PayPal drops payments to Pornhub performers — according to Pornhub, their reversal will affect the livelihoods of over 100k people #

The Verge on the cottage industry of Amazon “preppers” — a competitive industry appears in the middle of nowhere (via) #

Baking and cooking simulations with mixture theory — I understand none of this math, but it's nice to know we'll have fresh baked bread and cookies in the Matrix (via) #

The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon, dead at 51 — a tireless advocate for the comics medium, everyone I know in comics is mourning #

NYT Mag’s special issue on the future of the internet — on parasocial relationships, the Chinese internet, censorship in Turkey, BigTech consolidation, and more #

Private equity company acquires .org registry — in June, ICANN removed price caps for .org domains #

The Daily chats with Leo, a 3rd grader, about Trump’s impeachment — incredibly charming, and surprisingly insightful, to see it through a child's eyes (via) #

Impeachment.fyi — Dan Sinker's newsletter rounds up the daily impeachment news #

The new 16″ MacBook Pro has a good keyboard — scissor switches, a real Esc key, and old arrow keys; the least important news today, but I'm still happy about it #

Dancing text with CSS — love this simple effect #

The Blue Donkey — MSCHF created a fake Seamless restaurant to secretly funnel corporate perks to political candidates who oppose big corporations #

BBC Radio 4 on the work and tragic death of TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis — I missed the news of his passing last year; his mental illness inspired fascinating work, along with a history of racist, homophobic paranoia #

Little Runmo — two years in development, a surreal animated short inspired by side-scrolling platformers (via) #

Unmixer, extract and remix loops from any song — just announced and slow right now, but read about how it works while you wait (via) #

Picket signs from the Disney Artists’ strike of 1941 — more info here, including video (via) #

“OK Boomer” isn’t really about age — it's shorthand for power, money, and privilege (via) #

NYT’s Caity Weaver digs into the Valentine’s Day text message mystery — a third-party named Syniverse was responsible for firing off 168,149 messages, 265 days late (via) #

Sanam Maher on TikTok in Pakistan — while some are trying to ban it, TikTok is giving some Pakistani users an audience and new source of income (via) #

The Size of Space — from Neal Agarwal's excellent Neal.fun, a reliable source of joyful internet (via) #

Witches on Tinder — original animation from Worthikids #

Wayward — post-apocalyptic animated short by the very talented Beryl Allee #

AV Club’s 100 best, worst, and weirdest of the internet in the 2010s — any "best of" list that starts with Demi Adejuyigbe is a winner #

Neural network tries to reconstruct photorealistic faces from emoji and emotes — pure nightmare fodder, but especially the pepperoni pizza made of lips (via) #

Teachable Machine 2.0 launches — dead simple tool to train a machine learning model entirely in the browser #

Mysterious text messages from Valentine’s Day were received late last night — upsetting texts from ex-partners, dead friends, and family members #

State-of-the-art language processing with ten lines of TensorFlow 2.0 — Hugging Face's Transformers library had me generating text with GPT-2 on my laptop in about five minutes #

Airbnb promises to verify all 7 million listings after VICE report exposes scam — a surprising response to Allie Conti's outstanding exposé #

Uber’s self-driving car involved in fatal crash couldn’t detect pedestrians outside of crosswalks — reminder that the crime of "jaywalking" was invented by automakers #

Rating every horse emoji — "Pasterns and fetlocks appear abnormal, suggest radiographs before purchase." #

Drum machine in Excel — download it for Excel 2019/Office 365 #

Blot — incredibly minimalist file-based blog service, actively developed in public (via) #

Light Commands — inject unauthorized voice commands into Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple voice assistants with lasers! (via) #

Sephora Reviews that Mention Crying, Sobbing or Tears — a useful dataset from Connie Ye (via) #

Reporter writes about getting fired by the Des Moines Register — cowardly behavior from the paper, withering under a firestorm of criticism fueled by bad-faith actors #

Polygon’s 100 Favorite Videogames of 2010s — it's been a very good decade for games #

Bijan Stephen profiles Hot Ones for The Verge — the chicken wing gimmick is silly but effective, Sean Evans is a remarkable interviewer, and I love every episode #

VICE’s Allie Conti investigates an Airbnb scammer — lax verification enables large-scale hosts to exploit their platform #

Blade Runner intro but it’s actually Los Angeles in November 2019  #

Kotaku’s Death Stranding review — the first reviews for Hideo Kojima's new game are dropping, and it looks both audacious and agonizing #

Untitled Goose Costume — in a year of amazing goose costumes, Cabel's is tough to beat #

Websocket Ouija Board — feel spirits move your cursor planchette from the great beyond! (via) #

Hellvetica.ttf — for designers, a typeface scarier than Comic Sans and Papyrus (via) #

Ugly Gerry — typeface made from gerrymandered districts  #

Chris Wetherell reflects on building the Retweet for Twitter — Chris previously started and ran Google Reader, a product sorely missed by everyone who used it (via) #

Robin Sloan on the scale and feedback of social media platforms — interesting twigbunch on Rosegarden  #

Run Your Own Social — Darius Kazemi's guide to running a small social network for your friends; emphasis on "small"  #

User Inyerface — frustrating and funny interactive dark patterns (via) #

Profile of 8chan creator, Frederick Brennan — he should have let it die instead of selling it to this asshole  #

Mike Davidson on Superhuman’s creepy email tracking — and more generally, about ethics in technology (via) #

Using machine learning to find public domain Krazy Kat comics — novel use of AI to search newspaper archives with solid results  #