Webcurios 22/04/16

HOW ABOUT KICKING OFF WITH A CONTEMPORARY SELECTION OF TRACKS PICKED BY GERMAN MAG ‘NERDCORE’?

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT, WHEN WE AS A SPECIES ARE TOO LAZY TO EVEN TRY AND TYPE WORDS PERTAINING TO THE TYPE OF BONGO WE WANT TO WATCH, WE MAY WELL BE ON SOME SORT OF SLIPPERY SLOPE TBQHYWM:

• Facebook Tweaks Newsfeed Algorithm (Again): BREAKING NEWS! Or at least it is if you’re reading this hot off my fingers (wow, that sounds wrong doesn’t it? Sorry!); if you’re getting it from the CurioBot then maybe less so. Anyway, Facebook just announced that the Newsfeed is once again going to behave slightly differently – now prioritising content based on the likely amount of time it thinks you’re going to spend looking at it, as well as seeking to minimise multiple posts from the same source in your feed. As ever, they maintain that brands will see minimal disruption – which considering the near-0% status of organic Page reach is probably about right AMIRITE KIDS?! Although actually if you’re a prolific publisher then this is perhaps rather more important (cf the New York Times, regularly taking up ⅔ of my feed with its NEWS, dammit).

• Facebook Testing Differentiated Newsfeed: It’s a REALLY slow news week when I’m reduced to posting speculative Mashable links like this one. RUMOUR HAS IT that Facebook…oh, I’m just going to quote here: “Facebook is experimenting with a new layout on mobile that highlights multiple news sections, with topics such as World & U.S., Sports and Food. However, the primary (and presumably default) section is still the classic news feed we’re accustomed to seeing.” Interesting idea, though whether test users will find it overwhelming remains to be seen. Just think of all the differentiated ad options this will allow for, though!

• You May Soon Be Able To Monetise EVERYTHING on Facebook: I mean, realistically you probably won’t, and ‘soon’ is frankly a massive red herring, but. SOURCES suggest that they’re floating the idea of being able to apply a sort of virtual tip jar to posts, letting your ‘friends’ contribute pennies to reward you for the pithy bons mots about your idealised children and relationship you choose to spaff all over Facebook. Perhaps more probably, it seems they are also canvassing people about their willingness to shill on behalf of brands – direct influencer marketing with Facebook raking in a potential cut of any fees paid, thereby cutting out agencies? WHY NOT?

• Group Calling Launches in Messenger: Basically just that; you can now start group voicechat through FB Messenger, with the ability for others to drop in mid-call. The idea of speaking on the phone on a one-on-one basis scares me enough, frankly, but you may be more socially ept than I am.

• Facebook Lets You Buy Video Ads A Bit More Like You Do On TV: Yes, that’s a bit clunky, but what do you want? It’s vaguely factually accurate – you’ll soon be able to buy Facebook video ads in time blocks, so to air between specific times of the day, and (in the US at least) match your ad targeting on Facebook to your TV targeting, allowing for consistent campaigns (and, I suppose, better compare/contrast benchmarking of ad performance across platforms). So there.

• YouTube Introduces 360-degree Livestreaming: Hot on the heels of Facebook attempting to OWN live video last week comes this update from Google, announcing that (with the right kit) you can now stream video in 360. It’s currently only available in YouTube Space locations, but London’s one of those so if you work for the FA or similar I’d probably start talking to them about your next big live event thingy.

• Google Also Tweaking TV Integration: I know that I am supposed to at least pretend, but I have to confess that I find stuff about ad buying and placement and programmatic and all that jazz INTENSELY dull, so I’m just going to leave this here and you can do what you like with it: “Today we are taking big steps to bring new addressable advertising capabilities to TV Broadcasters and Distributors by announcing DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion. This makes ads hyper relevant for viewers across any screen that they watch. By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today. And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.” Exciting, eh?

• Snapchat Stops Charging for Replays, Launches Additional Faceswap Capabilities: The fact that the newly announced ability to swap your face with that of ANY photo on your camera roll is news is strangely comforting in the middle of all this celebrity death stuff. Anyway, that is now a thing, as is the fact that Snapchat’s given up trying to monetise replays of Snaps. Seeing as we’re on Snapchat, this Prince tribute is nice and a just-in-time antidote to MarleyGate; this is how you make Snapchat Stickers on video (announced last week; DO KEEP UP) work; and did you know that they are bringing back MTV Cribs as a Snapchat show? YES THEY ARE! Actually makes a lot of sense, that last one; when Through The Keyhole takes the same step then we’ll truly know that the platform’s adoption by the mainstream is fully complete.  

• Shazam For Brands: Slightly odd one, this, as there’s not 100% detail on what this actually means; from what I can tell, though, Shazam for Brands effectively indicates that the platform is going to start adding more Augmented Reality capabilities and wants to persuade brands to partner with them to create AUGMENTED ADVERTISING EXPERIENCES linked to packaging, etc. So basically fancy logo/packaging-based QR codes a la Blippar, maybe; this isn’t a bad idea actually, given the high install base the app has, although whether anyone actually wants to, say, scan biscuit for content is another thing entirely.

• Quora Introducing Ads: Which, if you’re targeting Silicon Valley types or people in India, is potentially BIG NEWS.

