There was meant to be one of these last week. I had dragged myself from my pit at 6am as per normal, drunk unconscionable quantities of appallingly-stewed tea and spaffed out about 6,500 words before a stray swipe of a sausagefinger on trackpad condemned each and every single one of those words – and they were good words, we have the best words here on Imperica, although I concede that occasionally the order in which they’re arranged could stand a little more care and attention – promptly vanished forever.
Reader, I howled. I gnashed and I flailed and I had something of a minor tantrum, it’s fair to say. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had anything like that happen, though I imagine most of you have, but it was the worst case I’ve ever experienced of intellectial coitus interruptus. Not to overextend this analogy (trust me, I’m no more comfortable with it than you are), but let’s just say I’ve been in quite some discomfort this week.
But! It is another Friday, and the web has delivered, and LO YOU ARE ONCE AGAIN BLESSED! So before you go out and spend the final bank holiday of 2017 assiduously pursuing cirrhosis or seratonin-deficiency, or both, fortify yourself with this – a veritable BOTTOMLESS BRUNCH BUFFET of content, except without being surrounded by a bunch of dickheads Instagramming everything in sight whilst they diabetes themselves on crap prosecco. It’s Friday, it’s a three-day weekend, nukes are out but nazis are back…it’s WEB CURIOS!
FIRST UP, MIXWISE, IS THE NEW SERIES OF MIXES COMPILER BY IMPERICA AND THIS WEEK FEATURING VELVETS, OLAFUR ARNOLDS, SLOWDIVE, LEFTFIELD AND MORE!
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T QUITE AS COMPREHENSIVE AS USUAL DUE TO NOT BEING ABLE TO FACE REWRITING SOME OF THE DULLER PIECES OF S*C**L M*D** ‘NEWS’ FROM LAST WEEK’S ABORTED CURIOS AND WHICH ADVISES YOU TO CHECK OUT WE ARE SOCIAL’S BLOG IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT COMPLETENESS THIS WEEK TBH (THIS…THIS IS HOW YOU BUILD AN AUDIENCE, RIGHT?):
- You Can Now Use A 360 Photo As Your FB Cover Image: I’m not really 100% sure why you’d want to do this, and yet here we are. It’s basically a feature that makes panoramic photo-shooting available as part of the FB app and which then lets users take said panoramics and use them as the cover shot; which, should you be doing some sort of event with lots of happy, screaming children waving their hands in the air at a famous on a stage or something, might be a nice way of commemorating the BRAND ACTIVATION. Or I don’t know, you could hide Easter Eggs in the edges of the picture or something, rewarding fans who bothered to look, or, oh, Christ, I don’t know, I’m pretty underwhelmed here to be honest with you. I hope this picks up or we’re in for a long morning.
- Publishers Get Logos Alongside Stories In FB Trending & Search: Ahem. “we will begin introducing publisher logos next to articles in Trending and Search surfaces on Facebook, as part of our ongoing efforts to enhance people’s recognition of the sources of news distributed on our platform. Publishers will now be able to upload multiple versions of their logos through a new Brand Asset Library, so that the logos can appear next to their content on Facebook.” So, to be clear, Facebook will be increasingly crap as a traffic-driver, and they want you to use Instant Articles thereby screwing with your revenue models, but LOOK! Little logos! See? Makes it all better, doesn’t it, publishers!
- Instagram Introduces Threaded Photomessaging: This is going to be a touch tricky to explain in prose, so bear with me here. You can now use the photo you’re replying to on Instagram Direct as a sticker in your photo response; actually, that wasn’t that hard at all! There’s actually lots of rather fun stuff you can do here, creatively-speaking, although less so perhaps for brands. Oh, and while we’re doing Instagram they also introduced threaded replies to posts, making managing customer service interactions significantly easier should that be the sort of thing that keeps you up at night.
- LinkedIn Adding Video Creation To App: This…this is seismic. What do you want to see more of on LinkedIn? No, no don’t tell me, for I already know! It’s videos of ham-faced middle managers dispensing their nuggets of SOLID GOLD corporate insight and tips on brand strategy whilst knocking back a couple of cold ones on the 19:11 to Guildford (always sit in the same carriage, on nodding terms with everyone, sometimes even have a bit of banter on a Friday if the wind’s right). According to the article – and I’m sorry about the Mashable link, but I can’t be bothered to attempt to navigate LinkedIn’s press office to find the actual announcement – “Some stories are better shown than told. Video allows you to evoke emotion, transport viewers, teach something or share some incredible piece of insight when words and images alone aren’t enough”. I mean, yes, there’s truth in that, but I’m not 100% convinced that it’s necessarily applicable to articles about “The 14 Things Princess Diana’s Untimely Death Can Tell Us About Brand Strategy”. Anyway, this is rolling out slooooooowly, but hopefully you too will soon have the ability to speke your branes via the medium of video.
