Roast Me — a neural network trained to insult people, based off data from the subreddit (via) #

John Perry Barlow, RIP — EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead member, and digerati icon #

Reddit bans deepfakes and other fake pornography — the budding genre of machine-generated face-swap porn #

How Facebook Is Killing Comedy — and, more broadly, every online publication that relies on ads #

Winamp2-js now supports all three windows — the list of features it supports is pretty impressive #

Vulture interviews Quincy Jones — every line of this interview is unreal, a man who truly has no fucks to give #

Rob Sheridan on his role in the Dancing Baby meme — I love hearing the secret histories of how early memes spread #

Monster Breeder — Neil Cicierega made a very fun, very silly game #

The Disconnect — digital magazine that requires you to go offline to read #

To Feel Strong — a new autobiographical comic from Lucy Bellwood #

Gustavo Viselner’s pixel-art TV tributes — even more on his Instagram (via) #

Jia Tolentino on the end of The Awl — and what we've lost with the long, slow disappearance of blogging #

The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm In 2018 — this is some first-class satire #

Larry’s Quest — related: Tango and Ariston and on #

The Awl and The Hairpin to shut down — after a year-long stint on Medium, the return to ads didn't work out #

VintageCG on YouTube — treasure trove of early CGI footage and experiments #

Joe Veix traces the history of badday.mpg, one of the first viral videos — good example at how videos spread by email in 1997 #

Making the Music of the Mazg — Robin Sloan used a neural network and Croatian klapa singing to generate new music for his Sourdough audiobook #

Moira Donegan on why she started the Shitty Media Men list — essential reading #

Alexis Madrigal on the rise of Instagram middlemen retailers — sold on Shopify, fulfilled by UpWork workers, dropshipped from China without ever seeing a product #

Marbles, Magnets, and Music — like Line Rider Mountain King meets Biisuke Ball's Big Adventure #

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 #