and graphics with a robust game engine and video/voice chat, to bring collaborative tabletop roleplaying to a digital age; if you’re into roleplaying, this is potentially very exciting indeed.
- The Steam Games Festival: If you have a PC or laptop, you can download 30 indie game demos from Steam this weekend for free, which seems like a fun thing to do.
- Boardgame Arena: This site’s struggling to cope with the traffic at the moment, but persist – it’s SUPERB, and, honestly, one of the most useful things I’ve seen this week; it’s basically EVERY SINGLE BOARDGAME EVER (well, 175 of them which is practically the same thing) available to play online, either with local or online competition, for FREE. These are all modern boardgames, or seem to be, so it’s more ‘Carcassone’ than ‘Game of Life’, but, honestly, there’s SO MUCH in here. This is family-friendly fun at its finest, and just a wonderfully-pure piece of internet.
By Marinel Sheu
THE SECTION
- Pixelart: A rather lovely Pixelart drawing tool, letting you easily create…well, in my case it let me easily create a classic cocknballs, but, presuming you have slightly more artistic ability and less of a gutter mindset than I do, this might be something fun to play around with. Why not make a pixelart version of your own face to act as your new avatar for all conference calls? GO ON FFS FOLLOW ONE OF MY SUGGESTIONS FOR ONCE JESUS CHRIST.
- The Colour Dot Font: A font where each letter is represented by a circular dot of different colours, rendering whatever you write a beautiful symphony of colour slightly reminiscent of mid-00s Hirst but also rendering it entirely unreadable. Please implement this on your website and ‘enjoy’ the reaction.
- Ultra-Abridged Books: A selection of books, abridged ‘beyond the point of usefulness’ by Zach Weinersmith (I have no idea if that is in fact Mr Weinersmith’s real name, but I do hope so). These are a particular type of humour, but, to give you a flavour, the Bible’s Genesis is cut down to: “God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time.” – if that vaguely amuses you then you will very much enjoy all of these.
- The Cheeseman: Look, we’re all going to be spending a LOT of time at home, and we’re going to need to broaden our horizons a bit and EXPAND OUR INTERESTS. Why not try getting into cheese? Why not let Gavin Webber take you on a journey through casein? WHY NOT?? Gavin is a cheery Australian with a very soothing manner and a recurring catchphrase (‘G’day, curd nerds’) which basically makes it seem like everything is ok in the world. You want to learn how to make cheddar in your kitchen? You want to learn how to make parmesan (also, it’s worth clicking that particular link for all the violently-irate Italians in there; honestly, my people, SO PROUD!)? Gavin has the knowledge. If this all goes much further south, planet-wise, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gavin engendering some pretty strong feelings of worship among a certain sort of person, tbh.
- AR Coworking: Does this look fun? Or does it look awful? YOU DECIDE!
- Power Slides: It’s PECHA KUCHA, THE GAME! Actually, this sounds sort-of fun, in a very specific sort of way: “During a round of Power Slides one player gives an improvised 5 minute pitch for an imaginary app using a series of randomly selected slides. The app concept will be on the first slide. Slides will advance automatically. On the last slide, the presenter must come up with a name for their app, and the audience must applaud!” – I can imagine that for many of you this is literally the least-fun-sounding thing I have ever put in here, but there are others who’ll read that and think ‘that sounds like a really satisfying way to spend a virtual hour in the groupchat with some homebrew’. Pays money, takes choice, innit.
- Markup: A really smart way of annotating any webpage for collaborative editing and design feedback – plug in any url and it turns it into a canvas that you can add notes, to, enabling anyone to easily leave notes and feedback on specific elements of design. Clever and useful, particularly right now.
- Concentricon: This is literally just a clock on a webpage, but it is SUCH a beautiful clock that I could happily throw it onto a screen and watch it until the end times arrive.
- De-Mainstream: USE THIS WITH CAUTION. Demainstream is a plugin for YouTube which claims to remove ‘mainstream’ media from search results on the platform (as an aside, along with the terms ‘virtue signalling’, ‘cultural marxism’ and ‘political correctness’, I find references to the ‘mainstream media’ in anyone’s output a pretty reliable red flag of borderline nuttiness); which is great for, as the site’s makers claim, finding the REAL creators on the platform rather than the big businesses which have also made it their home. It’s also, though, great for suddenly turning YouTube into a roiling mass of mad, with swivel-eyed Coronaloons EVERYWHERE and a surprising number of people advocating the ingestion of chlorine as the ONLY WAY of staying safe. Can I suggest that you be careful when using this and not leave it installed, maybe?
