Whilst ordinarily following a week like that we’ve just seen I’d be fully entitled to go FULL DYSTOPIAN HOWL, you’re spared that specific horror this week – so you’ll have to imagine all my white-hot takes on the Presidents Club and the rest, as I am running LATE.
That said, for the few new people who might have come to Curios in the past few weeks or months, I thought it might be useful to do a quick recap of, well, what this is. So:
- What is this?: It’s Web Curios, the longest and least-selectively edited weekly linkdump on the web! Delivered every week (well, ish) to your inboxes and to Imperica around about 1230 on a Friday, give or take a few minutes.
- Who are you?: I’m Matt, nice to meet you.
- Why is this so LONG?: Two main reasons; there is a LOT of webspaff produced every week, and I have appalling quality control
- Who do you do this for?: Charming. Myself, mainly – I tend to find that if I don’t do this almost weekly I get what feels basically like a fatberg of information building up between my ears (insert your own ‘that’s your BRAIN ahaha’ gag here, but know that I judge you for so doing).
- What’s in Curios?: Depends on the weekly link harvest, but the top section is always about social media platform news and stuff about advermarketingpr; the second and third are MISCELLANEOUS LINKS, the fourth is Tumblrs, the sixth is the best of the longreads I’ve consumed that week, and the final one is new videos music or otherwise.
- Why the desperately unfunny section headings?: I am a sucker for a running gag, even if the only person who recognises it as such is me
- How do you DO this every week?: I have a very, very limited ‘social’ ‘life’.
- Can I nick all this great insight and pass it off as my own each week, thereby making myself look better to my agency colleagues and piggybacking shamelessly on your effort and curiosity?: I am your humble servant.
- Must you do the shouty caps thing?: YES.
GREAT! Well, now we’re all caught up, and as we wait for Donald In Davos – and, on that note, the spectacle of a billionaire idiot, in his role as ‘most immediately powerful man in the world’, delivering a barely coherent address about why he is great to a roomful of other billionaires, some idiots, some possibly geniuses, who will then all get together and decide, based on their collective wills and whims, how the world is going to work for the rest of us, is enough to make even me, a reasonably rational person, start to get a bit BILDERBERG BILDERBERG LIZARDS ILLUMINATIE EYES AND PYRAMIDS OH MY DAYS about everything – let’s CRACK ON WITH THE LINKS! It’s another 8,000 word hit of web, RIGHT IN THE MAIN VEIN. This, as ever, is Web Curios!
By Brock Davis
THE SECTION WHICH FEELS A BIT CNUT-ISH RAILING AGAINST ‘STORIES’ AS A UBIQUITOUS FORMAT BUT IS NONETHELSS SITTING HERE RIGHT UP UNTIL THE POINT WHEREBY THE WAVES START LAPPING AT ITS CHIN:
- Facebook To Let Users Determine Which Publishers Are ‘Trusted’: Who is the best arbiter of which sources are to be trusted and which aren’t? Why, we are! We, the fans! We, the people who are responsible in the past year alone for a raft of stories peddled by such creditable fonts as libtardcucknews.com insinuating that our elites are cannibal paedophiles attaining widespread credibility! To quote Zuckerberg, Facebook “will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly. (We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.) This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.” In fact, it’s also going to be taking into account the proximity of a news source to a reader, as well as the extent to which readers consider sources to be ‘informative’. You can all go and read REAMS about this elsewhere, but fwiw I’m not entirely convinced that this sledgehammer-like blunt instrument is going to make even the slightest of dents in the misinformation nut (you like that metaphor? No, it was awful, wasn’t it? Sorry).
- Facebook To Add More Privacy Tools for Users: No word on what exactly these might be, but this is all wrapped up in the coming rollout of GDPR (have YOU ensured you’re compliant? Do YOU have any idea what any of it means? Eh? Oh) – one would imagine that the ‘Privacy Centre’ referred to by Sandberg in this interview will be a further, more detailed way for users to opt out of some Facebook advertising, but we’ll have to wait and see. Exciting!
- Facebook Watch Party: Do you remember how nice it was, in THE PAST, when we all used to cluster around the tiny 13” black and white analogue television wearing deelyboppers and munched on cardboard readymeals and laughed together at Ted Rogers and a man in a dustbin costume? When we all used to have real conversations like a real family, before The Screens came and RUINED IT ALL? Well fear not, because Mark’s going to bring the good times back! Not Ted Rogers, sadly (hypercontemporary reference to a literally 35 year old TV series, there, nice one), but instead the wonderful communal feeling of staring at an ENTERTAINMENT all together! A feature coming to Facebook Groups ‘over time’, currently being tested, “In a Watch Party, members of a Group can watch videos together in the same space at the same time — videos are chosen by the Group admins and moderators, and can be any public videos on Facebook (live or recorded).” Superb for fan groups, wonderful for fan service, great for advertisers (and further evidence that Group-level advertising is very much on its way).
