I'll go first. Hi, my name is Jason and I live in Vermont with my 2 kids. I enjoy mountain biking, movies, food, the ocean, museums, Fortnite, skipping rocks, and writing social software. I don't enjoying writing that much. 🤷‍♂️ I'm currently reading Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds (enjoying it, Groff is a hell of a writer) and Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening (*excellent* so far). I thought The Creator was great. I've barely travelled anywhere in the past year, but I'm going to Seoul and Thailand in December and I'm excited/anxious for the trip! You can find me online at Mastodon, Instagram, and Threads.

Oh, and this song is stuck in my head now.

OMG am I really going to have the second comment? I'm Neel, I've been reading kottke.org since at least 2004 (that's the first mention in my Gmail, though I suspect it goes back even farther.) I'm a Product Manager, jazz and music lover, and econ nerd. I'm not really online as a poster -- I'm a reader -- so no Insta, Mastodon, etc. links for me.

Recent song I heard that I loved: America India, a super-slowed down synth cumbia from 50-60 years ago.

Hi, I am David. I live in Madison WI with my wife and two kids. I work at UW Madison.
I was first introduced to Kottke when i saw Jason speak at SXSW in 2006 (ish) with Heather Armstrong (dooce) and have been following ever since.
I love Jason's recommendations on books and movies. There are so many lists out there that I have given up on those and pretty much go with what I read about here, which has led me to be a well-read, well-watched intellectual in these parts :)

Hi there! I'm Giles, based in London, UK. I've been reading the blog since 2007 I believe, which feels wild to realise. I'm a professional photographer and digital operator (photographic assistant), with a background in working closely with the music industry. My work these days is more broad, working on commercial, food and fashion projects, mostly. In my own time, I run, cycle, like to escape London when possible, and have a huge backlog of podcasts to catch up on, at any given time.
I'm @giloscope on most socials, but am really only active on Instagram these days.

Hi, my name is Beebop and I live outside Boston. I miss Brooklyn and hope to convince my wife one day to abandon suburban living to return to living and interacting with an interesting community once again. I'm a former scientist turned artist and have doing deep dives into the foundations that Piet Mondrian and Hilma Af Klint started their compositions and ended up going to the Tate Modern to see the exhibit. I lost my optimism and my spark for happiness during the pandemic and they have been replaced by loneliness, resentment, and a sense abandonment that are only temporarily relieved by listening to jazz, Dylan and Neil Young bootlegs, La Monte Young, and Duane Pitre. I'm excited about going to Big Ears, Solid Sound, William basinski, Yo La Tengo Hannukah shows, and a 'The Armed' concert. I'm reading Jenny Offill, Cosmic Scholar, and 'When We Were Birds.' I don't do much social media but want to see if anyone has any good discord invites/servers to recommend.

Hi, my name is Shawn and I live in Vermont with my 2 kids. 😅

I work (remotely) for a big tech company, doing things I enjoy that don't sound exciting on paper. Don't forget to backup your data, everyone. In my free time I help organize adventure races with the Green Mountain Adventure Racing Association, a nonprofit that likes to get people lost in the woods - this is our 20th year, and we just hosted the USARA nationals up near Smugglers Notch. Lately I spend more free time transporting my daughters to various theater & musical (harp, violin, viola, clarinet, guitar, voice) practices & performances. I recently started listening to Terry Pratchett's discworld audiobooks, which have been a pleasant escape. I'm on bluesky and countless slack/discord channels.

Hey, friends! I'm Moira, an actor based in NYC. I built my first homepage in my midwestern dorm room in 1995. I think I've been reading kottke since April 1999. These days I have a fledgling ceramics practice and am spending a lot of time navigating the eldercare system for my parents. (If you are or know a geriatric care manager or eldercare social worker, I would love to talk to you!)

I also just read The Vaster Wilds and finished the last few pages through a veil of tears.

Hi all -- I'm Joe and live in central NJ. I've been reading this site for appx 20 years, and it has given so much enrichment to my life. I work in asset management. I love to travel and have visited the Philippines and Singapore this year. I just finished reading American Midnight, River of the Gods, An Immense World, The Wager, and am now onto Blood in the Machine. I see lots of shows a year, mostly off-Broadway productions staged in smaller houses in Manhattan. I write, travel, eat (and as Bourdain would say, I'm hungry for more).

Well, hello! I'm Ben. I live in Minneapolis and manage the website of a regional non-profit health plan. Not 100% sure how long I've been reading Kottke.org, but probably around 2008 or so. I'm not on any of the big social media sites, but I like the idea of smaller online communities away from the commercialism and garbage, so I think this is great. Right now I'm reading Joan Didion's The White Album and Charlie Jane Anders' Even Greater Mistakes. Also slowly making my way through Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Greetings all - I'm John and I live in Billings, MT. I actually have a Kottke regret... some years ago, Jason put out a bold call to meet readers as he took a trip across the Western US. I fully intended to take him up on it, but the dates were bad... I was out of town when he was coming through my area. Despite my absence, he had a fantastic time, and sounded pretty impressed with all the wonders I live right next to. Here's hoping for another road trip... I'd carve out the time to hang out on the Beartooth Pass!

Yen here! Long time fan and reader, so long I barely remember my internet life without kottke. We came through in the same age of blogs, mostly food for me, and I count many friendships found and nurtured through the interwebs. I'm an artist and architect in NYC with kids who will soon be on their way out into the wide wide world, leaving me plenty of time to read, draw and eat. Things I have super loved lately are: the Ruth Asawa and Henry Taylor shows at the Whitney, The Life Before Us by Romain Gary and the pho bac (Hanoi style pho) at Hanoi House. I'm excited to see how a more visible kottke community evolves!

I'm Vena, I live in Portland, OR. It's so interesting to see how many people have been reading Kottke for so long - similarly, I've been following since the early 2000s. I have two kiddos and a dog and live with a couple other single moms on a multi-home property - it's pretty great.
I'm currently reading "We have always been here" which is creepy and cool. I work from home and Kottke has often felt like a quick conversation with a friend.

Hey there party people! My internet name is Sendrius. I live in Western Washington state with my family. I do not remember which newsletter led me to the site, but I'm glad I found my way. I spend my days reading ever more esoteric books about religion (rec: Gods of the Bible by Mauro Biglino) and listening to various podcasts (rec: Uhh Yeah Dude). I am not a part of any social media networks, and prefer to read all my news rather than watch it or have it fed to me via notifications (no judgement implied if you do, it just was no good for m mind).

Hello! I reside in the beautiful Hudson Valley, New York. I started reading this blog when I moved up here from NYC in 2005 and found blogs as a way to connect while settling into my new home. I'm an RSS feed completionist (currently Feedly, still in mourning for Google Reader), so I believe that I've read every single post since I started reading. There are so many times when I wanted to pop over and comment, so this is very exciting!
I burned all of my social media to the ground, but I still lurk and read and try to be informed enough to relate to the kids. That being said, my actual age is why I'm currently reading "The Menopause Manifesto" by Dr. Jen Gunter.

Hey, I'm Dave Sandell. I live just outside of Chicago with my wife and three young kids. Been reading Kottke since right after college, maybe 2003 or so. I launched a podcast earlier this year called Best Album For where we choose the best album for a variety of topics -- some serious, some whimsical. Would love for you to check it out. I'm @davesandell pretty much everywhere, but I more or less only check in on Instagram regularly. Right now I'm low-key obsessed with the art of Alma Thomas and b-sides from Radiohead's Kid A/Amnesiac recording sessions.

Hello! I'm Josh. I've been reading Kottke since ~99/2000. I kept a blog from ~99-~2004 (the kind of whiny confessional/link roll that only 19 year olds can muster), until I was bullied offline by former coworkers (dooced in 2000 before it was called dooced).

Since reddit's API change, I'm no longer on any social networks (though maybe MeFi counts? Still on there)

I'm curious to see what kind of community develops in these comments. Kottke (the site, if not the person) has always felt sort of introverted (inasmuch as a website can be) to me. As a fellow introvert, I vibed with it. I suspect that maybe a lot of members are more on that side of things as well.

I hope that my fellow wall flowers can get their backs up off the wall and dance.

Hi all,
I'm Rob Turpin, an illustrator, designer, and writer from the north of England (although I currently live just SW of London). You can find me, and my work, pretty much anywhere on social media - just look for thisnorthernboy, or you can find all my links here
I'm currently reading 'This Is How You Lose the Time War' by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Hello from Nebraska – the part where all the people live. Pretty sure I’ve been reading this site since around 2002, but I honestly can’t remember. It came to my attention shortly after getting personal access to The Internet. I work remotely on websites and occasionally make some art or a hand-bound book. This site always makes me feel like I have likeminded peers and often reminds me to seek out the joy and delight in the world.

Hi everyone, I'm Enrique. I've been lurking since Jason's osil8 days. Used to live in NYC, but now raising two teens just north of the Golden Gate. Been using Photoshop since version 2.0 (it didn't have layers, and only one Undo), and I've been working around Cupertino for the past 15 years. Reading… well, there's a pile of books on the nightstand. I felt the urge to pick up some Martin Amis from the local bookstore, but all they had was "Invasion of the Space Invaders," and it was a little pricey. Love cinema (nearly died at the Godfather scene in Barbie)… anyone else going to see Killers of the Flower Moon in a theater?

Hi everyone - I’m Chaston Kome, I live in Kansas City, Missouri with my gf, cat, and dog. My dad, who is also a major reader of this site, introduced me to kottke.org in the late 00’s. I love running, soccer (go Sporting KC!), and good vibes. I’m currently reading Maurice by EM Forster. I’ve listening to “Sun to Me” by Zach Bryan over and over. 5-4 and Articles of Interest for great Podcasts. Thank you for this website and this wonderful community, it has meant so much to me over the years. I have a twitter, but trying to spend less time there. Feel free to anyone add me on Snapchat and I’ll add back at “thisischaston” to see 100 snaps per day of my cat.

Hello from Boston! I've been reading the site since 2002 or so. I'm a former academic (vision scientist) turned data scientist, as so many of us are. You can find my own site at http://jdobr.es

Hi, my name is Darren. I live in Upstate New York, near Albany. A year ago, my family and I moved here from Jackson, Mississippi. The fragmentation of Twitter is what has me seeking different kinds of communities online, and I've finally joined specifically to cultivate better relationships to media I consume. I run a creative communications firm that serves clients in public health, mental health, and nonprofit spaces.

I've read Kottke for a long time (but not as long as some of you) and as long as I have, it's been an example of what I think of as the good Internet. My favorite posts are ones that sneak in a reference to my favorite science fiction book & tv series, The Expanse.

Hi I'm Ben, and I live in Milwaukee with my wife and 2 kids. I've lived all over the Midwest - Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and now Wisconsin - and think we'll probably stay put here.
I've been enjoying Jason's fine hypertext products since college, so probably '06-'07?
I'm a Quality Engineer for a small high-end computer manufacturer, which is borrrrrring, but stable, plus I get to work from home!
I enjoy sci-fi/fantasy books/shows/films, electronic music, kayaking on Milwaukee's rivers (you can dock at breweries for beer and curds!), and basketball.
Currently enjoying the Wheel of Time audiobooks, Station Eleven, Dune: Part One. I've been listening to Dua Lipa's Club Future Nostalgia on repeat since it came out, Lakefront and Vennture Breweries, and am VERY excited for the upcoming Milwaukee Bucks season with the addition of Damian Lillard.

I’m 44 years old and writing from the Olympic Peninsula in WA state. Been a reader of this site since 2005/6 by my best estimate... maybe earlier. RIP Google Reader. I don’t post much on socials but I can be found lurking around @zembla.bsky.social. I am current reading Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov (my favorite author by a mile since my pretentious college student days). I am in my old age suddenly getting into country-adjacent music like Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski. I deeply appreciate the work done around here, and the links, reads, recommendations, and ponderings offered here, especially due to synchronous parallels in our lives around parenthood and mental health, have been a source of enrichment on par with some of my closest IRL friends. Thanks for everything.

Hiya! I'm Ryan and I live just outside Chicago. I'm an artist/professor and have been reading Kottke since the early aughts. As a constant source of curiosity, creativity, and inspiration, It's the site I've read the longest on the web and I can't tell you how much I missed it during your sabbatical (but please don't hesitate to take another one when (or maybe before) you need it!!). I also roast coffee for my neighbors and design pins and stickers to support climate justice work.

Current song obsession: Jonathan by Adrianne Lenker

👋 Long time listener (1999?), First time caller. I'm James from NY where I'm a design team lead in an investment bank.

Hello all- I'm Jared and I've lived with my kids and wife outside Dallas for about 18 years now. 2 of the kids are still at home, the others have started making their way into the world. This website has been a mostly daily stop now for around 20 years. I've got a software engineering background but have been designing avionics systems for the last decade or so. Interests include indie rock, aviation, woodworking/home improvement, sci-fi, Legos, and the Utah Jazz. I'm on most of the major socials under my name, though I'm not a prolific poster. I'm currently rereading Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series and recently been watching the latest season of the Lower Decks amongst a lot of other stuff.
Been listening a lot lately to The Rural Alberta Advantage's latest album (their latest single, Conductors) and had an amazing time when The Beth's, Postal Service, and Death Cab came to Dallas.

Hi all - I'm Erik and I live in Brooklyn NY with my husband, two teen boys, and goldendoodle. I've been a regular here since the early 2000s when I worked as an interface developer (*Flash Actionscript* was my specialty; yea I'm old). For the past 20 years, I have been an urban planner for New York City. This website has been an endless source of entertainment, inspiration, and, once I had kids, a font of fun topics and video to discuss and watch with the family. One of the few bright spots in our digital world! Thanks, Jason!

Hello! I'm a photographer in Washington, DC and I've been reading Kottke pre-Y2K. During Covid, I was looking for other creative outlets and began writing about photography/books and that's been a really nourishing creative outlet for me. I somewhat grudgingly acknowledge the important of social media in my promotional work, and try to flesh out my photos w/ longer stories on my IG account,like this one.

I've recently been completely bowled over by this British show on Netflix called Top Boy, about British drug gangs. Its characters are as rich as those in The Wire, and it's just beautifully written with so many incredible performances. This song, by the Beths, and this one by Peter Matthew Bauer (The Walkmen) have been constant companions this year. Other than that, love traveling w/ my family, running, green tea and dark chocolate - all the finer things in life.

