Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage — a restauranteur finds a way to capitalize on a delivery startup's underhanded business tactics #

The Miracle Sudoku — I never thought I'd watch a 25-minute video of a guy playing Sudoku, but here we are (via) #

Orb.farm — make a virtual ecosystem with its own self-contained food chain (via) #

Inside Decentraland, the surreal Second Life for crypto true believers — an elaborate and desolate world, I didn't see a single person in there #

Shelter In Place Gallery — a dollhouse-sized Boston art gallery exhibiting artwork at a 1:12 scale, or 1 inch to 1 foot #

Anomalous Materials — Graham Dunning replaced every sound in Half-Life with samples from '90s rave tracks, letting him play it like an instrument (via) #

VR-DOS — JS DOS meets Three.js; see also: Windows 3.1 with networking in WebVR #

DEVO making Energy Dome face shields — the covid merch u want #

Facebook to buy Giphy for $400M — they raised over $150M in four rounds, so this isn't too surprising #

lyrics.rip — make Markov-generated lyrics for any band, like this ridiculous AC/DC pseudo-cover #

Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia — The Ringer launched a behind-the-scenes podcast of the startup's dramatic two years #

Shadowland, The Atlantic’s project about conspiracy thinking in America — includes features on QAnon, 5G, birtherism, and short fiction from Robin Sloan #

Chrome adds tab groups — for the tab hoarders out there #

Kevin Roose on the vaccine misinformation war — conspiratorial thinking is uniting anti-vaccination activists and far-right extremist groups #

Unreal Engine 5 running on the PlayStation 5 — a glimpse into AAA next-gen graphics #

The real Lord of the Flies — fascinating story of what happened to a group of schoolboys marooned on an island for 15 months #

Tristan Cross recreated his local pub in VR — first focusing on architecture and interiors, and eventually, bringing in his friends #

A Practical Guide to Covid-19 Risks and How to Avoid Them — Jason summarizes the key points, but the entire article is great and worth reading in full #

SCOPETREX — play Vectrex games on an oscilloscope #

Pose Animator — animate a 2D vector illustration with your webcam, FaceMesh, and PoseNet #

Making convincing 1990s-era browser fonts in modern browsers — harder than it sounds, but the results are flawless #

RIP “Double Rainbow” viral star Paul Vasquez — posted January 8, 2010, his video was arguably the first meme of the 2010s and made of pure joy #

The Office on Slack — MSCHF is recreating every episode weekdays from 9-5 #

Identifying Generational Gaps in Music — The Pudding put together a fun interactive quiz that's now collected over a million data points #

15.ai — generated text-to-speech using voices from My Little Pony, Portal, Undertale, and more #

Nook Street Market — haute couture in Animal Crossing (via) #

Passed the Brush — riffing on the popular video meme (via) #

Wonder of Wonder Art — draw a little dancing character, or browse the thousands of creations by others on Twitter (via) #

Salman Khoshroo’s Wool on Foam Portraits — reminds me of Joseph Lee's impressionist portraits (via) #

🐦🎶🎲 — Jer Thorp made a little game to help identify the calls of birbs in your neighborhood #

Zork source code from 1977 recovered from MIT tapes — compare to other Zork versions in the Historical Source collection (via) #

Dissolving Realities: Dong Xuan Market — part of RubenFro's series of hypnotic animations made from 3D point cloud data, see also: Dissolving Realities Vietnam #

Ars Technica on the massive effort to reverse-engineer N64 source code — Super Mario 64 was decompiled and ported to Windows, part of a two-year-long project motivated by speedrunners looking for new exploits #

Scunthorpe Sans — creative use of OpenType ligatures to automatically censor profanity #

TRENDS — playing off popular techniques in current motion graphics design #

GitHub announces Codespaces and Discussions — cloud-hosted dev environments and native Q&A-focused forums #

1loc — crowdsourced collection of favorite JavaScript one-liners #

Facebook open sources BlenderBot, a state-of-the-art conversational chatbot — pre-trained on 1.5 billion Reddit comments and fine-tuned with two-way conversational datasets, the transcripts feel very human #

This Fursona Does Not Exist — GAN-generated furry portraits (via) #

Ars Technica on art, fashion, and commerce in Animal Crossing — so much creativity coming from the ACNH community #

Augmented Reality Cut-and-Paste to Photoshop — using BASNet for object detection and removal #

Desktop Meadow — pay-what-you-like Windows utility lets you grow gardens on windows and receive kind notes delivered by birds (via) #

Tim Bray quits Amazon for firing whistleblowers — "a lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power" #

Animal Talking — an adorable talk show "filmed" in Animal Crossing by screenwriter Gary Whitta (via) #

True Facts: Killer Surfing Snails — "look, it’s trying to eat a people" #

MPAA to end physical Oscar screener distribution in 2021 — so long, DVDScr #

A Parks and Recreation Special — very clever reunion working within the constraints of remote production (via) #

Consistent Video Depth Estimation — new algorithm for generating high-quality depth maps from video, but way too slow for real-time use for now #

The Songs of 1984 — Hood Internet resumed their weekly mashups, jamming 50 songs from a single year into one three-minute song (via) #

Shift Shift Forward — Glitch launched a podcast about their creative community; the second episode features a segment by the excellent Jenn Schiffer #