How are we? I mean, how are we all really?
I’ll start – I’m…I’m quite tired of this, I think it’s fair to say, and it’s starting to make me fray at the edges slightly. I was approximately 15 seconds away from committing professional suicide on a client call yesterday; it was honestly so, so tempting to interrupt the people briefing me to say “Look, sorry, I’ve actually just realised that there is no amount of money available in the known universe, no sum of which I can possibly conceive, that would induce me to spend another second feigning interest in your stupid, pointless non-problem or indeed the pathetic, made-up reasons you have invented to convince yourself that any of this matters; I would honestly rather die in penury than spend another second listening to your voice, you double-figure-IQ waste-of-cells.”
I didn’t, though, mainly as I worry with that sort of speech that I’ll just flub it halfway through, like making an attempted dramatic exit by turning sharply on one’s heel and, by so doing, walking straight into a doorjamb.
Basically what I’m saying is that I could do with a bit of a break and I’m sure you could too. THANK GOD, THEN, FOR THE BANK HOLIDAY! Let’s enjoy our apparently-restored freedoms while we still can – but, inbetween, why not take the extra time to do a really deep dive into this week’s Curios? Go spelunking in my infocaves, my pretties, there is SO MUCH TO DISCOVER.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you really ought to know better by now.
By Subhelic
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS FACEBOOK’S PIVOT TOWARDS BECOMING E-COMMERCE FOR EVERY SINGLE SMALL SHOP IN THE WORLD IS, MISERABLY, A VERY SMART BUSINESS DECISION AND THE SORT OF THING THAT MEANS THAT THE FCUKING COMPANY ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE ANYTIME SOON:
- Facebook Shops: It’s remarkable it’s taken so long really, but, finally, the long-awaited ‘Facebook turns itself into what is effectively an ecommerce platform for every single one-person business in the world’ move is here. Announced this week, and accompanied by quite a bullish Zuckerbergian media tour (there’s a piece in the longreads later about Nick Clegg’s first 18-24m in the comms gig there, by the way, which is very much worth reading in the context of all this), this is rolling out in the US now and spreading globally as soon as the poor little localisation peons can manage. It will work as you’d expect; ‘Shop’ becomes an additional tab on a business’ Page, through which they can display inventory and pricing and with inbuilt-checkout via Facebook Pay for merchants who’ve signed up. And, given then alternative is having to manage payments via a third-party site and making users do ONE MORE CLICK, it makes perfect sense for everyone who signs up to use Facebook Pay – thereby making room for one more Zuckerbergian hook in their soft, soft flesh. It adds a bunch of customer service features to enable transaction-specific queries via chat across platforms, and this will eventually expand to work within Messenger. Oh, and there’s object-recognition AI built in (or at least their will be), to enable businesses to upload images and have available products in said images identified and linked for purchase directly. Even better, “soon, sellers, brands and creators will be able to tag products from their Facebook Shop or catalog before going live and those products will be shown at the bottom of the video so people can easily tap to learn more and purchase.” Look, obviously if you’re a small business somewhere, this is wonderful stuff – FB’s charging (I think) 5% fees on transactions over $5, and a flat $0.40 fee on transactions under, which I think is comparable, and obviously all of this will work seamlessly with the already-superb ad product, and it’s probably useful for consumers too…I get it, I get it, I just really don’t like the increasingly obvious slicing up of life into neat parcels clearly labeled ‘Jeff’ and ‘Mark’ and ‘Sunder’ and ‘whoever runs Epic’. So it goes.
- Updates to Facebook Workplace: I really don’t get on with FB Workplace, but for those of you who do and who use it regularly (or who don’t, but are forced to by your employers’ caprices) then this might be useful – basically the big thing here is the integration of videocalling gubbins ‘Rooms’ into the Workplace platform, meaning it’s easy to create Workplace videomeetings which anyone can access via a url, but there’s also updated functionality for better and more interactive livestreams with Q&As, etc, and some quite interesting stuff about increased Oculus integration for any companies that want to experiment with VR as part of the working environment. There’s something a bit prosaically-bleak about that, isn’t there? There’s a part of me that still likes to imagine VR as the doorway to magical playground of the imagination, so the idea of being told to ‘strap on this headset and do the filing, but, er, in VR!’ is a bit of a buzzkill.
- Facebook Buys Giphy: This came in last week just after Curios dropped, hence the week delay, and frankly it’s been rather superseded by all the Shop stuff; still, Facebook bought Giphy! For $400m! Which is interesting mainly if you’d like another datapoint to add to the increasingly mad-looking red string map on your wall (I know you’ve ALL got one) depicting all the different pies in which Mark has his increasingly berry-stained fingers, or if you’re Facebook and you want some wide-ranging and potentially useful data about how users across a very, very wide range of platforms are using gifs and in what context. IT’S ALL ABOUT FEEDING THE AI, HAVE WE NOT REALISED YET??
- FB Expands Brand Safety Controls for Advertisers: Basically this is just an expansion of whitelisting for FB advertisers. If you care about this more than I do, click the link.
- Instagram Launches Guides: This is interesting, and I’m not 100% certain how it will work; Instagram Guides is (I think – there’s a more detailed explanation here if you want one) a new feature which will present curated content selections from various users on the platform, “a way to more easily discover recommendations, tips and other content from your favorite creators, public figures, organizations and publishers on Instagram…When viewing a Guide, you can see posts and videos that the creator has curated, paired with helpful tips and advice. If you want to learn more about a specific post, you can tap on the image or video to view the original Instagram post. You can also share a Guide to your story or in Direct by tapping on the share button in the upper right corner.”. They’re kicking off with mental health stuff, because a) it’s been mental health awareness week; and b) they have to be seen to do this stuff first and then move onto the more fun and nakedly-commercial stuff later on – the long-term play here, though, will almost certainly be more frivolous, lifestyle-y type stuff, centred around music and hobbies and fashion and whatever, and the sort of thing that there will almost certainly be an influencer market for in short order as brands work out that they can get their stuff featured in highly-eyeballed sections of the app if they can only get the famous du jour to extol their products or service’s virtues in a Guide. Add it to your influencer marketing ‘deck’ today! Or don’t, and make a small contribution towards ameliorating society for a change, go on.