Dan here. I live in San Francisco with my wife and daughter. I've been a casual reader of the site since...I think the mid-aughts, but a more daily reader since Jason did the membership thing. I work Big Tech adjacent after getting a creative writing masters (it makes sense, I swear). Since the pandemic hit I've been doing neighborhood organization/community/street and pedestrian safety work on the side, and it's the most rewarding stuff I have ever done. We travel as much as we can, and sometimes document that on our old-style travel blog. Currently reading A Half-Built Garden, and working our way through the Cleopatra In Space graphic novels with my daughter. Thanks much to Jason for keeping this light on for so many years.

austinite here. (the city dweller type not the rare mineral). i am on a many year streak of riding my bicycle each and every day. i am also working to ride all 6,741.1 miles of travis county, texas. i listen to a lot of ambient and techno music from the early 1990s these days and i currently have 495 browser tabs open on my phone.

Hiya, Emily from Maine by way of SF here. Longtime follower and very appreciative of all the inspo, entertainment and straight knowledge that's dropped on this site. I'm a freelance designer and illustrator, mom of one brilliant, beautiful 8/yo kid, steadfast kickboxer, and absolute xennial. Also currently reading Groff's latest book after getting gloriously lost in Matrix, which I discovered here on Kottke. Currently binging World On Fire on PBS and slogging through Servant on Apple TV. Some other things I love are new-to-me wines, crispy fall leaves, coffee, asmr, and ornery terriers. This is starting to sound like an overcooked personal ad. Here's my website; you can also find me on instagram and threads (where I am awkwardly struggling to gain traction!)

Hi, I'm in Durham NC and I've been checking in to kottke.org on and off since the 90s, very regularly during the Google Reader era, the mid-twitter era, and now again in the early Bluesky era (we'll see how that goes). I'm currently reading a couple of great short story collections: Dancers on the Shore by William Melvin Kelley (recently read his novel A Different Drummer in book club, which was excellent) and Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. Also starting to read the Moomin books as book club's next selections are Finn Family Moomintroll and Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. I mostly prefer music without singing, or where lyrics are unintelligible. I've always worked for nonprofits (not counting high school jobs at McDonald's and Mr bill's sportscards & comics, lol). In the last decade or so I've gotten way more interested in art (like museums and galleries), with Wangechi Mutu, Hayv Kharaman, Hank Willis Thomas, Genevieve Gaignard, Patricia Piccini, and Yinka Shonibare being a few favorites. Locally, I really like Kennedi Carter and Saba Taj. And even though they have lyrics, the band Bangzz.

Hi, I'm another Jeff. Been reading Jason for at least 12 years. I live in Austin, TX, with my wife and 3 dogs. Kids are grown and out of the house. I'm a freelance graphic designer, amateur musician in a cover band and a writer. I am on social media, but don't really post much, except family stuff on Facebook. Loving the comment sections so far and happy to read about all your interesting readers.

First Canadian in. Long time reader, started in university and have been keeping up ever since. Miss greader as the way to stay on top of things. Live in Calgary.

I'm Caroline. I live in Vermont with my dog. I like all the stereotypical Vermont things: hiking, biking, swimming, bemoaning the lack of decent Mexican food, etc. I have been reading Kottke.org since 2008ish. In 2009, I got my first shout-out for submitting photos of a plush blobfish I made.

I work in education and have recently been reading lots of classic short stories as I develop a unit for 8th graders. If you haven't read The Lottery recently, go back and reread it; it's as good as you remember. And if you've never read it, here is your chance. When it was published in the New Yorker in 1948, the magazine received hundreds of letters in response—most of them expressing outrage.

hey everyone i'm moira but to differentiate from the other moira (what are the odds??) i'm using an old handle. i'm a voice actor, and live in the midwest with my carpenter husband + two kids who are mostly at their universities (but we're not quite empty-nesters yet).

i've been reading jason for what seems like forever but at least long enough that when my kids hit their stroppy teen years if i shared something in conversation they might eyeroll & say "did you get that from kottke?" lololol

i used to dj & still make mostly edm playlists but also love classical, afro-cuban jazz, & always bomba estereo & austin tv. i love movies & have a weird? habit of rewatching some faves but in their appropriate season, like troll hunter only in snowy winter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ just finished watching the full series of edeavour which was really great, & currently watching the latest season of lupin.

we're currently thinking about & planning our eventual relocation 5 or 6 years down the line, and our current shortlist of states to explore is vermont, wisconsin, oregon, and washington state- specifically whidbey island where we have old friends. weigh in if you want to big-up someplace cool in those areas!

thx jason for everything over the years & for offering comments up now 💛

Hi, I'm Ben, I live in Alameda, which is an island in San Francisco Bay. I live with my wife and daughter and a retired racing greyhound who is now super old and creaky. I've been reading Kottke for about 20 years, best as I can remember. I really appreciate the work that Jason does to curate the internet for me. As a token of my thanks I've been sending him a very small amount of money every month since he started the membership thing.
I'm a product manager at a software company and I enjoy photography, reading, travel (which I don't seem to do much of these days, though I am taking a trip to see the eclipse in April) and spending time with my family. I'm currently reading "Tailspin" by Sandra Brown, which is sort of a romance thriller and it's pretty terrible. I'm reading it because my eight year old daughter pulled it out of the Little Free Library in front of our house because she thought I'd like it because it has a picture of an airplane on the cover. So I'm slogging through it because I love her (my daughter, not Sandra Brown). Though who am I to criticize the work of Ms. Brown, who has apparently written more than 60 New York Times bestsellers? Geez, I'm really digressing here.

Hi everyone! My name is Terence and I live in Brooklyn doing software engineering.

My mini media diet:

• I will need a new cozy show once the growing season ends on Gardener's World.
• I surprised myself by sitting down and reading all the delightful commentary in one sitting in Michael Ruhlman's "The Book of Cocktail Ratios" recently.
• I spent two hours messing around with building space outposts in Starfield last night before I realized I was doing systems architecture for fun.
• I'll start paying attention to the NBA when Formula One winds down but I love them both.

Like many of you, I started reading Kottke.org in the mid-2000s and became a member to help fund Jason's sabbatical (an idea I loved).

Instagram | Threads

Hi all!

I’m Jason, a UX and Product designer with particular interest in UX for games and interactive stories. I pay especially close attention to tabletop RPGs, to Apple tech and to XR — I recently completed a Masters in Public Interest Technology with a focus on the anticipated future of near-term consumer AR.

I live in Seattle with my wife, who is from Brazil, and a rad 7-year-old kid, with whom I just rolled a first character sheet this weekend. :D We’re loving Seattle; we moved from Arizona, so the “by-the-water” lifestyle (ferries!) still seems like utter magic.

I’m so excited to see this community forming around Kottke.org’s comments section.

Hey I'm Jörg - I'm from Cape Town. I stumbled upon your site toward the end of the last century, and is the only blog I still read regularly. I know very little what happens on the Internet outside of what you post :). We're both born in the same year. I enjoy wild spaces, food, etc. I last visited Berlin where some of my family live, but I last travelled to Georgia ("The balcony of Europe") to experience her mountains, food culture and people. I developed a browser app about a decade or longer ago, but in the last few years I've been turning more toward painting, and when I travel, I'll go see every art exhibition I can get to. I've been reading George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, which has opened up so many thoughts on painting and developing a voice. I love some good 80's music like Roxy Music, but recently I've been hitting some Arthur Russel, and The Replacements hard.

Hullo all. I'm Pete from Birmingham UK. Jason has been part of my internet consistently since around 2000 and probably inspired me to blog in the "people should see this" manner.

I've been a blogger, was in the 2006-12-ish social media wars had an art practice and now work in a co-op bakery while developing a sideline in the theory and practice of composting which I've turned into a newsletter. My socials are pretty much a Mastodon account now, which I like because it rarely goes "viral" and when it does it's no hassle.

Also, rabbits. Have two: Walter Bunjamin and Lavander Graff Generator. They're the ginger and black/white ones on my Masto header.

Charlottesville landscape architect signing in. Little lady and I have two kids and I have been reading since early 2000s while then living in a very quiet downtown Oakland loft. I have an unquenchable interest in growing trees and have volunteered as a 1920/30s country and blues radio deejay on Saturday mornings since 2010. I really appreciate you, Jason. Props for your openness, brevity and thoughtful ability to capture our modern zeitgeist one post at a time.

Hello everyone! My name is John and I live in New Jersey, about 10 minutes from Newark Airport, for better or worse. My only living companion at this point in my life is my 17 year-old cat but that's plenty for me! I'm glad to see the comments space open up here as I've been a reader/support of Kottke for a couple of years now and I recently quit Twitter cold turkey. So it's nice to have another opportunity for online social interaction. My current passion is learning Italian which I've been doing since 2016. Among my interests are classical music (as well as Italian pop music!), reading, and a bit of drawing/sketching.

I'm currently re-reading Sara Baume's Spill Simmer Falter Wither in Italian (which is titled Fiore Frutto Foglia Fango or, in English, Flower Fruit Leaf Mud). Other random things I like: coffee, baseball, cocktails, classic movies (especially movies from the 70s set in urban environments!), playing guitar and piano badly. Anyway I really connect with the things that Jason shares and I seem to share a similar worldview. I'm really glad to be a part of this community and I look forward to reading everyone else's introductions.

Hi my name is Kirtan. I am a hematologist/oncologist practicing near Houston, TX.

So interesting to me how many of y'all keep creative practices going in parallel to demanding work lives. It's interesting, but given the nature of this site we all love, perhaps not surprising.

As for me, I'm also personal essayist working on putting together a collection about my search for home.

Some of my other current obsessions include sports analytics, video gaming, house/techno, and vintage workwear. But I'm little bit curious about everything. That's probably why I've been coming to this site every day for - hmmm - about 15 years.

I've enjoyed all the recommendations in this thread! I'm currently in my office listening to The Dream Pavilion by Harold Budd. Tonight, I'll keep reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung. And maybe I'll be able to talk my wife into watching Ken Burns' new American Buffalo documentary with me.

Looking forward to seeing what kind of a community we can build in these comments!

Hi everyone, I'm Ed. Originally from London in the UK, living in Vancouver BC for the past 10 years with my Canadian wife and 2 kids. I've been a web developer for 25+ years and reading kottke.org almost as long. Currently I run a web development / product agency. I think the comments are a great idea and it's fascinating to find out who else is reading the site - I don't do any "public" social media (just private slack groups and group texts) but this is a community I think would be very cool to be part of. Already noted down a couple of recommendations from this comment thread :D

I will add for that purpose that I have just finished all available Murderbot books / stories / online-only mini-stories. Highly recommended!

Look forward to seeing how this evolves.

Hi, I live in Wisconsin, I'm married to the love of my life for 23 years. We have college age twins and I am into the non-environmentally friendly hobby of four-wheeling. However, everything else about me is pretty liberal. My wife owns an all-electric car and I agree with Democrats for most causes (gun control, abortion rights, environment stewardship, business & bank regulations, gay marriage, etc) but I have some differences too. When I run into other people on the off-road trails, I don't talk politics because generally speaking that crowd are all Trump nuts.

We were lucky that COVID has almost no impact on our family compared to how others felt about it. I am fairly introverted and had almost no problems in dealing with social restrictions that were the byproduct of the Pandemic. I missed traveling and eating out, but having all the social engagements canceled was as much a relief as a let down. My kids didn't have a normal junior year in high school which sucked, but they did get a fairly normal senior year, which I think was about as good as that could have turned out.

As for when I first found Kottke, I'm fairly sure it was late 90's. Funny thing is I enjoy almost everything he posts but we have very different taste in music, which really surprises me considering how much most other thing resonate with me.

The only other Internet personality I've followed for a long time is John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame.

Keep up the good work Jason!

Hi, I'm Andy! I live in Portland, Oregon with my wife, Ami, and our 19-year-old son. You might know me from my site Waxy.org, where I've been blogging for over 20 years, or XOXO, an experimental festival/conference about independent artists working on the internet, one of my past web projects (see: Skittish, Upcoming.org, Playfic, Kind of Bloop, Supercut.org) or maybe my role in helping get Kickstarter off the ground. These days, I'm mostly handling print/web production for Pink Tiger Games, Ami's design studio for publishing conversational card games, and spinning up a currently-secret project that's equal parts exciting and terrifying. I love blogs, and of all the blogs I love, Kottke.org is one I love the most.

Hey there - I'm Peter. I live in Chicago with my spouse and two cats. I've been reading Kottke since High School I think, probably 2008 / 2009. I'm a Designer and Software Engineer by trade. I have far too many hobbies, but lately I've been focusing on a podcast that my spouse and I are doing called What Are We Doing - talking about pretty much what you'd expect a millennial couple to be talking about, which is to say, figuring out what we're doing with our lives.

You can find me on Mastodon and Threads

My latest media diet:

• Foundation (Season 2): Honestly fantastic, loved it. (A)
• Wheel of Time Its hard for me to separate what I think this show is from what it really is. I should re-read the books soon. (C+)
• A Memory Called Empire: Really solid space opera so far with interesting technology, and great hooks. (B+)
• Critical Role, Campagin 3, Episode 60: I've been less invested in Critical Role's 3rd D&D campaign than their 2nd, but I think the latest arc has been solid. (B)
• One More Time... by Blink-182: God its good to hear these three back together. (A)
• Bottoms: If Ayo Edebiri is in it, im watching it. (B+)
• Jedi: Survivor: Started off rocky on PC, but after upgrading my GPU, things have smoothed out, and I'm really enjoying it. (B+)
• Mastodon0: There is a reason why this is one of the highest rated D&D modules. (A)

👋 Hello!

❤️ Love kottke.org, been visiting since 2004 or so. Excited to meet fellow readers! Thanks for growing such a wonderful space here, Jason.

🏡 I live and work in New York State’s beautiful Hudson Valley with my wife Eileen, our three daughters, and our dogs.

📚 I’m a designer, author, speaker, and maker of tools. Interested in product strategy, innovation ops, interaction design, and design research.

🌍 As Head of Typography at Adobe, I’m responsible for the clarity, coherence, and relevance of our typography tools.

• My personal website is tbrown.org
• I’m @timbrown and @typesetting on Mastodon
• My book is currently on sale at A Book Apart: Flexible Typesetting is about how to practice typography — and why we’re experiencing the biggest shift in the history of graphic design.

My name is Jim, and I have zero idea how long I have been checking in on this site. I live north of Boston, and this reading I am reading books on marine biology (or in one case, a book that looked like it was about octopuses, only, it was a book about how weird is it that humans and octopuses both somehow evolved a consciousness. It was over my head a lot of the time). I am a fan of the baseball team in Cleveland and the football team in Green Bay - I was not given the choice to root for the Red Sox, when I was a kid. (I mean I was, but it was strongly discouraged.) I also have a small art studio, where I create random things that I think are amusing, and post them on instagram. Through this site, I have also added a few more than I wander to from time to time, and have subscribed to their sites as well.

