It’s…it’s ok, this quarantine lark. The only major downside so far was seeing a naked man performatively-masturbating for his phone the other day, but such is the packed-together nature of urban living in That London (it was almost touching how long he spent getting the angle exactly right) (look, you would have watched too, ok?); otherwise, though, it’s seemingly going ok! My girlfriend moved in, along with her cat, and neither of them have killed me or done a dirty protest yet, so I am counting that as a win.
How are YOU though? Are you ok? I do care, I promise, which is why I have once again prepared a care package stuffed to the very nines with LINKS AND GOODNESS, like some sort of intellectual pemmican to nourish you while you traverse the choppy waters of viral confinement (even by the low standards of Web Curios, that was a spectacularly-unsuccessful analogy; I can only apologise and explain to you that we’re living in straitened times and the simile aisle at the supermarket was empty.
Anyway, enough – here’s this week’s Web Curios for you to maybe enjoy. I hope you like it and I hope you are ok and I hope the people you care about are doing alright.
Er, you cnuts, etc etc. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and at least the clocks go forward this weekend so we lose an hour of this incarceration.
LET’S START THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH QUESTLOVE’S 7-HOUR DJ SET FROM EARLIER THIS WEEK!
THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT AFTER LAST WEEK’S TEMPORARY HIATUS THE S*C**L M*D** NEWS SEEMS TO HAVE RETURNED WITH A VENGEANCE BUT WHICH ENCOURAGES THOSE OF YOU WITH BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN MINOR TWEAKS TO PLATFORM FUNCTIONALITY TO SKIP RIGHT ON TO THE NEXT SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GOOD AND HAS SOME GENUINELY INTERESTING THINGS IN IT:
- Instagram Now Lets Users Share Insta Posts In Video Chat: You’re…you’re bored, aren’t you? Look, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. You’ve secretly made peace with the fact that, honestly, you don’t want to learn another language, or master the secret of a really open-crumbed sourdough, or master the floss, or read Ulysses (honestly, it’s not worth the trouble), or have that looming conversation about where the relationship is really going. Web Curios does not judge, remember – it only sees and silently logs. Anyway, for all those of you who see this quarantine as nothing more than an opportunity to go REALLY DEEP into the ‘Gram, then you’ll enjoy this new feature – you can now share Insta posts with your interlocutors over video chat, meaning you can all get together and absolutely roast that one person that you love to hate. Yes, I know that that’s not the stated aim of this, but, well, look, that’s what it’s going to be used for. I don’t make the rules.
- Culture and Conversation on Twitter: This feels very much like a relic from a pre-Corona era; this is a bit of datacrunching by Twitter based on BILLIONS of Tweets from between 2016 and the end of last year, broken down into themes and presenting trends as to what we all really care about and how that’s changed over the years. I’m including this mainly as I have had several conversations with people in a work context where there’s been a general ask along the lines of ‘what can social listening data tell us about global themes and trends around Coronavirus and what it means for brands and businesses?’ and, reader, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This bit of Twitter work shows exactly how bad social data is at helping you understand ANYTHING about big global trends and themes outside of the most banal generalisations; LOOK, EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT THE FCUKING VIRUS, WHAT DO YOU FCUKING EXPECT??? Also, social data is ONLY EVER TWITTER FFS, and so about as representative of the wider world as the Guardian newsroom is of the UK as a whole. A message to Directors of agencies – STOP THINKING THAT SOCIAL LISTENING DATA IS A FCUKING SCRYING GLASS INTO THE MINDS OF THE POPULACE, YOU ONLY THINK THIS BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT FCUKING WORKS, AND JUST BECAUSE YOU EARN 100K DOESN’T MAKE YOU A FCUKING EXPERT ON STUFF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, HOWEVER MUCH YOU SPEAK WITH CONFIDENCE AND AUTHORITY. Ahem. Anyway, if you want some social trends stuff that’s largely meaningless, here it is!
- A Guide To Hosting Virtual Events on YouTube: Seeing as I’m on a roll here, another annoying series of conversations I’ve had this week: “Matt, do you know of any creative ways in which we can host a webinar?”. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO BE ‘CREATIVE’? IS ‘FUNCTIONAL’ NOT IMPORTANT? FFS!! I mean, I could make everyone install a bespoke piece of conferencing software which places everyone in a VIRTUAL EVENTS SPACE in which you can navigate in 3d space and visiting individual rooms to see different speakers, or maybe we could do it in Minecraft…or you could just set up a couple of streams on YouTube, or Teams, or any number of FUNCTIONAL platforms that won’t eat all of everyone’s bandwidth and which are designed to work at scale. You morons. Anyway, this is a helpful guide to doing live stuff on YouTube, should you require one.
- WhatsApp As A Chatbot Service: This links to the announcement of the WHO WhatsApp Coronabot, but there have been local versions set up all over the place, including India and the UK (where it wasn’t working at launch). A useful reminder that, whilst the great Chatbot boom of 2017 seems like the very distant past, they can still be hugely useful in situations like this when there’s a clear series of potential questions and answers that you can predict people will need. Personally speaking I’d like to see HMT instituting some of this stuff on WhatsApp and Messenger to help triage all the people trying to make sense of their eligibility for financial support, not least to ease the burden on phonelines, but what do I know? Rhetorical, obvs.
- #Happyathome With TikTok: TikTok cares about you and your wellbeing! Especially if you’re attractive and middle-class and definitely not ugly or disabled (see this story from the other week if these references don’t make sense to you)! Which is why it this week announced daily themed content on the platform, made in conjunction with various influencers, to promote positivity and mental health and all those lovely words that large, VC-backed companies use to pretend that they see us as anything more than numbers of a hopefully hockey stick-shaped curve. Motivation Monday, Kickback Tuesday…you can imagine the bromides. Look, this isn’t a bad idea per se, but as ever with these things there’s a large part of me that questions whether watching Arnold Schwarzenegger or AN Other shiny-haired, glow-toothed teen broadcast themselves being all fcuking #namaste about life from their palatial manse is really going to be the happymaking pick-me-up that these people think it is.
