Woah woah woah woah I’m upset the XOXO festival has come to an end too, but we don’t need to send the military in town for that

A followup to my post two weeks ago, I found the couple at the center of the Will Smith AI crowd video. I wanted to know what it was like to find yourselves in the middle of a hypermodern problem: being confused for AI slop. waxy.org/2025/09/inte...

Ha, my son beat Silksong at 1am last night, in 15.5 hours of game time.

After 22 years, Typepad is shutting down with one month's notice. Go back up your old blogs, old-school blogger friends. everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08...

If you haven't checked in for a while, Internet Roadtrip is finally back in the U.S. after exploring Canada for the last three months, currently puttering around northeast Vermont. neal.fun/internet-roa...

In case you missed it last night, I dug into Will Smith's "fake AI crowd" video. Nearly everyone got this wrong, and the evidence was easy to find… if you're sick enough to watch everything Will Smith posted on social media in the last four months.

You may have seen this story blowing up about Will Smith using AI to generate fake audiences to promote his latest tour, but the truth is more complicated. The audiences are real, but the footage was manipulated: first by Will Smith's team and then, without permission, by YouTube itself.

they should have had marissa mayer redesign it

Deep discounts on Panic's lineup on Steam today, I just completed my collection with Arco and the just-released Herdling.

Less than 1,170 words to go until @avibagla.com's Bluesky tracker has indexed half of the English dictionary. Slip an obscure word or two from the unseen list into your posts today to help it along! www.avibagla.com/blueskydicti...

Can Bluesky say every word in the English dictionary? In the last 24 hours, @avibagla.com's tracked 32% of all dictionary words, over 88k of 274k unique words. www.avibagla.com/blueskydicti...

I'm amazed I've never seen this before: a photo licensing company shaking down someone for hosting an image used in an Open Graph tag.

my 98-year-old grandmother texts me sometimes, always nice to hear from her 🥰

Going through some old boxes, I found our 21-year-old son's first iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone. We powered them up and each one was a time capsule at different ages. It had old Minecraft and Terraria worlds he played with friends, texts/photos/videos, games long since removed from the App Store.

Last 30 hours to back Pet Names! The project ends tomorrow at 5pm PT/8pm ET. If you missed it, I posted a little behind-the-scenes of making the game and the fox plush last month in this thread.

First time I've ever 100%ed a blog post?! Incredibly impressive work by @aresluna.org and @persistent.info, a remarkable mix of writing, design, and engineering.

40 years after he started it, @scottandrew.com finished a text adventure game he began working on at age 14, a collaboration with his teenage self. I just beat "The Plot of the Phantom," and it was charming with several surprising moments. scottandrew.com/blog/2025/06...

Ask MetaFilter was mentioned on Jeopardy last night!? metatalk.metafilter.com/26681/What-i...

It sprawled like this for three miles, through downtown and across the river and back. Tens of thousands of Portlanders of all ages, lots of families, kids, seniors. Cars honking in support. From the Hawthorne Bridge, you could just make out the protest line heading back on the Morrison Bridge.

I went to a birthday party in L.A. around 1994, and Brian Wilson was there, just hanging out by himself. Nobody talking to him, everybody too cool to care. He wandered over to the piano and started playing. Literally nobody except me seemed to notice. He plucked out some chords and wandered off.

My secret hobby is feeding story ideas to the @404media.co crew via Signal group chat. This was one of them!

Pet Names is now live on Kickstarter! The newest game by @pinktigergames.com is a fast, fun party game where you compete to make cute nicknames for other players, with 400 mini-cards inside a custom furry fox plush bag. www.kickstarter.com/projects/ami...

The Tiny Awards are back, and so am I! After a year off, I'll be a judge helping to decide "the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web" made in the last 12 months. Nominations open until the end of the month, submit anything you love! tinyawards.net

A local pub trivia group started using ChatGPT for their event posters. I need a drinik.

Wayfair's aggressive search engine optimization is having some unintended side effects

Internet Roadtrip just entered a waterpark somehow. If you hurry, you might get to ride a waterslide with 614 other people.

Anyone know Madison, WI? I'm headed there for the first time next week. Recs for food/drink, neighborhoods, and off-beat and/or nerdy things to do welcome! (House on the Rock and the two big retro arcades are on my radar.)

