Webcurios 27/05/16

LET’S START WITH THE NEW MIXTAPE FROM RELIABLY ODD SAFFER RAPPERS DIE ANTWOORD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY DISAPPOINTED AT THE LACK OF CREDENCE GIVEN TO IT AS AN ‘INFLUENCER’ AND WISHES TO ONCE AGAIN REITERATE ITS WILLINGNESS TO SHILL RUBBISH ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR PENNIES:

• Twitter Changes The 140 Character Thing: It was promised, and LO! it came to pass that Tweets will no longer count images, polls and @usernames in the 140 character limit, thus magically making Tweets RICHER and MORE ENGAGING and causing them to be even more PLUMP WITH JUICY CONTENT than they ever were before. Annoying that they didn’t remove external urls from this, as that would have been ACTUALLY USEFUL, but I no longer expect these updates to improve the platform. Beautifully, the changes (which you can read a nice easy to read breakdown of here) also include the ability to RT oneself, overnight becoming a brand new indicator of someone being an insufferable prick, and, most dreadfully, the ability to tag upto 50 @usernames in a tweet, thereby turning the service into one of those mass-CC email chains that you can never, ever escape from. Which is exactly what everyone was clamouring for, so THANKS TWITTER!

• Bye Buy Button: Whilst unveiling this cornucopia of feature goodness (truly, you spoil us!), Twitter’s also apparently quietly shelved (or at least temporarily mothballed) plans to introduce in-Tweet commerce, with most of the team working on the mooted ‘Buy’ button for Tweets (letting users purchase products with one-click from within the app) either leaving the company or moving to other products. Which strikes me as a frankly baffling move, but I’m going to respectfully accept that the people running Twitter might just be a *touch* better at business than me and wait for proof that they were right all along *waits*.

• Spotify Now Embeds In Tweets: It does! Playlists! BRANDS, SHARE YOUR PLAYLISTS WITH EVERYONE! This is nice, and A Good Thing, but as ever with halfway-positive Twitter announcements it feels a touch like a plaster on an axewound. Still, BRANDED PLAYLISTS!!!!!!

• Facebook Lets Users Livestream CONTINUOUSLY!: Facebook has removed the limit on how long a live stream on the platform can last, meaning that you can now use it for all your ‘wait and see’ exciting webcam moments, like waiting for some Golden Eagle eggs to hatch or streaming some newborn puppies or somesuch (I don’t know why, but all I can think of is animal stuff here). The tradeoff is that streams of over a certain duration won’t be saved for replay at a later date, but that’s OK, right? Useful alternative to setting up webcam livestreams over long periods of time, this.

• Facebook Live Video Getting Soundcloud-like Reactions, Etc: Clever idea, this – Facebook Live will soon show at what point in a stream most users were watching, letting people playing the stream back skip straight to the ‘good’ bits, meaning that if you’re really cheap you needn’t even edit the footage down as people will be able to fast forward straight to the point where the watermelon bursts (for example). Which is nice.

• Facebook Audience Network Expands: Facebook Audience Network (as discussed last week, the bit of Facebook’s advertising setup which shows ads to users on third party websites or apps) will now show ads to users who don’t have a Facebook account. Which is really big, as it means that now you can reach EVERYONE IN THE WORLD by advertising through Facebook. Which is pretty crazy, really. But, look, you can now put Spotify in Tweets! Wait, come back!

• Emoji Stickers Now Available on Snapchat: Look, I don’t care either but we have to feature everything about Snapchat as it is now THE LAW.

• The Snapchat XMen Filters: Although if it keeps on pulling stunts like this then THE KIDS will all flee like startled fauns (nice imagery, eh? Come for the social media news, stay for the weird classical allusions!); this is the platform taking ALL OF THE MONEY from the new XMen movie which resulted in all Snapchat filters being replaced for 24h with special, bespoke XMen ones. Which must have cost the studio a VIOLENT amount of cash, and all just to annoy a bunch of kids who had to do without dogface selfies for a day.

• Ad Pins Coming To Google Maps: I think this is REALLY BIG. Google announced a whole load of updates to adwords, etc, none of the rest of which interested me enough to write about them individually, one of which was this BOMBSHELL – businesses will now be able to pay to have themselves featured on Google Maps as large pinned adverts when users are browsing the digital cartographic service nearby. Which, if you’re a large chain of retail outlets or restaurants or a bar or frankly anything with a real-world location, is pretty useful stuff I think.

• Reddit Creates Own Photo-upload System: Not particularly interesting per se, but probably signals at least beginning of the end for Imgur as somewhere it’s worth spending your marketing / ad budget.

• Levis x Google = Future: Hugely smart marketing by Levi’s, which has teamed up with the futuristic bit of Google (yes, ok, the more futuristic bit) to create this prototype of a digitally-enabled conductive jacket for cyclists (based on the Project Jacquard prototype stuff showcased next year), letting you the wearer do things like, say, answer your phone, or turn your music up and down, simply by fiddling with the cuffs of your pressed denim. This is superfuture and exciting and a really smart piece of PR, and amazingly this is apparently going to go on sale next year. HELLO FUTURE!