- Snap Launches Coronavirus Mythbusting Game: I like this a lot – simple and smart, Snap’s created a simple quiz that asks users a series of yes or no questions using a Snap Filter, showing your face and a little animated Corona particle, which you can play along or with friends. Really nice execution, although it does weird me out slightly that I have to look at my own face whilst playing this. Look, can I not learn without looking at my hideous, sagging epidermis? WHY MUST THE FUTURE REQUIRE ME TO LOOK AT MY OWN FACE ALL THE TIME FFS???
- Pinterest Launches ‘Today’ Tab: Pinterest is doing hugely well at the moment, as users flock to do imaginary home improvements and dream of what they could achieve were it not for the fact that they secretly hate DIY; it’s now launched a ‘Today’ tab, showcasing popular content each day. “The Today tab will feature curated topics and trending Pins, making it easier to explore timely ideas, Pinterest explains. That means, right now, you might find something like “Inspiring Work from Home Workspaces” rather than one focused on vacation ideas, for instance.At launch, the Today section is pulling from trending searches — like kid-friendly baking ideas, self-care tips, family-favorite movies and comfort food recipes, among other things. These recommendations will be curated by Pinterest’s team, but further down the road, some may come from guest editors. The company will also soon use the Today tab to offer expert information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on topics like hand washing, mask usage and other safety tips during the coronavirus pandemic.” This should be live now in the UK and US, so take a look should you be so minded.
- Reddit Introduces Polls: A new post type for Reddit! Polls! It’s quite rudimentary in terms of functionality, but as a way of gauging a community’s support for particular products or features or courses of action, it’s a useful one – particularly if you have the sort of brand which has its own little niche area of Reddit to call its own. Have to say, though, I would be fascinated to see under the hood of this and get a picture of some of the questions that are being asked here – I imagine quite a few of them would make my hair curl somewhat.
- Spotify Introduces Podcast API: This is techy and of limited interest to most of you, but if you’re interested in building anything that uses Spotify’s podcast data to surface or analyse content then, well, you’re in luck!
- Connected TV Market Analysis: This is slightly out of my comfort zone – I am not a media buyer (I may be scum but, well…), and I don’t do BIG AD BUYING CAMPAIGNS (what do I do? What is the point of me? It’s questions like this that assail one during this early period of churning out Curios, a sort of long, dark breakfast of the soul, if you will) – but it seems useful; it’s also a LinkedIn post, and I never link to those. The STUPENDOUSLY-NAMED Paul Gubbins (honestly, what a name) has written a very comprehensive post about the market for ad buying on connected TV, how it all works, etc – it’s very in-depth, and, at least for someone like me who really doesn’t know anything about this stuff, really quite interesting. I think there’s a real opportunity here to make some quite fun stuff based on the captive audiences we’ll all have to play with in the coming weeks and months.
- What Businesses Are Doing About Corona: A Google Sheet containing what seems like a pretty comprehensive list of Stuff That Companies Are Doing In The Time Of Corona, both good and bad. Useful if you are one of the seemingly-infinite number of advermarketingprdrones who has been tasked with creating a rundown of WHAT THIS ALL MEANS AND HOW BRANDS MUST RESPOND – who knew that this crisis would be such a catalyst for so much strategic thinking? Honestly, if I read one more poorly-paraphrased reworking of Muir’s Laws of the Internet – here they are again, for those of you with poor memories.
By Jason Limon
IN FACT, WHY NOT ENJOY AN ADDITIONAL THREE HOURS OF QUESTLOVE? MAN THAT WAS A LONG SET!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.1:
- The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: As long as this keeps being useful and updated, I’ll keep linking to it here. It’s growing exponentially each day, as thousands of people around the world contribute to adding new resources and helpful information, and now contains information to help parents with homeschooling, people working from home, and various helpful materials on churches, worship, online deliveries, worker’s cooperatives and unions that might offer assistance and support…look, this is just a superb resource and a proper reminder of what the open web can and should be. Kudos to everyone involved, it’s a hell of an undertaking.
- Help With Covid: I tried to sign up to be an NHS volunteer this week, only to find that as I can’t drive I am largely useless (to be expected, frankly); I’ve offered myself up as a telephone person but quite fervently hope that noone’s unfortunate enough to be diverted towards me as a source of emotional support. Links, I can do; emotional support, perhaps less so. Anyway, this site is a list of projects that are currently live which people can assist with in various ways; they’re in the main online projects, so perfect for wherever you are, although there’s a slight US focus with much of the content. From design to coding to manufacturing and loads inbetween, if you feel you have skills that you could be using to help then this is a good place to start finding out how.
- Covid Global Hackathon: Anyone who’s worked anywhere adjacent to tech in the past decade will hear the word ‘hackathon’ and breathe a small sigh of despair; it’s come to be shorthand for ‘look, some big business needs to look like it ‘gets’ tech and is all agile and stuff, so can we get a bunch of people with stickers on their laptops to sit in a gym with some whiteboards and pizza for a day attempting to solve a spurious challenge while we take photos for LinkedIn and then never speak of this again?’ Still, this looks like it might be rather more meaningful; it’s scheduled to take place on 30 March, so at the time of writing you’ve a few days left to register; “an opportunity for developers to build software solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic…The hackathon welcomes locally and globally focused solutions, and is open to all developers – with support from technology companies and platforms including AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat, who will be sharing resources to support participants throughout the submission period.” Worth a look if you do codestuff.
- Covid Tracker: I am trying to steer clear of scary or doomy links in here at the moment – this one’s a BIT scary, so, if you’re feeling a bit fragile and the numbers are all a bit worrying, DON’T CLICK. The rest of you, though, this is the best and clearest site for seeing how the relative spread of the virus over time differs from country-to-country, and how relative progressions compare. Clear, well-designed and updated daily from public datasources, this is fascinating. But, er, it’s also quite a scary graph, so, well, caveat emptor.