- Facebook Kinect: Remember Microsoft – you know, the full-body-tracking cameras which let you use your arms and legs as game controllers and which noone ever really used because it didn’t quite work properly? Well Facebook is working on the same tech; this is a series of patents filed by The People Who Own Our Future which will eventually enable Facebook to do full-body movement tracking, in preparation for the moment when we step inside the doors of the Big Blue Misery Factory for the last time and become one with Mark in glorious, forever symbiosis. Pray soon come! Oh,. and seeing as we’re doing the tech stuff here, Facebook also this week announced that its image recognition tech is going open source. It’s name? The not-in-any-way sinister DETECTRON! As Ben points out, it’s…it’s a bit sinister, isn’t it?
- Facebook Small Business Training: I’m including this mainly as this is the sort of killer give-and-take which I always find so bleakly amusing about Facebook. Not a fortnight after killing organic reach for brands and business Pages FOREVER (because really), Facebook’s going in hard on how VITAL it feels it is for small business and committing to offer over 1million such small businesses assistance and training on using digital skills to develop their prospects (BUY MORE ADS!). In fairness there’s a lot of stuff in here about assisting disadvantaged groups and teaching broader skills than just navigating FB Business Manager, but it does still feel a little like being offered a sweet by someone who’s just shaken you down for all your change and who, you can tell by the look in their eye, is likely to keep coming round and shaking you down over and over again until one of us dies (and they look a lot healthier than we do).
- How FB Changes MAY Affect Publishers: Take a pinch of salt along with this piece – not least as it’s increasingly clear that Facebook’s own engineers don’t actually quite know how all this stuff’s going to work yet and are just scrabbling to keep up with Zuckerberg’s godlike pronouncements – but it’s an interesting look at how the algorithm changes may affect publishers, particularly in the UK. The short answer, according to this analysis at least, is that Pages whose articles see a higher degree of peer-to-peer sharing will do fine, whereas those whose reach is predicated largely on posts from dedicated Publisher Pages will find that reach being chopped off at the knee. Really, though, NOONE KNOWS.
- You Can Now Use Gif Stickers On Your Insta Stories: You will get so fcuking sick of this over the next few weeks, I promise you.
- Insta Testing Text-based Stories: Text! On gradient-shaded backgrounds! In Stories! Can you tell I don’t care? Actually this is a useful and smart addition and will make the ‘storytelling’ (ugh) feature better and more flexible, but you’ll have to wait for it. WAIT!
- Twitter Working On Its Own Version Of Stories: OF COURSE IT IS. OF COURSE IT FCUKING IS. This is just rumour, but, well, FFS.
- You Can Now Link To Snapchat Stories: This has been trailed previously, and is now HERE! You can now get a url to link directly to a Snapchat story from elsewhere – these currently only play nicely with Twitter, where a linked Story will play in-feed; elsewhere it’ll just be a link which takes you to the Story on Snap – and it could, potentially, bring the platform to a whole new audience (who will look at it and go ‘Oh, look, it’s like an Insta Story! They copied Insta! Weird’, in all likelihood). I am yet to see any of these in the wild, so do let me know if you spot one please thanks.
- Snap App Install Ads Now Come With Deep Links: I can’t be bothered to paraphrase this, sorry – this means Snap ads will now have the ability to “drive traffic to a specific section by targeting users who have already downloaded and opened an app. For example, a mobile game developer might want to target players once they hit a specific level in the game, or a retailer could spotlight a product page that a user added to a shopping cart but didn’t buy.” GOOD NEWS!
- Camera Roll Photos On Snap No Longer Have White Borders: Making it even easier for you to create masterpiece stories from all your great CONTENT, or, alternatively, letting to craft and even more meticulously fictional version of YOUR BEST LIFE (I fcuking hate that phrase, by the way, with a burning passion) to fool everyone you’re not in fact a lonely empty sad mess like the rest of us.
- Ueno Careers: Digital agencies – or, in fact, all agencies, let’s be fair – often have a section on their website where they attempt to convey a sense of their kooky, playful personality, and the reason why they, in contrast to all the other employers out there, are fun-packed hotbeds of creativity and not, at all, sweatshops run by sadists, staffed by idiots and controlled by the idiot whims of insanely demanding clients who have had agency support for so long that they’ve lost the ability to do anything other than move numbers around on a spreadsheet and demand lavish lunches on the agency dime. Credit to Ueno, who’ve made the best example of this I’ve ever seen – this site lets you ‘meet’ some of the staff in a delightful little 3d environment; the writing’s honestly brilliant and the whole thing’s a pleasure to play with. Although if they were this knowingly arch at all times you’d probably be ready to rip your skin off after about three months, on reflection.
“>NEXT, TRY MY FRIEND JONATHAN’S FIRST LONDON FIELDS RADIO SET OF 2018!
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY STRUGGLED TO TEAR ITSELF AWAY FROM IN-BROWSER MARIO TO WRITE THIS, SO COUNT YOURSELVES ‘LUCKY’, PT.1:
- DDance Party: You remember Gif Dance Party from a few years ago, right? Well this is that but BETTER (or worse, depending) – you’re presented with a 3d ‘dancefloor’ onto which you can place a seemingly HUGE number of animated 3d figures, all taken from memes and pop culture (from the dancing hotdog to Mike from Monsters Inc to a very much not approved by Disney Luke Skywalker and on and on). Select the backing track, move the dancers around, set their dancing speed and size and jankiness, and YOU TOO can create your own totally pointless slice of internet dance floor. This is a silly and fun thing to play around with, but it’s also incredibly impressive as a piece of webdev – oh, and you can also submit your own characters for inclusion so expect this all to be ruined by the inclusion of the racist echidna within about a week.