• Cheese And Burger: I am a firm fan of ostensibly tedious organisations and companies doing surprisingly good stuff online – step forward the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, the most glamorous of ALL the dairy promotion bodies worldwide, who have EXCELLED with this website promoting Wisconsin-made cheese by celebrating the cheeseburger in a preposterous variety of incarnations. It’s slick, nicely-designed, reasonably funny (the voice-over’s pretty good, honest), and made me really, really want a cheeseburger (though I confess to not giving a flying one as to where the cheese comes from). A nice example of how to make something interesting from unpromising material.

• Reword: Another rather nice digital antibullying initiative from Canada (which may or may not be tied into the clever retargeting tactic from last week), this plugin works to prevent you (or, more probably, your offspring) from typing certain words or phrases when online. It works with Facebook, YouTube and some other sites, and will point out when users type hatespeech, swears and the like, encouraging them to take a long, hard look at what they’re writing and why. Which is lovely, although the fact that it won’t work on mobile, which is where we all spew most of our hate from these days, makes it sort of redundant on reflection.

• The Airbus Annual Report:I’m torn here – on the one hand I am all for people attempting to make tedious things like an annual report more interesting by chucking them on the internet; on the other, you’d sort of hope by so doing you wouldn’t render them borderline unreadabl as appears to be the case here. Fine, you can use the menu at the bottom to navigate the site without all the silly ‘scroll to FLY!’ UI rubbish, but you can’t seem to export any of the charts or figures or anything like that, which is the sort of thing you’d think analysts might be rather into. Total style over substance – though I concede it’s nicely built – which is a shame, I think. Wonder how much this cost, out of interest?

• Pay Your Selfie: The race to the very, very bottom of the ‘influencer’ barrel continues apace, with this latest attempt to turn everyone you know into a sales agent for A N Other deeply uninspiring brand of consumer tat. Pay Your Selfie lets users sign up to participate in SPONSORED DEALS, whereby they take photos of themselves ENJOYING A SPECIAL MOMENT WITH THEIR FAVOURITE BRANDS and posting it on social channels; they then get paid by said brand, via this sodding website, for having delivered an adequate piece of branded content to their ‘friends’. The going rate for this is $1 per branded selfie, which frankly seems like a lot less than the 30 pieces of silver Judas got for selling out his mate to the interests of The Man of the time (SATIRE!). Brands – if your agency suggests this stuff, they’re dicks. Just so’s you know.

AGEING RAVERS, AND IN FACT ANYONE ELSE, SHOULD ENJOY THIS RECENT MIX BY EVERLIVING DJ SASHA!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY CONVINCED THAT THIS IS A NEW LOW FOR SOCIETY, PT.1:

• Happy Hour: A frivolous project by Splash Worldwide which visualises HAPPY TWEETS around the world, on a map. Pleasingly retro – look! Tweets on a map! – but also, you know, HAPPY AND POSITIVE, and as such should be celebrated. Given that these things are now pretty easy to churn out, at least on a basic level, can someone please create a simple template for building them? I’d love a tool which let you quickly and simply build a realtime ‘mentions of X popping up on a map’ thing, ideally one with NO FILTERS whatsoever so I could get a facefull of human dreadfulness whenever I wanted.

• Ludwig: An interesting project, this, designed primarily for those for whom English isn’t a first language but generally useful for all who use the language; Ludwig is a program, currently in Beta, which lets users search for contextual examples of language usage – so you type in a sentence or phrase, and it gives you examples of that phrase being used, or phrases similar to it, to help you better understand how it can and should be deployed. There are translation functions there too, and some rough thesaurusing, which makes it really useful as a teaching aid, I think.

• A Mini Multiverse: I am obviously feeling a touch emo this week; ordinarily I would scoff at this tiny little illustration and accompanying website as being too twee for life, and yet something about its description about the nature of interest bubbles rather *got* me. Really rather sweet.

• The Vice Magazine Headline Generator: I’ve played around with this a bit now, and it STILL hasn’t churned out “We sacked our UK editorial team and spent the money on a private jet!”, which frankly is disappointing me a LOT.

• Li.st: Kind of baffled by this one – at what point have you, gentle reader, thought “You know what we really need? We need a Medium for LISTS OF THINGS, that’s what we need!’? No, I thought not, and yet here we are. List lets you…er…write lists of things. Which struck me as eminently pointless, and then I saw this list of things Anthony Bourdain thought about hanging out with Obama in Vietnam going everywhere this week, and McSweeney’s using it too, and though that maybe there’s something in it. Whether it’s just got decent NEW THING buzz about it, or whether the platform facilitates discovery of GOOD CONTENT, it might be worth playing around with if you need yet another place to put your FCUKING BRANDED CONTENT.

