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.
This woman does some amazing things with a series of white rings — lots of precision optical illusions.
It’s mesmerizing watching people moving like machines — an interesting psychological thing. Like Avantgardey, which if you haven’t heard of them (just because they show up all the time on my Instagram doesn’t mean that happens for everyone), you should check them out:
(via @sevlu)
Diego Poncelet recently set a new world record for the fastest speed on a skateboard. The old record was 146.7 km/h (91.2 mph) and he hit 151.8 km/h (94.3 mph). There are a couple of parts you can skip, but watching most of the video is worth it because you see the process and can compare how truly insanely fast he is moving during the final run — I found myself holding my breath for the last minute or so.
Also, I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.
I just found the first time I posted about speed skateboarding on KDO: this post from 2008. Less aerodynamic, more gonzo, and the cameraman is also on a skateboard going equally fast.
A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)
The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter.
The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of scampering feet is inaudible to us. But not to him. With the help of a special acoustic camera equipped with 60 highly sensitive microphones, we can see what the owl is hearing.
The footage in this video is amazing — and so is the owl’s sense of hearing. A YouTube commenter says “Cat software in Bird hardware. Bad news for the Rodents.” You can watch a short video on the science behind owl hunting techniques and watch the whole episode this is from about how animals use sound (but only in Canada, it seems…VPN works fine tho).
The only problem with this video is that now I want two hours of just closeup footage of the owl’s face and it flying directly towards the camera. Those eyes! And its mid-flight loaf-of-white-bread-shaped body! I would also like the owl to be my friend.
BTW, this clip is from a show called The Nature of Things, which is a CBC nature series that’s been going since 1960. A good thing to have on your radar if you’re looking for well-produced science & nature programs.
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline)
This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung)
It might be that this text-only quiz game from 1993 is the most challenging F1 video game of all time. Here are a couple of the 23 questions from Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz:
3. Which team was the best in the 80’s?
Statistically, it’s McLaren, but that’s not a correct answer. The correct answer is “Mc Laren.”
4. Who is the youngest champion of ever?
The correct answer in 1993 was Emerson Fittipaldi, but his full name cannot be accepted because it contains too many characters for the computer. The game will not take “Fittipaldi,” “Emerson,” or “E Fittipaldi.” The answer must be “Fit.”
The real quiz, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear.
Berger is a former F1 driver, and the game is so weird and forgotten that it’s not even listed on his Wikipedia page — and it might not have been an official game at all. What is listed on his Wikipedia page is the epic prank war he waged against teammate Ayrton Senna:
In an Australian hotel room, Berger filled Senna’s bed with frogs. An infuriated Senna confronted Berger, who replied, “Did you find the snake?” Senna retaliated by putting strong-smelling French cheese in the air conditioning unit of Berger’s room.
It seems likely it was in this spirit that Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz game was created: as a prank Berger himself would have enjoyed. You can play a cracked version of the C64 game for yourself on the Internet Archive (answer “N” and “N” if you want to play it in hard mode as intended) and watch this gameplay video:
Agustín Ferrando Trenchi became a little obsessed with the moon as a kid. As an adult, he’s taken tons of photos and hundreds of hours of footage of the moon. After seeing an airplane fly close to the moon while he filmed, Trenchi began a quest to capture a plane flying across the face of the moon.
Over the course of 10 years, he took photos and videos of birds and statues silhouetted by the moon, but planes eluded him.
I realized if I wanted to film this, I was going to have to try a different approach. It wasn’t just going to happen by accident. So in February of this year, taking advantage of being in London, I decided to go near one of the busiest airports in the world to maximize my odds as much as possible.
But while we were on our way, I had second thoughts. I felt like it took the fun out of it. It didn’t make sense to force it that much either. So we got off.
I’m not going to spoil the video, but the whole thing is just so lovely — a meditation on obsessions, journeys, and finding meaning in your life. (via virginia)
Laika is the stop-motion animation studio that made Coraline & Kubo and the Two Strings. Their newest film, Wildwood, looks pretty incredible; have a look at the trailer.
Creative Boom recently highlighted some of the process behind the film, which is heavily dependent on physical sets and puppets.
The man tasked with putting the show together was art director Matthew Maldonado, having spent five years designing and building Wildwood’s sets. So I asked him the million dollar question: how much of Wildwood is physical and how much is digital?
