This interesting article by Allegra Rosenberg explains that the viral “67” meme is just the newest expression of a long, lively tradition of children inventing and circulating their own playful lore, just like the rhymes, jokes, and games that folklorists Iona and Peter Opie documented in mid-20th-century Britain.
Open Reel Ensemble, a Japanese experimental music group, plays reel-to-reel tape recorders as musical instruments. Spectacular example of artistic technological misuse.
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Slop Evader, a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, by Tega Brain: “this is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022“.
Everyone knows that I’m only able to write books with arctic sounds in my headphones. Specifically, these sounds. So, for me, Ambient Antartica, a website “for people in Antarctica, whether physically or otherwise” is a dream come true. They stream music, images and random trivia.
Can I work my 9-5 Job from Inside Skyrim, a wonderfully ridiculous experiment by YouTuber habie147.
Youtuber Mctoran claimed to have interviewed Black August, the author of the original Backrooms post on 4chan. I don’t know if it’s really him (nobody can prove it), but the interview is incredibly insightful and inspiring. So even if it’s just another piece of lore, it’s worth a listen.
YouTube creator Syrmor uploads his VRChat encounters with random strangers, who open up about themselves and share intimate details of their lives while hidden behind their avatars. Some of the videos are incredible touching. Unfortunately, the latest upload is from two years ago, I can’t believe I haven’t come across this before.
I just fell into the Mallworld rabbit hole. Apparently thousands of people on Reddit, TikTok and other platforms are sharing their dream experiences and they claim to have visited the same place. Some are event drawing detailed maps of it. This place is Mallword and it is a sort of gigantic liminal space with shops, airports, playgrounds, hotels and other buildings. But the heart of the world is – of course – the oniric version of your typical American mall, where people get lost and disoriented. Mallworld is a sort of narrative container that merges vaporwave, liminal spaces, the backrooms, dreamcore and This Man all together.
“Ever dreamed of this place?”
Infini.wtf is a visual search engine created by a small team of indie developers. It uses AI to let you explore images, GIFs, and videos from Reddit by what’s in them, not just their titles.
Vilém Flusser‘s “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” as performed by Ian James.
Originally produced as a three cassette audiobook edition of unabridged book read by Ian James alongside binaural brainwave patterns, field recordings, product unboxings and other treats.
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The Dream Recorder AI is a device designed to transform fragmented dream recollections into replayable visual sequences: “Wake up, say your dream out loud, and watch it come to life as an ultra-low definition dreamscape“.
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Manofdutch uses Minecraft to build landscapes and architecture inspired by Dutch Golden Age paintings. They are absolutely stunning.
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“Faced with reality’s increasing obsoletion, from generative AI, to reality TV and faux authentic brands, POSTPOSTPOST (aka Al Hassan Elwan) applies Baudrillard’s 4 stages of Simulacra and dares to manifest what lies beyond, when meaning has all but collapsed”.
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“Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see”. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).”
“Visions of Heaven and Hell was a three-part documentary broadcast in the UK in 1994, which examined and extrapolated social changes brought about by new technologies, but also touched on wider themes of biotechnology, virtual reality, population density and pandemics.”
Featuring (among others): William Gibson, Stephen Hawking, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Tilda Swinton, Nick Land.
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Wplace (Paint the World) is a collaborative pixel art platform that serves as a spiritual successor to Reddit’s r/Place April Fools’ Day experiments. The Gaza strip is full of hearts.
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The mobile game Send Me to Heaven (2013) involves throwing your phone as high in the air as you can. The creator, Petr Svarovsky, said he made it with the hope of destroying as many iPhones as possible, but Apple banned it from the App Store.
In his short film Total Pixel Space, filmmaker and musician Jacob Adler employs generative AI to explore the nature of digital images.
You know that flattering, annoying tone of ChatGPT? Marco Cadioli made a video about it. It’s called “Macchine Adulatrici (Sycophantic Machine)”. The audio is composed of all the phrases the model used to “guide” the author during the creation of the video itself. If you ask me, this is definitely the romantic hit of summer 2025.
Silvia Dal Dosso‘s amazing trilogy is finally complete. And the future surely IS Weird AF.
A userbox (commonly abbreviated as UBX) is a small colored box designed to appear only on a Wikipedian’s user page as a communicative notice about the user, in order to directly or indirectly help Wikipedians collaborate more effectively on articles.
Kristin Merrilees published an interesting article about them in her Substack. You can read it here.
“In a chapter from the 2009 book “Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World,” William Westerman writes about the history and culture of userboxes: ‘A fair number of these are self-referential, or even metafolkloristic, in the sense that they make use of in-jokes that would only be comprehensible to aficionados of the same television series, adherents to a particular religion, or experienced Wikipedians.'”
Andrei Kashcha made an impressive website that maps Reddit. It visualizes 116K subreddits and 1.5B comments (Nov 2024-March 2025). An interactive exploration of community connections across the platform. I could literally spend the rest of my life browsing this.
Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho built the Vape-o-Gotchi, a vape device that dies if you stop puffing.
There’s a big trend of parental locking yourself,” Camacho added. “I’m locked out of certain apps behind a password that Rebecca knows, so I don’t scroll Instagram too much. It would be cool if you could have that for nicotine.” But then, explained Xun, Camacho “found this Stupid Hackathon. And we were like, it’d be kind of funnier to be evil.” And with that, their “evil-mode” Vape-o-Gotchi, which instead rewards users for vaping, was born.
This Tumblr blog hosts a crazy good selection of images pulled from Internet Archive (circa 1977 – 1997).
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I recently visited the Electric Dreams exhibition in London and I got to see this incredible work by Suzanne Treister. I knew about it, but I had never seen the entire collection before. Do yourself a favour and discover the amazing Fictional Videogame Stills series here.
This is a piece of internet art. Click at your own risk.
