Webcurios 23/02/18

“>NEXT UP, A REALLY LOVELY MIX BY THOMAS SPOONER WHO USED TO LIVE OPPOSITE ME WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID AND WHO’S GROWN UP TO BE A VERY NICE MAN WITH GOOD TASTE IN MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS TEACHERS PROBABLY DON’T GET PAID ENOUGH TO MARK HOMEWORK *AND* LEARN HOW TO FIRE OFF PRECISION ROUNDS IN INTENSELY HIGH-PRESSURE CIRCUMSTANCES, ON BALANCE, PT.2:

• Real Life Charts: Michelle Rial is a designer from San Francisco, and this is her Instagram account where she posts brilliant and funny graphs, all about, y’know, LIFE and stuff. So relatable! It’s quite difficult to describe this positively – I think it’s really good, but at the same time all the terms I want to use to describe it are generally the sort of words which generally make me want to gouge out my eyes. Still, click and enjoy.

• Historic Maps of London: Oh this is SUPERB! 50+ historic maps of London, ranging from old depictions of the tube to a ‘Hyde Park Glove Map’, designed to be worn by ladies with questionable orientation skills taking a gentle constitutional. Cartography enthusiasts (you crazy guys!) will adore this.
• Bump: The cooler kids among you – or the mindless Supreme zombies, either/or – may well know about this, but it was new to me. Bump is basically Wavey Garms as an app – it’s a streetwear buying and selling community, with marketplace and chat functionality, working with Paypal to manage transactions and provide payment security. Wonderfully, there’s an additional market where people basically offer themselves up to stand in line in Covent Garden or wherever to catch the latest drop – they queue so you don’t have to, and you don’t even have to know them or talk to them! Is this ok?
• List of Oreo Varieties: There are a LOT Of different types of Oreo, turns out.
• The Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies: Not a film that tends to get a lot of critical discourse around it, Gremlins 2, but in case you ever wondered about the Derridan implications of the Flasher Gremlin then you’re in for a treat.
• And Flowers: Thanks to Dan Green for pointing this out to me;  have you ever wondered what a florist would be like if you made it a lot less like a florist and a lot more like a cross between SuperSuper Magazine circa 2006, and everyone who’s ever lived in New Cross? It would be like this! Honestly rather lovely, despite being so hip it can barely see over its own pelvis.
• Public Office: The website of artist and maker Jonathan Levine, an Australian who makes the most incredible designs from cardboard – mechanical, architectural, fantastical, I would love to see this stuff animated in stop-motion.
• The Mercury Jacket: What could POSSIBLY go wrong with a jacket which has a built-in heating element and thermostat, controllable (OF COURSE!) by your phone? Why not be one of the thousands of curious folk to back this Kickstarter and find out! Yes, it’s another entry in the now-kilometric list of ‘internet connected stuff on Kickstarter which doesn’t really need to be internet connected and which I’m reasonably sure isn’t going to be as good as it looks in prototype!’ Here it is, then, the “Mercury Intelligent Heated Jacket — outerwear that’s voice controlled, built for anything, automatically heats to the right temperature, and learns your behavior to get better over time.” Yes, that’s right, voice controlled: “ALEXA WARM UP MY JACKET PLEASE” – who, WHO, is ever going to want to say that? “Alan, you’re sweating like a horse, what’s wrong?” “My phone ran out of batteries and now my jacket won’t let my body temperature fall below 101 degrees”. Oh, and OF COURSE it has ‘AI’ so it can ‘learn your preferences’. I mean, the possibilities are ENDLESS. Go on, buy one, let me know how you get on.
• Making Art With Alexa: Turning a pair of voice assistants into an interpretation of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 audio artwork “I am sitting in a room”. Peak Web Curios here, by Henry Cook.
• Not Quite Bronwyn: I don’t know who Bronwyn is, but I like the fact that she has an Insta account showing exactly how Starbucks mangle her name each morning.  
• Make Your Own Alexa-Controlled Toilet: Have you ever wanted to defecate and then walk away from the toilet, regally declaring “Alexa, eliminate my waste!” to trigger an automatic flush? No, no of course you haven’t. Still, this is a detailed set of instructions as to how you can turn your ordinary, banal toilet into an EXCITING, FUTURE CRAPHOUSE!
