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 shut it down after 14 years? Two main reasons: maintenance and obsolescence.
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.
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!)
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.
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:
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!)
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
RUNI 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.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how everyone got the viral Will Smith AI video wrong.
Most people believe that Will Smith’s team used AI to generate fake crowds and fake fans, presumably to cover for low turnouts, but the reality was much more mundane: they used AI to turn real photos into short video clips for a montage. The crowds were real, but everyone was convinced they were fake.
The focus of the internet’s suspicions was a couple holding a sign saying that a Will Smith song helped them to survive cancer, which Futurism called “nightmare fuel” with an expression “never before seen on a living human face.” Redditors called it “pathetic,” “vile,” and “sad and weird.”
After writing my post, I was left wondering what this uniquely-modern experience was like for these two people.
How did it feel to have millions of people think that you didn’t exist and were generated by AI? What was the story behind their sign, and what did that moment mean to them?
So I tracked them down to ask them.
This minute-long clip of a Will Smith concert is blowing up online for all the wrong reasons, with people accusing him of using AI to generate fake crowds filled with fake fans carrying fake signs. In the last day, the story’s been covered by Rolling Stone, VIBE, NME, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Mail, The Independent, Mashable, and Consequence of Sound.
And it definitely looks terrible! The faces have all the characteristics of AI slop, with familiar artifacts like uncanny features, smeared faces, multiple fingers/limbs, and nonsensical signage. “From West Philly to West Swig̴̙̕g̷̤̔͜y”?
But here’s where things get complicated.
The crowds are real. Every person you see in the video above started out as real footage of real fans, sourced from multiple Will Smith concerts during his recent European tour.