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In a video that pokes a little bit of fun at the stationary cycling of Soulcycle and Peloton, trials rider Danny MacAskill joins the gym and practices his own unique brand of bicycle fitness. Stick around until the end to see some bloopers and some more stunts that didn’t make the cut.
Impossible Foods is expanding from faux beef to faux pork. Impossible Pork is their newest product made entirely from plants that is engineered to look and taste as close to the real thing as possible.
From the press release:
Impossible Pork is delicious in any ground meat dish, including spring rolls, stuffed vegetables, dumplings, wontons or sausage links. Like ground meat from pigs, Impossible Pork is characterized by its mild savory flavor, adding delicate depth and umami richness without being gamey or overpowering.
Although they don’t specifically connect the dots, Impossible Pork seems to be the base for another new product of theirs: Impossible Sausage, which is debuting in breakfast sandwiches at Burger King later this month. (I mean, you can’t make sausage without pork, right?!)
In a review of Impossible Pork for The Verge, long-time vegetarian Elizabeth Lopatto says it’s mostly a success, calling it “a savory base of protein for a lot of foods that traditionally call for pork”.
Kylo Ren’s fractured helmet and the Japanese art of kintsugi (broken pottery repair with visible “scars”). “The idea is to treat the breakage of the piece as a part of its history, instead of something to hide.”
The number one song on the UK singles chart for the last week of 2019 was Ellie Goulding’s River, despite it not being available on Spotify, Apple, Google, or anywhere but Amazon (with one important exception). How the heck did that happen? Chart Watch UK has the story.
River was simply a prominent part of just about every “Christmas songs” playlist curated by Amazon themselves, a default choice for everyone muttering “Alexa, play Christmas songs” as they basted the turkey and cursed the sprouts. People have been spoon-fed a contemporary hit single like no other before it, and the result of that has been to propel it almost by accident to the top of the charts.
This is a fitting choice for the final chart topper in the 2010s because it encapsulates a number of trends in media that have played out over the past decade. To wit:
It is tough to imagine a more perfect example of how media functions (or doesn’t) today. (via @tedgioia)
Good God, these hand-drawn & painted notebooks by José Naranja documenting his travels are fantastic! From Colossal:
Formerly an aeronautic engineer, Naranja now archives his thoughts while visiting foreign countries by hand-crafting journals replete with items like collected stamps, an illustration of the periodic table, and a study of fountain pens. Each mixed-media page centers on a theme, such as the culture surrounding eating a bowl of ramen or the flamingos found in a zoo.
Whenever I see something like this, it makes me want to learn how to draw/paint better than my current 4th grade level.1 I spent about 45 minutes poring over his work just now. So creative & exacting…look at that handwriting! And check out the tiny box of watercolors he carries with him.
You can keep up with Naranja’s latest adventures on his blog or on Instagram. If you’d like to buy some of his art — including a bound copy of some of his notebooks — there’s a small shop. (via colossal, which is also endlessly creative & meticulous)
Ok, let’s be honest: 1st grade level. Most people might find it difficult to fake kids’ drawings but not me!↩
A visit to the Uncut Gems pop-up store in the Diamond District. They had the gem Furbys, bottles of water, and movie merch for sale. Really wish I coulda seen this.
Nathan Yau of Flowing Data picked his ten favorite data visualization projects for 2019. All the projects listed are worth a look … but maybe, just maybe, this post is really just an excuse to let my eyes feast upon Scott Reinhard’s historic topographic maps once again.
Designer Scott Reinhard takes old geological survey maps and combines them with elevation data to produce these wonderful hybrid topographic maps. From top to bottom, here are Reinhard’s 3D versions of a 1878 USGS Yellowstone map, a 1904 USGS map of Acadia National Park, and a 1899 USGS map of the Grand Tetons.
Illustrator Wendy MacNaughton spent a week at Guantánamo Bay sketching the proceedings at the 9/11 military court for this NY Times piece. In a behind-the-scenes piece, MacNaughton describes how she made the drawings, including the creative challenge posed by the restrictions and censorship enforced by US military officials.
Of the 30-something drawings I presented, Mr. Lavender shook his head at only two. The first contained some classified items in the courtroom. That made sense. The second was a handwritten list of everything that I was not allowed to draw, which I’d made to use as a reminder while working. I wanted to keep it. He refused.
I argued that the information it contained had been disclosed elsewhere. But Mr. Lavender and his supervisor came to the conclusion that my handwritten list was indeed a drawing, technically containing things I couldn’t draw. My “No” list was a no-go.
That’s Guantánamo.
Every drawing she made needed a signed approval sticker from the court’s censor, and in this piece and on Instagram, MacNaughton didn’t photoshop the sticker out, reinforcing that the censorship is a vital part of the story she’s trying to tell. Even the paper towel she used to clean her paint brushes needed a sticker:
My pal @craigmod loves to walk. Recently, he walked 600 miles across Japan on a quest for old-style Japanese cafes and their signature dish, pizza toast (which Mod calls “a hug produced in a toaster oven”).
1923 is a zine publication of works from that year that have entered the public domain due to copyright expiration. “If we don’t engage with the public domain, we can’t truly feel its value.”
Meet Stella and her human, speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger. Using a soundboard of buttons that say words when they’re pressed, Hunger has taught Stella how to talk. Here’s a video from several months ago in which Stella asks to go to the beach, and when rebuffed, asks to play instead:
Stella’s latest progress is documented on Instagram: learning the meaning of “later”, asking where her owners are, and asking for more water and a toy.
In this video, the visual effects artists at Corridor Crew help us visualize just how small atoms are and how large the universe is. For instance, if you imagine an atom being the size of a tennis ball, blood cells would be as large as a small town and a penny would be almost precisely the diameter of the Earth. This is like a deconstructed & remixed Powers of Ten. (via digg)
TIL that Billie Eilish and her brother/musical partner were homeschooled. “I never went to school, so popular was never a thing for me. I don’t understand peer pressure.”
If you are looking for some distraction today (and who would blame you really), check out Victor Ribeiro’s simple little isometric city builder. You just click on a building or snippet of road in the palette and place it on the grid. It took me just a couple minutes to whip this up:
I wish it had more green space options, some wider pedestrian paths, and maybe some bridges. But still fun! (via clive thompson)
Eat a Peach is a memoir by chef David Chang that will be out later this year. “David Chang opened a noodle restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village that should not have survived its first, misbegotten year.”
Using a book of insect illustrations from the 1890s, Bernat Cuni used a variety of machine learning tools to generate a bunch of realistic-looking beetles that don’t actually exist in nature.
A physicist from Caltech is closing in on a grand unified theory … of snowflakes. “Although ice is especially weird, similar questions arise in condensed matter physics more generally.”
Spurred by The Irishman’s take on the matter, Errol Morris, the progenitor of our current obsession with true crime, tackles an enduring mystery: Who Really Killed Jimmy Hoffa?
There is a weird discrepancy about whether the meeting was set for 2:00 or 2:30, but the uncertainty simply contributes to the argument that something strange was going on: Hoffa’s friends and family were incredulous that he would wait any amount of time; he was known to be extremely punctual and intolerant of those who weren’t. What compelled Hoffa to continue to pace around the sweltering asphalt outside the Machus Red Fox? Was he hoping to get high-level Mafia approval of his attempts to regain control of the Teamsters?
What happens next is a matter of conjecture, of inference — a collision between unimpeachable data such as phone calls, the unreliability of witness testimony, and fish-delivery times. We do know several things for certain: there’s a real world out there, a real asphalt parking lot, a real phone booth, and a real Machus Red Fox (now called Andiamo). And Jimmy Hoffa was there, left, and never came back.
If you know Morris, you know he loves ambiguity, so there’s not a 100% ironclad answer to the question posed by the article’s title, but Morris does have a guess in the closing paragraphs.
Before the holidays, NASA announced their plan for going back to the Moon by 2024.
With the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. We will collaborate with our commercial and international partners and establish sustainable exploration by 2028. Then, we will use what we learn on and around the Moon to take the next giant leap — sending astronauts to Mars.
The plan involves many supply runs and a small space station orbiting the Moon so that things like rovers and lunar landers are in place when manned missions need to land on the Moon or even continue on to Mars. You can check out all of the details on NASA’s website.
IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete With TurboTax. Good on ProPublica for their reporting pressuring the IRS into this.
It’s 2020. You’re old. “Remember when Jurassic Park, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump came out in theaters? Closer to the moon landing than today.”
I love this short little film from the creative duo of Zita Bernet & Rafael Sommerhalder entitled Popcorn.
(via mike essl)
From Evan Puschak, this is an analysis of a tightly edited five-minute montage in the middle of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite in which a family of schemers removes the last obstacle in their way of a luxurious life of service.
(This next bit is way off topic…I am not even going to try and connect it to the movie or Puschak’s thoughts on editing.) In looking for an appropriate quote from the video, I went searching in YouTube’s automatically generated transcript of the video and instead discovered whatever fancy AI program they’ve employed for transcription had some problems with the Korean language spoken in the video:
well the Kogi’s held on crew could to work a contra cut under something crazy kangaroo hot lava could carry yours a tiny car would cause a huge bang engines in his element saw cars motherfuckers Christian wear boxers and couvent a easy call it to Minaj Monica City on criminals chief juniper gun and a car don’t belong back in case come on Joey tell him to cool on the cloud Coronas our tornado man hold it up on watch from Atlanta
Also, peaches are a thing now in movies!
My Half-Hour with Einstein. “So you’re studying at Princeton. Would you like to meet Einstein?”
I’m not feeling particularly introspective or retrospective or reflective about 2019 and the 2010s coming to an end, at least not publicly so. I couldn’t even get it together to do a best of my media diet for 2019.1
But I did want to note that with this post, I have now published kottke.org across four decades: the 90s, 00s, 10s, and now the 20s. What. The. F?! That realization has me a little bit shook. Am I in a groove or a rut? I find myself feeling both comfortable here and restless for something different. Can those things work together to our mutual benefit in the year to come? We shall see.
In the meantime, thanks to everyone for reading the site. I know from your email that some of you have been reading since the 90s, which floors me. Thanks also to those of you who have supported the site through the purchase of a membership — this site literally could not function without that support. ♥
Ok fine. In no order, fave movies were Roma, Booksmart, Uncut Gems. Books: Normal People, In the Garden of Beasts. TV: Fleabag, Succession, Mindhunter, Chernobyl, Leaving Neverland, American Factory. Podcasts: 13 Minutes to the Moon, 1619. But travel to Mexico City and to the US west coast overshadowed all of that, with visits to Teotihuacán and California’s redwoods forests being my peak experiences of the year (that I am comfortable sharing in a public forum).↩
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