It Is All Just So Very Very Stupid

Folks, I can’t even today. I gotta tap out. I hope to be back with you tomorrow.

• kottke.org
• video

This One Goes to 27

On this day 27 years ago, on March 14, 1998, I started this here website. I’m not sure what there is to say about the ridiculous length of time that I’ve spent doing this “moderately anachronistic thing” that I haven’t already said before:

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.

As always, thank you so much for reading and for the membership support. 💞

• kottke.org

It’s Infrastructure Week!

Following on from my post this morning, I think this is a good time to step back from the site for a bit and focus on some long-neglected backend things that just don’t get the attention they deserve when I’m busy with the day-to-day posting. There are a couple of projects in particular that I’ve been noodling with that need some focus, so I’m gonna do that for the rest of the week. I’ll probably pop in with a few links here and there, but for the most part, I will see you back here on Monday. Until then, be excellent to each other and party on dudes!

• kottke.org

How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

On Inauguration Day in January, Eliza McLamb wrote about her abstention from social media for a month and the challenge of keeping up with current events “without either turning towards ignorance or overwhelming myself with information”:

I’ve been thinking deeply about this idea recently — how much do I really need to know? I by no means think that I (or anyone) should be exempt from keeping up with the political and social going-ons of the world. Certainly, it’s invaluable to remember that one’s personal life is not reflective of the lives of everyone else. But I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.

Ultimately, I realized that this impulse actually resulted in me feeling less about the things I purported to care about. All the information swelled to a terrifying, dizzying checked-out-ed-ness, where I would make my way through a timeline that showed me children missing limbs in Palestine to an influencer’s makeup tutorial to details about Trump’s incoming cabinet to a house tour in the Hamptons. The bizarre, violent juxtaposition of it all started to turn my brain off. It was simply too much information.

I read this essay a few days after it was published and have been thinking about it (and related articles) more or less constantly ever since, not only in terms of what media & information I am consuming, but also in terms of what I’m sharing here.

Every damn day over the past month an a half, the Trump administration has dropped some new horror in their attempt to speed-run the fascist takeover of American democracy.¹ All of it is relevant and all of it matters. Just two days ago, Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who is legally residing in the United States with a green card, was detained and imprisoned by DHS agents on some Trumped up nonsense about “[leading] activities aligned to Hamas” (he was one of the leaders of Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment). This is right out of the fascist playbook; Adam Serwer:

The way it works is that you strip fundamental rights from targets with less political support that people will turn their consciences off to justify persecuting and then eventually the state can do it to anyone, that’s always been the plan. Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy.

Here’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as reported by the New Republic:

You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.”

“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone - left, right, or center - who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.

Trump said he was going to deport his enemies (i.e. people who oppose him) and you’ve read the fucking poem, so I hope that somehow this can be stopped long before it reaches 50-something, white, male bloggers who live in rural Vermont, not at all for my personal sake but for every preceding person they try this shit on, up to and including Mahmoud Khalil.

And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.

So, the question I’ve constantly been asking myself is: How should I be covering all this? What is the best use of your attention and my time, platform, and abilities? For the first couple of weeks, getting good information and analysis out about what was going on seemed most important, along with expert contextualization of events, providing actionable information, focusing on the stakes not the odds, and emphasizing the human stories and costs of the coup.

I believe all those things are still important to highlight. And writing about this still feels like something I have to do. However it feels increasingly unproductive for me to keep up with the “day to day” (even when that means something as consequential as the disappearing of legal residents for political reasons) on KDO. Other people and outlets are better equipped to keep you informed about such events. I do not want to contribute to folks feeling helpless or numb from information overwhelm — that won’t do any of us, or our future prospects for democracy, any good.

So yeah, that’s where I am right now — between the opposite poles of too much and not enough — if that makes any sense at all. I don’t know what the answer is just yet, if there even is one, but I suppose I will figure it out.

(I’m gonna open comments on this because I want to hear what you have to say about How Much You Need to Know or What You Want to Hear From Me, but I’m gonna strongly suggest that your personal opinion on our current political situation is better addressed elsewhere. Thanks.)

1. Which was well underway before Trump even came along. We’re in the “suddenly” part of our “gradually, then suddenly” political bankruptcy.↩

• 2025 Coup
• Adam Serwer
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
• Donald Trump
• Eliza McLamb
• kottke.org
• Mahmoud Khalil
• politics

How Are You?

Hey folks. I’m gonna take a break from KDO for the rest the day today (unless we invade Canada this afternoon or something) — I worked for much of last weekend and need a breather.

But I wanted to open up the comments here and ask: How are you doing? What’s your attention on these days? How are you coping with all of this uncertainty? What’s the view from your community? If you’d like to share, the comments are open.

I’ll see you tomorrow, hopefully with some Friday Foolishness.

• kottke.org

Blogging for Democracy

This is a great post from Mike Masnick about why Techdirt is writing more or less full-time about the Trump regime’s attack on democracy: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not).

I agree with every word of it. One of the points he makes is that media outlets like Techdirt (and Wired and 404 Media, etc) and reporters like Masnick that cover tech and the law are uniquely positioned to understand what has been going on, particularly w/r/t to Musk’s seizure of the government’s computer systems:

This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.