• The Future of Bots: You know how Facebook announced bots for Messenger last week? This is what the future of that is going to look like – brand-owned bots, butting into your conversations unbidden, shouting about special offers and GREAT DEALS. “Meet outside Starbucks at 6…” “I NOTICE YOU SAID STARBUCKS; WOULD YOU LIKE A VOUCHER FOR A HOT CAFFEINATED BEVERAGE REDEEMABLE ONLY TODAY” “Fcuk off, Starbucks”.

• The Public House Failed Pitch Emporium: Dublin-based agency The Public House is selling off unsuccessful creative from pitches on eBay.  A rather nice idea, I think, although you sort of hope if anyone does buy and use these successfully that they’ll chuck the agency an additional few quid as a thankyou (you won’t, will you? GITS).

• Press Release Bullsh1t: Generate your own and see how many people you can get to sign it off.

• Emoji for Bongo: Pornhub are GREAT at PR, there’s no doubt about it. Although the less charitably minded among you might suggest that there’s no easier job than peddling bongo, you have to concede that they do it with imagination. This is the latest iteration of the “order X with emoji” bandwagon which we saw last year with pizza and film and stuff; in this case, users just text an emoji to a certain phone number (works in the UK too, kids!), and they will receive back a particular style of bongo based on the emoji they sent – you can see a list of commands at the link, but brilliantly there are a whole load of secret ones they don’t tell you – and because you pay (and they earn) per text, they earn pennies every time you experiment with the more esoteric of the unicode characters. Really rather smart, although make sure your teenage children don’t hear about this as the potential phonebill consequences could be ruinous, not to mention the hairy palms.

SHALL WE PROCEED WITH A TRULY SPECTACULAR DUB/REGGAE/DANCEHALL MIX IN TRIBUTE TO THE LATE, LAMENTED DJ DEREK? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY CONVINCED THAT CARTOONS WERE BETTER IN THE 90S, PT.1:

• Reuters TV News: Obviously not TV as it’s on the web. STUPID REUTERS. Although obviously that’s an increasingly meaningless distinction, so, er, stupid me. (parenthetical aside – I once had a client who, in an early meeting about website design, asked me the following question with a very serious face: “But, Matt, what is news? What is blog?” I was plunged into a pretty serious taxonomical tailspin for weeks, I tell you). Anyway, a clever idea from Reuters whose TV news site will stitch together a bespoke selection of video news stories HOT OFF THE CAMERAS based on how long you tell it you have; 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, etc. The idea is superclever – you can imagine with a combination of geolocation and really smart software in the back you could produce very slick bespoke reports on the fly – although at the time of writing it’s not seeming to update quite as quickly as you’d want (it was still leading with Japan’s earthquakes after Ecuador’s had happened, for example). Still, interesting idea and slick site.

• The NASA Standards Manual: NASA’s design handbook, available for sale next month, has a beautiful-looking website teasing all the lovely, lovely branding. If you’re a designer then you may want a copy of this – it’s *ahem* ‘iconic.

• Hello World In Esoteric Programming Languages: Included for no other reason than that I had no idea that there were so many joke coding languages. Who made these? You probably have to be a certain type of person to enjoy these (ie a coder), so feel quite free to skip this one if you’re not.

• The Motherlode of Skating Brands: An encyclopaedic compendium of brands pertaining to skateboarding and skater culture, with logos and information about who they sponsored as well as a selection of their ads. Brilliant if you’re looking for logo / design inspiration, but also as an look at how a culture has evolved (or hasn’t, depending) over time. I had no idea there was a skate brand called ‘Bitch’, for example – the logo’s, er, nice.

• Holonumber: You want to be able to set up a whole load of numbers across the world all feeding into one place? You can, apparently, with this service. Yes, OK, not a superexcitingfunsoundingthing, but it might be REALLY USEFUL for some of you, and there’s probably some sort of fun international prank you can set up. It’s launching at the end of this month; you can sign up if you’re interested.

• We Stay: Well, we might; let’s see how the next couple of months pan out, shall we? Anyway, this is a campaign site by the Lib Dems (remember them? They were all the rage back in 2010), exhorting people to share their memories and photographs of how ACE being in the EU is, with the promise of Eurostar tickets as a potential prize. Which is nice. It’s all so EARNEST, though, the site, with all the smiling politicos and activists. Whilst Web Curios FIRMLY ENDORSES staying in the EU (in case you were wondering), we also firmly endorse getting involved with this and, er, livening up the submissions a bit. Got a nice picture of MAD BARRY on some stag do in ‘Dam? CHUCK ‘EM ON THERE!

• HOVR: Standing desks were a THING for a while last year, if you recall – good for your health, keep you thin, convince your colleagues that you’re some sort of indestructible uberworker whose dedication to both your toned calves and the wellbeing of the company is unparalleled amongst the workforce. The only downsides were all the standing up and the fact that, well, you look like a bit of a weirdo. Here, then, is the new solution to the problem of how to work off the Graze box at your desk – HOVR is, basically, a set of pedals you shove under your desk to let you simulate walking whilst sitting down in white-collar servitude. Much like Diet Coke, if you spend all your time at work scoffing cake and crisps this probably isn’t going to be the solution to your waistband issues, just FYI.

