They found a chunk of Mars in the Sahara Desert. A recent reveals that a rock found a few years ago in Mali is more than 4.1 billion years old and “has a mix of igneous minerals that tells a story about how [Mars’] crust formed”.
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The Match Archive
The Match Archive is creating “the first research-grade, digital archive cataloging American matchbooks as primary sources for graphic design, commercial culture, and social history”. They haven’t launched a website yet (they’re working on it), but they’ve been sharing some of their collection on their Instagram account.
I love the art on the matches themselves…you don’t see that much anymore.
See also Vintage Eastern European Matchbox Labels (1950-1980s) and Matchbook Diaries of New York City.
An analysis of 59 studies (including a 24-year Danish study of 1.2 million children) found that the tiny amounts of aluminum in vaccines are not linked to “increased risk of asthma, autism, or autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes”. Of course!
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
refresh
see full list“Are sperm counts declining? Are microplastics and pesticides affecting male fertility? Does a low sperm count mean you’ll struggle to have children? Howtown investigates the science behind male infertility…”
We Have Star Wars at Home
This is cool: Evan Puschak looks at the rush of cheapo knockoff space operas that came out in the wake of Star Wars, a once-in-a-generation film that refashioned the entire movie business. Even the names are kooky: Starcrash, War of the Planets, Battle of the Stars, The Humanoid, Message From Space, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Man Who Saved the World, Star Odyssey, and The Beast in Space — although tbh, Star Wars is a goofy name as well. Some of the movies even had lightsabers and anxious robots.
Puschak highlights Star Wars’ unique combination of realistic depictions of space with special effects (a la 2001) and an adventure story with colorful characters. He quotes Julie Turnock’s book, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, in making the case that Lucas and other filmmakers of his generation were using special effects to up the sensorial ante for moviegoers — I dug the full passage out of the book’s introduction:
Certainly what was so exhilarating to many about these films was not simply the experience of a new kind of realism. Perhaps even more important was the intensified density of effects in films of the era, which many at the time understood as a thrillingly new and vividly somatic technologized experience. This book aims to recover the excitement that not just ticket-buyers but also many academics, critics, and journalists felt upon experiencing the special effects-heavy films of the 1970s, in particular Star Wars and Close Encounters, and further grant historical dimension and context to that experience. It may be surprising for many to realize that in the 1970s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were considered among the most interesting, ambitious, and exciting filmmakers of the era, alongside more canonized American filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. What critics praised most often about Lucas and Spielberg as filmmakers was their grasp of specifically cinematic visual dynamics that lent their films both greater visceral and sensual engagement and an extra layer of expressive and intellectual potential. While many critics have (often rightly) condemned the aggressive, pummeling blockbuster style that has arisen in the wake of the two successes of 1977, it is incumbent upon scholars to recover the creative process that made them so stimulating and exhilarating to the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert, and other prominent critics of the era, as well as so popular with audiences. A renewed interest in special effects technology by influential auteurist filmmakers certainly made this historical development possible. However, even more strongly, auteurist filmmakers went to the considerable and painstaking effort to promote and develop complex special effects technology, precisely in order to realize aesthetic filmmaking goals they designed to rouse and provoke the sensorium. They called this approach variously “visual storytelling,’ “visceral engagement,’ or “graphic dynamics.”
Moreover, so-called New Hollywood filmmakers in the 1970s reinterpreted the role of cinematic aesthetics to suggest a purposeful relation between sensual and intellectual impact. In other words, filmmakers sought to stimulate the senses. This was not to numb the viewer but to activate him or her — not unlike the notion of drug-induced mind expansion. Intensified color schemes, beams of light, fast-moving objects, and quick editing first penetrate the body and then engage the mind with the films’ ideas about technology, kineticism, power structures, liberty, etc.
I am firmly in the camp of those who enjoy filmmakers that engage the senses like this — among contemporary filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve come to mind as continuing the legacy of Lucas et al. in this way.
From filmmaker Kevin B. Lee, a story about seeing Platoon as a child in 1986. What age-inappropriate movies did you see as a kid?