This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation of administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).

I’m not a legal expert or a reporter, but I have been covering & writing about technology for almost 30 years and when I saw what Musk was doing (in conjunction with Trump’s EOs and what Project 2025 promised), I recognized exactly what was going on and started to cover it almost exclusively:

I keep hearing people saying this is a five-alarm fire but I feel like it’s a 500-alarm fire…we need metaphorical fire trucks coming from thousands of miles away to fight this blaze.

Masnick’s other main point is even closer to my heart:

When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

We’ve always covered the intersection of technology, innovation, and policy (27+ years and counting). Sometimes that meant writing about patents or copyright, sometimes about content moderation, sometimes about privacy. But what happens when the fundamental systems that make all of those conversations possible start breaking down? When the people dismantling those systems aren’t even pretending to replace them with something better?

This x 10000. Like Masnick, I’ve gotten lots of feedback about my pivot to covering the coup, the overwhelming majority of it supportive — even the people who have told me they need to tap out from reading (I totally get it!) are generally approving. But there have been a few disapprovals as well, in the vein of “shut up and dribble” or “keep politics out of it” — which I also understand. To an extent. They want the Other Stuff back, the art and beauty and laughter and distraction, and for me to cool it with the politics.

But echoing Masnick, I believe that covering the rapid disassembly of American democracy is not some separate thing from the Other Stuff and never has been. The reason I have been able to write freely about those things for the last 27 years is because the US has had a relatively stable democracy¹ under which people feel free to innovate, create art, take risks, and be themselves. Those things become much more difficult under fascist and autocratic rule. In a recent piece, Masha Gessen describes how autocracy stifles creativity:

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.

I’m covering politics in this particular moment *because* the actions of the Trump administration are threatening all of that Other Stuff, because I want to be able to go back to covering design & photography & movies & science & food & travel & cities & all the cool things humans can do, and because I want my kids and everyone else’s kids to live in a stable, free society where they can make art, pursue scientific truth, be freely gay or trans, have health care, be able to have families, have a place to live, and, if they want to, write about frivolities on their websites. All of that becomes much more difficult if Trump/Musk get their way, and if I can help push back on their efforts in some small way with this platform that I have, I’m gonna do it. ✊✌️

1. I realize the phrase “relatively stable democracy” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. American democracy has never been as inclusive as it could be and a lot of people have been (and are still being) left out of participating fully in our society.↩

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• Elon Musk
• journalism
• kottke.org
• Mike Masnick
• politics
• USA

A Quick Anniversary Note

Today somehow marks 20 years of writing/editing/designing/producing kottke.org as my full-time job (and almost 27 years in total).¹ Here’s part of what I wrote five years ago to mark the 15th anniversary:

It seemed like madness at the time — I’d quit my web design job a few months earlier in preparation, pro blogs existed (Gawker was on its 3rd editor) but very few were personal, general, and non-topical like mine, and I was attempting to fund it via a then-largely-unproven method: crowdfunding. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, attempting this is “still the most bonkers I-don’t-know-if-this-is-going-to-work thing I’ve ever done”.

Thanks to everyone for reading and for all the support over the years.

1. I texted a friend yesterday: My website is older than Doechii. (It’s somehow been around for more than a quarter of the entire lifetime of the New Yorker magazine. And almost 11% of the age of the United States of America, which it might outlast who knows?)↩

• kottke.org

Wind It Back

Hi. I’ve gotten a few notes recently about the shift in direction here at KDO, so I wanted to quickly point back to this post from a few weeks ago that explains what’s going on with the site:

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 again, no hard feelings if that’s not what you’re here for and you need to step away or cancel your membership. Thank you to those of you who have written in with support, including folks who work for the government or for companies & organizations who are already being affected by the purges and illegal funding cuts. Hearing that my efforts here are useful in some way keeps me going.

That said, we’re doing Foolishness Friday again today. I miss this place as a source of creativity, a chronicle of the best that humanity is capable of, and somewhere folks can come to have a bit of a laugh. I don’t know if this is going to be a weekly thing or if some of this is going to be working its way back into the site on a regular basis — I guess we’ll find out together!

Anyway, how are things going with you all? I’ve grown tired of winter. We have so much snow here…last weekend it took me an hour and 15 min to shovel a path to my car and then to dig the car out. I’m reading Timothy Ryback’s book about Hitler’s rise to power (no reason), watching Black Doves on Amazon, and playing a lot of Fortnite (I think the new season is out soon/today?). This weekend, I’m hoping to spend some time with my daughter and going wild ice skating again.

• kottke.org

An Update

Hey, everyone. This week has been a little wonky/distracted for me — I was tending to a sick kid for a couple of days and am trying not to get sick myself, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked here at KDO reporting on the coup and what we can do about it. As I said in this comment on the wild skating post, this feels like a new job to me and this week I was barely hanging on. I’m hoping to have a cleaner slate next week for getting a better handle on things.

That said, I am sensing that we could use a bit of a break from the NEWS. Or at least I do — it’s Friday and I feel like sharing some art, good news, and foolishness. Foolishness Friday or some such. Anyway, I’ll be back on Monday (or maybe over the weekend) with, uh, that other stuff. ✌️

• kottke.org

A Programming Note

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.

