3D Workers Island
— short horror story in the form of a series of 1999-era screenshots about a Windows screensaver simulating life on an island (via) #
Moida Mansion
— Papers Please/Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope dropped a surprise spooky free web game inspired by 1980s LCD handhelds #
Cruftbox’s Halloween 2024 costume data
— for the last 19 years, Michael Pusateri has tracked children's Halloween costumes at his front door and published the stats online #
Panic announces Playdate season 2 coming next year
— a dozen surprise new games released to everyone at the same time on a regular schedule #
PacCam, play multiplayer Pac-Man with your face
— look in the direction you want to move, open and close your mouth to go faster #
BLIB’s “Silent Love”
— Louie Zong, Worthikids, and Brian David Gilbert formed a supergroup making Steely Dan-inspired music and are playing L.A. next month!? #
When does Instagram decide a nipple becomes female?
— Ada Ada Ada is documenting her transition on Instagram, uploading shirtless photos weekly to test their nudity guidelines #
Graham Nash breaks down “Our House” for Song Exploder
— he has an extraordinary memory, reliving the stories behind a beautifully simple song #
Google is getting even worse for independent sites
— grateful to Mia Sato for staying on this beat, which affects so many smaller sites I care about #
Nintendo Alarmo can run custom code via USB without opening it up
— getting it to run DOOM is only a matter of time #
The RIP Off
— BRAIN scraped 16 years of Twitter to find the first people to post "RIP" when celebrities died, turning it into a morbid competition #
Boing Boing launches ad-free paid version on Substack, shuttering discussion forums
— the BBS goes read-only on Friday, replaced by Substack comments, and the community is not happy #
Ghost founder/CEO John O’Nolan on how they’re structured and funded
— a useful case study given the current debacle stemming from WordPress's "benevolent dictator for life" model (via) #
Anti-government militias using Facebook to recruit and organize in plain sight
— in some cases, Meta is automatically creating the pages (via) #
Vanishing Culture, the Internet Archive’s “Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record”
— research and short essays about cultural loss and the critical importance of preservation and access #
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
— The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel's clearheaded "endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and Kamala Harris" #
The Pudding’s interactive explainer on Crokinole
— like curling meets shuffleboard on a tabletop board #
This Must Be The Place lyric tattoos
— Liverpool tattoo artist Rachel Baldwin made charming tattoos for each line of the Talking Heads classic and made it into a music video #
2004 Week on The Verge
— a series of articles looking back 20 years, worth exploring just for the playful article design inspired by early Gmail, Digg, Kazaa, and more #
Cabel Sasser’s XOXO 2024 talk
— all of this year's XOXO talks were stellar, but this is the only one that comes with a newly-launched archive of nearly-lost artwork #
Aftermath’s list of discussion forums
— Chris Person compiled a list of active forums, grouped by subject area, hosted outside of the major platforms (via) #
Dookie Demastered
— Green Day collaborated with BRAIN to demake their 1994 album in 15 obscure formats, including Game Boy, Teddy Ruxpin, wax cylinder, and player piano roll #
Scripting News turns 30
— there's a nice companion piece for Dave Winer's milestone in The Guardian #
Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival
— the creator of A Short Hike relaunched his charming interactive ghost town where players design and share jack-o-lanterns #
31 Days of Halloween
— for the tenth year, Laura E. Hall brings back her popup newsletter sending a gently spooky email for each day of October #
Bop Spotter
— an Android phone hidden in the Mission is set to Shazam all audio 24/7 and post the roughly 120 songs/day it can identify #
Rest of World’s Digital Divinity
— feature package on new ways religious believers are using new technology, from Muslim VR simulators to Buddhist monks on TikTok #
Guided by Vices
— Nick Heer on the ever-increasing user-hostile demand for your attention from the biggest social platforms #
Making 8-bit music from scratch at the Commodore 64 BASIC prompt
— Linus Åkesson just casually being amazing again #
DOOM in the iOS Photos app
— a technically-playable (but just barely) hack using iOS Shortcuts to download remote screenshots compiled into videos #
The data on extreme human ageing is flawed
— most "blue zones," concentrated areas of supercentenarians, can be attributed to pension fraud or bad record-keeping #
all text in nyc
— a search engine using OCRed text from map imagery across Brooklyn, expanding to all of NYC soon (via) #
How to Monetize a Blog
— you'll just have to trust me on this one; recommended for desktop browsers (via) #
Cohost to shut down at the end of the year
— very sad to hear this but I'm grateful for their effort, and loved having them at XOXO to talk about their weird and special community #
Celebrity Number Six was found
— the low-stakes internet mystery to identify the only unknown celebrity on a shower curtain pattern is solved after four years #
The Bumpin’ Sticker
— Guy Dupont made a "Keep Honking! I'm Listening to…" bumper sticker-sized LCD display that updates in real-time #
404 Media on the anarchist collective teaching people to DIY expensive medicine
— the course of medication that cures Hepatitis C costs $84,000 at $1,000/pill, but can be produced for only $700 or $0.83/pill #
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick on the Internet Archive decision
— the ruling is "a knife in the back of libraries," claiming that authors won't write new books if libraries lend digital books for free #
Internet Archive loses its appeal against book publishers
— the appeals court ruled that, despite being a nonprofit and no evidence of market harm, its implementation of Controlled Digital Lending isn't fair use #
Song Pong
— open-source music visualizer that synchronizes MIDI to bouncing balls in a modified game of Pong (via) #
The rise and fall of OpenSea
— the SEC notified them last week that NFTs on the struggling platform are unregistered securities #
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
— 1994 replica of a printed circuit board handmade on an upright wooden loom (via) #
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
— Nolen Royalty tells the story of how a group of teens were writing secret binary messages on the Tiny Award-winning multiplayer experiment #
Shutterbug
— free desktop-only browser game where you photograph bugs by resizing and moving the browser window (via) #
Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From
— Facebook is paying bonuses for viral content, no matter how terrible, while laying off the content moderators who can prevent it #
One Million Screenshots
— a zoomable explorable rendering of 1M+ homepage screenshots, updated monthly (via) #