kottke.org posts about Jason Kottke
I began at the end. The Chōishi-michi pilgrimage route is an amazing 12-mile trail that winds its way up through the forest from the Jison-in temple in the town of Kudoyama in the valley to the Danjo Garan temple in the town of Kōyasan in the mountains. The origins of the trail date back to the founding of Kōyasan as a center for the esoteric Shingon school of Buddhism by Kūkai (aka Kōbō Daishi) in 819 CE. Legend has it that Kūkai used the trail to visit his mother; ever since, for some 1200 years, Buddhist faithful have been using the Chōishi-michi to worship in sacred Kōyasan. I was going to follow in their footsteps, for my own ends.
To climb up a mountain like a proper pilgrim, you need to start at the base. Seeing as my lodgings were already in Kōyasan, my journey began by a) catching the bus down a winding forest road; b) where I boarded a cable car for the ludicrously steep journey down to Gokurakubashi; c) where I got on an extremely local train; and d) finally disembarked at the Kudoyama train station and walked to the starting point. One hour and 30 minutes after I’d left my guesthouse, I stepped through the gate of the Jison-in temple. Now all I had to do was climb the entire 4100 feet of elevation back to where I’d started.
When establishing the Chōishi-michi some 1200 years ago, Kūkai marked the route with wooden guideposts, one every 109 meters. You don’t want your pilgrims getting lost — how are you going to find eternal salvation if you can’t even make it to the temple? The markers were replaced with more sturdy stone gorintō in the late 13th century. 180 of these stone markers are situated along the route from to Jison-in to Danjo Garan, along with another 36 markers from Danjo Garan to the Mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi in the Okunoin Cemetery. In the spirit of wayfinding, perhaps a map of my there-and-back-again route would be useful:
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I was thankful for the frequent stone markers as I’d gotten a little lost on my hike the previous day. I was traveling on — or I was supposed to be traveling on — the Nyonin-michi pilgrimage route (Women’s pilgrimage route) and doing pretty well when I took a wrong turn right near the end.
This particular trail, though popular, wasn’t on All Trails and markers were sparse, so I was doing a lot of pinching & zooming of Google Maps and a PDF I downloaded from the internet. The trail curved right and I stayed straight, wondering why this bit of the trail was a little less blazed than the rest of it had been, and I popped out into the backyard of a temple. Oh no, I thought, I’m not supposed to be back here; only monks are supposed to be back here. I’m offending so many ancestors right now.
More pinching and zooming — ok, there’s a road off to the northwest. I set off and walked by what looked like some recent graves? The ancestors: so mad right now! What a disgrace of a pilgrim I am. I found myself crouching as I walked almost on tiptoe, trying to evade detection — even though the Buddha surely knew where I was and what I’d done. The road was just where the map said it would be; I slipped through a gap in the fence and followed it downhill for a quarter mile, not entirely sure I wasn’t still in a restricted area.
I came up on the other side of the temple and realized I’d stumbled into the backyard of Kōbō Daishi’s Mausoleum, where Shingon founder Kūkai entered into eternal meditation in 835 CE,1 aka one of the absolute holiest places in all of Japan, aka I am in deep, deep shit with the ancestors. Abandoning my plans for lunch, I entered Okunoin Cemetery through a proper entrance and made my way to the mausoleum. Wishing to make amends, I bowed at every bridge and threshold where everyone else was bowing and threw some coins into the saisen box.2 Many of the people around me were quite emotional about being there. The whole atmosphere just felt good, peaceful, numinous.
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Ok, back to the Chōishi-michi, the big 12-miler. The first few miles felt almost straight up and then the trail leveled off for a while. The weather was cool but humid, so I hiked in shorts sleeves, sweating. It rained intermittently. Fog crept up the mountainside. I hiked though persimmon orchards; they’re in season right now. Small stands sold oranges & persimmons on the honor system. The path was well marked, not only with the stone gorintō but with well-placed signs in Japanese and English pointing the way to Kōyasan.
Walking the narrow path between the forest’s tall evergreen trees felt like entering a European cathedral with a towering vaulted ceiling. A bamboo forest earlier on the hike had a similar feeling; spaces such as these make you look up and feel whatever power or force or presence you believe in. You feel small and big all at once. The forest: unbelievably beautiful.
I heard voices through the trees and then the crack of something — was that a golf ball? Am I hiking through a golf course? The trail came to a clearing and lo, the tee for the 13th hole. The path also passed by vending machines,3 crossed roads, and zagged through tiny towns. The modern world, built up around this ancient trail.
I stopped for lunch around the halfway point: a sandwich, apple & custard pastry, and a small can of consommé flavored Pringles procured the night before at FamilyMart. FamilyMart is one of the big three convenience stores (konbini) in Japan — the other two are Lawson and 7-Eleven. Before you come to Japan for the first time, everyone tells you how amazing the konbini are: “You’re not going to believe this, but…” And then you get here and damn, they were right. The consommé Pringles were delicious.
After lunch: one foot in front of the other. Pilgrim mode locked in. Maybe I should become a monk, I think. I’m pretty good at being a pilgrim, the hiking part of it, I mean. I’m fine being alone with my thoughts. The clothes look comfy. I could be a monk with the internet at the center of my practice. Hours spent doomscrolling is kind of like meditation, right? It’s certainly a flow state of sorts, like the blood gushing from the elevators in The Shining. I’m into aesthetics. And I— oh, it’s ascetic? Ah. Maybe I’ll just stick to my secular life then.
Another stone marker. Another 109 meters. Keep going. I pass one every 90-100 seconds or so. Early on, the markers flew by; I didn’t even notice some of them. Now I’m searching them out ahead, peering up the slope I know (via All Trails) steepens sharply right at the end. Is this is the last one? No. But keep going. It’s damp, the rocks are wet. An inch of moss covers everything save for the well-worn pilgrimage path. It feels like a rain forest. Another stone marker. Another 109 meters. Keep. Going.
I sense the top of the hill — something about the light changes. I see a guardrail ahead. Emerging on the side of the road, I cross it and make for the Daimon gate, the traditional entrance into town. On the threshold, I bow deeply. Stepping over, I pump my fist in the air — I’ve made it back to Kōyasan.
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A weary pilgrim deserves a hot bath. My guesthouse is a further few hundred feet. The woman who runs it is very nice and a little kooky; I like her. After the sacred backyard debacle the other day, I told her about all the ancestors I’d offended. She chuckled and told me, the ancestors, they don’t mind so much. She cooked me breakfast (delicious, nutritious) every morning — you don’t look like a tofu person, she said, eyeing me. Correct.
On my last morning, I asked her about a bunch of boxes stacked on a table. I have an interest in incense, she said. Apparently it’s quite involved and the most skilled practitioners are equal in expertise to those who do the chadō tea ceremony. She opened one of the boxes and showed me a very expensive twig of charcoal, which is so special that they sell it by the stick. When the charcoal burns, it does so purely, without giving off any gases or sparking or spitting. Afraid she’s trapped me into politely listening to her going on about her hobby, she checks in: are you actually interested in this? My turn to chuckle; personally & professionally, I’m interested in all sorts of things, even fancy charcoal.
The guesthouse has a kick-ass bathtub, deep and quick-to-fill. My host keeps a selection of bath salts and I select a yuzu one. Tired but happy and fulfilled, I soak a long while, easing the pain in my aching feet & back, the yuzu scent filling my pores.
———
After bathing, I set out to finish my journey. I’d previously walked the length of town to the Okunoin Cemetery and back a couple of times, but I wanted to do the whole thing in one day: from Jison-in temple to Kōbō Daishi’s Mausoleum at the far end of the cemetery, a proper pilgrimage. Well, not quite proper…because I was tired from my hike, I caught the bus instead of walking. The quest is the quest, whatever it takes.
Okunoin Cemetery is one of the most breathtaking and magical places I’ve ever been. Imagine a redwood forest like Muir Woods with Buddhist temples and a 1200-year-old cemetery with tens of thousands of faithful buried in it. The soaring trees create that cathedral effect and even an atheist like me can’t help but feel holy in the presence of so many souls, including Kūkai/Kōbō Daishi himself.
