Square Town got a newspaper Nov 14
Every town worth living in has a local paper. The kind that puts the bake sale on the front page and tells you who moved in, who moved away and whose dog turned up. So Square Town got one too.
Meet The Square Town Gazette. It comes out every morning, it covers yesterday in town, and it costs one kiss.
Breaking news from a favicon wall
If you haven’t been by yet: Square Town is a little 3D town where every square is a website’s favicon. A dollar claims one, paying double evicts the owner, a square catches fire when its site goes down, and Grandma walks over to review one website a day. Things happen there all day long, and nobody was writing any of it down.
Now the Gazette does. Issue No. 1 opened with “A busy Thursday brings new squares and a quiet court”. Issue No. 2 went with “A busy day of arrivals and a smoky goodbye”, because unicornfounderai.com caught fire and four sites that had been burning for thirty days finally burned to the ground and went back on the market. Hard to argue with that as a lead story.
What’s in it
It’s laid out like a proper front page: a heavy serif masthead, a lead story with a drop cap, columns with thin rules between them and a strip of numbers at the bottom. The regular sections:
- Arrivals: who picked up keys and moved into a square, and who proudly put the town badge on their own site
- Fires: sites that went down and are now burning, and the ones that burned all the way down
- Clown Court: when the mallet comes down, the paper reports who got squashed. Yesterday it was pressbin.com, which “was given a gentle whack, and its square is empty once more.”
- Grandma’s afternoon walk: where she went and what she thought. Yesterday she stopped by ovov.ai and stayed for the music.
- By the numbers: 35 visits, 42 kisses, 74 cards opened, 40 new squares, 1 fire, 4 burned down, 1 clown squashed.
The photographs are taken in the town itself on the morning the paper comes out. So when a square has burned down, the picture shows the empty lot it left behind: a scorched patch with a few charred beams and some rubble. Very local news.
The editor is an AI on a short leash
Each issue is written in the morning by an AI editor working from the town’s own event log, and from nothing else. The one rule: it may not name a square the log doesn’t. No made-up scandals, no invented neighbours, no “sources close to the Throne”.
That rule is what makes it funny. The writing is grand and the facts are tiny. A single fire and one squashed clown get the full front-page treatment, written by an editor who takes it all exactly as seriously as a small-town paper should.
Back issues are kept, so in a year there will be a whole archive of who moved in, what burned and where Grandma went. A local history of a town made of favicons.
Get in the paper
The easiest way onto the front page is to claim a square today. Move in and you’re in tomorrow’s Arrivals. Let your site go down and you’ll make the Fires column instead. Your call.