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 #

VR Guitar — the race is on for the first full VR band #

mirror lake — stunning generative art by Katie Rose Pipkin #

Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah — always fun to receive little surprises in the mail from a bunch of weirdos #

Emoji Party — make your own, click to party #

Photojojo's Amit Gupta at XOXO — one of the most moving talks we've ever had #

Vox Product's employee Code of Conduct — on Github, too (via) #

#ALLMYMOVIES — watch Shia LaBeouf watch every Shia Labeouf movie in reverse-chronological order, 24 hours a day #

Max Temkin on why Hello from the Magic Tavern is amazing — they performed live at XOXO this year, and it was glorious #

12 Weird, Excellent Twitter Bots Chosen by Twitter's Best Bot-Makers — several of my favorites are in here #

Dumb Cuneiform — convert tweets to actual clay tablets; yes, this is real #

Robin Sloan on the dystopian vibes of Uber-for-food startups — there are alternatives, empowering indie cooks and bringing neighborhoods together #

Keynote Motion Graphic Experiment — Linda Dong shows off animation tools in Keynote, and the file for download #

Reconsider — DHH's epic rant against disruption culture; related: Jennifer Daniel's Design Is Capitalism #

Suck, Again — fan-made newsletter reissuing Suck.com columns, 20 years later to the day #

iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel — the complete legal agreement, drawn in the style of famous cartoonists #

Daily Dot on @1995regi, a webcomic told on Instagram — related: the newly-launched Glitched, a comic told entirely through Twitter #

C. Spike Trotman at XOXO — one of the best talks we've ever had; also, Dooce and The Toast's Mallory Ortberg #

Bob Ross marathon on Twitch — currently at 60,000 viewers, promoting the launch of Twitch Creative #

Twitch Installs Arch Linux — a cooperative text-based horror game #

Inside story of SXSW's Gamergate debacle — worse than I could have imagined #

Celery Man Simulator — add sequence: OYSTER #

Medium's stack — in a footnote, nice to hear they're working on tools for writers to make money next #

Remembering XOXO 2015 — our yearly recap; also, just posted the first XOXO talk, Heather Armstrong on sharing her life online #

Designing quotation marks on Medium — commitment is patching Chrome for Windows to fix typography issues on your site #

50 Best Non-Fiction Podcasts — a solid list that naturally skews geeky, coming from Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder's audience (via) #

Just a Brown Hand — story of a small, empathetic design decision at Slack #

Swing Dancers vs. Street Dancers — if this doesn't make you want to dance, well, see a doctor (via) #

Blake Ross finds the makers of Reload, a dangerous herbal Viagra — using historical whois records, Internet Archive, and searching Facebook by email address #

Ermahgerddon — Vanity Fair interviews the woman from the "Ermahgerd" meme #

Haunted by Data — Maciej Ceglowski compares big data to radioactive underpants; transcript here #

Restoring Wander, a lost adventure game for mainframes from 1974 — predates ADVENT/Colossal Cave; more on lost mainframe games #

Computer Show — Sandwich Video's pitch-perfect 1980s tech show interviews modern startups #

Conde Nast buys Pitchfork — apparently for its "millennial males" #

PCKWCK — serialized novel written in real-time with live comments and webcam of the author #

How WeWork convinced investors it's worth $10B — absolutely ridiculous projections, it's like a bubble inside a bubble; related: The Awl on WeLive #

The Chinese Room co-founder on why she's leaving — the developer of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture on illness, working with publishers, and the games industry #

horse chat — watch me neigh neigh #

Erica Joy on colorless diversity in tech — intersectionality matters #

USGS using Twitter to track earthquakes — tweets mentioning "earthquake" with less than eight words, no links, and no numbers #

Typatone — the video intro is adorable; from the creators of Patatap #

Network Effect — new Jonathan Harris project visualizing human behavior online with YouTube, Twitter, MTurk, Google Ngrams #

Mike Alger's research into VR interface design and usability — followup on his VR interface design manifesto #

karaoke_ebooks — turn a user's tweets into algorithmically-generated rhyming lyrics with music #