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!
Johnny Cash sings “Barbie Girl”
— another in a series of There I Ruined It’s cursed experiments with AI voice cloning #Hank Green has some good news
— Johnson & Johnson will allow generic versions of its life-saving TB drug in lower-income countries, and Hank’s cancer is responding well to treatment #Anil Dash on the radicalization of tech tycoons
— VCs and big tech CEOs are living together in a reactionary bubble, insulated from people who might call them out via Paul Bausch #Legal Lullabies
— it takes over 50 minutes to read the Instagram Terms of Use out loud, an extremely effective sleep aid via Web Curios #Super Aja 64
— my new jam is MIDI versions of Steely Dan’s Aja, but with every instrument replaced by the Mario 64 soundfont #The Free Movie
— MSCHF made a site to “crowd pirate” a hand-drawn frame-by-frame recreation of The Bee Movie #Rest of World talks to outsourced workers forced to adopt generative AI to stay competitive
— they commissioned work made with and without AI from freelancers in Nigeria, Mexico, China, and the Philippines #Windows Defender
— elegantly designed free browser game, like Vampire Survivors but a group of windows defending a desktop via Naive Weekly #Tiny Awards finalists announced, public voting open until July 20
— I helped narrow down the 300+ nominees to 16 charming websites representing the “small, playful and heartfelt web” #Twitter bug causes self-DDOS tied to Elon Musk’s emergency blocks and rate limits: “It’s amateur hour”
For the last two days, Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter is under attack from “several hundred organizations” who were conducting “EXTREME levels of data scraping,” forcing them to bring “large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis” and enact emergency measures.
Yesterday, Twitter started blocking all logged-out access to Twitter, requiring signing in to view any tweet or profile. Elon Musk called it a “temporary emergency measure,” claiming they “were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Apparently, it didn’t stop the crush of traffic and, this morning, Musk announced they escalated their actions against supposed “extreme levels of data scraping” by rate-limiting the number of tweets you can view.