• The Material Properties Database: Occasionally I come across something online which is so tedious that I figure it has to be incredibly useful to someone – so it is with The Material Properties Database, which lists the physical properties of loads of construction materials, should you ever need to know exactly what type of plastic you might want to build, I don’t know, a giant garden dinosaur out of. You might read this now and scoff but JUST YOU WAIT until someone’s asking you whether they ought to use Polynenzamidole or Epoxy to secure the camera to the drone mounts. Or, er, something.
• Beecosystem: You get the impression that perhaps the name came first here. Beecosystem (ok, it is a great name) is a slightly mad-looking concept which effectively offers buyers the opportunity to have an attractively designed, modular, display-quality beehive, er, in their house. It’s certainly a feature, but I confess to not being entirely comfortable with the idea of having MILLIONS OF FCUKING BEES in my house. “Yeah, so I’ll be home by about 8, want me to swing by th- Clare? What’s that sound? CLARE OH GOD NO THE BEES ARE LOOSE GOD CLARE SAVE YOURSELF” I mean, that’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve not been warned. Still, they look quite cool.
• The Swiss Transit System: A live map of all the trains on the Swiss rail network, moving in beautifully precise and well-oiled ballet across the territory. Wonderfully, soothingly dull.
• The Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex: Everyone hates Powerpoint. Everyone is dreadful at it. Although possibly noone is quite as bad at it as the US Military, as evidenced by this absolute goldmine of bizarre and increasingly surreal documents – the diagrams! The language! The seemingly uncritical devotion to clipart? Imagine having one of these ‘presented’ at you by a screaming man in fatigues – horrid, isn’t it? This one’s especially for any designers out there who will have a conniption at the complete absence of any sort of unifying aesthetic here.
• Celebrity Tattoos: A slightly-too-obsessive database of famouses and their tatts from around the world, with accompanying picture galleries, which is perfect when you just absolutely have to know about what ink DJ Lethal out of Limp Bizkit has (he has a House of Pain tattoo, tatt fact fans!).
• Pommerman: A robot competition! Pommerman is an international AI challenge, in which developers are invited to create code which can successfully compete in a multiplayer game of (pseudo-)bomberman. If you’re interested in coding and botbuilding and suchlike, this could be a fun pastime. Alternatively, just go and play Bomberman.
• Crying in Public: I am not 100% certain where the ‘crying in New York’ meme/trope came from, but it’s very much a ‘thing’. Crying In Public is a map of New York onto which people have tagged their stories of public emotion in the city – mostly sad, but more generally just beautifully human. A special credit to the person who’s posted a story about being lifted off a man’s lap whilst having sex with them by a bouncer and still not getting kicked out of the venue, which is a pretty impressive feat. This is a very sticky site, and one you can get lost in – I would like, OBVIOUSLY, for someone to replicate this for London please.
• Popcorn TV: This is a PERFECT Friday afternoon piece of webdistraction, and very nicely made with it; it’s a fairly standard ‘how many of these TV shows can you identify?’ game, but the graphics are nice and there’s lots of bonus content and you can also do it in French so, frankly, what MORE do you want? Jesus.
• Robot Mind Meld: This is rather fun and pretty impressive. The site presents you with a bot opponent; you both start with a work, pulled out of the ether by the bot and from wherever you keep your word stocks by you, and then try and iteratively arrive at matching words by trying to find a common term between the two. Fcuk, that makes NO SENSE, does it? Even by my standards, that’s some POOR EXPOSITION, sorry. Look, just try it, it’s fun.
• Pornceptual: “Pornceptual presents pornography as queer, diverse and inclusive. We aim to prove that pornography can be respectful, intimate and artistic, while questioning usual pornographic labels. “Can art succeed where porn fails – to actually turn us on?”” More ‘interesting’ than titillating, to my mind at least, but this is a fascinating site at the fringes of sex, art and bongo; obviously it’s not that safe for work, but the photography’s honestly really very cool and not actually all that bongo-ish, so I reckon HR will be fine with it. Seriously, I’ve cleared it with them, promise.
• Battleships: Finally this week, this is basically Battleships crossed with Sudoku and it made me feel REALLY thick and so I’m inflicting it on you in the hope that you’ll fail as spectacularly to solve these as I did.

