Link Archives
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May 25, 2016
Reddit replacing Imgur (more than half their most popular posts go to the image-hosting service)
Thngs (a visual index to human-made objects)
scribble.audio (draw looping sounds, from the creator of typedrummer)
Terrapattern (visual search engine for satellite imagery; example: baseball in Detroit, planes in NYC)
May 24, 2016
Peter Thiel secretly funding Hulk Hugan's lawsuit against Gawker (whaaaaa)
May 23, 2016
Oculus adds DRM to block Vive users, broken in a day (surprising how similar the two competing headsets are)
Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow (machine learning for dumb coding interview questions)
Pixelsynth (turn images to sound)
Quantizer (auralization of real-time collision data from the ATLAS detector at CERN)
May 20, 2016
Miranda July and Paul Ford at Seven on Seven (with the help of Mystery Show's Starlee Kine, they researched every attendee in the room)
The Evolution of an Accidental Meme (how an illustration about equality transmuted and spread)
Family Guy uses a 7-year-old YouTube video, then blocks the original (you'd think Content ID would factor in the publication date of copyrighted works, but I guess not)
May 19, 2016
Hyper-Reality (from the creator of the popular Augmented (hyper)Reality short)
Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens (finding a balance between copy, transform, and combine)
Rapping, deconstructed (great Vox explainer on creative rhyme schemes in rap)
May 18, 2016
Blue Feed, Red Feed (WSJ runs Memeorandum Colors-esque analysis on Facebook sources)
May 17, 2016
What's Your Pay Gap? (WSJ finds that "women earn less than men in 439 of 446 major U.S. occupations")
Funomena announces Woorld (augmented reality toy with Keita Takahashi art)
Four Seasons (space to change seasons)
May 16, 2016
On rocky beginnings (visualization of music listened to in a difficult year, part of the Quantified Selfie project)
The Next Generation of Pokemon (don't underestimate Quakstak)
Comic: My Girl by Sophia Foster-Dimino (from the creator of the Sex Fantasy sketchzine)
Comic: Bart Simpson and Chris Griffin in couples therapy (surprisingly touching)
Shuffleboard At McMurdo (the first dispatch from Maciej Ceglowski's Kickstarter-funded trip to Antarctica)
Max Goodman goes on a picnic (Stupid Hackathon project orders a random food delivery to a random location and Ubers you there)
May 14, 2016
History of the Dat Boi meme (o shit waddup)
Jason Scott's archiving hip hop mixtapes (close to 4,000 so far)
How Does an Editor Think and Feel? (brilliant episode of Tony Zhou's Every Frame A Painting)
Craig Mod's archival plans for Hi.co (microscopic etching community contributions on a nickel plate with a 10,000 year lifespan)
May 11, 2016
How algorithmic news feeds help spread conspiracy theories (an extension of the filter bubble and the net's ability to affirm all your existing beliefs)
May 10, 2016
Curio (the best of the modern PC demoscene; the latest two 64k demos are incredible)
Neural Doodle (semantic style transfer turns doodles into fine art)
Luke Phillips's Theremin (works best on a touchscreen; excited for his upcoming BlokDust)
YACHT's stolen sex tape was a PR stunt gone wrong (misguided hoax from a group I admire; their apology doesn't help much)
May 9, 2016
ConnectedNES (Super Mario hacked into a Twitter client with a custom wireless "modem")
Marco Arment on Apple's role on podcasting (the push for more behavioral analytics inevitably leads to centralization, and sacrificing control)
How browsers render emoji (I learned stuff here)
Christoph Niemann's augmented reality New Yorker cover (watch the video to get a sense of how it looks)
Magnets and Marbles (it's the speedrun of a nonexistent videogame I'd really like to play)
Typographica's favorite typefaces of 2015 (a little late, but great overview of the variety of the type world)
Mandy Brown on gendered bots (one of my pet peeves is naming every personal assistant app after women)
May 5, 2016
Pinboard wins Hacker News contest, disqualified for arbitrary reasons (fascinating thread that speaks volumes about Y Combinator culture)
May 3, 2016
waybackpack (command-line tool to download the entire Wayback Machine archive for a URL)
How Pop Music Evolved (audio/visualization of 
22,000 Billboard hits from 1956 to today)
Graphtreon (I'm familiar with most of Patreon's top creators, but I have to admit, #1 was a big surprise)
GeoCities Forever (neural network-generated web nostalgia) [via]
Matt Haughey looks back on leaving MetaFilter, one year later (lessons learned running an online community turned business)
PocketCHIP (real micro hardware for playing and coding games for the wonderful PICO-8 fantasy console)
May 2, 2016
Vimeo acquires VHX (very smart acquisition, though I prefer more distribution options for indies)
May 1, 2016
Radiohead erase internet presence (faded away to nothing at all)
April 29, 2016
JayisGames closes after 13 years (sad to see it go, absolutely essential for everyone who loved casual/Flash games)
I Want Your Email Address ("Welcome to the middle of this post. Now, can I please have your email address?")