• World Of Waterfalls: Literally THE only website celebrating the waterfalls of the world you are ever going to need. There is much to love about this, not least the breathless enthusiasm for these crazy conjunctions of water and gravity, but I think my favourite line is that the author and his wife “Love chasing waterfalls”; mate, they don’t move, you shouldn’t have to chase them. Or is that a TLC reference? Either way, I LOVE THEM.

• Love Clock: Would you like a Chrome extension which gives you a beautiful, animated clock each time you open a new tab? Yes, of course you would.

• Cyark: You’ll doubtless have seen the story of the recreation of the Arch of Palmyra in Trafalgar Square this week; Cyark are a company which goes around the world 3d scanning global heritage sites so that they can be preserved and in some cases replicated. A wonderful project, and the tech behind it is really rather interesting; if I were a really rich brand I’d look into working with them in some way (or, you know, just throw money at them because they do GOOD THINGS).

• Happy Dude: Absolutely my favourite moneymaking scheme of the week; Happy Dude is a website selling ‘units of happiness’ online for $1 (Canadian) apiece. You buy a unit of happiness, you get, well, marginally happier, as well as a digital representation of your Unit of Happiness to demonstrably prove that you’re marginally happier on Facebook. Give this person a medal, they are a BUSINESS GENIUS (I have bought three, and can confidently state that I feel several orders of magnitude happier than I did when I first woke up this morning – in case the site owner is reading this, you can totally use that endorsement for, say, $3 (Canadian)).

• Basically One Of The Games Off Tron In VR: Setting a new low bar there for the descriptors, I am aware, but seriously, I have no idea how to describe this and the details are pretty iffy at best, and frankly it may never arrive, BUT…this is created by the people who make giant spaceship spreadsheet simulation EVE Online, and is basically their prototype eSport which, using Oculus and other tech, lets you play a frankly BRILLIANT-LOOKING neon 3d game which involves you and an opponent flinging weird future lightfrisbees at each other, just like in Tron. Take a look – this really does look very fun indeed.

• Brilliant Mashup: A Twitter account generating ideas for pop-culture mashups, many of which may well prove legitimately decent inspiration, but which generally does a terrifyingly good job of capturing the tone of all this “look, it’s a steampunk Mario!” posts. “I want this! It’s a Twitter account that has pictures from The Dark Knight but with quotes from Aladdin” – actually, that’s almost certainly already out there. Ah, culture!

• Jasper St Aubyn West: I really hope that that’s his real name. Anyway, this is an Instagram account featuring photos which have had small cartoons drawn over them, illustrating everyday scenes with cute monsters and flourishes. Not superoriginal, but the execution is nice and I think that there’s a nice reactive brand Instagram thing you could do with some artists over a week – share your pics on Instagram with a brand using a particular hashtag, some get picked to be drawn on by artists and sent back to the submitter who then obviously reshares them, BINGO BRANDED CONTENT REACH ENGAGEMENT. God, this is wasted on you, isn’t it? Christ.

• The Raycat Solution: This is…odd. Imagine a future in which we need to warn people about potential radiation outbreaks. Done that? Good. Now imagine a world in which that’s easy to do because our predecessors thought to genetically engineer cats so as to change colour if they’re exposed to degrees of radiation. “Alan, the cat’s turning pink – what does that mean?” “TO THE BUNKER, SHEILA!”. You know, that sort of thing. Anyway, this is a seemingly serious community of people dedicated to discussing issues around genetic engineering and biology and stuff, and the cat thing is just a starting point, but still – GLOWING RADIOACTIVITY-SENSITIVE CATS!

• IconSpeak: A really nice piece of design, this; a tshirt which is covered in a series of icons designed to work as universal signifiers for a bunch of things which travellers might need to communicate when in a foreign land; ‘hungry’, ‘thirsty’, ‘imminently in danger of spectacularly voiding myself in public if you don’t help me find a bathroom sharpish’, ‘a goat has eaten my passport’, that sort of thing. I imagine that this is already getting ripped off left right and centre all over the world, but maybe the right brand could partner with them for something. Perhaps.

• An Online Metronome: Look, it might be useful for you.

• Online Speech-to-Text Tool: If you need one, this is actually pretty good – as with all these things you’ll need to speak slowly, but suggest you have it open in the background whilst attempting to lure colleagues into saying something personally or professionally compromising, just in case.

• Wander Round Don Draper’s Apartment: Yes, I know that Mad Men finished years ago, but it’s not my fault that this software developer’s only decided to make this now. Anyway, this is a nice promo for some 3d modelling service which creates interactive models based on floorplans; you can stroll through Don’s apartment and, er, add loads more furniture to it, should you so desire.

• Timeular: Timesheets are HORRID, aren’t they? Not that I’d know, to be honest – I never really did them, even when at a PROPER BIG AGENCY, and even when I did they were entirely fictitious (YEAH! TAKE THAT, THE MAN!). Still, I’ve had enough experience to know how unfun the general premise is; this is meant to take the pain away. Timeular is a die-like thingy which links to the web and times your activity – you position it with a certain face facing upwards and the clock starts ticking, assigning your time to whatever you’ve determined said face corresponds to;when you switch to another task, you switch the device so that the appropriate face is uppermost and the whole thing begins anew. The idea being that having a physical object there will remind you to log your time properly, and that this is somehow less onerous than clicking a button. Hm. Well it looks nice, at least.

