This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
If you thought a children’s book called Go the Fuck to Sleep couldn’t get any funnier, here’s the ultimate f-bomb thespian, Samuel L. Jackson, reading it.
Werner Herzog is also voicing an audiobook version of the book. (via devour)
This is a timelapse animation of the surprisingly wobbly Moon over a period of one year.
Note: this is an animation, not a timelapse video…i.e. there’s CG involved. More info here.
The Guardian compiles their list of the 100 best non-fiction books ever written.
In this profile of Chris Evans (aka Captain America) for GQ, Edith Zimmerman catches a movie actor on the rise testing the boundaries of his soon-to-be mega-fame.
Since we’re both single and roughly the same age, it was hard for me not to treat our interview as a sort of date. Surprisingly, Chris did the same, asking all about me, my family, my job, my most recent relationship. And from ten minutes into that first interview, when he reached across the table to punctuate a joke by putting his hand on top of mine, Chris kept up frequent hand holding and lower-back touching, palm kissing and knee squeezing. He’s an attractive movie star, no complaints. I also didn’t know how much I was supposed to respond; when I did, it sometimes felt a little like hitting on the bartender or misconstruing the bartender’s professional fliirting for something more. I wanted to think it was genuine, or that part of it was, because I liked him right away.
Is this the part of a celebrity profile where I go into how blue the star’s eyes are? Because they are very blue.
(via @choire)
I think I’ve featured this robot on the site before (yep, here it is), but she seems to have acquired some new skills. Throwing the mobile phone into the air and catching it is flat-out unbelievable but I liked the quiet deftness of the hand’s rice tweezing.
See also the universal gripper, the salami sorter, the robot who considers towels, and the pancake sorter. (via ★mouser)
A bunch of theaters in NYC (and around the US I would assume) are showing the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring at 7pm tonight.
The event will include a personal introduction from director Peter Jackson captured from the set of his current film and “Lord of the Rings” prequel “The Hobbit,” immediately followed by the feature presentation.
The same thing will happen with Two Towers on June 21 and Return of the King on June 28. Can’t believe Fellowship came out 10 years ago already.
Here’s a Playboy Bunny employee manual from 1969.
Bunnies must allow enough time before going to their assigned rooms to report to the Bunny Mother for appearance inspection. The Bunnies’ hair, nails, shoes, makeup and costume must be “Bunny-perfect” and no Bunny is permitted to begin working unless appearance specifications are met. Demerits may be issued for carelessness in this regard. When the Bunny reports to her scheduled room, the Room Director, too, will note her appearance and suggest improvements if necessary.
NSFW if having “PLAYBOY BUNNY” on your screen in huge pink letters is not safe in your workplace.
Pixar’s not involved — DisneyToon Studios is making it — but a direct-to-video Cars spin-off that features airplanes will go direct-to-video in spring 2013.
This movie is mostly a commercial for the inevitable billion-dollar toy/theme park tie-ins, but in general I am in favor of any kids movie that features White Zombie in the trailer. (via devour)
ps #1: This is probably going to get yanked from YT pretty quick. Sorry.
ps #2: My 3-yo son calls the main character in Cars “Lightening the Queen”. That would be an interesting movie.
There’s a great thread over at Quora with photos of famous people in unexpected places, situations, or company. For example, there’s a photo of a young Bill Clinton meeting John F. Kennedy and one of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla hanging out. My two favorites are a photo of Tank Man captured from an unusual angle and a chilling photo of John Wilkes Booth at Lincoln’s second inauguration, taken a little over a month before he killed Lincoln.
See also awesome people hanging out together. (thx, david)
Not quite sure how to describe this semi-liquid picker-upper in an enticing way, but I can say that my mouth dropped open about 5 seconds in to the demo.
And here I am, still using paper towels like a sucker!
Do you get that funny feeling that you’ve heard Lady Gaga’s Born This Way somewhere before? Maybe when it was called Express Yourself or Waterfalls or God is a DJ?
A+ for the performance too. Everything is a Remix, folks.
From very small array, an infographic look at which movie genres have done well at the box office and at awards time. Dramas have all but vanished from the box office chart in recent years. (thx, jon)
It’s just a person tumbling around inside a hoop. (via ★interesting)
The major types of wine bottle label include Animals Doing Things, Indie Designer, and the Euro-Trash A-hole.
