The best multi day hikes in the world. “As an avid hiker, who spends most of her time hiking, I have done more than 100 multi day hikes all over the world. This list includes 25 of my favorite ones.”
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Lobster is Lobster: a language guessing game. “Lobster is lobster in English. Langosta is lobster in ___”
Ooh, Mestra is a new short story from Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles). “Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listMap of the Lighthouses of the World
From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such. The screenshots above are static but the lights on the real map move: each lighthouse sweeps out its actual arc and the reach of the beams is true to scale. I recorded a short video of how it looks on the site:
Each lighthouse has a unique light characteristic so that ships can tell them apart:
In any of these designs an observer, rather than seeing a continuous weak light, sees a brighter light during short time intervals. These instants of bright light are arranged to create a light characteristic or pattern specific to a lighthouse. For example, the Scheveningen Lighthouse flashes are alternately 2.5 and 7.5 seconds. Some lights have sectors of a particular color (usually formed by colored panes in the lantern) to distinguish safe water areas from dangerous shoals. Modern lighthouses often have unique reflectors or racon transponders so the radar signature of the light is also unique.
See also A Blinking Map of the World’s Lighthouses. And mapped.earth has more cool visualizations of the Earth (rianfall, wind, lightning, pollution, etc.)
Looks like Every Frame a Painting is ramping up again! “Over the last 10 years, Taylor and I have amassed a series of ideas — some of them originally designed to be on Youtube, some designed to be other things. All of this is currently in progress”
How to Make Perfect Soft-Scrambled Eggs
I love watching Gordon Ramsay make scrambled eggs. I first saw this video years ago and, possibly because I am an idiot, have yet to attempt these eggs at home. You and me, eggs, next weekend.
P.S. Jean-Georges Vongerichten makes scrambled eggs in a very similar way. Not quite soft-scrambled…Serious Eats calls them fancy French spoonable eggs.
P.P.S. Anyone have a square Japanese omelette pan I can borrow?
P.P.P.S. In Jiro Dreams of Sushi (now on Netflix!), an apprentice talks about making tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette) over 200 times before Jiro declared it good enough to serve in his restaurant.
That apprentice, Daisuke Nakazawa, is now the head chef at Sushi Nakazawa, one of the five NYC restaurants that currently has a four-star rating from the NY Times (along with the aforementioned Jean-Georges and not along with Per Se, which recently got dunce capped down to 2 stars by populist hero Pete Wells).
Amazon is releasing some new Kindle models, including a thinner Paperwhite (my fave) with an aluminum back, more storage, and faster interactions. If I didn’t just get a new last-gen Paperwhite to replace one I lost, I’d be tempted to pre-order.
A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps. I listened to about half of this and had to stop…it’s incredibly candid but what he went through as a kid & young adult, oof.
A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city. As previously mentioned, he started playing the game to connect with his kids and never stopped. (This is only part 1 of ???)
Ominous Thunderstorm Rolling Across the Fields
This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.
The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.
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”. KDO readers might like the Early Technology section.
Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. “If you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.” Really interesting.
“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.”
The “Insane” Cinematography of Pride and Prejudice
I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film.
Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the closest to my own personal tastes as I’ve ever found. So today, I want to talk about how director Joe Wright created some of the best extended tracking shots, ones, long takes, that I’ve ever seen.
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.” (CW: there are some potentially upsetting photos on that page.)
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.
On The Joy Of Ownership
A lovely contemplative short video featuring Toshiyuki Ueno of the Japanese fashion brand Visvim talking about craftsmanship.
We want to make things that people will get attached to and will use for a long time. And that’s at the core of our creating process. It’s simple and not that complicated.
He continues:
I think about how people grow attached to things over time as they use them, and how those things add to its allure over time.
“Those things” is a little ambiguous without the context of the video…he means the wear that develops from use and how people grow attached to those “imperfections”. See also wabi-sabi.
Manchester City guilty over Premier League charges after £900m of ‘sham’ contracts. The “financial doping” scheme allowed the club’s owners to pump large sums of money into the team without appearing to exceed the league’s spending limits.
Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”
Kim Tschang-Yeul, Water Drops
From the early 1970s until his death in 2021, Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul painted water droplets. From one of the galleries representing his work:
The waterdrop was the starting point for a singular and iconic body of work, which stands at the confluence of lyrical abstraction, Pop art and Chinese calligraphy. This simple and limpid œuvre subtly fuses Taoist wisdom, modern conceptual irony and the tragedy of war.
You can view more of Kim’s work at Colossal and InspirationGrid.
The death of web development education. “The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).”
Brent Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be. “Many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.” Simmons’ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.
What’s On Your To-Do List?
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. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project ideas, vague prompts, and even things I don’t want to do but should maybe consider doing anyway at some point. I keep already-completed items on the list so progress can be gauged, noticed, and appreciated.
I was looking at the list today, and thought I’d share some of the items with you:
- Reposting social posts (in comment threads) for members
- Do a podcast
- Publish posts to Instagram. (How?)
- Implement site-wide search
- Make newsletter daily?
- Write a book based on kottke.org
- Sell Blue Line Air Express t-shirts
- Build a Substack competitor
- Make a gift link search engine
Some of these are partly finished or would take very little to implement if I wanted. Some will never happen. Weirdly, some of the projects and site tweaks I most want to make aren’t even on my list. They live only in my head and I mull them over in the shower or while walking until they’re “done” enough to start working on. I guess maybe ideas don’t go on the list unless they’re not that urgent or interesting.
Do you have to-do lists for your creative projects? Care to share an item or two with the group?
Insofar as KDO has a roadmap, which is somewhere between “not at all” and “a general direction into the murky haze of a possible future”. I play things by ear a lot. ↩
The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris. “Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish.”
On commodified, automated intelligence. “If any of these things shake out and we make it out of the near-future, the best you can hope for is a universal basic income, pegged to a meaningful percentage of existing compute.” (God that’s bleak.)
The MN Stolen Neighbors Quilt
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). The quilt was recently unveiled at the MN State Capitol.
The outpouring of support from the community was such that they overshot the initial goal of 11,000 squares, meant to represent the roughly 11,000 Minnesotan immigrants that were kidnapped by ICE between the beginning of Trump’s second term and the end of Operation Metro Surge. In total, more than 150 people have contributed to the effort. The finished quilt is approximately nine feet wide by 33 feet long.
Owen states, “We weren’t considering what happens when you ask Minnesotans for a favor, so the quilt here today actually contains 12,500 squares. Which is amazing. Unfortunately, it is reflective of what has been happening here over the past several months. Since March, ICE has abducted more than 900 Minnesotans and counting.”
This is extremely Minnesotan (complimentary).
In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits her 2015 piece on marriage. “Toward the end, I felt as if the best versions of ourselves had married and the worst versions of ourselves were getting divorced.”
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. “We didn’t add these songs to the album, but they were part of what I was feeling and discovering as we made it.”
What do you you do when the book you’re reading is too large to carry around? “I would like to recommend you to a practice I call Chop That Book Up Into Reasonable Sizes.”
Well. I’m not sure what to think about this. The teaser trailer for Madden, starring Nicolas Cage as John Madden and Christian Bale as Al Davis. Boom?
What if America Went Completely Dark? “We came up with some very astounding numbers. If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” And it could last months?
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. You guess the Wikipedia article from its categories.
Terry Riley’s In C is a composition where any number of musicians improvisationally play 53 melodic fragments in the key of C. This web app lets you play multiple In C live performances layered on top of each other. In C to the power of In C, if you will.
“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.” If, after two warnings, the black card is shown, the match is permanently cancelled.
Lego’s biggest set ever is coming out soon: the 12,060-piece Sagrada Família. $800. It will take as long to build as the actual cathedral — you may not live to see it finished.
What If We Just Stopped? “We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.”
Scans of City Textures
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. On his website, he offers city packs of hundreds of scans for sale and free sample packs as well. You can also check out how he captures the textures on Instagram and YouTube. This is a modern take on stone rubbing.
Homer’s Catalogue of Ships from the Iliad. Where the Greek ships that set out for Troy were from and what they may have looked like. “No Homeric ship survives. What we have are pictures: a handful of painted sherds of the twelfth century BC…”
Practical Engineering: Are beavers actually good at building dams? (A: Yes, duh.)
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. Brad Pitt returns as Booth, the character he played in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but 8 years later. Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, directed by David Fincher.
Trace is a daily puzzle game where you build a “recipe” of up to 4 steps to turn a starting set of numbers into another set of numbers.
The lessons four Islamic polymaths — al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi — hold for students today: “breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way”.
50 Songs That Explain America. “The songs were chosen on the basis that they told me something, sonically or lyrically or emotionally or vibrationally, about America and the idea of America.”
The 🔥🔥🔥 New Social App: NPR Podcasts Comments Section on Spotify
{Ira Glass voice} On this week’s episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPR’s podcasts on Spotify. From the transcript:
And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of any of them. They’re just these clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like— it screamed bots, just because anytime that I see just gibberish in a comment on the internet, I assume it’s a bot. But the fact that they were all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
They tracked down one of the participants and interviewed her:
Ira Glass: And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?
Ella: I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.
Ira Glass: I see. So you picked NPR because it didn’t seem very popular.
Ella: Yeah, so that we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s comments.
Ira Glass: I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.
You can listen to the whole episode here (or wherever you get your podcasts) — it’s the very first segment — or watch a shorter version of it on Instagram or YouTube. (thx, alana)
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