Entries for May 2023
Hey, I just wanted to pop in with some reminders and a couple of new things. As I outlined in a post last month, 2023 has been busy around here:
The site celebrated its 25th anniversary last month. I built and launched a micro-site for the Kottke Ask Me Anything & spent a couple of sessions answering reader questions. I went on The Talk Show to discuss the early days of blogging with John Gruber and put some cool t-shirts out into the world. It’s been fun to continue to build up a presence for kottke.org over on Mastodon. I rejiggered the Quick Links infrastructure (which has made it easier/faster for me to post them) and have been working on a couple of behind-the-scenes projects that will hopefully streamline & shore up things around here. Oh, and I also kept up the regular stream of posts and links you know and love. *phew*
And the hits keep on coming. In the last two weeks, I’ve added two additional ways to keep up with kottke.org: on Tumblr and Bluesky (web). My Tumblr posting bot stopped working a couple of years ago, so it was good to get that going again. So as of now, there are seven ways to read/follow the activity at kottke.org: on the website, full-text RSS, Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter (until they kick me off they kicked me off!), Bluesky, Tumblr, and Threads (kinda/sorta). And I’m adding one more (big one) to the mix, hopefully sometime in the next week, so look for that. (Also up next: focusing on some UI/UX stuff…) Oh, and regarding the social accounts, I’m only active on Mastodon and, for now, Bluesky…if you reply to stuff on Twitter or FB, I probably won’t even see it and won’t respond.
Last thing. I’m going to bug you one more time and then shut up about it for awhile: If you’re not already a member (or are a former member) and you’ve been liking what’s been going on here in recent months after my return from sabbatical and can manage it, please consider supporting the site by purchasing a membership. Everything I do here, including making it easy for readers to find the site wherever they choose to read web content, is only possible because of the financial support of members. Thank you so much for the support! ✌️
How to Build (and Destroy) a Social Network. “Status means everything to platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But contrary to what Elon Musk thinks, it doesn’t come from a blue checkmark.”
Casey Johnston lost her AirPods and tried to track down the thief. “The AirPods weren’t in the wind, as lost or stolen objects had been my entire life. They were right there. They were close. They were obtainable.”
Introducing ‘Total Crap’, the First Magazine Written Entirely by AI. “We are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency.”
Masks Work. Distorting Science to Dispute the Evidence Doesn’t. “Are randomized trials an appropriate way of evaluating a basic engineered safety system? We don’t rely on such trials for seat belts, bike helmets or life jackets.”
Pooja Saxena collects interesting examples of lettering from the streets of cities in India. Here are a few recent examples:
(via @ashur)
Last week, a small sailboat in distress was rescued by a massive 18th-century sailing ship. “This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?”
The Ultimate Oral History Of BuzzFeed News. I co-worked in the NYC BuzzFeed office for the first few years of this and didn’t realize half of these amazing folks even worked there.
Finally: a full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, easily the movie I am most looking forward to seeing this summer. Dunkirk was one of my favorite films of the past few years, I’ve done quite a bit of reading about the Manhattan Project over the years, and I studied modern physics in college, so I am all the way in for this. Fingers crossed!
P.S. The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Might have to read this one before the movie comes out.
Last month I posted a link to a story about a woman who discovered she was one of the world’s top Candy Crush players.
Since progress was tied to game score rather than PvP results, Rhoden kept getting pop-ups for milestones such as passing the quarterfinals, and then entering the semifinals as she was just casually taking part in her regular Candy Crush routine.
She was overwhelmed, so she texted the other esports athlete in the family: Her son. Xane was the best Meta Knight player in the midwest during the height of his Super Smash Bros. career. She asked him what a $250,000 prize pool was. After he explained that first place got half of the total pool, he asked why. “I’m in the semifinals accidentally,” she wrote.
In that vein, a reader sent me a link to this 2007 Boston Globe piece about a woman who discovers that she’s actually the world’s best Tetris player.
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
What Flewin said next I will never forget.
“Oh, my!”
