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kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Bacontarian is a weblog devoted entirely to bacon (and also pork). “A great tide of emotion came over me!!! and it rose up and came up thru mine eyes An I gave praise to the LARD! An i took that Leg of HAM home with me. And I ate it.”
Craigslist Missed Connections actually worked for one couple. I was wondering if that ever worked the other day.
Trailer for A Scanner Darkly, a new animated film by Richard Linklater. Based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick. Love that animation technique and aesthetic.
A gallery of Russian nesting dolls created by a number of contemporary artists.
The Onion interviews Dave Eggers. “[Fiction feels] like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you.”
Ben Hammersley likes Google’s move into movie reviews and listings. “What for [Rotton Tomatoes] is an entire business is just a happy side effect for Google. You can’t compete with people whose manufacturing has already been paid for.”
When I got home last night, I picked up my mail and opened the shirt I ordered from Threadless:
It took me all of two seconds to look at Scandinavia and determine that it was impossible to construct using conventional Tetris pieces. Unless some of the little blocks had been disappeared by clearing a row. And the dialogue in my head when I was thinking about all this was spoken in Professor Frink’s voice from The Simpsons. Maybe I need to start reading on the subway rather than playing my GameBoy Advance so much.
High mileage travellers get extra special perks as part of their frequent flyer memberships. Free luggage from Delta? That’s as lame as most of the bags and backpacks you get at conferences.
Some U.S. appeals court judges are skeptical of the Broadcast Flag. “‘It’s going to have less content if it’s not protected, but Congress didn’t direct that you have to maximize content,’ Sentelle said. ‘You can’t regulate washing machines. You can’t rule the world.’”
Scientists at Cardiff University have detected a galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter. A galaxy without stars? There’s a mindjob for you.
Ken Rockwell, who runs an excellent photography site, explains the dangers of fetishizing your gear. “Your equipment DOES NOT affect the quality of your image. The less time and effort you spend worrying about your equipment the more time and effort you can spend creating great images.”
Interview with David Foster Wallace in which he talks about challenging readers. “I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.”
How to buy lenses for your Nikon camera. Includes a good section on digital.
A dream of journalism without advertising. From E.W. Scripps’ experiment in Chicago to A.J. Liebling’s vision of newspapers funded by endowments.
I don’t want to completely turn the site into a discussion of the micropatronage initiative (more info) for the next three weeks, but I will be talking about it somewhat. For one thing, contributors have been asking for an update on how it’s going. Also, I’ve been planning this since May of last year but haven’t talked about it much on the site, so I’ve got a few pent-up posts to get out there.
Day one of the “fund drive” (I hate that term for it, more on vocabulary below) went pretty well. In the rough chart I conjured in my head last night, the revenue line and the “I don’t need to sell my blood plasma” line are converging nicely and I’m hopeful that my goal will be achieved within the three week period. You’ll hear this so many times on the site in the next few weeks that you’re going to get tired of it, but a sincere thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. I’m not going to be able to respond individually to each one, but I’ve read all your emails and PayPal notes and I appreciate you taking the time to write.
And now, the vocabulary part of the post you’ve all been waiting for! The term I’ve most commonly heard associated with all this is “donation”; that people are donating to a cause. When I was writing yesterday’s announcement post and the supporting materials, I had to make a choice in how I described this to you…otherwise that post would have been at least twice as long as it was. In the end, I opted to explain it in terms of patronage…using words like “support” and “contribute”. I specifically did not use the word “donation” because there’s a connotation there of someone giving something and receiving nothing tangible in return (and somehow, there’s less of that connotation with “contribution”, although maybe that’s just me). Patrons don’t donate in the sense that people donate to the Red Cross…they typically get something directly in return (e.g. a piece of art) for their patronage.
Another way to look at the money that people are giving me is that it’s like a subscription fee for a daily magazine. There’s a transaction here; you’re paying me in return for a (hopefully) interesting, engaging, timely site that’s full of information and creative projects and updated on a daily basis. So while I think the micropatronage idea fits the best with what I’m doing, there are also elements of the subscription idea in there as well. It’s hard to tell you exactly what I mean (either English is failing me here or I’m failing English), but I hope you get the gist of it.
