Waxy.org

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. Over time, it became an increasing pain to keep running.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

For the third year, the Tiny Awards have released their list of finalists that represent “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.” Voting is now open and runs until the end of this month, closing on September 1. I was on the judging committee this year, returning after a year away to focus on the final XOXO, and helped narrow down the finalists from 176 nominated websites.