Voight-Kampff Empathy Test 2015 — "You gotta hear both sides." #

Sweaterify — the perfect holiday gift #

Gaby Dunn on the sad economics of YouTube fame — every Just Between Us video gets 100k+ views, madness that they can't make a living off it #

True Love Tinder Robot — my friend Nicole is a goddamned genius #

The Trace on Sandy Hook hoaxers — inside the hateful world of mass shooting conspiracy theorists #

Reality Editor — MIT Media Lab augmented reality project to modify the behavior of connected objects (via) #

Matt Haughey on his GOP dildo project — nothing against dildos, it's a commentary on politicians pandering to gun lunatics #

MRA Dilbert — mashing up Dilbert comics with horrible, real quotes from its creator #

Touch Arcade on Apple TV's App Store and the state of iOS gaming — Apple's cluelessness about games extends to the TV, so much lost potential #

Data Atsume — running analytics on Neko Atsume, the notoriously opaque kitty collecting game #

Motherboard interviews Drew about The Worst Things For Sale — I've been following his work for over a decade, but never knew his last name #

YouTube Rewind 2015 — I've never felt so detached from YouTube culture, I only know 20% of these creators #

Miranda Harmon's comic about Harmontown, podcasts, and depression — no relation #

Anita Sarkeesian on harassment through impersonation — digging into a blatant example of faked tweets on 4chan designed to enrage people #

Serial podcast returns with the story of Bowe Bergdahl — as before, incredible production values and great storytelling, hopefully leaving the ethical issues behind #

Rev. Dan Catt on his Minus Everyone comic bot — "If someone does something simple, calls it art, then that's what it is." #

Yule Log 2015 — short looping animations for the holidays; watch 'em fullscreen with some hot cocoa #

10×15 — ten artists reimagine the cover art for their top ten favorite albums of 2015 #

Kickstarter Fulfillment Report — the full research paper is worth reading too #

New York Mag interviews viral stars of Internet past — Tay Zonday is an interesting guy #

Jury Duty — anonymous and unlisted first-person story of being a juror on a murder trial (via) #

Working videoconferencing and web browser in Minecraft — a Verizon tie-in, but hey, they open-sourced the libraries #

breadfaceblog — "giving the people something they didn't ask for" (via) #

Double Fine funding Psychonauts 2 on Fig — I'm pretty skeptical of equity crowdfunding, but thrilled they're working on this #

Access Denied — stunning John Herrman column on the end of special access for the media (via) #

Computerman — extended remix of the Vid Kidz segment from 1985 (via) #

Deep Forger, making art forgeries from photos with a neural network — want your own? the secret manual has tips for customizing it #

Adele's Hello, cut from movie quotes — the same creator brilliantly remixed Lionel Richie's Hello nearly four years ago #

Let's Encrypt enters public beta, free automated SSL for all — ignore the FUD and go make the web a little more secure #

The Last Message Received — the NYT interviewed the 15-year-old creator (via) #

oldweb.today — incredible in-browser emulation of vintage browsers using Wayback archives; source and screenshots #

Annalee Newitz leaves io9 after eight year run — the site she founded and defined its voice; excited to see what she does at Ars Technica #

Extra Ordinary's The Case of the Marked Man — Li Chen celebrates comic #400 with a special full-color detective story #

The Serial Swatter — the NYT goes deep on how armchair terrorists exploit America's over-militarized police #

Inside China's "memeufacturing" factories — massive, chaotic infrastructure for producing this year's cultural fads #

xkcd's Hoverboard — it's bigger than it looks #

Bret Victor goes deep on what technologists can do about climate change — "despair is not useful. Despair is paralysis, and there's work to be done" #

Donald Trump's skid towards outright fascism — I hope Nate Silver's right, but Trump's gone from mildly amusing to scary pretty quickly #

Jason Scott on the Infocom Cabinet — staggering collection of Infocom history, now on Archive.org #

NeuralTalk and Walk — Kyle McDonald walks around Amsterdam with a neural net trying to describe what it sees #

How Reddit Talks — n-gram analysis of Reddit comments from 2007-2015 #

Operation Wonderland — re-enacting reference footage for Alice in Wonderland; actual reference shots here #

Line of Sight — live visualization of satellites in the line of sight above us; more info here (via) #

Gay Island — homophobic Tumblr post turns into dystopian young adult sci-fi #

Behind-the-scenes story of Google Pac-Man background audio bug in 2010 — bizarre confluence of browser plugin and bad design choices #

Paint Drying — force the British film board to watch paint drying; currently at six hours, six minutes long #

Valleywag "permanently shuttered" in Gawker refocusing — I fully expect someone else to fill this niche soon #

Unfollow — Adrian Chen on Megan Phelps-Roper, a former Westboro Baptist member that found empathy online #

Rdio to shut down in wake of Pandora acquisition — I always preferred Spotify's listening model, but the loss of a good competitor is a bummer #

Maciej Ceglowski live-tweets the Next:Economy conference — if the whole bookmarking thing doesn't work out, he has a great future in conference coverage #