Player Two (short film based on a YouTube comment)
Fullest House (recurrent neural network generating a new Full House script every day; how it works)
The Revelations of Lady Murderface (Backchannel on the whistleblower who outed low pay at Yelp, which led to raises after her firing)
A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley ("Why has crowdfunding not worked for me? Is it worth pre-ordering a Tesla Model 3?")
April 28, 2016
Rube Goldberg with HTML form elements (a thing of beauty)
April 27, 2016
Breaking YouTube's Content ID with counteracting claims (pretty clever hack)
April 26, 2016
I Dropped My Phone The Screen Cracked (examples of web audio synthesis made with the library of the same name) [via]
Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved (make something great for someone, not everyone)
April 19, 2016
Virtual Art Sessions (interactive replays of artists using Tilt Brush in VR for the Vive)
Fusion interviews the new owner of 8chan (totally missed this move last September, and that he took control over 2ch too)
TEXT-MODE (beautiful tumblr of ASCII/ANSI-influenced art)
Rex Sorgatz revisits his tiny, remote hometown (technology changed it, but in unexpected ways) [via]
I Have No Idea What This Startup Does and Nobody Will Tell Me (tell me we're not in a bubble again)
NYMag on Social Autopsy, an anti-harassment startup gone wrong (it's easier to fall for conspiracy theories than understand the complexity of online harassment)
April 18, 2016
Velocipedia (realistic renderings of bicycles drawn from memory)
manygolf (Desert Golfing as an MMO)
The Humans Hiding Behind Chatbots (more artificial artificial intelligence)
Jen Lewis photoshopped Kanye and an artist reportedly made $100k off it (perfect encapsulation of how attribution works on the internet in 2016) [via]
April 15, 2016
Slither (like Agar.io meets Snake)
April 14, 2016
UC Davis paid $175k to downrank pepper spray results (a good time to revisit it from multiple angles)
Kite (interesting networked coding utility, if you're comfortable with the privacy issues)
April 13, 2016
A Neural Network Playground (tinker with machine learning in the browser)
Radiooooo (bizarrely great music recommendations with a quirky interface)
The Verge on the history of content moderation on major social networks (challenging and expensive at scale, with traumatic impact on moderators)
The Guardian's deep dive into harassment and abuse in their comments (analyzing 70M comments, women and minority authors were targeted disproportionately)
April 9, 2016
Gender and age breakdown of dialogue from 2,000 films (clever methodology maps character names in screenplays to IMDB actors)
Scan of Alan George's Treasure Hunt (from the 1940s, quite possibly the first choose-your-own-adventure/game book) [via]
Emoji miscommunication (the same emoji appears wildly different on various phones and browsers)
Conceptual strategies of Twitterbot poetics (Twitterbots are contemporary, populist poetry)
April 8, 2016
Koyannistocksi ("Koyannisqatsi reconstructed shot-by-shot with modern, watermarked stock footage")
April 7, 2016
Simone Giertz's Popcorn Machine (my favorite robot maker teams up with Adam Savage and Tested)
Neven Mrgan on the costs of Cuprimine (a drug he needs to survive now costs $44,000/month in the U.S., $36 in Australia without insurance)
BABYMETAL appears on Colbert (I wonder what most viewers made of their U.S. television debut)
lyrical school's RUN and RUN (watch this on your phone)
April 6, 2016
L.A. Times profiles Anita Sarkeesian's new project (one day left to fund the Ordinary Women series, which is about to hit its goal)
Command (Slack-like commands in the browser)
April 5, 2016
Medium adds new tools for publishers (new designs, revenue options and archive importing preserving timestamps and links)
Trump Minus Tan (warning: can't be unseen)
The glEnd of Zelda() (Tom 7's badass hack to automatically emulate NES games in 3D)
Zelda 30 Tribute (voxel WebGL fan remake, disable Flashblock for audio)
HTC Vive's "mixed reality" release trailer (the best demonstration of what good VR feels like without actually experiencing it)
April 4, 2016
Techies (interview series with underrepresented people working in tech in Silicon Valley)