I hopped off the bus and started into the cemetery. Night had fallen and it was quite dark; should I have brought my headlamp? Ah, no need…the way is lit by hundreds of lanterns lining the path at about shoulder height. There are also some brighter, taller lights, a concession to safety I suspect. They’re the wrong temperature though, a rare misstep in a country with an unrivaled collective attention to detail. Whereas the lanterns glow with a pleasant amber light, these safety lights are a cold, garish blue, a color as harsh to the eye as the word “garish” (or “harsh” for that matter).
Aside from a few other people, I’m the only one here at this hour. Why are my shoes. So! LOUD!!? Each footfall echoes about the whole place and the crunch of the sand on the wet pavement under my soles is deafening. Once again, I am disturbing the ancestors. I try to walk quieter but somehow that’s even louder? How is anyone supposed to be eternally meditating with all this racket going on? Definitely not monk material, neither me nor my cacophonous shoes.
What’s that noise?! Some kind of animal? Ok, I can still hear the faint sound of traffic on the nearby road and anywhere with automobile noise isn’t scary — dangerous perhaps, but not scary. I hear another noise, one that I can only describe as “probably bird but what if monkey?” Or maybe Ghibli monster? I gotta say, in case you didn’t know, Hayao Miyazaki sure nailed Japan. Hit it out of the park. Everywhere I go, I am reminded of his work: small food stalls, beautiful parks, tiny trucks, cute little train stations, forest paths — the just-so touches of Japan reflected and amplified by the meticulous and rich detail of Studio Ghibli’s work.
The cemetery oozes Ghibli energy; it is not difficult to imagine thousands of Miyazaki’s weird little guys hanging from every tree and lurking behind every gravestone. Buoyed by their benevolent presence, I make a full loop of the cemetery in the dark, all the way to Kōbō Daishi’s Mausoleum and back to the entrance again.
And then, not wanting to wait 25 minutes for the bus, I walked all the way back to my guesthouse again, stopping at a sushi place for dinner. When I poked my head through the door, there was one other customer, an old guy smoking a cigarette who gestured for me to join him at the communal table. A menu was produced; I ordered so much sushi. Baseball was on the TV in the corner — game 1 of the Japanese equivalent of the World Series. The old couple running the place brought me sake, six massive fatty tuna rolls, six even larger salmon nigiri, and a much larger bowl of miso soup than I was expecting. As the three of them chatted, we all watched the baseball and I finished everything they brought me. I’d walked a total of 17.5 miles and needed to replenish.
I rolled out of there around the 4th inning of the game, arigato gozaimasus all around, and limped the rest of the way back to the guesthouse with a full belly, full heart, and teeming mind — back to where I began, at the end, completely satisfied by one of the best, most fulfilling days I’ve had in a long time.
Hey folks. I’m very excited to be heading to Japan for the first time next month. I’ll be there from mid-October for 3-4 weeks. The current plan is Tokyo, Kamakura, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Koyasan, and perhaps Hiroshima — change my mind? If you’ve been there, please leave your recs in the comments below or drop me an email. If you live there or will be visiting at the same time, let’s meet up!
The photograph above is from Koya Bound by Craig Mod & Dan Rubin. The companion website to the book is great.
Writer & designer Frank Chimero took the summer off (“I quit my job at an opportune moment and called it a sabbatical”) and wrote a short post about the experience:
The summer is now mostly spent, and I am writing to say: not much has happened. I swept away the everyday to make space for the profound, and my days refilled with everyday things. No a-has, no takeaways, no transformation, no strong convictions about the future of technology, design, or Frank. But also: no crises, no existential dread (at least about myself), and very few reservations about quitting as the right choice. I am more spacious inside and enjoying a refreshed ability to attend to the things in front of me. Most people call this a vacation, I guess.
I never really wrote about the seven-month sabbatical I took three years ago because, as Chimero notes, not much happened. Or perhaps more accurately, the changes that took place didn’t reveal themselves or manifest for months (or even years) afterwards. As I wrote after being back to work for a year:
I still haven’t written too much about what I did and didn’t do during my time away — I thought I would but found I didn’t have a whole lot to say about it. The truth is I’m still in the process of, uh, processing it. But it’s clear to me that the extended time off was an incredible gift that has revitalized me — I’m really enjoying my work here and have great plans for the future that I can’t wait to get going on.
While I can tell you with absolute certainty that my sabbatical was transformative, pinpointing the critical things I did or didn’t do during my time off is still difficult. All I can say is: if you feel like you need one and have the opportunity, take a sabbatical. Just don’t expect your life to change that quickly because of it.
Hey folks. I’m dropping my son off at college today1 so the site is going to be a little slow until I get back midweek. In the meantime, you can check out some of the great sites on the KDO Rolodex on the front page of the site (scroll down some), and I’ll see you back here sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. 👋
From an excerpt of his new book, It’s Only Drowning (Amazon), David Litt writes about the frustrating and humiliating experience of learning how to surf at the age of 35.
Yet I didn’t quit. I returned to the dog beach twice more the week of my first solo session, and four more times the week after that. I could count my total number of successful pop-ups on my fingers, so it wasn’t the rush of riding waves that kept me coming back. It was something deeper. During each surf session I felt frustrated, exhausted, humiliated, terrified, depleted, confused, and sore — but never depressed. While flailing in pursuit of whitewater may not have been fun, it was something different to think about. It paused the spin cycle in my mind.
I started mountain biking almost 5 years ago, at the age of 46. The sport is not so geared towards young learners as surfing, but it presents sufficient physical challenges and danger for the older human that feeling “frustrated, exhausted, humiliated, terrified, depleted, confused, and sore” is guaranteed. But also: exhilarated, fulfilled, happy, and engaged. While my cardio could still use some work, I’m no longer terrible at mountain biking and continue to improve, which is both a source of satisfaction at my progression and hunger to keep getting better.
See also: To Air Is Human and The Joy of Fortnite.
Ok, having been all over the western Mediterranean for the past two weeks, I’m back. *sigh* Here, without comment or context (I know, I know), are some of the things I saw:
Not pictured: a bunch of amazing food we ate over the course of the trip.
Derek Bolz made a video about what biking does for his mental health. A partial transcript (boldface mine):
Life has been rough lately. I don’t want to air my dirty laundry on the internet, so I won’t go into detail. But for a number of reasons, I am quite stressed out, maybe more than I’ve ever been before. To put it simply: everything is not ok.
But then, suddenly, everything is ok. My hands are on the bars, my feet are on the pedals, the wind is in my face, my mind is clear. All I have to do is clear that jump, rip around that corner, clear that other jump, land that trick, hold that manual, hold that wheelie, hold on for dear life, pedal harder and harder and harder.
That is the beauty of biking. It demands so much of your attention that you have no option but to live in the present. There’s no time to worry. It’s like meditation while moving. And then you always feel a bit better after.
This is one of the reasons I’ve fallen in love with mountain biking over the past few years — riding is so all-encompassing that it forces me out of whatever past or future crisis is occupying my thoughts and into thinking no more than a second or two into the future. And moving through physical space feels like you’re making progress, which is amazing when you’re feeling stuck in the rest of your life.
Depending on the trail, if I lose concentration for a second while biking, I might get seriously injured or die. As someone who has never been into extreme sports, I have no idea why I decided being on the edge of death is fun and stress-relieving, but it is. 🤷♂️
Mountain biking isn’t for everyone — I know others get a similar sense of presence and focus from running, skiing, throwing pots, woodworking, photography, walking, surfing, writing, knitting, meditation, gardening, painting, reading, and the list goes on and on. I feel lucky to have found my thing and would love to hear if you’ve found yours. (via @mmilan)
When Fairlee, Vermont’s Lake Morey freezes over in the winter, a 4-5 mile loop is cleared by a local resort for wild ice skating. I was able to get out on the ice with my family for a couple hours on Friday; it was great fun, and I’m looking forward to going again soon.
I hope you got out this weekend and did something outside or active or new or comforting…we’re going to need to replenish our reserves in the coming weeks and months.
Hey, everyone. I just wanted to update you on what’s been happening here at KDO HQ. As you might have noticed (and if my inbox is any indication, you have), I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future. I don’t yet know to what extent other things will make it back into the mix. I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that, but I also believe very strongly that this situation is too important and potentially dangerous to ignore. And it is largely being ignored by a mainstream press that has been softened up by years of conservative pushback, financial pressures, and hollowing out by Facebook & Google. But I have an independent website and a platform, and I’m going to use it the way that I have always used it: to inform people about the truth of the world (as best as I understand it) and what I feel is important.
