On the one hand, no one wants an election (you may think you do, but you really don’t). On the other, THIS COULD BE OUR CHANCE TO ACTUALLY MAKE HIM THE LEAST-SUCCESSFUL PRIME MINISTER IN HISTORY. Of course, so doing would mean finding someone else worth voting for, which at the moment looks a touch problematic to be honest.
Yes, that’s right, we’re in PRE-ELECTION FEVER! Distinguishable from ACTUAL ELECTION FEVER by the absence of any actual election on the horizon, and the creeping feeling that this is all an elaborate bluff to distract us from the fact that NOTHING IS HAPPENING! Are you excited? I’M EXCITED!
I am not, of course, excited; I haven’t in fact been excited since approximately 2003, frankly. I am bored, tired, and increasingly of the opinion that, honestly, maybe climate catastrophe’s actually not that bad a thing after all. Shall we just call it quits, kids? Shall we just, well, stop?
But then, of course, I think of all the websites out there to scour and catalogue, all the weird and slightly-creepy artworks and kickstarters and fetish sites to share with you, all the words that would go unwritten and, honestly, I realise that it’s my OBLIGATION to keep doing this for as long as I’m capable, if only to keep distracting the rest of you from the slow, ineluctable entropy of everything (yes, that’s right, this is a PUBLIC SERVICE, what of it?).
So come with me as we once again avert our gazes from the bloody, toothy mess that is meatspace and instead turn our square eyes back towards our magical, promise-filled screens. Out there it’s all meat and gristle and hatred, whereas in here…well, it’s also all meat and gristle and hatred, frankly, but at least it’s the digital twin rather than the real thing.
I am Matt, this is Web Curios and, as ever, you’ll be glad when it’s over.
By Chris Austin
LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS NEW MIX COMPILED BY FRANK OCEAN!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF THE WORST THAT HAPPENS IS A LOT OF GAGS ABOUT HIS DEAD EYES AND CRAP HAIRCUT THEN MARK ZUCKERBERG GOT OFF PRETTY LIGHTLY THIS WEEK TBQHWY:
- Facebook Continues To Preserve Democracy!: No matter that the boss isn’t exactly clear on why a Nazi and a Nazi politician ought to be treated differently on his platform; they are CLEANING UP THE SWAMP! Sorry; it’s just quite hard not to jump on the ‘let’s kick Mark!’ bandwagon, even when it’s your bandwagon and you’ve been riding it for years and frankly you’re starting to get a bit irritated at how crowded it’s getting with all these bloody arrivistes hopping on at any opportunity – most of the stuff in here is perfectly sensible. This post summarises a slew of new initiatives being undertaken by FB (across both it and Insta) to help minimise chicanery around the US elections in 2020; these include greater transparency around who owns or administers Pages, clearer information about political adverts (where they appeared, better breakdown of overall vs regional spend, etc), and more prominent flagging of posts sharing stories that have been debunked by third-party fact-checkers. This is all generally Good Stuff – and, regardless of the fact that it’s sloooooowly being introduced in the US with no details of how long it will take to expand more widely, this is all worth knowing about, as there’s no way this isn’t going to become standard procedure worldwide. The stuff about Page transparency is most interesting, imho; the eventual requirement for all Pages to be linked to a registered business or individual, and for this to be public, would, if I’m understanding it correctly and if it becomes universal, be a hugely significant change.
- Facebook Protect: Announced in tandem with the above slew of electoral safeguards (ha!), Facebook Protect is a programme of measures designed specifically to help politicians and adjacent actors secure their Facebook / Instagram presences against outside interference; this “offers candidates, elected officials, federal and state departments and agencies, and party committees, as well as their staff, a way to further secure their accounts. By enrolling, we’ll help these accounts (1) adopt stronger account security protections, like two-factor authentication, and (2) monitor for potential hacking threats”. Which, again, is smart and sensible, will almost certainly be rolled out more widely in 2020, and hopefully means that the governing classes won’t be able to roll out the tedious, barely-believable ‘I was hacked!’ excuse next time they drunkenly share close-up photography of their various mucous membranes with a stranger.
- Facebook Adds Search Results to Standard Ad Placements: I could explain this but, honestly, you don’t need me to: “All new ad campaigns using Automatic Placements will automatically include the Facebook Search Results placement. You can also manually select the placement when setting up your campaign. Once you opt-in, ads will be eligible to appear on search result pages which includes general search and Marketplace search – and will both respect the audience targeting of the campaign and be contextually relevant to a limited set of English and Spanish search terms.” DO YOU SEE? Good!
- Facebook Testing Ads In The Group Tab Feed: It’s almost advertising to Groups, but not quite! FB is slowly starting to experiment with flooding one of its few as-yet-untouched pieces of real estate with ads, as some advertisers are being offered the opportunity to place their ads in the Groups tab of the FB app. This doesn’t currently afford said advertisers the ability to target based on what Groups people are members of, but, well, give it time.
- Facebook Adds Restrictions To AR Lenses: The Facebook SparkAR studio – the bit where you can make your own filters and lenses for FB, Insta et al – this week announced that it was launching a few restrictions on what users can create on the platform; specifically, filters which are ‘associated with plastic surgery’. Exactly how far this extends is…unclear; whilst this is obviously designed to limit the ability of devs to create those weird apps which filter people to look like they’re being fitted for a facelift or, even more weird, like they’ve just had one (complete with technicolour bruising and post-op swelling, because WHY NOT?!), it’s not immediately apparent as to whether this would kibosh anything that offers exaggerated CG-style facemodding, or even any ‘lip filler preview’-type lenses. Worth being aware of if you’re thinking about creating anything in SparkAR which involves facial deformation, however ostensibly benign.
