Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background.

Tags: movies · music · Project Hail Mary · video

Now open for business in Nyack, NY: Busman’s Holiday, a stationary store run by (former?) graphic designer Sam Potts, who announced the shop back in March in a KDO open thread. Lots of nice touches here, including a used pencil exchanger.

Ok wait, the NES Tetris world record is now 40.26 million??! It took 2 hours and 20 minutes and the previous record was 29 million. At level 255, you hit “rebirth” and the pieces slow down to level 0 speeds again. Totally bonkers.

From Deep Down History, an entertaining hour-long explainer video on the Bayeux Tapestry.

This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…

Completed within a decade or two of the events which it depicts, the tapestry is back in the news & public consciousness because it’s back in England for the first time since it was made and on display at the British Museum.

Tags: Bayeux Tapestry · video

I’ve linked to Summoning Salt’s videos before (they make some of the best video game explainer videos out there — hell, some of the best YT videos period) and here’s their newest one: The Tournament That Changed Tetris Forever.

In 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on Northern cod fishing due to overfishing. It was devastating for Newfoundlanders. This year, for the first time since then, the govt has “upgraded the cod stock’s status from ‘critical’ to ‘healthy’”.

From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami. ‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on ...

We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys. Today’s tech titans took all the wrong lessons from the science fiction of their youths and now they’re each building their version of the Torment Nexus.

The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found, a piece written by Colson Whitehead just a month after 9/11. “The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking.”

Neat little prototype demo of a Bluesky reader that uses the UI of the long-retired Paper app. I loved the design of Paper.

A late 90s guide to Super Metroid was written in monospaced type, fully justified with no double spaces or hyphens. “I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.”

Back when I went on sabbatical in 2022, I told the story of the fiddle leaf fig tree I bought shortly after my ex-wife and I separated and I’d moved into my own apartment. I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and figured a large plant in m...

“In almost every [US] county, extreme heat is at least as bad as it was 30 years ago. In most counties, it’s much worse.” It’s Not Just You. America Has Gotten Much Hotter. (Not a fan of articles like this being in the “opinion” section…)

VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital. “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society.”

At the beginning of a clip from this podcast episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend with Matt Groening, Conan talks about one of his favorite things they did on The Simpsons: It’s a phenomenon that the Simpsons did so beautifully, which is — and we did this with Homer a...

“Gimme is a dazzling ever-growing type family of multi-chromatic and variable display typefaces…” This is bonkers…letters made from Battleship pieces, Connect Four boards, playing cards, wooden railroad tracks, etc.

Bring Blockbuster Video back to your town/city by setting up a little free library of VHS tapes & DVDs. “Take a movie, leave a movie.” Love this.

Gloria Steinem’s final essay, posthumously published by the New Yorker. “When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.”

TIL that my iPhone has a tiny bit of water in it (for cooling).

Teaser trailer for Musk, a 3h45m-long documentary film on fascist businessman Elon Musk, directed by Alex Gibney. “He’s chaotic, random, capricious. He is manifestly cruel and selfish. In a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero.”

“We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web research task. These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions.”

The Chicago Public Library informs patrons of how much money they’ve saved borrowing from the library instead of buying. “You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!”

Over the past 12 years, Super Bowl-winning coach Mike Tomlin has built a Minecraft city. He started playing the game for the same reason I started playing Fortnite: his kids. “How do I meet them where they are and spend time with them?”

From the Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. “When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal…our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.”

Over on Flickr, Jane McDevitt maintains a huge collection of 20th century matchbox label art from Eastern Europe, over 4000 photos in all. Some of the labels are available as prints. They did a book too, but it’s sold out. It was really difficult to narrow these down to some of my favorites, but I managed. P.S. I wrote this whole post and then discovered that I’d written about this collection before. But I picked different labels so it’s all good. Tags: art · illustration · Jane McDevitt

A catalogue of 645 acts of hate from the week after 9/11. “Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh Americans were targeted for how they looked, dressed, or prayed.”

Bayeux Go! A playable video game of the Bayeux Tapestry. “Thou art Harold. Win Thine Battle. Tap to starte.”

Spaceships: A version of Asteroids where “you are not the ship” — you control the rocks instead.

The 101 Plays Itself. The five lanes of highway 101 in LA turned into a musical instrument: each car on the live Caltrans camera is a note.

Teaser trailer for You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim. “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move.” WHAT WAS THAT?