Exploring an old computer store that shuttered in 2001, frozen in time — the tech time capsule sits in a strip mall in Norman, Oklahoma, stuck in legal battles after the owner went bankrupt #

MetaFilter owner Jessamyn West interviewed on the community’s evolution and moderation challenges — it turns 25 (!) on Sunday with big changes in the works, including a full code rewrite and converting to a nonprofit (via) #

Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia — fascinating story of a Brazilian woman who built a business renting fake gig economy accounts made with stolen identities out to undocumented workers (via) #

Internet Phone Book — an open call for website submissions for "a physical printed directory for the vast poetic web" #

TUAW relaunched as zombie content farm with AI articles under the names of its old staff — the new domain owners even generated AI photos for each author, despite not buying rights to any of the content #

Ironic Sans on StripWare, short-lived 1980s method of scanning code from paper — the Cauzin Softstrip was like a giant CueCat, used for scanning in BASIC programs from books #

Ghost federates its first newsletter — they also open-sourced their ActivityPub server built with Fedify #

large.horse — zoom in to see a good use for subdomains; see also: endless.horse from 2015 (via) #

Pixel Mirror — a faceted crystal that turns everything viewed through it into pixel art (via) #

shindigs’ thread of unique vtubers — some people doing incredibly creative things on Twitch, from watercolor worlds to playing with CRTs #

Scalpers work with hackers to reverse-engineer Ticketmaster’s “non-transferable” tickets — to defeat their 2FA-like revolving barcodes, the scalpers can now generate a valid token for any ticket #

Anna’s Archive faces millions in damages and a permanent injunction — the shadow library is incredibly well-run, recently changing domains to stay out of U.S. jurisdiction #

Scientific American podcast on Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace — the anonymous math genius who haunted Math Stack Exchange with enigmatic answers before disappearing in 2015 (via) #

Lindsay Ellis on Yoko Ono and the Beatles — Lindsay Ellis has been active on Nebula, but this is her first new video essay on YouTube in nearly three years #

Chappell Roan spent 7 years becoming an overnight success — I wonder how the Atlantic Records rep that dropped her from the label after "Pink Pony Girl" feels about that decision now #

What should an electric car sound like? — interesting Vox video on the sound design for the hidden speaker systems that replace engine sounds #

Kowloon Walled City cross-section illustration — click/hover to read the English annotations for Terasawa Hitomi's stylized panoramic drawing from 1997 (via) #

Cloudflare launches one-click button to block known AI scrapers and crawlers — they'll also try to block AI companies using spoofed user agents like Perplexity #

In defense of an old pixel — tremendous Marcin Wichary talk on pixel fonts, complete with a new full-featured pixel font editor for the web #

Pikimov, free web-based motion design and video editor — the lightweight 5MB After Effects alternative was built by a single dev and processes everything locally with no signups or cloud uploads #

Perplexity’s grand theft AI — Elizabeth Lopatto doesn't hold back against AI search vampires trying to suck value out of the open web #

Code Galaxies — visualize software dependencies as stars in an explorable galaxy (via) #

Examining Jane Appleseed’s emails from an Apple Store demo computer — Apple is missing an opportunity to build an immersive ARG inside all the messages, photos, files, and apps #

One Million Checkboxes — "checking a box checks it for everyone," like a one-bit version of Reddit Place #

Recreating Georg Nees’s “Schotter,” iconic generative art from 1968 — don't miss part two where Zellyn finds the artwork's original seed from a billion possibilities (via) #

Woodworm — clever free PICO-8 puzzle game where you're a little worm carving wooden sculptures #

Major record labels sue AI music generators Suno and Udio for mass copyright infringement — this is a big case to watch, the largest group to try to set a precedent that training AI on copyrighted works for profit isn't fair use #

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 #