Hi, I'm Steve :) I live in Mexico City with my girlfriend and our two dogs. I first stumbled upon Kottke.org in the year of our lord 2000, I think it was. I think I saw a post of his linked off k10k or Dreamless.org. A few years later, Jason linked to a little fun event I did with Wii Tennis, which basically made the event a success, and I've always appreciated that, thank you Jason. I've been lucky enough to meet Jason a few times in NYC through friends. This blog is a daily visit for me and one of the best places in the world. It's a pleasure to see all y'all. I don't post on the socials much but you can find me at stevebryant.substack.com, where I write about content and product design.

I'm Tim Carmody. If you've been reading Kottke.org since 2010, you may know me from my many guest host appearances (including the occasional hijacking) and my role in writing and editing the Noticing newsletter.

I'm based in Philadelphia, but grew up in Detroit, and also lived in Chicago and New York (Hell's Kitchen and Carroll Gardens, I still miss you, even though Philly is better).

I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and also wrote technology journalism for many years at Wired, The Verge, The Message, Adweek, and many other places freelance. I was one of the three bloggers at Snarkmarket, along with the talented Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, who've gone on to become very famous, and rightly so.

Currently I write and edit a newsletter called The Batch, which is all about the latest AI news and research. Our company teaches classes about AI and machine learning programming for everyone from experienced coders to people who are just getting started. As my wife (the incredibly talented Karen McGrane) says, we're selling shovels at the gold rush. Honestly, it's amazing.

Hi, My name is Jesse and I live in Mexico with my wife (I split my time between Mexico City and Cuernavaca.) I've been reading this site for years but only just joined because I figured it's about time. I'm a general techie kind of person (I've been a programmer as well as an electrical engineer designing electronic devices mostly for film making) but also have been a cinematographer. I've got a lot of experience with high speed photography, and currently working a lot with virtual production. Writing is too arduous for me to maintain a blog or anything, but I do like to comment now and then!

Hi, I'm Christopher. I've lived in and around Chicago since 2000, which is also the year I discovered Kottke through a friend in college. In 2010 I launched an art and visual culture blog/platform/channel called Colossal. While I'm often immersed in social media for work, I abandoned places like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit last year in favor of ... going outside and doing things. That said, I'm really interested to see how comments work here and if the fragmentation of the "social web" may lead us back to communities just like this? I hope.

Howdy from Seattle! I'm Peter, a tabletop RPG game designer. I have a tight little game called The Well about living in an underground society and exploring tombs, and I'm playtesting my next big game now. (Volunteers welcome!) You can see my work at my website. I don't have Facebook, and there's no point in promoting Twitter any longer, so you can find me @[email protected] on Mastodon or @paschaefer on Bluesky.

Hi - Christina here. I live in the Chicago area with my husband and kid, who has received many of the TKSST gift recommendations I found from links here. I've been reading Kottke since near the beginning I think - I wrote a research paper on blogs as spaces in college (I admit the fully nerdiness of that). Most of my time goes to helping researchers learn and use technology and to running a recreational soccer league that aims at all kids in my area having a chance to try and play soccer if they want. The past few years I've particularly appreciated this site for cutting through the algorithms and helping me find ideas and people I probably wouldn't otherwise find or pay attention to. Thanks Jason!

Hi I'm Spencer. I've lived on the same block in Boston since 1995. I used to do a bunch of different things that had almost nothing to do with the internet, but for the last several years, I have spent most of my time helping build bridges between climate science and culture. Kottke.org has helped me develop a sense of the web. With an amazing group of people (including Jason's pal Paul Ford), I helped build the non-profit Probable Futures which offers beautiful, vivid, and resonant climate literacy tools and maps that allow you to see how the weather will change from Vermont to almost anywhere else in the world.

Hi! I’m Karim (@k4r1m on Bluski), and I live with my wife & small daughter in Bonn (Germany), and I work on Earth Observation stuff for our local space agency. I’ve been reading this blag for about 15 years, and am amazed about the number of people knowing about this place since before I had access to the internet :)

I don’t get to read or play video games as much as I would like to, but I get to figure out with my daughter who she is, and that is how I spend most of my free time.

I got to visit a couple of places in Pakistan recently, which turned out to be much nicer and safer than I would ever have thought!

Finally: thanks Jason!

Hi All, I’m Isah, 44. I started reading Kottke when I moved outside of the US in 2004, missing New York and wanting a way to have conversations in English for a few moments a day. And here we are, actually having conversations. Almost 20 years later, we’re considering a move back to the US (so many reasons to and not to do so), and I still count on this site to give me a reality check, not on what everyone is talking about, but what I might just want to think about or explore or stare at blankly.

I work remotely in higher ed— it was a weird path to get here through indigenous rights, food sovereignty, a few moments in politics. My work now fits my skillset and allows me to have small impacts on real people.

My last few years have been centered on navigating life with a neurodivergent daughter. I’m afraid I lost a bit of myself in that navigation, and I’ve been trying to rediscover how I define and practice joy lately. That has meant going back to old pastimes —reading historical fiction, mixed media journalling, making soups from any and all cuisines— but also discovering new ones like crochet and reading graphic novels (so forgiving for pick up/put down reading as I get back into my groove). We’re taking an ASL intensive online that has been kicking my butt. Between the crochet and ASL, I'm waking up at night with hand cramps! I’m assuming I’ll work the literal kinks out with more practice. I’ve fronted many a folk band and studied opera decades ago; one factor in my "move back to the US" pros column is that I want to join an activist-oriented women's choir. I'll be the one who brings a tambourine and kazoo to practice even if no one asks me to.

I'm Larry, I live in Florida with my fiancé (wife in three weeks) and our two canines. I'm currently an IT manager for a mid-sized company. I require live music, travel, podcasts (mostly music-related, comedy, and true crime), movies, table-top board games, and outdoor time. I just finished reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've always liked time travel movies, so I'm planning on readying The Time Machine by H. G. Wells next. I haven't been able to travel this year, but I'm looking forward to going to London soon. For board games, I can have fun playing almost any kind of them, but I tend to gravitate towards the German-style ones and my favorite has been Power Grid.

I've spent so many years passively gorging on this site that when I saw this post I thought 'ooh, it'll be interesting to read about everybody', but it didn't occur to me that I could take part myself. But here we are: I'm Jon, long-time reader, first-time commenter. I live just outside London, UK, and work as a copywriter. One daughter, one wife. This site is honestly the one I love visiting more than any other, so it's an honour to be able to add a few of my own words here. Huge book-lover, and if there's one I'd recommend over any other it's Karoo by Steve Tesich. Massively underrated, and brilliant. Currently reading Altered States by Anita Brookner (after thoroughly enjoying another two of hers - Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac and the devastating Look at Me). Instagram.

Hi all – I’m Ellen from Metro Detroit, Michigan. Been reading Kottke for many years like a lot of you. In the online world I generally like to stay hidden but I’m going to make an exception for this site which I find inspiring and soothing and enlightening and … you guys get it! I have had a long career in TV and Radio advertising but my true love is reading. (Also just finished The Vaster Wilds. Loved The Matrix more but still Lauren Groff = Wow.) I’m on Goodreads and am looking forward to hearing from fellow Jason fans.

Hi! Jason Packham, here. I live in the Salt Lake City area and I've been reading kottke.org since the last century, probably around 1999. I'm a product manager working for a large bank (I know, exciting). Big fan of crosswords, I've got a decent 440 day streak going on the NYTimes crossword. Also, piano, hiking, reading, baseball, watching my kids' sports.

My recent reads:
Working my way through Ferrante's Neapolatin series, just finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Also just finished watching the great My Brilliant Friend series.
I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy
Holly, by Stephen King

Watching: Just finished S2 of Reservation Dogs and S2 of Somebody Somewhere. Both fantastic.
MLB playoffs, although my Braves bowed out early.

Listening: New Sufjan Stevens album is amazing. Javelin
Also loving the new Wilco album, Cousin

Playing: Animal Crossing and Legend of Zelda (Breath of the Wild)....I know I'm a bit late on that but having a ball.

Big fan of Jason's Media Diets posts.

Thrilled about the comments. Reader since the early aughts.
I live in Chicago w/ wife & 2 kids. I ride them around on a cargo ebike.
Recently started going back to school to get a masters in a program that's essentially data science for govt/non-profits. I was job hunting and it concretely dawned on me that I did not care at all for the marketing work I had been doing.
For years now when sharing things with others that I found on Kottke.org I share the actual Kottke post and not the direct link to the video/story/etc, as I've found that Jason's writing about it offers better commentary than I could. I've also hoped that it would get my friends to regularly start reading Kottke.org. Do the rest of you do the same?

Checking in from Boise, ID. Here's my current Zoom background with my too-beautiful-for-words aussie, Malo. He's soft and sweet like a toasted marshmallow.

20 years in NH, 10 years in California, and now 4 years in Boise, plus some other years in some other places. Ex-band geek (trumpet) and current computer geek.

kottke.org has brought much joy to my life. Happy to support it. Happy to read from likeminded people.

Nathan here! I live outside Orlando with my wife and 6 kids. My wife and I founded Wondermade — we make the world's best marshmallows with 2 stores in the area, including one at Disney Springs. Incidentally when people ask me about my favorite marshmallow moments over our 11 years, I mention hanging with Martha Stewart, giving a Ted Talk, seeing countless people try and love our marshmallows… and being in the Kottke gift guide a few years back!
Thankful for the opportunity with these comments to do something that feels like vintage Internet.
In addition to marshmallows and kids, I lead a small house church and I'm about to chair the board of a non-profit for adults with special needs. I play a lot of soccer, read, and love to travel and hike. (If you're into hiking, I can't recommend the Lofoten Island in Norway enough.)
@wondermade on much / most of the web … though sometimes it's more the business and sometime's it's just me. 👋

Hi all, this is really lovely. I'm Michael. Philly suburbs born and raised, now living in the city itself. I've been reading kottke.org since small times, and it's now such a joy to be able to share it with my large young adult children. I work as an account manager for a smallish enterprise software company. My most recent read is The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, which I had spotted in a kids' toy and book store. It's a middle grades book but it's an absolutely wonderful read. And there are two more in the series! The best book I've read this year is Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, which I first learned about on Metafilter. It is also about nature and robots. I'm sensing a theme.

Hello from Denver! I've been reading for over 20 years—I don't remember when I started exactly or how I first found Jason's site but I've been visiting multiple times a day for quite a while. I think it's going to take a bit to get used to commenting here; for so long reading kottke.org has been a solitary/meditative experience for me, only rarely even sharing posts. It feels strange to start talking about them! But I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Thanks for everything Jason, I'm so glad you and your site are still here and trying new things. Keep at it!

I'm Richard, and I live in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm a law professor (a former lawyer, and I also have a PhD in English Literature). I live with my wife—well, part time, because she's also a professor and she split her time between here and her college town. I've been reading kottke.org for I don't know how long, a long time. I'm currently working with some of my students to design a boardgame about jurisdiction and civil procedure; it's actually really fun. I'm on most of the social media sites (links here: bio.site/rlheppner), although I've essentially quit X. I'm most active on BlueSky, and I have invite codes to share. (And I can't think of a better group of folks to share them with!)

Dana here, French professor in Duluth overlooking beautiful Lake Superior. I teach students how to see the world differently and help administrators articulate a value for the liberal arts. Publicly funded, comprehensive education matters! I have been following Kottke.org for probably 20 years. I came across Jason's site in grad school in Boston. I was struck by who closely his cultural references matched my own. We are about the same age, both group up in MN, and both migrated out east. I made my way back eventually to raise the kids near family. His victories and struggles have been more familiar than I care to admit. I know that it's a one-way relationship, but it has been reassuring to hear someone else go through so many of the same things. And the curated lists! I do love the curated lists. Thanks, Jason. Keep up the good work.

Hi there, I'm Mat. Been reading kottke.org for a long time, 15+ years I guess? I'm currently a data engineer at a mental healthcare company, started about 4 months ago. It's only my most recent career of many. Previously did a physics/neuroscience PhD, taught at an online education company, and worked on AI projects at a couple startups. I live in Long Beach, CA where I ride my bike along the beach and enjoy life with my wife and friends.

I love art from every medium: animation, music, books, comics, TV & movies, games. Recent fun things...

• Classic Sci-Fi: Hyperion & Fall of Hyperion
• Modern Sci-Fi: A Memory Called Empire, A Psalm for the Wild-Built
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Recent albums from Horsegirl and Feeble Little Fish
• Frieren, a really good new anime series

I'm about to be a new dad and I've never been more excited in my life.

Hello! I'm a public librarian in Florida. I live with two teen girls and my lovely husband and funny dog. I didn't plan to comment but had to chime in after reading so many wonderful intros from people. No clue when I started reading Kottke but definitely was on Google reader at the time. Obviously I love reading and was thrilled to find so many good book recs here. I just finished "Last to leave the room" but Caitlyn Starling.

Hi, I'm Todd from Pittsburgh. Wasn't going to comment until I noticed only one other Pennsylvanian and none from the Steel City. Have to represent! Originally from the U.P. (IFYKYK) and have lived in Chicago, San Francisco, Brooklyn and finally saved the best for last. I have a 16 year-old son, very talented painter wife, a cat, a dog and 18 fish.

First read Kottke after the first time I saw it linked to from Daring Fireball and haven't looked back. Currently running a photo studio and doing a lot of retouching but my career arc can pretty much be described as "mac enthusiast since 1984 who has managed to parley that into various vaguely creative jobs that I can do on a mac".

Top Authors - Kazuo Ishiguro, Neal Stephenson, Michael Chabon and most recently Emily St. John Mandel. Oh, and the audiobook of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders is one of the most amazing things I've ever listened to. Check it out!

Been reading for over 20 years. When I launched my first websites in high school, I would constantly look at your stylesheets for inspiration — that wonderful dark red and then that distinct dark blue you used for links, not to mention Lucida Grande, one of the great fonts.

I am now a reporter.

We once traded emails about beavers, a story idea I never got around to.

I am have been going through political biographies and history at the moment:
— Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes”
— the new MLJ biography by Jonathan Eig
— yes, Robert Caro’s Moses book
— “American Prometheus” — which pales in comparison of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” if you must read one book about Trinity
— still tackling the multivolume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” — insanely entertaining, if sometimes slow going

^MLK biography, I meant!

Hi, I'm Nancy in Indianapolis.
Writer/designer/English teacher/other stuff.

Fun fact, as they say: I was Jamal Khashoggi's Freshman Comp teacher.

Kottke.org is a must-visit site more than once daily.

Hi! My name's Max. I've been reading Kottke since probably 2003 or 2004 — so when I was 15??

