One of the great things about the World Cup and the US: In the United States, Every World Cup Team Is a Home Team. “Soccer fans from all over the world, many now making their homes in America, have packed bars, restaurants, living rooms…”

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation, The Onion has produced a Ken Burns-esque film called Birth of a Nation (“the only movie ever named this”).

250 years ago, a group of illiterate men would gather in these hallowed halls to scribble down what historians can now only assume were words. Words that would one day be assigned meaning. Words and pictures. Pictures mostly. That would serve as the founding principles for a grand new experiment that would forever change the course of human history. An experiment that would produce a monstrosity so powerful it would soon be known to the whole world by just one name. America.

Tags: politics · The Onion · usa · video

In 1937, the NYT ran a piece about the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier. “Many times Constant said his father spoke of meeting George Washington…” The Great Span in action.

Five young descendants of Frederick Douglass read his famous “What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?” speech.

Hey all. It’s Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend and the weather is glorious here, so what better (worse) time to unleash a new feature on KDO? I’ve been working on a new wysiwyg comment editor for the past few days and it’s finally ready to go. Asking you folks to deal with HTML while leaving a comment was always a bit of a kludge, but now you can include links, blockquoted text, lists, and bold/italic text formatting in your comments and know exactly what it’s going to look like before posting.

You can try it out by sharing something worthwhile you’ve seen, heard, or learned recently. Feedback and bug reports welcome!!

Tags: kottke.org

As it was foretold: the Trump regime gutted the NOAA and now weather forecasts are less accurate. An atmospheric scientist: “The forecasts I’m able to offer you are less accurate than they would otherwise be.”

Something for the digital crate-diggers: The 40 Best Albums From the Last 40 Years That You Probably Didn’t Hear (But Should’ve). I’d only heard of one or two these…

“Dictionary of the Illegible proposes illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance.”

“The average paid newsletter costs $10 per month or $100 per year, according to analysis of thousands of publications hosted on Beehiiv.” KDO memberships start at $3/mo. and I haven’t raised prices since 2016. You folks are getting an incredible deal!

Hank Green interviews Ze Frank, who kind of invented the modern YouTube format (aka vlogging). “At the episode’s end, Ze lays down some of the best advice Hank’s ever heard.”

Parker Molloy on why the panic about trans women in sports is not actually about fairness or protecting women & girls (in the similar way Gamergate was not about “ethics in games journalism”).

Will America Ever Give White-Man Rights to Everyone Else? “These documents…were written by rich white men for the benefit of rich white men, and this country has never for a day recovered from their failure.”

The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning. “The true Constitution is not a document. It’s more of a gut feeling. It is a shimmering legal gas that settles wherever conservatives need it most…”

Rebecca Solnit: What Is the United States of America Now? “The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked.” But also: “It is the country that gave the world jazz…”

Report from a cruise full of celebrity impersonators. “A woman sat a toddler down beside us, while another, larger toddler tugged at her capris. At this point, every child was starting to look like Wallace Shawn.”

Erling Haaland “brings the intensity of a raiding party to the sport”. And: “Haaland can call to mind a shark circling dark waters.”

My Family Has Been Here Since 1621. That Is Not What Makes Me American. “We are a nation of immigrants that has watched as immigrants arrive, assimilate and begin pulling the ladder up behind them.”

There’s been so much crazy to pay attention to over the past few weeks that I missed this: Midjourney, the AI image-maker that you access through Discord, is making a medical imaging machine. “It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light…”

A graphic of a floppy disk hamburger was created on an early Amiga computer, photographed, and then deleted (more specifically, it couldn’t be saved). Stuart Brown set out to recreate this image as accurately as possible, including colors, dimensions, etc. This is deliciously nerdy. Here’s the resulting image (with some horizontal padding I added):

(via unsung)

Tags: Amiga · art · burgers · design · food · video

I love the aesthetic of Fresco, a video game where you play as a character embedded into Egyptian wall paintings. In many ways, these wall paintings are ancient precursors to side-scrolling games.

For the latest episode of Howtown, Adam Cole and Joss Fong look at wildfires and how investigators go about determining and proving how they start. The backdrop of video is the investigation into the Palisades Fire and the related arson trial that just concluded. What s...

You know sometimes you learn some ancient lore and suddenly some contemporary pop culture thing snaps into place? Anyway, I found out how Isadora Duncan died and now I better understand the “no capes” thing in The Incredibles.

Saya Irie’s Intricate Sculptures Recomposed from Eraser Shavings. “The Japanese artist erases images & then uses those eraser shavings to recompose the images into three-dimensional form, transforming the byproduct of erasure into delicate works of art.”

The Last Astronomers. “Many fear that if unleashed in all parts of the scientific process, AI tools could lead to nothing less than the death of astrophysics as a human endeavor.”

Idris Elba, knight of the realm and forever Avon Barksdale’s right-hand man in my heart, has been a DJ since he was 14 years old. He recently DJed a house party for Black House Radio and it looks like everyone had a lot of fun.

You can also find this mix on Soundcloud, along with many more of Elba’s mixes.

Tags: Idris Elba · music · video

Playwright Georgica Pettus has written a play called Truck, which is based on the excellent documentary Hands on a Hardbody. “I thought, ‘This is the best premise for a play, because all the attention goes to the dialogue.’”

What is queer typography? “I think that covers a lot of what queerness means: an attitude in the face of conformity, an attitude in the sea of passivity, an attitude to say yes when others say no.”

Gah, this is another thing I’m completely fucking pissed about today: Supreme Court upholds bans on transgender athletes participating in women and girls’ sports.

Great piece by Andrea Pitzer on how lost Ezra Klein is in this current moment, newly relevant because he interviewed fascist activist Christopher Rufo on his NYT podcast (JFC!) “If you don’t know what your core beliefs are, you’re going to get played.”

I found this AI Compass quiz genuinely useful for pinpointing how I actually feel about various aspects of AI. At the same time, I don’t think my result (“The Kontextmaschine”) quite fits…