A call for more “mindful underparenting” from psychologist Darby Saxbe. “If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.” 💯
KDO Search Now Available to Everyone
Ok, after a week of testing, I’ve opened up KDO search to everyone. You can read more about it in my post from last week:
For now, the search only looks at posts from 2014 to the present. You can search by keyword, describe what you remember (“the guy who walks in Japan”), or paste a link to find posts that link to it. Search is fuzzy-ish but it’s not an AI bot or anything like that so if you ramble on with a 25-word query, it’s probably not going to work that well. You can sort by best match or newest, search all posts or just Quick Links or main posts, and filter by time (past month, past 3 months, etc.)
Launching that member preview was a little deflating tbh — “no plan survives first contact with the user”. It was clear that search was not as good as I wanted it to be — even I started noticing it despite my excitement. I spent quite a bit of time last weekend trying to tune the search and it’s much improved. I’ve been using it quite a bit this week and am loving it. There’s so much good stuff in the archives (and I can say that because if it’s more than 3-4 years old, I don’t even remember writing it! 🤷♂️) and this does a great job of surfacing that stuff.
Speaking of surfacing more posts from the archive, one of the coolest things about the way the search works is that you get a “more like this post” capability more or less for free. If you open recent posts like the video of three humpback whales breaching, the composite photo of 14,000 satellite trails, this Ted Chiang interview, or even an older post like Sesame Street puppeteers on how they play their characters and click on the “Related posts” tab below the post, you should see links 1-5 posts that you may want to read next.
Like the search, it’s not perfect and not every post will have related links, but I keep turning up good posts I’d completely forgotten about. Anyway, related posts are available for everyone on post-2014 posts. Post post post post. Poooooost. Ok, getting punchy. Have a good weekend everyone.
Bain Capital Acquires Tibetan Buddhism For $35 Million. “For centuries, this organization has been guided by outdated principles that are antithetical to investor and shareholder concerns, prioritizing incentives like wisdom, mental discipline…”
Anthropic has new rules for its Opus 5.5 model to “steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific [video] game”. (From a few days ago but I just saw it…)
And in other news, the NY Times is trying to buy Letterboxd for a reported price of $330 million.
Salon, one of the last OG general interest web publications, is shutting down. “When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place.” And: “We have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable.”
Rosa Parks on To Tell the Truth
In 1980, civil rights hero Rosa Parks appeared on To Tell the Truth, a long-running game show. Parks appeared alongside two other women claiming to be Parks and a celebrity panel tried to guess the identity of the true Parks. See also the appearance of a Lincoln assassination witness on a 50s game show. (via @ptak)
Video captured by Amy Yolland of three humpback whales breaching one after another. Incredible. Also available on YouTube.
Subvocal’s glasses turn your silent speech into text at 200 wpm — it measures mouth movements with radar? Like many things these days, this is very technically interesting but also creepy and dystopian.
Foursquare was recently acquired and co-founder Dennis Crowley wrote about it. “Dozens of current and former Foursquare employees have reached out to me to express their frustration with the leadership that led the company to this outcome.”
Grocery Shopping With a Bow & Arrow
For a 1992 conceptual art piece called The Hunt, Christian Jankowski survived for a week on goods he shot at the local supermarket with a bow and arrow.
To rebel against modern society, to return to nature: in pursuit of these primeval instincts, for one week, Jankowski lived off goods he hunted in the supermarket. Instead of stalking animals, he eyed and avoided the supermarket security cameras. Armed heroically with a bow and arrow, Jankowski shot down frozen chickens, butter, toilet paper, and various other essentials. His game, if edible, was not just dead, it was processed on a mass scale. Thus the reaction of the woman working the checkout counter: she remained wholly unimpressed by the trophies of his bargain hunt, which she scanned with the arrows still sticking out of them. He has to pay like everyone else.
Paul Ford: “The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for building applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.”
Women who die postpartum often do so because they lose too much blood. An 80-cent plastic bag is helping solve the problem. “The drape is not an A.I. thing — it’s the absolute opposite: It’s a simple, simple, intervention that can solve our problems.”
