Ben Davis on the fallout from his critical review of Devon Rodriguez's "Underground," and what it says about "parasocial aesthetics."

The world’s 1st museum for art born during Covid19 quarantine

I like this cute choose-your-own-adventure build-an-encouraging-frog website made with linked Tumblr posts.

Substation DIY is a free, open, and secure way to set up simple recurring payments and member messaging — as easily as pressing a remix button and adding credentials for Braintree and Mailgun. Try the demo, learn more, then remix your own!

Since starting development on the Electric Zine Maker I’ve been hoarding links to interesting, unusual, strange, small, or just cute tools. This has grown to be a strong area of interest as I’ve been diving into what even makes a tool approachable… How much experimental UI or humor is too much? Do people even want tools that are goofy? What else is out there from creators making small and interesting tools that solve a variety of creative problems?

Pixel artist supreme.

Just a bunch of cool/interesting/funny/thought-provoking websites from 2000–2019.

What we hear from companies like T and F and Y is that monitoring communication at this scale, preventing that harm, is an unprecedented technical challenge. That’s correct. However… no one asked for communication at this scale! To be clear, it’s a challenge these companies designed for themselves; a challenge they enlarged through relentless, ingenious growth; a challenge they now invoke as if it’s some longstanding problem in fundamental physics. [...] Social media platforms should run small, and slow, and cool to the touch.

procedural salt flats, mountains, forests

We spoke to some of our favorite bot-makers about their favorite Twitter bots — their own, and made by others in the #botALLY community — to surface some lesser-known projects worth following.

Jacob Bakkila could have made his own Twitter account to post gibberish to. But the point was to appropriate something people were already paying attention to. What we thought was marketing rediscovered as art has turned out to be art rediscovered as marketing.

Looking expectantly at the rest of the world to validate your interests, hobbies or art is a set-up to feel bad, to brood and be jaded that you are not understood. You need to reprogram your relationship with money as a creative person, because the one you have is like a hex. You need to grow-up your success dream and stop this focus on how it'll make you feel better.

EmilyKun from the Hatventures Minecraft server drew this picture of herself, Siejo82, and me exploding from a giant sakura tree that I filled with TNT and then lit too soon.

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

"A collaborative music/spoken word project." A collection of YouTube videos of people playing various instruments all in the B-flat key. Start and stop and fade them each in any way at any time. This is awesome.

Who are these people?