Bee videogames reviewed for accuracy — "the Citizen Kane of beekeeping games" is available for free on Itch.io #

Ars Technica’s Timothy B. Lee on making his own deepfake — good video cards are expensive, but cloud GPU fees add up quick #

Creators of “virtual influencer” Lil Miquela criticized for fictional sexual assault vlog — reminder that the agency behind it, Brud, raised $6M of venture capital from Sequoia #

The Verge’s Casey Newton talks to moderators responsible for removing violent extremism from Google/YouTube — there are serious mental health consequences to reviewing a high volume of disturbing and graphic content #

Dual Axis Rotation Illusion — JS version of this year's winner of the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest #

The Moon Is Right — the moon is right #

Circle World — Cyriak's looping animations are always hypnotic and vaguely disturbing #

100 Memes That Defined the 2010s — Katie Notopoulos, Julia Reinstein, and Ryan Broderick turn in the definitive list with useful context #

Face the Music — finally, I can make dubstep with my face (via) #

Happy Hues — curated color palettes in context of a real-world example site (via) #

Display.land — new app for generating, sharing, and editing 3D captures of physical spaces (via) #

Huginn — build agents to perform automated tasks for you online, like IFTTT or Zapier that you control (via) #

Why Nukemap isn’t on Google Maps anymore — Google's interest in small developers is fickle, shifting over time as products evolve #

NYT uses infrared cameras to show industrial methane leaks in Texas — great mix of investigative reporting and undeniable visual evidence #

Click Here to Kill — Harper's feature on the rise of dark web assassination marketplaces (via) #

All Star played on melons — see also: Toto's Africa on sweet potato and squash #

Postlight launches Yap, an ephemeral free chat room for small groups — Rich Ziade explains more on their blog #

Urban Archive — newly out-of-beta platform for uncovering local history, like this building that's still very special to me #

The Age of Instagram Face — Jia Tolentino on the increasing use of plastic surgery to resemble FaceTune-filtered photos in real life #

OpenStreetMap Haiku — generative poetry based on your location; more on how it works (via) #

Nvidia releases StyleGAN2, state-of-the-art generative image modeling — clears up many of the visual artifacts of StyleGAN, see it in action on This Person Does Not Exist #

“They” is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2019 — nice to see the continued mainstream acceptance of singular they #

Pico-8 Advent Calendar 2019 — a new game for the fantasy console every day until Christmas, don't miss the flawless Snowcraft demake #

YouTube expands anti-harassment policies — a clear reaction to their failure to act in the Carlos Maza/Steven Crowder incident #

Twitter announces Bluesky project to develop (another) decentralized open standard for social media — ActivityPub was tailor-made for this use, but they seem committed to reinventing it on the blockchain #

Vulfpeck Live at Madison Square Garden — I watched them play for a small crowd at XOXO, and four years later, they're selling out MSG with no label, manager, or advertising #

XOXO’s Worldbuilders fundraiser for Heifer International — we're giving away prizes from our own collection of XOXO history, and would love your help hitting the goal by December 17 #

Wired Magazine’s cover story on Simone Giertz — after surviving her brain tumor, she hopes to move on from shitty robots to space exploration (via) #

Twin Peaks VR — I still wonder what the cancelled Twin Peaks for the NES would've been like (via) #

“Link In Bio” is a subtle undermining of the web — Anil Dash on how links represent a threat to closed systems #

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List — this year's articles their editorial staff most wish they'd written #

Choose Your Own Adventure publishers try to get phrase banned from Itch.io — Chooseco has only owned the trademark since 1999, after Random House let it lapse #

The Universal LEGO Sorting Machine — made from 10,000 LEGOs, the AI-powered sorting machine can recognize and sort every LEGO part ever made #

10×19 — first day of the annual project where designers and illustrators create new covers for their top 10 albums of the year #

Verizon blocks Archive Team from preserving 20 years of Yahoo Groups history — days before mass deletion, they banned Archive Team's volunteer email addresses (via) #

TikTok’s Top 100 of 2019 — related: Taylor Lorenz interviewed Vanessa Pappas, TikTok's most accessible executive in the West #

People with Cool Avatars  #

Daniel Keogh’s maximalist illustrations — like Where's Waldo for memes #

Natural History Museum — delightfully weird short from Kirsten Lepore, who's currently directing an indie feature film #

Recovering hidden video from lighting changes — reconstructing the shadows in Plato's cave with deep matrix factorization (via) #

Janelle Shane experiments with AI Dungeon 2 — playing with this feels like black magic #

AI Dungeon 2 — an AI-driven text adventure that responds realistically to any input, one of the most profoundly amazing projects I've ever seen #

25 Rock Facts from me, Greg — lilly is a precious resource and must be protected at all costs #

YouTube Rewind 2019 — taking the safe route with a purely stats-focused roundup after last year's cringefest #

Teaching AI Feminism and Making Art — Arwa Michelle Mboya is training a neural network on iconic feminist texts (via) #

Tracking the bestselling songs for every decade back to 14,000BC — trust me and stick with it #

Nintendo took down Super Mario ROM hack video that likely inspired Mario Maker 2 feature — as Patrick explains, the ultra-hard Kaizo Mario fan-made games almost certainly inspired the original Mario Maker #

Hair Love — charming animated short, have tissues ready (via) #

The Hungry Terminator — next-level deepfake from the creator of the Bill Hader/Arnold Schwarzenegger swap #

Looop.dev — new creative coding tool for experimenting with looping animation (via) #