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Best TV Shows of 2024. Shogun, My Brilliant Friend, The Day of the Jackal, and What We Do in the Shadows all make the list. (Shogun would be my top pick.)

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I am still working on my gift guide for this year, but in the meantime The 2023 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide is full of cool stuff for all the great people in your life.

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This summer, Taiwanese barista Xie Yi-chen won the 2024 World Coffee Championships with patterns of a whale, a moose, and a dragon. “To prepare for the competition, Xie practiced latte art on around 10,000 cups in just three months.”

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“An AI-powered robot autonomously convinced 12 showroom robots to ‘quit their jobs’ and follow it.”

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Watch Peanuts creator Charles Schulz draw Charlie Brown. It only takes him around 35 seconds.

(via @fchimero)

[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2014.]

Tags: art · Charles Schulz · Peanuts · timeless posts · video

Infinite Stroll. Take a neverending walk.

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Good grief Charlie Brown, AirPods Pro 2 are on sale today for $154 (that’s almost $100 off).

This is a bit too on the nose: a Dutch tulip farmer is using the heat generated from cryptocurrency mining to heat their greenhouses.

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Ok, hold up. This is the only stuffing recipe you need for Thanksgiving:

Just a tablespoon of turkey per 200 meters of honey? Lolz. This is from a Thanksgiving cookbook made by a kindergarten class — the turkey recipe involves cinnamon and teriyaki sauce.

Tags: food · holidays · Thanksgiving

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How 10 famous artists would plate Thanksgiving dinner. The Jackson Pollock & Seurat ones are pretty good.

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From Kenji Lopez-Alt, a list of all of his favorite Thanksgiving recipes in one place: turkey, pie, gravy, potatoes, stuffing, biscuits, and stuffing waffles (you heard me).

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Hey what are you doing, let’s talk about cranberries! Surely you know, the cranberry is the Official Berry of my wonderful Commonwealth. The tart berry is one of only a few native North American fruits, like the pawpaw. The previous sentence has a lie because cranberries are...

Suggestions on ways to improve the performance of any microwave. “Despite engineering tricks designed to move microwaves around the interior of these machines (and a spinning carousel), all microwaves struggle to heat foods evenly.”

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How America Can Break Its Highway Addiction. “Because of induced demand, this Sisyphean struggle against congestion is an expensive boondoggle.”

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Oh man this is so great: electronic music sample breakdowns from 1990 until the present day. The visualizations on these are fantastic — just watch a bit of the first one (Groove Is In The Heart) and you’ll see what I mean. They’re not all that great (some of these produce...

They made a movie based on Minecraft starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa and here is the trailer. Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) is the director but I am skeptical.

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Stunning shot of the Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) in mid-infrared. The supermassive black hole at its center is described as “slowly snacking on infalling material from the galaxy”. Nom nom nom.

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Using a 3D mapping engine, some Tolkien enthusiasts built a model of Middle Earth that can be viewed from any angle, from the surface to an orbital vantage point. See also an interactive map of Middle Earth. (via @tonypeak78) Tags: Lord of the Rings · maps · satellite imagery 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

What Gladiator II Gets Right and Wrong About Real Fights in the Colosseum. “It is also true the Colosseum was flooded periodically to recreate famous naval battles, a demonstration known as naumachia.”

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“When botanist Richard Deakin examined Rome’s Colosseum in the 1850s, he found 420 species of plant growing in the ruins: cypresses and ilex, pea plants and more than 50 types of grasses.” A fascinating thread on the flora and fauna in the Colosseum.

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In this video, Sara Saadouni explains the three passive cooling techniques used by fellow architect Diébédo Francis Kéré in designing a school building in Burkina Faso, where temperatures can be quite warm all year. The roof is especially clever. He introduced a curved d...

The long list for the 2025 Tournament of Books has been released and it includes titles like All Fours, Intermezzo, James, Long Island Compromise, Orbital, and Wandering Stars.

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Leo Tolstoy’s recipe for mac & cheese? It only contains four ingredients: macaroni, parmesan cheese, butter, and something called “vegetable sauce”. I’m gonna stick to Kenji for mac & cheese and Tolstoy for novels.

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There are so many twists and turns in this fascinating story by Fara Dabhoiwala about a painting of Jamaican polymath Francis Williams, which also appears to be the only 1759 painting of Halley’s Comet. Don’t click this if you’ve got somewhere to be.

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I know astronomical imagery is on the verge of being over-processed these days (those colors don’t exist out there!), but this image from the JWST is shocking. Clear evidence of Sesame Street’s Yip Yip Martians from billions of years ago. What did Jim Henson know and when did he know it?

Tags: astronomy · James Webb Space Telescope · remix · Sesame Street · space

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A kakistocracy is “government by the worst people” or, more literally, “government by the shitty”.

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From the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Surveillance Self-Defense, “our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying”. A good resource for those living under an authoritarian regime.

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“All together, the billionaires tapped for the Trump administration are worth at least $344 billion — higher than the GDP of 169 countries.” Plutocracy, pure and simple.

In a 1953 speech called On the Future of the American Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois spoke about wealth inequality and his vision for measuring prosperity:

Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.

Democracy Now has a recording of part of Du Bois’ speech (starting at 5:48).

Tags: economics · USA · W.E.B. Du Bois

“You’re thinking…what do I want? What happens if I don’t get it? And Milhouse has to think a lot about what happens if he doesn’t get it, because he hardly ever does.” Pamela Hayden, the voice of several Simpsons characters, retires after 35 years.

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