- Welcome to the Amazon Influencer Programme: INFLUENCERS! You can now make actual cashmoney from persuading your slavish devotees to buy stuff from Amazon from your very own dedicated influencer Page! They’re expanding it to other platforms soon, but at the moment it’s only open to YouTubers – Instagram will almost certainly be next. You submit your YT Channel, they determine whether you’re worthy of being allowed to swim in Bezos’s money deposit. Smart, really.
- Bacardi X Major Lazer: What do you think the cost of this was? Tie-up with Major Lazer, marketing costs, bespoke Snapchat Lens and associate design, coding, etc, then the ad-buy to alert people to the fact it was actually happening… I mean, the idea – the FIRST EVER music video filmed entirely by fans through Snapchat – is a reasoable gimmick, which makes me do even MORE of a wince when I look at the views on that video. <8,000 is…objectively REALLY bad. I’d really very much like to read the agency evaluation report on this, if anyone happens to have access to it – I really enjoy the ‘reached 30million people’ line in this puff piece.
- Carlsberg 170: 170 is objectively something of an odd anniversary to go big on, but perhaps there’s something uniquely Danish that I’m missing here. Anyway, Carlsberg is 170 this year, and to celebrate they’ve put together this little site taking you on a drone’s-eye tour of the Danish capital – if you’ve never been, Copenhagen is a gorgeous city and this is a beautiful way to experience it. .
- KFC VR: This is…bizarre, and really quite sinister the more you watch it. As a gimmick, KFC has developed this VR…’game’? Experience? Not really sure what you’re meant to call these things. Anyhow, in it you get to ‘play’ at making your very own KFC, while a strange, scratchy-voiced Colonel exhorts you to up your game, and goes off on slightly askew tangents. All set in a strange sort of CGI panelled anteroom, and featuring some of the most unpleasant-looking ‘chicken’ you’re likely to have seen in a virtual realm, this is feels like the first 20 minutes of a very, very weird videogame in the mould of ‘Five Nights At Freddy’s’ or similar. WEIRD. Also, obviously, good marketing, so well done them.
- Burger King Creates Own Cryptocurrency: Really, though. This, too, is WEIRD. In Russia, BK “is now offering its own cryptocurrency, called Whoppercoin, in honor of the signature sandwich and best-selling burger at Burger King. According to reports from local news, the new cryptocurrency was launched on the Waves blockchain platform. To date, there are only one billion Whoppercoins issued, but the developers do not exclude the possibility of additional emissions. Customers of Burger King in Russia can now get Whoppercoins on a special digital wallet when they are buying Whoppers. For each “Whopper” bought, the visitor will receive one Whoppercoin. Starting August 22, customers can send a photo of the check paid for the order at Burger King and the address of their cryptocurrency wallet to receive new cryptocurrency. A representative of Burger King specified that the initial application of the new cryptocurrency is a new loyalty program that will allow customers to pay for fast food using collected cryptocurrency. However, it is still unclear what exchange rate will be implemented.” 2017, where a fast food chain can ACTUALLY create its own currency. Truly, what a time to be alive.
By Lu Kong
“>NEXT UP, WHY NOT TAKE A MUSICAL JOURNEY INTO TECHNO WITH THE MAN YOU AND MOSTLY I KNOW AS FAT BOB?
THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T WANT TO MENTION THAT MAN BUT WHICH THINKS THAT THIS REMIX OF HIM SAYING ‘ANTIFA’ TO THE TUNE OF THE ‘TEQUILA’ SONG IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD PIECE OF FRIDAY CONTENT AND SO HOPES YOU ENJOY IT, PT.1:
- Should You Date Nate?: This is a bit of a throwback in many ways. It’s been a few years now since I’ve seen one of these ‘LADIES OF THE INTERNET! APPLY TO BE MY GUINEVERE!’ horrorshows, and I thought they might have been consigned to the oubliette of online history, and then this week Nate turned up and OH MY. Nate is a 6’4” bachelor entrepreneur (of COURSE he is!), who’s decided that the best way to find romance is to write a slightly mad-sounding online screed talking about why you shouldn’t date him whilst at the same time making abundantly clear that Nate is, by any standards, a CATCH, ladies, never mind the thousand-yard-stare and the fact that he writes like the author of several dozen airport bookshop self-help tomes. One of the best (read: worst) things about this is the frankly startling ‘Privacy’ policy on the website (thanks Kate for pointing it out), which states that any woman…er…brave enough to contact Nate through the site are giving him permission to publish anything they write to him, anywhere on the web. I’m SURE that Nate is an upstanding and honourable man – imagine my tone here channeling Mark Antony – but, well, no. Anyway, click and MARVEL.