• Mind Webs: There are, I have decided, simply not enough places online which offer a massive archive of free-to-stream bedtime story-type audio out there. WHY IS THIS SO? Everyone loves a bedtime story, don’t pretend you don’t. Anyway, no idea whether this is yout idea of comforting eventide listening, but this here is a WONDERFUL collection of old and not-so-old scifi stories, read by all sorts of acting luminaries and all collected in one place, available to stream for aboslutely no cashmoney whatsoever. There’s about 80-odd hours of scifi recordings here, so enough to keep you going until someone finally accedes to my selfish demands and creates the Jackanory archive for adults online somewhere.

• Angry Nerd Socks: This link isn’t an endorsement – most of these I think are just a bit sort of pathetic really, and of the SWEARING IS COOL, YEAH! (ahem, yes, point taken) variety, but some of you may like these slightly angry-twee socks with slightly sweary designs. I’m linking to them, though, mainly as I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite as poignantly pathetic as a pair of socks which feature the proudly-embroidered statement ‘You’re not the boss of me!” placed in such a fashion that it’s totally invisible when shoes are worn. YEAH! YEAH! TAKE THAT, AUTHORITY FIGURES! Such wonderfully shit rebellion.

• Molekule: Do you ever worry that you’re not wasting enough money on pointless, first-world-problem-solving gadgets from the internet? Well fear not, as each week Web Curios will endeavour to bring YOU the reader the very best of insanely overpriced moneywasting gewgaws, ideally internet-connected ones for added pointlesslols. This week, we present Molekule (yes, that’s exactly how they spell it), an air purifying system connected to the web, which tells you when you need to change its filters (because a little flashing light is no longer future enough) and which purports to break down pollutants AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL, thereby PERMANENTLY ELIMINATING THEM. Now I’m no scientist, but surely if this tech has been developed for the domestic market then you’d think that, perhaps, we could maybe work to apply it to more important places than the homes of rich urbanites in the continental US? No? Oh, fine, as you were, then. What I particularly like is the homepage using the unit’s ability to break down E.Coli bacteria as an example – YES, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WE ALL HAVE FLOATING AROUND OUR HOUSES, RIGHT?

• FWRDTO.ME: Nice little Chrome extension which lets you email links to yourself with one click. Useful.

• The Dolls Of Noel Cruz: Noel Cruz is a very, very talented man who is also obviously some sort of obsessive; he takes Barbie dolls and then painstaking carves them to resemble famouses, but with a truly staggering degree of skill. This is both awesome and beautifully mad – tell me you don’t want one of the Diana dolls staring out at you from your shelves? Cruz does take commissions, so you may want to start saving now for whenever your plastic wedding anniversary is (or possibly get a doll commissioned as a comp prize for a fandom, I don’t know).

• Webgazer: Techy-but-potentially-useful, Webgazer is publicly available / accessible eyetracking code for browsers, available on Github, meaning that anyone can easily and cheaply integrate eyetracking tech into their website. I think there’s some really nice campaigning stuff you can do with this – perhaps showing people how they naturally focus on certain information on a page, for example, or games, or all sorts of stuff. Means you can add eye tracking to the list of ‘cool gimmicks you will mention in brainstorms and client meetings and which noone will ever sign off because they are all idiots and don’t understand that you’re a visionary oh god why does noone ever take me seriously’.

• Scribble: Cute little audiotoy which lets you make looping audio track based on doodline to create a harmony. Which is a dreadful description, which is why you should click the link and play with it rather than relying on me to spoonfeed you everything you pathetic whelps.

• Secret Marathon: Are you one of those weirdos who actively pursues physical pain and discomfort through running preposterous distances whilst people less fit than you yell at you to KEEP GOING? Would you like to do some MORE RUNNING, but as part of a secret, non-corporate project to RECLAIM THE MARATHON from the interests of corporate sponsors and the like? This is probably for you, then – Secret Marathon will take place…er…somewhere in London this Autumn. Allegedly – this could of course all be a clever datacapture stunt for some sportswear brand, so, as ever, caveat emptor and the rest.

• Hulten: Have you ever wanted to relive your childhood by having an old arcade machine, but think that they’re just not quite aesthetically up to snuff? Well why not drop several thousand quid on these bespoke miniature arcade machines, done in all sorts of nice wooden finishes by a PROPER CRAFTSMAN? Leaving aside, obviously, the insane pricetags. These are undeniably lovely, but SO expensive – perfect for the manchild in your life who has EVERYTHING (once you’ve splurged on the Molekule thing above, obvs).

• Spacehack: Do you LOVE space? To the extent it’s possible to love an infinite expanse of nothing whose very existence serves only to forever remind us of our own infinitesimal role in the majesty of creation, or course you do! Spacehack is a handy website which collects a host of ways in which YOU, webmongs, can get involved in the majesty of space exploration, linking out to all sorts of sites which let you explore photo of space, planets, and the like, and assist NASA and other organisations in identifying, say, features on the surface of the red planet. If you or your kids are into this stuff, this is a great resource.

• Google Advanced Technology and Projects: I mentioned the Google wearable tech project Jacquard thingy up there; this website collects information on all of Google’s most future initiatives, and is an excellent place to spend 5 minutes and get a proper frisson of scififutureisNOW-ness (an actual term, that, I think you’ll find).

