kottke.org

From the Control Rooms group on Flickr. 🤩 So many little details in all of these photos to pore over.

The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism.

“Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever’s ‘cool’ until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base.

In this video, Patrick Hicks tells the story of the development of the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail and how Prince (you know, the genius musical artist) was one of the first people in the world to play the very first version of the game.

A “Kelvin wave” powered by El Niño will soon raise sea levels in California “by half a foot or more”.

The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go.

The best multi day hikes in the world.

Lobster is Lobster: a language guessing game.

Ooh, Mestra is a new short story from Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles).

From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such.

Looks like Every Frame a Painting is ramping up again!

Amazon is releasing some new Kindle models, including a thinner Paperwhite (my fave) with an aluminum back, more storage, and faster interactions.

A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps.

A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city.

You can destroy kottke.org if you want.

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside.

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a hand-picked collection of unique & rare films across Vintage Animation, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, Documentaries, Found Tapes & Much More”.

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer.

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright.

The Tell, a very long read about Thomas Goldstein (SCOTUSblog founder, high-powered lawyer, poker player) who once played a legendary game at the Bellagio where he bet wildly, didn’t even look at his cards for long stretches of time, and won big.

“Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements, or to be eaten by scavenging animals.”

Craig Mod made a cool mini-site cataloging all of the long walks he’s taken since 2009, with maps and GPS tracks and links to essays/books/media that resulted from them.

A lovely contemplative short video featuring Toshiyuki Ueno of the Japanese fashion brand Visvim talking about craftsmanship.

Manchester City guilty over Premier League charges after £900m of ‘sham’ contracts.

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.

From the early 1970s until his death in 2021, Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul painted water droplets.

The death of web development education.

Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be.

I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete.

The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris.

On commodified, automated intelligence.

Over the past six months, dozens of people pitched in to create the MN Stolen Neighbors Quilt, which is made of 12,500 squares, each one representing an immigrant abducted in Minnesota by the Trump regime’s secret police (ICE + CBP).

In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits her 2015 piece on marriage.

OpenAI isn’t going to release its newest model because “it showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a willingness to mislead users about its actions [and] was also willing to go beyond the original scope of what it was asked to do”.

This American Life has a whole episode with Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter Najya, following up on her NYT article about Nikole’s school choice for Najya.

Whoa, for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder has released four additional songs from that recording session.

What do you you do when the book you’re reading is too large to carry around?

Well.

What if America Went Completely Dark?

Now We Can Sing is the first single from Max Richter’s upcoming album, While the Flood Rages, which will be available wherever you stream your music on Oct 16.

This is a fun daily game: Catfishing.

Terry Riley’s In C is a composition where any number of musicians improvisationally play 53 melodic fragments in the key of C.

“The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions.”

“The Romanian Football Federation (FRF) has introduced a new black card to help prevent abusive behaviour from parents at youth-team matches.”

Lego’s biggest set ever is coming out soon: the 12,060-piece Sagrada Família. $800.

What If We Just Stopped?

What If We Just Stopped?

Using a handheld scanner, designer/illustrator Noah Nolet captures textures from surfaces in cities around the world, including Tokyo, LA, Paris, Kyoto, NYC, and Berlin.

Homer’s Catalogue of Ships from the Iliad.