Ars Technica on the expiration of the 1998 “Mickey Mouse” copyright extension — for the first time in 40 years, works will start entering the public domain again annually on January 1 #

A letter about Google AMP — Google's preferential treatment of Google-hosted AMP pages is monopolistic and anti-web #

Permanent Redirect — art that moves every time someone views it; here's a head start where I last saw the art (via) #

One player’s 21,000 hole quest to finish Desert Golfing — after players persisted past impossible holes and endless flat levels, the game designer added a perfect ending #

Ars Technica on the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities — affects nearly every modern CPU; more detail from Google's Project Zero team (via) #

2018 IGF finalists announced — as always, a snapshot of the best and brightest in indie gaming #

Mapzen to end services at end of January — sad to hear, they've been a pioneer in open-source geo; their migration guide is a good list of resources #

The year we wanted the internet to be smaller — much of my social time online is now in private Slack communities #

Cheating at HQ Trivia with OCR and Google searches — clever approach; a friend tried to reverse-engineer the API, but it's well secured #

Predictive Writer — Botnik's predictive keyboard suggests words based on any corpus you feed it #

Analysis of Google Maps’ incredible lead in mapping data — new entry in Justin O’Beirne's ongoing series #

Dynamicland — Bret Victor and friends opened a communal physical computing space in Oakland #

Polygon’s 50 best videogames of 2017 — solid list with many of my favorites of the year, including Gorogoa, Universal Paperclips, and Getting Over It #

Generation Screwed — impressively-designed article on the uncertain financial future for anyone under 35 #

Cards Against Humanity’s Pulse of the Nation — 56% of millennials think it's okay to pee in the shower, and other fun poll results #

Reply All’s The Prophet — stunning episode on a journalist's sexual assault in broad daylight, and the ensuing culture war mounted by a Twitter troll army funded by Mexico's ruling party #

Ted Chiang on superintelligent AI and runaway capitalism — "We need for the machines to wake up, not in the sense of computers becoming self-aware, but in the sense of corporations recognizing the consequences of their behavior." #

The Other Tech Bubble — Silicon Valley founders still think they're the good guys #

Gorogoa — five years in the making, Jason Roberts' gorgeous illustrated game is out for iOS/Windows/Switch #

Rotten Apples — database of films/TV shows tied to people accused of sexual misconduct #

Atlas Obscura on IFComp 2017 — the rise of hypertext games led to a record 79 entries this year #

10×17 — 26 illustrators draw new covers and count down their favorite albums of the year #

Every Frame A Painting’s postmortem — Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos officially wrap one of the best web series ever; the bits on Content ID are frustrating and fascinating (via) #

Elastic Man — David Li made a squishy Morty (via) #

Vectorpark’s Sandcastles… — turn your sound up; also available on iOS #

WeWork buying Meetup — like Kottke, I thought they'd be private forever (via) #

Desert Bus VR — the worst game ever made, now in 360º immersion (via) #

The Outline on HQ, a real-time video trivia app — I've played for the last month (won once!), and it's firmly in Black Mirror territory #

A Physical Book — for this year's NaNoGenMo, Liza Daly rendered a book with physics in a game engine #

Harmonia — Liza Daly's stunning entry for IF Comp 2017 #

Why the ♻️ Emoji is Taking Over Twitter — some interesting analysis from Emojitracker creator mroth #

Constellation — just type stuff, a new toy from Terry Cavanagh #

Kickstarter announces Drip, subscription funding for artists — The Verge got the scoop with interviews from past and present staff #

Firefox Quantum is out — double the speed of previous versions, 30% less memory than Chrome #

Mystery Animal — 20 questions with a machine, from Google's voice experiments (via) #

Cards Against Humanity Saves America — I've bought every Holiday Bullshit, and never regretted it #

How Generative Music Works — interactive presentation on the landscape of generative music #

The Atlantic on fake friend services in Japan — actors hired to play the public role of friends, family, or romantic partners #

SpeechBoard — edit podcast audio by editing the transcript #

Let’s Enhance — use machine learning to upscale photos with high fidelity #

The Digital Antiquarian’s series on the history of pre-WWW networks — Jimmy Maher turns his eye from history of computer games to the proto-internet #

Story Speaker — ingenious interactive fiction for Google Home, games written in plain english in Google Docs #

Dotgrid — beautifully constrained pay-what-you-like drawing tool from Hundred Rabbits #

Obama Sinks Family Savings Into Developing Presidential Tabletop Game  #

Louis CK’s movie and Netflix special canceled after NYT report of sexual misconduct — as Lauren Duca said, "2017 is the year of male consequences" — let's hope the president is next #

The Verge on Re:scam, a chatbot that responds to email scams for you — like Lenny, the time-wasting telemarketer responder, for email #

James Bridle on the dark, strange underworld of YouTube kids videos — it only takes five or six related video clicks to get from benign to disturbing stuff #

Fooling neural networks with adversarial objects — 3D printing a turtle that looks like a rifle to a machine, and an espresso baseball #

The Simpsons’ Steamed Hams as a Guitar Hero song — related: Publio Delgado's Harmonizator and /r/zappafied #

Hewlett-Packard historical archives destroyed in Santa Rosa fires — frustratingly preventable, they moved everything out of a fire-protected vault #