I have pivoted like this a couple of times before: in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the pandemic. This situation feels as urgent now as those events did then. Witnessing the events of this past weekend, I felt very much like I did back in March 2020, before things shut down here in the US — you could see this huge tidal wave coming and everyone was still out on the beach sunbathing because the media and our elected officials weren’t meeting the moment. I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history — so I feel like I have no choice but to talk about it.
If you need to check out, I totally understand. I’ve heard from many readers over the years that some of you come to the site for a break from the horrible news of the world, and I know this pivot goes against that. I expect I will lose some readers and members over this — the membership page is right here if you’d like to change your status. For those who choose to continue to support the site, no matter what, my deep thanks and appreciation to you.
I’ll end on a personal note. I’ve talked a little about the impact that covering the pandemic for two years had on me, particularly in this post about Ed Yong’s talk at XOXO:
It was hard to hear about how his work “completely broke” him. To say that Yong’s experience mirrored my own is, according to the mild PTSD I’m experiencing as I consider everything he related in that video, an understatement. We covered the pandemic in different ways, but like Yong, I was completely consumed by it. I read hundreds(/thousands?) of stories, papers, and posts a week for more than a year, wrote hundreds of posts, and posted hundreds of links, trying to make sense of what was happening so that, hopefully, I could help others do the same. The sense of purpose and duty I felt to my readers — and to reality — was intense, to the point of overwhelm.
Like Yong, I eventually had to step back, taking a seven-month sabbatical in 2022. I didn’t talk about the pandemic at all in that post, but in retrospect, it was the catalyst for my break. Unlike Yong, I am back at it: hopefully more aware of my limits, running like it’s an ultramarathon rather than a sprint, trying to keep my empathy for others in the right frame so I can share their stories effectively without losing myself.
Covering the pandemic broke me. I spent the weekend and most of Monday wrestling with myself and asking, “Do you really want to put yourself through that again?” I could easily just go on posting like this existential threat to the United States isn’t happening. Like I said before, I believe we need — like they are actually necessary for life — art and beauty and laughter and distraction…and continuing to cover them would be a noble and respectable undertaking. But I eventually realized, thanks in part ot an intense session with my therapist on Tuesday, that in order to be true to myself, I need to do this.
Thankfully, I am in a much better place, mental health-wise, than I was 5 years ago. I know myself better and know how to take care of myself when I am professionally stressed out. There may be times when I need to step away and I thank you for your patience in advance. I hope that you’re doing whatever it is you need to do to take yourselves. 💞
Regarding comments: I haven’t been turning them on for any of the posts about the coup. I am trying to figure out how to turn them back on and not have the discussions mirror the sorts of unhelpful patterns that social media has conditioned us into following when discussing political issues online. I have turned them on for this post, but would encourage you to reflect on kottke.org’s community guidelines if you choose to participate; the short version: “be kind, generous, & constructive, bring facts, and try to leave the place better than you found it”. Thanks.
I may have shared this before, but here it is again in case it helps someone. A couple of years ago, I was telling my therapist about some crisis I was going through and she told me something that’s had a profound effect on my life ever since: “Jason, what you’re feeling is appropriate for the developmental stage you’re in right now.”
Reader, I was 49 years old. Developmental stages are typically associated with infants, children, and teens — we use them to mark their progress along the path to being adult humans. Adolescent growth is rapid and the transitions are stark; your appearance and capabilities change so much more between ages 3 and 10 than between 30 and 37 that adulthood can feel comparatively static. Even though people keep changing in adulthood, there is some sense in which people are fully baked by the time they reach 18-25 years old.
When my therapist said “what you’re feeling is appropriate for the developmental stage you’re in right now”, it hit me right between the eyes and I knew exactly what she was trying to say. Our growth never ends. We never stop going through developmental stages — we just call them things like “becoming a parent”, “mid-life crisis”, or “perimenopause”. The pain, confusion, and emotional distress we experience is because we’re growing.
Thinking about my life through this lens has flipped a switch for me. Internalizing “this is appropriate” and “I’m leveling up” provided me with a better alternative to “I’m almost 50, I don’t have my life figured out yet, what the hell is wrong with me?” Rewiring my thought process is still a work in progress, but I feel like it’s allowed me to approach challenges more as opportunities than as obstacles, provided me with a map/plan out of dark times, and given me more room to be easier on myself.
(I hope that all makes sense. Personal epiphanies can be difficult to translate for others.)
Hey everyone. It’s been more than 2 weeks since my bike accident and I’m still not quite back to full speed. I’ve been slowed down by some emotional/psychological/existential stuff and my wrists haven’t fully healed yet, making typing/mousing for long periods challenging. I’m sorry the site has been slower than usual — thanks for your patience as I get back into the groove here.
But also! I had a really nice, relaxing, contemplative birthday weekend in NYC — museums, art, walking, bookstores, city vibes, friends, and food. It really filled me up. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through Intermezzo and loving it. I’ve got an audiobook going too: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (recommended by Kottke reader Mike Riley). I finished Shōgun (excellent, can’t wait to rewatch), am working my way through season two of The Rings of Power, and am rewatching Devs with my son (a first-timer). I know, I owe you a media diet post…I haven’t done one since December. 😬
If you don’t mind sharing, what have you been up to recently?
Hey folks. I crashed my bike this weekend and as such I’m a little banged up (neck & wrist injuries). I’m mostly fine but I don’t know how much desk/mouse/typing time I can manage today. I’m gonna give it a shot though because I need some distraction and something else to do besides watch TV, lay flat on my back, and listen to podcasts. If I tap out early today, now you know what’s up. ✌️
Noah Kalina on viewing old photos or videos of yourself:
I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable for some people to watch old videos of themselves. It exposes the core of who you really are.
No matter what you try to do, no matter where you end up going, no matter how much you might try to change, you are who you are, and that very particular and unique type of personality you have stays with you forever.
It’s fascinating, painful, revelatory, and embarrassing.
The photo above is my 6th grade school picture from 1984. I loved that velour vest for reasons I cannot presently fathom. When I think about who that kid was and who I am now, I hope that I’ve retained the best parts and let go of the things that didn’t serve him so well. It’s a process…
Counterpoint (or perhaps complementary point): I think often of this old post from The Sartorialist about a woman who reinvented herself upon moving to New York:
Actually the line that I think was the most telling but that she said like a throw-away qualifier was “I didn’t know anyone in New York when I moved here….”
I think that is such a huge factor. To move to a city where you are not afraid to try something new because all the people that labeled who THEY think you are (parents, childhood friends) are not their to say “that’s not you” or “you’ve changed”. Well, maybe that person didn’t change but finally became who they really are. I totally relate to this as a fellow Midwesterner even though my changes were not as quick or as dramatic.
A couple of years ago, frustrated by a takeout Italian sandwich with unevenly distributed fillings, I had a wonderful, life-changing idea: chopped sandwiches. It’s like what you get at those chopped salad places but instead of chopping up all the ingredients and putting them into a bowl, you put them between two slices of bread or in a hoagie roll or whatever. That way, you get all of the elements of the sandwich — cheese, tomato, lettuce, dressing/mayo, onion, whatever — in every single bite. Yum.
Chopwiches already exist — tuna salad, Philly cheesesteaks, chicken salad, egg salad — and they’re amazing because you get all of their deliciousness in every bite. I just wanted to extend that enjoyment to many other types of sandwich: banh mi, BLT, Italian sub, gyro, turkey club, and even the humble ham and cheese. Great idea, right? I wanted to open a chopped sandwich restaurant and change the world.
Then I made a mistake: I told people about my idea. And every single one of them laughed at me. To my face! My friends, my kids, everyone. It was a heartbreaking moment but as an entrepreneur, I knew I had to persist and follow my dream. Like Wayne Gretzky said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” And I was going to win.
But the whole thing became a joke for awhile and I had to play along, biding my time. My friend Caroline came up with a name: Choppke’s. We brainstormed slogans and things the sandwich artists could say to patrons:
- Choppke’s. You’ll Love It to Bits.
