Stop-motion human Space Invaders. The must-see video
Stop-motion human Space Invaders. The must-see video game and stop-motion video related link of the day. (thx, janelle)
Update: This looks like the official site.
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.
kottke.org posts about video
A CBC report from 1993 on a global
A CBC report from 1993 on a global phenomenon called “Internet”. (thx, joshua)
Update: Here’s a mirror on YouTube.
Fifty people showed their asses, so the
Fifty people showed their asses, so the infamous “lost episode” of Ze Frank’s The Show has been reposted to the site. Clean towels all around.
TED is releasing audio and video of
TED is releasing audio and video of some of their talks for free on the web. Current offerings include Al Gore, David Pogue, and Gapminder’s Hans Rosling. They’ll be adding one talk a week from their archives.
Update: Here’s a post about the release from TED Blog.
ESPN writer Bill Simmons lists his YouTube
ESPN writer Bill Simmons lists his YouTube Hall of Fame videos.
Classic Royksopp music video featuring dozens of wonderful infographics.
Classic Royksopp music video featuring dozens of wonderful infographics.
Putting out a daily 3-minute video show
Putting out a daily 3-minute video show on the web is getting Ze Frank [wait for it….] a whole lot of ass. If enough people upload photos of themselves with “sports racer” written on their asses, Ze will repost the so-called “missing episode” of The Show (a copy of which I have and am trying hard not to upload to YouTube). Questions: How are these people writing so legibly on their own butts? Are they getting someone else to do it…and if so, man, that must be an awkward conversation. “You want me to write ‘sports racer’ where?” (Probably NSFW.)
Ze Frank and The Show gets some
Ze Frank and The Show gets some coverage in the NY Times. See The Show for yourself.
Video simulation of what might happen if
Video simulation of what might happen if a meteor strikes the earth.
Today’s episode of The Show aptly demonstrates
Today’s episode of The Show aptly demonstrates the pitfalls of “user generated content”. (What, you don’t watch The Show? Get on it!)
Video of the bird flu dance
Video of the aforementioned bird flu dance. (Could the bird flu dance be kottke.org’s SARS mask art? Tune in all this week to find out!!)
The Photography Channel has more than a
The Photography Channel has more than a dozen videos of photographers dicussing their craft, techniques, and experiences. A fine resource for photographers.
Oh, just go watch this remote controlled
Oh, just go watch this remote controlled airplane video. Go! Now! (via cyn-c)
Follow-up to Apple Store proposal (she said yes!)
Last week, I reported on a man using the video camera that Apple had set up to record the opening of their new store on 5th Ave in NYC to propose marriage to his girlfriend, one Uschi Lang.
I got an email from Uschi and she couldn’t be happier to announce that she said yes to the proposal and that her fiancé James has made her “the happiest woman in the world”. Congratulations, you two!
Update: I emailed Uschi and James for some more details and just got a response back. James had been meaning to propose for a few months — he’d had “the talk” with her father over the holidays — and was looking for a good opportunity. They were both in line for the 6pm opening of the Apple Store on Friday when James noticed the camera and a proposal idea that was “unique, timeless, and surprising” popped into his head.
At 4:30 am, he snuck out of bed without Uschi noticing it and headed back to the Apple Store. Based on the timing of the time-lapse video already posted on Apple’s site, James stood with the signs for about 15 minutes (5 minutes per sign) to ensure that they were visible in the video.
A few days later, James set up a “romantic trail of candles” leading up to his G5, showed Uschi the video — which she had not seen despite some coverage on the web — and she of course said “yes”.
Matt used MacSaber and his new MacBook
Matt used MacSaber and his new MacBook to recreate the Star Wars kid video. In related news, the Portland, Oregon area reported a huge nerdquake this afternoon.
Marriage proposal at the new 5th Avenue Apple Store
Apple opened a new retail store last night on 5th Avenue here in New York City. Since 5pm yesterday evening, they’ve had a camera trained on the store to capture the first 24 hours of the festivities and are displaying the results in a time-lapse movie on the store’s site. During the 5am segment of the movie, an enterprising Apple acolyte showed up and proposed to his girlfriend by holding up signs in front of the camera:
Does anyone know who this person is? Please email me if you do…I want to know how this turned out!
As it happens, this was the second marriage proposal at the opening…the eighth person in line proposed to his girlfriend right before the store opened and she said yes. Geek love!
Update: Uschi apparently said yes! (I say apparently because this blogspot site has the story and I’m assuming it was copied without attribution from a news site or newspaper but I can’t find the actual source.) (thx, robert)
Update: My pal David thinks the acceptance is a hoax…that blogspot site is filled with other fake news stories. I was fished in!!