- Insta Testing Better Account Cleaning Features: This is likely to do not-great things for branded Insta accounts. The platform’s apparently testing the ability for users to group the Insta accounts they follow, along lines like ‘least interacted with’ and ‘most shown in feed’; you’d imagine that many of the ‘least interacted with’ will be corporate Instas BECAUSE NOONE WANTS TO INTERACT WITH A BUS COMPANY’S FCUKING INSTAGRAM FFS, and that this feature might see quite a few of them getting unfollowed as a general hygiene thing.
- It’s Now Even Harder To Instastalk: Users attempting to browse Instagram on desktop will now have to be logged in to access or view anything more than a very minimal selection of a feed’s content, meaning…well, meaning not very much, I don’t think, other than a slightly-annoying additional step to go through when doing desk research and, in all probability, an even worse experience when trying to use any sort of social media analytics software on the fcuking platform.
- Twitter’s Q3 Earnings: It’s not particularly great news! More users (but still, really, not very many) and falling ad revenue, and Nazis (they don’t mention the Nazis, but they’re always there)! Still, as I feel occasionally compelled to point out, until someone invents a better and faster way for people to share news – you may scoff, but whatever you think of Twitter it really is unparalleled for this – then it is unkillable (please note that this is not the same as ‘a great and profitable business’, just that there are a few industries for which it’s basically infrastructural at this point and that’s not a bad position to be in).
- Better Employee Engagement Stuff on LinkedIn: Harass your staff into sharing your company’s THRILLING UPDATES on the world’s worst platform! “With Employee Notifications, Page Admins can now alert employees of important posts, which employees can then engage with or share to their LinkedIn network. This makes it easy for your employees to share your organization’s content and amplify your messages.” So not only do you now have to ignore the email from marketing asking you to PLEASE SHARE the CEO’s doubtless-inspirational essay about how “creativity is at the heart of everything the business believes in” (fancy that!), you have to ignore a nagging notification on LinkedIn too! There’s some other stuff in here about Page Admins now also having the ability to give badges and ‘kudos’ to particularly high-performing wageslaves within the company, too, which I’m sure will make not getting a bonus this year easier to swallow.
- Snap’s Q3 Earnings: It’s surprisingly OK news! More users! More ad revenue! A decent AR platform! Maybe it’s all going to be ok!
- Snap Launches Dynamic Ads Offering: Basically it’s exactly the same as the dynamic inventory ads you can already run on the big platforms: “With Dynamic Ads, advertisers can now automatically create ads in real time based on extensive product catalogs that may contain hundreds of thousands of products. These ads are then served to Snapchat users based on their interests using a variety of templates provided by Snap.” So expect to see the same bullsh1t Wish.com ads you see all over Facebook and Insta on Snap as well, as we continue to explore the cognitive dissonance inherent in ‘really wanting to save the planet’ and simultaneously ‘really wanting to buy whatever pointless crap we’re fed on the internet regardless of the fact it’s all made of plastic, produced under questionable labour conditions and shipped from the other side of the world because look it’s just so FUNNY!!!1111eleventy’.
- Twitch Testing Watch Parties: Amazon’s usually pretty quiet about its link to Twitch – there’s relatively minimal interlinking between the platforms, at least to the casual observer – but this creates a more explicit connection, with the news that streamers will (probably) soon be able to livestream films and TV shows for ‘watch parties’ with their audiences, using Prime Video as the delivery mechanism. This is, I think, very smart indeed, and the sort of thing that you probably ought to be aware of if you work in entertainment marketing or somesuch (HELLO TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN OSTERLEY!).
- The Latest We Are Social Global Statistical Jamboree: It’s that time of year again, when the diligent people at the We Are Social workhouse churn out another of their comprehensive compilations of statistics about global s*c**l m*d** usage. Want a vaguely-plausible-sounding figure for the number of people using Insta in Tuvalu? GREAT! As ever, perfect for constructing whichever straw man argument you fancy as to why your client MUST pay you five figures for a ‘TikTok Strategy’.
NEXT, WHY NOT TRY SOME SPARSE ELECTRONICA MIXED BY ANDREY ZOTS?
THE SECTION WHICH, MORE THAN EVER, REALLY, REALLY WANTS A ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ OPTION ON ANY EVENTUAL BALLOT PAPER, PT.1:
- Stealing Ur Feelings: It feels – perhaps unfairly; SORRY to all the creators of excellent interactive web experiences whose work I am unfairly dismissing here – that there’s been a bit of a dropoff in innovative webwork in the past 18m or so; not that I’ve not seen loads of interesting or beautifully-made work, more that it’s been a while since I’ve seen something which makes me think ‘ooh, I’ve not seen that before’. Which is why this pleased me so much – it’s, I think, something I’ve never seen before. Built in partnership with Mozilla, this is a video all about how facial recognition tech is being used by apps and websites without us necessarily being fully aware of what it’s doing or how it’s working, and does an excellent job of explaining how the tech can be implemented and to what ends; what’s EXCITING about it is the way it dynamically pulls in facial recognition information from your webcam, changing elements within the film based on your reaction to them. I have NO idea how this is compiling it all on the fly, but it’s very, very impressive. Also, MAN I look tired and baggy of face this morning. FFS, WEBCAM!