• OurMix: A N Other music suggestion toy, this one with the gimmick that it uses what your friends are listening to on Spotify to select and suggest new listens for YOU. Except, and this is a pretty significant flaw, just because I like someone and am friends with them it doesn’t mean that I share any musical tastes with them whatsoever (in fairness this is something my friends, or at least those of them who I have ever shared a house with, are far more likely to say about me).

• Mighty TV: Clever idea, ripping off the Tinder interface to let you swipe through films and TV shows in order to teach it what you like and provide recommendations based on algorithms and STUFF; there’s ‘Watch Now’ functionality built in, and you can link it with your various streaming accounts. A nice idea which I could see being coopted by Sky or someone similar.

• Skute: Slightly shamefully I think this is a) London-based; and b) not in any way new, and yet this is the first I’ve heard of it. Skute is an interesting idea – physical…thingies (yes, yes, I know) which can be used as little dead drops for digital files; you use NFC tech to transfer files from your phone to the…thingy…which can then go with you as a sort of phone-compatible USB, or be left somewhere in the physical world for anyone to tap-to-download the stuff on it. As with all these things – this is not, obviously, an entirely new concept – the potential for some really rather fun executions is big – music especially strikes me as really fertile territory for this one.

• The Simpsons Brand IDs: Like the Simpsons? Like branding? OH GOOD! These are really rather odd, and all the better for it.

• The Latest Crazy Magic Leap Video: In case you didn’t see it already next week, the latest in the series of ‘is it vaporware? Is it magic? NOONE KNOWS!’ promos from Google-backed purveyors of AR trickery Magic Leap is, as per the previous ones, simply jaw-dropping. Raises a lot of questions – namely, HOW DOES IT WORK? – but the most future thing you will see all week, hands down. Other AR tech is of course available, but it’s not anywhere near as stupidly impressive.

• Colordot: A really useful little iOS app for picking colours and associated palettes; the interface in particular is really rather impressive.

• Name That Blue: All tech / web companies are blue. ALL OF THEM. See how many different shades YOU can identify in this surprisingly fun pseudogame.

• Slitscanner: Tweet gifs at this Twitter account and it will (eventually) tweet them back at you, having run them through a slitscanner filter which will make them look all streeeeeetched and glitched and generally weird and sort of cool if you like that sort of thing.

I WENT TO SEE NONKEEN THIS WEEK AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY LOVELY; LISTEN TO THEM HERE AND MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY CONVINCED THAT CARTOONS WERE BETTER IN THE 90S, PT.2:

• Losswords: OH THIS LOOKS FUN! Kickstarter campaign which just got funded to produce a mobile game which is all about playing with words; users get given passages from literature and are tasked with finding the words within words – “ass” within “passage”, that sort of thing – these then get turned into other puzzles which challenge yet other users to reconstitute the passages. Annoyingly hard to explain, you can click the link and watch the video for a far more cogent explanation – this looks GREAT.

• DoGooder: Interesting set of online tools for campaigning purposes, letting you do a whole load of stuff you’d traditionally have to pay an agency for for a fraction of the cost. Email systems, simple websites, political targeting…this is potentially really quite powerful, and is set up to work in the UK. If you’re a small campaigning body with limited budgets this is DEFINITELY worth a look, I think.

• PostLoudness: The latest in a series of sites which seek to shine a light on some of the more diverse corners of the podcasting world, PostLoudness showcases podcasts by women, POC and queer-identified hosts; doesn’t mean that the topics have anything to do with gender or identity politics, mind, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in getting some slightly more diverse opinions on stuff you’re interested in.

• Source CodeVHS: In the unlikely event that you know anyone who wants a VHS recorder beautifully customised to recreate the artwork of VHS covers from classic horror movies then THIS is for you. Or if you’re looking for an artist to commission to beautify some other electronic gewgaw, perhaps – you can probably think of something, can’t you?

• Take A Look Back At 1986: This was the world as of 30 years ago, as reconunted in pictures on The Atlantic. Such wonderful shots – absolute time travel here.

• Electmeme: Picking the favourite memes of the US Presidential contest so far; this site is a depressing reminder that the memes have been a rare moment of light in what’s been an almost uniformly toxic and depressing process. Oh, and it links to voter registration too, so well done them – you want to mobilise the young vote, Stay in the EU-type people? This sort of thing might be a better bet than that Lib Dem site up there. Just saying.

• MOON!: I have no idea who actually wants one of these in their house, but judging by the success of the Kickstarter campaign there are LOTS of people who desire a beautifully-realised scale model of the moon, complete with accurate lighting to depict lunar phases and stuff. If you want to make some sort of moon-based space epic, on reflection, this could actually be the most cost-effective SFX solution out there. Also, it is called MOON, which is rather lovely.

• Hunch.ly: This is REALLY interesting. If you’re a reporter or a muckraker I can imagine it coming very much in handy – Hunch.ly is a Chrome extension which stores webpages as you browse, creating an archive of all text and images you’ve viewed as you’re looking into something, tracking names, etc, that crop up. It’s all stored locally – if you’re a journalist I’d suggest having a play with this as it sounds VERY useful.

• The Gear Award: A gallery of digital art experiments, mostly in WebGL. I love this sort of stuff; there’s LOADS in here to check out and play with.

• Our Unfinished World: Unfinished World is a London-based project which leaves cards around various locations in the city and invites people who find them to leave their own reflections on London around the web. Whimsical and lovely, and some of the writing on the site is really rather nice. Still in its infancy, but the seeds of a nice piece of art here.

