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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998

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Jason Kottke

Chindōgu: The Japanese Art of “Unuseless” Inventions

Chindōgu is the Japanese practice of inventing things that are not exactly useful but neither are they useless; they’re more unuseless, a term coined by chindōgu’s originator Kenji Kawakami. Some examples are tiny umbrellas for shoes, chopsticks with a tiny fan on them to co...

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Jason Kottke

My Car Is Becoming a Brick. “Cars used to be entirely mechanical...

My Car Is Becoming a Brick. “Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects” but now “certain models are destined to age their way out of compatibility with the latest software” (like smartphones).

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Jason Kottke

To Explore Violence Against Women, She Drugs Herself Onstage. “It’s an attempt...

To Explore Violence Against Women, She Drugs Herself Onstage. “It’s an attempt to explore whether performance can give form to the disorganizing experience of trauma, its gaps and obsessional thinking.”

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Jason Kottke

What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? “An artist is...

What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? “An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor” vs. “a creator is a self-directed market expressor”. (Wondering where I fit on the 4-quadrant graph…)

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Jason Kottke

Does Harrison Ford Know His Lines?

Vanity Fair sat down with Harrison Ford and asked him to identify which of his lines he’d said in which movie, mostly as a way of getting him to talk about his career. A few observations: I love that they trolled him with The Star Wars Holiday Special…and he knew the lin...

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Jason Kottke

Small Japanese Pickup Truck Shows Bigger is Definitely Not Better. “Kei trucks...

Small Japanese Pickup Truck Shows Bigger is Definitely Not Better. “Kei trucks are city-sized, not highway-sized.”

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Jason Kottke

America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle. “Social media monetization programs...

America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle. “Social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame.” Team USA just scoring own goal after own goal these days.

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Jason Kottke

Requiem for Early Blogging. “I still look for people with early blogger...

Requiem for Early Blogging. “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting.”

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Jason Kottke

The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up. A recent meta-analysis reveals that “adjusting...

The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up. A recent meta-analysis reveals that “adjusting our goals in response to stress or challenges, rather than grinding on, is often ‘a more appropriate and beneficial response’”.

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Jason Kottke

A thread of “feel good” YouTube channels to watch. E.g.: “CinemaTherapy. Two...

A thread of “feel good” YouTube channels to watch. E.g.: “CinemaTherapy. Two former college roommates (one a filmmaker, the other a therapist) analyze movies.”

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Jason Kottke

Poetic Textural Landscapes by Lee Hyun-Joung

I’ve posted about Korean artist Lee Hyun-Joung’s swirling and swooping work before, but I recently saw one of her pieces in person and decided to feature some of her most recent stuff. It’s always a good time to look at art. Tags: art · Lee Hyun-Joung 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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Aaron Cohen

Lots to like about Variety’s list of 100 Best Comedy Movies of...

Lots to like about Variety’s list of 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time, but Coming to America at #46 and no Trading Places at all make me question the list’s credibility.

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Jason Kottke

How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein...

How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails. They reveal “a power elite practiced at disregarding pain” who have “learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering” to protect their network of power.

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Jason Kottke

What’s All the Fuss About Pluribus?

So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine): Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter — and stranger — outing than his tw...

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Jason Kottke

“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30. I can’t remember if...

“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30. I can’t remember if I was one of the few that saw this in the theater, but I loved this movie on VHS/DVD. Haven’t seen it for, what, 20 years though…

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Jason Kottke

“Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see...

“Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison — the ordinary, unposed figures of other people.”

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Jason Kottke

Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images

We’ve talked before about how some people can picture things in their heads quite vividly and others can’t at all. The latter group has a condition called aphantasia. As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark unde...

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Jason Kottke

Activists are role-playing ICE raids in games like Fortnite & GTA to...

Activists are role-playing ICE raids in games like Fortnite & GTA to teach people what to do IRL situations. “Many people may not have seen an interaction with ICE yet, it’s a way to get folks to know or get used to what that might look like.”

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Jason Kottke

The World Lost the Climate Gamble. Now It Faces a Dangerous New...

The World Lost the Climate Gamble. Now It Faces a Dangerous New Reality. “We are heading into ‘overshoot’ within the next few years. The world is going to become more turbulent and more dangerous. So, what comes after failure?”

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Jason Kottke

The Bad UX World Cup 2025. “Build a date picker with bad...

The Bad UX World Cup 2025. “Build a date picker with bad UX (the worse, the better).” The winning entry used a Tinder-like interface to swipe your desired days, months, and years.

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Jason Kottke

A Bright Light Has Gone Out

I’m headed out on an unexpected trip this afternoon, to attend the funeral of Dr. Steve Feller, who was my advisor in college and to whom I owe a great deal. I talked about Doc, as all his students called him, on this podcast with Craig Mod several years ago. From the tran...

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Jason Kottke

My Pace

Goro Obata went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.

In the mountains of Hokkaido, Goro Obata traded city rules for freedom, backcountry skiing, fly fishing — and a café that sometimes closes on sunny days. Watch his story of choosing lifestyle over convention, and discover what “Higashikawa style” really means.

Obata in the video (bold mine):

From then I thought, life is fast. Death comes so easily. If I just drift, in no time I’ll be an old man. I want to build a fun lifestyle. That’s what I thought. I want to build it.

(With apologies to Henry David Thoreau.)

Tags: Goro Obata · Henry David Thoreau · video

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Jason Kottke

Stigler’s law of eponymy: “No scientific discovery is named after its original...

Stigler’s law of eponymy: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Stigler’s law is itself an example of Stigler’s law.

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Jason Kottke

The Librarians

As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the nation’s librarians, “first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment rig...

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Jason Kottke

NASA’s Perseverance rover scooped up a rock that might prove there was...

NASA’s Perseverance rover scooped up a rock that might prove there was life on Mars. But the planned return of that sample to Earth is endangered by the Trump regime.

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Jason Kottke

Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the...

Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air. “The transit system is one of the greatest tools communities have to combat climate change and reduce emission. You can make a pretty immediate impact.”

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“Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs can be high, but it’s...

“Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs can be high, but it’s always on and, once it’s set up, it is cheap and enduring.” Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy.

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Jason Kottke

Rainy Day Jazz Vinyl Set. “Plenty of ballads, blues and heart-warming songs...

Rainy Day Jazz Vinyl Set. “Plenty of ballads, blues and heart-warming songs from Jazz artists across the ages for a cold, and rainy Sunday afternoon.”

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Jason Kottke

Can You Drive West to Lengthen the Sunset?

Two reasons why XKCD’s What If? series is so compelling:

  1. Even when an answer seems straightforward, the devil is in the details.
  2. And with respect to the details, Munroe does his due diligence.

In this case, the answer to “what’s the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming you’re obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?” was fairly surprising and exact and the explanation delightful.

Btw, the ending of the video is a callback to an early XKCD comic about angular momentum.

Tags: science · videos · XKCD

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Jason Kottke

CDC officials confirm that the US is two months away from measles...

CDC officials confirm that the US is two months away from measles being considered endemic for the first time since 2000. “Elimination status is lost if the virus spreads continuously for 12 months.”