Link Archives
Ads via The Deck
August 18, 2016
A-Frame brings room-scale VR to the browser (this is unreal, I'm walking around in a web page)
Justice Department plans to stop using private prisons (thank you, Mother Jones)
Gawker.com shutting down next week after 14 years (Univision paid $135M for Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Kotaku)
August 17, 2016
Disney's Practical Guide to Path Tracing (modern animation techniques presented like a 1950s Disney short)
How to Be a Guy: Swimsuit Edition (from Jay Edidin's outstanding new column on transitioning)
August 12, 2016
Buzzfeed on Twitter's decade-long failure to address harassment (failure largely from the top down, it seems)
August 10, 2016
castles made of castles
Spaceplan (clicker game with a storyline)
Text analysis of Trump's tweets (he writes angry tweets on Android, gentler tweets authored by staff on iPhone/web)
Generating fantasy maps for Uncharted Atlas (beautiful Twitter bot; from the same author, how placenames are generated)
August 9, 2016
Desktop Ensemble (more from Soft Object)
Bicycling the length of Britain in VR (currently on day 58)
Morbotron (the Futurama counterpart to Frinkiac)
August 5, 2016
Vlogbrothers' How to Vote In Every State (big project with 54 videos to get out the vote for the Nerdfighter/VidCon community)
August 4, 2016
Rick and Morty recreate State of Georgia Vs. Denver Fenton Allen (this is a word-for-word voicing of an actual, incredibly NSFW court transcript)
August 3, 2016
Fan video for Macintosh Plus's "Floral Shoppe" (the 2011 remix album that defined the vaporwave genre)
This Is Not Fine (updated for 2016; related: new This Is Fine plush dogs)
August 2, 2016
webcomic name (oh no)
Tilt Brush adds audio reactive brushes (like anything VR-related, it really has to be experienced to appreciate it)
August 1, 2016
A Field Guide to China's Most Indispensible Meme (more remixable than reaction GIFs, and the most popular platforms don't support animation)
Only 9% of America chose Trump and Clinton as the nominees (elegant visualization from the New York Times)
Retro-Daze's VHS cover collection (so much great '80s design)
July 29, 2016
GuriVR (like Inform 7 for WebVR; describe scenes with pseudo-natural language)
July 28, 2016
Kickstarter's Impact on the Creative Economy (academic study finds Kickstarter contributed $5.3 billion to the economy and 8,800 new companies)
July 25, 2016
Quadrilateral Cowboy is out (Brendon Chung's stunning cyberpunk hacking heist game, years in the making)
Texture (a WYSWYIG editor for making interactive fiction, simpler than Twine)
July 22, 2016
Jason Kottke closes Stellar (it's been touch and go for a while, and I miss it daily; thanks for making something great)
July 21, 2016
I'm With the Banned (ferocious and sad Laurie Penny piece on MIlo, Trump, and weaponized insincerity)
July 12, 2016
The Was (Soda_Jerk's astounding visual collage for The Avalanches)
XOXO 2016 launch lineup and registration (in case you missed it, we're not doing XOXO next year, or maybe ever again)
July 4, 2016
Cabel Sasser's annual 4th of July fireworks packaging roundup (likely the last time because Vancouver, WA banned fireworks)
July 3, 2016
Multi Entry (Christina Xu's project on the "creative young people of modern mainland China")
July 2, 2016
DJ Jazzy Jeff + Mick's Summertime Mixtapes (seven years of perfect summer soundtracks)
Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing ("particularly" is the least metal word)
July 1, 2016
Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion (how it works, and more ambiguous objects)
Hillary Clinton's goodbye note to The Toast on their last day (hell of a way to send it off)
June 30, 2016
VRTX, 3D modeling in virtual reality (like the practical counterpart of Tilt Brush) [via]
June 29, 2016
FiveThirtyEight launches 2016 U.S. election forecast (don't miss the methodology, including lessons learned from forecasting the primaries)
June 27, 2016
Auctioneer Beats
June 24, 2016
Mother Jones' Shane Bauer's investigation as a private prison guard (astounding work of journalism, four months of life in the prison system)
Felix Salmon on Brexit (a "senseless, self-inflicted blow," "isolationist catastrophe," and a grim warning for the U.S.)
