Link Archives
Ads via The Deck
March 19, 2016
The Gif Connoisseur
March 18, 2016
Cabel Sasser on Firewatch, one month later (interesting postmortem from Panic's first foray into videogame publishing)
March 15, 2016
Julie Rubicon (short fiction, totally not written by Robin Sloan, about Facebook on Facebook)
The end of Emojitracker (Twitter's killing "elevated" access to its streaming API)
March 13, 2016
The Walk of Life Project (making every movie better, one Dire Straits song at a time) [via]
March 11, 2016
Bass cover of "Donald Trump Says China" supercut (related: Publio Delgado's Harmonizator series)
A poem made entirely from SXSW 2016 panel names ("Lifehacks for Dads Who Do Fifty Percent: Big Data Will Choose the Next President.")
NYT's 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going (some great music writing in here)
March 10, 2016
Responsive pixel art (designed by Marcus BlΓ€ttermann)
March 9, 2016
DeepDream VR (try it with Cardboard, if you have one)
March 8, 2016
David OReilly announces Everything (his ambitious followup to Mountain)
The covert 3D scan of Nefertiti bust appears to be a hoax (I should have questioned this myself, but I assumed they did lots of post-processing cleanup) [via]
Rotoscoping the Muybridge horse (love all the different student interpretations) [via]
March 7, 2016
The Guardian on the global economic downturn for millenials ("In the US, under-30s are now poorer than retired people")
March 5, 2016
500 1990s Desktop Wallpapers (the original vaporwave) [via]
Data analysis uncovers crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal (the data and source are available on Pwanson's site)
March 3, 2016
Fileship (hold digital files hostage until your client pays up)
TensorFlow for Poets (beginner's guide for the machine intelligence library)
March 2, 2016
Wait But Why's Tim Urban procrastinates his TED talk about procrastination (gripping reading for anyone with a fear of public speaking) [via]
Vox on the rise of American authoritarianism ("Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics")
Life and Death in the App Store (a depressing case study for bootstrapped paid iOS apps)
Wintergatan's Marble Machine (performative music instrument built from 2,000 marbles and 3,000 parts)
March 1, 2016
Vandelay Industries (a Slack bot that searches every line from Seinfeld and posts an animated GIF)
February 28, 2016
How Gawker trolled Donald Trump into tweeting a Mussolini quote as his own (Twitter bot making headlines)
February 25, 2016
New York Mag on Weird Facebook (related: Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer)
Postmortem 2021: How AI Won (Diana Kimball's speculative fiction memo on super-persuasive AI)
The Last Job on Earth (a partnership with the Guardian to imagine an automated future)
Minefield (massively-multiplayer Minesweeper) [via]
"We Are the World" using Face Swap Live (four years after Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro's demos, real-time face substitution is an app)
PBS Idea Channel on 𝘈 𝘌 𝘚 π˜› 𝘏 𝘌 π˜› 𝘐 𝘊 (more than just ironic, it ties into how we experience art online and where we "live")
Pejac's Heavy Sea (the short film claims no CGI, no Photoshop)
Matt Taibbi on how America made Donald Trump unstoppable ("Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star")
Sailor Mercury on the intersection of art and technology (art-inspired technology gives us new ideas instead of incremental improvements)
Playthings (cheeseburger drums and gummy bear xylophones on a day-glo VR island)
February 24, 2016
Metafilter's Gopher server is back after 15 years of downtime (there's no Gopher client for Chrome, but you can use an HTTP gopher proxy to browse it)
Boston Dynamics' new demo of their Atlas humanoid robots (that guy with the hockey stick will be first against the wall after the robot uprising)
Stripe Atlas (targeted to non-US businesses, but seems pretty damned useful for U.S. businesses too)
February 23, 2016
Evolution of Web Design (2003 was a dark year)
No Small Parts: Crispin Glover (Brandon Hardesty's web series on character actors is so good)
February 22, 2016
Reagan and WarGames (incredible story of how '80s government security policy was influenced by the film, though he wasn't the first to report it)
Paul Ford on Racter, a 1980s-era chatbot (don't miss the scan of the book it wrote, worth it for the illustrations alone)
Refurbishing A 1927 Switchboard (the interface for this incredible game, Hello Operator)
Artists covertly scan bust of Nefertiti and release data to public domain ("the one object in the museum's collection off-limits to photographers")
February 19, 2016
The Simpsons Sphere (360Β° video of 500 episodes at the same time; try it in the YouTube app on your phone)