Matthew’s response is simple. “Every single thing was made by hand, truly,” he stresses. “And every single thing that we built was either shot in camera or referenced by our effects department. We’ve got some really wide, expansive locations and there’s some digital aspect to all of that. But if it wasn’t on camera, on stage, it’s a scanned asset or a reference asset, specifically made by the artisans in the art department.”
“The show” referenced in the quote above is Wildwood: The Exhibition, due to open soon at the Design Museum in London.
(via justin lind)
BBC Earth is returning to the ocean. 25 years after the first installment, the legendary naturalist, presenter, and centenarian David Attenborough narrates Blue Planet III. This first look video, backed by a song Hans Zimmer & Jade Thirwall, is teeming with stunning footage of sea life of all sorts.
Ed Yong called BPIII’s predecessor the best nature series ever:
Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series that the BBC has ever produced.
It is almost transcendentally good—the product of a team that, after six decades of experience, is now at the height of its powers. The Blue Planet II crew traveled to 39 countries to capture over 6,000 hours of footage. They stuck their cameras into coral crevices. They hung off speedboats to film dolphins rocketing behind them. They literally stared into the abyss—and then repeatedly entered it. The resulting episodes, each narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark velvety tones, are hour-long distillations of wonder, featuring sequences that would be breathtaking had earlier shots left you with any breath to take away.
Blue Planet III will air sometime later in the year in the UK; not so sure about timelines in other locations at this point.
Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description:
In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on lockdown in 2020 turns to it as he tries to push the boundaries of perception.
It’s got a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and some good reviews on Letterboxd, including this one from film reviewer David Ehrlich:
me before seeing this movie: that is a big tree.
me after seeing this movie: that is a giant, hormonal, unbearably horned up 900-year-old virgin that understands loneliness on a level that most humans could never even begin to imagine.
The trailer and description put me in mind of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.
Back in ~2008, right on the cusp of stardom, Lady Gaga did a crate-digging video in a London record shop and named Radiohead’s set at Bonnaroo 2006 as her favorite show she’s ever been to. A post-fame Gaga reaffirmed her choice in this 2018 Vogue interview. Many share her opinion. Here’s the official concert video of that Bonnaroo show so you can judge for yourself.
The setlist for the show:
There There
2+2=5
15 Step
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Exit Music (For a Film)
Kid A
Dollars & Cents
Videotape
No Surprises
Paranoid Android
The Gloaming
The National Anthem
Climbing Up The Walls
Nude
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
The Bends
Myxomatosis
How To Disappear CompletelyYou And Whose Army?
Pyramid Song
Like Spinning Plates
Fake Plastic Trees
Bodysnatchers
Lucky
Idioteque
Karma PoliceHouse of Cards
Everything In Its Right Place
Even the band loved it:
The lore surrounding this show is well-documented: It was among the longest live sets the band has ever played, both by duration (two hours and twenty minutes) and number of songs (29). It featured early, alternate arrangements of six unreleased tracks that would go on to anchor ‘In Rainbows’ the following year. Thom Yorke said it was “his favourite gig for years and years and years.” Jonny Greenwood called it “the best festival experience I’ve ever had in America.”
I’ve mentioned this before but my favorite show was also Radiohead, in Oxford in 2001. It rained and they played Creep for the first time in three years; the crowd exploded.
During the pandemic, the band uploaded a number of full-length videos of their live shows to YouTube. Enjoy.
YouTuber Rob Martinez travelled to Columbus, Ohio to tell the story of what he calls the best sandwich shop in America, Wario’s Beef and Pork. Here’s part of the transcript of owner Stephan Madias talking about the restaurant:
For the longest time, especially the first two years, I was very protective of how the bread was sliced and I would not let anybody cut bread. It’s about the experience. I think about me eating the sandwich. Think about the things that happen when you get a big sandwich. You take that first bite into it. I want you to be able to, like, move this thing around. Take bites from the top, the bottom, the front, the back. And it’s held.
We’re very particular, and it’s part of the reason why we don’t have the bakery cut the bread is cuz we want to sort through our things. Yes, we have volume. Yes, we have speed, but [my employees] all have the integrity that we started when we only sold five sandwiches an hour when the shop first started. That’s part of being committed to the fundamentals and being consistent.
The devil’s in the details, man. You got to take the extra minute to do it. Some people like it. Some people complain about it.
As a fellow sandwich overthinker, I love the ethos and the process. And man, those sandwiches do look amazing — tomato butter, homemade whiz for the cheese steaks, a chicken caesar sandwich, what is not to like?