• Covid-19
• Ed Yong
• Jason Kottke
• journalism
• kottke.org
• politics

OOO: I’ll See You Next Week

Hey folks. After a busy and productive fall & holiday season, kottke.org will be closed this week for some much-needed rest, relaxation, and recharging. I will be back next week, ready to gooooo!

• kottke.org

Some New Site Features to Report

Hey folks, I just wanted to update you on some things I’ve launched recently at the ol’ dot org. (RSS reader folk, you’re going to have to click through to the actual WWW to see these…don’t be scared, you can do it.)

1. Last month, I added the ability for members to fave comments, to see comments they’ve posted and faved, and the ability to sort comments in threads. You can read about those features here.

2. Image zooming. If you click on images in posts (on the Embroidery Journaling post or the Eadweard Muybridge image at the top of this post), the image will zoom to fill the browser. Clicking it again will shrink it again. (Oh and I’m testing a feature that does the same thing for videos.)

3. For the Quick Link URL cards/unfurls, I’m displaying the embedded video instead of a cover image. For example, see this post about the special overalls that Finnish university students wear.

4. I refreshed the design of the newsletter a little bit and added a link to the comment section of each post. Because HTML email is a pain in the ass, it doesn’t look/work quite how I want it to yet, but it’s getting there. More tbd.

5. And the best for last: I can now pull Bluesky & Mastodon posts into comment threads in the form of reposts. You can see it in action in the posts about Meta’s Free Speech Grift, HTML: the Most Significant Computing Language Ever Developed, and The Truth About January 6th. I’m using it to collect noteworthy direct comments to my posts on those platforms but also a curated collection of posts and links that I think are particularly relevant to particular posts. So far, it’s been such a quick & easy way to pull in more information and voices around a topic.

Inspiration for this feature came from social media (retweeting, etc.) but also from the original reblog concept developed by Jonah Peretti, Mike Frumin, and others at Eyebeam while we were all there. Their software was the inspiration for Tumblr’s reblog feature, Twitter’s retweet, and Facebook’s share. Going back to the source (and the linkblogging & feedreaders that they were inspired by) is a useful reminder that these sorts of features aren’t just available to Twitter & FB. And in fact, we’ve let social media sites pull in so much content & activity from the open web…it’s time to start pulling back a little.

Right now, reposting is something only I can do (*rubs hands together diabolically*) but I might open it up to others after I iron out a few kinks and if there’s interest. It only works with Bluesky & Mastodon rn, but I’m going to add email (for threads like this) and Threads, although after this bullshit, I may not bother. Anyway, this feature was on the original roadmap for comments and I’m so glad I found the time to finally make it happen.

Ok, that’s all for now. As always, let me know in the comments if you have questions, comments, concerns. ✌️

• kottke.org
• weblogs

Kottke Comments, Now With Faves

Hello, everyone. I just launched a few new features related to the comments here on kottke.org:

1. The ability to fave comments. This feature has been in test mode for the past few months, and I’m happy it’s finally getting a wider release. Only kottke.org members can fave for now (but I may open it up for everyone depending on how things go). For now, only you will be able to see what you’ve faved. The number of faves on each comment will be displayed next to the fave button (again, I’m going to see how this works…precise fave counts definitely have their minuses). Non-members will not see fave buttons or fave counts. You can’t fave your own comments — no getting high on your own supply.

There aren’t any limits to the number of comments you can fave, but in the spirit of kottke.org’s community guidelines, try to be thoughtful and community-minded about faves…at their best, faves are a useful communal signal for others looking for the most interesting and useful comments.

2. If you’re a member, you can see your own comments and those you’ve faved on your new profile page, which you can find in the menu in the upper right of every page — just click on your name and then “Profile”. (If you’re on mobile, click on the menu, then your name, then “Profile”.) I don’t know if this is the right place for profiles to live, but it’ll do for now. As I add more features to the site, I may have to shift things around a little.

No one else can see your profile page right now, but that might change in the future. At the moment, you won’t be able to see all of your comments and faves, only about ~30 of the most recent — I need to add some pagination here soon.

3. For longer comment threads, I’ve added a sorting option. The default is the threaded view but you can also sort by the most recently posted comments and most popular (i.e. by number of faves). Anyone can use this — it’s going to be super useful for keeping up with new comments on popular threads (like What’s The One Thing Only You Noticed?) and for surfacing the best comments.

Ok, that’s all! I’m pretty excited about finally getting this launched — there’s lots of interesting stuff being shared in the comments these days and helping people find it is a good thing! Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns. And as always, thank you to kottke.org’s members for their support in enabling new features like this. ✌️

• kottke.org

Any Suggestions for the Gift Guide?

I posted the first pass of the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide yesterday and just added some new items to it this morning (this link will take you right to the new stuff). I’m gonna be updating it every day or two with new gift guides and things I run across, but I wanted to ask you folks if there’s anything you would recommend for the list. Please leave a comment below! And don’t forget to include links — you can just paste a URL into the comment box and it will autolink it for you. (And comments are editable for 10 minutes, so if you screw it up or forget the link, you have time to fix it.)

