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.

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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.

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LEGO Batman’s Commodore 64 BASIC easter egg

Cabel Sasser found a great easter egg in the new Lego Batman game. (Audio on!)

Here's an easter egg in the new Lego Batman that I think all of you will REALLY appreciate.It's so good, I had to make a video.

— Cabel Sasser (@cabel.panic.com) 2026-06-07T20:06:22.009Z

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.

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— for the JavaScript sickos, a cursed crossword puzzle where every clue is an eval of its answer #
— first new Bill Wurtz song in almost four years #
— like RNGdle, a minimalist experiment in addictive game mechanics #

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.

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— what’s the least amount of interactivity you can have in a game and still have it feel like a game? #
— telling the time using more than 20,000 Google Street View images found around NYC #
— you’ll want to try Neal Agarwal’s latest on desktop #
— every week, two guys spin a wheel of countries and find a restaurant in NYC serving that cuisine, random joy ensues #
— a new point-and-click text adventure made with World Builder, a game creator for the Mac first released in 1986 #
— Pippin Barr tests your attention span with weirdly meditative slowed-down remakes of Pong, Breakout, and Missile Command #
— 15 new pieces of experimental web poetry and art, my personal faves are milkfish, Banner Highway, and Cursor Park #
— compare the key images used to illustrate a topic in 300+ different language Wikipedia editions around the world via Web Curios #
— prompt an “ai” for answers and drawings, or fulfill prompts yourself for more credits #
— win points by calling from one of California’s remaining 2,203 payphones #
— Nolen Royalty made a massively-multiplayer Snake game played over SSH #