- Means TV: A really interesting project which I fear will be a casualty of The Times We Live In, MeansTV is meant to be a socially-conscious alternative to Netflix, committed to delivering quality content with a conscience. “Means TV is the world’s first worker-owned, post-capitalist streaming service. Means TV has a library of films, documentaries, and shows with new programming added all the time. We also have live weekly shows covering news, the working class, gaming and sports. All available to subscribers for $10/month across desktop, mobile and smart TV devices like Roku, Fire and Apple TV. No advertisements or product placements. No corporate backers or VC cash ever.” It’s admirable, and important, to attempt to extract the production of art from the moneymaking machine, but I’m not 100% certain it’s sustainable; still, it’s a project that very much deserves a look and perhaps a subscribe – look, I’m not going to lie, there’s a certain ‘knitted hemp’ quality to much of what’s on offer, and I know that an eleven minute, vaguely-Brooklyn-hipsterish account of the history of serfdom isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but equally you can’t only consume TikToks ffs.
- The TV News App: News channels, from around the world, for free, on an app. Although it’s fair to say that this may not be the most appealing time to scan the world’s bulletins for cheering updates and regional curiosities.
- Married To Betty Boop: This is BRILLIANT. A very long-running webcomic, ongoing and collected on this Twitter thread, about what it’s like to be a very anxious man married to the famously-pulchritudinous cartoon character Betty Boop. It features a murderous Bugs Bunny, some therapy sessions, an awful lot of uxoriousness, and is honestly one of the strangest things I have seen for a long, long time. I think, more than anything else, it’s the commitment – this goes DEEP.
- Isolated Vocals: A subReddit featuring, er, loads of isolated vocals from popular songs. I can’t remember if I chucked this in here the other week, but this is where that frankly insane Cyndi Lauper vocal came from – SO GOOD.
- Extinguished Countries: Kickstarting for a series of books about countries, states and principalities that no longer exist; the first book in the planned series is on the Republic of Venice. I think this is a beautiful idea for a series of books, a feeling only slightly tempered by the concern that we may well be an appropriate subject before too long (JOKES WE’LL BE FINE KIDS I PROMISE).
- Medicine On Screen: I’m fairly confident most of you really, really don’t to immerse yourself in medical literature and CONTENT given current circumstances, but, nonetheless, here you are! Web Curios – bringing you stuff you didn’t know you wanted and which in all probability you really don’t want AT ALL, since approximately 2010/11! Listen: “NLM holds a world-renowned historical audiovisual collection of nearly 10,000 titles from the silent era to the present. These films cover a broad range of medical and health-related topics, from public health, surgery, and nursing to mental health, cancer, tuberculosis, child development, tropical medicine, genetics, and substance abuse.” I mean, who DOESN’T want to watch some videos about TB while we’re all locked down? NO FCUKER, that’s who!
- Coloring Book: Oh this is fabulous. “This coloring book is both digital and on paper. The paper copy is where the coloring is done – color through the concepts to explore symmetry and the beauty of math. The digital copy brings the concepts and illustrations to life in interactive animations.” Seriously, click through and get to the meat of the book and all the patterns and tesselations animate so delightfully – I could honestly stare at this for hours, and perhaps you might want to do that too.
- The Bird Museum: Frivolous art/game poroject of the week #1 – download the ‘game’ and get the ability to wander around a giant virtual art gallery full of pictures of birds drawn by people across the world – some good, some bad, all remarkably cheering. Each bird was drawn by someone on Twitter, and there are over 1000 of them to browse, the museum refreshes and rearranges every time you visit, guaranteeing you a unique, bird-art experience each time you open it up. So, so lovely, totally silly, near-perfect.
- The Library of Babble: Another one you need to download, but this is also a glorious mix of artwank and words and gentle game mechanic – navigate the topographically-marked landscape and as you do you will come across short stories left there by people across the world; from a few words to a few sentences, these fragments of narrative create a sort of patchwork of stories and feelings across this imagined landscape, and you can add your own at certain points. Honestly, this is a really nice thing to just drop into every now and again – highly recommended.