After I hung up the phone, I went to the bedroom and woke my wife, Lori.
“Honey,” I said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s in charge of video game world records, and he said the world record for Game Boy Tetris is 327 lines, and he wants us to go to New Hampshire this spring so you can try to break the world record live in front of the judges at the world’s largest classic video game tournament.
Spoiler alert: she broke the record. Baker is still 5th on the all-time scoring list but her score was bested just three months later by Harry Hong, the original record holder, who achieved a score six times higher than Baker’s. (thx, euse42)
How The Legend of Zelda Changed the Game. Great little interactive feature on almost 40 years of Zelda games. “Zelda is the standard unit of measurement in the gaming industry.”
Clarence Thomas Promises To Adopt Code Of Ethics For The Right Price. “I admit to seeing the wisdom in developing some kind of ethical framework for the Supreme Court, so long as Papa gets some sugar.”
When filmmakers best each other at the box office, it’s tradition for the vanquished to publicly congratulate the victor. Spielberg started the practice in 1977 when Star Wars bested Jaws and it continues today.
For eight years, Keith Loutit captured hundreds of thousands of images of Singapore, combining the pulsing energy, the new buildings reaching for the sky, and the busy shipyard of one of Asia’s most iconic and futuristic cities into this 5-minute timelapse video.
When we pass by landscapes they appear fixed in time but they change around us constantly. Singapore has gone through an incredible change over the past 8 years, and I have tried to capture as much of this change as possible. There were no permanent cameras used in this film, it required regular site visits over 988 shoot days and over 3300 matched shots.
The video is also available on Vimeo and you can watch two previous Singapore timelapses by Loutit here and here. (via moss and fog)
Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags. “Can you tell the difference between a $10,000 Chanel bag and a $200 knockoff? Almost nobody can, and it’s turning luxury fashion upside down.”
A new book from Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. Sample advice: “If winning becomes too important in a game, change the rules to make it more fun. Changing rules can become the new game.”
Expanding on his previous thoughts on the relationship between AI and capitalism — “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism” — Ted Chiang offers a useful metaphor for how to think about AI: as a management-consulting firm like McKinsey.
So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey — a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100 — and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.
A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.
Good stuff — I especially enjoyed the mini You’re Wrong About on the Luddites — do read the whole thing.
Roxane Gay, writing in the NY Times about the recent killings and assaults of people who had the bad luck to run into self-appointed executioners (gift link).
There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us.
I will be thinking about Jordan Neely in particular for a long time. I will be thinking about who gets to stand his ground, who doesn’t, and how, all too often, it’s people in the latter group who are buried beneath that ground by those who refuse to cede dominion over it. Every single day there are news stories that are individually devastating and collectively an unequivocal condemnation of what we are becoming: a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it’s our own.
The whole piece is worth reading and sitting with.
Eternal Spring is a short timelapse film by Christopher Dormoy featuring beautiful shots of melting snow and ice. Watching this, it is difficult not to think of the climate crisis, which is of course the whole point.
Ice is a beautiful element I love to work with in my video projects. I wanted to feature the ice melting aspect in timelapse process to illustrate the phenomenon of global warming. Melting ice is beautiful and symbolizes spring, but it can also symbolize a problematic aspect of our climate.
And wow, that shot of the Moon at the halfway point… (via colossal)
The trailer for Then Comes The Body, a short documentary about a ballet school outside Lagos, Nigeria, run by Daniel Ajala, who learned ballet on YouTube.
How Finland Virtually Ended Homelessness — and We Can Too. “Instead of abandoning the homeless, they housed them.” A decade on, 80% of Finland’s (formerly) unhoused are still living in the provided housing, paying their own rent.
Seasonal Allergies Are Coming for Us All. Due to climate change, “allergy seasons are getting longer and more intense because plants are producing more pollen over a longer period”.
Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful, complex, and useful software program that millions of people know how to use, at least a little bit. For those who are experts, there are now esports competitions in Microsoft Excel that pit the best spreadsheet jockeys against each other. Here’s what that looks like:
It’s….a little confusing to watch if you aren’t that good at Excel yourself. From a piece in the Atlantic late last year:
Yes, we are talking about people competing in Microsoft Excel, the famous (and famously boring) spreadsheet software that you may have used in school or at work or to track your finances. In competitive Excel, players square off in test-taking showdowns, earning points each time they answer a question correctly. Players’ screens are a whirlwind of columns and keystrokes and formulae; if the terms XLOOKUP, RANDBETWEEN, and dynamic array don’t mean anything to you, you are unlikely to understand what’s going on. The commentators help, but only to a point. Even so, you can always follow the scoreboard, which tends to change suddenly and drastically. With just over three minutes to play, Ngai nailed a set of questions and jumped out to a 416-390 lead. GolferMike1 began to rethink his earlier assessment: “Uh oh. We got a game.”
There’s a pretty good explanation of what some of the challenges are like starting at the 6-minute mark in this video:
If you’d like more information, check out the Microsoft Excel World Championship for 2023 — the finals are in Las Vegas this year, they’re gonna show it on one of ESPN’s channels, and there’s more than $15,000 in prize money at stake.
Lauren Groff’s new book, The Vaster Wilds, is now available for preorder. I loved her previous novel Matrix.
On the difference between growth and scalability. One is a natural process that takes time and values diversity & interconnection and the other optimizes for efficiency & profit. “Growth occurs. It is not made.”
This company sells Star Wars scented candles — The Death Star candle has notes of smoked amber, cement, tobacco, forged steel, and black myrrh. What, no Hoth candle that smells like tauntaun innards?
In this video in their ongoing series on the climate crisis and how to fix it, Vox looks at the pros and cons of solar geoengineering (aka using artificial means to reflect sunlight in order to cool the Earth).
The climate change crisis has become so dire that we’re being forced not only to think of ways to curb emissions and mitigate greenhouse gases, but of ways to adapt to our current situation to buy ourselves more time.
One of those technologies is called solar geoengineering. It happens in nature when huge volcanic eruptions cover the stratosphere with ash: That ash forms a layer that reflects sunlight and cools the planet underneath. Solar geoengineering takes advantage of that principle, using different scientific methods to make the planet more reflective overall. The problem is, deploying it would require messing with our very complicated climate on a massive scale, and many scientists don’t think the risks are worth it.
Loving scrolling through this collection of sci-fi movie logos from Reagan Ray.
As is the case with most of my logo posts, it’s been fun to pick up on the trends. There’s the trick where they remove the segments from the top half of the letters like Blade Runner, or the embossed brushed metal of Robocop. Glowing letters were a big trend that started in the late 80s, most likely set off by the Alien franchise. And I can never get enough of the 3D type in early films.
You can check out more of Ray’s logo collections here.
America Makes It Too Hard and Dangerous to Get Divorced. “Divorce in the U.S. is governed by an arbitrary constellation of policies that impede the freedom to end a marriage and have a disproportionately harmful impact on women.”
Ok, here’s the first trailer for second part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Time to get hyped! It comes out on November 3 — we have until then to decide what “Timothée Chalamet rides the worm” is a euphemism for.
The three images above were created by long-exposure photography of the flight paths of drones with onboard bright lights.
The first image is from Jadikan’s new series, Phénomènes (Instagram), in which he uses fireworks to create brightly-lit cylindrical forms.
The second one is by Will Ferguson of Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds — you can see more of his aerial work here or on Instagram.
The third is from Reuben Wu (Instagram), whose work I’ve featured here for many years. IMO, Wu’s work is slightly more polished than Jadikan’s or Ferguson’s, but I enjoy experiencing all of it. (via petapixel)
Wealthy Couple Taking Real Vacation For First Time In Weeks. “She and her husband would have gone sooner, but they could barely find the time between the hours of work and the dozens of other vacations they had taken this year.”
The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small. “The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.”
Wii Sports Birdwatching. “Here we imagine what it would be like if Wii Sports had birdwatching as a game.”
In a pair of collections on Behance, Hungarian designer and artist Miklós Kiss showcases his skill with ligatures and swirling serifs: Type Beast and Type Beast 2.0
I love typography. I love letters. I love to make ligatures and find connections between letters. These are not logos, but sometimes they can be. Sometimes this kind of typography is not readable. Sometimes they look like abstract artworks. Sometimes they look like choreography. I love to watch them move, I love their beauty. I call my little typography monsters my Type Beasts.
(via abdz)
Definitely want to try zorbing someday (rolling down a hill in an inflatable ball filled with water).
For his second Iconic Sans video, David Friedman tells us about an itinerant filmmaker who travelled the country from the 30s to the 50s making the same movie over and over again with different casts of local children.
Why would somebody remake a movie hundreds of times? Was he obsessed? Mad? Director Melton Barker was a traveling filmmaker (historians call him an “itinerant filmmaker”) who went town to town from the 1930s to the 1970s convincing everyday folks to pay him to be in his movie “The Kidnappers Foil” over and over and over. He used the same script each time, with an all local cast. It’s a fascinating bit of Americana and cinema history.
You can learn more about The Kidnappers Foil at this site from The Texas Archive of the Moving Image, watch several full-length versions on the film on YouTube, or use the script to make your own version.
This is a sweet video profile of La Dinastia, one of the last old-school, family-run places in NYC where you can find Chino-Latino cuisine. From Lisa Chiu at ThoughtCo, a brief history of Asian-Latin food blends:
Cuban-Chinese Cuisine is the traditional fusing of Cuban and Chinese food by Chinese migrants to Cuba in the 1850s. Brought to Cuba as laborers, these migrants and their Cuban-Chinese progeny developed a cuisine that blended Chinese and Caribbean flavors.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, many Cuban Chinese left the island and some established Cuban Chinese food restaurants in the United States, mainly in New York City and Miami. Some diners contend that Cuban-Chinese food is more Cuban than Chinese.
There are also other genres of Chinese-Latin and Asian-Latin food blends created by Asian migrants to Latin America over the last two centuries.
See also Chinese Latinos Explain Chino-Latino Food and from The Village Voice in 2014, The Definitive Guide to NYC’s Chinese-Latin American Restaurants, many of which, like La Dinastia, are still around.
What All My Best Meals Have Had in Common. A pro food writer: “The most memorable meals of my life have unquestionably been in other people’s homes.” This has not been my experience…my top 10 are all restaurants.
A man claiming to own a David Hockney painting brings it to Antiques Roadshow to be evaluated. The appraiser: “I now know what an early Hockney looks like.”
No matter which side you come down on in the debate about using AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to create digital art, this video of an experienced digital artist explaining how he uses AI in his workflow is worth a watch. I thought this comment was particularly interesting:
I see the overall process as a joint effort with the AI. I’ve been a traditional artist for 2 decades, painting on canvas. And in the last five years I’ve been doing a lot of digital art. So from that part of myself, I don’t feel threatened at all.
I feel this is an opportunity. An opportunity for many new talented people to jump on a new branch of art that is completely different from the one that we have already in digital art and just open up new way of being creative.
Thousands of film and television writers belonging to The Writers Guild of America go on strike today. Sticking points include pay levels, staffing & revenue sharing around streaming, and use of AI in the writing process.
Man Going Through Phase Where Life Implodes And Everything That Follows Is On The Decline. “Someday I will look back at this difficult period in my life and wonder how I ever had it so good.” 👋
A review of the five best croissants in Paris, filmed during the massive strikes and demonstrations around raising the pension age in France. This is amazing…
Eyecandy: a collection of dozens of visual effects and techniques like crash zoom, screen in screen, scale shift, rack focus, infinite zoom, etc.
The paintings in David Ambarzumjan’s Brushstrokes in Time series bring together large, rough brushstrokes with intricate landscapes — it’s a stimulating combination. A popular one too: all of his prints are currently sold out but there’s some new ones coming soon. You can also check Instagram for auctions of the original oil paintings. (via my modern met)
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