- Welcome to Choppke’s, your wich is my command.
- As you wich. [In response to any customer query.]
- Welcome to Choppke’s! What can I get chopping for you today?
I asked ChatGPT to come up with a logo; this was my favorite one:
When (not if!) Choppke’s gets huge, there’s gonna be a corporate jet, so I wanted to see what that was going to look like:
Caroline got me a custom-made hat for my birthday (actual hat and actual dopey human wearing it, not AI-generated):
Ever so slowly, I was winning her over, despite every fiber of her being telling her that a chopped sandwich restaurant was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard and causing her to question the entire basis of our relationship. And if I could get one person on my side, a person who thought I was an idiot, the rest of the world would surely follow. Ideas + persistence = manifesting your reality.
I think it was the legendary management guru Michael Scott (quoting IBM founder Steve Jobs) who said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Well, my long chopped sandwich skate has finally paid off — the puck is here! According to The Takeout, the chopped sandwich is all the rage on TikTok!
If you enjoy a good chopped salad, the kind where every component (veggies, cheese, protein) is chopped into uniformly forkable bites and then tossed in dressing, you’re halfway to a chopped salad sandwich, sometimes just referred to as a chopped sandwich. It’s simply any version of that same salad, just stuffed into a hinge-cut roll. The shape of the roll is crucial, as it prevents all the fillings from falling out the sides.
Yes, exactly. Wow. I’ve never felt so seen. What’s that smell? No, not a delicious chopped sandwich…it’s the sweet smell of V-I-N-D-I-C-A-T-I-O-N.
Nearly any filling is a candidate for a chopped salad sandwich, and that’s the part that appeals most to TikTok users. Beyond the go-to Italian sub, you can create chopped salad sandwiches that contain Vietnamese banh mi ingredients, wedge salads, Caesar salads, whatever your heart desires. And that versatility means it’s a goldmine for social media content.
A goldmine! You’re goddamn right it’s a goldmine! The time is right, the market is PRIMED, Gen Z is on board, it’s now or never. We’re gonna do it, Choppke’s is a go!
Now, just to properly calibrate expectations, I haven’t looked at any commercial real estate nor have I made a single chopped sandwich of any kind at home to test out whether they actually taste better or not because I just know they will. What I do have is the idea (which is amazing, as we’ve agreed), a janky misspelled AI logo, and a dream.
Right now, you’re probably wondering how you can help, how you can climb aboard this rocket ship, how you can secure a place in a better future for us all. Well, I’m happy to announce that you can join the movement for better, tastier sandwiches today by zhuzhing yourself up with an exclusive Choppke’s t-shirt!
All proceeds from shirt sales will be pumped into developing the Choppke’s franchise (or, if that doesn’t work out, buying myself sandwiches from the local deli). Thanks for the support everyone — even though I could have done it without you, I definitely couldn’t have done it without you.
Hi, Edith here. This is the first in an interview series in which I talk to people about their media diets and habits. Jason seemed like a good person to start with as we figure out the format, although honestly his actual Media Diet series is more thorough. Look for the next installment in a few weeks!
So, have you seen or read anything good recently?
I saw Dune Two on opening weekend. And I went by myself, which I like to do. There are no IMAX screens in Vermont, but there’s a theater about 45 minutes from me with a screen called the T-Rex. It’s not quite IMAX, but it’s not bad either.
How was it?
Great. Better than the first one.
And it was definitely a movie that you want to see on the big screen. Like you could feel the bass, and at one particular moment it felt like the whole theater was vibrating.
I’m sure you’ve read Dune. Have you read it many times?
I have not read Dune, ever.
Really?!
I’m not sure the movie necessarily makes me want to read Dune, either, which is surprising, because usually when I see a movie based on a book, I’ll be like, “Oh I need to read that.” Like when I saw Oppenheimer, later I read the book it’s based on, which is this 600-page biography of Robert Oppenheimer. And it was good, but I think the movie was better.
You mentioned the other day that you haven’t been enjoying, or even reading, many books recently. Is that true?
Pretty much? For the last couple months, I’ve been working a lot, and that means spending a lot of time on a device – my computer, my phone. And generally I don’t want to read after I’ve been working a lot. TV is much more something I turn to. Also video games. Like I play Fortnite, which is something I started doing with my kids, but now I play more than they do, which is weird.
And so you’re playing against other strangers on the Internet?
Exactly.
Are you good?
I don’t think so. But I’ve gotten a lot better.
And I know you play some of the NY Times games too.
I do the crossword almost exclusively with a friend over FaceTime. She shares her screen, and we solve them together.
I wasn’t a crossword puzzle person beforehand – and I kind of hate Scrabble because at a certain level it’s all about strategy and memorization, which is boring to me. I felt similarly about crossword puzzles, but then she and I started doing them, and I was like, “Oh this is actually pretty fun,” and now we do maybe two or three a week.
And I don’t do Wordle, but I do play the Spelling Bee and Connections. And I’ll do the little mini crosswords on my phone. But a lot of that is just procrastinating about getting out of bed in the morning.
So they’re mostly morning experiences for you?
Yes. I will go back to Spelling Bee, though, if I didn’t do well in the morning.
What’s doing well?
I don’t get Genius every day, but I would like to. But sometimes I just don’t have the patience for the particular puzzle, and I’m like, I’m sorry, I don’t want to grind.
And I’m not judging others, but for me, if I’m spending too long on the Spelling Bee, it means I probably need to get up and move my body, or, you know, engage my brain in a different way.
You mentioned that you read Middlemarch last year. How did you squeeze that in? Because that’s a commitment.
Middlemarch was wonderful. I loved it. When you take seven months off work, you can have time to relax, and my reading went crazy. I couldn’t get enough books, because I wasn’t reading anything online. I stopped cold turkey, basically. People would send me links, like, “Here’s an interesting New Yorker article,” and I’m like, nope. Not even news. Not gonna read it. I’m gonna read about Dorothea and Casaubon.
What were other highlights, book-wise, from that time?
Middlemarch was definitely the highlight. I don’t know if I’ll ever have another sabbatical like that. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
Right now I’m listening to a good audiobook, though: Blood in the Machine, by Brian Merchant. It’s about the Luddites.
It was painted as an anti-technology movement in the early 19th century, but the book recontextualizes it as a labor movement. Rich factory owners were introducing new technologies, and people were getting laid off. Workers were angry and would go into the factories to smash machines, but they would only smash the ones that were, like, driving people out of work. The machines that actually helped the laborers do their jobs, those were kept.
And he relates it to what’s going on these days with AI and the current anti-tech movement. I’m enjoying it.
How did you hear about it?
I’d seen it on some “best of” lists at the end of 2023, and then Casey Johnston recommended it on Blue Sky. She was like “this book is great,” and so I was like, Okay, that’s good enough for me.
Do you listen to things most of the time while you’re driving?
Maybe half the time. I also use driving time to think. Like if there’s some work thing I need to think over, I’ll put on music without words, and just, you know, spin the wheels.
But when I don’t feel like doing that, I’ll listen to an audiobook or podcast.
What kinds of music do you listen to?
The music thing is embarrassing because I don’t listen to a lot of, like, new music. André 3000’s flute album is maybe the newest thing I’ve listened to recently.
I can’t write when the music has lyrics, so when I’m working I play a lot of classical and soundtracks. Also videos on YouTube. One of my favorites is just basically an ice breaker idling in the Arctic during a storm.
I also listen to a lot of electronic music, at varying levels of, uh, what would be considered good? And when I’m programming or designing, I listen to a lot of upbeat house, club, and techno.
Anything you’ve seen recently that just wasn’t for you?
Rebel Moon on Netflix was bad. Not even “not for me.” Just objectively terrible.
And something you loved?
The Zone of Interest. I saw it a few weeks ago and have thinking about it ever since, especially the sound design.
Well. Finally. I’m unbelievably pleased, relieved, and exhausted to launch the long-awaited (by me) redesign of kottke.org today. Let’s dive right into what has changed and why.
