NYT Magazine profiles Trevor Rainbolt, professional GeoGuessr champion — after memorizing the world from his desk, he started exploring it in late 2022, staying in a different country every month (via) #

How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline — some are finding success recovering their hacked or disabled accounts in court, and in at least one case, financial damages (via) #

Chris Fenton made a 1/25-scale Cray Supercomputer wristwatch — it displays a simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons; all his other projects are great, but especially the Electromechanical Lunar Lander (via) #

How will your city feel in the future? — The Pudding explores the changing climate zones of 70 global cities over the next 50 years #

Fast Crimes at Lambda School — Ben Sandofsky's long deep dive into the collapse of a predatory coding bootcamp and its narcissistic founder (via) #

500,000 books removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library after publisher lawsuit — ebook licensing for libraries continues to be far too expensive and restrictive #

Ars Technica’s oral history of text games and interactive fiction — interviews with Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Graham Nelson, Lizy Daly, Chris Klimas, and more #

Anil Dash on the “New Alt Media” — a generation of writer-owned reader-funded indie publications emerging from the ashes of digital media brands #

FromSoft Word — "The Dark Souls of word processors" deletes your document if you make a single typo (via) #

Infinanana — endless Hey Jude ending generated from random YouTube clips (via) #

1,500 videos of someone quietly flipping through old magazines, cover to cover — I didn't know this was a thing (via) #

Duran Duran’s Rio cover model identified 42 years later — Patrick Nagel based his iconic 1980s illustrations on photos found in fashion magazines (via) #

Moondrop Isle — nine authors each wrote sections of a sprawling interactive fiction game with a shared inventory between them (via) #

Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe — Tic-Tac-Toe reimagined as a game of chance, with probabilities for different outcomes on each square (via) #

Louie Mantia on designing icons for dark mode — interesting exploration of using color creatively for richer icons than just swapping in a black background #

Crying About My Cancer Comedy — a behind-the-scenes of Hank Green's upcoming standup special, which will be the thing that finally gets me to sign up for Dropout on June 21 #

Sony Pictures buys Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest, first major Hollywood studio to own a theater in 75 years — a sad end to a struggling franchise hit hard by the pandemic, but at least their 35 remaining theaters in 25 metros will live another day #

pn0gstr0m — I played this multiplying Pong variant for longer than I'd like to admit (via) #

TerminalTextEffects — completely impractical, but strangely hypnotic, text effects for your terminal (via) #

Ginger Root’s “No Problems” — all of Cameron Lew's music videos are so stylish and catchy, each album building its own storyline #

Badness 0 — in which Tom 7 develops a system for writing fully-justified text in papers in the most convoluted way possible #

Walnut and Me — Sam Anderson writes about what his dog taught him about mortality, with animated illustrations by Gaia Alari (via) #

How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop — using the serial port might have been easier, but OCRing six pages of faxed hexadecimal gets points for creativity #

The unlikely black market for Taco Bell art — people are stealing early 2000s prints off the walls of Taco Bells and selling them online (via) #

Qlock, a Javascript quine clock — a seven-segment clock made from its own source code, only 321 bytes of JS #

Tiny Awards is back! — go nominate your favorite non-commercial indie website launched in the last year #

Gmail will break your heart — with Gmail turning 20 last month, Caitlin Dewey is collecting your long-forgotten emails for an (anonymized) art project #

Brr.fyi on engineering for slow internet at the South Pole — modern web apps and OS updates are mostly unusable with glacial speeds and high latency at McMurdo Station #

How do they know dogs are colorblind? — Howtown is immediately great out of the gate #

Internet sleuths find origin of the photo that inspired “The Backrooms” — a 2003 photo of an empty hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin #

$400k worth of stolen Playdates mysteriously returned — if you watched Cabel Sasser's excellent GDC talk, you'll know two pallets of handhelds disappeared earlier this year #

Neven Mrgan on how it feels to get an AI email from a friend — "like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside" #

Aaron A. Reed on wordplay as a game mechanic in interactive fiction — most of the games he talks about can be played instantly in the browser for free through IFDB #

Teresa Ibarra analyzed 83,000 text messages with her ex-boyfriend — "Q: It's very personal to share this. Why did you do this? A: that's art babey!!" #

Why Old Heads Hated Kendrick vs. Drake — Jay Smooth's first new Ill Doctrine video in six years! #

Sympawnies, pet portraits in sheet music — Noam Oxman makes animal portraits made of musical notation, composed to match the personality of each subject #

Golden Gate Claude — as part of a new research paper, Anthropic released a version of their LLM that hyperfixates on the Golden Gate Bridge (via) #

The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder — only discovered 28 years later, most of the interpreter's source code could be found in "unused" sectors of the disk #

The Kleptones remastered “Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots” and “A Night At The Hip-Hopera — celebrating the 20th anniversary of two of the best mashup albums of all time #

Osamu Tezuka’s “Jumping” from 1984 — beautiful animated short with a first-person perspective, there's a behind-the-scenes video that includes a panorama view of the entire map (via) #

&udm=14 — "the enshittification Konami code" #

The launch lineup for XOXO 2024 is out! — really proud of this one, registration is open for the next eight days until Wednesday, May 29 #

Ten Blue Links — single-serving site with instructions for switching your browser to Google's AI/clutter-free search results #

City in a Bottle, how a magical 256-byte city generator works — Frank Force breaks down one of his most popular dweets #

Cabel Sasser digs into a forged Apple employee badge on eBay — a detailed forgery exposed with the help of Apple Employee #8, it ended up selling for $1,001 with shipping #

The Graying Gig Workers — Rest of World's series of articles reporting on the pros and cons of gig work for older workers around the world #

AI art bots are killing DeviantArt — this was entirely predictable when I first wrote about their failure to police it two years ago #

Nilay Patel interviews Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of Google Search, and the fate of the web — Patel is a dogged interviewer, but Pichai refuses to acknowledge Google's broken pact with the web #

Coding My Handwriting — Amy Goodchild expands her generative font experiments to reproduce her own handwriting in 26kb #

The story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his “lost week” at the movies — $20 in 1947 is $280 in 2024 dollars, buying one adventurous 10-year-old boy a wild week in San Francisco #