• The Hovercart: Hoverboards were so 2015, weren’t they? Do you remember that brief vogue for the things, thousands of which are now gathering post-Christmas dust beneath teenager’s beds the continent over? Well DRAG THAT PLASTIC BACK OUT, kids – this attachment lets you turn your staggeringly unsafe and flammable personal transportation device into an in-no-way-equally-unsafe GoKart! What could possibly go wrong?

• The Black Dahlia: Obligatory 420 post of the week, pt.1 – The Black Dahlia is a special box which appeared on Indiegogo this week designed to keep your weed fresh for ‘up to a year’; I might suggest that if it’s lasting you a year you should perhaps just buy less of the stuff, but it’s your money.

• Tony Greenhand: Obligatory 420 post of the week, pt.2 – another of those ridiculous weedporn Instagram accounts, the blunts and joints on display on here are sort of preposterous. The one shaped like a T-Rex, for example, is adorable (and looks like a marijuana suicide waiting to happen tbh).

• The Pyongyang Metro: Until recently, tourists to North Korea were only allowed to experience one stop of the Pyongyang Metro – this only changed a few weeks or so ago, and these are the first pictures to ever be taken by a Westerner and show the slightly crazy grandeur of their tube network. The mosaics alone are GLORIOUS.

• How To Operate Your Frog: Can someone explain this to me? Seriously, I know that this is a joke, but I simply cannot for the life of me understand what it is about. Anyone? Bueller?

• InkHunter: As I discovere when on holiday earlier this year, I am now in a minority when it comes to ink (insofar as I don’t have any). Maybe I should finally get that mid-life crisis tattoo done, on reflection; I’ve always rather fancied having a reassuring “It probably doesn’t matter” in small letters over my wrist, to look at in times of emotional distress. Anyway, were I to be considering such a thing I could use this app to get a reasonable idea of what it could look like; InkHunter lets you superimpose tattoo designs on a photo, changing the orientation, size, etc to give you an idea of exactly how INCREDIBLY COOL you’ll look with the teardrops on your cheekbone or whatever you’re considering. I once saw a bloke at Highbury many years ago who had the Arsenal cannon tattooed on his face, which I always thought was an impressive commitment to the cause (if a potentially career-limiting one outside a few select North London postcodes).

• ManyGolf: Multiplayer infinite golf game, which if you ignore the fact that you could be playing on a BBC Micro circa 1988 is actually quite a lot of fun.

• GRAPHIC Novels: Bike safety is a hugely important thing, obviously – a position with which the city of Phoenix REALLY agrees, judging by this frankly astonishing selection of comics promoting cycle safety to kids which really do put the ‘graphic’ in ‘graphic novel’. Effectively a 2d analogue to the PSA films of the 70s in which simply looking at a kite stuck on a pylon was enough to get you a few million volts to the craium, these present a series of short vignettes which demonstrate exactly how much bone, muscle and viscera can and will be exposed if YOU, CHILD fall off your bike whilst wearing inadequate protection. HILARIOUSLY overblown.

• Exploring The Cosmic Web: The most amazing ‘oh my God we are tiny and insignificant’ thing you will see all day, this – have a wander around inside a visualisation of the universe. To quote: “The concept of the cosmic web—viewing the universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity—is deeply ingrained in cosmology. Yet, little is known about architecture of this network or its characteristics. Our research used data from 24,000 galaxies to construct multiple models of the cosmic web, offering complex blueprints for how galaxies fit together. These three interactive visualizations help us imagine the cosmic web, show us differences between the models, and give us insight into the fundamental structure of the universe.” This is AMAZING.

• Visual Art Sessions: Lovely Chrome experiment which lets you participate (sort of) in the creative process of six different visual artists making work using 3d painting and sculpture tools – you can watch, and zoom around, them as they go about creating artworks in VR environments. The tech’s pretty beta, so the end results look very much like the sort of Kinect scans you were seeing in music vids a few years back, but the window into the creative process is a gorgeous one.

• Naked Fit: There’s a reason I tend not to look a myself in the mirror very often, let alone do so when I’m unclothed (in fact there are many reasons, most of which would require more expensive psychoanalysis than I’m willing to put myself through); I don’t understand why ANYONE would want to engage with any technology that gave them a better understanding of what they really look like with their clothes of. And yet, here we are – Naked Fit is a piece of tech which basically looks like a full-length mirror with a special stand in front of it, and which will scan your entire body, head to toe, in 360 hi def so that you can, over time, track how it’s changing. I KNOW HOW IT’S CHANGING, YOU BASTARD, IT’S IRREVOCABLY DECAYING TO THE POINT WHERE THE SIGNS OF MY MORTALITY WILL BE ETCHED IN EACH AND EVERY SINGLE SAGGING, DYING MILLIMETRE OF MY EPIDERMIS. Thanks for the reminder.

• Tootz The Unicorn: A crowdfunding campaign to raise money for an internet-connected model unicorn which will actually fart rainbows when certain predetermined conditions are met (you get an email; someone ‘Likes’ your photo; you get the idea). Sadly not even the most preposterous internet of things-thing I’ve seen this week.

