December 1, 2021
Amazon Brand Detector
— an offshoot of The Markup's investigation into how Amazon favors their own house brands and exclusive products (via) #
Team builds the first living robots that can reproduce
— “Xenobots” can gather cells inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth," assembling robot babies capable of self-replication when they grow up #
Beifall
— clap your hands in this weird little web toy from the creators of KIDS and PLUG & PLAY (via) #
Casey Newton on Jack Dorsey stepping down as Twitter CEO
— and what to expect from his successor, crypto-enthusiast CTO Parag Agrawal #
NYT interviews Jack Ferver, the little lad who loves berries and cream
— a Starburst ad that went viral online in 2007 blew up again 14 years later, thanks to Justin McElroy and TikTok #
Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History
— Defunctland hired an industrial engineer to build a theme park simulation for this feature-length documentary #
Ed Yong talks to health-care workers with long COVID
— dismissed by their peers, some medical professionals are re-evaluating how they've treated their own patients #
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation
— investigation into how millions of ad dollars bankroll clickbait actors, funding disinformation campaigns internationally (via) #
Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit
— Stuart Brown goes deep into chiptune for a new episode of Ahoy (via) #
Garbage Day unravels the mystery of Thinkarete Lifestyle, Facebook’s most viral publisher
— a "barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content" is the most widely-viewed page in the U.S. this year #
Justin Ling interviews the reclusive creator of Pictures for Sad Children
— she deleted the comic and her presence online after a 2014 Kickstarter update blew up online #
Apple announces self-service iPhone repair program
— getting ahead of FTC right-to-repair enforcement #
Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, Founder of Something Awful, Is Dead at 45
— related: Motherboard's oral history of SA from 2017 #
The New Jersey arcade with a banned-for-life blacklist
— charming video talks to the current owner and some of the exiled, now in their 40s and 50s (via) #
NYT on Neopets fans after the death of Flash
— how they've adapted to the redesign of something they never wanted to change #
An oral history of Processing
— the second part documenting the history of the influential creative coding language is out now #
The growing partisan gap of U.S. covid deaths
— because of natural immunity in red counties and new antiviral treatments, that gap may soon peak (via) #
Steve Albini reflects on his edgelord past
— interesting conversation about privilege and culture from someone with a history of ironically saying shitty things for shock value (via) #
The Untold Story of Sushi in America
— how a religious movement played a role in spawning the U.S. sushi industry (via) #
50 Years of Text Games on Porpentine’s Howling Dogs
— how the Twine revolution opened up interactive fiction to a new world of writers and audiences #
Clive Thompson on the legacy of COBOL in the banking industry
— related: an oral history of Bank Python (via) #
haveagood.today
— built on her collection of found GIFs, Olia Lialia's Perpetual Calendar wishes you a happy day (via) #
Tweet Shelf
— an excellent replacement for Nuzzel, I love being able to break out articles, websites, and videos #
Metaverse Noir
— Kathryn Yu made this branching narrative thread for an MFA class project, earning her an A in the process #
5,162 attempts Super Mario Bros speedruns combined into a single video
— don't miss the behind-the-scenes video showing the custom software used to reconstruct it #
Rebecca Jennings on the Mountain Goats’ “No Children” going viral on TikTok
— she talked to John Darnielle about its surprising rise as a TikTok meme #
Garbage Day on the Facebook Papers
— reiterating again that Facebook knew all along, ignored everyone ringing the alarm bell, and lied about it publicly #
Cabel Sasser shares a prototype original iPod
— I'm lucky enough to have seen this yellowing beast in person #
Lay All Your Love On Me, performed by a vampire
— the first song from Brian David Gilbert's AAAH!BBA, his Halloween-themed ABBA cover album releasing at midnight PT tonight #
“History Will Not Judge Us Kindly”
— Adrienne LaFrance on how employees repeatedly raised alarms about the harm Facebook was doing but were ignored by leadership #
Casey Newton on how Facebook decides which countries need protection
— "There is a pervasive sense that, on some fundamental level, no one is entirely sure what’s going on." #
Ben Smith on how the Facebook Papers coverage was coordinated
— it's unusual for so many major publications to work together like this, but Frances Haugen was able to set the terms #
Washington Post’s key takeaways from the Facebook Papers
— there's simply too much good reporting on this to read today, but WaPo has solid highlights with links to deeper reporting on each #
Facebook’s lost generation
— Facebook is dealing with an aging user base, while teens are using Instagram less #