If you run an online store or sell products that would be appropriate for holiday gifts, feel free to share your own stuff. (But be reasonable and personable — if you paste a press release into my website, I’m gonna yeet that comment right into the Sun.)

Comments are members-only, but I will also be taking suggestions via email — send them along and I will make sure they are included below. Thanks!

• kottke.org

The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide

Since 2013, I’ve done a holiday gift guide that’s basically a curated roundup of stuff from the best gift guides I can find. I always do it a little bit differently from year to year, and this year I’m going with a simple list. It’s gonna be dense…let’s go!

1. Charitable giving. If you can, give cash to your local food bank. Volunteer. Start with GiveWell’s list of “high-impact, cost-effective charities”. Here are Vox’s 10 guidelines for giving effectively. I personally give to the National Network of Abortion Funds.

2. The Kid Should See This Gift Guide is the GOAT for kids’ gifts. Every dang year they hit it out of the park. What caught my eye this year: Wyrmspan is a dragon-themed “sequel” to Wingspan by Elizabeth Hargrave; Yoto Player Bluetooth Speaker for Kids (I have friend who swear by these for their kids); Cloudspotting for Beginners (Bookshop); and the Thames & Kosmos Roller Coaster Engineering STEM Kit (omg, I would have loved loved loved this as a kid…and this Nat Geo magnetic marble run). [via The Kid Should See This Gift Guide]

3. You can give the gift of Kottke! *cringe* There’s The Kottke Hypertext Tee and The Process Tee in light & dark colors. There are kottke.org gift memberships as well starting at $30/yr; check the FAQ on the membership page for more options and details.

4. Wahhhhh, I love these spring bowls & sun bowls from Studio Arhoj. Oh and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Bookshop) and The Complete Far Side (Bookshop). [via The Atlantic’s 2024 Gift Guide]

5. Twelve South AirFly Duo is a Bluetooth transmitter that you can plug into the jack on your seatback TV on the airplane and then use your Bluetooth headphones to listen to your movie. I have one of these; it works great. Apple AirTags are essential travel infrastructure these days. Oooh, there’s a new addition to the Sushi Go! family of games: Spin Some for Dim Sum. I reget to admit I am a tiny bit curious about Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. [via The Verge’s 2024 holiday gift guide]

6. You know her, you love her: Edith Zimmerman. Her Etsy shop is chock full of prints, cards, and even original watercolor paintings. Go get ‘em.

7. Verbatim from last year: You’re probably getting tired of me talking about the 2nd-gen Apple AirPods Pro but I use mine every day and they are great. Almost every book I read, I read on the Kindle Paperwhite — it’s light, waterproof, and very travel-friendly. (Though I am still eyeing the Colorsoft Kindle.)

8. You’ve still got a chance to buy the fine-art edition of Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things before it sells out forever. I just finished reading it a few days ago and I regret to inform you that it is infuriatingly good, the bastard.

9. Tinned fish! I have my eye on the Fishwife Smoky Trio 3-Pack (Smoked Rainbow Trout, Smoked Salmon, Smoked Mackerel). [via The Amateur Gourmet Gift Guide 2024]

10. Uniqlo’s HEATTECH Ultra Warm T-Shirt is one of the warmest and comfiest shirts I’ve ever owned. I picked one up when I was in NYC a couple of months ago and I loved it so much I just ordered two more the other day. On sale right now for $20! Men’s. Women’s.

11. Dozens of puzzles of New Yorker covers. [via Cup of Jo’s Best Gifts for Dads]

12. A handmade crokinole board from Muzzies. And a budget-friendly option. (If you’re wondering what crokinole is.)

14. {I asked Edith for a gift suggestion and here’s what she sent me. Thanks, Edith! -j} I’d like to recommend these cute, fleece-lined “Antura” baby booties from Reima. I felt a little silly getting them for my first daughter (surely there’s a hand-me-down option?), but they’re still going strong on baby no. 2, they stay put, we get compliments wherever we go, and they work well, warmth-wise. They don’t seem to be available in the “Cinnamon” color I ordered in 2022, but Red Violet and Navy are great, too.

15. My friend Caroline hiked Vermont’s Long Trail this summer and compiled a small list of outdoors supplies for the gift guide: ThermoDrop Zipper-Pull Thermometer, Opinel wood-handled stainless steel folding knives, Kahtoola MICROspikes, and Smartwool’s Thermal Merino Reversible Cuffed Beanie. And the Cotopaxi Bataan fanny pack, about which she said: “The MVP of my hiking trip. No more fiddling around with side pockets or opening your pack any time you need a snack, to find your your phone or to look at the map.”

16. My friends at Colossal recently-ish reopened their shop and I love these Cyanometer Postcards (for measuring the blueness of the sky and the orangeness of the sunset). [via The Colossal Gift Guide]

17. I like getting The Giant Jam Sandwich (Bookshop) as a gift for the little readers in my life. [via The Strategist’s What’s Your Go-to Book to Gift Little Kids?]

18. Come on, someone has to buy this 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant this year. We need this to save 2024.

