Links Archives – Page 2 of 334

January 7, 2020

Disinformation For Hire — how "black PR" firms are using content farms, bots, and other shady techniques to spread lies for clients

WaPo investigation into how the federal government misled the public about the war in Afghanistan — I originally missed this December release of 2,000 pages of interviews, only released under FOIA after two years and three federal lawsuits

Kentucky Route Zero’s fifth and final act releasing on January 28 — along with a console release on PS4, Xbox, and Switch

Major union launches campaign to organize videogame and tech workers — they hired Game Workers Unite co-founder Emma Kinema, who just spoke at XOXO

Don’t F**k With Cats — gripping Netflix documentary about the internet's attempts to track down an animal abuser turned murderer

DangerousBot, a random noun Zelda bot for Twitter and Mastodon — his code is CC-licensed and runs on Lambda for pennies

IGF 2020 nominees announced — as usual, a snapshot of some of the best of the indie gaming scene

January 6, 2020

Bellingcat’s guide to reverse image search — I had no idea Google's reverse image search was far eclipsed by Yandex, especially for manipulated imagery (via)

Deceased gerrymandering GOP strategist’s daughter makes files public — link to the full archive on thehofellerfiles.com (via)

January 5, 2020

Generating beetles with machine learning — walkthrough of different techniques with stunning results

January 3, 2020

Taylor Lorenz on Hype House and other L.A. collab houses — like Vine and YouTube before them, groups of TikTok creators are renting mansions largely for collaboration

Which emoji scissors close? — ✂️

Canvas Cards — 52 card designs created with JS canvas, one for every week of last year

Zdog — playful pseudo-3D JS engine for modeling and animation with canvas and SVG (via)

Synopsis — newly-released suite of tools using machine learning for analyzing and editing video (via)

Hydra — live-code networked visuals in the browser, many examples here (via)

TidalCycles — open-source software for live-coding music (via)

January 2, 2020

Public Domain Day 2020 — works from 1924 entered the public domain yesterday (via)

Borogrove, online editor for Vorple and Inform interactive fiction games — built on the Vorple library, a huge step beyond my own Playfic app (via)

ContraPoints on cancel culture — long and nuanced deep-dive into the differences between cancelling and criticism

LIGHT — Facebook AI open-sourced a large-scale multiplayer text adventure game with over 1,700 AI-controlled NPCs (via)

December 27, 2019

Katamari Christmassy — a PICO-8 demake (via)

After 11 years, 8tracks closes with five days’ notice — they cite streaming royalty increases and competition from Spotify (via)

December 23, 2019

Seeking Awesome Republican Goddess — this is the worst Twine game ever (via)

December 20, 2019

Tesseract.js — free OCR engine ported to pure JS, supporting over 100 languages

Gretchen McCulloch on boomerspeak — the written tics of older internet users are Ripe for parody.… (via)

SmugMug’s struggling to make Flickr sustainable — they're encouraging everyone to upgrade to Flickr Pro, I hope they can make it work

wenyan — "an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature" (via)

Smallbu Animation’s Daffodil shorts — absurdly charming, just like Alex and Lindsay in real-life

Making Escher, a web-controlled robotic Etch-a-Sketch — not open to the public, probably because they don't want it covered in penises and swastikas (via)

Turning animated GIFs into pure CSS — impressive but horrible hack, converting GIFs into hundreds of vertical linear-gradients

December 19, 2019

Building a Slack client for Windows 3.1 — they had to find and read "books" to figure it out

FlowingData’s best dataviz of 2019 — the sleep blanket is stunning

NYTIMES ALL CAPS — yesterday was only the fourth of the year

NYT analyzes a database of 50 billion locations from 12 million phones — an anonymous source from an unnamed location data company provided the 2016-2017 dump (via)

December 18, 2019

Kubito’s Secret Base — there's something so satisfying about detailed miniatures, but the electronics take it to the next level (via)

Trump impeached — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress

Fake AI-generated faces used for fake Facebook accounts promoting right-wing content — this month's release of StyleGAN2 makes these images much harder to recognize

Emily Short’s retrospective of the year in interactive fiction — intriguing list, all but one were new to me

Song of Bloom — new iOS game from Philipp Stollenmayer, one of my favorite game designers

The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in HyperCard — Voyager created this expanded version for the Mac in 1991, emulated in browser on the Internet Archive (via)

The Far Side relaunches official site — with classic comics posted daily, sketchbooks, and a letter from Gary Larson about why now

Joe Sabia’s list of groundbreaking internet videos — much of Joe's work belongs in that list

December 17, 2019

Endless Jingling — hilariously bad generative Christmas carol mashups, click on the window to hear the audio

USE CUPS — Adult Swim short co-created by Don't Hug Me I'm Scared's Joe Pelling

Go to Sleep, Baby Yoda — The Auralnauts take on The Mandalorian

AI Dungeon released for iOS/Android — if the Google Colab version scared you off, this is a simple way to try one the most interesting projects of the year

December 16, 2019

The Dweetabase — an archive of all 13k+ tweet-length generative JS art from Dwitter (via)

The Verge reviews Wattam, the new game from Katamari creator Keita Takahashi — out tomorrow for PC/PS4, so excited to finally play it

Bee videogames reviewed for accuracy — "the Citizen Kane of beekeeping games" is available for free on Itch.io