- TikTok Introduces Youth Portal: It’s a whole load of other stuff about safety and privacy in the app, basically, as the company does an impressive job of staying just ahead of what I get the impression is a tsunami of very iffy stories about its app. The Youth Portal will exist “to give teens and parents a single destination for safety resources, best practices and guides to the video-creation application’s tools. The new Youth Portal will roll out globally in over 15 languages, including English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Thai, and more educational resources will be added in the coming months.” It’s exactly the sort of stuff you’d expect – explaining password security, privacy controls, etc – and is all well and good, but, as ever, seems a touch disingenuous from a company whose expansion strategy is quite clearly ‘we want everyone, yesterday, and we will pay whatever it takes’.
- A List of Publishers and Journos on TikTok: More for curiosity than anything else, though don’t be surprised if you see a guide to pitching media on TikTok at some point in the next 6m. These are very odd – the Daily Mail’s account is just them reposting other people’s moderately-viral videos for no immediately-apparent reason, whilst the Daily Star’s is…just some bloke in his house, which makes me think that these accounts haven’t been vetted quite as assiduously as one might hope (this doesn’t look like the official account of a national newspaper, does it? Not even one as risible as the Star). Interesting mainly as proof that very few publishers or journalists have the first inkling as to why they ought to be using TikTok, just that it’s VERY IMPORTANT that they do.
- Google Maps Adds Wheelchair Accessibility Information: No brand angle for this at all I don’t think, but it’s a really good addition that it might be useful for some of you to know about.
- Microsoft Updates Teams: I think that this is the first time I’ve had an update about Teams – how miserable that I’ve had to break this duck. Still, now that more and more of us are being forced to use Microsoft’s (surprisingly good) online coworking and videocalling platform, I figured it might be useful to include this update – it’s all quite dull and I can’t really be fcuked to enumerate the various bits, but the most interesting thing is the improved ability to livestream from Teams out to other platforms (via third-party software), which might be of interest to those of you who work at companies who mistakenly think anyone wants to watch a bunch of small talking heads wanging on about their jobs from their home offices, LIVE.
- Dropbox Care Packages: This is a really nice bit of work by Dropbox – useful and ON-BRAND. The platform commissioned a bunch of ‘influencers’ to create their own Dropbox folders full of things that they think are interesting, fun, useful, etc, all made open to the public – it’s nothing more inventive than ‘hey, why don’t we get famous X to curate something??’, but the fact that it heroes the product they are flogging so perfectly is a rare example of execution working almost perfectly; not only that, but the lineup of curators really is strong, with some really impressive names from a wide-ranging variety of fields. I was sold at Roxanne Gay’s involvement, but there are big names from dance, music, design, visual art, food…honestly, these are really good and I would probably have featured them in the actual proper bit of Curios too.
- GroupThink Fest: I imagine quite a few of those of you who bother to read this initial bit – and, in fact, the rest of this bstard thing – work in advermarketingpr and probably suffer under the dubious, ambiguous job title of ‘planner’ or ‘strategist’ or ‘how the fcuk do they manage to get away with spending all their time on the internet looking at stuff? And why are they always crying at PowerPoint slides?’. If so, you might like this – my (FULL DISCLOSURE) friend Rob is involved with GroupThink, which is a community for planners and strategists and people like that – they are running a VIRTUAL EVENT on June 4th, with speakers from across the agency spectrum talking about…er…planning and strategy and stuff like that. If I were less biliously-inclined towards the ‘profession’ I ‘work’ in right now I would be tempted to take a look – it’s £25 (or £15 for students, grads and interns) and I reckon is the sort of thing you really ought to be able to swing the afternoon off for under the guise of ‘personal and professional development’.
By Espen Kluge
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES IT HAD GOT IN ON SOME OF THAT HOT COVID-TRACKING-APP-DEVELOPMENT ACTION BASED ON SOME OF THE MONEY BEING QUOTED TODAY, PT.1:
- People of the Pandemic: Not the first of these I’ve seen, but it’s the prettiest and that what counts. People of the Pandemic (it sounds a lot more grandiose than it is, trust me) is an interactive simulator letting you – yes YOU! – play around with policy to see how taking different personal approaches to the easing lockdown conditions might affect viral transmission, SECOND WAVES and all that jazz. The nice touch here is that you can choose to see how your choices work in concert with the choices of other, previous players, giving you a cumulative impression of the impact of decisions taken in isolation on the overall levels of infection, etc. A CAVEAT – I don’t know what science this is based on because I DON’T CARE.
- The New Normal: I am breaking my personal ban on that phrase to introduce this website – not least as that’s what it’s called and it would be quite hard to introduce it were I to ban myself from typing its name. The New Normal (imagine me typing this through the most gritted of teeth) is a digiart project by Tobias Revell collecting Tweets from around the world which use the term and presenting them as one, unbroken screed. It’s sort of wonderful – I would love a realtime feed of this, updating a la Twitterfall at a conference circa 2011 – but also a slightly-miserable indication of the crushing banality of almost everyone’s observations about all this (and those that aren’t banal are often hateful or just staggeringly stupid). Also, there’s quite a lot of this sort of stuff – “’The new normal’ is the same old control model used to subjugate and conquer, with fear and persistent media broadcast repeating the same msg ..over and over until imprinted on your brains. break the cycle and switch off the media!? Your futures are being destroyed. Your choice.” – which is quite interesting and makes me think we’ve not seen the end (or even the beginning of the end) of the mad ‘WE WANT TO BE FREE TO EAT ICECREAM!’ protests quite yet.
- Outside Simulator: This is great, and a really interesting demonstration of quite how much the enforced inside-ness might have altered your attitude towards public spaces. Reminiscent of the ‘ride around a foreign city in a taxi’ site from a few weeks ago, this instead simulates the experience of walking around various cities, which you can select from a menu. The link I’ve included here defaults to London, but there’s a wide range – Amsterdam, Rome, NYS, San Francisco… – and each offers you a first-person view of someone wandering through the streets of your chosen destination. The London one was obviously shot at Oxford Circus in the runup to Christmas, meaning that it’s dark and there are festive illuminations suspended from t the buildings and FUCK ME THAT’S A LOT OF PEOPLE AND WHY ARE THEY ALL SO CLOSE?!?!?! I found this over the weekend, and was honestly sweaty-palmed and moderately-nervous after watching about 15s of this; I think it’s the fact that I’ve not experienced a stranger brushing past me for nearly three months, and there’s something quite jarring about the invasion of personal space (or at least the illusion of said invasion) that this experience presents. Try it out, I promise you that you’ll either find it quite amazing and a bit freeing or, at worst, interestingly-uncomfortable.
- Stream Informer: Courtesy of Jed, this is a great Twitter feed which keeps followers updated as to which livestreams are coming up, by which artists, where and when. It’s literally just a Tweet every day offering listings of who’s playing on which platform. There’s an accompanying newsletter too, which might be worth a look, and if you’re in the market for a more varied selection of tunes to accompany you as you stare desultorily out of the window and wonder what the point of making another 70-slide horrorshow really is.
- Tree Talk: Occasionally I learn something about myself when writing Curios – not often, though, as I don’t really believe in self-reflection or self-improvement – such as this week, when I realised that I obviously have something of an arboreal fetish, what with all the repeated times I feature things like ‘tree of the year’ or ‘trees which you can attach personal stories to via geotagging’ and stuff like that. Hence my inclusion here of Tree Talk, a website which not only will generate walks for you at random based on your postcode or your intended starting point/destination but which will also provide you with a guide to ALL THE TREES you are likely to pass on the way. Honestly, I am SO BORED of walking out of my front door and having nothing to think about other than the growing mountain fly-tipped detritus – next time I’m going to fire this up and learn about my local EXTREMELY RARE Pineapple Guava, of which there are apparently only 10 or so in the whole of London. So pure, so beautiful.
- Friends and Astronauts: This is lovely and perhaps just the sort of thing you might be needing now as this whole thing starts to drag rather. Friends and Astronauts is a project which offers FREE teaching on how to do magic tricks, presented in a series of bundles which are released on a regular basis – each bundle is up for a short while before being retired forever, thereby doing a small bit to preserve the mystery of magic whilst at the same time helping you learn some sleight of hand. They’re on to bundle #2 at the time of writing, which features various card tricks being taught to you by ACTUAL MAGICIANS, and the whole thing is presented in a really nice, accessible, friendly tone. You’re encouraged to donate some money to charity – or, where applicable, to the magicians in question – but this is all free and a pretty good way of spending an hour or so this weekend as you try and stop the walls from closing in again.
- Follow The Butterfly: This is more conceptually impressive than it is practically impressive, but still – the site uses eye-tracking within your browser to let you move a digital butterfly across your screen ONLY USING THE POWER OF YOUR EYES!! Except, well, I don’t actually think it’s eye-tracking at all, I think it’s a bit of a fudge based on tracking the end of your nose or similar, but perhaps I’m wrong. Regardless, it’s impressive that this can be done on the fly, in Chrome, on my underpowered laptop, and makes me wonder when this stuff will be good enough that it’s worth building actual experiences/interfaces based on it (‘a while’, is my ignorant half-guess – if you hire me, you too can gain access to this sort of trenchant analysis and insight!). Oh, and seeing as we’re here, why not try this too – it’s a similar proof-of-concept thing which demonstrates facemapping and meshing in-browser in relatime (it’s a bit chunkier, this one, so perhaps close a few tabs first).
- Hawkeye: Nothing to do with either tennis or nobody’s favorite MCU character – instead, this is an app for Macs that lets you implement headtracking as an additional interface. It’s easier to watch in action than to explain, but basically it allows you to use small head movements to do simple actions like scrolling, dragging, etc, within your standard Mac interface – obviously it looks seamless in all the promo videos, but I guarantee you’ll be gurning like Christie Brown (I sort-of hope noone gets this, on reflection) when you try and move files around your desktop with your chin.
- BYOM: Or, ‘masks, but design’! “BYOM is a project initiated by HyperAktiv.li. The goal of this project is to propose a design that goes in the direction of excellence, to exhibit our Swiss know-how in terms of innovation while combining cutting-edge aesthetics, avant-garde support and ingenious functionality. The brief was completely open and the interpretations were free, the aim is above all to offer a showcase for our Swiss designers. There were no technical, material or industrial reality constraints. Despite the sensitive subject, the invited designers were able to restore strong values and overcome the anxiety-provoking connotation of the object by the force of the design, the poetry of the aesthetics and the beauty of the concepts.” Some of these are great – many are totally impractical, but that’s not really the point – and I am slightly amazed that I’ve not seen any actual design competitions for masks by anyone yet – ‘get your design mass-produced and a cut of the proceeds go to you or the charity of your choice’ seems like something of an obvious one, no? This one’s my favourite, fwiw, but you pick your own.
- Music Taste: This is SO clever, and not as far as I can tell an official Spotify thing – Music Taste is built by Australian Computer Science and Marketing student Kalana Vithana, and is a site which takes your listening history, analyses it, and then lets you compare it to that of other Spotify users to help determine your musical compatibility based on which artists, tracks or genres you have a shared affinity for. So simple and so nicely-executed, this is the sort of thing that I feel ought to be baked into dating apps as standard and which, if any of them have any sense, will be before too long.
