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) #

Phantom Tollbooth author Norton Juster dies at 91 — I adored this book, and the 2012 documentary exploring its lasting impact #

Google urged employees reporting discrimination to take mental health counseling and medical leave — 11 current and former employees were effectively told "it's not us, it's you" #

Remembering Allan McDonald — the engineer refused to sign off on the Challenger launch and helped expose the disaster cover-up, risking his career twice #

Who I Lost — devastating NYT interactive feature interviewing Americans who lost friends and loved ones to Covid-19 (via) #

ertdfgcvb’s livecoding playground for text-based art — love the sand game made of "sand" #

OpenAI’s state-of-the-art machine vision AI is fooled by handwritten notes — the downside of teaching your AI to read #

Now Play This 2021 — the festival of experimental game design is fully online this year with a delightful lineup #

The Garden of Earthly Delights — inspired by Bosch's triptych, an online chatroom for the animals of Age of Empires II (via) #

Needledrop — a turntable interface for YouTube #

Jazz Popcorn Robot — love the way this ramps up #

The Kilobyte’s Gambit — can you beat 1,024 bytes of javascript? #

Everest Pipkin on the environmental issues of cryptoart and NFTs — "Proof of work places a direct lien against the future." #

Indie.vc calls it quits — sadly, most investors want big exits, not a bunch of sustainable independent companies paying dividends #

Glitch workers sign tech’s first collective bargaining agreement — Glitch voluntarily recognized the union a year ago this month #

Remote, Oregon — job sites are geocoding remote work positions to an unincorporated hamlet in southern Oregon #

Gab hacked — 70GB of data, public and private, from the far-right social media platform #

picoCAD — build and texture low-poly 3D models in PICO-8 (via) #

AI learns to speedrun QWOP — combining reinforcement and imitation learning to get a top 10 speedrun (via) #

Finger.farm — modern free finger hosting for all your finger needs #

Twitter announces Super Follow paid creator subscriptions — elements of Substack, Patreon, and Clubhouse #

The Verge report on employee discrimination at Mailchimp — stories of racist/sexist behavior and pay disparities from 11 current and past employees #

Virtual Coachella — your vibes are not compliant with festival policy #

gan.style — cursed generator resynthesizes audio from YouTube using a neural net trained on choral and strings recordings #

who’s my little chef — just frying some eggs #

ink 1.0 released — the powerful scripting language powering narrative games like Heaven's Vault, Pendragon, and 80 Days (via) #

Amulet — Robin Sloan proposes short poems whose SHA-256 hashed text includes four or more 8s in a row, with its own scratchpad #

Fry’s Electronics shutting down — I'll miss the great selection, friendly customer service, and completely normal decor #

Adventures in Stereograms — Scott Pakin's innovative stereograms are equal parts impressive and migraine-inducing #