Illustrator and writer Luis Mendo’s second book is out. “The only website that once a year becomes a book.” I have Book One and it’s lovely…
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Chromatic Inkscapes
I love these digital illustrations by Adam Fuhrer; he calls them chromatic aberrations. It was difficult to narrow them down to the few favorites above. I posted about Fuhrer’s pen plotted art a couple of years ago…I like the direction he’s taking this.
Margaret Atwood in 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book. “It’s very hard to control what young people get their hands on, especially if they’re told something is too old for them, or too evil, or too immoral.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listRoooobot. Huuuuuman.
This woman does some amazing things with a series of white rings — lots of precision optical illusions.
It’s mesmerizing watching people moving like machines — an interesting psychological thing. Like Avantgardey, which if you haven’t heard of them (just because they show up all the time on my Instagram doesn’t mean that happens for everyone), you should check them out:
(via @sevlu)
The trailer for Blade Runner 2099, a new limited series premiering in late November and starring Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer.
Going 94 MPH on a Skateboard (New World Record)
Diego Poncelet recently set a new world record for the fastest speed on a skateboard. The old record was 146.7 km/h (91.2 mph) and he hit 151.8 km/h (94.3 mph). There are a couple of parts you can skip, but watching most of the video is worth it because you see the process and can compare how truly insanely fast he is moving during the final run — I found myself holding my breath for the last minute or so.
Also, I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.
I just found the first time I posted about speed skateboarding on KDO: this post from 2008. Less aerodynamic, more gonzo, and the cameraman is also on a skateboard going equally fast.
I played (not) solitaire for more hands than I would care to admit. “A multiplayer game where the multiplayer was about companionship, empathy, and comfort, instead of competition or even interaction.”
Beautiful Seamless Ride
A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)
Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.
How Hunting Owls Use Sound to “See” Under the Snow
The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter.
The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of scampering feet is inaudible to us. But not to him. With the help of a special acoustic camera equipped with 60 highly sensitive microphones, we can see what the owl is hearing.
The footage in this video is amazing — and so is the owl’s sense of hearing. A YouTube commenter says “Cat software in Bird hardware. Bad news for the Rodents.” You can watch a short video on the science behind owl hunting techniques and watch the whole episode this is from about how animals use sound (but only in Canada, it seems…VPN works fine tho).
The only problem with this video is that now I want two hours of just closeup footage of the owl’s face and it flying directly towards the camera. Those eyes! And its mid-flight loaf-of-white-bread-shaped body! I would also like the owl to be my friend.
BTW, this clip is from a show called The Nature of Things, which is a CBC nature series that’s been going since 1960. A good thing to have on your radar if you’re looking for well-produced science & nature programs.
How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”
Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!
Where You Should Live: Five Factors to Keep in Mind
I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think these are universal (e.g. people who live in rural areas likely prioritize other needs) or even necessarily the most important considerations (climate, sunlight, crime, schools), but they resonated with me.
1. Your 10-minute radius matters more than almost anything else about where you live: Think about what you can get to in ten minutes without making it a whole thing. I can get coffee, get groceries, go to a park, and go to a friend’s place.
This is the biggest thing that was missing for me living in rural VT for the past 10 years. My 10-minute radius required a car to access and even then was not teeming with options. My 10-minute radius here in Tokyo is, obviously, bonkers. It makes me so happy. A photo I took inside my 10-minute area a couple of weeks ago:
2. More space can give you a smaller life: This one I’ll actually argue about. Idk why we’re obsessed with getting more sq footage, but sometimes the bigger house means you spend way more time inside it. House, car, work, car, house. Meanwhile, someone in a tiny apartment might walk downstairs, grab coffee, run into someone they know, walk to dinner, stop at the park. Technically they have less space. Butttttt their actual life might be way bigger.
One of the things living in NYC taught me was how to treat the city as an extension of your home. I’m not sure people who live in rural and suburban areas think that way about the relationship between their homes and locations.
3. The best neighborhood amenity might literally just be other people outside. […] You don’t even need to talk to any of them. Just seeing other people out living their lives makes you feel like you’re part of something.
Yep. I have been so missing this in my life. My first few days here in Tokyo, I was craving being in huge crowds of humanity so much that I spent a lot of time in ultra-busy areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya.
4. Moving somewhere new will change you, just probably not in the way you think: trust me, I still tend to do this. I think that a new city can solve all my problems. But it will not. You’re still going to be you.
Haha, yeeeeep. Even a month into my travels, I have been disappointed to learn that my bad habits are still with me. Would really like to speak to the manager about that one…
5. Where your friends live should influence where you live way more than we admit: I don’t even feel the need to explain this one. Relationships are the most important thing you’ll do in your life. Go live near people that light you up
Even though it’s halfway across the world from where I’ve been living for the past 50+ years, I’ve seen more friends here in Japan in the past month than in the past 3 months in VT. It’s not going to be like that everywhere I go and I’m not near the most important folks in my life here, but it’s nice to have it while I’m here.
Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.
Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.
The Muffled Thud of Fire in the Hole
From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph:
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him — under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself — to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”
Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the woods?” Signal president Meredith Whittaker: “Look, I know social media wants this. I know you guys want this little clip. But what the fuck? What the fuck?? Both are bad!”
May Peace Prevail on Earth
Here are some photos I’ve taken during my time in Tokyo so far. I’ve been posting new stuff more or less daily to Instagram. Somehow I’m already about halfway through my stay.
Somehow these images both capture and don’t even come close to capturing my experience here. That kinda place, I guess.
“‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong.” Digger is fascinating — I can’t remember another big movie where public opinion has been so divided (it’s either genius or garbage). I saw it with a friend and he loved it so much he went again.
Anthropic says that, as of Sept ‘26, they were merging 30,000 code changes per day, a 12-fold increase from just four months earlier. The volume increased so much that they wrote their own Git alternative.
Whoa, the Lion Nebula!
NASA’s JWST recently snapped this image of the Lion Nebula (NGC 2392).
Massive stars undergo supernova explosions at the end of their lives, but these kinds of events are few and far in between. Most of the universe’s stars have lower masses, like the one belonging to NGC 2392. When a lower-mass star can no longer sustain itself with nuclear reactions in its core, the star becomes unstable and pulsates, losing its mass by shedding its outer layers, which then turn into shells of gas and dust called a planetary nebula. (Stars at this life stage are responsible for producing much of the universe’s observable dust.) The star’s radiation drives the ejected material away, leaving behind the very hot stellar core, also known as a white dwarf.
In the Lion Nebula’s case, the death of the oxygen-rich central star has left behind a white dwarf that is “cooking” everything from the inside and producing a bubble of ionized gas as it does. The gas bubble, which forms the lion’s face, is expanding over time and destroying dust that is in its path. Understanding why the swept-up gas has a complex structure of rings and shells, a common feature in planetary nebulae, is an ongoing endeavor.
The mane of the lion is the interior of a dust shell that is being illuminated by the white dwarf at the center. The tufts of hair, which look like cometary tails of material, are compact clumps of dust that have survived the stellar core’s radiation and protect the material that lies behind them.
Webb’s imagery “freezes” this planetary nebula in time, though the star’s death, and its tumultuous effects, go on. NGC 2392 will continue to undergo changes as its gas and dust migrate away from the stellar core. Astronomers estimate the lion will eventually disperse in approximately 10,000 years — a relatively short period in astronomical terms.
The Hubble imaged the nebula in 2000 in visible light, but the JWST’s infrared cameras are higher resolution and better at capturing the gas and dust details.
Discovered by William Herschel in 1787 and “visible with a small telescope”, the nebula was called the Eskimo Nebula until recently — NASA discontinued using that name in 2020 because “certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful”. (via robin sloan)
The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse. “When perseverance turns against us, quitting isn’t just a way out. Often, it’s the first step to something better. A pivot. A break. A chance to go further — or be free.”
“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.” OpenAI recently released 350+ proofs of mathematical theorems, all in one go. “I imagine many mathematicians, like me, felt like they got punched in the stomach yesterday,”
The first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. I love Gerwig and I know this will be good, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be great. (I still forever have “Chronicwhatcles of Narnia” stuck in my head tho…)
Girls is coming back to HBO for a 5-episode run. Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, and Andrew Rannells are all returning. I loved this show and will tune in for sure.
So Many Different Mes
Japanese photographer and artist Tomoko Sawada works primarily in self-portraiture. For her first project, she visited ID photo booths to take hundreds of photos of herself, dressed, posed, and presented differently. Eugenie Shin of Tokyo Weekender calls that 1998 project, ID 400, “a dizzying grid of strangers who are all actually the same woman”.
For subsequent projects, Sawada says she’s continued to “examine the relationship between outer appearance and inner self through different concepts”.
(via tokyo weekender)
ArtCraft is building open source versions of what looks like most of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. Oh, and a word processor and a spreadsheet app because why not?
Reelizer: A Trove of Movie Art
Reelizer is a personal project by Roger Erik Tinch that is a collection of movie art: prints, posters, illustrations, albums, books, covers, etc. Careful, you can lose hours here…Tinch has a great eye. A few of my favorites:
Thing I am going to make time for in the next few days: Harry Styles and Thom Yorke in conversation. “My laptop has been dead for about 6 years. I don’t know where my charger is.” There’s an accompanying Rolling Stone cover story.
The People Holding Up the Internet. Amazing to see how much of the modern internet still depends on the volunteer work of individual people. 4 billion phones rely on the time zone database, a text file edited by just two people in their spare time.
Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive. “Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer…”
“I’m forced to admit that these AI-decompiled web browser ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: CE, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Skate 3, and The Simpsons: Hit and Run actually seem to run very well.”
Improving Conversation on KDO
I’ve been really pleased with how KDO comments are working lately — you folks have been lively, informative, fun, and pushing conversations beyond what I can individually manage. And the vibe of the threads are more closely matching the vibe of the community guidelines. All good! The one-size-fits-all-ness of social media has its advantages, but some are looking for quieter spaces and more orientation around community and shared sensibilities. Through the comments, KDO has been growing into one of those places.
Note: comment threads on the site are free for everyone to read, but in order to participate, you need to be a KDO member. Join us if you fancy a group chat.
In order to give us a few more tools to facilitate conversations, I’ve been working on some new stuff over the past few days and some of it just went live:
- Improved thread design. More compact (not so much indentation) and better on mobile especially. I feel like some of the spacing isn’t quite right yet, but that’s easy to tweak as I see how it works on real threads. I spent a lot of time trying to get the right mix of simplicity and info into the comment design, so I hope it works.
- Images. You can add images/photos to your replies now — just paste or drag them into the comment editor or use the image button in the toolbar. You get two images per comment. From the community guidelines: “Posting images and embeds (video and audio) should safely err on the side of utility. I love Phillip J. Fry waving a wad of cash and saying ‘Shut Up And Take My Money!’ as much as the next person, but we’re not doing reaction GIFs/images/videos here.” Animated gifs will not work.
- Embeds. Pasting a link to a YouTube video, Vimeo video, or SoundCloud audio on its own line will embed the appropriate player right into your comment. You get two embeds per comment.
- Replies. You can reply to individual comments now. Threading is still only 1 level deep (i.e. there are “top” comments and replies indented under those top comments) but each reply now tracks the comment you’re replying to. (This is difficult to explain! But hopefully easy to understand when you’re looking at a comment thread.)
- Better reply tracking in “latest” and “popular” sorts. When comment threads reach a certain number of comments, you’re able to sort them reverse chronologically or by number of faves. Previously, it was difficult to distinguish “top” comments from replies to comments (which often read as incomprehensible outside of their context). Now, each reply shows a) who it’s in reply to, and b) a snippet of the replied-to comment (which you can click to read in the thread). Again, difficult to explain (we’re firmly into “how the sausage is made” territory here…my eyes are glazing over re-reading this…) but easier to use — I hope!
- Mentions. You can mention another member in a comment. Typing “@” and a couple of characters will bring up a list of members who have been recently active on the site — select the one you want and their name will appear in your comment. Their name will have a dotted line under it and hovering over it will bring up their profile bio (if they have one). I hope this will be useful in referencing and connecting replies in threads (e.g. “I love what Franklin G. said in his comment and will be thinking about Maggie W.’s reply as well…”) and also between threads (e.g. “This reminds me of something Darcy Wong wrote last week…”).
- Reposting social media posts. I’ve been able to do this in threads for quite awhile (here’s a recent example) and I just opened it up for everyone else. Post a public Bluesky or Mastodon link as the only thing in the comment box and it will automagically expand to a repost (including up to two images from the post). No idea if anyone else will use this! But it’s there.
- Profile page changes. I reorganized how the profile page works. (If you’re a member, you can access your profile page in the menu under your name at the top-right of the page.) There are now three tabs: Comments (lists the most recent comments you’ve made on the site), Faves (list of posts and comments you’ve faved), and Mentions (list of comments you’re mentioned in and replies to your comments). For comments in the Comments and Faves views, I’ve also made it easier to see what’s being replied to.
Ok, I think that’s it? At least for the public-facing stuff. I’ve also been tweaking the KDO post editor (Movable Type is now completely out of the loop, RIP to a real one) and it’s getting goooood. I’ve been streamlining the posting process, especially for adding images and doing Quick Links, and it’s really a pleasure to create posts now. More to do on this front as well.
Anyway, feel free to try some of the new stuff out in the comments — I’m hoping this will make conversations easier to follow, both for participants and readers. I’ve got some ideas for further improvements, but I wanted to get these out here for now. As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome! And thanks for your membership support — it means I can spend time making improvements like this.
Beautiful Hand-Painted Globes
Bellerby & Co. Globemakers are one of the world’s last remaining makers of globes by hand. Their Instagram account is chock full of their handiwork.
If I could afford it (£2000!), I’d get The Livingstone globe in Prussian blue. Beautiful and wonderful craftsmanship.
Prompting as Self-Portrait. “We need the blank page and the silence to go deeper into our thoughts and our understanding of ourselves and of the world.”
Nearly 4M Records of Enslaved People in 20 Former British Colonies Now Searchable Online. “The Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers contains about 300,000 pages recording enslaved people across former British colonial dependencies…”
Why I Did Not Leave Nazi Germany in Time. “Many of us feared the shock of being uprooted and tried to avoid it if at all possible. But to understand this reaction…I say that nobody could possibly have foreseen the ‘final solution.’”
The Worst Way To Get To Space. I’d never heard the story of the manhole cover possibly propelled into orbit by a nuclear blast — it was estimated to be moving at ~42 miles/sec. “Some speculated it became the first manmade object to enter Earth’s orbit.”
All the Percents on Star Trek: TNG
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline)
My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and wrote up his experience and observations. “I don’t think humans were ever meant to experience that many eyes and faces at once, so it was a unique experience.”
Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-wise. Incl. “Could be found on the second to last line of an optometrist’s vision chart” and “The sound a cow might make when spanked”.
Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by Anna Kodé. Looking forward to this one…Kodé is one of my favorite journalists covering urban culture. “Observation…is not a passive act, but a powerful and radical way of connecting…”
Every US Electrical Outlet Explained
This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung)
Japanese book rave. A club in Tokyo spread carpets on the dance floor, played ambient music, and invited daytime clubgoers to chill out and read. Would 100% frequent a bookstore/cafe that did this regularly.
Weball allows you to roll up websites into a Katamari ball. You can even roll up KDO. This is too much fun. See also Destroy Any Website.
Is This Weird Quiz Game the Toughest F1 Video Game Ever?
It might be that this text-only quiz game from 1993 is the most challenging F1 video game of all time. Here are a couple of the 23 questions from Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz:
3. Which team was the best in the 80’s?
Statistically, it’s McLaren, but that’s not a correct answer. The correct answer is “Mc Laren.”
4. Who is the youngest champion of ever?
The correct answer in 1993 was Emerson Fittipaldi, but his full name cannot be accepted because it contains too many characters for the computer. The game will not take “Fittipaldi,” “Emerson,” or “E Fittipaldi.” The answer must be “Fit.”
The real quiz, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear.
Berger is a former F1 driver, and the game is so weird and forgotten that it’s not even listed on his Wikipedia page — and it might not have been an official game at all. What is listed on his Wikipedia page is the epic prank war he waged against teammate Ayrton Senna:
In an Australian hotel room, Berger filled Senna’s bed with frogs. An infuriated Senna confronted Berger, who replied, “Did you find the snake?” Senna retaliated by putting strong-smelling French cheese in the air conditioning unit of Berger’s room.
It seems likely it was in this spirit that Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz game was created: as a prank Berger himself would have enjoyed. You can play a cracked version of the C64 game for yourself on the Internet Archive (answer “N” and “N” if you want to play it in hard mode as intended) and watch this gameplay video:
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