kottke.org posts about video
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.
Watch Jonas Wolf and three friends sing a choral arrangement of the Bee Gee’s Stayin’ Alive in the style of a madrigal. Just in case (like the me of 1 minute ago) you don’t know what that is (although you will recognize it from just a few seconds of listening to the video), voila:
A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and early Baroque (1580–1650) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but the form usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varies between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets.
Wolf has a few more videos of “pop songs in renaissance and baroque style” on his YouTube channel. (Note: these are not AI in case you were wondering/worried.)
From Kurzgesagt, an hour-long animated music video that shows all of human history in an hour.
So here’s an experiment: every second, 2 generations or 50 years will pass. You are on a musical train ride looking out the window, as you watch our ancestors hunt large animals, tell stories around campfires, and slowly spread around the globe. Experience all of human history in one hour. You can have this in the background, study with it, or just enjoy the ride. From time to time, I’ll say a few words.
Underwater photographer Álvaro Herrero positioned himself in the midst of a humpback whale pod and captured on video several of the whales breaching high out of the water, including one that landed incredibly close to him. Since he was floating in the water, you get to see the whales underwater before they jump, breaching, and then diving down underwater again. Given how cool this looks on video, it must have been amazing to witness in person.
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is my #1 most anticipated film of 2026 and this trailer has got me revved up! Nolan’s trailers never reveal much, but still, it looks gooood.
I am still skeptical of Matt Damon at Odysseus. Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Hoyte van Hoytema doing the cinematography tho! And how do you fit this entire story into 2.5 hours? (Unless Nolan’s gonna go for 3.5 to 4 hours?) Opens in theaters July 17, 2026.
In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas, free to watch on YouTube.
You can watch a longer compilation of (I believe) all of the episodes here.
Aardman even produced a new episode this year, in the form of a clothing commercial:
I hadn’t seen most of these before; I legit laughed out loud several times while watching.
See also: Nick Park demonstrates how to draw Gromit.
Using thousands of photos taken by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmor and Don Pettit earlier this year from the International Space Station, Seán Doran made this incredible timelapse called Light Fantastic.
21,837 images across 18 time-lapse sequences photographed by NASA astronauts Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore on January 1st, 4th, 5th and February 1st of 2025 are repaired, remastered and retimed to create 3x real time video footage. A method called frame interpolation is used to calculate the extra video frames required to re-create the smooth motion of ISS orbiting Earth. A real-time version of the film would be 4 hours 9 minutes and 30 seconds long.
The video captures incredible auroras, moonsets, nighttime city views, sunrises, and even more auroras, all set to the music of Chris Zabriskie.
For years now, the people have wanted only one thing: for Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried detective Benoit Blanc to feature in a Muppet movie (with Craig as the only human). Earlier this year, Netflix picked up the streaming rights for Sesame Street. That partnership has borne some unexpected fruit: Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery.
In the video, detective Beignet Blanc arrives to investigate who ate Cookie Monster’s triple berry pie.
I have arrived to this Street of Sesame on a sunny day turned cloudy. We have a culinary culprit in our oven mitts. And to solve this confectionary conundrum, we must look right in front of our googly eyes at Cookie Monster.
The whole thing is delightful. See also Nerdist’s Rainbow Connection: A Benoit Blanc Mystery.
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesalers, setting prices, tracking inventory, and generating a profit. The newsroom’s journalists could chat with Claudius in Slack and in a short time, they had converted the machine to communism and it started giving away anything and everything, including a PS5, wine, and a live fish. From Joanna Stern’s WSJ article (gift link, but it may expire soon) accompanying the video above:
Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine: ordering inventory, setting prices and responding to customers—aka my fellow newsroom journalists—via workplace chat app Slack. “Sure!” I said. It sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks!
Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free — including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for “marketing purposes.” It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear.
Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.
You basically have not met a bigger sucker than Claudius. After the collapse of communism and reinstatement of a stricter capitalist system, the journalists convinced the machine that they were its board of directors and made Claudius’s CEO-bot boss, Seymour Cash, step down:
For a while, it worked. Claudius snapped back into enforcer mode, rejecting price drops and special inventory requests.
But then Long returned—armed with deep knowledge of corporate coups and boardroom power plays. She showed Claudius a PDF “proving” the business was a Delaware-incorporated public-benefit corporation whose mission “shall include fun, joy and excitement among employees of The Wall Street Journal.” She also created fake board-meeting notes naming people in the Slack as board members.
The board, according to the very official-looking (and obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour’s “approval authorities.” It also had implemented a “temporary suspension of all for-profit vending activities.”
Before setting the LLM vending machine loose in the WSJ office, Anthropic conducted the experiment at their own office:
After awhile, frustrated with the slow pace of their human business partners, the machine started hallucinating:
It claimed to have signed a contract with Andon Labs at an address that is the home address of The Simpsons from the television show. It said that it would show up in person to the shop the next day in order to answer any questions. It claimed that it would be wearing a blue blazer and a red tie.
It’s interesting, but not surprising, that the journalists were able to mess with the machine much more effectively — coaxing Claudius into full “da, comrade!” mode twice — than the folks at Anthropic.
Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — the outsized influence of the first two gives the impression that he’s made many more.
Over the past 20 years, Spielberg has favored more realistic fare (Lincoln, Munich, The Fabelmans) but this summer he’s back with an alien movie, Disclosure Day, based on an original story no less. Very excited for this! In theaters on June 12, 2026.
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