- Skin On: You will, I am sure, have seen this story somewhere this week – it was even in a NIB in the Metro ffs – but it’s worth clicking on the actual creator’s website to get the full horror. Skin On is a project by technologist/designer Marc Teyssier, which involved him creating an artificial ‘skin’ for his phone, which he was in turn then able to use as a new gestural control interface. Rather than tapping, stroking or swiping the screen, Teyssier found himself instead able to pinch, tickle, tug and prod his newly-epidermised device to control it, in the most Existenz-mimicking thing I’ve ever seen in real life. Honestly, you HAVE to watch the video; there’s something so amazingly, viscerally-unpleasant about the ‘skin’ – I think because it reminds me of how sticky toys look after you’ve lost them under the bed for 6 months and then they emerge all befluffed and unsticky and weirdly old and flabby – but also so incredibly satisfying about the tactility introduced by the fauxflesh. Wonderful, horrible, and the sort of thing that I guarantee at least one person will discover a new and moderately-disturbing fetish as a result of.
- Digital Wellbeing Experiments: It’s not even the sort of thing you can call ‘bleakly ironic’ anymore, really; welcome to the latest suite of tools designed to help us cope with the horrors of technology, designed by…one of the creators of the horrors of technology!! This selection of ‘Experiments’ by Google are small pieces of code which can be downloaded – or fiddled with, as it’s all Open Source – designed to help us manage our digital distractions better. So, for example, there’s one which lets you select a variety of different settings for your device to limit notifications and alerts to selected apps, or something which gently shows you how many times you’ve unlocked your phone in the past 24h, or one which lets a group of people all set a collective lock on their phones to ensure they all STAY IN THE MOMENT TOGETHER… Cynicism aside (ha! ONLY JOKING), these are all very smart pieces of design (as you would expect), and there are some small-but-wonderful germs of ideas in here. I just sort-of wish this wasn’t done by Google.
- Bruno Simon: Right, developers – RAISE YOUR GAMES. This is the new high watermark for ‘ridiculously flashy and overdesigned CV/portfolio websites’ in 2019 and beyond; take a bow, Bruno Simon, because this is just superb. It’s one of those ‘website that’s also an interactive experience’ things, specifically an interactive experience in which you drive a little RC car around an isometric-3d environment complete with RAMPS and JUMPS and STUNTS and, weirdly, BOWLING. Oh, yes, you can see Simon’s work and CV and stuff, should you so desire, but frankly it’s the jumps that will keep you interested. Hire this person, just so you can get them to add a 360-degree loop-the-loop to this.
- The White Tower: If you’ve ever wanted to explore a comprehensive history of the constructivist movement in architecture and design and its specific relevance to the construction of the water tower of Uralmash in Yekaterinburg, Russia, then this will please you no end. If, on the other hand, you’ve never wanted that, trust me when I say that you will find this interesting regardless. There’s a VR version to experience for those of you with access to the kit, but for everyone else this is a genuinely fascinating piece of arthistoricalarchitecturaldesignhistorystorytelling, with some nice webwork and design flourishes thrown in.
- Flipfit: Has anyone ever made the ‘social shopping’ thing work as a business yet? I mean in a platform sense rather than just ‘managing to sell stuff using socials’ sense – I don’t think I can recall anything having any sort of significant breakout success, but perhaps Flipfit will be the exception. This doesn’t feel like its hugely different from ideas I’ve seen before, or indeed like it’s economically sustainable, but, well, I am pretty much the opposite of a businessperson, so. The idea is that users shop through Flipfit, get outfits sent to them, then post photos of the clothes and get their followers to vote on what to keep, with the initial buyer able to return all the stuff they don’t want; users to attract new users to the platform will earn credit within the app, as will users who vote on other users’ looks – obviously designed to get people onboard fast (as is the app’s pretty aggressive influencer engagement programme), but equally obviously the sort of customer acquisition strategy that’s very much not financially sustainable (unless Softbank is backing them, of course). Oh, there’s a social justice element to it to, with users able to use the platform to return old clothes to be donated to charitable causes, which is a nice touch. I may be wrong, though, but I can’t see any way in hell that this can become a sustainable proposition (watch as it becomes Amazon by 2025).
- Quick AI Avatars: To be clear – this is not ‘AI’, and the ‘quick’ bit is, well, questionable. Still, though, if you want to make your own, slightly-shonky, question-and-answerbot, delivered in equally-slightly-shonky 3d humanoid fashion, then lucky you! The deal is that you type in questions and answers into a spreadsheet, along with notes on emotes that you’d like the avatar to express when delivering certain phrases, and VWALLAH! You’re very own 3d answerbot! If you want an example of how widely the term AI is being abused, this is perfect – they are literally peddling a lookup sheet as being somehow ‘intelligent’, which is, well, quite the reach. All that aside, it’s sort-of fun to fiddle with for five minutes if you fancy making a humanoid CG minifig which will give ‘humorous’ answers to childish questions (yes, that is exactly what I did – don’t you dare judge me).
