Can’t stop, won’t stop. On the heels of the refreshed Rolodex from earlier in the week, I’ve pushed another “Just Enough Social” feature to the site: members bios & profile pics. Here’s what that looks like:
Members can find a link to their profile by 1) clicking on your name in the menu in the upper righthand corner of the site (or under the hamburger menu on mobile); 2) clicking on the “edit profile” link by your name at the bottom of any post with active comments; or 3) clicking on your name or profile pic in any comment thread. You can change your username, provide a short bio (300 character limit, up to 2 URLs), and upload a profile pic (jpg, png, webp). Check the community guidelines for more advice/info.
The idea with this feature is to provide a lightweight way for KDO members to get to know who they’re conversing with in the comments without having to share that information with the entire internet (in the form of a full-blown social media profile). As a member, you’re in control of what you share in your bio and selecting a profile pic. So here’s how it works right now (i.e. who can see what and where):
- Your member profile pic & display name are fully public…they’re shown next to comments you’ve made on the site (which are also fully public). Profile pics are optional. Display names can be changed from your full name used in your Memberful account — you don’t even need to use your real name (again, see the the community guidelines for more info on this).
- Your bio can only be viewed by other members with active memberships. As a member, you can view another member’s bio by hovering over their name or profile pic in a comment thread or in the comment lists on your profile page. Bios are not public on the internet.
- Your profile page can only be viewed by you. Other members cannot see the posts or comments you’ve faved or the list of comments you’ve made. They also cannot see your email address, your real name (only your display name), membership level, the date you joined, whether you’ll renew, or your member renewal date.
- Inactive members can modify their bios & profile pics, see their own profile pages (with faves & comments), but can’t see other members’ bios.
This level of detail about something that’s existed on the internet since the dawn of time (message board profiles, essentially) might seem tedious, but I’m being clear and straightforward about how this works because I want people to feel comfortable connecting with each other here as much or little as each person wants. Many of you will probably share things like your personal website, job, hobbies, or social media accounts in your bios. Put your Signal handle or email address in there if you want. Gregarious types: put your phone number in your profile if you feel comfortable with that (not recommending that tbh). Or you can be super private or deliberately vague — on KDO, no one knows you’re a dog. Ditto for the profile pic: anything from your headshot to a pet photo of your pet to a Mark Rothko abstract goes — totally up to you.
The comments, the Rolodex, and now member profiles all operate under the same principle: Just Enough Social. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are too overwhelming and stand-alone blogs (like KDO circa 2 years ago) don’t offer much in the way of community. I’m vectoring toward the lightweight Baby Bear option of getting readers talking with each other in the easiest possible way & exploring the larger web community that KDO is a part of. There’s more work to do, but I’m happy with the direction it’s going.
One last thing before I go. I hope this goes without saying with this fine crew but I will say it anyway: if you are going to reach out to someone using the info in their KDO profile/bio, do not be a dick. Someone putting their website address or email in their bio is not an invitation for inappropriate behavior or taking a disagreement outside the bounds of the community guidelines. Enough said about that, I hope.
Ok, I’ll let you go freshen up your profile if you’d like. Lemme know if you have any feedback, questions, concerns, or even attaboys.
The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”.
vintage post from Aug 2016
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Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen after glad-handing some patrons and proceeded to tear into the quality of the food:
Once in the kitchen, the colonel walked over to a vat full of frying chicken pieces and announced, ‘That’s much too black. It should be golden brown. You’re frying for 12 minutes — that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?”
When Mr. Singleton explained that he first mixed boiling water into the instant powdered potatoes, the colonel interrupted. “And then you have wallpaper paste,” he said. “Next suppose you add some of this brown gravy stuff and then you have sludge.” “There’s no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes,” he said after tasting some. “And this cole slaw. This cole slaw! They just won’t listen to me. It should he chopped, not shredded, and it should be made with Miracle Whip. Anything else turns gray. And there should be nothing in it but cabbage. No carrots!”