- The Remote Work Survival Kit: To be honest this may well be linked to within the larger Corona Tech Handbook up there, but if you want a useful bunch of links and resources to help you setup homeworking for yourself, colleagues or a small business then this could be hugely helpful.
- The Coronavirus Shop: This site is selling virus-themed merch. You want a ‘Coronavirus World Tour 2020’ hoodie? NO YOU DO NOT FFS THAT IS GOING TO AGE VERY POORLY. It purports to be a charitable venture, but I can’t help but feel that the statement ‘A % of every sale is donated to charity’ isn’t quite the level of clarity I’d want from something like this – also, the charity it donates to is US-specific. Still, if you’d like a poorly-printed, very of-its-time souvenir of a major global disaster then, er, you do you, friend! NB – we are not friends, and I would like you to stop reading my newsletterblogthing right now, please. Go on, fcuk off.
- How Is The World?: I mean, I think we can hazard a guess, right kids? Still, if you want a global tracking snapshot of how we’re all doing right now then you might like this site, which tracks what I presume is Twitter sentiment data from across the world to attempt to present a snapshot of how the world’s coping with STUFF. Obviously all the usual caveats apply – sentiment analysis is largely bunkum, no real people use Twitter, the sample size and geolocation are very iffy (Twitter’s fault, not the website’s)…still, it’s kind of interesting to look at, even if I question the veracity of a site which currently claims that the happiest people online right now are in Saudi, Iran and Pakistan. I mean, Saudi maybe – I shudder to think about what might happen to your thumbs if you were to type how you really felt about life – but not sure that Iran has that much to smile about now.
- Zenly Launches Stay At Home Leaderboards: This feels like it should go in the top section, now I come to think of it. Oh well. Zenly is a Snap-owned app which effectively lets you track where all your friends are all the time, a la Snap Map; it’s introduced a really cute little gamification mechanic to encourage people to stay put, creating ‘streaks’ based on how long since you left your house. Such a nice way of making it a fun challenge rather than a chore; maybe something that might be helpful for your household. I’m slightly surprised that more apps aren’t doing this; after all, our phone knows exactly where we are at all times, and whether we’re leaving the house, so I’d have expected everyone to jump on the ‘let’s gamify this’ bandwagon.
- Immersive Online Experiences: Thanks so much for Paul Drury-Bradley for pointing me at this; it’s an AMAZING resource and I encourage you all to click the link and have an explore. I’ll let them explain: “Here at No Proscenium, we’re dedicated to searching out the best in immersive & experiential work. Traditionally that has meant tracking the immersive theatre renaissance, putting a spotlight on narrative & performance driven escape rooms, and covering the growth of location based entertainment (LBE), with the occasional foray into at-home VR, alternate reality games, and the odd Escape Room in a Box. Because of the ongoing fight against the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, not only are we left without a lot of new live performance and LBE based work to cover it wouldn’t be responsible of us to encourage people to go out at this time even if many of our readers were not facing curfews and other measures. So we turn to that which can be done INDOORS and ONLINE, and instead of looking at this as a bad thing, we’re embracing the idea of IMMERSIVE FOR INDOOR KIDS.” THIS IS SO GOOD!! You want interactive online experiences? You got them! You want games that can be played on the phone, using calls? You got them! You want podcasts as plays, online text games, ARGs, interactive livestreams, video-on-demand…you got them! SUCH a wonderful resource full of creative play and fun, this is probably the richest funlink in all of Curios this week and I cannot recommend enough that you explore it.
- The National Emergency Library: The Internet Archive has for years run a slightly-peculiar sort of digital lending library, whereby it had one digital copy of a huge selection of texts which could be lent out to one user worldwide at a time (for reasons of copyright, I presume); now, though, because of these ‘extraordinary times we live in’ (dear God, I really need a new term for this – could we try ‘virageddon’? I might see if I can make it catch on, feel free to help), that restriction has been lifted and anyone, anywhere, can now access a dizzying number of texts, digitally, for free. There are 1.5million texts in here – the tagging options you can use to search them run to 50 pages. There are nearly 20,000 works labeled ‘fiction’ ffs – honestly, this is one of the most amazing online resources I think there has ever been, and I am awed at its scale and scope. I’ve just scrolled right to the end of the tags and discovered that there are 120 books dealing with the behaviour of dogs, so basically what I am saying is that whatever you’re into there’s something here for you.
- The Boardgame Remix Kit: The experience that got me into immersive theatre play stuff was called ‘Journey to the End of the Night’, and it involved being chased across London by 100 people in weird period costume including a terrifying man on spring-stilts, culminating on the Southbank at about 2am and which involved me getting VERY scared and rather too stoned in Hyde Park whilst trying to evade a capture squad. It was great, and honestly changed my life in a few small ways; it was organised by Gideon Reeling, which was an early offshoot of Punchdrunk (you see what they did there, right?), and was run by Alex Fleetwood who went on to found Hide & Seek who, while they existed, were a BRILLIANT company exploring ways to ‘hack’ games and play in interesting and fun ways. One such project was the Boardgame Remix Kit, which they released as a product a few years back but which they’ve now made free – the idea behind the kit is that it provides a bunch of new rulesets and ways to play for existing games and toys you might have at home but which might need a refresh. Want to turn Cluedo into a zombie survival game? Want to turn Scrabble into a gambing game using your Monopoly money? SO many excellent and fun ways of tweaking stuff you already own to keep it interesting, and a wonderful resource for week three when you’ve played as many games of Settlers of Catan as any single household can reasonably be expected to.
