kottke.org posts about video
A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop a sequence of moves and timing to score a perfect game, proving that it was possible. But could a human do it just by the playing the original game in the way it was intended? Well, you’ve got to watch the video to find out.
I’ve said it before — I love these Tetris analysis videos. Both aGameScout, who did the video above, and Summoning Salt (who made this feature-length video about the history of Tetris world records) are world-class at using video to explain the innovation, competition, and cooperation that allow these players to keep pushing higher and faster, past what anyone thought possible even a few years ago.
Thinking back to the Jackson Goldstone post, what I really want is a aGameScout- or Summoning Salt-caliber video about the differing riding styles of mountain bike riders, how each of them uses their own style to go faster, and where the innovations are happening. I’m sure these videos exist and I just don’t know where to find them, but if they don’t, this would be a hell of an opportunity for someone with ace communication & video editing skills.
Last week, I linked to a video mashup by Bill McClintock of several metal songs, saying “although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers”. This morning, YouTube helpfully informed me that McClintock had since done a proper tribute in the form of a compilation of every Ozzy/Sabbath-related video mashup he’d ever done.
Rest in darkness, Ozzy. 🤘
Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten:
Wow, if he keeps riding and improving, I wonder how good this kid could be? Ok, I’m funning you a little bit because that was several years ago and Jackson is starring in GoPro videos at the age of 10 and riding the hardest trails faster and better than many adult riders:
I mean, I think Jackson could really be world-class some da— Ha, more tricks! Jackson is actually 21 years old here in the present of 2025 and is actually now one of the best downhill mountain bikers in the world. Here’s the POV video from a recent win of his:
There are a couple of notable things about this video:
1. Watch the way he goes through a bunch of tree stumps at full tilt at ~1:10 by basically jumping over the whole thing with a couple of quick hops. Adjust the playback speed of the video to 0.5 or 0.25 to see how he does it. I’ve watched this like 10 times and it’s still bonkers.
2. And then at ~1:52, he screams through a tunnel and gaps directly onto a wooden berm — and you can hear how the crowd reacts. Here’s another view of that same gap and the rest of his run:
Other riders clear that gap too, but somehow not as big or direct as Jackson does it. I don’t actually know enough about mtn biking to know how Goldstone is doing what he’s doing, but if you want a hint, check out the “Bike Jesus” section of this video that starts at ~5:30:
3. Oh yeah, and just how ungodly fast he and the other riders are going past trees and through rocks and all sorts of other lurking assailants. Blimey.
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other.
Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world. Standing on his hind legs, the Great Dane Zeus was taller than Shaq. He could drink directly from the kitchen sink.
Slow Light is an animated short film about a man whose eyes are so dense that light needs seven years to travel across them. Everything he sees happened seven years ago, like a very precise, obligatory memory playback.
I feel like this is related to whether or not you can visualize things in your mind and also Braid, a video game where you can collaborate with your past self. (via colossal)
This is a great 5-minute mashup of several metal and metal-adjacent songs from artists like NIN, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, KISS, Dio, Black Sabbath, and Soundgarden. Even if you don’t care for metal, I feel confident that you’ll enjoy this anyway — it’s a bop. Here’s the track list:
Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie
Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name
Dio - Holy Diver
Soundgarden - Outshined
Judas Priest - Hot Rockin’
KISS - All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose
Pantera - 5 Minutes Alone
Black Sabbath - Into the Void
Billy Squier - The Stroke
Judas Priest - You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’
Alice in Chains - Them Bones
Metallica - Sad But True
Although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers. (via neatorama)
Follow Architectural Digest as they head behind the scenes at the offices of NPR Music to see how the now-iconic Tiny Desk Concerts come together. My favorite bits are the callouts of all the stuff on the shelves behind the artists: Adele’s water bottle, Sabrina Carpenter’s bedazzled martini glass, a Green Bay Packers helmet signed by Harry Styles. And: “Chappell Roan’s wig is actually sitting on Cypress Hill’s skull.”
I love the look of this black & white animated video made by Anthony Dickenson from thousands of hand-painted frames for Rival Consoles’ song Soft Gradient Beckons. Stick around after the song ends for a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made.
