If you haven’t seen this or heard about it (or even if you have), the full story of this McDonald’s mural is well worth your time. “Giving that talk…was one of the greatest moments of my life. Bar none.” (Don’t skip the video!)

As you know, I love me some Lego engineering builds. This one is pretty fun: using a large syringe, a Raspberry Pi, neodymium magnets, a controller scavenged from a toy submarine, and a bunch of Lego pieces, Brick Experiment Channel built a remote-controlled submarine. And it works so well! They even tested it by navigating 200 meters in a real stream.

Tags: Lego · video

Spider-Noir is an upcoming live-action series starring Nicolas Cage as his noir Spider-Man character from Spider-Verse. The trailer is available in color and black & white.

The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge. The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind...

Fun word search game from Slate: Pears. (I love any Boggle-esque sort of game. Got 433 today.)

“‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism generally involves a press outlet parroting the claims of a CEO or billionaire utterly mindlessly without any sort of useful historical context as to whether anything being said is factually correct.”

“Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its centre but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence.”

The Origins of One of the Most Beloved Video Games of All Time. “Something I’ve heard from every Mario developer I’ve ever spoken to over the years is this: Whenever you press a button, something fun should happen.”

Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart) on the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest. “If you allow yourself to trust-fall into the barbed intricacies of the writing, you will discover soft, exquisite humanity as its perennial landing.”

Sara Hussain for Vogue India: In 2026, I’m No Longer Interested in ‘Working on Myself’, aka the exhausting “hyper-policing [of] our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise”. Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise....

“Any serious push to account for the actions of this government — to abolish the president’s private army, restructure immigration enforcement and punish anyone responsible for wrongdoing — must include recompense and repair for its victims.”

When Gmail was released as a public beta in 2004, it “ran on three hundred old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted”.

Actor-style headshots from the 80s of artists like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Robert Longo.

The Merchant’s House Museum was NYC’s first landmarked building, but until this year, the function of a small hidden passageway in the house was unknown. When historians and preservationists examined it in detail, they found that it was built by the first owner of the hous...

AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions. “From this point on, for as long as we exist, we might be asking AIs what comes next. We won’t always understand how they arrived at their predictions.”

Sleeping cleans your brain. Research suggests that zoning out, daydreaming, and being bored can perform a similar function without the need for deep sleep. So put down that phone occasionally and let your brain chill for a bit.

Tags: neuroscience · science · sleep · video

In case you didn’t realize, ICE is still terrorizing communities, kidnapping people off the streets, and destroying property in Minnesota. “The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance.”

Fontemon is the world’s first video game in a font. “The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font.”

The GOP goal of destroying the post office is coming along: the USPS is now so unreliable that newspaper delivery is delayed across the country. (My mail delivery is currently one bundle every week or two.)

Hey gang. I took a couple of days off at the beginning of the week to visit some colleges with my daughter. She found a potential contender, one that was just fine, and a school that isn’t going to work for her — we both independently zoned out listening to the presentation ...

Everyone’s living a life you know nothing about. Be kind.

“We will not achieve any of our ultimate goals without exercising state power, and the most effective way to take state power is through nonviolent but confrontational resistance.”

This video catalogs every borrowed sample from Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, from the soundtrack to Car Wash to the Sugarhill Gang to the Eagles to the Ramones to the Beatles. They play the original first and then what they did with it on the album. Somehow this vi...

TIL that the hieroglyphic hobo code probably wasn’t used as extensively as the internet suggests. However, hobos and tramps did tag bridges, water towers, and train cars with tramp writing, which usually consisted of their moniker (i.e. their hobo name), the date, and the ...

Bumblebee, honey bee, yellow jacket, paper wasp…what’s the difference? I don’t know if this comprehensive guide to Yellow Stripey Things is entirely truthful or not — a bumblebee is “actually a flying panda” and a yellow jacket “is just an asshole” — but it is pretty enter...

Art director Antonio Alcalá, one of four art directors employed by the USPS, talks a little bit about the history behind US postage stamps and how they are designed and produced.

[This is a vintage post originally from Dec 2016.]

Tags: Antonio Alcala · design · stamps · USPS · video

From Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, a reminder of the rules of adjective order that fluent English speakers follow without quite knowing why. …adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. S...

Speaking of DJ Shadow, his 2-hour Essential Mix that aired in early July is really hitting the spot right now.

[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2016.]

Tags: DJ Shadow · music

From photographer Richard Silver, vertical panoramic photos of churches that emphasize their often incredible ceilings. (via ignant) [This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2015.] Tags: architecture · photography · religion · Richard Silver · timeless posts

This image was tweeted out by the NASA Europa Mission account the other day:

One of these images is of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, and the other eight are frying pans. Can you pick Europa out? Hint: frying pans tend not to have impact craters.

Update: The photos of the frying pans were taken by Christopher Jonassen, whose work I featured back in 2011 (which I had totally forgotten about). At the time, I even joked about the pans looking like a Jovian moon. kottke.org is a flat circle. (thx, tony)

[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2015.]

Tags: astronomy · Christopher Jonassen · Europa · Jupiter · NASA · space · timeless posts