- The Yes: This is potentially really interesting – The Yes is a new shopping app, launched this week (or practically this week – look, it’s new, leave it at that) whose gimmick is that it ‘learns’ your taste by asking you a series of yes or no questions about fashion and then determining the sort of stuff you’re likely to want to buy based on this (and a bunch of other signals from elsewhere, I don’t doubt). The lineup of brands onboard at the start seems impressive, and one of the people behind it has a hell of a pedigree in clothes (Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, etc), but I do wonder whether there’s currently room for A N Other way of buying clothes, even one with a slightly-Tinder-y mechanic behind it. This is iOS and US-only at the moment, but it’s worth taking a look at the interface as it’s reasonably-interesting from a conceptual and UI point of view.
- The Most Incredible Minecraft City Ever: No, really, just look at this. Clicking on it takes you to a reasonably-zoomed-out view that looks quite a lot like SimCity – zoom in, though, and it quickly becomes clear that this has all been built in Minecraft. All of it. LOOK HOW MASSIVE IT IS!! It’s at something insane like 1:1 scale, and is some sort of crazy collective labour of love by literally hundreds of builders; what’s even more incredible is when you scroll to the edges of the extant built-up environment and realise that they’re not finished yet. Seriously, I know that ‘Minecraft is digital LEGO’ is a simplistic explanation, but this is effectively the greatest collaborative LEGO building project I have ever seen, ever. Wonderful, mad, and the product of almost a decade of building, you can read more about the project here – apparently regular players will be able to get access to it ‘soon’, so you can wander around these empty, virtual streets to your heart’s content, which feels like a Frieze exhibit waiting to happen.
- North Korean Telly: Is this real, or is it some sort of sophisticated misdirection propaganda by that madman in Pyongyang? WHO KNOWS? Still, if we take it at face value then this site is offering visitors a window into life inside the dictatorship – or, more accurately, the televisual version of life inside the dictatorship. Broadcasts run from approximately 8am-330pm UK time, with news bulletins at 10am, 1pm and last thing, so should you want to check in on the version of reality currently being peddled to the poor denizens of North Korea then this is your chance. I only found this this morning so haven’t been able to investigate properly, but as I type they’re playing a football match, complete with crowd and featuring enough non-Korean players that it makes me think it’s the Malaysian league or something; does NK have COVID-19? Do North Koreans have any idea? ARE THEY PLAYING OLD REPLAYS OF FOOTBALL WITH SPECTATORS AND PRETENDING IT’S CURRENT? Honestly, I have so many questions – this really is quite odd, and I would like someone to do a proper analysis of it that I can read at my leisure later on. Ok? GREAT!
- Drive Me Insane: I was convinced this had been in Curios before, but apparently not – Drive Me Insane is something of a classic of the old web which I was reminded of this week, and which I think someone really ought to update for 2020. The premise is very simple – it’s a webcam, set up to film a room in a house somewhere in the US which can be controlled almost entirely remotely by anyone logged on to the url. So you can change the lighting, the music, the text displayed on the computer screen, all in realtime…I really want to play with this idea a bit, as I reckon there’s LOTS you could do with it, not least (this might be a terrible idea, so bear with me) creating giant, real-world Tower Defence-type games using Nerfs or water guns or similar, or alternatively some sort of massively-masochistic performance art in which someone does actually live in a house like this whilst being tormented by the web…honestly, I am captivated by the (almost entirely slightly dark) possibilities here, can someone put some thought into what might be done with it? Again, GREAT!
- The Best COVID-19 Tattoos: It may not surprise you to learn that these are not, in fact, universally-recognisable as ‘the best’ anything. To all those of you who’ve marked this unique occasion in modern human history by having a toilet roll tattooed on yourselves – really?
- Share Your Dream: This is actually a small part of a wider initiative raising money for COVID initiatives worldwide and which is having some big livestream gig on 29 May featuring ubiquity’s Dua Lipa and girth’s Jason Derulo and a bunch of other kid-friendly names, but this particular bit was sent to me by Rina (hi Rina!) and amused me for a second. For some reason, this organisation has the following mission: “We believe that everyone on this planet has the right to dream. And now more than ever we need the dreams of humanity to be heard. Our mission at Constellation is to connect 1 billion shared and collective dreams and use this as the context to reshape the future of our planet.” No real idea what that means in practice, but you go, kids! As part of this, anyone can write down their own personal dream and the website will add it to the global collection – there’s some code in here which takes the text of your dream and turns it into some sort of sub-Kandinsky abstract based on the words and spacing and stuff, meaning everyone gets their own unique dreamart based on what they type. You can browse other people’s submissions on the site and, whilst obviously I don’t want to slag off anyone’s INNER HOPES, WOW are there some amazing bromides on here. Well done everyone who ‘dreams of a better and more peaceful humanity’ and seeks to achieve that by, er, posting these words on a website!
- The Old Timey Computer Show: Twitch as Telly, part x of y – this is a Twitch stream which broadcasts three times a day and which shows a selection of old (90s, mainly, insofar as I can tell) TV shows about videogames. A lot of the stuff I’ve seen on here seem to be Japanese, but if you’re at all interested in the history of gaming then there’s almost certainly something to interest you here; the streams are compiled by people rather than pulled from YT using an algo, so there should be a decent, continual stream of interesting stuff over time; worth bookmarking if you’re a particular sort of old geek.
- Textmoji: Create your own text-based emoji that you can then export and use in Slack or anywhere else that you care to. Small, but if you’ve always wanted to have a special character that says, I don’t know, “Darren Is A Nonce” that you can use in the groupchat, then well isn’t this your lucky day!
- The Drinking Game Zone: I think I’m one of the few people in the UK who can reasonably be said to be drinking less in lockdown; this isn’t down to anything other than my spectacularly-dipso pre-pandemic habits, and certainly isn’t a result of abstemiousness, but it does mean that I think I’m probably not quite as well-equipped to cope with A SESH as I might have been a few months back. If you’re itching to get back into the swing of PROPER AGGRESSIVE BOOZING, though, then you might enjoy this site which collects drinking games from around the world and offers instructions on how to play them. From the relatively-benign to things like this, which I honestly think might kill you, if you’re looking for a way to up your chances of cirrhosis then this is the site for YOU.
