NYT profiles Keita Takahashi, 20 years after Katamari Damacy
— everything he’s made since then is great too, I especially loved Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure for Playdate via @lauraehall #Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t
— Erin Kissane surveyed people on Bluesky who bounced off Mastodon and her write-up is excellent #Arcade collector rescues a roadside Discs of Tron
— imagine keeping a pristine arcade game in your garage for decades and then just dumping it with the weekly garbage via Kottke #The little search engine that couldn’t
— The Verge profiles Neeva, a well-funded startup that tried and failed to take on Google via Nelson Minar #Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
— excellent plain-language primer on how transformer-based LLMs like ChatGPT work #Arc browser for Mac now available publicly
— I have friends that swear by it, but I found it too hard to get used to #I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!)
— the misunderstood history of the Luddite movement and what they can teach us about resisting an automated future via MetaFilter #Attenzione, Pickpocket!
— the NYT profiles the woman going viral on TikTok for outing pickpockets on the streets of Venice #Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web
— Apple shipped attestation in Safari last year, but Chromium-based browsers are ~70% of the internet usage #The World’s Last Internet Cafes
— Rest of World visits some of the last remaining cafes in Uganda, Nepal, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, and Hong Kong #The Tiny Awards Winner Is…
Earlier this month, I wrote about Tiny Awards, a tiny prize to honor websites that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” I was invited to be a part of the inaugural award’s selection committee, and helped narrow down the 270 submissions to 16 finalists, which were then open to public voting.
This morning, Tiny Awards announced the winner: the dizzying and delicious Rotating Sandwiches by Lauren Walker. When I linked to it here back in March, I described it simply as the “best of the web, right here,” so I’m pretty happy with this result. Lauren will receive a $500 prize and a tiny trophy. Congrats!
The organizers of the award also released the full list of all 272 nominated websites, a “dizzying snapshot of the boundless creativity and artistic endeavor (and, occasionally, silliness) of the web (and, by extension, the people who make it).”
The organizers originally asked each member of the selection committee to decide on their top two picks from the full list of nominees. Given the volume, diversity, and quality of the entries, this was no easy task.
Now that the winner’s announced, I thought I’d share my own decision-making process, along with my personal list of runners-up.
A brief tour of South Pole Station through signage
— brr.fyi continues their wonderful documentation of “routine, mundane activities and infrastructure in extraordinary contexts” #Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of Warcraft
— “Time is a flat circle, and so is self-referential AI-generated content.” #Nikolas Bentel makes wallets that look like Mac/Windows folders
— my brain won’t accept these are physical objects via mossandfog.com #identiFIVE
— incredibly annoying daily puzzle, try to find the only five-letter word in a 9×9 grid of letters via b3ta #Geoguessr expert Rainbolt shows how he geolocates a photo in minutes
— he uses Overpass Turbo to search OpenStreetMap data; related: Bellingcat’s powerful OSM Search Tool #Human Shader
— over 1,500 people have manually calculated RGB values to collectively make a shader with human brain power #Reddit brought back r/Place and it’s going as well as expected
— as of this moment, a good chunk of the pixel art canvas is devoted to messages urging the CEO to fuck himself #Quiznos brings the Spongmonkeys back
— resurrecting an unhinged 2003 meme from b3ta is the least confusing thing about this campaign #The Pudding’s analysis of hit songwriters by gender over the last 64 years
— only three top 5 hits in the last decade were written entirely by women, and one of those was Kate Bush #TechCrunch writer tries to buy a post on TechCrunch from Fiverr SEO scammers
— doctored screenshots, Telegram impersonation, and organized crime #Aaron A. Reed on the short life of 1980s type-in computer game books
— the book acts as a guide to the adventure game, which you have to tediously type by hand #How School Board Meetings Became Flashpoints for Anger and Chaos Across the Country
— ProPublica analyzed 60 incidents that led to arrests or charges as part of their ongoing Chaos at the School Board series #Applying high voltage to kids’ toys
— there’s a second part with Psyduck, Thomas the Tank Engine, and friends via MetaFilter #Meta’s Threads Could Make—or Break—the Fediverse
— it’s still unknown what Threads’ ActivityPub implementation will look like, which will determine its impact #Otamatone cover of Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life”
— from the harmonies to the Gudetama rap verse, this is just perfect via MetaFilter #Vole.wtf’s Big Ben
— a new game from Matt Round with a unique word puzzle for every second of the day #ooooooooo.ooo
— searchable frontend to the Flashpoint preservation project, archiving 145,000 Flash games playable with the Ruffle emulator via MetaFilter #Storehouse-A
— from 2021 but new to me, a Nethack/Rogue-inspired virtual exhibition of interactive visual poetry #West of House, a Zork-inspired cross-stitch
— made with glow-in-the-dark thread, you can buy the pattern on Gumroad #Chip Player JS
— open-source chiptune player with over 200k songs in a variety of tracker/console formats, turn on the visualizer and hit shuffle #Viola the Bird
— puppet a bird playing an ML-synthesized cello, the latest musical experiment from David Li, creator of Blob Opera via @matt_muir #Playing Wordle from the Firefox address bar
— using search suggestions from OpenSearch via joy.recurse.com #Adam Pickets Everything
— Jacobin talks to Adam Conover about his activism on the picket line and social media during the writers’ strike via Cory Doctorow #Zoo asks guests to stop showing gorillas their device screens
— last year, a teenage gorilla in a Chicago zoo “became so engrossed in cellphones he started ignoring his peers” via Caitlin Dewey #The Romance Scammer on My Sofa
— Carlos Barragán goes to Nigeria to find the Yahoo boy who duped his mother via Caitlin Dewey #Searching for a Search Engine
— like Garrett, I’ve been playing with Kagi recently and impressed with the results via Chris Glass #Tiny Awards, a celebration of the small, playful, and heartfelt web
In May, the creators of two of my favorite newsletters, Naive Weekly and Web Curios, reached out to see if I’d consider joining the selection committee of Tiny Awards, a tiny prize to honor websites that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” I loved the idea and quickly accepted.
There were some additional rules: sites must have launched in the last 12 months, work on mobile and desktop without requiring an app or download, made by individuals or a group of creators (i.e. not agencies or brands), and should be primarily non-commercial.
Nominations were free and open to the public, unlike some other web awards, and the selection committee ended up reviewing over 270 submissions, which we narrowed down to a shortlist of 16 finalists, a wonderfully eclectic collection of websites.
The winner is decided by public voting, which is also free and easy, and closes next Thursday, July 20. I hope you take a look and cast your vote. Here’s a little about each of the finalists. Update: The winner was announced!