- Makeway: One the one hand, I came across this via an aggressive campaign of digital advertising (I have no idea what audience I am in, but MAN does this company want me to see its ads) and I am suspicious of Kickstarters that can afford that sort of ad spend as, well, couldn’t you fund yourselves in that case? On the other, this looks really fun – it’s raised a staggering £1.5m at the time of writing, off a goal of £8k, which may be the largest over-funding I’ve ever seen – and is basically a real-life physical version of the classic Rube Goldberg machine simulator ‘The Incredible Machine’ (which you can play here). The idea is that you’re buying a bunch of rails, magnets, spinners, trapdoors and the rest, which you affix to a wall in whichever configuration you desire to make wall-mounted, ceiling-to-floor marble runs of potentially crazy complexity. If you’ve ever watched one of those YouTube videos in which a ball-bearing takes a painful-but-impressive six minutes to travel around a house before finally filling a glass with lemonade and thought “I could make one of those, but I can’t be fcuked to raid the kids’ meccano box” then this is absolutely for you (though given it’s still got 20 days to run, you may well not receive this til 2021 by which point, God willing, we may be allowed to go outside again).
- The Films of SXSW: For all those of you who were going to go to SXSW (the film and music bit, not the advermarketingpr bit) and who are sad about missing all the short films from the festival, FEAR NOT – Mailchimp is hosting them all to view for free on this site. I confess to not having watched any of these, but the cinephiles among you might find some good material in here should you wish.
- Colourpush: A nice, seemingly-utterly-frivolous, little project by WeTransfer, which lets users spend 90s playing with a few buttons and a limited canvas to create a small, pastel-ish, slightly abstract, multicolour artwork, which you can then download and use however you wish, as well as adding it to the digital gallery of other people’s compositions. There are worse ways of making a new Zoom background, tbh, and the slightly fingerpaintish nature of the interface means that I think it could be quite a fun distraction for small kids (for about three minutes, til they start demanding more Peppa).
NEXT, TRY OUT DJ TWITCH’S ‘TRANQUILITY’ MIX WHICH IS ALL AMBIENT AND LOVELY!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.2:
- United We Stream: I can’t work out whether being a rabid clubber would be bad right now – on the one hand, you obviously can’t go clubbing; on the other, with the right connections you can keep yourself in medical-quality speed, ket and pills for months; with a few cheap lighting rigs from Amazon and a decent pair of speakers, you can probably create your own sweaty khole experience in the comfort of your own home (and you’re literally only metres away from the comedown couch). More seriously, the virus is obviously ruinous for many, many music scenes, not least Berlin’s infamous techno clubs; United We Stream is collecting a variety of live sets from clubs across the city, from 7-12 each night (at least at weekends), and also features a fundraising effort to keep the whole thing going. Sadly doesn’t seem to include anyone playing Thunderdome IV in its entirety, but one can always dream.
- Online Dance Classes: New York’s Mark Morris Dance Group is putting daily live classes streaming online, and available to watch back later on its website. I am not, it may shock you to learn, necessarily an aficionado of dance; I get the impression the stuff here is probably quite serious, and it might help if you know what a plie is (I don’t, to be clear). That said, if you think Joe wossname is a bit too amateur for you and you want a workout that could quite feasibly result in a badly-torn hamstring, then some of these will be perfect for you. Alternatively, if your kid does dance and is bouncing off the walls, this could be a perfect way of exhausting the fcuker. Up to you really.
- Six Feet of Separation: I am not, in the main, a sentimental man (unless that sentiment is ‘sneering self-regard’), but this is SUCH a lovely project and something that might be lovely for those of you with kids to try. Six Feet of Separation is a newspaper made collaboratively online by a bunch of kids aged between 2 and 19 in…oh, I have just checked and they’re in San Francisco. That figures. Still, it’s a collection of drawings and essays and games and recipes and even horoscopes, and, honestly, even though my cute threshold is VERY low, this warmed even my frozen, warty cockles. I would love to see a collection of these sorts of things in a year’s time; aside from anything else, I think they could become really interesting historical documents of kids’ responses to the…*gestures, futilely*…thing.
- Snag Films: Another niche website for free streaming of video that I had never heard of before – the deal with Snag is that all the content is…well, it’s mainly stuff you’ll never have heard of before, leaning heavily on documentary content with a bit of an inspirational bent. Films about surfing culture, the Cuban-American diaspora, and lesbian bar owners (not the same film, to be clear) – there are 2000-odd, it’s all totally free, and whilst it’s not, it’s safe to say, ever going to trouble Netflix, if you’re after something a little more niche and you’re sick of being told to watch that show about that bloke and the fcuking tigers then this might be worth a look.
- Reply All on Twitch: Reply All is a very popular and apparently very good podcast that I know lots of you probably like. They are now doing it on Twitch. This may be of interest to some of you (and, more broadly, I’m quite interested to see how they translate the show from one medium to another; if this works in any reasonable way, expect to see the rise of ‘Zoo TV’ as every single fcuking bloke who has a podcast with his mates where they ‘just kind of talk about random stuff and weird sh1t, you know?’ decides the it would be immeasurably better if you could see all their beards and their slightly-going-to-fat-in-your-early-30s physiques.
- Escape The Document: I am in awe of this, both in terms of scope and execution. Did you know that you could use Google Docs to make an ‘Escape The Room’-type interactive fiction game, with fiendish puzzles and some really rather good writing? I certainly didn’t, and yet here we are. Kudos to writer and creator Anthony BL Smith, this is a quite astonishing bit of work – it does rather beg the question ‘why?’, but then again so does most of the best stuff.
- Theme Park Rides: One of the WORST things about this – not in any way one of the worst things, but forgive me a touch of authorial hyperbole – is that I’m unlikely to get to a theme park anytime soon, meaning I am JONESING FOR ROLLERCOASTERS. If you too are finding yourself getting centrifugal force withdrawal, you might want to check out this YouTube playlist of videos of rollercoasters in first person view; most of these are Disney and not all of them are thrill rides, with various monorail videos and footage of kid-friendly rides like ‘It’s a Small World’ for those of you with particularly masochistic tendencies. Honestly these are ace and it’s amazing quite how much of an effect watching them fullscreen can have. BONUS GAME – if you’re the sort of person with a really big telly or a wall-mounted projector, get everyone in your house to stand in front of the telly and watch a few of these, and then watch as they all get jellylegs and fall over when they try and move (this works BRILLIANTLY with small children, fwiw, though there’s an outside chance they will vomit in the immediate aftermath).
