Earlier this month, I wrote about Tiny Awards, a tiny prize to honor websites that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” I was invited to be a part of the inaugural award’s selection committee, and helped narrow down the 270 submissions to 16 finalists, which were then open to public voting.

This morning, Tiny Awards announced the winner: the dizzying and delicious Rotating Sandwiches by Lauren Walker. When I linked to it here back in March, I described it simply as the “best of the web, right here,” so I’m pretty happy with this result. Lauren will receive a $500 prize and a tiny trophy. Congrats!

The organizers of the award also released the full list of all 272 nominated websites, a “dizzying snapshot of the boundless creativity and artistic endeavor (and, occasionally, silliness) of the web (and, by extension, the people who make it).”

The organizers originally asked each member of the selection committee to decide on their top two picks from the full list of nominees. Given the volume, diversity, and quality of the entries, this was no easy task.

Now that the winner’s announced, I thought I’d share my own decision-making process, along with my personal list of runners-up.

I ended up eliminating several nominees because they didn’t meet the contest criteria, either because they launched long before the June 2022 cutoff date (e.g. Lynn Fisher’s wonderful Nestflix), required an app/download or subscription (e.g. Spotify-based projects), were primarily commercial or viral marketing for an agency/company, or in one unfortunate case, stole their content from another artist.

When I finally narrowed down my personal top list of contenders, I broke the tie by ranking each on the three core values that the contest was meant to highlight: the “small, heartfelt, and playful” web.

To be clear, these were just my own personal picks: each of the eight members of the selection committee contributed their top two websites, which became the shortlist of 16 finalists that everyone voted on. Here’s the email I sent to Matt and Kristoffer, the two organizers:

You have no idea how hard this was for me! Here’s my top two:

• Brr.fyi – brr.fyi. This anonymous blog came out of nowhere last year, documenting life on a research station in Antarctica, one of the most remote places on earth. But it uniquely uses the web to communicate their personal experience to the rest of the world, from mundane observations to the quietly profound. At a time where it feels like blogging has largely fallen by the wayside, this newly-launched blog (July 2022, just in time!) is a shining example of why the web is great.
• The HTML Review – thehtml.review. “An annual journal of literature made to exist on the web.” Incredibly well curated, simple and poetic experiments with HTML from 17 individual contributors. Grid World is my personal highlight (and also nominated, ranked high in my list), but really, they’re all great and special and unique. A publication worth supporting, completely non-commercial and made out of pure love of the artisanal web. I hope it goes on forever.

I had some very close runners-up, but they weren’t as 1. small, 2. heartfelt, and 3. playful as those two — usually a bit lower on one characteristic out of the three. All of them met all the criteria, including dates. But they’re all great and I love them, and it was super painful to choose!

Playful and heartfelt, but technically complex, so perhaps not “small” by many definitions:

• ooh.directory – ooh.directory
• Life Universal – oimo.io/works/life
• America – 4m3ric4.com
• Infinite Mac – infinitemac.org

Small and very playful, but maybe not as “heartfelt”:

• Rotating Sandwiches – rotatingsandwiches.com
• f1f2f3f4f5f6f7f8f9 – f1f2f3f4f5f6f7f8f9.online

Smart, heartfelt, and playful, but sadly, doesn’t work well on mobile:

• Bloggy Garden – bloggy.garden

The organizers have already announced they plan to hold the award again next year, which I’m very excited about. I think it’s important to remind people that the internet is more than a bunch of apps and walled gardens made by large companies, and literally anyone can make a little website to make it better.

In May, the creators of two of my favorite newsletters, Naive Weekly and Web Curios, reached out to see if I’d consider joining the selection committee of Tiny Awards, a tiny prize to honor websites that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” I loved the idea and quickly accepted.

There were some additional rules: sites must have launched in the last 12 months, work on mobile and desktop without requiring an app or download, made by individuals or a group of creators (i.e. not agencies or brands), and should be primarily non-commercial.

Nominations were free and open to the public, unlike some other web awards, and the selection committee ended up reviewing over 270 submissions, which we narrowed down to a shortlist of 16 finalists, a wonderfully eclectic collection of websites.

