Great essay about how you should learn a little bit of programming so that you can automate some of the repetitive tasks in your life. “Don’t learn to code – learn to automate.”

As a writer (of sorts) without formal training who hamfistedly “assembles obvious, time-tested concepts about writing from scratch”, I enjoyed @j_zimms’ piece on hot dogs and the “braided essay”.

Published today for the first time: the complete sequence of a human genome.

33 Letters for Ukraine: an Alphabet of Solidarity

A pair of Polish designers have organized a challenge for designers around the world called 33 Letters for Ukraine: to create letterforms of the Ukrainian alphabet “as a sign of solidarity”. Each day until April 6th, a new letter is chosen and featured on their Instagram account — you can see some of the work above. It’s Nice That has a piece on the challenge.

Speaking on the thinking behind 33 Letters, Alina says: “To put it briefly, we have two main goals for the project — promoting the Ukrainian alphabet and encouraging people to donate to organisations helping Ukraine. The Instagram challenge is an essential starting point, and we loved to see so many designers getting involved and expressing their solidarity by drawing the letters. But equally important are tangible results: collecting funds and education.”

To do so, they are hoping to sell original artworks and prints of the letters once the project has finished, and then they plan to exhibit all of the works as part of a fundraiser, though the venue is yet to be confirmed. “There are amazing designers taking part in the challenge, and it would be great to see their work shine also outside of Instagram,” says Alina.

(thx, jackson)

• design
• typography
• Ukraine

“Content moderation clearly actually enables more free speech [because] when you have a totally freeform venue for free speech, it makes many people hold back and not join in.”

It’s tax season and this is your reminder that filing your taxes could be simple but H&R Block and the makers of TurboTax spend millions of dollars a year lobbying against it.

I don’t know John Siracusa (he’s a friend of friends) but lots of what he has to say here, particularly about work/life balance and negotiating your “maximum capacity”, resonated with me. Good luck going indie, @siracusa!

Study: Highlighting COVID-19 racial disparities can reduce support for safety precautions among White U.S. residents. You saw this early on in the pandemic, esp in conservative circles: when we learned who was most at risk, concern evaporated.

Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films

Francis Ford Coppola, a legendary filmmaker no matter how you slice it, sat down recently to talk through his most notable films: The Godfather films, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and a new movie he’s working on called Megalopolis. I really enjoyed this. Some tidbits:

• Coppola didn’t know anything about the Mafia before making The Godfather.
• The studio did not want to call it Godfather Part II. And now explicit sequels like that are ubiquitous.
• He praised the way Marlon Brando thought about ants and termites?!
• I’d missed that Godfather Part III had been recently recut and rechristened “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone”, which is what Coppola wanted to call it all along.

And this is a great way to think about creative projects:

Learning from the great Elia Kazan, I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about — in one word. For “Godfather,” the key word is succession. That’s what the movie is about. Apocalypse Now,” morality. “The Conversation,” privacy.

(via open culture)

• film school
• Francis Ford Coppola
• movies
• The Godfather
• video

Dick Van Dyke Still Dancing at 96!

The Unskippable Opening Credits for Severance

After hearing a buzz from my social circle about Severance on Apple+, I’ve been catching up on it for the past couple of weeks. Here’s the series synopsis:

Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.

I’m going to reserve judgment on the show for my next media diet post, but let’s talk about the opening credits sequence by Oliver Latta. It’s fantastic, an instant addition to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame. Mashable talked to Latta about his process and you can see a few behind the scenes images at Behance. And check out Latta’s other animations…you can definitely see where some of the imagery in the title sequence came from.

Now, back to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame. For me, the opening title sequences that I never ever push the “skip intro” button on are Succession (that music!), Stranger Things (again, that music!), Halt and Catch Fire, The Wire, The Simpsons (gotta catch that couch gag), Transparent, Six Feet Under, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, and The Muppet Show. What would you add to the mix?

Update: Composers of TV themes lament the rise of the “skip intro” button.

Yet there’s one thing that annoys softly spoken Britell: the “Skip intro” facility on streaming services, which was brought in five years ago and lets viewers bypass a show’s opening credits. “I am very against it,” says Britell. “TV theme music is incredibly important. It’s almost a show’s DNA identifier. It serves as an overture to bring you in and sets the tone. I think that formal entrée is crucial.”