19. Richard Scarry-themed temporary tattoos from Tattly. Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, the Apple Car, Goldbug, and many more of your favorites.

20. My daughter got me this jar of truffle butter as a gift last year and it’s so good (and it lasts forever in the fridge). Perfect for putting into white, creamy pasta sauces or as a finishing element for a grilled cheese. (Also I just learned you can buy white truffles on Amazon but I wouldn’t?)

21. kottke.org guest editor Aaron Cohen owns a pair of ice cream shops in the Boston area and they take their merch very seriously. So many t-shirts! Oh and you can find pints of Gracie’s ice cream all over the Boston metro area…as far away as Concord and Beverly.

22. Did you know that you can commission a portrait from one of the artists belonging to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters?

23. Pal Austin Kleon’s book, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Bookshop), seems like a good thing to be reading these days. [via The 2024 Kleon Studios Gift Guide]

24. I love this one: gift audiobooks from Libro.fm. “You choose the credit bundle, your gift recipient picks their own audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase!” Two credits (for two books) for $30, 3 for $45, 6 for $90, etc.

25. A levitating Moon lamp, anyone? Or a Bluetooth cassette player? [via the New Yorker’s Little Treats Galore: A Holiday Gift Guide]

26. Pal Robin Sloan and his partner Kathryn Tomajan run a tiny olive oil producer called Fat Gold. This year they’re offering a Super Fresh Gift Set of olive oil produced just a few months ago. I can also recommend Sloan’s latest novel, Moonbound (Bookshop) — I’m eagerly awaiting the second installment. [via Robin’s 2024 gift guide]

27. Another great gift list for kids’ stuff: Purdue University’s 2024 Engineering Gift Guide. Some of their picks: Mochi Robotics Kit: Screenless Coding for Ages 3-9; Snap Circuits “Arcade” Electronics Exploration Kit; and Smartivity’s Robotic Mechanical Hand. [via Purdue University’s 2024 Engineering Gift Guide]

28. Do you want a tiny little TV with a miniature remote? You can load your own videos on here for some reason… What about Teenage Engineering’s completely unhinged medieval sampler, drum machine and sequencer? [via Gizmodo’s Best Tech Gifts of 2024]

29. Food/kitchen things that I can vouch for: Xi’an Famous Foods meal kits, pastrami from Katz’s Delicatessen, Ernest Wright’s kitchen scissors, the Ooni Volt electric pizza oven, Headley & Bennett’s crossback apron, and this Zojirushi rice cooker (Neuro Fuzzy!).

30. Also Verbatim from last year: Let’s destigmatize the gift card: there is no shame in not knowing what to get someone for a gift, even if you know them really well. This is actually the gift of getting someone exactly what they want. There’s the obvious Amazon gift card but you can also get cards for Apple (use it for Fitness+ or Apple TV+?), Audible, Fortnite, Snapchat, Airbnb, Disney+, Spotify, Netflix, and Roblox.

31. Sometimes people ask me where to buy art online and I always direct them to 20x200. For instance, just take a look at Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River meander maps.

32. Speed round of friends and readers of the site who sell cool shit: Simplebits (shirts, fonts, and more), Wondermade marshmallows, Hella Cocktail Co. (bitters, mixers, canned margs), This is a MomBod, Jodi Ettenberg’s Legal Nomads shop (food art, totes, shirts) and gluten free translation cards and celiac travel guides, Yen Ha (prints), Moss & Fog, Spoon & Tamago, Fitz (custom fitted eyeglasses), and Field Notes. (to be continued…)

33. Stuff from last year’s guide that still slaps: Keap Wood Cabin candle (had this burning today…I love the smell), Crayola Palm-Grip Crayons, this cute whale butter dish, Darn Tough socks, leather floppy disk wallet, and Analogue Pocket (actually in stock).

34. Thing that I want: Insta360 GO 3S. It’s a teeny 4K camera that you can magnet-attach to your shirt and record yourself, say, downhilling on your mountain bike.

35. Teens are impossible to shop for. The Strategist always has good gift guides: The Best Gifts for Teenage Girls, According to Teenage Girls; The Best Gifts for Teenage Boys, According to Teenage Boys. The Spikeball set, disco ball, and this Brooklinen robe look promising. And I can recommend the tortilla blanket for ages 0 to 120…everyone loves this thing.

36. I asked readers for gift suggestions and IMO the resulting thread is even better than the gift guide I put together. There’s some great stuff here: wooden puzzles; colorful, design-y charging stands for Apple things; leather bound notebooks; box cutters; and this vintage shop on Etsy. Go check out the rest here.

37. More friends and readers of the site who sell cool shit! Pink Tiger Games (“sweet, kind” tabletop games), Storyworth (keepsake books), Christoph Niemann (prints & books), Noah Kalina (photographic prints & books), Jessica Hische (prints, apparel, fonts, etc.), Mike Monteiro (paintings), Cotton Bureau (t-shirts and more),

38. Surprisingly popular item from last year’s gift guide: this Japanese nail clipper. (This tracks because when you finally adult up and buy a quality nail clipper, the shame you feel at wasting so much time on a shitty nail clipper is real.)

