Notes for August 8, 2026

dotMeow wants to be the purrfect place for a queer and open internet

A few years ago, a few of us queer nerds were sitting in a pub, thinking about what we could do to give our community greater stability. The idea of running our own gTLD came up. Because many people in our community love cats, and because the wilder side of the internet is often associated with cat videos and memes, we soon settled on .meow.

The web is expanding with some new top level domains and .meow will likely be one of them. This is siiiick! No idea what I would use yet another domain for, but I'm definitely adding some .meows to the fleet. I'm already draining my bank account with renewals every year on too many unused domains as it is, but I'm a junkie for this kind of stuff. If everything goes according to plan, they're looking at a 2028 launch.

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

By working with living but dormant cordyceps militaris fungus instead, the researchers have been able to take advantage of its biological functions. The result is a material that is self-renewing and responsive to its environment, in ways that could one day transform architecture and clothing – as seen in a prototype dress created together with material innovation company Peelshere.

As long as it doesn't mutate and turn everyone into a bunch of fucked up hybrids between The Last of Us zombies and Jim Carrey in The Mask, this is pretty neat!

Teenage Boy Suffers Temporary Hearing Loss After Listening to Cicadas for Four Hours

Wang noticed that the cicada noises became noticeably louder around noon, but he remained in the forest until evening, when he began experiencing tinnitus and a sensation of fullness in his ears. As the cicadas started going silent, he noticed that he couldn’t hear the chirping of birds, or even the notification sounds of his phone.

And people say I need to touch grass... at least I'm not going deaf sitting on my laptop with a soothing white noise generator humming in the background, enjoying the synthetic breeze of central air.

Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook

In Facebook news today: why in the fuck does anyone still hang out over there‽

Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found...“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.

From Will Smith to Third Eye Blind — the “hidden” number-one hits of 1997!

Indeed, every Hot 100 leader in ‘97 topped the sales chart, and vice-versa. Below is every official №1 of the year, along with their peak positions in sales and airplay. This means that most of 1997’s “hidden” number-one hits were №1 on radio, but not in sales. Let’s see what they were.

I was six years old in '97. Every single one of these tracks bring back a flood of nostalgia. It reminds me most of going out with my mom and sisters to our uncle's pool in the summer. We spent so much time out there in the 90s. These are the songs that were always playing on the cheap boombox under the shade of the umbrella table 🥲