Projects for July 2025
JD Vance on your boarding pass, calculated urinal usage, drinking every documented cocktail, and more
Welcome to Newsletter Goes Here - a once-a-month roundup of projects that our friends made.
Turn your boring boarding pass into a big, beautiful bald JD Vance for airport checkin
From James: Turn your boring boarding pass into a big, beautiful bald JD Vance for airport check-in. The most surreal part was being contacted by Mads Mikkelsen, the guy who was deported and hearing his side of the story. He in turn said it was surreal to see a day of his life become one of those memes about current events he usually consumes.
The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million.
From Calvin: My trip to the Fed’s Money Museum went sideways when I discovered their $1 million cube doesn’t add up.
Primesweeper
From Matt: Minesweeper… but with prime numbers!. Every now and then it’s fun to drop what I should be doing and turn around a little game in a day.
I Made The Most Anxious Elmo Ever
From Avi: So glad I got back to making YouTube videos, and honestly that was the difficult part in that case. But the actual making of the Elmo was crazy too - at one point I had to desolder a bunch because of how the SFX board worked and it wasn’t letting me put new files on it.
Interestingly, people kept asking how I generated the voice, which was my friend just voice acting. AI is changing too much
CaptchaStash
From Guy: When the machines rise, we'll need the ultimate digital security to protect our physical goods. I used an ESP-32-powered touchscreen and an electrically actuated lock to create a safe that only opens after it verifies that its operator is indeed human… using reCAPTCHAs, of course!
Internet Flowers
From Mika: Leaked and sold my data in a very very cute way (◕‿◕✿).
I spent a lot of time thinking about piss
From Chianli: You do not know the mathematically best place to take a piss. But if you go to threeurinaldilemma.com you may just find enlightenment. I got a lot of weird looks interviewing people about their urination preferences which might make you think I’m weird, but in fact I am very normal and well adjusted. This is also why I strapped an internal combustion engine onto a skateboard which you should be seeing soon.
Cowstars
From Morry: I tried to dunk on Laura Giplin’s poem “The Two-Headed Calf” and ended up accidentally making something very beautiful. Oops. Click the button for more stars .✦ ˚ . ✦
Please fix this site
From Avi: We were inspired by XKCD 3113 for this one and we wanted to make a nightmarish site. A very funny problem was that cursor really didn’t want to make this website so broken since I was actively breaking design guidelines. This was also a Humidity Studios project.
We’re So Over, We’re So Back
From Mac:
IG: @transistor_resistor
Bluesky: macp.bsky.social
I’m a Chicago based “artist” that makes “artworks.”
It’s DOOM but you can Cut, Copy and Paste
From Greg: My friend's software had a wacky implementation of Copy/Paste which made me think that it would be funny to have that very "normie" functionality in a game, one of the last places where copy/paste is typically (completely?) absent. I vibe-made this with AI - I'm also still unsure of what it truly means to copy in doom. My most secret wish is that you could copy/paste walls. Maybe v2! xx
Heavyweight
From Morry: Not legal advice, but you can look like you have a lawyer if you afford it. The scariness of legal letters is 90% document formatting and then 10%, you know, the power of the law. Input your complaint, play around with the sliders, and send your obstinate landlord or customer service desk a letter from people that look extremely serious. Did we mention this isn’t legal advice?
I drank every cocktail
From Adam: I drank all 102 cocktails on the IBA official cocktail list, and I wrote a blog post recapping the experience. It turned out to be surprisingly tricky, thanks to some of the list's more obscure inclusions and my self-imposed constraint of not making the drinks myself. In the post, I document the journey’s twists and turns, interesting bars it took me to, and my new favorite cocktails. Cheers!
Street View
From Matt (and Yufeng): This was a really fun collaboration inspired by the discord server! I came across Yufeng’s project and thought that it could tell a really cool story to bring people into the data for greater exploration. Yufeng had already done the difficult part (collecting the data), so this was a relatively straightforward exercise in storytelling!
Reworked Guitar Hero Guitar
From Emma: I took an old Guitar Hero guitar for PS2 and modded it into a midi instrument! Had an artist use it on stage to play a phat synth and it made my inner child extremely happy. I replaced the internal PCBs with my own custom ones. I harvested the strum buttons off the old board though, which, funny enough, were surprisingly similar to tactile keyboard switches. No wonder it felt so satisfying to strum.