Molly White launches Tech Influence Watch to track AI spending in politics
— a natural evolution of Follow the Crypto, her project tracking over $130m spent by crypto companies in last year’s elections #Big Walk and the magic of proximity chat
House House just announced that Big Walk will be out on August 4 for PC/Mac on Steam, Switch 2, and PlayStation 5, with cross-play between all platforms.
The followup to Untitled Goose Game, the Melbourne-based team spent six years building an open world for you to explore with your friends, a virtual play space for 2-10 friends with cooperative challenges built around the constraints of its proximity-based voice chat.
This is, hands down, my most anticipated game of the year. I’ve followed its development for years through my friends at Panic, but have largely managed to avoid spoiling myself.
Tiny Awards 2026 nominations are open
Once again, for the fourth time, nominations for this year’s Tiny Awards are now open.

I love this weird little low-stakes contest that celebrates the “best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.”
As before, the criteria is specific. Websites must be:
- Launched in the last 12 months, between July 2025 to July 2026
- Non-commercial. No stores, no ads, no paid products/services.
- No agencies or brands. Individuals or groups of creators only.
- You own it. It must be a page you own and control. Not a Bluesky bot, not an Instagram feed, not a YouTube channel.
- Websites. It’s about the web! Websites only. No apps/downloads.
I’m on the judging committee for the third time, joined by Depths of Wikipedia’s Annie Rauwerda, Today in Tabs’ Rusty Foster, Elle, Escape the Algorithm’s Elan Ullendorff, and a bunch of other cool people.
LEGO Batman’s Commodore 64 BASIC easter egg
Cabel Sasser found a great easter egg in the new Lego Batman game. (Audio on!)
For anyone who grew up with a Commodore 64, this is perfect nerd sniping.
I transcribed the C64 BASIC code from Cabel’s video for you to try yourself. Just copy the code below and paste it into your emulator of choice.
10 V=53248:POKE V+21,0:X=120:Y=120:POKE V+4,X:POKE V+5,Y:POKE V+21,4
11 POKE 2042,13:POKE 53277,15:POKE 53289,7
20 FOR N=0 TO 62:READ Q:POKE 832+N,Q:NEXT:DX=7:DY=3
30 X=X+DX:IF X>255 THEN X=255:DX=-DX
31 IF X<65 THEN X=65:DX=-DX 35 Y=Y+DY:IF Y>200 THEN Y=200:DY=-DY
36 IF Y<65 THEN Y=65:DY=-DY
40 POKE V+4,X:POKE V+5,Y:GOTO 30
200 DATA 0,0,0, 0,0,0, 12,68,96, 56,108,56, 120,124,60, 120,124,60
207 DATA 252,124,126, 255,255,254, 255,255,254, 255,255,254
211 DATA 143,255,226, 7,255,192, 3,255,128, 2,124,128
215 DATA 0,56,0, 0,56,0, 0,16,0, 0,16,0, 0,0,0, 0,0,0, 0,0,0
RUN
I recommend ty64, an amazing new-ish browser-based Commodore 64 emulator by Hungarian software developer named Krisztián Tóth. You can paste from clipboard using the three-dot menu in the bottom-right.
Released in 2023, ty64 also supports network play, so you can share a synchronized session with friends anywhere in the world, plus gamepad support, shader effects, saving/loading emulator state, a graphical keyboard, time travel, and loading every popular file format from a URL. (See the docs for more info.)
Krisztián also maintains a library of 700+ classic C64 games that you can play with a click. Amazing. You can support his work, and follow updates, on his Buy Me A Coffee page.
Cloudflare CEO says AI bots now exceed human traffic on the web
— over a year earlier than anticipated, currently 57% to 43% by their metrics #Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, dead at 56
— a friend said she “died of sadness” after losing her husband last year, her memorial for him on Instagram says it all #Ted Chiang on the question of LLM consciousness
— I agree this is true right now, and the horrific implications if it wasn’t, but he’s more certain about the future than I am via MetaFilter #Joanna Stern on the cottage industry removing Meta’s Ray-Ban recording lights
— modders are widely advertising the service on, where else, Facebook Marketplace via The Verge #Companies are using Reddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI search
— 404 Media reports on companies specializing in AEO, AI-engine optimization, the evolution of SEO scum #How Mihai Parparita reads social media via RSS
— his Stream Spigot tool now supports Mastodon, Bluesky, and X/Twitter using Nitter’s reverse-engineered private endpoints #The Bluesky firehose if everyone was messaging you
— extremely anxiety-inducing via @spencer.place #The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum
— excellent new video from Emily Zhang’s Rabbit Hole, now over 200k subscribers with only three videos since its February launch via Marcin Wichary #A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS
— Misty De Méo writes about a 1994 Japanese BBS preserved forever on CD-ROM and browsable in Infinite Mac #JS Crossword
— for the JavaScript sickos, a cursed crossword puzzle where every clue is an eval of its answer #The AI Bubble
— disturbing post on the leveraged financing of the AI infrastructure buildout from No One’s Happy, a new anonymously-authored blog via Marcin Wichary #Last.fm goes independent after 19 years at CBS Interactive
— no info about how the ownership change happened, though they say it will be run by the same team #More than 340 local news outlets are now blocking the Internet Archive
— Nieman Lab continues to report on news orgs blocking the Archive’s crawlers over fears of AI training #Launching a permanent archive for XOXO

Last week, we launched XOXO Explore, a permanent archive for XOXO, the Portland-based festival and conference I co-organized with Andy McMillan for eight years between 2012 and 2024.
This was a huge undertaking, bringing together every lineup, schedule, recap video, conference talk, and standalone website that we ever made into a single permanent archive, filled with little photos and ephemera from the festival. It includes the final versions of our policies, which we refined over several years and released under open licenses, along with an archive of our guide. We even finally made a proper About page.
This is something we first started talking about back in 2015, and attempted three times, but it was never finished until now.