• Web Up Time: SO DULL, this, but potentially really useful if you have a whole bunch of sites worldwide which you’d like to ensure don’t fall over; Webuptime is a service which will monitor all of your domains on a minute-by-minute basis and alert you should any of them stop working for whatever reason. Helpful-if-tedious.

• Pungen: This site will generate a seemingly-infinite number of ‘puns’ (are these puns? I don’t think these are puns) of the form “You put the X in Y” – most are nonsensical, but you do get the occasional gem; I for one would love to have the opportunity to deploy ‘You put the ‘sting’ in ‘thrusting’’ in real life. Needs a Twitter bot, tbh.

• Botmoji: VITAL TWITTER BOT DEVELOPMENT! Botmoji will, if you tweet it an emoji, tell you what that emoji is. It won’t, sadly, shed any light on exactly what nuanced message your interlocutor was attempting to convey with their use of ‘spangly explosion’ or whatever the fcuk they sent you, but at least you’ll be able to identify exactly what is confusing you.

• Daily Doodlegram: Geffen Raffaeli is an illustrator who each day doodles something inspired by a post she’s seen in her Instagram feed and then posts them in her feed. The sort of thing it would be really rather nice to do if you had access to a famous or an artist or something for a while – SURPRISING AND DELIGHTING people by making work based on their output. Go on, someone do this, it’s a GREAT idea.

• The Sound of Cern: We’re rapdily approaching the point whereby all data that can possibly be converted to audio will have been, and where the sound of the London Stock Exchanged, live-mixed by David Guetta, will be used to fuel the dancefloors of Tokyo nightclubs (actually sort of love the horror of this idea, on reflection) – this is the latest in the endless line of ‘let’s turn numbers into sound!’ sites, which on this occasion is using live data pulled from CERN to generate the pleasingly and surprisingly ambient soundscapes you’ll hear if you press play. Actually not all that unpleasing on the ear, though a touch on the intermittent side – this is what PHYSICS sounds like, kids!

• Rex: Rex is the latest in the seemingly-infinite list of ‘new social networks noone ever asked for and which people continue to churn out in the mistaken belief that theirs is the platform which will take off and change their lives forever’; the gimmick here is that it’s designed solely to share recommendations with friends and peers, which is OBVIOUSLY something you can’t do anywhere else and which OBVIOUSLY required its own standalone platform. Obviously. Look, it’s a nice idea, but do we really need another app for this when you can just ask Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Jelly, Snapchat, Quora, Tripadviser….you get the idea.

• Mount Improbable: So this is a promo for charmless, one-note God-denier (and, er, scientist) Richard Dawkins’ works on evolutionary biology, published by Penguin 30 years ago. The gimmick is that they have cleaned up the code used by Dawkins 30 years ago to simulate evolutionary patterns and genetic transference, and are now letting YOU AND I play with them – the further gimmick being that you can win the chance to have YOUR evolutionary design featured on the cover of the reissue of the books. This is lovely, however much of a cock you think Dawkins is (nothing to do with his atheism, more the fact that he seems incapable of realising that militant atheism is EXACTLY THE FCUKING SAME AS BLIND FAITH IN A SUPREME BEING, and is so utterly humourless about everything).

• Grimemon: Because everyone, and I mean everyone, needs a set of cards with classic Pokemon reimagined as the today’s grime stars. Big Narstie as Snorlax is a particular favourite of mine.

HOW’S ABOUT SOME RATHER LOVELY TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY NICK WARREN? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY CONVINCED THAT THIS IS A NEW LOW FOR SOCIETY, PT.2:

• Electric Object Museum Collections: I think I featured Electric Objects when they launched YEARS ago – these are those hi-res digital photo frames which come with a a sales programme allowing you to buy digital art downloaded straight to your wall-mounted display. This week they announced a series of partnerships with a load of museums, meaning you can temporarily rent a variety of classic artworks in digital form to have hanging on your walls. I think there’s something rather nice about the idea, though Brian Sewell (God rest him) would no doubt have something pithily vituperative to say about it.

• Buy Brutalist Papercraft: I featured something like this last year, but it was only proof-of-concept I think – you can now BUY paper models of Brutalist buildings from around Europe, including London, so you too can have a concrete horrorscape arrayed in miniature across your mantel. Rather lovely, these.

• My Gululu: So much to hate about this, not least the name, My Gululu (it makes me feel a touch sick just typing it; it REALLY makes me think of the sound of someone just about to vomit) is a SMART WATERBOTTLE (yes, again) designed for children, to gamify the act of drinking and make it FUN. Really? We really need a digitally-enabled bottle to make children drink more? Are all middle-class Westenr children becoming horrifically crippled and stunted by dehydration? They’re not, are they? NOOONE NEEDS THIS THING! Also, you just know that the whole ‘tap bottles together to make your waterbottle tamagotchi knock-offs become friends’ thing won’t work properly, and that kids will just fill the sodding things up with sugarwater in any case. IT WON’T STOP THEM FROM BEING FAT, YOU KNOW.

