More Tabs, Please #19: Awful Robots, YouTube Faces, and Fashion Culture

Hey, More Tabs, Please is back after a short hiatus. I’m sure everyone definitely noticed and was really upset. Anyway, as usual, here’s our collection of articles, artists, and listens from around the web. It’s good to be back.

Our album to read along to this week is Duppy Writer, Wrongtom’s take on some Roots Manuva tracks:

“So what’s wrong with these people? Were their brains tenderized?”

Science fiction often deals with the big stuff, like big ships and big planets and big battles and big villains. What they can miss are the little details, like a pan-social media platform facial expression mimicking itself and echoing throughout the infinity of the internet.

‘Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell‘ gives us the rundown on YoutTube Face, the weird subset of exaggerated expressions employed by YouTubers to attract us. Facial clickbait, if you will. No. Wait. There’s probably a better term than that.

“Lisa, the dog is barking.”

What’s that? Six thousand words of in-depth analysis and critique of a beloved cartoon show that’s deeply embedded within our social psyche and has gone from a cultural touchstone of quality to one of mediocrity, wasted potential, and destroyed nostalgia?

Don’t mind if I do.

‘I Watched All 629 Episodes of The Simpsons in a Month. Here’s What I Learned.‘ looks at how The Simpsons has changed since the ‘Golden Age’, but also focuses in on something that now seems painfully obvious: the writers hate Lisa Simpson.

Hire This Person: Tidawan Thaipinnarong

This week we’re featuring the illustrator and visual development artist Tidawan Thaipinnarong. I absolutely love her work, a lot of which depicts everyday scenes with an incredible cartoon-style that lends a strong feel of the real. The colour schemes are always strong and there is a huge amount of character portrayed in her faces.

Go hire her for a project now! You can find her website here, while Thaipinnarong is also on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

Taken From The Timeline

Nothing like a creepy walk through the foggy British countryside in search of an isolated church you’re not sure you’ll ever find. And that’s what we get in this incredible Twitter thread:

I saw this on an OS map and couldn’t not investigate. A place of worship symbol in the middle of bloody nowhere on the edge of a wood. It was a foggy, atmospheric day up on the North Downs, so I decided to walk three sides of a square through the wood to reach it. pic.twitter.com/R47CTs9Mg2

— gawanmac (@gawanmac) April 13, 2018

The trend-takeover algorithms

Increasingly, the things around us are curated by machines and AI, whether it’s what music we should listen to or the clothes we should wear. Algorithms follow us everywhere digitally, and everywhere physically as they’re carried along on our phones.

‘Style Is an Algorithm‘ is an incredible essay looking at how originality is being suffocated by algorithms influencing our own and society’s taste. In-depth and slight worrying, it’s an important piece for today’s world.

Think of this next time you think you have an original thought.

Up above the clouds so high

We all love a good old photograph. Even more so when they’re of places familiar to us, that look recognisable in the photo but are entirely different. So how about a site that has a country’s worth of photos like that?

‘Britain from Above‘ is just that. A huge collection of aerial photos from 1916 – 2006, covering the width and breadth of Britain. You can search for specific locations or just explore a map instead.

Fully recommend showing this to a grandparent to get them proper going on a ‘how things have changed’ moan.

Watch And Listen: Simone Giertz

We’ve featured Simone Giertz on the blog before in our list of robotics influencers. Usually this would mean we wouldn’t include them in More Tabs, Please, but I’m making an exception. Simone’s work and videos are always incredible, and she’s going through a tough time at the moment.

Her channel, mostly, is about her attempts to create shitty robots, some of which end up not being too shitty. From making things obit her head to building a robot to hunt, Simone bring a uniquely creative approach to her channel.

You can find all of her videos here, but we also encourage you to head over to her Patreon and sign up as a supporter. To introduce you to her work, here’s her attempt at making a Westworld robot: