October 29, 2021
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 #
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 #
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 #
“History Will Not Judge Us Kindly”
— Adrienne LaFrance on how employees repeatedly raised alarms about the harm Facebook was doing but were ignored by leadership #
Casey Newton on how Facebook decides which countries need protection
— "There is a pervasive sense that, on some fundamental level, no one is entirely sure what’s going on." #
Ben Smith on how the Facebook Papers coverage was coordinated
— it's unusual for so many major publications to work together like this, but Frances Haugen was able to set the terms #
Washington Post’s key takeaways from the Facebook Papers
— there's simply too much good reporting on this to read today, but WaPo has solid highlights with links to deeper reporting on each #
Facebook’s lost generation
— Facebook is dealing with an aging user base, while teens are using Instagram less #
Running list of all the Facebook Papers stories
— no longer under embargo, 17 publications started releasing their reporting on the internal Facebook docs leaked by Frances Haugen #
Michael Hobbes on the methods of moral panic journalism
— media coverage of the "cancel culture" panic is rife with irrelevant examples, bad stats, and false equivalence #
Janelle Shane plays with Ask Delphi, the ethical AI
— played with the demo and the results were laughably awful #
Trump’s new social media site collapses after trolls flood it before launch
— it's also just a modified Mastodon instance and they're violating the license terms #
Clickbait Genius
— quiz to guess which headlines performed better, using real data from the Upworthy Research Archive (via) #
Resignation screenshots on r/antiwork
— subreddit filled with stories of people quitting abusive jobs #
The story behind Mariah Carey’s secret ’90s alt-rock album
— the label killed the idea of releasing anything that could compromise her pop star image #
The Worst Thing on Earth
— an excerpt from Tamara Shopsin’s debut novel LaserWriter II, out tomorrow #
magneticscrolls.net
— every classic Magnetic Scrolls adventure playable with color graphics via SSH #
NYT simulation of how gender bias affects promotion cycles
— very good interactive infoviz showing how biases stack to impact women in higher roles #
Adam Savage goes incognito at NYCC with an incredible Ghostbusters costume
— his enthusiasm is contagious, mirrored by Jason Reitman and the young cast of Ghostbusters: Afterlife #
Investigation finds Amazon puts its own brands above better-rated products
— not just house brands like Amazon Basics, but it puts Amazon-exclusive products above competitors (via) #
“Every Frame A Painting” creators to co-direct VOIR, David Fincher’s new Netflix docuseries
— visual essays celebrating cinema, a perfect fit for Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou #
Ryan Broderick on TikTok’s low stakes toxicity
— conspiratorially obsessive discourse over mundane subjects going viral, a fender bender or a girl surprising her boyfriend #
Rickrolling an entire high school district
— exploiting lax security for a senior prank, followed by a debrief with IT to fix the issues they discovered #
How Slack Upended the Workplace
— the chat tool can invert power structures by letting employees speak candidly and organize internally #
ProPublica investigation into Tennessee juvenile court that jailed Black kids for nonexistent crimes
— until ordered to stop in a federal court, Rutherford County locked up children in almost half of cases, compared to the state average of 5% #
Please Don’t Destroy makes their SNL debut
— flashbacks to the Lonely Island; Rebecca Alter profiled the online comedy trio for Vulture in July #
Netflix suspends trans employee who tweeted about Dave Chappelle special
— "You can’t do a carbon offset for bigotry" #
After three years, Michael Hobbes leaving You’re Wrong About
— Sarah Marshall will continue the podcast with special guests (via) #
ScummVM turns 20
— they merged with ResidualVM, adding support for Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, Escape from Monkey Island, and Myst 3 Exile #
just the punctuation
— Clive Thompson made a little utility to look at literary styles by stripping out everything except punctuation (via) #
50 Years of Text Games on “Violet” and Inform 7
— a delightful game about procrastination with a unique narrator, enabled by an equally unique authoring tool #
Bloomberg goes looking for Tether’s billions
— searching for the not-so-stablecoin's reserves inexplicably leads to a Mighty Ducks child actor and the co-creator of Inspector Gadget #