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.

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. It includes the final versions of our policies, which we refined over several years and released under open licenses, along with an archive of our guide. We even finally made a proper About page.

This is something we first started talking about back in 2015, and attempted three times, but it was never finished until now.

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.

The focus of the internet’s suspicions was a couple holding a sign saying that a Will Smith song helped them to survive cancer, which Futurism called “nightmare fuel” with an expression “never before seen on a living human face.” Redditors called it “pathetic,” “vile,” and “sad and weird.”

After writing my post, I was left wondering what this uniquely-modern experience was like for these two people.

How did it feel to have millions of people think that you didn’t exist and were generated by AI? What was the story behind their sign, and what did that moment mean to them?

So I tracked them down to ask them.