How conspiracy theories are shaking the foundation of American democracy — “You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very least occupying the same solar system.” #

Wildfire photographers threatened by vigilantes who thought they were antifa arsonists — paranoid conspiracy theories and armed militias are a dangerous combo #

Wandaland — animated student film about a fictional animation tycoon (via) #

PayPal’s war on tardigrades — best theory so far is that there's a company called "Tardigrade Ltd" on the OFAC sanctions list (via) #

The Matrix on polarized 3D TV glasses — very clever #

Cory Doctorow launches Kickstarter for Attack Surface audiobook — Amazon-owned Audible won't carry his audiobooks without DRM, so Cory made one for the third Little Brother book on his own #

Hundreds of Americans planted the China mystery seeds — Jason Koebler filed 52 FOIA requests to learn more about the mysterious, but apparently harmless, seed operation #

AI lip-syncs movie clips to All Star — using Wav2Lip, synchronizing lip movement solely from an audio file, with an interactive demo (via) #

Doom Pregnancy Test — Foone replaced the guts of a digital pregnancy test, and hijinks ensue #

Pareidolia — a machine continuously searching for faces in grains of sand (via) #

Allie Brosh emerges from seven year hiatus with new book — the followup to Hyperbole and a Half will be out September 22 and she's doing some virtual events #

Winamp Skin Museum — over 60,000 interactive skins from the Internet Archive's collection (via) #

walk cycles — a Tumblr of rotoscoped videogame walking and running animations (via) #

Public Enemy updates “Fight The Power” for 2020 — with Nas, Rapsody, Jahi, YG, and The Roots' Black Thought and Questlove #

Mezerg’s “Watermelon” — playing fruit as a musical instrument using the Playtron (via) #

press play to pause your thoughts — a poolside.fm side project #

Kelly’s back with “Masks” — 5,117 days after the release of Shoes #

Lo-Fi Player — an 8-bit room that builds a custom chill beats melody and soundscape based on your interactions (via) #

microCOVID Project Calculator — estimate infection risk for common activities factoring in location, ventilation, speaking volume, mask type, and social activity (via) #

Rain in Games, Part I — an incredibly chill 30-minute compilation by Jez Burrows #

xiaoxiaodou’s TikTok cooking videos — every one is absurdly over-the-top, incredibly fun to watch (via) #

Capturing the Police — The Verge launched a project documenting how people use technology to document police brutality and racism #

Darius Kazemi on Twitter usernames with lots of numbers — most people think accounts with names like @Andy2884336 are bots, but it's been the default Twitter onboarding for years #

Michael’s Community Chat — the website for the craft supply chain lets visitors talk to one other, and chaos ensues (via) #

Virtual Recurse Center — so much exciting work in spatial virtual spaces right now #

Phantom of the WAPera — ALW's TikTok is pretty great #

Kevin Roose on the right-wing media dominating Facebook — his Twitter bot shows the top-performing link posts on U.S. Facebook pages daily #

Microsoft Flight Simulator players are flying into Hurricane Laura — the game features simulations of real-time weather patterns globally #

Charlie Warzel on the R.N.C.’s alternate universe — "a meaningful percentage of Americans live in an alternate reality powered by a completely separate universe of news and information" (via) #

Covid gag rules at U.S. companies are putting everyone at risk — Cheesecake Factory, Amazon, McDonald's, Target, and many more are hiding employee infections #

Trevor Noah on why police shot Jacob Blake, but let a white gunman walk — they view Black people as less than human, a deadly threat even without a weapon #

Kenosha police chief blames protesters for their own deaths, defends vigilante groups — before the shooting, police were filmed offering bottled water to the white militia members and thanking them #

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism — OneZero published Cory Doctorow's new book in full, print and ebook editions coming soon (via) #

What They Saw — 28 ex-prisoners detail the horrors of China's detention camps #

BuzzFeed News investigation into China’s vast infrastructure for imprisoning Muslim minorities — they used blanked-out spots on Baidu maps to detect camps, and commissioned new satellite imagery of the censored places #

On all that fuckery — Kat Fukui writes about the coordinated harassment she received on GitHub from 4chan anons working in tech (via) #

TikTok CEO resigns — that explanation smells funny #

exclusive.website — the music helps pass the time #

Rafat Ali thinks the event industry is having its Napster moment — most companies are acclimating to a world without physical conferences, event sponsorship, and business travel #

NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS players strike for racial justice and police accountability — LeBron summed it up #

Facebook chose not to act on militia complaints before Kenosha shooting — surprising nobody, the 17-year-old shooter idolized police and was front row at a Trump rally in January (via) #

In alarming move, CDC now says asymptomatic people exposed to Covid don’t need testing — CNN and NYT are reporting the CDC was pressured by the Trump administration #

Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk Concert — don't miss the reveal at the end #

How Louis DeJoy ordering USPS mail trucks to run on time backfired horribly — rather than fix underlying issues with late mail sorting, he just forced trucks to deliver less mail (via) #

Internet Archive acquires the Tytell Typewriter Collection — in his excellent newsletter, Marcin Wichary wrote about the acquisition and his final interview with Peter Tytell #

Nour — TJ Hughes just announced his delightful upcoming food videogame will be published by Panic, and got a new trailer and website #

The Washington Post’s Editorial Board on “Our Democracy in Peril” — part one of a series of editorials on "the damage this president has caused and the danger he would pose in a second term" (via) #

Making optimal peanut butter and banana sandwich with deep learning and computer vision — extended quarantine affects each of us differently (via) #

Superheroes — the first edition of The Mail newsletter is an impassioned love letter to the USPS #

Eve Ewing on police unions — "The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them." (via) #