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.

I cleaned up the comments design, which was frankly kind of ugly. It now does a better job of remembering who you are if you’re posting on the same device, but without requiring auth.

I also refreshed the About page, updating my bio, past, and current projects. The header and footer finally includes links to Waxy’s automated accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon, the only two social media apps I still feel comfortable using, and a new icon for RSS, which everyone should use but hardly anyone does. I refreshed the type across the site, and there’s a proper 404 page now.

Finally, I added a tiny easter egg in the logo for desktop users.

Tiny changes, but they all add up to something I’m pretty happy with.

The first half of this year was pretty rough for me and my wife, dealing with the fallout from the deaths of my uncle and her father, spending months apart, caring for others and picking up the pieces. (The worst seems to be behind us now.)

Since then, I’ve found some comfort in spending time getting my digital life in order: migrating my outdated servers, verifying backups, getting everything safely checked into source control, and brushing off the cobwebs.

These small changes to Waxy were the first in a series of updates to long-dormant projects of mine: some small, some pretty big. I’ll post more on that over the next few days.

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:

• Launched in the last 12 months, between July 2025 to July 2026
• Non-commercial. No stores, no ads, no paid products/services.
• No agencies or brands. Individuals or groups of creators only.
• You own it. It must be a page you own and control. Not a Bluesky bot, not an Instagram feed, not a YouTube channel.
• Websites. It’s about the web! Websites only. No apps/downloads.

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
RUN

I 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.