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

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• Jason Kottke

The Lego Game Boy

Lego is coming out with a near 1:1 replica of Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy handheld video game system. It’s not playable, but you can insert & remove Lego game cartridges and use different lenticular screens to pretend. Here’s a short video showing how it “works”: You can preorder the kit from Amazon; the price is $60, which is only $30 less than the actual Game Boy cost when it was released.1 I still have my original Game Boy from 1989 — it’s sitting on a table near where I’m typing this. I played so so much Tetris on that thing… (via moss & fog) Although $90 in 1989 is $235 in 2025 dollars, which is right around what the Playdate handheld costs.↩ Tags: Game Boy · Lego · Nintendo · remix · video games 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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• Jason Kottke

A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family...

A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online. That’s roughly a book a week. The list runs over 100 pages and he checked most of the books out of the local library.

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• Jason Kottke

The Boston Globe’s Prescient 2016 View of Our Trumpist Future

On April 9, 2016, several months before Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, the Boston Globe ran an editorial entitled “The GOP must stop Donald Trump”. Donald J. Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-...

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• Jason Kottke

Wplace Is Exploding Online Amid a New Era of Youth Protest. “Some...

Wplace Is Exploding Online Amid a New Era of Youth Protest. “Some pixels started movements. At one point there was just a single wooden ship flying a Brazilian flag off Portugal. Soon, a fleet appeared, a tongue-in-cheek invasion.”

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• Jason Kottke

The Iron Chef Opening Theme Was Composed by Hans Zimmer?

Today I learned that the opening theme song for the original Iron Chef TV program was adapted from a song composed by Hans Zimmer, who has done scores for films like Interstellar, Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Inception, and Dunkirk. Perhaps even weirder, the name of the theme song is “Show Me Your Firetruck”. (The song is from Zimmer’s score for the movie Backdraft.)

Tags: Hans Zimmer · Iron Chef · music · TV · video

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• Jason Kottke

Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Site of the Year! This looks...

Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Site of the Year! This looks like a fantastic group of nominees that celebrate “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”.

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• Jason Kottke

This website is for humans. “I write the content on this website...

This website is for humans. “I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them.”

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• Jason Kottke

Reddit will block the Internet Archive. “The company says that AI companies...

Reddit will block the Internet Archive. “The company says that AI companies have scraped data from the Wayback Machine, so it’s going to limit what the Wayback Machine can access.” AI scraping will kill the open web — everyone’s shutting the gates.

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• Jason Kottke

Roll On, You Crazy Tire!

The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.

And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”

(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)

Tags: this is a metaphor for something · video

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• Jason Kottke

Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America. “When you make...

Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America. “When you make smart and ambitious young people feel unwelcome in America and give them no indication that they’ll have a job in this country at all…they may eventually decide not to come here.”

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• Jason Kottke

I Spent 6 Years Building a Ridiculous Wooden Pixel Display. “I built...

I Spent 6 Years Building a Ridiculous Wooden Pixel Display. “I built the world’s most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it.”

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• Jason Kottke

The Lord of the Rings Audiobook Is Fantastic

Just the other day, I learned that Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the LoTR movies, did an unabridged audiobook version of the original trilogy, as well as one of The Hobbit: The Hobbit (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible) The Fellowship of the Ring (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible) T...

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• Jason Kottke

Scientists have found a “robust” candidate for a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri...

Scientists have found a “robust” candidate for a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the Sun-like star closest to our solar system. “Not only that, but it orbits the star in its habitable zone, meaning the temperature isn’t too hot or too cold…”

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• Jason Kottke

Honey, I Have No Clue What You’re Talking About — I Did...

Honey, I Have No Clue What You’re Talking About — I Did NOT Use AI to Write My Wedding Vows. “Do you remember when we moved in together and spent that whole first weekend building furniture? This is an example of an anecdote you could include.”

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• Jason Kottke

In a preseason game yesterday, Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Cam Little nailed a...

In a preseason game yesterday, Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Cam Little nailed a 70-yard field goal. The official NFL record is 66 yards.

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• Jason Kottke

Smokey Bear Through the Years

This is a fun new website featuring 80+ years of artifacts & memorabilia related to Smokey Bear, the famous spokesbear for the US Forest Service. In 1944, the USDA Forest Service, National Association of State Foresters, and Ad Council launched the first poster...

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• Jason Kottke

Karen Attiah: I Gained 20 Pounds of Muscle. Here’s What I Learned....

Karen Attiah: I Gained 20 Pounds of Muscle. Here’s What I Learned. “Weightlifting embodies a form of female expression that society is not quite ready for: physical power that we define on our own terms.”

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• Jason Kottke

“You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The...

“You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole.”

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• Jason Kottke

American neo-Nazis love the Trump era. “[Trump] awakened a lot of people...

American neo-Nazis love the Trump era. “[Trump] awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years. He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”

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• Jason Kottke

Israel’s right-wing government has murdered five Al Jazeera journalists in a deliberate...

Israel’s right-wing government has murdered five Al Jazeera journalists in a deliberate attack targeting front-line journalist Anas al-Sharif.

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• Jason Kottke

Great new t-shirt for Gracie’s Ice Cream features a Jaws-shaped cone about...

Great new t-shirt for Gracie’s Ice Cream features a Jaws-shaped cone about to chomp a cherry.

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• Jason Kottke

“James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who helped turn a failed...

“James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who helped turn a failed moon mission into a triumph of on-the-fly can-do engineering, has died. He was 97.”

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• Jason Kottke

The Danish post office will stop delivering mail (but not parcels) at...

The Danish post office will stop delivering mail (but not parcels) at the end of 2025. “Letter volumes have decreased by over 90 percent since 2000”. But over 100 million letters were delivered in 2024…that’s still a tremendous number.

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• Jason Kottke

“New FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are...

“New FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s” but the media disproportionately covers crime, so most Americans aren’t aware of the decrease.

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• Jason Kottke

Why wildlife crossings and crucial for animals and humans: they embiggen habitats...

Why wildlife crossings and crucial for animals and humans: they embiggen habitats and greatly reduce vehicle-animal collisions.

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• Jason Kottke

From the Phonograph podcast, a look at the early days of 99%...

From the Phonograph podcast, a look at the early days of 99% Invisible (as that podcast’s 15th anniversary approaches).

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• Jason Kottke

Tractor beams exist in the real world. They use ultrasound to hover...

Tractor beams exist in the real world. They use ultrasound to hover and manipulate tiny objects. “It can be thought of as an acoustic hologram. It’s a shape that exists in space but is made of sound.”

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• Jason Kottke

Vintage Bike Tricks, Circa 1965

Lilly Yokoi was an acrobat who specialized in performing on a bicycle. During her career, she toured around the world and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show three times. In this performance from 1965, Yokoi does some seriously before-their-time tricks on her Golden Bicycle, including a no-hands handlebar spin, a no-hands wheelie, a handstand over the handlebars, and several other tricks…all in chunky high heels, mind you.

Here’s an even earlier performance, from 1961. See also some bike tricks filmed by Thomas Edison in 1899.

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

Tags: cycling · Lilly Yokoi · timeless posts · video

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• Jason Kottke

Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing. “The Nazi push alert was only possible...

Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing. “The Nazi push alert was only possible because of Substack’s continued commitment to not only hosting but actively promoting authoritarian, Nazi-sympathizing, and other bigoted forms of extremism.”

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• Jason Kottke

Emily Wilson’s current project is translating The Odyssey (again). “I am doing...

Emily Wilson’s current project is translating The Odyssey (again). “I am doing a fully revised re-retranslation, to align my Odyssey translation more closely with my Iliad.”

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