- Football Manager: I don’t leave this link here lightly – I know what this game has done to marriages, careers, relationships – but, well, it is time Football Manager – what old people used to call Champ Man back in the day – is available for free for another couple of days. FREE. YOU CAN LITERALLY SPEND THE ENTIRETY OF QUARANTINE HELPING STRANRAER BECOME THE EUROPEAN SUPERPOWER THEY WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO BE!! When we finally emerge, blinking, into the post-lockdown sunshine, molelike and pale, there will be a certain coterie of men (it is always men) who will be desperate to get back inside to carry on with the Brazilian third-tier playoffs of 2039.
By Jenny Morgan
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:
- Archimaps: Architecture and maps. But really interesting examples of both, I promise.
- Art For Housewives: Not in fact a Tumblr, but instead a slightly old-school blog, this is maintained by an artist living in Italy and details her thoughts, her practice and her work. I really hope that the next few months sees a return to this style of personal documentation; video’s fine, yes, but sometimes written words are just better.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Logofonts: Want to know what fonts are being used in which logos? No, I can’t imagine you do, and yet still I persist in thrusting this, unbidden, into your face.
- Soap Journal: Old soaps, in their packaging. More interesting than you might think, I promise.
- 24h Plays: This used to be about time-limited theatre, but has seemingly pivoted to sharing videos of actors delivering monologues from plays, which, if I’m honest, is a pleasing contrast to the amateur-hour entertainment being produced by the rest of Insta. I wonder whether we’ll all sort of lose the love for lo-fi UGC after we’re forced to spend three months or more watching ordinary people being ordinary, BRING BACK HOLLYWOOD AND AIRBRUSHING!
- Etn.co_man: I don’t ordinarily feature cutesy food stuff but, honestly, this Japanese person’s food art is fcuking astonishing.
- Electricalgram: An instagram feed that is solely about electrical engineering. It shares photos of wires and junction boxes ffs. I include the for the following reasons: 1) it is boring, niche and largely-inexplicable, making it near-perfect Web Curios content; 2) it is proof that, whatever your community, if you make something that is of use to it you will get numbers – there are over 165k people following this account ffs; 3) there is, inexplicably, exactly ONE slightly-creepy photo of two young women in black dresses standing next to a slightly-grubby-looking circuitbox – WHY??? WHO ARE THE ELECTRICITY GIRLS???
- Love Is Quarantine: I mentioned to someone that one of the interesting things I think will happen as a result of this is a boom in new entertainment formats – this sort of thing, for example. Love is Quarantine is a riff on insanely-popular dating show ‘Love Is Blind’; it’s been set up this week by two guys who share a flat in the US, and the gimmick is that each day people apply to be set up on dates via a Google sheet; they’re then matched with a date by the showrunners, which then happens over chat later that day. Participants then share their feedback on the date, which is broadcast over Insta as part of the ‘show’, and the whole thing is SO charming (very American, but) and fun, and there is the seed of a really strong show in here imho.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG (AND WHICH THIS WEEK INCLUDES THIS SELECTION OF 30 FREE eBOOKS FROM ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS)!:
- A Short Note About This Week’s Longreads: Ok, so I’ve tried to keep the longreads largely misery-and-horror free – I imagine you all know where to find SERIOUS NEWS and THINKING about THE PANDEMIC and THE RESPONSE, and, frankly, as previously stated I have no expertise in or around any of the issues affecting us at the moment; as such, I’ve tried to keep this week’s selection, insofar as it touches on WHAT’S GOING ON, on the side of cultural observations, which feel less…well, potentially-terrifying, frankly. Basically, though, there’s lots of stuff to read in here this week which has NOTHING to do with the news and so I encourage you to scroll down a bit and pick some pleasing prose distractions of your choosing.
- Our Self-Isolating Future: This piece asks the question which I’ve seen several people grappling with this week, to whit ‘will we ever work in the same way ever again?’. This is mainly focused on the practical realities of coworking and collaboration being now proven to…sort-of work, for most white-collar gigs at least, and whether that this, coupled with a potentially more-virally-compromised future, might lead to this, or a version of this, becoming The Norm in the medium-term. The thinking gets interesting towards the end where it begins to consider the societal implications of this sort of shift; this isn’t a miserable piece, per se, but it might make you think slightly scifi thoughts, so, well, caveat emptor. If you’re interested, this piece in Technology Review looks at the same topic from a slightly more technical perspective, coming to many of the same broad conclusions.
