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Hey folks. I’m going off the grid for a few days. Call it a spiritual retreat of sorts. I’ll be back soon; be well in the meantime.
The image is of the Great Buddha and a group of adorably chapeaued schoolchildren at the Todai-ji Temple in Nara.
For the past several months, I’ve been using a web-based music player I built called Underscore. It’s playing music for me right now. I recently revamped & improved it and thought it was time to show it off. Here’s a screenshot:
Ok, let me explain. I listen to music all day while I’m working, favoring music without words — electronic, classical, soundtracks, ambient, nature sounds, that sort of thing. I listen to whole albums, long mixes, and playlists across several services, including Spotify, YouTube, and Soundcloud. It was becoming a pain in my ass trying to pick something to listen to while working; I’d have to scroll through playlists on all these different services and generally I’d end up listening to the same stuff over and over again, getting sick of it, getting distracted by choosing music, missing some gems buried deep in a list of saved albums, etc.
So, pair programming with Claude, I built Underscore, a “home-cooked meal” app that’s both simple and opinionated. Here’s how it works. You can add links to music from Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Apple Music to it — just paste their share URLs in. Reloading the page gives you a random piece of music from your collection. You can see a list of the songs, videos, playlists, and albums in your collection and can hide them if you want. That’s it. That’s all it does.
There’s no APIs or authentication or auto-synching playlists. The music is played through embedded players and if it lands on something from Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp, you’re gonna have to click the play button in the embedded player (Soundcloud and YT videos should play automatically (but don’t always for whatever reason)). When your current selection ends, the new random thing doesn’t automatically play…you need to refresh the page.
It’s not ideal, having it be a little bit manual and janky in this way. But oh boy, am I loving this thing. It took me awhile to get everything into the system, but I’ve got almost 300 resources in my collection now — probably 300-400 hours of music all told — and I listen to it all day while working. I’m listening to stuff from deep in the archives, albums and playlists I just wouldn’t have thought to play, when strapped for time in the rush to get to work. When something new comes along, like NIN’s Tron: Ares soundtrack, I add it in there. I don’t get distracted…I just get good music for flow/coding/writing all the live-long day.
The background animation was adapted and extended from one of the examples in Rick Rubin’s The Way of Code — there are a bunch of different patterns and colors that it cycles through. I’m kinda proud of the way the media embeds fade into 1-bit images so you can see the background behind them when they’re playing…dorking around with CSS & web design is still super fun.
And but so anyway, I built Underscore for myself, to scratch an itch, but recently thought that it would be relatively easy to add other users to it. So, if you’re a logged-in member of kottke.org, you can build your own collection and play it with Underscore; just head right this way. If you’re not a KDO member, you can still check it out…but the only thing it does is play my music collection (which has some good stuff in it IMO). Fair warning: aside from this post, there is no onboarding. You may be confused as to how it works. But it’s simple enough that you quickly figure it out. Due to lack of auto-shuffle, it’s not worth using if you’re adding stuff that’s under ~30 minutes in length — Underscore is for albums, long tracks, playlists, etc.1 Caveat emptor. You break it, you buy it. Etc. Etc. If you try it out, let me know what you think in the comments below. Suggestions or improvements welcome.
Hello fronds and anemones. Tomorrow is my birthday so I am taking today off. I’ll see you back here on Monday.
But before I go: I pushed some changes to how videos work on the site (after a bunch of feedback). The default behavior is now: you click on a video and it plays. If you hold “b” (for lightbox) while clicking, the video will play in a widescreen lightbox. Also, the escape key will now close the video and the lightbox is better about resizing so that the bottom of the videos don’t get cut off (thanks to Christophe for the CSS fix).
I don’t think this is the forever solution (it doesn’t address folks who want to open the videos on YouTube or Vimeo in a new tab), but I wanted to get something out there while I figure out the rest.
Hey folks, I know there’s a lot going on these days, but I wanted to update you on a few things I’ve been doing for the site lately. Alright, looking through my Git commits from the last couple of months:
There are a few new gift‑link indicators that I added to the site — for links to sites like Defector, Aftermath, Hellgate, Slate, Medium, Talking Points Memo, in addition to the older ones like the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. When I link to paywalled stuff, I try to post a gift link — here’s how the indicator looks if you’re reading on the site. (RSS readers, live a little and come in from the cold!)
I’ve been a little busy, I guess. The day-to-day posting has not been consistently sparking joy recently but digging into the guts of the site & making improvements has provided me with the heads-down, flowy focus that I need to stay emotionally and intellectually afloat these days. Thank you to KDO members for supporting this work and keeping the site free to read for all.2
I’d love to know what you think. Criticism and nice words are equally welcome. I’ve heard that some of you dislike the auto-expanding video player — does anyone actually love it as much as I do? I’ve gotten some early feedback that the comment avatars are too big (and I might agree with that).
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. 👋
Over the weekend, I added a new feature to the site that, for now, is only accessible from the front page of the site, right after the third post on the page. It’s a list of websites and people that I follow — “kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators”. It’s a blogroll, but I’m calling mine the Kottke.org Rolodex. Here’s what it looks like:
AI slop content increasingly proliferates on the internet and traffic from large tech companies like Google and Meta continues to fall off. In just the last two days, The Verge and Wired have launched new features that aim to strengthen their direct relationships & trust with their readers. From Wired’s announcement:
The platforms on which outlets like WIRED used to connect with readers, listeners, and viewers are failing in real time; Facebook traffic disappeared years ago, and now Google Search is dwindling as the company reorients users to rely on AI Overviews instead of links to credible publishers. More and more users are also skipping Google altogether, opting to use chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude to find information they once relied on news outlets for. Meanwhile, AI-generated slop and mis- and disinformation are seeping into the internet’s every pore, polluting social media feeds and drowning out news and human-driven storytelling.
At WIRED, our solution to this so-called “traffic apocalypse,” and the AI sloppification of the internet, is simple: connect our humans to all of you humans.
Some of the sites on the Rolodex have been moving in this direction as well — and KDO has too of course: with the membership program, comments on posts, the redesign, and some of the other social features that have been creeping in here and there, as well as some tried-and-true methods of direct connection like the twice-weekly newsletter, the RSS feed, and syndication to social sites that don’t devalue links, like Bluesky and Mastodon.
The Rolodex is part of this “strategy” of relationship-building and strengthening of trusted sources of information. You readers are curious about what I read and pay attention to, I enjoy linking to things I like (duh), and I believe it’s more important than ever for those sites who traffic in knowledge & curiosity and care about humans to acknowledge and stand with each other. As I wrote last year, we are not competitors; we are collaborators:
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.
So pop on in to the front page of the site and scroll down a bit to take a look. Clicking the “refresh” link will load five more sites from the list. I hope you find something you like.
That’s not all I’m hoping to do with the Rolodex, but it’s a good start. Feedback, etc. is welcome.
Hey, folks. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be away from the site for a couple of weeks for a family vacation. No guest editor or anything…just going off the air for a much needed rest. Wishing everyone well and I will see you in mid-June.
Hey folks. I’ve been plugging away behind the scenes on some new features and while some of them aren’t ready to go yet, others are. I don’t know if Sunday evening is the best time to do this, but here’s what’s new on the site:
1. Faving posts. For the past several months, KDO members have been able to fave comments in threads and it’s been working well. The feature allows people to applaud/reward good comments, keep track of comments that they particularly like, and, in aggregate, participate in showing the community as a whole which comments are especially popular or meaningful.
Now I’ve extended that capability to posts; members will find a fave button attached to every post on the site. The number of faves a post has will appear next to the fave button. I went around and around on whether to display fave counts or to figure out some alternative way to indicate the popularity of a post, but I settled on just displaying them because it’s easy and everyone understands that if number is big, post is more popular/beloved. (I also went back and forth a jillion times about whether to do faves with stars, faves with hearts, or likes with hearts. Faves with stars felt right because it’s old school. You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments.)
Like I said when I launched the comment faves, there isn’t a limit to the number of posts 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 posts.
Still to do: I’m working on making it so you can see a list of posts you’ve faved and a list of the most-faved posts on the site. And there are other things that can be done with the faves…it’ll take some time to figure out what those are.
Again, this feature is only for members. A few people have been testing this with me for a few months and I’m excited to open it up to members.
2. The main content area is now wider on non-mobile browsers. When I launched the most recent design in March 2024, I said I wanted the site to feel like a contemporary version of an old school blog, which meant a more compact design. For many posts, this works well but the more visual posts — with embedded art, photos, illustrations, and videos — didn’t look as good as they could have. Hopefully the wider content area gives them more room to breathe.
3. Along with that, I made some tweaks to the sidebar: decreased the menu font sizes, decreased the width, and tweaked the design of the logged-in user view (which I’m still not entirely happy with, but we’re gonna go with it and see).
4. For non-mobile browsers, clicking play on embedded videos in posts will now open up the video in a lightboxed player the width of the browser window. If that doesn’t make sense, just give it a try with one of the internet’s favorite videos, Tom Holland lip-syncing to Umbrella:
I’ve had this feature enabled for myself for a few months and I love it — it’s a much better viewing experience than in KDO’s narrow column or on YouTube or Vimeo. And if you do want to click through and watch it on the original site, it’s only one extra click. I’ve also been making sure I put a link to the video in the text of the post so that it’s easy to get to that way. (I suspect some of you are going to hate this feature because it overrides the expected behavior of the video click. But I genuinely believe it’s better for watching videos! Like, this isn’t some weird tactic to keep people on the site — please, go to YouTube if you want, delete your KDO bookmark, shut your computer down, throw your phone in the ocean, walk into the forest, you’re the internet now, you’re free! In other words, give the lightboxed videos a chance?)
(Reminder: clicking on images in non-Quick Link posts will open them in a lightbox as well. I love this feature too.)
Ok, I think that’s all for now. As always, let me know in the comments below (or via email) if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns.
Folks, I can’t even today. I gotta tap out. I hope to be back with you tomorrow.
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. 💞
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!
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.)
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.
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. ✊✌️
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.
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.
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. ✌️
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.
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!
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. ✌️
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. ✌️
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.)
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. ✌️
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