Entries for January 2025
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?
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.
Update: These stamps are now available from the USPS online store and at your local post office.
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.
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…”
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.
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.”
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)
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.)
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.
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…”
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.
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.
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.
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.’”
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.”
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. 😉
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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