I was born and raised in Buffalo, NY, but have been living in Brooklyn since 2006. I have a Boston terrier pitbull mix named Tucker. I'm currently an art director and content strategist. I can be found at my website here and on Instagram here.

Currently reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (would recommend!). Next on my book stack is Death Valley by Melissa Broder (extremely recommend her previous work, The Pisces and Milkfed). I, like everybody else, have been sucked into the vortex that is Taylor Swift and most recently watched the Eras Tour movie in theaters where I scream-sang throughout with my fellow moviegoers (would also recommend).

Thank you for continuing to maintain this site! It is a daily read, and one of my favorite corners of the internet.

Hi, it looks like my comment instigated this thread and then I was sleeping while it took off. I’m Russell, the first poster from down under. I live on never-ceded Gadigal land, aka Sydney, and saw Jason talk at Webstock in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2013 - so I’m a relative latecomer. I’m the Chief Experience Officer at the Australian Museum, a colonial institution trying to deconstruct itself into something more relevant.

I’m from LA and moved to Aotearoa in 2002 and then Melbourne in 2012. 21 years as an expat is a weird feeling, but with an Australian family now, this has become home. My kid is a few years younger than Jason’s but it’s been great to pick up recs from him about things his boys liked and foist them on mine.

Hope some other Kiwis and Aussies wake up this morning and add to the post. I know you’re out there.

Hey this rules!

I’m Tyler and I’m typing this from my home office in the suburbs of CT, about 45 mins outside of NYC. I live with my wife, 2 kids and 2 dogs in an antique house (1849) which take up all my time. I very little time for leisure reads but we did just put up a Little Free Libary on our property last year and that’s been a joy to steward. When I’m not doing my day job (project manager for a large health outsourcing company) I like to spend my money by getting hoozwaggled by Instagram ads.

Been leeching off this site for 15 years or so and it acts as a warm blanket for me. So very appreciative of everything Jason has posted and done over the years!

Long time reader, here every day. Retired biochemist and now college chemistry teacher, 5 miles from Lake Ontario. Suffered through the interregnum, but wholeheartedly approved the taking of mental health time!
Yesterday an amazon truck was pulled up outside and I noticed that, when their side doors are slid open, the logo still works, though the curved arrow is shorter and I thought JASON HAVE YOU SEEN THIS!!!

Love the site. MVC

Daniel checking in from the Nashville, TN area. Been a fan of the site since around 2006 or 7 I think; I'm pretty sure I accidentally found this site looking for Leo Kottke's website. I'm a mechanical engineer for a company that builds cranes. I live with my wife of 15 years, irish twin girls at home (currently both 13 atm) who I am very proud of, and a pile of whitebread hobbies (guitar, drawing, painting, mountain biking, backpacking, woodwork, etc) that I am not great at. Currently reading 'The Saturn V F-1 Engine: Powering Apollo Into History', but I generally read less dry non-fiction.

Of all the great things this site has pointed me to, I think my favorite thing is when Jason posts something I'm already a fan of. It's a pretty lopsided ratio (maybe 400:1-ish) but when it happens it gives me a sense that I'm still capable of being interesting, which, sometimes as a 40-something dad you forget what that's like...

I live in Cincinnati, Ohio with my partner and a cat named Edie. I currently design various graphical things as a freelancer, and take daily photos to reflect on the days. But my real joy is avoiding work and I've been following been following along here for as long as I can remember. Kottke.org is part of a nutritious breakfast of RSS feeds that start the day (and I revisit between tasks whenever I catch myself scrolling unsavory news outlets and social media for too long.) It is among my favorite things on the internet and I thank you Jason for making it so!

Hello everybody! So fun to read about everyone here. What a bunch of wonderful, accomplished, cool people!
I’m not sure anyone is reading this far down, but here goes:
I live in Grand Rapids, MI, with my lovely wife of 32 years. My son just graduated from Northwestern University Nd now lives in DC. My daughter attends Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. I’ve been reading Kottke since the early 2000s. My own neglected blog is at englishrules.com. Currently a software engineer, but have had a few careers over the years, starting with HR and then internal tooling at Microsoft in the early 1990s, followed by owning/operating a coffeehouse, teaching high school English, copywriting, and then web development while helping out in the jQuery team in the early days. Now I work at BAMF Health, a company at the forefront of molecular medicine for the treatment of cancer and soon other diseases

I'm Sara, originally American but have been living in London for over 15 years – and definitely reading this site for longer than that! I edit non-fiction illustrated books for a living, but when left to my own devices I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I just finished White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, which I loved despite not usually being a short story person, and started The Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. And I recently bought an e-bike, mostly to get my 4yo kid to school, and am embarrassingly into it.

👋 Lenny here in SF, reading since I was in high school and kottke.org was highlighter green (gonna say 2003?) I don't have a specific or succinct example, but this site has surely had a profound (and positive) influence on my life over these decades!

Hi! Eric in Austin Texas here. I'm a consultant that's helping to bring more clean renewable energy to Texas as part of the energy transition. Climate change is a crisis. Austin is lovely.

Hi all! I'm here on kottke every day, usually a few times a day. I think this is one of the best places on the internet, and I'm really happy about the comments.
I live in Upstate NY with my spouse, cat, and dog. I love my job in the healthcare field, and I enjoy baking, scary movies/tv, the local music scene, and trying new restaurants. My favorite posts on kottke are usually about the arts, books, and science.

Howdy all and Jason.

I'm Logan in Boulder, CO. I'm a dad of two beautiful daughters. I manage environmental impact analyses on coal mines for the Federal government. As you can imagine, we're at the forefront of everything climate change. Good times! I'm not competitive, but I've been riding all types of bicycles, daily if possible, for 30 years now. I LOVE music and art, all of it, although I'm not a connoisseur like some probably are. I'm cautiously optimistic about how our world will take shape as my kids grow into adults. I believe in them and their loving, kind, intelligent selves so much! I've been a daily Kottke.org visitor since around 2006, I think. I'm extremely grateful for this space and the consistency, dedication, and energy (work) which you, Jason, have put into it. I appreciate everyone else here for helping to keep it going!

Hi all. Excited for this new feature. Been reading Kottke since at least 2004 and I look forward to catching up on posts every evening.

I’m a rare book dealer in the Washington DC area. Aside from obviously being a serious book lover, I dig music, movies, watches, and other assorted Kottke-esque and Kottke-adjacent things.

Current reading: new Larry McMurtry biography. About to finish Going Infinite.
Current watching: Moonlighting (finally streaming!)
Current listening: You Look So Serious by Florian T M Zeisig (just one of the many things I’ve discovered right here via Jason)

With the continued death spiral of social media, really looking forward to maybe connecting with some other readers / like minded folks.

Hi everyone! I'll echo what a few said: wasn't gonna comment, but loving the energy, and hoping to replicate it.
I'm in Albuquerque, NM, and I teach high school English. (Also, AP Seminar, if there are any other HS teachers here.)
Been reading Kottke since 2004...ish?
Read almost exclusively comic books, listen to hip-hop, but expanding both of those as I'm getting older. Find me running on the Bosque Trail listening to podcasts, too, though.

Hi! 👋

First, thanks to Jason for inviting us here and for writing and sharing so many things over the years. It's a daily bit of joy and I love having this in my life. I think I've been here since 2009.

I love Mad Men, home-made veggie burgers, and drawing the world. I post my drawings of Los Angeles on Instagram. 〰️〰️〰️

My latest obsession has been the musician Blake Mills. He's a singer-songwriter that stretches and shreds structure within songs. His productions move between spare to lush, with small twists and in-your-face moments sprinkled throughout. I really like it when his understated songs edge on feeling aggressive through a barking synth or a screeching voice. I think my favorite song is 'History of My Life'.

I look forward to reading and sharing more in these comments. Hope to see you all again soon. ✨

My question to you all: if you've ever been in a Book Club, beyond simply discussing the book, what specifically would you do at meetings that made the Book Club great? Thank you in advance for sharing!

I’m Bob. I live in the Philly suburbs with my wife and a couple of kiddos. I’ve been reading kottke.org for 20+ years. I make software (mostly websites), solve tech problems, and consult generally about technology decisions at The Criterion Collection. I’m grateful to be a part of a team that helps preserve and put great art into the world.

This site has always been what’s good about the Internet. I used to love twitter too, so I’m sad to see it desolving into a garbage heap, but none of the alternatives have captured my fancy yet. If anyone can point me to what’s a good corner of Bluesky or Mastodon or some other pseudo-Twitter type space without trashy adverts or annoying algorithms that would be amazing.

I’m starting to think that old school 90s/early-00s small Internet communities and moderated bulletin boards with comment sections where everyone knows each other might be the future. Or at least the part of the future-Internet that I want to be a part of, so it’s great to see Jason trying out this experiment.

Take care all, and have a great weekend.

I'm James, from the Pioneer Valley area of Western MA. I'm a 77 year old retiree ( many jobs, no career ). My latest senior moment was forgetting I'm a Kottke Patreon and thus after figuring that out, I can post this. I've been visiting kottke.org for quite awhile.

Recent reading - Flags On The Bayou - James Lee Burke, Desert Star - Michael Connelly, Kingdoms of Savannah - George Dawes Green, Killing Moon - Jo Nesbo

I listen to KPIG radio online.

My recent favorite "tune" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWc7vYjgnTs

and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZXIVMdXsVU

Most recent live music heard - James McMurtry

Favorite band - Tedeschi Trucks

Currently streaming - Suits

I'm Alex. I'm an aerospace engineer that can code half decently, and know enough about fonts and kerning from Kottke.org to be snobby about mismatched fonts in reports. I'm on Mastodon at universeodon.com.

Hey peeps, Steve here. I’m French Canadian, or more precisely Québécois. Grew up in Quebec City, did a stint in NH where I met my wife, and we now live in Toronto.

I’ve been reading Kottke since around 2002? It’s one of the very few blogs for which I read every post. So many things I’ve read on here turned into dinner table conversation with the family. It’s hard to imagine not having had Kottke all that time. Feels like life would be very different, without that enlightened window on the good Internet.

I’ve been a software developer for 25 years, doing iOS and Android apps for the last 10. My background is actually industrial design, so companies don’t always know how to categorize me. I work at Aura, best digital frames around.

I keep my online presence relatively lean but my source of truth is steveroy.ca which gets cross-posted to mastodon. I got tired of companies owning our content so I post to my own site and I self-host my feeds with FreshRSS. Sorry for being so long! Cheers!

How lovely it's been to read through the intros from this captivating community-to-be! I live on an island in Maine with my husband and work remotely for a multi-disciplinary media company. Kottke.org has been a near-daily dose of wonder since I first accessed the site via dial-up on my old Gateway desktop near the turn of the century. I appreciate the curiosity and humanity Jason brings to his work.

I'm in the midst of a social media break, which has given me a rather shocking amount of time to dabble in hobbies, soak up the wilderness, and connect with the people I love. Consequently, I've been reading through my Kindle backlog. Memoirs first: Crying in H Mart, Between Two Kingdoms, and What Looks Like Bravery; and now on to novels, beginning with The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan. My first Broadway show post-COVID shutdown was David Byrne's American Utopia, which reminded me of the power of collective joy.

Hi, I'm Marco. I do technology things for a birdy nonprofit that works to help birds and the places they live thrive. I live in Albany, NY after spending more than a decade in Brooklyn and the Western Catskills. Recently I've been getting more seriously into gravel biking and learning to play the cello.

I don't remember how long I've been reading kottke.org but I think I was digitally aware of Jason in the early 2000's when I was active on a listserv about a well-known American writer. (Frequent readers here can probably guess who.) I ran a link blog from 2005-2010 while I was doing a late 20's stint in Las Vegas and Reno. Something I would've posted there that Kottke wouldn't typically post are gonzo interviews like this recent one with Godfrey Reggio: https://thefilmstage.com/the-hearing-of-the-mystic-godfrey-reggio-on-technophobia-anarchism-ai-and-grand-theft-auto-parodies/

My recent media diet is pretty Kottke-adjacent. books (Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; The Fifth Season; Robert Caro's LBJ books; The Mezzanine); music (wide-ranging but often OPN and Aphex Twin and twangier stuff when live); video games (most recently, The Case of the Golden Idol); TV and movies (the usual critically-acclaimed ones plus the occasional dip into the Criterion app) -- although I don't think Jason seems to have a particular fondness for things Nathan Fielder is involved with, at least not that he's written about.

If you like birds, you might want to check out this thing I was involved with that allows you to explore animated migration tracks for hundreds of bird species in the Western hemisphere (https://birdmigrationexplorer.org), the far-flung locations they connect to from where you are with beautiful maps, and the challenges they need to overcome in order to do so successfully.

Hello there, I'm Daniel. I am a UX designer here in Silicon Valley, although I am a former professional music during and after college in souther California. I am married with two kids in the Bay Area. I hold dual Swedish-US citizenship, although born here, but to Swedish immigrants. It helps me select the shortest line when going through customs at the airport. I love playing music, photography, reading fiction and history, long walks, listening to podcasts and so much more. I most recently finished reading Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut (highly recommend it!) and currently reading 'Make It So' by Patrick Stewart, although in this case I chose to have Sir Pat read it to me on Audible, something I don't do very often (important to hear him speak his Yorkshire dialect). My sites: BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Artifact, Instagram, my photography. And I still watch way too much M*A*S*H to this day.

Hey, all! I'm a long-time Kottke reader currently living in the LA suburbs and working at Mighty Networks.

I'm married to an amazing English teacher. We have 3 sons and a small, opinionated dog.

I write posts and a newsletter at House of Kyle, and am also active on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Great to meet everyone!

another Jason, ~20 years on the kottke train

Once, in a tizzy about crappy schools, I pitched my (now ex) wife that I wanted homeschool the kids and their friends from the neighborhood with a curriculum drawing solely from Kottke.org. It started as a mental stunt but the more I thought about it the more great ideas spontaneously emerged.

I’m not like an “internet” person, so while you can find me under worstedchalice on instagram it’s mostly a lot of videos of my tortoise. I swear by tiktok, and get a lot of super diverse input there.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Corridos Tumbados of late, and some sick Arabic 70s souls reissues on the “Habibi funk” label. allovertheplace

Like so many I have activated a lot of mental energy in these recent weeks on issues of justice, compassion, fucking heartbreak, and related topics.

What an inspiring group of commenters! So much great stuff reading them. I'm Bob, live just outside Chicago now, but was born and raised in Philly. Practicing chemist these days - came here for a PhD and never left. A good friend introduced me to the site in 2000 or 2001. Been a nearly daily check ever since. I try to read a lot, love live music (and am a huge Deadhead) and spend way too much time messing around with technology in all aspects. Out of doors, I'm trying to get back in to Mountain Biking, I commute by bike/train nearly every day, have recently took up ice hockey as an adult and love tennis. Trying to go out fighting for sure.