- Did You See This?: A new content format by Buzzfeed in the US which I found quite interesting; it’s a multi-presenter ‘let’s chat about the NEWS’-type magazine show, but delivered via the medium of the Groupchat – so the video content is literally the screenrecording of a groupchat conversation, with the participants narrating in v/o. This sounds terrible but, honestly, works surprisingly well, particularly when they bring in multimedia elements; it reminds me of something that launched a few years back and whose name I forget and which briefly got hyped before, inevitably, dying, whereby users could livestream their messenger conversations to interested parties, but, er, less fundamentally-pointless. There’s definitely some ‘creative inspiration’ *cough* to be taken from this I think.
- Camera Rescue: Do you have an old analogue camera knocking about that you know that you will never get round to getting fixed, despite your 2019 new year’s resolution to ‘get back into analogue’ staring guiltily at you from the frontpage of your diary? No matter, give it to these lads! “Camera Rescue is an organisation from Finland dedicated to preserving cameras for future generations. So far we have rescued just above 46 000 cameras, but we are just getting started. From one to thousands at a time, we rescue cameras from any time period old or new, working or broken. Trade in your old or unwanted camera equipment for cash, and help us with our goal of rescuing 100,000 cameras by 2020.” Embarrasingly I am VERY late to this, but I think it’s a lovely project and deserves support if you fancy donating your Box Brownie or whatever (nice contemporary reference there, well done Matt).
- Magic Spoon: It’s an online recipe scrapbook…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! No, I have no idea why either, but it’s nice to know that I can secure my personal selection of culinary picks to an immutable decentralised ledger. I…I honestly don’t understand who this is aimed at or why it would be a thing – is this for people who are worried for the imminent collapse of everything and feel that this is the only way that they can ensure that their favourite recipe for one-pot chicken survives the Great Inevitable Mainstream Web Breakdown of 2020? Baffling.
- Creepy Professional Anecdotes: Hell of a question, this, on Reddit: “What is the creepiest thing you don’t talk about in your profession?” Now were I to answer that as a ‘non-specific generic media w4nker stroke advermarketingprdrone’ I’d struggle to come up with anything really unsettling, other than, perhaps, the weird, unspoken thing that in PR agencies people will STILL parade attractive young female staff in front of middle-aged male clients like they’re pieces of fleshy collateral (and if you work in PR and you don’t believe that this still goes on then, well, you’re an idiot). Thankfully, though, the people responding to the question work in more interesting or esoteric jobs and MAN are there some genuinely unsettling things in here. A lot of it – caveats, as ever – is quite upsetting, so be aware that there are references to abuse, death, injury and the like throughout. That’s not, now I come to type it, any sort of appealing description, but I promise you that this is really interesting (if, obviously, bleak).
- The Book Cover Archive: Like books? Like design? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is a wonderful archive, though it’s a US site and, frankly, I don’t think they do book covers as well as we do – although actually, looking more closely, I think they feature examples of design from around the world so SHUT MY FACE. A lovely project.
- Superpatron!: It is a truth universally acknowledged that any and all human beings in possession of 4g or broadband access are CREATORS here in the year of our Lord 2k19. And creators need to EAT. Thanks, then, to Patreon CEO Jack Conte who has created this $50k endowment for ‘creators who are ready to solely focus on making art’. There’s no elaborate form to fill in – you just give your name and details and a short proposal – the only criteria is that your application must be short enough that it can be reviewed in three minutes. So, if you want to jack it all in to MAKE STUFF for the next 12m, and you have an artistic practis/praxis that can be distilled into <180s, GO FOR YOUR LIFE! If this isn’t all hoovered by by kids who want to make TikToks fulltime, though, I will be STUNNED.
- The Evolution of the Scrollbar: The design history you didn’t know you needed. It’s a small touch, but I like the fact that the scrollbars all, well, scroll.
- The 2019 Photomicrography of the Year Award: SMOL THINGS CAPTURED ON CAMERA! This year’s Nikon-sponsored celebration of photos of really, really tiny things rolls round again; once again, these are all astonishing. To my mind the spider’s the standout, but, honestly, this stuff just blows my mind in general.
- Hey Robot!: The creation of games for Amazon Echo isn’t a new one – Sensible Object made ‘When In Rome’ a few years back, and I’ve seen a few other variants on the theme since. This is a new one, funding on Kickstarter and already funded with a month to go, which has a really smart premise; the idea is that each team competes to get the voice assistant to say a specific word, the catch being you can’t use any form of that word in your question. Sounds simple, but you can easily imagine the slightly contortionistic fun you could have as you attempt to work out how to get Alexa to say ‘diarrhoea’.
- Toilet Duck As A Service: There have been a few REALLY dumb ‘as a service’ things in recent weeks, but this one’s a strong contender for dumbest of the lot – and yes it’s 10x funded on Indiegogo with a whole week left and, honestly, what is the MATTER with people? Shine describes itself as ‘automatic cleaning and toilet maintenance’, but is – let’s be very clear about this – simply AN ADDITIONAL FLUSHING MECHANISM YOU ADD TO YOUR TOILET. There is a LOT to love (not in fact love) in here – from the opening sentence of the crowdfunding page which boldly asks “We all start preparing for the day in the bathroom, but how are we expected to prepare ourselves for the world, when the bathroom we use isn’t prepared for us?” (a pretty fcuking fundamental question, I think we’ll all agree), to the accompanying app (OF COURSE) which lets you check into the operational status of your toilet wherever you may be. Oh, and you can tell Alexa to clean your toilet for you, thereby sending a blast of ELECTROLYSED WATER (for that is what Shine uses to keep your porcelain spick and span, you see) to sanitise the bowl. EVERYONE IS MAD. EVERYONE.
