In 1996, the Blondin family drove all around the US, blogging about it all before “blog” was even a word. “We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.”
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Chasing a Plane Across the Moon
Agustín Ferrando Trenchi became a little obsessed with the moon as a kid. As an adult, he’s taken tons of photos and hundreds of hours of footage of the moon. After seeing an airplane fly close to the moon while he filmed, Trenchi began a quest to capture a plane flying across the face of the moon.
Over the course of 10 years, he took photos and videos of birds and statues silhouetted by the moon, but planes eluded him.
I realized if I wanted to film this, I was going to have to try a different approach. It wasn’t just going to happen by accident. So in February of this year, taking advantage of being in London, I decided to go near one of the busiest airports in the world to maximize my odds as much as possible.
But while we were on our way, I had second thoughts. I felt like it took the fun out of it. It didn’t make sense to force it that much either. So we got off.
I’m not going to spoil the video, but the whole thing is just so lovely — a meditation on obsessions, journeys, and finding meaning in your life. (via virginia)
Abolish Frat Culture. “This is going to be uncomfortable for anyone with a kid in a fraternity to hear: If your son finds himself in a group that would send a ‘free pussy’ text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listAny Human Ever randomly picks an average person from some point in human history and tells you about what their life was like. Mine was a woman born in 1547: “Of all the sounds of her life, the loudest were thunder and the church bells.”
Stutterer
Stutterer by Benjamin Cleary won the 2016 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film and is now available to view online for free courtesy of the New Yorker.
It’s a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood (Matthew Needham). Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. (For surliness, she rivals the operator in the old Yaz song.) When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter.
Great little film…my heart broke three separate times watching it. Here’s an alternate video if you can’t view the embed at the top of the page.
Mamdani’s “Richard Scarry Socialism” Can Make City Life Simple Again. “It is an astonishing indictment of our times that the cities of our picture books can seem like a radical utopia.”
Bertrand Russell Shows How to Respond to Fascists Who Want to Debate
Late in his life, the prominent English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was subject to an attempt in the early 1960s by Oswald Mosley to provoke him into a debate about the merits of fascism. Before WWII, Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists. BUF had a corps of paramilitary personnel, nicknamed “Blackshirts” for their uniform color, at its disposal and Mosley “publicly espoused antisemitism and sought alliances with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler”.1 After the war and having left Britain in disgrace, he was an early Holocaust denier. From Wikipedia:
Mosley was a pioneer in the emergence of Holocaust-denial. While not denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps, he claimed that they were a necessity to hold “a considerable disaffected population”, where problems were caused by lack of supplies due to “incessant bombing” by the Allies, with bodies burned in gas chambers due to typhus outbreaks, rather than being created by the Nazis to exterminate people. He sought to discredit pictures taken in places like Buchenwald and Belsen. He also claimed that the Holocaust was to be blamed on the Jews and that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about it.
With all that as context, Russell wrote a letter to Oswald in January 1962 emphatically declining his invitation to engage in discourse about fascism:
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
That’s how it’s done.
Fascists and authoritarians are often personally shitty as well. “During his marriage to Cynthia, Mosley engaged in an extended affair with his wife’s younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, while also carrying on a separate affair with their stepmother Grace, who had been a widow since her husband’s death in 1925.” During his marriages, Mosley apparently also slept with the wives of friends, another of his first wife’s sisters, and several other women. ↩
The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? “Electoral dictators — who identify as presidents and prime ministers — hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.”
A short (too short?) video from Little White Lies on designer Saul Bass and his influence on the art of movie title design. They also did videos on Pablo Ferro and Kyle Cooper.
Great Deals on Apple Stuff Today
Just wanted to dip in here to say that Amazon is running another one of their sales for Prime members, which can be a great opportunity to upgrade some tech items at lower prices, especially with the price increases we’ve seen recently. Just a couple of quick things:
- The AirPods Pro 3 are my daily headphones; I really do love them. They’re $179 right now ($249 regular price), which I think is the lowest price they’ve been.
- The 15-inch M5 MacBook Air starts at $1299 (normally $1499). I am typing this on my M4 Air, which is the best computer I’ve ever owned, and the temptation to upgrade is strong.
- If you like your laptops smaller, the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air is also on sale, starting at $1099 (regularly $1299).
You can find more sale items here. I think these deals expire in a few hours, so hop to it.
And also, other stores like Best Buy often do their own deals around this time and Bookshop.org is offering free shipping. I’m reading Marlon James’ The Disappearers right now and, oof, it’s great but harrowing.
“Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.”
Where in the world are typefaces being designed? The US, Germany, and France…but also the UK, Netherlands, and Indonesia.
