Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Love the idea of a volta, a pivotal point. “The moment when an acquaintance becomes a friend, when a song goes from background noise to what I will demand people play at my funeral.” Or when a novel goes from boring to incredible.
The Drawn Maps are the borders of the countries, state, provinces, and other official territories collectively drawn by more than 300,000 people playing an online daily game called Borderline. There’s a world map as well as maps of the USA, Canada, Italy, and…
Babe, wake up! New potato just dropped. It tastes like roast chicken.
Trailer for season four of The Gilded Age, which started yesterday. I love this show for reasons that are unclear to me. But I don’t care! The heart wants what it wants!
Readwise announces Readwise Books. “We’ve built Readwise Books: our very own ebook store and app. In simple terms, you can think of it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps, where you can buy, read, and track books.”
In the wake of Patrick Stewart’s death the other day, I watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation — the two-part series finale All Good Things… in fact.1 Wanting to add more Picard-centric episodes to my watchlist, I did some research. There…
Great Art Explained: Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio. “Even Matisse wasn’t entirely sure what he had created and nobody wanted to buy it.”
The top 10 paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes. “I feel like Artemisia has actually thought through the logistics of overpowering a grown man and hacking his head off.”
There are no generalized solutions to the three-body problem. Say you have three planets orbiting each other: it’s impossible to calculate how they will move using Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. Unlike the two-body problem, the three-body problem has no…
James Bridle on making chairs with LLMs. “What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one.”
In a late-stage trial, personalized mRNA vaccines for melanoma “reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment”.
After years in the making (or more accurately, years in the wanting), I finally figured out how I wanted to do search for KDO posts. I’ve been tinkering with this specific implementation since the beginning of the summer and it finally all came together. If yo…
A DJ named Ralph Lawson, who hosted a radio show called Trans Europe Express, found an incredible time capsule in his collection: an hour-long mixtape sent to him by Daft Punk in 1997, shortly after the release of their debut album, Homework. The tape was badl…
Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, has died at the age of 86. He passed at home in Los Angeles from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was largely considered an unknown when th…
An Italian farmer planted some decades-old seeds he found in his attic. Wheat with seven ears per stalk came up and the farmer found a reference to this type of nutritious, drought-resistant wheat in the Bible’s book of Genesis.
Somehow I’d never heard of this before: NPR produced and aired1 radio dramatizations of the films in the original Star Wars trilogy. The first program was particularly popular, garnering NPR hundreds of thousands of new listeners. The original versions are ava…
Dumpster Archeology. “Lew Blink’s passion for dumpster diving, his tenacity in connecting the dots, and his magnetic charisma as he unearths the secrets of others were a captivating lens through which to explore themes of privacy, waste…”
What’s the largest tweetable number? You’ve got 280 characters. So: “9999…” or “one centillion” or “googol!!!!!!…” or an image of a number? Turns out it’s complicated!
Rolling Stone: The 200 Greatest Rock Songs of the 21st Century So Far. I cannot argue with the top pick: Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. There’s a Spotify playlist with all 200 songs…a great way to spend 15 hours and 25 minutes.
I’ve been reading a bit about the recent election in Serbia and some of the details are fascinating. A student-led coalition toppled the 12-year corrupt reign of “the increasingly authoritarian leader” Aleksandar Vučić in recent elections. But in order to ensu…
The NY Times recently asked readers “what they can no longer afford, or have given up on having”. Among the answers: medication, car repairs, new clothes, having more kids, eating out, and contact lenses.
This is great: Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia fame) sifted through the archive at newspapers.com to find the goings on of long-ago celebrity name doppelgängers (follow-up post). A few of my favorites: Tags: Annie Rauwerda · celebrity · language
I made a small tweak to Prometheus (gift link discovery site) that kinda kicks ass: NYT Cooking is now a separate source (which you can filter by). The Rigatoni With White Bolognese recipe is a favorite of mine. 🤌
Errol Morris shot ads for Theranos and recently revealed he has a two-hour interview with Elizabeth Holmes that he’s considering releasing. “Did I have any reason to believe that she was a fraud? I did not. Did that change as time went on? It did.”
Remember the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game? Turns out: “Kevin Bacon is not the center of Hollywood. In fact, he never has been, and almost certainly never will be.”
A bunch of items from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archive will be auctioned off early next year, including Jack Torrance’s axe & the sisters’ blue dresses from The Shining, Kubrick’s director’s chair, and a chess set owned by the director.
The Moving Image Archive is a collection of over 120,000 clips from almost 2300 archival films drawn from public domain collections. The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can n…
It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical. “It was disappointing how easily money turned a lot of them into sudden conservatives, full of right-wing doctrine about bootstraps and the fantasy of a black capitalist utopia…”
Scientists are studying whether “many chronic diseases we treat as separate failures of separate organs may share one deeper problem: cells struggling to extract and use energy from food” (diabetes, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, etc.)
I’ve been vaguely aware for awhile that researchers had traced the origins of HIV/AIDS back to Sub-Saharan Africa. But I didn’t know the whole story, which turns out to be really fascinating. For decades, one man was blamed for bringing AIDS to America. But th…