By Mike Campau

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS LOFI BEAUTY FROM AKIRA WHICH WILL BE PERFECT FOR THE LONGREADS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Walls and Portals: You may not think you want to look through a series of photos of walls and portals, but you do.

• Colourful Gradients: A different colour gradient, automatically generated by a computer, posted every 30 minutes. Really, really pleasing (and would actually make a far better Insta account than a Tumblr if I’m honest).
• Mapstalgia: Videogame maps drawn from memory. This is great – obviously a love of games helps, but I like the interesting interpretations of space different people have, evident from the way they attempt to draw these worlds.
• Shell Make The Future: This is in here SOLELY to showcase the quite remarkably soulless corporate music promo that Jennifer Hudson, Pixie Lott, Luan Santana, Yemi Alade and Monali Thakur all got roped into doing, all in the service of greenwashing Shell a bit. Scroll down, you’ll find it, it’s AMAZING. Have any of you actually knowingly heard a Pixie Lott song? As with the Saturdays, quite a large part of me believes she exists solely to give the appalling gossip pages in the Metro a blonde person to feature.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Fcuk You, I Like Guns: We’ve not been short on opinion pieces following last week’s tediously predictable school/gun event, but this is the only one I’ve read I thought essential; written by a former member of the US Military, it calmly and cogently lays out the reasons why there is no reason whatsoever to allow civilians access to military-grade weaponry. My personal favourite point is the one directed to all the people who use ‘the need to form militias against corrupt government’ as a reason for their semi-erotic attachment to automatic weaponry, which basically just says “MATE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FCUKING TANKS AND HELICOPTERS, YOUR AR15 WOULDN’T HELP”.
• Trending on Social is Worthless: A smart essay on why it might be better were social platforms to abandon the concept of ‘trending’ entirely, given the complete lack of any sort of agreed methodology or indeed transparency around how each platform’s selections work. When outlined like that, it does make quite a lot of sense – you wouldn’t necessarily give much credence to someone who was constantly shouting “LOOK AT THIS IT IS AN IMPORTANT THING” but who then was incapable or unwilling of explaining exactly why said thing was in fact important.
• The Good Room: This is a long and digressive but fascinating essay in which designer Frank Chimero writes about the importance of free public spaces in the physical realm as areas for human interaction and growth, and draws parallels to their importance – and, crucially, their decreasing accessibility – in the virtual. “Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it. It’s a visibility problem that’s an inadvertent consequence of values. The commercial parts become more self-contained and link inside themselves to keep you around—after a while, you’re looping around their cul-de-sac because attention is money on the web. Non-commercial sites link out and will let you go, which immediately puts them at a disadvantage for mindshare.”
• Absurdist Dialogues with Siri: This perhaps slightly snobbishly alarmist, but I’m broadly in agreement with the author’s premise – to whit, that the simplified and transactional nature of the language we are developing to deal with voice assistants is moving us ineluctably to a point where we see and use language in purely functional fashion. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Siri’s going to, y’know, KILL POETRY, but it’s an interesting line of thought.
• Casapound and Italian Neofascism: You may or may not know that Italy goes to the polls again in March, affording the Italian people yet another opportunity to make themselves a European laughing stock by once again doing exactly what increasingly-Piltdown-Man-looking Uncle Silvio – he’s back! He never really went away! Truly, it’s amazing the degree of rehabilitation that can be achieved when you own all the telly and some of the newspapers! – tells them to. Except this time there’s a lovely hard-right component to the election, comprised of Forza Nuova and Casa Pound, the subject of this excellent article which traces the history of Italy’s fascist movement since World War II. My mum says this is borne out of Italy never really having engaged in any critical analysis of its past relationship with extremism, which seems legit given my grandfather would proudly walk around in the 1980s and 90s happily saying he was a fascist and Mussolini was a bit ace, and everyone basically just thought he was a bit of a lad (to be clear, Web Curios is very much an antifascist publication and my granddad, god rest Nonno’s immortal soul, would have very much disapproved).
• Building All The Live Shows: From the same sort of ballpark as that piece about doing the audio for the Superbowl halftime show which I posted a few weeks back, this is about the company which designs, builds and manages the sets when people like U2 or Gaga go on tour. This sounds SO incredibly stressful – the various points in the piece where they basically acknowledge that, say, Bono, will literally just sketch something on a napkin and say “This, but flying and with laser rockets on” and then swan off, and you just have to make that happen, make me sweat nervously. I remember once meeting the bloke who managed the stage settings for the 2012 opening and closing ceremonies at my friend Paul’s wedding, who told me that his first meeting with Annie Lennox about her performance involved him sitting largely in silence with a cup of tea at her house, while she expanded an artistic concept which was basically ‘giant skeletal ghost ship’ and he thought, repeatedly, “I have literally no fcuking idea how to do that, Annie”.
• I Can Text A Poo, But Not My Name: A hugely interesting piece about the historic systems of cultural dominance and oppression which are being accidentally extended into digital life through unquestioning UX and UI design; the piece’s title is referring to the fact that whilst Unicode is really good at adding new emoji, it’s less good at expanding charactersets to support languages in the second and third world, for example.
• I Dated Bad Men Until A Bad Man Became President: This is a nicely written personal essay by Sarah Sweeney about her experiences dating fuckbois and wastemen and how the election of exactly that sort of person to the Presidency convinced her not to anymore.
