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) #
Making Mixolumia from idea to release
— 18-month-long Twitter thread follows the full development of an indie video game #
USPS overhauls leadership, centralizing power around new Postmaster General
— reassigning or displacing 23 postal service executives via a memo buried on a Friday #
After 72 years, federal judge ends antitrust rules on studios owning theaters
— a kick in the teeth to indie theaters and filmmakers already suffering through a pandemic #
Antimander
— visualizing the complex tradeoffs in redistricting, a kludgy alternative to proportional representation #
Trump signs executive order to ban transactions with Bytedance and WeChat beginning September 20
— this will undoubtedly face legal challenges, and needs to die in court #
Adam Neely harmonizes the Jay-Z deepfake
— three talented musicians find the rhythm in machine-generated speech #
Spelunky 2 will be released on September 15
— Derek Yu explains what guided his design choices for the sequel #
Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago
— five white male justices affirmed, with the sole female and Black person on the court dissenting #
Facebook employees find evidence of special treatment for right-wing sources of misinformation
— Facebook fired an engineer who complained internally #
This RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 maze takes trillions of years to complete
— see also: the rollercoaster that takes 3,000 in-game years to ride #
Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates
— it was easier to rename MARCH1 and SEPT1 than wait for Microsoft to allow users to disable autoformatting (via) #
Three of Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen stars of color quit over pay discrepancies
— even after weeks of negotiations, their new contracts would still pay less than their white counterparts #
Paper interviews Rebecca Sugar and Noelle Stevenson
— the creators of Steven Universe and She-Ra reflect on queer representation in animation #
Trump’s TikTok crusade makes US censorship look a lot like China
— though unlikely to be enacted, the White House's proposed "Clean Network" would be akin to a new Great Firewall #
Instagram launches Reels, its TikTok competitor
— unlike TikTok, you can't download videos, they're capped at 15 seconds, and the feed's buried in a tab #
A blog secretly written by GPT-3 made it to the top of Hacker News
— the author wrote only the title and intro for each post, the AI wrote the rest #
Adrian Hon on what ARGs can teach us about QAnon
— expanding on his popular Twitter thread; related: Charlie Warzel interviewed him about it for the NYT #
TikTok and the Sorting Hat
— Eugene Wei on how algorithms can form interest graphs at unprecedented scale without following anyone #
Melanie Faye’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
— incredible guitarist and songwriter, she's a great Instagram follow #
TikTok and the Law
— Lawfare looks at the legality of the White House's order for ByteDance to divest (via) #
Star Turns
— Duncan Robson compiled all his face-aligned rotating movie posters into a single video #
Alanis Morissette performs “Ablaze” with her daughter
— singing a song about parenting while parenting (via) #
Trump threatens TikTok will “close down” on September 15th unless an American company buys it
— needless to say, TikTok creators and fans are freaking out #
How the Pandemic Defeated America
— Ed Yong's cover story for The Atlantic is a deep dive into the U.S.'s catastrophic pandemic response #
Future Islands’ “For Sure”
— animated music video about "two autonomous rental cars finding love on the way across state lines after a climate collapse" (via) #
Matt Muir’s Web Curios goes on hiatus after 300 issues
— my favorite linktastic newsletter goes on break because Imperica, its publisher, shut down today #
Meeting Intruders
— convert Google Meet into a Space Invaders knockoff with your coworkers as the aliens #
Black Lives Matter protests in Portland resume peacefully as feds withdraw
— first night of protesting in weeks that wasn't met with a wildly disproportionate and violent police response #
Double Fine’s 20th Anniversary Humble Bundle
— $9 gets you virtually everything Double Fine's ever made or published #
Vanity Fair on the White House’s secret aborted Covid-19 national testing system
— they abandoned it because of bad models, concerns over bad publicity, and disinterest in helping Democrat-run states #
Tampa 17-year-old arrested for massive Twitter hack
— Twitter added a big update to their postmortem, explaining how their employees were spear phished by phone #
Microsoft in talks to buy TikTok as Trump weighs ban/sale order
— Bloomberg was first to report ByteDance will be ordered to divest its ownership #
TikTok opening algorithm, moderation, and data to regulators
— an attempt to counter suspicion around Chinese government control #