New Tron movie coming, music by Nine Inch Nails. “Tron: Ares follows a highly sophisticated program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.”
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Entries for January 2025
The Japanese Salaryman Eraser Goes Bald Through Use
Designed by Kazuya Ishikawa, the clever Salaryman Eraser features a Japanese businessman who goes bald as you use the eraser. The same company also makes an eraser that turns into Mt Fuji through repeated use.
New Square Feature Allows Customers To Tip With Bible Quote. “We have also heard our customers and are working to provide Christian cross and praying-hands emojis as well.”
The Bawdy Graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This was was written on the wall of a bar/brothel: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”
The New Comfort Movie Canon: The 10 Best Feel-Good Films of the Last 10 Years. Includes Flow (which I watched the other day and is brilliant), The French Dispatch, Little Women, and Logan Lucky.
Asteroids vs Space Invaders! Scans of Early 80s Gaming Magazines.
The Video Game History Foundation has launched a digital library of documents, magazines, and transcripts related to video games that’s free for everyone to access. Some of you might be interested in the collection of materials related to the development and promotion of games created by Cyan (Myst, Riven, etc.) but I went straight for the library of video game magazines. The earliest issue I could find was this issue of Electronic Games from 1981.
Ha, I bet you had forgotten that George Plimpton was a spokesman for Intellivision. (Quick sidebar here because I can’t resist this odd fact: Plimpton was one of a group of people, which also included former NFL star Rosey Grier & Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, who apprehended and disarmed Sirhan Sirhan after Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy.)
That same issue of Electronic Games from 1981 contains this interesting nugget of news about how long McDonald’s has been thinking about replacing their cashiers with computers:
Will McDonalds be the first fast-food chain to hop on the electronic gaming bandwagon in a big way? The hamburger king has approached Atari about the possibility of designing a computerized video monitor. The device would take the meal order and then help the customer pass the wait pleasantly by playing a videogame. One potential hitch: What happens if a player is on a hot streak when the Big Mac, fries and soft drink show up?
Anyway, I definitely lost more than a few hours to this. You can check out the full digital library and watch this video for more information about what’s in it. (via the verge)
A web version of Pitfall. I used to play this a lot on my cousins’ Intellivision and yep, it’s still as difficult & annoying as I remember it!
Author Mary Childs shares some of her “stress-designed” drafts: On Trying (and Really Failing) to Design My Own Book Cover. “It’s a miracle any cover is ever good.”
Brian Eno Believes in Singing
Brian Eno believes that singing is the key to a good life.
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
(via subtraction)
20 years ago, Seoul tore down an elevated highway and built a park in its place. “The restored waterway has been a triumph.” It attracts millions of visitors, improves air quality, manages floods, cools the city, and hosts plants & wildlife.
Andrea Pitzer lost her mother to Amway. “In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story.”
Joy Machine is a new art gallery in Chicago from the team behind Colossal. “We believe that joy expands our ability to move and be moved and is an essential antidote to despair.”
If I’m being real honest, which I try to be, I can’t say I’m terribly excited about the discovery of a fungus which turns cave spiders into zombies, you know, just on the level of wildlife things I’m into or, as is the case here, not into.
The Best Table Tennis Points Of 2024
I did not think I was going to watch this whole video when I started but I totally did. Some absolutely incredible shots & rallies in here. (thx, dunstan)
From an interview with Na Kim, her answer here could not be more personally resonant with me. “OWEN: Would you say you’re a disciplined person? KIM: I didn’t think I was, but I must be.”
Netflix is making a Little House on the Prairie reboot. “The series will offer a kaleidoscopic view of the struggles and triumphs of those who shaped the frontier.” A manifest destiny series for 2025 seems about right…
The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World — and Shapes Our Future is a forthcoming book from Sam Arbesman, out in June 2025.
The Public Domain Image Archive
The Public Domain Review (a true gem of the web) has launched The Public Domain Image Archive, “a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse”.
While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.
The “infinite view” is particularly fun…you can just pan & scroll and let the whole collection wash over your visual cortex. (via colossal)
“A Dyson tree is a hypothetical genetically engineered plant (perhaps resembling a tree) capable of growing inside a comet. Plants may be able to produce a breathable atmosphere within the hollow spaces of the comet.”
What If Letterboxd Ratings Decided the Best Picture Oscar?
In deciding the Oscar Best Picture winners from 1927-2023, let’s say you relied on the contemporary ratings of films on Letterboxd instead of the Academy vote totals of the time. Sometimes, you’d get the same answers but rarely. You’d get lots more foreign films from directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Leone, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. You’d get Best Picture wins for The Empire Strikes Back (over Ordinary People), Do the Right Thing (over Driving Miss Daisy), and Brokeback Mountain (over Crash). And Paddington 2!
Looking at just one year, 1999 was a good one for movies but the Oscar nominees were on the safer side:
American Beauty
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense
Here’s the Letterboxd list from 1999, ranked by rating (more than 1K ratings):
Fight Club
The Iron Giant
The Green Mile
Magnolia
All About My Mother
The Matrix
The Straight Story
Beau Travail
The Insider
Being John Malkovich
American Beauty and The Sixth Sense are further down the list and The Cider House Rules is nowhere to be found. Anyway, interesting to compare!
Reuters made a cozy game about cozy games. “Wolfe would put on cozy game music as she worked on the cozy game about cozy games, and she could feel her own stress and anxiety ebb away.”
“The MacArthur Foundation today announced more than $6 million in grants to support the growing field of climate journalism in the United States.” The grants will go to local and independent newsrooms & organizations.
Lorne Michaels may not like it when the actors on SNL break character to crack up at each other, but, to me, it’s the best part of the show. Here’s the NYT with a look at the phenomenon.
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith Has Died, Age 85
Artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has died at the age of 85. From Hyperallergic’s obituary:
As part of a generation of Indigenous artists who tirelessly worked to “break the ‘buckskin ceiling’” in the art world, Smith (an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is known for a prolific arts practice that merged piercing humor and profound socio-political commentary with poetic depictions of Native American life. Her five-decade oeuvre, which spans painting, collage, drawing, print, and sculpture, is an intimate visual lexicon that bridges personal memories and joyful resilience, exemplifying her lifelong refusal to be defined by any singular narrative.
More obits: ARTnews, Artnet, The Art Newspaper.
Her art seems to me to be in conversation with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and countless Native artists & European cave painters from millenia ago — as well as Leonardo da Vinci it seems…that marvelous painting above featuring the buffalo is called “Indian Drawing Lesson (after Leonardo)”.
You can see more of Smith’s work on her website, at The Whitney, at the Garth Greenan Gallery, the Missoula Art Museum, and at the Smithsonian.
An audio recording of the audience’s reaction to Star Wars in 1977, synced to the action of the movie. “This audio was recorded in 1977 when my mother took me to see Star Wars.”
Approvingly citing Musk/X and Zuck/Meta, Substack reiterates its commitment to support Nazis, antisemites, anti-vaxxers, transphobes, and homophobes in spreading disinformation & hate under the guise of “free speech”.
Pee-wee as Himself, a New Documentary Series About Pee-wee Herman
Before he died in 2023, Paul Reubens conducted 40 hours of interviews about his life and career with filmmaker Matt Wolf. These interview form the backbone of Wolf’s two-part documentary series Pee-wee as Himself. The series recently premiered at Sundance and there’s no trailer yet, but Variety has an overview and review.
Reubens is a compelling enough figure to carry a straightforward bio-doc, and over its substantial length, Wolf’s two-part film does justice to its subject’s thoroughly sui generis artistry — a rare blend of experimental performance, broad comedy and high, queer camp that caught imaginations of all ages — while giving due scrutiny to the off-screen legal troubles that unfairly threw his career off-course. Reubens is a generous, engaging raconteur on all such matters, while also allowing himself to be drawn on a personal life that he kept close to his chest up until his death. But it’s the brittle, unsettled dynamic of the interview footage itself that makes “Pee-wee as Himself” unusual and engrossing, as Wolf and Reubens — never, we learn, an artist comfortable with surrendering creative authority — grapple for control of a story that each wants to tell very differently. The result is perhaps a draw, though far from a dull one.
In the interviews for the film, Reubens reveals publicly for the first time that he is gay. He’d been openly gay earlier in his life but had his reasons for not talking about it as his career blossomed:
In adolescence, those inclinations shifted toward the bohemia of the late-1960s art scene, and upon leaving home and going west, CalArts proved a sympathetic environment for his singular talents and personality. At this stage of his life, Reubens was openly gay, while his family was fully supportive in this regard. A long-term, live-in relationship with a fellow artist brought him both happiness and creative stasis: “I lost a lot of myself and my ambition in being with someone else,” he says, reflecting on his subsequent decision to suppress his sexuality to prioritize his career.
Pee-wee as Himself will air later this year on HBO.
I missed this back in October: Venkatesh Rao retired his long-running Ribbonfarm blog. His post is an interesting read, kind of a tour through the era of blogs & social media that Rao believes is now in the rearview.
The ACLU: Know Your Rights (or, what to do if you are questioned about your immigration status). “You have the right to remain silent and do not have to discuss your immigration or citizenship status with police, immigration agents, or other officials.”
Nirvana Before They Were Nirvana: Watch Their 1988 Performance Recorded in a Radio Shack. “In those days the group went by the name of Ted Ed Fred.”
“Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?”
I don’t know how to say this any louder
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS MORE RADICAL, MORE FASCIST, MORE VIOLENT THAN ANYONE IN MAINSTREAM POLITICS OR MEDIA IS WILLING TO ADMIT OUT LOUD
THEY ARE FULLY IN THRALL TO A MOVEMENT OF ONLINE NAZIS THAT WANT TO END AMERICA AND KILL MANY, MANY PEOPLE
They do not care about fixing anything. They do not care about running the government. They want to set the Constitution on fire, destroy the federal government, and torture and murder their enemies for fun. This is their only true political commitment
It’s beyond insane - it’s suicidal - that our leaders and our commentators and our media won’t talk about what’s really going on here. They maintain the pretense that this is all about policy differences, but MAGA is barely even bothering with the pretense of a mask anymore
I agree 100% with Stancil here — it is so completely obvious what Trump and the Republicans are trying to do (they are not hiding it!) and it’s maddening to watch the media and Democratic politicians treat this like any other political situation: “that this is all about policy differences”. They are trying to destroy American democracy and amass power for themselves and the oligarchs that support them — that’s what autocracies are for and it’s why Trump and Republicans want one.
We’ve seen this happen with brittle governments all over the world for the past century — it’s not a novel situation — and Republicans have decided that now is the moment to strike our teetering democracy. They convinced voters to roll a wooden horse covered in MAGA stickers inside the city walls and now they are going to hollow it out from within. That’s the game and the sooner everyone wakes up to this truth, the sooner we can try to fix the situation.
Update: Jamelle Bouie: If All This Sounds Delusional, That’s Because It Is.
Put another way, the American system of government is not one in which the people imbue the president with their sovereign authority. He is a servant of the Constitution, bound by its demands. Most presidents in our history have understood this, even as they inevitably pushed for more and greater authority. Not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power, or as he once said himself, “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The freeze, then, is Trump’s attempt to make this fanciful claim to limitless power a reality. He wants to usurp the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute and unchecked authority. He wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.
💯 Bouie is one of the few traditional media folks who sees this situation clearly.
Title quote courtesy of Bishop Mariann Budde.
Severance Has a New Opening Title Sequence for Season Two
Season two of Severance is underway and while the first episode didn’t have an opening title sequence, the second episode debuted a new sequence. The season one intro was inducted straight into the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame and season two’s intro is just as good. Once again, the titles were done by Oliver Latta, who was found by Severance producer Ben Stiller via his Instagram account.
Interesting: Ooni is coming out with a mixer that they say creates “stronger gluten networks” in your bread or pizza dough. “The stronger the gluten network, the more elasticity and extensibility you get in the dough.”
America Wouldn’t Know the Worst of a Vaccine Decline Until It’s Too Late. “Should vaccination rates drop across the board, one of the first diseases to be resurrected would almost certainly be measles.”
Paul Krugman on “recovering my freedom” and why he left the NY Times after 25 years. “In 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive.”
Ebooks are now available from Bookshop[dot]org. You can read the ebooks you buy in the browser or with their app, but you can’t read them with an ereader (like the Kindle).
The Louvre’s upcoming renovation & expansion includes a dedicated room for the Mona Lisa. “The Mona Lisa would be accessible separately from the rest of the museum…with its own ticket.” An estimated 80% of visitors come just to see the Mona Lisa.
DC superhero Dreamer, Fortnite’s first out trans character (introduced in 2022), is available in the game’s item shop until Jan 31. Brb, totally buying this right now.
Winners of the 2024 Close-Up Photographer of the Year. “Tadpoles devour the corpse of an adult female toad in Cantabria, Spain.” (Damn nature, you scary!)
Who Were the Nazis?
From January 2017, A.R. Moxon on Nazis:
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?
A 10-hour ambient cover of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack, perfect for relaxing, focus, studying, or drifting off to sleep.
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter to a Man Blow-Drying His Balls at the Gym
I don’t know about you, but my brain is short-circuiting a bit from the news today, so I was glad to run across this video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading Ross Beeley’s letter published by McSweeney’s in 2011 called An Open Letter to the Gentleman Blow-Drying His Balls in the Gym Locker Room.
You’re actually doing it. I mean, we’ve all dreamed of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you’re actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people who just finished exercising at this pricey sports club. Some of us will do it in private in our homes, or in a hotel room using a hairdryer a stranger might have just used to style their hair for that big business meeting in Denver. But not you. You are not confined to such social norms, norms that usually keep flapping, flag-like balls out of my eyes.
(via open culture)
Now Streaming: Seven Samurai’s 4K Restoration
Back in June, I posted about the 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai coming out in theaters; here’s the trailer:
I just checked and the 4K version appears to be out on streaming and 4K Blu-ray. The 4K Blu-ray is available from the Criterion Collection and includes a bunch of extra goodies: two audio commentaries, a making-of documentary, “a two-hour conversation between director Akira Kurosawa and filmmaker Nagisa Oshima”, and a documentary looking at the samurai traditions and films that helped shape Kurosawa’s masterpiece.
As for streaming, here’s the situation:
- There’s a version on Max that might or might not be the recently restored 4K version. I’ve played the beginning and the titles are nice & crisp and there’s no dust & scratches. But the description doesn’t say anything about 4K and you need to subscribe to their top-tier service to get 4K streaming anyway, so who knows. It might just be a 1080p restoration — which still looks really good, to be clear. (Note: Max’s support team confirms that their version isn’t 4K. Boo. Thx @nabil-boutaleb.bsky.social.)
- Apple TV appears to have Criterion’s 4K restoration — the listing shows the “4K” icon and Criterion links directly to it from their page. And the trailer is for the 4K restoration.
- Amazon may also have the 4K version, but there’s no “4K” icon on their listing. But Criterion does link directly to it from their page.
Streaming services should be better about telling viewers exactly what they are getting. I know most people don’t care and the streamers just want to push content to eyeballs, but this is Seven Samurai we’re talking about here!
Anyway, if there are any big film/streaming nerds out there who can help me sort this out, let me know! I’d love to be as accurate as possible even if Max & Amazon don’t care. (Tbh, this kinda makes me want to buy a 4K Blu-ray player and go back to physical media…)
Reupping this Jamelle Bouie piece from Dec: Now Is Not the Time for Surrender. He’s talking about Democratic politicians and they still are not doing much to oppose Trump. This is driving me *nuts*. Fight, you assholes!
The planned new spinoff of the CBS series “FBI” will focus on CIA agents and is currently titled “FBI: CIA”. 😂 Not even The Simpsons at its peak could have come up with something this nonsensical.
The full trailer for season three of The White Lotus. “You will leave an entirely different person.”
Denis Villeneuve’s Criterion Closet Picks
Director Denis Villeneuve steps into the Criterion Closet to choose and talk about a few of his favorite films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Steven Soderbergh’s Che, and Seven Samurai. At one point, he says, “We all look like Smurfs next to Fellini.”
“NBA greats think this D-II coach is a basketball genius. So why don’t you know who he is?” I love reading about stuff like this.
I spent too long playing Neal Agarwal’s Simulation Clicker. “Stimulation Clicker takes players on the all-too-familiar journey from ‘this is neat’ to ‘this is ruining my life.’”
ElevationLab is selling a waterproof AirTag case that provides 10-years of battery life. “Easy assembly: Discard AirTag’s battery and door, place on the custom contact, install AA batteries, screw shut.”
TabBoo is a browser extension that adds “random jumpscares to sites you’re trying to avoid”.
The New Yorker is 100 years old this year and part of the celebrations include an exhibition at the NYPL that showcases “founding documents, rare manuscripts, photographs, and timeless cover and cartoon art” from the magazine.
What on Earth Is Jogging? (1971)
In June 1971, the BBC aired a segment on a “mysterious” and “niche” sports imported from America called “jogging”. It’s in black & white, which makes it feel even older than it is, and they interview (while jogging!) Tory MP Ernest Marples, who says he often jogs to Parliament from his house in a lounge suit. This is something straight out of Monty Python…more interviews with people while they are running please.
BTW, Wikipedia has this to say about Marples:
In later life, Marples was elevated to the peerage before fleeing to Monaco at very short notice to avoid prosecution for tax fraud.
Once a runner, always a runner. (thx, dunstan)
A history of computer screensavers, from dumb terminal screen dimming in the 70s to flying toasters and beyond.
From Teen Vogue: How Trans Kids Can Protect Themselves Now That Trump Is in Office. “Despite what can seem like a deluge of anti-trans bills, policies, and language, there are a lot of people on your side, fighting for trans rights.”
“The Wiener Holocaust Library, one of the largest Nazi-era archives in the world, has launched a new online portal putting over 150,000 pages of evidence of the Holocaust and those who resisted it at the hands of researchers worldwide.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day
80 years ago today, the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. An estimated 1.1 million people (Jews, Poles, Russian POWs, Roma) were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945, and this date was subsequently chosen by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
One of the things you can do to mark the day is to join Yad Vashem’s IRemember Wall:
The IRemember Wall is a unique and meaningful opportunity for you to participate in an online commemorative activity marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
By joining our IRemember Wall, your name will be randomly matched to the name of a Holocaust victim from our Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, and will appear together on the Wall.
