From visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger, a new book called America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History that’s gotten great reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
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.
Entries for May 2023
“We are currently in the midst of a radical reinvention of English. Not perhaps since the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries has the English language shifted faster.”
Train Panoramas
The robots are coming for trainspotters. A piece of software called Trainbot can watch a piece of train track, detect passing trains, and then stitch together panoramic images of the full-length trains.
The software for running your own trainbot is available on Github and “should work with any video4linux USB cam, or Raspberry Pi camera v3 modules”. (via nelson)
The trailer for a Frog and Toad TV series, now streaming on Apple+.
“Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines…” Wow.
The web’s most important decision: CERN putting the WWW into the public domain. “Nobody owned the web, and the web wasn’t licensed. It was simply a part of the world, for anybody to use, distribute, or modify.”
The Galactic Menagerie, Wes Anderson’s Star Wars
It’s a no-brainer: what if you handed over a visually rich sci-fi universe with slightly campy origins to a quirky auteur with an overwhelming aesthetic, just to see what you’d get? This short trailer imagines Wes Anderson at the helm of his very own Star Wars movie, complete with Bill Murray as Obi-Wan and Owen Wilson as Darth Vader (wow).
See also, from back in 2012, Conan O’Brien’s take on Wes Anderson’s Star Wars, A Life Galactic. I would totally watch either of these movies tbh.
The trailer for The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the Hunger Games prequel set 60+ years in the past, based on the book by 2020 book by Suzanne Collins.
Q&A: Chronicling the failures of the U.S. response to Covid. “The Covid war revealed a collective national incompetence in governance.”
Socials & More