On April Fool’s Day, when the rest of the internet devolves into a cesspool of unfunny press releases and fake product launches, Reddit becomes the most interesting place online by unleashing a social experiment on its enormous community.

In past years, Reddit’s mods started a color war, an exponential chatroom, and a countdown button that ran for over two months, inspiring its own cult-like religions.

This year, it was Reddit Place, a collaborative canvas of one million pixels. You can color any pixel, but only one pixel every 5-10 minutes. It ended 72 hours later.

This is what happened.

The end result is about as aesthetically pleasing as Million Dollar Homepage, but even a full-screen 4K timelapse can’t fully convey what happened over those 72 hours.

Every tiny patch of the Place is a story. Every piece of real estate represents a hard-fought battle, drawn from the collective activity of hundreds of smaller communities teaming together, and often against each other.

Communities were formed solely to rally people to various causes: painting the bottom-right corner blue, making a patch of green lattice, a rainbow road, a series of interlocking hearts, a Windows 95 start menu. The Starry Knights and the Mona Lisa Clan formed to paint pixel art renditions of famous paintings. Another just wanted to tell the the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise.

Each community created strategies, locations, and grid-based templates — tools to help make sure their work found its place. And all of them had a common enemy: The Black Void, a group of nihilists repeatedly defacing artwork with a growing, spreading maw of black pixels, only to be repeatedly fought back and incorporated into new pieces.

The Place couldn’t have gone on much longer: automated tools were developed to maintain pixel colors, making it more of a technological arms race. So, 72 hours later, the experiment was over.

There’s a heatmap timelapse of activity for all 72 hours, and a static heatmap of all activity. (Full data dumps are available, if you like.) The Place Atlas, with close to 1,000 entries, lets you find the story behind nearly every pixel.

One person made a live-updating Minecraft server to visualize all Place activity, stacking blocks as pixels change. The final result is browsable as a static render.

Reddit can be hard to love. There’s so many wonderfully creative corners of that community, but it’s often drowned out by a noisy minority of hateful scumbags and trolls, emboldened by haphazard management.

But on April 1, when the internet is at its most annoying, it’s nice to have an annual reminder of what makes it great — even for a short time.

Or, as Reddit’s Josh Wardle wrote in the Place announcement, “Individually you can create something. Together you can create something more.”

In mid-December, I took an unannounced hiatus from Waxy for the first time, and largely stepped back from social media. It was a long, cold winter in Portland, but an absurdly productive period for me. That said, I hope to never do it again. I miss writing here!

The break was partly inspired by six weeks of internet malaise, a pervasive feeling of unease from obsessively spending time online in a post-Trump wave of political despair.

But it was also the competing forces from two factors: the death of one project and the rebirth of another.

The End of the Outpost

Last year, we opened the XOXO Outpost, our shared, pay-what-you-can workspace for independent artists that we’d opened at the beginning of the year. We’d grown to 85 members, a pretty absurdly great group of writers, videogame designers, illustrators, cartoonists, filmmakers, and creative coders.

We ran dozens of events throughout the year, and bought a 1967 Airstream, retrofitted into a community podcast studio by a team of volunteers. Every Friday afternoon, we ran Show & Tell, where everyone shared what they were working on and the terrible stuff that came with it. It was a pretty great place to work, surrounded by talented indies that turned into quick friends.

Sadly, we weren’t immune to Portland’s rising costs, and our initial sublease was set to nearly double in 2017. We couldn’t afford to sign a long-term lease, so we made the hard decision to close doors on December 31.

It was short-lived, but it was one of the best experiences of my life, and I don’t regret it for a second. Last Friday, I went to the first Show & Tell from the Enthusiasm Collective, a group of ex-Outpost members who started their own space in SE Portland. And the Airstream lives on, thanks to the collective effort of the Stream PDX crew.

And I made a lot of new real friends, which is worth more than I can possibly tell you.

The Rebirth of Upcoming

As the Outpost closed, I quietly started a three-month sprint to get Upcoming.org back online.

Four years ago, in May 2013, Yahoo shuttered the event-sharing community I started in 2003 with 11 days’ notice. A massive archiving effort by Archive Team preserved the majority of the events, venues, and user profiles. But the community was dead.

A year later, a friend at Yahoo reached out, offering to sell the domain back to me. No code and no data—just the domain. I jumped at it, and launched a Kickstarter project to see if it was worth bringing back Upcoming. 1,787 people thought so, pledging over $100k to make it happen.

When I first launched the project in May 2014, my original hope was to have a public beta in April 2015. It’s now April 2017, two years later than I thought.

There were milestones: I launched the historical archive last June, bringing 7.6 million events back from the dead at their original URLs, and opened up a very rough beta to backers shortly after, but actually, you know, launching the new site has taken far longer than I originally expected.

So, what happened? Three main issues.