- The Map of #1s: I’ve featured the work of the smart people at Pudding on here before – this is another superb piece of datavisualisation, taking information about what was number one in several-thousand regions of the world over the past month or so, and presenting it as a navigable map which lets you click around and see what was top of the charts in different parts of the world. It’s really very slick, and there are some absolutely cracking tracks you can find through it – I’m currently enjoying West Bengal’s chart-topper and can highly recommend it. Also shout out all those central Asian nations currently still really, really enjoying Gangnam Style.
- Larry’s Quest: Are you a middle-aged man? Did you have a PC in the 1980s? You will, if so, perhaps remember early cult PC game classic ‘Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards’, in which players took on the role of the titular Larry in his quest to, well, get laid. It doesn’t stand up hugely well 30 years on, it’s fair to say, although its portrayal of Larry as a toupee-clad, white-suited loser feels strangely apposite this week. Anyway, this is a…thing, which takes the Larry sprite and puts it in a weird wasteland and…oh, just have a fiddle, it’s just sort of perfectly bleak and existential and after about 3 minutes had me convinced it’s the truest thing I’ve ever seen about the human condition (fine, hyperbole, but).
- WikiWear: WHY ARE THESE NOT FOR SALE??? This is a superb idea – WikiWear automatically creates tshirts emblazoned with images which are in the Wikipedia database but which aren’t currently used on any page on the site. It’s an incredibly random selection of objects and people and places and stuff, and weirdly it produces some superb (and very hipster, fine) results. Hook this up to Cafepress, Alibaba or Amazon and start making…er…TENS of pounds!
- Eye on the News: This is lovely. An Instagram feed showcasing the artworks of a reader of the Independent newspaper, who spent last year making a drawing of one story from the paper each day, and who submitted them to the News Editor by post thinking they might be of interest. These are SO LOVELY; it’s a beautiful idea, and the style of the illustrations is reminiscent of Molly Crabapple – as Barbara Speed, who the drawings were sent to, says, they make you see 2017 in a completely different light. Honestly gorgeous, do take a look.
- Population Estimator: I am not sure how accurate this is, and frankly I don’t really have an idea what the potential use case for it might be, but if you’ve ever wanted to be able to draw a shape over a map of the world and be given an estimate of the number of people living in that are then WOW are you in luck! Actually if you’re a (town) planner this might actually be helpful; I know nothing.
- Canmarker: Have YOU ever been crippled by fear at a party trying to work out which of the assorted mass of opened beercans is yours? Do YOU have a phobia of ingesting anyone else’s saliva? GREAT! Canmarker is currently seeking funding to provide a solution to that most pressing of conundra, and forever eliminate the fear that you’ll get a faceful of someone else’s warm backwash rather than your own, or, er, if you’re of a darker mindset (who, me?) to potentially enable anyone to know exactly who to roofie! Anyway, there’s 6 days left for these lads to meet their goal and they’ve only raised £50, so this may come under the heading of ‘ideas we’re just not ready for’. Shame.
- Perfume Ads: This is a legitimately brilliant Twitter account. Perfume ads will every two hours punt out an imagined script for a perfume advert, featuring a scenario, a star, and a closing shot. Seriously, you can’t not fall in love with something which helps you to imagine Tom Hiddleston playing the trumpet to a single squid in an attempt to flog you stinkwater. If anyone out there’s an animator with a lot of time on their hands, why not do a bunch of these YOU LAZY FCUK?
- The Jugend Archive: Jugend was an early-20th century publication from Germany, charting the art deco movement; this is its entire archive in digital form, spanning its first edition in 1896 to its final throes in the early years of WWII by which point it had been largely coopted as Nazi propaganda. This is a truly astounding treasure-trove of art deco design and style, and if you’ve any interest in design or art history of Germany then you will adore this. More (and, frankly, better-explained) detail here should you want some.
- Dive Sites: A global map of the world’s dive sites, should you be sitting here in the cold of The January That Never Ends contemplating an escape to sunnier climes. I just spend ten minutes zooming around and now really, really want to go to Mafia Island off the coast of Tanzania so if anyone can sort that for me that would be great thanks.
- Volume.gl: Ok, this isn’t an easy one to describe – you just sit there and watch as I flail around in my attempts to do so. Volume.gl is, as far as I can describe it, software which effectively lets you rip 2d elements from video and recreate them as 3d objects in an AR/VR space. So, in the example video you can see on the page, Travolta and Thurman’s dancing scene from Pulp Fiction is taken and dumped into the cameraman’s living room; janky, yes, but there’s a real sense of depth to the way they move around the space which is, frankly, mental. Couple this with the faceswap porn and WOW is there going to be some fun (read: appalling!) home entertainment coming down the line in the 2020s!