xkcd's Garden (give it light and time)
Wasted Hours (I identify with this a little too much)
We Are What We Build (Eric Meyer on #663399becca and #gamergate)
Sand Marble Race (I picked the winner, time to go to the track)
April 3, 2016
World-record blindfolded run of Super Mario Bros. (capturing the flag at 8-3 in the nick of time, and the final win against Bowser, are both incredible)
Tom Scott on base64 and YouTube video IDs (in one take, too)
perfectly emulated human body #1 (view in the Javascript console, press "x" to interrupt)
Guardian analysis of the Panama Papers (12 national leaders using offshore tax havens to hide funds)
Dirty Little Secrets (Fusion's analysis of the Panama Papers, a leak 100x bigger than Wikileaks)
April 2, 2016
AP style to lowercase "internet" and "web" (most of the resistance is from older net users, who still think of it as an invention and a place)
Pilot episode of The Foo Show (Tested's Will Smith is doing a TV show in VR; don't miss where they jump inside the game set)
Reddit's Robin (their sequel to last year's thebutton, another game-like experiment in online social dynamics)
April 1, 2016
Laughter Doesn't Scale (Paul Ford on Gmail Mic Drop and Internet Jackass Day)
Google pulls misguided Gmail Mic Drop prank (read the whole thread starting here, as it unfolded)
Online casino funding massive Eve Online war (MMOs continue to be weird, but Eve is particularly so) [via]
Cabel Sasser finds the proverbial "uncle who works at Nintendo" (shorthand for that non-existent family member with insider information in the gaming industry)
March 30, 2016
Microsoft adds Linux commandline to Windows 10 (whaaaa, official support for native bash and Ubuntu Linux binaries in Windows)
A day in the life of a young black male engineering student (infuriating story of dealing with systemic racism while trying to cash a money order)
GMUNK's Sub.Division ("a series of perceptual landscapes where graphic complexity emerges from the structure of simplistic three-dimensional forms")
March 28, 2016
Pinboard's heroic and lazy stand against IFTTT changes (I love IFTTT, but this is a bummer)
Seth Bling turns Super Mario World into Flappy Bird (first-of-its-kind code injection, by hand, on an unmodded SNES console)
March 26, 2016
Holoportation (combining 3D capture with multiple participants with an augmented reality display)
March 25, 2016
How to Make a Bot That Isn't Racist (superb Sarah Jeong piece on bot ethics with four of my favorite bot creators)
March 24, 2016
Moogfest's Substrate (interactive musical experiment)
March 23, 2016
Angola Internet users organizing on Facebook to pirate files on Wikipedia (given free access to a tiny handful of site, they're making the most of it)
March 22, 2016
Smarter Every Day on 3D printing magnetic fields (I fully expect these to be a mundane part of everyday life in a few years)
How Netflix uses computer vision to generate promo images (detecting faces, bodies, and other focal points)
Making Day of the Tentacle Remastered (it's out now for PC, Mac, and PS4; worth it for developer commentary alone)
Legalize It All (starts with a shocking quote from Nixon's Watergate co-conspirator, making made headlines on its own)
March 21, 2016
Elastic Terrain (play with wobbly mountains)
March 20, 2016
San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam (GTA V hacked to follow a single deer as it randomly roams the landscape)
Adventures in Narrated Reality (experiments with using machine learning for writing prose, poetry, and other texts)
March 19, 2016
The Gif Connoisseur
March 18, 2016
Cabel Sasser on Firewatch, one month later (interesting postmortem from Panic's first foray into videogame publishing)
March 15, 2016
Julie Rubicon (short fiction, totally not written by Robin Sloan, about Facebook on Facebook)
The end of Emojitracker (Twitter's killing "elevated" access to its streaming API)
March 13, 2016
The Walk of Life Project (making every movie better, one Dire Straits song at a time) [via]
March 11, 2016
Bass cover of "Donald Trump Says China" supercut (related: Publio Delgado's Harmonizator series)
A poem made entirely from SXSW 2016 panel names ("Lifehacks for Dads Who Do Fifty Percent: Big Data Will Choose the Next President.")
