Track-by-track breakdown of making David Bowie's "Heroes" — analyzing the master recording in-studio with his long-time producer, Tony Visconti #

#screensaverjam entries — a game jam inspired by classic screen savers, over 30 viewable in browser #

Bypassing YouTube's ContentID with mouth sounds — I highly recommend turning on the auto-generated captions #

Donald Rumsfeld made an iOS game — using the preferred business model of war criminals everywhere (via) #

Breakdown of Amazon's social engineering backdoor — damning transcripts of customer support handing out customer details #

Oscars make changes to diversify membership — a good start, though may not have much impact until the industry changes #

Shamchat, random chat with roleplaying — hilarity ensues #

Jon Benjamin tries jazz — he recorded a full jazz album playing piano, but he doesn't know how to play piano #

"Men" by Irene Koh — great personal comics on dating terrible dudes #

Detecting faces in objects and random noise — the averaged photos are haunting and beautiful #

The Verge on how a convicted scammer revealed a secret surveillance device from prison — and used the legal system to hack his way out of federal prison in the process #

Oregon militia organizer angry about dildos — I blame Matt Haughey #

Digital Materiality of GIFs — Sha Hwang's talk about GIFs turned into a remixable NewHive essay #

oh you pretty things  #

RIP David Bowie — heartbroken #

1080plus, wonderfully weird social YouTube viewer — I lost myself in this for an hour last night, VJing retro videos for a bunch of people; desktop only #

How Mickey Mouse evades the public domain — old hat around these parts, but love the visualization #

Bushes of Love — the anonymous creator of Bad Lip Reading knows how to write a catchy hook #

Simulating the World in Emoji — Nicky Case's interactive experiments with thinking in systems #

Oculus Rift preorders start Wednesday — no word on pricing or shipping dates yet #

Of Oz the Wizard — astounding remix of The Wizard of Oz recut in alphabetical order; related: ARST ARSW #

The Website Obesity Crisis — another essential Maciej Ceglowski talk, video here #

butts.lol — Charles Vestal's new year's resolution to draw (at least) one butt a day in 2016 #

Pay Women the Money They Need to Make the Culture — also, the replies to Rachel's query on Twitter turns up so many great responses #

The Trump Diet — Matt Haughey embarks on a high-stakes weight loss challenge #

Song A Day Navigator — today marks seven full years of Jonathan Mann's daily song project #

What should Have entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016? — a depressing annual reminder that current copyright law terms suck #

Randi Harper on leaving the FreeBSD community — "the measure of health in any open source community is how they deal with conflict" #

Griffin McElroy on why Undertale matters — a divisive and misunderstood game with a massive, and well-deserved, cult following #

Pirate group apologizes for releasing Hateful Eight screener — feels a bit like they're trying to cover their asses #

The end of the Pastry Box Project — four years of great independent writing #

Milling Time — you may not play Hearthstone, but this probably applies to you too #

Twitter reinstates Politwoops — the service monitored deleted tweets from public officials, a violation of Twitter's API terms #

Guesstimate, a spreadsheet for things that aren't certain — free, open-source tool for performing estimates using Monte Carlo experiments (via) #

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with President Obama — I'm going to miss that guy #

Archillect — this bot is so good, I was convinced it's human; after reading how it works, I'm still not sure #

MVP — short fiction about devs building a game for an audience of bots #

BuzzFeed on the rise of the chanterculture — tying racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic paranoia into meme culture #

A-Frame — shockingly simple open-source framework for making WebVR with HTML #

ClickHole's Glengarry Glen Ross Christmas lights display — please somebody do this for real #

Martin Shkreli arrested on security fraud charges — now's a good time for Wu-Tang and Bill Murray to steal their album back #

Grayout — the new Blackbar prequel for iOS by Neven Mrgan and James Moore #

Star Wars Minus Star Wars — retelling A New Hope without using any images or sounds from the film (via) #

Publio Delgado's Harmonizator series — brilliant free jazz guitar harmonizing found footage on YouTube (via) #

The best Twitter bots of 2015 — my favorites were Deep Forger, YouTube Artifact, and Wow So Portland #

Darth Vader Yule Log  #

Justin McElroy on the current state of the Frog Fractions 2 ARG — pretty sure we're all playing Frog Fractions 2 right now #

Slack's new app directory — officially launching the Slack platform; related: Botkit #

Survey results from this year's Cards Against Humanity holiday survey — correlating penis length and tipping preferences, among others #

A Day in the Life of Americans — simulation of 1,000 people's average day, minute by minute (via) #