• 42: This is quite odd. 42 is a…school? University? Cult? No idea, but it’s in the US now and coming to Europe soonish. Basically it’s a sort of unofficial university which teaches people how to code – the schtick is that it’s pretty much all taught digitally, with little to no actual teaching, and the recruitment process is BRUTAL, with 40,000 applicants each of the past few years for what are a handful of places. Really interesting idea, though, particularly the ‘learn through exploration’ model which they espouse; you can read a proper explanation of what it is and how it works here, should you wish.

• Armageddon Painted: Staggering bodypaintingartperson on Instagram, who’s not only very good at what she does but is also only 16. FFS. You can see a whole load of video tutorials on her YouTube channel if you’re into this sort of thing – they’re really rather good.

• Dungeons & Donald: A Twitter account combining the increasingly frightening lunatic pronouncements of The Donald with gags about Dungeons & Dragons, which is admittedly a pretty niche gagset but one which I am sure will appeal to at least three of you out there (you know who you are).

• The Museum of Obsolete Media: Possibly THE most digitartwankeryish website on here this week, the Museum of Obsolete Media seeks to house and record files in all those physical and digital formats which no longer exist. You want to find information about old audio and video filetypes? GREAT!

• Fair Warning: Digital art project being run by the Whitechapel Gallery (which I visited again this week and was reminded just how great it is), which “encourages viewers to participate by responding to a series of over 300 questions which range from colour preferences, politics and emotions to the latest trends in the art world. Playing with our expectations of traditional online questionnaires or personality tests, it examines the value and use of data collection when attempting to represent user tastes and asks whether an objective way of measuring the value of art exists.” So there. YOU CAN BE A PART OF AN ARTWORK, KIDS – all the data gathered by this is being displayed as part of the in-situ installation running at the Gallery til July.

• Lost America: Glorious, eerie and oddly scifi photography of America’s disappearing midwest, the abandoned hinterlands which are exactly where the scared and the disenfranchised are finding hope in the xenophobe with the bouffant hair. Heavily colourised and altered, but these are wonderful.

• Snips: The rest of this year is going to be characterised by a near-infinite number of bots and not-very-smart-tech masquerading as AI – here’s another! In its defence, Snips does look rather useful – the idea is that it’s a local knowledge graph for your phone, which learns what you do and what you have on the device so that it can start to help you find information on your phone and make recommendations for you, much like Google Now but without the overarchingly creepy feeling of Skynet reading your mail. All the info about your personal stuff is apparently only ever stored locally, so there should be fewer fears about this data being used to sell you more stuff – but let’s be clear that T&Cs can always be changed…

• Take Me Anywhere: Thespian failure and artistic nonentity Shia Lebouf, and the rest of his ‘art collective’ who are NO WAY using him as a passport to notoriety otherwise unavailable to them through their mediocre conceptual ‘artworks’, present their latest gimmick, which involves them hitchhiking around the US for a period of time, broadcasting their coordinates via this website and taking a lift from the first person to pick them up; the whole journey will be documented, with the resulting material forming the lasting body of the work. Can the web please agree to just leave them stranded somewhere, please? STOP VALIDATING BAD ART MADE BY FAMOUSES.

• Bloopdance: Load this up on your phone, and turn YOUR phone into an in-no-way-annoying synthtoy, which bloops and burbles based on how you wave it around. Actually pretty fun for 5 minutes, and the sort of thing that it might be quite fun to incorporate into a wider interactive music video type thing – maybe allow people to be Bez or something (I’m a child of the 90s, what can I say?)?

• The Rabid Puppies: Not in fact anything at all to do with hydrophobic canines, this is instead the website of WORLD-FAMOUS author of pulp erotica Chuck Tingle, best known as the ‘mind’ behind such classics of eroticism as ‘Pounded in the Butt by my own Butt’. Small, but perfectly formed, and contains a load of gags about the recent Nebula Awards controversy if you followed that as a THING – here’s an explanation as to why this website is a perfectly-formed FCUK YOU to all the strange and pathetic manboys who are weirdly incapable of dealing with women’s involvement in their boys’ club scifiworld, should you want one.

• Overnight: Have you ever wanted the exciting, slightly random “stay in a stranger’s house” excitement of Airbnb, but are too much of a free spirit to commit to such banal, bourgeois, things as ‘planning a holiday’? Excellent, you will LOVE Overnight, then – a service which works in basically exactly the same way as Airbnb but which instead of making you book in advance lets you try and find a place to stay nearby RIGHT NOW. The service links to your Facebook profile to ostensibly weed out the real weirdos (because there are no weirdos on Facebook), but I can’t be alone in thinking that this is basically either a recipe for murder or a really excellent way of circumventing whatever local laws may exist against prostitution. Can I? Oh, maybe I can. Sorry.

• Terrapattern: Rather smart visual search engine thing, currently in beta and only working for certain bits of the US, which lets you identify a certain thing on Google Maps and which will then search for other examples of that thing based on its ability to recognise the image on the satellite view. So, for example, you could use it to identify weapons depots in Iraq so that you didn’t bomb any baby milk factories by accident (topical reference to Gulf War 1 there!), or, er, some other use case I can’t quite come up with right now.

