kottke.org posts about video
I know I probably say this every time I post videos like this, but I wish I’d gotten into art & art history earlier than I did. Channels like Behind the Masterpiece are so good at making this stuff come alive and their Brief History of Japanese Art scratches my recent interest in Japan itch quite nicely. I was lucky to see some of the pieces from the video on my Japan trip last fall, including the Big Buddha in Kamakura, hand scrolls, sumi-e, and so many woodblock prints. (via open culture)
As you know, I love me some Lego engineering builds. This one is pretty fun: using a large syringe, a Raspberry Pi, neodymium magnets, a controller scavenged from a toy submarine, and a bunch of Lego pieces, Brick Experiment Channel built a remote-controlled submarine. And it works so well! They even tested it by navigating 200 meters in a real stream.
The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge.
The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind from the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, the boys are guided by their devoted coach Senad, whose fight to rebuild the neglected track mirrors his determination to create a future for his athletes in a country facing one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.
Filmed over five transformative years, The Track captures an intimate and deeply human coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a nation still recovering from the scars of war, political corruption, and rising nationalism. As the boys balance Olympic ambition with the pull of street life, heartbreak, and survival, their paths begin to diverge, revealing the stark realities young people face in modern Bosnia.
You can check the website for online and IRL showings; it’s on Amazon Prime in the US.
The Merchant’s House Museum was NYC’s first landmarked building, but until this year, the function of a small hidden passageway in the house was unknown. When historians and preservationists examined it in detail, they found that it was built by the first owner of the house, abolitionist Joseph Brewster, as a hiding place for enslaved people escaping from the South.
But when visitors head upstairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, there’s something strategically hidden within the walls of Manhattan’s first landmarked building: a link to the Underground Railroad.
“We knew it was here, but didn’t really know what we were looking at,” Camille Czerkowicz, the curator for the Merchant’s House Museum, said.
Now they know that the Merchant’s House was also a “safe house” for enslaved Africans who escaped bondage in the South.
Architects and preservationists recently investigated the building’s hidden vertical passageway along the west wall and examined it for themselves.
“I’ve been practicing historical preservation law for 30 years, and this is a generational find. This is the most significant find in historic preservation in my career, and it’s very important that we preserve this,” Michael Hiller, a preservation attorney and professor at Pratt Institute, said.
Underneath those built-in drawers is the path to freedom.
Sleeping cleans your brain. Research suggests that zoning out, daydreaming, and being bored can perform a similar function without the need for deep sleep. So put down that phone occasionally and let your brain chill for a bit.
In addition to his great series Subway Takes, Kareem Rahma does another series called Keep the Meter Running where he hops into NYC cabs, interviews the drivers, and asks them to take him to their favorite places.
In the run-up to the NYC mayoral election last year, Rahma jumped into a cab driven by Mouhamadou Aliy, who wanted to pick up his friend along the way to his favorite spot. That friend was now-mayor Zohran Mamdani, who tells the story of how the two of them protested & went on a hunger strike together. It’s a great conversation and video…I watched a snippet of it on Instagram (I missed it last year) and had to track down the whole thing:
I’m sorry, how can you not vote for this guy? The real deal, indeed — and voters could tell. There are so many politicians, particularly on the left, who talk a good game, push all the right buttons, and then they sputter or freeze or about-face when the rubber meets the road. It feels hollow; no wonder voters and activists find it hard to get behind the calculation of politicians who they know, deep down, are just saying certain things to get a vote. At least with Republicans, they tell you they’re going to run the country into the ground and then they go out and try to do it.
I don’t normally say this, but if you watch one thing on kottke.org today, this week, this month, make it this speech written by Shakespeare and performed by Sir Ian McKellen on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The segment starts at ~20:00; McKellen sets it up:
It’s all happening 400 years ago. In London, there’s a riot happening. There’s a mob out in the streets and they’re complaining about the the presence of strangers in London, by which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting the odds and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent back home wherever they came from. And the authorities send out this young lawyer, Thomas Moore, to put down the riot, which he does in two ways. One by saying that you can’t riot like this. It’s against the law. So, shut up, be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity.