• SwearJar: SUCH a good idea and ripe for reappropriation. SwearJar is a Slack bot which you can set up to automatically charge users $1 each time they use any of a list of proscribed terms in the channel and donates them to a charity of your choice. SO many applications here, both for brands and for charities and for campaigns – the possibilities are HUGE, particularly if you build this as a Facebook bot instead.

• Livia: I don’t have a womb, and have never had a period, so am probably in no way qualified to discuss the brilliance or otherwise of this, but nonetheless. Livia is a…thing…which you can attach to your stomach and which will, it maintains, MAGIC your menstrual cramps away. I mean, there’s some purported science on there but the description doesn’t fill me with confidence that it’s any better than, say, magnetic bracelets to prevent headaches – to whit, “It tunes into the wavelength frequency of your menstrual pain and blocks the pain from registering in your body.” Oh, right, OK then. Also, and this is incidental, not sure of the branding behind naming it after Augustus’s famously unpleasant and machiavellian (can one be machiavellian before Machiavelli? Hm) wife.

• Fantastic Vocab: Adorable project which uses a bot to create and define new words. If you love language you will love this – some of these are beautiful, some are silly, but the whole list is just a joy to dip into.

• Replace Tube Ads With Cats: Crowdfunding campaign to replace ads in a tube station with cat pictures. Fine, great, but could we maybe do it with something better than cat pictures? Please? You can read a proper writeup here should you so desire (you should desire).

• Google Creative 5: Google Creative 5 is an annual project giving people the chance to apply for a year-long paid position at the Google Creative Lab – they welcome people from all disciplines with a cxreative artistic bent, and the website through which you apply is lovely, featuring as it does a fun design-based challenge riffing on the Google logo. Try it out.

• Peggy: I have just realised that this is a washing powder promo gimmick (for OMO, which was, trivia fans, used as a signifier of a housewife’s availability for extra-marital affairs bitd; a packet of OMO on the windowsill signified ‘Old Man Out’ and that the lady of the manse was open to solicitations, or at least so Jonthan Meades told me in Pompey), but nonetheless it’s STILL the silliest IoT thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s an internet-connected clothespeg, FFS. A CLOTHESPEG. It will tell you when it’s likely to rain, for example, or if it’s started raining; OR YOU COULD LOOK AT THE WEATHER FORECAST, OR OUT OF THE WINDOW.

• Helena: Take a look at this. It’s a startup, apparently, with a view to…er…MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. “Helena is an organization of thirty global influencers who work together to achieve positive world impact. The group collaborates to create breakthrough ideas, then leverages its collective reach, strategic partnerships, and network to make them happen.” Wonderfully, this seems to be a collection of rich children of rich businesspeople who have secured funding for a nonspecific project designed to let them play at philanthropy in an ill-defined, outcome-light sense. THANKS, BENEVOLENT CHILDREN OF THE GLOBAL RICH, FOR YOUR ALTRUISTIC MUNIFICENCE! Truly, without initiatives like this the world really would be hurtling hellwards in the proverbial handcart.

• My Colour Me Book: Take your Instagram pictures and turn them into a colouring book, courtesy of this service. Smart idea which costs next to nothing to produce and I really, really wish I’d thought of myself. Perfect for any of the shallow narcissists in your life!

• Slither: Like snake, but for an infinite number of simultaneous players. Moderately diverting for 10 minutes or so.

• The Cavalier Challenge: A series of pretty fun 3dish minigames inviting you to complete a variety of knightly tasks like riding horses through a dark forest and that sort of thing; really quite slickly made, and worth playing with for 15 minutes while there’s noone looking at your screen.

• Choose Your Own Adventure Fallout New Vegas: You know those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type videos using YouTube annotations that were sort of vogueish a few years ago? Well this is one of those, but using Let’s Play vids of Fallout New Vegas to create a truly impressive adventure game. Obviously slightly improved if you have an interest in / knowledge of Fallout, but even if you don’t the scope and ambition here is laudable, and might give you some ideas if you fancy making something like this yourself.

• The Album Cover Special: An INCREDIBLE opportunity to own some original South African art; Marks Sign sells handpainted artworks from South Africa, and for a limited time only will, for the knockdown sum of $200, reproduce your favourite album cover in their own inimitable style. You want to know why you should consider this? JUST LOOK AT THE WORK! JUST LOOK AT IT! Your office refurb will look SLICK with some of this on the walls.

• DOS Emulator: Finally, this *sounds* dull but in fact is a one-stop site letting you play Wolfenstein 3d, the original Civ, or Monkey Island on a PC emulator in your browser. Go on, do it, they will NEVER sack you. Never.

FINALLY FOR THE MIXES, HAVE THIS BY METALHEADS AND TURN IT UP LOUD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Supper Mario Broth: More Mario-related stuff on here than you could shake a stick at. Also, I love the title.

• STNW: I don’t ordinarily feature Tumblrs collecting odd images, etc, without an overriding theme, but the stuff on here is just so good in general. Gently weird.

• Ru Is My Rabbi: I was going to try and write a description for this and then I read their own and I thought ‘sod it’: “daily wisdom from jewpaul: supermohel of the world”. EXACTLY.

• Star Wars UI: User interfaces from the original Star Wars. Some really quite cool design in here.

• Fakepics: Not actually a Tumblr – SORRY – but still wonderful, this blog collects pictures doing the rounds which are doctored in some way and debunks them. Decent place to search if you’re suspicious about some vintage photo or another and want to check its provenance.