{ Important: If the “logo” on the left/top is not circles and is squares/diamonds instead, you can update your browser to the latest version to see it how I intended. (Will be looking for a fix for this…) }
(Justified and) Ancient. The last time I redesigned the site, a guy named Barack Obama was still President. Since then, I’ve launched the membership program, integrated the Quick Links more fully into the mix, (more recently) opened comments for members, and tweaked about a million different things about how the site works and looks. But it was overdue for a full overhaul to better accommodate all of those incremental changes and, more importantly, to provide a solid design platform for where the site is headed. Also, I was just getting tired of the old design.
Back to the Future. In my post introducing the new comments system, I wrote about the potential for smaller sites like mine to connect people and ideas in a different way:
The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.
Before Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat came along and centralized social activity & output on the web, blogs (along with online diaries, message boards, and online forums) were social media. Those sites borrowed heavily from blogging — in the early years, there wasn’t much that those sites added in terms of features that blogs hadn’t done first. With the comments and now this redesign, I’m borrowing some shit back from the behemoths.
A social media design language has evolved, intelligible to anyone who’s used Twitter or Facebook in the past decade. Literally billions of people can draw what a social media post looks like on a napkin, show it to someone else from the other side of the world, and they’d say, “oh, that’s a post”. In thinking about how I wanted kottke.org to look and, more importantly, feel going forward, I wanted more social media energy than blog energy — one could also say “more old school blog energy than contemporary blog energy”. Blogs now either look like Substack/Medium or Snow Fall and I didn’t want to pattern kottke.org after either of those things. I don’t want to write articles — I want to blog.
Practically speaking, “social media energy” means the design is more compact, the type is smaller,1 the addition of preview cards for Quick Links, and the reply/share/???? buttons at the bottom of each post. But, it also still looks like a personal (old school) blog rather than a full-blown Twitter clone (I hope). I think this emphasis will become clearer as time goes on.
So What’s Different? I mean, you can probably tell for yourself what’s changed, but I’ll direct your eye to a few things. 1. Member login + easy account access for members on the top of every page. kottke.org has always been very much my site…but now it’s just a little bit more our site. 2. No more top bar (on desktop), so the content starts much higher on the page. 3. Most Quick Links have a preview card (also called an unfurl) that shows the title, a short description, and often an image from the link in question — the same as you’d get if someone sent you a link via text or on WhatsApp. 4. We’ve bid a fond farewell to the Whitney typeface and welcomed Neue Haas Unica into the fold. 5. IMO, the design is cleaner but also more information dense, reflecting the type of blogging I’d like to do more of. 6. Dark mode! There’s no toggle but it’ll follow your OS settings.
Billions and Billions. kottke.org has (famously?) never had a logo. I’ve never wanted one thing to represent the site — in part because the site itself is all over the place and also because it’s fun to switch things up every once in awhile. Instead, I’ve always gone for a distinctive color or gradient that lets readers know where they are. This time, I’ve opted for a series of circles — a friend calls them “the planets” — but with a twist. There are 32 images, each with 4 different hues and 8 different rotations, that can slot into the 4 available spaces…and no repeats. By my calculations (corrections welcome!), there are over 900 billion different permutations that can be generated, making it extremely unlikely that you’ll ever see the same exact combo twice. Even if, like last time, this design lasts for almost eight years.
Gimme the Goods. The tiny collection of kottke.org t-shirts has its own page on the site now. The Hypertext Tee based on the previous design will be offered only for another few weeks and then probably be retired forever. To be replaced with…TBD. 😉
Winnowing Down. Last time I redesigned, I went back and modified the template of every page on the site, even stuff from the late 90s and early 00s that no one actually remembers. This time around, I’m focusing only on the core site: blog posts from 1998-present, tag pages, membership, and the few pages you can get to from the right sidebar. The rest of the site, mostly pages deep in the archive that see very little (if any) traffic, are going to stick with the old design, effectively archived, frozen in digital amber. We wish those old pages well in their retirement.
So yeah, that’s kind of it for now. There is so much left to do though! The comments need some lovin’, some social media things need tightening up, the about page could use some tuning, the newsletter needs a visual refresh, a few other small things need doing — and then it’s on to the next project (which I haven’t actually decided on, but there are several options).
I’m happy to hear what you think in the comments, on social media, or via email — feedback, critique, and bug reports are welcome. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have not taken a full day off from the site since late December (including weekends), so I’m going to go collapse into a little puddle and sleep for about a week.
I’m feeling a little retrospective and nostalgic today, so if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to acknowledge a couple of personal milestones.
1. Today marks 19 years of me doing kottke.org as a full-time job. What. The. Actual. F? I kinda can’t believe it. Before this, the longest I’d ever stayed at a job was about two years…and the average was closer to 9-12 months. Aside from dropping out of grad school to bet my life on the World Wide Web, choosing to turn this website into my job is the best decision I’ve ever made.
Some of you may not know this, but when I went full-time, I ran a three-week “pledge drive” to fund my activities on the site. In 2005, this was an almost unheard-of thing to do — people did not send money to strangers over the internet for their personal websites. But it worked: that initial boost sustained me that first year and allowed me to build this career sharing the best of the internet with you. Those brave folks got a pretty good return on their risky investment, I’d say.
Several years ago, I circled back to the idea of a reader-funded site and since then, the membership program has completely transformed the site and my engagement with the work I do here. Incredibly, some of the folks who supported me back in 2005 are still supporting me today — a huge thank you to them and to everyone else who has supported the site along the way.
2. This is a less-obvious milestone with diffuse edges but one that came to mind this morning as I looked back at some photos from a couple of years ago. When I announced I was taking a sabbatical in May 2022, I wrote about my fiddle leaf fig and the metaphorical connection I seem to have with it:
I’d brought this glorious living thing into my house only to kill it! Not cool. With the stress of the separation, my new living situation, and not seeing my kids every day, I felt a little like I was dying too.
One day, I decided I was not going to let my fiddle leaf fig tree die…and if I could do that, I wasn’t going to fall apart either. It’s a little corny, but my mantra became “if my tree is ok, I am ok”. I learned how to water & feed it and figured out the best place to put it for the right amount of light. It stopped shedding leaves.
I went on to explain that my tree was not doing that well…and its condition was telling me that I needed a break. Well, what a difference the last two years have made. On the left is a photo I took two years ago today of my fig and on the right is from this morning:
Oh, there are a couple of janky leaves in today’s photo (the product of some inattentive watering earlier this winter as I failed to adjust to the winter dryness), but the plant is happy in a bigger pot and there are several new leaves just from the past two weeks (as the amount of daylight increases). There are also two other fiddles in the house that are descended from cuttings I took from this one — they’re also thriving and both have new leaves coming in right now.
I still have not written a whole lot about what I did (or didn’t do) during the seven months I was off, but after more than a year back, it seems pretty clear that the sabbatical did what I wanted it to. I feel like I’m thriving as much as my tree is. In recent months, I’ve launched a couple of new features (including the comments, which I’ve been really pleased with) and added another voice to the site. There’s a new thing launching soon (*fingers crossed*) and I have plans for more new features, including improvements to the comments.
More importantly, the site feels vital and fun in a way that it hasn’t for quite awhile. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops (nothing is — I’m looking at you, tax season), but I’m having a blast, am engaged with the work, and am feeling pretty fulfilled lately. So another huge thanks to everyone for hanging in there while I sorted my shit out — I appreciate you.
Today is Jason’s 50th birthday. Ten years ago, Aaron Cohen and I surprised Jason by rounding up as many Kottke.org guest hosts as we could find and taking over the site for the day.
If I’d planned further ahead, I would have done something similarly spectacular, like all of us (and there are even more guest hosts and friends-of-Kottke now) arriving in Vermont to take him on a party train to Montreal. (We need more party trains. We rented a party train — technically just a private car — for my wife Karen McGrane’s 50th birthday, and it was amazing.) But we will just have to settle for this short solo tribute.
Jason runs the best blog on the planet, and he’s been doing it for half his life. But blog posts rarely go viral any more, and Jason’s style was never about controversy or provocation or any of the things that lead to virality, even novelty. Jason has cultivated an audience of dedicated readers who help make other things go viral.
I’m sure there are casual Kottke.org readers, but most of the ones I’ve encountered in my thirteen years writing for the site are unusually devoted to it, and to him as a writer and editor — again, even though Jason himself does not do most of the things that inspire that kind of charismatic devotion.
Jason puts the internet first and keeps himself at arm’s length. So you get peeks and pieces of his face and his character, but mostly it shows through his interests rather than his confessions.
