Paste Parties: The Ephemeral, Chaotic Joy of Random Clipboards

Posted by Andy Baio

Yesterday was my birthday, and like I’ve done for the last four years, I posted a single tweet that instantly destroyed my mentions for over 24 hours.

That tweet kicked off a paste party with over 2,000 replies, a potpourri of pure chaos and joy.

Random strings from emails and chat, passwords and 2FA tokens to unknown apps, screenshots and photos, obscure Unicode characters, dollar amounts from spreadsheets, bits of text in languages from Python to Esperanto, and so many links to articles, songs, videos, tweets, and obscure web pages.

It’s a momentary snapshot of digital ephemera, to be used and immediately discarded, much of it never meant to be seen by anyone and stripped of all context.

I first saw this idea in a private file-sharing/discussion community, and tried it on Twitter back in 2012, giving away copies of games and movies to people who replied with the contents of their clipboard. (Those attempts netted 14 and 24 replies, respectively, but Twitter won’t show threaded replies for older tweets.)

But the idea goes back much further. Discussion forums and message boards have played variations of the “Ctrl+V Game” (or “Ctrl+V Threads”) since at least the early 2000s. Some of them ran for years, like this 12-year-long thread from Ants Marching with 4,500 replies.

The earliest examples I found are this Usenet thread from May 2001 (thanks, Ben!) and this thread from October 2001, but pre-2001 digital archives are hard to search these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if this idea went back to forums, Usenet, and BBSes in the ’80s or ’90s. (Add a comment if you know more!)

Without context, everything seems more mysterious. You wonder what it meant, or why someone had it in their clipboard.

https://twitter.com/aidanz/status/1253069039875784719

It’s a great way to discover interesting links to music, video, articles, and web pages, because if it was in someone’s clipboard, it probably means they found it interesting enough to send to someone.

Our clipboards show temporary glimpses of work in progress, whether it’s art, design, or code.

And so many good videos.

https://twitter.com/billyterr/status/1253089776938311680

It’s also a snapshot of a moment in time: we’re at the height of a global pandemic, and our clipboards reflect it in the content we’re copying.

https://twitter.com/aflawson/status/1253113690896949248
https://twitter.com/angledge/status/1253068732030574592
https://twitter.com/bvac/status/1253142259861721099
https://twitter.com/failladrum/status/1253071195924123648

This tiny peek into everyone’s lives — their work, interests, and concerns, or even just the mundane momentary ephemera that’s forgotten two seconds later — is the perfect birthday gift.

Thanks for the presents. See you next year. ✂️📋🎉

Kickstarting Flatter Me: A Compliment Battle Card Game

Posted by Andy Baio

Three years ago, my wife Ami designed and developed her first game, a charming conversational card game called You Think You Know Me, which went on to sell over 9,000 copies around the world and now close to selling out its second print run.

I loved helping out with the package and card design for You Think You Know Me, a return to my pre-web career in desktop publishing and print production, as well as making the official homepage to support it. (The cards are all CSS!)

The followup to her first game is Flatter Me, a new game where you compete with friends to give compliments, with rules similar to the classic card game of War. It takes literally seconds to learn, explained in full in the project video below.

Each of the 250 cards have a unique compliment on them, which you can give away as little tokens of affection.

Once again, I helped out with the packaging and card designs, and if it hits its goal, you can expect to see a site at flatterme.cards once it’s officially on sale.

I know I’m biased, but Ami’s games have a gentle sweetness that really resonates with me. They’re all designed to bring people together, whether it’s by learning more about people you love or simply by telling them how much they mean to you.

Her games have rules and win conditions like any other card game, but they’re so quick and easy to understand that they become a convenient framework to enrich the connections between friends, family, and partners.

Flatter Me is now funding on Kickstarter, currently at 95% funded (!) with three days to go, and I’d love it if you checked it out or helped spread the word. Thanks!

Bbbreaking News: Discovering Amateur News Videos by Monitoring Journalists on Twitter

Posted by Andy Baio

If you’ve ever looked at the replies on any newsworthy amateur video posted to Twitter, you’ll see an inevitable chorus of news organizations and broadcast journalists in the replies, usually asking two questions:

  1. Did you shoot this video?
  2. Can we use it on all our platforms, affiliates, etc with credit?

That gave me an idea, which I posted to Twitter.