- Scratch: Scratch is a free, browser-based tool by MIT that lets users program their own games, animations and lightly-interactive stories to share with others. This could be quite an interesting way of augmenting storybuilding with your kids, or alternatively of making simple-yet-vicious animated vignettes of your quarantined life which you can share with the wider world (until your partner finds out and your life becomes very, very uncomfortable). It’s designed to be a learning tool as much as a creative one, is available in LOADS of languages, and is designed for ages 6 up; this looks like a really, really good platform to play with imho.
- Find My Pasta: A nice idea, though only as good as its uptake and the quality of data submitted; Find My Pasta’s an app designed to help users track and report food shortages in their local area, with the idea being that you use it to flag shops that are either locust-ravaged or stocked to the nines. Might be worth a look if you’re concerned about access to supplies where you live, though I’d caveat this by saying that there’s no guarantee that enough people will be using it for it to be functional.
- Google Learning: All of Google’s learning resources in one place. SO MUCH LEARNING! SO MANY SUBJECTS! Honestly, if you can’t find something in here that you’re interested in learning about then you may well be dead, or at the very least terminally uncurious.
- Connected Camps: Despite my somewhat-snarky reference up top to using Minecraft as a place to do events, this is a super-smart idea; Connected Camps runs educational classes in Minecraft, specifically in adjacent disciplines such as digital object design and coding – it’s SUCH a good idea, and another example of how existing, built digital worlds can be used for pretty much anything with enough ingenuity and care. Oh, and this announcement by Minecraft from this week, about how it’s making Minecraft Education Edition (the stripped-back version that lets you do shared virtual world stuff with a lot of the more obviously ludic elements stripped out) is now free til the Summer for anyone with an Educator’s version of Office365 – which might be worth a look if, er, you are such an educator.
- Krisp: Software that works to mute or eliminate background noise from your videocalls. Your colleagues and friends will thank you, I promise.
- Walkie Talkie: There are a bunch of these available, but this one’s widely said to be the ‘best’ – why not turn your daily conversations with friends and colleagues into FAR more interesting walkie talkie conversations? Pick a frequency, get everyone to tune in, and enjoy the crackly goodness of faux-radio communication! Bonus points if you all invent a preposterous and overelaborate system of signoffs and callsigns to frame the experience; the temptation to refer to everyone as ‘Good Buddy’ in the manner of a US long-distance trucker will be very, very strong, I warn you.
- Anchor Makes Podcasting Easier: Coupled with the boom in terrible novels being written RIGHT NOW, I am pretty certain there will be a parallel boom in people deciding that what the world really needs is to hear them on a podcast. It is now even easier to do co-recording and editing and all sorts of other things remotely – “with Record With Friends 2.0, currently in beta, up to 4 people can join your podcast recording from any device, on desktop or mobile, with or without an Anchor account. In order to join your recording, all your guest has to do is click an invitation link and type in their name. Like the rest of Anchor’s podcasting platform, Record With Friends is free to use and available globally.” Let me be clear – I don’t want you to do this, I don’t think it’s likely to result in anything good, but I like and care about you SO MUCH that I am including this link in here regardless of my own feelings. Fcuking hell, I deserve some sort of award for this ffs.
- Bingo Deal: Poor the Nanas – deprived of their main social focal point (to whit: sitting on rural bus routes all day, where they always all seem to know each other), they’ve also been deprived of the bingo. Thankfully, though, this site lets you print out bingo cards which you can distribute to run games online over whatever videocalling platform you like. Why not try livening this up by creating new, Corona-appropriate caller slang? “Cupboard’s Empty – Number 20! Hungry Tum – 41!’. Or, on reflection, maybe don’t.
NOW ENJOY SOME DOWNTEMPO BALEARIC-TYPE STUFF COURTESY OF CLASSIC LOVER!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.3:
- Wrestling: WWE is weird. We’ve spoken at length here before – or, er, I have; look, I know this is a monologue but it’s weirdly helpful to imagine it as a dialogue because, well, the alternative’s a bit bleak – about how it has generated kayfabe, the most important and culturally-significant concept of our times, but less so about the fact that at its heart it is basically The Bold and the Beautiful or Days of Our Lives with smaller pants, bigger muscles and approximately the same hair. I don’t know if you’ve seen the footage of them doing WWE in audience-free arenas because of quarantine, but if not do dig it out – it turns the whole spectacle into nothing more than a slightly camp series of over-the-top shouting matches between very, very orange wardrobes. Anyway, that’s by way of unnecessarily-long preamble to the fact that WWE has now made a bunch of its matches available to stream for free. Great!
- Arrange Meetups Easily For many people it seems that this…situation (no, I can’t use that either, it reminds me of Jersey Shore and makes me think of the virus as a slightly-going-to-fat guido with vertiginous hair) is leading to the reinvigoration of their social lives as they do virtual hangouts every night with people they haven’t spoken to for ages (not wishing to p1ss on your parades here, kids, but this might not be quite the same when we all stop having this one thing in common again). If that’s you, and you’re finding it tricky for you and your friends to find a slot in your respective jam-packed diaries for virtual pub time, this webapp – called ‘Lettuce’, for no good reason that I can discern – might be useful; it’s basically like Doodle, but less annoying (Doodle used to be ace, but it’s UI’s gone down the toilet in recent years imho).
- Some Good Internet Rabbitholes: Reddit doing God’s work here in this thread, which brings together various users’ favourite internet rabbitholes from over the years – in this context, ‘rabbitholes’ refers to stories which are weird and deep and strange and which investigating will potentially consume you. Examples referenced in here include the Voynich Manuscript, John Titor the time traveller, TimeCube and SO MANY MORE. Honestly, this is FULL of interesting oddness – it’s worth it for the story of the Death Valley Germans if nothing else.