- Da Share Zone Card Game: Kickstarter, 3x funded, by meme factory Da Share Zone, to produce a card game based on the account’s unique skeleton aesthetic and weird wholesome/relatable/nihilistic tone. If you ‘get’ the account you’ll probably find this funny; if you don’t, this will be a classic ‘the internet is stupid and everyone on it is an idiot’ moment (I like to think that everything online is basically a constant ouroboros of those two qualities, frankly).
- All Of The Chuckle Tunes: You want a Spotify playlist of all the music ever played on Chucklevision and the Brothers’ associated TV output? No, of course you don’t, that sounds awful – and yet, once again, here we are. Another one of those ‘hook this up to the office sound system, lock your computer, leave and never come back’ links which I occasionally tempt you with; make the most of it.
- Possibles: This is a beautifully-designed website presenting a variety of artistic projects which have taken place over the past year in Montreal. The interface here is really rather beautiful; I love the way the site’s movement ‘flows’ (which, yes, sounds unforgivably wanky, I know, but click the link and you’ll see what I mean). Here’s their explanation: “Citizen consultations identified 12 major themes related to sustainable development in the city. Once a month an artist or a collective, together with collaborators, interpreted one of the selected themes in their own way (theatre, visual arts, performance art, film) with the support of a creative partner. This year of production has enabled the 12 artistic teams to test the creation protocol and to highlight three “alternate routes” from which stems a POSSIBLE.” Take a look.
- Icowid: A Twitter account mashing up ICO announcements with drug chat from erowid.Shouldn’t work, but the fact that it does goes some way to exposing the proto-shamanic insanity of much of the chat around crypto here in the year of our lord two k eighteen.
- Mental Map Test: This is a great little game; presenting you with the outlines of two countries, it simply asks you to adjust their relative sizes until you think they are roughly proportionate, giving you an overview of how accurate you were at the end. Not only a decent test of your base level geographical knowledge, but an interesting way of demonstrating exactly how Western-centric map design has warped our perception of relative country size over the years.
- Audio Adversarialism: This week’s Private Eye (BUY IT) has an interesting snippet about this, but here are some practical examples. Audio Adversarialism is the practice of fooling voice-to-text and voice recognition systems by effectively embedding ‘hidden’ commands in audio files which are inaudible to human ears but which are picked up by speakers and mean, in theory, that we might hear the telly saying “Should have gone to Specsavers!” where instead our Amazon Echo is in fact hearing “Alexa, lock all the doors, turn on the gas and start sparking all the bogs in 00:59, 00:58…”. This is…not scary at all, oh no.
- Spoonbill: When I first saw this I thought “ooh, what a useful tool for journalists!”. Spoonbill is a tool which lets you track any changes to the ‘Bio’ section of a user’s profile – the copy, the website they link to, their stated location – and will relay any changes to you, either as they happen (ish) or in an update email. Which, from a media point of view, is undeniably useful. Except, as Kate Bevan rightly pointed out to me, there’s also a not-insignificant possibility that this could be used for unpleasant and stalky purposes – the fact that the FAQ section makes no mention of whether or not users can opt-out of the service, or how it works with people that a user may have blocked, doesn’t speak great volumes for the service’s attitudes to safety and privacy. Not wishing to get all TEACHABLE MOMENT about this, but that’s honestly the sort of thing that does rather make one understand the concept of privilege – I honestly hadn’t given that a moment’s thought, because I’m a white straight bloke who’s not a famous and therefore I simply don’t have to worry about being screamed at by strangers and therefore don’t take this stuff into consideration. FFS.
- Weird One-Character Domain Superstore: Do you want a weird, pointless one-character domain name, ideally using a weird unicode character noone will ever, ever remember or use? No, you probably don’t, but should you suddenly think of a use for them then here’s where you’d buy one. Actually, there’s been a strange and unexpected resurgence in the popularity (ok, ‘popularity’ is a big word, but) of ARGs in the first few weeks of 2018, and these could potentially be quite useful in that regard – maybe this isn’t totally pointless after all.
- Little Brick Lane: Not, sadly, a miniature diorama in which one can get a poor curry, a £6 pint and a £45 ‘vintage’ Lacoste with matching ‘vintage’ sweatpatches all whilst being coated with the cokesweat of the bridge and tunnel crowd. Instead, Little Brick Lane is an Etsy shop which, in exchanged for some photos of your house (oh, and a few grand) will make you an actual miniature LEGO model of your dwelling, complete with interior if you choose to cough up. Amazing work, and a perfect gift for…er…someone. Although I can totally imagine a certain type of KOOKY company having one of these made of its offices and making the ‘About Us’ page a photo of the building with custom LEGO minifigs for all staff standing outside and looking all happy Christ I hate this industry so, so much.
NEXT, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING, TRY THIS FRANCO-CANADIAN-ARABIC SPOKEN WORD AMBIENT LOFIHIPHOP BY HODA!
