Adam Savage tours the prop house that makes Hollywood’s printed products
— The Earl Hayes Press has printed fake newspapers, magazines, product labels, and more for films and TV shows since 1918 (via) #
New Word Order
— addictive little web game to try to put words/phrases in the order they first appeared (via) #
The Life and Death of an Internet Onion
— "a perennial website about the possibility of love online" only accessible for five weeks, the shelf life of an onion (via) #
Casey Newton on how the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk
— "Lawmakers are quickly advancing an anti-sex, anti-speech agenda in which every adult user of the internet could soon find themself entangled." #
Paul Reubens Never Got the Critical Reappraisal He Deserved
— if Pee-Wee's Playhouse came out today, it'd be maligned by conservatives for its playful diversity and queerness #
It’s So Over/We’re So Back
— Max Read on the bullwhip effect applied to sentiment on social media, wildly swinging with every new update about the room-temp superconductor #
AI Concerts remixes songs with deepfake AI cartoon voices
— every one of these is gold, from Squidward covering Creep to Gary the Snail covering Landslide #
Catching up on the weird world of LLMs
— Simon Willison gave an approachable and interesting talk that covers "the last few years of LLM developments in 35 minutes" #
Infinite Mac adds CD-ROM Library, external discs, and custom instances
— just start any version and click the tab at the bottom of the screen #
EXP TV
— launched in 2020, a 24/7 "endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera" a la Everything Is Terrible! #
Anita Sarkeesian closing Feminist Frequency after 15 years
— a powerful force in raising awareness of systemic sexism and harassment in the games industry #
Paul Reubens dies at 70 after private bout of cancer
— Pee Wee Herman brought so much joy into the world #
NYT profiles Keita Takahashi, 20 years after Katamari Damacy
— everything he's made since then is great too, I especially loved Crankin's Time Travel Adventure for Playdate (via) #
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t
— Erin Kissane surveyed people on Bluesky who bounced off Mastodon and her write-up is excellent #
Arcade collector rescues a roadside Discs of Tron
— imagine keeping a pristine arcade game in your garage for decades and then just dumping it with the weekly garbage (via) #
The little search engine that couldn’t
— The Verge profiles Neeva, a well-funded startup that tried and failed to take on Google (via) #
Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
— excellent plain-language primer on how transformer-based LLMs like ChatGPT work #
Arc browser for Mac now available publicly
— I have friends that swear by it, but I found it too hard to get used to #
I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!)
— the misunderstood history of the Luddite movement and what they can teach us about resisting an automated future (via) #
Attenzione, Pickpocket!
— the NYT profiles the woman going viral on TikTok for outing pickpockets on the streets of Venice #
Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web
— Apple shipped attestation in Safari last year, but Chromium-based browsers are ~70% of the internet usage #
The World’s Last Internet Cafes
— Rest of World visits some of the last remaining cafes in Uganda, Nepal, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, and Hong Kong #
A brief tour of South Pole Station through signage
— brr.fyi continues their wonderful documentation of "routine, mundane activities and infrastructure in extraordinary contexts" #
Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of Warcraft
— "Time is a flat circle, and so is self-referential AI-generated content." #
Nikolas Bentel makes wallets that look like Mac/Windows folders
— my brain won't accept these are physical objects (via) #
identiFIVE
— incredibly annoying daily puzzle, try to find the only five-letter word in a 9x9 grid of letters (via) #
Geoguessr expert Rainbolt shows how he geolocates a photo in minutes
— he uses Overpass Turbo to search OpenStreetMap data; related: Bellingcat's powerful OSM Search Tool #
Human Shader
— over 1,500 people have manually calculated RGB values to collectively make a shader with human brain power #
Reddit brought back r/Place and it’s going as well as expected
— as of this moment, a good chunk of the pixel art canvas is devoted to messages urging the CEO to fuck himself #
Quiznos brings the Spongmonkeys back
— resurrecting an unhinged 2003 meme from b3ta is the least confusing thing about this campaign #
The Pudding’s analysis of hit songwriters by gender over the last 64 years
— only three top 5 hits in the last decade were written entirely by women, and one of those was Kate Bush #
TechCrunch writer tries to buy a post on TechCrunch from Fiverr SEO scammers
— doctored screenshots, Telegram impersonation, and organized crime #
Aaron A. Reed on the short life of 1980s type-in computer game books
— the book acts as a guide to the adventure game, which you have to tediously type by hand #
How School Board Meetings Became Flashpoints for Anger and Chaos Across the Country
— ProPublica analyzed 60 incidents that led to arrests or charges as part of their ongoing Chaos at the School Board series #
Applying high voltage to kids’ toys
— there's a second part with Psyduck, Thomas the Tank Engine, and friends (via) #
Meta’s Threads Could Make—or Break—the Fediverse
— it's still unknown what Threads' ActivityPub implementation will look like, which will determine its impact #
Otamatone cover of Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life”
— from the harmonies to the Gudetama rap verse, this is just perfect (via) #
Vole.wtf’s Big Ben
— a new game from Matt Round with a unique word puzzle for every second of the day #
ooooooooo.ooo
— searchable frontend to the Flashpoint preservation project, archiving 145,000 Flash games playable with the Ruffle emulator (via) #
Storehouse-A
— from 2021 but new to me, a Nethack/Rogue-inspired virtual exhibition of interactive visual poetry #
West of House, a Zork-inspired cross-stitch
— made with glow-in-the-dark thread, you can buy the pattern on Gumroad #