How Primitive Building Videos Are Staged — the success of Primitive Technology spawned dozens of over-the-top knockoffs based in SE Asia; related: footage of abandoned sites and Coconuts' 2019 exposé #

The modifiers vs. the keepers — another charming Marcin Wichary post about an obscure footnote in keyboard history #

How a fake job offer led to Axie Infinity’s $540M crypto heist — multiple rounds of phony interviews helped convince a senior engineer to open a malware PDF with the fake compensation package (via) #

Vulture profiles Nathan Fielder — the master of uncomfortable comedy (via) #

Making a virtual retro PC in Godot that plays Sierra games — related: Robin Ward's deep-dive into Sierra graphics and attempts to upscale them #

Book Exploder — Song Exploder expands to literature on August 3 with host Susan Orlean interviewing authors about their work #

The Terror of Everything Everywhere All At Once — Thomas Flight ties the film to hypermodernity, Bo Burnham's Inside, and the feeling of being extremely online #

Last Call BBS — the final game from indie legends Zachtronics is out now #

An oral history of Contact on its 25th anniversary — in development hell for 20 years, it's sort of amazing it was ever made #

cohost — intriguing new microblogging service with flexible formatting; see Everest Pipkin's Twine-esque editor #

Max Read on wrong number text scams — surreal variations of "pig-butchering" confidence scams #

The Looker — very funny parody of The Witness, free for Windows (via) #

Jia Tolentino on the death of Roe — "we are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy" #

Where to Send Your Money (That Isn’t Planned Parenthood) — you can make a big impact giving to local abortion funds and other support groups #

Donate to an Abortion Fund Right Now  #

Liberal justices deliver blistering joint dissent on Roe — "From the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of." #

Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade, ending federal right to abortion — catastrophic decision from the Conservative majority, abortion is now banned in 13 states with more to follow #

Platformer Toolkit — interactive essay to experiment with adjusting game feel in a simple side scroller #

Human Record Player — the only way to listen to Weezer's new single is to spin around in a circle with your phone #

Filmot — search captions from 528 million YouTube videos and 45 million channels #

Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting — don't miss the long exposé detailing all the evidence #

Strong Bad meets DALL-E 2 — animating and voicing the output from Janelle Shane's AI prompts  #

The Bleak Spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp Trial — Michael Hobbes debunks the conspiracy theory at the center of the "largest explosion of online misogyny since Gamergate" #

50 Years of Text Games is now on Kickstarter — Aaron A. Reed is turning my favorite newsletter of 2021 into a book, with "feelies" and new material in deluxe editions #

Partita Prelude for 8-Bit Ensemble — Linus Akesson performs Bach live on three Commodore 64s and a 1541 disk drive #

DJ Cummerbund mashes up Lizzo and Linkin Park — this goes the extra mile (via) #

Like like — "a tool for wandering through Twitter" (via) #

Vox explainer on the AI text-to-image revolution — with a bonus video talking to artists about what AI art means for human artists #

Janelle Shane uses DALL-E 2 to mess up corporate logos — it's a perfect Sbubby meme generator #

Bertrand Fan installs a payphone in his house — from 1990s credit card fraud to phone line simulators #

Make WordArt — if you're stuck, maybe Clippy can help #

Tracking what happens after TikTok songs go viral — Vox's Estelle Caswell and The Pudding did a seven-month data investigation into how TikTok is shaping the music industry #

MarkovJunior — this probabilistic programming language is impenetrable to me, but the generated results are amazing (via) #

Yotam Mann teases his AI music studio — stem splitting, chord detection, instrument conversion, tempo stretching in a browser-based editor #

robotsdraw — Joshua Schachter's very funny plotter videos are a hit #

The Inside Outtakes — Bo Burnham dropped an hour-long compilation of material cut from his Netflix special released one year ago today #

Sliderland — minimalist coding playground to make animations with 64 HTML sliders, don't miss the music video (via) #

A City In A Bottle — Frank Force's tiny city and raycasting system in a tweet, with more info about how it works #

Who Owns 4chan? — since 2015, the Japanese toy firm Good Smile has been its silent partner #

This Image Does Not Exist — try to guess if an image was generated by a human or machine #

Searching 32 million academic papers for obscene acronyms hidden in the titles — Rob Manuel doing critical research #

Marble Madness II prototype ROM finally leaks online — a later version without the "Marble Man" branding or trackball support, but fully playable in the next MAME release #

SponsorBlock — crowdsourced browser add-on removes YouTube sponsor reads, "like and subscribe" reminders, intros, outros, and other filler (via) #

Imagen — Google Research announced an impressive DALL·E 2 rival #

Adversarial Minesweeper — harder than Hatetris #

How to Make Automatic Supercuts — Sam Lavigne updated his Videogrep tool to use Vosk, a powerful speech recognition toolkit #

Alan Resnick’s DALL·E 2 variant test — starting with the prompt "a bad photo" and requesting variations of each image #

Reply All calls it quits — co-creator Alex Goldman and co-host Emmanuel Dzotsi announced their departures in a leaked internal memo #

Making sense of VRChat, the “metaverse” people actually like — People Make Games digs into the chaotic and expressive alternative to Facebook's bland corporate vision #

The woman who created Wabbit for the Atari 2600 has been found — Van Mai designed and coded the first-known console game with a human female protagonist in 1982 #