A Sick Giant — Wait But Why on the roots of modern political polarization #

vj for your home — experimental web app to generate random glitchy visuals (via) #

IAC sells CollegeHumor to COO, lays off 100+ employees — more details from Sam Reich, who is the new majority owner #

The Mane Quest — website dedicated to horses in video games, with reviews and in-depth analysis (via) #

Nick Heer on Teen Vogue’s weird, now-removed puff piece on Facebook’s election security — feels very out of character for the progressive publication #

Twitter adding feature to disable replies or limit to people you follow — I'm curious to see if they extend it to quote-retweets, another major source of harassment #

NYT on the battle over the .org TLD — weirdly, that article is the only mention of the newly-formed co-op I could find #

Tomorrow’s On Fire — a short film from Australian animator and director Darcy Prendergast #

Nelson Minar on Yandex’s face recognition — I found the same thing in my tests, worked disturbingly well #

Two Minute Papers on MuZero, DeepMind’s new game-playing AI — interesting to hear which games it still can't master, particularly those with long-term planning; related: AlphaStar #

NYT on the rise of ridiculous pop music copyright lawsuits — the Blurred Lines decision was a disaster for musicians, redefining influence as infringement (via) #

Disinformation For Hire — how "black PR" firms are using content farms, bots, and other shady techniques to spread lies for clients #

WaPo investigation into how the federal government misled the public about the war in Afghanistan — I originally missed this December release of 2,000 pages of interviews, only released under FOIA after two years and three federal lawsuits #

Kentucky Route Zero’s fifth and final act releasing on January 28 — along with a console release on PS4, Xbox, and Switch #

Major union launches campaign to organize videogame and tech workers — they hired Game Workers Unite co-founder Emma Kinema, who just spoke at XOXO #

Don’t F**k With Cats — gripping Netflix documentary about the internet's attempts to track down an animal abuser turned murderer #

DangerousBot, a random noun Zelda bot for Twitter and Mastodon — his code is CC-licensed and runs on Lambda for pennies #

IGF 2020 nominees announced — as usual, a snapshot of some of the best of the indie gaming scene #

Bellingcat’s guide to reverse image search — I had no idea Google's reverse image search was far eclipsed by Yandex, especially for manipulated imagery (via) #

Deceased gerrymandering GOP strategist’s daughter makes files public — link to the full archive on thehofellerfiles.com (via) #

Generating beetles with machine learning — walkthrough of different techniques with stunning results #

Taylor Lorenz on Hype House and other L.A. collab houses — like Vine and YouTube before them, groups of TikTok creators are renting mansions largely for collaboration #

Which emoji scissors close? — ✂️ #

Canvas Cards — 52 card designs created with JS canvas, one for every week of last year #

Zdog — playful pseudo-3D JS engine for modeling and animation with canvas and SVG (via) #

Synopsis — newly-released suite of tools using machine learning for analyzing and editing video (via) #

Hydra — live-code networked visuals in the browser, many examples here (via) #

TidalCycles — open-source software for live-coding music (via) #

Public Domain Day 2020 — works from 1924 entered the public domain yesterday (via) #

Borogrove, online editor for Vorple and Inform interactive fiction games — built on the Vorple library, a huge step beyond my own Playfic app (via) #

ContraPoints on cancel culture — long and nuanced deep-dive into the differences between cancelling and criticism #

LIGHT — Facebook AI open-sourced a large-scale multiplayer text adventure game with over 1,700 AI-controlled NPCs (via) #

Katamari Christmassy — a PICO-8 demake (via) #

After 11 years, 8tracks closes with five days’ notice — they cite streaming royalty increases and competition from Spotify (via) #

Seeking Awesome Republican Goddess — this is the worst Twine game ever (via) #

Tesseract.js — free OCR engine ported to pure JS, supporting over 100 languages #

Gretchen McCulloch on boomerspeak — the written tics of older internet users are Ripe for parody.… (via) #

SmugMug’s struggling to make Flickr sustainable — they're encouraging everyone to upgrade to Flickr Pro, I hope they can make it work #

wenyan — "an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature" (via) #

Smallbu Animation’s Daffodil shorts — absurdly charming, just like Alex and Lindsay in real-life #

Making Escher, a web-controlled robotic Etch-a-Sketch — not open to the public, probably because they don't want it covered in penises and swastikas (via) #

Turning animated GIFs into pure CSS — impressive but horrible hack, converting GIFs into hundreds of vertical linear-gradients #

Building a Slack client for Windows 3.1 — they had to find and read "books" to figure it out #

FlowingData’s best dataviz of 2019 — the sleep blanket is stunning #

NYTIMES ALL CAPS — yesterday was only the fourth of the year #

NYT analyzes a database of 50 billion locations from 12 million phones — an anonymous source from an unnamed location data company provided the 2016-2017 dump (via) #

Kubito’s Secret Base — there's something so satisfying about detailed miniatures, but the electronics take it to the next level (via) #

Trump impeached — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress #

Fake AI-generated faces used for fake Facebook accounts promoting right-wing content — this month's release of StyleGAN2 makes these images much harder to recognize #

Emily Short’s retrospective of the year in interactive fiction — intriguing list, all but one were new to me #