Rebecca Solnit writes for the London Review of Books about what’s happened to San Francisco since it’s been “fully annexed” by Silicon Valley.
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Entries for February 2024
For the first few decades of the web, the tacit agreement was that web crawlers could take data from sites in exchange for traffic back. But now, are AI crawlers (incl. Google) taking too much and offering too little in return?
Anyone who sends a SASE to a particular Colorado address can get a teaspoon of sourdough starter that has been kept going continuously since 1847. Bonus: a website design that hasn’t changed since 1996.
Chasing Impossible Dreams
YouTuber Casey Neistat has achieved a lot in life, including several “impossible goals” he set for himself. But one of his longest-running goals seemed to be slipping out of his reach and, well, I don’t want to spoil what happens.
I will say however that I think it’s good and healthy to let go of your goals and dreams if they do not serve the person you have become since setting them. I’ve never been much of a goal person, but I’ve definitely had thoughts about directions I’ve wanted to head or things I’d like to have had happen that just aren’t relevant for what’s important to me right now. If it’s not working for you, chalk it up to sunk cost and let it go.
I got this link via Andy, who said, “I allow myself one link to a Casey Neistat video every ten years, and this is that video.” Lol.
Parisian police were going to close the bouquinistes (booksellers) along the Seine for the Olympics but Macron nixed that plan. In their defense, the booksellers quoted Camus: “Everything that degrades culture shortens the paths that lead to servitude.”
The 13 Worst Bike Lanes in the World. Includes examples of “paint as bike lane” and “car charging cables stretching across bike lane” and my fave: “trees in the middle of the bike lane”.
I am a relative NYT crossword n00b, so I just found out about XWord Info and the wealth of statistics available there — it’s like sabermetrics for crosswords. Word nerds, I’m sure there are other CW resources like this out there…share your faves?
Love Stamps? Love Stamps!
A day late, but there’s room for love every day here at kottke.org: from the Portland Stamp Company, a history of LOVE stamps issued by the US Postal Service from 1973 to the present.
There are some heavy hitters amongst the designers of these stamps, including Robert Indiana, Sister Corita Kent, Jessica Hische, and Louise Fili. In looking at the designs over the years, it seems like things got noticeably pinker and redder over the past 10-12 years…I wonder what that’s about?
Also, “Chief Perforation Officer”. 😂
I love the cover of Stephen & Evie Colbert’s new cookbook, Does This Taste Funny? “I love cocktail hour. It feels like a reward for having gone so long without a cocktail.”
Cabel Sasser bought some acetate records recorded by a jazz band loosely affiliated with Disney and found a long lost recording from Cinderella. “Take a moment to let it sink in that you’re one of the first people to hear this music in nearly 75 years.”
Andy Weir’s The Martian was released in bookstores ten years ago. To celebrate, he wrote a new “lost” chapter of the book. “So now, my bed was a pressurized space car on Mars.”
The founder of Bob’s Red Mill grain company sounds like an interesting dude. Having retreated to a seminary to learn how to read the Bible in Hebrew & Greek, he stumbled across a mill for sale. “I bought the thing and it changed my entire life.”
Vintage Typologies
Lost Found Art is a design company that “specializes in sculptural installations and assemblages using antique and vintage pieces”. Their collections are fun to browse through and remind me of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
(via present & correct)
Kids playing football are doing the “Brexit tackle”, which means taking out the player without getting the ball while yelling “Brexit means Brexit”. “You have to admit, there’s something very funny about one child barking ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ to another in a muddy park.”
The CDC is considering changing its recommendation about how long to isolate after testing positive for Covid from 5 days (itself insufficient) to “fever free for at least 24 hours without medication”. *sigh* This is what we get instead of guaranteed paid leave.
B.J. Novak considers Caps for Sale & other kid’s books. “The best children’s books […] aren’t advertisements for anything — not even the important things. They’re an advertisement for reading itself; for the entertainment value of the world itself.”
Virtual Stickers to Manage Replies By
Dan Hon: “Over on Mastodon, which has a Kind of Person, I made these images to attach to help people manage replies.” These are aces — I’ve included my personal favorites above. You can find the whole set here on Flickr or here with alt text.
These pair well with Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece on How to Comment on Social Media. (Dan, could I get one that says something about reading the link before replying?)
The death of the world’s best marathon runner is part of a troubling global trend. “Car crashes are killing too many young Africans like Kelvin Kiptum.”
