Search Record — visualize your Google Search history as poetry or a wall of questions (via) #

The Pudding visualizes the names of 6,816 complexion beauty products to reveal bias — "nude" and "natural" mostly describe light skin tones, while darker shades are named after objects #

The Mess at Medium — Casey Newton talks to 14 and current Medium employees about their unionization attempt, editorial layoffs, and eternal pivot #

Beeple Generator — generate one of these daily for 5,000 days and sell a token with some metadata pointing to a collage for $69M #

Zoom court videos are making people’s darkest hours go viral — during the pandemic, the courts were tasked with balancing transparency, accessibility, and privacy (via) #

The inside story of All Gas No Brakes — Taylor Lorenz digs into what happened to the gonzo journalism YouTube series and how its creator was fired #

GPT-3 pickup lines — "I will briefly summarize the plot of Back to the Future II for you" is a sure-fire winner #

In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests — across thousands of incidents in nine major cities, police escalated conflicts with an aggressive militarized response #

Remember the Internet — a book series about internet subcultures, first one by Ana Valens on Tumblr porn is out now (via) #

Stunning drone footage of Iceland volcanic eruption — more on Bjorn Steinbekk's YouTube channel #

What does it mean to buy a GIF? — the most balanced explanation I’ve seen of the potential value of NFTs, Ethereum's "eye-watering energy use," and sustainable alternatives #

How a splintering internet damages the Internet Archive’s archival efforts — regional balkanization, paywalls and walled gardens, and the potential end of Section 230 (via) #

Inside the world of Spotify artificial stream manipulation — the black market of playlist payola and stream bots (via) #

Cookie Consent Speedrun — disable all cookies, try to get a sub-30 second time #

Dungeons & Directories — a short text adventure you play in your file browser (via) #

Fontemon — jaw-dropping Pokemon-lite videogame in an OpenType font, with a postmortem and tutorial for making your own font game (via) #

Chrome adds automated live captioning for any video and audio on the web — English-only for now, but just tested and this works surprisingly well for clearly-spoken speech #

Folding screen of pixel-art animated battle of Sekigahara — don't miss the video of it in action #

XXXX Swatchbook — hand-stitched CMYK embroidered swatchbook laboriously made with 219,647 stitches #

Jonty Wareing on how NFTs actually reference the media you’re “buying” — I continue to believe cryptoart is one of the most pointless and wasteful trends in modern history #

Curious World of Animals — "lions pretend to be really cool and awesome and stuff, but really, they're just assholes like most cats" (via) #

The long history of U.S. racism against Asian Americans — from "yellow peril" to "model minority" to the "Chinese virus" #

Nicole Chung’s advice to a parent whose son bullied his Asian classmate — "If we’re not challenging and educating our kids about racism, we leave them at risk of perpetuating it" #

The answer to Anti-Asian racism is not more policing — also: Vox covered the policing debate among members of Asian-American communities #

Asian-Americans experience far more hate incidents than numbers indicate — many go unreported because of language/cultural barriers and lack of trust in law enforcement #

Bystander intervention training to stop anti-Asian/American and xenophobic harassment — free one-hour interactive training, I signed up for next month (via) #

61 Ways to Donate in Support of Asian Communities — from policy reform and legal defense funds to LGBTQ and gender-based orgs #

There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year — new report from Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting center for anti-Asian hate incidents, which escalated during the pandemic #

Vaccines at the Movies — an entertaining and informative survey of immunizations in TV and film #

Chess world champion plays Bongcloud Attack opening in tournament — welcome to the world of meme chess, popularized by grandmaster/livestreamer Hikaru Nakamura #

Hackers can reroute text messages without permission using commercial SMS services — extremely disturbing, and yet another argument for never using SMS for auth #

Zoom Escaper — add echo, choppiness, noise, crying babies, and more to your microphone audio to get out of terrible meetings #

Online Hacker Simulator — change settings in the Start menu #

The Universe Is Dark — winner of the second Incremental Game Jam #

Turntable.fm revived after eight years, as two competing sites — one from its original founder, and a reboot created by two former team members (via) #

Gabe Ferreira’s immersive video proposal — playful demo of creative integrations for web video #

VoCSSels, a voxel editor for 3D CSS/HTML models — a browser-based clone of Kenney's brilliant KenShape for Windows/Linux (via) #

Finding Mona Lisa in Conway’s Game of Life — parallelized to run a thousand iterations on Google Colab in 40 seconds #

Teens on a Year That Changed Everything — art, photos, and words from U.S. teens on a year of pandemic, protest, and social isolation #

ChatChat — Terry Cavanagh's Flash-based kitty MMO now fully works embedded in a tweet on desktop #

What Really Happened at ‘Reply All’? — followup from the NYT on the fallout from Reply All's reporting on Bon Appetit (via) #

Beeple sells NFT of a JPG for $69M, the most ever for a digital work — despite their obvious waste and uselessness, NFTs will persist as long as crypto-whales keep dropping life-changing sums on artists #

NYT interviews 75 artists about their pandemic year — Tig Notaro, Issa Rae, Jenny Holzer, Aaron Sorkin, Phoebe Bridgers, and many more #

Buzzfeed’s oral history of March 11, 2020 — the day the WHO declared a pandemic, NBA cancelled the season, and Tom Hanks got it within hours of each other #

Incarceration in Real Numbers — from the creator of wealth shown to scale and 300,000 faces (via) #

Seeing CO₂ — visualization of carbon emissions as an abstract driving game #

Adi Robertson’s Verge feature on Twine — the legacy and influence of the accessible tool for crafting branching interactive fiction #

Taylor Lorenz on startups letting creators monetize every aspect of their lives — reminds me of Mike Merrill's personal IPO #

Basement video rental shop — I want this, but for a 1980s computer software store #

Deepfaked Tom Cruise breakdown — the creator works on Sassy Justice, and each TikTok clip took weeks of work (via) #