NYT's 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going (some great music writing in here)
March 10, 2016
Responsive pixel art (designed by Marcus Blättermann)
March 9, 2016
DeepDream VR (try it with Cardboard, if you have one)
March 8, 2016
David OReilly announces Everything (his ambitious followup to Mountain)
The covert 3D scan of Nefertiti bust appears to be a hoax (I should have questioned this myself, but I assumed they did lots of post-processing cleanup) [via]
Rotoscoping the Muybridge horse (love all the different student interpretations) [via]
March 7, 2016
The Guardian on the global economic downturn for millenials ("In the US, under-30s are now poorer than retired people")
March 5, 2016
500 1990s Desktop Wallpapers (the original vaporwave) [via]
Data analysis uncovers crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal (the data and source are available on Pwanson's site)
March 3, 2016
Fileship (hold digital files hostage until your client pays up)
TensorFlow for Poets (beginner's guide for the machine intelligence library)
March 2, 2016
Wait But Why's Tim Urban procrastinates his TED talk about procrastination (gripping reading for anyone with a fear of public speaking) [via]
Vox on the rise of American authoritarianism ("Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics")
Life and Death in the App Store (a depressing case study for bootstrapped paid iOS apps)
Wintergatan's Marble Machine (performative music instrument built from 2,000 marbles and 3,000 parts)
March 1, 2016
Vandelay Industries (a Slack bot that searches every line from Seinfeld and posts an animated GIF)
February 28, 2016
How Gawker trolled Donald Trump into tweeting a Mussolini quote as his own (Twitter bot making headlines)
February 25, 2016
New York Mag on Weird Facebook (related: Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer)
Postmortem 2021: How AI Won (Diana Kimball's speculative fiction memo on super-persuasive AI)
The Last Job on Earth (a partnership with the Guardian to imagine an automated future)
Minefield (massively-multiplayer Minesweeper) [via]
"We Are the World" using Face Swap Live (four years after Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro's demos, real-time face substitution is an app)
PBS Idea Channel on 𝘈 𝘌 𝘚 𝘛 𝘏 𝘌 𝘛 𝘐 𝘊 (more than just ironic, it ties into how we experience art online and where we "live")
Pejac's Heavy Sea (the short film claims no CGI, no Photoshop)
Matt Taibbi on how America made Donald Trump unstoppable ("Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star")
Sailor Mercury on the intersection of art and technology (art-inspired technology gives us new ideas instead of incremental improvements)
Playthings (cheeseburger drums and gummy bear xylophones on a day-glo VR island)
February 24, 2016
Metafilter's Gopher server is back after 15 years of downtime (there's no Gopher client for Chrome, but you can use an HTTP gopher proxy to browse it)
Boston Dynamics' new demo of their Atlas humanoid robots (that guy with the hockey stick will be first against the wall after the robot uprising)
Stripe Atlas (targeted to non-US businesses, but seems pretty damned useful for U.S. businesses too)
February 23, 2016
Evolution of Web Design (2003 was a dark year)
No Small Parts: Crispin Glover (Brandon Hardesty's web series on character actors is so good)
February 22, 2016
Reagan and WarGames (incredible story of how '80s government security policy was influenced by the film, though he wasn't the first to report it)
Paul Ford on Racter, a 1980s-era chatbot (don't miss the scan of the book it wrote, worth it for the illustrations alone)
Refurbishing A 1927 Switchboard (the interface for this incredible game, Hello Operator)
Artists covertly scan bust of Nefertiti and release data to public domain ("the one object in the museum's collection off-limits to photographers")
February 19, 2016
The Simpsons Sphere (360° video of 500 episodes at the same time; try it in the YouTube app on your phone)
The Maker ("the simple story of one man's enduring passion")
How Google's Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls (still feels like bad practice that Google indexes content that isn't freely available on the web)
The Outpost Is Here (the absurdly great launch lineup for XOXO's new shared workspace in Portland)
February 18, 2016
Codeology (gorgeous visualization of Github projects by size and languages) [via]
February 17, 2016
Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens (as much about how people make money on Tumblr, and Yahoo's attempts to thwart it)
