Behind the scenes of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’s new TV series
— it was set to debut today but was delayed to late September because of the Queen's death #
Vulture profiles Kate Beaton on the release of her new graphic memoir
— her 900-page book explores her two years working at the Alberta oil sands, "the world's most destructive oil operation" #
Lexica, search 10M+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts
— now using CLIP embeddings for search, click any image to explore similar styles #
Lunar Lander playable in Windows file copy dialogs
— never be bored again while waiting for huge files to copy (via) #
The Humiliating History of the TSA
— part of The Verge's Homeland series on two decades of American life under the DHS (via) #
ProPublica exposes a million-dollar Instagram verification scheme exploiting music platforms
— the investigation was top-notch, but seeing the two scammers rat on each other is pure gold (via) #
Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman Over 25
— updated for 2022, a very good chart made in Excel/Powerpoint #
Know Your Meme’s analysis of meme origins by platform from 2010-2022
— TikTok is now fully half of new memes tracked on the site #
Retrospective of Medium’s first ten years
— curious to see where it goes next under its new CEO, Tony Stubblebine (via) #
How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor
— scoop from Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton; Elon Musk's buyout attempt shifted their focus to spam bots #
The Big [Censored] Theory
— Manyun Zou digs into Chinese censorship of the Big Bang Theory for The Pudding #
An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism
— among the interviewees, two NASA astronauts, an astrophysicist, and a former Greek Minister of Finance #
NYT profiles Michael Heizer’s “City”
— 50 years in the making, a massive 1.5 x 0.5 mile land art installation in the Nevada desert (via) #
Making an Internet Time Machine
— a Raspberry Pi-based plug-and-play box running Wayback Proxy to browse the old web on old computers #
New World Unlocked
— GLASYS drew pixel art frame-by-frame for the first single off his upcoming 8-bit album #
Stable Diffusion public release
— open-source text-to-image AI model that runs on your own GPU, similar quality as DALL-E 2 without content filters #
Profile of Stable Diffusion, the open-source text-to-image AI model without content filters and safeguards
— new Pandora's box just dropped #
John Deere tractors jailbroken at DefCon, allowing farmers to repair their own equipment
— and yes, this means you can play Doom on them #
How magicians made a fortune on Facebook
— the industry best suited to deceiving people for fun and profit; see Ryan Broderick's earlier reporting on Rick Lax and friends #
The Verge profiles Archive of Our Own for its 15th birthday
— interesting read on the origins of the fan-run fanfic community and its issues addressing racism #
The Biggest Deal in Climate History Almost Didn’t Happen
— Hank Green's excellent explainer on the details of the confusingly-named Inflation Reduction Act #
Life on the Internet
— charmingly naive 13-part TV series from 1996, captures footage of sites that predate the Internet Archive (via) #
Physically simulating an entire car engine for realistic audio
— it needs to run at 80,000 FPS to remain stable #
The Kubrick Times
— using GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to make full articles for the future NYT headlines written in 1965 by Kubrick's team for 2001: A Space Odyssey #
Map of most notable people around the world
— using metadata from Wikipedia and Wikidata, including article length, views, and external links (via) #
Amazon’s third-party seller piracy problem
— Amazon gets paid either way, so they're unlikely to fix it #
The Apple Store Time Machine
— interactive macOS app with four meticulous reconstructions of Apple Stores on their opening days #
Molly White on victim-blaming in the crypto crash
— related: her excerpts from letters to the judges of the Celsius Network and Voyager Digital bankruptcy cases (via) #
Stray, tilt-shifted
— I finished the cat game this weekend and it was a pure joy, highly recommended #
Infinite Mac adds virtual networking
— you can now play games remotely with Mihai Parparita's full-featured in-browser classic 68K Mac #
Joni Mitchell performs first full set in over 20 years
— she spent years recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm, relearning guitar by watching videos of herself playing #
Absurd AI-generated food photography with DALL-E 2
— Max Woolf serves up Rubik's Cube PB&Js and five-dimensional burgers #
The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater
— Brian Feldman goes deep into a '90s viral video and tracks down everyone involved (via) #
Scratch, MIT Media Lab’s visual coding platform for kids, is blowing up
— it doubled in popularity in the last two years #
The Verge on how indie writers are using AI tools like Sudowrite and Jasper
— love the interactive article design #
Everyone Everywhere Needs Waymond Wang
— Pop Culture Detective on Everything Everywhere All At Once's subversive portrayal of masculinity #
Lego makes Atari 2600 set for Atari’s 50th anniversary
— from the fold-out 1980s living room to the game cartridge dioramas, this was laser-targeted to me #