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) #

British Seaside Simulator — I love Matt Round's dev threads where he shows what goes into making all these ridiculous projects for Vole.wtf #

a clock where the time is made of news headlines — Russell Samora continues his Data Clocks series for The Pudding #

Reddit activity plummeted since API changes and moderator protests — average daily posts and comments for most major subreddits dropped 50-90% compared to a year ago #

Taylor Lorenz on Julia Allison’s vilification as an early influencer — an excerpt from Extremely Online, Lorenz's upcoming book on the history of social media and internet fame #

The George Lucas Eggsperience — a new remix by Neil Cicierega, only slightly stranger than the original ads #

Irene — Mark Slutsky talks to a woman mentioned in a 2012 YouTube comment by a long-forgotten admirer quoted in his Sad YouTube project #

Elon Musk’s DIY Twitter datacenter migration disaster — completely unhinged behavior, definitely the kind of person who should run a bank (via) #

Adrian Holovaty’s Melodic Guitar Music — his first proper album, ten original guitar instrumentals inspired by Django Reinhardt, The Beatles and Chet Atkins (via) #

Looking back at Aardvark’d, the Fog Creek Documentary, 18 years later — several former employees in the 2005 documentary involved reflect on it in the Hacker News discussion (via) #

Harry Styles fans debate the authenticity of possibly AI-generated leaked demos — even the AI experts hired by 404 Media can't tell which, if any, are real #

Nour: Play With Your Food — the surreal interactive food physics toy with reactive music is out now for PC/Mac and PS4/PS5 #

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 #