• Predominantly: I don’t really know why you’d need this, but I am glad that it exists. Predominantly presents you with a colour palette from which you can pick any hue – it then spits out all the albums it can find whose colours match the shade you’ve chosen. So I suppose if you were looking to select LPs for a house with a ridiculously draconian aesthetic it might be useful. You can also save the output as a spotify playlist – which if I worked for a paint brand (HELLO PERSON FROM FARROW & BALL WHO I KNOW READS THIS) I would totally be ripping off / using here.

• Legal Name Fraud: Not new, this, but pleasingly mad nonetheless – this is the website of a bunch of people who believe – for reasons they are seemingly incapable of explaining – that one does not ‘own’ one’s ‘legal name’ and that as such one is being CONTROLLED BY THE FORCES OF THE STATE or somesuch. Brilliant, incomprehensible, swivel-eyed conspiracy-theory lunacy here, of which this is an excellent prime example: “Q: What is your name? A: You say ‘blah blah blah’… or “My name is Blah Blah”, or Q: is this you? as the ‘person’ hold’s your ID card, A: And YOU say YES! Yikes… You just JOINED in AGAIN to the GAME.” Yes, mate. Yes.

• Post-Soviet Life: Brilliant photographs depicting life in the immediat aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Look how much FUN everyone is having! These are great shots, partly because of the sense of freedom and opportunity they capture but also because they are just SO DAMN FASHION. About ⅓ of these could totally be used right now by Dazed or whoever. Mildly NSFW due to a few teenage nipples, but nothing serious.  

• Virtual Reality Wikipedia: We’ve all thought “you know what would make Wikipedia better? YES! THAT’S IT! A VR VERSION!”, haven’t we? Well quite, and now here we are. Click on the link, click on the Google Cardboard logo in the top right, and be transported to a world in which you can experience a 3d moose in a 3d forest with, er, some clickable explanatory text! It’s a silly idea in practice, but the thinking behind it is interesting – taking links to other pages and visualising them to show information / concepts in context, for example.

• J-Dar: Baffling service which lets you plug in any film you choose and which will then tell you exactly – and I mean exactly, with a percentage rating – how Jewish that film is. A promo for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, but also an excellent way of choosing an appropriate film for tonight’s post-dinner entertainment. I just plugged in Yentl and it told me it was only 71% Jewish, mind, which makes me wonder exactly what something has to do to attain a coveted 100% rating – if anyone can find a 90%+ movie, do let me know what it is.

• Faception: This week’s dose of dystopian futurehorrror comes in the form of this dreadful service, which purports to be able to identify people’s personality traits and qualities based only on analysis of their faces by software – so basically applying the long-discredited principles of phrenology to facial recognition, then. SO MUCH to hate about this, from the bullshit science to the potential (and appallingly plausible) potential for this sort of stuff to be used in conjunction with CCTV for some real-life Minority Report-style precrime prevention. Think I’m being hyperbolic? This is from their website: “We develop proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist.” Yes, that’s right, they claim they can identify terrorists JUST BASED ON WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE? What does that sound like? OH YES THAT’S RIGHT IT SOUNDS LIKE TECH-BASED RACISM! Great, thanks The Future!

• Raining Poetry: A lovely project which is sadly ripe for advermarketingpr thievery which uses hydrophobic ‘paint’ on the pavements of Boston to paint on poetry which will become visible only when the pavemens are wet from rainfall. So, so lovely, and so, so going to be coopted for a large-scale marketing campaign come winter (unless it’s been done already, which is entirely possible).

• WTF Is Brexit: Really smart chatbot-style interface fronting this piece of pro-Remain propaganda, designed to inform THE YOOT about the importance of staying in the EU via a faux-conversational interface. This is a really nice piece of work, and the sort of thing I would imagine being ripped off left, right and centre in the next few months by all sorts of publications.

• Timestripe: Are you worried that you don’t spend enough time fretting and feeling guilty and worried about the speed at which time is running away from you, and how little you are accomplishing as the leaves fly from the calendar and you inch closer and closer to your inevitable demise? Well you might want to install this, then, which is a calendar app which basically exists to put the fear of God into you about how much time you’re wasting and OH GOD HOW FAST THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES PASS LIKE SAND THROUGH THE HOURGLASS OF TIME. Chilling.

• One-screen Star Wars: Even if you couldn’t care less about Star Wars, and even if you could happily go through the rest of your days without hearing some fanboy boring on about THE CINEMATIC PURITY OF THE TRILOGY or whatever neckbeardy guff is their particular obsession, this one–screen visualisation of the entire plot of the first movie is totally and utterly superb. Brilliant, brilliant visual storytelling  – as a piece of design or graphical art alone, it’s an astonishing achievement.

• Shotta Texts: Drug dealer LOLS part 1: this instagram account shares photos of the sort which are ALLEGEDLY sent out by dealers at the start of the weekend, advertising their wares, offering deals and generally seeking to tempt you into bunging a few hundred quid into the class-A oubliette of regret. Aside from anything else, students of language will find much to love in here.