June 22, 2016
C-SPAN broadcasts Periscope from House members (Republicans turned off the cameras during the sit-in on gun control)
Crows Crows Crows' The Temple of No (a very good use of Twine)
June 21, 2016
Seinfeld recreated in Doom 2 (downloadable here)
June 20, 2016
Vi Hart on internet fame, violence against women, and dealing with tragedy (in the context of Christina Grimmie and the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando)
June 17, 2016
Zach Gage's Glaciers (poetry made with Google autocomplete and Raspberry Pis)
The Atlantic on Ev Williams and the open web (the open web's fading away in favor of consolidated convenience and algorithmic relevance)
Animated evolution of the NYT homepage during the Orlando shooting (breaking crises are one of the few times a homepage still matters)
Thoughts & Prayers: The Game (making a real difference there, GOP)
June 16, 2016
The Guardian looks back on lonelygirl15 (nicely timed, the channel posted its first new video in seven years)
Field Trip to Mars (Lockheed-Martin's school bus motion ride with real-time imagery based on geolocation)
What happened to Yahoo's 53 acquisitions under Marissa Mayer (at least 41 were shut down)
June 15, 2016
Bandcamp's feature on the cottage industry of indie game soundtracks (interviews with Jim Guthrie, Chipzel, Toby Fox, Chris Remo, and Disasterpeace)
Interview with a woman who recently had an abortion at 32 weeks (losing a child is tragic enough, but the pro-life right insists on compounding women's suffering)
June 14, 2016
Silicon Valley's Scapegoat Complex (Buzz Andersen on Gawker and Peter Thiel)
Samantha Bee on the Orlando murders (prayer isn't cutting it)
June 13, 2016
Who Is My Voice? (nice to see my representatives refused NRA cash)
ThinkUp closes its doors (sad to see, I had fun working on its open-source incarnation)
Visually-indicated sounds predicted by AI (algorithmically creating soundtracks for silent video; related: water sound synthesis)
June 11, 2016
2016 AICP Sponsor Reel (mesmerizing motion capture and material rendering; this should be fun when the metaverse arrives)
June 10, 2016
Gawker files for bankruptcy, likely selling to Ziff Davis (no heroes in this story, but I worry about other billionaires using this technique on smaller publications)
Building an emoji translator with deep learning (this is fun to play with)
2001: A Picasso Odyssey (also: Blade Runner meets Starry Night)
Cracking Broderbund's Gumball for the Apple II (including an easter egg hidden for 33 years; now you can play it in the browser)
June 9, 2016
Mapping Silicon Valley characters to their real-life counterparts (I can't watch the show without triggering flashbacks)
June 8, 2016
Tracking the most popular YouTube video in the world (behind the single-serving site)
Fatal Migrations (tracking where migrants died crossing from Mexico to Arizona; more on the project)
Twinklr (a modern music box)
June 6, 2016
WSJ's Hamilton rhyme analysis (here's the methodology)
June 4, 2016
The Stanford victim's statement to her attacker (incredibly powerful indictment of rape culture on campus and in the courts)
June 3, 2016
Frame-by-frame reconstruction of Blade Runner with a neural network (like a computer's memory after "watching" it six times; of course, it got a DMCA takedown)
June 1, 2016
We R Cute Shoplifters (Good Magazine on the online subculture of shoplifting teen girls)
ＳＩＭＰＳＯＮＷＡＶＥ (my aesthetic)
xkcd's Guide to Dating an Undated World Map (oh wait, this is a tuba)
Y Combinator's Basic Income Project pilot (not a huge YC fan, but I like this)
Shining360 (reconstructing 3D space using film stills from The Shining for VR) [via]
The Upcoming.org Archives (7.6 million event pages back from the dead from Upcoming's first ten years)
May 31, 2016
Amen, a toolbox for algorithmic music remixing (today's the effective last day of the Echo Nest's pioneering Remix API)
Mosh Pit Simulator trailer (the future of VR)
May 29, 2016
Mu Cartographer (experimental game of colorful landscapes and exploration)
May 27, 2016
Don't Get Rich, Don't Die Trying (The Thermals' Hutch Harris on day jobs, money, and ego in indie music)
May 26, 2016
Browsing Wikipedia with WebVR (I'm getting VRML flashbacks)
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)