- Hvper: I consume a LOT of web. Unhealthy amounts. The sort of diet which leaves me pasty, bloated, enervated, and on the really bad days bleeding from the eyes and ears and with an unaccountable feeling of disassociation from the species of which I still vaguely recognise as my own. Still, even I am slightly taken aback by just HOW MUCH internet is included in one-stop-link shop Hvper, which basically pulls in RSS feeds from some of the web’s biggest news and trending sites – from Reddit to the BBC to Vox to Cracked to VICE to The Guardian to…well, you get the picture. If your job is to vaguely know ‘what’s happening on the internet right now’, this is probably your new homepage. WARNING: may cause information anxiety, in much the same way this thing probably does.
- Foreign Rap: This is BRILLIANT. A wonderful site which lets you select from a pretty exhaustive list of countries from a dropdown and then just plays you a seemingly infinite selection of hiphop from said country, videos and all. It’s a really nice-looking site, you can set it to ‘Random’ if you just fancy taking a meander through the world’s rappers, they do mixtapes, and basically how can you not love a website which right now has me listening to some apparently quite angry young men from Zurich, possibly rapping about how they will never be able to afford any of the watches advertised in the airport (or something like that, Swiss French is hard to understand for me).
- Make It Metal: This is quite tiring, you will look very silly, and if you have a hangover I really don’t recommend you try it. Those caveats aside, this is a fun/stupid promo site for Japanese metal band Crossfaith – give it access to your webcam, and the site will play the band’s new single, but only for as long as it can tell you are furiously headbanging along in accompaniment. You stop headbanging, the song slows and stops. I confess to not liking the music enough to warrant giving myself whiplash, but the mechanic’s cute.
- Plus Privacy: An EU initiative (TAKE BACK CONTROL!) which purports to offer a single, simple dashboard whereby users can easily control the privacy settings across all their digital identities – “It will enable you to control the privacy settings in your social network accounts, hide your email identity, block ads, trackers and malware and prevent unwanted apps and browser extensions from tracking you and collecting your private data.” Which is obviously A Good Thing, and might be worth sending on to people you know who are maybe less savvy about this sort of thing than you are. What’s really interesting about this, though, is the additional line on the homepage which states “If you explicitly choose to do so, PlusPrivacy will help you to trade your privacy for rewards and benefits offered by participating service providers.” We are absolutely moving towards a point where we will be able to barter directly with our personal data, and I’m fascinated at the rather glib acceptance of this from a major government institution (though obviously were I to OPEN MY EYES WAKE UP SHEEPLE this probably oughtn’t surprise me so much). Apparently the existing rewards are discounts and vouchers rather than actual cashmoney, but there’s a dystopian short story here about people at the very bottom of society eking out a living from selling their privacy for pennies. Ooh, selling advertisers access to your dreams for pocket money, there’s a good one – must have been done, surely. Hang on, I’m going off on a tangent here, BACK TO IT.
- Whorl: This is really rather nice. Whorl is an app which makes it easy for anyone to make pleasing images in a variety of styles which can then be ordered as prints, iPhone cases, etc. Not sure what the deal is with shipping to the UK, but, presuming they do, why not get everyone you know and love a bespoke print of your own artwork for Christmas? They’ll love it, you narcissist!
- All of the Saul Bass Film Posters: From Vertigo to The Man With The Golden Arm, the iconic (sorry, but it’s justified here) film art of Saul Bass is here collected for you to peruse. The slideshow format is usually unforgivable, but I’m letting it slide here as Bass’s work is so strong – aside from anything else, it’s incredible just how much of an influence his style has had on so much other late-20C design; I can’t think of another designer whose style is mimicked so consistently.