• Competing projects. While developing Upcoming, I organized three XOXO festivals, while launching and managing the Outpost for all of 2016. Both projects grew to consume all my available time and creative energy.
• Infrastructure changes. In the middle of development, I switched from one language, framework, database, and set of libraries to a completely new stack. (The new Upcoming was originally in Python, Tornado and RethinkDB, and is now Node, Express, and MySQL.)
• Learning curve. I’m working in an environment and framework that’s completely new to me, and that’s taken some time to get used to. It’s my first real experience with modern asynchronous JavaScript, and I’m still learning.

I couldn’t do everything at once, and Upcoming suffered the most. So, starting in January, I quietly cleared my slate to focus exclusively on Upcoming. We’d already announced we were taking a break from the festival this year, the Outpost was over, and on top of it, I took a blogging break.

Last Thursday, Upcoming relaunched. It’s still rough, and there’s a long to-do list—many of them on the homepage sidebar. I’m already starting to hear stories of people using it, finding new things, and sharing them with friends.

It just passed 3,500 members and 700 events. It’s rough, but it’s a start, and I’m excited and hopeful to see where it goes over the next few years.

The Spring

So the winter’s over and spring is here, and we’re all coping in our own ways.

I’m going to go back to doing what I’ve always done: writing incessantly about the things I care most about, and that make me happy, and evangelizing everything I love about the internet and the people and projects that make it interesting.

Thanks for sticking around.

The talks at this year’s XOXO were really, really good. It’s hard for me to stop myself from writing about every one as they’re released.

But there were two in particular that I wanted to mention, from two of my favorite people in the world.

The first is from Jenn Schiffer—the coder/artist behind Make 8-Bit Art, Vart Institute, and other internet weirdness. At XOXO, I asked her to talk about her hilarious tech satire on Medium and the reaction to it.

It’s very funny, but also an insightful case study of the humorlessness and self-seriousness of the tech industry, and how many men react when trolled by a woman online.

The second is from cartoonist Lucy Bellwood, in a brave and vulnerable discussion of money and the costs of perceived success online. This talk left many in the audience in tears, earning her a standing ovation.

If you enjoy these talks, pass them on! We don’t make money from any of these videos, and because the festival is perpetually sold out, they have little marketing value for us. They take a lot of time and money for us to produce, edit, and caption, but we think they’re all worth preserving.

If you like, you can subscribe on YouTube and click the little bell icon to get notified when they’re released, or follow @xoxo on Twitter.

Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, Darius Kazemi started National Novel Generation Month in 2013, with the goal of writing code each November to generate a novel of at least 50,000 words. The entries are often surreal and playful, and occasionally profound. (See this year’s entries so far, 2015, 2014, and 2013.)

Several of my favorite past NaNoGenMo entries are by a single creator: the multi-talented Liza Daly, the Boston-based software engineer behind World Writable and former CTO of Safari.

In 2014, Liza’s entry was Seraphs, a procedurally-generated codex inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, using a randomized corpus from Voynich, a Voynich-like typeface, the Flickr API, and the Internet Archive’s collection of 18th century illustrations.

Last year, she created SAGA III, a reimagining of a 1961 MIT computer program that generated scripts for TV westerns, which were then filmed by CBS.

This year, she’s submitted two entries so far.

Her first was Trapped in the Q, an infinitely long story styled after the scene in every James Bond movie where Q shows off a series of new inventions and weapons, complete with bad procedural wordplay. (Eventually, Bond dies of thirst while an oblivious Q keeps introducing new gadgets.)

Very clever, but Liza’s second entry absolutely blew me away.

Blackout generates pages of text from a book or newspaper in the style of Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poems.

Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as its source, the Blackout code generated The Days Left Foreboding and Water, a 45 page book of blackout poetry. The results are pretty amazing.

You can download the full PDF here (145 MB). Or, for the committed, the full NaNoGenMo entry—a 9.3GB PDF that’s nearly 10,000 pages long. As Liza says, “You almost certainly do not want to download it.”

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One side note: Austin Kleon first started making newspaper blackout poems in 2005, originally inspired by redacted FBI files, but once he started putting them online, he started getting emails and comments arguing that his work was completely unoriginal.

In his TEDx talk from 2012, Austin traced the 250-year-old history of people finding poetry in newspapers. In the 1760s, Caleb Whitefoord started reading across newspaper columns instead of downwards, joining fragment sentences from two different stories into something new. He published the results:

The comet is now on it’s return to the sun—pursuant to a decree of the high court of chancery.

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

Yesterday there were violent disputes in the common-council—For some time past the volcano has been extremely turbulent.

Which, bringing it full circle, reminds me of Darius Kazemi’s @TwoHeadlines Twitter bot, but made with 1760s newspapers instead of Google News.

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There’s still a week left in November. It may not be enough time to write a novel, but plenty of time to generate one. Good luck!

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging through the Internet Archive’s computer magazine collection and stumbled on these cover illustrations from the Midnite Software Gazette, a Commodore user newsletter that ran from 1980 to 1987.

Now, I think about them every time I’m up too late, like tonight, working on my computer well into the night.