Links Archives – Waxy.org

November 27, 2020

Banners Begone! — clicker games are my Kryptonite, transparently manipulative but I still succumb #

David Lu spent 11 years making a Line Rider track — in the process, he rebuilt Line Rider using modern web standards to fix its bugs, which became the official version #

Correlating Covid-19 cases and negative reviews of scented candles — people who lost their sense of smell and haven't realized it yet #

NYT investigation into Coinbase’s treatment of Black employees — nearly all the company's Black employees left a year and a half ago, before their "no politics" stance last month led to another exodus #

Strong Bad Emails on the Internet Archive — all the interactive easter eggs will now be preserved thanks to Flash emulation (via) #

November 25, 2020

Every Movie Cough — and some sneezes too #

Mixtape for the Milky Way’s “Video Games” — touching music video with papercraft recreations of games from Pong to Gris (via) #

Talkin’ Strong Bad — makes a great holiday gift, along with Trogdor!! The Board Game #

Cursor*10 — over a decade later, this short Flash game now emulated with Ruffle is still perfect #

The Secrets of Monkey Island’s Source Code — unused art, assets, and deleted scenes found spelunking through the source #

If you own an Echo/Ring device, you should opt out of Amazon Sidewalk ASAP — the service automatically opts you into sharing your bandwidth with randos #

Redditor finds the mysterious Utah monolith — using the rock type, color, and shape, texture of the canyon floor, and flight paths #

Twitch plays the NYT Crossword — chill collaborative gameplay, for now #

Four Seasons Total Landscaping and Fantasy Island Adult Books in miniature — stunning work from artist Tracey Snelling #

Why I’m Mourning the Arecibo Telescope — a good time to watch Tom Scott's visit to Arecibo from 2017 #

YouTube temporarily demonetizes OANN and suspends uploads for a week — why now? they've posted thousands of videos filled with harmful disinformation for years #

Pop Culture C-SPAN — David Friedman mines the C-SPAN archives for cultural references in government hearings #

lofi hip hop radio beats to relax/study on a Sony Watchman — aesthetic #

Salesforce may buy Slack — if it happens, it'll be one of the top 10 largest tech acquisitions ever #

Laura Hudson reads Ready Player Two — lowlights from the sequel #

November 24, 2020

Email A Dumpster Fire — send an email and watch it printed and burned in a live stream #

Gone with a Flash — Paolo Pedercini talks about his game design work in the context of Flash's life, death, and surprising afterlife #

Maskalike — incredibly disturbing face masks of your own face, now available for $30 (via) #

NYT report on internal Facebook battle over safeguards to limit hate speech and misinformation — despite employee protests, they won't add measures that lower engagement or disproportionately impact right-wing outlets #

November 23, 2020

Connection Interrupted — stunning surrealist datamoshing videos #

Sherwin-Williams fired their employee who went viral for his paint-mixing TikTok videos — good job firing your most enthusiastic staff member #

Booting DOS from a vinyl record — 64k bootloader stored in 6 minutes and 10 seconds of audio on a 10" record #

Algorithmic Trap — uniquely-generated copyright-free beats made with SuperCollider #

Hunter Walk on the multi-SKU creator — most indies are cobbling together their income from multiple sources and platforms #

Infinite Bad Guy — thousands of Billie Eilish covers on YouTube aligned to the quarter-beats of the original with machine learning #

November 20, 2020

TikTok Mansions Are Publicly Traded Now — a company running hospitals and healthcare services in China made a bizarre pivot into influencer content houses #

The Substackerati — their hands-off approach to community moderation smacks of Twitter and Reddit circa 2010 #

Pitchfork talks to Shameika Stepney, the inspiration for Fiona Apple on Fetch the Bolt Cutters — a magical story of childhood schoolmates reunited through music #

Emulating the unreleased Sega VR headset — modifying the source for an unreleased game for the Sega Genesis add-on to get it running on modern VR hardware #

Why is an obscure Pavement B-side their top song on Spotify? — autoplaying recommendations created unexpected hits out of algorithmically-similar songs #

The Max Headroom Incident — Criminal digs into the 33-year-old unsolved mystery of pirate television #

The Markup’s Simple Search — Chrome/Firefox add-on spotlights Google's web search results instead of their own info boxes #

The Pudding looks at representation in crossword puzzle clues — USA Today's crossword editor is pushing for more modern and inclusive puzzle design #

November 19, 2020

BuzzFeed acquires HuffPost — Jonah Peretti cofounded the Huffington Post, but they've always been separate companies #

Internet Archive begins archiving and emulating Flash games and animations — anticipating Flash's EOL next month with a growing archive emulated with Ruffle #

Disney Must Pay Alan Dean Foster — they seem to think they no longer need to pay royalties on acquired works (via) #

YouTube to run ads on non-partner videos — if you've opted out of monetization or don't yet qualify for the partner program, you're out of luck #

Gumroad introduces Memberships — very competitive with Patreon, with lower fees and more flexibility with your own domain and branding #

How to Tell Social Media Apps Apart — my interest in ephemeral tweets is already fleeting (via) #

Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy — "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work." #

Locast — nonprofit streaming over-the-air broadcast TV, currently fighting for its life in court with the EFF's help (via) #

I should have loved biology — so much of science is astonishing, but rarely taught in a way that conveys it (via) #

Runway launches Green Screen — browser-based real-time video rotoscoping with machine learning (via) #

Google to finally end preferential treatment of AMP stories for publishers — for years, the requirement for news sites to use AMP to appear in top stories was a flagrant example of their monopoly power #

Taylor Lorenz on Zillow surfing — a voyeuristic, aspirational, and escapist internet hobby, "the opposite of doomscrolling" #