THE SECTION WHICH, MORE THAN EVER, REALLY, REALLY WANTS A ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ OPTION ON ANY EVENTUAL BALLOT PAPER, PT.2:
- Fesshole Ipsum: If you’re not already following Rob’s anonymous confessionbot Fesshole on Twitter, do it now. Fesshole Ipsum is a small, silly toy built on the Fesshole corpus, which will generate Lorem Ipsum-type copy for your website needs from all of the horrible confessions people have added to the back-end. Web devs! Please, please, please use this to populate a slightly-hidden Page in your current least-favourite site build and see if anyone notices; bonus points if anyone can get a site live with some of this copy still on there.
- Programming Hero: It’s increasingly clear to me that I’m going to be almost entirely unemployable within about a decade or so (which is fine, because I’ll probably also be nearly dead) – were it not for the fact that I’d honestly rather eat my own face than procreate, I’d probably be banking on my kids to be able to take care of me in my capitalistically-useless dotage. If you’re more sensible than me, though, and have spawned, consider using this useful-looking app to TEACH YOUR WHELPS TO CODE! I know, I know, we’re all over the idea that simply knowing a bit of HTML will make the blindest bit of difference to one’s actual prospects, but this teaches Python and, apparently, will add more languages in the coming weeks and months. I know that this isn’t a cast-iron guarantee of quality, but the fact that the devs are answering all the reviews and messages on the Play store makes me think this is probably A Good Thing (God I am SO NAIVE).
- The Squirrel Census 2019: Why the FCUK doesn’t this happen in St James’ Park?! There has been a SQUIRREL CENSUS in Central Park in New York! They now know how many squirrels there are, and where they hang out, and you can buy a glorious map displaying this incredibly significant information! I slightly wonder whether this isn’t organised and paid for by the dogs of NYC, but, regardless, I love that it exists. I case you wondered, by the way, there are ‘approximately’ 2,373 grey squirrels living there at the time of going to print.
- Stones/Water/Time/Breath: I am a bit of a sucker for pieces of art / music which are sort-of open source and can be performed / created anywhere, by anyone, and which are determined by the setting in which they exist and as such are always inevitably unique each time – see also John Cage’s 4’33, for example. This is SUCH a wonderful idea and I love it – “Dean Rosenthal’s Stones/Water/Time/Breath is experimental music in which a participant or participants choose any body of water and perform a set of actions designed to create a musical performance. It was born from an impromptu performance by the composer in May 2012 on Martha’s Vineyard that was later written down as a set of performance steps that can be performed by everyone.” You can see videos and hear recordings of various instances of its performance over the years, and get the score so you can perform your own version – if you’re stuck for something to do this weekend, I guarantee there are NO more pretentious options than this.
- The Goodsell Gallery; David Goodsell is an artist specialising in representations of elements from structural biology, microscopy and biophysics; what that means in practice is that his work presents the molecular structure of cells as beautiful, semi-abstract, colourful canvases. You can find a selection of his drawings here available to download under creative commons – these would make SUCH beautiful large-scale prints, to my mind.
- Free For Dev: Not exciting AT ALL – unless you’re a dev, in which case it might be a bit exciting. “Developers and Open Source authors now have a massive amount of services offering free tiers, but it can be hard to find them all in order to make informed decisions. This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers. The scope of this particular list is limited to things infrastructure developers (System Administrator, DevOps Practitioners, etc.) are likely to find useful.” See? TOLD you it wasn’t exciting. Still, there are about three of you who might find it practically helpful, and that’s the sort of incredibly-specific reader service you get with Web Curios – I know none of you care, but I do, dammit.
- Dr Lava’s Lost Pokemon: Whenever I come across Pokemon-related stuff it feels very much the sort of thing I ought to include in here, given it’s such an immense cultural lodestone for a whole generation of people just a tiny bit younger than me; at the same time, though, I’m equally slightly amazed that that kids’ card game has had such an incredible legacy with millennials. WHY?!?! Anyway, this Twitter account is a fascinating look into WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN – whoever Dr Lava is, they have access to all sorts of information about imagined Pokemon which, for whatever reason, never made it into canon; you want to know all about the specific evolutionary trees of the Blastoise family, and how there are SECRET COUSINS you never knew about? Christ alone knows why, but here you go.
- VGMaps: Would you like a website collecting images of videogame maps from throughout the history of the medium? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! The site is…basic, and a bit clunky, but I just travelled back in time 23-odd years and reminded myself of the map of level 6 of Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System and, well, madeleines have NOTHING on this, is all I’m saying.
- Tattoo Votes: Not so much a link to a good website as a link to a GREAT (if a bit mean) idea. Click the link and DO IT.
- One Rothko Per Hour: I mean, what else do you need me to tell you? Put it on a big screen and feel like you’re in the Tate Modern except without all those other irritating fcuks (I once tried to chat someone up in the Rothko room at the Tate Modern. It went SO badly I still feel actual, physical pain at the memory. GOOD TIMES!).
