Internet Archive Scholar — launched in 2021, a new-to-me project indexing 25 million research documents from the 18th century to today #

A year of new avenues — Robin Sloan pens a call to arms for online experimentation and invention in 2023 #

Animated timeline of most popular social networks from 2003-2022 — ballpark estimate of monthly active users over time #

Level, a clever one-screen puzzle game — the first day of this year's Confounding Calendar, an advent calendar of tiny puzzle games #

Polygon reviews Dwarf Fortress’ graphical update, out now — one of the most complex games ever made is more approachable, without sacrificing depth or difficulty #

Building a virtual machine inside ChatGPT — hallucinating fake virtual machines inside fake virtual machines on fictional internets #

Inventing a new language with ChatGPT — a progressively wild case study making a fictional language for slime people #

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI model — free to play with, it can "answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests" #

mindmelt.party — "real-time hallucinatory music visualizer and networked culture explorer" from Nullsleep and friends (via) #

Vanity Fair interviews Billie Eilish for the sixth year — this will be her last annual video for a while, she plans to keep recording them but stagger the releases (via) #

Movetodon, find your Twitter friends on Mastodon — new tool with a streamlined UI; I'm [email protected], if you want to join me #

Why Japanese web design looks different from the rest of the world — don't miss Sabrina's accompanying article and resources #

The Barnacle Goose Experiment — Everest Pipkin's latest is an "abiogenesis body horror idle clicker" (via) #

Marine Beaufils’ videogame needlepoint — especially love the series inspired by The Sentinel (via) #

C64 2FA — who needs SMS? use a Commodore 64 for generating two-factor authentication codes (via) #

Stable Diffusion 2.0 released — trained from their new OpenCLIP encoder, with higher resolution, a 4x upscaler, and a new depth-guided img2img model #

Defunctland’s documentary on who wrote the Disney Channel theme — Kevin Perjurer solves a mystery with impeccable production values and a meditation on legacy #

Last.fm turns 20 — The Verge quoted my 2003 post about Audioscrobbler #

Meta made an AI that can win at Diplomacy — building extremely persuasive AIs that are more effective negotiators than humans, what could go wrong #

Taylor Lorenz interviews @Dril — a rare interview, showing his willingness to commit to the bit until the cleansing fire burns it all down #

Can AI generate the perfect Thanksgiving? — Priya Krishna makes GPT-3 generated recipes and it goes about as well as you'd expect (via) #

ooh! directory — Phil Gyford made a wonderful categorized directory of 852 (and growing!) active blogs #

A Letter Groove — another gorgeous NaNoGenMo entry from Liza Daly #

Interactive Fiction Competition 2022 winners announced — 70% of the top 20 are choice-based instead of parser-based, continuing the trend of the last few years (via) #

Corridor Crew on neural radiance fields and the future of 3D scanning for video — NeRFs are neural networks that can generate complex 3D scenes from 2D photos (via) #

Tim Molloy’s production stills for TV shows that never existed — profoundly weird generations made with Midjourney v4 #

Twitter employees resign en masse, refusing to sign Elon Musk’s “hardcore” pledge — 🫡 #

Floor796 — "an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station" #

Ask My Book — Sahil Lavingia made an experiment where you talk to a vocalized AI of him about his book #

The Verge’s deep dive into the murky waters of copyright and fair use in AI — I talked to the reporter for this piece, which does a good job covering some of the complex questions around legality #

Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration — multiplayer Discord game tasking you with finding objects in the multiverse with an AI image generator #

Bubbles — charming bubble-blowing simulator, the rest of Saharan's portfolio is great too (via) #

Mastodon’s Eternal September begins — thoughtful post on the different cultural norms and expectations between Twitter and Mastodon #

Tumblr launches Important Blue Internet Checkmarks — a real steal at two for $7.99, with up to 24 per user #

CSS Puzzle Box — the fact this is fully playable on Cohost is very impressive #

Inside the Twitter meltdown — Platformer reports on Elon Musk's ongoing self-inflicted train wreck #

Abortion Bus — fundraiser livestream of a Desert Bus-esque simulation of the 23-hour drive South Texans need to make to get an abortion #

The Infinite Conversation — an AI-generated never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek; more details on Hacker News #

Josh Millard finishes his grandfather’s stained glass project — I followed every step of this as he documented it on Twitter since learning about it in 2019 #

AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community — very relevant to my new post #

Diana Smith’s pure HTML/CSS Varga-style pinup — inspect the source for some comedy, and be sure to try it in older browsers #

Welcome to hell, Elon — Nilay Patel points out the obvious and inevitable conflict between Elon's dreams and Twitter's reality #

Odd Giants — carrying on the spirit of Glitch, the MMO that died so Slack could live (via) #

Matt Levine’s The Crypto Story — for the second time, following Paul Ford's "What Is Code?" in 2015, Businessweek devoted an entire issue to one 40,000 word article #

The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater — wild update to Brian Feldman's article I linked to in July, a story of false memories and local folklore #

Slow Roads — chill procedurally-generated infinite driving game made in Three.js (via) #

DiscMaster — browse and search Archive.org's massive collection of 11 terabytes of vintage files, mostly from 7k CD-ROM compilations #

Stayin’ Alive, performed by a werewolf — Bee Dee Gee's Hee Bee Bee Gees is Brian David Gilbert's followup to AAAH!BBA, his Halloween-themed ABBA cover album #

The Commodordion — Linus Åkesson made an 8-bit accordion out of two C64s and a bellows made of floppies #

William Shatner writes about going to space — "My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral." #