February 13, 2020
Former Uber CEO’s new startup is running sketchy ghost kitchens
— Travis moved on to disrupting health inspections (via) #
Inside the world of “femcels”
— a community of women who believe they're genetically destined to be alone, while their male counterparts deny they even exist #
Taylor Lorenz on the unsung 14-year-old creator of the Renegade viral dance
— interesting to see the different norms and expectations around attribution between different apps #
Bloomberg campaign floods Instagram with sponsored memes
— spearheaded by the CEO of Fyre Festival marketers and professional plagiarists, Jerry Media aka fuckjerry #
Netflix loses bid to drop Choose Your Own Adventure lawsuit
— Chooseco's also been going after indie game devs on Itch.io (via) #
DoNotPay’s new project to help you locate and sue robocallers
— it uses their virtual credit cards, which can also be used for no-risk free trial signups #
Nonchalance
— new site for the immersive design agency behind Jejune Institute and Latitude Society (via) #
Billie Eilish answers questions from an AI
— Nicole He fine-tuned GPT-2 to generate interview questions and new lyrics #
Copyrighting every possible melody to avoid accidental infringement
— brilliant stunt to subvert the horrible precedents set by recent high-profile music copyright infringement cases (via) #
Chrome to start blocking links on SSL pages to non-SSL downloads
— including text, images, and audio, presumably impacting a large swath of the pre-2010s web #
Vulture on the set design from Parasite
— with interviews from the team and behind-the-scenes photos and digital renderings #
Dancing Baby meme gets an HD remaster
— 24 years later, it's now re-rendered in 1080p 60FPS video from the original 3ds Max source #
The Verge on the Mario Paint music scene
— or, more accurately, free fan-made apps that mimic the Mario Paint aesthetic #
Basecamp announces Hey, an upcoming email app for iOS/Android/web
— slated for this April, excited to see what they come up with #
Password of the Day
— get texted the credentials for a mystery site daily, first person who figures out what it's for gets to keep it #
Fangs
— very good webcomic about a vampire and werewolf in love, from the creator of Sarah's Scribbles #
Lumière Brothers’ “Arrival of a Train” from 1896 upscaled to 4K 60fps video
— using Gigapixel AI for increasing resolution and DAIN for interpolation #
Noclip.website
— explore 3D maps from classic games in the browser, including Katamari, Psychonauts, Mario Galaxy, and many more #
Panic Podcast tells the story of Pantscast
— their commitment to a dumb joke is part of why I love them so much #
Google Takeout data export service sent some private videos to wrong people
— 0.01% of Google Photos users attempting to export, but who knows how many that was #
Cards Against Humanity buys ClickHole, grants majority ownership to employees
— now they just need to get rid of those crickets #
Eevee’s whirlwind history of CSS and web design
— a delightful, practical look back at how CSS evolved (via) #
Kaitlyn Tiffany on the reappropriation of the Doomer Girl meme
— for more on Doomer memes, see the MEL piece by Miles Klee #
Reddit thread of little-known but obvious facts
— "You don't actually bite down. You bite up because of your lower jaw." (via) #
In secret deal with drugmaker, health records tool pushed opioids to doctors
— dark software patterns fueling the opioid crisis (via) #
Byte will share 100% of revenue with creators during partner pilot program
— competing with the most valuable startup on the planet won't be easy, but this is a good way to do it #
VICE on tabletop RPG creators’ efforts at inclusivity
— and the inevitable backlash from internet bozos #
BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint
— massive Flash/Shockwave preservation project makes 38,000 webgames and 2,400 animations playable from a single Windows-only launcher (via) #
Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog
— after last year's exodus, several Deadspin writers reunited for a sponsored Super Bowl weekend project (via) #
Map of Emotions Evoked by Music
— a companion to the vocal burst map, an interactive visualization of emotions conveyed by music (via) #
Taro Oono’s animated Twitter microgames
— creative use of the pause function to turn tweets into single-button games (via) #
The 10,000-Year Clock Is a Waste of Time
— a $42M monument to techno-utopianism inside a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos #
West Wing Weekly ends podcast with huge live show with 30+ cast and crew members
— four years and 156 episodes later #
Dissolving Realities
— 360 scans of a Vietnam street converted to a 3D point cloud and rendered real-time in Unity with custom shaders #
NYT profile on MSCHF
— their bi-weekly drops are a great source of random internet weirdness, I highly recommend signing up #