- Entrupy: This is fascinating – I mean, I can’t imagine any of you will be in the market for this what with the fact that I don’t think any of you are either customs agents or the sort of people who regularly buy dodgy ‘designer’ gear, but the concept’s an interesting one. Entrupy is a device which can be used to analyse the detail of luxury goods and determine based on COMPLEX DETECTION ALGORITHMS whether or not your Louis is in fact a Louis. I would love to know what its success rate is when confronted with the master forgers of China and the like.
- Go Highbrow: Are you one of those people who doesn’t feel right unless they are packing their day with SELF-IMPROVEMENT, and whose every spare moment is spent in the quest for life-optimisation? Because if you are, let it be clear that we have NOTHING in common. Anyway, should that sound like you – you terrifying Alpha! – then this might be of interest. Go Highbrow is a service whereby you can sign up to receive bitesize, 10-part courses on a variety of topics, delivered to you as modules on your phone. Some of the courses are free, but most require you to shell out $4 a month for access – which, if you desperately want a series of 10-part lectures on topics as diverse as ‘how to play the drums to any song ever’ or ‘how to overcome procrastination’ (!), might sound like a bargain.
- Peanut: Billing itself as ‘Tinder for mothers’ (no, really), this is an app designed to help mums find other mums to hang out with, basically, using a Tinder-style interface. It’s light on practical details of what you actually do on it, but you can see from screencaps that there are profiles, that it connects with your Facebook account, and you can tag yourself with qualities such as ‘French Speaker’ or (dear God) ‘Wine Time’. Is this a good and useful thing? No idea.
- Rocks In The Sky: David Quentin is a photographer who takes photos of, amongst other things, rocks seemingly floating suspended in mid-air. There is probably a really good explanation for how he gets the shots – he throws a stone in the air and moves VERY QUICKLY? – but I have no idea what it is; in any case, this is a pleasing Twitter feed of, er, rocks. In the sky.
- Hufelandstrasse in the 80s: Beautiful, beautiful photographs of the community which existed around one East German street in the mid-late 80s, taken by photographer Harf Zimmerman. There are some wonderful shots in here, and some brilliant faces and fashions – the picture of the teenager in the heavy metal tshirt may well be one of my favourite EVER.
- Antipodes Map: Want to know where you would emerge if you tunneled through the earth and emerged EXACTLY on the other side? You probably don’t, really, but just in case, this site will tell you that very thing. SPOILER: if you’re in the UK, you will almost certainly end up in the sea.
- Big Boy Pinups: Were I big hairy gay man, I would TOTALLY get one of these tattoos. I mean, I’m not a big hairy gay man and I’m still sort of tempted. These are really very fun indeed. Oh, and on a semi-related note, I don’t really know where else to put this so I’ll put it here.
- Vanitysec: Operating at the intersection you never knew existed between fashion and information security, Vanitysec brings together recommendations for this season’s best clutch bags with news about malware. Tongue very firmly in cheek here.
- Superhuman: Another one for the efficiency-optimisers here (actually, on reflection, I don’t know who I think I’m talking to here – I mean, if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in making the very most of their time and being efficient and stuff, you’re pretty unlikely to be wasting your time reading this), Superhuman is an ALL NEW email client which includes apparently INCREDIBLE SPEEDS with an undo send function that ACTUALLY works, the ability to pull in information from social media about whoever you’re emailing, those sorts of things. Looks pretty good actually, if you’re into this sort of thing. As an aside, this week someone called up one of my jobs to complain about me for sending them an email, as part of a 100+ person bcc fcukup, which included a photo of a horse with the legend ‘SURPRISE HORSE’. Some people are SO joyless.
- The Binary Graffiti Club Choir: “Can you sing? Would you like to be part of something fun, arty, musical in London which will be made into to a short film? The Binary Graffiti Club are looking for volunteers to take part in experimental vocal workshops led by artist Stanza and musician Richard Frostick. The musical score will be composed of a series of binary codes extracted from a newly published book made from public contributions. All you have to do is turn up and sing, and take some instruction. The aim is to have fun creating music and make a piece of art (a film) which will be exhibited later in the year.” Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Sign up, this is happening next month.
- The Concrete Watch: Do you want a watch made out of concrete? You do, don’t you? I can tell. You with your beard, neatly trimmed, rolled-up trousers in a soft pastel shade and your fcuking moleskine. Ahem. Look, we can all imagine the sort of person to whom this is likely to appeal, it’s fine. 304 of them, at the time of writing, have backed it on Kickstarter and it’s definitely happening, so if you want to wear a piece of concrete on your wrist – sadly as far as I can tell the strap isn’t concrete, though – then this is the link for YOU.