You can also choose a specific name to remember and match with on the Wall from our Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, which contains over 4.8 million names of Holocaust victims.
As he does every year, illustrator Christoph Niemann drew the person he matched with and shared the story of her life.
This year I was paired with Astro Cofino. We have very little biographical information: she was born in 1930 in Athens, her parents were called Benoua and Mairy. The first thing that caught my eye when I saw Astro’s photo was a little brooch she’s wearing: it looks like a comet, and I can’t help but thinking that it was meant as a reference to her name? Astro is maybe 11 or 12 in the picture, she smiles, with a tiny hint of giddiness in her eyes.
Here’s Astro’s information from Yad Vashem’s database — she was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz when she was 14.
“The Homosaurus is an international linked data vocabulary of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) terms.”
Questlove’s Fantastic Video Mix of 50 Years of SNL Music
Oh this is just delightful: for the opening of his documentary film on the history of music on SNL he co-directed with Oz Rodriguez, Questlove produced what the NY Times calls “a high-speed, six-minute DJ mix of SNL music highlights”. So. Good.
From the same piece in the Times, Questlove explains how it came about:
It’s impossible for me to phone anything in, even if I wanted to. I just wanted to throw the ultimate D.J. gig and hook you in from the gate. It started off small, and it couldn’t stop.
In the beginning, I was just going in five-year intervals — what’s the three strongest moments between ‘75 and ‘80? — and do it that way. But I’m so programmed as a D.J. it’s physically impossible for me to gather a group of songs together and not start — that’s my version of improvisation. And once you put, like, 17 songs together, you have a conversation with yourself: “OK, are we really doing this?”
My producers said: “It’ll never happen! The clearance, the clearance!” This is the first time that I realized my diplomatic position in music. People say, “Ahmir, you might be the next Quincy Jones, because your whole thing is more social than creative, knowing the right people, knowing who’s who.” There were at least 19 situations in which I had to come hat in hand to said person, and mind you, this is for two seconds — Michael Bolton singing “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” just once.
He got every clearance except for Luciano Pavarotti:
The only outright no that I couldn’t fix was that Luciano Pavarotti was going to be part of the Bobby McFerrin-Busta Rhymes mash-up. But it was too much to explain to his estate, and I couldn’t go to Italy and whatever. It could have been brilliant, Bobby McFerrin and Pavarotti going toe to toe.
The film premieres tonight on NBC and will be available on Peacock starting tomorrow.
Update: According to Questlove’s Instagram post, the musical montage was edited by John MacDonald, Coordinating Producer of The Tonight Show. (via @solace.bsky.social)
Update: The YouTube video is now barely watchable — 2/3s of the screen is blurred. You’ll have to watch the film on Peacock to get the full experience.
The Source of the Irish Potato Famine Pathogen Is Finally Identified. “Researchers nailed down the Andes Mountains in South America as the birthplace of Phtytophthora infestans, otherwise known as potato blight or late blight.”
Oh man, very sad news: Pableaux Johnson has died. If you were at SXSW in the late 90s or early 00s, you probably ran into Pableaux, probably at a big dinner he threw, probably him handing you, a stranger just minutes before, a plate of food. Fuck.
How to Weather the Storm
Without really meaning to, this week I’ve posted a few related articles around the theme of how to survive the next four years of the new oligarchical, authoritarian regime here in the US. I thought it would be helpful to compile them into one post, with excerpts that are particularly relevant or resonant.
Mishell Baker, who is living with “deadly, incurable cancer”, urges us to think about how we spend our time and allocate our energies:
So, there are times when I need to pay attention to the cancer, like, when I have to go to doctor’s appointments, take a medication on time, or make choices regarding self-care to increase my quality of life.
But when I am not doing those things, thinking about the cancer is actively harmful.
There are moments when I feel okay, and my daughter wants to play a video game with me. Or I have the chance to see a cool movie, or the urge to write a story.
I cannot do these things if I am paralyzed with horror and dismay thinking in detail about what’s happening in my body.
Whether there is the chance for a one-day miracle if I live long enough is irrelevant. The point is: I am alive, *today*, and at some point, I will not be. So if in a given moment I can make my or someone else’s life better, that is what I should be doing, rather than obsessing over my illness.
But every minute you focus on that horror when you are *not* actively doing something to evade or improve or ameliorate the situation (receiving chemo, taking Zofran, listening to the doctor, etc.), you are WASTING WHAT’S LEFT OF YOUR WILD PRECIOUS LIFE.
The same goes for all of you. Most of you have more time than I do (and it has taken a lot of work for me not to rage at that, and to feel genuine happiness and hope for you), but none of you have forever.
You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad… you are turning away from those opportunities.
Mike Monteiro wrote about how to survive being online:
The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.
Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source.
But the people spreading panic to generate attention for themselves? Be they elected idiots, or oligarchs, or regular folks like me and you — block at will.
Mike and I are both on Bluesky, where there is a culture of blocking attention-seekers instead of dunking on or arguing with them, which I believe has made it a better place to spend time than other current social networks. I hope that culture endures as the site grows.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens is a paper published by a group of scholars in 2022:
Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring — choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.
And:
In sum, digital environments present new challenges to people’s cognition and attention. People must therefore develop new mental habits, or retool those from other domains, to prevent merchants of low-quality information from hijacking their cognitive resources. One key such competence is the ability to deliberately and strategically ignore information.
Kim Kelly shared some dos and don’ts and resources related to mutual aid, which will become more important over the next few years as our government leans into working against the people it’s supposed to be serving:
To make a crucial distinction, mutual aid is not charity; there is no means testing, no judgement, no quid pro quo or paternalistic notions about “saving” people. It’s about giving what you can to someone who needs it, and knowing that, if the roles were reversed, someone else would step in to help you.
Find the people who are already doing the work, and follow their lead. A common mistake that folks make when they’re newly invested in a cause or movement is feeling as though they need to start up their own brand-new organization in order to really make an impact. Your energy is better spent identifying the people and groups who have already been doing the kind of work you’re interested in, and then finding ways to get involved. Intentionally pooling time, resources, and people-power is far more effective than spreading them thinly and hoping for the best!
Keep showing up. It’s okay if you only have so much time or energy to contribute — we’re all human, and we’ve all got our own struggles — but making a firm commitment to continue participating in a group or an action is how to build up a real, durable network. Mutual aid is not just a disaster response, it’s a way of caring for one another, building stronger communities, and preparing for whatever life may throw at us next. It’s a labor of love — and a way of life.
“Pace yourself” is something I hear all the time from activists…it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
From my post on Laozi’s Dao De Jing:
The soft and yielding overcome the strong and powerful.
And some wisdom from The Wire’s Avon Barksdale about weathering long, hard times:
This ain’t no thing, man, you know what I mean? You come in here, man, and get your mind right — get in here and you do two days: that’s the day you come in this motherfucker and the day you get out this motherfucker.
I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry on my vacation and I wish I could share a few relevant passages from it, but in keeping with the theme of the book, I left it at my hotel’s communal library for someone else to read.
I don’t know where this fits, but I found this heartening from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (more of this energy from our elected officials please):
One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.
And finally, something I ran across this morning, from Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs:
Instead I just want to encourage you to join something. Please don’t feel like it has to be a political organization, unless you absolutely love Roberts’ Rules of Order. Find a group of people doing something you like, and join them. Join a bowling league. Find a book group. Join a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, if that’s the way your heart leans. If the first thing you try doesn’t bring you joy, try something else.
It took me a lot longer than it should have but eventually I realized that I don’t need to feel guilty about not sticking with the DSA. And I realized that search and rescue isn’t frivolous, and it wouldn’t be even if it was a disc golf team, or a neighborhood dinner swap, or a knitting circle, or a biking group. This isn’t a marathon, this is the rest of my life, and what gets me through it isn’t eternal helpless vigilance or angry posting. It’s forming connections with other people around activities that bring me joy. It’s building trust, so that when some goose-stepping fuck tries to make me afraid of my neighbors, I can laugh at him.
See also How to Be Productive in Terrible Times.
I’ve decided that part of what I’m doing to weather the storm is to keep doing what I’m doing here on kottke.org — that is, highlighting the creativity of humanity, telling the truth about what’s going on in the world, sharing dumb stuff that makes us laugh — and continue to develop an online community built around those things via the comments and other means. It feels good and purposeful to me to do this work and to support this fledgling community — you could say that I find it engaging.
Anyway, I hope you have a good weekend and I’ll see you back here on Monday.
This post by Matt Webb on “a bunch of stuff that happened” works best when you imagine the last three lines being read by Ricky Jay (a la in Magnolia).
“Live, laugh, tape fish on ATMs.” Last year, a Utah teen was arrested for taping fish to ATMs and posting pictures of the fishy ATMs to an Instagram account.
From Antiques Roadshow in 1990, a look at a rare first edition copy of The Hobbit. It’s got a dust jacket and is accompanied by a personal letter from J.R.R. Tolkien himself.
Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries. They say conventional predictions ignore “tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration and conflict as a result of global heating”.
A real-time map of passenger trains in the US and Canada. Good for marveling at the teensy, embarrassing number of trains operating in the US.
Comets Are Cool
From astronomer Yuri Beletsky, a photo of Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) arching over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Unfortunately, it seems like the comet disintegrated as it swooped around the Sun, always a danger.