Tip: Bluesky supports exact phrase searches with quoted strings, but the iOS app defaults to “smart quotes”, which are ignored. Change your searches to "straight quotes" and it’ll work! Here’s an issue/PR, maybe someone at @support.bsky.team can merge it? github.com/bluesky-soci...

The 2025 student films for CalArts Character Animation program are pretty great. Fun to see so many talented new artists at the start of their careers. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Well, here's a fun iOS 18 bug, courtesy of the latest episode of the Search Engine podcast: you can't send an audio message that mentions "Dave & Buster's" from one iPhone to another iPhone. Try it!

This is a delightfully weird internet experience, like a fictional retrocomputer/BBS with its own lore/games/forums to explore, and there are only eight tickets left!

I’m loving/hating Little Sisyphus, a masocore physics platformer originally made for the NES, but that runs perfectly in the browser. Carry a ball to the top of Mount Olympus, collecting 80 souls along the way.

This big compilation from the creator of VVVVVV/Super Hexagon/Dicey Dungeons is a delight. I’d played several of these experimental games over the years, but more than half of them are new to me and the ones I’ve tried so far are all great. A steal at $9 for PC/Mac. bsky.app/profile/terr...

Feedly just announced Bluesky support. Every Feedly user can now follow Bluesky users, feeds, and lists, with an option to follow only posts with links in them. feedly.com/new-features...

I can repeat this on my iPhone and it's totally baffling. I searched the complete Wikipedia edit history and the "scrambled egg" phrase is nowhere in there. I have to know how this happened! /cc @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social @molly.wiki

One of my favorite Twitter bots ever is now on Bluesky: Neil Cicierega’s Endless Jeopardy. Reply to randomly-generated Jeopardy answers with your best question, vote on your faves with likes.

I updated my Oscar piracy spreadsheet. 79% of this year's 28 nominated features have already leaked online in a high-quality format. Only six films (A Complete Unknown, Better Man, The Brutalist, I'm Still Here, Nickel Boys, and September 5) don't have a high-quality leak online yet.

If you're in the U.S. and ever used TikTok, you should download all your liked/faved videos locally before it's shut down on Sunday. This free Chrome extension creates a local static HTML/MP4 archive with video metadata. myfavett.com

Hearing that people are starting to get their Kind of Bloop 15th anniversary vinyl preorders in the mail! I think there’s still a handful left from the small print run if you missed out.

I’m headed to Atlanta next week for the first time, staying downtown without a car. What should I do/see while I’m there? Food/drink recs, quirky/geeky sights, unmissable/unique museums?

This is so well done. You can click the artwork’s name to view it on The Met’s site, there are three secret areas, and don’t miss the gift shop on your way out!

What happened to the world’s largest CRT? @shankmods.bsky.social went on a quest to find the last surviving Sony 43” tube TV, tracked down from one of only two known photos of the 440-pound behemoth.

Found an accidental color blindness Captcha test in the wild. The left is the original, the right is a simulation of what it looks like to me with deutan (green-blind) color blindness.

@aresluna.org Anyone send you this unusual keyboard yet? 5:55 in this video www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jKG...

It’s that time of the year! Please enjoy my “Christmas Music That (Probably) Won’t Make You Murder Someone” playlist, a collection of mostly 1960s-era jazz/soul/blues instrumentals, inspired by my love of the best Christmas album ever made, Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Annapurna is publishing FARAWAY next year?! Steph Thirion announced it in March 2010, it earned IGF nominations in 2011 and 2012, then quietly disappeared for years with no updates. Originally a mobile game, it looks to be PC-only now. youtu.be/5LxbmaXQa-E

If you care about inauthentic accounts on social media, @conspirator0.bsky.social is a great follow with a really interesting blog. Here’s a thread of coordinated spam networks found by monitoring the Bluesky firehose, one with over 1,000 accounts all boosting the same political post.

Hi, Philly! @pinktigergames.com and I are in town for #PAXUnplugged, come say hi at booth 4209 on the expo floor, or hear me talk about building inclusive gaming spaces with @jonathancoulton.bsky.social, @paulandstorm.bsky.social and @thatbronzegirl.bsky.social, Saturday 12pm in Kelpie Theatre!