February 16, 2016
Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys (barnburner of a performance)
The Brain (a neural network built in Quartz Composer)
February 15, 2016
A Large Dataset of Object Scans (more than 10,000 public domain scans)
The New Yorker profile on TMZ's paparazzi infrastructure (great quote from Alec Baldwin in there)
Smell Dating (from Useless Press, a "publishing collective that creates eclectic Internet things")
OK Go's zero-gravity music video (how it was made, and why the video is Facebook-only)
February 12, 2016
Zebra (painful new game from Bennett Foddy; epilepsy warning)
Blab (Twitch meets Hangouts)
The Life of Pablo Generator (make your own Kanye album cover)
Creative Cloud for Mac update deletes the first hidden folder in root (for Backblaze users, it's the folder containing backup drive metadata)
February 11, 2016
Quartz's delivers the news with a chat-like UI (interesting approach to news app design)
Internet Archive adds Windows 3.1 software emulation (start with the Windows Showcase before deep-diving the rest)
February 10, 2016
Ezra Klein on the rise of Donald Trump (New Hampshire crosses the line from comedy to terror)
Jezebel on Samantha Bee's new show (the debut episode is a barnburner)
February 8, 2016
The First 100,000 Funded Kickstarter Projects in 100 Numbers (it took 121 days to hit 100 funded projects, only three days for the most recent 100 funded)
How to Snapchat Like the Teens (surprisingly informative, while also making me feel like I'm a warm corpse)
XOXO Outpost (if you're in Portland, applications are now open for our shared workspace, opening this week)
Soylent Dick (part of the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon)
February 7, 2016
Polygon Shredder (source code here, but good luck understanding it)
February 5, 2016
Transparent LCD displays in the wild (coming soon to pretty much everywhere)
The Malware Museum (safely run vintage DOS viruses in your browser)
February 4, 2016
Trump Donald (best on a desktop browser)
DeRay Mckesson on why he's running for mayor of Baltimore (pretty excited about this; related: Campaign Zero's ten steps to ending police violence in America)
Bill Wurtz explains the History of Japan (better than it sounds; all his videos are pretty great)
January 27, 2016
Anil Dash on "never read the comments" (persuasive argument that the common in-joke normalizes online harassment)
January 26, 2016
The Michael Jackson/Sonic 3 videogame conspiracy (Sega continues to deny Michael Jackson's work made it into the game, likely for legal reasons)
Polygon's review of The Witness (Jon Blow's epic, seven-year followup to Braid is out, and it's something special)
After 15 years, AbeVigoda.com updated (RIP)
The Chickening (Nick DenBoer and Davy Force bat-shit insane remix of The Shining)
January 25, 2016
Spherical Droste video (navigate with the mouse, or watch in VR; related reading)
Track-by-track breakdown of making David Bowie's "Heroes" (analyzing the master recording in-studio with his long-time producer, Tony Visconti)
#screensaverjam entries (a game jam inspired by classic screen savers, over 30 viewable in browser)
Bypassing YouTube's ContentID with mouth sounds (I highly recommend turning on the auto-generated captions)
Donald Rumsfeld made an iOS game (using the preferred business model of war criminals everywhere) [via]
January 24, 2016
Breakdown of Amazon's social engineering backdoor (damning transcripts of customer support handing out customer details)
January 22, 2016
Oscars make changes to diversify membership (a good start, though may not have much impact until the industry changes)
January 21, 2016
Shamchat, random chat with roleplaying (hilarity ensues)
Jon Benjamin tries jazz (he recorded a full jazz album playing piano, but he doesn't know how to play piano)
January 19, 2016
"Men" by Irene Koh (great personal comics on dating terrible dudes)
January 14, 2016
Detecting faces in objects and random noise (the averaged photos are haunting and beautiful)
The Verge on how a convicted scammer revealed a secret surveillance device from prison (and used the legal system to hack his way out of federal prison in the process)
January 13, 2016
Oregon militia organizer angry about dildos (I blame Matt Haughey)
Digital Materiality of GIFs (Sha Hwang's talk about GIFs turned into a remixable NewHive essay)
January 11, 2016
oh you pretty things
RIP David Bowie (heartbroken)
January 8, 2016
