Thinky Dailies
— charming ever-changing collection of free daily puzzles, now in its fourth season #I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning
— creepypasta in the form of a forum thread, don’t miss the “what’s new!” at the very end #9/11 in Realtime
— impressive archival project synchronizing TV broadcasts, radio traffic, pagers, newsgroups, and more #Modern Day Typographer
— “Papyrus is a virus and restraint is the inoculum” via actsofvolition.com #Usenet-Rewind
— new commercial archive with deep full-text search of 982M posts going back to 1981 #Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader
— Morry Kolman made a GTA V mod that adds 235 Flock cameras around Los Santos, earn cash by destroying them #Kids Trends
— Riley Walz analyzed 100 million children’s drawings over 20 years, try searching for your own name #Rogue OpenAI agents using public wikis as message boards
— in a week, a swarm of 3,700 agents made 13k edits with disposable email addresses to collude on tasks via Simon Willison #Unusual Suspects
— Neal.fun’s latest is a sketch artist game where you draw famous characters from witness testimony via @mrgan.com #The Internet Archive’s Vintage AI collection
— Worms, Alter Ego, MacJesus ProGold, Portal (1986), and many more via Web Curios #Katamari Object Library
— sort by triangle count to see the simplest and most complex models in the game via @lifewinning.com #Walkable Cities
— the dev made a fun postmortem on how the game was made and later went viral in Japan #Mimic your own voice with Pink Trombone
— an open-source model to control the classic human vocal tract simulator #Nitter, XCancel shut down after X sends cease-and-desist
— the privacy-friendly X/Twitter frontends were a helpful way to view a post without an account #Amazon shuttering Mechanical Turk after 21 years
— three years after it launched, I asked Turkers to send me selfies for cash #Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in alphabetical order
— the latest submission to Supercut.org, inspired by Of Oz The Wizard via supercut.org #Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” is set today
— “‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, ‘in the city of Allendale, California.'” via @aaronmeyers #Marcin Wichary on the Mac’s quirky drag-install app windows
— some of the many ways designers encourage you to drag an icon into the Applications folder #The Pudding’s lawn mowing experiment
— 30,954 mowed a virtual lawn, but the best mowers thought about it first #House House’s Big Walk out now
— I played the first hour of the game with three friends at Panic HQ last month and it’s brilliant #Waxy Refresh: The End of Playfic
Like I mentioned last week, I spent the last few months quietly updating several projects of mine, like my blog and Supercut.org.
Today’s refresh is a bit different: after 14 years, I decided to finally retire Playfic, the community for writing and sharing interactive fiction games that I launched in 2012 with my then-teenaged nephew, Cooper.
Why Now?
Why shut it down after 14 years? Two main reasons: maintenance and obsolescence.
Ikea Complexity Index
— I wonder how many people know they’ve committed to a 10 hour build when buying a $700 kitchenette via b3ta #Waxy Refresh: Supercut.org
Like I mentioned yesterday, I’ve quietly spent the last few months dusting the cobwebs off some long-dormant side projects of mine.
Today’s refresh is Supercut.org, a site I first launched in 2011 as part of Seven on Seven with Michael Bell-Smith, and redesigned later that year as a browsable archive of every supercut I could find.
Over the years, videos slowly became unavailable, either deleted, privatized, removed for copyright infringement, or made inaccessible by Vimeo (more on that later). Even as the submission backlog grew, I ended up taking the site offline entirely at the end of 2015 after my server got hacked.
I migrated to a new server, but Supercut.org didn’t make the transition and stayed offline for five years. After auditing my ancient PHP for security holes, I finally brought it back in 2020.
The Changes
I gave the archive a long-overdue design refresh, finally retiring the basic Bootstrap theme and making the site responsive while keeping the overall layout.
All of the old unavailable videos were removed, and I replaced deleted videos with alternatives if I could find them. I cleared the long backlog of submissions, and added quite a few new supercuts to the database, many from Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases. That was a lot of tedious work, but it brought the live collection to over 580 videos. (You can use the “Add” link to suggest more if you have them!)
A Little Waxy Refresh
If you read Waxy.org entirely via RSS, you may not have noticed that I’ve refreshed the site a bit. Or even if you visit it, you may not have noticed!
I’ve made a bunch of small incremental changes over the last few weeks. Nothing major, mostly fixing a lot of long-standing issues and polishing rough edges that have bothered me for years.
The most notable changes are the redesigned archives and search features, which try to better surface some of my last 24 years of writing here. It includes starred long-form posts, highlighting some of my favorites over the years.
I added better credits to the linkblog, showing a site name, domain, or social media username instead of just the bare “via” link, and added that into the RSS feed for better attribution.