- Women Photograph: A resource to help you find female photographers around the world. “Women Photograph is an initiative that launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of female* visual journalists. The private database includes more than 500 independent women documentary photographers based in 87 countries and is available privately to any commissioning editor or organization. Women Photograph also operates an annual series of project grants for emerging and established photojournalists, a year-long mentorship program, and a travel fund to help female photographers access workshops, festivals, and other developmental opportunities. Our mission is to shift the gender makeup of the photojournalism community and ensure that our industry’s chief storytellers are as diverse as the communities they hope to represent.” A Good Thing.
- Proportionl: An interesting little tool which, once you connect it to your Twitter account, analyses the people you follow and those who follow you and tells you – very roughly, and with admitted limitations – the proportion of each which are male vs female vs non-gender binary. Leaving aside the caveats here about how tricky it is to automatically determine gender on Twitter with any degree of accuracy, this is an interesting way of interrogating one’s own latent biases (I think).
- Some Really Good Eclipse Photos: I got really quite jealous about not being able to see it this week, but these helped a bit.
NEXT, ENJOY THE NEW ALBUM BY AESOP ROCK!
THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T WANT TO MENTION THAT MAN BUT WHICH THINKS THAT THIS REMIX OF HIM SAYING ‘ANTIFA’ TO THE TUNE OF THE ‘TEQUILA’ SONG IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD PIECE OF FRIDAY CONTENT AND SO HOPES YOU ENJOY IT, PT.2:
- Offline Only: This has been everywhere this week, but in case you’ve not seen it it’s a very clever little site by designer Chris Bolin which can only be viewed when disconnected from the web; turn on airplane mode briefly and click again to see what happens when you’re offline. Leaving aside the slightly irritating tone of the message (YOU’RE NOT MY DAD, CHRIS!), it’s a really smart little hack and there is quite a lot of stuff you could potentially do with this, depending on exactly how it works which I am still trying to get my head round what with not actually being any good at any of the hard bits of the web at all.
- The Silly Robots Gallery: Lots of beautiful gifs of silly robots, developed by animation and illustration agency YLLW. These are charming.
- Bongo Posters Throughout History: A wonderful collection of vintage film posters advertising erotic cinema throughout the ages (but mostly from the 70s). Some of these you will have seen before, others will be new to you, but there are some absolute gems in here – not least the Japanese flyer for Deep Throat which includes the wonderful legend “Blow girl cries Oh Deep! Oh Deep!”. Reasonably NSFW, depending on your employer’s tolerance for illustrated cheesecake smut.
- Tasted: This is very clever indeed, I think. Tasted is an app which lets you search for recipes based on what you have in the fridge – so far, so standard – but which takes the added step of then syncing with your Amazon Echo or Google Spymaster (or whatever its called) to give you audio-instruction on the prep and cooking process, synced to an instructional video playing out on your phone. Which, fine, is perhaps a touch gimmicky, but the potential application of this for other things here is huge. Imagine an audio story which plays out additional atmospheric video on your phone at key times, giving you clues or making you doubt the narrator, for example. Add in a bit of light mixed reality and you have some hugely interesting ‘storytelling’ potential here imho.
- Photos of Teen Bedrooms, 1960-1980: For those of you of a certain age, this is going to be like a wonderful time capsule to a time when you were pustulent and hated yourself.
- Globe Makers: Another in the occasional series of ‘incredibly niche Instagram accounts which despite ostensibly being really boring are in fact really quite soothing and which I think you will rather enjoy’, this week featuring loads of pictures of people in the act of making globes (sadly none of the globes in question appear to be the sort which contain a bar if you open them up, but we live in hope).
- Duke Robotics: In a week in which Elon Musk has come out to definitively tell us that murder robots are bad – thanks, Elon! Thanks for telling us that! – it’s worth pointing you at this glorious site, the promo front for Duke Robotics which makes murderdrones. “War is inevitable”, screams the website, already taking a slightly more pessimistic view of the state of humanity than one might reasonably hope for, “Duke Robotics brings a fully robotic weaponry system to an airborne platform. TIKAD, which is a proprietary development of Duke, uses the delivery of a unique suppression firing and stabilization solution. TIKAD allows governments to utilize completely new capabilities against terrorist groups and reduce the number of deployed ground troops, and therefore, the number of casualties.” Just have a browse, and then realise that perhaps me being all snarky about Elon was a bit unfair and that maybe we should all start maybe asking for fewer of the murder robots in our collective futures, please.
