Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Generator: Movable Type 4.2
“[This website] is a repurposed smartphone running on solar power. It’s a web server pieced together from scraps, humming in the attic of an apartment building.”
Interesting thing about contextual fame: to the surprise of bookstores, Craig Mod has sold out every appearance on his book tour for Things Become Other Things. But he couldn’t get a single store in Portland or Boston to host a reading.
George Wendt, who played lovable barfly Norm Peterson on Cheers for 11 seasons, died yesterday at the age of 76. Here’s an 18-minute supercut of every time Norm entered the bar. I loved Cheers when I was a kid; I’ve seen every episode multiple times (though not for many years) and of course Norm was a favorite. 🍺💞
Tags: Cheers · George Wendt · obituaries · TV · video
From Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, here’s how every single news report on the economy plays out:
Dennis and Pamela People are affected by numbers, and since they have a child, you’ll empathize with what they say while I nod in their direction.
“Well, it’s been hard because of the numbers.”
“Yeah, it has been hard, mainly because of the numbers.”
Brooker, you may remember, is the creator of Black Mirror.
[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2015.]
Tags: Charlie Brooker · economics · journalism · timeless posts · video
Some advice from Old Man Kottke: if you need readers, get some with good lenses. I had some cheapo ones that gave me eye strain, so I ordered these from Caddis and they’re like 100 times better.
Magnus Carlsen played a game of freestyle chess against 143,000 people (who voted on what moves to make) and was forced into a draw. I’m surprised at the outcome…I didn’t think the wisdom of the crowds would work in a situation like this.
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno:
Or direct the action in a short cops & robbers film:
Play Grand Theft Auto in real life:
There are many more of their interactive videos in this playlist. (thx, ollie)
Tags: Lagarto Films · video · video games · YouTube
A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds”. As one of the students said, “So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
The world record for a human solve is 3.13 seconds by Max Park in 2023. (via we’re here
Tags: robots · Rubik’s Cube · video
“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.)