Sony Pictures buys Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest, first major Hollywood studio to own a theater in 75 years — a sad end to a struggling franchise hit hard by the pandemic, but at least their 35 remaining theaters in 25 metros will live another day #

pn0gstr0m — I played this multiplying Pong variant for longer than I'd like to admit (via) #

TerminalTextEffects — completely impractical, but strangely hypnotic, text effects for your terminal (via) #

Ginger Root’s “No Problems” — all of Cameron Lew's music videos are so stylish and catchy, each album building its own storyline #

Badness 0 — in which Tom 7 develops a system for writing fully-justified text in papers in the most convoluted way possible #

Walnut and Me — Sam Anderson writes about what his dog taught him about mortality, with animated illustrations by Gaia Alari (via) #

How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop — using the serial port might have been easier, but OCRing six pages of faxed hexadecimal gets points for creativity #

The unlikely black market for Taco Bell art — people are stealing early 2000s prints off the walls of Taco Bells and selling them online (via) #

Qlock, a Javascript quine clock — a seven-segment clock made from its own source code, only 321 bytes of JS #

Tiny Awards is back! — go nominate your favorite non-commercial indie website launched in the last year #

Gmail will break your heart — with Gmail turning 20 last month, Caitlin Dewey is collecting your long-forgotten emails for an (anonymized) art project #

Brr.fyi on engineering for slow internet at the South Pole — modern web apps and OS updates are mostly unusable with glacial speeds and high latency at McMurdo Station #

How do they know dogs are colorblind? — Howtown is immediately great out of the gate #

Internet sleuths find origin of the photo that inspired “The Backrooms” — a 2003 photo of an empty hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin #

$400k worth of stolen Playdates mysteriously returned — if you watched Cabel Sasser's excellent GDC talk, you'll know two pallets of handhelds disappeared earlier this year #

Neven Mrgan on how it feels to get an AI email from a friend — "like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside" #

Aaron A. Reed on wordplay as a game mechanic in interactive fiction — most of the games he talks about can be played instantly in the browser for free through IFDB #

Teresa Ibarra analyzed 83,000 text messages with her ex-boyfriend — "Q: It's very personal to share this. Why did you do this? A: that's art babey!!" #

Why Old Heads Hated Kendrick vs. Drake — Jay Smooth's first new Ill Doctrine video in six years! #

Sympawnies, pet portraits in sheet music — Noam Oxman makes animal portraits made of musical notation, composed to match the personality of each subject #

Golden Gate Claude — as part of a new research paper, Anthropic released a version of their LLM that hyperfixates on the Golden Gate Bridge (via) #

The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder — only discovered 28 years later, most of the interpreter's source code could be found in "unused" sectors of the disk #

The Kleptones remastered “Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots” and “A Night At The Hip-Hopera — celebrating the 20th anniversary of two of the best mashup albums of all time #

Osamu Tezuka’s “Jumping” from 1984 — beautiful animated short with a first-person perspective, there's a behind-the-scenes video that includes a panorama view of the entire map (via) #

&udm=14 — "the enshittification Konami code" #

The launch lineup for XOXO 2024 is out! — really proud of this one, registration is open for the next eight days until Wednesday, May 29 #

Ten Blue Links — single-serving site with instructions for switching your browser to Google's AI/clutter-free search results #

City in a Bottle, how a magical 256-byte city generator works — Frank Force breaks down one of his most popular dweets #

Cabel Sasser digs into a forged Apple employee badge on eBay — a detailed forgery exposed with the help of Apple Employee #8, it ended up selling for $1,001 with shipping #

The Graying Gig Workers — Rest of World's series of articles reporting on the pros and cons of gig work for older workers around the world #

AI art bots are killing DeviantArt — this was entirely predictable when I first wrote about their failure to police it two years ago #

Nilay Patel interviews Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of Google Search, and the fate of the web — Patel is a dogged interviewer, but Pichai refuses to acknowledge Google's broken pact with the web #

Coding My Handwriting — Amy Goodchild expands her generative font experiments to reproduce her own handwriting in 26kb #

The story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his “lost week” at the movies — $20 in 1947 is $280 in 2024 dollars, buying one adventurous 10-year-old boy a wild week in San Francisco #

Twitter.com is officially X.com now — one of the worst rebranding decisions of all time is mostly complete, though references to Twitter and tweets are still everywhere #

Archie, the internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running — a copy of the source code for the FTP search engine was found at the University of Warsaw in Poland #

Retro tech in anime supercut — a compilation of camcorders, VCRs, floppies, cassettes, arcade games, and more from '80s and '90s anime (via) #

Fabio and the Goose — Bobby Fingers teams up with Adam Savage and The Slo Mo Guys to bust a long-standing myth about the incident #

Google Search will now show AI-generated answers to millions by default — a destructive, predatory move that seems likely to hurt everyone who publishes for the web #

Pink Floyd’s “Any Colour You Like” on the Famicom Disk System’s Family Composer — every video on this channel is great, covering Frank Zappa, Weather Report in Otocky, Steely Dan on the Roland PMA-5, and Jaco Pastorius on a music box #

Replace your Windows cursor with a cat paw — inspired by a viral Foone post on Tumblr, you can buy it now at the very good domain catpawdesk.top #

OpenAI announces GPT-4o — they're really tripling down on acting like a human, these live video demos are clearly inspired by Spike Jonze's "Her" #

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? — The New Yorker is geoblocking this fascinating article in the UK, presumably because its impact on the retrial could violate their contempt of court law #

Matt Sephton digs into the early history of Japanese emoji — painstakingly redrawing emoji sets he found on electronic organizers and pocket computers that predate SoftBank's emoji set by at least a decade #

Development notes from xkcd’s “Machine” — how the massive collaborative Rube Goldberg machine was designed and built in three weeks #

Pop Culture Detective’s Patriarchy According to The Barbie Movie — "a primer to help explain what patriarchy actually is, what it isn't, and how it ends up harming everyone, including men" #

Exploring Hacker News by mapping 40 million posts and comments — don't miss the Hackerverse demo, visualizing 2D embeddings as an island of posts #

Food for Fish — a browser game with lots of underpants, made with WebGPU so try it in Chrome, Edge, or Safari Technology Preview (via) #

Apple’s “Crush” iPad ad sparks backlash — amazed nobody there realized how a tech behemoth crushing creative tools with a giant hydraulic press would be received #

Indie rock legend Steve Albini dies at 61 of heart attack — a shocking and tragic loss, Shellac's first album in a decade was due out next week #