I’ve been lucky that Jason’s been my friend and counselor and frequent collaborator now for many years. And we’re lucky to have him. We’re lucky that he and a few others from the beginning of blogging/posting are holding it down for RSS and the open web. We’re generationally lucky that so much of Gen X’s contribution to this still evolving form has a steadfast representative — even though again, Jason is not especially well-characterized by most of the stereotypes about Generation X!
We’re lucky that as the fortunes of online advertising for independent sites have waxed and waned, Jason has still found a model that has let him keep doing what he does full-time. And we should celebrate that and keep it going. (It would make an excellent birthday gift.)
Ten years ago, when we took over the site for a day, we asked each of the guest hosts to say something about their favorite Kottke.org post. I wrote a short essay called “Computers Are For People,” which riffed on a 2009 post Jason wrote called “One-Handed Computing with the iPhone”. You can read both pieces to find out more about why September 27th is important to me, for reasons only tangentially to do with Jason. But it ends like this:
Jason is important to me because Jason is always writing about how technology is for human beings. He doesn’t bang gavels and rattle sabres and shout “TECHNOLOGY IS FOR HUMAN BEINGS!” That’s partly because Jason is not a gavel-banging, sabre-rattling sort of person. But it’s mostly because it wouldn’t occur to him to talk about it in any other way. It’s so obvious.
The thing that tech companies forget — that journalists forget, that Wall Street never knew, that commenters who root for tech companies like sports fans for their teams could never formulate — that technology is for people — is obvious to Jason. Technology is for us. All of us. People who carry things.
People. Us. These stupid, stubborn, spectacular machines made of meat and electricity, friends and laughter, genes and dreams.
Happy birthday, Jason. I hope you’re surrounded by people you love today. Here’s to the next 50 years of Kottke.org.*
Watch video on YouTube.
* It could be a family business! The Ochs-Sulzbergers did it! Why not Ollie or Minna? Dream big, kids.
Update: Oh man, thank you Tim! And also to the Swedish Chef! What a lovely and touching surprise. I was going to write a bday post this morning — something about how the only thing I want for my birthday is for you to support kottke.org with a membership, buy a Squiggle t-shirt, etc. — but it seems like Tim’s got that covered. So, I’m gonna take the day and I’ll see you back here tomorrow. I’m gonna get changed, grab my bike, and head out to the trails. 👋 -jason
P.S. You should check out Tim’s new gig: he’s producing a weekly newsletter about AI called The Batch.
Hey folks, just a short note to say that I’m dropping in to answer some more questions over on the Kottke AMA site this afternoon, so head on over there to check out what’s new or read through some previous questions if you missed it a couple of weeks ago.
Just a quick reminder that I answered a bunch of questions from readers for the inaugural Kottke.org Ask Me Anything. I talked about how to separate work from life:
If I let it, every part of my life could be part of my job: not only books, movies, and travel but kids, relationships, emotions, everyday goings-on, etc. etc. etc. That’s the way it used to be, much more than it is now. But slicing and dicing everything up for consumption all the time, meta-experiencing absolutely everything; that’s no way to live. Back in the day, you saw journalers and bloggers burn out from sharing too much of themselves and their lives online with others — now you see it happening with YouTubers, TikTokers, and influencers. I’ve learned (mostly) how to meter myself; you get less of me now (this AMA notwithstanding) but hopefully for much longer.
And who I have in mind when I write for the site:
The site is best when I try to write posts as if each one is an email to a curious friend who I think would be interested in the thing I’m writing about, irrespective of topic/subject/field/whatever. I know not everyone is interested in every topic (or even most topics!) but I tend to look for things that people might find intriguing even if they don’t normally collect stamps, skateboard, watch ballet, appreciate mathematics, or listen to rap. Anything is interesting if you dig deep enough, observe it from the correct angle, or talk to the right enthusiast.
And what my kids and I have read before bedtime:
One book we read together that turned out to be surprisingly popular with them (when they were ~9-11 years old) was Emily Wilson’s excellent translation of The Odyssey. They were already fans of Greek mythology and knew some of the story and Wilson’s writing is so wonderful — “Soon Dawn was born, her fingers bright with roses” — that we blazed right through it and were sad when it ended.
And a favorite recent pasta recipe:
I have been really enjoying this Pasta alla Norcina recipe I found on Instagram awhile back. There’s some great Italian sausage that I get from the local market that works really well for it. And my daughter got me some truffle oil for my birthday, so we put a little bit of that on there too.
I might pop in there later this week to answer some more questions, so stay tuned! Folks had lots of questions about my process and what I learned on my sabbatical, so I may tackle them next.
Last month, I put out a call for readers to ask me anything — “questions about the sabbatical, media diets, 25 years of blogging, membership stuff, editorial policies, my fiddle leaf fig, Mastodon, parenting, Fortnite, etc.” I meant to start answering these sooner, but I ended up getting so any questions (over 330 of them!) that I decided to go a little overboard and build a little site to host the questions and answers.
I’ll be spending the entire day today answering questions over there, so check it out now and then come back later for more. You can favorite posts to help others discover what the collective readership thinks are the best ones. Here’s one of the questions I’ve answered so far:
Q: What’s the reader profile you have in your mind when you write? Are you thinking about someone or some kind of person specifically? I’m a 37 year old lawyer who can’t even remember how I first came across your blog. I’ve read for 10+ years and have always sort of wondered if you had a sense of the breadth of people who read your blog. I don’t necessarily fit neatly within any of the topics you focus on but always learn something when I dip in. - Garo
A: The site is best when I try to write posts as if each one is an email to a curious friend who I think would be interested in the thing I’m writing about, irrespective of topic/subject/field/whatever. I know not everyone is interested in every topic (or even most topics!) but I tend to look for things that people might find intriguing even if they don’t normally collect stamps, skateboard, watch ballet, appreciate mathematics, or listen to rap. Anything is interesting if you dig deep enough, observe it from the correct angle, or talk to the right enthusiast.
Check out the full AMA for more.
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch Fire:
When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence. What follows is my (relatively brief) attempt to explain where kottke.org came from and why it’s still going.
It’s an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since I experienced that “thunderbolt that completely changed my life” — it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses and organizes an ever-growing share of human information and activity. As a web designer in the 90s and early 00s, I helped companies figure out how to use the web for business, but the core of my own personal experience of the web has always been self-expression and making websites for individual humans to read & experience.
I started making personal websites shortly after discovering the web, first using Notepad and then a program called HTML Assistant. My first site had an audience of exactly one — it lived on a 3.5” floppy disk and was mostly a jazzed-up version of my bookmarks file that I carried back and forth from my dorm room to the physics lab. When I was finally able to finagle public server access, I launched a site called “some web space” (all lowercase, because 90s)1 that included a hand-drawn graphic of swiss cheese and a bunch of links related to Pulp Fiction. This is me right around that time:
That tiny baby Jason loved cheese, Quentin Tarantino, and the World Wide Web, bless his little heart.
Anyway, the sites I built then were terrible at first, but I was obsessed and slowly they improved. some web space turned into a site called 0sil8, which became a playground of sorts for my experiments in writing and design. Every few weeks/months, I’d create a new “episode” to put up on 0sil8 and gradually I gained an online following and became part of a community of folks who were likewise experimenting with the web.
Around this time, more and more of what I was reading online were diaries and these things called weblogs.2 The updates on weblogs & diaries were smaller but more frequent than on other personal sites — their velocity felt different, exhilarating. But by the time I actually got interested enough to start my own weblog, there were so many of them — hundreds! maybe thousands! — that I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested. I forged ahead anyway and on March 14, 1998, I started the weblog that would soon become kottke.org. It was called Notes and here’s what it looked like:
I’m not gonna go through the whole history of the site, but it eventually took off in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Since 2005, kottke.org has been my full-time job and supports my family. I’ve met so many people from all over the world through my work here, including many life-long friends and my (now ex-) wife. I’ve spoken at conferences and travelled the world. I got to be on TV. I launched a membership program (which you should totally join if you haven’t already) that has given the site an incredible boost as it powers through its third decade.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of kottke.org, I wrote this:
I’ve been reading back through the early archives (which I wouldn’t recommend), and it feels like excavating down through layers of sediment, tracing the growth & evolution of the web, a media format, and most of all, a person. On March 14, 1998, I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little about actual real life. I was a cynical and cocky know-it-all. Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself. What the site has become in its best moments — a slightly highfalutin description from the about page: “[kottke.org] covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity” — has given me a chance to “try on” hundreds of thousands of ideas, put myself into the shoes of all kinds of different thinkers & creators, meet some wonderful people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to call my friends), and engage with some of the best readers on the web (that’s you!), who regularly challenge me on and improve my understanding of countless topics and viewpoints.