The nucleus of Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) held together during a brutal perihelion but not for long. Lionel Majzik of Hungary was the first to report and record dramatic changes in the comet between January 18th and 19th. The bright, strongly condensed head rapidly became more diffuse, a sure sign that its nucleus was disintegrating based on past observations of crumbling comets. His superb sequence, photographed remotely from Chile, clearly reveal the dramatic transformation, which was later confirmed by Australian observers.
The tail will be visible for a few days after the breakup — such comets are called “headless wonders” by astronomers. (via @philplait.bsky.social)
An interview with Questlove on his upcoming documentary on the history of music on SNL. “I will never forget seeing Devo as a 7-year-old — laughing like: ‘Are these aliens? What the hell is this?’” The film starts with a 6-min DJ mix by Questlove.
Supercut of Movie Scenes That Break the Fourth Wall
Leigh Singer gathered more than 50 clips from movies that break the fourth wall (where the characters acknowledge they’re in a movie).
Sadly my favorite broken fourth wall moment didn’t make the list: Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places getting a commodities lesson from the Dukes. (via zupped)
Update: Ah, and all is right with the universe again as Trading Places makes it into Singer’s second compilation of fourth wall breaks.
Wikenigma is an encyclopedia of known unknowns. That is, a listing of “scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer”.
Quietly marveling at the diverse array of ceramic work on view this month at an art fair in Brussels dedicated to the medium.
How Daft Punk Made The Drums For “Starboy” By The Weeknd. They used a pocket-sized synthesizer from Teenage Engineering.
Rick Steves, Always on the Go
I really enjoyed this interview with traveller and writer Rick Steves by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, which is also available as a YouTube video and podcast episode (Apple, Spotify). Here are some particularly appealing excerpts:
I love to be on a bus that’s so crowded that there’s people hanging outside the door when the bus takes off and then they settle in like cornflakes settle into a box, and there’s always room for one more body.
If you’ve never been on a bus or train like this, have you even travelled?
I just love to expose people to examples of things they would never encounter at home. Culture shock is a constructive thing. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective. To me, there are two kinds of travel: There’s escape travel, and there’s reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.
I love escape travel (my recent trip was 90% escape) but the trips I really value are the ones that change me.
Media consumption modes could also probably be sorted into escape and reality. I’ve watched/read a lot of escape/comfort/easy media over the past year and am trying to ease myself back into stuff that’s a little more challenging.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, Travel makes a person wiser if less happy. I’ve always had this hunger to be more engaged. Not necessarily more happy, but more engaged.
As someone who is often puzzled by how to answer the “are you happy?” question, I appreciate this perspective. Happiness is generally not my goal, something closer to engagement is.
Lulu, I’m in this sort of thing in my teaching where I remind people there’s three kinds of travel: You can travel as a tourist, a traveler or a pilgrim.
Ok Steve, is it two kinds of travel or three? 😉 Here’s his explanation of the three types:
Most travelers I know, they’re proud to be known as a traveler as opposed to a tourist: “I’m more thoughtful — I’m not just here to shop and get a selfie. I’m here to immerse myself in the culture and learn.” That is a traveler, to become a temporary local. A traveler learns about the world, but I think a pilgrim learns about themselves, and you learn about yourself by leaving your home and looking at it from a distance. You learn about yourself, I think, by trying to get close to God in your travels
Yeah, the pilgrim thing definitely resonates with me — “transformational travel” he calls it a paragraph later.
The most frightened people are the people who have never traveled, whose worldview is shaped by commercial news media. And the people that are not afraid are the people who have been out there and met the enemy. My most powerful travel experiences have been going places where I’m not supposed to go: Cuba, Palestine, Iran. The friendliest people, the most curious people, the people that need to meet me and I need to meet them. When they meet me, it’s tougher for their propaganda to demonize me, and when I meet them, it’s harder for my country’s propaganda to dehumanize them. It’s a powerful thing.
Tomorrow, Jan 24th: a special 24-hour livestream of the “groundbreaking” generative documentary film Eno (about Brian Eno). The film is different each time it’s shown; they’ll be presenting 6 different versions over the 24 hours.
The Evolution of Bugs Bunny Over 80 Years
In his ongoing series Cartoon Evolution, Dave Lee looks at how the character of Bugs Bunny has changed and evolved since his debut in 1938 as an unnamed rabbit in Porky’s Hare Hunt. It didn’t take long for the character to find its stride. From Wikipedia:
While Porky’s Hare Hunt was the first Warner Bros. cartoon to feature what would become Bugs Bunny, A Wild Hare, directed by Tex Avery and released on July 27, 1940, is widely considered to be the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is the first film where both Elmer Fudd and Bugs, both redesigned by Bob Givens, are shown in their fully developed forms as hunter and tormentor, respectively; the first in which Mel Blanc uses what became Bugs’ standard voice; and the first in which Bugs uses his catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?” A Wild Hare was a huge success in theaters and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cartoon Short Subject.
You can explore more of Lee’s Cartoon Evolutions, including The Simpsons, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh, Super Mario (not strictly a cartoon), and James Bond (not at all a cartoon).
A calque is a word that has been loaned *and translated* from another language. Some English calques: flea market, potsticker, beer garden, iceberg, refried beans, superman, scapegoat, stormtrooper, killer whale.
The Moon is on this year’s list of at-risk sites compiled by the World Monuments Fund. “The group warns that more than 90 important sites on the moon could be harmed”, including the Apollo 11 landing site.
Two “Secret” Mini-Seasons of The X-Files
In 2017, Audible released a pair of immersive audio dramas of The X-Files, with David Duchovny as Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Scully, that fit “somewhere between season 10 and 11” of the TV series. Then at some point, Audible removed them from their site/service, making them completely unavailable. So, a fan put them up on YouTube for X-Files fans to enjoy.
The Cold Cases audio drama is 6 episodes and about 4 hours long; here’s the first episode:
The Stolen Lives audio drama is 7 episodes and about 3h 45m long; here’s the first episode:
(via ironic sans)
A peek inside Robert Caro’s home library, hidden shelves and all. His collection includes a library book overdue by “at least 50 years”.
Building a Medieval Castle From Scratch
Since 1997, using only Middle Ages tools & technology, a group has been building a medieval castle in a French forest.
In the heart of Guédelon forest, in an abandoned quarry, a team of master-builders is building a 13th-century castle from scratch. Quarrymen, stonemasons, carpenter-joiners, woodcutters, blacksmiths, tilers, carters and rope makers…are working together to revive heritage craft skills and to shed light on the world of medieval construction.
Here’s a quick, 2-minute video on the effort:
And here’s a longer look:
And from the Absolute History channel, a five-part series on how medieval castles are built, using Guédelon as an example; here’s the first video in the series:
If you find yourself in Burgundy, you can visit the castle — the construction is funded in part by visitors’ fees.
Instances of haptic nostalgia (“the poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing”) include shifting gears in a manual transmission, pulling the edges off of dot matrix printer paper, and twisting the phone cord around your finger.
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days. “In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means.”
A sick sunfish stopped eating after its aquarium closed for renovations so the staff put cutouts of humans and pictures of smiling faces outside the tank and then it started eating the next day.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, i.e. “choosing what to ignore, learning how to resist low-quality and misleading but cognitively attractive information, and deciding where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities”.
Kind of Obsessed With Shōgun
I finished the last half of Shōgun, James Clavell’s 1200-page 1975 historical novel, on my recent vacation, riveted the entire time. I loved reading it and possibly enjoyed it more than Hulu’s TV series (which is saying something). The TV version hews pretty closely to the text but the major difference is in the amount of detail and explanation available to the book’s readers. There’s just so much more intrigue & plotting in the book and the reader is much more aware of what’s going on than in the show (the reader has access to the inner dialogue of multiple characters), but without sacrificing any of the suspense or drama. And the end of the book is devastating — I was completely gutted by it.
Anyway, I’ve been poking around to see what else I can read/watch/listen to about Shōgun and the historical period in which it’s set. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
- Of course, there’s the original TV adaptation of Shōgun from 1980, which I was surprised to find that you can stream on Amazon. Richard Chamberlain stars as Blackthorne and the legendary Toshiro Mifune as Toranaga.
- Just before the 1980 miniseries was broadcast, a group of scholars published a book called Learning from Shōgun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy. “This book is intended for those who have read James Clavell’s Shōgun and who are curious about its educational significance as ‘A Novel of Japan.’” The book is out of print but I found this PDF copy on Columbia’s website and have been reading it with interest. I wonder though how contemporary scholars would react to Shōgun.
- FX Networks’ viewers guide for the 2024 miniseries has a bunch of resources on the history behind the events in the book & show, including this 6-minute video on The World of Shōgun: History & Backstory.
- Naturally, there are podcasts. The Hulu series has an official podcast (also available on YouTube). The Prestige TV Podcast did 60-minute+ recaps on all the episodes (first episode on Apple & Spotify). A Short History of Japan podcast runs 35 episodes…it looks like the last few cover the period in question. (I haven’t listened to any of these yet, so ymmv.)
- There are also many books about the late Sengoku & early Edo periods of Japan, but it’s hard to pick out which ones are actually good. I poked around on various lists and found Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan, The Battle of Sekigahara: The Greatest, Bloodiest, Most Decisive Samurai Battle Ever, and The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan.
If anyone has any advice on what to watch/read/listen to about this period of Japanese history, please share it in the comments. The resources I found are mostly Western, so I’d be especially interested in English translations of Japanese resources.
We Only Have Ourselves: The How-Tos and DOs and DON’Ts of Mutual Aid. “DO: Find the people who are already doing the work, and follow their lead. DON’T: Assume that you know what people want or need.”
A caffeine calculator that tells you how much of your favorite beverage would kill you. “287.4 cans of Pepsi is a lethal dose.”
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: A Visual History. A coffee table book about one of my foundational cultural touchstones? Yes please!
Where Do You Put the Camera?
For the final video in their current series, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting tackle one of the fundamental questions in filmmaking: where do you put the camera? I was especially struck by Greta Gerwig’s comments about camera movement in two of her films:
Well, I kind of had an image of Lady Bird that I wanted it to be almost like stained glass windows in churches, because it is Catholic school and all of that. I was thinking of everything as a presentation within a frame. But then when I got to Little Women, I had the opposite feeling. I felt like I wanted the camera to be alive and curious and a dancer. Like I almost wanted the camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did.
I wanted to camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did — that’s pretty brilliant. The full interview with Gerwig is available here.
So that’s all for now from Every Frame a Painting…hopefully they will be back soon with a new project because I truly love their perspective on how films are made.
Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked. I think the top 5 here are correct, although you could maybe swap them around a bit. I might put First Contact ahead of The Undiscovered Country for instance.
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers. “[Mark Zuckerberg’s] cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton.”
Explore an Incredibly Detailed Topographical Map of the Moon
Moon Lidar is a visualization of the data collected by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) mission. According to this factsheet, the visualization includes nearly six billion measurements.
LOLA data was captured by a polar orbiting laser altimeter. Think of it like the range finder you would use to measure how far away the hole is from your current position at a golf course, except you press the button six billion times, save the position from where you are measuring, save every distance measurement on a hard drive, and then phone that data back to earth.
I’d love to know where people are directing their giving these days. I regularly support the National Network of Abortion Funds, the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, and my local food shelf.
Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt. “Once in a while, though, they’ll find a specimen that shares a timeline with Beowulf, the Phoenician alphabet or even early math.”
From the Paleontological Research Institution, The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change, “the single best available resource for teachers on climate change”.
Nintendo Announces the Switch 2
Nintendo has finally released some details and a sneak peek trailer for their upcoming console, a sequel to the mega-popular Switch. From The Verge:
The console looks a lot like the original, but it’s bigger. In the video, the Joy-Con controllers are black with colored accents, and they attach to the side of the console instead of sliding on and off. The Joy-Cons appear to snap on quite easily — leaks have suggested they could be attached via magnets.
It looks like there’s going to be a new Mario Kart game (huzzah!) and the Switch 2 will play Switch games, although “certain Nintendo Switch games may not be supported on or fully compatible with Nintendo Switch 2”. As for what Nintendo hasn’t revealed at this time, it’s a long list — and The Verge has some questions:
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the Switch 2 reveal was the fact that Nintendo didn’t say anything about how powerful the new console is. We can see that the console is bigger, but what’s the screen size? Is it OLED or LCD? Is the screen resolution still 720p? Is 4K resolution supported?
Though visible for a few brief moments, the reveal video showed off the Switch 2’s new dock. What’s the docked resolution? Is it just a charging shell, or is it still required for TV play? Can you dock the Switch 2 in the original Switch dock, or will it support all the super-portable third-party docks?
Very excited for the Switch 2, but I’ll admit I will be slightly less enthused if it doesn’t support 4K resolution while docked.
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy. “There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way.”
Here’s the archived Biden White House website in the National Archives. “This is historical material ‘frozen in time’. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.”
Mike Monteiro on how to survive being online. “The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.”
What the…??! It seems that Back to the Future and The Goonies were both set on the same day, Saturday, Oct. 26, 1985. (And it might be a Spielberg Easter egg.)
Live Animated Broadcasts of the Australian Open
Following on from last year’s successful trial, the Australian Open is once again broadcasting all their matches, nearly live and in their entirety, on YouTube — but with animated avatars in place of the players. Here’s how it looks in practice, kind of Wii Tennis; this is a match between Coco Gauff and Jodie Burrage from a few days ago (the animation starts just before the 35-minute mark:
The matches are only delayed by two minutes (the system needs some rendering time) and viewers get to hear the the audio & commentary from the actual match. From The Guardian:
The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men’s final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024.
The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. “Limb tracking is complex, you’ve got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton,” he said. “It’s not as seamless as it could be – we don’t have fingers – but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes.”
Re: not seamless, here’s a recent blooper reel:
Back in 2023, the NFL and Disney collaborated on a Toy Story version of an NFL game, the NHL broadcast an animated hockey game in 2024, and last month the NFL did another animated broadcast with characters from The Simpsons playing key roles.
Finally! Soup you can suck on! “It’s Progresso Chicken Noodle Soup like you never expected — a convenient, on-the-go soup experience.” Who says innovation is dead?
USPS Announces Goodnight Moon Stamps
The USPS has announced that they will be issuing stamps based on the children’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd, and first published in 1947.
The Postal Service notes that “these designs are preliminary and may change”. Goodnight Moon was the very first bedtime book for our kids — we read it to them so so so many times. I will be buying some of these stamps for sure.
The Forgotten Woman Who Transformed Forensics (by inventing the rape kit). “In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.”
“Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce.” Great perspective.
The 25 Best Films of 2024: A Video Countdown
Film critic David Ehrlich has dropped his annual visual love letter to cinema in the form of an expertly cut & crafted video countdown of his top 25 movies of 2024. You can also watch on Vimeo. Please note before you watch though:
This video includes a significant amount of footage from the endings of several films, most notably “Challengers,” “The Substance,” and “I Saw the TV Glow.”
The musical choice for Nosferatu had me cackling — an absolute perfect selection. Here’s the full list of his selections:
25. The Outrun
24. The Breaking Ice
23. Megalopolis
22. Hard Truths
21. The End
20. Babygirl
19. Juror #2
18. The First Omen
17. Between the Temples
16. The Brutalist
15. Flow
14. All We Imagine as Light
13. Evil Does Not Exist
12. The Substance
11. Close Your Eyes
10. I Saw the TV Glow
9. Nosferatu
8. The Beast
7. Challengers
6. A Different Man
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
4. Anora
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
2. No Other Land
1. Nickel Boys
On a personal note, I’ve seen only two of these films — three out of the six movie theaters I usually go to within an hour’s drive of my house permanently closed in 2024. There’s a lot less diversity in offerings now…everyone has to show the same blockbuster stuff because that’s what most people want to see and I don’t really care for the experience offered by the one remaining theater that shows more arthouse stuff. As usual, Ehrlich has got me fired up to fill in the gaps in my film watching, though it’s going to be impossible for me to see Nickel Boys until it comes out on streaming in like April or May.
I loved the pop-up cubicle at Grand Central that Apple did for the second season of Severance.
Provocative from Tim Carmody: David Lynch was America’s greatest conservative filmmaker. “There is an assumption that great artists, especially subversive ones, live radical lives and embrace progressive politics. But Lynch…”
On Leadership and Doing Time
Over the last few days, I’ve been reading Ken Liu’s new translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing. (Liu translated the first and third books in The Three-Body Problem trilogy.) Today, on a dark day for America, I thought that we could all use some of his wisdom.
Favor takes power from you. When you don’t have it, you crave it. When you do have it, you dread losing it.
…
Thus, only those who can value the body politic as their own body should be entrusted with power; only those who love the body politic as they love themselves deserve authority.
On leaders:
The best sort? The people don’t even know they’re there. The next-best sort? The people love them and praise them. A rank below that? The people fear them. The worst? The people are contemptuous of them.
…
A country teetering on the edge of collapse is filled with patriots.
…
Why does a lord of ten thousand chariots treat the fate of the world so lightly?
…
Delight not in victory, for to delight in victory is to delight also in killing. Pleasure in killing will never win over the world.
…
Lords stride about in glorious clothes, carry sharp swords, eat so much good food that they’re sick of it, and hoard wealth beyond measure. They’re bandits and robbers, having wandered far from Dao.
…
The more people arm themselves, the more chaotic the country.
…
The people go hungry when those above eat too much. The people are hard to govern when those above crave great deeds. The people care little for lives when those above care too much about good living.
…
The soft and yielding overcome the strong and powerful.
Today I am also reminded of the words of another philosopher, The Wire’s drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, who had this to say about spending years in jail:
This ain’t no thing, man, you know what I mean? You come in here, man, and get your mind right — get in here and you do two days: that’s the day you come in this motherfucker and the day you get out this motherfucker.
Minds right, everyone. I’ll see you tomorrow, no matter what.
The Kindle version of Ken Liu’s new translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing is on sale for only $1.99. Laozi loved a good bargain! 🤔
Film director David Lynch has died at the age of 78. RIP, Lynch was a real one. “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
OOO: I’ll See You Next Week
Hey folks. After a busy and productive fall & holiday season, kottke.org will be closed this week for some much-needed rest, relaxation, and recharging. I will be back next week, ready to gooooo!
I paged through this illustrated retrospective of Hayao Miyazaki’s work at the bookstore a few months ago and it was gorgeous. “The book is artistic biography, aesthetic treatise, creative process explication, and celebration of the filmmaker’s work.”
Want to Wear a Tiny Apollo Guidance Computer on Your Wrist?
A British company is selling a wristwatch that’s a shrunk-down replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer interface that the Apollo astronauts used to maneuver their spacecraft to the Moon and back. From Gizmodo:
The original AGCs were used by astronauts for guidance and navigation, which you cannot do with the watch — and no offense, but you probably don’t have a spacecraft anyway. But it does function in its own way. The watch has a built-in GPS, a digital display, and a working keyboard. It’s also programmable, built atop an open-source framework that is compatible with a number of coding environments including Arduino and Python. So if you have some features you’d like to run, it’s open to input.
You can pre-order the DSKY Moonwatch today. (via moss & fog)
Did we all know this already? “Chip is a nickname for a guy named after his dad. Skip is a nickname for a guy named after his grandfather. Trip is a nickname for a guy named after his dad AND grandfather.”
The Art of the Snack Solo. “And now I am into my stride. A fig is plucked. The cornichons emerge. The cheeses multiply. Little packets of oatcakes are opened. Maple syrup is experimentally poured.” (I…do not eat this way. 100% mealer here.)
Post-Apocalyptic Orbs
While these might look like they are AI-generated, these floating orb-structures created by Masakatsu Sashie are actually oil paintings. You can check out more of his work on Instagram and Facebook. (via colossal)
33 Ways To Improve Your Life, Japanese Style. Including “be happy in your own company”, “find your inner otaku”, “take inspiration — but with respect”, and “be reliable”.
Jessica Hische & Chris Shiflett are launching a company called Studioworks that makes business management software for creative studios.
An Ambient 24/7 Streaming Video of Chill Work/Study Vibes
Back in 2016, I wrote about The Most Relaxing Song in the World, an ambient track by Marconi Union called Weightless. Today I learned the band’s record label hosts a 24/7 streaming video of their music on YouTube:
I am adding this to my chill working music rotation immediately, alongside this 10-hour version of Weightless.
(via jodi ettenberg)
Learning from Finland’s success in combatting homelessness. “It is the result of a sustained, well-resourced national strategy […] which provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate, independent, permanent housing…”
The Rollercoaster of Compassionate Death
The Euthanasia Coaster is designed to thrill the hell out of its passengers just before it kills them.
Each inversion would have a smaller diameter than the one before in order to inflict 10 g to passengers while the train loses speed. After a sharp right-hand turn the train would enter a straight, where unloading of bodies and loading of passengers could take place.
The Euthanasia Coaster would kill its passengers through prolonged cerebral hypoxia, or insufficient supply of oxygen to the brain. The ride’s seven inversions would inflict 10 g on its passengers for 60 seconds — causing g-force related symptoms starting with gray out through tunnel vision to black out and eventually g-LOC, g-force induced loss of consciousness. Depending on the tolerance of an individual passenger to g-forces, the first or second inversion would cause cerebral anoxia, rendering the passengers brain dead. Subsequent inversions would serve as insurance against unintentional survival of passengers.
When Your Terminal Illness Makes You a TikTok Star. “After being diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2022, Brooke Eby could have turned inward. Instead, she opened up — and found a fan base online.” This was a really great & poignant read.
The Design of Classic Doctor Who Title Cards
While designing a one-off t-shirt for a holiday gift, I stumbled across this amazing page on the Doctor Who Wiki about the design of the show’s title cards. It’s a pretty thorough resource and includes the typefaces used for the titles — like Grotesque, Eurostile, Futura, Della Robbia, and OPTI Formula One.
I put together a few representative samples from episodes featuring the first four Doctors, after which the designs get less interesting IMO. Enjoy.
See also a video of All Doctor Who Title Sequences: 1963-2023.
The Beauty Of Old Hollywood In One Scene. Evan Puschak dissects a scene from The Philadelphia Story, featuring Katherine Hepburn & Jimmy Stewart.
How Ernest Wright Makes Scissors
Ernest Wright has been making scissors in Sheffield, England since 1902. This video takes a look at how they make one of the their most sought after models.
In this episode of Sheffield Makes we visit Ernest Wright to follow the production of the Kutrite kitchen scissor, a complex design that’s woven into Ernest Wright history.
The Kutrite pattern of flat kitchen scissors was designed by Philip Wright in the early sixties and produced till the eighties. After an absence of decades, the Kutrite model is proudly being produced in Sheffield once again.
I first featured Ernest Wright on kottke.org more than 10 years ago:
A person who makes scissors by hand is called a putter, short for putter togetherer. The Putter is a four-minute silent film by Shaun Bloodworth that shows putter Cliff Denton making scissors.
I have a pair of their Turton kitchen scissors and they are great and will last pretty much forever.
What Dinosaurs Were Really Like. This is an entertaining and informative look at what we know about dinosaurs today (for those of us who haven’t kept up much since Jurassic Park).
“Coyote time” is a trick video game designers use to be more forgiving about players jumping — the jump button still works after running off the end of the platform. It’s named after Wile E. Coyote’s ability to run in midair.
Kohei Ohmori’s Hyperrealistic Pencil Drawings
Wow, check out these amazing hyperrealistic pencil drawings by Kohei Ohmori. The detail is next-level…here’s a close-up view of the drawing above:
This drawing took 280 hours (~11.7 days) over a period of five months. You can check out some BTS and Ohmori’s other work on Instagram. (via clive thompson)
Montana youth score a major climate victory in court. “Montana’s Supreme Court has ruled that the 16 youth who sued the state in a landmark climate change lawsuit have a constitutional right to ‘a clean and healthful environment.’”
The trailer for Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. This looks pretty good. Streaming on Max in the US.
Reporter Lucy Sherriff on fleeing from the LA fires: I Saw the Beginning of Hell. “A father ran up the street with his daughter in her school uniform. ‘I can see my house, my house is burning! Mommy’s there, Mommy’s going to die!’” Jesus.
The Weirdest TV Crossovers of All Time include St. Elsewhere + Cheers, Arrested Development + Law & Order: SVU, Alice + The Dukes of Hazzard, and Mr. Robot + Alf.
You Don’t Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume. “The most popular vehicles in America may be the greatest examples of overcompensation ever invented.”
Some New Site Features to Report
Hey folks, I just wanted to update you on some things I’ve launched recently at the ol’ dot org. (RSS reader folk, you’re going to have to click through to the actual WWW to see these…don’t be scared, you can do it.)
1. Last month, I added the ability for members to fave comments, to see comments they’ve posted and faved, and the ability to sort comments in threads. You can read about those features here.
2. Image zooming. If you click on images in posts (on the Embroidery Journaling post or the Eadweard Muybridge image at the top of this post), the image will zoom to fill the browser. Clicking it again will shrink it again. (Oh and I’m testing a feature that does the same thing for videos.)
3. For the Quick Link URL cards/unfurls, I’m displaying the embedded video instead of a cover image. For example, see this post about the special overalls that Finnish university students wear.
4. I refreshed the design of the newsletter a little bit and added a link to the comment section of each post. Because HTML email is a pain in the ass, it doesn’t look/work quite how I want it to yet, but it’s getting there. More tbd.
5. And the best for last: I can now pull Bluesky & Mastodon posts into comment threads in the form of reposts. You can see it in action in the posts about Meta’s Free Speech Grift, HTML: the Most Significant Computing Language Ever Developed, and The Truth About January 6th. I’m using it to collect noteworthy direct comments to my posts on those platforms but also a curated collection of posts and links that I think are particularly relevant to particular posts. So far, it’s been such a quick & easy way to pull in more information and voices around a topic.
Inspiration for this feature came from social media (retweeting, etc.) but also from the original reblog concept developed by Jonah Peretti, Mike Frumin, and others at Eyebeam while we were all there. Their software was the inspiration for Tumblr’s reblog feature, Twitter’s retweet, and Facebook’s share. Going back to the source (and the linkblogging & feedreaders that they were inspired by) is a useful reminder that these sorts of features aren’t just available to Twitter & FB. And in fact, we’ve let social media sites pull in so much content & activity from the open web…it’s time to start pulling back a little.
Right now, reposting is something only I can do (*rubs hands together diabolically*) but I might open it up to others after I iron out a few kinks and if there’s interest. It only works with Bluesky & Mastodon rn, but I’m going to add email (for threads like this) and Threads, although after this bullshit, I may not bother. Anyway, this feature was on the original roadmap for comments and I’m so glad I found the time to finally make it happen.
Ok, that’s all for now. As always, let me know in the comments if you have questions, comments, concerns. ✌️
Simon Willison shares his approach to running a link blog. “I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.” Ditto. 😉
The Dune Bible
Recently sold at auction for £277,200, The Dune Bible is the storyboard for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which was famously never made. From an Instagram tour of the book:
The book contains a complete storyboard that tells the narrative of the proposed Dune film shot by shot, in addition to depictions of all the featured characters, vehicles, and environments by the greatest sci-fi artists of the time.
The auction house believes that only 20 of these bibles were ever made and only 10 have survived. An imperfect scan of the book appears to be available on The Internet Archive and here’s a sample of around 46 images.
