February 8, 2022
Lost for Words
— Ami's fourth game just went live on Kickstarter, this one co-designed with our son! #
The giant chainmail box that stops a house dissolving
— Tom Scott highlights a creative conservation effort of historic architecture #
Is “Cancel Culture” Really a Threat To America?
— Michael Hobbes (Maintenance Phase/You're Wrong About) made a video about our national moral panic #
The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now
— Ian Bogost on the securitization of everything; see also: Kaitlyn Tiffany on Web3 backlash and Amanda Mull on celebrity NFTs (via) #
That’s How It Works When You’re a Woman on the Internet
— visceral essay from writer Aubrey Hirsch about hate and harassment she's experienced online (via) #
Janelle Shane’s AI-generated Valentine’s cards
— "Crush hearts with your lovely forehead, Valentine!" #
Casio CA-100 Simulator
— Stef Animal's "fan-fiction" tribute to the 1990 keyboard, try the demo button for an example (via) #
Matt Round used GPT-3 to generate romantic poetry as if written by 8-bit computers
— and cheezy pickup lines later in the thread #
GPT-NeoX-20B
— the free 20-billion parameter model powering goose.ai, a drop-in OpenAI replacement at a fraction of the cost (via) #
New Yorker cartoons so dated that they’re just people doing normal things
— some genuinely funny comics in the replies #
Etienne Jacob’s Self-Description
— four charts that describe themselves, inspired by xkcd's comic of the same name #
The Seinfeld Theme Mixed With A Hit Song From Every Year Seinfeld Was On TV
— @Seinfeld2000 and Hood Internet team up (via) #
Kaitlin Tiffany on the history and cultural impact of Tumblr
— their CEO quietly left last month, Matt Mullenweg will be running it for a while #
New York Times buys Wordle
— Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard, Sony buys Bungie, and now the biggest game acquisition news of all #
Garbage Day on Joe Rogan and Spotify
— they want to convince you it's a moderation problem, but they paid $100M to exclusively publish him #
Disney movie scenes recreated in Animal Crossing
— Blathers as the owl from CInderella is inspired casting #
Dinner Party
— intensely weird Twitch streams of 3D characters having surreal GPT-3 conversations (via) #
GD Colon’s Thirty Dollar Website
— silly music sequencer with some incredible examples in the thread and quote-tweets #
Cease & Desist Grand Prix
— MSCHF is selling eight shirts with infringing corporate logos, with the winning team whoever C&Ds them first #
Multitrack breakdown of Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”
— incredible how much went into the production, check out the isolated acoustic guitar or synth/keys #
Perfect Tides
— the charming point-and-click adventure game from Octopus Pie's Meredith Gran is out on February 22 #
New breakfast cereals from AI
— prompted by my tweet, Janelle Shane generated some delicious new cereal options #
Folding Ideas on the problem with NFTs
— Dan Olson's massive 2.5 hour critical deep-dive into crypto, NFTs, DAOs, and web3 #
Hank Green on how TikTok is failing to adequately pay creators
— how TikTok's fixed creator fund pays out 6x less of their earnings than YouTube's 55/45 revenue split #
Google ends support for free legacy G Suite users
— if you use Gmail with a custom domain for free, you have to start paying a minimum $6/user/month by May 1 #
Major record labels sue youtube-dl’s web host
— the German service only hosts the documentation, not the repo or downloads, which are all on GitHub #
Anti-vaxxers, QAnon influencers, and white nationalists are flocking to Substack
— they seem determined to repeat the mistakes made by Twitter and Reddit's hands-off approach to content moderation #
Playdate Pulp goes into public beta
— Panic's browser-based code-optional editor for making games for their upcoming handheld (via) #
homecoming.diary
— bizarre TikTok account demonstrating dozens of hyper-specific gadgets in each video, "if Shein was a house" #
COVIDtests.gov launches a day early
— currently serving over 500k people with one order of four tests per residential address #
Daniel Radcliffe to play Weird Al in biopic
— co-written by Al and the writer of the Funny or Die sketch in 2013 #
Wiki History Game
— try to drag Wikipedia articles into chronological order, my best streak is 12 (via) #
Books & Sleeves
— part of Henning M. Lederer's ongoing series of videos animating vintage book covers #
The Most Frequently Used Emoji of 2021
— Jennifer Daniel's interactive breakdown of emoji trends (via) #
Paper Website
— in this behind-the-scenes post, Ben Stokes wrote about using GPT-3 to correct errors in handwriting recognition (via) #
Moxie’s impressions of web3
— the former Signal CEO built some provocative crypto projects and wrote about it #