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) #

Visualizing how the @nyt_first_said Twitter bot works — magical text transforms with two.js (via) #

The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, in the Words of Her Mother — Tamika Palmer talks to Ta-Nehisi Coates (via) #

Much of Scots Wikipedia was written by an American teenager who doesn’t speak Scots — over 20,000 articles and 200,000 edits (via) #

The Great Fire — guest edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair's special issue on racism and police violence in America, and the uprising against it #

GPT-3 writes an op-ed on human intelligence — "the brain is a very bad computer, consciousness is a very bad idea" #

Bigtop Burger: Season One — normal food truck stuff from Worthikids #

Everest Pipkin’s Neopets crime syndicate — like Goodfellas, but with 10-year-olds #

The Daily Beast digs into the world of private Roku channels — thousands of obscure niche channels, including conspiracy and far-right content #

TikTok to sue Trump administration over executive order — without any evidence of wrongdoing, it's a gross abuse of power that would seriously impact countless young creators #

Brian Feldman interviews GDQ’s first VR speedrunner — the 31-minute Half-Life: Alyx run is fun to watch as he crawls, runs, and jumps around to clip through walls #

Pigeon Jazz — from the genius behind Italian pigeons and "Tired of Being A Bird?" #

Alex Kantrowitz interviews The Verge’s Casey Newton — his self-reflection and nuanced understanding of his beat is why Casey's one of my favorite journalists, period #

Covid Tracking Project reports some hopeful trends — "This week, for the first time in more than two months, all our major COVID-19 metrics improved at the same time." #

The Golden Age of computer user groups — Ars Technica's Esther Schindler looks back at the value and influence of local computer clubs (via) #

Live From the Space Stage: A HALYX Story — Defunctland's full-length documentary about Halyx, Disney's forgotten 1980s Star Wars-inspired space-rock band (via) #

Flight Simulator players are finding some amazing world glitches — the Melbourne obelisk stemmed from a typo in OpenStreetMap specifying a building with 212 stories instead of two #

O Human Star ends after eight years — Blue Delliquanti's brilliant queer post-singularity comic about robots, family, and love #

Trump praises QAnon supporters because “they like me” — finally asked directly about the conspiracy, he blithely equated the "radical left" to a Satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals #

sharpest egg kitchen knife in the world — this channel started out making sharp knives from strange ingredients, and now devolved into the quieter Japanese cousin to HowToBasic (via) #

Flight Simulator players flocking to Jeffrey Epstein’s island — Microsoft's new flight sim uses Bing Maps, Azure AI, and real-time weather and air traffic to recreate the entire planet in astounding detail #

Motherboard launches The Mail, a newsletter and zine about the USPS — free issues weekly on Substack with a paid subscription option to get a zine by mail #

Spiritfarer — "a cozy management game about dying" out today #

Postmaster general to suspend policies blamed for causing mail delays — nothing about undoing the damage already done, as 20 states plan to sue USPS over service delays #

The oral history of Steamed Hams — with Bill Oakley, sure, but also experts on isometric exercise, Aurora Borealis, and burgers in upstate New York #