Sanders sold his company to an investment group in 1964, which took the company public two years later and eventually sold to a company called Heublein. After selling, Sanders officially still worked for the company as an advisor but grew more and more dissatisfied with it, as evidenced by the story above. When the company HQ moved to Tennessee, the Colonel was quoted as saying:
This ain’t no goddam Tennessee Fried Chicken, no matter what some slick, silk-suited son-of-a-bitch says.
And he got sued by a KFC franchisee after he commented:
My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I’ve seen my mother make it.
To the “wallpaper paste” they add some sludge and sell it for 65 or 75 cents a pint. There’s no nutrition in it and the ought not to be allowed to sell it.
And another thing. That new crispy chicken is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.
Colonel Sanders: serving up chicken and sick burns with equal spiciness. (via @mccanner)
“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.)
Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…”
Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.”
Oh wow, I love these photographs of “big tusker” elephants by Johan Siggesson.
I didn’t even know big tuskers were a thing — and they may not be for much longer:
The term “Big Tusker” refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor. Unfortunately, the opportunities for witnessing a big tusker in its natural habitat are slim. As of today, there are approximately 25 individuals left in the world, most of which reside in the Tsavo Conservation Area. It is vital that we make every effort to protect what is arguably the last viable gene pool of “Big Tuskers” remaining.
You can see just how large these elephants’ tusks are compared to those of other elephants in this photo. A great find via Colossal.
Siggesson’s Instagram is worth a look as well…the starkness of the stripes in this zebra photo!
This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard. Includes military activity, climate anomalies, live webcam feeds in warzones, internet outages, active fires, and even the Pentagon Pizza Index.
Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue. “The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of American life that have not yet been optimized into oblivion.”
From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures from the Trump regime’s political appointees. “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team.”
After posting the video on the history of HyperCard the other day, I went down a bit of a HyperCard rabbit hole on the Internet Archive. There are a ton of HyperCard programs, manual & packaging scans, and other resources available on IA; among them:
I also found this version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies:
You can see why people call HyperCard “the web before the web”…it’s all right there.
Also, don’t miss this comment from Keith Dawson (who you may remember from the pioneering tech newsletter Tasty Bits From the Technology Front) on how HyperCard was almost called Wildcard.
Soon after, I took a call from Apple. Would we be willing to give up the name Wildcard, or at least license it for their use on a new product? We discussed it. No.
Wild.
Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute (but you get more time with correct guesses).
In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable:
In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable, and the walk has to be interesting.
I know Speck is talking about cities here, but these four rules — useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting — get at something about living in rural Vermont that I’ve always had trouble articulating: for a place that’s so outdoors-oriented with so many trails and places to hike, a good walk can be difficult to find. I can walk out my door to take a walk that’s sorta safe (walking against traffic on the side of the road — some assholes don’t slow down or move over that much). Comfort is variable: cars kick up dust and my house is surrounded by pretty steep hills. I can’t really walk to anywhere useful, and there aren’t too many possible routes so the interest of the scenery, though beautiful in the summer, gets stale. So then I’m left with driving somewhere to walk, which always just bums me out.
Anyway, this explains why every time I get to walkable city (Tokyo, Rome, NYC, Paris), I am instantly like, yes!! This! This is a walk.
Related reading: Speck is the author of Walkable City (Amazon) and Walkable City Rules (Amazon). (via paul stout)
Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth: “Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6.”
“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument.”
From late January, a 40-minute talk by Rick Steves on “how lessons learned on the road can help Americans better understand and meet the challenges facing Democracy in the USA.”
Timothy Snyder on strongmen. “Once you accept that Trump is strong, you are accepting that you are weaker than Trump. And once you accept the strongman form of politics, you no longer have recourse to laws, or norms, or even basic ideas of decency.”
Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert.
The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk.
Here’s the setlist:
YUHDONTSTOP
Will Be
Much More
Stakes is High
Sunny Storms
Different World
Breakadawn
Pony Ride
A Quick 16 for Mama
Me Myself and I
Feel free to dance at your desk or in your kitchen or wherever you’re listening.
A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis:
Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.
In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.
The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.
While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.
I feel like maybe I should read this. I need some hope about the world.
See also Solnit’s recent Longreads Questionnaire.