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY STRUGGLED TO TEAR ITSELF AWAY FROM IN-BROWSER MARIO TO WRITE THIS, SO COUNT YOURSELVES ‘LUCKY’, PT.2:
- Flesh Mesh: Hands-down winner of the ‘worst name for an app’ award for this week, Flesh Mesh is not, you may be displeased to learn, something that lets you create horrible Clive Barker-type flesh melanges but instead is a very, very impressive iPhoneX app which basically turns your face into a Spitting Image puppet in realtime. I’ve said this before about the iPhoneX stuff like this, but can someone use this with the faces of famouses off the telly? Seriously, that plus a bit of decent impressionism and you’ve basically got a no-budget satirical HIT on your hands. Maybe.
- Are.na: Are YOU a planner? Look, I know some of you are, stop looking shifty and pretending otherwise. Are.na is A N Other web-based moodboarding/annotation/shared scrapbooking tool, of which there are many, but I rather like the interface here; might be worth a look if you’re in the market for such a thing.
- Photos of a Woman’s March Weekend: Pictures from last weekend’s Woman’s Marches across the globe.
- Archive of Digital Film Posters: The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin in Texas is, slowly, digitising its collection of vintage film posters. They’ve only done the first 500 or so, of a collection of many thousands, but if you want some awesome examples of mid-20thC poster design alongside some reminders of some truly appalling-sounding films from the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood (although Forrest Tucker in ‘Fighting Coastguard’ sounds ACE) then this is a treasure trove.
- Trad Wave: A Twitter account combining the vapourwave aesthetic with, er, tropes from traditional catholicism. Very odd, but aesthetically perfect – the only thing that could make this better, to my mind, is if it’s eventually revealed to be part of the Church’s digital marketing efforts (which wouldn’t, frankly, be too much of a surprise).
- Ghanaian Film Posters: This is a wonderful collection of hand-painted posters from the Ghanaian film industry – you know the style by now, but the collection here is really quite impressive and if you don’t want the art from Deathstalker IVon your walls then, well, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. The only slight issue I have is that the gallery whose site this is, and which is selling all the posters, is charging eye-watering sums for them – $3200 for the aforementioned Deathstalker is…punchy, particularly when I am pretty certain that the seller’s not going to passing that cash back to the artist given he’s based in Chicago.
- Positive Romania: My goal of staying POSITIVE in 2018 is obviously still going FANTASTICALLY, but if you’re finding it a bit more of a struggle then you may find some small succour in this Twitter account, which exists solely to share positive headlines from Romania. Nice photos, announcements of feast days, good news from the country…I would like every country on earth to do this, please; it’s excellent tourist propaganda, and it would allow us all to live within the carefully-constructed illusion that the world is FINE. Also, whose world isn’t improved by headlines like “11-year-old boy from Targu Jiu returns found wallet with cash inside”? NOONE’S.
- VHS Distributor Logos: No, me neither, but still.
- Topi Tjukanov: Topi Tjukanov is not only the owner of a truly fantastic name (all the best people have alliterative names ahem) but is a very talented data visualiser; this site collects his work, which mainly focuses on dynamic data representation; this map, showing trains moving on a map whose size is relative their speed, is just beautiful.
- Coverclamp: An astonishingly aggressive product to introduce into a relationship, this, and approximately 0.5 of a step away from suggesting separate bedrooms in my view, Coverclamp is a piece of kit designed to literally CLAMP the duvet/sheet to one side of the bed so as to prevent one partner or another monopolising the covers. WHAT THE FCUK? How do you introduce that? “You’re so terminally selfish, even in your sleep, that I am having to take mechanical steps to safeguard my own warmth”? Do you broach it in advance, or just sneakily fit it without saying anything and then wake laughing in the night at your bed companion’s red-faced and futile attempts to deprive you of your rightful share of bedcover real estate? MADNESS. Although if someone can invent something which prevents your girlfriend’s cat from attacking your feet at 3am, or occasionally stepping on your face at night, that would be great (NB apparently a door to the bedroom is not a viable answer to this problem).
- The London Time Machine: Wonderful site which presents the 1682 Morgan Map of London, the first significant map to be produced after the Great Fire, and lets you navigate it whilst showing you the contrast with modern London as presented by Google Maps. The nature of the original map means that it’s most interesting in and around the City and central London, but as a quick overview of the city’s evolution in the past 350 years it’s hard to beat; check out the area around Lincoln’s Inn Fields and how north of there everything just…stops. Beautifully made, too.
- 3d Maritime Models: Yes, ok, that sounds very dull, but these are GREAT – 3d scanned models of shipwrecks presented for you to have a bit of a nose around, either in-browser or in VR. Hugely impressive, and a wonderful example of the sort of thing which in a few years you really will be able to do quite superbly in VR; we’re not far away from being able to just drop into stuff like this and properly explore it in reasonably immersive 3d, which is incredible (to me). See, sometime’s the future’s LOVELY!
- Igor Lipchanskiy: A one-gag Insta account, but it’s a great one. Igor takes famous album covers and imagines what’s happening just out of shot – click the link, it’ll make more sense, but this has ‘coffee table book’ written all over it, as well as ‘going to be absolutely ripped off for an ad creative by the time I finish writing this sentence’.
