What was the original URL for Yahoo before it was called Yahoo? — a simple question from Joanne McNeil sent me on a rabbit hole through Usenet, listservs, and the Internet Archive #

The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme — every link is clickable, lose yourself in cursed computer lore #

Rocky Horror played to an empty theater for 54 weeks. Now, audiences return to Portland’s longest-running movie — "I was in a position to keep a flame burning, to keep a torch lit." #

Pocari Sweat commercial’s astounding in-camera effects — watch the behind-the-scenes video to see the rolling walkways in more detail (via) #

DMX, dead at 50 — rest in peace #

Google blocks advertisers from using social/racial justice keywords for ad targeting on YouTube — "Black Lives Matter" and "Black power" were blocked, but "white lives matter" and "white power" were allowed #

Fyre Fest attendee auctioning viral tweet for a new kidney on Ja Rule’s NFT platform — this entire story is a sad sandwich #

Justin McElroy’s loving ode to Yahoo! Answers — for over a decade, My Brother, My Brother and Me turned its silliest questions into comedy gold #

NYT analyzes restrictions in Georgia’s new voting law — Republicans are working overtime to make sure fewer people can vote to regain control (via) #

Leaked internal database of police departments using Clearview AI — provided to Buzzfeed News from an anonymous source, as of February 2020 #

The Hidden Game Within Microsoft Flight Simulator — using the photo mode to turn it into a walking simulator, exploring the glitchy planet from ground level #

Lauren Goode on algorithms that won’t let her forget her canceled marriage — six years ago, Eric Meyer wrote about inadvertent algorithmic cruelty (via) #

New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv profiles memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus — her controversial research on false memories made her a popular expert witness casting doubt on claims of sexual assault (via) #

Have I Been Zucked? — check if your personal info was among 533 million Facebook accounts leaked #

Yahoo Answers shutting down on May 4 — just like Yahoo to delete 16 years of community-contributed content with 30 days' notice #

NYT on the Trump campaign’s dark design patterns for fundraising — they tricked donors into emptying their bank accounts with automatic weekly donations (via) #

StyleCLIP, manipulating StyleGAN imagery with text — don't miss the absurdly impressive demo video (via) #

Anil Dash on inventing NFTs with artist Kevin McCoy in 2014 — their haha-just-serious Seven on Seven presentation is worth watching, if you've never seen it (via) #

How QAnon Is Tearing Families Apart — VICE interviewed three dozen people about their QAnon family members of widely-varying backgrounds #

Wormhole — free blazingly fast web app to send files with end-to-end encryption, up to 10GB #

Reddit’s Second — try to guess the second-most voted picture, or wait to see vote counts for fewer points #

itslennnie — I love this supportive little ghost #

Slamilton, A Basketball Musical — Space Jam mashed up with Hamilton shouldn't work this well, but it does #

Imaginary Friends Reunited — a social network for imaginary friends like Gloop, Dracula CEO, and Tears for Fears #

68k.news, a lo-fi Google News for retro computers — "Tested on Netscape 1.1 through 4 on a Mac SE/30" (via) #

Simone Giertz makes a chair for needy pets — fun to see her creative process and missteps along the way #

Sixtyforgan, playing church organ music on a modded Commodore 64 — the flipside of his Chipophone project, turning an organ into an 8-bit synthesizer (via) #

The New Yorker digs into the Lawyer Cat Zoom call — they found the source of the avatar, bafflingly set as the default webcam software for some Dell computers in the late 2000s #

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" #