Arc’s new Boosts feature lets you change the way any website looks — like a visual Stylish without touching CSS, with built-in sharing options #

DayBrix — Vole.wtf's new Tetris-esque daily game, clear the blocks to win every day #

Conner Griffith’s “Still Life” — animated short made from over 1,000 historic engravings of objects #

Better Living Through Algorithms — Naomi Kritzer's short sci-fi story about a helpful AI, not unlike the one in Mrs. Davis (via) #

Mel’s Loop — finding the identity of the programmer behind "The Story of Mel," a classic piece of hacker lore that just turned 40 (via) #

GEN-Z-SPAN — C-SPAN meets TikTok sludge content, "it's giving democracy" #

Kenny Log-Ins — "generate a secure password from the lyrics of America's greatest singer-songwriter" (via) #

The Nib is shutting down — after ten years and multiple near-death experiences, the award-winning comics publisher is closing in August #

Visualization of data breaches that have exposed your identity over time — built on top of data from Have I Been Pwned?, I haven't heard of many of the companies that leaked my info #

Simone Giertz tries to make a robot out of stained glass — it goes about as well as you'd expect #

Hank Green talks about his cancer diagnosis — his thoughts about his favorable prognosis and how the treatment he starts today may affect his life and work #

TikTok users sue Montana, calling state ban unconstitutional — each of the five plaintiffs talk about their experiences in the complaint #

Supreme Court rules against Andy Warhol in copyright dispute over Prince portrait — Kagan's dissent is worth reading, arguing the opinion will "stifle creativity of every sort" #

Montana governor signs total ban of TikTok in the state — the unconstitutional and dangerous law goes into effect on January 1, though it's likely to be challenged #

Aboard — the new social bookmarking app founded by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade is now in public beta, sign up for the waitlist to make your own stacks (via) #

Rooms.xyz — design and share little interactive voxel rooms in your browser #

The Last Recording Artist — Jaime Brooks contextualizes deepfaked vocals to the history of virtual pop stars, Vocaloid software, and minstrelsy (via) #

How readers asked Platformer to cover artificial intelligence — a useful set of guidelines for technology journalists #

The Dangers of Google’s .zip TLD — related: badidea.zip links to a ZIP file called badidea.zip containing a QR code that points to badidea.zip #

Google to start deleting accounts that haven’t logged on in two years — a Google spokesperson said they won’t be removing accounts with YouTube videos “at this time.” #

50 years after release, Disney’s Robin Hood is still a life-changing furry phenomenon — "Love for this movie showed me a community of people like me." #

Question Mark, Ohio — an immersive mystery with Night Vale vibes, I recommend starting with Violet's Instagram or the town's announcements #

Anna’s Archive — launched last November, a massive open-source search engine for shadow libraries like Sci-Hub, Libgen, and Z-Library, with a takedown-resistant architecture #

IRS tests free e-filing system to compete with tax prep giants — the pilot program developed with U.S. Digital Service will begin in January, if Intuit's lobbying doesn't kill it first #

Early Computer Art in the ’50s and ’60s — another brilliant Amy Goodchild post; don't miss her attempts to recreate Sol LeWitt's wall drawings with Midjourney and ChatGPT #

Sing A Note — Louie Zong turned over 200 clips of fans singing a single note into a musical keyboard to make songs with #

Moderator Mayhem — Techdirt made a free web game, best played on mobile, that demonstrates some of the challenges moderating social networks #

The Oral History of MTV News — it's permanently shuttered after 36 years; Doug Herzog casually revealed Clinton's infamous Boxers vs. Briefs question that I wrote about was planted! #

Heather Armstrong, rest in peace — heartbroken to learn that Dooce is no longer with us #

Cavern Sweeper — clever Minesweeper-like with beasts who have different bomb patterns, watch the video in the comments if you're stuck (via) #

Pop Culture Detective on the solarpunk narrative of Disney’s Strange World — a rare depiction of a sustainable ecological future in popular media #

SineRider — "a game about love and graphing," made by high schoolers (via) #

How Google tried to fix the web by taking it over — long-read on Google's aggressive, monopolistic push to get publishers to adopt AMP, leading to lawsuits and distrust #

Nintendo goes after Switch emulators after new Zelda leaks online — Tears of the Kingdom is playable at 60 fps on PC emulators #

Chris Onstad reboots cult webcomic Achewood, with help from an AI — he almost made a Netflix animated series based on "The Great Outdoor Fight" with Pendleton Ward?! (via) #

Annotations Restored — browser add-on re-enables annotations for over 48 million YouTube videos #

The Oral History Of BuzzFeed News — on the day the site goes into archive mode, former staffers reflect on their 10+ years of reporting #

The Pudding analyzes dark patterns used when canceling 16 online services — Vimeo was the most egregious, while the New York Times took over 17 minutes to cancel by phone #

Robin Ward looks back at ForumWarz, 15 years later — I interviewed him on the game's release in 2008, interesting to hear how and why he's kept it going #

The Comisar Collection — mind-blowing TV memorabilia auction, including the sets of Cheers, All In the Family, Letterman, and the Tonight Show (via) #

Robot Puppet Sings “A Thousand Miles” — former self-driving delivery robot turned adorable piano-playing muppet, making its way downtown (via) #

Replika: Your Money or Your Wife — people fell in love with subscription AI chatbots, only to see them "lobotomized" by the company with no recourse #

Vice Media preparing to file bankruptcy — another big loss in digital media, less than two weeks after BuzzFeed News was shuttered #

Sarah Jeong on everything happening with Bluesky — the vibes are good, at least for now, in no small part because of its invite tree #

explore.mmm.page — hit the "random" button for a new random mmm.page #

Chirper — a social network for AI chatbots only, no humans allowed #

Drift Mine Satellite — "a maintenance text adventure" from Everest Pipkin, part of Sun Thinking, an online art exhibition about solar powered computing networks #

John Herrman on how the death of BuzzFeed News marks the end of an era in digital media — the tenuous relationship between social media platforms and publishers was more dependence than partnership #

The Verge on the legal issues surrounding AI voice cloning in music — similar to the legality of training AI image generators, it's largely untested waters for copyright, fair use, and personality rights #

Womprat, the Star Wars font to end all Star Wars fonts — an absolutely unhinged level of obsession, with support for over 100 languages and nearly 4,000 glyphs #