- Delivery In An Age of Pandemic: This is a every angry, slightly shouty, piece in VICE which asks the quite reasonable question of all of us: “Are we stopping to think about the poor fcuks who are the human pieces in the logistics operation ensuring we can order whatever the fcuk we want from the internet and still expect to find it on our doorstep within 24h, pandemic be damned?” No, of course we’re not, and there’s nothing we can do about it – fine, it’s nice to say to people “Don’t buy stuff from places that do delivery”, but not everyone has that privilege; simultaneously, the precarious nature of this sort of supplychain work means there’s a legitimate argument to suggest that we’ve sort of got an obligation to support workers in these jobs who will likely have no security whatsoever. Basically this is a cast-iron example of the magic of the modern capitalist machine, in which whatever you do someone, somewhere is in essence getting fcuked with knives. I know that this is perhaps a bit pinko-utopian of me, but I do rather hope that we come out of this with rather more of a ‘no, these systems are not OK’-type view than we do at present. The central message, though – that in times like these we shouldn’t be buying frivolous sh1t online, or pretending that doing so doesn’t have very real consequences – is one we should all get behind.
- “I’m Not An Epidemiologist, But…”: Excellent reporting by Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed, focusing on the author of a certain post on Medium that has apparently gone EVERYWHERE this week (I didn’t see it as I am trying not to read stuff about this that I have no hope of understanding) and which opens with that exact line – because it was written by some bloke in marketing! If you can read this piece and not get small shudders of horror at the revelation (deliciously, just left there without comment) that said marketing bloke has employed a content promotion agency to help get even more attention and fame as a result of having written something viral, you’re a stronger person than I am. USING YOUR PANDEMIC SPECULATIONS FOR THE CLOUT, IS IT??? My days. Honestly.
- Our Boring Instagram Lives: Or, alternatively, The Great Content Boom of 2020. This piece positions the sharing of quotidian mundanity on the socials as being effectively a form of ‘self care’, a kind of ‘we’re all in it together’ sort of boring shared experience that will start to see people becoming more and more comfortable sharing streams, audio, images and the rest of the every day. Which is almost certainly true, but which doesn’t fill me with joy; I know that sharing’s good and all that jazz, but I’m also increasingly aware that it will be entirely possible to Soma oneself through the next XX weeks of this simply by staring at your tiny screen at other human beings doing nothing and, well, it doesn’t feel like that’s a great idea tbh.
- The World of Zoom: Three weeks ago, you’d never heard of Zoom; now you’ve got a favourite background, you know the jokes, you call yourself a ‘Zoomer’ (please, don’t do that, even if you’re a kid)…this is a really interesting NYT piece (whose web culture team, Taylor Lorenz in particular, are SO good at the moment) on how people (mainly kids) are using the platform, how it might birth new entertainment formats (see the dating Insta thing above, eg) and how its use may persist the CRISIS into everyday life. I can’t speak for everyone, fine, but I fcuking despise phonecalls AND video chat, and yet even I can see myself doing it over the next few months. Maybe I’ll learn to stop hating my face.
- The Virtual Happy Hour: You don’t need me to describe what this article is about. A prediction, though – within a month, someone will go viral for getting VERY drunk and behaving disgracefully in one of these groupchats. Actually, maybe I should amend that to ‘within a week’; things are moving awfully fast.
- Cash App Friday: Cash App is a money transfer app in the US, like Venmo but less famous. Every week, the company behind it gives away money to random users – the only catch is, you need to have the app. BOOM! Instant user-acquisition strategy and a viral moment on social media every week as people across Twitter and Insta start BEGGING Cash App to choose them for the drop. UK BRANDS – there is a MASSIVE opportunity around something like this right now, if you can afford to do big giveaway things; hard to get tonally right, fine, but I reckon we’ll see a couple of people create weekly competition/quiz-type giveaway things in the next few weeks that will do very, very well indeed.