• Diego Cusano: Combining food and illustration to charming effect. Hire this man for a food-related ad campaign, someone.

• Listing To Port: I really don’t know what this is, but some of the writing on here is lovely and silly and whimsical (like properly whimsical, not like that fcuking boat).

• Text-Mode: ASCII-ish graphics and animations, 8-bit-style art and generally great retro-giffery collected here.

• Morten Just’s Experiments: Morten Just occasionally undertakes small experiments in building techthings and posts them here. Some of these are really clever and could serve as excellent ‘inspiration’ (*ahem*) for campaigns, etc, should you need some.

• Brutalist Websites: Websites which don’t really do ‘pretty’. Great design examples if you’re into this sort of aesthetic.

• East Like A Duck: Recipes from the Simpsons, made and eaten, with photos. A noble endeavour, although you feel that the author may end up with the same sort of physique and complexion as one of the characters if they continue in this vein.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Disney Songs Ranked From Worst To Best: Depending on the sort of place you work, this list could potentially shut down the office for the rest of the day. If nothing else will give you a decent excuse to belt out the Beauty & The Beast soundtrack at the top of your lungs to your oh-so-grateful deskmakes (yes, I’m talking to you).

• Inside Magic Leap: As a companion piece to the Magic Leap promovid up there, this kilometric puffpiece in Wired suggests several things; firstly, that they have some GREAT PR; secondly, that the bloke from Wired was really very impressed with it; and thirdly, that they are either completely unwilling to give away ANYTHING AT ALL about the tech, or indeed what it actually is, or that this is the biggest tech=based prank ever devised. Because really, indescribable technology which noone has ever seen working in the wild, based on completely new systems which noone can seemingly adequately explain, delivered to the user…er…somehow? You can forgive me for being perhaps a touch on the sceptical side here.

• A Primer For Mushrooms: A clear, well-written and crucially pretty funny guide to doing mushrooms. Not that we’re suggesting you should, obviously, but in case you were ever tempted. Web Curios just wants you to be SAFE.

• Using Foursquare To Predict Sales & Share Prices: So this is long and is also about s*c**l m*d**, for which apologies, but if you’re interested in DATA and predictions and stuff then this is not only a really interesting writeup of how Foursquare checkin data around Chipotle stores in the US was used to predict what was going to happen to the brand’s shareprice, but also contains lots of food for thought about other uses for data of this sort. Smart, if technical.

• Plays For Normal People: Excellent comic writing around the theatre and how people involved in the theatre often think about it as opposed to ‘normal’ people. Thespy sorts among you will particularly appreciate, I think.

• How Food Became Pop Culture: A BRILLIANT essay by US celebrity chef and general personality Mario Batali, about the rise of food as a ‘thing’ in culture, the elevation of the chef to a position of festishised commodity, and how our relationship with what we eat has changed as a (Western) culture over the past few decades. Obviously from an American perspective, but this is a lovely piece of writing about food and what we eat and how we eat it and who we are.

• 27 Things That Concern A Millennial: Is this a joke? I think it’s a joke. I hope it’s a joke. Anyway, it made me laugh. BONUS MILLENNIAL!: If you can pass this off as a real thing to anyone you work with, you win a million(ial)(sorry) points.

• When Rape Is Broadcast Live Online: When Periscope and Meerkat first appeared last year, I confess to this sort of thing not even crossing my mind. Fast forward 12 months and we have our first spate of horrorstories about non-consensual sex being broadcast over the web, live and in realtime, for people to watch. So much horror/questioning in here – why do people watch, and how do companies who run these services set up systems whereby people stumbling across these feeds can quickly report stuff to appropriate authorities? Seriously though, the horror of the idea of thousands of people passively watching this and doing nothing about it.

• Explaining The Alt Right: The alt right is the name given to a loose coalition of post-internet groups all coalescing around strange and amorphous ideas of economic and social liberty, allied with small-c conservatism of all stripes, and united by a shared hatred of political correctness and, sadly often, non-whites, women and a whole host of other groups of people. This is a pretty exhaustive look at the factions and elements within it, which will leave you feeling sort of exhausted and a bit grubby by the time you’re through.

• I Have No Idea What This Startup Does: I linked to the company in question – Helena – up there; this is the piece through which I find out, in which the author gets a press release about this mysterious philanthropic company and tries to find out a little more about what it is and what it’s for. And fails, completely. Partly sort of amusing and partly just a little sinister; where is the money coming from? What is it for? Is it performance? Is James Franco going to end up appearing in promo videos for it? Literally no idea at all.

• Meet Richard Prince: The title of the piece refers to him as ‘The Warhol of Instagram’, which is perhaps about right; both artists are interested in the reappropriation of contemporary culture by art (establishment) as art (product), and both have a ‘loose’ relationship to their eventual output (studios et al doing a lot of the heavy nonconceptual lifting). Prince got internet famous a few years back when controversy erupted over the ‘plagiarism’ inherent in his instagram images, where he takes screencaps of Instagram pictures that he has commented on, and then prints and resells them as canvases; this is an interesting profile of his career and his place in the contemporary pantheon. I’m not qualified to comment on the artistic validity on display, but I will say that a lot of the people quoted here as his friends sound like dicks.

