Cruftbox’s Halloween 2024 costume data
— for the last 19 years, Michael Pusateri has tracked children’s Halloween costumes at his front door and published the stats online #Panic announces Playdate season 2 coming next year
— a dozen surprise new games released to everyone at the same time on a regular schedule #PacCam, play multiplayer Pac-Man with your face
— look in the direction you want to move, open and close your mouth to go faster #BLIB’s “Silent Love”
— Louie Zong, Worthikids, and Brian David Gilbert formed a supergroup making Steely Dan-inspired music and are playing L.A. next month!? #When does Instagram decide a nipple becomes female?
— Ada Ada Ada is documenting her transition on Instagram, uploading shirtless photos weekly to test their nudity guidelines #Graham Nash breaks down “Our House” for Song Exploder
— he has an extraordinary memory, reliving the stories behind a beautifully simple song #Google is getting even worse for independent sites
— grateful to Mia Sato for staying on this beat, which affects so many smaller sites I care about #Nintendo Alarmo can run custom code via USB without opening it up
— getting it to run DOOM is only a matter of time #The RIP Off
— BRAIN scraped 16 years of Twitter to find the first people to post “RIP” when celebrities died, turning it into a morbid competition #Boing Boing launches ad-free paid version on Substack, shuttering discussion forums
— the BBS goes read-only on Friday, replaced by Substack comments, and the community is not happy #Ghost founder/CEO John O’Nolan on how they’re structured and funded
— a useful case study given the current debacle stemming from WordPress’s “benevolent dictator for life” model via @johnonolan #Anti-government militias using Facebook to recruit and organize in plain sight
— in some cases, Meta is automatically creating the pages via Garbage Day #Vanishing Culture, the Internet Archive’s “Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record”
— research and short essays about cultural loss and the critical importance of preservation and access #A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
— The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel’s clearheaded “endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and Kamala Harris” #The Pudding’s interactive explainer on Crokinole
— like curling meets shuffleboard on a tabletop board #This Must Be The Place lyric tattoos
— Liverpool tattoo artist Rachel Baldwin made charming tattoos for each line of the Talking Heads classic and made it into a music video #2004 Week on The Verge
— a series of articles looking back 20 years, worth exploring just for the playful article design inspired by early Gmail, Digg, Kazaa, and more #The XOXO 2024 Talks
Last week, we released the talks from the final XOXO.
In the eight years that Andy McMillan and I put on XOXO, we had so many wonderful talks—you can peruse the featured tag for some of our favorites from the full archive—but I think we both agreed this was the single best day of talks we ever had.
The consistency was so high, it was clear every speaker understood the assignment. Every talk is worth watching.
The Talks
“We can build the web we want to see.” Molly White kicked off XOXO 2024’s conference with a hopeful talk about building Web3 Is Going Just Great and how we can “push the web back towards the wonderful, joyful, beautiful place it used to be.”
Cabel Sasser’s XOXO 2024 talk
— all of this year’s XOXO talks were stellar, but this is the only one that comes with a newly-launched archive of nearly-lost artwork #Aftermath’s list of discussion forums
— Chris Person compiled a list of active forums, grouped by subject area, hosted outside of the major platforms via Garbage Day #Dookie Demastered
— Green Day collaborated with BRAIN to demake their 1994 album in 15 obscure formats, including Game Boy, Teddy Ruxpin, wax cylinder, and player piano roll #Scripting News turns 30
— there’s a nice companion piece for Dave Winer’s milestone in The Guardian #Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival
— the creator of A Short Hike relaunched his charming interactive ghost town where players design and share jack-o-lanterns #31 Days of Halloween
— for the tenth year, Laura E. Hall brings back her popup newsletter sending a gently spooky email for each day of October #Bop Spotter
— an Android phone hidden in the Mission is set to Shazam all audio 24/7 and post the roughly 120 songs/day it can identify #Rest of World’s Digital Divinity
— feature package on new ways religious believers are using new technology, from Muslim VR simulators to Buddhist monks on TikTok #Guided by Vices
— Nick Heer on the ever-increasing user-hostile demand for your attention from the biggest social platforms #Making 8-bit music from scratch at the Commodore 64 BASIC prompt
— Linus Åkesson just casually being amazing again #DOOM in the iOS Photos app
— a technically-playable (but just barely) hack using iOS Shortcuts to download remote screenshots compiled into videos #The data on extreme human ageing is flawed
— most “blue zones,” concentrated areas of supercentenarians, can be attributed to pension fraud or bad record-keeping #all text in nyc
— a search engine using OCRed text from map imagery across Brooklyn, expanding to all of NYC soon via Naive Weekly #How to Monetize a Blog
— you’ll just have to trust me on this one; recommended for desktop browsers via MetaFilter #Cohost to shut down at the end of the year
— very sad to hear this but I’m grateful for their effort, and loved having them at XOXO to talk about their weird and special community #Celebrity Number Six was found
— the low-stakes internet mystery to identify the only unknown celebrity on a shower curtain pattern is solved after four years #The Bumpin’ Sticker
— Guy Dupont made a “Keep Honking! I’m Listening to…” bumper sticker-sized LCD display that updates in real-time #404 Media on the anarchist collective teaching people to DIY expensive medicine
— the course of medication that cures Hepatitis C costs $84,000 at $1,000/pill, but can be produced for only $700 or $0.83/pill #TechDirt’s Mike Masnick on the Internet Archive decision
— the ruling is “a knife in the back of libraries,” claiming that authors won’t write new books if libraries lend digital books for free #Internet Archive loses its appeal against book publishers
— the appeals court ruled that, despite being a nonprofit and no evidence of market harm, its implementation of Controlled Digital Lending isn’t fair use #Song Pong
— open-source music visualizer that synchronizes MIDI to bouncing balls in a modified game of Pong via The Verge #The rise and fall of OpenSea
— the SEC notified them last week that NFTs on the struggling platform are unregistered securities #The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
— 1994 replica of a printed circuit board handmade on an upright wooden loom via MetaFilter #The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
— Nolen Royalty tells the story of how a group of teens were writing secret binary messages on the Tiny Award-winning multiplayer experiment #SNAKEBYTE
— impressively deep sequel to STRG.SNEK, a stylish Snake-inspired ASCII adventure via Web Curios #Shutterbug
— free desktop-only browser game where you photograph bugs by resizing and moving the browser window via Naive Weekly #Kind of Bloop 15th Anniversary Vinyl
15 years ago this week, Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis came out on the 50th anniversary of the release of Kind of Blue, the bestselling jazz album of all time.
I started the project as a bit of a goof, launching on Kickstarter on May 12, 2009, only 14 days after Kickstarter itself launched. I wanted to test out the platform I’d helped to build, to see what the experience was like as a creator. For years, I’d also wondered what “chiptune jazz” might sound like, and figured this was a good way to do both.