The Maker ("the simple story of one man's enduring passion")
How Google's Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls (still feels like bad practice that Google indexes content that isn't freely available on the web)
The Outpost Is Here (the absurdly great launch lineup for XOXO's new shared workspace in Portland)
February 18, 2016
Codeology (gorgeous visualization of Github projects by size and languages) [via]
February 17, 2016
Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens (as much about how people make money on Tumblr, and Yahoo's attempts to thwart it)
February 16, 2016
Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys (barnburner of a performance)
The Brain (a neural network built in Quartz Composer)
February 15, 2016
A Large Dataset of Object Scans (more than 10,000 public domain scans)
The New Yorker profile on TMZ's paparazzi infrastructure (great quote from Alec Baldwin in there)
Smell Dating (from Useless Press, a "publishing collective that creates eclectic Internet things")
OK Go's zero-gravity music video (how it was made, and why the video is Facebook-only)
February 12, 2016
Zebra (painful new game from Bennett Foddy; epilepsy warning)
Blab (Twitch meets Hangouts)
The Life of Pablo Generator (make your own Kanye album cover)
Creative Cloud for Mac update deletes the first hidden folder in root (for Backblaze users, it's the folder containing backup drive metadata)
February 11, 2016
Quartz's delivers the news with a chat-like UI (interesting approach to news app design)
Internet Archive adds Windows 3.1 software emulation (start with the Windows Showcase before deep-diving the rest)
February 10, 2016
Ezra Klein on the rise of Donald Trump (New Hampshire crosses the line from comedy to terror)
Jezebel on Samantha Bee's new show (the debut episode is a barnburner)
February 8, 2016
The First 100,000 Funded Kickstarter Projects in 100 Numbers (it took 121 days to hit 100 funded projects, only three days for the most recent 100 funded)
How to Snapchat Like the Teens (surprisingly informative, while also making me feel like I'm a warm corpse)
XOXO Outpost (if you're in Portland, applications are now open for our shared workspace, opening this week)
Soylent Dick (part of the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon)
February 7, 2016
Polygon Shredder (source code here, but good luck understanding it)
February 5, 2016
Transparent LCD displays in the wild (coming soon to pretty much everywhere)
The Malware Museum (safely run vintage DOS viruses in your browser)
February 4, 2016
Trump Donald (best on a desktop browser)
DeRay Mckesson on why he's running for mayor of Baltimore (pretty excited about this; related: Campaign Zero's ten steps to ending police violence in America)
Bill Wurtz explains the History of Japan (better than it sounds; all his videos are pretty great)
January 27, 2016
Anil Dash on "never read the comments" (persuasive argument that the common in-joke normalizes online harassment)
January 26, 2016
The Michael Jackson/Sonic 3 videogame conspiracy (Sega continues to deny Michael Jackson's work made it into the game, likely for legal reasons)
Polygon's review of The Witness (Jon Blow's epic, seven-year followup to Braid is out, and it's something special)
After 15 years, AbeVigoda.com updated (RIP)
The Chickening (Nick DenBoer and Davy Force bat-shit insane remix of The Shining)
January 25, 2016
Spherical Droste video (navigate with the mouse, or watch in VR; related reading)
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]
January 24, 2016
Breakdown of Amazon's social engineering backdoor (damning transcripts of customer support handing out customer details)
January 22, 2016
Oscars make changes to diversify membership (a good start, though may not have much impact until the industry changes)
January 21, 2016
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)
January 19, 2016
"Men" by Irene Koh (great personal comics on dating terrible dudes)
January 14, 2016
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)
January 13, 2016
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)
January 11, 2016
oh you pretty things
RIP David Bowie (heartbroken)
January 8, 2016
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)
January 5, 2016
Bushes of Love (the anonymous creator of Bad Lip Reading knows how to write a catchy hook)
January 4, 2016
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)
January 1, 2016
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)
December 31, 2015
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)
December 30, 2015
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)
December 23, 2015
BuzzFeed on the rise of the chanterculture (tying racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic paranoia into meme culture)
