Activists turn facial recognition tools against the police — Google Photos would be a dead simple way of doing this kind of face identification with a private corpus #

After Patreon ban, QAnon creators move to PayPal, SubscribeStar, and GoFundMe — last Thursday, Patreon joined YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter in finally cracking down on the conspiracy #

Earn $20K EVERY MONTH by being your own boss — Brian David Gilbert brings Eldritch horror to Google Spreadsheets #

cyberpumpkin.zone — this Halloween, carve and share an e-pumpkin (via) #

Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator in Rust — the extension will allow SWFs to play in the browser after 2020 #

RIAA orders GitHub to remove youtube-dl — they claim that the fabulously useful software is illegal under the DMCA's controversial anti-circumvention provision #

ClipDrop — Cyril Diagne turned his AR cut & paste tech demo into a product #

Krebs on the now-defunct companies behind 8chan, QAnon — here's hoping ARIN pulls Jim Watkins' block of 25,000 IP addresses #

Privacy-invading test monitoring startup sues critic for tweeting its unlisted YouTube videos — this story is about my friend Ian, who's sinking his life savings into fighting this trash #

Em Lazer-Walker on using game design to make virtual events more social — Roguelike Celebration's custom MUD-inspired space made it one of the only fun virtual events I've experienced #

RIP The Amazing Randi — the fantastic 2014 documentary An Honest Liar covered his long career of debunking scammers and charlatans #

Photoshop adds AI-powered filters and features — the Neural Filters are incredibly powerful, and occasionally hilarious #

AppleTV+ gets exclusive rights to Peanuts holiday specials — 2020 will be the first year A Charlie Brown Christmas won’t be broadcast over-the-air since its 1965 debut #

Quibi shutting down after six months and $1.75 billion burned — I hope they bury it with its golden arm #

AOC’s Among Us stream quickly became one of Twitch’s biggest ever — I watched this live and it was sheer delight #

Contrapoints on voting — Natalie takes on some common leftist critiques of voting for Biden, or voting in general #

Gowalla rebooted as an augmented reality social game — I didn't see that coming #

Tom Lehrer releases his lyrics into public domain — this 2014 profile by Ben Smith talks about his outsized influence on musical comedy #

Inside the Fall of the CDC — ProPublica's comprehensive report on the Trump administration's catastrophic interference in public health policy #

The Video Game Source Project — an effort to preserve and make available historical game source code; don't miss their Secret of Monkey Island event (via) #

TikTok starts banning QAnon accounts, redirecting related hashtags — joining YouTube's very belated crackdown last Thursday, citing real-world violence #

Touring the official Biden HQ island in Animal Crossing — so many great touches, from the voting booths and field office to the villager selection and use of forced perspective #

The Verge digs into three years of Foxconn’s broken promises in Wisconsin — continuing their excellent coverage of this disastrous $4 billion boondoggle #

derivative.works — machine-generated collage portraits composed of shapes derived from GAN-generated images made by Artbreeder #

Taylor Lorenz on the blockbuster success of Among Us — like Werewolf meets Spaceteam, the two-year-old indie game is now the biggest game on Twitch (via) #

Something Awful under new ownership, after 21 years online — users revolted against Lowtax after an accusation of domestic assault, leading to an 85% drop in Patreon support #

Vulture profiles Sohla El-Waylly and her life after Bon Appétit — I love her new show in the expanding Babish Culinary Universe #

Library Takeout — a surprisingly catchy song about Covid-19 library safety protocols #

GANksy — 256 GAN-generated Banksy artworks, with the purchase price increasing one pound for each sale #

Top 10 games from the JS13K 2020 competition — extremely impressive results #

Underunderstood digs into how Ryan Broderick became a Chinese face model on Amazon — one of my favorite podcasts returns for its third season after an eight-month break #

AI-based video completion — this new technique for inpainting video is unreal #

Facebook finally removes holocaust denial content — 16 years after founding and two years after Zuckerberg explicitly said it was allowed #

Sean Ono Lennon performs “Isolation” — an apropos cover for what would've been John's 80th birthday #

How many potatoes does it take to run DOOM? — too many (via) #

Visualizing Covid-19 cases by state partisanship — after the first big wave hit major cities, Republican-led counties/states now dominate weekly case counts despite lower density #

The Swamp That Trump Built — NYT investigation reveals over 200 companies, special interests, and foreign governments that paid him for favors and access #

Noelle Stevenson’s coming out story — this illustrated comic essay is very sweet #

Mattis Dovier — stunning monochrome pixel art animation #

24/7 lo-fi hip hop beats to drink pepsi to — my favorite part about this is that it's a 10.5 minute loop with lyrics all about Pepsi #

Telemelt — web-based NES/SNES/Sega/GB emulator allowing up to 8 remote players to share a single controller with zero latency (via) #

Facebook bans QAnon Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts — will still allow individual posts, but this is a stunning and long-overdue step to combating dangerous misinformation #

The Problem with the Inconsequential Quest — the costs and potential risks of producing Mystery Show-style investigations are high, limiting who can take them on (via) #

Compute Cuter — a guide to cute-ifying your computer from BubbleSort Zines's sailorhg #

Nvidia’s AI video compression — streaming keypoints from your facial expressions and movement, generating a detailed deepfake of your own face locally #

Ironic Sans interviews pop culture archaeologist Marc Tyler Nobleman — Noblemania interviews bit players from TV/film/music videos, forming oral histories from untold perspectives #

Grocery store musical duets on TikTok — TikTok makes this kind of improvisational collaboration so easy #

Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends — Caitlin Dewey's very good newsletter you should consider subscribing to #

The history of paid newsletters in the mid-20th century — journalists left newspapers to launch their own subscriber-funded newsletters (via) #

The Cut’s Bridget Read on /r/unemployment — people struggling to survive the pandemic are finding support and advice on Reddit (via) #