- TikTok’s Africa Play: TikTok continues to be a fascinating case study in terms of social media 2.0 rollout (sorry for the 2.0 thing, but you know what I mean; post-Insta, basically); this piece looks at how it’s effectively paying African YouTubers to make content for TikTok in the hope that their fans will follow them across and drive adoption. Smart, and also nakedly cynical – it’s rather impressive in a bleak sort of way.
- TikTok’s Invisible Censorship: Ever wonder why TikTok is so MIDDLE-CLASS and BEAUTIFUL? By design, turns out, as moderation was in place to weed out users who looked ugly or ‘ghetto’ (yes, really – parse that however you will) in favour of more visually-appealing kids who were more likely to keep viewers watching. “Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose. Videos in which “the shooting environment is shabby and dilapidated,” including but “not limited to … slums, rural fields” and “dilapidated housing” were also systematically hidden from new users, though “rural beautiful natural scenery could be exempted”” On the one hand, this is vile; on the other, the public gets what the public wants, etc etc etc.
- Folding City: Toyota has very quietly created a hugely-interesting experiment in AI, with the development of the very-Resident Evil-sounding ‘Folding City’ at the base of Mount Fuji, which in 2021 is scheduled to become the world’s first robotic city, in which robotics and AI are integrated into every aspect of civic and social planning. Reading this in the context of the past week is a genuinely-fascinating look at how a post-Corona society might look, with an increased in automated delivery systems and more spaced out housing, etc – obviously, this is very much ‘how a post-Corona society might look for the rich’, but it’s a rare piece of futurology that feels as contemporary as this currently does.
- From Pr0n to YouTube: Another piece about platform stars pivoting to new formats in an attempt to expand their audiences – after last week’s piece on Twitch streamers trying to make it on TikTok, now it’s the stars of bongo trying to get some of that mainstream appeal by posting wholesome, relatable content on the Tube. Why? Well, audience is money, and I would imagine that bongo really isn’t that lucrative for most performers these days; if you can command an audience of hundreds of thousands for your home workout videos, maybe one day you’ll get to stop having to play ‘P1sspig Granddad’ in “Urinal Chuggers XII”. It’s interesting how as the online entertainment industry matures a bit we’re seeing a similar move from its stars toward becoming ‘entertainers’ and wanting to capture as many demographics as possible, just like back in the day.
- 25 Songs That Matter Now: This is, I think, the third year the NYT has done that, and as ever it’s a superb overview of the current state of the music scene, taking you from Lizzo to Swift to del Rey to Styles to…oh, just click the link. Really beautiful webwork, too, although personally were I some of these artists I might feel a little bit like the artist had something of a grudge against some of these poor famouses. I mean, Lana del Rey, what DID you do to this person?
- The Perks of Being a Weirdo: On how oddity and outsider-ness at a young age can help with creativity in later life. Which obviously I agree with, as someone who was very much in the ‘only not picked last for games because there were at least two kids in his class with genuine disabilities’ camp, although part of me does slightly wonder whether it’s b0llocks and the jocks are just as creative as we are, it’s just that they don’t have to bother because they enjoy life just as it is and don’t have to waste their time making up imagined worlds in which they’re the special stars.
- Cottagecore: I feel like this is coming like a tidal wave. Cottagecore is the aesthetic trend towards the sort of ‘I live in the country and raise chickens and my daily existence is simply a long line of domestic activities which I complete with an air of zenlike calm and without getting even a bit of cupcake batter on my immaculate vintage polkadot Amish dress”; which, basically, is absolutely the Pinterest-version of social isolation that we’re all going to be subjected to.
- From Bongo To Oscar: Will Pr0nhub ever win an Oscar? Why not? This is an interesting look at the entertainment industry, which posits that on the basis of numbers alone there’s no reason why Pr0nhub won’t be able to expand upon its recent foray into non-bongo content and perhaps become a proper production company a la Netflix.
- Cameo: I featured Cameo on here a few years back – or certainly something very similar to it – as you will doubtless-recall; it’s a platform that lets you pay ‘celebrities’ a set fee to record a message for you, and its popularity is BOOMING. You want to get Dave Benson Philips to wish your gran a happy birthday? JOB DONE! You want to get Darren Bent to tell your mate he’s got no tekkers? YES MATE! This is a really entertaining look at the site and how it works, and the weird economy of celebrity that means people really are willing to pay a Tom Cruise lookalike to perform a small reaction video that they can use as their signature sign-off in Stories for evermore.
