2026

Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link to what appeared to be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to make a “dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express.”

The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s promotional book site: an author biography, press mentions, and links to buy the book on Amazon.

Strangely, it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms, with their accompanying definitions, etymology, and short essays, all penned by Koenig.

Note: On July 1, the site was changed dramatically. You can see how it previously looked on the Internet Archive. See the update at the end of this post for details.

The book’s original photo-collage illustrations made by Koenig and several other artists are conspicuously missing. Instead, each word has an AI-generated image made with DALL-E 2, riddled with the errors and artifacts typical of that model.

A banner at the top of the homepage encourages visitors to “Generate your own words using AI – give your sorrows a voice!” The Submit A Sorrow feature lets you describe a feeling, and then uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate the new word, etymology, and definition, which go into a gallery of “User-Generated Sorrows” with AI generated art.

MetaFilter members were immediately suspicious, and so was I. My wife Ami and I made a card game in 2022, Lost for Words, partly inspired by Koenig’s project. We own a copy of the book, and I’d followed it online for years. The embrace of AI seemed out of character.

Then I noticed the new site was a different domain than the original Tumblr homepage entirely:

The original: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
The reboot: thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com

What’s going on here?

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.

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.

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.

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.