What Dinosaurs Were Really Like. This is an entertaining and informative look at what we know about dinosaurs today (for those of us who haven’t kept up much since Jurassic Park).
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“Coyote time” is a trick video game designers use to be more forgiving about players jumping — the jump button still works after running off the end of the platform. It’s named after Wile E. Coyote’s ability to run in midair.
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Wow, check out these amazing hyperrealistic pencil drawings by Kohei Ohmori. The detail is next-level…here’s a close-up view of the drawing above:
This drawing took 280 hours (~11.7 days) over a period of five months. You can check out some BTS and Ohmori’s other work on Instagram. (via clive thompson)
Tags: art · Kohei Ohmori
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Montana youth score a major climate victory in court. “Montana’s Supreme Court has ruled that the 16 youth who sued the state in a landmark climate change lawsuit have a constitutional right to ‘a clean and healthful environment.’”
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Reporter Lucy Sherriff on fleeing from the LA fires: I Saw the Beginning of Hell. “A father ran up the street with his daughter in her school uniform. ‘I can see my house, my house is burning! Mommy’s there, Mommy’s going to die!’” Jesus.
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The Weirdest TV Crossovers of All Time include St. Elsewhere + Cheers, Arrested Development + Law & Order: SVU, Alice + The Dukes of Hazzard, and Mr. Robot + Alf.
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You Don’t Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume. “The most popular vehicles in America may be the greatest examples of overcompensation ever invented.”
Hey folks, I just wanted to update you on some things I’ve launched recently at the ol’ dot org. (RSS reader folk, you’re going to have to click through to the actual WWW to see these…don’t be scared, you can do it.)
1. Last month, I added the ability for members to fave ...
Simon Willison shares his approach to running a link blog. “I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.” Ditto. 😉
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Recently sold at auction for £277,200, The Dune Bible is the storyboard for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which was famously never made. From an Instagram tour of the book:
The book contains a complete storyboard that tells the narrat...
The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2024. Here’s Ron Charles on Kristi Noem’s memoir: “…a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge”.
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Surviving President Tr*mp: Lessons from the 1960s and Octavia E. Butler. “First, breathe. Meditate. Journal. Dance. Hydrate. Get enough rest. If you’re an artist, CREATE.”
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After the Civil War, the economic recovery of the southern United States hinged on trade with the North and moving goods westward via the railroad. But there was a problem. Tracks in the South had been built with a gauge (or track width) of 5 feet but the majority of tracks ...
Study: More Americans Buying Firearms To Defend Selves From Toddlers Who Found Their Guns. “If a child ever gets into their nightstand or unlocked gun safe, they just want a chance to fight back.”
You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill. “It’s not just the cooking that wears me down, but the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the soon-to-be-rotting produce sitting in my fridge.” Everything after the “but” is my daily nemesis.
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In this excerpt from Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, author Eliot Stein travels to a city in Sardinia to learn how to make the world’s rarest pasta, su filindeu.
As much as I would hate to see su filindeu...
From MIT Technology Review, the 8 worst technology failures of 2024. Includes AI slop, Boeing’s Starliner, and woke AI.
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I enjoyed Randall Munroe’s take on what he thought adult life would be like as a kid…in the form of a graph, naturally. All those Looney Tunes reruns & 80s movies led us Gen Xers astray.
Tags: infoviz · Randall Munroe · XKCD
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Exercise is “the single most potent medical intervention ever known”. “People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps.”
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The 2024 Architecture and Design Awards. There’s a children’s book museum in Kansas City? And Miranda July renovated the kitchen in her rental apartment without her landlord knowing?
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Tim Carmody has a great appreciation of HTML in Wired magazine: HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me.
HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library — an archive, a directory, a set of connections — for all digital knowledge.
I love HTML!
Tags: HTML · programming · Tim Carmody · web development
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The Criterion Channel’s collection of Surveillance Cinema, including The Conversation, Gattaca, Minority Report, Sliver, and The Lives of Others.
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From The Verge: Meta abandons fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of Community Notes.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta’s new ...
The Militia and the Mole. “A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.” He returned with a trove of documents.
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Have you ever wanted to browse art from the Metropolitan Museum in a first-person shooter interface? You are in luck because DOOM: The Gallery Experience exists.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world...
Every month, my friend Jodi Ettenberg sends out one of the best links roundups around, her *free* Curious About Everything newsletter. This month’s issue came out yesterday and there’s really so much good stuff in there — Spotify’s ghost artists, biofarming animals for liv...
Director Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of everything he watched and read in 2024. (I would love to read little media diet-style reviews of all this from him.)
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“I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of Trump. So, what happened? The blame largely lies with Republican political leaders.” Remember: Mitch McConnell plainly stated that Trump incited the attack…then voted not to impeach him.