Hello. Longtime consumer of fine hypertext products here. 👋

At least judging from the names - there are so few women* here! So I'll increase that small number -

I live in Eastern Germany with my 4 kids and 2 fluffy cats. I am a psychotherapist, these days mostly working as an advisor/experts for family courts and training the next generation of psychotherapists.

Currently reading The Covenant of Water which is wonderful and so immersive. I recently watched all of Parks and Rec for the first time; never wanted to leave that loving, escapist community. I enjoy the Hardfork podcast among many others, especially because of the chemistry between the hosts. I like cooking, baking, lifting weights and eating chocolate.

Been reading kottke.org for at least 15 years, and it's been the source of so much joy and inspiration in my life ❤️

Hello from Queens! Mom, wife, runner, strategist. This is my favorite place on the internet. Thank you Jason for this blog and for all its added to my life and my thinking over the years. Thank you commenters for the chance to connect with everyone else who loves it as well. I feel like it's never been more important to build community than it is today.

Also, I am halfway through Michael Lewis's "Going Infinite." Literally, am unable to make heads or tails of SBF. Even with the up close and personal view and the crazy anecdotes.

Hey all, so cool to see everyone here--it's like the auditorium lights came up and we all just remembered that this isn't just a private conversation!

I'm ReeD from San Francisco where I live with the family, 2 kids, 2 cats, and 8 oversized spiders crawling up our exterior wall alongside an inflatable ghost. We don't own a car, and I'm a lover of transit (Muni!) and biking, both as transportation and as great ways to meet new friends and neighbors outside of boring work circles. I'm a grown-up liberal arts kid playing the role of designer, but I mostly like to spend my days drawing or writing down ideas with a fountain pen in a Rhodia webnotebook at a cafe. Surely I'll solve all of the world's problems that way some day.

I've worked for too many big places, not enough small places, and most recently worked at a lil blue bird company...but got shitcanned by the new guy while on parental leave (for which I am very grateful). I am now working on something far more entertaining with a few other folks, and trying not to take life too seriously.

Kottke's been probably the most consistently awesome thing on the internet in my lifetime, and I've been steeped in it ever since noodling around with Gopher and Mosaic at NCSA in Champaign-Urbana as a kid. I somehow have never bookmarked the site, but still manually type it in...generally daily, sometimes multiple times a day...when I just need a little grounding and the real world is too far for my feet to carry me.

Repping for the still-great Portland OR. I’m Shannon, female — why so few ladies on this thread, I know you out here! — and find Kottke to be one of the most tonally-positive islands in this ever roiling sea of the internets. I’m here on the daily to see what has caught the interest of JK and what might catch my own.

I’m a creative director by day, a ceramicist at nite and can be found on all types of bikes, on trail or just thinking and making. Currently slow-walking through the 21 book Patrick O’Brian series (Master and Commander Appreciation Club Member; judge me, I do not care ‘cause I love me this movie), David Marx’s Ametora and listening to the most excellent biography of the Mitford sisters by Laura Thompson — a fantastic contextual portrait of these personalities whose privileged existence and casual racism veered into unapologetic fascist fandom. I recently discovered BBC audio theater on YouTube and suddenly listening to beautifully produced Colin Dexter audio plays is a new favorite thing.

Also randomly obsessed with Zamrock, which I can’t seem to get enough of and the W.I.T.C.H show here was the highlight of summer. Zamrock and MTB gots the flow.

Hey choomers,
I really like the idea of getting to know the neighbours. What a great move, Jason!

I heard about this blog in 99 or 2000? And since then I’ve been here on a daily base...

Yesterday night I finished the Cyberpunk 2077 extension Phantom Liberty for the first time and I’m still trying to figure it out if it was a good ending or not. As a former Cyberpunk rolepIayer back in the 1990s I couldn’t wait to play this game as it was released and of course to get the Phantom-addon. It was really worth the wait! Hell I even got my PS5 for this!

I live in the western part of Germany and in real life I make films for children TV. I’m looking forward seeing the Bundesliga this afternoon with my son.

And, Jason, I was surprised finding soccer content on your blog. Wish there was more to come!

I’m Les early retiree from brewing and SciFi reader now teaching management at a university in Singapore - which is bad as I love good and it’s the worst place in the world for not eating. I focus on experiential learning - simulations and serious games … focus on relevance emotion & (mild) stress to aid learning Cheers

And I’m a bad subeditor who posts before re-reading … as I love good “+ food”

Hello from Herefordshire, in the UK, where we moved nearly four years ago from London, to a house surrounded by fields. It's beautiful and peaceful and/but I miss everything about cities. I'm an increasingly-retired freelance web developer.

I've been reading this site since 2000 when I also started blogging, inspired by Jason and other early bloggers. I also run The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Today's Guardian, and ooh.directory, a collection of blogs.

Due to an administrative oversight my "to read" shelf has run out of fiction so I'm currently re-reading some Nicholas Mosley books because I love the way he writes thoughts, Accident being a favourite.

The most recent music I bought is Fortitude Valley's self-titled 2021 album. I like to think I'm hunting for new diverse and experimental musical trailblazers but apparently it's still indie-pop about broken hearts that I love.

😅 Yikes, thank goodness for this post: looks like my membership had expired! Maybe that says a lot about me. Or at least about my skills in keeping on top of email.

Hi, my name Kristian. I’m the Founder of Ooni which I run with my wife and Co-CEO, Darina. We live in Edinburgh, Scotland, with our two boys and a dog called Marty McFly. Outside of work and home my interests are running, wall climbing, skiing, photography and whisky. Occasionally I post about those on Threads, Mastodon and Instagram. And pizza. Plenty of pizza photos, too.

I can’t remember when exactly when I started reading Kottke.org but it’s got to be at least 15 years. Mid-noughties. Whenever it was, it’s been a daily destination ever since.

Nice to meet you all!

Hi, I'm Yun, a 15-year Kottke subscriber from Seoul, South Korea, and I work in marketing field.
I don't remember how I first came across Kottke.org, I think it was from another blog.

Kottke has provided me with a treasure trove of reading material, and I think it's pretty much stealing that I've been able to enjoy it for free for 15 years. So when they added commenting, I signed up for a membership. Jason's antennae and curation of the nooks and crannies of the internet makes it worth every penny.
Things like the Cari Institute, which he recommended this week, are invaluable to me.

I'm not very active on social media. I have Instagram, but I rarely use it and use it to talk to my Korean friends in Korean language.
I read various English-language news, including Kottke.org, and summarize what I think is interesting in a newsletter called YUNSFEED, which is also in Korean, so I don't think it will be of much interest to English-speakers. (If you have Korean friends, please recommend it to them. LOL)

Anyway, Keep up the good work Jason. Wishing you all the best, always.

* As a side note, I use Pinboard as a bookmarking service. I love the tagging and lightweight nature of it. I have over 600 articles on my Pinboard tagged with "kottke".

I'm Jeffrey and I live north of Boston and work from home - thankfully after years of brutal commute - and work in the tech industry. I've been reading Kottke since the early 2000's. Jason's and my kids are around the same age, I've always found his lists/recommendations pertaining to his kids to be relevant to my own, I've taken many of the suggestions & my kids have loved most of them...see 'Shaun the Sheep' etc. I'm one of those that gets easily distracted while working, the 'Music to Work To' series during the pandemic I loved and still refer back to. I'm currently reading the 'The Power Broker', I'm about 700 pages in to the 1100+ pages; taken me 5 months but worth the effort. I love to cook (perhaps not always good but the experimenting is fun) and exploring all genres of music; the fun is in the musical discovery process/journey to me, get a mini charge when stumble upon something new - to me - that's good to my ears.

Hello! Feeling like a kid in the comments section here 🐐. I’m about six months older than the site, and I’ve been reading for probably the last ~10 years.
I’m living in the Boston area right now but in the time I’ve been reading, I’ve lived in NYC, Philly, France, and did a very brief stint in Germany.
Outside of kottke I’m currently reading through all of Agatha Christie’s works as well as a lot memoirs, which I suspect is a way to try and orient myself in life as one does in one’s twenties. The best memoirs I’ve read recently was All the Beauty in the World, which I’m pretty sure was a kottke rec. I also loved Know my Name by Chanel Miller.
I feel like I’ve ended up at a neighbor’s party - there are lots of people who seem neat here and they’re mostly people I wouldn’t usually run into day-to-day. Cheers!

I can't actually remember the internet without Kottke, so maybe that puts me in early days?
I live with my graphic designer husband and two cats in the most beautiful nook of Northern Manhattan where eagles fly and spent 20 years in Seattle before that listening to fog horns at night.
I may be the first theater person here (apologies if I missed an earlier person) but have been an Opera Stage Manager for thirty years. The work schedule is brutal, but am finding ways to make new outlets for creative endeavors outside the work place; current obsessions include making the worst pottery you've ever seen and snail mailing to loved ones with stamps found at flea markets.
Kottke is the internet to me, and I send a whisper to the internet gods every time I go to the site that Jason is in good health and continuing on.
Currently reading the Dovekeepers (Alice Hoffman is like a hearty soup on a cold day) and eyeballing The Vaster Wilds next.
Currently listening to KEXP out of Seattle. Saturday mornings is "Positive Vibrations"; it is the soundtrack to the weekend for me.
You can find me on Instagram @minakullmann or @metoperastagemanagers.

Hello! So great to get to know some of the community. I’m a freelance graphic designer in Rochester NY, focused on nonprofit clients. Born in northern Maine, schooled in Boston.
Currently Reading: All Souls Lost by Dan Moren
I watch a lot of tv… waiting for Severance to return and equally enjoying Billions and This Old House.

Hi, I'm Jim. I'm from Massachusetts but live in Prague, Czechia with my wife and son. I'm a privacy attorney (GDPR, etc.) who occasionally moonlights as a writer. I've been reading Kottke.org since at least 2004, when I was living on Grove St. in Boston, had my own blog (which I thought was profound), and thought I was the cool because I got an early invitation to Gmail.

I'm currently reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and enjoy fountain pens, crosswords, and Negronis. And yes, I think about the Roman Empire more often than I'm comfortable admitting.

The only social network I've ever been remotely successful at using is LinkedIn, which probably says something about me.

I love the return of comments, in particular because it's fascinating (and slightly moving) to see how many people have, like me, followed this site over the decades, and to think about having it as a common touchpoint with so many people I've never met.

Greetings from (just outside) Boston! I'm a freelance marketing research strategist and recent empty-nester. I enjoy traveling (recently spent a week in Bigfork, MT), pickleball, and reading. My bookclub just read The Lioness of Boston, a work of historical fiction about Isabella Stewart Gardner, and had our monthly get together inside of the ISG museum, which I highly recommend both visiting and enjoying a meal at the Cafe G inside. I've been reading kottke.org forever - I love how Jason can find and share such interesting pieces across a wide range of topics. So nice to meet you all!

Hi, I'm Luke. I've shared a few things over the 24-25 years I've been reading that have made the front page of this site. I run a screen printing company in East Lansing, MI, co-wrote and produced a movie currently in film festivals (if you want to watch, let me know, especially if you like to laugh and/or have a Letterboxd account) and write a weekly newsletter sharing things of interest to me. Everything can be found here.

Hi! It’s such a gift to meet each one of you.

Child of Silicon Valley, I also created a website with a blog roll in 1998 and found Jason’s writing soon after. I took my interest in web design and coding as a cue to move to NYC and tried out design agencies and publishing houses for a bit. Then I moved back to SF to work in tech, just long enough to recognize my true calling is psychology. I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Sacramento, CA. Married, with two small children, I spend whatever free time I have in community with other therapy folks, so Kottke.org has been a precious thread back to my earliest, computer-related self. It’s a real treat to age together.

The book I’m obsessed with right now is Sexuality Without Consent, by Avgi Saketopoulou. I will read anything by Elena Ferrante. My iTunes tells me I only listen to Twenty Trucks’ Truck Tunes, an absolute score of a kids’ album, but my real love is for women rocking out. My partner and I are late discovers to the show, Couples Therapy, and it’s amazing! Highly recommend. What else? Hiking, biking, and camping are my jam.

Hi all, I'm Collin. I live in Oregon with my spouse and two small kids (the youngest is 7-weeks-old). I'm currently a grad student studying conflict resolution, with a focus on youth restorative justice. Before that, I worked in the hospitality industry for about a decade, mostly making cocktails and managing bars. My brother-in-law pointed me towards the blog around 2009, and I've been a daily reader ever since. It's hard to quantify how much I've learned from what Jason has shared and written over the years, how many book/tv/movie recommendations I've taken him up on, and what it means to have a deeply trusted source online to turn to, so I'll just keep it simple and say Thank You.

I'm not on social media; this post is the most I've come out of my shell online in a long time. I enjoy commuting on my e-bike, bouldering, and cooking. Video games I've had fun with recently include Slay the Spire and Tears of the Kingdom. Currently reading Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy, which is really resonating with how I want to parent.

It feels oddly thrilling to participate in Kottke.org! Curious to see how this community evolves.

Hello hello, I'm Matthew Battles. I've been reading and learning daily from this site too long to reckon (or admit). I've developed a reckless portfolio as a writer, editor, maker, and thinker—a couple of books about libraries, one about the history of writing (sort of), and a short one on trees, among others. Currently I edit a magazine about the nature of trees. I've been a riverboat cook and a visiting professor at Harvard, and it's the river I miss.

👋 Hello everyone, hope you're all doing great! It's really nice to get to know a bit about fellow Kottke readers.

👌 I've been reading Kottke since 2008 or 2009, after discovering it through Twitter (RIP), if I remember well. It's been a constant source of wonder, fun and inspiration ever since, reading it almost daily. Jason, I hope you'll enjoy keeping this fun-tain (ha!) of knowledge open for a few more decades.

✏️ I'm Iancu (sounds like yan-koo), a graphic designer and illustrator living in London, UK, with my wife and baby daughter. I was born in Transylvania, Romania, during the communist period. Bread and milk ration cards and regular blackouts were not much fun, trust me. Fortunately things have changed, and Transylvania especially is a wonderful place to go on a holiday.

• My website is iancul.com
• You can also find me at @ianculdraws on Instagram, @[email protected] and @iancul.bsky.social.

🌸 My work's been mentioned twice on Kottke (thanks again Jason!). You might remember – or enjoy, if you missed it – my stop-motion short film with over 500 flowers hand-drawn for my wife, “A flower a day”.

🤞 Best wishes to you all!

I'm John, and as I approach retirement, I live in South Dakota after raising my kids in Connecticut. I must have been around as a reader near the beginning, because I've had Kottke bookmarked since my kids were... kids. I've gone through numerous advances and retreats on my participation in internet/social media, but Kottke has been an anchor for a long time. The sabbatical was difficult to wait through, but I'm glad Jason had it and returned for bigger and better things.
My happy place is my lawn, watching my squirrels and rabbits and birds, with Radiohead and Neil Young in the background.
Peace

Hello y'all,

I'm Pratik, a reluctant Texan living in Austin for the last twenty years. I've been reading Kottke ever since I got into blogging (circa 2003) and have watched his life journey from the sidelines. I'm one of those who read Kottke on the web and not via RSS. I live with my wife and son, who is now in middle school. I love writing and participating on the social web, photography, gardening, reading, good TV, and traveling. I work as a social science researcher primarily in education (K-12 & higher ed) and have examined it from a substance abuse, college readiness, growth mindset, and now healthy aging perspective.

I signed up as a Patron to be part of the Kottke Commenting Community and want to appreciate Jason's efforts for the social web.

This is all so great!

I’m Chris, I live in Washington DC with my partner and a bunch of former alley cats. I’ve read Kottke since the mid aughts, can’t even remember how I came across it in the first place but it quickly became a central component of my media diet.

My job requires me to follow the ins and outs of the 24-hour news cycle pretty closely and, as you can imagine, that is pretty exhausting. Every day, as my workday draws to an end, I look forward to checking in on the latest gems Jason has found and shared with us all. The curiosity, whimsy, and exploration of this site is something of a mental rinse washing off the doom-and-gloom of the daily news cycle. Often one of the best parts of my day.

Looking forward to this community, already noted a few new items to add to my reading list. Great meeting you all.

Terry here. Kottke has been my favorite website for 20 years, probably shaped me more than I know. I’m a med device engineer developing eye implants in Northern California. I love backpacking, alpinism, mountain biking. Two teen kids, an ex, and a second wife who I travel with whenever I get the chance. Big fan of walking and public transit.

Hey gang! Michael Wolfe here, loyal reader since (checks watch) forever, rarely a day goes by when I miss the change to peruse this amazing site. I live in Connecticut with my wife and extra large bernedoodle, having raised twins here and now enjoying the empty nest. I work in corporate comms, after spending a couple of prior decades working in magazine publishing (am I the only one who truly misses the day when your favorite mag arrived in your mailbox?). One of my great personal thrills was when Jason was kind enough to post a Quick Link to a blog post I wrote a few years back on how watching films together with my son during a difficult period brought us a measure of connection (you can read that here). I'm also now the co-host of a music nostalgia / humor podcast called Past Tens: A Top Ten Time Machine, which riffs (far too long) on the songs and albums that hit the top of the charts in the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. If you're into pop music and might appreciate some history and laughs, you'll get a kick out of it.

In a way, reviewing old blog posts from this site is its own form of nostalgia. But the thrill is in the discovering of new items that I would never have the patience or drive to find on my own, and for that I'm forever grateful to Jason for his efforts. Jason, if you ever feel the intense drive to talk about a random week of pop music from the 80's, let me know and we'll make it happen on the pod!

So many cool people!

I'm in Fort Worth, TX and earn my daily bread in IT as jack of all trades type. I want to say I discovered in the site in the early 2000s and didn't start consistently reading it until 2003ish. It's been a reliable source of entertainment, education, and inspiration. The last of which, I've been keeping a media diet log for several years now. here are a few recent things (I use a 5 point scale, 5=excellent; 1=oof) :

• Bodies - 4
• Scavengers Reign - 5
• Mexican Gothic - 3
• Glen Hansard: All That Was East Is West of Me Now - 3
• Welcome to Wrexham - 5
• Avalon Emerson: & the Charm - 4
• Iris DeMent - Workin’ on a World - 5

Beyond that, I enjoy whiskey, and have held tastings for friends and family various themes — urban, Irish, paired with cupcakes, Olympics (nontraditional whiskey countries). I always try to keep a creative project going--sometimes it's something random like attend live music every day for a month or writing a book. My current project is composing a song weekend in Garage Band.

First Italian to comment here?
Hi Jason, hi everyone. I read this blog since... I don't know when! It feels like from ever. Most probably since John Gruber linked here ages ago. I'm reading the blog every single day, but just got a membership. "Finally".
I live in Italy and pretend to be an expert in online communication since 1996.
Thank you Jason for keeping this place so insightful for so long. You make the internet a better place.

How nice to meet you all! My name is Elaine and I live in Chicago with my husband, our 2 tweens, an aloof cat, and 4 chickens. I am an acupuncturist and trade off biking and cross country skiing depending on weather. I think I have been reading kottke.org since 2005 and found it through metafilter.com or notmartha.org and am grateful for this delightful part of the web and what it brings to my days.
Current media:
Read Aloud: The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt
For Adults: Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive ... by D J Nakazawa
For Fun: The Seven Husband's of Evelyn Hugo by Reid (which is going to be due at the library v soon)
For Work: Slowly writing all over Medical Acupuncture by Callison and listening to mimi ceremonies
TV: Great British Bake Off

I hope we have a meet and greet again, 'cause I will want updates!!

Hi, I'm Kristeen. I've lived in Vermont for many years now, but grew up in rural Utah. I have a husband and a daughter in college. I work in public education as a speech-language pathologist. I'm interested in linguistics, alternative/augmentative communication (AAC), the science of reading, and neurodiversity.

Among the many things I enjoy are bikes, mountains, clouds, locally-grown food, good beverages, dogs, and front porches. I also enjoy seeking to expand my world through books, music, nature, travel, art, movies, etc., which is why I'm a long-time kottke.org reader. The links from this site have sent me down countless interesting and thought-provoking pathways over the years! (Truly the finest Hypertext products available!)

Recently I've enjoyed the movie [The Engine Inside](), which is about the revolutionary nature of biking. It highlights a few individual's biking stories from around the world. I found it beautiful and inspirational.

Thanks for experimenting with comments! It's nice to hear from other readers/neighbors!

Hi Jason! I'm struggling to remember when I first started reading this blog. I vaguely remember getting really into CSS in high school (2004-ish?) and finding the site for the design...but then stayed around for the journey. I've always considered the site a quiet balcony at a busy party - a place of calm within earshot of the hubbub elsewhere.

I live in San Francisco with my partner and brother. We are fortunate to have a micro workshop in the city, where I can fulfill the need to make stuff with my hands, a need occasionally unsatisfied by my day job designing components for electric vehicle batteries. A slightly awkwardly paced video of one of my projects can be found on youtube. Bug me if you find yourself needing something vacuum heat treated in SF.

Recently, I enjoyed Omon Ra, a short novel halfway between Saunders and Gogol.

I've also been enjoying the mysterious Cambrian explosion of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese factory tour videos buried on youtube. The history of monetized content on the internet is littered with disasters, so enjoy this one before it turns sour.

Cheers!

Hi everyone. I'm Audrey, and Kottke has been a bookmark in my browser for at least 10 years. This is an interesting idea to connect readers! I live in Portugal now, and recently started a blog, An American in Portugal. I took out the comments section of the blog out of concern for general internet vitriol, so I'm curious to see if Jason has any better luck. In between having kids, the pandemic, and the death of my husband two years ago, my ability to lose myself in a novel has dwindled, so these days I'm mostly into non-fiction: Drunk by Edward Slingerland (if wanting a buzz has evolutionary roots, who am I to not imbibe?) and wonky podcasts like The Ezra Klein Show and Pod Save America. I was a Twitter lurker but I deleted my account the day I had to log into X. Cheers!

Hi all! I'm Huxley, and I've been reading / enjoying / sharing Kottke since around 2006ish (at least according to my email archive). I deeply appreciate what this Jason has done with this site, especially in this era when so many of my former online hangouts (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) have become really awful places to be.

I'm a lifelong nerd, and I've had some fun and strange adventures: youngest kid ever granted a street performer's license in San Francisco, spent several years as the only full-time corporate Apple employee in New Mexico, one-time MMA fighter, etc.

These days I'm mostly focused on a fun project: turning my ever-expanding collection of vintage computers and video games into a non profit pop-up museum of hands-on exhibits. We've been doing our "Retro Roadshow" pop-ups around the San Francisco Bay Area for a few years now, and this weekend we're a featured exhibit at the Bay Area Maker Faire, which has been a total blast. Would love to see some Kottke fans at our events some day!

Hi fine internet folks - I'm Logan 👋

Currently living on a hillside outside Geneva, Switzerland with a dog and a girl and some chickens. I think I found Kottke in high school in the early 2000s when I spent more time in the comp sci lab than anywhere else. I've followed Jason and the blog through RSS ever since and I'm excited to have a reason to click through to the main site now.

I spend some part of my day as a product manager for big tech company helping guide the teams responsible for our product comms infrastructure and technical writing. But I've also spent the last couple years coming to terms with calling myself an artist (some stuff on instagram) and love to mess around with paper and string and reverse engineer the work of other artists I admire.

I read across two streams:
- long non-fiction that I nibble through in 5 minute chunks before falling asleep. These are often "noun" books that explore the connections of a single thing like hummingbirds or bunkers or fabric.
- Science fiction and new weird: Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and China Mieville were my gateways here. Recently I've particularly enjoyed the Locked Tomb series from Tamsyn Muir, which does a brilliant job blending those (and many other) inspirations and is just flat out entertaining.

Really looking forward to seeing how this comments experiment evolves!

Hello! Michael here. I live on a quiet lake in Central Florida with my lovely wife Caroline and many cats, fostered and otherwise. I often take sunrise photos across the lake.

I took a long break from blogging due to eye surgery (it went well) but am happily now starting up again at 8sided.blog. I'm passionate about blogs + blogging (this passion started when I self-published a punk rock zine in the '80s), but I don't think Kottke has anything to worry about as far as my overtaking Jason's impressive prolificness.

I am also the producer + manager of a podcast called Spotlight On, hosted by music industry vet Lawrence Peryer, who I sincerely think is one of the best podcast interviewers of musicians + creative people out there. Recent guests included Dengue Fever, Peter Kruder, Pete Josef, and Seth Godin.

Oh, and I used to make music under the name of Q-Burns Abstract Message with some success, but for some reason that I refuse to self-examine, I don't feel like making music anymore. I suspect that'll change.

I just bought tickets to see Marc Ribot perform a live soundtrack for Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, and I couldn't be more excited.

I'm enjoying these introductions. Please to meet everyone. And, thank you, Jason! 🚀

Hi, I'm Adam from Atlanta. I owe this site a particularly odd thank you for its influence on my life. Seeing comments return feels a bit like it's me coming back around the bend and seeing I've finished the full circuit.

I found Kottke as a high schooler, in 1999, and read it along with the other very early blogosphere folks. Stuck in a Texas suburb where I knew no one, my morning ritual of Kottke, F-Train, Textism (RIP, Dean), and Caterina served as the cozy coffee shop where people knew my name and were occasionally willing to listen to my thoughts.

So I set up my own blog, redesigned it more frequently than I got new readers, and knew just enough HTML and PHP to get tech jobs that payed my way college summers and then graduate school. Like the weird internet people I read, I was good enough at tech but mostly interested in using it for other things. I got a degree in classical Chinese poetry, made a web viewer for critical editions of translated poems, and published my research as Creative Commons in the hope someone might remix it.

And then life happened: got married, had kids, saw the heady days of the open web come to a close. I got tech-centric jobs, moved from RSS to Twitter, and saw more of what everyone else was seeing and less of the weird stuff I had grown up on.

Blogs with comments sections, Twitter's influence evaporating, new forms of open media—all seem to bode over 2023. I guess "bode" is normally a transitive verb, but I'm not sure what is being bidden, just that it bodes.

The feeling reminds me of Becky Chambers's "A Psalm for the Wild-Built", a novella that takes place in the lush revival of a post-apocalyptic world, where a monk can have a full-time vocation to serve people tea and listen to their worries. The protagonist of that novella seems to me a lot like Jason's role here: riding around to all the nearby towns, bringing something strange and delightful, and—now, with comments!—listening to what the locals have been up to.

I'm Nora, elder gen-x, so senior member of the Kottkeverse. Currently living in a village outside Boston, but raised in the mountain west, so love seeing a few of my Montanan homies here. I want to quote Matt from Helena "Anything we can do to fight consolidation, we need to do" because my conviction is that without that, we can accomplish nothing else, including fighting climate change.

I left the corporate, largely venture-cap funded world last year, currently exploring out how to be an effective part of the solution instead.

Currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass, A New European Bauhaus Economy: Designing Our Futures, and Leading by Nature by Giles Hutchins.

I’m Chris. I work at real estate development company where our focus is to “Create Terrific Places,” a mission we really enjoy. My filmmaker/musician/activist wife and I have three great kids and an awesome dog. We live in Denver, a place we’ve really come to love. Like many of you, it’s Seth Godin, Jason, Gruber and Tina Roth Eisenberg every day for me, with some Letters from an American sprinkled in.

Right now I’m reading Hello Beatiful and The One Page Financial Plan. I’m always listening to our kids’ playlists. I’m always teaching myself guitar, despite almost no natural musical ability. And, I love this place.

I'm Steven, a native NYer who's been (mostly) happily relegated to Philadelphia for the last 20+ years, coinciding with when I started reading this wonderful page. Since coming to Philly I started and run the Healing Arts Center, practicing acupuncture with a strong women's health and fertility specialty. I dabbled in the podcasting world when no one was talking about the hardships of fertility (Waiting for Babies), and then moved on when the taboos were lessened. Most of my time is split in 4 between the joy of raising 2 awesome kids, being married to a Sociologist who's trying to be more radical every day, racking my brain to figure out how to help this city be better with a system that won't let it, and taking my moderate resemblance to Mo Salah to convert everyone I know to be a Liverpool supporter.

I'm usually found gorging on space operas (last was the Bobiverse) but lately have been enthralled with funky speculative fiction by the likes of the Glass House by Emily St John Mandell, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and the Fold by Peter Clines.

My name is Jerm. I live in Honolulu. I am a mailman.

I have been reading Kottke since the beginning of the internet. Back when it was just a bunch of haikus about spam. There were two Jasons, two Jeffs, two Erics, two Heathers, two Mollys, and a Lance Arthur. That was it. That was the entire internet. They were all great. Give them all the "Top 5% of the Internet" badge.

I checked my email using PINE until they finally took that away. I used Google Reader until they took that away. Lightly commented on the AVClub until that place turned upside down. This site is one of the last places of "my internet" that I still recognize. And now there are comments? Sign me up.

As I said, I am a former AVClubber. Someone needs to insert Simpsons quotes into every comment thread, right? That is a healthy addition to a positive community? Sporcle doesn't mind so much. I guess I could mix it up a little. I have also seen Airplane!

