Looks like Every Frame a Painting is ramping up again! “Over the last 10 years, Taylor and I have amassed a series of ideas — some of them originally designed to be on Youtube, some designed to be other things. All of this is currently in progress”

Amazon is releasing some new Kindle models, including a thinner Paperwhite (my fave) with an aluminum back, more storage, and faster interactions. If I didn’t just get a new last-gen Paperwhite to replace one I lost, I’d be tempted to pre-order.

A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps. I listened to about half of this and had to stop…it’s incredibly candid but what he went through as a kid & young adult, oof.

A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city. As previously mentioned, he started playing the game to connect with his kids and never stopped. (This is only part 1 of ???)

You can destroy kottke.org if you want. Or any other site!

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.

The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.

Tags: video

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a hand-picked collection of unique & rare films across Vintage Animation, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, Documentaries, Found Tapes & Much More”. KDO readers might like the Early Technology section.

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. “If you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.” Really interesting.

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film.

Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the closest to my own personal tastes as I’ve ever found. So today, I want to talk about how director Joe Wright created some of the best extended tracking shots, ones, long takes, that I’ve ever seen.

Tags: film school · Joe Wright · movies · Pride and Prejudice · video

The Tell, a very long read about Thomas Goldstein (SCOTUSblog founder, high-powered lawyer, poker player) who once played a legendary game at the Bellagio where he bet wildly, didn’t even look at his cards for long stretches of time, and won big.

“Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements, or to be eaten by scavenging animals.” (CW: there are some potentially upsetting photos on that page.)

Craig Mod made a cool mini-site cataloging all of the long walks he’s taken since 2009, with maps and GPS tracks and links to essays/books/media that resulted from them.

A lovely contemplative short video featuring Toshiyuki Ueno of the Japanese fashion brand Visvim talking about craftsmanship.

We want to make things that people will get attached to and will use for a long time. And that’s at the core of our creating process. It’s simple and not that complicated.

He continues:

I think about how people grow attached to things over time as they use them, and how those things add to its allure over time.

“Those things” is a little ambiguous without the context of the video…he means the wear that develops from use and how people grow attached to those “imperfections”. See also wabi-sabi.

Tags: cars · design · fashion · Japan · Porsche · Toshiyuki Ueno · video · Visvim

Manchester City guilty over Premier League charges after £900m of ‘sham’ contracts. The “financial doping” scheme allowed the club’s owners to pump large sums of money into the team without appearing to exceed the league’s spending limits.

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”

From the early 1970s until his death in 2021, Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul painted water droplets. From one of the galleries representing his work: The waterdrop was the starting point for a singular and iconic body of work, which stands at the confluence of lyrical abstraction, Pop art and Chinese calligraphy. This simple and limpid œuvre subtly fuses Taoist wisdom, modern conceptual irony and the tragedy of war. You can view more of Kim’s work at Colossal and InspirationGrid. Tags: art · Kim Tschang-Yeul · water

The death of web development education. “The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).”

Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be. “Many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.” Simmons’ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.

I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project id...

The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris. “Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish.”

On commodified, automated intelligence. “If any of these things shake out and we make it out of the near-future, the best you can hope for is a universal basic income, pegged to a meaningful percentage of existing compute.” (God that’s bleak.)

Over the past six months, dozens of people pitched in to create the MN Stolen Neighbors Quilt, which is made of 12,500 squares, each one representing an immigrant abducted in Minnesota by the Trump regime’s secret police (ICE + CBP). The quilt was recently unveiled at the MN...

In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits her 2015 piece on marriage. “Toward the end, I felt as if the best versions of ourselves had married and the worst versions of ourselves were getting divorced.”

OpenAI isn’t going to release its newest model because “it showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a willingness to mislead users about its actions [and] was also willing to go beyond the original scope of what it was asked to do”.

This American Life has a whole episode with Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter Najya, following up on her NYT article about Nikole’s school choice for Najya.

Whoa, for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder has released four additional songs from that recording session. “We didn’t add these songs to the album, but they were part of what I was feeling and discovering as we made it.”

What do you you do when the book you’re reading is too large to carry around? “I would like to recommend you to a practice I call Chop That Book Up Into Reasonable Sizes.”

Well. I’m not sure what to think about this. The teaser trailer for Madden, starring Nicolas Cage as John Madden and Christian Bale as Al Davis. Boom?

What if America Went Completely Dark? “We came up with some very astounding numbers. If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” And it could last months?