December 17, 2015
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)
December 16, 2015
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
December 15, 2015
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]
NPR's Songs We Love 2015 (31 hours of music, broken up into playlists)
Undertale is tearing GameFAQs apart (the Kickstarter-funded indie RPG is brilliant; here's a great review explaining why it's finding an audience)
Pilot (each episode is a pilot for a new podcast, from This American Life's Stephanie Foo)
Noby Noby Boy finally completed after 2,489 days of gameplay (released in February 2009, players collectively stretched across the solar system)
December 14, 2015
Internet Credit Union closes (Brewster Kahle's bank shutters, stymied by bureaucracy)
Farewell, Rdio (export tools and some goodbye analytics; import your playlists to Spotify)
Itch.io launches desktop app (my favorite indie game platform launched an open-source desktop app)
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)
December 13, 2015
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)
December 12, 2015
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)
December 11, 2015
YouTube Rewind 2015 (I've never felt so detached from YouTube culture, I only know 20% of these creators)
December 10, 2015
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.")
December 8, 2015
Yule Log 2015 (short looping animations for the holidays; watch 'em fullscreen with some hot cocoa)
10x15 (ten artists reimagine the cover art for their top ten favorite albums of 2015)
December 7, 2015
Kickstarter Fulfillment Report (the full research paper is worth reading too)
December 6, 2015
New York Mag interviews viral stars of Internet past (Tay Zonday is an interesting guy)
December 4, 2015
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]
December 3, 2015
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)
December 1, 2015
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)
November 30, 2015
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)
November 29, 2015
Extra Ordinary's The Case of the Marked Man (Li Chen celebrates comic #400 with a special full-color detective story)
November 28, 2015
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)
November 24, 2015
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)
November 23, 2015
Jason Scott on the Infocom Cabinet (staggering collection of Infocom history, now on Archive.org)
November 22, 2015
NeuralTalk and Walk (Kyle McDonald walks around Amsterdam with a neural net trying to describe what it sees)
November 21, 2015
How Reddit Talks (n-gram analysis of Reddit comments from 2007-2015)
November 20, 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)
November 19, 2015
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)
November 17, 2015
Valleywag "permanently shuttered" in Gawker refocusing (I fully expect someone else to fill this niche soon)
November 16, 2015
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)
November 15, 2015
VR Guitar (the race is on for the first full VR band)
mirror lake (stunning generative art by Katie Rose Pipkin)
November 12, 2015
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)
November 11, 2015
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)
November 9, 2015
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)
November 6, 2015
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)
November 5, 2015
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)
November 4, 2015
iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel (the complete legal agreement, drawn in the style of famous cartoonists)
November 2, 2015
Daily Dot on @1995regi, a webcomic told on Instagram (related: the newly-launched Glitched, a comic told entirely through Twitter)
October 30, 2015
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)
October 27, 2015
Inside story of SXSW's Gamergate debacle (worse than I could have imagined)
Celery Man Simulator (add sequence: OYSTER)
October 26, 2015
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)
October 20, 2015
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]
October 19, 2015
Blake Ross finds the makers of Reload, a dangerous herbal Viagra (using historical whois records, Internet Archive, and searching Facebook by email address)
October 15, 2015
Ermahgerddon (Vanity Fair interviews the woman from the "Ermahgerd" meme)
Haunted by Data (Maciej Ceglowski compares big data to radioactive underpants; transcript here)
October 14, 2015
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)
October 13, 2015
Conde Nast buys Pitchfork (apparently for its "millennial males")
PCKWCK (serialized novel written in real-time with live comments and webcam of the author)
