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.
Time lapse video of a designer laying out an article for a magazine. I could watch stuff like this all day. It’s also the type of video I wish were on Vimeo…sometimes YouTube is like watching a UHF station from 200 miles away with the rabbit ears positioned just so. (via quips)
Video of a kinetic sculpture from the BMW museum in Munich. It starts doing cool stuff about 45 seconds into the video. (via cyn-c)
Attention time merge media fans: do not miss Golan Levin’s extensive collection of slit scan video projects as well as Eddie Elliott’s related list. (via migurski)
Tim Lincecum is a 5’ 10” 172-pound Major League pitcher with a 98-mph fastball. Such velocity out of such a small frame is attributed to his unique (but mechanically sound) pitching technique.
One key to Lincecum’s delivery is to keep his left side, especially his left shoulder, aimed toward his target for as long as possible. “Don’t open up too soon because then you lose leverage,” Tim says. “If you twist a rubber band against itself, the recoil is bigger. The more torque I can come up with, the better.”
Where Lincecum truly separates himself from most pitchers is the length of his stride. It is ridiculously long as it relates to his height. And just as his left foot, the landing foot, appears to be nearing the ground at the end of his stride, he lifts it as if stepping over a banana peel — extending his stride even more. The normal stride length for a pitcher is 77% to 87% of his height. Lincecum’s stride is 129%, or roughly 7 1/2 feet.
As a casual fan, it’s difficult to see what’s so different and violent about Lincecum’s pitching technique.
Video of actors doing the voices for The Family Guy. High levels of dissonance may occur while watching Mike Henry doing the Cleveland voice at the end.
Christopher Hitchens writes about getting waterboarded for the July issue of Vanity Fair.
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning-or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.
As you can see in the video, Hitchens maybe lasted 15 seconds or so.
Video art by William Lamson. The banana firecracker, the balloon duel, and the balloon box pop are my favorites.
Camille Utterback’s Liquid Time Series project modifies the playback of a video according to a person’s motion in front of the screen. The closer a person is to the screen, the faster the video plays in that area. Kinda hard to explain…just check out the video. See also yesterday’s time slicing Processing video.
Video of a Processing program that slices up frames from a video and displays them with a slight time delay from top to bottom. The result is completely trippy. Wait for the door opening bit. See also: time merge media. (via today and tomorrow…thx, red)
After the video of a Chinese farmer’s homemade airplane started circulating around the web late last week, commenters on several sites cried hoax, and I received several emails and tweets questioning my mental health for believing such a thing exists.
But the video wasn’t obviously fake; home-built airplanes aren’t rare, I have no reason to doubt the ingenuity of the Chinese farmer, and I’d rather believe in the wonderfully improbably than be cynical about everything I see. A second video of the plane has been uploaded to YouTube which, in my mind, corroborates the existence of the flying contraption (it’s actually an autogyro) beyond a reasonable doubt.
Video of a Chinese farmer flying his homemade airplane. Nice landing! According to a post at IfGoGo, the plane is referred to in Chinese as “shanzhai huaxiangji”. The “shanzhai” part literally means “little mountain village” but has developed into a slang word that denotes something homemade or counterfeit.
Date back to 2007, due to an open (maybe leak?) source of MTK platfrom (a wireless communication development platform), there are millions of cell phone factories burst out in south China. These factories made lots of famous-brand cell-phone-copies in a short period of time. They just copied the outline and software design from Nokia, Apple iPhone etc. The manufacturing cost is very low so many people are involved. However, these cell phones are not all completely copied. They are even totally redesigned and added a lot of features. A brand called “NCIKA” even went very popular in China. People’re even joking that the farmers in big mountains can develop and design a cell phone too. So many people call it “Shanzhai Ji” (Ji means machine in Chinese, here means cell phone) and then the name is widespread in China.
Since then, many funny/weird stuff from ordinary people are called “shanzhai” something, and that’s why this plane is named “Shanzhai Huaxiangji” in Chinese :)
The video is too long and the guy is kind of annoying, but it’s worth checking out his impression of Christopher Walken and the explanation of how he puts the voice together. Skip to 2:10.
