FeedCity

All week, host Kelly McEvers surfaces some of her favorite episodes from the archive. Here's today's story:  In August 1953, airstrip operator George van Tassel claimed he was woken up in the middle of the night by an intelligent lifeform from outer space named Solganda...

Explanation: Have you ever seen the full moon rise? This colorful image was photographed last weekend in Sicily, just outside the town of Nicosia, in Italy. It is a composite photograph that shows the Moon rising as the sky turns darker. Lower clouds are reflecting the color...

You can destroy kottke.org if you want. Or any other site!

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.

The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.

Tags: video

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a hand-picked collection of unique & rare films across Vintage Animation, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, Documentaries, Found Tapes & Much More”. KDO readers might like the Early Technology section.

I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model, the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard.

It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely make a priority to see it if you get the chance.

Tags: museums, new-york

My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News.

I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv...

Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

They're not notably different from the GPT-6 family pelicans: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr...

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gpt

Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out.

It uses Google's MediaPipe C++ library, compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision, plus the BlazeFace face detection model.

Tags: photography, tools

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. “If you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.” Really interesting.

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider.

Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX. Or skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS.

Read the guide →

Link: workos.com/guide/the-developers-guide-to-sso?utm_source…

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link): Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a ...

"Parenting is a practice. You learn from your mistakes and then repeat them anyway."

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday: Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. This is a strong clear lede, ...

I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film.

Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the closest to my own personal tastes as I’ve ever found. So today, I want to talk about how director Joe Wright created some of the best extended tracking shots, ones, long takes, that I’ve ever seen.

Tags: film school · Joe Wright · movies · Pride and Prejudice · video

The Tell, a very long read about Thomas Goldstein (SCOTUSblog founder, high-powered lawyer, poker player) who once played a legendary game at the Bellagio where he bet wildly, didn’t even look at his cards for long stretches of time, and won big.

The Montréal-based multi-disciplinary artist is deeply interested in the history and politics of colonization.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Eddy Firmin Interrogates History and Colonizing Forces in Provocative Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

“Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements, or to be eaten by scavenging animals.” (CW: there are some potentially upsetting photos on that page.)

"Archiving a life at the edge of disposal."