• Class A Marketing: Drug dealer LOLS part 2: Class A marketing takes the texts referred to above and analyses them based on marketing principles – ambush, guerilla, cause-related, etc. Rather wonderful, and reminded me of that lovely conversation in Will Self’s excellent ‘My Idea of Fun’ between two addicts discussing the concept of ‘junk’ as a generic in a heavily branded world.

• Audiograph: This week’s ‘Hey, look, a whole website visualising an album, track by track’ effort comes from Pilot Priests. It’s GOOD, have a play.

LAST UP MUSICALLY, TRY SOME BRAND NEW INDIEPOPROCK BY PRISM TATTS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Pokemon As Cats: Pokemon, redrawn as felines, because there will never be enough Pokemon-themed sites on the internet, it turns out.

• Terrible Cheers Sweaters: Collecting the stylistically questionable knitwear worn by characters in Cheers over the years. There really should be an online store attached to this.

• The London Column: Not actually a Tumblr, but. The London Column collects photos and stories and anecdotes about the City, from the 1950s to now. Wonderful stuff – you could very much get lost in this if you’re a fan of London history and culture and stuff.

• The Coolest Ducks: Pictures of some pretty fcuking cool ducks for you to enjoy at your leisure. YEAH! DUCKS!

• Just Two Things: Brilliant collection of cash-in nerd culture laziness, highlighting the current trend for just taking two popular things with fandoms and mashing them together on a tshirt because, well, sales. Basically EVERYTHING on here will, if worn, guarantee that you will never, ever have sex again.

• Princess Cheeto: Princess Cheeto is a cat. This is her Tumblr. Look at how she disdains you. LOOK AT HER CONTEMPTUOUS GAZE.

• Accidental Boob Charts: Charts from academia which end up looking a bit like breasts (I mean this in the very loosest possible sense, here – there is nothing that actually looks like breasts).

• Reading and Art: Not actually a Tumblr, but. Images from classic artworks featuring people reading books. No idea what you might use this for, but nonetheless.

• Simon Stalenheg: Simon Stalenheg is an artist whose paintings depict strange and sinister future worlds in which we are all permanently plugged into the machine, or visions of a post-robot apocalypse scifi future. Good stuff, this.

• Tekkon Kinkreet Zine: The story of two semi-feral brothers, Black and White, surviving organised crime in a vertiginously-imagine near-future Tokyo, Tekkon Kinkreet is one of my favourite Manga ever and is well worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with it. This Tumblr collects artwork inspired by the comic, and is full of great work in various styles.

• Barry Owl: Not actually a TUmblr, but. Barry Owl collects Tweets trolling various brands on social media – childish, yes, but VERY funny.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Evolution of an Accidental Meme: Fascinating piece by Craig Froehle who a few years ago drew a simple doodle to illustrate a point he was making about the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, and has now seen his idea attain a life far beyond what he might have imagined for it. Fascinating not only on the power of a well-communicated concept but also on the manner in which themes and ideas evolve over time – probably one of the better explanations of memeification which actually makes sense in the context of Dawkins’ original idea.

• The Other Clinton: Looking at Bill Clinton’s role to date in the US Presidential race, and how this might develop should, as expected, Hillary win the Democratic nomination. Interesting as a portrait of the inevitable ageing and decline of one of the 20th Century’s political heavyweights, but also as an illustration of the general distrust and vague sense of…disgust(?)…felt towards the Clintons by much of the US. The piece is in GQ, which is unlikely to bat for Trump come November, and yet the underlying sneer when talking about Bill and Hillary is unmistakable.

• Peak TV: It’s generally accepted that this is a GOLDEN AGE of television, but what does this mean for the industry? This is a great, exhaustive (and -ing) look at the business of making telly in the US in the post-box set world, when the fees commanded by stars are higher than ever and the pressure to make the next GoT or Breaking Bad is immense. Makes you think that there is no way in which this is sustainable based on the current economic model – also makes you think that the future is Amazon’s and Apple’s if you look at the crazy numbers being paid to talent right now.

• The Curse of the Ramones: I’ve never been a fan of the Ramones, and I’m proud to say I don’t own a tshirt with their name on it as some sort of attempted signifier of my nonexistant punk credentials (KEEPING IT REAL). Regardless, this portrait of the band and their origins as beaten-down losers is compelling as you like – these are some pretty seriously messed up backgrounds, which sort of goes some way to explaining why they sounded like they did. Pretty much the diametric opposite of Sylvia Young, this.

• The Esperanto Conference: Wonderful vignette by Edward Docx on the recent UK Esperanto convention in Liverpool, where optimistic devotees of the world’s second or third most popular made-up language (I’m positive there are more Klingon speakers worldwide than there are Esperantans) congregate to discuss exactly how they’re going to make it the international lingua franca. Warm-hearted and funny and actually rather utopian in the end, whilst at the same time acknowledging that it is never, ever going to catch on.

• Learning Chess at 40: The author explains how it feels teaching his daughter chess, and looks into the neuroscience around why she’s better than him at it. You don’t need to play chess to enjoy this – it also contains a few mildly comforting things about how, as an OLD PERSON, you can effectively mind-bully your way into beating the children (not just in chess but in LIFE, probably).