- The Art of Neuroscience: Gorgeous images of the brain – neurons and ganglia and the rest – from scientific research. These are beautiful and could function as semi-abstract works.
- Minimise Email: An incredibly pass-agg service which lets you send an anonymous email to anyone you like, telling them that they send to many emails. Exactly the sort of thing which you can, should you so choose, use to create mild but seething unrest and resentment in a slightly enervated office. Not suggesting that you ought, just that you could.
- Arena FPV: This has two days to go and it is almost certainly, barring a miracle, not going to meet its funding target. This is DEVASTATING. What is wrong with you people? How can more people be in the market for a fcuking concrete watch than want to be able to take part in first-person view remote car/drone racing controlled by their phones and which others can watch? Seriously, you’re telling me you wouldn’t want to race actual remote control vehicles from anywhere, using your phone? You’re all MAD.
- Emoji Domains: You may have managed to forget that brief period about two years ago when every single fcuking thing in the world had to be emojified (it was in that period in which that fcuking film got greenlit), but I remember it like it was yesterday. It was AWFUL. Anyway, should you unaccountably wish to buy a gimmicky emoji domain name – you too could have smiley faeces dot com! – then this is your one-stop-shop for so doing. Although having mocked this roundly, scrolling to the end of the site suggests that most of these have been bought up which once again goes to show that I am a know-nothing bozo.
- ARG RPG: This week’s ‘Wow, this ARKit stuff really is something’ video comes in this little proof-of-concept video showing how a mixed reality RPG might work. Imagine FFVII suddenly popping up on your walk in to work, basically; this stuff is going to KILL productivity.
- Pigeon Daily: A Twitter account posting a photo of a pigeon every day, to soothe and calm. For those of you who know or care about the pair of pigeons which recently hatched on my windowsill, I learned three things: 1) baby pigeons, when first hatched, are awful-looking creatures straight out of the imagination of Clive Barker; 2) noone should ever attempt to watch, or indeed even hear, a pigeon feeding its young; it’s not just way the kids basically just go MENTAL at the parent, just pecking manically at the general region of its face and trying to gouge its eyes out as it attempts to vomit some partially-digested Morley’s fragments into their ravening maws, it’s the sounds, dear Christ, of a pigeon retching. TIL THE GRAVE, I tell you; and 3) that a pair of small pigeons and their parents will produce a volume of fecal matter that is equivalent in size and weight to approximately four loaves of bread. The takeaway here is, mostly, hope that pigeons don’t nest on your windowsill.
- Motel Vibes: An Instagram account sharing images which are basically the photographic equivalent of the feeling engendered by a Lana Del Rey album (yes, I know, but it’s really true, look!).
- Pimp My Invoice: This is a really nice idea. A nursery in Argentina (I think) was struggling to pay its bills; so they got a bunch of artists to draw original works on each of the invoices that had been sent to the nursery, each of which were then made available for sale for the exact amount named on the invoice, thereby solving their cashflow problem through the sale of art. A few of these are still available, but the gallery is worth a browse in any case as some of the illustrations are wonderful.
- Memeosis: I am sort of amazed that this has taken so long to exist, but anyway. Memeosis is an app for memes – share, discover, create, all within the app itself. Created by an 18 year old Georgia Tech freshman, this is the sort of thing which will almost certainly never take off but might be quite a fun place to find ODD STUFF if you’re that way inclined.
- Eclipsecore: A collection of work by 27 artists created in response to this weeks North American solar eclipse. Videos and gifs, in the main, but some of these are excellent.
- Unlock Our Kids: A mobile-only site designed to draw attention to the number of children who are locked up in New York State. The mechanic is rather clever, I think, particularly in the way it forces you to consume information; open it on your phone and see what I mean.
- The Red Bull Soapboax Race Maker: Draw your own track, place obstacles and boosters and STUFF and then drop your soapbox racer onto your creation and see how it fares. Basically what will happen here is that you will spend about 15 minutes playing with the editor and then you will get curious as to what the pre-made tracks look like and then you will spend the next 15 minutes clicking through them and becoming increasingly disillusioned with your own track design skills. It’s ok, we all feel like that.
- Dance Tonite: Finally in this section this week, the nicest single-serving music website I’ve seen in a while. This is for LCD Soundsystem’s latest track – here’s the website description, but it’s a lot cooler than this, honest: “In it, you go from room to room experiencing a series of dance performances created entirely by fans. Using a new technology called WebVR, the experience is accessible from a single URL and works across platforms, giving the user a different role in the experience depending on their device. With Daydream View or other handheld VR headsets, you are on stage watching the experience unfold around you. With room-scale VR such as the HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift (which enable your physical movements to be reflected in your virtual environment), you are a performer. And without VR, you are in the audience getting a bird’s eye view perspective.”
