May 19, 2021
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.” #
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 #
The Palestinian Dispossession at the Heart of the Gaza Conflict
— "They will rubber stamp more evictions, all the while using the tool of law to provide a veneer of integrity." #
Wired’s Megan Molteni on the 60-year-old scientific error that helped Covid kill
— related: Zeynep Tufekci on the long delay in accepting spread by aerosol transmission #
Aaron A. Reed on Monster Island, a play-by-mail MMO from 1989
— over 250,000 rooms and 1,600 concurrent players, all running on a 386 and played via postal mail #
David Farrier gets scammed by a foot fetishist
— don't miss his interview with an online sex worker about their lessons learned: cash up-front and never use Paypal #
Enhancing photorealism in GTA V with a convolutional networks
— processing game imagery using a network trained on cityscapes #
Google Docs to switch from HTML to canvas based rendering
— I wonder when media sites will start doing this to prevent ad blockers (via) #
How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body
— Laine Nooney on the history of computer-induced pain and the ways people tried to manage it #
WaPo interviews the Japanese biker dad who uses FaceApp to post as a young woman
— raises complex questions around authenticity and identity online #
P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A. (1988)
— teen hackers in communist Czechoslovakia made and swapped illegal protest text games on bootleg cassettes #
Genesis Noir leads IGF 2021 finalists
— as always, an incredible year of indie games to seek out and play #
Neopets’ blackmarket pet scandal, explained
— Simone de Rochefort dives into the site's history, current drama, and future #
LiveLeak shuttered after 15 years
— I never knew until today that it started as an offshoot of internet shock site Ogrish #
Report finds ISPs funded fake net neutrality comments
— 18 out of 22 million comments were fake, 7.7 million from a single 19-year-old college student #
Signal banned from running Instagram ads revealing how much Facebook knows about you
— a stunt, but a good one (via) #
How Basecamp Blew Up
— incredible reporting from Casey Newton on the disastrous all-hands meeting that led to a third of the company quitting #
Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm
— the new company will be just called "Yahoo," finally dropping the exclamation point #
Web Curios returns
— after a nine-month hiatus, Matt Muir's link-laden newsletter is back and at its own domain #
Basecamp employees quit en masse after politics ban and severance offer
— I counted 19 out of 57, fully one-third of their team, and those are just the ones who announced it publicly #
Snopes or Nopes
— guess whether Snopes fact-checks were true or not based on the article titles (via) #
Casey Newton on what really happened at Basecamp
— the company banned societal/political discussions at work, to the surprise and dismay of its employees #
Making animated glitter text with SVG
— reproducing the Angelfire look with SVG's noise, color cycling, and blending features #
SiriusXM acquires 99% Invisible
— the show will remain free, with Roman Mars and his team developing new shows for Stitcher #
Yahoo, the Destroyer
— Kaitlin Tiffany interviewed me, Jason Scott, Maciej Ceglowski, and others about Yahoo's casual destruction of internet history #
The Slander Industry
— Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill dig into the relationship between gripe sites and reputation-management services #