I'm Dirk, and my stock social media bio is "Avid cyclist and middle-aged metal head". I'm also trying to be a photographer, working as a programmer/tech-lead, and living with a couple cats and a wife. Given that [my personal website](https://otisbean.com/) is the first Google hit for my name there's no harm in posting it here. My claim to fame is probably my extensive list of [Geek Advice](https://www.otisbean.com/professional/geek-advice.html), compiled over several years of mentoring tech workers.

I spend way too much time online, but mostly as a spectator. I find it almost impossible to be social with people I don't have some kind of IRL connection with, so I rarely if ever become a real "member" of an online community. I'm also dealing with a nasty case of post-Trump and post-pandemic disaffection and executive dysfunction. But enough with the whinging, let's see if I can't make a go of being a Kotte-ite.

Hello all. I'm Garrett, from Oxford, UK (always happy to act as a tour guide if anyone finds themselves in my neck of the woods).

I can't remember how long I've been reading Kottke, but it's a long long time. I'm what would probably be called and "old school" web developer (HTML and CSS on the frontend, Python on the server) and I currently work at the Internet Society. Any opinions are mine, not theirs, etc.

I can be found on Mastodon, BlueSky, and Metafilter, and I have my own site that I don't post enough on, but it also aggregates my Flickr, Last.fm, and Pinboard activity.

Media diet-wise. I recently finished a complete re-read of the Discworld series, which is something I do every few years, and I'm still finding new things to marvel over. I thought I'd keep to fantasy after that marathon so I'm now re-visiting the Earthsea series. On the to-read pile I have Sunyi Dean's "The Book Eaters" and Amal El-Mohtar/Max Gladstone's "This is How You Lose the Time War" (which I hear nothing but consistent praise for).

In film, "No One Will Save You", "They Cloned Tyrone", and "The Creator" recently impressed me.

I'm finally catching up with season 2 of Foundation, which I'm finding much pacier and engaging than season 1. And I'm one of those people who really liked Ahsoka.

Hi Everyone! I’m Emily. I live in Duluth, MN, with my cat, Kiwi, and have lived here since 2011. Before that I lived in Milwaukee for 20 years, specifically Shorewood, which was a great place to raise kids. I work remotely as a UX design director, strategist, sometimes front-end engineer and wanna-be product manager (if only the language of Agile wasn’t so…harsh? I’ve got questions). I’m also a mom although semi-retired mom is more accurate. My two girls are in their 20s and out in the world as artists, travelers, weavers, education students, and herbalists.

I’ve been reading Kottke.org since the beginning (since osil8) and I still visit every day.

I’m currently writing and designing a MahJongg learner’s guide and workbook and love to play the game as much as I can. I still believe in the web as a connector and creative outlet and I still believe in the small indie web. Someday I’ll start a blog or something after all of these years lurking. I am what you call an “early adopter” and have worked on the internet since the beginning (1993). I actually worked before that on CD-ROMs and before that demonstrating Prodigy to bank customers. When everyone with any sense of HTML was moving out to SF in 1994-1995, I stayed in Milwaukee raising babies and doing web work for local companies such as Harley-Davidson. I’m working now to carve out something for myself out here online after working for others for so long in-between mom duties. It’s time. Oh and I love music. I was a volunteer on-air DJ (jam band show and women’s music) for 5 years and ran an off-menu music venue in my (ex) mansion with my (ex) boyfriend for 6 years. I still love to see live music whenever I can. Generally no regrets (other than that SF thing…)

Thanks Jason for all that you do!!

Hello! This is Gregor in Columbus, Ohio. I've been a daily Kottke reader for at least a decade. I'm a former magazine editor/journalist and full-time freelance writer for clients large and small (from NFL teams and Fortune 100 companies to two-person startups). I also teach, and use Jason's posts as an example of crisp, clear, engaging writing.

I'll admit that when Jason took his sabbatical, I panicked. I was worried he might not return. So I'm delighted he's back, and continuing to experiment. When he started his break, he asked for any ideas he might consider while he was away. I suggested a meet up or conference that gathered readers and featured speakers and ideas from the blog. Based on all the interesting people posting here, I think it would be a blast!

I've been involved in the online industry since before the web. I was editor of CompuServe Magazine for several years, where moderated forums showed there could be civility online. Those were heady days and I miss the optimism about being connected. But Kottke.org continues to give me hope.

Current media diet: I'm finishing Walter Isaacson's bio of Elon Musk. My older son graduated from Tulane University in May, and one of his last classes was Isaacson's History of the Digital Revolution, which he loved. He said as soon as Isaacson's last class was finished, the writer would jet off to shadow Musk, returning to class a few days later. Isaacson's taken some heat for treating Musk with kid gloves, but to me the book seems blunt about his behavior and manias.

Last weekend, my wife and I saw the U2 show at the Sphere, which more than lived up to the buzz. The visuals and sound quality were astonishing, and the scale of the interior is so vast, it's almost unsettling. In terms of TV, I'm begging anyone who will listen to watch Reservation Dogs, which is a minor miracle.

Hi everyone! I'm Jennifer from Atlanta, GA. I've been reading kottke.org on a regular basis since high school (so around 1999 or so for me). I'm very surprised that I'm the only Jennifer who has commented so far. My internet claim to fame is that I got in on Gmail early enough to get firstname.lastname for my account (my name is extremely common, especially for my particular generation). The reason I was able to get it is because I was (still) using Blogger at the time, and after they got bought by Google, Google rolled out Gmail, and Blogger extended invitations to some of their users. This is still my primary email account, despite having to deal with all the "real" (not spam) emails I get that are intended for other Jennifer Ls, which happens two or three times a week or so. I kind of appreciate these glimpses into their lives, and the fact that I have some vague awareness of the universe of Jennifer Ls.

Hello, I'm Laurie from New Jersey where I've lived for the past 25 years. I'm a retired software engineer (age 64) and spent the last 15 years of my career at Princeton University where I wrote software for geneticists. In the mid-to-late-90's I wrote Java applets for geneticists at Johns Hopkins, back when applets were brand new. I call myself an early adopter of the web because of that and also because I was able to get the very terse email address "lauriek" from Yahoo. I've been reading kottke.org since forever, and about 20 years ago Jason included a link to my blog post about spending a week in a psych ward. I just finished "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall" by Zeke Faux and have to admit that I'm still confused at how cryptocurrency actually works, but have no desire to read the Michael Lewis book after reading so many negative comments about it. I used to write the web's (at the time) definitive site about beagles, and later showcased my own dogs for 14 years in a wordpress blog. In my copious (I love retirement) spare time I play a lot of bridge, both online and in person.

I was offline this weekend but happy to come back to this post. My name is Aileen and I live in Syracuse, New York. I was lucky enough to be a part of the early NYC blog world and having been reading Kottke for years and years. I love the old Internet and I am so grateful to Jason for protecting and perpetuating it. I am re-watching "Lost" right now and have been thinking about how the current Internet would play a part in today's viewing experience.

Howdy neighbors! Late to the party, as ever, I had to scroll a reassuringly long way down this page to be able to write this. I'm Peter, an artist and designer in London, UK. I run a small creative agency as well as a print shop here. And, along with my friend Mike, I’m also planning something rather special for the year 2269.

I've been continually fascinated by the eclectic goings-on at kottke.org since someone sent me a link at least fifteen years ago. Re-introducing comments is such a great idea and I can’t imagine them getting out of hand because we’re clearly such a nice bunch of people : ) There should be an annual Kottke-fest!

Kottke is a treasure! I'm Matthew, I'm an American living in Uruguay, I'm a software engineer (testing a browser at the moment), I make paintings. I think I've been reading kottke since maybe 99? Let me know if you come to Uruguay.

Wow what a great collection of comments, names, locations, pleasures etc. Enjoyed reading through that. I live in Manchester, UK and work in the arts. I have been reading kottke since I was at university, so started sometime around 2001 or so. I still visit a few times a week, it's a great site. I love the idea of comments - I don't comment to much on sites, but enjoy reading them. Not really on social media, but where I exist online I tend to use this handle.

Looking forward to visiting for the articles and now staying longer for the comments.

Thanks everyone (and Jason of course).

Hello everyone, I am Paolo.
Born and raised near Florence, Italy. Moved to Bergamo, then Florida, then Atlanta, where I currently live with my wife and two cats. We have two grown up kids, one in Nashville (check her music at ), the other a junior at FSU.
Electronic engineer by formation, IT executive by trade, amateur tennis player on weekends. I love computers and technology, photography (Canon gear) and sports in general.
I have been reading kottke.org since 7-8 years ago, a member since 2021. I LOVE the variety of the posts on the site, from the travel blogs to Jason's media diet to the videos about Chinese fireworks or artisanal scissors. I also love Jason's posts on Instagram.
Favorite podcasts: ATP, Dithering, Robot or Not, The Incomparable, Upgrade, The Talk Show.
Favorite websites: Daring Fireball, Kottke, Techmeme, Sixcolors.
Kind of lost in the social media space since Twitter imploded. I divide my time among Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads, but nothing really sticks.
Recent media diet: The Morning Show S3, Loki S2, Foundation S2, Black Bird, Succession S4, Oppenheimer, Severance S1. If you haven't watched 'In Bruges' and 'Parasite', what are you waiting for?

Hi Everyone.

My name is Christophe, but my friends and everyone call me Chryde. It's a mix between 'Christophe' and 'Clyde' that my wife Gwenola invented by naming us 'Gwennie and Chryde' when we met 20 years ago. I needed a nickname to blog without my boss knowing it, so I adopted it.

I live and work in Paris, France, and I've been reading Kottke daily for at least 19 years (my first mail mentioning Jason goes back to 2004). It's like a daily yoga for my brain, it opened me to so many things... I'm really happy to see the community of readers burgeoning here.

I founded a music blog 20 years ago with a bunch of friends. We called it Blogothèque. At first it was just a mp3 blog. Then, in 2006, we launched one of the first music series on YouTube called the Take Away Shows. We filmed more than 600 bands and now Blogothèque is a production company operating from Paris.

Right now, I'm crazy about a Brasilian artist called Ana Frango Elétrico, I loved Severance, The Bear and the docu series Abstract on Netflix. And The Wager has just been translated in French, so I'm reading it and loving it.

Hi all, I'm Kevin Ohlin.

I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, spent brief stints in Seattle and Nashville, a few years in L.A., then a couple years in Colorado before moving back here with my wife and baby girl to be close to family again.

I'm currently a product manager (shout out to the other PMs, designers, and developers I've seen here in the comments 👋) for a tech company building apps and websites for various startups, but I've also been a web designer/developer, lighting programmer, A/V/L installer and technician, census enumerator, shoe salesman, and keyboard/synth player.

Been reading this here blog for about 20 years now (which is wild to think about), and have always enjoyed how neatly Jason's interests and curiosity overlap with my own over the years. There's always so much new to discover.

I'm Carl - second reader from Boise, ID with an Aussie. Hi brett, I recognize those foothills ;) Whiskey enthusiast and outdoor/mountain lover (can't wait for ski season to start). I'm about halfway through the "No Reservations" series again and I am enjoying it even more than when I watched it years ago.

Kottke has been an active tab in my browser for around 10 years, and I can't begin to remember how many times I've said to someone "I saw something cool on this website I follow...".

I’m Marietta- I live in Northwest California coast in a wee town. I mostly attempt to fix landslides ( there are plenty of those here- so lucky 🙃).
Reading this blog makes me feel like I am living in a city.

I’m Matt from Maidenhead, UK. I’ve been reading since I can’t remember when - likely 10+ years. I think I came via a link from Daring Fireball - imagine there’s a heap of crossover there - and made daily trips back since then. I’ve have a love of games and have been fortunate to have been making video games all my career (since 1990) across 8, 16, 32 and 64-bit machines. Love the intersection of tech and art, well entertainment really. I could geek out over any aspect of technology and I love anything that flies (mechanically). What makes me feel great about this site is that it’s written with heart and I can follow almost every link with genuine interest. It’s introduced me to all sorts of influences and inspiration that I wouldn’t otherwise get - as I largely avoid social media. Thank you Jason and helpers!

Hi everyone! I’m Nevan, happy to have been following along here since 2005. I grew up in Austin, TX, and am now happily settled in Barcelona, Spain, where I teach design.

Back in 2010, I worked at Buzzfeed for a while, in the old Chinatown office, where I got to see Jason at work, and have an occasional lunch chat. He very strongly recommended The Wire, which I still have not seen... (Sorry Jason!)

I’ve always appreciated Kottke.org for Jason’s eclectic interests and especially his enthusiastic support of human creativity in its many forms. Jason’s writing and linking here were a big part of my formative years as a web designer, and I’m still inspired by Jason’s commitment to keeping this an active and lively space on the web.

I’m loving this experiment in bringing back discussion threads, and can’t wait to see where it goes!

Hi I'm Tracie, in Brooklyn, NY. I'm an artist and designer, currently an Executive Director of Product Design at The New York Times. I've been a reader of kottke since the early days, and I feel like it's always been this oasis on the internet where I can go and find something interesting and thought provoking. And so much more!! It's brought me my career (I applied for a job that Jason had posted. I didn't initially get hired but I got connected with other people and that led to five million other things), friends and community (still good friends with said people), and inspiring travel (I joined a group trip to Lundy Island with the Cloud Appreciation Society because of a post).

So I'm totally excited about comments, because it's building on this ethos of community and sharing and openness that I feel like I've been a part of for ages. It's lovely meeting you all, and thank you Jason for all that you do!

Recommendation: reading books by people that know a place really well that you're traveling to. It's so inspiring and it makes the travel experience that much richer. Some faves:

• Southern California: Mecca by Susan Straight
• Sicily: Pomp and Sustenance by Mary Taylor Simeti
• Oaxaca: Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks

Hi all,

MichaelD here ... long time listener, first time caller (never got to do say that on the radio)

I'm recently unpreparedly retired from a large tech company, kinda looking for something new to do and finding solace in long solo drives around the west coast listening to podcasts. Most recent discovery is Hakai Magazine uniquely focused on news and views around coastal science and communities.

Don't know when exactly I discovered Kottke but this has been a part of my morning routine for many years. I can always count on seeing/reading/discovering some new undiscovered rabbit hole that makes getting up more worthwhile! Thank you Jason :)

Hello! My name is Dacia (pronounced “DAH-sha”) and I live in Oakland with my 2 kids (7 and 13), husband, black lab, and a little void of a cat. (Jason: you may remember an audio clip I sent of my then 9yo daughter and her reflections on your post "Regarding the Thoughtful Cultivation of the Archived Internet”).

I don’t really know when I started reading Kottke, maybe 1999? This is likely due to the fact that I definitely went back to read from the beginning when I first landed here.