1080plus, wonderfully weird social YouTube viewer (I lost myself in this for an hour last night, VJing retro videos for a bunch of people; desktop only)
How Mickey Mouse evades the public domain (old hat around these parts, but love the visualization)
January 5, 2016
Bushes of Love (the anonymous creator of Bad Lip Reading knows how to write a catchy hook)
January 4, 2016
Simulating the World in Emoji (Nicky Case's interactive experiments with thinking in systems)
Oculus Rift preorders start Wednesday (no word on pricing or shipping dates yet)
Of Oz the Wizard (astounding remix of The Wizard of Oz recut in alphabetical order; related: ARST ARSW)
January 1, 2016
The Website Obesity Crisis (another essential Maciej Ceglowski talk, video here)
butts.lol (Charles Vestal's new year's resolution to draw (at least) one butt a day in 2016)
Pay Women the Money They Need to Make the Culture (also, the replies to Rachel's query on Twitter turns up so many great responses )
The Trump Diet (Matt Haughey embarks on a high-stakes weight loss challenge)
Song A Day Navigator (today marks seven full years of Jonathan Mann's daily song project)
December 31, 2015
What should Have entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016? (a depressing annual reminder that current copyright law terms suck)
Randi Harper on leaving the FreeBSD community ("the measure of health in any open source community is how they deal with conflict")
Griffin McElroy on why Undertale matters (a divisive and misunderstood game with a massive, and well-deserved, cult following)
Pirate group apologizes for releasing Hateful Eight screener (feels a bit like they're trying to cover their asses)
The end of the Pastry Box Project (four years of great independent writing)
Milling Time (you may not play Hearthstone, but this probably applies to you too)
Twitter reinstates Politwoops (the service monitored deleted tweets from public officials, a violation of Twitter's API terms)
Guesstimate, a spreadsheet for things that aren't certain (free, open-source tool for performing estimates using Monte Carlo experiments) [via]
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with President Obama (I'm going to miss that guy)
December 30, 2015
Archillect (this bot is so good, I was convinced it's human; after reading how it works, I'm still not sure)
MVP (short fiction about devs building a game for an audience of bots)
December 23, 2015
BuzzFeed on the rise of the chanterculture (tying racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic paranoia into meme culture)
December 17, 2015
A-Frame (shockingly simple open-source framework for making WebVR with HTML)
ClickHole's Glengarry Glen Ross Christmas lights display (please somebody do this for real)
Martin Shkreli arrested on security fraud charges (now's a good time for Wu-Tang and Bill Murray to steal their album back)
Grayout (the new Blackbar prequel for iOS by Neven Mrgan and James Moore)
December 16, 2015
Star Wars Minus Star Wars (retelling A New Hope without using any images or sounds from the film) [via]
Publio Delgado's Harmonizator series (brilliant free jazz guitar harmonizing found footage on YouTube) [via]
The best Twitter bots of 2015 (my favorites were Deep Forger, YouTube Artifact, and Wow So Portland)
Darth Vader Yule Log
December 15, 2015
Justin McElroy on the current state of the Frog Fractions 2 ARG (pretty sure we're all playing Frog Fractions 2 right now)
Slack's new app directory (officially launching the Slack platform; related: Botkit)
Survey results from this year's Cards Against Humanity holiday survey (correlating penis length and tipping preferences, among others)
A Day in the Life of Americans (simulation of 1,000 people's average day, minute by minute) [via]
NPR's Songs We Love 2015 (31 hours of music, broken up into playlists)
Undertale is tearing GameFAQs apart (the Kickstarter-funded indie RPG is brilliant; here's a great review explaining why it's finding an audience)
Pilot (each episode is a pilot for a new podcast, from This American Life's Stephanie Foo)
Noby Noby Boy finally completed after 2,489 days of gameplay (released in February 2009, players collectively stretched across the solar system)
December 14, 2015
Internet Credit Union closes (Brewster Kahle's bank shutters, stymied by bureaucracy)
Farewell, Rdio (export tools and some goodbye analytics; import your playlists to Spotify)
Itch.io launches desktop app (my favorite indie game platform launched an open-source desktop app)
Voight-Kampff Empathy Test 2015 ("You gotta hear both sides.")
