Internet Culture
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The Search for Salvage
A fifteen-year hunt for Salvage, an indie rock band that charted once and disappeared, told as a personal music detectiv…
The Shortest Papers Ever Published
A roundup of famously brief academic papers, including a few that fit a title and a single sentence or a short table yet…
The Silk Dress Cipher and the Orphan Train
Nick Pelling digs into the Silk Dress Cipher, a coded message found in a Victorian dress, as reader clues suggest it is…
The Singularity Will Occur on a Tuesday
A tongue-in-cheek essay that fits curves to AI progress data and concludes the singularity will hit on a specific Tuesda…
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
A retro gaming detective story about a slip on Space Quest II master disks, revealing hidden data on the floppies and ho…
The Story of How RSS Beat Microsoft
The history of Microsoft's ICE syndication format and how open, simple RSS beat it, with lessons on why open formats lik…
The Strangest Computer Manual Ever Written
A tour of an unusually dark and funny computer manual unlike any other, with excerpts that show off its odd voice and hu…
The Tao of Backup
A classic piece of computer humor written as a Zen parable, in which a master teaches a novice the seven heads of backup…
The Taylorator
A hobbyist builds software to flood the FM broadcast band with Taylor Swift songs, walking through the radio hacking and…
The True Story Of Idaho
A deadpan essay arguing that the state of Idaho does not actually exist, laying out the case with mock-serious evidence,…
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
A sharp, much-cited essay explaining why consumer software tends to get worse over time, and how chasing the marginal us…
The User Condition
Silvio Lorusso's online essay on computer agency and behavior, asking how users can evade automatisms inside software bu…
The very weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
A detective-style blog post that digs into why HP shipped laptops with a strange FreeDOS option, with screenshots and th…
The Virtual Community
Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community, free to read online: a firsthand account of the WELL and early onlin…
The Web Revival
A MelonLand wiki page explaining the Web Revival, the movement of people building handmade personal websites again, with…
The Website Obesity Crisis
Maciej Ceglowski's classic talk on bloated web pages, arguing that page weight and needless complexity are making the we…
The Word of the Year Is: Sophistry
A Ted Gioia essay arguing that sophistry deserves to be the word of the year, on clever arguments that win attention wit…
The World's Most Dangerous Toy Edition
A short, entertaining look at fun and danger through 1970s toy airplanes, the hazardous playthings kids once flew around…
The X Window System Boot Stipple
A nostalgic look at the grey checkerboard stipple and X-shaped cursor that greeted Unix users at startup, and how that t…
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
A loving history of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor on its 50th anniversary, covering its design, the home computers and co…
The Zombocom Problem
An essay using the old joke site Zombocom, where you can do anything, to ask why unlimited freedom in software often lea…
There Are Only Three Memes
A playful essay arguing that every internet meme fits into just three formats, then making the case that they all boil d…
Things That Aren't Doing the Thing
A short, punchy essay listing all the ways we feel productive without actually starting the work, from planning and list…
Things Unexpectedly Named After People
A quick, fun list of brands, places and products with surprising namesakes, from PageRank and Taco Bell to Debian, perfe…
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