The winner is decided by public voting, which is also free and easy, and closes next Thursday, July 20. I hope you take a look and cast your vote. Here’s a little about each of the finalists. Update: The winner was announced!

(we)bsite

“A living collection of internet dreams,” (we)bsite is a community-contributed collection of blog posts and notes about the internet we love, hate, and dream about, with a unique interface for browsing and sharing messages as stamped letters.

A Friend Is Writing

A set of short essays about digital textual communication, A Friend Is Writing is presented in the form of a simulated chat app with pieces of the essay delivered in dozens of short messages across multiple tabs, all competing for your attention.

A Walking Poem

A Walking Poem generates “psychogeographical poems” using real Google Maps directions from your current location to a random place around you. Allow access to your location, decide how long of a pooooem you want, and go.

Acronymy

Help define every word in the dictionary as a made-up acronym. Did you know “tiny” is an acronym for “truly infinitesimal negligible yardage”? With Acronymy, now you do.

Bird Game

Bird Game is like a free minimalist Tabletop Simulator in the browser, designed to make it as easy as possible to start playing board games with other people online. Choose from eight different games from Uno to Catan from a simple sharable link, no registration required.

Brr.fyi

Brr.fyi started in July 2022, an anonymous blogger documenting life on a research station in Antarctica, one of the most remote places on earth, transmitting their unique experience to the rest of the world from mundane observations to the quietly profound.

Himmel über Karlsruhe

A tiny website that shows the current color of the himmel über Karlsruhe (translation: “sky above Karlsruhe”), a city in southwestern Germany. Don’t miss the archive with daily collages going back to July 2022.

Interdependence Online

“A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace” is a revised update to John Perry Barlow’s 1996 declaration, a collectively-written demand for independence from the large technology corporations currently dominating the internet, available for signing or forking for your own use.

MeatGPT

MeatGPT is an extremely useful AI chatbot offering “prime answers to rare questions,” poking fun at the current wave of AI hype.

Ooh! Directory

ooh.directory is “a place to find good blogs that interest you,” a community-contributed updated directory collecting nearly 2,000 blogs about every topic from art and design to death and religion.

Prose Play

Prose Play is a tool for creating interactive sliding texts: interactive poems and stories where you can change the words by dragging them around.

Rotating Sandwiches

Exactly what it sounds like.

Solar Protocol

Solar Protocol is a “naturally intelligent network” that’s hosted across a network of solar powered servers and is sent to you from whichever server is in the most sunshine. Don’t miss Sun Thinking, a group exhibition exploring the “qualities and logics of solar power and solar powered computing networks.”

the html review

the html review is “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web.” Its second issue, published in spring 2023, features an incredibly well curated selection of creative, thoughtful, and poetic experiments with HTML from 17 individual contributors. (Don’t miss Grid World.)

User Sentimental eXperience

User Sentimental eXperience is a series of four interactive experimental web essays, each exploring the “comprehensive meaning of positive (or rich) user experience,” with design process documentation for each one.

Wild Heart Homestead

Wild Heart Homestead documents their efforts in “cultivating agroecological reciprocity” on their urban homestead in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, covering gardening, soil health, beekeeping, fermentation, and more in a series of detailed journal entries and reports.

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Update

The winner was announced!

For the last two days, Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter is under attack from “several hundred organizations” who were conducting “EXTREME levels of data scraping,” forcing them to bring “large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis” and enact emergency measures.

Yesterday, Twitter started blocking all logged-out access to Twitter, requiring signing in to view any tweet or profile. Elon Musk called it a “temporary emergency measure,” claiming they “were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”

Apparently, it didn’t stop the crush of traffic and, this morning, Musk announced they escalated their actions against supposed “extreme levels of data scraping” by rate-limiting the number of tweets you can view.

Immediately, Twitter users started seeing “Rate Limit Exceeded” messages and every trending topic was about the collapse of Twitter:

Are shadowy AI companies scraping Twitter for training data? Maybe!

