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Gus Mueller: This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It’s still a one time purchase to use as long as you’d like, and as usual, the full release notes are available. I want to highlight some of my favorite things below. “Sele...

🔔 Laaaast call for The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you still have holiday shopping to do, it’s probably coming down to the last day or two for ordering in time for Dec 25 (Xmas and also the first night of Hanukkah).

36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024, including Chappell Roan, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, The Substance, Twisters in 4DX (🤔), and Nobody Wants This. (I think there’s maybe a better version of this list out there…)

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A group of scientists warns against creating mirror cells. This sentence is somehow not sci-fi: “Drug developers might be able to create mirror antibiotics, but the treatments might not be ready to use until a mirror pandemic was out of control.”

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Writer Karen Attiah recently wrote about the pleasure of perusing other people’s personal libraries and then asked her followers what their “personal foundational texts” were…those books that people read over and over again during the course of their lives. Here was her an...

Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world. Ther...

Blackmagic Design: Blackmagic Design announced it will start taking pre-orders for the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera — the world’s first commercial camera system designed to capture Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro — today with deliveries due to sta...

It is easy to be cynical about the do-gooding motivations of a $3 trillion company, but Apple’s commitment to accessibility is admirable. This music fan bought Airpods Pro and nearly cried after learning they were also hearing aids.

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Yo-Yo Ma played the prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major at the reopening of the Notre Dame in Paris. I bet this sounded wonderful, with the sound reverberating around the cathedral.

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With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to stare at1 as you await your favorite’s show’s weekly release...

Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)

Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.

And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.

This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.

Tags: Doechii · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video · Waxahatchee

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Apple has renewed Silo for two more seasons. The show will end after season four, having told “the entire story contained within Hugh Howey’s books”.

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The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan record this podcast from a position of “fuck you’ after rewatching the 2014 high-stakes thriller ‘The Gambler,’ starring Mark Wahlberg, Brie Larson, John Goodman, and Michael K. Williams. Watch this episode on your Ringer Movies YouTube channel! Producer: Craig Horlbeck Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog: Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We d...

A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.

Tags: HBO · The White Lotus · trailers · TV · video

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Speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts, the most popular set of 2024 (18M views) is by “Argentine power duo” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso. Their music is “heavily dependent on electronic sounds” but for Tiny Desk they went traditional and it sounds great.

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A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS messages sent between u...

Excellent five-minute short video from the ever-insightful Kirby Ferguson for The New York Times, exploring why everything looks the same, sounds the same, and seemingly is the same in today’s pop culture. The short answer: that sameness is only pervasive when you only look at what’s promoted by our three-headed social media hegemony (Meta, YouTube, and TikTok).

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=aToMV4wL2wc

Actual things my parents said while watching my son’s swimming lesson. “MOM: He’s so beautiful. The teacher must be beside herself. DAD: She’s barely controlling herself. She’s trying not to cry. [HE IS CRYING A BIT]”

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HPV vaccines have been linked to a steep drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women. “We observed a substantial reduction in mortality — a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths over the last decade.”

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