O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics:
‘Cause when love is gone
There’s always justice
And when justice is gone
There’s always force
And when force is gone
There’s always Mom
Hi, MomSo hold me, Mom
In your long arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
In your automatic arms
Your electronic arms
In your arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
Your petrochemical arms
Your military arms
In your electronic arms
Ah, ah, ah, ah
60 Minutes did a profile of Anderson a few years ago and she explained the meaning of the song (to her):
This is a song about how basically technology cannot save you. It’s about a lot of things: justice, safety, power.
As a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, this kind of music wasn’t available to me, so I only actually heard this for the first time fairly recently. So I thought I’d post it in case you hadn’t really heard it either — that and the message & meaning it carries is relevant these days.
I also liked this rendition of it, slowed down and reverbed. There are also several O Superman remixes on Soundcloud of varying quality.
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.
This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.
The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.
I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film.
Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the closest to my own personal tastes as I’ve ever found. So today, I want to talk about how director Joe Wright created some of the best extended tracking shots, ones, long takes, that I’ve ever seen.
A lovely contemplative short video featuring Toshiyuki Ueno of the Japanese fashion brand Visvim talking about craftsmanship.
We want to make things that people will get attached to and will use for a long time. And that’s at the core of our creating process. It’s simple and not that complicated.
He continues:
I think about how people grow attached to things over time as they use them, and how those things add to its allure over time.
“Those things” is a little ambiguous without the context of the video…he means the wear that develops from use and how people grow attached to those “imperfections”. See also wabi-sabi.
I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one, he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects.
Like Manet, she’s dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she’s exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric. And she’s experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles.
But Cassat isn’t just adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She’s putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened up by perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet’s methods with a meticulous observation of posture, gesture, expression, and activity.
I believe I have featured login.jp_ here before — they pair electronic music with different locations around Japan to highlight the Japanese experience. For their latest video, they had English DJ & producer Bonobo play some downtempo ambient electronica in a Shinjuku dyeing workshop.
Standing on a street corner in the middle of Shinjuku, Fujiya Senkobo has preserved one of these techniques, known as hikizome or brush dyeing, for over 70 years. Dyeing is a traditional local industry in Shinjuku dating back to the Taisho period, and about 40 dyeing workshops still exist in Shinjuku Ward today. Composing patterns in his mind and dyeing extended fabrics with a brush, Takatoshi Nakamura, the third generation owner, states that staying sharp and maintaining perfect physical health are essential in hikizome, where mistakes are simply not permitted.
Wes Anderson steps into the mobile Criterion Closet to select some films that he enjoys.
One unsurprising thing about this video: Anderson says he has his own Criterion closet at home with all of the Criterion films. That’s maybe a $40-50K investment? (He probably gets them free from Criterion tho.) I wonder how many films he watches a day? Two? Three? If Soderbergh’s yearly watch/read lists are any indication, it’s probably in that ballpark.
One surprising thing about this video: I was expecting Anderson to go for Kurosawa, Tati, Truffaut, Welles, and some other of his big influences but instead selected family friendly fare suitable for a trip. The man has a wide array of influences. Here’s the full list:
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
I love seeing Flow on there. What a great little film.
See also Wes Anderson Talks Up Some of His Favorite Movies in a Parisian Video Store and this delightful video from 20 years ago or so featuring Anderson and Jason Schwartzman picking out music & movies in a Borders:
Uruguayan birder Juan Pablo Culasso, who was born blind, has been recording and collecting bird songs for more than two decades.
I think that because I’m blind, I enjoy birds differently. Bird songs are my way of appreciating and understanding this world.
Culasso is aided in his quest by his incredible sense of of hearing:
Culasso is blind, but his hearing is so acute (he has absolute pitch) he can identify over 3,000 components of birdsong and differentiate among more than 700 species in his native South America (he’s Uruguayan). Ten years ago, he won a $45,000 prize in a National Geographic competition by accurately identifying 15 random bird calls.
You can find dozens and dozens of his recordings on Spotify. Filmmaker Johnny Holder made a 22-minute documentary film that features Culasso called Sonora; you can watch it on Vimeo. (via the kid should see this)
This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass everyone. Spoiler alert: he only needed 35 minutes. (And yes, his kart was the same speed as everyone else’s…you can see it in the straights later in the race.)
They had F1’s lead commentator Alex Jacques call the race and used a feature called Proximity Chat, where Alex, Max, and whoever Max was fixing to pass did a three-way live voice chat. They should implement this in F1 (only half kidding).1
I guess this is part of an occasional KDO series about normal folks competing against world class athletes; previous installments include The Worst NBA Player Is Way Better Than You, Soccer: 55 vs. 2, All for One and One for All (three expert fencers vs 50 amateurs), and Olympic Gold Medalist Dominates the 100m at Her Kid’s Sports Day Event.
And perhaps this fits here as well, tangentially: “Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans.” Hmm!
Could you imagine though? Drivers could try and emulate the voice of their opponent’s crew chief and hit ‘em with a “Kimi, showing a slow puncture in the left rear, box box…” ↩
The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is used for locks or stops that can be released under pressure. Craighill even has a pips + nubs category in their online store. (thx, rion)
Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful video, backed by a Max Cooper soundtrack. As one of the commenters notes, MacAskill makes a relatively heavy eMTB seem extraordinarily playful.
As a mountain biker myself, some of that looks insanely fun but the narrow steep stuff looks insanely insane. Makes me want an eMTB, which I suppose is the whole point of the video.
Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background.
From Deep Down History, an entertaining hour-long explainer video on the Bayeux Tapestry.
This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…
Completed within a decade or two of the events which it depicts, the tapestry is back in the news & public consciousness because it’s back in England for the first time since it was made and on display at the British Museum.
From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami.
‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest’ —Kafka On The Shore
The playlist features tracks by Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Dizzy, the Bill Evans Trio, Monk, Mingus, and Miles Davis. Some of the video’s comments:
I had just prepared a light meal and hit play on this playlist when the telephone began to ring.
about to make my morning matcha, a spring breeze is flowing through the open windows, the air smells of optimism
Early morning, sun shining to balcony, having espresso and writing.
Studying the day before the exam with a bittersweet optimism while playing this and holding on to my hopes
Canned cold beer, windows open on a warm summer night, just after finishing a simple dinner of rice and salmon and sitting next to my cat
See also Classical Music from Murakami Novels. Both of these are going straight into my Underscore collection.
At the beginning of a clip from this podcast episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend with Matt Groening, Conan talks about one of his favorite things they did on The Simpsons:
It’s a phenomenon that the Simpsons did so beautifully, which is — and we did this with Homer a lot — but Homer is not the smartest guy in the world, but if it’s funny for him to have a certain knowledge of something or turn a phrase, suddenly he has it.
And one of my favorites of that is he’s sitting around the table and Lisa’s despondent. Something didn’t go well for her and she doesn’t think she’s going to get to go to a good school now. And she’s sitting at the table and she said, “Oh no, now I’ll never get to go to an Ivy League school. I’ll have to go to Vasser.” Which is just this like — by the way, my wife went to Vasser, it’s a very good school. But it was just this thing where in Lisa’s little world, oh my god, I’ve been I’ve been ruined. I’ll have to go to Vasser. And Homer like slams a table and says, “There’ll be no Vasser bashing in this house.”
I loved this about the show too. And it was part of a general thing the writers did where sometimes characters would play against type. So Marge became reckless, Homer was smart/sensitive, Bart was organized, and Lisa was a giggly little girl. Those moments helped make the show and when, after the epic run in the early-to-mid 90s, the show became almost exclusively about how dumb & crass Homer was, it was much less rich and entertaining. (thx, mark)
The thing about me is if I see a making-of video for pencils, I’m gonna stop and watch it and then post it to my website, especially if said pencils are Blackwings, made in Japan.
Take a first-ever, in-depth look at the Blackwing pencil manufacturing process. This short film gives a glimpse into its manufacturing facilities in Japan and California. Beginning in Kofu, Japan, the film details the intricate graphite formulation and cutting process, then transitions to the woodworking facility in Tokyo where the pencils are pressed and lacquered.
Finally, it ends in Stockton, California at Blackwing’s headquarters where the pencils are imprinted, assembled with its signature ferrule, quality-checked, and hand-packed. Each and every Blackwing pencil is thoughtfully made to help you slow down and have the best tools for your creative journey.
I’m always so curious about what’s being blurred out in making-of videos like this!
See also See How Pencils Are Made in a Japanese Factory, How Pencils Are Made, A Visit to an American Factory That’s Been Producing Pencils Since 1889, and A History of Pencil Lead and How Pencils Are Made. (via NaOH)
Socials & More