• The Creepiest Threads on 4Chan and Reddit: From creepypastas to the potential last-writings of serial killers, a comprehensive guide to some of the darkest and most potentially disturbing threads across both forums. You’re welcome!

• Actually All Writers Steal: A brilliant short essay on how all authors of fiction necessarily appropriate details from their real lives for use in fiction, and how that affects their relationships with friends and family. Beautifully written by Rufi Thorpe.

• The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob: Brilliant real-life crime tale, featuring the best and least-likely cross-dressing bank robber you’re likely to come across all year. By the end has turned into something a lot sadder and more poignant than you’d have expected; this is a GREAT story and worthy of a novel in itself.

• Which Rockstar Will We Remember?: An essay exploring what the essence of rock and roll is, and, based on that, looking at which of the stars of 20th Century rock’n’roll will be the defining example of the concept. Good, in the way that only overly-analytical writing about music can be.

• The Unnecessariat: This is a great, and deeply depressing, essay about what the author defines as a new underclass – those who aren’t in immediate danger of falling off the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, but whose existence simply doesn’t matter anymore. Whether that be culturally or economically, it paints an excellent and pretty compelling picture of exactly the sort of people so disenfranchised in 2016 that they are contemplating voting for a beweaved thug, people whose horizons can’t and don’t extend beyond the borders of their one-horse town and who have been definitively left behind by the METROPOLITAN MEDIA ELITES. Scary stuff indeed. .

• Wealth Inequality: A brilliant explainer by Vox on how wealth inequality has arrived at its current point in the US, notable mainly for how great the illustrations are. A lovely example of using visuals to develop and communicate a concept in simple and clear fashion, this.

• The Racial Politics of Dat Boi: Ah, Dat Boi – from the Jesus Christ of memes to the latest example of how literally EVERYTHING is ‘problematic’ in 2016 in a matter of weeks. This is, to me, simultaneously fascinating and baffling and sort of silly, but it’s a pretty exhaustive breakdown of the arguments perpetuated among a meme-loving online community by Dat Boi and the apparent issues around cultural appropriation which it raises. If you’re baffled as to how a gif of a frog on a unicycle can engeder this much anger then, well, WELCOME TO THE WEB! Bonus cultural appropriation: #demthrones!

• The Strange Entitlement of Fan Culture: A rather good explanation, by a geek and for and about geeks, about how turning every single event in film into what is effectively fan service may not in fact be a good move, artistically speaking, and what exactly it is about nerd culture that turns grown men into whiny, spoilt children.

• The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs: The Toast, a website I am genuinely going to miss, speculates as to the conversations which led to the commissioning of famously surreal and subversive not-really-for-kids-kids-show Animaniacs. Far smarter than it needs to be, this, and very funny indeed.

• Sunk: One of two ESSENTIAL long reads this week, this is a KILOMETRIC and utterly fascinating look at the development of the most feted film in Chinese cinematic history, a film which has yet to see the light of day, a film which has had myriad writers and directors and stars and which is still struggling to find distribution despite being a decade in the making. The film is called ‘Empires of the Deep’ and you will TOTALLY want to see it when you are done reading this.

• Surviving the Love Bomb: Finally, a brilliant piece of long, personal writing by Katherine Hale, about being an insecure teen and how people exploited that, from the Church of latter-day Saints, to employers, to an unnamed Hollywood star. Such a good narrative voice, this made me want to read everything Hale has ever written – pour a mug of tea – in fact, make a pot – and enjoy this.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s start this with an excellent and rather silly mix of star wars music with classic hiphop, all with an accompanying video – whatever your feelings about THOSE FILMS, the technique here is impeccable:

2) Next up, Kaytranada with their track ‘Lite Spots’, which features the most joyous dancing robotic companion I have seen in AGES. I want one, please:

3) This is called ‘I Wonder’, it’s by the Thin Lips, and it scratched my pop punk itch this week rather wonderfully:

4) This is by Night School, and it’s called ‘Last Disaster’, and it is SO beautifully reminiscent of 60s girl groups that it made me very happy indeed and I hope it does the same to you:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Loyle Carner continues to produce bona fide excellence, and if you’ve not heard him yet then make sure you check this out. Lovely video, too, for his latest track called ‘Stars & Shards’:

6) A potrait of the best pool party you never went to as a teenager with a slightly sinister twist, this is called ‘Drugs’, it’s by Private Island, and it’s EXCELLENT:

7) I can’t quite work out if I like the Fat White Family or not, but they are compelling as. This video, for their new single ‘Tinfoil Deathstar’, is brilliantly odd and slightly horrible. GREAT STUFF!:

8) Finally this week, absolutely the best use of 3d / VR-type video I’ve yet seen. Unsurprising as it’s by Google, but the animation and the song and the whole thing is just PERFECT. Even if you never bother with these videos, please do give this a try – I think it’s genuinely lovely. It’s called ‘Pearl’. BYE HAPPY WEEKEND BYE!!!!