• Your Cortex Contains 17billion Computers: Web Curios once again dips an ignorant toe into the murky (to me) wonders of neuroscience, a subject despite having had lots of really smart people patiently and kindly explain it to me, and in which I am genuinely interested, I simply cannot ever hold onto information about. Perhaps this essay will remedy that – it’s a really interesting and reasonably easy to parse examination of how exactly the brain relates to the concept of computational networks, and quite how much more complicated it is. Also contains some excellent images of dendritic networks which are always a pleasure to see.
• All The Art In Bojack Horseman: “Yes, Matt, we know you don’t really watch telly, there is no need to tediously announce this fact whenever discussing something televisual, we know you haven’t seen it”. Good, now we’ve got that out of the way, this is a brilliant look at all of the parody artworks featured in miserable alcoholic horse lolfest Bojack Horseman. I love this sort of thing – just look at the amount of art history nerdery that’s contained here, purely as extraneous detail, it’s wonderful.
• //medium.com/@dethtron5000/the-marvel-movie-graph-5-years-later-7334a6a01398″>The Marvel Movie Universe Graphs: Someone has poured a frankly baffling amount of time and energy into mapping the interrelationships between all the different bits of the Marvel Movie Universe. If you care about that sort of thing this will ENTHRALL you.
• Thunderdome: Oh WOW. When I was a callow 15 year old youth and shipped off to international school, I lived in my first year with a Spanish guy called Javier who’d previously lived in Brussels and whose CD collection included a few compilations of quite frankly terrifying high-tempo hardcore music under the name THUNDERDOME (my favourite of these opened with staccato gunshots and air raid sirens and then a massive Teutonic voice SCREAMING “FCUK PARIS! FCUK LONDON! FCUK MILAN! THIS IS THUNDERDOME!!!!”, at which point it all went a bit 240bpm for about three hours). Anyway, this is an incredibly comprehensive look at the culture around the Thunderdome parties, and the Northern European hardcore scene as a whole – even if this was never your vibe, check out the photos and click on a few of the links to some of the music; it’s…jesus, it’s horrible, can you imagine the amount of speed you’d need to be on?
• On Colorism: I had absolutely no idea that Colorism was even a thing until a couple of years ago when I worked on the BBC’s Black and British season and lots of the people I worked with educated me. This is a decent primer on the issue, and quotes Emma Dabiri who I have met a few times and is a frighteningly smart person on issues of race, society and representation.
• Let’s Talk About Waveforms: Just a GORGEOUS interactive, explaining what waveforms are, what they do and how they work. Beautiful design and a wonderful example of how UX/UI can make a huge difference in communicating tricky concepts.
• The WeWork Manifesto: Wonderful, haughtily scathing critique of co-working phenomenon We Work, which, not content with attempting to convince us that work really ought to be our entire life and that we MUST BE FRIENDS with our colleagues, wants to start building that brand loyalty even earlier with the launch this September of its first for-profit school, WeGrow. To give you a feel for the tone of the piece, and the insane hubris of the project, enjoy this beautifully cutting excerpt: “Though Ms. Neumann has no background in education (on the website, she describes herself as “an avid student of life” and says her “superpower” is “intuition”), she has applied for accreditation from the state, has hired a team of career educators and is accepting applications for the coming school year. Tuition for toddlers: $36,000 a year.”
• Opioid America: Not the first photo essay on the US opioid crisis I’ve featured, but this one by Time is full of bleakly brilliant pictures of an epidemic which continues to seemingly be utterly ignored by lawmakers.
• Northwest Passages: “For the past seven years, [Jessica] Dimmock has been photographing and filming older trans women in the Pacific Northwest. Dimmock is careful to explain that the situations are, well, complicated: some of her subjects don’t consider themselves to be trans because, as Dimmock explains, it was not an identity that they felt free to totally embrace. “They’ve been trapped in a timeline and a situation at home that has made it impossible for them,” says Dimmock. “But everyone I photographed is on the spectrum of having a full female identity. There are women inside all of these people.” The series of photographs below, taken in late 2017, returns the women to what Dimmock calls “these hidden and secretive spaces.”” These are superb.
• Can Free Speech Survive The Internet?: That is, in an era in which all (fine, not quite all, but) speech is infinitely recordable and recoverable, can we still be said to have ‘free’ speech (free qua unguarded)? Let’s just say the outlook doesn’t look fantastic. A lightly philosophical exploration by Thomas R Wells.
• The Great Stink: This is a long and wide-ranging essay by Laurie Pennie, touching on the need for men to take on the emotional burden of the Me Too movement and to, you know, not just sit around feeling scared and a bit vulnerable about it. “Suck it up and let go. Let go of your resentment at women’s lack of patience, let go of your wounded pride, let go of your useless shame, and let go of the idea of being a “good guy.” “Good” is not a thing you are, it’s a thing you do, or don’t do. The world is not neatly divided into good and bad men.” I know Pennie’s often divisive, but she gives good essay and this is a cracking piece of writing / thinking.
• Mother of Invention: A short scifi story by Nnedi Okorafor, set in future Nigeria. It’s one of a series being published in Slate around how technology is set to change our lives, themed around various prompts – this one’s on the theme of ‘Home’, and it’s so refreshing to read an African female voice in scifi; the framing and the ideas feel fresher than the majority of gunmental-grey futurescapes you often get fed.
• Derangements: This is a remarkable piece of writing, and I promise it will surprise you in ways you weren’t necessarily expecting. Beau Freedlander talks about his practise of ‘radical fasting’, and how that intersects with his manic/bipolar issues; it is VERY honest, whilst simultaneously giving me quite a lot of unreliable narrator vibes. I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but this *really* got to me this week and has been rattling around in my head for a few days. Give it a go.
• My First Year Sober: Finally this week, a comic strip by Edith Zimmerman whose words I have recommended to you before when she wrote at The Hairpin. This is a beautiful, sweet, and in-no-way preachy sequential art account of her experience of her first year sober; regardless of your relationship with booze, this is a glorious piece of work.