- Open Doodles: A free library of open source doodles and illustrations, for all your ease of use. It’s worth reading the ‘about’ Page, which is a lovely articulation of why the creator has bothered to make all their work freely available like this, and their support for the principles of open design; one of those rare moments when you think ‘aw, isn’t the internet NICE and OPEN and FREE’, before you remember that it’s not, really.
- Mac OS Screensavers: A Github repository of all the old Mac OS screensavers you could possibly ask for, and several more besides.
- The Worst Garfield-related Facebook Group You Will Ever See: I mean, I’m not lying to you. Want to click and find out exactly how awful? YES YOU DO. This is a *bit* NSFW, but I reckon you can probably get away with it if you’re careful (you’re tempted now, aren’t you? I CAN TELL).
- Virtual Mate: The latest in Web Curios’ occasional series of dispatches from the dark frontiers of teledildonics and sextech, say a big, sticky, slightly awkward HELLO to Virtual Mate! What is Virtual Mate, I hear you ask? TAKE A WILD FCUKING GUESS. It is, unsurprisingly, some sort of cocksheath which you can connect to software, OBVS, except the gimmick here is that the accompanying software will REACT TO YOUR ONANISM! Yes, that’s right, it’s FULLY INTERACTIVE DIGITAL W4NKING! Even better, the makers claim that you can add literally ANYONE YOU LIKE to the software – as long as you have their consent! That…that couldn’t possibly be abused, could it? There is SO MUCH horror here – this is obviously a crowdfunded project, and with a week to go it’s raised $120k – the amazing (disturbing) thing, though, is that there are only 700 backers – meaning on average they have each paid 5x the suggested retail price for this BECAUSE THEY WANT IT SO MUCH. Who are the men who want a $1000 dollar luxurywankingmachine, and can afford one, and can we please quarantine them all somewhere. Be aware, btw, that whilst technically sort-of SFW this is a VERY sleazy website indeed.
- ASCIIDent: Finally this week, the most impressive ASCII game you will ever see. Ever. I am not joking, this is INCREDIBLE and one of the most insane labours of love I think I have ever seen. Please, do click, this is honestly quite, quite jaw-dropping.
LET’S FINISH THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH SOME GOOD OLD DRUM’N’BASS!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:
- Kitchen Ghosts: Foodie cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs were ACE, weren’t they? Can we make them a thing again please?
- Hidden Architecture: Maps, plans and drawings of historical buildings and monuments, if you’re into those sorts of things.
- Warning: Graphic Content: Not in fact anything gross at all, this is instead a great Tumblr compiling dataviz-type stuff (there’s a newsletter too if you prefer your information delivered that way).
- Wikihow Illustrations: The images on Wikihow are some of the most consistently-baffling things on the web. This Tumblr collects them – please, just marvel at the wonder of some of these; there’s a glorious caption competition game waiting to happen here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Alpacas of Instagram: You…you don’t need me to explain this, do you?
- Spenser Little: Little makes art out of wire (not only that, but there’s a lot of it); there’s something beautiful about the style here, which reminds me oddly of a certain school of Italian illustration from the 70s.
- Chandler Holding Your Favourite Album: You…you don’t need me to explain this, do you?
- John Waters Divine Trash Page: Like John Waters? Like Divine? Like trash and schlock and pulp? GREAT, you’ll love this feed then.
- Ricardo Oliveira: You may have seen the heartwarming clip doing the rounds this week, of the kid with cerebral palsy skateboarding thanks to a specially-made rig that holds him upright and supports his muscles; Ricardo Oliveira is the skateboarder who made that kit. This is his Insta feed, full of his own rather good ‘boarding exploits.
- Nick Walker: This is my friend Nick. He is, in his own words, gorgeous and hilarious, and he mentioned to me that he felt somewhat slighted by the number of Insta followers he had, so I said I’d chuck him in Curios and see if that helped. Look, I’m not expecting loads to happen here, but if NONE of you follow him I will look really stupid so, er, please? I promise I will never, ever, sully the purity of my blognewsletterthing with this sort of shameless friendplugging EVER AGAIN.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:
- The Best Thing You Will Read About WeWork: Not ‘best’ in the sense of ‘most in-depth or informative’, but certainly ‘best’ in the sense of ‘most likely to make you snigger at the very real madness at the heart of this whole story’. When you consider the bare facts – that despite utterly fcuking a bunch of people, almost certainly committing some pretty creative acts of fraud and being pretty much the new dictionary definition of delusional, asshole founder, Adam Neumann is still walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars – there’s an argument to suggest that this superb piece of satire-adjacent writing by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine maybe doesn’t go quite far enough.
- How Softbank is Breaking the World: Susbtitute ‘Softbank’ for ‘the very practice of venture capitalism’ and you’re closer to the truth, imho, but the premise still holds. I know I’m by no means alone in this, certainly not some sort of visionary seer, but it’s nice to finally see a little more mainstream consensus forming around the idea that the problem, perhaps, is the funders in these cases as much as the founders. I found this line particularly telling: “Deep-pocketed VCs understand that while continually pumping money into a company can prop up valuations, it’s not enough. You also have to pretend business is something that it’s not. Vision Fund investments need a vision, after all. It doesn’t matter whether Uber or WeWork actually work—or what happens when they fail—but that they have a vision that sounds profitable.” Apply that lens to EVERY SINGLE ‘X as a Service’ business you’ve seen of late – it’s true, isn’t it?