The riot took place on May 1, 1517 and is referred to as Evil May Day:
According to the chronicler Edward Hall (c. 1498–1547), a fortnight before the riot an inflammatory xenophobic speech was made on Easter Tuesday by a preacher known as “Dr Bell” at St. Paul’s Cross at the instigation of John Lincoln, a broker. Bell accused immigrants of stealing jobs from English workers and of “eat[ing] the bread from poor fatherless children”.
The same as it ever was. The text of the play, Sir Thomas More, is available at Project Gutenberg; here are the bits that McKellan performed, after the crowd calls for the removal of the strangers (some translation help, if you need it):
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
And of course, McKellen performs this wonderfully — he originated the role and has been performing it since the 1960s. Again…I urge you to watch it.
The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest surviving work attributed to Michelangelo, painted by him in 1487 or 1488 when he was 12 or 13 years old. This is an intense painting, the kind of thing that would have resulted in Michelangelo’s parents visiting the principal’s office had the young man painted this in a contemporary 7th grade art class.
Until 2009, it was believed the painting was a copy of a documented Michelangelo original, but a restoration and x-ray & infrared scans of the work showed evidence that the painting was done by the future master.
Michelangelo’s work was based on Martin Schongauer’s engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons. This video provides a great overview of the history of the painting:
(via colossal)
A couple of weeks ago, AI company Anthropic published the constitution that they use to train their Claude LLM (“under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission”). From the company’s news release:
We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.
The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written — with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them — makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.
The full document is 80+ pages, but the news release does a decent job in summarizing what’s in it.
Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.
We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave — that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society.
Casey Newton and Kevin Roose recently interviewed the primary author of the constitution, philosopher Amanda Askell, for the Hard Fork podcast (the segment starts at ~25min).
Newton says the document reads like “a letter from a parent to a child maybe who’s leaving for college”:
And it’s like, we hope that you take with you the values that you grew up with. And we know we’re not going to be there to help you through every little thing, but we trust you. And good luck.
Both the constitution and the conversation with Askell are fascinating, no matter where you lie on the AI debate continuum. You might also be interested in this video of Askell answering questions from Claude users about her work:
Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang the lyrics.
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
How many ICE/BPD/DHS officers marched in Charlottesville, assaulted Congress on Jan 6, and/or are Proud Boy/Stormfront members, I wonder? (They’re the same picture.)
Morello spoke briefly before the performance:
Brothers and sisters, thank you for welcoming us to the Battle of Minneapolis. My friends, if it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now, it’s in my city, it’s in your city and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, ousted, overthrown and driven out. By who? By you. By me.
Minneapolis is an inspiration to the entire nation. You have heroically stood up against ICE, stood up against Trump, stood up against this terrible rising tide of state terror. You’ve stood up for your neighbors and for yourselves and for democracy and for justice. Ain’t nobody coming to save us, except us. And brothers and sisters, you are showing the way.
To that end, we would like to begin our program with an old Native American war chant. We encourage you to singalong, in this very room Prince created a revolution, now it’s our turn.
Here’s the official video for Killing In The Name:
PS. Bruce Springsteen was there as well and performed his song Streets of Minneapolis.
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.
During an exhibition, Japanese volleyball player Yuji Nishida hit a courtside judge in the back with an errant serve. He immediately sprinted across the court and dove prostrate in apology. The gesture was a sort of sliding dogeza:
Even in a country where a sincere apology can go a long way, Nishida’s mea culpa was an extreme example. The most extravagant form in Japanese culture is the dogeza, which can also be used to express deep respect.
When used as an apology, the person in the wrong prostrates themselves and bows so that their forehead touches the floor between their hands. While the dogeza is rarely seen in public, scandal-hit politicians have used equally theatrical gestures to communicate their remorse.
Nishida followed up his slide with several more bows.
