“Originally released in 1982, the Vectrex was a truly unique console, featuring its own built-in vector display and colorful screen overlays. Forty-three years after its creation, this iconic console is reborn in a brand-new miniature edition.”

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Thanks to Great Wave Today, I was able to see an original woodblock print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa at the Creative Museum here in Tokyo. My first time seeing an original IRL! And an amazing exhibition as well.

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I began at the end. The Chōishi-michi pilgrimage route is an amazing 12-mile trail that winds its way up through the forest from the Jison-in temple in the town of Kudoyama in the valley to the Danjo Garan temple in the town of Kōyasan in the mountains. The origins of the ...

From NY Times reporter Anna Kodé (whose “intersection of culture and real estate” reporting I’ve been enjoying lately), a short video on the increasingly hostile architecture of NYC. The spread of the leaning bench and the lack of seating at places like Moynihan or around...

Bud Smith built a desk for his truck so he could write during breaks in his work as a mechanic and welder. “Now that I had my Truck Desk, that vehicle was my very own rolling cubicle.”

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“Glowing sperm helps to reveal secrets of mosquito sex.” And what are those secrets you might ask? “Female mosquitoes are actually in charge during sex.” Good for her.

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Courtesy of login.jp (“archiving the Japanese experience through music”), a jazz jungle mix by Takuya Nakamura, played in a Japanese rice field to celebrate the importance of rice in Japanese culture. A trumpet makes a few appearances.

Nakamura recently played a set in an elevator as well. (A trumpet makes a few appearances.)

It’s worth exploring login.jp’s back catalog, including party mix with green onions, techno & house mix in a Japanese fish shop, and chill mix with Japanese grandpa at a stationery shop.

(via mike bates)

Tags: food · Japan · login.jp · music · Takuya Nakamura

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Yessss. I noticed that a 4K remaster of Princess Mononoke was playing in some IMAX theaters here in Japan last week, and now the movie is opening wider, with showings w/ English subtitles. So excited to see this!

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Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud. “The other reason I want to be open about all of this is that I don’t like the idea of there being any stigma attached to having Parkinson’s disease or, for that matter, any disease.”

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Heidi Klum always brings it for Halloween and this year she dressed as Medusa, complete with writhing snake hair. “Her husband, musician Tom Kaulitz, dressed as a man turned to stone.”

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I’ve got this queued up to listen to on the Shinkansen later: Lane 8’s Fall 2025 Mixtape. Available on YouTube, Soundcloud, and Apple Music. I’ve added this to my Underscore collection too.

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Proof of life! I’m writing a longer post about my time in Kōyasan, but in the meantime, I made this Insta reel of some of the photos I took there.

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Hey folks. I’m going off the grid for a few days. Call it a spiritual retreat of sorts. I’ll be back soon; be well in the meantime.

The image is of the Great Buddha and a group of adorably chapeaued schoolchildren at the Todai-ji Temple in Nara.

Tags: kottke.org

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“I fell at the top of a mountain – and knew I had to haul my broken body down or die in the snow.” Holy moly, this is a harrowing tale.

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A Chinese naval officer who took part in D-Day wrote an 80-page diary of his time embedded with British forces. “Lam was part of a group of more than 20 Chinese naval officers sent during World War II for training in the U.K. by Chiang Kai-shek.”

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A riff on catfishing, “chatfishing” is using an LLM to communicate with prospective dates on the apps. Ohhhh man, this is a cringe-read.

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While working as a filmmaker as part of the Scott Expedition, Temujin Doran made a beautifully shot and edited short film about a small team of people who live and work on Antarctica’s Union Glacier during the summer.

For me, this film seems a bit like an antithesis to many expedition and adventure documentaries. There is no great achievement or record broken, nor any real challenge to overcome. Instead it concerns minor details; the everyday tasks of the staff that were made more special by the environment surrounding them. And in fact, I think that’s what attracted me to make this film - the delightful trivialities of an average life, working in Antarctica.

Wes Anderson-esque. (thx, joseph)

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

Tags: Antarctica · Temujin Doran · timeless posts · video

This podcast episode looks really interesting: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jamelle Bouie, and David French “explore how the nation’s fascination with Southern culture reveals deeper truths about race, class, belonging and the power of Trumpism”.

‘I get to do whatever I want in the moment’: why more people are going to gigs, festivals and clubs alone.

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Gina Trapani on how she thinks about and uses AI as a former full-time software engineer. “It’s remarkable and so very bad at the same time.”

I’m visiting Kyoto soon, so I reread Lauren Groff’s piece about The Tale of Genji: A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto. “I believe that places, like people, hold memory, and when place memory announces itself, it does so through the body.”

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The Jacket Potato Jacket. “Supermarket chain Aldi has teamed up with London fashion brand Agro Studio to create a puffer coat that resembles a giant baked potato.”

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Bear Breaks Into California Zoo to Mingle With Other Bears. “A bear came in from the wild, introduced itself to the zoo’s bears and played with their toys, before being shown the exit.”

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A Reminder that Protected Bike Lanes Can Make Streets Safer for Everyone. “A 2019 study spanning thirteen years in twelve cities found that protected bike lanes dramatically reduced fatalities for all road users on the streets that added them.”

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The ‘Anti-Woke’ Tax That All Americans Are Paying. “Tariffs are the most obvious example” but also food prices rising due to the immigrant crackdown, rising energy prices bc of the regime’s anti-solar bias. And the tax is flowing into corporate coffers.

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New essay collection from classist Emily Wilson: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. “From Athenian comedy and Rome’s love of Greek culture to Han Kang’s novels, Cardi B’s lyrics and the discoveries she made whilst translating Homer…”

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Listening to Ethan Hawke talk about his career for 30 minutes is a treat. He starts with Explorers (which I loved as a kid) and continues with Dead Poets Society, Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and First Reformed. Good Lord Bird is on the list as well…I’m making my way through the book right now and I’ll be eager to check out the miniseries after I’m finished.

I wish they would have included Gattaca but you have to stop somewhere otherwise the dang thing’s gonna be an hour long.

Tags: Ethan Hawke · film school · movies · video

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Hitler, Stalin, Freud, Trotsky, and Franz Joseph all lived within a radius of a few km in Vienna in 1913-14. “Stalin could have, with real probability, walked past a homeless Hitler trying to sell his mediocre watercolor paintings on the street…”

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The Neurodivergent Genius Who Invented Formula 1 For Marbles. “This is the story of how one creator on the autism spectrum redefined online sports through marbles, community, and viral spectacle.”

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This is so so cool and an arrow-splitting bullseye in the middle of my wheelhouse: a short Boards of Canada tune played on a DEC PDP-1, one of the most significant machines in the history of computing. Here’s a description of what’s going on, courtesy of @dryad.technology...