Infinite Bad Guy — thousands of Billie Eilish covers on YouTube aligned to the quarter-beats of the original with machine learning #

TikTok Mansions Are Publicly Traded Now — a company running hospitals and healthcare services in China made a bizarre pivot into influencer content houses #

The Substackerati — their hands-off approach to community moderation smacks of Twitter and Reddit circa 2010 #

Pitchfork talks to Shameika Stepney, the inspiration for Fiona Apple on Fetch the Bolt Cutters — a magical story of childhood schoolmates reunited through music #

Emulating the unreleased Sega VR headset — modifying the source for an unreleased game for the Sega Genesis add-on to get it running on modern VR hardware #

Why is an obscure Pavement B-side their top song on Spotify? — autoplaying recommendations created unexpected hits out of algorithmically-similar songs #

The Max Headroom Incident — Criminal digs into the 33-year-old unsolved mystery of pirate television #

The Markup’s Simple Search — Chrome/Firefox add-on spotlights Google's web search results instead of their own info boxes #

The Pudding looks at representation in crossword puzzle clues — USA Today's crossword editor is pushing for more modern and inclusive puzzle design #

BuzzFeed acquires HuffPost — Jonah Peretti cofounded the Huffington Post, but they've always been separate companies #

Internet Archive begins archiving and emulating Flash games and animations — anticipating Flash's EOL next month with a growing archive emulated with Ruffle #

Disney Must Pay Alan Dean Foster — they seem to think they no longer need to pay royalties on acquired works (via) #

YouTube to run ads on non-partner videos — if you've opted out of monetization or don't yet qualify for the partner program, you're out of luck #

Gumroad introduces Memberships — very competitive with Patreon, with lower fees and more flexibility with your own domain and branding #

How to Tell Social Media Apps Apart — my interest in ephemeral tweets is already fleeting (via) #

Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy — "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work." #

Locast — nonprofit streaming over-the-air broadcast TV, currently fighting for its life in court with the EFF's help (via) #

I should have loved biology — so much of science is astonishing, but rarely taught in a way that conveys it (via) #

Runway launches Green Screen — browser-based real-time video rotoscoping with machine learning (via) #

Google to finally end preferential treatment of AMP stories for publishers — for years, the requirement for news sites to use AMP to appear in top stories was a flagrant example of their monopoly power #

Taylor Lorenz on Zillow surfing — a voyeuristic, aspirational, and escapist internet hobby, "the opposite of doomscrolling" #

The viral pig ad is fake, but the couch is real — I'm intrigued both by the artist who made the couch and the person using Craigslist for surreal hoaxes (via) #

Nintendo asks brands to keep politics out of Animal Crossing — Joe Biden's political campaign may be the last to have its own island #

GitHub restores youtube-dl after EFF response — they changed their policies for anticircumvention takedowns and created a $1M developer defense fund #

The battle between Twitch and the music industry, with streamers caught in the middle — Twitch's negligence is inexcusable, failing to tell streamers which of their clips are infringing #

WaPo on the rise of invasive cheating-detection software companies and the student rebellion against them — teachers are threatening to fail students because shitty AI says they're moving their eyes too much during tests #

Exploding Whale footage remastered for its 50th anniversary — 50 years ago today, an early internet legend now available in gloriously visceral 4K #

Constantly Wrong: The Case Against Conspiracy Theories — Kirby Ferguson's incredibly entertaining new video essay draws a bright line between conspiracies and conspiracy theories #

Four Seasons Total Landscaping in VRChat — now available for all your press conference needs #

tixy — an extremely minimalist creative coding environment, click the dots for more examples #

Talkin’ ’bout A Revolution — a rare TV appearance for Tracy Chapman, her first since 2015 #

Existential Troopers — with The Mandalorian back, the Auralnauts take on the question of free will in the Star Wars universe #

Homestar Runner’s Halloween Hijinks — quite possibly the last Homestar before Flash is EOLed by Adobe and removed in Chrome on December 31 (via) #

AI camera mistakes soccer referee’s bald head for ball — or maybe it fell in love and couldn't take its eyes off him (via) #

When To Expect Election Results In Every State — plus, whether to expect a blue or red shift based on when results are reported in each state #

MC Frontalot’s This Is Not A Drill — the lyrics are extremely late-October 2020 #

SpaceX declares it won’t recognize international laws in planned Mars colony — "Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement." #

Brian Feldman on why conservative news thrives on Facebook — related: Kevin Roose's @FacebooksTop10, tracking top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages (via) #

The Pudding digs into how officer complaints are investigated — using Philadelphia as a case study, they visualize the clear racial differences in reporting and inaction #

Mayor Bones Proudly Presents: Ghost Town’s 999th Annual Pumpkin Festival — make and share pumpkin carvings in this game from the creator of A Short Hike #

Zeynep Tufekci’s Insight — her new Substack is already great, an instant subscribe #

K-pop superfans vs QAnon — I know which side I'm betting on to win the stan wars (via) #

Michael Hobbes on why older Americans are a vector for misinformation online — cognitive decline, digital illiteracy, and a social media ecosystem of fringe partisan websites (via) #

Kim Kardashian’s father resurrected as birthday hologram — Kanye commissioned a deepfake of Robert Kardashian saying she married the "most genius man in the whole world" #

NYT’s Election Distractor — this has Choire Sicha's fingerprints all over it #

Visualization of how Covid-19 spreads indoors with various precautions — with extended exposure and without adequate ventilation, masks and distancing will only go so far (via) #

Not for You — an "automated confusion system" for Firefox that randomizes TikTok viewing behavior (via) #

You Must Build A Lighthouse — a puzzle game in pure CSS #

8800 Blue Lick Rd is the best accidental video game of the year — try it in VR, or attempt one of the many speedrun categories #

The Art Of “Cool As Ice” — if there was an award for worst movie with the best cinematography, Vanilla Ice's feature film debut would clinch it #