Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to "wait to see if conditions improve"; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality.

From this conceit the Oregon Trail Time Machine was born; a multiday livestream of the game as the party waits for conditions to improve at the final Snake River crossing until the year 10000, to see if the withered travellers can make it to the ruins of ancient Oregon. The first attempt ended in tragedy; no matter what albrot tried, the party would succumb to disease and die almost immediately.

Filed under “reasons I love the Internet.”

I will insist on using this for my CAPTCHA purposes from here on out.

Fun exploration of why <font color=“chucknorris”> gets converted into <font color=“#c00000”>.

Apparently timbornholdt gets converted into #0b00d0, a lovely shade of blue.

Matt Might wrote some shell scripts back in 2010 to identify and correct a few bad writing habits.

Simon Willison took these scripts and used Claude to build a tool that does the same, but within a web browser.

I could see taking this concept and baking it into my publish system for this blog. I am very interested in becoming a stronger writer, and having something like my own Rubocop would be annoyingly useful.

This was dope.

I hope they expand this idea so Kirby inhales the entire DOM.

Last year, we decided to launch Tiny Awards, a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.

We hoped it would be a small contribution to celebrating ‘people making stuff on the internet for the fun of it and the love of it and the hell of it’. We were thrilled to see that people seemed to like the idea, so we’re doing it again in 2024 - still tiny, still celebratory, and still (hopefully) helping spread the word about some of the small, personal, whimsical, weird and poetic things people are making on what is left of the web.

Woohoo! Can’t wait to see the shortlist published on July 19th.

This site contains 29257 unique* 88x31 buttons that I scraped from the GeoCities archives compiled by the incredible ARCHIVE TEAM before GeoCities' demise in late 2009.

I shouldn’t go through all ~30,000 images to find the ones I made for Tim’s World or That’s Unpossible, right?

…right?

This album essentially served as the soundtrack of the early days of the Jed Mahonis Group.

Whenever we needed a day to be heads down, this album would be turned on repeat.

Whenever there was a late night push and we needed the extra motivation to get through it, this album was on repeat.

I came across this video describing the inner turmoil that Daft Punk was feeling while making this album, and I couldn’t help but feel the similarities to my present day situation.

I have long considered this album to be in my top 5 favorites of all time, but this YouTube video made me understand and appreciate it a whole lot more. I should see if there are similar videos for my other favorite albums.

File this video under “reasons I love the internet.”

Lately, I’ve been trying to find more examples of the internet being a force for good for humanity.

Here’s an example my wife sent me from the r/Parenting subreddit. The OP told a story where she blew up and cussed out her 8-year-old.

Here’s the highest-rated reply:

When you are both in a calm state - take your kid aside and discuss the incident. Apologize sincerely. Then tell this story:

Imagine you are on a high ledge, and you can take a slide or the stairs. The slide is more satisfying and gets you to the bottom faster. BUT - there's always poop at the bottom of the slide that you land in. And then there's the stairs. It's boring, it takes longer, it takes more effort - but you get to the bottom with no poop at the bottom.

Losing your temper is like taking the slide. It feels great during the ride (ooh yelling is cathartic and it's releasing the pressure valve, and it's FAST which is what your brain wants when it's upset) but, you're cleaning off poop at the end.

Use yourself as an example - I lost my temper, I took the slide, and I spent all day feeling bad about myself and now apologizing.

And sometimes the poop doesn't come off - the smell stays no matter how hard you try to clean.

That's the memory your kid has of the incident. Sometimes the stink is permanent. It's always more work and bigger consequences to take the slide/lose your temper.

It’s easy to find examples where the internet shows us the worst in ourselves.

I’m being intentional about engaging with content on the internet that attempts to show us at our best.

Parenting is harder than ever because we’re fighting generations of poor parenting habits based on tough love that’s necessary for survival when you’re living on the plains, foraging for food, one snowstorm or famine away from certain death.

We now live in a world where we’re safer, healthier, and wealthier than we’ve ever been... which renders those poor habits obsolete.

It's gonna require a ton of stair walking, across several more generations, in order to break them.

As awful as Reddit can be, it's moments like these which make me truly appreciate what we can do when we are able to pool our collective wisdom and try to do better.

Reports of Baby Boomers worried that younger generations lack the motivation and morals of their parents were met with pictures of a 1974 hippie commune and a plea from 28-year-old Travis Garner who said, “Look, every generation eventually figures it out and finds their own way. We’ll be fine.”

In California, 18-year-old Sarah Thompson began her freshman biology class at UC Davis where she’ll learn stuff we didn’t know when her parents went to college, while she won’t be taught stuff that’s since been proven false. “That’s how progress works,” her professor said. “A slow grind higher over the generations.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 48 points on Tuesday. Greg Jones, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, expected that no one would care about that useless, vapid, fact by tomorrow.

See, this is the kind of article that makes my five-day-long anxiety attack start to subside.

Slow and steady progress wins the race. Relax. Take your time. Be just a tiny bit better every day.