• Our Well Regulated Militia: You probably don’t need to read another piece about why the availability of firearms in North America is, you know, not always a great thing, but this is superbly written about gun culture and history and all sorts of other things.

• I Don’t Care About Your Life: A brilliant skewering of the stylistic trend towards imbuing all critical writing with a clear, distinct and often intrusive authorial voice and perspective – the elevation of the ‘I’ in criticism, if you will. Obviously something of which I am totally guilty (this sentence being a fabulous demonstration of exactly that, which is pleasingly reductive), this gets bonus points for the tone, which is fair and measured, and for recognising the influence of DFW on all of the writers in question.

• The Bifurcation of Social: Very smart essay talking about the essential difference between the phone and the phonebook in contemporary digital / social culture, and how this distinction embodies what Facebook is, and is becoming. Clever thinking.

• Meet The Man Who Owns 8chan: 8chan, the place where a bunch of dreadful people off 4chan fled when Moot decided that doxxing people sort of wasn’t ok, is owned by some bloke who lives in the Philippines. This is all about him, why he bought it and what he wants to do with it – did you know you can buy ads on 8chan for $5? Terrifyingly I was quite tempted to give it a go – should I advertise Curios on there? I bet they’d love the vaguely pinko worldview.

• The KFC Sandwich That Ate Pakistan: One of those wonderful pieces which gives you a totally new perspective on a country or culture, this is a wonderful look at how the ‘Zinger’ has become ubiquitous in Karachi and beyond; awesome on food and culture and (sort of) semiotics. Also, you will CRAVE a zinger biryani by the time you get to the end of this, I guarantee it.

• The Only Wild West Town In England: This is Laredo, a fully-functional replica of a Wild West town. In Kent, in 2016. So wonderfully eccentric and peculiarly British, and all the nicer for the fact that it’s a self-contained community rather than a tourist cash-in machine.

• Inside The World Of Offstage Touring Musicians: When I worked at Buckingham Palace many years ago, the bloke who ran the ticket office was a lovely queen called Kevin, an acid-tongued veteran of the West End who taught me the immortal phrase “my throat is as dry as a nun’s cnut”, and whose regular job involved sitting in the wings in BIG West End musical productions, being vocal cover for the more storied performers who could guarantee a sellout with top-billing but whose vocal range wasn’t quite up to the task. Anyway, this is a portrait of people who fulfil the same role for touring rock bands. WEIRD GIG.

• Being Metro Boomer: A profile of one of the hottest producers in US hiphop right now, painting a picture of an endearing and talented kid, backed by a lot of drive and ambition and a seriously understanding mother, who, by the time you get to the end of the piece, you’re sort of getting a touch worried about. You hope that the throwaway segment about his having recently bought a gun isn’t unpleasant foreshadowing.

• On Open Marriage and Illness: A glorious essay about coping with a partner’s long-term sickness and navigating the choppy emotional waters of an open marriage. It sounds pretty awful, to be honest (the open marriage rather than the illness, which obviously is awful), but whatever your feelings on polyamory this is an excellent piece of writing.

• Cork Is A Male Place: A confession: I really don’t get on with professional Irishness, the nonspecific fug of ‘craic!’ and lyricism and blarney which swirls around so much that comes out of the country (to my mind). This, from Granta, about Cork, is about as far from that as it’s possible to be; I’ve never visited, but having read this it feels like I have. One of the best evocations of place through prose I’ve read in years, this deserves a cup of tea and some proper concentration. Enjoy it, it’s fabulous.

• The Internet Has Changed Everything: Finally, a piece looking at how growing up in the middle of nowhere is different in the online era. For everyone who was ever a teenager stuck in a personal hell from which you couldn’t wait to escape.  

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is called The Others and it’s by Hiroshi Kondo and it’s the best video I’ve ever seen of people crossing the road:

2) Next, a fabulous piece of animation to accompany the pleasingly funky ‘Freaking Out’ by Magnetic Skulls. Basically a Saturday morning cartoon in 3.5-minute music video form:

3) This is called ‘Your American Girl’ and it’s by Mitski, and I LOVE the song but possibly love the video even more for its odd awkwardness and the handkissing which is just SO poignant:

4) This is by Kangding Ray, it’s called ‘These Are My Rivers’ and it’s a nice slice of techno with a wonderful video taking nature and glitching it all out in geometric black and white:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! I’m obviously a prude (what?) but I tend to get a little bit embarrassed at overtly explicit hiphop; this track by Run The Jewels is no exception, and I find the whole thing quite silly, but it’s catchy as all get out and the video, featuring extreme hi-res insect-and-flower bongo, is LOVELY:

6) I don’t know what this is AT ALL, but it seemed to me like the audiovisual equivalent of an icecream headache. It’s “あなくろノイズ” by tilt-six:

7) This, by contrast, is soothing in a wonky sort of way, although the video’s another slice of CGI weirdness. It’s called ‘Wiik’, by Yllis:

8) Have you ever watched ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’? If you have, you may recognise this woman, who’s apparently on it; no matter if you don’t, though, as the song and the video stand alone as the most awful/brilliant musical thing I have seen in ages. It’s called ‘How Many Fcuks?’ and it’s like a laser-guided missile to the heart of bitchy hi-camp. ENJOY!:

9) Finally this is the weirdest thing I have seen all week, by miles. Stick with it, it’s worth it. This is ‘A Prank Time’. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!