Robust words from the man whose Emmy-winning, earwormy Succession work, with its gothic strings, cascading piano and skittering beats, is helping to revive TV theme tunes.

Update: From the excellent Art of the Title, an interview with Latta and designer Teddy Blanks on the Severance opening credits.

• music
• Oliver Latta
• Severance
• TV
• video

Bruce Willis is stepping away from acting because of a diagnosis of aphasia, which (roughly) is a “loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage”. Sad news.

A reformed jewel thief says that you want 4-door sedan with “boring paint” as a getaway car. “You want to blend in. That’s the getaway. You’re not gonna outrun the cops, this is not Baby Driver.”

The Giant Archive Hidden Under the British Countryside

This is very cool: Tom Scott (who you may remember from The Giant Chainmail Box That Stops a House From Dissolving) visits an underground storage facility operated in a working salt mine by a company called Deepstore.

DeepStore was set up in the 1990s because we’ve got the perfect atmosphere down here to store items. The salt creates a naturally occurring dry atmosphere. And of course with the racking, nothing actually comes into contact with the salt. Because this is relatively a shallow mine — we’re around 150 metres, 400-500 feet — and because of the salt bed, it has created this natural ambient temperature of 14-15° along with a relative humidity of 53-55%, which anybody in the archive and storage world knows, naturally occurring, that is absolutely fantastic.

I would love to see more video of just riding through the tunnels in that cavernous place…gonna have to poke around on YouTube to see what I can uncover.

Update: Some more mine storage video here and here. (thx, @four_sides & @zakmahshie)

• Tom Scott
• video

100,000 Stars is a zoomable, draggable simulation of the 119,617 stars in our stellar neighborhood and it works entirely in the browser. Very impressive. “Loading the galaxy, please wait…”

Cherry Blossoms at a Tea Plantation

Stunning drone photo of cherry trees blossoming at a tea plantation in Fujian, China taken by afun阿方. This looks like a still frame from an animated movie…just stunning.

• China
• drones
• photography

Impeccable Digital Recreations of TV Game Show Sets

If you, like me, grew up semi-obsessively watching game shows from the 70s and 80s, you will get a big kick out of this. Photographer Steven Rosenow makes incredibly accurate digital renderings of the sets of old game shows like Jeopardy!, The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Match Game, and Family Feud, which he shares with a Facebook group called Eyes of a Generation. David Friedman shared some of these recreations in his newsletter. Here’s Rosenow’s notes on the Price Is Right set:

This was a fairly difficult set to model in 3D even though I had blueprints of the set to work with, as well as blueprints of CBS Studio 33… Assistance in this project was provided by the current owner of Door No. 2, who bought it from CBS when it was auctioned off.

I might have a new aspiration in life: to be “the current owner of Door No. 2”. (via waxy)

• architecture
• David Friedman
• remix
• Steven Rosenow
• TV

This is the only thing I’ve read about the Smith/Rock Oscar fracas because Wesley Morris wrote it. Smith, Rock, Jada, Denzel, Sean Combs, Questlove, Lupita, the Williams – “a remarkable convergence of Black celebrities”.

The deep belly laugh I desperately needed this morning: Paul Rudd once again pranks Conan O’Brien with the same clip from Mac and Me, this time on a podcast.

In an old timers game in 1982, 75-year-old Luke Appling (who made his MLB debut in 1930) hit a home run off of Warren Spahn. Age schmage – a sweet swing is a sweet swing.

Hannah Gadsby Talks About Her Autism Diagnosis

In an excerpt of her new book, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (out today), Hannah Gadsby talks about her later-in-life diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. As often happens whenever I read about an autistic person’s experience, there’s stuff here that really resonates with me. Like:

My meltdowns had always been a mystery to me, so when I was finally diagnosed, I was able to reframe the way I thought about my strange little outbursts. For a start, I became far more compassionate toward myself, which probably halved the distress of the occasions. In the scheme of my life, I have not had very many meltdowns, however. I’m more of a shutdown kind of autistic. From the outside, a shutdown looks very similar to a sulky tantrum, but it is nothing of the sort. I don’t have control, for a start. And I am certainly not ruminating on any kind of emotional narrative, because I have gone into fight or flight, but in my body that translates into neither fight nor flight; I just shut down like a maxed-out power grid in the middle of a storm.