- Gravity: I love this site. Create planets and asteroids with your mouse, flick them around space, create orbits and solar systems and learn, gently, about interplanetary physics while you’re there. This is a lot of fun, in a slightly-godlike power trip sort of fashion, and is pleasingly-rendered and generally a bit like one of those 80s executive toys except digital and ALL ABOUT SPACE.
By Ina Jang
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES IT HAD GOT IN ON SOME OF THAT HOT COVID-TRACKING-APP-DEVELOPMENT ACTION BASED ON SOME OF THE MONEY BEING QUOTED TODAY, PT.2:
- Crossword Hobbyist: I think I’ve mentioned here before that I simply cannot do cryptic crosswords at all, despite very much wishing I could – they are TOO HARD, basically, which means I’m reduced to only being able to do simple crosswords for thickies (and even then I often fail – back in the day when I used to get the Sun and the Guardian for maximum contrast, I would regularly do the Guardian’s quick crossword in about 10m and then find myself utterly banjaxed by the Sun’s, whose clues were inevitably things like “dog (3)”). If you like yourself a cruciverb, this site will be a GODSEND – not only does it feature loads of puzzles for you to complete, which is a pretty good way of passing the time while you wait for the allocated ‘pretending to work’ time to be over with, but it also lets you MAKE YOUR OWN CROSSWORDS! Yep, you just type in the clues and the answers you want to include and the website will MAGICALLY turn them into a puzzle for you that you can share with whoever you like. Which means that you have NO EXCUSE for either hiding an elaborate proposal in a crossword and sending it to your partner, or alternatively creating one that starts out relatively benign but which slowly reveals itself to be a full-on evisceration of the intended recipient’s character as it develops.
- UK Rave Comments: Thankyou Paul for this EXCELLENT Twitter account which does nothing other than post comments from oldschool rave videos on YouTube. I think there needs to be a special, extremely-online name for this specific class of person: “Wish i could go back to 92 with a bag of snowballs from back then, absolutely savage E’s, for all those that were there, we had something pretty special, we almost changed this world for the better, so fcuking close”. I mean, you’ve met him, right?
- Squadded: Picked this up from Paddy’s newsletter this morning – Squadded (horrid name) is an interesting group-online-shopping platform which, as far as I can make out, lets retailers add an additional layer to their sites which enables visitors to enjoy a ‘collaborative’ shopping experience including chat around specific items, ‘community’, etc etc. It’s interesting – the site’s blurb suggests that the reason that online conversion rates are lower than in-store is because real-life shopping is a social event which results in a more fulfilling retail experience and which thereby encourages purchase which, honestly, sounds like bunkum to me – surely a large part of this is the opportunity cost of real-world shopping (time, effort, energy) meaning that you’re more likely to feel you ought to buy something, whereas digital browsing is frictionless and costs you no time/effort, and as such makes it easier to ‘waste’ time browsing without in fact feeling you’ve wasted anything? Anyway, those of you working in and around fashion and retail might find this of interest (or, more likely, probably know about it already).
- Uncertain Times New Roman: THE CORONAFONT! It’s distanced, and all the letters are wearing masks!
- Malicious Masks: Facemasks! But fashion! And horror! Malicious is a Japanese company that makes accessories and which is currently retailing a bunch of masks accessorised with slightly-scary horror teeth. If you’re after a mask which demonstrates your EDGY credentials whilst at the same time being actual proper fashion then these might be up your street – in fact, everything on here is sort-of wonderful, including the superb eye-in-the-pyramid necklaces in which the pyramid is…fleshy. So unpleasant, so good!
- Drawn to Sex: I’ve featured the comics of Oh Joy Sex Toy before – they’re cutely-drawn but wonderfully matter-of-fact guides to various aspects of sex, particularly focusing on queer and fringe/fetish stuff but covering the whole wide gaunt of sexuality in a pleasingly-down-to-earth fashion. This Kickstarter – fully funded with a month to go – is for their second sex-ed book, this one designed to educate people about ther biology and health when it comes to fcuking the way they want; honestly, I can’t recommend these people’s work enough. This is absolutely the sort of sex-positive guidance that kids need but don’t get ANYWHERE, and exactly the sort of antidote to growing up getting all your sex-ed from bongo that I would imagine kids could probably do with.
- Buzzfeed Quiz Party: There’s something very sad about Buzzfeed having launched this shortly after shuttering their UK journalistic operation – the site had quietly become one of the UK’s best investigative reporting outlets over the past few years, surprisingly so, and (in my head at least) was no longer associated with clickbait and quizzes as it had been a decade or so ago. Sadly, though, Jonah Peretti joins the long list of people who have as yet failed to solve the ‘so, what’s the future of journalism then?’ question, so Buzzfeed UK is left as a repository for the sort of content that noone really cares about anymore and which is available everywhere else now because it’s 2020 and the whole internet is basically the same. Still, at least now you can pretend it’s 2011 all over again and get really excited by QUIZZES on Buzzfeed – quizzes which you can now play along with your mates! So if you want to simultaneously answer 33 questions about all the times Joey said “Heyyyy!” in Friends then WOW is it your lucky day! I wonder if one of the quizzes is ‘how do you burn through half-a-billion dollars of VC funding in a decade?”?
- Asian Cinema Streaming Repository: That’s obviously not what this site is called – instead it’s AMP, the Asian Movie Project, which is here collecting links to a HUGE collection of Asian cinema from across the web. Some of these are freely available on YouTube whilst others might not be available depending on where you are in the world, but all are in theory free to stream; there are 100-or-so films here, skewing Japanese, mainly from the past couple of decades but with a reasonable selection of stuff from the 70s and 80s thrown in. I have no idea how good these are – I have heard of about 3 of them, and that’s being generous – but they can’t be worse than what you’re left with on Netflix and the rest.
