WeirdSpot — generate Spotify playlists that spell out sentences using song titles (via) #

Simulating large-scale plant ecosystems over time — more in the source paper and video #

Emoji to Scale — just missing the microbe and galaxy on either end of the spectrum #

Max Read on web3 — very good roundup of thoughts and threads from enthusiasts, detractors, and the rare voice in between #

Blockify Yourself — turn yourself into a Block exec or board member #

Townscaper demo — a free web demo of Oskar Stålberg's lovely townbuilder (via) #

Amazon Brand Detector — an offshoot of The Markup's investigation into how Amazon favors their own house brands and exclusive products (via) #

Team builds the first living robots that can reproduce — “Xenobots” can gather cells inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth," assembling robot babies capable of self-replication when they grow up #

Beifall — clap your hands in this weird little web toy from the creators of KIDS and PLUG & PLAY (via) #

Casey Newton on Jack Dorsey stepping down as Twitter CEO — and what to expect from his successor, crypto-enthusiast CTO Parag Agrawal #

Aliendscapes — Frank Force's alien landscape generator in 2k of JS, click for a new one #

That Funny Feeling — Bo Burnham's dystopian ditty is finally on YouTube #

NYT interviews Jack Ferver, the little lad who loves berries and cream — a Starburst ad that went viral online in 2007 blew up again 14 years later, thanks to Justin McElroy and TikTok #

Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History — Defunctland hired an industrial engineer to build a theme park simulation for this feature-length documentary #

DOONT, A Bad Lip Reading of Dune — don't miss the full version of Heaven Drips #

Ed Yong talks to health-care workers with long COVID — dismissed by their peers, some medical professionals are re-evaluating how they've treated their own patients #

AI breaks NES Tetris — love the glitches introduced as it blows past the kill screen (via) #

AI Weirdness plays with Pixray Swirl — CLIP generates surreal pixel art animations #

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation — investigation into how millions of ad dollars bankroll clickbait actors, funding disinformation campaigns internationally (via) #

Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit — Stuart Brown goes deep into chiptune for a new episode of Ahoy (via) #

Garbage Day unravels the mystery of Thinkarete Lifestyle, Facebook’s most viral publisher — a "barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content" is the most widely-viewed page in the U.S. this year #

Justin Ling interviews the reclusive creator of Pictures for Sad Children — she deleted the comic and her presence online after a 2014 Kickstarter update blew up online #

Apple announces self-service iPhone repair program — getting ahead of FTC right-to-repair enforcement #

Wordle — new daily word game from Josh Wardle, the creator of r/button and r/place at Reddit #

Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, Founder of Something Awful, Is Dead at 45 — related: Motherboard's oral history of SA from 2017 #

The New Jersey arcade with a banned-for-life blacklist — charming video talks to the current owner and some of the exiled, now in their 40s and 50s (via) #

NYT on Neopets fans after the death of Flash — how they've adapted to the redesign of something they never wanted to change #

An oral history of Processing — the second part documenting the history of the influential creative coding language is out now #

The growing partisan gap of U.S. covid deaths — because of natural immunity in red counties and new antiviral treatments, that gap may soon peak (via) #

Steve Albini reflects on his edgelord past — interesting conversation about privilege and culture from someone with a history of ironically saying shitty things for shock value (via) #

Rocks — Neal Agarwal's rock-stacking simulator #

The Untold Story of Sushi in America — how a religious movement played a role in spawning the U.S. sushi industry (via) #

50 Years of Text Games on Porpentine’s Howling Dogs — how the Twine revolution opened up interactive fiction to a new world of writers and audiences #

The Woman With No Face — powerful science-fantasy short story from A.L. Goldfuss #

Clive Thompson on the legacy of COBOL in the banking industry — related: an oral history of Bank Python (via) #

Mundane Halloween 2021 — "person who briefly mistook a plastic bag for a cat" #

haveagood.today — built on her collection of found GIFs, Olia Lialia's Perpetual Calendar wishes you a happy day (via) #

Weeklypedia — weekly digest of most-edited Wikipedia articles and discussions #

Tweet Shelf — an excellent replacement for Nuzzel, I love being able to break out articles, websites, and videos #

DIY lava lamp Halloween costume — with LED smart lights (via) #

Metaverse Noir — Kathryn Yu made this branching narrative thread for an MFA class project, earning her an A in the process #

5,162 attempts Super Mario Bros speedruns combined into a single video — don't miss the behind-the-scenes video showing the custom software used to reconstruct it #

DOOM playable as 16,000 HTML checkboxes — made with Checkboxland #

Rebecca Jennings on the Mountain Goats’ “No Children” going viral on TikTok — she talked to John Darnielle about its surprising rise as a TikTok meme #

Penzil — three.js app for sketching in 3D #

Cleanup.pictures — content-aware fill as a free web app (via) #

Garbage Day on the Facebook Papers — reiterating again that Facebook knew all along, ignored everyone ringing the alarm bell, and lied about it publicly #

Cabel Sasser shares a prototype original iPod — I'm lucky enough to have seen this yellowing beast in person #

Lay All Your Love On Me, performed by a vampire — the first song from Brian David Gilbert's AAAH!BBA, his Halloween-themed ABBA cover album releasing at midnight PT tonight #

Glitch Art in Medical Imaging — love that confetti (via) #