Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse — Charlie Warzel interviews Wagner James Au about what we can learn from Second Life #

The 2,731-Person Project to Build New York City in Minecraft — builders are collaborating to recreate NYC one neighborhood at a time (via) #

People Make Games investigates three indie studio founders accused of emotional abuse — well-reported piece about Ken Wong (Mountains), Steve Gaynor (Fullbright), and Robin Hunicke (Funomena) #

This City Does Not Exist — machine-hallucinated satellite imagery (via) #

What happened to Torah learning software TropeTrainer after the death of its creator — S.I. Rosenbaum's remarkable story of faith, passion, and software obsolescence after death (via) #

Yarn Spinner — a friendly web-based tool for writing branching game dialogue (via) #

Nilay Patel interviews Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg — wide-ranging chat about Tumblr, Wordpress, the financial securitization of everything, and keeping the web weird #

Vimeo ordering creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars or they’ll delete their videos — particularly painful for creators on Patreon where it's the default video integration #

Rocketman Bob Maddox rides his “Beast” jet engine go-kart — "that was about half-throttle" (via) #

Marino Totino’s incredible miniature video store — behind-the-scenes videos on Instagram, with more photos on her homepage #

Drop a playable Mario from Super Mario 64 into any Blender project — people are posting fun examples on Twitter (via) #

Shader Park — creative interactive 2D/3D shaders using a P5.js style library #

Amateur open-source researchers went viral unpacking the war in Ukraine — some of the OSINT happening on Twitter is incredible (via) #

The Gender Bias Inside GPT-3 — some particularly damning examples reflecting the biases of the internet that trained it (via) #

Connor Ratliff finally interviews Tom Hanks for the Dead Eyes podcast — 30 episodes and two years later, a fascinating conversation about how and why a director makes a casting decision #

New Spline beta adds real-time collaborative 3D editing — plus new sculpting tools, export options, template library, and a more #

fly around — lovely new bill wurtz song, his second in the last month #

DeepMind’s new AI model helps decipher, date, and locate ancient inscriptions — if you happen to know ancient Greek, you can try DeepMind's interactive Ithaca demo #

Pockit, a tiny powerful modular computer — very impressive demo, more details at pockit.ai (via) #

Atari acquires MobyGames for $1.5 million — despite their promises, this bodes very poorly for the 23-year-old database's future given Atari's track record #

Brandon Stanton’s Empire of Empathy — fascinating profile of the Humans of New York creator and his philanthropic efforts (via) #

The Many Escapes of Justin Sun — The Verge's new exposé on the Tron/Poloniex/BitTorrent crypto-mogul's history of sketchy financial dealings #

Kyle Orland’s taxonomy of game difficulty — Elden Ring won't hold your hand, but its challenges can be overcome with further exploration and grinding #

Smithsonian to return Benin bronzes to Nigeria — more museums are returning looted cultural objects to where they once belonged (via) #

Talking to the creators of Gender Pay Gap Twitter bot — they cleverly used open UK salary data to call out companies tweeting about International Women's Day #

One man’s journey from Portland to Ukraine’s frontlines — Sergio Olmos documents the final moments of a father leaving his daughters to rescue his mother in Kiev and fight for his country #

Chowhound closing after 25 years online — definitely concerned about other CNET Media Group properties like GameFAQs and Gamespot #

Itch.io Bundle for Ukraine — the massive collection of 1,000 indie videogames, tabletop RPGs, books, and assets raised over $1.5M so far #

The Verge on the Bitsy community — like Twine, the approachable lo-fi game toolkit has opened up game development to new voices #

Adam Neely casts doubt on the plagiarism claims against Dua Lipa’s Levitating — every time I see one of these infringement lawsuits, I get suspicious; she was hit with a second lawsuit yesterday #

The Verge on Hundred Rabbits’ Uxn, a virtual ecosystem for experimental tools and games — I love their design philosophy, we invited them to talk about it at XOXO 2019 #

How Peter Thiel backed an “anti-woke” film festival that ended in tragedy — "a subculture based on transgressing bourgeois norms in 2021 faces a trap: It can look indistinguishable from Trumpism" #

feral.earth — links that can only be clicked under certain ecological/weather conditions measured near the server (via) #

Where does the tone come from in an electric guitar? — don't miss the final test, thoroughly debunking the idea that the body and neck impact tone #

Russia blocks its last independent television channel — New Yorker's Masha Gessen on the final days of TV Rain; its journalists have fled the country #

Primitive Technology’s Thatched Workshop — first new video in two years, he was working on a TV pilot stuck in development hell #

600 Songs From 1990-1999 Remixed Into 34 Minutes — Hood Internet compiled their '90s megamixes into a single mega-megamix #

Bandcamp acquired by Epic Games — definitely didn't see this one coming; I was the first to write about their launch 13 years ago #

The internet is a force multiplier for Ukraine — Casey Newton's notes on platforms in wartime #

Playdate SDK released — comes with a bunch of code samples and minigames for the Simulator, should start shipping soon #

Wordle! for Netscape — fully playable in Netscape 1.0 (via) #

ProsePainter — from the creators of Artbreeder, modify images with text-to-image AI brushes #

Debunking the viral story of false teeth returned to their owner after 11 years — it got widespread coverage, but nobody bothered to dig any deeper into the obvious holes in the story #

wilderness.land — "a tribute to web surfing," an explorable pixel art spreadsheet map of interesting websites #

Map of Reddit — just be careful exploring the large dark continent to the south #

Casey Newton interviews Molly White of Web 3 Is Going Just Great — a good companion to Molly's growing collection of essays about the blockchain #

Dictionar.io — navigate between a starting and ending word by clicking linked words in their definitions #

Titanic with a Cat — every OwlKitty video is just sublime (via) #

The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s “high five” photos — don't miss the reenactment at the end #

Making It Work 2022 — The Verge's article series on artists and creators dealing with commercial clones, counterfeits, and plagiarists #