October 9, 2015
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)
October 7, 2015
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)
October 6, 2015
Network Effect (new Jonathan Harris project visualizing human behavior online with YouTube, Twitter, MTurk, Google Ngrams)
October 5, 2015
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)
I'm Google (Dina Kelberman's ongoing project to manually find chains of visually similar images and videos in Google)
October 2, 2015
The Beginner's Guide (Davey Wreden's very meta followup to the Stanley Parable, highly recommended)
September 29, 2015
Unmasking a pseudonymous Twitter user with machine learning (interesting approach, and thoughtful decision not to reveal the name after confirmation)
September 25, 2015
Weird Simpsons VHS [via]
Happy "Happy Birthday" Day! (Vi Hart on the oddities of Happy Birthday to You beyond its copyright status)
September 24, 2015
Tested's preview of the Glowforge laser printer (uses a camera for positioning and tracing imagery, looks so much easier)
else Heart.Break() (gorgeous new cyberpunk adventure game)
Bloomberg Business on clickfraud (related: Maciej Ceglowski's What Happens Next Will Amaze You)
What Shape Is The Internet? (illustrations of the internet from patent applications)
September 23, 2015
Why Julia Nunes made her older YouTube videos private (she felt her past life online was holding back her changing voice)
Judge rules Warner doesn't hold copyright over "Happy Birthday" (but it's not technically in the public domain, it's an orphan work)
cloud ocr (pick a street, look up, and try to OCR the sky)
CableRobot Simulator (that should help motion sickness from VR, right?)
September 22, 2015
Scouting NY writes its last post (after seven years of blogging interesting NYC locations, the scout is making his own movie)
Hacker News Simulator (Markov-generated community; see also: Subreddit Simulator)
Moot sells 4chan to 2channel creator (going full circle, now owned by the board that inspired it)
Neurotic Neurons (Nicky Case's explorable explanation of exposure therapy, and how we learn and unlearn)
Ethical Ad Blocker (Darius Kazemi found a unique solution to the ad blocking debate)
Spending Time (an interview/portrait project at XOXO 2015, a sequel to last year's For Yourself)
September 21, 2015
Kickstarter reincorporates as a public benefit corporation (they don't think or act like other startups)
September 18, 2015
Marco pulls his iOS ad blocker, two days after going on sale (I'm torn, I think it just delays the inevitable shift to unblockable alternatives to traditional ads)
The Verge on Slack's impact on XOXO (not sure how well it would work outside of XOXO, but it was huge for us)
September 8, 2015
The Echonest is behind Spotify's new Discover Weekly playlists (this is the first music recommendation algorithm that actually seems to work for me)
frankenSim (from Milo Targett, the creator of Lido Sim)
September 7, 2015
Using tweets to predict the death of social apps (I'm kind of surprised more journalists don't do this kind of analysis, the Twitter API's great for it)
September 3, 2015
Byte (like Hypercard meets Mixel, odd and interesting; the API is shockingly robust for a brand new iOS app)
The Atlantic on Archive Corps' intense manual rescue project (the new offshoot of Jason Scott's Archive Team, saving physical materials)
Rachel Nabors on demanding conference codes of conduct (remarkable cluelessness from an established event organizer; also: worthless manfeelings)
Kill Screen on Adam Mathes' Sierra adventure Twitter bots (@quest_glitches is just beautiful)
1 Hour of Binaural Nut Sack ASMR (oh, internet)
XOXO 2015 schedule goes live (pretty proud of this)
Star Wars Ep 4: Laser Moon Awakens (The Auralnauts reimagine the Death Star as a laser tag arena complex)
McSweeney's Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar (how to turn a clear statement into vague and distant nonsense)
September 1, 2015
Dictionary Stories (very short stories composed entirely of dictionary example sentences)
August 30, 2015
Donald Trump says "China" (beautifully edited supercut, love the cadence)
August 29, 2015
Jim Jarmo's Puntastic (lyrics replaced with social media profile pics; Anarchy in the FB, Tweeted Love)
August 26, 2015
Amanda Palmer is not crowdfunding her baby (spirited defense of motherhood for independent artists)
Leaving Everywhere (Darius Kazemi made a rant generator about moving away from cities using real census data)
Annalee Newitz's analysis of the Ashley Madison leaked database (Only 0.04% of women ever checked their messages, compared to 64.7% of men)
August 23, 2015
Wired on the Hugo Awards and sci-fi's culture war ("Some nerds just want to watch the world burn.")
