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 #

Eternal Wanderer — a bot generating videos from old websites and media files in the Wayback Machine, favoring pages with animations and sound (via) #

Blue skies over Mastodon — Erin Kissane on the recent rise of Bluesky and Mastodon's cultural resistance to criticism of its obvious pain points (via) #

The Pudding’s Map of Places with the Same Name — they made an interactive explainer breaking down the ranking factors they used #

Four-Byte Burger — Ahoy's Stuart Brown painstakingly recreates a piece of 1985 pixel art from a printed photo of an Amiga screen #

Employees begged Google not to launch Bard AI — a "pathological liar" that's "worse than useless" #

xkcd’s Escape Speed — a charming space exploration game that's much deeper than it appears #

Imgur is banning porn and purging old anonymous uploads on May 15 — the default image host for Reddit's early years, this will damage the archives like the yfrog/tinypic shutdowns did to Twitter #

Buzzfeed News is shutting down, laying off 15% of staff — this is a big loss, they did some amazing journalism in an unlikely place #

WaPo analysis of websites in Google’s C4 dataset, used by several LLMs — a massive swath of the web derived from Common Crawl data, including my own site, ranked 169,716th (via) #

This Mom Didn’t Know She Was In A $250K Candy Crush Tournament, But She’s Killing It — the 48-year-old Columbus, Ohio mother of three is "one of the most successful esports athletes in the entire country" #

AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google — must-read Nilay Patel post about the copyright conflict between Google's AI efforts and YouTube's relationships with publishers #

Where In the USA Is This? — guess the spot where five different photos were taken in The Pudding's new daily guessing game (via) #

The Internet Is Suddenly Full Of AI-Generated Hip-Hop — Chris Stokel-Walker on so-vits-svc, the singing voice conversion AI model behind Ghostwriter, the "lost" Oasis album, and many more #

Space Elevator — another delightful long scrolling single-serving site from Neal.fun #

Aaron A. Reed on The Gostak — a fascinating 2001 interactive fiction game where you slowly learn an invented language #

Ghostwriter’s AI-voiced Drake/The Weeknd song is going viral — hiding their identity is a good idea, makes it harder for labels to serve the subpoena #

Montana House votes to completely ban TikTok in the state — the first U.S. state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices #

Doogie Typer — like Hacker Typer, but for Doogie Howser's journal entries; don't miss the settings (via) #

Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar — "When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar." #

Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages — fine-tuning LLaMa's privacy-friendly uncensored model on messages stored in iMessage's SQLite db (via) #

The Ringer interviews Paul Dochney, the Los Angeles writer behind Twitter legend Dril — his first interview not in character #