Since then, I've ...

• gone to grad school . . . twice!
• co-hosted a podcast back in the day called This Week in Blackness.
• lived in NY, VT, MN, Los Angeles, and now Oakland.
• grown to love cycling and skiing (I’m married to a Vermonter, the latter is a requirement 😉).

And now I’m Chief of Operations at a small political advocacy and media company — also from the old internet days — Daily Kos. Not what I ever thought I would be doing, but I’m loving it!

Let’s see, oh! Media diet --

Watching:

• Star Trek Prodigy: My daughter is an aspiring animator, so I watch anything she recommends. This series is designed for a younger audience, and has, hands-down, my favorite pilot episode of Star Trek, ever!
• Mrs. Davis: Holy hell was this show good. I know you felt super meh about it, Jason, but this show really surprised and delighted me, might be worth a second try?

Reading:

• Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele, et al.
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, by Michel-Riley Trouillot. This is an historiography about the Haitian Revolution and the silence of historical narrative about the largest slave rebellion in history. I return to this book often.
• This comments thread, we’re an interesting bunch!

Where you can find me: I’m @daciatakesnote on Twitter (despite everything Leon Moops has done, I still check in on that hellsite) and Instagram, you can also find me on BlueSky at This Week in Blackness0.

See you here and all around!

Hi hi!
I'm Jenni Leder. I'm an art-obsessed mobile app designer living in Dallas, TX. I also go by thoughtbrain, when we all had weird, silly internet handles.

I've been reading Kottke since Dooce mentioned it, around the mid-2000s. I was working at an advertising firm that wasn't very busy (yeah it doesn't exist anymore) and found myself with a lot of free time. I kinda became obsessed with finding cool things on the internet. After annoying my friends by sending them too many things each day, I refocused that energy and started a blog, as well as started posting to BuzzFeed via their community posts.

I felt super lucky that Jason chose me to help him with The Noughtie List, which was a fitting project for me. And it always feels neat when he reposts the stuff I've found. We also met briefly in person at an XOXO Festival, another community that I'm super involved with.

I was a Twitter timeline completor, and really tried to read the whole internet every day. I'm a bit out of sorts not having that in the cycle anymore. I'm mostly on Mastodon and Instagram. But all my social stuffs is here.

Hi
I’m Rob, I live in Brooklyn, NY with my wife, two kids and new foster boxer/pittie/boston terrier mix. Been reading Kottke for about twenty years? Just recently became a member. Long overdue.

I’m a photographer currently working on a newsletter that covers a different neighborhood in NYC each week with pictures, field recordings and history/tangents. Twenty down, 240ish to go…

I also did a personal project on the Space Coast of Florida and urban farming in the city. I do scanning and archive work for other artists and galleries.

Currently reading and loving W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Favorite movie (this week): A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Hi ! I'm David,

My wife and two kids (1 and 6) recently moved to Pelham NY from Brooklyn. We used to live around the corner from Tina Eisenberg's Swiss Miss HQ. I have been reading Kottke since ... 2002 my Junior year in High School via Google Reader, Feedly, etc.. Kottke is my single favorite website and appreciate all of the work that you do Jason. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I am a big hobbyist beekeeper, potter, and gardener. During Covid I burnt out from the corporate world and joined my dad as a tax and business accountant. When I was young, I worked as a field organizer on the 2008 Obama campaign.

The last two years I've been attempting to create a media diet:
Favorite Books of 22/23

• Project Hail Mary | A+ 
• The Midnight Library | A+
• The Song of Achilles | A 
• Piranesi | A+
• Oona Out of Order | B+
• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow | A-
• Blood In The Garden | B+
• The Hike | Drew Magary | A/A-
• The Twilight World | Werner Herzog | A
• This Time Tomorrow | Emma Straub| B+
• Kane and Abel | Jeffrey Archer | B-
• Cloud Cuckoo Land | Anthony Doer | C
• The Spaceman of Bohemia | B+
• The Sparrow | B
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry | C

America and The Holocaust | A

• Marcel The Shell With Shoes On | A +
• Star Wars: Andor | A +
• Star Wars: Ashoka | C+
• Foundation | A+Severance | A+ 
• Game of Thrones: House of Dragons | A
• Everything Everywhere All At Once | B
• Atlanta | B
• Lord of The Rings: Rings of Power | B+
• Great British Bake Off | B
• Industry | B
• Grand Designs | A
• For All Mankind | B-
• Fleishman is in Trouble | C
• Fauda | C
• Rick and Morty | F
• America and The Holocaust | A
•  The Peripheral | D
• Love is Blind | F+
• Brooklyn Nets | F
• Top Gun: Maverick | B+\A-
• Mad max fury road | A
• This Old House | B+
• The Minions: Rise of Gru | C
• Station Eleven | B
• The Detectorists | B+
• Westworld | B- 
• Dave | A
• The Great | A

That's me! Smooches.

What a moving series of portraits. Jason, you should feel incredible at how much you have given to so many over the years.

Don't know how I stumbled onto the site, but it was around 2005, because I remember some internet chatter about Jason and Meg being an item. Since then I have been a daily visiter. Reading Jason in the morning is like a dose of vitamins and sunshine.

Long time Chicagoan, live on the north side very close to the lake. On a good day (which is most) I feel like we have it all - a big city and a seaside resort all in one. For almost four months a year we swim at a beautiful beach 15 minutes bike ride away. And if time is short we can pop over to a closer one a mere 5 minutes away. A quick bus ride down Lake Shore Drive takes me to a vibrant city (or what was a vibrant city before covid and our current plague of urban problems began...).

I am at the tail end of a long career in advertising. I am a freelance Producer, a function at the intersection of creative and business. I am entrusted with a creative idea and assemble the team, budget and schedule to bring it to life. There have been big changes over the years as clients have become increasingly prescriptive. Also different communication and technology platforms must be mastered for each and every gig. Storytelling remains the same but the accoutrements of getting there have become cumbersome.

Time to evolve. I am starting work on a more personal filmmaking project. I am very involved in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago and recently formed a 501C-3 to support our local Chicago Public School. I love reading, bicycling, World Cup football and my husband of 25 years.

Most of all I like building and being a part of community. Discovering the vast human web that is the Kottke-verse has been a moving experience. As I read some of the write ups I fantasized about all of us getting together. I would be happy to help produce if someone wants to make it happen!

Curious questers (I've loved reading and learning about all your lives),

A month ago I turned 70 and handed over Wolfworks, the residential design/build (planning to do) company I founded to the worker owners (formed a coop and sold the company to them). For forty years it provided me with a sandbox for "making good homes better" (I love domesticity) with and for fun people (the pleasant memories). I blogged there, much but not all about paying attention to energy in buildings and acting accordingly. The vision: Better home, Better life. Better planet.

I now have the luxury of not needing to work and am itching for new maker playgrounds: music (Jamusica on Soundcloud), video (learning Premiere), 3D printing, etc. and time to visit friends and make new ones. Let's call it finding out who else I might be (absorbing from others here all the variations of being/doing).

Jason greets me each morning as I wait for my wife Barbara to finish her exercise regime and before we play Connections, do the Mini, and Wordle together. Can I just say that starting the day slowly with someone you love is one of life's dependable pleasures (should you be so lucky). We've lived in Farmington, CT for 35 years (launched our son Jesse in 1990) - before that owned a two family in Hartford, adolescence in West Hartford, after Newington (grew up there but born in NYC and anchored to grandparents through the 90's on 9th St between 5/6 Ave.) - in other words locally rooted.

Groomed on the counterculture internet (Whole Earth Catalogue) then jumped on the WELL via a MacPlus when that came along and treasure tribal online communities (Amy Jo Kim's "Building Community on the Web" anyone?). Learned business via peer networking and now facilitate one of six Building Energy Bottom Lines groups (triple bottom line businesses via my tribe at NESEA) where we gather via Basecamp.

Beside my own music making (guitar, cello, computer - bands in my twenties) there is always music playing, diverse and deep (archives of vinyl and CD's but now thriving on Spotify algo's). Short list of old heroes: Andy Partridge (XTC), King Crimson (all eras), National Health, Bjork, Joni - and new ones: Maro, Jacob Collier, Saje (but really, just feed me).

After years reading non-fiction I got a Kindle and am taking notes in anticipation of time to read fiction. Seth Godin and Austin Kleon are the newsletters that feed me, along with Maria Popova and others. Beside Kottke the tabs that stays open on my iPad are Scope of Work, Collaborative Blog, Russel Davies, and Colossal. The designer Bruce Mau is an inspiration.

Media diet includes the classics mentioned by others but miss the indie theaters and that experience (my wife was triggered at the Turrell exhibit at MassMOCA and those warnings about strobing lights before shows - that's for her). Podcasts had me at "Design Matters" and in rotation now are Ezra Klein, Rick Rubin, Ferriss (selectively), Strong Songs, and Make Me Smart (man crush on Kai Ryssdal). Agree with all about Jason and his gifts and guidance.

As many have suggested, I am looking forward to learning more from communities and less from the goliaths.

Ahoy. I’m Jay. I live in the Southwest with my family, which includes mostly humans but does include one rabbit as well. I have an aversion to adjectives, adverbs, and sharing things about myself. This last one is for a few reasons, primary among them that I’m afraid others will think I’m sharing just because I want them to think I’m cool. I know that I’m not cool, and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I only wear solid colors and shirts without graphics, though I do make an exception for “hypertext.” I like cactuses, bicycles, trails, and tunes.

Hello, I'm John.

I've been following Kottke, for probably 14 years now? I'm delighted that Jason is still doing his thing and able to make ends meet doing it.

I'm a software developer for a small start up. But in my free time I like to build things like bikes, guitars, ceramics and most recently little geometry animations

https://genart.social/@Onsequitur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaBOLbdQu0c

Hi all, I'm quite late to the party but it's been exciting to just scan through all the bios above and to know that I'm in such wonderful company reading kottke! I've made such a rule to "never read the comments" that this whole thing just passed me by.

I'm 70 (!) and a psychologist who has just retired from working with the San Francisco Dept of Public Health where I did lots of research and evaluation and reporting (yay Tableau). Been living in SF for more than 40 years (yikes!).

Kottke and Metafilter are pretty much the only things I read on the internet, however I am working on developing a streak of NY Times crossword puzzles.

I have the great good fortune of having someone who is famous and has the same name as me, so I'm mostly invisible on the web (though I realize I shouldn't tempt fate!).

I've been reading kottke for many years and always appreciated the "honest broker" nature of the site.

Where all the Canadians at?
I'm Mike, live on Vancouver Island in a town big enough for a Costco, but small enough that 15minutes on your bike from downtown gets you to some world-class mountain bike trails.
My wife introduced to me Kottke probably around 2010 (after yet another "wait - where did you read that; I gotta check that out"), and I've been checking in almost daily since.
In addition to plenty of riding, I enjoy helping people keep their 20yr old VWs running (better than they did when new 😃), playing on my own cars (Sportwagen and A3 e-tron), and just being outside and doing stuff.

Best show just about no one talked about anywhere: Deadloch (Amazon). Satirizes the Broadchurch-esque whodunit serial killer mystery, but done with love, a really good mystery plot that plays fairly honestly, and some scathing social commentary (that of course comes along with some laughs). Set in Tasmania with some fairly thick Aussie accents, so subtitles may be recommended to get all of the one-liner asides as they fly by.

Hello, I'm Mark and I live in Arlington in northern Virginia with my four dogs, Otto, Hank, Martin, Waylon, and my cat Sputnik. I retired a few years back after 30 years building two internet companies in DC. I've been reading Jasons blog since the late nineties, I believe. Anyway, it has been a long time. Since I've removed myself from all social media platforms over the past few years, it's pretty much the only place I frequent often. I love learning about the other people who visit this site.

Hi, Jason & Community:
I'm Josh, and I live outside outside Boston with my wife (we're both teachers—I do high school English at our local public) and our flame-haired, kindergarten-age son. I've been religiously visiting your site every day for years. Hard to know when or how I first came across it.
I'm originally from Hanover, NH, with a few years of my youth spent on sabbatical in California. I'm a slow runner, an aspiring writer, an aspirational sleeper, and the dedicated dinner chef in the family.
My claim to fame is knowing a lot of people before they were famous: CNN's Jake Tapper was my 7th grade Sunday school teacher, I was Cousin Greg's high school English teacher his sophomore year, Lauren Groff and I went to college together, I was good friends with Hillary Clinton's last campaign manager in high school, and preschool friends with the son of minimalist composer Steve Reich.
Here's what I'm currently consuming, media-wise:
• Books I'm Teaching: My seniors just finished Stay True, by Hua Hsu, and mostly seemed to genuinely like it. They are now halfway through Fences, the August Wilson play. My sophomores are deep into The Crucible.
• What I'm Reading: The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. (If you haven't read Skippy Dies, his first novel, drop whatever you're reading and pick that up instead, because it will be better.)
Anyway, good to be here. Thanks, Jason, for gathering us all together in this way.

Good day to you all!

I live in a seaside town in Wicklow - just south of Dublin, Ireland with my amazing wife, two daughters and two cats. I work as a UX designer for a design agency based in Dublin.

Kottke is my favourite site on the internet and has been for quite some time. I feel like I've grown up with Jason. I'm so happy comments are back even though I am a wizard level lurker. It's like going back to a more innocent time.

I just completed a full read through of all Cormac McCarthy which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. I play lots of guitar and lots of console games. Just lost a chunk of my life to Tears of the Kingdom - well with it.

Sorry I'm late. Not a neighbour. Just came by to drop a well-deserved thank you note for being out there with your weird/exciting content, so much different from my usual readings. I've been following your blog for the past 10 years, after being linked by both CoJ and SwissMiss. It feels like having an older nerdy brother whom you hardly understand but totally admire. The only thing we have in common is probably love for the Wes Anderson movies. And art. Greetings from the sunny Alps!

(I just spent the last 30-sh minutes reading through all of these lovely comments, so thanks, everyone, for the pleasant distraction.) I'm Neil, originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and now in Toronto, Ontario. Kottke is the blog I've subscribed to and read the longest – starting around 2001 or so. It's amazing and a testament to Jason's skill, tenacity, and overall interestingness that this site has lived as long as it has. I raise a cup of Good Morning America in his general direction – cheers. ☕

As for the day-to-day, I am a single parent of ten and 16-year-old boys and manage product design teams for a living. I've worked in tech/internet/nerdery so long, I remember when companies were virtually pulling people off the streets to teach them HTML. Halcyon days, indeed.

I'm currently reading Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening (which I believe Kottke recommended), enjoying Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and listening to O.'s OGO.

It's a pleasure to meet you all!