FINALLY IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THE RATHER LOVELY R’N’B OF OLIVIA LOUISE ON HER JUICY FRUIT EP!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Folded Clock: Collecting and documenting objects found and kept in pockets. Except it’s so much more than this – it’s a wider project that’s part of the author’s wider work, and some of the writings accompanying the photos are beautiful. Very autumnal, in a nice way.
- Standing But Not Operating: Photos of abandoned theme parks, which are obviously HUGELY creepy and absolutely mesmerising.
- Greyhounds In Art: You probably never knew that your life was incomplete without a Tumblr collecting representations of the greyhound in art over the years, but it was. It was. Enjoy feeling whole again.
- Satanic Cats: This Tumblr is, I think, maintained by the official North American Church of Satan, meaning that all the cats featured are VERIFIABLY satanic! Which is lovely, really. Cats, posing alongside vaguely occult accessories. You can sort of imagine what the person taking these photos looks like; I’m thinking VERY DARK LIPSTICK (regardless of gender).
- Isopresso: Tumblr of a Japanese balloon artist – yes, really – who makes absoluteky the greatest balloon animals you have or will ever see. No hyperbole, these are INSANE.
- Theme Park Art: Collecting concept art and sketches from theme park designers, this is really interesting from a design perspective. Sadly I still haven’t found a Tumblr collecting Crap Fair Art, which was initially what I was hoping this was going to be – you know, the spraypainted artworks you see on the terrifying carnie rides which are all over local parks this weekend.
- Awful Library Books: Not a Tumblr! Still great! This collects brilliant, dreadful library books; it’s been going for 4 years, so there is a LOT of CONTENT in here. ‘Decorating with Macaroni’ was a personal favourite of mine, but you can lose hours in here.
- Jordan Bolton: Jordan Bolton is an artist who makes tiny little paper models of the props, clothes, etc, from famous films. They are rather amazing.
- Antireal: Design that looks so much like the output of Wip3out-era Designers Republic that looking at it takes me straight back to the chillout room in the Blue Note circa 1996.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- The Mindset List for the Class of 21: This is great. Beloit college in the US publishes its mindset list for the new students who are arriving as Freshmen this year – the mindset list is a series of statements about the students based on their age, setting out the things they have always lived with and never lived with, the truths that the likely hold self-evident and the ideas they will find preposterous. This year’s coterie of kids will have been born in 1999 – “In their lifetimes, Blackberry has gone from being a wild fruit to being a communications device to becoming a wild fruit again.” This is not only fascinating but far better-written than it needed to be.
- Awkward Office Encounters In The Style Of Romance Novels: These are wonderful. Short vignettes of workplace awkwardness, delivered in the style of the bodice-ripper.
- The Legion of the Lonely: A look at the growing problem of loneliness, in society as a whole and with a specific focus on why it is that this issue seemingly overindexes in young men. Much of the material referenced won’t be new to you, but this piece draws together the strands of thinking reasonably well. You might want to maybe give a friend a call after reading, maybe.
- What Should Happen To People’s Online Identity When They Die?: This is Facebook’s recent blogpost, from its ‘Hard Questions’ series, on the issue of post-mortem social media and how the as a platform see it. It’s obviously not a great piece of prose writing, but it is really interesting in terms of making you think how the platform itself has to consider these issues. I have to say, whatever I say elsewhere about Facebook, being their in-house ethicist would be absolutely fascinating (ha! Like they have an in-house ethicist. Still, you get my point).
- The Year of Living With Banksy: A whimsical, silly account of what it might be like to live for a year with Banksy as your landlord (spoiler: Banksy’s a dick).
- Netflix and Audience Data: Using the recent Marvel Universe show ‘The Defenders’ as its jumping off point, this is an interesting look at how Netflix uses show categorisation and taxonomy to entice viewers to jump from series to series. The people behind this stuff at Netflix are SO GOOD it’s frightening really.
- The Man Who Broke Money’s Rib: I know it’s a cliche, but boxing writing is the BEST sportswriting. In the first of two examples of this this week, we’re told the story of Robert Gorman who 8 years ago found himself on the cusp of boxing stardom, sparring with Floyd Mayweather in Vegas as he prepared for a fight with Juan Manuel Marquez. The tale of how he got there and what happened afterwards is a proper good yarn, full of rollercoaster ups and downs, and worth reading regardless of whether or not you give two figs about boxing.
- The Puncher’s Chance: This, though, is truly brilliant, on this weekend’s Vegas circus and the likelihood, or not, of Conor McGregor being able to do anything other than pick his teeth up off the floor after an unspecified number of rounds. This, by William D’Urso in the LA Review of Books, breaks down in simple terms why it is that the odds are so against the Irishman and explores the romance of the idea that the plucky underdog really can make it. Beautifully written throughout, this is another one which doesn’t require any real interest in boxing at all.
- The McSweeney’s Aesthetic: How the design of McSweeney’s basically created a wider ethos that dominated a certain aesthetic sphere for years hence. This is fascinating if you’re into design and typesetting and that sort of thing.
- Vantablack: Vantablack is the world’s blackest black, a material which absorbs nearly all light and which has a variety of applications from engineering to aerospace, and which has also exerted a degree of fascination over the artworld – so much so that Anish Kapoor purchased the exclusive rights to use it, in perpetuity. This is the story of the material and the art world dispute that followed Kapoor’s attempted colour-grab – it’s fascinating, and quite silly, and Kapoor comes out of this looking like a bit of a twat if I’m honest.
- Sexism In The Valley: Ellen Pao lost her law suit against Kleiner Perkins, who she was suing for sexual harassment. Regardless, this piece in which she explains the background to the case and her experience of it is essential reading if you’re in any way interested in the toxic state of gender relations in the Valley.
- Mistrust, Efficacy and the New Civics: Warning – this is LONG and dense, but it’s equally absolutely fascinating. It’s a paper presented by Ethan Zuckerman of MIT Media Lab where he posits that attempting to understand contemporary US politics along left/right lines no longer makes any sense, and that instead we should characterise actors as ‘Institutions’ and ‘Insurrectionists’. As relevant to us as it is to the States, and a very interesting way of reframing thinking around political / ideological polarisation. Worth it, if you have the stamina.
- Sportswriting’s Filthiest Fcukup: We’ve all had moments, haven’t we, at work, where the bantz just goes TOO far and after the initial chuckles have died down from the lads there’s that slight pause where one of you, maybe you, thinks “hang on, was that really alright to send? Is this…still…bantz?” and gets that cold creeping feeling up the back of the neck and the realisation that Paul from HR is coming up behind you now, quiet as the grave but you can hear the tread of his Hush Puppies electrifying the nylon carpet as he sidles across to have a quiet word (I ought to pay Joel Golby a tribute fee for that last para, really) – my personal highlights from this canon include THAT leaving email, and the Tweet asking Sir Martin where my fcuking bonus was. Anyway, imagine the WORST POSSIBLE version of that, and you have this story – it’s quite remarkable.
- Dissolving Bodies: Death enthusiast Hayley Campbell meets the people attempting to find a THIRD WAY for the death industry – rather than burial (no room) or cremation (just really grim, as I can attest having seen my little brother’s corpse getting literally pushed into an industrial burner last year; you really don’t want to see this stuff up close), how about dissolution? Campbell writes beautifully, and the story contains all the sorts of weird human elements – the rivalry between different technologies, the stories of why they are obsessed with ‘perfecting’ corpse disposal – to make it fascinating even for non-thanatophiles.
- The President of Blank, Sucking Nullity: I thought I’d come to the end of ‘Trump, you know, he’s BAD’ articles, and then this one came along and I found myself applauding. This is the best I’ve read on why Trump’s essential quality, the quiddity of the Donald, is that he is a total and utter arsehole – it’s his defining characteristic and once you get that it explains a lot of the rest. Wonderfully written, and obviously pretty depressing.
- Dylan Roof – The Making of an American Terrorist: Breathtaking piece of journalism by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in which she goes to the places where murderer Dylan Roof grew up, in an attempt to explore the reasons behind his massacre of 8 black parishioners at a Charleston Church. Again, the writing here is really quite astonishingly good.
- An Evening Out: Finally this week, a short story by Garth Greenwell, author of last year’s wonderful novel What Belongs To You. ‘Foreign teacher takes two students out to nightclub’ is the general premise, but this is loads better than that bald description suggests. A great piece of fiction – sad and cold and beautiful and warm all at once.
By Swen Renault
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!
//medium.com/@electrolemon/the-year-of-living-with-banksy-f9e1774ec60b