Playful Chess Variants

From experimental game developer Pippin Barr, several variations on the game of chess that makes the game more interesting (or a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Mister Rogers Cuts a Record

From a 1972 episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Mister Rogers demonstrates how to make a record using a machine called a rec | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Metallica’s Enter Sandman, Covered in 20 Different Musical Styles

Listen in as Anthony Vincent covered Metallica's classic Enter Sandman in 20 different musical styles, ranging from yodeling to | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Hand-Sculpted Archaeological Reconstructions of Ancient Faces

Working from remains discovered during archaeological excavations, sculptor and archaeologist Oscar Nilsson combines his two disci | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

What’s Cropped Out of Passport Photos?

Passport photos are subject to an extensive list of guidelines and restrictions -- for instance, the background has to be &q | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Playful BMX Video Full of Rube Goldberg-esque Street Tricks

In this fun BMX video, Tate Roskelley uses all sorts of props -- car tires, milk crates, trees, tennis balls -- to perform all k | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

A Collection of 100 Years of US National Parks’ Graphical Ephemera

From the folks that produced the NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual and the NASA Standards Manual comes a new book, P | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The King of Fish and Chips

In the 1960s, Haddon Salt built up a small empire of fish & chips shops in North America -- they eventually had more than 500 | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Le Corbuffet

Le Corbuffet was a series of performances by artist Esther Choi that sought to bring together food with notable artists and design | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Music Video Shot from the Front of a Toy Lego Train

The music video for Anna Meredith's latest song, Paramour, is a single-take journey of a toy Lego train through a group of music | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Lovely and Relaxing Videos of Traditional Countryside Life in China

Li Ziqi is a woman who lives in Sichuan province in China with her grandmother, preparing food and making clothing from scratch wi | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Return of Grumpy Cloud

Andy Bailey is a stop-motion animator at Laika who worked on Kubo and The Boxtrolls. In this video, he shares his process while | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Overview, Young Explorer’s Edition

In 2016, Benjamin Grant published Overview, a book of high-definition satellite photos of the Earth that were drawn from his site, | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

There’s Always Something Charming and Creepy In A Circus

Circuses, like children, are always both charming and creepy. Make it a children's circus, i.e., like Greenboro, Vermont's Circu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How [Points In A Circle] All This Could Be Different

Gizmodo has a pretty cool theme this week: the Alternate Internet. Not, like, the internet where they play Stone Temple Pilots b-s | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Interviewing Ira Glass

One of the troubles with interviewing Ira Glass is that Ira Glass has a lot of thoughts about interviews.Claudia Dreifus: When | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders

The servers at The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, a series of pop-up restaurants in Tokyo, are all living with dementia, which mea | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

These Nigerian Teens Are Making Sci-Fi Shorts with Slick Visual Effects

For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Barack Obama’s Summer 2019 Reading List

As he does every so often, President Obama shared a list of the books that he's reading this summer in this Facebook post. I am no | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Earth Rotating Beneath a Stationary Milky Way

In most time lapse videos you see of the night sky, the stars wheel through the sky as the heavens revolve around the Earth. But | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Up and Up

Photos by Daehyuk Im of the Coney Island amusement rides and other structures, framed against the sky. Looking back through | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The 1619 Project

The first Africans to be brought as slaves to British North America landed in Port Comfort, Virginia in 1619. Thus began America's | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Blocky Abstract Oil Paintings

Oh, I love these abstract oil paintings by Jason Anderson. They are analog and organic but also more than a little pixel-y. | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Bear with Its Own ZIP Code

Today I learned that ZIP Codes do not strictly represent geographic areas but rather "address groups or delivery routes" | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Version Museum

The mission of Version Museum is to record and present what the interfaces of software and websites looked like, from their earlie | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Tracking Overnight Use of US National Parks

Designer Jordan Vincent has created a visualization tracking overnight stays in US National Parks, i.e. people using tents & R | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Urban Nudges

Urban Nudges is a site that documents small efforts by cities and the people who live in them to slightly change the behaviors of | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Racial History of Soda in America

In 2013, University of Virginia historian Grace Elizabeth Hale wrote about "the long and often fractious history of soft drin | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Gerrymandered Font

Gerry is a typeface where the letterforms are created from heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts. For example, the lette | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Measuring the Popularity of the Falsetto in Pop Music

In today's episode of Earworm, Estelle Caswell teams up with Matt Daniels from The Pudding to track the popularity of the falset | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Railrodder, Buster Keaton’s Final Silent Film from 1965

In 1965, long after his days making some of the most iconic and physically demanding silent films, pioneering physical comedian Bu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Taking a Full Photo of the Earth Every Day

This is a really cool visualization of how Planet's 150+ imaging satellites take a complete satellite photo of the Earth every sin | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Making Food from Carbon Dioxide & Water

Using a concept from NASA, a Finnish company called Solar Foods has figured out how to manufacture protein from carbon dioxide, wa | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Mosquito: Humanity’s Greatest Enemy

For the New Yorker, Brooke Jarvis reviews Timothy C. Winegard's The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.It turns | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Border Wall Seesaw

I realize that many of you have probably seen it already, but I ran across this while away on vacation and thought it was one of t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Greta Thunberg Effect

According to recent statistics, the number of books published about the climate crisis & the natural world aimed at children h | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Questionnaire

I read a short poem by Wendell Berry this morning called Questionnaire that has relevance to some of the things our society and cu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Zero-Waste Cooking

Nolla is a zero-waste restaurant in Helsinki, Finland.At Nolla there is no waste bin in the kitchen nor can you find any single | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

German physicists reacted to the Hiroshima bomb (2016)

During World War II, a group of scientists led by Werner Heisenberg worked on designing a nuclear weapon for Nazi Germany. They we | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

See You Next Week

Hey, just a short note to say that kottke.org won't be published this week. This is the first break in publishing the site since.. | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The United States of Guns

Like many of you, I read the news of a single person killing at least 20 people in El Paso, Texas yesterday and another person kil | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Richard Feynman’s Tiny Machines

In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman, who had already done work that would win him the Nobel Prize a few years later, gave a talk | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

An enjoyable week of discovery

Well this was fun! I'm not sure to which degree readers realize how much work goes into a week of kottke.org, and I'm sure Jason | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Recreating the sun’s plasma in a laboratory

Since it's quite hard to study the sun, "a team of researchers decided to try to re-create the sun's magnetic field structu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Time-lapse film of two seasons of supercell storms

We often talk about the damage we are doing to nature, and as often about the catastrophes this is bringing across the globe. An | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today

Amidst all the calls for more ethics and considerations for social issues on the part of tech companies, this looks like quite an | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Deep dive into uber-obscure video game research

Interested in gaming? Old-school 80s-90s games? NES? Chinese shenzhen-speed recombination and innovation? Then I've got the thre | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Spirograph-like multi-color ellipses

If you are old enough, you probably have fond memories of the kids' drawing toy, Spirograph. Actually, they still exist but I'm | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago