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!”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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.
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.
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?
Crafting Apps: open-source creative tools · getartcraft.com
Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics, page layout, interface design, word processing, audio, presentations, CAD and spreadsheets: thirteen native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.
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.”
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.
vintage post from Aug 2015
· gift link
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.
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:
Bill McKibben: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This. The human nervous system wasn’t designed for the polycrisis. “Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out.”
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.”
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.”
Any 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.”
vintage post from Oct 2016
· gift link
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
Older posts
Socials & More