Vulture profiles Kate Beaton on the release of her new graphic memoir — her 900-page book explores her two years working at the Alberta oil sands, "the world's most destructive oil operation" #

Lexica, search 10M+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts — now using CLIP embeddings for search, click any image to explore similar styles #

Kiwi Farms is effectively offline — good riddance #

Lunar Lander playable in Windows file copy dialogs — never be bored again while waiting for huge files to copy (via) #

The Humiliating History of the TSA — part of The Verge's Homeland series on two decades of American life under the DHS (via) #

ProPublica exposes a million-dollar Instagram verification scheme exploiting music platforms — the investigation was top-notch, but seeing the two scammers rat on each other is pure gold (via) #

Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman Over 25 — updated for 2022, a very good chart made in Excel/Powerpoint #

Know Your Meme’s analysis of meme origins by platform from 2010-2022 — TikTok is now fully half of new memes tracked on the site #

Retrospective of Medium’s first ten years — curious to see where it goes next under its new CEO, Tony Stubblebine (via) #

C64 Theremin — Linus Åkesson's latest amazing instrument built with a 40-year-old computer #

How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor — scoop from Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton; Elon Musk's buyout attempt shifted their focus to spam bots #

’90s Cursor Effects — that clock takes me back (via) #

The Big [Censored] Theory — Manyun Zou digs into Chinese censorship of the Big Bang Theory for The Pudding #

Nutshell — Nicky Case made a charming little tool for making "expandable explanations" #

An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism — among the interviewees, two NASA astronauts, an astrophysicist, and a former Greek Minister of Finance #

NYT profiles Michael Heizer’s “City” — 50 years in the making, a massive 1.5 x 0.5 mile land art installation in the Nevada desert (via) #

Making an Internet Time Machine — a Raspberry Pi-based plug-and-play box running Wayback Proxy to browse the old web on old computers #

New World Unlocked — GLASYS drew pixel art frame-by-frame for the first single off his upcoming 8-bit album #

Stable Diffusion public release — open-source text-to-image AI model that runs on your own GPU, similar quality as DALL-E 2 without content filters #

Simone Giertz made a bubble wrap music box — this thing was made to play Hot Butter's "Popcorn" #

Profile of Stable Diffusion, the open-source text-to-image AI model without content filters and safeguards — new Pandora's box just dropped #

John Deere tractors jailbroken at DefCon, allowing farmers to repair their own equipment — and yes, this means you can play Doom on them #

How magicians made a fortune on Facebook — the industry best suited to deceiving people for fun and profit; see Ryan Broderick's earlier reporting on Rick Lax and friends #

Paint with Music — turn paint brushes into looping musical soundscapes (via) #

The Verge profiles Archive of Our Own for its 15th birthday — interesting read on the origins of the fan-run fanfic community and its issues addressing racism #

The Biggest Deal in Climate History Almost Didn’t Happen — Hank Green's excellent explainer on the details of the confusingly-named Inflation Reduction Act  #

Life on the Internet — charmingly naive 13-part TV series from 1996, captures footage of sites that predate the Internet Archive (via) #

Timelooper — cooperate with your past selves in this browser game made in three days (via) #

Every Internet Video From 2003 — Alasdair Beckett-King revisits the Albino Blacksheep aesthetic #

Physically simulating an entire car engine for realistic audio — it needs to run at 80,000 FPS to remain stable #

Pass the Wine — Joseph's Machines made a Rube Goldberg machine with comic timing #

U1KE, a playable ukulele in 1KB of JS — use mouse to strum, keys to fret notes #

The Kubrick Times — using GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to make full articles for the future NYT headlines written in 1965 by Kubrick's team for 2001: A Space Odyssey #

Map of most notable people around the world — using metadata from Wikipedia and Wikidata, including article length, views, and external links (via) #

Amazon’s third-party seller piracy problem — Amazon gets paid either way, so they're unlikely to fix it #

The Apple Store Time Machine — interactive macOS app with four meticulous reconstructions of Apple Stores on their opening days #

Molly White on victim-blaming in the crypto crash — related: her excerpts from letters to the judges of the Celsius Network and Voyager Digital bankruptcy cases (via) #

Stray, tilt-shifted — I finished the cat game this weekend and it was a pure joy, highly recommended #

Infinite Mac adds virtual networking — you can now play games remotely with Mihai Parparita's full-featured in-browser classic 68K Mac #

Joni Mitchell performs first full set in over 20 years — she spent years recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm, relearning guitar by watching videos of herself playing #

Emoji Kitchen Browser — explore over 30,000 emoji mashups #

Absurd AI-generated food photography with DALL-E 2 — Max Woolf serves up Rubik's Cube PB&Js and five-dimensional burgers #

The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater — Brian Feldman goes deep into a '90s viral video and tracks down everyone involved (via) #

MegaPortraits — real-time animated avatars made from a single portrait image #

Scratch, MIT Media Lab’s visual coding platform for kids, is blowing up — it doubled in popularity in the last two years #

The Verge on how indie writers are using AI tools like Sudowrite and Jasper — love the interactive article design #

Everyone Everywhere Needs Waymond Wang — Pop Culture Detective on Everything Everywhere All At Once's subversive portrayal of masculinity #

An Ode to Desus and Mero, Forever Kings of New York — the brand was strong #

Lego makes Atari 2600 set for Atari’s 50th anniversary — from the fold-out 1980s living room to the game cartridge dioramas, this was laser-targeted to me #

RIP Sockington — at his peak, Jason Scott's adorable cat had over 1.5M Twitter followers and was in the top 100 most-followed accounts #