I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you. I feel so so so lucky to have had this opportunity.
That all still rings incredibly true and I cannot improve upon it as an explanation of why I’m still here doing this moderately anachronistic thing. Thank you all so much for reading. ♥
P.S. You can read my thoughts on past anniversaries and view some previous site designs here: 10 years, 18-ish years, 20 years, and 24 years.
P.P.S. I wrote a separate post about this yesterday, but if you find value in what I do here, I’d appreciate if you’d support the site by purchasing a membership. And to everyone who has supported the site over the years, thank you so much!
P.P.P.S. Last one: I’m gonna write more about this later today, but I’ve turned ordering back on for Kottke Hypertext Tees for the next 24 hours or so. Go get ‘em!
P.P.P.P.S. Ha, I’ve thought of one more thing: I’ve turned comments on for this post! kottke.org used to allow comments on every post, but it’s been almost 8 years since the last time they were on. I figured it would be fun to try them out today. No idea if they’re even going to work or how long they will be available, but let’s try it out. If you’d like to share how long you’ve been reading the site or leave any memories or observations, feel free. My inbox is open as well. Ok, that’s really all for now! Thank you!
Update: A bunch of comments got hung up in a spam filter in my CMS that I didn’t even know was active. They should be all through now…sorry about that!
So, it’s been a few months since I’ve been back to work here and perhaps some of you have noticed that I haven’t really written about my sabbatical at all. It wasn’t my intent to skip out on it, but life outside of work has been much busier than I’ve wanted or planned for and I just haven’t had the bandwidth to do it. Plus I’ve just wanted to get back in the flow here — and any extra site time has gone into shoring up some things on the backend, dealing with the Twitter API idiocy, getting in the flow on Mastodon, and thinking about how I might want the site to look/work/feel differently (all stuff that you folks don’t necessarily see day-to-day but do feel the indirect effects of).
Anyway, I thought with the sabbatical in the rear view mirror yet largely unmentioned here in detail and the upcoming 25th anniversary of the site (!!!), it would be a good time to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything). I’ve set up a form at Google to collect questions and sometime in the next couple of weeks (exact date TBD), I’ll spend an entire day answering them right here on the site (exact method of answering also TBD).
So, what would you like to know? I imagine there will be questions about the sabbatical, media diets, 25 years of blogging, membership stuff, editorial policies, my fiddle leaf fig, Mastodon, parenting, Fortnite, etc., but you can also ask about anything you might be curious about or that I might have an opinion about. It would be neat to get some questions that I’m not usually asked — but I have no idea what they would be. I don’t mind hard questions — as long as they’re thoughtful (gotcha questions will be ignored). I probably won’t get to every question, but I will answer as many as I can. Thanks and ask away!
Update: A bunch of great questions so far! Keep them coming!
I posted this earlier today to the newsletter and thought I’d publish it here too. -jason
Hey folks. I’ve been back at work on kottke.org for a couple of weeks now and just wanted to give you a little update on where I’m at. In a brief reentry post, I promised a “massive forthcoming post” about my sabbatical activities and thoughts. I had planned on having that done by now, but…………….. well, it’s not. And honestly I don’t know when it’s going to be. I’ve got the whole thing sketched out and have been working on it in dribs and drabs, but taking on such a big thing after not having written & thought in a structured way for months is proving difficult. I’ve realized that I haven’t had sufficient time to reflect on my experiences — I believe I have interesting things to say and conclusions to draw about the sabbatical, but not just yet.
The other thing is: I’m just having a really good time being back in the saddle here. I’m finding that I’d rather just work on the day-to-day site stuff, which is more variable than just the heads-down, pure writing that the big post requires. (Dirty little secret: The actual writing I do for the site is often my least favorite part of all the different things that go into running kottke.org. Newsflash: writer hates writing, details at 6pm.)
With recent posts about a Chinese painter of replica van Goghs who visits Europe to see real van Goghs, a lovely Twitter thread of big-name authors recalling low-turnout readings they’ve done, Jenny Odell’s forthcoming new book, a new USPS stamp celebrating John Lewis, a site that rates apples, an AI imagining scenes from Jodorowsky’s Tron, a list of the best books of 2022, the truffle industry being a big scam, the best photos from NASA’s Artemis I mission to the Moon, this appreciation of a tight action scene from Top Gun: Maverick, a 1-dimensional version of Super Mario Bros., “wet putty” car paint jobs, parentification, and dozens of other posts and links, I feel like I’ve gotten off to a good start and just want to keep the momentum going on that. So anyway, thank you for your continued patience as I figure out how this all works again.
Oh, and here’s a new thing: for those who have jettisoned Twitter, I’ve created a Mastodon account for kottke.org. Links to all my posts and Quick Links are now available at botsin.space/@kottke, in addition to the usual places: Twitter, RSS, Facebook, and kottke.org. Thanks for reading!
*peeks hesitantly around the corner*
Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actually, I’ve been posting a bit here and there this week already — underpromise & over-deliver, etc.) I’m going to share more about what I’ve been up to (and what I’ve not been up to) in a massive forthcoming post, but for now, know that I’m happy to be back here in the saddle once again. (And that my fiddle leaf fig is doing well!)
I am, however, still dealing with some chronic pain that sometimes makes it difficult for me to work. I’m doing the things I need to do to get better & stronger, but just be aware that it might affect my output here. It’s a very frustrating situation — in many ways, I’m in the best physical shape of my life and am excited to be back here but this more-or-less constant background pain is a real source of friction as I go about my day. Just wanted to get that out there — thanks for your continued patience.
Ok, here we go!
It’s been about five months since I announced I was taking a sabbatical and lately I’ve been getting messages from members and readers asking what’s been going on. While I don’t have anything specific to say about how it’s been going (other than I’m well and that I’ve been mostly and blissfully offline), I did want to share a brief update on my plans for the fall:
I will be returning to work on the site sometime in November or December. I don’t know exactly what shape that will take, but it will resemble what I was doing before I paused back in May: posting interesting links and things to share with you on this here website. You know, fine hypertext products.
In the meantime, I hope you’ve been enjoying some of the timeless posts from the archive that are being posted to the front page — just a few each week. Finishing that republishing system was an enjoyable little sabbatical task…it was fun to dip my toes back into programming.
Anyhoo, I’ll see you soon. -jason
Hello, everyone. I’m going to be taking an extended break from kottke.org, starting today. I’ve been writing here for more than 24 years, nearly half my life — I need a breather. This is something I have been thinking about and planning for years1 and I’d like to share why I’m doing it, how it’s going to work, what I hope to accomplish, and how you can help.
This is a long post and was a hard one to write — I hope you’ll give it your thoughtful attention. But first, let me introduce you to my plant.
(This is going somewhere. Trust me.)
Eight years ago when I still lived in NYC, I bought a fiddle leaf fig tree from a store in the Flower District. Here it is a couple of years ago, thriving next to my desk here in Vermont:
I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and figured a large plant in my new place would add some liveliness to a new beginning that was feeling overwhelming, lonely, and sad. For the first couple of months, I didn’t know if my tree and I were going to make it. I’d never really had a plant before and struggled getting a handle on the watering schedule and other plant care routines. It started losing leaves. Like, an alarming number of leaves.
I’d brought this glorious living thing into my house only to kill it! Not cool. With the stress of the separation, my new living situation, and not seeing my kids every day, I felt a little like I was dying too.
One day, I decided I was not going to let my fiddle leaf fig tree die…and if I could do that, I wasn’t going to fall apart either. It’s a little corny, but my mantra became “if my tree is ok, I am ok”. I learned how to water & feed it and figured out the best place to put it for the right amount of light. It stopped shedding leaves.