And:

The problem is that communication skills are developed atypically in autistic people and, most often, very slowly. I have always had difficulty articulating my needs, but as I have got older, my language and social skills have improved a great deal. My ability to regulate, however, has not, and nor have my sensory sensitivities. My eternal struggle with these distressing disabilities often gives the impression to others that I am moody, reactive and inconsistent. I say I want one thing, then moments later I will say that I need the opposite. This is not a reflection of my character, but rather a reflection of my neurobiological functioning. I am unable to intuitively understand what I am feeling, and I can often take a much longer time to process the effects of external circumstances than neurotypical thinkers. But it is they who get impatient with me, and under that pressure I feel forced to guess my needs before I have had time to process stuff in my own way, and so mistakes are made. I can be cold and not know it. I can be hungry and not know it. I can need to go to the bathroom and not know it. I can be sad and not know it. I can feel distressed and not know it. I can be unsafe and not know it. You know how sometimes you put your hand under running water and for a brief moment you don’t know if it is hot or cold? That is every minute of my life. Being perpetually potentially unsafe is a great recipe for anxiety. And — spoiler alert — anxiety is bad.

I do not feel these things as acutely as Gadsby describes, but I do feel them — moodiness, sensory sensitivity, emotional shutdowns, difficulty understanding what I’m feeling, and taking a long time to process things. This line: “…under that pressure I feel forced to guess my needs before I have had time to process stuff in my own way, and so mistakes are made” <— woooooo boy I feel that so so much. Maybe, just maybe, he thinks to himself, this is why I’ve worked by myself for the past 16+ years.

Anyway, I loved Nanette and am looking forward to reading her “memoir situation” soon.

• autism
• books
• Hannah Gadsby
• Nanette
• Ten Steps to Nanette
• TV

Shrinkflation and “5 fewer Doritos”. In order to avoid raising their prices, brands are shrinking the sizes of their products and charging the same price, e.g. Gatorade shrunk their bottles from 32oz to 28oz.

Sheila Bridges’ Harlem Toile

Toile de Jouy is a fabric, typically featuring “romantic pastoral scenes”, that was popular in France in the 18th century — the wealthy covered their walls in it. Interior designer Sheila Bridges developed her own patterns for her Harlem Toile, inspired by her Harlem and Philadelphia neighborhoods and the African American experience more generally.

As an African American living in Harlem, I have always been intrigued and inspired by the historical narrative of the decorative arts, especially traditional French toile with its pastoral motifs from the late 1700s. I’m entertained by the stories these patterns tell and the questions they sometimes raise. But after searching for many years for the perfect toile for my own home, I decided that it quite simply didn’t exist. I created Harlem Toile de Jouy initially as a wallcovering then expanded the collection to include fabrics, bedding, plates, glassware, umbrellas and clothing. This design (which lampoons some of the stereotypes deeply woven into the African American experience), has been featured in The Studio Museum In Harlem, the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, and the Musée De La Toile De Jouy in Jouy-en Josas, France. I am honored to have my Harlem Toile De Jouy wallpaper included in The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s permanent wallpaper collection.

Veronica Chambers wrote a great piece about Harlem Toile for the NY Times: The Wallpaper That Is Also a ‘Reminder That My Ancestors Had My Back’.

The wallpaper, which was created by the celebrated interior designer Sheila Bridges in 2006, features beautiful drawings of African Americans in the lush, historical settings that rarely featured them — a couple in 18th-century dress dance under a structure that recalls the Arc de Triomphe to the tunes of a boombox that rests playfully on the grass; women in ball gowns sit under a majestic tree, one combs the other’s hair while yet another woman holds up a fairy-talelike mirror; a courting couple in fashion that now brings to mind the popular series “Bridgerton” feast on a picnic. For a Black girl who grew up loving Jane Austen and Toni Morrison with equal aplomb, Harlem Toile was more than wallpaper. It was a tableau of possibility and belonging.

I’m not doing justice to all of what is being expressed in Bridges’ work and how it’s resonating with Chambers & other members of the Black community, so you should just read the piece. (thx, caroline)

• art
• design
• Sheila Bridges
• Veronica Chambers

“Dagny Carlsson, believed to be the world’s oldest blogger, who documented her life in Sweden and spread the message that age should not limit happiness, has died. She was 109.”

Discover Modern Art with Each New Browser Tab

I just switched my web browser to use the New Tab with MoMA extension. Each new browser tab I open contains another piece of art from MoMA’s collection. Here are a few things that have popped up so far:

I’m really enjoying this so far…it feels like being in a slow-moving art history class all day long.

• art
• MoMA
• museums

This move by Golden State’s Jordan Poole, in which he splits two defenders by going between his legs twice, is perhaps the best basketball highlight I’ve ever seen. Even in slow motion, it looks absolutely impossible.

“The inconvenient truth is that we are going to experience a new BA.2 variant wave in the United States — the magnitude of which remains uncertain — and this highlights the question of whether a 2nd booster (4th shot) would be useful.”

Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous

Let’s listen in on a support group for recovering conspiracy theorists.

Hi, my name’s Terry and I believe that Matt Damon runs a network of underground tunnels beneath a pizza parlor in Washington DC to secretly vaccinate 5G towers.

Hi, Terry.

So, it’s been six days since I last posted anything on Facebook about lizards running the world.

But even the most hardcore members of the group don’t believe one of the most durable conservative tenets of American capitalism…

• video

A definition of Twitter for 2022: “It’s a fandom app for current events. The users on there don’t have anything in common other than an increasingly pathological need to consume either news as content or content as news.”

Because of the climate crisis (melting glaciers). Switzerland’s cartographers are having to redraw the country’s topological maps. “Only three cartographers at the agency [are] allowed to tinker with the Swiss Alps.”

Incredible deep dive into how all the Oscar best picture nominees were made: cameras, editing, budgets, effects, audio, etc.

The Wizard of Oz as an Allegory for the Presidential Election of 1896

I’ve never heard this theory before: L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz as an allegory for the 1896 Presidential election, the central issue of which was the monetary concept of bimetallism. Quickly, from Wikipedia, a definition of bimetallism:

Bimetallism is a monetary standard in which the value of the monetary unit is defined as equivalent to certain quantities of two metals, typically gold and silver, creating a fixed rate of exchange between them.

There was much debate in the run-up to the election over how to define the rate between gold and silver in the US. Here’s where The Wizard of Oz comes in:

Dorothy is whipped out of Kansas by a tornado with her little dog “Toto” (short for teetotalers, who made a loud noise yip-yapping but were otherwise ineffective political companions). On her way to the Land of Oz, Dorothy picks up her electoral coalition. First, the Scarecrow, representing western farmers. “He thinks that he has no brains because his head is stuffed with straw. But we soon learn that he is shrewd and capable. He brings to life a major theme of the free silver movement: that the people, the farmer in particular, were capable of understanding the complex theories that underlay the choice of a standard.”

Next, the Tin Man (or Tin Woodman). The working class man, once a true human, is now just a cog in the industrial machine. Piece by piece his human body was replaced by metallic parts. He is now little more than a machine, a heartless (literally) machine. The Populist hope of the era was a grand farmer-labor coalition that never quite solidified — and we still see residual evidence of this hope in the official name of Minnesota’s Democratic Party, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

The Cowardly Lion, then, was William Jennings Bryan himself. Capable of a great roar — his speeches were legendary — alas, to mix metaphors, he was all bark and no bite.

(via kyle westaway)

• books
• economics
• finance
• L. Frank Baum
• The Wizard of Oz

The sad tale of the world’s largest bee. Presumed extinct, it was recently rediscovered in Indonesia, but conservation efforts have sputtered and the publicity has made the bee a target for rare animal collectors.

Interesting evolution of the design of the NY Times’ maps of the war in Ukraine. Early maps over-represented Russian advances while later maps showed what each side in the conflict was doing more accurately.

Introducing Cool Stuff Ride Home

Hey folks, just wanted to let you know about a slight change in the lineup around here. The Kottke Ride Home podcast has been renamed Cool Stuff Ride Home and will no longer be affiliated with kottke.org. The show’s got the same format (15-20 minutes of interesting news & information each weekday, a linkblog in podcast form) and the same great host, just with a new name that more accurately represents what the show is about. You can find the podcast here, here, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

It’s been a pleasure to have the podcast as part of kottke.org for the last year and a half. Brian, James, and the crew at Ride Home Media were great to work with and I especially valued getting to know Jackson Bird — who knows, you might see something of him around here in the future. Good luck with the podcast!