- Abandoned Tourism: Photoagrapher Noah Kalina is posting images to this Twitter thread that he’s capturing from the world’s webcams, which, per recent Curios, are a wonderful window into the empty world outside (by the way, if your kid’s 11ish and reasonably robust, this is a CRACKING book about the aftermath of an event much worse than this one); see Rome bereft of tourists, Times Square silent…eerie, but not unpleasant; things…things are just sort of nicer without us cluttering them up, aren’t they?
- The Great Empty: More of the same – images of empty public spaces worldwide, though this time snapped by in-situ photographers rather than webcam shots. A glorious collection by the NYT; the shot of the empty restaurant by night in Myanmar is a personal favourite.
- Taco Cat: Taco Cat is a new card game, playable with a standard deck. I don’t know if it’s any good, if I’m honest; I just really liked the name, and the fact that there’s actually a game based on a relatively minor meme from a few years back. You’ll need a printer and post-it notes to play, but WHO doesn’t have those at home? Apart from me.
- Who Has Your Face?: It’s amazing how quickly we all stop worrying or caring about issues around digital privacy. Not surprising, I suppose, more faster than I expected – turns out that we’re actually absolutely fine with our data and privacy being compromised if it means we get streaming video and the ability to chat to our mates. WE HAVE FINALLY FOUND THE PRICE OF OUR DATA! Still, doesn’t mean that it’s not still something we should keep an eye on, as this US project shows rather neatly – facial recognition tech is more widespread over there than over here, and the laws governing the use of the data it collects are far looser, but that’s not to say that we’re not heading in the same direction ourselves. This site asks users a series of questions (based on the assumption that they’re US-based) to determine which companies and organisations are likely to have access to their facial data, based on previous behaviour and signups; genuinely a little chilling, and absolutely coming to a country near you within a few years (it’s not really the time tbh, but there’s reason to be a little wary of creeping encroachment on civil liberties buried in some of the legislation that’s been rattling through Parliament at a rate of knots).
- Plylst: Better Spotify playlists, apparently. I barely use Spotify, but if you do there may be some good reasons to give this a try.
- A Thread of Animal Live Cams: I bought a Google Chromecast thingy the other day, mainly so that I can throw streaming theatre onto my telly (/pseud) but also so I can put some of these webcams up there so my girlfriend can imagine she’s in some sort of critter heaven all day. This is a womnderful Twitter thread collecting links to all sorts of live animal cams from zoos around the world; LOOK AT THE PANDAS! LOOK AT THE ORANGUTANS! LOOK AT THE NAKED MOLERATS Actually, maybe don’t look at them, they might make you feel funny.
- Quarantine Gone Wild: Ordinarily I’d have to start this description off with something like THIS IS A LINK TO ACTUAL PHOTOS OF NAKED PEOPLE, SOME OF THEM BONING, DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE AT WORK! Now, though, no need! Who cares if you’re at work? Literally NOONE WILL KNOW if you have a whole separate monitor full of scud on the go as you type! Anyway, Reddit has responded to quarantine as only Reddit knows how – with a new sub featuring people getting their kit off whilst stuck at home! This is mostly cis-, mostly-straight, and mostly-white afaics, but if you want a seemingly never-ending procession of random naked strangers to distract you from…*gestures again, more floridly* that, then maybe this will do the trick. Side note: there’s an awful lot of people showing their faces in these pics ‘because the world is ending’; Web Curios would like to cautiously advise readers that, should they choose to get involved in all this naked fun, they possibly take a slightly longer-term view of things, just in case.
- Stock Jumper: Take any share price from any market in the world, and turn it into a very smol ski-jumping game so that you can have fun at the expense of the crashing global economy. SILVER LININGS!
- Skynet Simulator: Finally in this week’s miscellania, a BRAND NEW and really rather good clicker game, in which you attempt to raise a world-destroying AI from a twinkle in a C64’s eye to the Terminator-birthing death-mind of the imagined future. This is suprisingly tricky – you can and will lose – and it helps to have a vague sort-of understanding of basic tech/programming principles (honestly, VERY vague is fine I know fcuk all, and still basically managed to get the hang of it), but it rewards patient experimentation and is surprisingly involving if you persist. Even better, it looks REALLY boring so this is something you can totally play whilst pretending to the kids or whoever else that it’s ‘actually a work thing and I really need to concentrate, can you maybe just shut the door for an hour?’.
THE CIRCUS OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT TUMBLRS AND IN FACT ARE BASICALLY JUST BLOGS – ARE THEY MAKING A COMEBACK? SHOULD I RENAME THIS SECTION NOW?:
- Passport To Dreams: An actual, proper, honest-to-goodness blog, like what they had in the old days! This is lovely – passionate and informed and all about a VERY niche topic, to whit Disney amusement parks and their design, their rides, and the way they’ve evolved over the years. A perfect companion for those of you who decided to take on the ‘learn to design a themepark’ education challenge from last week’s Curios.
- Apocalypse Pizza: The worst sort of pizza, I think we can all agree. Another actual blog(!), this one’s written by someone living in East London who, at least a week or so ago, worked in a pizza joint. It’s very quiet, and very small, and I like it a lot; I would love to know of anyone else doing these sorts of personal diaries right now; I know everyone’s sort-of doing this via Stories, but the problem with those is the ephemerality; I do wonder how much of the long-term record of These Times We Live In, or at least the in-the-moment experience of them, will end up vanishing as a side-effect of built-in digital ephemerality.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Darian Mederos: Superb, photo-real painting which for some reason features lots and lots of bubble-wrap. Superb.
- The Social Distance Project: I LOVE THIS. Sharing short stories about how people are getting on with each other – or not – during quarantine. Small, human, happy, sad, intimate, impersonal and universal, this is maybe my favourite project to come out of all this so far – like PostSecret in a time of Corona, basically.