The fig tree was a happy plant for several years after that. And I was ok because my plant was ok — I found new routines and rhythms in my altered life, made new traditions with my kids, got divorced, met new people, moved to a new state (w/ my family and tree), rediscovered who I was as a person, and, wonderfully and unexpectedly, forged a supportive and rewarding parenting partnership and friendship with my ex. We made it through that tough time together, that plant and me.
Recently however, my fiddle leaf fig has been struggling again. It’s been losing leaves and has become lopsided — some branches are going gangbusters while others are almost bare and the plant is listing so badly to one side that the whole thing tips over without the weight of water in the pot. This is what it’s looking like these days:
My plant is not ok. And neither am I — I feel as off-balance as my tree looks. I’m burrrrned out. I have been for a few years now. I’ve been trying to power through it, but if you’ve read anything about burnout, you know that approach doesn’t work.
I appreciate so much what I’ve built here at kottke.org — I get to read and learn about all sorts of new things every day, create new ideas and connections for people, and think in public — and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to set my own schedule, be my own boss, and provide for my family. But if you were to go back into the archive for the past several months and read the site closely, you’d see that I’ve been struggling.
Does what I do here make a difference in other people’s lives? In my life? Is this still scratching the creative itch that it used to? And if not, what needs to change? Where does kottke.org end and Jason begin? Who am I without my work? Is the validation I get from the site healthy? Is having to be active on social media healthy? Is having to read the horrible news every day healthy? What else could I be doing here? What could I be doing somewhere else? What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs? I’ve tried thinking about these and many other questions while continuing my work here, but I haven’t made much progress; I need time away to gain perspective.
· · ·
So. The plan, as it currently stands, is to take 5-6 months away from the site. I will not be posting anything new here. I won’t be publishing the newsletter. There won’t be a guest editor either — if someone else was publishing here, it would still be on my mind and I’m looking for total awayness here. I’m planning on setting up a system to republish some timeless posts from the archive while I’m away, but that’s not fully in place yet. If you send me email (please do!), it might take me awhile to read it and even longer to reply — I plan to ignore my inbox as much as I can get away with. I probably won’t be on Twitter but will be more active on Instagram if you want to follow me there.
The goal of my time away from the site is resting, resetting, recharging, and figuring out what to do going forward. In this NY Times feature, Alexandra Bell said this about how art is made: “I need some space to think and live and have generative conversations and do things, and then I’ll make something, but I can’t tell you what it is just yet.” That’s the sort of energy I need to tap into for a few months.
Here’s the way I’ve been thinking about it: there’s a passenger ferry that goes from Cape Cod to Nantucket and there’s a stretch of time in the middle of the journey where you can’t see the mainland behind you and can’t yet see the island ahead — you’re just out in the open water. That’s what I need, to be in that middle part — to forget about what I’ve been doing here for so many years without having to think about where I’m going in the future. I need open water and 5-6 months feels like the right amount of time to find it.
· · ·
This is probably a good time to admit that I’m a little terrified about taking this time off. There’s no real roadmap for this, no blueprint for independent creators taking sabbaticals to recharge. The US doesn’t have the social safety net necessary to enable extended breaks from work (or much of anything else, including health care) for people with Weird Internet Careers. I support a lot of individual writers, artists, YouTubers, and bloggers through Substack, Patreon, and other channels, and over the years I’ve seen some of them produce content at a furious pace to keep up their momentum, only to burn out and quit doing the projects that I, and loads of other people, loved. With so many more people pursuing independent work funded directly by readers & viewers these days, this is something all of us, creators and supporters alike, are going to have to think about.
I’ve said this many times over the past 5 years: kottke.org would not be possible today without the incredible membership support I have gotten from the people who read this site. Members have enabled this site to be free for everyone to read, enriching the open web and bucking the trend towards paywalling information online. I hope you will continue to support me in taking this necessary time off.
If, for whatever reason, you would like to pause/suspend your membership until I return, email me and I would be happy to do that for you. You’re also free of course to raise or lower your membership support here if you’d like. Regardless of what you choose to do, I hope I will see you back here in the fall.
· · ·
If you’re curious about what’s on my agenda for the next few months, so am I! I’m leaving on a long-planned family trip soon, but other than that, I do not have any set plans. Suggestions and advice are welcome! I’d like to spend some unrushed time with my kids, who too often see me when I’m stressed out about work. I want to read more books. Watch more good movies. Take more photos. Go on pointless adventures. I want to exercise a little more regularly and figure out how to eat a bit better. Maybe travel some, visit friends or the ocean or both. Bike more. Stare at the walls. I hope to get a little bored. I need to tend to my fiddle leaf fig tree — if my tree is ok, I will be too.
I’m going to miss this — and all of you — more than I probably realize right now, but I’m ready for a break. I’ll see you in a few months.
*deep breath*
Here I go!
*jumps*
· · ·
P.S. The best way to keep tabs on when the site starts up again is to subscribe to the newsletter. You can also follow @kottke on Twitter, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow me on Instagram so you don’t miss anything.
P.P.S. Big big thanks to the many people I’ve talked to about this over the past few months and years, especially Anil, Alaina, David, Adriana, Tim, Caroline, Matt, Joanna, Meg, Aaron, Edith, Kara, Megan, Anna, Jackson, and Michelle. (Forgive me if I’ve forgotten anyone.) I value your wise counsel and your pointing me, hopefully, in the right direction.
P.P.P.S. A quick blogroll if you’re looking for sites and newsletters to keep you busy while I’m gone. In no particular order, a non-exhaustive list: The Kid Should See This, The Morning News, Waxy, Colossal, Curious About Everything, Open Culture, Drawing Links, Clive Thompson @ Medium, Cup of Jo, swissmiss, Storythings, things magazine, Present & Correct, Spoon & Tamago, Dense Discovery, Austin Kleon, NextDraft, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Poetry Is Not a Luxury, A Thing or Two, The Honest Broker, Interconnected, The Whippet, Craig Mod, Why is this interesting?, Sidebar, The Prepared, Life Is So Beautiful, Fave 5, Sentiers, The Fox Is Black, and Scrapbook Chronicles. Happy hunting!
Update: Hello, everyone. I want to thank you all so much for your emails, tweets, and DMs…yesterday was just a little overwhelming. I was apprehensive yesterday morning about publishing this post — I had no idea what the reaction was going to be — and, well, you folks turned it into a party. I’m so grateful for your support, advice, well-wishes, and understanding. I should not have doubted you — if this site is anything, it’s that way because of all of you. Thank you again for the support and I will see you in a few months. ❤
24 years ago today, I published the first post on kottke.org and, aside from a few weeks-long stretches (including a two-month paternity break when my son was born), I just never stopped. 1998! The late 20th century, for god’s sake. I write an anniversary post like this every year and I’m increasingly unsure how to think about the magnitude of that length of time — 24 years is just a few months away from being half of my life. Half. Of. My. Life. How? Why?!
In 2018, on the 20th anniversary of the site, I wrote a little bit about what I’ve gotten out of the site:
Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself. What the site has become in its best moments — a slightly highfalutin description from the about page: “[kottke.org] covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity” — has given me a chance to “try on” hundreds of thousands of ideas, put myself into the shoes of all kinds of different thinkers & creators, meet some wonderful people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to call my friends), and engage with some of the best readers on the web (that’s you!), who regularly challenge me on and improve my understanding of countless topics and viewpoints.
I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you. I feel so so so lucky to have had this opportunity.
I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch for the past several months, both related to the site and not, and it’s so helpful for me to read that today, to be reminded of what kottke.org has given me and the special place it occupies in my life. I know some of you have been reading since the very beginning and others only for a few weeks/months, but I’d like to thank all of you for coming along with me on this journey.
And hey, while I have you here, I’d especially like to thank those readers who have supported kottke.org with a membership over the last five years — that financial support has allowed me to keep this site open and free for everyone to read, an increasing rarity in today’s subscription media environment. If you would like to join them (or if you’re a former member1 wanting to contribute again), step right this way.
Hey all. Today is my birthday and the boss has given me the day off. I’m gonna spend time with some of my favorite humans, start a book I’ve been looking forward to reading, eat some good food, and, if it stops raining, go for a bike ride. I’ll see you back here tomorrow, bright eyed and bushy tailed.
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