A rare sighting, the A-Hole label is usually more than a label. Often, the whole bottle is some unique shape. Look! I’m a wine bottle in the shape of a shampoo bottle! Deal with it! Whatever. What to Expect: I wouldn’t know, for I do not condone this sort of behavior. And neither should you.
(via @hodgman)
You may remember the New York version. This is the same deal — asking people on the street what song they’re listening to on their headphones — except in London.
(via stellar)
It’s a documentary about Joyce McKinney and the so-called Mormon sex in chains case.
Here it is on Apple Trailers in case the YouTube one gets yanked.
From 1962, Alex Haley interviews Miles Davis for Playboy magazine.
Why is it that people just have to have so much to say about me? It bugs me because I’m not that important. Some critic that didn’t have nothing else to do started this crap about I don’t announce numbers, I don’t look at the audience, I don’t bow or talk to people, I walk off the stage, and all that.
Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player. I only can do one thing — play my horn — and that’s what’s at the bottom of the whole mess. I ain’t no entertainer, and ain’t trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician. Most of what’s said about me is lies in the first place. Everything I do, I got a reason.
The article is SFW but the ads are NSFW…here’s a completely SFW version.
No idea what these have to do with business or being inside business or whatever, but Business Insider has a nice selection of photos by Danny Lyon of Brooklyn in 1974.
This is a very smart take on the Anthony Weiner situation from Amy Davidson at the New Yorker. Davidson argues that Weiner’s recent sextual actions are politically relevant because they demonstrate that he’s not very good at evaluating risk.
Measuring risk is what politicians do for a living — from when they decide to run, to voting to hire policemen or teachers or to go to war. One doesn’t want them to be completely, or even mostly cautious: politicians who never say anything that causes anyone to cringe, and never take a political risk, are useless. […] That is why it is, sad to say, a matter of legitimate interest that Weiner’s wife was pregnant when he sent those tweets. It widens our sense of just how careless he is with the lives of others, particularly those of people who are more vulnerable than he is. That is good to know about a politician; it is distinct from the question of whether someone who lies to his wife will lie to the public and, I’d argue, is more important.
Textify.it is a web app that uses text to make alphabetic pointillist representations of images. I turned a photo of the Most Photographed Barn in America into this:
It’s also available as an iOS app. (via prosthetic knowledge)
I watched this video the other day:
I’m grateful to Bill Simmons for covering my main thoughts about this video so well in his piece about “LeBron’s playoff irrelevancy”. Which are:
1. “Jordan never would have done THAT.” The THAT in question is not bringing it in the playoffs. Taking your foot off the pedal in the playoffs is just not done if you’re supposedly one of the top players in the game.
2. “We made so much fuss about LeBron these past two years and he’s not even the most important dude on his own team.” LeBron might be the better pure player, but Wade is a leader and winner.
The Heat may go on to win the title this year and for six or seven years to come but unless something changes with LeBron’s approach to the game, he’ll never be as great as Jordan was. There’s more to being the best than just talent.
From the just-launched Grantland (Bill Simmons’ new thing w/ ESPN), Chuck Klosterman writes about the greatest sporting event he’s ever witnessed: a 1988 junior college basketball game in North Dakota. Why that game? Because one team, the underdog, started the game with only five players, finished with three players, and won.
The Tribe had opened the season with a full 12-man roster, but people kept quitting or getting hurt or losing their eligibility. By tournament time, they were down to five. It was bizarre to watch them take the court before tip-off — they didn’t have enough bodies for a layup line. They just casually shot around for 20 minutes.
“It was always so goofy to play those guys,” says Keith Braunberger, the Lumberjacks’ point guard in 1987-88. Today, Braunberger owns a Honda dealership in Minot, N.D. “I don’t want to diss them, but — at the time — they were kind of a joke. They would just run and shoot. That was the whole offense. I remember they had one guy who would pull up from half-court if you didn’t pick him up immediately.”
Taking ratings data from Rotten Tomatoes, Slate made a neat little toy called the Hollywood Career-O-Matic that tracks the movie ratings of actors and directors since 1985.
Most Improved: Josh Brolin, Dakota Fanning, and Ken Loach. If the average Hollywood career is a slow decline into mediocrity, an actor or director whose films actually improve deserves special recognition. Among actors with at least 20 films in the Rotten Tomatoes database since 1985, Brolin has seen the greatest increase in average rating from the first half of his career to the second half — an improvement of 28.4 percentage points. Despite Brolin’s early appearance in The Goonies (63 percent), the first half of his career was marred by abominations like The Mod Squad (4 percent), and Hollow Man (27 percent). His later transition into gems like No Country for Old Men (95 percent), Milk (94 percent), and True Grit (96 percent) is a tale of redemption that not even Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (54 percent) could derail. The most improved actress is Fanning, with a 20.1-point increase from such duds as I Am Sam (34 percent) to critical darlings like Coraline (89 percent). Among directors, the award goes to Ken Loach, the British filmmaker whose reviews went from great in the first half of his career (80 percent) to stunning in the second half (88.1 percent).
For actors it would be interesting to see a similar analysis of box office gross and especially a weighted analysis that takes both critical acclaim and box office gross into account…the RT ratings for many actors are all over the place as they bounce from crappy big gross/paycheck blockbusters to lower grossing/paying critical darlings.
I don’t really know why exactly, but I found Steve Jobs’ presentation to the Cupertino City Council about Apple’s proposed new campus fascinating.
Really smart and eco-friendly design. (via @daveg)
A great collection of behind-the-scenes shots from famous movies. Here’s Kubrick and Sellers on the set of Dr. Strangelove:
(via df)
Paragliding photographer George Steinmetz takes beautiful aerial photos of Africa and other places from what is basically a chair attached to a motor and parachute.
Steinmetz was the subject of a New Yorker profile last year.
3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection.
There are lots of ways to show these interactions…the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done. (thx, janelle)
It’s been nearly three months since I launched Stellar in closed beta, so I thought it might be time for a status update.
I’ve been working steadily on the site since then and have made several improvements, notably in the scaling department, but it’s been slow-going because it’s just me and I’m not the world’s quickest programmer. (God, I’m learning a ton though.) Right now I’m working on a pretty major feature (in terms of modification to the site’s backend) that will hopefully make Stellar’s reading experience even better and, more importantly, pave the way for other additions and improvements in the future. After that’s done, there are lots of little improvements I want to push out to upgrade the reading experience in other ways. Can you tell that I’m focused on “the reading experience”?
Next: invites. When I opened up the invite request form in March, 7000 people (!!) signed up in fewer than 24 hours. The invite request form is still closed and I am still working on getting all of those folks off the waiting list (there are thousands still on the list but new invites go out every day). To everyone on the waiting list and to those waiting for the invite request form to open up again, I thank you for your patience. Like I said, I’m letting people in “reeeeally sloooowly”.
And thanks also to everyone for their feedback via email and Twitter…it’s been quite helpful in chasing down bugs and plotting out the future of the site. I’ve also been collecting some of the nice things people have been saying about the site here.
Finally, I’ve set up a Stellar leaderboard of sorts that shows some of the most-faved stuff on the site. It’s a regular Stellar account so you can follow it if you’re signed up. But it’s also publicly available for bookmarking, etc.
Pssst. If you’re on the waiting list (and only if you’re on the waiting list), bug me on Twitter and I’ll try (no promises!) to send an invite your way.
Sometimes children’s author Roald Dahl was not a very nice man. This Recording explains.
His early writing in the short story form was impacted by the political situation on the world stage. He believed in a world government and he was extremely sympathetic to Hitler, Mussolini, and the entire Nazi cause. His stories were filled with caricatures of greedy Jews. One suggests “a little pawnbroker in Housditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone.” In 1951 he visited Germany with Charles Marsh and luxured in Hitler’s former retreat at Berchtesgaden. His dislike of Jews and especially of Zionists was egged on by Marsh’s Israel hatred, later encapsulated in a revolting letter to Marsh where he mocked the head of East London’s B’Nai B’rith Club.
Dahl’s dark side is on display in his short story collection, Tales of the Unexpected, which I read as a teen (twice!) and loved. A more charitable take on Dahl is available at Wikipedia.
This one’s pretty simple: one guy tries to rinse off some shampoo while another guy surreptitiously applies more and more shampoo to the first guy’s head.
(via ★interesting)
Harvard tracked down three people who dropped out of the school in the late 60s to see what had happened to them in the meantime.
“I knew I didn’t want to do city planning, to play in that bureaucratic world,” he continues. “I also knew that if I stayed another semester they would hand me a diploma, and that diploma is going to open a whole lot of doors that I don’t want to go through. And I know that I am not real strong, and if I have that key, at some point I’m going to be seduced and want to go through one of those doors. So by not having the diploma, I will remove the temptation. That actually worked out very well, because I was tempted, more than once.”
That’s from a man who became a world-renowned knife expert.
From the June 1880 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain writes about the telephone, then a relatively recent invention. Or rather, he writes about hearing other people use the telephone:
Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.
David McCandless made a data visualization comparing the Atlantic Ocean fishing stocks in 1900 and in 2000. It’s a literal jawdropper…here’s just a little bit of it:
That’s not just depleted…the fish are just gone. Click through for the full craziness. (via @daveg)
Chris Ayers is designing posters, logos, and magazine spreads for the fictional people, places, and things in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, including movie posters for Himself’s films, a magazine layout for an article on Orin, and this poster for the Whataburger Southwest Junior Invitational tennis tournament:
(via @tcarmody)
A ten-minute video shows clouds forming and dissipating at timelapse speed. Quite relaxing.
Best viewed in fullscreen HD.
Oh McSweeney’s, sometimes you’re just perfect.
You’re actually doing it. I mean, we’ve all dreamt of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you’re actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people that just finished exercising at this pricey sports club. Some of us will do it in private in our homes, or in a hotel room using a hairdryer a stranger might have just used to style their hair for that big business meeting in Denver. But not you. You are not confined to such social norms, norms that usually keep flapping, flag-like balls out of my eyes.
(via delivereads)
I don’t really have an opinion about it, but David Heinemeier Hansson does:
Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account.
At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion?
To which John Gruber adds:
I feel like the Groupon IPO is an elaborate practical joke.
It was a different time and (as DHH notes) a different company, but when Amazon IPOed in 1997, they lost $27.6 million that year on net sales of $147.8 million. That’s an 18% loss for Amazon compared to Groupon’s, hey, 18% loss. Amazon didn’t report their first profit until Q4 2001. No guarantee whether Groupon will ever turn a profit but something to consider anyway. Oh, and probably not relevant but interesting nonetheless: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is an investor in DHH’s company, 37signals…and until recently, 37signals co-founder Jason Fried was on Groupon’s board of directors.
Two NYC subway trains dancing down the tunnels…what a charming little video.
(via ★leela)
Space photography and videography all looks pretty much the same: high contrast, lots of black backgrounds, smooth, and often sterile. Designer Chris Abbas took a bunch of photos from the Cassini Mission (to Saturn) and made them into something that is definitely not your usual NASA video.
(via stellar)
A short interview with Gene Hackman in GQ…he says he’s done with acting.
GQ: Sum up your life in a phrase.
Hackman: “He tried.” I think that’d be fairly accurate.
A little late for Memorial Day but useful for the rest of the summer: how to work the little stringie thing at the top of a bag of charcoal.
I’m talking about those rugged paper bags of hardwood charcoal that are bound at the top with a zipper-like string seam that looks as if it was made to cleanly unravel. Sometimes it doesn’t and then you can yank and yank to no avail. And even when it does there seems to be some magic involved, like the gods of charcoal are smiling down on you.
Service journalism at its finest…now I won’t have to tug on the string like an uncomprehending chimp and then just rip the bag. Ok fine, fail to rip the bag because I’m not strong enough and go inside and get the scissors and cut it. Like a fancy gentleman.
This is a wonderful seven-minute HD video tour of Earth using video shot from orbit.
Look at this neat picture of Great Salt Lake in Utah. And the variation in color? That’s due to an almost a complete blockage of the circulation of the lake by a trestle for a railroad that crosses from one side to the other. It stops the circulation and things get a little bit saltier and certainly saltier at the north end of the lake.
Never knew that about the Great Salt Lake, but you can see the effect on Google Maps as well. (via ★interesting)
Olafur Eliasson’s latest project is now on display at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark…it’s a circular viewing platform with rainbow-hued glass.
These are just a few of the 9000+ TV channel logos collected here.
(thx, tanner)
In his recent commencement address at Harvard Medical School, Atul Gawande argued that medical practitioners need to shift from thinking of themselves as cowboys to thinking of themselves as pit crews.
Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge-because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.
Whoa, I think Shaquille O’Neal just announced his retirement on Twitter:
im retiring Video: http://bit.ly/kvLtE3 #ShaqRetires
A look back at the Magic (and Lakers and Celtics and Cavs and Heat and Suns and Fighting Tigers):
Socials & More