39. No surprise that Roxane Gay’s gift guide includes some bangers: CC40 (Criterion Collection 40th anniversary box set that includes 40 films like Tokyo Story, Do the Right Thing, Cléo from 5 to 7), vintage menu art, the Bird Buddy bird feeder, and Haptic Labs’ Constellation Quilt.

40. Gift guide lightning round: Helen Rosner’s food-focused list for the New Yorker, Cup of Jo’s 2024 holiday gift guide, 48 Homemade Food Gifts for the Holidays, The Best Bookish Gifts Under $30, Lenny’s Newsletter holiday gift guide 2024, Every Holiday Gift Guide From the Strategist (So Far), and Noah Kalina’s Is this a gift guide?

41. Time Since Launch is a unique timepiece — you pull the pin to start the timer and it keeps counting…for up to 2,738 years.

{Dec 11: Added some new items to the list below…}

42. I love the minimalist look of these Best Kind sweatshirts.

43. Quickly, some books! The Backyard Bird Chronicles written & illustrated by Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club), Jessica Hische’s My First Book of Fancy Letters, James by Percival Everett, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris, Samatha Harvey’s Orbital, The Observer’s Guide to Japanese Vending Machines, Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders, and The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

44. Naomi Kritzer’s Gifts for People You Hate 2024. Many years ago, a work colleague and her husband received a turtle as a wedding gift. A turtle.

45. A few things that didn’t quite fit elsewhere: Meow Wolf has some weird stuff; 2025 Crossword Calendar; and prints of ship movements from Beautiful Public Data.

This is a living document — I’ll be updating this list with more stuff over the next few days, and I’ll let you know when to check back! To be continued…

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

• kottke.org

This Week

Hello there everybody. I’m working on some programming stuff to enable some future new features for the site this week, so I’m going to be around a little less than usual. My pal Aaron Cohen (previously) is going to be here to fill in some of the gaps, so be on the lookout for that. 👯‍♂️

In the meantime, what was one small thing you did this weekend that made you or someone else smile, laugh, relax, or feel satisfied? After a productive day yesterday, I treated myself to the first episode of the new season of Silo, read Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things for 30 minutes, and listened to James by Percival Everett on audiobook for 20 minutes.

• Aaron Cohen
• kottke.org

Here We Go Again

Hey everyone. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the election results and probably won’t talk about it too much here over the coming days. I don’t know what kottke.org’s “role” will be in this altered world we awoke to on Wednesday, but for my own sanity, I need to get back to work here or I will scroll myself into dust. I have no idea if what I’ll be posting is what you’re looking for, but it’s what I’ve got.

• kottke.org

Hyperlinks, the Open Web, and a Membership Appeal

Ok, look. I know there’s a loooot going on these days, particularly in these United States, but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported kottke.org over the years with a paying membership. It’s the 8th anniversary of the membership program, and I’ve written many times about what that support means to me and to the site; here’s a snippet:

Perhaps nearest and dearest to my heart, member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled. It’s not difficult to imagine an alt-universe kottke.org with ads crammed into every bit of whitespace, email collection forms popping up on every visit, and half the site behind a members-only paywall. No shade to those who have gone that route to keep things running — I’d probably make more money with members-only content on Substack or whatever and that pull is tempting. But seriously, I love you folks so much for collectively keeping all of kottke.org on the open web. Thank you.

One important aspect of the open web I haven’t covered here is linking. The web has always been made up of nodes (web sites/pages) and connections between those nodes (hyperlinks). Over time, the number of nodes has increased (good!) but the nodes have also gotten larger (think Facebook or Google or even Substack) and when they get too massive and too competitive with each other with huge content moats to guard, they turn into hypertext black holes: links go in but they don’t link out.

I love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodes…the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing — I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators. (This is just another sentence so that I can link to more folks who love to link.)

And but so, in the interests of keeping this hyperlink party rolling along here at kottke.org, I wanted to appeal to those who aren’t currently supporting the site to consider doing so. (Or if you’re a past member, to consider rejoining.) As always, if you can’t swing it, no sweat! But if you find value in this site and can manage it, I’d appreciate you supporting the site with a membership.

P.S. I also fixed a couple of nasty bugs with the membership system. Please let me know if you notice anything amiss?

P.P.S. I haven’t raised the prices on memberships in 8 years, but if you are a current member and would like to contribute more, you can go to the subscriptions view and click on “change price”. Thanks!

• kottke.org
• WWW

Ed Yong on Breaking Down and Putting Yourself Back Together

My favorite presentation at XOXO this year was Ed Yong’s talk about the pandemic, journalism, his work over the past four years, and the personal toll that all those things took on him. I just watched the entire thing again, riveted the whole time.

Hearing how thoughtfully & compassionately he approached his work during the pandemic was really inspirational: “My pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness — and much else flows from that.” And his defense of journalism, especially journalism as “a caretaking profession”:

For people who feel lost and alone, we get to say through our work: you are not. For people who feel like society has abandoned them and their lives do not matter, we get to say: actually, they fucking do. We are one of the only professions that can do that through our work and that can do that at scale — a scale commensurate with many of the crises that we face.