- Charm With Menaces: I imagine many of you are planning on getting cosy with the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy; this is a (no spoilers: laudatory) review of it in the LRB, which whilst being, obviously, incredibly positive, does a good job of not just being a total hagiography. If you enjoyed Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies, and even if you’re yet to read the final novel, this is a superb piece of literary criticism and a pleasure to read.
- Naked & Afraid: In the US, there’s a TV show in which two people get dumped, naked, into the wilderness, and have to survive for four weeks with no assistance. This article is the story of a female contestant on the show; it’s a brilliant behind-the-curtain peek at how the sausage is made, and you will be amazed at just how little artifice is used in production of this quite insane-sounding show.
- On Motherhood and Money: A superb essay – one of a few on the topic I’ve included in here in the past few years, but it does seem to produce excellent writing – on the burdens of art and motherhood and production and getting paid and parenting and guilt on writing women. So, so well-written and well-observed.
- Broken Country: Or, sexuality and disability. Molly McCully Brown writes wryly (I know, I know, ‘wry’ is one of those qualities that noone actually ever exhibits outside of fiction, but I promise it fits here) and movingly about being a sexually active, interested, curios adult in a body which, during adolescence, is widely seen as nothing but asexual, and how her life is defined, sexually or otherwise, by her experience of a body which fights her. “Just as I hit adolescence, my body abruptly began to break down. I grew, and so did my physical instability. My tendons tightened, and my pain increased. The doctors scheduled another set of medical procedures: a surgery, a summer in a set of full-leg plaster casts and then a pair of heavy, bulky metal braces. Just as I began to learn I could feel sexual desire, I was splintered and in pain again, and the fact of it demanded most of my attention. My earliest experiences with lust feel shrunken by the trauma, vague and distanced, as if I watched through a scratched viewfinder while they happened to someone else. I can’t identify them for you except as strange, dark shapes at an unreachable horizon line.” Beautiful.
- My Gchat Affair: An office ‘romance’, never consummated, conducted over Gchat, recalled in painfully-clear detail by Eleanor Thomas. If you’ve ever had a workplace relationship of any sort, there will be elements of this that are so painfully familiar that you will wince with recognition.
- Absolution:The story of a former child soldier who served in Joseph Kony’s (remember him? Wow, where does the time go) army in the late 90s and early-00s, told mostly in his own words, as told to Adriana Carranca. An incredible piece of writing, which manages to present its subject as victim and perpetrator, as the poor man surely was; be warned, there is a LOT of very unpleasant violence in this piece, alluded to if not always explicitly described, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
- What Do We Do With Feelings Now That They Don’t Matter Anymore?: WARNING: this will not make you feel happy if you read it. That said, I thought it a superb piece of writing, on what we are supposed to do with the feeling that feeling sad is just what we do now, and how we are going to feel forever. Look, here’s a flavour of it: “We’re in a moment now where we have had these lives that we’ve lived, things we have said, things we have achieved, people we love, but in the end, the stuff that matters is whether or not we can survive, and who else we can help to survive. You may have been told all your life that there were certain things you needed and certain things you needed to do, but it turns out that you don’t need most of those things and you don’t really need to do anything. In fact, nothing would be better for the world right now than if we all stopped trying to achieve things and said, “We no longer believe work will set us free, it is the opposite, in fact,” and behaved accordingly.” I thought this was beautiful but, really, take care with it.
- The Knowledge: Finally this week, a longread about cabbies doing the knowledge. There was an EXCELLENT New York Times piece about exactly this which I included in Curios about 5 years ago – this treads similar ground, obviously, but is far, far better at asking questions about the intangible qualities of specific types of knowledge or information which mean we perhaps ought to value them differently or separately to their utility. Regardless, this is a superb, entertaining, warm piece of writing which made me forget about everything for five minutes while I read it; I hope it does the same for you too.
Weirdly enough, I didn’t see ANY interesting music videos this week so this week’s Curios ends here, with me wishing you a safe week til I write one of these fcukers again. Take care of yourselves, and thanks for reading. I love each and every one of you with a troubling intensity that I am almost ashamed to admit.
By Miki Kim