A growing list of brands to avoid because they are “actively engaged in the enshittification playbook” (many post-acquisition by private equity), including Dr. Martens, Pyrex, Hoka, rag & bone, Ray-Ban, Black+Decker, Hunter Boot, Craftsmen, and more.
Stunning Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.
This is the most time-consuming photo edit I’ve EVER done!
I left my camera photographing the night sky over Mt Taranaki for nearly TWO HOURS, capturing 578 photographs.
The result? An estimated 14,450 satellite trail appearances, representing approximately 1,400 individual satellites! 😱
I manually masked in EVERY SINGLE TRAIL from the original photographs — approximately 45 HOURS of editing to create this one image!
The Guardian has more on how he created the image (which, despite many online commenters’ beliefs, is not AI):
Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”
The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
“I could start to see the pattern emerging and realised: ‘Wow, this looks really awesome.’ I knew if I carried on it would look even better and more impressive in terms of satellite numbers.”
Fellow photographer Vincent Laforet called Larsen’s image “an important photograph”:
I was initially startled. Then confused. Then fascinated all in quick succession.
And then I felt a deep sense of betrayal once I realized that what I was tracking with my eyes were a series of small satellites. And btw: that they likely had ruined my long exposure that I was capturing at the time.
I remember asking in the moment:
Who gave anyone permission do this?
I Thought I’d Left Authoritarianism Behind. “To anyone who has lived under dictatorship, the pattern is instantly recognizable. Dictators start by instilling fear. They exploit uncertainty to manufacture loyalty.”
See You Thursday
I’m taking the day off from the site today — feeling crispy from a little too much work lately. Besides, everyone’s gonna be too busy huffing US midterm election results to pay any attention to anything else. In the meantime, you can spend some time with my poorly timed Election Day post celebrating 10 years of the KDO membership program that gets into all the stuff I’ve been busy working on around here.
How Human Civilization Began
In a recent video, Kurzgesagt explores what we know about the first human civilizations that formed some 12,000 years ago and how they led to the first cities and the invention of writing.
What we know about human history is only a fraction of the full story. Much of the rest is like dark matter, invisible to us. We can’t see it, and we can only see the effects of its presence. But thanks to new techniques for DNA sequencing, dating ancient detritus, mathematical models, and aerial and lidar archaeology, we are now able to get a faint idea of what this world might have looked and felt like.
One thing I really appreciate about Kurzgesagt is how each of their videos is accompanied by an extensive list of sources. For instance, I’m not sure I’d heard about the massive Lake Agassiz draining into the world’s oceans and disrupting the entire planet’s climate some 8200 years ago — and there are several primary sources listed for further reading. Here’s how Kurzgesagt tells it:
Around the year 3800 of the human era a sudden catastrophe happened in North America. The receding glaciers of the last ice age had created one of the largest lakes in Earth’s history, larger than the Caspian Sea today. It was held back by super massive ice sheets, which formed a gigantic dam.
Surprising no one, the dam melted and suddenly failed – the whole lake suddenly drained into the ocean. Global sea levels rose by 1-2 meters and the great conveyor belt that carried warm water northwards slowed down. Across the North Atlantic and Europe, and into the Near East, the climate turned colder and drier – in some regions by several degrees. Rain patterns shifted, summers grew longer and harsher, and a drought lasting well over a century parched the land.
And:
We know that during this time all over the world migration towards rivers and lakes sped up — bringing agriculture and technology with them. Some of the most consequential journeys led into the Nile Valley, where farming villages took root and slowly laid the ground for the rich civilization that would one day rise there.
Lake Agassiz’s major drainage reorganization events were of such magnitudes that they significantly impacted climate, sea level, and possibly early human civilization. The lake’s enormous freshwater release into the Arctic Ocean has been postulated to have disrupted oceanic circulation and caused temporary cooling. The draining of 13,000 years ago may be the cause of the Younger Dryas stadial. Although disputed, the draining at 9,900–10,000 years ago may be the cause of the 8,200 yr climate event. A study by Turney and Brown links the 8,500-years-ago drainage to the expansion of agriculture from east to west across Europe; they suggest that this drainage may also account for various flood myths of ancient cultures, including the Biblical flood narrative.
Fascinating.
Do you think you could write down the names of 3000 people? “As part of a competition with a few friends, I attempted the very dumb challenge of trying to write the names of 3,000 real people in one sitting. It took 7 hours, but I did it.”
“Our attention is all we have. And we already gave away a huge percentage of it to machine learning algorithms 10 years ago, and we are living in an intensely different and I think worse world because of it.” Was 2016 a sneaky inflection point?
The soundtrack for Wipeout XL (aka Wipeout 2097) was crazy for a video game; it featured tracks from groups like Underworld, Orbital, The Prodigy, Daft Punk, and Chemical Brothers. I had this on CD! Ripped it and played ‘em on Winamp!
10 Years of Kottke.org Membership
An important KDO milestone whooshed by the other day and I was so heads-down on tuning up the new search engine (more on that below) that I missed it. So: it’s been 10 years since I started the KDO membership program! (Quick recap of the value proposition from the membership page FAQ: “kottke.org is my full-time job and member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled.”)
10 years! It is impossible for me to overstate the impact membership has had on my work. Beyond the simple fact that KDO wouldn’t exist without it, membership support allows me the freedom to choose when, where, how, and why to work, resulting, IMO, a better place for all of us to spend time.
The last couple of years have felt especially membership-inflected and influenced. We’ve been working together on building the KDO comments into a quieter haven for sharing stories and information, outside the social media networks driven by algorithms and outrage. It’s taken time, but KDO is starting to feel like a neighborhood joint where folks can stop by and find a welcoming place for interesting conversation.1 And more to come!
I’ve also been working hard on different ways of helping people find stuff to read/watch/listen to online and just generally making things easier to use around here. There’s:
- The Rolodex (which includes a mini feed reader for members), which is a list of the sites and people I read that you might like too.
- Improvements to the comments to help make following & having conversations easier. This has been a steady effort — tweaks and new features every few months since launching member comments three years ago. (How has it been that long?!)
- Prometheus, a search & discovery tool for gift links, open only to members for now.
- KDO site search. Still only open to just members. I spent a lot of time over the past weekend tuning it to return better results, and I think we’re getting somewhere. Improved the speed as well, at the expense of, well, increased expense.2 It’s still not magic, but I’m hoping to open this up to everyone soon.
- Underscore, a web-based music player I built for listening to music across multiple streaming platforms while I work. Anyone can listen to my collection and members can compile their own collection to listen to.
And this is in addition to the site’s usual service of curated links and posts. A lot of this has happened in just the last month — Jesus, Kottke, slow down! — but I’ve been working on some of these things, on and off, for years. I couldn’t focus on this stuff for months and months earlier this year — launching requires a level of attention that’s difficult for me to muster when other things are going on. Getting the move behind me and establishing myself in surroundings more suitable to my temperament has been a real boon.
I hope all of this adds up to a place and project that people want to make use of and support. Twenty-something years into doing KDO as my full-time job, I can honestly say I am enjoying it more than ever. Thanks so much for reading and for your support. If you’re not yet a member and want to join us on this ride, you can check out your membership options here — it only takes a minute to sign up (less if you use Apple Pay or Stripe’s Link autofill).
Maybe KDO readers have always felt this way about the site, but for me, the comments have livened things up and added a new dimension to things. ↩
I’m using a couple of outside services for search, but at the relatively small volumes I’m dealing with, it won’t come to more than a few bucks every month. ↩
Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires by Paris Marx. “He exposes the deceptive, exploitative ways tech companies are siphoning energy and resources from vulnerable communities in their pursuit of digital power…”
Film Meets Art
Vugar Efendi has made a pair of videos showing scenes from films that have been inspired by famous paintings. The second video is especially good, showing references in There Will Be Blood, Lost In Translation, and a Jacques-Louis David reference from About Schmidt.
Simon Willison: The October Inflection Point for Vibe Game Development. “The thing I find both exciting and shameful about this is that I have got interesting results from so little creative input.”
