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 #

Liz Pelly’s exposé on Spotify’s internal program to promote fake artists to minimize royalties to real ones — in other news, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is now richer than any musician, more than 4x Taylor Swift's net worth (via) #

Cat Graffam breaks the iPhone Notes app recreating a da Vinci painting — the app grew increasingly unstable, randomly drawing a black tire mark through the entire image on day four #

Anti-Tag Clouds — the most common English words that never appeared in a book, like "woman" in Winnie the Pooh or "difficult" in Moby Dick (via) #

Writing down (and searching through) every UUID — Nolen Royalty's postmortem of the challenges making EveryUUID.com #

Six hours under martial law in Seoul — Sarah Jeong was on vacation in South Korea (and pretty toasted) when their president declared martial law in a coup attempt #

The Verge adds a subscription — $50/year seems like a good deal for some of the best tech journalism around, plus full-text RSS feeds and a limited-edition print magazine #

Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters — a simple but tricky puzzle game to find a word that makes every picky eater happy #

The Verge on an Amazon influencer suing a rival for mimicking her vibes — Mia Sato talks to two women whose similar aesthetic was shaped by Amazon product options, social media algorithms, and other larger influencers (via) #

Crossword Calendar — Adam Aaronson made a printed calendar where each month is a crossword grid where each day is a square #

Toronto runner turns four months of Strava runs into a flipbook animation — the dedication and planning here is incredible #

Hundreds of Beavers, streaming free on YouTube in the U.S. — 97% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, this low-budget slapstick indie comedy is one of the best movies I saw this year #

Hank Green on populism, media revolutions, and our terrible moment — major media revolutions throughout history lead to predictable cycles of populism and the erosion of institutional trust #

Visualizing 13 million Bluesky users — if you're on a desktop Chrome/Chromium browser, go find yourself on the interactive map #

All I Want for Christmas Is Home Alone — I will never get tired of Bell Brothers transporting characters into different movies #

The Sound of Sorting — crank the delay up to 120ms, pick the Mountain shape, and try the Heap Sort for a real banger (via) #

Pi Plays Pokémon Sapphire — mapping 0-9 integers to button controls, it finally caught its first Pokémon in July after 80M digits of Pi and 973 days of nonstop play #

Erin Kissane pushes back on the dark forest theory of the internet — retreat into private spaces can't be the only option, ceding the public internet to predatory global mega-platforms #

Sill, find trending links from your Bluesky and Mastodon network — like Nuzzel was for Twitter and now out of private beta; I shared this too early and deleted it last week, sorry if you saw it twice! (via) #

The Long Context — author Steven Johnson used Gemini Pro to make an interactive fiction game out of his latest book and wrote about it (via) #

YTCH — YouTube as TV channels, click the book icon for a channel guide #

Memento Movi, A Cinematic Progress Bar for Life — enter your birthdate, estimated lifespan, and choose from over 500 movies to see where you're at in the movie (via) #

Find the Net Elevation of Dead People — calculating the difference between their birth and death place; George Mallory is high up there, but can you find the person with the greatest negative change? #

Foursquare open-sources its places database — 100M+ global places of interest now available for commercial use under an Apache 2.0 license #

Playdate Podcast: True Crime Edition — the full story of how two pallets of Playdates worth $400,000 were stolen in Las Vegas and eventually recovered #

Anil Dash on why you should quit Substack while you still can — every new feature they add increases lock-in, making it harder to leave while they court some of the worst people online (via) #

Pokémon Go players have unwittingly trained an AI model to navigate the world — Niantic leveraging its database of scanned real-world places and objects for "robotics, content creation and autonomous systems" #

IMG_0001 — inspired by Ben Wallace's recent blog post, Riley Walz crawled 5 million "IMG_XXXX" videos on YouTube and made a viewer for them #

The first virtual meeting was in 1916, linking 5,100 engineers across eight cities — Alexander Graham Bell kicked off the event with a few words (via) #

Bluesky Firehose 3D — someone needs to turn this into DOOM next (via) #

Half Life 2 turns 20 — like Half-Life's 25th anniversary, Valve commemorated it with a two-hour documentary, new commentary, and the games are free until Monday 1pm ET #

Consuming the Bluesky firehose for less than $2.50/month — don't miss Deletion, the "questionable little app" that lets you glimpse deleted Bluesky posts #

The Rise of the Golden Idol sets the standard for point-and-click mysteries — incredible standalone sequel for fans of detective deduction games like Obra Dinn #

Fake AI albums on Spotify are damaging real artists — Elizabeth Lopatto investigates streaming music distributors profiting off royalty fraud by not policing bad metadata #

Andrew Dana Hudson’s “Any Percent” — short sci-fi story about a speedrunner in a game that lets you play through a human lifetime in 25 minutes (via) #

IMG_0416 — crate digging through YouTube for homegrown videos with generic default filenames as titles; see also: astronaut.io (via) #

The Pudding analyzes 65 years of love songs on the Billboard charts — the love song may not be dying, but it's changing #

Tim Maughan’s “Not My Problem” — short fiction about "the near future of art and creative work" #

Sky Follower Bridge — useful Chrome/Firefox add-on that finds your X/Twitter friends on Bluesky (via) #

For the first time, every incumbent party in 10 major countries lost vote share this year — inflation was a painful global phenomenon, and every ruling party was punished for it regardless of political leanings #

Oasis, a playable real-time AI model trained on Minecraft video footage — anything out of frame is immediately forgotten, making it very dream-like and surreal to explore (via) #

NYT Tech Guild goes on strike the day before U.S. election — they're asking people not to access NYT games or cooking apps until it's over, so give up that Wordle streak #

Auto-Texting STOP to unknown numbers — I didn't even realize iOS automations could do this #

Infinite Mac adds native support for the Macintosh Garden — the incredible web-based Mac/NeXT system emulator somehow keeps getting better #

Over the Garden Wall’s 10th anniversary short — Aardman Animation worked with Patrick McHale and the original voice cast for an elaborate stop-motion tribute #

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 #