But on Mastodon this morning, web developer Sheldon Chang noticed another source of unusual traffic: a bug in Twitter’s web app that is constantly sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop:

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.

He posted a video of the bug in action, sending hundreds of requests a minute.

On Twitter, software engineer Nelson Minar independently reproduced the bug with his own video capture.

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It’s currently unclear when this bug went into production, or how much it’s actually impacting their traffic, so it’s hard to determine whether this bug inadvertently inspired Twitter to block unregistered access and add rate limits, or if the bug was triggered by the rollout of those changes.

On Bluesky, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote, “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter. There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”

Sheldon suspects the bug was related to yesterday’s decision to block unregistered users from accessing Twitter, but in a followup, wrote that it’s “probably not the cause of their scraping panic and most of these requests are being blocked.”

It seems very likely that killing free access to the Twitter API led to a big increase in scraping, since countless businesses, organizations, and individuals used it for their projects. It’s also plausible that these issues are entirely unrelated.

Still, how funny would it be if this “emergency,” from start to finish, was brought on by a Javascript bug that caused Twitter to DDOS itself, spawning all of these truly terrible decisions? At this point in Twitter’s downward spiral, nothing would surprise me.

If you know more, leave a comment or get in touch. Confidentiality guaranteed.

Under the moniker Miniatua, Montreal designer Nicolas Temese makes hyperrealistic scale replicas of vintage computers, real and fictional, in stunning detail with animated displays and period-accurate LED lights.

His latest project is a scratch-built 1:12 model of David Lightman’s bedroom from 1983’s WarGames, complete with IMSAI 8080 microcomputer, 8″ inch floppies, Epson RF 80 FT dot matrix printer, JVC model HR-3300 VHS VCR, and 1960s Naugahyde Steelcase Armless chair, among dozens of other smaller props.

The bedroom diorama follows an earlier WarGames project commissioned by a private collector to recreate the WOPR computer from the film, also in 1:12 scale, with 960 blinking lights that mimic the patterns from the movie. You can see it in action in a video on his site.

The surface mount LEDS being square, a front plate with 3D printed “bulbs” that replicate the movie lights were put in front of the custom PCBs to give it’s unique look. The light pattern can be changed using the “DEFCON” button found at the back of the model, cycling through “idle”, “playing thermonuclear war” and “hacking the nuke code”.

Previously, Miniatua created a limited-edition run of IBM 5150 miniatures to celebrate its 40th anniversary, complete with a functioning TFT screen that cycles through period-accurate videos of Zork, Jumpman, Microsoft’s Multiplan, DONKEY.BAS. IBM even granted permission to use the logo!

You can see all the details, including the monitor in action from one of the 40 miniatures sold, in LGR’s detailed video about the project.

Miniatua recreated several other vintage computers, including the IBM 704 from 1954, the Hewlett-Packard HP264x from 1974, and for its 60th anniversary, the IBM 1401, which was donated to the Computer History Museum, where it’s now on display.

If you want to follow along, Nicolas Temese posts progress photos of his stunning work on Instagram and Mastodon, with a small selection of videos on his YouTube channel.

The pseudonymous Irishman known as “Bobby Fingers” has only made three videos since launching on YouTube last August, but each one is an unhinged masterpiece.

If you haven’t seen them before, Bobby Fingers makes elaborate 1:9 scale dioramas depicting embarrassing moments in the lives of famous men, showing off his talents in model-making with a range of techniques from Bronze Age wax casting to modern 3D laser scanning.

But each video veers off wildly in different directions, interspersed with field trips, interviews, deadpan commentary, surrealist humor, and inevitably, a musical number.

Craft-wise, it’s on par with the best modelmakers on YouTube, but shares more in common with viral video phenomena like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Too Many Cooks, Nathan for You, and Unedited Footage of a Bear. Each one subverts the conventions of a familiar genre, whether it’s educational children’s shows, classic TV intros, business makeover reality shows, pharmaceutical ads, or in this case, crafty ASMR artisan YouTube channels.

Who Is Bobby Fingers?

Normally, it takes months or years for a YouTube creator to refine their style, but it seems like Bobby Fingers figured it out on day one.