Arkivism is a search and visual discovery engine for millions of public domain works from the collections of the Smithsonian, The Met, NASA, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, and more.
Ted Chiang: “There’s no way to write fiction and guarantee your readers will understand it correctly. There is no way you will ever be able to write something so straightforward that Elon Musk will understand it the way that you intend it.”
Let’s get this out of the way: Olivia Colman will be great as Mrs. Bennet in the new Pride and Prejudice series; here’s the trailer. But the rest of it has some awfully large shoes to fill — both the 1995 and 2005 adaptations are rightly beloved.
Are contemporary technologies like GPS, phones, and AI deskilling the human body? “In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending.”
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 Collectively Drawn World
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 more. There are also timelapse versions of some of the maps.
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.”
The Ten Best Captain Picard Episodes of Star Trek
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 are several lists out there of the episodes of ST:TNG and Star Trek: Picard where Captain Jean-Luc Picard particularly shines. Some episodes appear on nearly every list; these are the consensus favorites:
- The Inner Light. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard is struck unconscious by an energy beam from an alien probe. While just 25 minutes pass for the rest of the crew between Picard being struck unconscious and eventually regaining consciousness on the Enterprise bridge floor, the probe makes Picard experience 40 years of lifetime as Kamin, a humanoid scientist whose planet is threatened by the nova of its sun.”
- Family. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard visits his brother’s family in France, where he begins to come to terms with his treatment by the Borg.”
- The Best of Both Worlds. “In this two part episode, the Enterprise must battle the Borg who are intent on conquering Earth, with a captured and assimilated Captain Picard as their emissary.”
- Darmok. “The crew of the Enterprise is unable to establish meaningful communication with the crew of an alien vessel, which is resolved by the struggle of the ships’ captains to defend each other from a vicious beast.”
- All Good Things… “The plot involves Captain Jean-Luc Picard jumping through time and the formation of an anomaly that defies causality, the whole situation being a test that allows Picard to demonstrate human potential to the Q Continuum by making an intuitive leap of faith to understand the cause of, and how to eliminate, the anomaly before it destroys humanity.”
- The Measure of a Man. “In this episode, the rights of the android officer Lt. Commander Data are threatened by a scientist who wishes to dismantle him to produce replicas of him. Captain Jean-Luc Picard fights in a Starfleet court for Data’s right of self-determination, not to be declared mere property of Starfleet, while Commander William Riker is obliged to argue on behalf of the scientist.”
- Starship Mine. “While the Enterprise is evacuated for hazardous maintenance, Captain Picard must, alone, contend with thieves posing as a work crew aboard the ship. The plot has been noted for its similarity to the 1988 action film Die Hard.”
- Chain of Command. “Jean-Luc Picard is relieved of command of the Enterprise and reassigned to lead a covert mission, while his replacement is assigned to deal with the Cardassians openly. The second part of the episode is noted for the intense performance of Patrick Stewart and its depiction of brutal torture and interrogation scenes.”
- Tapestry. “Q allows a supposedly deceased Captain Jean-Luc Picard to re-visit a pivotal event in his youth that he since regrets. Picard changes the past, but upon returning to the present he finds that the event made him the man he became.”
- The Drumhead. “An explosion aboard the Enterprise leads to a high-level investigation headed by Admiral Norah Satie, a retired officer renowned for her skill at exposing conspiracies.”
You can check out the lists at Screen Rant, Collider, Comicbook.com, That Love Podcast, and Popular Mechanics for more good Picard episodes.
The movies seemed to be out of scope for these lists, but I’ve always loved First Contact and Picard’s unhinged pursuit of the Borg — “The line must be drawn here!”
Did I tear up at the final scene at the poker table? When Picard says, “I should have done this a long time ago”? Yes. Yes, I did. Did I tear up again watching just that scene just now? Yes. 💞 ↩
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.”
Three-Body Orbits
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 general closed-form analytic solution. The differential equations that govern the motions of three gravitating bodies are not integrable and cannot be solved to give explicit formulas for the positions of the bodies as a function of time. For most initial conditions, the dynamical system for three orbiting bodies is chaotic, and the only way to predict their motions is to estimate them using numerical methods.