Then, 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.¹

I didn’t get a chance to meet Yong in person at XOXO, so: Ed, thank you so much for all of your marvelous work and amazing talk and for setting an example of how to do compassionate, important work without compromising your values. (And I love seeing your bird photos pop up on Bluesky.)

1. I hope that makes sense? Sometimes you can feel the pain of others so intensely that it renders you useless to help them or to keep yourself afloat. So you’re still empathetic and open to the experiences of others, but in a much more functional and constructive way.↩

• conferences
• Covid-19
• Ed Yong
• journalism
• kottke.org
• video
• working
• XOXO

Status Update

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?

• Jason Kottke
• kottke.org

Black and Blue and Read All Over

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. ✌️

• cycling
• Jason Kottke
• kottke.org

Taking Some Time

Hey folks. I’m gonna be on vacation with my family for the rest of the week, so I won’t be posting here that much, if at all. September is going to be busy — kids back to school, Ollie applying to college, mtn biking — so I’m gonna recharge the ol’ batts at the beach.

Even though next month will be hectic, I’m looking forward to getting back to mucking about with the guts of the site after taking the summer off from that. I’ve got some rough ideas about improvements for the comments section, adding social features, and a few other things.

Catch you back here next Tuesday!

• kottke.org

Free Shipping on Kottke Tees

Hey folks. My pals at Cotton Bureau are celebrating their 11th birthday. So, for the next three days (until the end of July 11), all of their shirts come with free shipping!

This includes the handsome Hypertext Tee:

And the Process Tee (dark colors | light colors):

Just use code HBDCB11 at checkout for free shipping within the US and 50% off international shipping. You can see all your Kottke shirt options on the Goods page.

Reminder: 50% of the profits from the Process Tee will be donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Thanks to your support, I’ve been able to donate more than $4,700 to the NNAF so far.

• fashion
• kottke.org

A Little Comments Check-In

Hey there everyone. As I quickly touched on over the weekend, I launched a few new tweaks/features for the comments here on kottke.org:

1. Ability to edit comments. After you post a new comment, you’ve got 10 minutes to edit it — to fix any typos, formatting slip-ups, or quick extra thoughts. After 10 minutes, the comment is locked. Edited comments are denoted by some text (“Edited”) next to the timestamp of the comment and you can click on it to see the comment’s original text.

2. A (hopefully) less confusing posting interface. I still haven’t totally dialed this in, but the inline reply box wasn’t working, particularly when you tried replying to the last comment in a thread and then you had Dueling Comment Textareas but only one was the One True Textarea — chaos. Now everything (posting, replying, editing) is in a popup modal. We’ll see how that works.

3. There’s been a list of recently active comment threads on the front of the site for a couple of months now. One of the biggest feature requests I’ve gotten is a way for people to follow threads that they’ve participated in, to see if others have replied to them, etc. There are lots of potential ways to tackle this problem, but for right now, I’ve added a tab to the front page comment widget that lists threads that you’ve commented in that have new comments. It’s not perfect, but neither is turning the whole site into Reddit or a social media site. Navigating that middle path is going to be tricky — I don’t want to end up in a place where several things about the site half-work — but hey it’s fun to be out here experimenting.

Given this refresh, this seems like a good moment to check in on how comments are going overall. Here’s what I wrote when they launched back in October:

“Always good, often great, and occasionally sublime” describes a lot of the feedback I get via email and social media — kottke.org readers are a super-interesting bunch and very often share things that are more interesting than whatever thing I posted that prompted them to write in. Reader comments become more valuable to everyone who reads the site when they’re relocated from my inbox and from disparate threads on various social sites to the site itself. Some days, my inbox is the best thing on the internet and I want to bring that vibe to the site.

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.

I have been very happy with how the comments have gone over the past 6 months. Borrowing Michael Pollan’s formulation, I feel like we’ve largely stuck to the unstated maxim of “Post comments. Not too much. Mostly interesting.” Every day on the site, there’s are 2-3 active threads going and I learn something new from or am moved (to feel, to action) by a comment or a discussion, but it’s not so much that you can’t keep up with it all. There are a lot of posts without comments and that’s great too. Thank you to everyone for taking the time to participate and adding to the vibe here.

Moderation has been extremely easy — having commenting open only to active members has resulted in aligned incentives for everyone and we’ve all committed to the bit, i.e. tried to follow the guidelines to help create something meaningful together.

How about some stats? Around 850 unique commenters have left more than 4300 comments on ~650 posts (mean: 6.5 comments/post, median: 3 comments/post). The most popular post is Who Are the People in the Neighborhood? (350 comments) and more than two dozen threads have 30 comments or more. Only 4 comments have started with the word “actually”. 🙃

Comments are open on almost every post now, and that’s been going well. The very few comments I’ve had to hide have either been off-topic, out of place in a community setting, or of the “fighting about opinions” variety. Nothing that I can recall has been mean-spirited or in bad faith. All of the hidden comments would not be out of place on social media at all, but we’re trying something slightly different here.

The last time we checked in on the comments, I shared a few threads that I thought were particularly good for whatever reason and I’d like to do that again here:

• The job board comments thread is an obvious place to start — in the months since I’ve heard of a couple of people who found work bc of it. I’ll try doing this again in a few weeks.
• Why Weather Forecasts Have Gotten So Good. Not a huge thread but almost every comment is substantive. And Jeffrey Shrader, whose paper was cited in the link I posted, made a comment and took the time to answer questions from other readers. The thread made the whole post so much better.
• Knitting Anything? A perfect Friday post about something that a lot of people are into. This was one of the most active threads and the most enthusiastic. I don’t knit and am not super interested in it, but I checked back on this one through the weekend because everyone was so excited to share and learn. And now I want to learn how to knit a little?
• I asked Edith about her favorite threads and she replied with two: this short thread about an interview with Marilynne Robinson (she keeps thinking back on the comments here) and the recommendations in this thread for Middlemarch (“changed my life!”)
• Where Do You Call Home? Maybe my favorite thread on the site…just so many people sharing personal stories and thoughts about what and where they think of as home and why.
• I loved Aaron’s question and the resulting thread: What Did You Learn How To Do This Year? Again, lots of sharing and camaraderie around interests.
• And finally, a short thread about something goofy with folks in the comments sharing related goofy things. One commenter even came back more than a month later to follow up on a recommendation made by another reader (“Recommend! And thanks Elsa!”)

What threads and/or comments have you particularly liked? Maybe I’ll collect some of them under a tag of some sort so we can all keep track of them. Also, please let me know if you’ve got feedback or other thoughts about the comments — I’ve got a list of future improvements I’d like to do, but would love to hear of any features you’d like to see or pain points you’re having a hard time with.

• kottke.org

It’s Eclipse Day!

Hey, gang. Today is the solar eclipse, it’s supposed to be mostly sunny here in Colchester, VT, we’ve got 3 minutes and 16 seconds of totality to enjoy, and I built a solar filter for my telescope (and binoculars!), so kottke.org is going to take the day off. Edith and I will see you back here tomorrow.

In the meantime, are you doing anything for the eclipse? Anyone got any crazy camera/telescope setups? Do you think Instagram is going to crash this afternoon? Will I completely lose my mind if a cloud drifts in front of the sun today at 3:26pm ET? Is it a coincidence or a miracle that we happen to be alive during the relatively brief period of time when the moon almost exactly covers the sun, resulting in total solar eclipses? Could you imagine if the eclipse somehow doesn’t happen today??!

• 2024 solar eclipse
• astronomy
• kottke.org
• Sun

Welcome Aaron Cohen Back to the Site

Hey, Jason here. I’m off this week (Mar 25-29) to spend some time with family (and Edith is working on Drawing Media), so my friend and ice cream impresario Aaron Cohen will be taking over the site again (he previously guest edited a couple of times in the ’10s). He owns and operates Gracie’s Ice Cream & Earnest Drinks and I hear he’s working on a novel.

As an ice cream man, Aaron keeps things fun — he takes Hard Style photos with patrons (he’s the one in hat above), makes ice cream tribute flavors for Carly Rae Jepsen (Call Me PB and Carlymel Rae Jepsen), writes a linky newsletter for the shops, and has cool merch.

Welcome back, Aaron!

• Aaron Cohen
• kottke.org

26 Years Ago…

On this day in 1998, 26 freaking years ago, I started writing this blog. I’ve talked at you a lot about the site recently, so I’ll be brief. Last year on this anniversary, I wrote:

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.

And still having fun. Perhaps more fun than ever. Thanks to all of you for being a part of it.

P.S. I hope you’ll forgive me taking advantage of any 26-years!-I-love-this-place! feelings you might have today to ask that 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!

• kottke.org

Membership Pricing

Oh no, a dreaded dose of site news — but I’ll make this quick. One of the changes I quietly made to the site with the recent redesign is enabling members to set their own price on memberships. It’s been 7 and a half years since the membership program launched, and I’ve thought about raising prices over the years just to keep pace with inflation, but it never seemed like the right way to go.

So I’ve put that capability in your hands. Now you can voluntarily raise prices if you’d like — here’s how it works. The price of each membership tier is now a base price that can be added on to (e.g. for the Patron tier, $30 is the minimum but you can increase that to $35 or even $130 if you’d like). For current members, your chosen new price will go into effect on your next renewal date.

If that’s something you’d be interested in doing and are currently a member, you can go to the subscriptions view and click on “change price”. The whole thing takes about 15 seconds (perhaps a bit longer if you need to log in). For new members, you can simply choose the price you want when you enter your payment information during the signup process.

Ok, that wasn’t too bad. Now back to our regularly scheduled links from the internet. 💞

• kottke.org

Kottke.org Redesigns With 2024 Vibes

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.

1. If you’d like the text bigger, you can adjust the size using your browser’s zoom controls (cmd + & cmd -). This is what I do for viewing Instagram on my desktop web browser — 150% is the way to go…the photos are teensy otherwise. (I adjust Daring Fireball and Threads too.) The browser even remembers your settings for a site between visits…you only have to adjust it once.↩

• design
• Jason Kottke
• kottke.org
• web development
• weblogs
• WWW

How’s It Going Today?

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.

• Jason Kottke
• kottke.org
• working