Gulf of Anything — MapQuest is one of the few U.S. mapping companies that hasn't caved to Trump's name change yet #

The hardest working font in Manhattan — Marcin Wichary's beautifully visual and interactive history of a 135-year-old typeface that's somehow everywhere and largely unknown at once #

Ethan Marcotte on leaving 18F — one story of what it's like to be forced out of a job you love at a federal agency filled with talented public servants as it's dismantled by fascists #

Molly Soda interviews tvwishes — a Missouri college student is crate-digging through Flickr for early 2000s nostalgia, reposting it on Instagram for a new audience (via) #

Little Sisyphus — clever and challenging physics NES platformer, made using the author's own programming language for NES development (via) #

Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government — Elizabeth Lopatto sums up Musk's actions so far, though as Jason Kottke points out, this is not solely his coup (via) #

Kyle Orland on the genius of Dragonsweeper — I've been mildly obsessed with the game since it came out, in part because Daniel Benmergui keeps changing it #

No, The People Didn’t Vote For This — Mike Masnick debunks the myth of Trump's mandate, a slim margin of victory made possible only through deception #

(mac)OStalgia — imagining what modern apps might have looked liked in the Mac OS 9 era (via) #

Hiding data in emoji — try the encoder/decoder to smuggle your own message in a Unicode character (via) #

Plumbsum — Asher Vollmer's first PICO-8 game is like Tetris meets Pipe Dream #

GovWayback — access historical versions of U.S. government pages by replacing ".gov" in the URL with ".govwayback.com" #

I’ll save it myself — a little WebXR scene, you may need to look around to figure it out (via) #

GLOBAL CAPSLOCK KEY — Nolen Royalty made a cross-platform client that synchronizes everyone's CAPS LOCK key #

Endless Jeopardy — Neil Cicierega ported his excellent Twitter game, shuttered by Musk's API changes in 2023, over to Bluesky #

WikiTok — a TikTok-style interface for exploring random Wikipedia articles; see also: ReddTok (via) #

Dancing Boss — Laura Sirvent made a charming little sequencer that dances to music you make (via) #

Jason Kottke on his shifting focus to covering the U.S. coup — it's hard to keep posting fun creative projects while your country is being gutted, but I'll keep going until I can't anymore #

botsbotsbots — a playful reverse Turing test to convince five bots, each powered by gpt-4o-mini, that you're not a human #

QR code that goes to two different sites, depending on the angle it’s scanned — details on how it works in the replies; see also: Guy Dupont's lenticular QR code that inspired it #

Subpixel Snake, the web’s smallest game — a Javascript Snake game that's so small, you need a microscope to play it #

TabBoo — add random jumpscares to sites you're trying to avoid #

Nepenthes — a tarpit intended to distract AI web crawlers with slowly-displaying pages of randomly-generated hyperlinked babble (via) #

textmode.art — make textmode art with layers of images, videos, webcams, shaders, and 3D models combined with effects #

trains.fyi — a live, real-time map of passenger trains in North America (via) #

Dragonsweeper — brilliant free Minesweeper-inspired roguelike by Daniel Benmergui (via) #

myFaveTT — Chrome extension to download your liked/faved TikTok videos and metadata locally as MP4s, with a static HTML interface for browsing them #

Wikenigma — an encyclopedia of "known unknowns," documenting gaps in human knowledge (via) #

Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban-or-sale law slated to start Sunday — violating the First Amendment right of free speech for millions of Americans under the specter of national security #

David Lynch, dead at 78 — "Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole." #

1Crossword — generate crossword puzzles from the passwords in your 1Password vault #

The Visible Zorker — Andrew Plotkin made a tool for exploring the original Zork's annotated source code and game state while you play #

NY Mag exposé on Neil Gaiman’s sexual abuse allegations — Lila Shapiro's new reporting following the podcast series that broke the story last year; CW: graphic descriptions of rape and assault #

Mastodon announces transition to non-profit ownership — meanwhile, Bluesky is raising millions more from Bain Capital less than three months after their $15 million Series A #

Dumb Trading — a dedicated site for the weirdly addictive stock-trading minigame from Neal.fun's Stimulation Clicker #

Casey Newton on Meta ending fact-checking and loosening limits on hateful speech — bending the knee to the incoming administration, the Hateful Conduct policy changes are incredibly disturbing #

Bauble — an open-source playground for making 3D art #

Instagram blocked teens from searching LGBTQ-related content for months — Taylor Lorenz reports that Meta reversed the restrictions after she reached out for comment #

Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money — if this 12 minute version isn't enough, there's an hour-long version compiling 2,800 clips from 206 videos #

The Truth About January 6th — on its fourth anniversary, Jason Kottke revisits the attempted coup and attack on Congress #

Elon Musk is not Adrian Dittman — even if you don't care about this conspiracy theory, Maia and Ryan's OSINT research is an interesting read #

Stimulation Clicker — Neal.fun's latest is an overstimulating idle game borrowing every form of online sludge and engagement bait (via) #

Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks — Maggie Appleton reflects on "the strange experience of growing a human from scratch" in her new visual essay #

DOOM: The Gallery Experience — sip wine, eat hors d’oeuvres, and peruse art from The Met's Open Access collection in a reimagined version of E1M1 (via) #

Happy Public Domain Day 2025! — books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s are now in the public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924 #

DOOM CAPTCHA — kill three monsters to prove you're human #

Joe Rogan and the Black Keys Diorama — the latest Bobby Fingers video is a wild ride of lost data, broken bones, and pitch-perfect parody #

Howtown lab-tests the Hot Ones sauces — all but one of the sauces' Scoville units are lower than their on-screen numbers, with Da Bomb 2.8 times hotter than The Last Dab #

Moon — another amazing Bartosz Ciechanowski interactive explainer, this time on the motion, phases, and gravitational effects of the Moon #

What happened to the world’s largest tube TV? — wild quest to rescue the last surviving Sony 43" CRT, tracked down from one of only two known photos of the 440-pound behemoth #