His combined set of skills is so unusual — prosthetics, model-making, video production, musical comedy — and the channel showcases all of them so well. But I also sensed this was an experienced internet creator, someone who knew what worked well online.

I wanted to meet the full-size person behind these miniature worlds — so I did a little digging and tracked him down, and he kindly agreed to answer a few short questions.

His real name is, in fact, Bobby. But the surname is an alias, obviously, and he asked to stay pseudonymous. (With that in mind, comments identifying him by name or past projects will be removed.)

As is clear from the videos, Bobby is an experienced model maker and prosthetics artist with over 15 years of experience in film and television, a frequent collaborator with Odyssey Studios, the Limerick-based model-making studio featured in his videos. (You can see his past prosthetics work on Instagram.)

He also has deep experience in music and film, as a musician, producer, and video director. (And, yes, he’s found viral success online before under another name.)

While he’s collaborated with others in the past, Bobby Fingers is entirely a solo project, from conception to launch. “It’s just me in the shed,” he told me. “I sometimes tell my ideas to [brother] Billy Fingers and he makes sure they’re not bad ideas. Like a dung filter. But other than that, it’s just me.”

The Dioramas

His choice of subjects is pretty unique, described by one commenter up as “filling the niche of scale models of iconic embarrassing moments in the lives of famous monsters.”

All three dioramas capture, in excruciating detail, embarrassing or traumatic moments in the lives of controversial male entertainers with reputations tarnished by allegations and lawsuits:

• Mel Gibson, with a well-documented history of hateful comments, is depicted during his 2006 DUI arrest in Malibu, during which he unleashed an antisemitic tirade at the cop who arrested him.
• Steven Seagal, the subject of multiple lawsuits and allegations of sexual harassment and assault, is shown getting choked out by stuntman Gene LeBell and losing control of his bowels.
• Michael Jackson, accused and sued for alleged child molestation before and after his death, is shown at the moment his hair caught on fire during a Pepsi commercial taping in 1982.

I asked Bobby why he chose the subjects he did.

“I like men who have failed us,” he wrote. “The feeling they give is interesting. Like a dog who has chewed something we once enjoyed. But we move on.”

The finished dioramas are buried somewhere in the world, with coordinates hidden in the video itself. Viewers are encouraged to go find and dig them up, with early access given to his supporters on Patreon, an ingenious way of driving support and involving the community, who scramble to crowdsource information, reminiscent of ARGs, geocaching, and other collective internet projects.

“I have no sentimental attachment to things. So I’m happy to give them away,” Bobby told me. “And I have always believed there are not enough treasure hunts in the world. So it just wrote itself really.”

I also asked about his influences: the artists, people, and projects that inspired him, and specifically inspired the channel. I was expecting other internet creators or YouTubers, but he only cited sculptor Kris Kuksi, also known for his intricate sculpted dioramas, musician and actor Tom Waits, and, “anyone with an Irish accent that’s so thick that I can’t understand them.”

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Bobby Fingers seemed to burst onto the internet fully-formed, delivering a remarkably consistent quality for a fledgling YouTube channel, executed with uncanny skill and high production values.

I suspected the person behind the channel was a seasoned internet veteran, with a deep understanding of what works online and how to execute it, which is why I wanted to track him down in the first place.

But I understand why he asked not to be named or tied to his other projects. Working under a pseudonym can be freeing: unburdened by expectations from the past, a clean slate to build something new, on its own merits.

And it’s just so early! Only three videos in, he’s growing a new fan base that’s financially supporting his work on Patreon — me among them — anxiously waiting to see what humiliating scene he’ll take on next and the absurdist lengths he’ll go to recreate it.

If you want to help Bobby Fingers achieve his dream of making videos full-time, or get early access to videos and the dioramas’ hidden locations, you can support his Patreon now. Otherwise, all his videos are on YouTube and you can subscribe to get notified when the next video is out. Allegedly!

Update: Six months after this post, Bobby Fingers put out a new video. Instead of a miniature diorama, he went bigger. Much bigger.