Within two days, a talented developer named Corey Johnson made it real by launching Bbbreaking News.

I’ve returned regularly since Corey launched it and, as expected, it’s a powerful way of tracking a particular type of breaking news: visual stories with footage captured by normal people at the right place and right time.

Much of it is of interest only to local news channels: traffic accidents, subway mishaps, a wild animal on the loose, the occasional building fire.

But frequently, Bbbreaking News shows the impact of gun violence and climate change: a near-constant stream of active shooter scenarios, interspersed with massive brush fires, catastrophic flooding, and extreme weather events.

It’s a fascinating way to see the stories that broadcast media is currently tracking and viewing their sources before they can even report on it, captured by the people stuck in the middle.

I recommend checking it out. Thanks to Corey for running with the idea and saving me the effort of building it myself!

The Tools I Use: My Setup, 11 Years Later

Posted by Andy Baio

On January 22, 2009, I linked to Daniel Bogan’s newly-launched Uses This (then called “The Setup”), an interview series where he asks interesting people about “the tools and techniques they use to get things done.”

Three days later, Daniel asked me on AOL Instant Messenger if I’d be open to doing an interview myself.

I happily agreed—and then waited nearly 11 years to get around to it, despite his occasional prodding.

Since he first asked me, Daniel’s published over 1,000 interviews with an incredibly interesting group of people spanning dozens of fields and professions.

So I finally sat down and wrote my answers, and the interview is now live.

I can’t say it’s particularly interesting or meaningful, but it might give you a glimpse into how I think about the tools I use to make things.

And Daniel? Thanks for your patience.

How Artists on Twitter Tricked Spammy T-Shirt Stores Into Admitting Their Automated Art Theft

Posted by Andy Baio

Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Nana ran an experiment to test a theory.

Their suspicion was that bots were actively looking on Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt” or “This needs to be a t-shirt,” automatically scraping the quoted images, and instantly selling them without permission as print-on-demand t-shirts.

Dozens of Nana’s followers replied, and a few hours later, a Twitter bot replied with a link to the newly-created t-shirt listing on Moteefe, a print-on-demand t-shirt service.

Several other t-shirt listings followed shortly after, with listings on questionable sites like Toucan Style, CopThis, and many more.

Spinning up a print-on-demand stores is dead simple with platforms like GearBubble, Printly, Printful, GearLaunch (who power Toucan Style), and many more — creating a storefront with thousands of theoretical product listings, but with merchandise only manufactured on demand through third-party printers who handles shipping and fulfillment with no inventory.

Many of them integrate with other providers, allowing these non-existent products to immediately appear on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and other stores, but only manufactured when someone actually buys them.

The ease of listing products without manufacturing them is how we end up with bizarre algorithmic t-shirts and entire stock photo libraries on phone cases. Even if they only generate one sale daily per 1,000 listings, that can still be a profitable business if you’re listing hundreds of thousands of items.

But whoever’s running these art theft bots found a much more profitable way of generating leads: by scanning Twitter for people specifically telling artists they’d buy a shirt with an illustration on it. The t-shirt scammers don’t have the rights to sell other people’s artwork, but they clearly don’t care.

Once Nana proved that this was the methodology these t-shirt sellers were using, others jumped in to subvert them.

Of course, it worked. Bots will be bots.

For me, this all raises two questions:

  1. Who’s responsible for this infringement?
  2. What responsibility do print-on-demand providers have to prevent infringement on their platforms?

The first question is the hardest: we don’t know. These scammers are happy to continue printing shirts because their identities are well-protected, shielded by the platforms they’re working with.

I reached out to Moteefe, who seems to be the worst offender for this particular strain of art theft. Countless Twitter bots are continually spamming users with newly-created Moteefe listings, as you can see in this search.

Unlike most print-on-demand platforms like RedBubble, Moteefe doesn’t reveal any information about the user who created the shirt listings. They’re a well-funded startup in London, and have an obligation not to allow their platform to be exploited in this way. I’ll update if I hear back from them.

Until then, be careful telling artists that you want to see their work on a shirt, unless you want dozens of scammers to use it without permission.

Or feel free to use this image, courtesy of Nakanoart.

Update

Nearly every reply to the official @Disney account on Twitter right now is someone asking for a shirt. I wonder if their social media team has figured out what’s going on yet.

I know I shouldn’t buy them, but some of these copyright troll bait shirts are just amazing.

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