- The Big Box Collection: Back in the olden days (the 80s and 90s) videogames on PC were sold in massive, overly-elaborate cardboard boxes, which featured occasionally-excellent cover art and design. The person behind this site, Benjamin Wimmer, is meticulously cataloguing these boxes, putting up 3d scans of his collection as it grows over time; you can browse ALL of them, and, if you’re me, transport yourself back in time to being 13 or 14 and going into town after school and spending time in the one games shop that didn’t chase you out after 5 minutes and just looking at all the boxes and reading the blurb on the back and staring at the screenshots and imagining what it would be like to play them (and then never doing so, because £50? You’re having a laugh).
- Deaf Power: I love this. Why shouldn’t the auditorily-impaired have their own symbol of power and pride and defiance? This is it: <0/ – “The symbol is based on the written form of Deaf Power, which is signed with an open palm over an ear and with other hand forming a closed fist in the air.” Were I a graffiti artist (which I am definitely, definitely not) I would totally take to tagging this EVERYWHERE, not least because I quite like the idea of the police being slightly confused as to why there were a lot of militant deaf people suddenly deciding to come out of the woodwork.
- Memex: I ought to find bookmarking and information organisation software useful, but I never really do; I think it’s because the inside of my head is reasonably good at the taxonomy and recall bits on its own, and I can’t really be fcuked to corral it into a more user-friendly interface (basically, as anyone who’s ever worked with me will (un)happily attest, I am far too lazy and arrogant to bother changing the way that I do things for other people, which is yet another reason I am expecting to be pretty much unemployable once I hit about 45). If you’re different, though (and I do hope you are), you might find Memex useful – it’s a service that effectively creates a local, searchable log of every single webpage you visit, meaning you can keyword search your browsing history, which, judging by the number of you who get in touch asking ‘do you remember that site on Curios once, that one with the pictures?’ you could all sort-of do with a bit.
- DAF Beirut: “The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) is a Beirut-based visual arts institution dedicated to making modern and contemporary Arab art accessible to local and international audiences through archiving, exhibitions, education, publications, public programs, and research. Its aim is to preserve and disseminate its permanent collection which includes works in drawing, installation, mixed-media, painting, photography, ceramics, and sculpture.” The museum has recently put its collection online to browse, and there’s a wonderful breadth to the work they feature; I would love to visit Beirut, and almost certainly never will, so this is a pleasing opportunity to visit a superbly-curated gallery with some genuinely interesting artists from countries one doesn’t ordinarily see much work from in the West – honestly, select ‘browse by country’, it’s fascinating to be able to browse work by Alegrian artists, or Sudanese, and see thematic similarities that emerge.
- Titonic Fishermen: A N Other musical browsertoy, this one enlivened by the interface which is presented as a digitised drawing – cute in style, like a kid’s book illustration – which you can interact with elements of to create your song. If you’ve a kid of around 5, I reckon they will LOVE this – but, er, you might want to put headphones on them as it will doubtless sound atrocious.
- The Tank Museum: A YouTube channel that is nothing but videos about tanks. This is for all the dads, who might just want something incredibly boring and history-focused to zone out in front of whilst drinking the nth bottle of Spitfire and failing to pull their weight around the house.
- RoboArcade: This is GREAT – a bit clunky, fine, but it’s FUN and it sort of taps into the ‘drive me insane’ thing from a few dozen links ago. This is an arcade machine that anyone can play via a web interface – you wait your turn and eventually get control of the cabinet, moving around and playing a slightly-crap but very-colourful version of Space Invaders, complete with power-ups and a big boss ship and everything. I am not 100% certain exactly how this setup runs, but I really, really want to see more of these things now, please. If nothing else, we’ve all got the bandwidth to make it sort-of work properly, so why not?
- Gotta Eat The Plums: A very smol, gently funny, slightly arch game about William Carlos Williams’ Twitter-iconic poem about the plums in the icebox (you know the one).
- JSTRIS: OH YES. Competitive Tetris (except they obviously can’t call it that for legal reasons). Play against strangers in an attempt to survive the longest; you’re matched against strangers of wildly-varying skills, meaning you’ll often only last a few seconds, but this is an active community and there are always people playing, so you never have to wait too long to get a new game. Or you can play against bots, or in 1v1 games against anyone you like; this is really, really good fun, and the best way of wasting the rest of your afternoon that I’ve found all week.
- Orb Farm: Last up in the miscellanea, Orb Farm is a beautiful little browsertoygamething which lets you create your own bespoke little aquatic ecosystem – pour in water and sand and vegetation, add algae and Daphnia and bacteria and goldfish, and try and create a self-sustaining waterworld, watching it evolve and change as you go. This is SO SOOTHING and very satisfying and, best of all, is persistent – close the tab and then open it again and your little world is saved, making it something you can totally keep open in a tab to check on once or twice a day. I promise you, this is significantly more appealing than you might imagine from my description – give it a try, it will charm you.
LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, ENJOY THIS DARK, TRAP-ISH SELECTION BY UGANDA’S SLIKBACK!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS CLOSED THIS WEEK, POSSIBLY DUE TO THE ‘RONA!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- The Shelter in Place Gallery: Oh, this is glorious: “Shelter In Place is a miniature gallery, measuring 20 by 30 inches and exhibiting scaled-down works in a model structure created using foam core, mat board, balsa wood, and plexiglass. Artists can submit works at a 1:12 or one inch to the foot scale, allowing them to create and show even ambitious, seemingly large-scale pieces — a romantic, suspended latex installation by Mary Pedicini; wall-to-wall canvases by B. Chehayeb — while traditional exhibition spaces remain closed. With high ceilings and skylights that flood the space with sunshine, the condensed gallery is impressively lifelike, giving artists room to get particularly creative. In some photographs, it is nearly impossible to tell apart from larger galleries.” Beautiful, and a nice antidote to all the people making smol pseudo-galleries for their totally disinterested pets because they think it will get them 100+ likes on Insta.
