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 #

The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful — conspiracy-minded influencers are repackaging QAnon on Instagram with inspiration aesthetics #

America’s poor broadband making online education impossible for millions of students — "by some measures, the digital divide is growing even as the internet becomes more essential" #

stoxart — stock market charts as illustrated landscapes (via) #

Brand New shifts to paid subscription to offset event losses — if their postponed events are canceled in 2021, they'll be facing bankruptcy #

Wayne Radio TV watches all of The Simpsons for the first time — like his fridge, this Twitch stream goes to very unexpected places (via) #

PEmbroider — an open library for computational embroidery with Processing (via) #

Orwell’s Animal Farm — an upcoming indie game adaptation from interactive fiction legend Emily Short and the makers of Reigns (via) #

AI AI Weirdness — Janelle Shane asked GPT-3 to write her "weird AI" blog posts #

Alongside his attack on the USPS, Trump’s mounting a legal war on mailed ballots — Democrats are far more likely to vote by mail in this election, and Trump will do anything to make sure they aren't counted #

Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite — Epic is suing Apple after they removed Fortnite from the App Store for bypassing Apple's payment processing #

The Wikipedia War Over Kamala Harris’s Race — the rebirth of birtherism with "295 edits and more than 19,000 words of debate in less than 24 hours" #

QWOP is real life, actually — Bijan Stephen's video essay about time, memory, and games (via) #

Karaoke Nite — karaoke with friends in VR or the browser, open-source and hosted on Glitch (via) #

2020: An Isolation Odyssey — outstanding quarantine-inspired shot-for-shot recreation of 2001: A Space Odyssey's ending (via) #

Twitter launches new API to make amends with third-party developers — fool me once, etc etc #

The scars of “non-lethal” weapons deployed in protests — what doesn't kill you… can still really fuck you up for the rest of your life #

Pseudonymous postal carrier writes about the disastrous changes to the USPS — you can follow @DingusJMcGee for more #

Mozilla Talent Directory — some of the many people laid off and looking for new opportunities #

Sudowrite — Amit Gupta and James Yu are making a creative writing assistant with GPT-3  #

Broken cable damages Arecibo Observatory — a three-inch cable ripped through 100 feet of the reflector dish #

Mozilla lays off a quarter of the company — major cuts as their browser share declines and lucrative Google contract expires #

tech brain — "an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity" #

Vid2Player, controllable video sprites from tennis footage — next-gen Pong will melt your GPU #

Exploring accidental triggers of smart speakers — researchers found more than 1,000 words or phrases that incorrectly trigger Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google devices #

WeHole — watch YouTube videos with under 500 views with others (via) #

Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” gets an official video, 46 years later — animated by Native American artist Brent Learned for the first Native American band to achieve a top 5 Billboard single (via) #