Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
From Big Think and Pop Charts, A Literary Map of America that “highlights the real and imagined settings of hundreds of books”. Frank Jacobs takes a closer look at some of the imaginary places on the map, including Sleepy Hollow, Lake Wobegon, Brokeback Mounta…
Solving the Feynman restaurant problem, i.e. how many dishes should you sample at a restaurant to find your favorite one? “Once you settle on a dish, the best strategy is to order it on every remaining visit.”
Paul Ford made an app called Mouse Party for easily hosting video watching parties for your friends, no web server needed.
Afghan-American visual artist Daniel Malikyar recently shared some great photos of what he calls “a fashion subculture unlike anything I’ve encountered before” that he found in a remote village in the mountains of Afghanistan. I met a group of boys in a remote…
The long-lost source for a sample in Craig Mack’s Flava In Ya Ear has been found. “Back then, rap producers took care in disguising the samples that they chopped up, making them difficult to trace — not just for legal reasons, but as part of the art.”
Literary Hub is trying to determine the best literary TV adaptation of all time. I have soft spots for Station Eleven, Mindhunter, Shogun, The Expanse, Normal People, and, especially, My Brilliant Friend. (Where is Fleishman Is in Trouble??)
On his site Notes From the Road, Erik Gauger has a wonderful eight-part series on The Citrus Kingdom, a collection of illustrated stories about citrus fruit and Sicily. The key to the citron’s future—a future that links nearly every aspect of Sicily’s cultural…
The 100 Best Indie Rock Albums of All Time. Includes albums by Death Cab for Cutie, Neko Case, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bon Iver, TV on the Radio, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Liz Phair, and Sonic Youth.
Jono is a video game with 1,000,000 levels. Only one person can play at a time, for 60 seconds, while everyone else watches on a livestream.” As of this writing, the game is up to level 179,579, and Jono has died 250,687 times.
Writer and comedian Zach Mander took quotes from Karl Marx and paired them with illustrations from books by Richard Scarry like What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. See also Mamdani’s Richard Scarry socialism. Tags: books · illust…
Riding the Rails With America’s Last Train-Hoppers. “There are still people today who risk injury and arrest to climb aboard freight trains, still moving through the country in cars designed to carry things rather than people.”
The corkscrew car jump from the Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun was extensively modelled on a computer in 1974. “McHenry took all the measurements and simulated the stunt using the equations of the 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler.”
“Today’s rich people are richer than ever, and that seems to have made them worse than ever. More shameless. More out of touch. Less empathetic. Thinner-skinned. And…angrier. They’re people who consider equality for others oppression for themselves.”
As part of the 30 Day Map Challenge, Maxwell Howe created a map of New England places that many out-of-towners mispronounce (Instagram). As you would expect when you start talking about local pronunciations and accents, he’s getting some blowback: You’re mixin…
Starting today at 7pm in NYC, 400 volunteers will read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in 10-minute increments for 4 days. They’re gonna livestream it on YouTube.
Nope, this is not at all metaphorical: “In its glory days, the S.S. United States was fast, luxurious and all but indestructible.” RIP, the United States.
NPR recently welcomed Swedish pop star Robyn to their office for a Tiny Desk Concert. She sings four songs, including one of her first hits, Show Me Love. Every choice here is a tender one, down to the teardrop glued to her cheek. Every move is confident, yet…
A recent documentary called Capturing Bigfoot offers proof that the famous clip of Bigfoot was a hoax in the form of “a lost 16mm film shot in 1966, the year before the famous Bigfoot footage, and what it shows is a kind of rehearsal for it.”
When someone says “German techno group”, you probably have a pretty good picture in your mind. MEUTE, on the other hand, is an 11-piece techno marching band that plays electronic music with acoustic instruments: tubas, trombones, drums kits, etc. Reset (above)…
A comment by Adam Keys about showing grace in airports over on Craig Mod’s site reminded me of this story from the introduction of Genny Rumancik’s book The Wisdom of Feeling: Finding Clarity, Courage, and Connection Through Emotional Intelligence: I was in th…
Scientists have identified a new species of penguin, the first in 100 years. “Genetic evidence shows that what scientists once treated as a single, widely distributed gentoo penguin species is actually made up of four separate species.”
What Will Starting a Creative Career Look Like in the Next Few Years? “We can’t keep asking where all the good designers are if we’re unwilling to help anyone become one.”
Why Does Japan Have Such Good Railways? “Successful public policies can be emulated by one good government. Much about Japan’s railway system could be replicable around the world.”
Animation director Maria Tomazou made a short animated film entirely in Microsoft Excel. There’s no reason for this film to exist. Yet, I made it and it took ages to put together. To keep going and keep creating something that is pointless is actually very pai…
Watch the morning fog flow like ocean waves into the town of Triesenberg, Liechtenstein. (Also on Instagram.)
Advice for the incoming Democratic Congress: 8 Bold Ideas to Fix America. Bold? I dunno…it seems like a lot of this stuff is closer to the floor than the ceiling of what they should be considering.
Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996? “It (almost certainly) wouldn’t have even been close.”
A short history of Lego instructions from 1955 to the present. “Prior to [1955] the only ‘guidance’ for products containing plastic bricks were drawings on the packaging to serve as inspiration for consumers.”
Satellite images of sand dunes migrating in Egypt. They move about 13 meters a year.
The US Postal Service recently released a partial list of the stamps it’s putting out in 2027. One of the sets is Mythical Creatures, featuring five cryptids.1 The legend of Mothman has endured for more than six decades, but of the creatures encountered on the…