- Yatzil Elizalde: These are some quite remarkable tattoos – the ones giving the illusion of blurred vision are the most striking, but the line work overall is superb.
- Robert Hodgin: The artist’s Insta feed presents their works, much cartographical and featuring maps that have been slightly altered, digitally or otherwise, to make new pieces. I really, really like this stuff, and I would love to buy some if I knew how and if it were anywhere near affordable.
- Glamour Shots: The Insta feed of a South Korean photographic studio, showcasing some of the ‘glamour’ shots that its patrons pay for. Not, to be clear, ‘glamour’ in the British tabloid sense, but instead ‘glamour’ in the ‘weirdly acid-tinged photoshop and greenscreen fantasy’ sense. Are…are all the cross-eyed people in these photos doing it on purpose, or does South Korea have some sort of strabismus epidemic that they’ve been keeping hidden? Regardless, these are JOYFUL.
- Ines Alpha: Ines Alpha is a digital makeup artist making weird aesthetic filters for Insta. Honestly, these are amazing and I would totally be exploring this sort of thing were I particular type of brand.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:
- Mumbai In Lockdown: As we’re all encouraged to move towards a mindset whereby ‘we’re over the worst!’ and we all get back to work like the good oil in the filthy economic machine we at heart we know we are, it’s interesting to look at other nations whose experience with the virus is at a slightly different stage. This NYT photoessay looks at how Mumbai – ‘Maximum City’, as defined by its inhabitants and the truly excellent book of the same name on the city, its people and its history – is attempting to manage the pandemic. It’s…it’s a mind-fcukingly big place, and a mind-fcukingly big task, and it amused me momentarily to imagine how Mr Johnson and his friends might have coped with that scenario given their stellar performance in what really can only be described as the comparative shallow end of disaster mitigation.
- Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage: OK, this is a bit financially knotty, but you don’t need to have a working knowledge of the term ‘arbitrage’ to get what it’s about and what it’s saying – which is basically that VC money is SO STUPID in many respects that it’s technically possible for restaurant owners who are new to delivery platform Doordash in the US to order food from their own restaurants and make reasonable profit. If you ever needed a decent explanation of why there’s a massive, throbbing digital business bubble at the moment, and why and how it might pop, this is worth reading.
- Fandoms on Zoom: If one of the accepted truths of the web is ‘bongo comes first’ (apologies for the unintended pun), surely one of the others is ‘fan communities will absolutely define and determine platform usage’ – admittedly it’s not catchy, but. This piece looks at how various fandoms are using Zoom to host listening parties of their favourite stars’ music, shared viewings of music videos, and generally integrating videochat into the extant panoply of fan community comms. This is fascinating to me, partly as a natural extension of ‘this is what people want to do and they will bend/tweak any platform they find to fit that desire’ and ‘why the fcuk is video being employed here, what does it add to the experience, and will it persist once the relative novelty has worn off?’ Anecdotally I’m finding that there’s been a significant dropoff in people using video on work calls as they realise that it adds very little, and that it’s tiring to have to contort your face into a simulacrum of interest and maintain that for 45m x8 per day; I don’t know whether I quite buy into the idea of a universal videochat revolution just yet, but we shall see.
- The Virtual Economy: Another thanks to Rina (THANKS RINA) for this piece – if you’re after a decent overview of WHERE WE ALL ARE with regards to digital goods and virtual spaces and monetisation of the virtual and people becoming professional skin designers for Fortnite as an actual job, then this is worth reading. Two points to note – if you’re reasonably up on this stuff there won’t be anything in here that you don’t already know, and, secondly, it’s been dressed up with SO much unnecessary parallax that it’s borderline-headache-inducing. Still, give it to an intern to summarise in more sober format.
- When SimCity Got Serious: This is a great piece of minor software history that I had no idea about whatsoever. Apparently when SimCity got famous, developers Maxis were inundated with enquiries from large organisations asking ‘could you make SimCity, but for tedious-but-complex-field X?’ – so, for a few years at least, they tried to do just that. Thanks to this, the world of oil got SimRefinery, a training tool designed to help greenhorns get to grips with the running of an oil refinery safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t in fact be able to dump 3m litres of crude into the Western Seaboard, however badly they messed up; the world of energy production got SimPower; and, inexplicably, everyone was offered Think2000, which would allow them to simulate the effects of the Millennium Bug on their systems. Unsurprisingly that last example killed the offshoot professional-Sim-building business, but this is a really interesting look at a niche which I reckon you could probably resurrect with far greater success in 2020 (which, as I regularly remind readers, is why I am not in charge of businesses or budgets or people or, really much of anything at all).
- Meet Nick Clegg: Wow, ok, so I just checked some dates and I really have been doing Web Curios in some capacity for over a decade now. WELL DONE ME! Also, Christ what a waste of time! I remember one of the first ones I did at H+K made reference to the surprise advent of the coalition government in the UK back in May 2010, and made reference to the imaginary beast called ‘The Cleggeron’ which would now be leading our country. And now look at us – I am a pseudo-freelancer typing from his pants in the midst of a global pandemic, still doing jobs I largely despise for clients I disdain, writing a newsletter for God knows what reason; Clegg is running comms for Facebook. Clegg, it’s fair to say, has done more with the past decade than I have. Anyway, this is a really interesting read, which is partly about Clegg as a person and partly about the role he’s undertaken at Facebook and how his influence has manifested itself in the 18m or so since he took up the position. I know it’s unfashionable to say so, but I quite like Nick Clegg and I think he comes across pretty well here; also, imagine what a fascinating job it is. I mean, I couldn’t do it – I would be terrible, and also I would hate myself so much – but, objectively, it’s one of the most interesting comms gigs on the planet, no question. One thing, though – that photoshoot! Oh Nick!
