Culture

and wondered how an unlicensed two hour film could exist when even Disney had to negotiate with Sony to use the character in films. Sony, Disney, and Marvel are all very protective of the character so it’s a surprise to see this film still live. It’s also super unusual to see a fan film of this scope outside of the Star Trek fan film community, especially as the last time a Star Trek fan film attempted a project of this high a production quality level Paramount sued the creator.

The Internet Archive’s Great 78 project launched in 2017 and streams thousands of digitized 78rpm discs and cylinder recordings for free. Now music labels, including Universal, Sony, and Concord, are suing, citing 2,749 sound-recording copyrights they say it’s infringed and pointing to the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (via Reuters).

In this episode of Andscape’s Rap Stories podcast series, David Dennis and Curren$y recap the “blog era” of rap music that existed in the late ‘00s by pinpointing exactly why it was so relatable.

Apollo app developer Christian Selig dropped new wallpaper art of a cute hybrid of Clippy and the Reddit alien today.

And the German flag apparently expanded to fill the new space within under three minutes. How did they do it? According to Redditor HellsOnWheels45, a Discord server with 50,000 users in active coordination.

What if we made the Internet Archive the real internet and let the machines have Google?

Wiby, a search engine that only indexes the most basic of webpages, gives you something Google is almost completely unwilling to these days: websites made by regular people.

Perhaps reacting to Threads’ 100 million user milestone, Elon Musk tweeted today that “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime... may hit an all-time record this week.” He noted that stat, “as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game.”

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a graph to both Threads and Twitter today (Cloudflare’s communications VP Daniella Vallurupalli confirmed it was him) showing what he says is Twitter’s DNS ranking from January to now.

Windows Central shows you how to get the Threads app installed using Windows Subsystem for Android, a feature that allows you to install and use Android apps on your Windows 11 machine.

Following word that the good version of TweetDeck is back, an update from Harpy developer Roberto Doering said they were able to get the app functioning again by switching user profiles to use the old v1 API, but they don’t expect to begin maintaining the app again:

Threads has quickly blown past the other Twitter alternatives in terms of registered accounts. The highest account number badge I’ve seen on Instagram so far this morning puts its count at over 86 million.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about the iOS-only app Spill, which was founded by two former Twitter employees and calls itself “visual conversation at the speed of culture.” On Spill, large text captions over pictures, GIFs, or video clips add the conversational pace of Twitter to the look of Instagram or TikTok.

Software Engineer PJ Evans put a bot on Mastodon that posts a single frame from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey once an hour, and has been for a month. 1,300 toots in, it just reached the title card yesterday.

I feel Epic CEO Tim Sweeney very strongly on this. But there’s an way for web browsing to feel much less horrible: RSS.

Three Reddit moderators have just told me that Reddit is sending a message to closed communities asking if they plan to reopen.

This creepypasta-esque story by merritt k is fiction — think “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by way of NeoGAF. But it may strike a chord in anyone who’s fallen way too deep into a real internet in-joke.

Some users on the Sync for Reddit subreddit reported running into rate limits on Tuesday, and Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig tells The Verge he’s been seeing rate limits, too.