TIL about babysitting co-ops. “The premise is simple: Families in the co-op provide each other with free childcare. A point system…ensures that everyone contributes their fair share. Every half an hour is worth one point…”
Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently to make my life (hopefully) easier and have gotten that to a place of “useful enough to test out to find all the bugs & irritations”. So onto some things that you folks can actually use.
When I launched the KDO Rolodex last July, it was a simple list of five recommended sites on the front page of the site. You could refresh to see more sites, but you couldn’t see the whole list all at once. Fun, but lots of room for improvement.
Over the weekend, I launched the full list of sites (186 at the moment) for your perusal. Any visitor to the site can see the sites & people I read to help make KDO. I’ve written before about why this is important to me:
I love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodes…the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing — I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators.
I loved seeing the whole list. So I kept pushing made something I’ve had on my todo list for awhile: I turned the Rolodex into a tiny RSS feed reader. Which I love even more. The feed reader feature is a bit rough around the edges, so I’m making available only to members while we beta test it. Here’s what it looks like:
The three latest posts from each site or person are listed below their name; clicking on a post title will open the post in a new tab. You can obviously click on the name of the site/person to open that in a new tab too. Sites are sorted by most recently updated (this is true of the public listing as well). If you’re a member, please check it out and kick the tires.
For the curious, some details about the implementation. I use Feedbin as my feed reader and they have a pretty good API. So I built a sync system that adds the URLs of the sites in the Rolodex (if they have associated feeds) to Feedbin and tags them with “Rolodex”. Once the feeds are associated with sites, I can just retrieve new entries from those Rolodex-tagged feeds (every 30 min currently). There are a few sites causing problems — for instance, Beehiiv newsletters don’t appear to have RSS feeds by default?1 — and there are some other bugs, but I’m working on it. I’m not including posts from social sites (Bluesky, Mastodon) for now because that’s another level of velocity.
But like I said, I am loving this casual wee feed reader so far. No read/unread statuses, no counts, no folders, no pressure to catch up, no 3-pane view. I’d say 90-95% of the sites on the list work fine — and it doesn’t need to be 100%. Try it out, lemme know what you think.
Thanks to KDO members for helping to fund new features like this. If you’d like to help support the site, check out your membership options here. ✌️
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Acquires Original Disney Adult. “There wouldn’t be a Disney as we know it without this guy, a grown man who has watched Tinker Bell And The Great Fairy Rescue more than 90 times.”
TIL about burping your house, aka lüften (in Germany), aka opening up the windows in your house daily to air it out, even in winter.
The Library of Congress houses an online collection of 48 color photographs of Rome taken in the 1890s. The prints were created using the photochrom process:
The prints look deceptively like color photographs. But when viewed with a magnifying glass the small dots that comprise the ink-based photomechanical image are visible. The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints. Each color in the final print required a separate asphalt-coated lithographic stone, usually a minimum of six stones and often more than ten stones.
If you look at the individual items from the collection (like the shot of the Colosseum), you’ll notice that the photographers were uncredited:
The names of individual photographers are rarely identified on the photochrom prints. Initials on the original negatives and entries in the Detroit Publishing Company ledgers at the Colorado Historical Society sometimes reveal the image creator.
(via open culture)
Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?
LLMs are getting pretty good at unmasking pseudonymous users — their success rate is “far greater” than humans alone can manage.
“Imagine what it was like for women in colonial North America. Life was different depending on where you lived, your background, and how much money you had.”
This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said:
HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder.
There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser.
Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz. “Is your country a notorious bad actor in the Middle East? Has your leader deployed the country’s military domestically against civilians who were protesting peacefully?”
As part of his show called Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis, currently on display in LA, Takashi Murakami painted his own version of Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son. The painting is paired with Murakami’s copies of woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) that influenced the work of Monet and other abstract & impressionist artists.
Here Murakami pairs a copy of Monet’s portrait with twelve enlarged versions of ukiyo-e prints by Kikukawa Eizan and his teacher, Utamaro. Through these examples Murakami shapes a narrative of Monet’s encounter with bijinga. They suggest the elements that Monet absorbed in his study of prints: statuesque three-quarter figures; sensual outlines; parasols viewed from below; cloud-like masses of cherry blossoms; windswept skirts. Another selection, Utamaro’s Yamauba and Kintarō, is an example of a bijinga sub-genre in which women are shown with young children.
As noted by Greg Allen, Murakami used an unusual process for his reproductions:
Copying the originals, Murakami had his own intimate encounter with these features, recognizing in the process the meticulous care taken in pursuit of delicate effects. He interprets them in his signature style, composed of layer upon layer of silkscreened acrylic paint, applied with a special squeegee work application method and coated in a glossy finish.
Remember the “scroll lock” key on your keyboard? What the heck was it for? And why is the same scrolling mechanic showing up in streaming service interfaces?
A painting from 1633 called Vision of Zacharias in the Temple has been newly identified by Rijksmuseum researchers as an authentic Rembrandt van Rijn. It had been decades since the painting was examined — art historians have access to all kinds of new techniques and information about Rembrandt’s methods and materials.
Vision of Zacharias in the Temple was shown at the major Rembrandt exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1898. In 1960, however, it was excluded from Rembrandt’s oeuvre. A year later, a private collector purchased the work, after which it disappeared from public view. Only recently did the current owner contact the Rijksmuseum, allowing the painting to be examined again after 65 years.
The two-year investigation shows that all the pigments used also appear in other paintings by Rembrandt from the same period. The build-up of the paint layers and the handling are likewise consistent with his early work.
The painting is executed on two oak panels from trees grown in the south-east of Lithuania, a common wood source in the seventeenth century. The dimensions and construction correspond to panels Rembrandt frequently used. Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) confirms that the inscribed date “1633” is plausible.
Here’s the back of the painting (the whole analysis is interesting):
Vision of Zacharias in the Temple goes on display at the Rijksmuseum tomorrow. (via the history blog)
vintage post from Jul 2017
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Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.
Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.
(thx, eric)
Recent advances in science have revolutionized our understanding of the Maya, e.g. there’s evidence that “more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire…”
“Supercharged” solar activity and the equinox effect, which “doubles the chance of auroral activity around the spring and fall equinoxes”, could make March 2026 the best month for the northern lights until the mid-2030s.
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
This is the most 2026 thing I’ve ever heard: Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter Bella Freud has a video podcast on YouTube where she interviews people (Cate Blanchette, Lorde, Graydon Carter) while they lie on a psychiatrist’s couch.
A Boston man discovered a document passed down through his family: his ancestor’s freedom papers. “When he touched that paper he was touching the same place his relative touched in 1834.”
Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description:
Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with their astonishing new invention, the cinematograph, made it possible for audiences to voyage around the world in moving pictures for the first time. Featuring gorgeous new restorations of more than 100 comedies, dramas, and travelogues — some famous, some forgotten, and some never before seen — and set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré, this wondrous documentary enables contemporary viewers to imagine an entirely new language of storytelling unfolding film by glorious film.
Just watching the trailer is wild — the restored footage from short films that are 120, 130 years old is astonishing. From a review in Collider:
From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each clip speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory, not simply segregated to being streamed on a small screen, or to suffer through damage that makes these segments feel all that more removed from the present. It’s as if many of these clips have been rescued from an island where they have been deserted for more than a century, carefully dusted off, and allowed finally to be seen in a context that their creators could only have dreamed possible.
Astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi proposes sending a tiny spacecraft to study nearby black holes. “Earth-based lasers would blast the [light] sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light.”
“Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the [company] unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken…without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements…”
There are many possible and plausible answers to this simple question. Timothy Snyder offers a useful perspective in helping answer it:
How do [we] understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know.
These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.
From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy.
Trump is not a conventionally intelligent person and is losing his wits to age, but he remains an instinctual genius. There’s no grand plan here and there doesn’t need to be; he’s just moving towards his flame: enrichment for himself, entrenching power, and instability for everyone else.
“For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”
A 2-hour mix of music compiled by Thom Yorke that plays before Radiohead’s European shows.
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