- Inside The TikTok Hype Houses: A look at the proliferation of TikTok community houses for CONTENT CREATORS in LA – this isn’t particularly insightful, and you won’t learn much about the kids or the life that you won’t have seen in a dozen other similar articles – but I found the photos interesting; I have said this before, and I am not the only one to mention it, but LOOK HOW WHITE THESE KIDS ARE! In the US in 2020 this is quite weird, and speaks (I think) to the platform’s clear strategy to embed itself in affluent communities first by promoting content from affluent, attractive, young people. Look at all these kids – they’re all the bland pretty of Abercrombie models, which is the sort of aesthetic I honestly thought youth culture had broadly decided to repudiate. I would be interested to read something about what this all means, if anyone has any links; I am genuinely fascinated about what the renewed popularity of this look amongst young people means/presages, should anyone have any ideas.
- What Were Sports?: Imagining people of the future looking back at the strange, largely-pointless, often-inexplicable pastime that was ‘sports’. Funny, unless you really like and miss sport, in which case this might still be TOO SOON.
- TikTok Fame In Quarantine: Less about TikTok per se and more about how ‘being a creator’ works in 2020; this piece profiles a bunch of people who’ve gone a bit viral on TikTok since the pandemic began, and who are now finding that they have been pigeonholed and that their only chance of recapturing that highpoint is to double-down on their particular ‘thing’, whether or not they want to or otherwise. It’s interesting to me what this says about the platform – if you accept that TikTok, YT et al are TV (you know what I mean), then in the same way that you would be annoyed if you tuned into Hollyoaks to discover it had one day pivoted hard to political analysis you might well be annoyed if your favourite TikToker who always uses that EXCELLENT catchphrase attempts to, I don’t know, do a dance or something. Basically, the crowd is a tyrant and the massive disbenefit in being a DIRECT-TO-FANS-CREATOR is that, as with all human beings, many of your ‘fans’ will be selfish, demanding cnuts who don’t care that you are an actual human being or indeed that this is actual labour and instead just expect you to DO THAT THING and will actively abuse you if you don’t. GOOD TIMES! EVERYONE IS A CREATOR! FAMOUS FOR 15 PEOPLE!!!
- Oops, I Did It Again: You may not have thought that the red catsuit video warranted a 20-year retrospective, but this piece will convince you of its necessity. Takes a very wide-ranging look at the song and the time into which it was born – take a moment to imagine 2000, a new millennium, no 9/11 or war on terror or all-consuming fear of The Other sweeping across the Western world…no large-scale mainstream web to speak of… – as well as offering interesting commentary on the Swedish hit factory Cheiron and the whole slightly-iffy-even-at-the-time-but-definitely-feels-very-wrong-now presentation of Spears as an actual, bona-fide jailbait sexkitten. Brilliant, especially if you’re old enough to remember it first time around.
- Paris Hilton, Left Behind: I wouldn’t ordinarily point you at a Buzzfeed article about Paris Hilton and contrasting her fame with that of friend and protegee Kim Kardashian but this is surprisingly interesting in terms of its analysis of the changing nature of the celebrity industrial complex and the way in which the Kardashians, with their obsessive and steely-eyed focus on The Dollar and The Brand, changed the game forever.
- Botch on the Rhine: The New York Review of Books reviews a history of the Battle of Arnhem in WWII, one of the great British humiliations of the war despite occurring at a point when the conflict had been largely decided in the Allies’ favour. This is a brilliant article – I have limited interest in the history of battles, but it manages to impart knowledge without feeling like a tedious Boy’s Own fantasy of warfare, instead managing to communicate the very peculiar and very British reasons why it all went so wrong. As we stare down the barrel of 40,000 dead here in the UK, this is full of absolutely wonderful quotes which could as well be applied today as 80 years ago – this in particular struck me as miserably apt after two months of ‘blitz spirit’ and ‘pull together’ and ‘we’re a world-leader’ and ‘our app will be the best’ rhetoric: “The idea that Britain remained a first-rate power was a fantasy which Churchill desperately tried to promote, even though he knew in his heart that it was not the case…. One could argue that September 1944 was the origin of that disastrous cliché which lingers on even today about the country punching above its weight.” Quite.
- Ignoring The Internet In Fiction: An excellent essay by Joyce Hinnefeld on why, in the main, the internet tends to remain unrendered in fiction (or at least ‘literature’). I don’t know why it is that novelistic descriptions of online life feel to me flat and dissatisfying – and I wonder whether it’s the same for younger readers, or whether it’s just a function of my not being used to it meaning that writing about being online feeling rather like dancing about architecture. Regardless, this is very well-written and asks interesting questions about the relationship of the written to the internal and, in turn, to the real.
- Facetime With Lipstick: On being at home, and being online, and makeup and self-image and ‘self-care’ and how in this as in so many other things there is a significant gender differential that we’re perhaps not thinking about enough. I loved this, although it made me feel, guiltily, grateful that I am a bloke.
- 36,000 Feet Under The Sea: Oh oh oh this is SO GOOD. It’s also super-long, but it’s worth every moment, I promise you – this is all about a reclusive millionaire’s attempts to build a vessel that will enable him to reach the lowest points in the ocean. It features peril and incredible characters, an exhibition crewed by a classic ‘cast of misfits’, and so much casual, throwaway derring do that you could have written seven articles and had material left over. Honestly, even if you don’t normally care about ACTION and EXPEDITIONS, this is superbly-written and compelling on a human level rather than just in terms of adventure. Also contains this anecdote, which I would very much like to apply to certain rich businessmen seeking government bailouts right about now: “But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” While Shackleton was missing in Antarctica, a member of his expedition cabled for help. Winston Churchill responded, “When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins.””
- Self-Portrait With iPhone: Finally in the longreads, this is truly wonderful and I urge you to click. Pam Mendel, in her 50s, discusses online dating and quarantine and getting older and looking older and feeling older and, honestly, this is beautiful.
By JC Gotting
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: