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.
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). Even as the submission backlog grew, I ended up taking the site offline entirely at the end of 2015 after my server got hacked.
I migrated to a new server, but Supercut.org didn’t make the transition and stayed offline for five years. After auditing my ancient PHP for security holes, I finally brought it back in 2020.
I gave the archive a long-overdue design refresh, finally retiring the basic Bootstrap theme and making the site responsive while keeping the overall layout.
All of the old unavailable videos were removed, and I replaced deleted videos with alternatives if I could find them. I cleared the long backlog of submissions, and added quite a few new supercuts to the database, many from Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases. That was a lot of tedious work, but it brought the live collection to over 580 videos. (You can use the “Add” link to suggest more if you have them!)
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.
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.
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