The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets. “In a country like the Netherlands where parents like my sister receive ample parental leave, childcare stipends, a four-day work week, and universal healthcare, the low-level anxiety that many American parents feel isn’t as common.”
Winners of the 59th Annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest
What a treat: the winning entries in the 59th annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, organized by London’s Natural History Museum. I’ve selected a few of my favorites above.
Amit Eshel took the photo of the ibex:
After hiking to a clifftop vantage point, Amit slowly crept closer. Using a wide-angle lens, he set the action of two clashing Nubian ibex against the dramatic backdrop. The battle lasted for about 15 minutes before one male surrendered and the pair parted without serious injury.
Sriram Murali captured the jungle lit up by fireflies:
Sriram combined 50 individual 19-second exposures to show the firefly flashes produced over 16 minutes in the forests of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve near his hometown. He watched as pinpoint flashes appeared in the treetops increasing in number as they spread down along the branches until something remarkable happened. Synchronising, they pulsated through the canopy like a wave — the pattern punctuated with sequences of abrupt on-off bursts in unison.
The happy turtle photo is by Tzahi Finkelstein:
This dragonfly unexpectedly landed on the turtle’s nose but instead of the turtle snapping up the insect, it appeared to be experiencing pleasure from the interaction as they shared a moment of peaceful coexistence amid a swamp’s murky waters.
A list of directors’ impressive first movies, including Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig), 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet), Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard), The 400 Blows (François Truffaut), and The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola).
Brian Eno’s Glowing Turntable
Electronic music pioneer Brian Eno has designed a glowing turntable that shifts colors as plays records.
Brian Eno’s Turntable II is made up of a platter and base, which change colours independently, seamlessly phasing through combinations of generative ‘colourscapes’. The pattern of lights, the speed at which they change and how they change are programmed, but programmed to change randomly and slowly. It plays both 33 and 45rpm vinyl.
Only 150 will be sold and they’re £20,000 so hopefully you’ll see one in a museum someday. (via kevin kelly)
The unsettling scourge of obituary spam. “In the wake of death, AI-generated obituaries litter search results, turning even private individuals into clickbait.” Thanks, Google!
Great to hear that 404 Media is profitable 6 months in. “Owning our own work, and being beholden to no one but our readers and colleagues — as opposed to say, investors, venture capitalists, or out-of-touch executives — feels like the future.”
His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. “It wasn’t just an attack, as far as Austin was concerned, but a murderous act of betrayal, one that shattered everything he thought he knew about the deep bond between man and pig.”
USPS Underground Railroad Stamps
The USPS is coming out with a collection of stamps honoring the efforts of 10 Americans who were part of the Underground Railroad.
The U.S. Postal Service is honoring 10 courageous men and women who helped guide enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad, network of secret routes and safehouses in use before the Civil War.
Love the design. The stamps honor Catherine Coffin, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Garrett, Laura Haviland, Lewis Hayden, Harriet Jacobs, William Lambert, the Rev. Jermain Loguen, William Still, and Harriet Tubman. They go on sale March 9th and if you want, you can attend the first first-day-of-issue event at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Church Creek, MD.
LeVar Burton hosts an episode of Banned Book Rainbow, “where we talk about books that have been banned by adults who don’t want kids to learn or grow or change, and have totally lost their sense of wonder”.
Brilliant Labs is selling a pair of fully open-source AI glasses called Frame. Image recognition & manipulation, written & speech translation, etc. And they don’t look terrible either. “What if your glasses gave you AI superpowers?”
Superb Owl Sunday VIII. A day late perhaps, but it’s always a good day to look at cool photos of owls.
The Super Mario Bros. theme song played on a bunch of different instruments, including xylophone, glockenspiel, stylophone, and something called the slapophone.
2024 Begins With More Record Heat Worldwide. The daily sea temperatures graph is breaking my brain a little bit.
Beyonce is releasing a new album on March 29 called Act II. From the sound of the first two tracks, it sounds like a country album.
The Superb Owl Trailers
Here are all the cool new movie trailers that they played during The Big Game™. Or, the ones that I give a shit about anyway. First up, Deadpool and Wolverine:
Did I even see the second Deadpool movie? Does it matter? I’ll see this one. Next: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
Apes in charge, running down the humans? I’m in. There’s also Despicable Me 4 (a franchise I like more than I care to admit), The Fall Guy (based on the 80s TV show I very much didn’t watch; starring, somehow, Ryan Gosling & Emily Blunt — I hope this is a pleasant surprise), and Twisters (the Twister sequel no one asked for).
Stinge Watching Is the Opposite of Binge Watching
Last weekend, my daughter and I watched all 8 episodes of Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+. We binged it. That’s how people watch TV shows now: streaming services have entire shows available at the click of the “next episode” button. Many shows are uploaded a whole season at a time for maximum bingeability — no need to wait more than the time it takes to skip the credits to continue the story. It’s an all-you-can-eat media buffet. The mechanics and economics of streaming media have changed how we watch TV and movies — the binge watch reigns supreme.
But recently, I’ve found myself watching some shows in a much different way. When I find a new show I really like or I’m digging into the newest season of a favorite series, instead of getting hooked and then blasting through all the available episodes, I’ll slow down or even stop watching so as to prolong the pleasure…or to delay the end. I feel like a squirrel, hoarding nuts for the winter. It’s stinge watching instead of binge watching.
Schitt’s Creek was the first show I recall stinge watching. I just didn’t want to stop spending time with those people and so I went from watching 1-2 episodes per day to a few a week. The final season’s 14 episodes probably took me longer to watch than the first three seasons put together. I’ve also done this with The Great British Bake-off, The Expanse, and Silo. And it’s gotten worse — right now, I’m in the middle of four different shows that I am loving but cannot bring myself to actually watch: Reservation Dogs (love those shitasses), For All Mankind (haven’t watched the last episode of the most recent season), Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (stalled out on the second-to-last episode of s01), and The Great (I stopped in the middle of an episode where something Very Dramatic happens and I just can’t seem to continue).
Wondering if anyone else has been stinge watching and curious about what their motivations might be, I asked about it on Instagram and found that dozens of others swim against the fierce current of binge watching…and even stinge read books.1 The Sopranos, Ted Lasso, The Wire, Firefly, Escape at Dannemora, Fleishman Is in Trouble, The Bear, Griselda, and Brooklyn 99 were all cited as shows too good to keep watching. One reader told me she still hasn’t watched the end of Schitt’s Creek “because those characters all grew so much and I knew the last episode would be really emotional and I wanted to avoid crying”.
This was a common theme amongst the stinge watchers, particularly with series finales. Digital media producer Micaela Mielniczenko didn’t want to finish Gilmore Girls “because I loved the characters so much and I didn’t want the story and world to end”. I felt the same way about The Expanse — I wanted to live in that world and with those characters forever, a testament to the world building and character development by the writers, directors, showrunners, and actors.
My friend Adriana X. Jacobs, a professor of modern Hebrew literature, poet, game designer, and long-time stinge watcher, says she has trouble with denouements. She told me:
They put me in a melancholy mood. I prefer the build-up, that long stretch when a character is tunneling (literally or figuratively) their way into or out of a problem. But the story interests me a lot less once the issues start to resolve. This is why it took me YEARS to finish Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-wook), a movie I kept pausing and abandoning when the protagonist was still trapped in that unholy hotel room.
I knew that the story would take him out of the room but I wanted to remain in the mess and confinement. It’s the same thing with Normal People. Even though I’ve read the book and know that the ending is (thank god) open-ended, by not finishing the series, I leave these chaotic characters even further suspended in that beautiful, very human state of uncertainty and possibility.
Wow, yes, exactly.
Andreas, who normally hoards shows to watch in the “dark days of winter” in Berlin, said that he had trouble finishing Wednesday on Netflix: “God I loved that so, so much, I could not bear the thought of it ending so soon.” He rewatched the entire first season immediately after finishing the show and even “did a whole keynote speech only with [Wednesday’s] quotes as slides”.2
Courtney Walsh, who is holding off on finishing Brooklyn 99, told me:
Delaying the finale keeps the characters in stasis and delays me feeling sad when it’s over. By keeping it in the queue, I’ll be happy when I watch, not sad.
Several other people told me they hold off on watching certain shows until they need them. When I asked her when she was going to watch the rest of Brooklyn 99, Walsh said:
When I need a guaranteed, bittersweet day. When I’m thinking about the past and I know that these 8-10 episodes will fit the bill. Probably in the next year or two. Bittersweet is a hard emotion to plan for and keep for later. When I can, I do!
Ryan N said that he keeps a stash of Queer Eye episodes because they’re “like soothing medicine in dark times”. Mielniczenko keeps the last episode or two (or sometimes a whole season) of a show in her queue because she likes “the idea that I can finish these shows at any point”. I definitely held back on the final episodes of Schitt’s Creek until I was emotionally ready and on GBBO episodes until I needed a guaranteed pick-me-up on a particularly gloomy day.
Josh Puetz is portioning Firefly out in drips and drabs — he last watched an episode in Dec 2022 as a treat to himself for being sick — and I asked how he was going to decide when to finish the rest of it:
I think…when I’m ready to let go of the characters and story on my terms. So many endings and changes in life are out of our control, but this one little thing (ending a series, saying goodbye) happens when I need it.
Puetz said he’s not a binge watcher at all (one-in-a-row is the most he can muster), but I both binge and stinge. Several of the shows I mentioned above (like Reservation Dogs & ST: Strange New Worlds), I binged several episodes at a stretch before slowing down when I realized, oh god, I’m going to run out! I loved Succession and could not wait to watch the series finale last May. The second season of the Gilded Age aired over two months last fall and I gobbled up each episode as it aired on Sunday nights.
Mielniczenko said she doesn’t horde every book or show; her stinge watch candidates “usually have a world that is unique/exciting or comforting/wholesome”. Like I said above, for me it usually comes down to the characters and the world and whether they overcome my need to find out how the plot wraps up. When something is soapy or sensational, like The Gilded Age or The White Lotus, I have to watch to find out what happens. But if my desire for the company of beloved characters and the comfort of a familiar place outweighs my desire for plot closure, I slow down and bank those shows for later.3
Streaming services are definitely geared towards binge watching, but the creators of particular shows have worked their magic so well, creating realities that feel unusually real, that some of us want to stay in them for as long as we can. My Brilliant Friend, one of my favorite shows of the last few years, is returning this year for a fourth and final season on HBO, and I am at once deliriously excited to meet those characters again but am also already bracing myself to have to say goodbye to them. At least I’ll have fellow stinge watchers to commiserate with.
Are you a stinge watcher? Let us know which shows you’re stuck on and why in the comments.
- I hoard books too, but it’s more difficult to do with audiobooks and ebooks. Sometimes I’ll get to the end of an audiobook without realizing it and the “Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program” trods on my spirit a bit.↩
- I don’t know about you, but I would love to see that keynote deck! (This reminds me of the time I suggested to my daughter that she do a school project about the philosophy of The Good Place because she’s seen that show seven times. She did not take my advice.)↩
- Several people said that they don’t hoard shows, they just rewatch them, sometimes just after they’ve finished. I do that too, but rewatching doesn’t feel the same. Knowing what happens is comforting in a different way, but the novelty is important to me in terms of spending time in worlds with characters.↩
Here’s why chicken over rice from a lower Manhattan cart costs $10 now. “Mr. Mousa’s red sauce of choice, a spicy sambal, costs $23 a gallon, up from $11.”
Incredible Satellite Images of the Latest Volcanic Eruption in Iceland
Archaeologist and satellite expert Marco Langbroek posted a satellite image of the latest volcanic eruption on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, near the city of Grindavik.
Wow. It’s worth clicking through to see it larger (mirrored here). You can see the Keflavik airport to the northwest of the fissure and Reykjavík is the darker area in the upper part of the image, just right of center. This image really underscores the extent to which volcanoes are fiery, slashing cuts to the Earth’s skin. It’s bleeding! Bleeding lava!
This image was taken by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel 2A satellite and processed by Langbroek. The Copernicus project posted their own view of the volcano today as well:
Again, worth seeing larger. And here’s a closeup view of the fissure.
The famed Blue Lagoon spa, circled in blue, is very close (less than a mile) to the lava flow and is currently closed.
If you want to check out the satellite imagery for yourself, you can find it on Copernicus Browser. I tried for a few minutes to duplicate Langbroek’s view (“combined natural colour + SWIR”) but couldn’t quite manage it.
“The LightSound device was designed and developed in 2017 as a tool for the Blind and Low Vision (BLV) community to experience a solar eclipse with sound.”
Our Missed Head Start on the Climate Crisis
In 1896, scientists determined that industrialization was adding CO2 to the atmosphere and quantified how much it would warm the Earth. That date is closer to the start of the Industrial Revolution than to the present day.
If you’re wondering, like I did, about that 1896 date — what about Fourier and Pouillet and Tyndall and Eunice Foote? — the Wikipedia pages on the history of the discovery of the greenhouse effect and the history of climate change science are worth a read.
The warming effect of sunlight on different gases was examined in 1856 by Eunice Newton Foote, who described her experiments using glass tubes exposed to sunlight. The warming effect of the sun was greater for compressed air than for an evacuated tube and greater for moist air than dry air. “Thirdly, the highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas.” (carbon dioxide) She continued: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its action, as well as from an increased weight, must have necessarily resulted.”
Foote’s paper went largely unnoticed until it was rediscovered in the last decade. If you’re interested, the best thing I’ve read on the history of climate change is the 7th chapter of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.
The New Vocabulary of Cocktails, including “snaquiri” (a small daiquiri shot), “Bro-Nar” (shot of bourbon + Cynar), “dirty dump” (pouring a shaken cocktail w/o straining), and “Peyshawty” (Peychaud’s bitters).
T-Pain has written a lot of country songs but doesn’t want to be listed in the credits anymore because “the racism that comes after it is just like…I’ll just take the check.”
Meet Venus’s Newly Named Quasi-Moon: Zoozve
A couple of weeks ago, Radiolab aired an episode about a puzzling object on a children’s poster of the solar system: a Venusian moon called Zoozve. Venus doesn’t have any moons and “Zoozve” didn’t show up on Google at all, so co-host Latif Nasser went on a bit of a mission to find out what the heck this object was. He talked to someone at NASA, the poster’s designer, and various astronomers and physicists, including the person who had discovered Zoozve (aka 2002 VE68).
So begins a tiny mystery that leads to a newly discovered kind of object in our solar system, one that is simultaneously a moon, but also not a moon, and one that waltzes its way into asking one of the most profound questions about our universe: How predictable is it, really? And what does that mean for our place in it?
It’s an entertaining listen and you’ll want to catch the follow-up as well, which I won’t spoil for you. And if you’re a reader rather than a listener, this piece at space.com recaps the whole thing.
On the Bulletpointization of Books. “A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.”
Social Media Sites Are Metaphorical Aquariums
I loved reading Elizabeth Lopatto’s stab at a “unified taxonomy of text-based social media”.
The successful social media network is an aquarium. The influencers and posters are the denizens — jellyfish, filter feeders, sharks, octopuses, rays, squid, clownfish, and so on. The lurkers are the visitors, marveling at the shape and color of the aquarium’s denizens.
Lopatto was spurred to post because she feels that Threads is too much gift shop:
Threads is also unbalanced as an ecosystem, skewed toward Brands, a particularly noxious infraclass of influencer that is nonetheless profitable for the network. But for Threads to be valuable to Brands — more valuable than, say, TikTok — there needs to be a strong base of lurkers. Most lurkers will tolerate Brands, but Brands themselves aren’t a draw. They’re just the gift shop at the aquarium.
Yay, Disney+ renewed Percy Jackson and the Olympians for a second season. My daughter and I watched it this weekend and really liked it. My only complaint: it felt a bit rushed.
Ryan Gosling finally summited the iconic WB water tower. “For whatever reason, right now, at this stage in my life and career, they’re letting me climb the water tower. So climb it while you can, because I don’t know if I’ll be able to climb it tomorrow.”
“The Unspoken Racial Politics of ‘Fast Car’ at the Grammys”
Ooh, I’d been waiting for this — Tressie McMillan Cottom’s take on the Grammy performance of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs.
The cover is popular in a genre that has long been roiled by racial conflict. Over the past five years, artists and activists have tried to get mainstream Big Country to get with the multiracial program, but they have won little more than nominal, marginal inclusion rather than a reckoning with the industry’s soul. However lovely, Chapman’s and Combs’s performance ties too neat a bow on years of conflict within country music over who gets to play with the genre’s big boys.
Contrast that with articles like this one: A Rare Moment Americans Could All Share.
People across an angry and divided nation were given a magical, unifying moment on Sunday. We needed it.
“Ties too neat a bow” indeed. Maybe it’s the beginning of something but it sure doesn’t seem like the end of anything.
Update: If you’re on Bluesky, I recommend reading Cottom’s thread that answers a few questions that readers had.
John Cage’s composition Organ^2/ASLSP will play continuously in a German church until 2640. The last tone change was on Feb 5, 2024. “Usually, the change in sound is followed by a respectful five-minute silence and a round of applause.”
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