Sweaterify (the perfect holiday gift)
Gaby Dunn on the sad economics of YouTube fame (every Just Between Us video gets 100k+ views, madness that they can't make a living off it)
December 13, 2015
True Love Tinder Robot (my friend Nicole is a goddamned genius)
The Trace on Sandy Hook hoaxers (inside the hateful world of mass shooting conspiracy theorists)
Reality Editor (MIT Media Lab augmented reality project to modify the behavior of connected objects) [via]
Matt Haughey on his GOP dildo project (nothing against dildos, it's a commentary on politicians pandering to gun lunatics)
MRA Dilbert (mashing up Dilbert comics with horrible, real quotes from its creator)
December 12, 2015
Touch Arcade on Apple TV's App Store and the state of iOS gaming (Apple's cluelessness about games extends to the TV, so much lost potential)
Data Atsume (running analytics on Neko Atsume, the notoriously opaque kitty collecting game)
Motherboard interviews Drew about The Worst Things For Sale (I've been following his work for over a decade, but never knew his last name)
December 11, 2015
YouTube Rewind 2015 (I've never felt so detached from YouTube culture, I only know 20% of these creators)
December 10, 2015
Miranda Harmon's comic about Harmontown, podcasts, and depression (no relation)
Anita Sarkeesian on harassment through impersonation (digging into a blatant example of faked tweets on 4chan designed to enrage people)
Serial podcast returns with the story of Bowe Bergdahl (as before, incredible production values and great storytelling, hopefully leaving the ethical issues behind)
Rev. Dan Catt on his Minus Everyone comic bot ("If someone does something simple, calls it art, then that's what it is.")
December 8, 2015
Yule Log 2015 (short looping animations for the holidays; watch 'em fullscreen with some hot cocoa)
10x15 (ten artists reimagine the cover art for their top ten favorite albums of 2015)
December 7, 2015
Kickstarter Fulfillment Report (the full research paper is worth reading too)
December 6, 2015
New York Mag interviews viral stars of Internet past (Tay Zonday is an interesting guy)
December 4, 2015
Jury Duty (anonymous and unlisted first-person story of being a juror on a murder trial) [via]
Working videoconferencing and web browser in Minecraft (a Verizon tie-in, but hey, they open-sourced the libraries)
breadfaceblog ("giving the people something they didn't ask for") [via]
Double Fine funding Psychonauts 2 on Fig (I'm pretty skeptical of equity crowdfunding, but thrilled they're working on this)
Access Denied (stunning John Herrman column on the end of special access for the media) [via]
Computerman (extended remix of the Vid Kidz segment from 1985) [via]
December 3, 2015
Deep Forger, making art forgeries from photos with a neural network (want your own? the secret manual has tips for customizing it)
Adele's Hello, cut from movie quotes (the same creator brilliantly remixed Lionel Richie's Hello nearly four years ago)
Let's Encrypt enters public beta, free automated SSL for all (ignore the FUD and go make the web a little more secure)
December 1, 2015
The Last Message Received (the NYT interviewed the 15-year-old creator) [via]
oldweb.today (incredible in-browser emulation of vintage browsers using Wayback archives; source and screenshots)
November 30, 2015
Annalee Newitz leaves io9 after eight year run (the site she founded and defined its voice; excited to see what she does at Ars Technica)
November 29, 2015
Extra Ordinary's The Case of the Marked Man (Li Chen celebrates comic #400 with a special full-color detective story)
November 28, 2015
The Serial Swatter (the NYT goes deep on how armchair terrorists exploit America's over-militarized police)
Inside China's "memeufacturing" factories (massive, chaotic infrastructure for producing this year's cultural fads)
November 24, 2015
xkcd's Hoverboard (it's bigger than it looks)
Bret Victor goes deep on what technologists can do about climate change ("despair is not useful. Despair is paralysis, and there's work to be done")
Donald Trump's skid towards outright fascism (I hope Nate Silver's right, but Trump's gone from mildly amusing to scary pretty quickly)