As far as the rest of the site goes, I’m planning on updating as regularly as I can for the next three weeks. I may be a little slow here and there because of the “fund drive” overhead (the amount of email in and out of my mail client over the past week is staggering)…which is one of the reasons I wanted to limit this to three weeks. You don’t have to deal with me bugging you all year about it and I only need to focus on these administrative duties for a short time and can spend the rest of the year doing more creative things for the site.
Last thing…a couple of press mentions of this little experiment:
$2.50 for your thoughts (Red Herring)
Quit Your Job to Blog, Blog, Blog (Wired News)
Some PBS stations are unwilling to air a documentary with profanity in it for fear of getting fined by the FCC. I hope the web remains a wild and woolly place for expression of all kinds, it’s content not shaped by the FCC’s self-marketing concerns.
How to repel telemarketers. “Caller ID says: MCI. Jonah picks up and says: ATT Wireless, how can I help you?”
The 10 best-selling books of all time. The Bible and Mao’s little red book are #1 and #2.
Phallic cookery. “It would look like the food was creating a progression of ideas where (1) I like the shape of cock and balls, and then (2) I express my happiness about cock and balls by rearranging the meat to look like a smile”.
The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less. And very few of those words are small.
The 2005 Independent Food Festival Awards. Love their categories: “Baking Sugar with the Most Personality” and “Food Worth the Risk of Injury”.
Massive, massive spoilers for Star Wars Episode 3. Don’t read this if you don’t want to know what happens.
If you’re looking to upgrade your camera, Dell has a deal going on the Canon 20D dSLR, just $1304. Free shipping and no taxes in a lot of states.
Video: man listens to Dancing Queen by Abba during entire 5 hour road trip.
I recently quit my web design gig and — as of today — will be working on kottke.org as my full-time job. And I need your help.
I’m asking the regular readers of kottke.org (that’s you!) to become micropatrons of kottke.org by contributing a moderate sum of money to help enable me to edit/write/design/code the site for one year on a full-time basis. If you find kottke.org valuable in any way, please consider giving whatever you feel is appropriate.
This will be a one-time “fund drive” lasting 3 weeks, you may make contributions via PayPal, credit card, or check, there will be some great gifts as an incentive for you to give (more details here), and your contributions will be the primary means of support for the site. And yes, I have absolutely no idea if this will work and I’m completely nervous and exhilarated by the challenges ahead.
If you’re uncertain as to whether you want to become a kottke.org micropatron, please read on. I’m going to explain what it is I’ll actually be doing, why I’m doing it, how the site might change, and what I’ll be doing with your hard-earned money.
Why are you doing this?
I’ve been self-publishing on the web for almost 10 years now, first with a little site on my school’s web server, then on various ISP accounts, then 0sil8, and finally kottke.org for the last 7 years (almost). Looking back on it all, this little hobby of mine has been the most rewarding, pleasurable, maddening, challenging thing in my life. I’ve met so many nice, good people, formed valued relationships with some of them, traveled to distant lands (and New Jersey), procured jobs & other business opportunities, discovered new interests, music, movies & books, and lots of other stuff, all for putting a little bit of me out there for people to see.
And yet, I almost quit last spring. The site was getting out of hand and wasn’t fun anymore. It was taking me away from my professional responsibilities, my social life, and my relationship with my girlfriend. There was no room in my life for it anymore. As you can imagine, thinking of quitting what had been the best thing in my life bummed me right the hell out.
After thinking about it for a few weeks, I had a bit of an epiphany. The real problem was the tension between my web design career and my self-publishing efforts; that friction was unbalancing everything else. One of them had to go, and so I decided to switch careers and pursue the editing/writing of this site as a full-time job.
Ok, but why else are you doing this?
How will you doing this full-time affect the site?
First, let me tell you what won’t change. The content on kottke.org will always be freely available to everyone who visits, regardless of whether you have contributed or not. No special “member” content or services. Think of kottke.org as non-crippled, fully-supported shareware…you only pay if you feel it’s worth supporting.
kottke.org will also not become any less personal or any more professional. This is still my personal web site and is not going to mutate into a vertical blog about tech, design, politics, pop culture, or even asbestos. I’m not turning into a journalist. I’m still going to write and post almost exclusively about things I am interested in, whatever those may be at any particular moment. Just so you know, I may occasionally post cat photos, as is my right as the editor of a personal web site.
What might change on the site will be driven mainly by two conditions:
1. kottke.org is now my main professional priority. At long last, focus!
2. I will have available to me, for the first time in years, large uninterrupted chunks of time with which to produce creative works.
The goal is to use the increased level of focus and time to create a (much) better site. More time means there will be more content of a greater variety. Some days, that may mean more posts and more links. I’ll be able to go to more (hopefully interesting) events in NYC (& elsewhere) and write about them. I’ll have time do the occasional bit of real journalism, collaborate on neat projects like Dropcash, and do larger projects that require longer time scales to finish…dare I hint at a return to more 0sil8-like projects? (I dare.) And there are opportunities that I’m sure will present themselves as I settle into the luxuriant folds of full-timeness.
Why not advertising?
Like I said above, there’s got to be a way to support media that doesn’t involve advertising. But more than that, I don’t want to disrupt the relationship dynamic we’ve got going here. There are currently two parties involved with kottke.org: me and the collective you. Advertising introduces a third party. In my experience, the third wheel of advertising often works to unbalance the relationship in favor of either the author or the readers (usually in favor of the author). If ads were involved, I might feel the need to change what or how I write to appease advertisers. I might write to increase pageviews and earn more revenue. I could fill pages with ads, earning more revenue but making the content more difficult to read or pushing some content off the page entirely. You could block advertising and deny me needed revenue.
None of that is appealing to me. If I’m writing, you’re reading, I’m responding to what you’ve got to say about my writing, and we’re mixin’ it up in the comments, why do we need a middleman? Why not keep that dynamic intact if we can?
What’s your monetary goal?
Quitting my job to run kottke.org full-time is possibly the dumbest economic decision I’ve ever made in my life. This undertaking so isn’t about the money. (I’m gonna link to Ludicorp’s about page here because their corporate philosophy matches well with my philosophy in approaching this.) At best, my goal is to make about 1/3 to 1/2 of my former yearly salary to support my efforts here for a year. I have no idea whether this goal is even remotely achievable…only the hope that it is and the desire to make it happen. Like I said, dumb economic decision.
As with anyone starting a new business, I’ve tightened things up in order to give myself the best chance of success. I’ve moved to a (way) cheaper apartment in Brooklyn, cut way back on eating out (I’m learning how to cook properly instead…hey, if I can learn to cook, you can pony up a couple of bucks), will be using my cache of frequent flier miles when I need to travel, and am curtailing my spending in general. It feels a lot like right after I got out of college…without the ramen noodles.
Are you excited?
If by that you mean “do you feel like you’re going to throw up?” then yes.
Ok, that’s about all I’ve got for now. That’s definitely the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to write; I hope it came out OK. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll consider supporting the site. If you’ve got any questions, send me some email or find me on AIM (I may be a little slow on the IM uptake…I’m anticipating a busy day or two). I’ll probably end up compiling questions I get into a later FAQ post of some sort (or making corrections/clarifications to this one).
Again, thanks for reading.
(Oh, and I should be on the webcam most of the day today. I guess you should be able to tell roughly how the above is going by how much I’m smiling. If instead you see me rocking catatonically in my chair clutching an empty pill container, call 911.)
Update: Hi there. Not a lot of time (today has been crazy! have you ever gotten IMed by 300 people in one day?) but things seem to be going pretty well. If you’ve emailed to ask to be put on the micropatrons list and don’t see your name up there, don’t despair…I’ve got a bit of a backlog. I’ll get the names up there as soon as I can. And more later..but for now, thank you to everyone who contributed, you’re too kind. Off to dinner before I starve…..
kottke.org is going full-time and I’m asking my readers to help.
This slick web app lets you draw your own bitmap font and then d/l it in Truetype format.
Drunkenblog has a great collection of responses to one of the Apple lawsuits, including one from Steve Wozniak. The suit specifies 28 people who leaked builds of OS X 10.4 onto the web…Woz says: “I wish that Apple could find some way to drop the matter” and “I will personally donate $1,000 to the Canadian student’s defense”.
A Field Guide to Sprawl documents 51 different kinds of urban sprawl. Snout house: “[a house] where the garage is the dominant projecting feature”.
Opentable redesigned their site. Haven’t used it enough to compare to the old site, but it’s still pretty slow.
The life of an autistic savant, from his own perspective. “Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder.”
How to achieve, grow, and maintain a powerful position. Not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, but I still wanted to take a shower after reading it.
Scientists discover evidence of a frozen sea on Mars, right near the equator.
Vimeo is a new site for “organizing and sharing your video clips”. A bit like Flickr for video clips.
“Purseuing is a blog obsessively covering purses, bags, totes, clutches, and just about anything else you can carry on your shoulder”. “I would pick up [a purse] and think ‘cute’ and put in on my shoulder then pick up another and do the same. Pretty soon you could hardly see my torso, just legs with a head on top and hands sticking out to the sides.”
I’ve been busy. For as long as I can remember now. There was a point in my not-so-distant past when I wasn’t so busy, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what that feels like. Lately though, I’ve been a different kind of busy…I’m enjoying the nonstop rush of tasks, meetings, projects, emails, IMs, etc. for the first time in a long, long while. If I were feeling cynical, I might chalk it up to the giddy infatuation of starting something new, but I don’t think that’s it. I hope not, anyway.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately as well, and it’s been taking me back into different periods of my life. I don’t know how it is with you, but my life definitely has a soundtrack, songs and albums that remind me of people, places, and experiences. The soundtrack for the past few weeks includes Daft Punk, Bloc Party, The Pixies, Joy Division, The Life Aquatic soundtrack, The Arcade Fire, Scissor Sisters, Death Cab for Cutie, and a couple of mixes given to me by friends.
This is going to sound crazy to you, but both Joy Division and The Pixies are recent “discoveries” of mine. I’d heard of both before, but had never really listened to any of the music (I missed most of the 80s musically). I found Joy Division through the excellent 24 Hour Party People and first time I really heard anything by The Pixies was at one of their recent reunion tour concerts. What’s amazing about both groups is how fresh their music sounds to me as a new listener, especially Joy Division. I imagine some of it is the lack of genuinely new sounds in rock these days, but these two groups both have well-deserved reputions as innovators and produced music that was ahead of its time. Glad I’m finally getting around to enjoying it. :)
Oh, and stay tuned for an announcement tomorrow (hopefully).
The characters in Jane’s virtual Animal Crossing world remember her ex-boyfriend. “My neighbors rhapsodize about his letter-writing skills or the fact that they used to play and play and play all day”
Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray was Hunter S. Thompson’s last article before he died.
Hunter S. Thompson dead at age 65 from a self-inflicted gun shot.
Memory Alpha is a Star Trek wiki with 8200+ articles. This is pretty much what wikis are for.
Soon you may be able to buy from eBay via your Tivo. Establishing the trustworthiness of particular auctions might be tough to do with just a remote tho…an Amazon store on TiVo would work much better.
Economist Steven Levitt strikes again: real estate agents sell their houses for more than their clients’ homes. The more homes an agent can sell within a given time period, the more they make, so holding out a few more days for a small commission doesn’t make economic sense for them.
Unintelligent design: if there is a “someone” responsible for designing the universe, they must have not been very smart. “Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception.”
The worst reviewed movies on Metacritic. Bio-Dome gets a 1 out of 100.
“Astronomers estimate about half the planetary systems so far discovered in our galaxy could contain Earth-like worlds”. And space telescopes will be good enough to check in about 15 years.
Cooking Under Fire is a “12-part PBS documentary-style look at a national cooking competition”. Starts April 27th and features Ming Tsai, Tood English, and Michael Ruhlman as judges.
Michelin three-star restaurants. “Infuriatingly, there is no index to the Guide Michelin, and nothing that might tell you what all the 3 star places are, or anything useful like that. Hence I have drawn up the table below, to save you trawling through the book.”
Exploding star 50,000 light years from earth was briefly brighter than the moon in the night sky. “If the explosion had been within just 10 light-years, Earth could have suffered a mass extinction”.
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