The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me. “I suspect that famous, wealthy men may be especially frustrated by their inability to control events, or even stop people from ridiculing them on the internet.”
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 July 2023
Duck & Cover: Ukrainian Book Fair Poster
This is a poster for the 2023 International Book Arsenal Festival which recently took place in Kyiv, Ukraine. The poster was designed by Art Studio Agrafka from an illustration they originally did for the cover of Linkiesta Magazine.
A book festival. During a war. In a city under martial law. While schools and legislatures here in the US ban books about Black and LGBTQ+ experiences based on bad faith complaints of tiny fundamentalist parent groups. Tell me, who’s doing democracy better right now? (via @gray)
The Man Who Broke Bowling. “Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest — and changed the sport forever.”
A report on the D3 ultramarathon, a 24-hour-long race that takes place on a 400-meter high school track in Pennsylvania. “The thing about lying down is that it’s not very helpful in moving forward…”
An Incredible Stop-Motion Animation of a Samurai Fight
Not going to bury the lede here: this is a straight-up masterpiece and maybe the best thing I’ve seen all week. Hidari is a stop-motion animation of an inventive fight sequence between a lone warrior/craftsman and a boss & his minions. The vibe of the animation is at once halting and buttery smooth, a combination that’s wonderfully expressive. Directed by Masashi Kawamura, the plan is to turn this into a feature-length film:
This is a pilot version of the stop-motion samurai film that tells the story of “Jingoro Hidari,” a legendary Edo-era craftsman. All the characters are made by wood and animated frame by frame, just like how Jingoro’s wooden sculptures came to life in his many anecdotes. We hope you enjoy this film, which mixes dynamic actions as seen in Japanimation, and the rich analog expressions of stop-motion animation.
Our intention is to use this pilot film as a starting point to create a full length feature film. We have started activities to raise the necessary partners and funding to achieve this goal.
Take my money! (P.S. Turn on subtitles if you don’t speak Japanese. Oh, and here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how they did the animation.)
Why Does the U.S. Copyright Office Require Libraries to Lie to Users about Their Fair Use Rights? “The copyright notice that libraries are required by law to provide you {when photocopying documents} is false and misleading.”
Heat Pumps — The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs. “If air conditioning is going to be climate-friendlier, it needs to be smart, talk to the grid, use better refrigerant, and be a heat pump.”
Keyword is a new online game from the Washington Post that’s kind of a cross between Wordle and (maybe) Scrabble or a crossword.
Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace
“it’s what everyone wants in the year 2023: 8000 words on david foster wallace” ⬅️ That’s how Patricia Lockwood shared her piece about the complicated legacy of David Foster Wallace on Bluesky. Turns out, it is what we want; this piece is brilliant. But it’s also unexplainable, so I’ll just post these three snippets and let you work out whether you want to read the rest of it or not.
As I read, I thought Wallace must have been taken by something very simple, the smallest sensual fact: that as an IRS worker you are issued a new social security number, in essence a new identity, a chance to start over. The old number, the old life, ‘simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint’. A whole novel could take flesh from that fact, one about the idea of bureaucratic identity as opposed to individual identity: memories, mothers, sideburn phases, the way we see ourselves. That we are, at our core, a person; in the bed of our family, a name; and out in the world, a number. Of course, as so often with Wallace, on actual investigation this turns out not to be true. The fact withdraws itself, and only the epiphany remains.
—-
Infinite Jest — man, I don’t know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been ‘and then this little kid had a claw.’ It’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex. You feel not only that he shouldn’t be allowed to take drugs, but that he shouldn’t be allowed to drink Diet Pepsi. The highlights remain highlights: the weed addict Ken Erdedy pacing back and forth while reciting ‘where was the woman who said she’d come,’ the game of Eschaton, the passages where Mario is almost the protagonist, the beatified ex-thug Don Gately being slowly swept out to sea over the course of a hundred pages. Every so often Wallace offers you a set piece that’s as fully articulated as a Body Worlds exhibit — laminated muscles pinwheeling through the air, beads of plasticine sweat flying — or pauses the action to deliver a weather bulletin that approaches the sublime. The rest is Don DeLillo played at chipmunk speed. You feel it in your hands: too heavy and too light, too much and not enough. In the end, it is a book about the infiltration of our attention that was also at the mercy of itself, helpless not to watch itself, hopelessly entertained.
—-
Time will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of fiction. I’m not sure that’s true — the new style is always the last gasp of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.
Lockwood wrote a book called No One Is Talking About This; I read it last year and excerpted some of my favorite quotes from it.
No, this guy is not an asshole for carving his name in the wall of the Colosseum for not knowing the building was 2000 years old. He’s an asshole because he carved his name in a wall that doesn’t belong to him.
An Incredibly Tidy Little Park For All Ages
Yesterday I posted about the 2023 Drone Photo Awards and one of my favorite shots was of a playground/park in Poland. My curious pal Neven tracked down more information about the park and, well, it’s so cool and cute!
Here’s part of the description from the park’s creators, SLAS Architects:
“Activity zone” is a multifunctional public space which is the first phase of regeneration and integration of the University of Silesia campus with the urban tissue of Chorzów City.
The site is located in the place of the demolished military building with a number of old existing trees. “Activity zone” is designed as concrete platform strongly perforated and filled with a diverse programme that includes: students leisure zone, children’s play devices, fitness, individually designed elements of street furniture and greenery including all existing trees. Some parts of the garden are possible to develop by local seniors. The platform connects the diverse program, intensifies the use of the place and becomes itself an element of play. Variety of attractions enhance interactions between users of all age groups and integrates academic community with local inhabitants and the surrounding nature.
My only complaint: it’s maybe a little too small? But otherwise: top marks.
Scrounging is a new cookbook from A24 featuring “last-ditch” recipes from movies like The Breakfast Club’s Pixy Stix sandwich, The Martian’s baked potato with Vicodin, and omelettes from Big Night, Tampopo, and Phantom Thread.
The Full Trailer for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon
Oh boy. I thought the teaser trailer was good, but the full trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon just dropped and I am. So. Excited. To. SEE. THIS!
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder.
Once again, it’s based on David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which I highly recommend. Grann + Scorsese appears to be a potent combination — the latter is already signed on to adapt Grann’s latest bestseller, The Wager.
So, Trump posted Obama’s home address and one of his supporters drove over there with guns to get a “good angle on a shot”. Textbook stochastic terrorism — Trump basically put out a hit on a former President and no consequences once again.
Really interesting piece on Pat Summitt & feminism. “Sports are not just about sports. They encompass a battleground for determining how gender manifests in the world, how women and girls can use their bodies, and who can access self-determination.”
Wow, after 10 years of making weekly videos on YouTube (weekly? how?!), Tom Scott is stopping his channel at the end of this year to take a break. 👏
Threads, Facebook’s Twitter killer, is live. You can follow me over there I guess?
The Winners of the 2023 Drone Photo Awards
I am a sucker for aerial photography, so I had a lot of fun looking through all the winners and runners-up of the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. As usual, I picked out a few favorites and included them above. From top to bottom, photos by: Sebastian Piórek (a very tidy Polish playground), Brad Weiner (surfer), Gheorghe Popa (amazing abstract shot), and Matias Delacroix (a border crossing between Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Begin Transmission is a new book about the trans allegories of The Matrix. “No other mass media franchise speaks as truly, deeply, and honestly to the trans experience.”
Incredible analysis by The Pudding about just how little airplay women artists get on country radio stations in the US. In one 24-hour period, “you’d likely only hear 3 back-to-back songs by women, compared to 245 from men”.
“I Created Clippy”
Illustrator Kevan Atteberry created the Clippy character that was introduced in Microsoft Office 97. There was a ton of backlash when the character was introduced, but as time has passed, many people have begun to think fondly of him.
He’s a guy that just wants to help, and he’s a little bit too helpful sometimes. And there’s something fun and vulnerable about that.
Vote now in the Tiny Awards, which seek to honor the website that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web”.
“Liberals have lost the Supreme Court for a generation. Their only hope is to seize state courts and launch a counterrevolution.”
Monday July 3, 2023 was the hottest day on Earth since record-keeping began in the late 19th century. It seems as though 1.5°C is inevitable now.
It’s easy to be cynical about such things, but I found Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray’s separation announcement to be sincere and genuine and perhaps even a little bit brave and sweet.
Stunning Photo of an Aurora Over an Icelandic Waterfall
Astrophotographer Cari Letelier caught this amazing shot of the aurora borealis over the Goðafoss waterfall in Iceland. We live in a truly magical world — if science fiction authors made something like this up, you wouldn’t believe it’d ever be real. You can check out more of Letelier’s astrophotography on Instagram or on her website.
I found this via the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, a gem of the old school web that’s been sharing astronomy photos since 1995.
Machine learning models trained on accelerometry data (e.g. from smartwatches) can identify Parkinson’s disease “years before clinical diagnosis”.
“Astronomers have watched the distant universe running in slow motion, marking the first time that the weird effect predicted by Einstein more than a century ago has been observed.” Einstein: still (almost) undefeated.
Can Everyone Take a Sabbatical? “Sabbaticals also provide…a ‘check against total burnout.’” Feeling very grateful for the support of my readers in taking a sabbatical last year.
Wes Anderson’s Imperfect Moments
Precise. Symmetric. Stylized. Controlled (often bright) color palette. Slow-motion. Lateral tracking. These are all hallmarks of Wes Anderson’s films. But as this short video from Luís Azevedo shows, there are plenty of imperfect moments in his movies as well. Anderson is a canny filmmaker and it’s the contrast between the controlled worlds he constructs and these more frenetic, off-kilter, imperfect moments that gives them their weight and impact.
Will AI Change Our Memories?
Photographs have always been an imperfect reproduction of real life — see the story of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother or Ansel Adams’ extensive dark room work — but the seemingly boundless alterations offered by current & future AI editing tools will allow almost anyone to turn their photos (or should I say “photos”) into whatever they wish. In this video, Evan Puschak briefly explores what AI-altered photos might do to our memories.
I was surprised he didn’t mention the theory that when a past experience is remembered, that memory is altered in the human brain — that is, “very act of remembering can change our memories”. I think I first heard about this on Radiolab more than 16 years ago. So maybe looking at photos extensively altered by AI could extensively alter those same memories in our brains, actually making us unable to recall anything even remotely close to what “really” happened. Fun!
But also, one could imagine this as a powerful way to treat PTSD, etc. Or to brainwash someone! Or an entire populace… Here’s Hannah Arendt on constantly being lied to:
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
As I said in response to this quote in a post about deepfakes:
This is the incredible and interesting and dangerous thing about the combination of our current technology, the internet, and mass media: “a lying government” is no longer necessary — we’re doing it to ourselves and anyone with sufficient motivation will be able to take advantage of people without the capacity to think and judge.
P.S. I lol’d too hard at his deadpan description of “the late Thanos”. RIP, big fella.
Want to Run a World-Record Time? Follow the Green Lights. Wavelights are a pacemaking technology that are helping runners achieve faster times. But is it cheating? (This is like racing Mario Kart ghosts!)
A list of 30 roadtrips you can take this summer on all seven continents: safaris in Uganda, travelling the east coast of Taiwan, an epic Patagonia trip, coast-to-coast US roadtrip, driving Adelaide to Melbourne, etc.
Street Photographer Captures Perfectly Timed Scenes
Greek photographer Anthimos Ntagkas stalks the streets in search of visual coincidences to capture and put on his Instagram account. My Modern Met talked to Ntagkas about his process:
Nowadays, I don’t choose the place, but I make every location work for me. I combine people with elements everywhere I stand. Luckily the themes in this type of photography are endless, and I never lose interest.
See also Eric Kogan’s photography, which has a similar vibe.
I was Russell Crowe’s stooge. From 2006, a great read by a journalist who was recruited as a shill and then discarded by Russell Crowe. “I had been quite the sucker. It was the only truth that made sense.”
Air quality has become a huge issue recently: Covid, wildfires, gas stoves, longer allergy season. “If the pandemic was whispering to us about air quality, the wildfires are screaming to us about it.”
Now this is how you do special effects. Absolutely seamless.
Socials & More