Absorber — weirdly addictive idle game where you absorb the powers of the enemies you kill #

How Did Vanilla Become a Byword for Blandness? — blame it on cheap artificial vanillin, which became the default flavor for ice cream across the U.S. (via) #

Kagi Small Web — another reason to love Kagi is their effort to promote blogs and other smaller independent websites #

AI emoji generator — the cursed thumbs up/down icons are a nice touch #

Postmarks — Casey Kolderup made a single-user bookmark sharing app with ActivityPub support that's easily hosted on Glitch #

Wavacity — Audacity ported to the browser #

Teaser trailer for The Boy and the Heron — Miyazaki’s first film in ten years, and reportedly his last, will be out on December 8 in the U.S. #

DJ Phonetic — make beats with drum sounds found in phonemes from audio clips of public-domain historical speeches (via) #

Mr. Platformer — VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh's latest is a free Pitfall-esque platformer that quickly turns masocore #

Endless Thread finds the previously-unknown illustrator for A Wrinkle In Time’s cover art — picking up the phone and pulling every thread to solve a mystery (via) #

Badger Badger Badger Turns 20 — Jonti Picking celebrated with a new video #

Dungeons & Dragons on Death Row — heartbreaking story of how a group of Texas prisoners awaiting execution found escape and therapy in role-playing #

EXPI by @p01 — astounding graphic demo in 1024 bytes of Javascript, it won the Assembly 2023 1kb compo (via) #

The Glitch Gallery — an online exhibition of pretty software bugs, submit your own (via) #

You Say Potato, I Say Fuck You — how have I never seen this 17-year-old crowdsourced collection of 2,500+ photos of anthropomorphic objects (via) #

Cliquart — Philippe Caron's generative art experiments, each following a set of simple instructions reminiscent of Sol Lewitt's wall drawings (via) #

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge — Tyler Vigen investigates the existence of a seemingly-useless pedestrian bridge to a satisfying conclusion (via) #

Searching for Maura, an investigative journalism graphic novella — uncovering the death of an Indigenous Filipino woman recruited for the 1904 World's Fair, her brain stolen by a racist scientist at the Smithsonian (via) #

Singapore in Colour — finding the unique palettes of a neighborhood by analyzing colors in photos (via) #

a clock where the time is mentioned on YouTube — the latest in Russell Samora's series of data clocks for The Pudding (via) #

Utopia Clicker — Darius Kazemi made a clicker game #

The end of the Googleverse — Ryan Broderick interviewed me and a bunch of others about the decline of Google's usefulness for The Verge #

Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee — on the hypocrisy of big tech liberally scraping the web for AI, while legally blocking scraping from their own platforms #

Rewriting wipEout from leaked source — the PSX classic now runs at about 3,000 fps in the browser on my aging laptop #

Nikita Diakur’s avatar learns to backflip — bizarre and delightful short film about overcoming a fear with machine learning (via) #

Internet Archive’s Manuals Showcase — Jason Scott curated a selection of unusual manuals from their library of nearly three million (via) #

Threads launches on the web — not at feature parity with the mobile app, but a good start #

Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale — 404 Media investigates the people and platforms profiting off AI generative porn, including non-consensual depictions of specific women #

404 Media launches — four of my favorite Motherboard journalists started a new indie media company and it's already great, I subscribed instantly #

Thank Goodness You’re Here! — teaser trailer for the latest Panic-published game, which looks extremely silly and good #

South Pole Electrical Infrastructure — the anonymous writer behind Brr.fyi shares how power generation and distribution works at South Pole Station #

Internet Archive will remove publishers’ commercially-available titles from online lending program — print-only and out-of-print books will remain available, but this is still a huge loss #

Good Tape — free secure audio transcription, up to three 90-minute recordings per month or pay for more features #

a clock where the time is in a song title — The Pudding's Russell Samora made a clock that plays 8,968 songs from Spotify based on your local time #

Two grad students unravel a widely believed math conjecture — clear explanation of Apollonian circle packing and disproving the local-global conjecture (via) #

Little Rat — Chrome extension that monitors and optionally blocks other extensions' network calls #

TextFX — Google Labs collaborated with Lupe Fiasco on a series of LLM-based tools for exploring text and language (via) #

The unusual success of the harpejji, a hybrid guitar/piano/harp invented in 2007 — you have to hear this thing in action to appreciate it, try searching YouTube for harpejji songs (via) #

This London cookbook store tests recipes by cooking for customers — the French chef/owner makes three-course set lunches from recipes found in the books they sell #

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule — Ronan Farrow reports on the U.S. government's unpredictable and dangerous reliance on Musk and his companies #

Clone-a Lisa — paint a terrible forgery of the Mona Lisa in 60 seconds; my high score is 75% #

Record labels hit Internet Archive with new $400M lawsuit for preserving 78 rpm records — absolute garbage lawsuit, every recording was pre-1978 from deceased artists digitized from the original 78s (via) #

Gary Brolsma recreates Numa Numa, 19 years later — once a Numa Numa kid, now a Numa Numa man #

The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year from 1973-2023 — Tracklib breaks down sample sources from the last 50 years #

the uncolouring book — the color's provided, you draw in the lines (via) #

always return your shopping carts — I appreciate Jack Carden's commitment to the bit #

Polygon’s video essay on the history and future of VTubers — XTina GG did a great deep-dive on the culture of streamers using virtual avatars, interviewing six of them #

How to donate and help support Maui communities — a list of resources and fundraisers #

How climate change made Hawaii more vulnerable to wildfires — rising temperatures, declining rainfall, a changing landscape, and increased likelihood of large storms #

Wildfire decimates Lahaina, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom — some historical and cultural context on what was lost #