Wildwood
Laika is the stop-motion animation studio that made Coraline & Kubo and the Two Strings. Their newest film, Wildwood, looks pretty incredible; have a look at the trailer.
Creative Boom recently highlighted some of the process behind the film, which is heavily dependent on physical sets and puppets.
The man tasked with putting the show together was art director Matthew Maldonado, having spent five years designing and building Wildwood’s sets. So I asked him the million dollar question: how much of Wildwood is physical and how much is digital?
Matthew’s response is simple. “Every single thing was made by hand, truly,” he stresses. “And every single thing that we built was either shot in camera or referenced by our effects department. We’ve got some really wide, expansive locations and there’s some digital aspect to all of that. But if it wasn’t on camera, on stage, it’s a scanned asset or a reference asset, specifically made by the artisans in the art department.”
“The show” referenced in the quote above is Wildwood: The Exhibition, due to open soon at the Design Museum in London.
(via justin lind)
AI-generated images don’t have to look like AI-generated images…they can be any style you want. (It’s just going to get more and more difficult to tell…)
In 2005, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the water stored by China’s huge Three Gorges Dam is enough to increase the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds and move the North pole by 0.8 inches. (A 9.1 earthquake had a bigger impact.)
Lots and Lots and Lots of Control Panels
To go along with my recent post about control rooms, here’s the Control Panels group on Flickr, containing almost 3000 photos of control interfaces for all kinds of things.
You’ll see some of the same photos as in the Control Rooms group, but when you get past the first couple of pages, there’s more variety: fiddly knobs, entire walls of nearly identical switches, dials, inscrutable gauges, soda machine interfaces, bump it and you might die buttons, computers with switches, Swinging Fingers (!!), and many more…
How much Gorton did you spot?
The Job Trail, a web game about making it through 52 weeks as a laid-off creative worker. Based on The Oregon Trail. My first try: “You have died of burnout. Week 13. 51 applications, 1 ghosting.”
Blue Planet III
BBC Earth is returning to the ocean. 25 years after the first installment, the legendary naturalist, presenter, and centenarian David Attenborough narrates Blue Planet III. This first look video, backed by a song Hans Zimmer & Jade Thirwall, is teeming with stunning footage of sea life of all sorts.
Ed Yong called BPIII’s predecessor the best nature series ever:
Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series that the BBC has ever produced.
It is almost transcendentally good—the product of a team that, after six decades of experience, is now at the height of its powers. The Blue Planet II crew traveled to 39 countries to capture over 6,000 hours of footage. They stuck their cameras into coral crevices. They hung off speedboats to film dolphins rocketing behind them. They literally stared into the abyss—and then repeatedly entered it. The resulting episodes, each narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark velvety tones, are hour-long distillations of wonder, featuring sequences that would be breathtaking had earlier shots left you with any breath to take away.
Blue Planet III will air sometime later in the year in the UK; not so sure about timelines in other locations at this point.
118 Things to Do Instead of Doomscrolling. Including “put together a puzzle”, “go for a bike ride”, “hold a plank for as long as you can — even if it’s only a second”, and “make your own limoncello”.
From a tongue-in-cheek Google Japan, a conveyor belt keyboard, where the keys move and your hand stays still while typing. One of several unusual keyboards released by the company. You can even build your own.
Silent Friend
Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description:
In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on lockdown in 2020 turns to it as he tries to push the boundaries of perception.
It’s got a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and some good reviews on Letterboxd, including this one from film reviewer David Ehrlich:
me before seeing this movie: that is a big tree.
me after seeing this movie: that is a giant, hormonal, unbearably horned up 900-year-old virgin that understands loneliness on a level that most humans could never even begin to imagine.
The trailer and description put me in mind of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.
Things That Are Good to Do. Including “admit what you don’t know”, “put the cart away”, “rest before you’re exhausted” (I often get this one wrong), and “walk home if you can”.
The Ku Klux Klan is rebranding itself as The Knights Party, centered on “family and faith” along with proud & open white supremacy. 💩🖕
Watch One of Radiohead’s Best Live Shows: Bonnaroo 2006
Back in ~2008, right on the cusp of stardom, Lady Gaga did a crate-digging video in a London record shop and named Radiohead’s set at Bonnaroo 2006 as her favorite show she’s ever been to. A post-fame Gaga reaffirmed her choice in this 2018 Vogue interview. Many share her opinion. Here’s the official concert video of that Bonnaroo show so you can judge for yourself.
The setlist for the show:
There There
2+2=5
15 Step
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Exit Music (For a Film)
Kid A
Dollars & Cents
Videotape
No Surprises
Paranoid Android
The Gloaming
The National Anthem
Climbing Up The Walls
Nude
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
The Bends
Myxomatosis
How To Disappear CompletelyYou And Whose Army?
Pyramid Song
Like Spinning Plates
Fake Plastic Trees
Bodysnatchers
Lucky
Idioteque
Karma PoliceHouse of Cards
Everything In Its Right Place
Even the band loved it:
The lore surrounding this show is well-documented: It was among the longest live sets the band has ever played, both by duration (two hours and twenty minutes) and number of songs (29). It featured early, alternate arrangements of six unreleased tracks that would go on to anchor ‘In Rainbows’ the following year. Thom Yorke said it was “his favourite gig for years and years and years.” Jonny Greenwood called it “the best festival experience I’ve ever had in America.”
I’ve mentioned this before but my favorite show was also Radiohead, in Oxford in 2001. It rained and they played Creep for the first time in three years; the crowd exploded.
During the pandemic, the band uploaded a number of full-length videos of their live shows to YouTube. Enjoy.
An interesting long profile of Mark Zuckerberg. “Mark is the fucking Terminator. He’s actually not an asshole, which is interesting. He’s not a miserable fuck. But his source of advantage is he’s never happy. He just doesn’t fucking stop.”
The Best Sandwich Shop in America?
YouTuber Rob Martinez travelled to Columbus, Ohio to tell the story of what he calls the best sandwich shop in America, Wario’s Beef and Pork. Here’s part of the transcript of owner Stephan Madias talking about the restaurant:
For the longest time, especially the first two years, I was very protective of how the bread was sliced and I would not let anybody cut bread. It’s about the experience. I think about me eating the sandwich. Think about the things that happen when you get a big sandwich. You take that first bite into it. I want you to be able to, like, move this thing around. Take bites from the top, the bottom, the front, the back. And it’s held.
We’re very particular, and it’s part of the reason why we don’t have the bakery cut the bread is cuz we want to sort through our things. Yes, we have volume. Yes, we have speed, but [my employees] all have the integrity that we started when we only sold five sandwiches an hour when the shop first started. That’s part of being committed to the fundamentals and being consistent.
The devil’s in the details, man. You got to take the extra minute to do it. Some people like it. Some people complain about it.
As a fellow sandwich overthinker, I love the ethos and the process. And man, those sandwiches do look amazing — tomato butter, homemade whiz for the cheese steaks, a chicken caesar sandwich, what is not to like?
Richard Linklater is directing a film adaptation of the Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along. Shooting started in 2019 and will continue until 2040 to match the musical’s 20-year period. (Linklater’s Boyhood was shot over 12 years.)
Mapsnap is a program designed to take old Sanborn insurance maps (block-by-block maps of every US city from 1870-1960) and aligning them with modern maps.
JumpStar is the world’s strongest Chinese Checkers AI engine. Designed to emulate AlphaGo and Stockfish but for Chinese Checkers. The model was trained entirely on a M4 MacBook. You can play it online or on iOS.
Random TV Time: watch old TV pulled from the Internet Archive. 17 channels to surf, including cartoons, 1960s TV, and one that’s only old commercials.
Designer Giorgia Lupi: In Defense of the Detour. “I fear that A.I. is undermining what makes us most human — the ability to translate lived experience and nuanced thoughts into a unique point of view…”
The Future Library
A few years ago, in a forest just outside of Oslo, 1000 trees were planted. In 2114, after a century of growth, the trees will be cut down and made into paper for an anthology of books. Meet the Future Library, an artwork by Katie Paterson.
Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the one hundred year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future.
The first three writers to contribute texts are Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Icelandic novelist Sjón. Atwood said of her participation:
How strange it is to think of my own voice — silent by then for a long time — suddenly being awakened, after a hundred years. What is the first thing that voice will say, as a not-yet-embodied hand draws it out of its container and opens it to the first page?
See also the John Malkovich movie that no one will see for 100 years. The Future Library also has something in common with the (possibly apocryphal) story of the grove of oak trees specifically planted to replace the massive ceiling beams in the dining hall at Oxford hundreds of years in the future. Stewart Brand told the story in the TV adaptation of How Buildings Learn.
One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.
He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”
Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
Update: Karl Ove Knausgaard has become the 6th contributor to the library. (via @tedgioia)
Stalin Boys is a short documentary about a Joseph Stalin-obsessed middle-schooler from a tiny Texas town who writes a play about the Soviet dictator and enlists his three friends to stage it for the Texas State History Fair. Free to watch online.
Nappy is a site offering free stock photos of Black and brown people. (The site says they’re going offline in a few months due to a falloff in demand bc of AI. Maybe Internet Archive can do their thing here?)
O Superman, Laurie Anderson
O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics:
‘Cause when love is gone
There’s always justice
And when justice is gone
There’s always force
And when force is gone
There’s always Mom
Hi, MomSo hold me, Mom
In your long arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
In your automatic arms
Your electronic arms
In your arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
Your petrochemical arms
Your military arms
In your electronic arms
Ah, ah, ah, ah
60 Minutes did a profile of Anderson a few years ago and she explained the meaning of the song (to her):
This is a song about how basically technology cannot save you. It’s about a lot of things: justice, safety, power.
As a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, this kind of music wasn’t available to me, so I only actually heard this for the first time fairly recently. So I thought I’d post it in case you hadn’t really heard it either — that and the message & meaning it carries is relevant these days.
I also liked this rendition of it, slowed down and reverbed. There are also several O Superman remixes on Soundcloud of varying quality.
Mapping Tariffs explores “the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities at the neighbourhood and city level”.
After working hard taking away the civil rights of people and granting more powers to our Mob Boss President, Chief Justice John Roberts retreats to a Maine island for the summer. But lately, neighbors are protesting his presence there. Good! No peace!
The 2026 Comedy Wildlife Awards Finalists
The Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the finalists for the 2026 competition and, well, these awards never miss. You can almost hear the background music for some of these…
Is American Culture Simply Bad Now? I’ve been hanging with my friend Matt while he’s here in Tokyo for a trip, which he refers to as his “America is Cooked Tour” as he keeps running across things that are much better here.
Back in 2005, a group of restorers established a hidden workshop in Paris’s Panthéon and snuck into the building for a whole year to repair an antique clock. “The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer…” Wild!
OrySnack: The Bar Where Bartenders Work From Home. Small robot servers in this Japanese bar are controlled by people who can only work from home because of disability or illness.
The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century
Last week, the NY Times dropped a list of The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century, as picked by a panel of “more than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV”. The rankings have already been dissected online six ways from Sunday, but the link got lost in my forest of browser tabs and so here it is, a bit late but still interesting.
Here are some of my personal favorites from the list and arrowed opinions on whether some should be higher or lower on the list: Halt and Catch Fire (↑), Reservation Dogs (↑), Shogun (↑↑↑), The Great British Bake Off, Planet Earth, Downton Abbey (↓), The Good Place (↑), Normal People, Schitt’s Creek, Andor (↑↑), Severance (↓), Band of Brothers (↑), Deadwood (↑), The Crown (↓), Chernobyl (↑), The Americans (↑), Six Feet Under (↓), Girls (↓), Arrested Development, The Office (US), 30 Rock, Game of Thrones, Fleabag (↑), Succession, Mad Men, The Wire (↑), and Breaking Bad (↓).
There are many excellent shows that didn’t make the list — the one that immediately pops into my mind is My Brilliant Friend. As for stuff that’s on there that perhaps could be replaced with something more worthy, I’ll hold my tongue. I do think the inclusion of some of the more recent shows on the list will not age well when this is looked back on in, say, 10 years.
Don’t Cook That: a collection of real recipes that you shouldn’t make. Cholera remedy recipe calls for “equal parts laudanum, rhubarb, double-strength capsicum, camphor and spirits of nitre”.
So Many Amazing Control Rooms
From the Control Rooms group on Flickr. 🤩 So many little details in all of these photos to pore over.
See also Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green, The User Experience Design of Lego Interface Panels, Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center (c. 1966), and Lots and Lots of Control Panels.
The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism. “What’s this middle bit?” “Why, that’s the Battle of Legitimate Concerns!”
“Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever’s ‘cool’ until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base. Then they move on to the next thing, leaving the original to die…” 🎯
Prince Was One of the First Players of The Oregon Trail
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.
The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the history class that Rawitsch was student teaching. While developing the game, Heinemann & Dillenberger tested it out with some kids at the high school at which they were student teaching…and one of those kids was Prince Rogers Nelson.
Paul would later say that he heard about Prince before he even met him. One of the other teachers told him, “There’s this kid here who basically is running his own business. He’s this amazing musician who plays all these instruments and writes his own songs.” And then later, Paul realized that that was Prince.
But listen to Hicks tell the whole thing…it’s a good story. And if you want to hear a lot more of the story, here’s Gaming Historian’s feature-length documentary (the Prince anecdote is at ~24:00).
You can play the familar 1980s version of the The Oregon Trail online.
A “Kelvin wave” powered by El Niño will soon raise sea levels in California “by half a foot or more”. “It’s ‘highly probable’ that California will soon witness its highest sea levels ever recorded.”
The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go. “Why be financially independent, [editor in chief Sophia Dasser] wondered, if not to publish sharp-edged views of the biggest campus issues?”
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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