Better to keep this one simple: video of a lady spinning on an escalator. (via cyn-c)
In celebration of Euro 2008, public prankster and more-than-fair soccer striker Rémi Gaillard made the following video of himself using the urban landscape as a soccer pitch. Gaillard scores goals into police vans, trash cans, open windows, etc. to the annoyance of his oblivious goalies.
Something about the video seemed familiar and after a bit of searching, I discovered that the same fellow was also responsible for one of my favorite links from a few years ago, Rocky Recreated. There are tons of his videos on YouTube, most of them centered on Gaillard’s brand of graffiti-esque performance art. I can’t condone some of his actions but he’s certainly amusing to watch. (via memeticians)
Video of champion motorbike rider Dougie Lampkin riding his bike through Goodwood House, a stately English home dating from the 1700s. (thx, jan)
Video visualizations of how the HTML rendering engine underneath Firefox’s hood renders mozilla.org, a Wikipedia page, and Google Japan.
Re-cut trailer for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off using music from Requiem for a Dream. (via shaun inman)
Moving Mario: imagine Super Mario Bros as created by Michel Gondry. Check out the video to get the gist.
Rave review of a 1995 documentary on the Yugoslavian War called The Death of Yugoslavia.
Despite some criticism about the accuracy of translation, the series would be in my list of top ten documentaries of all time, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It unravels the mechanism of the sordid path of human conflict, from nationalism to genocide, like no other film before or since. It is the film that never was made about the holocaust.
Sounds like a candidate for True Films. All six parts are available on Google Video…start with part one.
Video of a bunch of people (including what looks like a 8-yo girl) shooting the shit out of cars and stuff with fully automatic machine guns…the footage is from the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot & Trade Show.
KILL THE CAR is on of the favorite events we have here at OFASTS. In this event, there will be a car, loaded with explosives located on the far side of the shooting range. Anyone who wants, can participate, and try and “KILL THE CAR”. Which basically means, try and blow it up first. It’s a real BLAST!!
(via delicious ghost)
Man, I love this video. It’s some guy explaining how the banana — “the atheist’s nightmare” — so perfectly fits in the human hand and peels so easily that it must have been made by God**. Kirk Cameron listens intently. I can’t wait for the follow-up video where he explains why watermelons don’t have handles and what God was thinking when he built the coconut.
** Not that this guy cares or whatever, but the modern banana is a cultivated fruit…i.e. pressured by humans to, oh what’s the word…evolve into its present form. And other varieties of bananas are smaller or larger and differently shaped. Some wild bananas have large hard seeds. I could go on….
Video of the 2008 Democratic primary in 8 minutes.
Awesome recap…and mostly new to me because I didn’t pay much attention to all the weighty issues that were bandied about during the whole thing. (via jakob)
A video clip of La Paz, Bolivia’s crossing guard zebras, the Cebra Voluntaria. Traffic in La Paz is so dangerous that its mayor started a program to have youths dressed as zebras help people across the city’s busiest intersections. From the recent issue of Monocle:
It doesn’t get much busier than La Paz’s Plaza San Francisco of a Friday afternoon. Two zebras stand on the curb chatting with a teenage girl. Then something remarkable happens: the traffic light turns red, and at the sight of the zebras, the cars actually stop. One driver, however, is a little slow and the nose of his car is left hanging over the crossing. One of the zebras skips over to the offending car and mimes pushing it backwards. Then he continues skipping across to the other side of the street.
A good, concise pep talk from Ira Glass, about sticking with your creative endeavors. He’s talking specifically about story telling, but it really goes for anything you want to pursue seriously. Except math. If you’re still not good at math at 28, just give up already. (via mot cot)
The music video for my song ‘Alice’, an electronic piece of which 90% is composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film ‘Alice In Wonderland’.
Said video. Said song download. (thx, sam)
One of the most enjoyable sessions at the New Yorker Conference was the chefs roundtable.
Bill Buford talks with the chefs David Chang, Daniel Humm, and Marc Taxiera about their influences and the future of the culinary world.
Buford talks too much and the chefs too little but he manages some good questions and fun is had.
A compilation of “that’s what she said” jokes from The Office. I’m retroactively embarrassed for my non-ironic use of this phrase the other day. Sorry, friends. (via fimoculous)
Socials & More