We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End — a companion piece to Zeynep Tufekci's NYT new op-ed urging world leaders to take action against new variants #

Dynamo Dream: Salad Mug — Blender virtuoso Ian Hubert's absurdly detailed CG-rich short film about a salad vendor in a cyberpunk city (via) #

Invisible Roommates — Nicole He and Eran Hilleli's delightful AR prototype imagining the secret lives of smart devices #

Motherboard’s exposé of Citizen’s dangerous effort to cash in on vigilantism — remarkable reporting using internal documents, messages, and roadmaps #

Rublight — from 2012, a very silly new-to-me Conan sketch that made me laugh #

The Pudding tries to get an AI to win New Yorker cartoon contest — they prompt OpenAI's GPT-3 model with the cartoon description, you vote on the output #

QAmom — a filmmaker makes some bets with his conspiracist mother #

Charlie Bit My Finger video sold as an NFT, will be deleted from YouTube — bought by the same NFT whale who bought Disaster Girl, Overly Attached Girlfriend, and Kevin Roose's NYT article #

A Press Conference About What Happened To This Morning Where I Was Going To Get So Much Done — yes, this morning got away from us (via) #

What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed — reconstructing the Greenwood neighborhood from archival photos, insurance maps, city directories, Census data, and survivor accounts (via) #

Caught in the Study Web — exploring the creative use of YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Twitter for studying, built for and by students #

Taylor Lorenz on Adrian’s Kickback — a party invite went viral on TikTok, drawing thousands of teens and content creators to Huntington Beach #

BuzzFeed profiles The Linda Lindas — their Rebel Girl cover just kills me #

A Mind Is Born — from 2017, a stunning Commodore 64 demo made in 256 bytes #

Uberduck — using Tacotron, generate synthetic speech using dozens of famous voices, such as rappers, politicians, and cartoon characters #

The Battle of Sharks! — CGP Grey digs into a London art group's hilarious battle with a city council #

Remain Seated Please — short doc about two friends who illicitly explored every inch of the Horizons ride at Disney World #

NYT retrospective of the Space Jam website from 1996 — Gina Cherelus and Caity Weaver interviewed several of the people behind it #

Harvard Law School’s analysis of link rot in the New York Times — 6% of deep links in NYT articles from 2018 are dead, 43% from 2008, and 72% from 1998. (via) #

Terms & Conditions Apply — a game where you try to opt out of everything #

New Session — a collection of queer and trans works accessible only via telnet (via) #

River Runner — follow a raindrop placed anywhere in the contiguous U.S. and see where it ends up (via) #

You Can Pet the Dog in VRChat — Coopertom isn't impressed #

Beware the Copyleft Trolls — photographers using Creative Commons and the courts "as a blunt object with which to coerce nuisance value settlements from unsuspecting parties" #

Ed Yong on the aftermath of America’s pandemic trauma — anxiety, grief, and psychic numbing from a self-reinforcing disaster #

The Linda Lindas play the L.A. Public Library — their song "Racist Sexist Boy" is blowing up on Twitter, but the whole set's great (via) #

Were microwaves invented to thaw cryogenically frozen hamsters in the 1950s? — yet another brilliant Tom Scott video (via) #

Fansubbing BookStory — collaboratively translating Kairosoft's used bookstore simulator after 24 years (via) #

Determining the time of a photo by measuring its shadows — if you know the location/date and have a clear, straight shot, you can estimate within 30 minutes #

Preserving Worlds — a "documentary travelogue through aging but beloved virtual worlds," interviewing people trying to preserve them (via) #

Aaron A. Reed on LambdaMOO — it's stayed running continuously for over 30 years, still easily accessible today #

AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google — ding dong, AMP is dead (via) #

25 Edits That Defined the Modern Internet Video — related: 12 Video Creators on Their Hardest Edit Ever (via) #

Exploring a general store untouched for nearly 60 years — the 153 Mile Store opened in 1914 and closed in 1963 with everything inside, a time capsule of the early 20th century #

Pouët looks at 20 years of demoscene trends — wild that the Commodore 64 passed Windows for the last two years, albeit with smaller prods #

Visit the first Apple Store from 2001 in augmented reality — please do Electronics Boutique in 1988 next, thanks #

Twitter shares learnings about biased image cropping algorithm — they found it favored white faces, leading to the cropping changes this month #

Freenode staff resigns after hostile takeover of IRC network — the holding company for the world's largest IRC network was sold under false pretenses #

NYT’s Amanda Hess talks to Sinead O’Connor — “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.” #

Google adding an RSS reader to Chrome on Android — a headline I didn't expect to see in 2021 #

Trash the Planet — browser-based idle game about capitalist raccoons taking over the world (via) #

Vandal — browser add-on to see historical versions of a webpage from the Wayback Machine without leaving the tab (via) #

pmndrs market — newly-launched database of freely-licensed 3D models/textures with an open API (via) #

After 20 years, eBay closing its adults-only categories next month — including all adult art, comics, and games, presumably because they're transitioning from Paypal to traditional payment processors #

Google previews Project Starline, a life-size holographic 3D video chat booth — multiple cameras and sensors capture a 3D model in real-time, displayed on a 65-inch holographic light field display #

Prosecutors can’t prove cheerleader mom deepfake is actually a deepfake — with evidence pointing to its authenticity, seems like a case of deepfakes being blamed for teens screwing around #

Sending an international email in 1984 — "I won't tell you my account number" (clearly types in account number and "0000" PIN on keyboard) (via) #

Colossal Cave Adventure as a playable long-polling GIF on AO3 — learn more about Andrew Sillers' Living GIFs, including Doom on AO3 #

Itch.io waiving all fees today for Creator Day — go get some delightful indie games with 100% of revenue going to their creators #

Vox on the Gaza doom loop — solid explainer on the political dynamics behind Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority #