Blackbird Spyplaneâs Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. âIf youâre doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.â Really interesting.
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âThere are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonaldâs, Walmart, Home Depot, Dominoâs, Dunkinâ, and Costco locations combined.”
The âInsaneâ Cinematography of Pride and Prejudice
I love 2005âs Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boydâs 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.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listThe 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, didnât 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.â (CW: there are some potentially upsetting photos on that page.)
Craig Mod made a cool mini-site cataloging all of the long walks heâs 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 thatâs at the core of our creating process. Itâs 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.
âThose thingsâ is a little ambiguous without the context of the videoâŚhe means the wear that develops from use and how people grow attached to those âimperfectionsâ. See also wabi-sabi.
Manchester City guilty over Premier League charges after ÂŁ900m of âshamâ contracts. The âfinancial doping” scheme allowed the clubâs owners to pump large sums of money into the team without appearing to exceed the leagueâs 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 Ĺuvre subtly fuses Taoist wisdom, modern conceptual irony and the tragedy of war.
You can view more of Kimâs 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 isnât the easy choice it used to be. âMany of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.â Simmonsâ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.
Whatâs 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 donât 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 Iâd 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 arenât even on my list. They live only in my head and I mull them over in the shower or while walking until theyâre âdoneâ enough to start working on. I guess maybe ideas donât go on the list unless theyâre 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 futureâ. I play things by ear a lot. âŠ
The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris. “Ironically, Tetrisâs 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.â (God thatâs 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 regimeâs 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 Trumpâs 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, âWe werenât 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.â
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 isnât 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 youâre 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. Iâm 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.â And it could last months?
Now We Can Sing is the first single from Max Richterâs 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 Rileyâs 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.â If, after two warnings, the black card is shown, the match is permanently cancelled.
Legoâs biggest set ever is coming out soon: the 12,060-piece Sagrada FamĂlia. $800. It will take as long to build as the actual cathedral â you may not live to see it finished.
What If We Just Stopped? âWeâre in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where weâve glided well past the edge of the cliff and itâs slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.â
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.
Homerâs 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 ârecipeâ of up to 4 steps to turn a starting set of numbers into another set of numbers.
The lessons four Islamic polymaths â al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi â 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 đĽđĽđĽ New Social App: NPR Podcasts Comments Section on Spotify
{Ira Glass voice} On this weekâs episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPRâs 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) â itâs the very first segment â or watch a shorter version of it on Instagram or YouTube. (thx, alana)
How to rescue an orphaned baby elephant. “The baby elephant needs a mother to run to. And the fact is that the mother is a 30-year-old Nigerian man right now.”
JimbĹchĹ Book Town
I visited JimbĹchĹ today, a neighborhood thatâs home to more than 100 used bookstores. Many sell only Japanese books, but some of them have books in English or sell magazines, posters, or visual books that are interesting to browse no matter what language you speak. I visited maybe 20-30 of the stores; here are four of my favorites.
Sawaguchi Book Store features larger format books on art, design, photography, fashion, and architecture. The walls of the staircase are covered in wonderful posters; it took me awhile to climb those stairs. On the second floor, I found a Princess Mononoke movie poster for ÂĽ50,000; tempting. Also on that floor, thereâs a small seating area where you can enjoy a beverage out of their two vending machines and quietly read a book or look out the window.
Kitazawa Bookstore. A beautiful old bookstore selling mostly English titles. I spent a lot of time in here browsing. I found a nice leather-bound Pride and Prejudice and a copy of Hemingwayâs For Whom the Bell Tolls from the 40s. They had these little notes scattered amongst the shelves gently reminding patrons of the storeâs guidelines: âHere, silence helps words to grow. Hold each book with both hands, as if to embrace it.â Another one: âDonât rush or force the pages wide. Stories, too, are most beautiful when they open slowly.”
Komiyama Shoten is another bookstore specializing in books about art, arcitecture, design, photography, and fashion. I found a cache of old Raygun magazines from the 90s along with a ton of other design books & magazines â on the third floor, I think. On that same floor, they have a collection of erotica and LGBTQ+ books, including a couple of amazing books by Tom of Finland. Lots of great posters throughout the store as well, including a poster for Kids (1995) signed by Larry Clark.
Ohya Shobu features books, woodblock prints, and maps from the Edo and Meiji periods. Super old stuff. The huge map of Edo (Tokyo) in the window is worth the trip by itself. Because everything was so ancient and presumably delicate, I was a bit timid about picking stuff up to look through it, but Iâm gonna go back when Iâm feeling bolder.