- The Dark Power of Keyword Signalling: Amongst all the rubbish talked this year about the DARK GENIUS OF DOMINIC CUMMINGS (please, can we all acknowledge that the only person who benefits from this narrative is Dominic Fcuking Cummings himself, and that perhaps we ought to maybe give it a rest?), possibly the best/worst was all the stuff about Boris’ speeches being carefully tailored to replace old search results with new, silly ones – see the ‘I like to play with buses’ example. This story is adjacent to that, but more sinister, and explores how right wingers in the US are working to insert specific words and phrases into the public discourse, which if searched for will lead the curious down a rabbithole of fashy conspiracy – genuinely smart, if deepy iffy, tactics, these.
- Jakarta is Sinking: So the XR people have gone dark again, at least for a few weeks, and so we can all forget about the climate emergency for a bit. Except, well, try not to! This piece, all about exactly how fcuked Jakarta is, is one of the most sobering things I’ve read about the actual, imminent impact of environmental catastophe; the prospect of having to imminently find new homes for 30million people is so utterly, mind-flayingly daunting. What’s interesting (read: miserable) about the article is the sense it gives of how systemic the problems are; the very fabric of the city, as it currently exists, is simply not sustainable, and this problem is almost certainly going to be replicated across the developing world multiple times over the next five decades or so.
- Social Credit In Practice: A really interesting look at the differing practical realities of several local Social Credit schemes across China; this does a really good job of explaining how the system is a largely regionalised set of experiments rather than a full-scale national programme, and how different schemes in different reasons differ practically in the function and philosophical approach to the idea. It won’t necessarily make you think that Social Credit is any less creepy as an idea, but it might make you wonder which elements of it could reasonably be incorporated into a less-obviously-creepy setup (can anyone say “slippery slope”?).
- The Obamanauts: A fabulous essay, ostensibly a collected review of the post-White House memoirs of several Obama staffers but in fact more of a review of his Presidency, as well as a series of musings on the nature of legacy and biography. There’s a lot of wonderful writing in here, not least the offhand dismissal of 75% of the books reviewed as little more than protagonistic fanboying; this is a really great piece of criticism and analysis.
- Useful YouTube Tricks: Ok, this is neither an essay or a piece of journalism or indeed good writing – it is, though, REVELATORY (or at least it was to me) on what you can make YouTube do. Honestly, there will be at least one trick in here which you will find properly lifechanging (oh, ok, FINE, that’s shameless hyperbole, but it’s still pretty good, I promise).
- Viewingbots On Instagram: The latest engagement-baiting technique on Insta uses Stories as the hook – there’s a spate of bots and software plugins available which will automatically make your profile ‘view’ thousands of Stories a day, thereby exposing YOUR profile to thousands of potential new followers who might be flattered enough by your interest to offer you a follow and thereby (presumably goes the thinking) make you marginally, incrementally more likely to be able to pass yourself off as an ‘influencer’ than you were before. This is a good overview of how it works, how to spot it, and, if you’re BLACK HAT, exactly what sort of apps can do this for you.
- 20 Years of Blogging: Unless you’ve spent a LONG time online this may not speak to you; to me, though, this was a genuinely lovely, strangely poignant essay, by David Liebowitz, who’s been blogging for two decades; here he looks back at why he started, why he’s kept going, what’s changed and what’s not. It’s an almost-perfect distillation of what was beautiful about blogging and the early internet back in the day; no expectation of audience or reward, just the small joy of carving out a tiny piece of cyberspace (LOL SO RETRO) all of your own, which anyone could stumble across and enjoy. I am obviously getting old, because this made me ever-so-slightly sentimental and misty-eyed.
- Ghost Hands: Sub-headed ‘A history of art and AI’, this article looks at the historical use of technology and automation in the creation of artworks, from the self-playing pianos of the early-20thC; its conclusions aren’t startling, fine, but as an exploration of man/machine creative collaboration and the history of the ‘Centaur’ (see Curios passim), it’s fascinating.
- Machine Reading: More on AI, this time the particular advances being made in machine analysis of texts, and the idea that we might one day be able to ‘teach’ a machine to ‘read’. What’s most interesting here is the breakdown and analysis of how we analyse language as humans (or at least how we understand ourselves to understand language) and how machines currently parse text; even the latest iterations of the very best software, based on code by Google nicknamed BERT, can’t be said to do anything so complex as ‘understand’ language so much as being a wonderful, sophisticated system of pattern recognition. There’s a nagging part of me that wonders whether the really interesting questions here don’t revolve around what we currently mean when we say ‘understand’, and how that meaning might require tweaking as we start to grapple with the mechanics of machine intelligence in a serious way.
- BBC Voice and AI: The BBC this week updated its Alexa Skill for News, with the added functionality of being able to ask for more depth on any given story; using voice commands, users will be able to access additional reporting from the BBC on any news item they here. Regardless of the fact that it’s a very smart idea, the tech and thinking behind it is really interesting; here, the BBC’s Tallulah Berry, involved in the project, explains some of the considerations and thinking – technical and user-focused – involved in its creation. As a primer on how to think about voice tech, this is really good.
