“I Kissed A Girl” to “Call Me By Your Name”
— Jan Diehm shares a story in The Pudding about hearing yourself represented with same-gender lyrics for the first time #NYT visualizes the intensely weird PNW heat wave
— from these charts, I learned that it’s really hot outside #GitHub Copilot
— powered by OpenAI, an evolution of AI code autocomplete tools like Tabnine and Codota #Don’t Piss Off Bradley, the Parts Seller Keeping Atari Machines Alive
— amusing story of one temperamental guy who cornered the market on Atari new-old stock via Caitlin Dewey #What the Robot Saw
— livestreamed “robot film” generated from YouTube’s least-viewed recently-uploaded videos #Court records show Britney Spears quietly tried to end her conservatorship for years
— for 13 years, her father’s controlled her life, including work, finances, and even forced birth control #Paul Rudd shows a clip on Conan, one last time
— when you’re done watching that, go find the Baby Geniuses fight scene on YouTube #A Eulogy for the Free Press in Hong Kong
— after 25 years, Apple Daily shuttered after 500 police raided its HQ, froze its assets, and arrested its founder and directors #The Chinese content farms behind Factory TikTok
— popular industrial channels aren’t factory workers documenting their labor, but largely cheap marketing for their employers #How Peter Thiel turned a Roth IRA into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank
— accounts designed to help working Americans save for retirement are being abused as tax loopholes for the ultra-rich #John McAfee found dead in Spanish prison
— hours after courts approved his extradition to the U.S. for criminal tax evasion #Joni Mitchell’s Blue turns 50
— the NYT spoke to 25 artists and writers about its influence; Joni released an EP of Blue outtakes/demos today #Alternate Realities
— 2,400 CG artists were challenged to render a base animation, here’s the top 100 in a single video via @meandmybadself #The Digital Antiquarian on the best of The Voyager Company
— Jimmy Maher digs through the vault of hard-to-emulate Apple CD-ROM multimedia #Associated Press will no longer name suspects in minor crimes
— search results can cause lasting damage even if charges were dropped via MetaFilter #NYT investigation into JFK8, Amazon’s massive NYC fulfillment center
— interviews with nearly 200 current and former employees reveal high turnover, inadvertent firings, and racial inequities #Discriminator
— brilliant interactive documentary about facial recognition algorithms trained on Flickr’s CC-licensed corpus #Jay-Z’s verse on Monster except he’s listing as many monsters as he can
— Uberduck.ai is a good tool for comedy via Garbage Day #The Shortcut
via @genmon #50 Years of Text Games on Curses
— the game and language that launched the modern interactive fiction scene #Wired on finding Satoshi, the final Perplex City ARG puzzle
— imagine searching for a puzzle for 14 years, knowing your partner held the answer the whole time #A Supercut of Supercuts
— this pushed me to put Supercut.org back online, frozen in time from 2015 via Kottke #Bo Burnham: Inside
— finally finished this and it’s very good, grappling with the pandemic, mental health, and the internet #ProPublica investigation into the tax avoidance strategies used by billionaires
— using anonymously-leaked tax documents for Musk, Bezos, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, and other ultra-wealthy Americans #Playdate Update
— full Season 1 game lineup, a delightful dock, a browser-based no-code game maker, and preorders start next month! #The Mystery of the $113 Million Deli
— Jesse Barron figures out the mystery of a New Jersey sandwich shop with a ridiculous valuation #9/11 and 1/6
— Yale history professor Timothy Snyder on the big lie, anti-voter laws, and the end of free U.S. elections via Kottke #Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid
— donate at least $5, get 1,000+ games including Minit, Calico, GNOG, Pikuniku, VVVVVV, Windosill, Luna, and Art Sqool #Skittish Hosts Its First Public Events
Last month, we reached a big milestone for Skittish, the playful virtual space for online events I’ve been working on over the last few months: we hosted our first big public events, including the delightful !!Con, New Relic’s FutureStack conference, the Flatpack Festival, and Future of the Browser, among others.
This was a bit of a marathon, allowing us to see how Skittish worked in the real world in a variety of different events, from film screenings and unconferences to livestreamed talks and dance parties. Throughout it all, we continually tweaked and tuned it every day, making changes and fixing issues as they came up.
The result was a huge wave of new features and development in May, which I wrote about over at the Skittish blog, along with a new feature article from TechCrunch and my FutureStack talk about it all. Go check it out!
This is likely the last big update before we start sending out invites to the announcement list and opening the doors to the public. If you’re interested, you can sign up at Skittish.com, subscribe to the news blog, or follow @SkittishHQ on Twitter and Instagram to follow along.