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." #

“Through the Fire and Flames” in Trombone Champ — by law, DragonForce must be in every rhythm game ever made (via) #

Kevin Costner’s Waterworld — turning a 10-second joke from a 1997 episode of the Simpsons into a free full game #

DOOM in Notepad — MS Paint next? #

NYT short doc on Sally Schmidt, creator/chef of the French Laundry — the pioneering Napa Valley chef overshadowed by Thomas Keller's success after selling him the restaurant (via) #

Kilogram — the "lowest-quality photo sharing site on the internet," where every image is compressed to under 1KB #

Words Against Strangers — The Pudding made a clever word game where you play asynchronously against one random stranger per day #

The Battle for the Soul of the Web — Kaitlin Tiffany on the blurred lines between the DWeb and Web3 movements #

Imagen Video — impressive output, but I'm increasingly skeptical that Google will ever release any of this work #

Innovations in Juggling — David Friedman looks at novel juggling routines #

New Yorker profiles the creator of NTP and its evolution — deep dive into its transition from benevolent dictatorship to open-source consensus #

The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear — Ed Yong is taking a six-month sabbatical because of burnout from pandemic reporting #

Tree Talk — scroll up to read this animated comic about two trees talking to each other (via) #

For once, the hurricane shark is real — after a decade of "street shark" hoaxes, the AP confirmed this one was real #

AudioGen — text-to-audio model, love the nonsensical speech #

Elon Musk’s text exchanges — so many sycophants #

Community movie is finally happening — the "six seasons and a movie" prophecy will be fulfilled #

Louie Zong’s “Business!”, an album of retro corporate music — commissioned by Brian David Gilbert for his "terrible guide to the terrible terminology of U.S. health insurance" #

Phenaki — another text-to-video model announced today that can handle long videos with multiple prompts, check out the two-minute example #

DreamFusion, text-to-3D using 2D diffusion — it's unbelievable how fast this area is moving #

NESOS — 48K OS for the NES featuring "two core applications, the word processor, and the settings" (via) #

Teenage Engineering’s PO-80 Record Factory — a recreation of Gakken's Toy Record Maker, make your own lo-fi 5" vinyl records #

Google is shutting down Stadia — predicted by virtually everyone since it launched, it'll close in mid-January #

Meta announces Make-A-Video, a text-to-video AI generator — like Google's Imagen, I expect an open-source model to come out before this is public #

The Guardian interviews one of the admins keeping Discworld MUD going — online for over 30 years, the community has created over 20,000 detailed rooms with 12 million lines of code #

Björk’s Sonic Symbolism podcast — she digs into one of her albums for each of the nine episodes #

Matt Mullenweg on the challenges of hosting adult content in 2022 — like Matt, I'd also love to understand why Twitter and Reddit are an exception to Apple's anti-porn policies #

Days Since Incident — 9,691,764 days since last Apocalyptic Volcanic Eruption (VEI 8) #

Folding Ideas on “passive income” con artist entrepreneurs — Dan Olson wrote a 25,000 word book in 25 days to fully understand how one ghostwritten audiobook grift worked #

Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine — James Earl Jones signed over rights to Darth Vader's voice, replaced by AI from a Ukrainian startup #

webЯcade — impressive open-source web frontend for 20+ emulated game systems and support for custom feeds #

summarize.tech — surprisingly good GPT-3 powered summaries of long YouTube videos #

How platforms turn boring — Russell Brandom on the "Bootleg Ratio," the ratio of original to freebooted content #

OpenAI open-sources Whisper, a speech recognition and translation system — this will be life-changing for many podcasters, journalists, and anyone else who needs transcription #

Making Minecraft in Minecraft — runs at 0.1 fps using MCHPRS, which runs redstone 10-20,000x faster (via) #

Snap shuts down Zenly instead of selling it, fearing competition — the social mapping app has 40 million monthly active users globally #

Tux and Fanny — finally played through this Instagram series-turned-videogame and it's brilliant #

Return to Monkey Island is out now — 13 years since the last game, and the return of series creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman #

After 23 years in prison, Serial’s Adnan Syed freed after judge vacates murder conviction — "the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction" #