Lessons from A Pandemic Anniversary — Zeynep Tufekci looks back at what we knew and didn't yet know in January 2020 #

Mini Modern House — absurdly detailed miniature house, don't miss the needlepoint rugs #

NYT’s Kashmir Hill on how one woman destroyed the online reputations of more than 145 people — during the reporting process, the same woman started defaming the writer, her husband, and editor #

OKO — hypnotic puzzle game made from NASA imagery, best played full-screen #

Shaderworlds — a collection of open source VR-enabled shader worlds (via) #

NYT Mag’s Yudhijit Bhattacharjee confronts an Indian phone scammer — assisted by Jim Browning, who made his own video on finding the guy #

Ben Zotto reconstructs a corrupted Apple II game he made in elementary school — interesting look at 30-year-old data recovery #

Casey Newton on the battle inside Signal — Signal's exploding in popularity after WhatsApp's fumble, but very vulnerable to abuse #

Twitter introduces Birdwatch, community reporting of misinformation — starting to address an obvious gap in their reporting tools #

How Reddit traders pushed GameStop’s struggling stock to the moon — one trader turned $53k into more than $11 million, while short-sellers lost $1.6 billion in a day #

Garbage Day on Reddit manipulating GameStop stock — r/WallStreetBets pushed the stock to an all-time high, making it the most actively-traded U.S. company for a time #

Turning random internet drama into songs pt. 4 — this series blew up pretty quickly #

The moderation war is coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse — they seem determined to repeat the mistakes made by social platforms before them (via) #

Adobe’s Flash kill switch shuts down Chinese railway — they resolved it by installing an older pirated version (via) #

Rememory — record, edit, and playback layers of 3D captured video in augmented reality (via) #

Facebook continued to push users to join partisan political groups after saying they stopped — Facebook pushed political groups to Trump voters most often, 25% of the top 100 recommended groups #

TUCOWS retiring downloads after 23 years — Chrome removed FTP support just this week #

Vaccine Progress bot on twitter — faster please #

Kalidoface — puppet a virtual character with your webcam, supports P2P calling and uploading your own model (via) #

Inside QAnon’s virtual inauguration watch party — highlights from Gab and Telegram; Ron Watkins called it quits too #

Amanda Gorman reads “The Hill We Climb” — the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history finished writing it the night of the attack on Congress #

Biden sworn in, Harris becomes first woman and woman of color to serve as VP — a historic moment in a period of multiple national crises, marking an end to the worst presidency in American history #

paint.wtf — compete with others to convince an AI you're the best artist #

Three.js Journey — lovely landing page for Bruno Simon's new course, who made one of my favorite homepages ever #

Bot that turns Reddit arguments into Ace Attorney scenes — add !objectionbot to any Reddit comment chain, the results may be NSFW (via) #

Bill Wurtz’s “here comes the sun” — Bill quit releasing new music and videos in March 2019, but he's finally back #

What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol — ProPublica's interactive timeline of over 500 POV videos, with highlights and a breakdown of how/why they made it #

The Radicalization Of Giggle Palooza — Ryan Broderick on the rapid descent from Minions memes to QAnon for one 1.6M follower Facebook page #

Reverse-Engineering Prodigy — they're looking for volunteers to help transcribe the source code #

Knee-Deep in the Shred — DOOM meets BMX #

Panic re-releases Audion for modern macOS — mostly an archival project preserving the hundreds of fan-created faces #

Among the Insurrections — gripping on-the-ground reporting from a war correspondent that previously covered Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan #

U.S. police three times more likely to use force against left-wing than right-wing protestors — a clear disparity that grows when comparing peaceful protests (via) #

Modern Retro Computer Terminals — 3D printed enclosures that are like Computer Space meets the original iMac #

Most House Republicans did what the rioters wanted — 66% of the House GOP tried to overturn election results with no evidence and no accountability #

The Greater Gatsby — now that it's public domain, Brian Feldman rounded up some Gatsby remixes #

Song Exploder interviews Yusuf/Cat Stevens on recreating “Father and Son” 50 years later — for the 200th episode, Hrishikesh talks to the legendary singer-songwriter about duetting with his 22-year-old self #

The Emoji That Nearly Weren’t — Jennifer Daniel writes about how the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee used zero-width joiners to ship new emoji for 2021 #

The Internet Archive’s Flash Loops collection — GIFs with sound #

Sea Shanty TikTok — another delightful example of the creativity enabled by TikTok's duet feature #

Janelle Shane digs into the drawings of DALL-E — you can play with more variations in their OpenAI's announcement post from last week #

VOC-25, a vocal synth made with 25 sets of plastic teeth — inspired by Simone Giertz's teeth wall (via) #

Mining Parler metadata to pinpoint Capitol crimes — Archive Team grabbed 56 terabytes of public data from Parler in its last day online, including EXIF metadata #

How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol Rampage — NYT's visual investigation into the insurrection at the Capitol (via) #

Apple gives Parler 24 hours to remove incitements to violence and detail moderation plan — they rejected the app and will remove it from the App Store if they can't comply #

Twitter permanently banned Trump — finally #

Open Mike Eagle pays tribute to MF DOOM — reflecting on working with one of his heroes on "Phantoms" and "Police Myself" #

The end of Mr. Boop — after ten months, Alec Robbins wrapped his absurdist NSFW meta-comic about his very real wife, Betty Boop (via) #

OpenAI’s DALL·E generates images from text — finally, a neural network that can create illustrations of Pikachu wearing a Christmas sweater and drinking a latte #

Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2 — if you have a spare Atari Portfolio hanging around, please send it to Bert #