- Ivenoven: Really cute cakemaking. Which, fine, is a bit basic, but basic is comforting and comforting is good.
- Massimo Bottura: Bottura is chef patron of Osteria Francescana in Italy, a super-starred restaurant with a kilometric waiting list. This is his Insta feed, which is in some respects the antithesis to Jack Monroe and Jamie Oliver’s laudable ‘cook with your storecupboard ingredients’ cookalongs – Massimo, I DON’T HAVE EASY ACCESS TO FRESH ARTICHOKES YOU BSTARD – but which is SO lovely to watch in a kind of gently-escapist ‘one day I will eat in a restaurant again, but til then let me just melt at the beauty of your knifework’ sort-of way. Not sure how much practical help you’ll get with your lockdown cooking here, but it’s rather good regardless.
- Crayola The Queen: Crayola is a drag artist from London who’s brought their act onto Insta for lockdown. Drag makeup tutorials, cabaret performances, audience interaction…Crayola is just one of many creatives finding new ways to make and engage despite physical distance, and I wholeheartedly approve.
- Handsome Devil Puppets: Because regardless of what may or may not be going on outside, I am always a sucker for sinister, vaguely-satanic-looking puppetry.
- Stop Making Points: Not you, you understand, everyone else. This is a wonderful essay which neatly-encapsulates much of what I feel about the online experience right now. The author is Italian (I think this is written directly in English, which, if so, kudos to them as I wish my Italian were this good), living in Italy, and describes their experience of quarantine and the virus and their family and the world and the country and my God this is full of superb vignettes and observations and very, very real moments of interfamilial hatred and honestly, were this not about The Bad Thing I’d have considered putting this last as my favourite piece of the week. I promise you it’s not sad or depressing – it’s just a wonderful bit of prose about This Fcuking World We Live In. “As it turns out, even in the midst of dystopia you can still want to kill your mother” is my line-of-the-crisis so far.
- Some People: Jason Kottke’s one of the originals of the small web (by which I mean, bloggers and creators ploughing relatively small furrows on their own platforms for love not money (though Jason now makes a living through his website, which, wow) – this series of observations did the rounds this week, but if you’ve not seen it yet it’s worth a look. Some People is a list of the types of experiences that people around you might be having, and a perfect reminder of the fact that you have no idea about other people’s circumstances and conditions and, as such, it possibly behooves you to be charitable about their presumed motivations. I normally abhor stuff like this; the virus is making me soft, I tell you.
- Things I Learned in Solitary: Here, advermarketingprdrones, you can have this for free – do any of your clients have any links to prisoner rehabilitation? Get a bunch of ex-lags to do a ‘coping with lockdown’ video series; instant hit. That’s the premise of this essay, by Shaka Senghor who spent a chilling five years in solitary from 1999-2004. Their observations on how to deal with the experience are frankly the sort of things that one could reasonably apply to the general business of Coping With Life, but are particularly germane right now; if you’re finding it hard to find a light at the end of the tunnel, some of these might be useful.
- The Black Death: I know, I know, you might not think that reading all about the greastest known plague to afflict our species would be a happymaking thing to do right now, but I promise you that it will give you a real ‘dear Christ, thank fcuk that I am alive now and not (inevitably, briefly) alive then instead’. WOW was the Black Death a bad time! I appreciate that that’s the sort of phrase that will make all right-thinking, educated people roll their eyes and mutter about extended exposure to the internet making everyone dumb, but, honestly, I had very little knowledge of the exact facts around the plague til reading this. LISTEN UP EVERYONE – IT COULD BE SO MUCH WORSE. Which, ok, might not exactly feel like a pick-me-up right now, but let’s clutch at whatever straws we can see poking out of the dungheap.
- Quarantine Socialising: You will, I guarantee, get bored both of reading and talking about ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH THIS IS CHANGING SOCIETY – while you’re still able to contemplate such questions without your eyes rolling fully back in your head, though, this is a decent precis in the NYT of some of the different ways people are choosing to adapt their social lives to an online-only existence. Nothing in here should be revelatory to you, but there’s a slightly-wider lens than the usual ‘exercise! Cookery! The pub!’-type lists; there’s almost certainly three things in here you can use with clients, whilst knowing in your heart of hearts that literally noone right now wants to interact with a brand unless they absolutely have to (and even then, frankly).
- Quarantine Influencers: Specifically, quarantine fashion influencers, who now that they can’t go outside and snap themselves against their favourite urban backdrops are having tyo pivot to a new, more domestic aesthetic. The crux of the piece is the question of whether this shift will persist post-lockdown, presuming there is such a post-, or whether instead there will come a backlash and a reversion to hyper-stylised, pro-looking irreality. Not, I concede, questions that ought to be keeping us up all night right now, but Curios has always been a whiplash switchback between the trivial, the even more trivial and the occasionally-consequential.
- Corona Comes to Sing-Sing: Sing Sing, as I’m sure you all know, is a New York prison; this is a piece in Esquire, written by an inmate, about what it felt like to have Corona looming as part of the inmate population. It’s wonderfully-written piece, and if you enjoy this I recommend clicking the author profile at the top and checking out the rest of John J Lennon’s work for the magazine; he’s hugely talented and still incarcerated.
- The Self-Quarantine Adult Activity Book: McSweeney’s does lockdown. This is funny, but also quite bleak – I did like the ‘cards to hold up at your partner in lieu of talking’ cut-outs, though (“Enough about Idris Elba now”).