Robert Eggers is doing Romeo & Juliet. âWhen it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Elizabethan English (aka early modern English), with lines straight from the play.”
Play Solitaire Alone Together. “Itâs Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet.â A little more social than solitaire, but not by much.
The Museum of Time-Based Art. “My idea for this site is to build an exhaustive, authoritative compendium of every art project that uses time as part of the work.”
I canât remember where I heard about this, but judging by the trailer, Hope by Korean director Na Hong-jin looks pretty good.
Whenâs the Last Time You Cried?
For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive).
I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt ⌠nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasnât totally surprising; by this point, I hadnât cried for more than three years.
Iâd started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend Iâd known since childhood died and I didnât shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing â a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing âin the arms of the angelâ â none of it moved me to tears. I wasnât a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses thatâs like youâve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place Iâd been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.
I started taking an SSRI a few years ago with the goal of giving me enough space to approach lifeâs challenges without feeling completely overwhelmed (by anxiety, by depression). The medication didnât âfixâ meâŚit just kept the train from derailing all the time (sometimes over the smallest things) and gave me the freedom to work through things on my own and with my therapist.1
I was lucky to land on a good med/dose combo on my second try â the first pill I tried made me feel jittery and more anxious than I already was. But my current med does come with a couple of side effects. My sex drive is lower than it was (although that could also be age), which is not altogether unpleasant â a quieter mind in charge of things instead of a libido. The other side effect is that I donât cry anymore, at least not as easily.
Crying is something I took up after my kids were born. Not often, but once every few weeks maybe. I cried when things got hard and for awhile, things were hard a lot of time: pandemic, parenting insecurity, divorce, living somewhere that really didnât suit me, and always always the website & the discomfort of being an odd sort of “public figure”. Watching any movie with parents and kids (esp. dads and sons) got me â heck, even some Marvel movies got me. In sessions with my therapist, I cried when weâd hit a particularly tender vein of pain. As Gould says, the crying was cathartic and felt necessary â I always felt better and clearer afterwards.
But thatâs mostly stopped since Iâve been on my meds. I still get sad, although less so, but I donât cry. Movies donât really get me going anymore. When my kids are struggling (in school, with friends), that gets me the closest. I miss that release â I feel a little pent-up sometimes. But I wouldnât trade crying again for how I felt in the Before Times. Iâm ok not having access to crying â at least for now.
I don’t usually talk about this sort of thing on the site and I don’t quite know why I’m talking about it now â Gouldâs openness makes it easier maybe. And it may help someone else to hear about my experience? âŠ
Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately teach other chimps (often their offspring) to use them for ant dipping, algae fishing, and termite fishing.
Can You Draw a Perfect Circle?
This maddening little web toy on vole.wtf challenges visitors to draw a perfect circle and judges them on how well they do. After dozens of tries with a mouse, I could only manage 92.9% perfection (which looks more like 80% tbh).
Then I tried it on a touchscreen and got much closer: 95.2%. Several more tries with an Apple Pencil bumped it up to 97.7%, after which I retired so as not to waste the entire rest of my afternoon on this.
And of course, here’s the classic video of Alexander Overwijk drawing a perfect freehand circle on the blackboard in about a second.
I love everything about this video â the way he swings his arm to warm up, his drying-the-blackboard flapping motion, and the ease of his perfection. 100.0%. (via sam potts)
Some advice on giving good advice. âNot every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.”
The Earth in the Sky
I love these black & white photos of Devils Tower by Zac Henderson.
A butte of a rare kind of volcanic rock that formed a mile underground 50 million years ago, Devil’s Tower is visible now thanks to erosion of sedimentary rock. The tower features the worldâs largest known example of columnar jointing. Its massive stone columns, as much as 10 feet in diameter, formed as magma cooled and contracted, creating great stress that the rock alleviated through fracturing. The columns come in 5, 6, and 7 sided varieties.
These photographs were captured over the course of 3 days with the ultimate goal of capturing the full moon streaking behind the tower. The black and white images in this series were captured late in the day while waiting for the moon to rise. These photographs were captured in 830nm infrared and helped create intense contrast between direct sunlight and shaded regions of the image. The resulting set of photographs are a study of afternoon light and shadow on the surface of the tower.
If you ever get the chance to see Devils Tower in person, I recommend it. (via colossal)
TIL they can do wing replacements on injured butterfliesâŚjust take a look at this repair video.
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