Ahhhhh!! Freaky Gatorade commerical with big-headed children.
Ahhhhh!! Freaky Gatorade commerical with big-headed children. Like nails on a chalkboard, this is. Reminds me a bit of Loretta Lux’s photographs though.
Video of a Dutch store celebrating its 10,000
Video of a Dutch store celebrating its 10,000 shoplifter. Transcript & translation in the comments.
Funny but also depressing SNL bit with
Funny but also depressing SNL bit with Al Gore last night, speaking as if he were President and Bush was the comissioner of baseball. (via rw)
Get yer Richard Feynman on at Google
Get yer Richard Feynman on at Google Video, particularly this 50-minute video of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. A bit more Feynman at YouTube.
The original 13-minute version of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket
Before he started making the super stylized films for which he is now known, a 23-year-old Wes Anderson made a 13-minute short film called Bottle Rocket. The film was shot in 1992, found its way to Sundance, and gave Anderson the opportunity to make his first feature film of the same name. Here’s that original short, starring then-unknown actors Owen and Luke Wilson.
Video of a man performing the history of dance. Awesome.
Video of a man performing the history of dance. Awesome.
Fun video of FedEx planes getting into
Fun video of FedEx planes getting into the Memphis airport around a thunderstorm. They look like ants trying to avoid a puddle of water. (via rw)
Great extensive list of old Sesame Street
Great extensive list of old Sesame Street videos that you can watch on YouTube. Oh, the nostalgia. (Rubber duckie!!!)
BitTorrent = launching a mission to Mars
Must be something in the water today…Paul Boutin has a story on Slate today that makes the same point about BitTorrent, YouTube, and Google Video that I did this morning (although somewhat more succinctly and entertainingly):
The guys behind YouTube hit the sweet spot. Most important, they made it head-slappingly easy to publish and play video clips by handling the tricky parts automatically. Given up on BitTorrent because it feels like launching a mission to Mars? If you’ve sent an e-mail attachment, you’ve got the tech skills to publish on YouTube.
The final paragraph of the article contains this interesting bit:
The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate’s. Photos, news, and other people’s bookmarks just aren’t as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties. The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life.
Expect more bootleg TV and hotties from kottke.org in the future…I need some Alexa love.
BitTorrent, YouTube, and Google Video
The other day I realized that within my little online social circle, there’s been a lot less mention of BitTorrent lately. It used to be that someone would link to a cool video, the site hosting the video file would go down because of high traffic, and then someone who grabbed the video before the outage would put it up on a torrent site so that everyone could see it again.
And then YouTube and Google Video came along. They offered free hosting and fast (free) bandwidth for videos so when people want to put some neat video of something on their sites, they just slapped it on YT or GV and pointed to it. And more important to the point about BitTorrent, they work completely within the browser environment. You upload videos to YT in the browser (GV has a standalone app for uploading) and the Flash-based viewer works in the browser (most Web users have Flash installed). They offered a seamless end-to-end solution to finding and watching videos all in one application.
Compare that with how you typically watch a video with BT. First you download a torrent file, then open that file up in your BT client (which you need to have previously downloaded and installed), then the file downloads, and finally you open that file in a media player, generally QuickTime, Windows Media Player, or some other player that needs to be downloaded and installed…and hopefully you have the right versions and codecs for the video in question. And that’s just the viewing side of things…publishing videos via BT was even more difficult, particularly for non-technical folks.
That BitTorrent took off at all is a testament to the utility of downloading files from multiple sources simultaneously, but it’s also telling that once an easier-to-use alternative came along that offered many of the key advantages of BT, people switched1…and really quickly too. Eventually BT will have to find its way into the browser (AllPeers is promising a Firefox extension that will do just that) and somehow overcome the multiple media players problem in order to find success.
[1] For videos of the type I’m talking about anyway. BT is by no means unpopular these days, particularly for feature-length movies, lossless music files, and other really large files. YT and GV are only taking BT’s “marketshare” in the realm of short video. ↩
Old 70s song about the subway from
Old 70s song about the subway from Sesame Street. This went totally over my head as a kid, but as a NYC resident, it’s awesome. On the subway. Subway!
Awesome American Express commercial by Wes Anderson. (via gf)
Awesome American Express commercial by Wes Anderson. (via gf)
Time lapse videos from Vimeo, which relaunched nicely today.
Time lapse videos from Vimeo, which relaunched nicely today.
Jakob noticed an interesting effect…if you
Jakob noticed an interesting effect…if you take two copies of the same video, play them side-by-side a few frames out of sync, and do the cross-your-eyes thing that you do with stereoscopic images, you’ll see the video in 3-D.
Socials & More