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) #

masterWiki — MSCHF's latest drop is Masterclass class summaries in the style of WikiHow #

TwikTwok — swipe through popular videos on Twitter #

ACLU calls for dismantling the DHS — co-signed #

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 #

Gripping Food With Force — happy friday, everyone (via) #

Blaseball — absurdist text-only fantasy baseball idle game with a thriving fan community #

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 #

Steven Levy interviews Bill Gates on Covid — ignore the clickbait headline #

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) #

Georgia students suspended for posting photos of crowded hallways — the story behind the viral photo is worse than it looked #

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 #

New York, D.C. attorneys general sue NRA for widespread fraud, seek to dissolve organization — good riddance #

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 #