Satoshi Kon: The Lost Interview — Mark Slutsky interviewed the visionary director in 2007 about Paprika, published here in full for the first time #

Is Laufey jazz? — Adam Neely's fascinating breakdown of her musical influences, appeal to young audiences, and the modern state of jazz #

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival — open until Halloween, explore a spooky multiplayer world where a thousand ghosts have shared their pumpkin designs #

The Great Zelle Pool Scam — yet another Zelle horror story, this time with scammers hacking contractors' email accounts to solicit payments from their customers #

Control Panel for Twitter — browser add-on that reverses many of the most annoying changes under Musk, including yesterday's removal of link titles #

31 Days of Halloween — for the ninth year, Laura E. Hall's popup daily newsletter of spooky stuff is posting every day of October #

HONK — Cyriak made a new animation, his first in two years #

Rolling Stone’s oral history of School of Rock — charming inside story of making the movie from the cast and crew #

The Curse of Dialup World — inside story of a wildly mismanaged dialup ISP in the late '90s , the billing process alone made me scream (via) #

Songs That Stop on the Word “Stop” — Todd in the Shadows made a perfect supercut, over 30 minutes long! (via) #

Folding Ideas’ “This Is Financial Advice” — Dan Olson's new video essay is a 2.5-hour epic about the apocalyptic doomsday cult of GameStop short sellers #

Restoration Magic — love this channel pointlessly "restoring" used objects, from old pencils and dollar bills to crumpled paper and Coke cans #

Epic Games sells Bandcamp amid 16% workforce layoff — definitely worried about the future of the singular indie music platform, a lifeline for many artists #

On its 5th anniversary, Dropout drops the CollegeHumor brand — amazingly, they've managed to make a subscription streaming video business that's independent and sustainable (via) #

24 hours in the loneliness epidemic — The Pudding visualizes social isolation in a sample from the American Time Use Survey #

The new WGA contract will change how Hollywood works — raises, new limits on AI-generated content, transparency around streaming data, and a whole lot more #

Eternal September — from the creators of Incredible Doom, a new serialized comic about proto-blogging teens #

Wired on the cottage industry of YouTube obituary reading videos — these are embarrassingly low-quality, we're moments away from someone automating this with AI avatars flatly voicing them (via) #

404 Media on a viral TikTok account doxing random people with facial recognition for clout — unlike TikTokers using OSINT techniques to identify people with consent, all this takes is a $30 Pimeyes account and no ethics #

Conlextions — if NYT's Connections game is too easy for you, try all of Lex Friedman's devious puzzles instead #

The world’s oldest active torrent turns 20 this week — I'm seeding The Fanimatrix, so if you download it, you might get part of it from me #

There I Ruined It deepfakes Red Hot Chili Peppers — continuing their series of delightfully cursed AI remixes #

Legal Eagle on the copyright issues with reaction streamers — some of the most popular streamers are freeloading off other creators' videos with little original commentary for views and cash (via) #

Photographing NYC’s singular independent storefronts — James and Karla Murray have been photoblogging over on Blogspot for ten years this December #

Surviving and Dying in the Comics Industry — Heidi McDonald writes about Peepshow creator Joe Matt, who died suddenly this week from a heart attack at his writing desk #

Mastodon releases major improvements to search, onboarding, and more — finally, full-text searching posts from accounts who opt into indexing #

Sept 21 — that's today #

Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can’t — interesting look at all the ways scalpers win at presale lotteries, from specialized web browsers to black market verified accounts #

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth on being targeted by Trump and Musk — a strategic effort to erode the safety and integrity of online platforms, with employees bearing the brunt of the consequences #

10 Years of Emulation at the Internet Archive — The Emularity project became a ridiculous success, making vast collections of software and systems instantly available to millions in the browser #

How facial recognition apps are used to identify sex workers with little recourse — an excerpt from Kashmir Hill's new book investigating the invasive history of Clearview AI (via) #

The Tree In Our Backyard — Alexis Madrigal traces the history of an apple tree #

OpenAI announces DALL·E 3 — integrated into ChatGPT, it can handle more complex prompts and will decline generating images in a living artist's style #

Dream Scenario trailer — finally, a movie about the universal experience of having Nicolas Cage randomly appear in your dreams #

With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways — "be truthful, not neutral" (via) #

Well Wishes My Love, Your Love — like Kottke says, a unique animation style to match the unusual narrative #

Casey Newton on lessons learned in three years of running Platformer — essential reading for anyone interested in journalism #

Managing a game dev community with GitHub Actions — fascinating look at the devops infrastructure supporting A Little Game Called Mario, a Godot platformer anyone can contribute to #

A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials — Max Read sifts through the Wayback Machine to go back to 2011 with the launch of iMessage in iOS 5 #

The Rise of Tech, According to Sandra Bullock Movies — escape is impossible when you're caught in The Net (via) #

It’s Nice That talks to designers behind fictional brands for TV and film — worth it just for all the high-res fictional brand images made for Wes Anderson films and Barbie #

ramen.haus — like rotatingsandwiches.com for ramen (via) #

Elon Musk’s X continues to throttle links to competitors — shortened links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack wait an additional 2.5 seconds before redirecting (via) #

Spiral Town and Checkered Village — using the same technique as the Stable Diffusion QR codes, guiding ControlNet with black-and-white patterns can lead to amazing results #

The Artists and Cartoonists Who Designed Pee-wee Herman’s World — first of a two-part feature with never-before-seen sketches and photos from the artists' personal archives #

Boss Fight 3D Render Challenge — hypnotic montage of CG artistry with music by Disasterpeace, if you want more, the full video with all 2,880 entries is over 3.5 hours long (via) #

21st Century Roguelike Pac-Man — Pac-Man reinvented as a dungeon crawler with quests, crafting, mining, and of course, hats (via) #

URL Poetry Club — short poems composed mostly of creative domain names (via) #

Major publishers sue Libgen for “staggering” copyright infringement — the shadow library's operators are entirely anonymous so they're suing 50 John Does, "persons of unknown identity" #

River, a visual connection engine — Max Bittker made a CLIP-based image browser, similar to same.energy (via) #