A similar copy of the book was sold for $3 million in 2021 to a bunch of crypto-dopes who “believed that the purchase granted them the copyright to the book, which they intended to splice and sell as NFTs before burning the physical copy”.
The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2024. Here’s Ron Charles on Kristi Noem’s memoir: “…a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge”.
Surviving President Tr*mp: Lessons from the 1960s and Octavia E. Butler. “First, breathe. Meditate. Journal. Dance. Hydrate. Get enough rest. If you’re an artist, CREATE.”
The Days They Changed the Gauge
After the Civil War, the economic recovery of the southern United States hinged on trade with the North and moving goods westward via the railroad. But there was a problem. Tracks in the South had been built with a gauge (or track width) of 5 feet but the majority of tracks in the North had a 4-foot 9-inch gauge (more or less). So after much planning, over a concentrated two-day period in the summer of 1886, the width of thousands of miles of railroad track (and the wheels on thousands of rail cars) in the South was reduced by three inches.
Only one rail would be moved in on the day of the change, so inside spikes were hammered into place at the new gauge width well in advance of the change, leaving only the need for a few blows of the sledgehammer once the rail was placed. As May 31 drew near, some spikes were pulled from the rail that was to be moved in order to reduce as much as possible the time required to release the rail from its old position.
Rolling stock, too, was being prepared for rapid conversion. Contemporary accounts indicate that dish shaped wheels were provided on new locomotives so that on the day of the change, reversing the position of the wheel on the axle would make the locomotive conform to the new gauge. On some equipment, axles were machined to the new gauge and a special ring positioned inside the wheel to hold it to the 5-foot width until the day of the gauge change. Then the wheel was pulled, the ring removed, and the wheel replaced.
To shorten the axles of rolling stock and motive power that could not be prepared in advance, lathes and crews were stationed at various points throughout the South to accomplish the work concurrently with the change in track gauge.
And you thought deploying software was difficult.
Update: In their book Information Rules, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian point out that sometimes having different standards from the norm is a good thing.
As things turned out, having different gauges was advantageous to the South, since the North could not easily use railroad to move its troops to battle in southern territory during the Civil War. Noting this example, the Finns were careful to ensure that their railroads used a gauge different from the Russian railroads! The rest of Europe adopted a standard gauge, which made things easy for Hitler during World War II: a significant fraction of German troop movements in Europe were accomplished by rail.
They also describe the efforts that the South went through to support the stronger standard of the North without switching over:
In 1862, Congress specified the standard gauge for the transcontinental railroads. By this date, the southern states had seceded, leaving no one to push for the 5-foot gauge. After the war, the southern railroads found themselves increasingly in the minority. For the next twenty years, they relied on various imperfect means of interconnection with the North and West: cars with a sliding wheel base, hoists to lift cars from one wheel base to another, and, most commonly, a third rail.
At home, I have a drawer full of sliding wheel bases and third rails in the form of Euro-to-US & Asia-to-US power adapters.
Study: More Americans Buying Firearms To Defend Selves From Toddlers Who Found Their Guns. “If a child ever gets into their nightstand or unlocked gun safe, they just want a chance to fight back.”
You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill. “It’s not just the cooking that wears me down, but the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the soon-to-be-rotting produce sitting in my fridge.” Everything after the “but” is my daily nemesis.
How to Make the World’s Rarest Pasta
In this excerpt from Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, author Eliot Stein travels to a city in Sardinia to learn how to make the world’s rarest pasta, su filindeu.
As much as I would hate to see su filindeu fade away, I understand why Abraini doesn’t want to teach it to any Canadian or Greek chef who calls her out of the blue. Sure, after several years, she may succeed in passing on the skill, but as she told me, when you take something that is so intertwined with a specific place, a specific event, and a specific pastoral code, and you present it in a different context, “it’s no longer the threads of God; it’s just pulled pasta.”
Only a few people in the world know how to make this pasta properly, and they all belong to the same family.
“There are only three ingredients: semolina wheat, water and salt,” Abraini said, vigorously kneading the dough back and forth. “But since everything is done by hand, the most important ingredient is elbow grease.”
Abraini patiently explained how you work the pasta thoroughly until it reaches a consistency reminiscent of modelling clay, then divide the dough into smaller sections and continue working it into a rolled-cylindrical shape.
Then comes the hardest part, a process she calls, “understanding the dough with your hands.” When she feels that it needs to be more elastic, she dips her fingers into a bowl of salt water. When it needs more moisture, she dips them into a separate bowl of regular water. “It can take years to understand,” she beamed. “It’s like a game with your hands. But once you achieve it, then the magic happens.”
Here’s a 30-minute video on how su filindeu is prepared — there are a couple of shorter videos as well.
From MIT Technology Review, the 8 worst technology failures of 2024. Includes AI slop, Boeing’s Starliner, and woke AI.
Features of Adulthood
I enjoyed Randall Munroe’s take on what he thought adult life would be like as a kid…in the form of a graph, naturally. All those Looney Tunes reruns & 80s movies led us Gen Xers astray.
Exercise is “the single most potent medical intervention ever known”. “People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps.”
The 2024 Architecture and Design Awards. There’s a children’s book museum in Kansas City? And Miranda July renovated the kitchen in her rental apartment without her landlord knowing?
HTML: the Most Significant Computing Language Ever Developed
Tim Carmody has a great appreciation of HTML in Wired magazine: HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me.
HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library — an archive, a directory, a set of connections — for all digital knowledge.
I love HTML!
The Criterion Channel’s collection of Surveillance Cinema, including The Conversation, Gattaca, Minority Report, Sliver, and The Lives of Others.
Meta’s Free Speech Grift
From The Verge: Meta abandons fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of Community Notes.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta’s new Trump-friendly policy chief Joel Kaplan. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg’s thread about the announcement:
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:
1/ Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
2/ Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
3/ Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
4/ Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
6/ Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.
It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I’m looking forward to this next chapter!
I wildly underestimated how quickly the big media and social media companies were going to kowtow to the incoming president. From The NY Times:
Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.
Since Mr. Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives.
Mr. Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections” felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
In late November, Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Mr. Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.
BTW, Dana White, a violent man who assaulted his wife, got a warm welcome to Meta’s board from Instagram/Threads chief Adam Mosseri: “Excited to have you on board!” Everyone is falling in line. And all those $1 million donations to Trump’s inaugural fund from tech & media companies and CEOs are nothing but racket protection payments.
I don’t think this actually has a whole lot to do with Zuckerberg’s or Meta’s commitment to free speech. What Zuckerberg and Meta have realized is the value, demonstrated by Trump, Musk, and MAGA antagonists, of saying that you’re “protecting free speech” and using it as cover for almost anything you want to do. For Meta, that means increasing engagement, decreasing government oversight and interference, and lowering their labor costs (through cutting their workforce and strengthening their bargaining position vs labor) — all things that will make their stock price go up and increase the wealth of their shareholders.
Decreasing moderation and allowing more political & hate speech (I don’t now how else to read “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations” — hate speech is protected speech in the US) will increase engagement overall, any AI bots they want to unleash to spur engagement don’t have to be moderated, TX is more labor- and corporate-friendly than CA (I’m sure this is also part of Meta’ ongoing negotiation with CA about letting them have more leeway or they’ll leave the state), and I think the benefit of rethinking their rules to be more friendly to conservatives is self-explanatory.
The Militia and the Mole. “A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.” He returned with a trove of documents.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience
Have you ever wanted to browse art from the Metropolitan Museum in a first-person shooter interface? You are in luck because DOOM: The Gallery Experience exists.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.
In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).
They sourced the art from the Met’s Open Access collection and in the game you can click through to see each piece on the Met’s website. Here’s a video of the gameplay:
And of course people are speedrunning it. (via waxy.org)
My friends Matt & Kay have written a book about travelling to all 14 National Women’s Soccer League stadiums in the US, documenting the highs and lows of each stadium. This is extremely niche and I love it.
Do You Enjoy This Amazing Newsletter? Here’s How You Can Help.
Every month, my friend Jodi Ettenberg sends out one of the best links roundups around, her *free* Curious About Everything newsletter. This month’s issue came out yesterday and there’s really so much good stuff in there — Spotify’s ghost artists, biofarming animals for live-saving chemicals, the history of risotto, and a look at how the Vatican picks saints.
This issue also includes a sad update on her health:
After two years of slowly making progress on my ‘uptime’ from my spinal CSF leak, I slid in the shower on Christmas Day when, unknown to me, my body scrub tipped over and oil dripped down onto the floor. The shower was very slippery even with shower slippers on — they’re no match for body scrub, apparently. I felt my the tearing at my leak site as my leg shot forward, and my heart sunk.
It’s now January, and many symptoms that had disappeared have come rushing back. The screeching tinnitus, the nausea, dizziness, and shakiness upright, the ‘brain sag’ at the back of my head yanking my skull downward the minute I stand, and the searing pain at my leak sites. Before I slid, I was averaging 7-8 non-consecutive hours upright a day. Now, I’m back to being almost entirely bedbound.
You can read more about Jodi’s disability in a piece she wrote for CNN.
As I mentioned above, the Curious About Everything (CAE) newsletter is completely free and Jodi relies on financial support from her Patreon members to fund her activities, which includes not only the newsletter but her work as the president of board of directors of the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation (I’m assuming not a paid position) and other projects as well (you might know her from Legal Nomads). And this is where you come in. If you enjoy Jodi’s newsletter, consider supporting her on Patreon today.