- Second Life for Crypto Bros: It was this week announced that Linden Labs, the people who made Second Life and had for years been working on their follow-up virtual world Sansar, had decided to call it quits; odd timing considering the potential boom in appetite for virtual spaces these circumstances might engender, but that does mean that the field is now clear for Decentraland to make a play to be THE virtual 3d world of choice for the future. Decentraland is a very, very odd concept – I don’t think I’ve featured it on here before, but there are other, similar projects I’ve definitely linked to – which combines the 3d virtual environment of Second Life with a real-life economy linked to the Blockchain (of COURSE), which means that real ownership of digital assets is not only possible but also encouraged as part of the fabric of the ‘world’. The knock-on effects of this mean that it’s a world with a functioning labour market, a loans market, rough market rules, and exactly the sort of pro-capitalist worldview that underpins a lot of the ‘well, if people have to die to keep the markets afloat then that’s a risk we just have to take’ madness that’s coming out of Trumpland right now. This article’s not the best-written you’ll read all week, but it does a very good job of explaining the mechanics of the world and how…odd it is. What is it about crypto that attracts all these…these…people (you can infer whatever you like from my italics here)?
- Sim Racing: I’ve had various chats about whether eSports is going to take off in a mainstream way now that all sport is cancelled forever; I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, there is a LOT of time to fill in people’s sporting calendars, and videogames are more popular than ever, and the infrastructure’s there to support streaming as a thing; on the other, watching other people play videogames is still quite a niche pursuit, and watching other people play fast-paced FPS-type games, or MOBAs, is pretty hard to follow even for people who play the things. Also, watching other people play FIFA is boring, I don’t care if the players in question are famouses. The one exception to this, perhaps, is motor racing, a sport so tedious (look, I don’t care, I will die on this hill – I’ll make an exception for rally, but F1 is mogadon) that it could perhaps be improved by the digital gubbins streaming would bring. This is an interesting look at how the F1 circuit is seeking to use streaming to replace some of the grand prix, and how this might perhaps be the future of the sport; certainly, if this picks up traction amongst fans it’s hard to see how we can really justify the great, petrol-burning, globetrotting F1 circus in the future.
- Half-Life: Alyx: This is a videogame review – albeit one on RPS, so it’s very well-written – so probably not of interest to everyone; I’m including it, though, from the point of view of VR and its potential tyo have something of a breakthrough moment this year. I was on a podcast in January in which I said, laughingly, that “no, this was NOT going to be the year in which people suddenly started wanting VR headsets at home” and then obviously the virus happened and Facebook started selling out of Oculus units worldwide, and now I look like a d1ck, basically. Anyway, this game is the other reason VR might get a breakout in 2020 – by all accounts it’s the first genuinely-good ‘proper’ game in in the medium. Worth a read if you’re interested in what the cutting edge of VR experiences look/sound like right now.
- DJs on Twitch: I’m going to keep posting these articles of ‘industry X realises that it can reach fans really easily and engage them for a decent amount of time by just using Twitch’ for as long as they keep cropping up; there’s nothing specifically interesting about the way in which producers and DJs are using the streaming service to play to fans, debut new tracks and do virtual live shows, but it’s a further indication that Twitch has everything you need to pull together a reasonably-interesting livestream/tvshow/gig/lecture/talk hybrid, and that it’s only going to get bigger. Such a shame it’s owned by Amazon.
- I, Backpack: I really enjoyed this – very smart, well-thought out, and nicely written by Andrew Kortina, the piece looks at the peculiarities of modern manufacture and supply that means that it is almost never easier or cheaper for a supplier to repair a good than it is for them to replace it, and whether or not this is something that will change for both social and environmental reasons. I reckon this is the sort of thing that really will change – I would be surprised if the next couple of years didn’t see a distinct shift towards manufacturers offering the ability to fix-rather-than-replace, a la Patagonia, and of parallel small local businesses springing up to patch-and-mend your goods. YOU READ IT HERE…probably fifteenth if I’m honest, but wevs.
- Quarantine Gone Wild: The explainer piece to the bongo link above, this is Mel Magazine exploring what compels people to share pictures of their junk with the world in times of crisis. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!!
- Mary Beard on Asterix: Uderzo’s death this week means that the plucky little Gaul is now an oprhan – poor Asterix (and also Obelix, though he’s probably less bothered); this is Mary Beard from a few year’s back, writing in the LRB about the Asterix books, their history, their depiction of the Roman empire and so many other things. This is delightful – Beard is never anything but a pleasure to read – and it will make you want to dig out old copies of the books and read them again. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me until well into my late teens to make sense of the embedded gag in the druid named ‘Getafix’, which shame I was reminded of upon reading this piece and which I now fear will never leave me.
- Wounded Soldiers: A moving and sensitively-written piece which will nevertheless have you wincing on occasion (possibly even moreso if you’re in possession of a penis) as it describes the efforts made to perfect penile reconstructive surgery for soldiers wounded by landmines and shrapnel. There’s a lot of slightly, er, meaty description of war and wound, but what’s most poignant is the portraits of the soldiers themselves; there’s one anecdote in there about a veteran who has a habit of whipping out his reconstructed member in provincial nightclubs and playing helicopters with it, which on the one hand is eye-rollingly stereotypical but then also serves to remind you that these are mostly just idiot kids who’ve been blown up in faraway wars.
- The Beach: An extract from Laura Cummings prize-nominated novel ‘On Chapel Sands’ – I read this and it made me ache for space and outside and the sea, but in a surprisingly unsad way. Such wonderful writing about nature and people and place.
- Small Breeds: Last up this week, this essay by Jackie Connelly is about dogs and isolation and poverty, and contained so many lines that made me stop and read them back just for the joy of the prose – this paragraph, for example: “I was feeling permanent. I was anorexic and suicidal, lonely and furious, stuck in a massive concrete slab of a city, living in a centipede-infested basement the size of a Chrysler Town & Country. Everything I could want was blocks away: the Smithsonian, the café–bookstore that hosted queer open mics, the quirky bakery that sold me a honey-steeped Kouign-Amann croissant every morning, the Metro that would plummet deep into the city’s bowels before ejecting me up, up, up, over the Potomac, into deferent, cobblestoned Virginia, then backwards over the same forty-five minute course, with all its peaks and descents, eleven hours later.” Superb.
By my girlfriend (it’s her cat, Lebowski, who is currently quarantining with me)
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: