Satellite images of sand dunes migrating in Egypt. They move about 13 meters a year.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
USPS Announces Mythical Creatures Stamps for 2027
The US Postal Service recently released a partial list of the stamps it’s putting out in 2027. One of the sets is Mythical Creatures, featuring five cryptids.1
The legend of Mothman has endured for more than six decades, but of the creatures encountered on these stamps, this flying, man-sized, red-eyed being emerged the most recently. The cryptid was first reported in West Virginia in 1966. Several nights after a gravedigger reported a winged, human-sized creature swooping above, two couples on a midnight drive in the rural outskirts of Point Pleasant reported being chased from overhead at great speed as they fled back to town. Newspapers dubbed the creature “Mothman.” After a year of eerie sightings was followed by a local tragedy, some interpreted the appearances as harbingers of disaster. In the years since, a lighter side of Mothman has been embraced by festival attendees, many in “spooky-cute” costumes that evoke this increasingly popular cryptid.
Unlike most of the creatures on these stamps, the Jackalope has been spotted by a great many Americans. It has multiplied rapidly, especially in the West, since first appearing in the 1930s in Douglas, Wyoming. This antlered rabbit was the creation of two young brothers studying taxidermy by mail who, in a moment of inspiration after a hunting trip, crafted the hoax. When the masterful mashup was displayed at a local inn, the Jackalope quickly sprang into regional folklore. Today, Jackalopes are found in gift shops in the Great Plains and Western states — on postcards, stickers, and T-shirts, and as plush toys and mounted specimens. The fanciful hybrid endlessly inspires the imaginations of those who encounter it, and who add to its lore with their own stories, songs, and artworks.
The Squonk hides away in northern Pennsylvania’s dense hemlock forests, so distressed by its own appearance that it cries constantly. This piglike animal, wrinkled, blemished, and self-conscious, was first described in print in a 1910 collection of lumberjack folklore, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. The book — recounting tales often spun and re-spun by the fireside in remote logging encampments of the 19th and early 20th centuries — relates an episode of a Squonk captured in a bag: As the hunter carried his prey, its weeping faded and the sack grew lighter. Investigation revealed that the Squonk had melted into “nothing but tears and bubbles.” In recent years, the melancholy character has been revived as a darling mascot of introverts and anyone else who relates to the Squonk’s social anxiety.
Sasquatch captures the American imagination like no other cryptid. Nobody, though, has captured Bigfoot, as this large hairy hominid is commonly called, nor even retrieved a confirmed strand of hair from its notoriously stinky, shaggy fur. In the Pacific Northwest, ancient Indigenous tales of mysterious, hairy humanoids encouraged caution in the wild and mindful custodianship of forest habitat. By the late 20th century, reported sightings of Sasquatch and similar regional creatures had taken hold and spanned the nation. In fact, tales of huge bipeds are told worldwide, almost anywhere shadowy terrain could conceivably conceal such elusive beings. Hoaxes abound, including blurry films and casts of outsized human-like footprints, but the most notable impression Sasquatch makes is its lasting mark on American popular culture. Even if our most famous mythical creature is nowhere to be found, Sasquatch is everywhere.
Champ, as the Lake Champlain monster is affectionately known, is said to dwell within the nation’s sixth largest lake, which defines more than 100 miles of the New York–Vermont border. A glacial lake reaching 400 feet deep and 14 miles wide is bound to contain mysteries — over the last few centuries, hundreds have claimed to see the serpentine organism. Cryptozoologists have tried to determine what it could be: perhaps a descendant of an aquatic, dinosaur-era reptile or whale, as found in fossils? Skeptics point to more mundane possibilities: sturgeon and other large fish that inhabit the lake, swimming deer, waves, mirages, and tree trunks riding currents. While a living specimen has proven elusive, Champ is ever-present as a beloved mascot of the region, celebrated in business logos, and in festivals and museum exhibits.
The stamps feature the artwork of tattoo artist Nat Power and will be available next year.
The 2027 stamp lineup also includes a set of unicorn stamps. So many fantastical animals! ↩
How to Build a Police State. “Bukele didn’t declare a dictatorship on day one. He built toward it incrementally, each step framed in the language of anti-corruption, public safety or efficiency.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
refresh
see full listHow Much Wealth Does It Take to be Safe in the United States?
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi’s new book is about wealth inequality in America. Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (Amazon) follows ten people with ten different incomes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10% and everything in-between:
For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed them all, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. She researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, inheritances, and so much more to understand the systems that keep people stuck. But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?
This looks great — Chalabi’s work is always worth a look. Shades of Studs Terkel and What Do People Do All Day crossed with Barbara Ehrenreich. Chalabi did a recent interview with It’s Nice That about the book.
Part of the message of the book is that class doesn’t show up enough in our intersectional identities, and that that’s fundamentally dishonest. I would hope that people read the book and then get much more fluent and comfortable with describing their current wealth and income, as well as the one that they grew up in. I think that’s kind of ambitious, but you never know.
Ten Lives is out today in the US.
Great title for an article about London’s invasive parakeet population: The Pollycrisis. “Do we want tens of thousands of Himalayan parrots squabbling all over our cities?”
100 Big Unanswered Scientific Questions
The NY Times recently asked 100 scientists from across dozens of disciplines: “What is a big unanswered question in your field?” Here are some of their questions that caught my eye:
4. When and where did the cognitive capacities that made language, mathematics and complex societies possible first emerge?
9. Why does full writing — complete sentences that can make sense to readers out of context — appear so late in human history?
37. Why are humans the only species with a chin?
40. What is dark matter?
48. Do organisms use quantum effects, such as entanglement and superposition?
54. Will we ever decipher Linear A, Cypro-Minoan and other important ancient scripts?
61. What would be the global impact of a supervolcanic eruption in modern times?
70. Blue whales are the biggest animals ever to exist on Earth. Where are their babies born?
81. Chemical reactions have had a speed limit, described more than a century ago. Can we learn to surpass it?
93. Can environmental sustainability be achieved under capitalism?
Another banger from neal.fun: Battle Draw. Sort of an open world tower defense “game”?
Crimson Star
Watch the Sun’s atmosphere pulse and flow in extreme UV. Images are from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and “conformed, repaired, graded, blended, rescaled & retimed” by Seán Doran, whose video work is always incredible.
It would be great to see this in IMAX or some other large screen format, like in the observatory on the ship in Sunshine.
The most intense shoe salesman you’ll ever meet, a CBS News report by Charles Kuralt from 1983 about a “champion” shoe salesman.
The Welcome Rain Falling From the Sky
I love Taiwanese artist Kuang-Yu Tsui’s 1997 conceptual art piece The Welcome Rain Falling From the Sky but I couldn’t really tell you what it means. Something about the way people are bombarded with advertisements for consumer goods? I also couldn’t help but think of the iOS game co-created by Neven Mrgan, The Incident.
Award-winning photographer Stephen Voss is making a book about the world’s largest data-center hub in Northern Virginia. “Forests have disappeared. Empty fields have become enormous buildings.”
Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made. “The phone in your pocket is several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the computers used for the Apollo mission. One AirPod could easily calculate a path to the moon.”
A YouTuber discovered that most videos contain inaudible background audio that can be geolocated by using airplane flight data. Incredible. I wonder how long the NSA has known about this though…
Winners of the 2026 Photomicrography Competition
Ok, I’m gonna use the word gobsmacking here because I think it’s completely appropriate. This image of an inkjet printer laying down ink on a piece of paper is gobsmacking.
Like what?! You can check out photographer Ole Bielfeldt’s behind-the-scenes process on Instagram; he built a whole custom rig to capture this composite image.
The biggest challenge was speed and lighting.
The printhead, in the printer, moves at a very high speed over the paper. Simultaneously, the ink droplets get injected at around 20 m/s. So to capture the ink droplets mid air and get my lens close enough, this required me to build a custom setup where, instead of the printhead moving over the paper, the paper moved below the printhead. This allowed me to keep the nozzles in focus while printing.
As the max shutter speed of 1/8000s on my camera is way too slow, I used a high speed flash setup. Here the flash acts as the effective shutter, freezing the droplets mid air. I then used focus stacking to capture the depth of the scene.
Bielfeldt’s took the top spot in the Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition. The top 20 images are all quite something…here are a couple more of my favorites, from Justin Theodore Benttinen and Dr. Francisco Lázaro-Diéguez.
(via curious about everything)
Dark Forestry. “What defense against this onslaught of talking machines? Craft, and ‘the nobility of a day’s work’, once-proud heraldry against inconsiderate design and careless release cycles, are threadbare banners in winter winds.”
The Divorce Tapes (gift link). “The only music she listens to is heavy metal from 1986. It’s the year she still lives in. She wanted me to tell this story.” This is a tough read. (CW: rape, family trauma)
They found a chunk of Mars in the Sahara Desert. A recent reveals that a rock found a few years ago in Mali is more than 4.1 billion years old and “has a mix of igneous minerals that tells a story about how [Mars’] crust formed”.
The Match Archive
The Match Archive is creating “the first research-grade, digital archive cataloging American matchbooks as primary sources for graphic design, commercial culture, and social history”. They haven’t launched a website yet (they’re working on it), but they’ve been sharing some of their collection on their Instagram account.
I love the art on the matches themselves…you don’t see that much anymore.
See also Vintage Eastern European Matchbox Labels (1950-1980s) and Matchbook Diaries of New York City.
An analysis of 59 studies (including a 24-year Danish study of 1.2 million children) found that the tiny amounts of aluminum in vaccines are not linked to “increased risk of asthma, autism, or autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes”. Of course!
“Are sperm counts declining? Are microplastics and pesticides affecting male fertility? Does a low sperm count mean you’ll struggle to have children? Howtown investigates the science behind male infertility…”
We Have Star Wars at Home
This is cool: Evan Puschak looks at the rush of cheapo knockoff space operas that came out in the wake of Star Wars, a once-in-a-generation film that refashioned the entire movie business. Even the names are kooky: Starcrash, War of the Planets, Battle of the Stars, The Humanoid, Message From Space, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Man Who Saved the World, Star Odyssey, and The Beast in Space — although tbh, Star Wars is a goofy name as well. Some of the movies even had lightsabers and anxious robots.
Puschak highlights Star Wars’ unique combination of realistic depictions of space with special effects (a la 2001) and an adventure story with colorful characters. He quotes Julie Turnock’s book, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, in making the case that Lucas and other filmmakers of his generation were using special effects to up the sensorial ante for moviegoers — I dug the full passage out of the book’s introduction:
Certainly what was so exhilarating to many about these films was not simply the experience of a new kind of realism. Perhaps even more important was the intensified density of effects in films of the era, which many at the time understood as a thrillingly new and vividly somatic technologized experience. This book aims to recover the excitement that not just ticket-buyers but also many academics, critics, and journalists felt upon experiencing the special effects-heavy films of the 1970s, in particular Star Wars and Close Encounters, and further grant historical dimension and context to that experience. It may be surprising for many to realize that in the 1970s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were considered among the most interesting, ambitious, and exciting filmmakers of the era, alongside more canonized American filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. What critics praised most often about Lucas and Spielberg as filmmakers was their grasp of specifically cinematic visual dynamics that lent their films both greater visceral and sensual engagement and an extra layer of expressive and intellectual potential. While many critics have (often rightly) condemned the aggressive, pummeling blockbuster style that has arisen in the wake of the two successes of 1977, it is incumbent upon scholars to recover the creative process that made them so stimulating and exhilarating to the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert, and other prominent critics of the era, as well as so popular with audiences. A renewed interest in special effects technology by influential auteurist filmmakers certainly made this historical development possible. However, even more strongly, auteurist filmmakers went to the considerable and painstaking effort to promote and develop complex special effects technology, precisely in order to realize aesthetic filmmaking goals they designed to rouse and provoke the sensorium. They called this approach variously “visual storytelling,’ “visceral engagement,’ or “graphic dynamics.”
Moreover, so-called New Hollywood filmmakers in the 1970s reinterpreted the role of cinematic aesthetics to suggest a purposeful relation between sensual and intellectual impact. In other words, filmmakers sought to stimulate the senses. This was not to numb the viewer but to activate him or her — not unlike the notion of drug-induced mind expansion. Intensified color schemes, beams of light, fast-moving objects, and quick editing first penetrate the body and then engage the mind with the films’ ideas about technology, kineticism, power structures, liberty, etc.
I am firmly in the camp of those who enjoy filmmakers that engage the senses like this — among contemporary filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve come to mind as continuing the legacy of Lucas et al. in this way.
From filmmaker Kevin B. Lee, a story about seeing Platoon as a child in 1986. What age-inappropriate movies did you see as a kid?
A call for more “mindful underparenting” from psychologist Darby Saxbe. “If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.” 💯
KDO Search Now Available to Everyone
Ok, after a week of testing, I’ve opened up KDO search to everyone. You can read more about it in my post from last week:
For now, the search only looks at posts from 2014 to the present. You can search by keyword, describe what you remember (“the guy who walks in Japan”), or paste a link to find posts that link to it. Search is fuzzy-ish but it’s not an AI bot or anything like that so if you ramble on with a 25-word query, it’s probably not going to work that well. You can sort by best match or newest, search all posts or just Quick Links or main posts, and filter by time (past month, past 3 months, etc.)
Launching that member preview was a little deflating tbh — “no plan survives first contact with the user”. It was clear that search was not as good as I wanted it to be — even I started noticing it despite my excitement. I spent quite a bit of time last weekend trying to tune the search and it’s much improved. I’ve been using it quite a bit this week and am loving it. There’s so much good stuff in the archives (and I can say that because if it’s more than 3-4 years old, I don’t even remember writing it! 🤷♂️) and this does a great job of surfacing that stuff.
Speaking of surfacing more posts from the archive, one of the coolest things about the way the search works is that you get a “more like this post” capability more or less for free. If you open recent posts like the video of three humpback whales breaching, the composite photo of 14,000 satellite trails, this Ted Chiang interview, or even an older post like Sesame Street puppeteers on how they play their characters and click on the “Related posts” tab below the post, you should see links 1-5 posts that you may want to read next.
Like the search, it’s not perfect and not every post will have related links, but I keep turning up good posts I’d completely forgotten about. Anyway, related posts are available for everyone on post-2014 posts. Post post post post. Poooooost. Ok, getting punchy. Have a good weekend everyone.
Bain Capital Acquires Tibetan Buddhism For $35 Million. “For centuries, this organization has been guided by outdated principles that are antithetical to investor and shareholder concerns, prioritizing incentives like wisdom, mental discipline…”
Anthropic has new rules for its Opus 5.5 model to “steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific [video] game”. (From a few days ago but I just saw it…)
And in other news, the NY Times is trying to buy Letterboxd for a reported price of $330 million.
Salon, one of the last OG general interest web publications, is shutting down. “When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place.” And: “We have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable.”
Rosa Parks on To Tell the Truth
In 1980, civil rights hero Rosa Parks appeared on To Tell the Truth, a long-running game show. Parks appeared alongside two other women claiming to be Parks and a celebrity panel tried to guess the identity of the true Parks. See also the appearance of a Lincoln assassination witness on a 50s game show. (via @ptak)
Video captured by Amy Yolland of three humpback whales breaching one after another. Incredible. Also available on YouTube.
Subvocal’s glasses turn your silent speech into text at 200 wpm — it measures mouth movements with radar? Like many things these days, this is very technically interesting but also creepy and dystopian.
Foursquare was recently acquired and co-founder Dennis Crowley wrote about it. “Dozens of current and former Foursquare employees have reached out to me to express their frustration with the leadership that led the company to this outcome.”
Grocery Shopping With a Bow & Arrow
For a 1992 conceptual art piece called The Hunt, Christian Jankowski survived for a week on goods he shot at the local supermarket with a bow and arrow.
To rebel against modern society, to return to nature: in pursuit of these primeval instincts, for one week, Jankowski lived off goods he hunted in the supermarket. Instead of stalking animals, he eyed and avoided the supermarket security cameras. Armed heroically with a bow and arrow, Jankowski shot down frozen chickens, butter, toilet paper, and various other essentials. His game, if edible, was not just dead, it was processed on a mass scale. Thus the reaction of the woman working the checkout counter: she remained wholly unimpressed by the trophies of his bargain hunt, which she scanned with the arrows still sticking out of them. He has to pay like everyone else.
Paul Ford: “The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for building applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.”
Women who die postpartum often do so because they lose too much blood. An 80-cent plastic bag is helping solve the problem. “The drape is not an A.I. thing — it’s the absolute opposite: It’s a simple, simple, intervention that can solve our problems.”
A growing list of brands to avoid because they are “actively engaged in the enshittification playbook” (many post-acquisition by private equity), including Dr. Martens, Pyrex, Hoka, rag & bone, Ray-Ban, Black+Decker, Hunter Boot, Craftsmen, and more.
Stunning Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.
This is the most time-consuming photo edit I’ve EVER done!
I left my camera photographing the night sky over Mt Taranaki for nearly TWO HOURS, capturing 578 photographs.
The result? An estimated 14,450 satellite trail appearances, representing approximately 1,400 individual satellites! 😱
I manually masked in EVERY SINGLE TRAIL from the original photographs — approximately 45 HOURS of editing to create this one image!
The Guardian has more on how he created the image (which, despite many online commenters’ beliefs, is not AI):
Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”
The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
“I could start to see the pattern emerging and realised: ‘Wow, this looks really awesome.’ I knew if I carried on it would look even better and more impressive in terms of satellite numbers.”
Fellow photographer Vincent Laforet called Larsen’s image “an important photograph”:
I was initially startled. Then confused. Then fascinated all in quick succession.
And then I felt a deep sense of betrayal once I realized that what I was tracking with my eyes were a series of small satellites. And btw: that they likely had ruined my long exposure that I was capturing at the time.
I remember asking in the moment:
Who gave anyone permission do this?
I Thought I’d Left Authoritarianism Behind. “To anyone who has lived under dictatorship, the pattern is instantly recognizable. Dictators start by instilling fear. They exploit uncertainty to manufacture loyalty.”
See You Thursday
I’m taking the day off from the site today — feeling crispy from a little too much work lately. Besides, everyone’s gonna be too busy huffing US midterm election results to pay any attention to anything else. In the meantime, you can spend some time with my poorly timed Election Day post celebrating 10 years of the KDO membership program that gets into all the stuff I’ve been busy working on around here.
How Human Civilization Began
In a recent video, Kurzgesagt explores what we know about the first human civilizations that formed some 12,000 years ago and how they led to the first cities and the invention of writing.
What we know about human history is only a fraction of the full story. Much of the rest is like dark matter, invisible to us. We can’t see it, and we can only see the effects of its presence. But thanks to new techniques for DNA sequencing, dating ancient detritus, mathematical models, and aerial and lidar archaeology, we are now able to get a faint idea of what this world might have looked and felt like.
One thing I really appreciate about Kurzgesagt is how each of their videos is accompanied by an extensive list of sources. For instance, I’m not sure I’d heard about the massive Lake Agassiz draining into the world’s oceans and disrupting the entire planet’s climate some 8200 years ago — and there are several primary sources listed for further reading. Here’s how Kurzgesagt tells it:
Around the year 3800 of the human era a sudden catastrophe happened in North America. The receding glaciers of the last ice age had created one of the largest lakes in Earth’s history, larger than the Caspian Sea today. It was held back by super massive ice sheets, which formed a gigantic dam.
Surprising no one, the dam melted and suddenly failed – the whole lake suddenly drained into the ocean. Global sea levels rose by 1-2 meters and the great conveyor belt that carried warm water northwards slowed down. Across the North Atlantic and Europe, and into the Near East, the climate turned colder and drier – in some regions by several degrees. Rain patterns shifted, summers grew longer and harsher, and a drought lasting well over a century parched the land.
And:
We know that during this time all over the world migration towards rivers and lakes sped up — bringing agriculture and technology with them. Some of the most consequential journeys led into the Nile Valley, where farming villages took root and slowly laid the ground for the rich civilization that would one day rise there.
Lake Agassiz’s major drainage reorganization events were of such magnitudes that they significantly impacted climate, sea level, and possibly early human civilization. The lake’s enormous freshwater release into the Arctic Ocean has been postulated to have disrupted oceanic circulation and caused temporary cooling. The draining of 13,000 years ago may be the cause of the Younger Dryas stadial. Although disputed, the draining at 9,900–10,000 years ago may be the cause of the 8,200 yr climate event. A study by Turney and Brown links the 8,500-years-ago drainage to the expansion of agriculture from east to west across Europe; they suggest that this drainage may also account for various flood myths of ancient cultures, including the Biblical flood narrative.
Fascinating.
Do you think you could write down the names of 3000 people? “As part of a competition with a few friends, I attempted the very dumb challenge of trying to write the names of 3,000 real people in one sitting. It took 7 hours, but I did it.”
“Our attention is all we have. And we already gave away a huge percentage of it to machine learning algorithms 10 years ago, and we are living in an intensely different and I think worse world because of it.” Was 2016 a sneaky inflection point?
The soundtrack for Wipeout XL (aka Wipeout 2097) was crazy for a video game; it featured tracks from groups like Underworld, Orbital, The Prodigy, Daft Punk, and Chemical Brothers. I had this on CD! Ripped it and played ‘em on Winamp!
10 Years of Kottke.org Membership
An important KDO milestone whooshed by the other day and I was so heads-down on tuning up the new search engine (more on that below) that I missed it. So: it’s been 10 years since I started the KDO membership program! (Quick recap of the value proposition from the membership page FAQ: “kottke.org is my full-time job and member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled.”)
10 years! It is impossible for me to overstate the impact membership has had on my work. Beyond the simple fact that KDO wouldn’t exist without it, membership support allows me the freedom to choose when, where, how, and why to work, resulting, IMO, a better place for all of us to spend time.
The last couple of years have felt especially membership-inflected and influenced. We’ve been working together on building the KDO comments into a quieter haven for sharing stories and information, outside the social media networks driven by algorithms and outrage. It’s taken time, but KDO is starting to feel like a neighborhood joint where folks can stop by and find a welcoming place for interesting conversation.1 And more to come!
I’ve also been working hard on different ways of helping people find stuff to read/watch/listen to online and just generally making things easier to use around here. There’s:
- The Rolodex (which includes a mini feed reader for members), which is a list of the sites and people I read that you might like too.
- Improvements to the comments to help make following & having conversations easier. This has been a steady effort — tweaks and new features every few months since launching member comments three years ago. (How has it been that long?!)
- Prometheus, a search & discovery tool for gift links, open only to members for now.
- KDO site search. Still only open to just members. I spent a lot of time over the past weekend tuning it to return better results, and I think we’re getting somewhere. Improved the speed as well, at the expense of, well, increased expense.2 It’s still not magic, but I’m hoping to open this up to everyone soon.
- Underscore, a web-based music player I built for listening to music across multiple streaming platforms while I work. Anyone can listen to my collection and members can compile their own collection to listen to.
And this is in addition to the site’s usual service of curated links and posts. A lot of this has happened in just the last month — Jesus, Kottke, slow down! — but I’ve been working on some of these things, on and off, for years. I couldn’t focus on this stuff for months and months earlier this year — launching requires a level of attention that’s difficult for me to muster when other things are going on. Getting the move behind me and establishing myself in surroundings more suitable to my temperament has been a real boon.
I hope all of this adds up to a place and project that people want to make use of and support. Twenty-something years into doing KDO as my full-time job, I can honestly say I am enjoying it more than ever. Thanks so much for reading and for your support. If you’re not yet a member and want to join us on this ride, you can check out your membership options here — it only takes a minute to sign up (less if you use Apple Pay or Stripe’s Link autofill).
Maybe KDO readers have always felt this way about the site, but for me, the comments have livened things up and added a new dimension to things. ↩
I’m using a couple of outside services for search, but at the relatively small volumes I’m dealing with, it won’t come to more than a few bucks every month. ↩
Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires by Paris Marx. “He exposes the deceptive, exploitative ways tech companies are siphoning energy and resources from vulnerable communities in their pursuit of digital power…”
Film Meets Art
Vugar Efendi has made a pair of videos showing scenes from films that have been inspired by famous paintings. The second video is especially good, showing references in There Will Be Blood, Lost In Translation, and a Jacques-Louis David reference from About Schmidt.
Simon Willison: The October Inflection Point for Vibe Game Development. “The thing I find both exciting and shameful about this is that I have got interesting results from so little creative input.”
Arkivism is a search and visual discovery engine for millions of public domain works from the collections of the Smithsonian, The Met, NASA, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, and more.
Ted Chiang: “There’s no way to write fiction and guarantee your readers will understand it correctly. There is no way you will ever be able to write something so straightforward that Elon Musk will understand it the way that you intend it.”
Socials & More