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) #
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 #
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 #
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 #
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 #
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 #
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 #
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 #
Emily Pothast on Bean Dad and Gen X irony
— Roderick posted an apology this morning, which is a start #
50 Years of Text Games
— each week this year, Aaron A. Reed will profile a text-based computer game from 1971-2021 #
Today In Tabs returns
— after five years away, Rusty Foster revives his excellent media newsletter on Substack #
Caitlin Dewey’s top 25 internet culture reads of 2020
— great list from one of my favorite linkbloggers #
Museum curators react to 2020’s best video game museums
— also great this year, the museum of lockpicking, Virtual Lo-Fi Museum, and the Gallery of Anything (via) #
Internal pay data shows Coinbase underpaid women and Black employees
— at least 60 employees left after their CEO instituted a ban on political activism earlier this year (via) #