Pony Town — impressive and very active game-like social space (via) #

Biggest announcements from The Game Awards — very excited for Open Roads, We Are OFK, and Season #

Better Days — music video made from 2,117 photos over 101 days of lockdown #

Zodiac Killer cypher solved by amateur sleuths after 51 years — don't miss the video where they break it down #

Familiars.io, a multiplayer game played entirely inside a Twitter embed — I had no idea this was even possible (via) #

The Quarries — Vulture's first, and hopefully last, quarantine culture awards #

EFF whitepaper on how YouTube’s Content ID discourages fair use — includes interviews with Harry Brewis, Lindsay Ellis, and Todd in the Shadows #

Orwell’s Animal Farm out now — game adaptation developed by the creators of Reigns and written by interactive fiction legend Emily Short #

Gifts from Cyberspace — Choire Sicha shitposting in the New York Times brings me great delight #

FTC and 46 states sue Facebook for stifling competition with acquisitions — they're asking a federal court to force them to sell assets "including, but not limited to, Instagram and/or WhatsApp" (via) #

Jazz Cats — live kitten cam with meows converted into sax solos real-time using Imitone #

Physics of Beauty — Clemens Wenger’s interactive jazz album with creative code by Gianluca Monaco #

Ironic Sans on the itinerant filmmakers of the early 20th century — traveling hucksters went town to town convincing locals to make the same movie starring their kids, over and over again #

Reddit’s 2020 Year in Review — Reddit exploded during the pandemic and protests, with daily active users up 44% and posts/upvotes up over 50% #

Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built COVID-19 dashboard — allegedly over "hacking" an alert system in which "all authorized users use the same user name and password" #

Tumblr Year in Review 2020 — interesting snapshot of the community from October 21, 2019 to October 20, 2020 (via) #

Interactive Fiction Competition 2020 winners — the core game mechanic and implementation of The Impossible Bottle is genius #

This Person Exists — samples from the corpus feeding GAN-generated faces #

Recovering pixelated text from screenshots — reveals text obscured with a linear box filter, assuming you can supply it with an accurate font sample (via) #

500 Reasons We’ve Loved New York — a tribute to the restaurants, bars, shops, and other businesses, some over a hundred years old, that closed since the pandemic started (via) #

Zeynep Tufekci on a Covid case study of indoor dining — within five minutes of unmasked exposure, one person infected two others 15-21 feet away (via) #

The self-destructive final months of Tony Hsieh’s life — the beloved Zappos founder was privately suffering from mental health and addiction issues #

Windows Ugly Sweaters — they spelled "unspeakably beautiful" wrong #

The Markup on why web scraping is vital to democracy — the Supreme Court heard its first CFAA case this week, which may make scraping a crime #

100 Days of Art History Jinjins — artist digitally paints herself into famous paintings #

How Oisín Moran made a self-quoting tweet — Curtis Coleman's recursive tweet from 2009 is the only other example I know of (via) #

Casey Newton on how Microsoft crushed Slack — I had no idea Teams doubled in size in the last six months #

Nick Heer on Salesforce’s Slack acquisition — like Nick, I adore Slack and barely understand what Salesforce does, and that makes me worry #

Footage of the Arecibo tower collapse — heartbreaking, but at least nobody was hurt #

EFF on the misplaced blame on Section 230 for big tech’s failures — for different reasons, liberals and conservatives are both wrong about repealing platform immunity #

Google Poly shutting down in 2021 — a huge library of Creative Commons-licensed of 3D objects with a powerful API disappears in six months #

Verse by Verse — compose poems with the help of generative models trained on the work of famous poets (via) #

Combat at the Movies — scenes from ten classic films reenacted by the tanks from Combat for the Atari 2600 (via) #

Swirled Series — 115 checkerboard loop animations from 81 contributors (via) #

AR audio visualizer distorts real-world surfaces — built with ARKit #

TikTok’s Top 100 of 2020 — see also: Elite TikTok and Cartel TikTok #

Sidney Powell teams with 8chan admin Ron Watkins — Ron and his dad are widely suspected to be Q #

Laura Hudson reviews Ready Player Two — "Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past generation’s nostalgia?" (via) #

Judgement on COVID-19 goes Heavy Metal — Andre Antunes remixes televangelist grifter Kenneth Copeland #

Adrian Smith discovers his 8-year-old self is a meme — he's taking it well #

Billie Eilish: Same Interview, The Fourth Year — I hope she keeps doing these forever #

A song by the demon of 2020 — Beardyman channels Randy Newman #

20 days of fantasy and failure — WaPo goes inside Trump’s attempted coup, a failed quest to overturn election results #

Web Conversations With the Year 2000 — Paul Ford's brief conversation with his younger self about web tech (via) #

First-person account and photos of the removal of the Utah monolith — four men dismantled it on Friday night, implied that they were annoyed by the environment impact of tourists in the area #

SpaceHey — MySpace rebooted by an 18-year-old German student, who was five years old at its peak popularity (via) #

How old, ambient Japanese music became a smash hit on YouTube — a 2016 study analyzed 22k YouTube videos and found recommendations fell into 50 clusters (via) #

Vulture on the season finale of “How To with John Wilson” — the strange and good HBO docuseries ended with scenes of NYC shot as the pandemic unfolded #

Russian Cyberpunk Farm — you'll want to turn on the captions (via) #

Painting a Selfie Girl with Maths — fascinating step-by-step breakdown of a procedurally-generated graphic; play with it on Shadertoy (via) #