Google “turning down” Fusion Tables next year — turn down for what?

Population Mountains — Matt Daniels’ stunning visualization of world population for The Pudding

Patreon de-platforms Gamergate heroes Milo and Sargon — if you’re not familiar with Sargon, here’s a good rundown

How to recognize fake AI-generated images — Kyle McDonald teaches a valuable skill for the near-future

BetamaXMas turns 10 years old today — an internet Christmas classic

Anatomy of an AI System — a visual map and long-form essay about the labor and resources used by the Amazon Echo (via)

Rapper 2 Milly Sues Epic Games For Stealing His Dance — Fortnite reproduces, renames, and sells dance moves as emotes, raising questions about copyrighting choreography

Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche — Laurie Penny goes on a crypto cruise

The Making of Crossy Road — on its fourth birthday, short look at the progressive development of the instant classic

India is jailing people for social media posts criticizing government — at least 50 arrested in the last two years, here are stories of ten cases

Vanity Fair on the long winter for digital media networks — Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed, and others diversifying away from ad revenue

The Untitled Goose Holiday Pop-Up Shop — you’ll love this if you’re as excited about Untitled Goose Game as I am

Recomendo — weekly newsletter of six solid recommendations from Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson

Monster Factory is back — oh, thank god

The Verge’s Laura Hudson announces Better Worlds — a series of short written, animated, and audio science fiction about hopeful futures

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t understand the internet — this might be funny if he wasn’t Trump’s cybersecurity advisor

Tumblr’s porn detection algorithm is garbage — many, many, many, many more examples of false positives

BeatBot — make beats with voice synthesis; by the same creator: Polynote and Flock Sound

Getting Over It mini-game easter egg in Just Cause 4 — with narration by Bennett Foddy himself

The full Bee and PuppyCat series is on YouTube — after years of VRV exclusivity, all ten episodes available free

Student projects from Nicole He’s ITP class on voice technology — comfort a Google Home going through a breakup, or let Google comfort you (via)

Kevin Roose’s ode to TikTok — like Vine, it’s a hotbed for short-form video experimentation and meme creation

10×18 — a daily countdown of top ten albums of the year, with new album covers by 33 different artists

Friends with Secrets — three friends with different backgrounds share their transcripts from online text therapy sessions

Tumblr to ban all adult content on December 17 — that should go over well with everyone

Why is Tucker Carlson mad about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? — Max Read’s guide to the Content Cycle

Shrek Retold — like Star Wars Uncut, Shrek remade in pieces by 200 different people

The Alt-Right Playbook — ongoing video series by Innuendo Studios’ Ian Danskin (via)

Al Lowe puts his Sierra source code collection on eBay — the Leisure Suit Larry games, King’s Quest III, Police Quest I, and more

Later Alligator teaser trailer — the delightful creators of Baman Piderman are making a videogame

Absurdly detailed recreation of the Titanic in Unreal Engine 4 — you can download the work-in-progress Windows demo

GANpaint — draw with object-level control using a deep network (via)

Internet Boy Band Database — The Pudding continues to pour effort and creativity into every post

Browsh — modern text-based browser with full video, CSS3, and WebGL support (via)

Downloading games on the radio in the ’80s — Datarama, a Bristol radio show, transmitted data to listeners (via)

Stop treating Mastodon like a startup — it doesn’t need millions of users to be useful (via)

A Business With No End — Jenny Odell explores a sprawling dropshipping empire

XOXO Holiday Market — a collection of goods made by folks in the XOXO community, courtesy of Lucy Bellwood

IFComp 2018 winners — love seeing people push beyond the parser; related: Emily Short’s picks

Conway’s Webcam of Life — also on Glitch if you want to remix it (via)

Ganbreeder — some incredible stuff made with BigGAN lately

Vulture interviews Nancy’s Olivia Jaimes — rare interview with the pseudonymous artist behind the extremely online reboot (via)

Ear Hustle’s Earlonne Woods gets prison sentence commuted — after serving 21 years for attempted robbery

The Peach Pack — my wife Ami launched the first expansion to her card game, I helped with the design

Caselaw Access Project — 360 years of U.S. court decisions available for download or via API; also, caselaw limericks!

turtle.audio — make music with line drawing, inspired by Logo

Slack on a SNES — one of the most impressive hacks I’ve ever seen

dddance.party — GIF Dance Party goes 3D

Everything Is Alive — charming podcast interviewing inanimate objects

The Internet Archive’s Commodore 64 Software Library — in-browser emulation of over 13,000 disks