But thousands of stable three-body orbits have been found — their paths repeat after a given interval. The Three Body Orbits website is an atlas of some of those orbits: you can watch each three-body system play itself out in a wide variety of different shapes and complexities. There’s this simple figure 8, this slightly less simple one, and this one that looks like a spirograph.
The site even enables you to search for new stable solutions to the problem in your browser. This is what one of my unsuccessful tests looked like — two of the planets locked in a gravity death spiral while the other one peaces out in the other direction:
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”.
Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Site Search!
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 you’re a member, please help me to kick the tires on this for a few days. (That link, as well as the search links below, will 404 for non-members for now.)
Hopefully it’s pretty close and then I can open it up to everyone. I’ve been using it for the past week or two and it’s been really helpful so far, especially in surfacing older posts about topics I’m currently writing about or generally interested in. The tag pages are good for that too, but search can help hone in on specifics — like posts I’ve made about fascism or posts that link to McSweeney’s. Search also pulls in results from Quick Links, which aren’t included on tag pages. The rankings still need some work here and there (it’s not magic), but your searches will help calibrate things.
For now, the search only looks at posts from 2014 to the present. You can search by keyword, describe what you remember (“the guy who walks in Japan”), or paste a link to find posts that link to it. Search is fuzzy-ish but it’s not an AI bot or anything like that so if you ramble on with a 25-word query, it’s probably not going to work that well. You can sort by best match or newest, search all posts or just Quick Links or main posts, and filter by time (past month, past 3 months, etc.)
I’ll share more about how search works in a subsequent post. For now, kick the tires and let me know what you think in the comments or via email. As always, bug reports, comments, and suggestions are welcome.
Listen to a Long-Lost Daft Punk Mix From 1997
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 badly damaged, but he worked with a specialist to restore it and has put the whole mix up on Soundcloud.
As I write this, the mix has been up for a little over a day and has just over 7000 plays. It’s unclear whether Lawson ever even played it on the show, so we could be among the first people, outside of Daft Punk themselves, to hear this mix in almost 30 years.
See also Daft Punk Live DJ Sets From the 90s.
Rest In Peace, Patrick Stewart (1940-2026)
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 the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.
A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Mr. Stewart to audition — even though, as Mr. Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.
Surprised to get the part — the “Star Trek” creator, Gene Roddenberry, who was overseeing the new series, had not been keen to hire him at first — Mr. Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?
This is hard news to take, even though Stewart lived a full and fulfilling life. The Next Generation will always be my favorite Star Trek series and Picard my favorite captain. Stewart got off to a rough start on the series:
So when he was on set shooting the show’s debut season and co-stars like Jonathan Frakes, Denise Crosby and Brent Spiner would tease him or ad-lib a joke or laugh when they flubbed their lines, it would low-key infuriate him.
“I could be a severe bastard,” he writes. “My experiences at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre had been intense and serious… On the TNG set, I grew angry with the conduct of my peers, and that’s when I called that meeting in which I lectured the cast for goofing off and responded to Denise Crosby’s, ‘We’ve got to have some fun sometimes, Patrick’ comment by saying, ‘We are not here, Denise, to have fun.’”
“In retrospect,” Stewart continues, “everyone, me included, finds this story hilarious. But in the moment, when the cast erupted in hysterics at my pompous declaration, I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at. I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door.”
But he found his footing and eventually found meaning in the role of Picard (archive):
Q: There’s a passage where you say that, from your father, “I drew Picard’s stern, intimidating tendencies. But I like to think that my mother is in the captain too, in his moments of warmth and sensitivity.” Do you see Picard as your way of reconciling that conflict between your parents?
A: Very much so, yes. Both Star Trek and therapy have been responsible for that. Having to open the doors into my childhood in order to be an actor became utterly intriguing to me in a way that it never had been before. And I regret that when I look back on some of the roles I played, what I might have brought to them if I just released myself a little bit more.
Might watch an episode or two this evening in remembrance. If you’re not a Trek fan, you can watch Stewart play Macbeth in 2010:
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