January 5, 2015
The Year in Kickstarter 2014
— in its fifth year, continuing to seriously impact culture; dig into the numbers #
The First Bad Man Store
— Miranda July promotes her debut novel by auctioning items mentioned in it #
If Only Once, If Only For A Little While
— "a comic about loss, coping, and the ways we deal with grief" #
Yahoo directory shuttered five days early
— sad end to the index that opened my eyes to the wonder of the web #
Laurie Penny on nerd entitlement
— the difference between nerd bullying and structural oppression (via) #
Solving the Holiday Bullshit 2014 puzzle
— massive group effort to open a safe located on a Hawaii 2 #
Eric Meyer on Facebook's inadvertent algorithmic cruelty
— their Year in Review app is a source of misery for several friends this year; don't miss his followup #
Supercut of Darlene Love on Letterman
— 28 years of Letterman performances, her final appearance was last week #
Who invented the fake Ayn Rand film review?
— I wrote a thing on plagiarism, comedy, and multiple discovery #
Brandon Boyer's 20 Games You Shouldn't Miss in 2014
— every game I've played here has been gold, and the ones I haven't are high on my to-try list #
Sam Biddle on stirring and receiving Internet outrage
— a rite of passage for every outgoing Valleywag editor, until Gawker stops funding their miserable behavior #
The Awl on Shitpics
— the artifacts of any media format define its aesthetic like a cultural permalink #
Max Temkin on the logistics of Cards Against Humanity's Black Friday Bullshit
— the scratch-and-sniff poop button is an especially nice touch #
NYT Mag on Yahoo under Marissa Mayer
— worth reading if only for the "Bobbie Had a Nickel" anecdote #
The Nib's The Year in Garbage 2014
— so many of these are related to our ever-increasing interconnectedness #
Decade-specific words in Billboard popular song titles, 1890-2014
— uses the pop spreadsheet from the Whitburn Project #
The Old Pirate Bay
— IsoHunt archived TPB for posterity after its seizure; Peter Sunde's thoughts on the closure #
Computers in Crisis
— Perry Chen's archive of Y2K books and materials, presented at the New Museum this Friday #
Playing With My Son
— before I let Eliot play any modern games, we worked our way through 25 years of gaming history first #
Casey Johnston on the vanishing Comp Sci classroom
— she's been smacking down mansplainers on Twitter #
WNYC analyzes NYC police data to spot problem-prone officers
— should probably factor in percentage of all arrests, since the dataset might include desk jobs #
Deb Chachra on the 25th anniversary of the École Polytechnique Massacre
— "I don't think being a woman in technology is worth dying for, but I learned early that some men think it's worth killing for." #