• Cool Stuff Ride Home
• Jackson Bird
• kottke.org
• Kottke Ride Home
• podcasts

Questlove’s Summer of Soul won the Oscar for Best Original Documentary. Well-deserved! Great film.

Slime Molds!

I have been a fan of slime molds ever since I read about them in Steven Johnson’s Emergence; they are fascinating. From a NY Times excerpt of Johnson’s book:

The slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single-celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which then begins its leisurely crawl across the garden floor, consuming rotting leaves and wood as it moves about. When the environment is less hospitable, the slime mold acts as a single organism; when the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, “it” becomes a “they.” The slime mold oscillates between being a single creature and a swarm.

In his ongoing series of photographs, Barry Webb captures these bizarre and exotic creatures. Yet another example of not having to look off-world to find alien life. (via colossal)

• Barry Webb
• books
• Emergence
• photography
• Steven Johnson

Poll: about 1-in-5 Americans agree w/ the core tenets of QAnon, incl “The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.”

“Experience: I let a baby bird nest in my hair for 84 days. He fell asleep in my palm. As far as he was concerned, I was his mother.”

Here’s another story about Will Smith, Questlove, and (briefly) Chris Rock.

How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions. “At every step of his political career, Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.”

The Queen of Basketball Wins the Oscar

At the Oscars last night, The Queen of Basketball won the award for best documentary short. The film is about Lusia Harris, the only woman to officially be drafted by an NBA team. Here’s what I wrote about Harris and the film back in August:

Before this morning, I had never heard of Lusia Harris and now she’s one of my favorite basketball players. Playing in the 1970s, before the enforcement of Title IX in athletics, the 6’3” Harris dominated in high school, led a small university to three consecutive national basketball championships in the first 5 years of the program (while averaging 25.9 points and 14.5 rebounds per game), scored the first basket in Olympics women’s basketball history, is the only woman ever officially drafted by an NBA team, and was inducted into the National Basketball Hall of Fame.

Great to see this film win, but also bittersweet because Harris died only two months ago at the age of 66. The director is Ben Proudfoot, whose stuff I have been posting about since 2011. Really fun to see him be rewarded for his talent.

• basketball
• Ben Proudfoot
• Lusia Harris
• sports
• video

The scale of these greenhouses in southern Spain is incredible.

A podcast called The Weather in Brooklyn is automatically generated each day by a computer program.

Search interest in electric cars is up significantly in the past month.

Satellite images that, as @waxy put it, were “hallucinated” by an AI algorithm.

A survey by Science magazine indicates that scientists were subjected to increased levels of harassment (both online and off) during the pandemic for talking about Covid-19.

Claude Monet’s War Paintings

This is another great episode of James Payne’s Great Art Explained on the work of Claude Monet, specifically the massive water lily canvases he completed before his death, created as “a war memorial to the millions of lives tragically lost in the First World War”.

Claude Monet is often criticised for being overexposed, too easy, too obvious, or worse, a chocolate box artist. His last works, the enormous water lily canvasses are among the most popular art works in the world.

Yet there is nothing tame, traditionalist, or cosy about these last paintings. These are his most radical works of all. They turn the world upside down with their strange, disorientating and immersive vision.

Monet’s water lilies have come to be viewed as simply an aesthetic interpretation of the garden that obsessed him. But they are so much more.

These works were created as a direct response to the most savage and apocalyptic period of modern history. They were in fact conceived as a war memorial to the millions of lives tragically lost in the First World War.

I’ve seen these paintings at the Musée de l’Orangerie — amazing to see them exactly the way in which the artist intended them to be seen.

See also Film of Claude Monet Painting Water Lilies in His Garden (1915) and Monet’s Ultraviolet Vision.

• art
• art school
• Claude Monet
• James Payne
• video
• war
• World War I

The five most common jobs in a medieval European city were “farming, carpentry, butchery, shoemaking and Church-related work”.

Framed: try to guess the movie from six successive screen captures.