- Kisha: Ordinarily, regular readers will know, I am sniffy about internet-connected STUFF – I do not, fundamentally, believe that human life is likely to be improved by the addition of, say, toasters to the world of the interconnected. Occasionally though, something so beautifully stupid comes along and you can’t help but applaud – witness Kisha, a SMART UMBRELLA! Yes, that’s right, with the main draw being that you will NEVER lose an umbrella again, Kisha comes with a tracking device letting you pinpoint it on an app – meaning you need never leave it behind ever again! Oh, and the app also tells you if you’re going to need to take the umbrella out, just in case you fancy replicating the information that your phone’s homescreen already probably tells you. Which is nice. You know what else is likely to prevent you from ever forgetting your umbrella again, Kisha? SPENDING £100 ON THE BASTARD THING. Yes, that’s right, that’s the price point. Everyone is a moron. Everyone. Especially the people buying a smart umbrella.
- Realdoll Teledildonics: Can I just be clear about something? When I feature stuff like this it is, ok, in part a slightly ‘crikey everyone, isn’t the future a bit weird and ooh look SEX WITH ROBOTS’; I admit this, it is true. It’s also, though, slightly in order to attempt to showcase some of the slightly sinister implications of this sort of stuff – witness, for example, this latest innovation from teledildonics pioneers (not a phrase I was really expecting to type this early into the year, but oh well) Camsoda, who have partnered with Realdoll to create a doll/sexcam experience whereby a users’ experience with the Realdoll will mimic the experience they are having with the camgirl on a VR headset; so effectively mapping the actions of the real woman on the VR film to the…er…actions of the doll. Obviously this would be awful and janky as you like, not to mention depressing as you like, but there’s a deeper point here about quite how psychologically unpleasant it is. Or is it? Am I being a terrible prude here? I can’t quite tell any more, but whilst I’ve always found the realdoll thing a bit, well, odd, this time it’s veered very hard into creepy territory.
- Deepfakes: Sticking with disturbing futuresex, because why not, this is the subreddit which has sparked all those articles about faceswapping porn you’ll doubtless have seen. “r/deepfakes is a community for the use, discussion, and refinement of /u/deepfakes‘ algorithm for creating realistic face-swapped videos using neural networks”, the description reads; in reality what this means is it’s a subreddit full of porn onto which people have swapped the faces of other, real people. To be very clear – this is a subreddit full of porn, so perhaps don’t click on it in the office (or do! See what happens! Take risks!) but if you can stomach it it’s sort of horrifically fascinating. The fact that you can now take anyone who’s got a reasonable amount of video of their face in the wild and that you can make it look as it they are doing anything you like…well, it’s not hard to envisage scenarios where that is A Bad Thing, leaving aside the bongo. Factor in the voice synthesising tools which cropped up last year and it’s further proof that we are only seeing the very tip of the fake news iceberg at the moment. This is honestly the creepiest stuff I have seen in a very long time.
- Sign: Sign is an escape the room game for your browser. You know the drill. ESCAPE THE ROOM! Good but HARD, this one.
- Bullying and Behaviour: A beautifully-made site from Japan, presenting vignettes from a young student’s experience of being bullied and how he overcomes the experience through the medium of dance (I know that this sounds like a joke description, but it’s not I promise). The whole site is just beautifully made, the films are gloriously shot, and the message is lovely – really do take a look, it’s a wonderful piece of webwork.
- You Are The Stylist: SUPERB interactive music video, this, for the band Broken Back’s latest song – the gimmick here is that at any point once the video kicks in you can change the lead character’s outfit with simple controls. The joy here is not so much in the interactivity, though that’s beautifully executed, but the seamlessness of the transitions between outfits; this is superbly built, so well done to the devs whoever they may be.
- PLAY ALL THE NINTENDO: Look, this is an in-browser Nintendo emulator (desktop only); it contains working, happily playable versions of Contra, Castlevania, ALL THE SUPER MARIO GAMES, Bubble Bobble…seriously, it’s amazing and the best thing you can do to waste your employer’s money on a Friday afternoon, but, look, the rest of Curios is good too, please don’t go yet please stay please
By Ray Oranges
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Groceries Left Behind: Is there anything more poignant than the site of as solitary, unloved cauliflower left abandoned on a supermarket checkout? There is not, and this site collecting photos of stuff abandoned at the till is proof of that.
- Floor Charts: This is ace, and a wonderful reminder of the fact that ours isn’t the only parliament with its own idiosyncratic and silly traditions. Floor Charts collects photos of all the weird bits of cardboard that people seem to have to use when illustrating points on the floor of Congress. Can someone explain to me why these are a thing, please, and why they can’t use a monitor?
- You Like My Succs: Succulents. Lots of succulents.
- Weird By North West: “Exploring the weird, gothic, supernatural and/or magic realist fictions produced and/or set within the Pacific Northwestern states of America.” Yes, that.