August 22, 2015
Living with Jigsaw (over a year old, but new to me; part of the short film lineup at Dismaland)
BigRingLover's guide to the J.R.P.G. Torkelson's Lorne of the Rings trilogy (more genius from Neil Cicierega; related: guide to the races of Star Warms)
August 21, 2015
How Jason Scott and 60 volunteers saved 50,000+ rare tech manuals from destruction (see the before and in-progress photos to get a better sense of the undertaking)
Evan Ratliff's wife found his email in the Ashley Madison database (also: The Awl's John Herrman on the hack)
Real-Life FPS on Chatroulette (surprised they were able to find that many non-nude players)
August 20, 2015
New trailer for The Martian (finally read the book last month, I'm very excited about this)
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't (Steven Johnson on the steady increase of indie artists making a living)
Rex Sorgatz's TV Channel Guide from the Future ("A whole lotta cash is flowing from old television networks to new internet properties")
Ashley Madison DMCAs journalist for posting spreadsheet column names (also: Sarah Jeong's followup on the copyright status of hacked user info)
vnc-roulette (crawls Shodan for insecure VNC servers and connects you to one)
Burning Man's massive bug infestation (multiple species, some that bite and cause rashes)
Banksy opens Dismaland, large-scale Disneyland satire (the most mediocre place on Earth; love the Cinderella pumpkin crash)
Untold history of the Space Jam website (with original notes and site map) [via]
August 19, 2015
Ryan North live-tweeted his way out of a hole (like a real-life text adventure game puzzle)
Emoji Mosaic (entirely in JS)
August 18, 2015
A tour of abandoned college campuses in Second Life (all these polygons will be lost like tears in rain)
Cameron's World (incredible collage of text and images from archived GeoCities pages)
August 14, 2015
100 Days of Pleasantries (NSFW) (illustrated diary of a stripper's memorable encounters with customers and co-workers)
August 13, 2015
Cycloid Drawing Machine (digital version of this real-world toy)
Ferrolic (computer-controlled ferrofluid makes a pretty interesting analog display)
August 11, 2015
Madventure Time (Doof Warrior Marceline is a nice touch)
Overshare: The Links.net Story (the documentary Justin Hall talked about in his XOXO talk is out)
Fax.ink (new art project by YACHT, co-built by Daniel Bogan of The Setup fame)
August 9, 2015
This Is My Jam shuts down with class (going read-only with a permanent archive and API, open-sourcing the data, export with opt-out)
August 7, 2015
Glenn Fleishman on the happy birthday copyright lawsuit (he got a copy of the 1922 book that firmly puts the song in the public domain)
SubredditSimulator (fully-automated Markov-generated subreddit, human comments are removed)
August 6, 2015
Pokemon Palettes (reload for a new one)
Adam Saltsman on bootstrapping his indie dream game (the reality of indie game development: it's really fucking hard)
Rolling Stone on the point of no return for climate change (let's see what the GOP candidates have to say about it...)
August 5, 2015
Ennuigi (follow a depressed Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders over a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom)
codedoodl.es (creative coding experiments with web technologies)