Jodi acknowledges that until she gets better, the CAE newsletter might be a lot shorter or might not be sent out at all. To which you might say, well why should I support now when I might not get anything from it? My response to that is that we need to stop thinking transactionally and in the short term about our support of the things and people we love. Jodi is a freelance creator, writer, artist, and activist and if we want her to be in the best possible position to produce work that enriches our lives and helps other people for years to come, we need to support her now. We’re her social safety net — our investment in times of rebuilding, regeneration, and rebirth can make a huge difference. Here’s that link to Jodi’s Patreon again if you’d like to help out. Thank you.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of everything he watched and read in 2024. (I would love to read little media diet-style reviews of all this from him.)
“I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of Trump. So, what happened? The blame largely lies with Republican political leaders.” Remember: Mitch McConnell plainly stated that Trump incited the attack…then voted not to impeach him.
The Truth About January 6th
Today is the fourth anniversary of the attack on Congress and attempted coup of the United States government and the man who incited it will be sworn in as President of the United States later this month. On this dark day, it is important to remember what happened and why, so I went back and looked at some of what I posted in the aftermath of the attack. Here are a few of the videos, articles, and thoughts worth a second look.
This video investigation by the NY Times (YouTube video) lays out what happened that day very clearly:
Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.
Another excellent video of Jan 6 footage was taken by Luke Mogelson, a war reporter for The New Yorker:
Mogelson’s accompanying article, Among the Insurrectionists, is a must-read:
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776 — it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. … USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert — a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol — had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
Importantly, Mogelson’s piece connects Jan 6th to other right-wing militant actions incited by Republicans and Trump:
In April, in response to Whitmer’s aggressive public-health measures, Trump had tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” Two weeks later, heavily armed militia members entered the state capitol, terrifying lawmakers.
In an Instagram video and a Buzzfeed news interview a few days after the insurrection attempt, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying:
Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated.
And:
The Democrat said that she worried during the storming of the Capitol about other members of Congress knowing her location and did not feel safe going to the same secure location as her colleagues because of members who believe in the QAnon collective delusion and “frankly, white supremacist members of Congress … who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location,” saying she was concerned there were colleagues “who would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, etc.” She said that she “didn’t feel safe around other members of Congress.”
AOC’s comments and concerns highlight something I’ve been trying to be clear about in my own writing here: this was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an “attack on the Capitol” is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it’s misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.
From the Washington Post, an account of the attack from the perspective of the DC police:
“We weren’t battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,” he said in the first public account from D.C. police officers who fought to protect the Capitol during last week’s siege. “We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.”
Someone in the crowd grabbed Fanone’s helmet, pulled him to the ground and dragged him on his stomach down a set of steps. At around the same time, police said, the crowd pulled a second officer down the stairs. Police said that chaotic and violent scene was captured in a video that would later spread widely on the Internet.
Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
All the while, the mob was chanting “U.S.A.” over and over and over again.
“We got one! We got one!” Fanone said he heard rioters shout. “Kill him with his own gun!”
Here are two of those DC police officers speaking to CNN:
For This American Life, Emmanuel Felton interviewed “several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob”:
Emmanuel Felton: Have you ever been in a fight like that?
Officer Jones: No, not like that. No way. These people were deranged, and they were determined. I’ve played video games before. Well, you know, zombie games — Resident Evil, Call of Duty. And the zombies are just coming after you, and you’re just out there. I guess that’s what I could relate it to — Call of Duty zombies. And the further you go, the more and more zombies just coming. You’re just running, running, running. And they wouldn’t stop. You’re seeing they’re getting their heads cracked with these batons, and we’re spraying them, and they don’t care! It was insane.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson placed January 6th within the context of the history of right-wing terrorism in the US, setting it alongside Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Bundys:
Right-wing terrorism in American has very deep roots, and those roots have grown since the 1990s as Republican rhetorical attacks on the federal government have fed them. The January 6 assault on the Capitol is not an aberration. It has been coming for a very long time.
Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don’t we treat them like one? “Like tobacco, its use can — and often does — kill innocent bystanders. I’m talking about oversized cars.”
Clip is a “plug & play” unit that upgrades almost any bike to an e-bike. The “no-tools” gadget clips onto to the front forks of a bike and provides up to 12 miles of range.
I loved the first volume of this, so I’m pleased to see that David Whyte is back with Consolations II. “To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.”
Male college enrollment could be dropping because of male flight. “Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.”
Man-Made Structures Now Outweigh the Mass of the Living World
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Update: As noted in the comments and in my inbox, it should probably be “humans outweigh wild mammals 10 to 1”.
A list of advice for defeating the authoritarian threat. “Authoritarians want you to feel powerless because it makes their work easier. Courage, faith, and optimism are essential. Fascism feeds on cynicism and pessimism. Starve it.”
Depictions of children dying were rife in 19th century literature, mirroring high child mortality levels in real life. “People who want to dismantle a century of resolute public health measures, like vaccination, invite those horrors to return.”
An online-only conversation from the British Library with Lauren Groff about her novel Matrix, Marie de France, and “violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in the medieval world”. Jan 14, £10.
Fact-Checking the Spiciness of ‘Hot Ones’ Sauces
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
Huh, there’s going to be a Blade Runner 2099 TV series. It stars Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer and will premiere at some point on Amazon Prime.
Say Nothing TV Series
Somehow I missed that Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book on The Troubles, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, has been turned into a 9-part TV series (now available on Hulu in the US & on Disney+ elsewhere).
Spanning four decades, the series opens with the shocking disappearance of Jean McConville, a single mother of ten who was abducted from her home in 1972 and never seen alive again.
Telling the story of various Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, Say Nothing explores the extremes some people will go to in the name of their beliefs, the way a deeply divided society can suddenly tip over into armed conflict, the long shadow of radical violence for all affected, and the emotional and psychological costs of a code of silence.
It’s gotten good reviews and has also attracted at least one lawsuit from one of the people depicted in it.
Veteran Republican Marian Price intends to sue Disney+ after she was depicted shooting Jean McConville in one of the most notorious murders of the Troubles, a law firm has said.
Mrs McConville was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972, becoming one of the disappeared.
Her body was eventually found more than 30 years later at a beach in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland.
Ms Price, 70, also known by her married name Marian McGlinchey, has denied any involvement.
The 20 Best Podcasts of 2024, including podcasts about the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Stevie Wonder, the NYPD, and guns.
Last week, Alessandro Slebir rode one of the largest waves ever surfed, a 100-ft monster at Mavericks.
Embroidery Journaling
Since January 2020, Sophie O’Neill has been keeping an embroidery journal. Each day, she sews an “icon” to represent that day’s events and memories.
“I embroider an icon every day,” Sophie says. “So at the end of this year, I’ll have 366 icons.”
The 29-year-old has now embroidered more than 1,800 one-pence-coin-sized symbols to represent every stage of her life over the past five years.
A self-taught sewer, she picked up the craft in 2019 when looking for a new hobby.
But as for her embroidery journal, Sophie said: “I had just started a new job and I thought it would be a really cool way to track everything I learned throughout the year.”
Little did she know, several years later, she would have embroidered icons to document moving from California to Glasgow, starting her business and buying a house, among others.
O’Neill also keeps track of the books she reads by filling in an embroidered bookshelf. You can keep up with her activities on The Stir-Crazy Crafter and Instagram. If you’d like to try your hand at embroidery journaling, O’Neill sells a kit on Etsy.
Mapping Police Violence: “Police killed more people in 2024 than any year in more than a decade.” And: “Black people were 30% of those killed by police in 2024 despite being only 13% of the population.”
The top 10 videos shared by The Kid Should See This in 2024. Includes how wire photos worked in 1937 and “living in a tree for 3 weeks to film 10 million bats”.
Happy Public Domain Day!
Yesterday was Public Domain Day and Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has the scoop on what works entered the public domain in the US on January 1, 2025. They include:
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
- Agatha Christie, Seven Dials Mystery
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (only the original German version, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter)
- A dozen more Mickey Mouse animations (including Mickey’s first talking appearance in The Karnival Kid)
- The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (the first Marx Brothers feature film)
- The Skeleton Dance, directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks (the first Silly Symphony short from Disney)
- Spite Marriage, directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton (Keaton’s final silent feature)
- E. C. Segar, Popeye (in “Gobs of Work” from the Thimble Theatre comic strip)
- Hergé (Georges Remi), Tintin (in “Les Aventures de Tintin” from the magazine Le Petit Vingtième)
- Singin’ in the Rain, lyrics by Arthur Freed, music by Nacio Herb Brown
- Ain’t Misbehavin’, lyrics by Andy Paul Razaf, music by Thomas W. (“Fats”) Waller & Harry Brooks (from the musical Hot Chocolates)
- An American in Paris, George Gershwin
- Rhapsody in Blue, recorded by George Gershwin
The Internet Archive is hosting several of the newly sprung works, free for you to remix, reuse, misuse, and generally do whatever you would like with. Huzzah!
Oh, and here’s why the public domain matters:
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution — this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past — reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever — if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation.
Apple TV+ is going to be free this weekend for non-subscribers. You can stream Silo, Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, etc. to your heart’s content.
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