If I plan too much, it’s often disappointing. It’s much nicer if I just let it go the way it wants to go. But obviously sometimes it just doesn’t work and, you know, that’s okay. Sometimes, the mistakes are the bits that really reveal kind of new techniques. I love these little moments of imperfection. Otherwise, you know, you might as well just build it in AI.
The skateboard dolly! (via colossal)
In Florida, flooding is a huge cause of death and destruction from hurricanes. This video looks at how a town called Babcock Ranch was designed to withstand hurricane flooding through some smart engineering.
Yet this one town, Babcock Ranch, has been hit by four hurricanes and basically came out unscathed. There was no flooding at all. So we asked the engineer who helped build this town to break down its hidden designs.
Related: John Seabrook’s piece in this week’s New Yorker, In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods? (archive).
Vermont feels like the frontier of climate change in the Northeast. Farmers in the bottomlands, who previously planted wheat and barley, are beginning to plant rice, which can be underwater for two days without damage to the crop. The old roads that early Vermont settlers hacked out on hilltops, which lasted for more than two hundred years, are melting back into the forest. Extreme-rain events scour the roads down to bedrock ledges, rendering them impassable, and, because no one then uses them, any blown-down trees don’t get cleared. The next storm brings more blowdowns. A road that I went mountain biking on ten years ago, when it was a distinct pathway with old-growth trees on each side, lined by aged stone walls, is now such a tangle of fallen trees, branches, and rocks that it’s hard to tell a road was ever there.
Vermont is the second least populated state, after Wyoming, with fewer than six hundred and fifty thousand residents; it is also the fourth highest in disaster-relief funding per capita, nearly all of it flood-related. Washington County ranked first nationally in disaster declarations between 2011 and 2024. Annual precipitation in the state has increased six inches since the nineteen-sixties, and heavier-than-normal rain events in the Northeast are expected to increase by as much as fifty-two per cent by 2100. Vermont is a laboratory for the study of intense rainfall in steep terrain, and a proving ground for scientists, policymakers, regulators, and land-use planners who are on the front lines of a recurring catastrophe that traditional methods of prevention — dredging a river’s bottom, armoring its sides, berming its banks — have only made worse.
I live in Washington County so how communities are attempting to mitigate flooding is of great interest to me.
Noah Kalina is uploading videos of the “long photograph” variety of peaceful & contemplative nature scenes to YouTube. 4K. No AI. “Press play and walk away.”
Twenty years! It’s been twenty years since Bloc Party’s debut album Silent Alarm was released. To celebrate, the band stopped by the NPR office’s for a Tiny Desk Concert.
To celebrate, this Tiny Desk set begins with the super catchy and energetic pop anthem “Banquet” from Silent Alarm. The band continues with a couple songs from 2008’s Intimacy: the shimmery, glockenspiel-forward “Signs,” then “Mercury,” where we give a sneak peek of Okereke’s vocal effects rig under the Desk. Bloc Party closes with “Blue,” a sweet song on the slower side of the band’s catalog. It ends quietly, yet powerfully, as Okereke sings, “I fall asleep on your sleeve / with those three words in my dreams.”
Still bangs. (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)
Wanting to get away from manufactured perfection, artist Wang Mansheng makes his own paint brushes.
Manufactured things are, you know, have a certain form. Like a manufactured brush; they’re all really fine. The factory trying to make as fine as they could, but when you use it, all the lines come out smooth and beautiful. But sometimes, I think it’s too perfect, because I really love the rough surface of a rock or the big tree trunk.
Wang’s work is currently on display at The Huntington near LA in San Marino, CA.
A question from a viewer of XKCD’s What If? series: “What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? And what would a lunar (“holar”?) eclipse look like?” The answer to the first part of the question is: not that much. But the explanation of why that is is fascinating.
It’s worth reading the comments on the post as well…XKCD brings out the nerds and their interesting observations:
Imagine if a species grew up on a planet that had a black hole moon the mass of the moon. They’d have tides, they’d have an unobstructed view of the night sky, and they’d have no clue about this behemoth out there and would be unable to explain these bizarre perturbations in Earth’s orbit when they finally worked out Earth’s orbit.