- Tavola Mediterranea: Not a Tumblr! Instead, this is an old-style blog in which the author explores and experiments with ancient Roman cooking, with discursive looks at Roman history, social as well as culinary, and guides on how to make modern versions of Roman dishes. Fortunately seems lighter on the garum than one might have feared.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:
- Everything We Got Stuck In Ourselves in 2017: We kick off this week with Deadspin’s annual roundup of all (or at least a wide selection of) the things that Americans got stuck inside themselves in 2017. Fine, you can read about people getting magnets stuck in their nostrils, but we all know that you’re really here for the stuff at the bottom, the good stuff, the anecdotes about people ‘somehow’ getting a curtain rod stuck inside their bottom. My personal favourite this year is another in the long line of ‘just hanging out with the lads, yeah’ instances – “AT A PARTY HAVING FUN WITH HIS MALE FRIENDS WHEN ONE PUT A SHOT GLASS UP HIS RECTUM”. Just beautiful.
- Jake Paul is a Terrifying Genius: Rest assured, the title’s not 100% unironic, but this look at the younger of the Paul hellspawn’s series of online tutorials, teaching how YOU TOO can become a millionaire YouTube celebrity influencer cancer, shows exactly how much effort and work Paul puts into his success, and demonstrates that he does, sort of, know what he’s talking about when it comes to pimping stuff to idiots online. The line about Facebook and marketing people is painfully, wonderfully accurate.
-
The End of the Awl: The Awl and its sister site The Hairpin, which are shutting down soon because, guess what, publishing’s still fcuked in 2018, were two bastions of genuinely interesting and thoughtful writing – often personal, often very creative in terms of form and style, and often very, very funny. This looks back at the sites’ legacies, and speculates as to what the future of online writing looks like now we no longer have so many publishers – actual publishers, paying actual money – to new and experimental voices. (Imperica Publisher’s note: we are ALWAYS looking for new and experimental voices, and pay for articles. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
) - I Will No Longer Recognise Gender (Mine or Yours): Alex Velky is a nice man and an online (and on a few occasions offline) friend of mine (full disclosure and all that), who is currently building a life for himself and his wife and two daughters in (very) rural Wales. This is Alex’s (long, slightly rambling, but) well-argued essay about why we might as well abandon gender identities altogether; he makes lots of good points in here, all of which seem significantly more apposite now in the aftermath of the tits’n’brandy club revelations from this week. Read it, it’s thought-provoking and smart.
- The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism: This is a lovely Guardian essay on the peculiar pleasures of having two (or more) languages and the way that language, and the way you think, is shaped by the fact. I particularly like the Italianglish examples the author gives at the beginning; if you’re interested in this, and like this piece, there’s another good one on how linguistic differences between English and Italian lead to different appreciations of football which you can read here if you fancy.
- Straight Outta Romford: From last year, this one, but resurfaced this week and a good enough read to include despite the lack of absolute novelty. Did you ever wonder, in the early 2000s and late 90s, who was making all those appalling straight to DVD UK gangster movies and, more pertinently, why? This provides some of the answers – more in the ‘who’ sense than the ‘why’, mind, as I very much get the impression that the combination of lottery cash and tax breaks meant that the answer to the ‘why’ was often ‘money laundering or massive fraud’. A lovely look back at the mid-point of Danny Dyer’s career – I was heartened to learn that his daughter, Dani, has taken on the baton by starring in some of these gems herself.
- Attending The First Rare Pepe Auction: In a year which even in its first few weeks has been pretty damn strange, let’s revel in the fact that one of the very strangest things has been the fact that a rare Pepe this week sold at auction in New York for nearly $40,000 dollars. Is this an art market? Is it its own form of cryptocurrency? Is it a wise investment in a world gone mad? HODL Pepe? Who knows, but this piece is a reasonably wide-eyed look at a frankly lunatic-sounding bunch of people. Blockchain-verified Nazi-coopted cartoon frogs, oh what a world we live in.
- The Story of Hedonism: One for you old ravers – and by ‘old’ here I mean ‘old enough to have been doing clubbing seriously in the late-80s’ rather than just, you know, my age – this is the story of legendary series of London club nights Hedonism, as told by the people behind it. This is long but FASCINATING as a picture of an emergent scene – the stories of what they took from New York, the music, the people, and the REALLY INTENSE DRUGS (there are, unsurprisingly, a lot of references to REALLY INTENSE DRUGS, to the point that you can almost taste the sweat of the man talking at you REALLY INTENSELY as his pupils grow to a size whereby he could swallow the entire room with his eyes); this made me feel VERY lightweight and, unless you’re basically Bez, may make you feel the same way.
- Second Wave Feminism and the Generational Divide: Another example of ‘good journalism comes in some unexpected places these days’, this excellent article on the current divide between ‘Second Wave’ feminists and young women online in 2018 was published on Elle; not the obvious home for this sort of thing, but then now that Teen Vogue’s on its uppers, maybe someone needs to pick up the ‘surprisingly woke fashion mag’ baton. This does a good job of explaining, for people like me who might have been ignorant of the history, what the major beef is within different feminist movements – still, it’s another depressing example of the left’s persistent and unfailing ability, when it has a reasonably free shot at the right, to shoot itself unerringly in the foot.
