Is American Culture Simply Bad Now? I’ve been hanging with my friend Matt while he’s here in Tokyo for a trip, which he refers to as his “America is Cooked Tour” as he keeps running across things that are much better here.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for October 2026
Back in 2005, a group of restorers established a hidden workshop in Paris’s Panthéon and snuck into the building for a whole year to repair an antique clock. “The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer…” Wild!
OrySnack: The Bar Where Bartenders Work From Home. Small robot servers in this Japanese bar are controlled by people who can only work from home because of disability or illness.
The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century
Last week, the NY Times dropped a list of The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century, as picked by a panel of “more than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV”. The rankings have already been dissected online six ways from Sunday, but the link got lost in my forest of browser tabs and so here it is, a bit late but still interesting.
Here are some of my personal favorites from the list and arrowed opinions on whether some should be higher or lower on the list: Halt and Catch Fire (↑), Reservation Dogs (↑), Shogun (↑↑↑), The Great British Bake Off, Planet Earth, Downton Abbey (↓), The Good Place (↑), Normal People, Schitt’s Creek, Andor (↑↑), Severance (↓), Band of Brothers (↑), Deadwood (↑), The Crown (↓), Chernobyl (↑), The Americans (↑), Six Feet Under (↓), Girls (↓), Arrested Development, The Office (US), 30 Rock, Game of Thrones, Fleabag (↑), Succession, Mad Men, The Wire (↑), and Breaking Bad (↓).
There are many excellent shows that didn’t make the list — the one that immediately pops into my mind is My Brilliant Friend. As for stuff that’s on there that perhaps could be replaced with something more worthy, I’ll hold my tongue. I do think the inclusion of some of the more recent shows on the list will not age well when this is looked back on in, say, 10 years.
Don’t Cook That: a collection of real recipes that you shouldn’t make. Cholera remedy recipe calls for “equal parts laudanum, rhubarb, double-strength capsicum, camphor and spirits of nitre”.
So Many Amazing Control Rooms
From the Control Rooms group on Flickr. 🤩 So many little details in all of these photos to pore over.
See also Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green, The User Experience Design of Lego Interface Panels, Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center (c. 1966), and Lots and Lots of Control Panels.
The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism. “What’s this middle bit?” “Why, that’s the Battle of Legitimate Concerns!”
“Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever’s ‘cool’ until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base. Then they move on to the next thing, leaving the original to die…” 🎯
Prince Was One of the First Players of The Oregon Trail
In this video, Patrick Hicks tells the story of the development of the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail and how Prince (you know, the genius musical artist) was one of the first people in the world to play the very first version of the game.
The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the history class that Rawitsch was student teaching. While developing the game, Heinemann & Dillenberger tested it out with some kids at the high school at which they were student teaching…and one of those kids was Prince Rogers Nelson.
Paul would later say that he heard about Prince before he even met him. One of the other teachers told him, “There’s this kid here who basically is running his own business. He’s this amazing musician who plays all these instruments and writes his own songs.” And then later, Paul realized that that was Prince.
But listen to Hicks tell the whole thing…it’s a good story. And if you want to hear a lot more of the story, here’s Gaming Historian’s feature-length documentary (the Prince anecdote is at ~24:00).
You can play the familar 1980s version of the The Oregon Trail online.
A “Kelvin wave” powered by El Niño will soon raise sea levels in California “by half a foot or more”. “It’s ‘highly probable’ that California will soon witness its highest sea levels ever recorded.”
The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go. “Why be financially independent, [editor in chief Sophia Dasser] wondered, if not to publish sharp-edged views of the biggest campus issues?”
The best multi day hikes in the world. “As an avid hiker, who spends most of her time hiking, I have done more than 100 multi day hikes all over the world. This list includes 25 of my favorite ones.”
Lobster is Lobster: a language guessing game. “Lobster is lobster in English. Langosta is lobster in ___”
Ooh, Mestra is a new short story from Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles). “Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.”
Map of the Lighthouses of the World
From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such. The screenshots above are static but the lights on the real map move: each lighthouse sweeps out its actual arc and the reach of the beams is true to scale. I recorded a short video of how it looks on the site:
Each lighthouse has a unique light characteristic so that ships can tell them apart:
In any of these designs an observer, rather than seeing a continuous weak light, sees a brighter light during short time intervals. These instants of bright light are arranged to create a light characteristic or pattern specific to a lighthouse. For example, the Scheveningen Lighthouse flashes are alternately 2.5 and 7.5 seconds. Some lights have sectors of a particular color (usually formed by colored panes in the lantern) to distinguish safe water areas from dangerous shoals. Modern lighthouses often have unique reflectors or racon transponders so the radar signature of the light is also unique.
See also A Blinking Map of the World’s Lighthouses. And mapped.earth has more cool visualizations of the Earth (rianfall, wind, lightning, pollution, etc.)
Looks like Every Frame a Painting is ramping up again! “Over the last 10 years, Taylor and I have amassed a series of ideas — some of them originally designed to be on Youtube, some designed to be other things. All of this is currently in progress”
Amazon is releasing some new Kindle models, including a thinner Paperwhite (my fave) with an aluminum back, more storage, and faster interactions. If I didn’t just get a new last-gen Paperwhite to replace one I lost, I’d be tempted to pre-order.
A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps. I listened to about half of this and had to stop…it’s incredibly candid but what he went through as a kid & young adult, oof.
A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city. As previously mentioned, he started playing the game to connect with his kids and never stopped. (This is only part 1 of ???)
Socials & More