EDIT: To everyone mentioning lensing effects: no. The eye can discern about 1 arc minute which at the distance of the moon is 280km. The lensing effect is detectable generally about double the event horizon. If the event horizon is about the size of a grain of sand, doubling it is not going to come close to being detectable with the naked eye from Earth. It is probably safe to assume that the same would be true of captured dust — that the particle size is too small to be detectable to the naked eye.
Another commenter points out that the video never explicitly answers the second question:
It never answered the part of the question about the eclipse. A grain of sand passing in front of the sun wouldn’t be visible, but if it’s a black hole, would lensing effects do anything weird?
The consensus in the comments seems to be that the effect would be minor and nearly imperceptible:
Lensing is dependent on two things: Mass of the object around which light passes, and how close by light passes. Since the black hole is one lunar mass, a very small mass on gravitational level, the lensing would be minor. Light could get a lot closer to the black hole, though. You might see a very slight “shimmer” at the edge of the sun when the black hole passes by the edge, but not much more than that. If the black hole happened to perfectly pass in front of a star that you’re observing with a telescope, you might very very briefly see a small ring instead of a point of light, but that’s about it.
Science!
Baggage is a short, stop-animation film by Lucy Davidson about the sometimes unpleasant experience of being seen — when going through airport security and also just generally.
Three girlfriends check in their baggage at the airport, but one is carrying a little more than the others. As they travel along the conveyor belt to security, can she hide what’s inside?
(via colossal)
This is a unique look at the history of the world from 1925 to 2025, told through the lens of movies whose plots take place in those years. For example, the WWII era is represented by The Sound of Music (1965), The Pianist (2002), The Darkest Hour (2017), Casablanca (1942), The Thin Red Line (1998, Come and See (1985), Son of Saul (2015), Oppenheimer (2023), and Godzilla Minus One (2023).
As the video goes on, more and more of the scenes depict imagined past futures from films like 1984, Transformers: The Movie, Blade Runner, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Johnny Mnemonic.
In the end, it’s not a happy video — lots of war, both past and future. Hollywood does like to dwell on our worst times.
Clocking in at almost an hour, this “definitive interview” with Wes Anderson by Vanity Fair about all 12 of his films is perhaps only for Wes stans or cinephiles, but then again, listening to thoughtful, creative people talking earnestly about their work is almost always worth the time.
Hi, I’m Wes Anderson. I have made, apparently, 12 films and I’m now going to walk us through every one of them in some way.
(via open culture)
Living Colour recently visited the NPR Music office for a Tiny Desk Concert. Cult of Personality might be an all-time top 10 song for me — I vividly remember their 1989 appearance on Saturday Night Live.1 They still got it!
Slice of Life (trailer) is a feature-length documentary about the American Dream through the lens of former Pizza Huts that have been transformed into everything from bars to churches to candy stores to cannabis dispensaries. A woman who runs an LGBTQ+ church out of a former Pizza Hut says:
It’s the stained-glass windows that draw people and touch people, and I think really takes it out of the realm of a Pizza Hut. It’s the power of transformation. When things continue to transform, beauty can come from it, good things can come out of it.
You can rent or buy the film from their website.
I’ve written before about how Pizza Hut was a special place to visit when I was a kid:
Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut.
ImillaSkate is a Bolivian female skate collective whose members dress in traditional cholita clothing. This is a great short documentary about the group, the challenges they face, and the change & joy they’re trying to bring to their communities.
Some people in my generation are embarrassed to wear a pollera [traditional skirt]. Because the pollera highlights your features. Your indigenous features. Highlight what we are as indigenous people, as the daughters of women of polleras. It’s a part of my family legacy. And without my family, I’m nobody. It’s about giving the pollera new meaning.
I wrote about ImillaSkate a few years ago as well. I poked around to see if they were raising funds for their activities (lessons, building a skatepark) because I wanted to contribue, but didn’t find anything — if anything pops up, I’ll let you know. You can follow their adventures on Instagram and via their website. (via @lizziearmanto)
In a collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Evan Puschak made a video about 16th-century Dutch artist (and all-around polymath) Joris Hoefnagel, who painted some of the first dedicated and detailed images of insects in the world. His paintings were so accurate that if he’d lived 200 years later, you would have called him a naturalist.
I love how some of the caterpillars in the last image are crawling along the “frame” of the painting — that strikes me as a modern flourish.
From The Marvelous Details of Joris Hoefnagel’s Animal and Insect Studies:
These watercolors served as sources for a series of 52 prints engraved by Hoefnagel’s teenage son, Jacob. That series, Archetypes and Studies, offered the earliest printed images of dozens of species.
The relatively cheap prints enabled little beasts to multiply and crawl out into the world. They inspired a broader interest and study of nature which continues today.
Some of Hoefnagel’s insect images are on display at the NGA in the Little Beasts exhibition, which runs through Nov 2, 2025.
The fantastic art history YouTube channel Great Art Explained has a great two-episode series on Jackson Pollock.
In Part One of my film I look at how, post World War Two, the art scene shifted from Paris to New York. How America was searching for “The Great American painter”, and why he is so loved and hated at the same time. I look at just what Abstract Expressionism means, how we can “read it”, and I look at the myths surrounding Pollock and modern art itself. I also look at his influences ranging from Mexican sand Painting, to the Regionalist art movement, to Picasso and the modernists.
In Part Two of my film I look at how fame affected Jackson Pollock, and how alcohol destroyed his relationships. I look at the science behind why we are so affected by his work, and I also look at a lesser known story, of how art became an unlikely player in the Cold War and the global contest of ideas. How Abstract Expressionism was enlisted as an unknowing agent in a shadowy propaganda war, bankrolled by the CIA, to sell the story of freedom… and capitalism.
Ok so this is weird and delightful. Swedish electronics company Teenage Engineering makes a collection of singing wooden dolls called the Choir. The dolls are basically speakers but with some autonomy and personality…and they can work together:
what you see are eight wooden dolls, made to serenade you with a repertoire of choral classics as well as perform your own original compositions through midi over ble. each member has their own characteristic vocal range. individually one can sing a dynamic solo, together they perform an immersive a cappella concert.
Composer Rob Simonsen used three Choirs together to help create the score for Elio, the newest Pixar movie that takes place in space.
we were looking for an otherworldly sound—something that sounded relatable, that echoed vocalizations, communication that humans could understand, but felt like it was from another world. i came across these choir dolls and heard their sound. it was beautiful — electronic, but human. each body is handcrafted. they have a robotic but organic sound at the same time. it felt like a perfect answer to what we were looking for.
In this interview with Simonsen, he talks about working with the Choir to create the movie’s sound; the relevant part starts at the 15:20 mark and includes some of the music they composed with it.
There’s a flip flop element to this too: they mic’d up the dolls to record the audio, just like they would with human performers.
Here’s another short clip of the Choir in action:
Like I said, weird and delightful. You can get your own full ensemble from Teenage Engineering for about $2000.
See also Dueling Carls, which this reminded me of for some reason.
I read Project Hail Mary (by The Martian author Andy Weir) a few summers ago; it was fine. I suspected at the time it might make a better movie than a book and after watching the trailer, I’m excited to see this next summer. Ryan Gosling stars and Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, produced the Spider-verse movies) are directing. Out in theaters March 2026.
Cheating expert Sal Piacente, who’s got the perfect name, accent, demeanor, and face for someone who helps casinos catch cheaters, stops by Wired Tech Support to answer reader queries about how gamblers & casinos attempt to bamboozle each other.
Can slot machines be hacked? Why is card counting illegal? How can you tell if dice are loaded? What’s it like working security at a casino? Could an Oceans 11-style heist ever happen in real life? Are casinos ever the ones to cheat? Answers to these questions and plenty more await on Casino Cheating Support.
Whoa, I’d never heard of the chip cup before — it looks like a stack of low-denomination chips but actually hides a smaller stack of high-denomination chips inside of it. The false shuffle demo and the edge sorting explanation are especially interesting.
See also Casino Cheating Expert Reviews Card Counting and Casino Scams From Movies.
Join National Geographic as they ride one of the most punishing train routes in the world, the Mauritania Railway, which travels through the Sahara Desert.
One of the longest and heaviest trains in the world, the 1.8-mile beast runs from the mining center of Zouerat to the port city of Nouadhibou on Africa’s Atlantic coast. The train is the bedrock of the Mauritanian economy and a lifeline to the outside world for the people who live along its route.
The train carries iron ore but many passengers also rely on the train to move long distances:
Passenger cars are sometimes attached to freight trains, but more often passengers simply ride atop the ore hopper cars freely. Passengers include locals, merchants, and occasionally some adventure tourists. Conditions for these passengers are incredibly harsh with daytime temperatures exceeding 40°C, night-time temperatures approaching freezing, and death from falls being common.
Diego Luna is guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live this week and for his first monologue, the Mexico native spoke about immigration and what he’s experienced and observed in the US and LA during his time here.
Diego steps in as our first guest host of the summer and talks about how much Los Angeles means to him, the very important immigration issues happening here and across the United States right now, the authoritarian policies of Donald Trump, his son being born in LA, finding community here, the importance of immigrants and the amazing things they bring to America, how unfair it is that they are living in fear, the violence and separating of families being unacceptable, and he encourages everyone to call their representatives and let them know how they feel about it, and support organizations like Public Counsel and Kids in Need of Defense.
Death of a Fantastic Machine (aka the camera) is a short documentary on “what happens when humanity’s infatuation with itself and an untethered free market meet 45 billion cameras”…and now AI. It’s about how — since nearly the invention of the camera — photos, films, and videos have been used to lie & mislead, a trend that AI is poised to turbo-charge. Not gonna sugar-coat it: this video made me want to throw my phone in the ocean, destroy my TV, and log off the internet never to return. Oof.
The short is adapted from a feature-length documentary directed by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson called And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine (trailer). Van Aertryck & Danielson made one of my all-time favorite short films ever, Ten Meter Tower (seriously, you should watch this, it’s fantastic…then you can throw your phone in the ocean).
P.S. I hate the title the NY Times gave this video: “Can You Believe Your Own Eyes? Not With A.I.” That is not even what 99% of the video is about and captures none of what’s interesting or thought-provoking about it. However, it is a great illustration of one of the filmmakers’ main points: how the media uses simplifying fear (in this case, the AI bogeyman 🤖👻) to capture eyeballs instead of trying to engage with complexities. “Death of a Fantastic Machine” arouses curiosity just fine by itself. (via craig mod)
Premiering this Friday June 27 on the PBS, an episode of the series American Masters on Hannah Arendt, historian, philosopher, and one of the 20th century’s most influential political thinkers.
Hannah Arendt came of age in Germany as Hitler rose to power, before escaping to the United States as a Jewish refugee. Through her unflinching capacity to demand attention to facts and reality, Arendt’s time as a political prisoner, refugee and survivor in Europe informed her groundbreaking insights into the human condition, the refugee crisis and totalitarianism.
Her major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), On Revolution (1963) and Crises of the Republic (1972) remain among the most important and most-read treatises on the development and impact of totalitarianism and the fault lines in American democracy.
The PBS site has a few clips from the documentary to whet your appetite.
I love this interactive video at Design Ah! Exhibition Neo at Tokyo Node. The display introduces the audience to a series of simple hand gestures, followed by some outcomes of their performance, e.g. a squeezing motion leading to soapy spray on a window or toothpaste on a toothbrush. This looks like it would be super fun in person.
The exhibition is a real-life version of Design Ah!, a Japanese show about design for kids.
Set to catchy music, Japanese Hiragana characters danced across the screen for a few minutes. Then came a line animation wordlessly designing and redesigning a parking lot. Next was stop motion. Electronic devices came apart. As the camera zoomed out, the individual parts lined up into a grid.
We didn’t know what we were watching, but we were transfixed. Everyone from the adults to the one-year-old had their eyes glued to the TV.
If you’re like most people, you probably started yawning as soon as you read the title of this post and saw the video’s thumbnail. And then yawned like two or three times watching it. That’s because a) yawning is contagious, and b) that video is chock-a-block with clips of people and animals yawning.
Yawning is so weird. It’s even a strange word. Yaaaaawwwwwnnnn. And like I mentioned, it’s contagious. In fact, it’s so contagious that even reading or overhearing someone talking about yawning can cause you to yawn. Why the hell do we do this weird thing? Perhaps to cool our brains.
(via the kid should see this)
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