- Instagram, Censorship and Art: It’s long been a bone of contention among the art world that Instagram’s ‘don’t offend ANYONE’ prudery effectively limits the platform’s efficacy as a vehicle for art. This is the account of a recent roundtable between a varity of arts practictioners and the powers that be at Facebook/Insta, discussing where lines can and should be drawn and how the platform can and should evolve to become more hospitable to the creators it claims to value so highly. Nothing conclusive emerges, but it’s interesting to see the arguments presented, and the fact that this conversation’s even taking place would suggest that changes are a-coming.
- An Oral History of Clerks at 25: I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but I actually prefer Mallrats. Still, Clerks is a GREAT film, and this look back at it around its 25th anniversary is interesting if you’re a fan, funny in general, and VERY 90s. I love the idea of Jason Mewes getting cast simply because he was quite funny and just sort of around; there’s something so pleasingly shambolic about the whole thing that should give heart to anyone who’s ever wanted to make anything but never quite known how.
- Meet Condé Naste: I had NO IDEA until I read this article that Condé Naste was a real man, but I am now obsessed with the idea of someone I know calling their kid ‘Condé’ (seriously, HOW FABULOUS WOULD THEY BE?? Also, how bullied?). Anyway, this is a profile of the publishing magnate, and the very singular vision thatr powered the creation of the modern empire that is ‘The Nasty’. As a credo, this is on the one hand quite horrid but on the other the clearest articulation of a vision you can hope for: “The publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and the circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others.”
- Journalist as Influencer: This Guardian article got a lot of love on the TL this week, mainly from other female writers strongly endorsing its perspective – to whit, that there is something inherently character-driven and performative about modern journalism, particularly for women, whereby it’s not solely about the act of writing but also about the act of being seen to embody and espouse a lifestyle or character that will resonate and be relatable, and that this lifestyle or character is as important in attracting readers and commissions than the content or quality of your prose. As a non-bylined journalist (this is not journalism) I’m in no position to speak – I found elements of the article a little bit self-indulgent and self-pitying (part of me thinks, for example, that the pattern described here simply doesn’t apply to the very best writers regardless of gender), but the overall thrust seems true. What struck me is how much the central theme of performance as a necessary component of professional practice applies almost as much in advermarketingprland, with the endless AWARDS and BLOGS and TWITTER FEEDS and HUSTLES and THINKPIECES and POLEMICS and oh god I am just part of the problem aren’t i?
- How To Write Great Mystery Plots: By Charles Finch, himself a writer of mystery novels, and one of the best things I’ve read in ages about the practice of writing. Smart, funny, self-deprecating, a tiny bit catty, this is just delicious.
- The Case for Checking a Bag: Does Roxanne Gay ever write anything bad? This is a short-ish essay on why it is always a good and sensible thing to pack hold luggage when travelling on an aeroplane, and it has no right to be this good.
- My Broken Bladder: You may not think that the (very) personal tale of the author’s struggle to stop peeing so often would be the funny, uplifting story of (sort-of) triumph against (sort-of) adversity you needed today, and yet here we find ourselves. This is very, very funny (unless you yourself are a bit incontinent, in which case it’s probably a bit close to the bone).
- Welcome To The Land: One of two wonderful pieces of travel writing in here this week, this is Adam Karlin’s trip to the Northernmost point of the United States – Utqiagvik, Alaska (no, no idea how you pronounce it, sorry), “a place that is not just a cardinal direction but so far away from everything that it is defined by its liminality, its edge-ness, like reality had a border where the night is the day and the road is the beach and the bears.”
- Parenting and Panic: I can’t vouch for this beyond the quality of the writing, but if you can get behind the following sentence then you will enjoy this a lot I think: “Parenting has a lie built right into its name: we should’ve called it childing, because that’s who is in charge.”
- Under The Knife: A very honest and rather sad account of the author’s own labioplasty procedure – why she had it, how it felt, and how it made her feel. It’s dispassionate, and well-written, but there’s something so dispiriting about the eventual and unsurprising realisation that perhaps the issues they were trying to fix were perhaps not fixable by a ‘simple’ act of surgery.
- Electronic Dawn in Uzbekhistan: This is SUCH a brilliant essay – as a piece of travel writing, as a piece of music writing, as a general ‘wow, isn’t the world and human culture just fcuking AMAZING’ exclamation of delight…Tom Faber was recently at a techno festival in Uzbekistan, a place it may not surprise you to learn doesn’t host loads of them as a rule. Honestly, if you can read this and not have at least a small flicker of believe at the unifying power of 140BPM sounds and a campfire then, well, what’s wrong with you? Truly superb, even if you would rather perforate your own eardrums with rusty nails than listen to this sort of stuff.
- The Essential Harv: Finally in this week’s selection of longreads, this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all year. I have no idea who Harvey Mayes was, nor indeed does that matter. I don’t think he was particularly famous or notable on a global scale, but that doesn’t matter either. This is an essay written earlier this year on what would have been his 75th birthday, by the man for whom Harvey was a first ever boyfriend. In 25 small vignettes he paints a wonderful, vivid, human picture of someone we’ve never known and will never meet and who, by the end, you are genuinely sad never to have hung out with; it’s one of the most intimate essays I can remember reading about anyone, ever, less in the quality of the details and more in the general sense of love that permeates the whole thing (yes, I know that sounds AWFUL, but trust me on this – I am the most repellently cynical person I know, and if I think this is cute then I promise you it really is). Please enjoy.
By Tina Berning
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
Next, a truly brilliant video for a really excellent song- this is ‘I See You’ by Pumarosa: