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

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Hyperland, a Prescient 1990 TV Show by Douglas Adams

I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent int...

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Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours,...

Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours, recorded live at SF’s Castro Theatre. This one’s going straight into the earholes. Soundcloud, YouTube, and elsewhere.

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Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from...

Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from Building the Creature? “These are serious concerns. And I think we should all stop. Me, especially. Can anyone make me stop doing the thing I want to do? Apparently not.”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Consequence of Donald Trump

Writing for Vanity Fair (archive link), Ta-Nehisi Coates says that Donald Trump is the most visionary politician of his era. Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, an...

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Charles Harley on Subway Takes: “I don’t think Black...

Charles Harley on Subway Takes: “I don’t think Black people should have to pay for ancestry.com. Why do I have to pay you to figure out where you stole me from?”

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Illustrator and writer Luis Mendo’s second book is out....

Illustrator and writer Luis Mendo’s second book is out. “The only website that once a year becomes a book.” I have Book One and it’s lovely…

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Chromatic Inkscapes

I love these digital illustrations by Adam Fuhrer; he calls them chromatic aberrations. It was difficult to narrow them down to the few favorites above. I posted about Fuhrer’s pen plotted art a couple of years ago…I like the direction he’s taking this. Tags: Adam Fuhrer · art

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Margaret Atwood in 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book. “It’s...

Margaret Atwood in 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book. “It’s very hard to control what young people get their hands on, especially if they’re told something is too old for them, or too evil, or too immoral.”

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Roooobot. Huuuuuman.

This woman does some amazing things with a series of white rings — lots of precision optical illusions.

It’s mesmerizing watching people moving like machines — an interesting psychological thing. Like Avantgardey, which if you haven’t heard of them (just because they show up all the time on my Instagram doesn’t mean that happens for everyone), you should check them out:

(via @sevlu)

Tags: dance · video

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The trailer for Blade Runner 2099, a new limited series...

The trailer for Blade Runner 2099, a new limited series premiering in late November and starring Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer.

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Going 94 MPH on a Skateboard (New World Record)

Diego Poncelet recently set a new world record for the fastest speed on a skateboard. The old record was 146.7 km/h (91.2 mph) and he hit 151.8 km/h (94.3 mph). There are a couple of parts you can skip, but watching most of the video is worth it because you see the process and can compare how truly insanely fast he is moving during the final run — I found myself holding my breath for the last minute or so.

Also, I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.

I just found the first time I posted about speed skateboarding on KDO: this post from 2008. Less aerodynamic, more gonzo, and the cameraman is also on a skateboard going equally fast.

Tags: Diego Poncelet · skateboarding · video

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I played (not) solitaire for more hands than I would care...

I played (not) solitaire for more hands than I would care to admit. “A multiplayer game where the multiplayer was about companionship, empathy, and comfort, instead of competition or even interaction.”

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Good headline: Nine Inch Snails.

Good headline: Nine Inch Snails.

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Beautiful Seamless Ride

A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)

Tags: cycling · video

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Is the camera shutter noise the last skeuomorphic element...

Is the camera shutter noise the last skeuomorphic element left in iOS?

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Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates...

Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.

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How Hunting Owls Use Sound to “See” Under the Snow

The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter. The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the soun...

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How many shots are in the average movie? How does it...

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”

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Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic...

Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!

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Where You Should Live: Five Factors to Keep in Mind

I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think thes...

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Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings:...

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.

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Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts...

Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.

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The Muffled Thud of Fire in the Hole

From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph: One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West...

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It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem...

It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”

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Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the...

Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the woods?” Signal president Meredith Whittaker: “Look, I know social media wants this. I know you guys want this little clip. But what the fuck? What the fuck?? Both are bad!”

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May Peace Prevail on Earth

Here are some photos I’ve taken during my time in Tokyo so far. I’ve been posting new stuff more or less daily to Instagram. Somehow I’m already about halfway through my stay. Somehow these images both capture and don’t even come close to capturing my experience here. That kinda place, I guess. Tags: Japan · Jason Kottke · photography

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“‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong.”...

“‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong.” Digger is fascinating — I can’t remember another big movie where public opinion has been so divided (it’s either genius or garbage). I saw it with a friend and he loved it so much he went again.

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Anthropic says that, as of Sept ‘26, they were merging...

Anthropic says that, as of Sept ‘26, they were merging 30,000 code changes per day, a 12-fold increase from just four months earlier. The volume increased so much that they wrote their own Git alternative.

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Whoa, the Lion Nebula!

NASA’s JWST recently snapped this image of the Lion Nebula (NGC 2392). Massive stars undergo supernova explosions at the end of their lives, but these kinds of events are few and far in between. Most of the universe’s stars have lower masses, like the one belonging to NG...

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The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting...

The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse. “When perseverance turns against us, quitting isn’t just a way out. Often, it’s the first step to something better. A pivot. A break. A chance to go further — or be free.”