A year of new avenues
— Robin Sloan pens a call to arms for online experimentation and invention in 2023 #
Animated timeline of most popular social networks from 2003-2022
— ballpark estimate of monthly active users over time #
Level, a clever one-screen puzzle game
— the first day of this year's Confounding Calendar, an advent calendar of tiny puzzle games #
Polygon reviews Dwarf Fortress’ graphical update, out now
— one of the most complex games ever made is more approachable, without sacrificing depth or difficulty #
Building a virtual machine inside ChatGPT
— hallucinating fake virtual machines inside fake virtual machines on fictional internets #
Inventing a new language with ChatGPT
— a progressively wild case study making a fictional language for slime people #
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI model
— free to play with, it can "answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests" #
mindmelt.party
— "real-time hallucinatory music visualizer and networked culture explorer" from Nullsleep and friends (via) #
Vanity Fair interviews Billie Eilish for the sixth year
— this will be her last annual video for a while, she plans to keep recording them but stagger the releases (via) #
Movetodon, find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
— new tool with a streamlined UI; I'm [email protected], if you want to join me #
Why Japanese web design looks different from the rest of the world
— don't miss Sabrina's accompanying article and resources #
The Barnacle Goose Experiment
— Everest Pipkin's latest is an "abiogenesis body horror idle clicker" (via) #
Marine Beaufils’ videogame needlepoint
— especially love the series inspired by The Sentinel (via) #
Stable Diffusion 2.0 released
— trained from their new OpenCLIP encoder, with higher resolution, a 4x upscaler, and a new depth-guided img2img model #
Defunctland’s documentary on who wrote the Disney Channel theme
— Kevin Perjurer solves a mystery with impeccable production values and a meditation on legacy #
Meta made an AI that can win at Diplomacy
— building extremely persuasive AIs that are more effective negotiators than humans, what could go wrong #
Taylor Lorenz interviews @Dril
— a rare interview, showing his willingness to commit to the bit until the cleansing fire burns it all down #
Can AI generate the perfect Thanksgiving?
— Priya Krishna makes GPT-3 generated recipes and it goes about as well as you'd expect (via) #
ooh! directory
— Phil Gyford made a wonderful categorized directory of 852 (and growing!) active blogs #
Interactive Fiction Competition 2022 winners announced
— 70% of the top 20 are choice-based instead of parser-based, continuing the trend of the last few years (via) #
Corridor Crew on neural radiance fields and the future of 3D scanning for video
— NeRFs are neural networks that can generate complex 3D scenes from 2D photos (via) #
Tim Molloy’s production stills for TV shows that never existed
— profoundly weird generations made with Midjourney v4 #
Ask My Book
— Sahil Lavingia made an experiment where you talk to a vocalized AI of him about his book #
The Verge’s deep dive into the murky waters of copyright and fair use in AI
— I talked to the reporter for this piece, which does a good job covering some of the complex questions around legality #
Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration
— multiplayer Discord game tasking you with finding objects in the multiverse with an AI image generator #
Mastodon’s Eternal September begins
— thoughtful post on the different cultural norms and expectations between Twitter and Mastodon #
Tumblr launches Important Blue Internet Checkmarks
— a real steal at two for $7.99, with up to 24 per user #
Inside the Twitter meltdown
— Platformer reports on Elon Musk's ongoing self-inflicted train wreck #
Abortion Bus
— fundraiser livestream of a Desert Bus-esque simulation of the 23-hour drive South Texans need to make to get an abortion #
The Infinite Conversation
— an AI-generated never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹľek; more details on Hacker News #
Josh Millard finishes his grandfather’s stained glass project
— I followed every step of this as he documented it on Twitter since learning about it in 2019 #
AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community
— very relevant to my new post #
Diana Smith’s pure HTML/CSS Varga-style pinup
— inspect the source for some comedy, and be sure to try it in older browsers #
Welcome to hell, Elon
— Nilay Patel points out the obvious and inevitable conflict between Elon's dreams and Twitter's reality #
Matt Levine’s The Crypto Story
— for the second time, following Paul Ford's "What Is Code?" in 2015, Businessweek devoted an entire issue to one 40,000 word article #
The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater
— wild update to Brian Feldman's article I linked to in July, a story of false memories and local folklore #
DiscMaster
— browse and search Archive.org's massive collection of 11 terabytes of vintage files, mostly from 7k CD-ROM compilations #
Stayin’ Alive, performed by a werewolf
— Bee Dee Gee's Hee Bee Bee Gees is Brian David Gilbert's followup to AAAH!BBA, his Halloween-themed ABBA cover album #
The Commodordion
— Linus Ă…kesson made an 8-bit accordion out of two C64s and a bellows made of floppies #
William Shatner writes about going to space
— "My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral." #
“Through the Fire and Flames” in Trombone Champ
— by law, DragonForce must be in every rhythm game ever made (via) #