Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
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Amazon’s series The Rings of Power hasn’t gotten great reviews and Evan Puschak hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories.
I’m skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien’s mythology, can really work as a TV series. It’s a square peg round hole situation. TV as a form just doesn’t play to the strengths of Tolkien’s vision.
Tags: books · Evan Puschak · J.R.R. Tolkien · The Rings of Power · TV · video
I’d missed that Ray Nayler, author of the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, came out with a short novel earlier this year called The Tusks of Extinction. “Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.”
Colossal, one of my all-time favorite sites on these here interwebs, has launched a spiffing new redesign. Go take a look.
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!
Tags: kottke.org
The TinyAwards have announced the winners of the 2024 competition: One Minute Park and One Million Checkboxes. (If you want to win next year, just name your project One Something Something.)
From the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, What to Know About the Updated COVID Vaccine for Fall, Winter 2024–25. The updated shots are available now at US pharmacies and soon at doctor’s offices. Go get ‘em!
An extensive report by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi on how governance, moderation, and diplomacy works in the fediverse. “We think the fediverse’s structure can allow for particularly humane and high-context moderation…”
I just got back from the XOXO Festival and one of things that happened was that Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou showed their new short film The Second and their first new Every Frame A Painting video essay in eight years!! And now the video essay is on YouTube:
It’s a quick one about the sustained two-shot, a type of shot that was used a lot in the olden days but still has its uses today — and gives actors room to actually act.
So happy to see Ramos and Zhou back at it. I’m not sure if I should even say this, but they indicated during their XOXO appearance that there will be more to come (in fewer than 8 years).
Here’s my post about them shuttering the channel and a few of my favorite videos of theirs.
Tags: film school · movies · Taylor Ramos · Tony Zhou · video
In 1974, Saturday Review asked some of the world’s leading thinkers (Isaac Asimov, Jacques Cousteau, Andrei Sakharov, etc.) what the world of 2024 would look like. Here’s what they got right (internet) and wrong (factories on the Moon).
Adam Hale makes these fantastic brain-busting time- & perspective-slicing animations.
Not sure why I didn’t know that Chris Ware has released two volumes of sketchbooks, but the third one comes out this fall. “Ware finally succumbs to imaginary public pressure by concluding his tiresome experiment in reader trust…”
This is lovely: illustrator & cartoonist Stephen Collins drew the progression of shoes worn by each of his three kids.
Back in 2020 we had to chuck the kids’ baby shoes out 😱, so I decided to keep the first ones and draw the rest, in order, starting with pre-walking socks.
When I look at photos of my kids from when they were younger, my eye is always drawn to their shoes and clothes — some of them are so iconic in my mind they almost function as logos for my kids at different stages.
Tags: art · fashion · parenting · shoes · Stephen Collins