In one of his final on-camera interviews, David Lynch recounts going to the very first Beatles concert in the US in 1964.
I ended up going to this concert. I didn’t really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering… crying… screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal.
Lynch continued:
Music is one of the most fantastic things. Almost like fire, water, and air. It’s like a thing. It does so much.
The interview was for the documentary Beatles ‘64, which is available on Disney+. Here’s how it came about:
“David had the idea to interview not just people who like the Beatles, because we’d be still making this movie forever. But it was people who’s who had some kind of pivotal, profound reaction or moment when the Beatles first came to the U.S., or when they first heard or saw the Beatles,” Bodde explained. “We had done extensive research on people who had that level of connection and we learned that David Lynch was living in Alexandria, Virginia, with his family. His father was in the Department of Forestry and they moved around a lot, [but at that time] they lived in Alexandria. He had met JFK. Had been at the inauguration of JFK as an Eagle Scout. And then had gotten a ticket to the to the Beatles concert, the first US concert at the Washington Coliseum. We were kind of amazed that he had multiple connections to the story that was being told.”
(thx, david)
Sesame Street has uploaded a bunch of classic episodes to YouTube that are free to watch, including the very first episode from 1969, the one where Mister Rogers visits, and the episode where Mr. Snuffulupagus is finally revealed. The most recent one was uploaded just a couple of days ago, so it appears to be an ongoing effort. (via open culture)
P.S. From Four Things About Mr. Snuffleupagus:
Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.
From Taner’s Funk Kitchen, a 30-minute set of smooth/chill deep cuts from Daft Punk. As noted in the description, this mix is less of a club vibe and more of a chill listening party.
The DJ is using a Digital Vinyl System (DVS) to play/mix the songs. I’d never heard of this before; from the description:
DVS is a DJ technology that allows you to control digital music files on your computer / smartphone using traditional turntables with special timecode vinyl. It combines the tactile feel of analog DJing with the flexibility of digital music libraries.
I knew many (most?) DJs were playing from digital these days but never knew how. From Wikipedia:
A Digital vinyl system (DVS) allows a DJ to physically manipulate the playback of digital audio files on a computer using turntables as an interface, thus preserving the hands-on control and feel of DJing with vinyl. This has the added advantage of using turntables to play back audio recordings not available in phonograph form. This method allows DJs to scratch, beatmatch, and perform other turntablism that would be impossible with a conventional keyboard-and-mouse computer interface or less tactile DJ controllers.
That’s pretty cool. I guess if I needed another expensive hobby…
David Ehrlich is back with my favorite end-of-year celebration of film; here’s his look back at the best films of 2025 (YouTube). See the full list at Letterboxd. I’ve only seen five of these so it’s difficult to comment on the list as a whole, but I feel like Sinners should have been higher?
This is an animated 3D visualization of the growth of Paris from 300 BCE to the present day. It was made with Blender (no AI) by Christian Ivan, who notes that it’s a “simplification” and so might not be 100% accurate. To my eye, the broad strokes are all there. The subtle sound design helps with the overall effect as well.
“Divers documents the restless anticipation of walking to the platform’s edge and the fleeting serenity found in jumping.” Lovely. Just lovely. (via colossal)
There’s a guy named Orion who surfs the St Lawrence River in the winter, sometimes dodging massive chunks of ice and sometimes riding them downstream, looking for waves. If you’ve ever been in Montreal near the river, even in the summer, you know how scary the water looks — churning & choppy with many eddies; I’m gobsmacked that someone goes out in that in freezing temperatures. The footage in this short film is incredible, otherworldly.
Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it’s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform their hive-mates about food source locations.
So if a bee wants to fly straight towards the sun, it waggles straight up the hive. If the food is 30° away from that polarization line, it waggles 30° away from vertical. If the food is directly away from the sun, it waggles downward.
And the distance they should fly is encoded on how long the waggle lasts. It depends on the species of bee, but a waggle of about 1 second means about a kilometer away. So a 45° waggle for about 0.6 seconds means fly at 45° angles from the sun polarization line for about 600 meters.
The bee repeats this waggle dance over and over. And the more excited the dance, the better the food source. And if other bees verify it and perform the same dance, the signal gets amplified until the whole hive knows where to go.
As shown in this video, it’s possible to construct an optical compass using polarized filters in order to wayfind like the bees. Pretty cool! (via damn interesting)
In 1375, a Spanish mapmaker made a world map we now refer to as the Catalan Atlas. For its time, the atlas was remarkably accurate and comprehensive. This video explains how such a map was made in medieval times. From Open Culture:
The upshot is an answer to the very reasonable question, “how were (sometimes) accurate world maps created before air travel or satellites?” The explanation? A lot of history — meaning, a lot of time. Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in most geographies of the ancient world.
See also How Leonardo Constructed a Satellite-View Map in 1502 Without Ever Leaving the Ground and The Oldest World Map in the World.
MTV Rewind is an interface through which you can watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also “channels” for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and the first full day of MTV programming.
All of the music videos, more than 33,000 of them, are hosted on YouTube and the lists of videos come from The Internet Music Video Database. Great idea and execution…this is the closest you’ll get to watching MTV back in the 80s.
Identity — The Story of Czech Graphic Design is a seven-part series available on YouTube.
In seven parts, the Identita series introduces viewers to the history of Czech graphic design. We will not only explore together the development of the visual face of the Czechoslovak Republic, we will also reveal what is hidden behind the symbols, signs and colors that represent it.
A couple of weeks ago, someone uploaded to YouTube and Google Drive eleven unreleased tracks from Boards of Canada (made from 1985-1996). This seems to be a legit, high-quality leak, judging from the excitement in the YT comments and on Reddit. I’ve heard a couple of these before, courtesy of some long-ago Kazaa/Limewire crate-digging, but most of these are new to me. (via the morning news)
An ecologist in Wales uses tracking dogs to help track & protect the endangered wild otter population; meet The Detectorists.
Set against the serene backdrop of rural Wales, this short documentary follows wildlife ecologist Lee Jenkins and his two German Pointers — Neo and pup-in-training Cariad — as they search for elusive otters. Using scent detection to guide camera trap placement, the team gathers crucial evidence to protect these endangered animals. Shot from a dog’s-eye view with immersive cinematography, the film offers a poetic glimpse into conservation through the nose and eyes of a canine detective.
Until the late 19th century, Japan’s relations with Europe were relatively limited. So when a pair of letters written by a Japanese man in the early 1600s were discovered in Venice, a mystery was born. Who was this man, why was he in Italy, and why was there little previous evidence that he’d been there? In part one of a new series, Evan Puschak sets the geopolitical stage and introduces us to the samurai who travelled to Rome to treat with the Pope.
In 2023, Paul Scheer spent a few days talking to fathers who accompanied their daughters to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in LA, either as concert-goers or just chauffeurs. I love this video. One of the dads summed up the vibe of being there for your loved ones, even if it’s maybe not entirely your thing:
Life is moments. Life has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with things. Life is dancing, that is life! It’s when you feel happy. Their happiness is my happiness.
Elizabeth Spiers wrote about the Swiftie Dads on Bluesky:
This is a model for what actual masculinity should be. Men don’t need to spend more time in caves beating their chests with other men; they need to take their daughters to a meaningful thing and talk to them about it.
These guys taking their daughters to Taylor Swift concerts — and unabashedly enjoying it! — are the model. They are being themselves and not treating their daughters’ interests as stupid or aberrant or a thing they should be patted on the back for participating in.
See also The Joy of Fortnite. (thx, caroline)
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
From Mr. Bean’s official YouTube channel, the show’s hilarious Christmas episode.
While Christmas shopping, Mr Bean purchases a bulky string of tree lights before making a shambles of a department store toy section. He later manages to acquire a free turkey and Christmas tree, and attempts to conduct a Salvation Army band. Finally, during Christmas dinner, Bean has quite a surprise in store for his long-suffering girlfriend.
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