By Butch Locsin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, this is 90 seconds of PURE satisfaction. Marbles plus magnets plus rube goldberg = HEAVEN:

2) Next, this is ‘Dolly Said No To Elvis’, a bluesy song about how Dolly Parton refused Elvis the right to cover one of her tracks. The video is ACE and reminds me very much of the classic stop-motion accompaniment to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Enjoy:

3) I think a few of you are going to rather enjoy this. The Cellblock song from Chicago, reinterpreted to refer to the oh-so-modern phenomenon of mansplaining – The Cellblock Mansplaingo:

4) This is called ‘Interference Pattern’ by Loud Neighbour – the slightly dopplering drums go perfectly with the black and white visuals, and generally I can just sort of stare and listen to this on an infinite loop. GOOD TECHNO:

5) This is ‘Simple Love’ by Manifest and it is SUPERB and the video is absolutely gorgeous. Put this full-screen and enjoy:

6) This is…unsettling:

7) Dinosaur! This is a film by Nathan, who’s a small boy, and his Dad, who’s an animator. It is SO CHARMING – I would watch something longer in this style, but equally appreciate it’s ripe to be ruined by some advercunt:

8) Finally this week, the best-named band I’ve featured in Curios for an age. Say hello to Hardcore Anal Hydrogen – this is their…er…challenging track ‘Jean Pierre’ – I LOVE THIS VIDEO SO MUCH. And, as this is the end, I love YOU! Really! THANKS FOR READING THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING THANKS FOR NOT LEAVING ME ALL ALONE HERE I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO YOU AND YOURS BYE BYE BYE!

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