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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
The Brattle theater is playing what they call the Ultimate Double Feature: “we play the first movie up until the point when the characters enter a cinema to watch a different film”, then play the entirety of that 2nd film, then finish up the 1st film.
You know who else had a Greenland obsession? “Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s.”
New from Neal Agarwal: Sandboxels. “It’s a falling-sand game with hundreds of elements, heat simulation, electricity & a lot more. I like making little cities and then adding tons of rats.”
Some modern collective nouns: a cringe of Cybertrucks, an anxiety of authors, a migraine of toddlers, and “a group of two or men is called a podcast”.
Business/product advice: launch it three times. “The vast majority of the time, the single biggest problem you have is that nobody knows you exist, and nobody gives a damn about what you do.”
With music by Max Cooper and visuals by Conner Griffith, A Sense of Getting Closer is a music video that was inspired by a quote submitted to Cooper’s On Being project:
I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen.
Mesmerizing. Like literally, given that it’s based on “a hypnotic light show we can’t look away from, yet we know is made up of low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms.” (via @aaroncoleman.bsky.social)
Tags: Conner Griffith · Max Cooper · mesmerizing · music · video
Searching for Birds, an engaging visualization of eBird and Google Trends data that reveals human curiosity about birds.
How to raise children. “It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is.”
Team Pursuit speed skaters used to trade off leads like cyclists but the sport has been revolutionized by the US team’s invention of the “bump drafting” technique.
Paul Ford on AI and the Infinite Software Era. “All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.”
Current is an interesting new RSS reader that doesn’t function like an email inbox. “There is no count because counting was the problem.”
The goal of the Trump Action Tracker is to “document how the trajectory of Trump’s presidency is aligned with the authoritarian playbook”.
Why AI Writing Is So Generic, Boring, and Dangerous: Semantic Ablation. “The AI identifies high-entropy clusters — the precise points where unique insights…reside — and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences.”
The 19 richest Americans hold more than 2% of the total US holdhold wealth. That figure has roughly doubled in the past 5-6 years. “The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering.”
Ski Jumping Pairs is my favorite Winter Olympics event. (Video by Riichiro Mashima.)
From designer Beth Mathews, a free “Private Property! No ICE” sign you can print out for your shop or restaurant.
What movies can you brag about seeing during their original run in the theater? Not big movies, more culty ones. I’ve got Iron Giant, American Movie, Run Lola Run, Hands on a Hardbody, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. 😂
From a draft of the opening narration of Star Trek: “Assigned a five year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds…” I’m glad they punched it up.
If what you want is to see tiny people all over your plate, you 100% absolutely have to try Lanmaoa asiatica. The mushroom is a popular food during mushroom season, but if undercooked has the same effect worldwide: lilliputian hallucinations.
I know I probably say this every time I post videos like this, but I wish I’d gotten into art & art history earlier than I did. Channels like Behind the Masterpiece are so good at making this stuff come alive and their Brief History of Japanese Art scratches my recent interest in Japan itch quite nicely. I was lucky to see some of the pieces from the video on my Japan trip last fall, including the Big Buddha in Kamakura, hand scrolls, sumi-e, and so many woodblock prints. (via open culture)
Tags: art · art school · history · Japan · video
On historical accuracy in movies (Wuthering Heights, The Odyssey) and the “anxious, professional monitoring in which the images onscreen must be checked and rechecked for their accordance with the original text and preexisting notions about it”.
