Beto O’Rourke was in Cult of the Dead Cow — writing gems like this under the handle “Psychedelic Warlord”

The Christchurch attack was made to go viral — Charlie Warzel writing for the NYT

Spotify files antitrust complaint against Apple — they make a strong case

Baba Is You — the IGF-winning puzzle game is out today for PC/Mac/Switch, and it’s stunning

Chart Party’s search for the saddest punt — somehow, against all odds, Jon Bois finds a way to make me interested in football

This Person Does Not Exist — reload for a new GAN-generated face; see also: This AirBNB Does Not Exist (via)

Endless Jeopardy — a new Twitter bot/game from Neil Cicierega

Netflix launches new podcast with Another Round’s Tracy Clayton — Strong Black Legends is an instant subscribe

Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company — remarkably unusual story of how Gumroad’s founder turned a VC-funded startup into a “lifestyle” business (via)

Holly Wood’s mega-thread of anonymous dirty secrets in various professions — fascinating to see people spilling dirt about their respective industries (via)

Simone Giertz’ brain tumor is back — Burn Brian 2019

Guess the most expensive domain name — I’m disturbingly good at this (via)

Bird Scooters threatens Boing Boing over Cory Doctorow post — laughable legal claim, with a great response from the EFF

The oral history of the Hampsterdance — a wild story of copyright, remix, and early web culture (via)

In A Nutshell — stunning stop-motion reminiscent of PES’s work (via)

The meta-meme history of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing video — from a Phoenix remix and Larry Lessig lawsuit to a failed smear of a badass Congresswoman

2019 Independent Games Festival finalists announced — as always, great selection of the best of the new and upcoming indie game scene

Scratch 3.0 released — extensions as building blocks, an offline editor, and new tutorials

Meditations — 365 small games, each only available to play for a single day

365 RFCs — Darius Kazemi’s new year-long project to blog one RFC daily in chronological order

Happy Public Domain Day! — published works from 1923 entered the public domain today, the first additions in over 20 years

Lauren Hough’s compelling account of a decade doing cable repair in D.C. — sex dungeons, Russian mobsters, and Dick Cheney

Analyzing the phonetics of Grover swearing on Sesame Street — step-by-step breakdown of how two very different phrases can sound similar (via)

Very Slow Movie Player — watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on a custom ePaper display at 24 frames per hour (via)

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? — Max Read on “the Inversion,” the point when fake traffic is perceived as real by algorithms

Some images Joe Veix saved to his laptop in 2018 — this is an excellent use of Medium, and also, I want to subscribe to this newsletter please

Infinite Gift — the final day of Christmas XP, the WebGL advent calendar

Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES — Frank Cifaldi’s in-depth writeup on the unreleased prototype, with downloadable ROM (via)

Turtletoy — make generative art using the Turtle graphics API

Every Mickey — combining every 3D model of Mickey Mouse found online into a single physical object

Happy Shopper — from Christmas XP, a WebGL advent calendar (via)

StyleGAN — applying style transfer techniques to adversarial networks for better control over generated imagery (via)

Dimensions.Guide — database of dimensioned drawings (via)

Soup-Salad-Sandwich Space — related: The Cube Rule of Food Identification

Cabel Sasser’s screenshots of Xbox Live’s former support forum — hard to imagine any major platform handling moderation this publicly again

Archive Team’s race to preserve 700,000 Tumblrs before Monday — Tumblr isn’t just deleting porn, but anything their bot thinks is “adult”; follow along and help here

Reply All on Foxconn’s plant in a small Wisconsin town — incredible reporting by Sruthi Pinnamaneni; more on The Verge

AI Art Gallery — visual art, music, and design made with machine learning, curated by Luba Elliott

Pixar releases Bao animated short — weirdly, only on Twitter

Looky What We Made — a 76-page book of interesting projects from the Glitch community (via)

Choir — from David Li, who made Elastic Man, Fluid Paint, and Character Soup

Searching the Creative Internet — “you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy” (via)

Cragne Manor — for the 20th anniversary of Anchorhead, over 80 authors made one room in a huge interactive fiction game (via)

NYT Interactive on apps that track and share detailed location data — sold to advertisers, retail outlets, and anyone else seeking insights about consumer behavior

CastlevaniaBot — teaching a bot how to play Castlevania without machine learning (via)

Google “turning down” Fusion Tables next year — turn down for what?

Population Mountains — Matt Daniels’ stunning visualization of world population for The Pudding

Patreon de-platforms Gamergate heroes Milo and Sargon — if you’re not familiar with Sargon, here’s a good rundown

How to recognize fake AI-generated images — Kyle McDonald teaches a valuable skill for the near-future

BetamaXMas turns 10 years old today — an internet Christmas classic