Emoji Kitchen — made by Jennifer Daniel and Bhavik Singh #

Google hit with third major antitrust lawsuit from 38 states — their "bread on Bing" response is kind of laughable #

Cloudflare Pages launches — very competitive with Netlify's pricing and a generous free tier #

Brian Moore’s pull cord to end conference calls — flush your coworkers #

Substack launches RSS reader — good idea, but not too useful without the full text; alternately, read Substack newsletters as RSS feeds #

Works from 1925 entering the public domain next month — The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, The Gold Rush, Sweet Georgia Brown, The Trial, and many more #

Blob Opera — amazing David Li project lets you control machine-generated voices trained on 16 hours of audio from four opera singers #

Twitter shutting down Periscope — oh well, back to Meerkat #

Nicholas Quah’s Best Podcasts of 2020 — love seeing You're Wrong About getting the attention it deserves #

Taylor Lorenz on Atlanta’s all-Black collab houses — Black influencers are underpaid, and face discrimination from brands and recommendation algorithms #

nobody.live, random Twitch streams with no viewers — it's surprisingly delightful to be someone's only fan for a few minutes (via) #

Making a digital clock in Google Sheets — see also: analog clock in Google Spreadsheets (via) #

Hypha — grow letters by simulating the mycelium growth found in fungi (via) #

Polygon’s top 50 videogames of 2020 — some great picks including Blaseball, Spiritfarer, If Found…, and Wide Ocean, Big Jacket #

Scroobly — bring doodles to life with your webcam, made with Tensorflow.js, FaceMesh, and PoseNet models (via) #

Amazon-owned Goodreads quietly shutters API — killing countless apps in the process; Open Library's APIs may be a good replacement (via) #

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) #