- No Filter: You will, I presume, have heard of this week’s hoopla surrounding Rebecca Watts’ NP Review (non-)review of Hollie Mcnish’s poetry book ‘Plum’ and Mcnish’s subsequent response. If not, you can catch up with the two links just posted – you don’t need to to enjoy this essay, though, which is tangentially-related insofar as it’s a critique of ‘Instagram Poetry’, that particular aesthetic which feels, in a literary sense, to have a lot in common with the international airbnb aesthetic (bare bricks, filament bulbs, ennui). I’ve featured a few things about Instapoetry before, though nothing as scathing as this – I’m not 100% certain I agree with the full argument or the thesis that it can’t be good work, but the author makes their case cogently and with good examples, and the repeated ‘Like’ numbers after titles is an exquisitely bitchy (but telling) touch.
- Amazon Go And The Future: So Amazon this week opened up its first ‘no humans, no cash’ shop, and it went surprisingly well – noone managed to break it, basically, and the coverage was all about as positive as they could have hoped for. Deep analysis of WHAT IT MIGHT ALL MEAN was a touch thin on the ground, though, aside from Ben Thompson, whose predictably smart take on Stratechery was basically “Now watch Amazon build these EVERYWHERE until they are retail and we are just basically paying Jeff 62% of our salaries directly every month”.
- Fish Feel Pain: It’s official, science has said. Obviously ‘pain’ is a very human concept and even amongst humans a hugely relative and subjective one, but rest assured that were you clinging to pescatarianism as an ethically-defensible form of semi-vegetarianism because ‘they’re only fish’ then, well, there go your standing legs. What’s interesting about this is, yes, partly the science, but also the arguments at the end around how the inherent ‘otherness’ of fish in purely species-level terms, and their lack of mammalian reference points, makes it so hard for us to empathise with them at all that even this knowledge might not significantly affect our attitude towards killing at eating them.
- I Invented The Dancing Baby: This is a great story, and a nice reminder that there was a time when going viral could actually mean that your life wasn’t entirely ruined and your past scrutinised for opportunities to milkshake duck you.
- The Wildest Places You’ve Had Sex, In 6 Words: A list, compiled by VICE, from their readers. I would like it very much if Curios readers could, with no explanation, start sharing their own 6 word confessions on Twitter with no context or explanation. Hats off to this person in particular: “Had a threesome in Paris catacombs.”
- The Man Who Fixes Broken Sex Dolls: This is about as cheery as you’d expect, but a really interesting look into a profession which, if all the focus on sex robots and the future is anything to go by, is likely to be one of the few growth professions for us human beings over the next few decades. If you want to be REALLY creeped out, have a browse through the forum threads on the Realdoll Community Repair forum – it’s really best not to dwell too hard on how the dolls became that broken in the first place.
- Reviewing Salt Bae: This is SUCH astonishingly good writing, it’s almost a shame that it’s being wasted on the preposterous new steakhouse – the latest in his empire – to have been opened by Nusret Gökçe, better known as Salt Bae. There is SO MUCH good prose here, so many killer lines – here’s a sample, but do read the whole thing: “Upon seeing Salt Bae, the first impulse one has is to reach for one’s phone. Salt Bae, knowing this, gamely waits a few moments in silence, for screens to be unlocked and cameras aimed before beginning his performance. Salt Bae does not talk. Salt Bae picks up your steak and twirls it half a rotation. Salt Bae squats slightly and, holding the steak at an angle, raises his large knife into the air. Salt Bae cuts with steak from the bone then the meat from the meat. He cuts with his whole body. With every slice he demi-pliés and his knife moves in graceful parabolas through the air when it is not cutting.. Salt Bae has done this many times. He will do this hundreds of times this night alone. The performance is both real and a reproduction. Salt Bae knows he is being held to the standard of his own 36-second video and its millions of views. He is a real-life meme, and he knows what we want.”
- The Baby Influencer: This kid has millions of followers on Insta. She’s a ‘legitimate’ ‘influencer’ (both words whose meaning I am unsure of here in modernity right now) whose mother curates and creates her account, and cultivates the ‘sassy’ persona which have brought the fans and the brands flocking. Meanwhile, though, take a look at some of this stuff and wonder whether or not this looks healthy (it doesn’t look healthy). Honestly terrifying.
- Just Ask: Thanks to Jay for drawing this one to my attention – this is a quite remarkable profile of “Kasia Urbaniak, a dominatrix and Taoist nun turned empowerment coach” (her description, and I’m not going to argue) which turns quickly into one of the most interesting disquisitions on gender and power and sex and abuse and politics and modernity and well pretty much everything you can think of that’s been vaguely socioculturally zeitgeisty so far this year. Long, but superb. Read this one. But if you don’t, then DEFINITELY read…
- Utopia: It’s hard not to get a bit arsey as someone of 38 when you read a piece of writing like this – so smart, so assured and so clever which is penned by someone of 21, but I’m going to try REALLY HARD. This is the latest editorial by Tavi Gevinson in her magazine Rookie, which is an essay to her young readership but also to anyone else who cares to listen, and which covers social media and constructed identities, the nature of the personal ‘story’ and the need (or not) for performative narratives, the web and youth and age and marketing and the fetishisation of adolescence and seriously, if you read a smarter essay by anyone this week I would like to see it. Awesome.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: