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) #
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) #
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) #
Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid
— donate at least $5, get 1,000+ games including Minit, Calico, GNOG, Pikuniku, VVVVVV, Windosill, Luna, and Art Sqool #
50 Years of Text Games on “Silverwolf”
— astounding story of the "Game Mistresses" of St. Bride’s School, who released eight full-length text adventures from 1985 to 1992 #
Polygon’s list of “stupid but absolutely genius” internet videos
— part of their Masterpieces of Streaming feature, including the best of Vine and video essays #
Four Laps
— Marcin Wichary's Ignite talk about looping videos, told as a live looping video; how it was made #
U.S. soldiers exposed nuclear weapons secrets via online flashcard apps
— found by, uh, searching Google #
Charlie Bit My Finger will stay online after NFT sale
— 3F Music decided not to take it offline after all #
We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End
— a companion piece to Zeynep Tufekci's NYT new op-ed urging world leaders to take action against new variants #
Dynamo Dream: Salad Mug
— Blender virtuoso Ian Hubert's absurdly detailed CG-rich short film about a salad vendor in a cyberpunk city (via) #
Invisible Roommates
— Nicole He and Eran Hilleli's delightful AR prototype imagining the secret lives of smart devices #
Motherboard’s exposé of Citizen’s dangerous effort to cash in on vigilantism
— remarkable reporting using internal documents, messages, and roadmaps #
The Pudding tries to get an AI to win New Yorker cartoon contest
— they prompt OpenAI's GPT-3 model with the cartoon description, you vote on the output #
Charlie Bit My Finger video sold as an NFT, will be deleted from YouTube
— bought by the same NFT whale who bought Disaster Girl, Overly Attached Girlfriend, and Kevin Roose's NYT article #
A Press Conference About What Happened To This Morning Where I Was Going To Get So Much Done
— yes, this morning got away from us (via) #
What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed
— reconstructing the Greenwood neighborhood from archival photos, insurance maps, city directories, Census data, and survivor accounts (via) #
Caught in the Study Web
— exploring the creative use of YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Twitter for studying, built for and by students #
Taylor Lorenz on Adrian’s Kickback
— a party invite went viral on TikTok, drawing thousands of teens and content creators to Huntington Beach #
The Battle of Sharks!
— CGP Grey digs into a London art group's hilarious battle with a city council #
Remain Seated Please
— short doc about two friends who illicitly explored every inch of the Horizons ride at Disney World #
NYT retrospective of the Space Jam website from 1996
— Gina Cherelus and Caity Weaver interviewed several of the people behind it #
Harvard Law School’s analysis of link rot in the New York Times
— 6% of deep links in NYT articles from 2018 are dead, 43% from 2008, and 72% from 1998. (via) #
River Runner
— follow a raindrop placed anywhere in the contiguous U.S. and see where it ends up (via) #
Beware the Copyleft Trolls
— photographers using Creative Commons and the courts "as a blunt object with which to coerce nuisance value settlements from unsuspecting parties" #
Ed Yong on the aftermath of America’s pandemic trauma
— anxiety, grief, and psychic numbing from a self-reinforcing disaster #
The Linda Lindas play the L.A. Public Library
— their song "Racist Sexist Boy" is blowing up on Twitter, but the whole set's great (via) #
Were microwaves invented to thaw cryogenically frozen hamsters in the 1950s?
— yet another brilliant Tom Scott video (via) #
Fansubbing BookStory
— collaboratively translating Kairosoft's used bookstore simulator after 24 years (via) #
Determining the time of a photo by measuring its shadows
— if you know the location/date and have a clear, straight shot, you can estimate within 30 minutes #
Preserving Worlds
— a "documentary travelogue through aging but beloved virtual worlds," interviewing people trying to preserve them (via) #