Still one of my favorite internet things: The case of the 500-mile email. I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's … | Continue reading
This is a supercut of the final moments of the Titanic as represented in various films and TV shows, from 1912's La Hantise to a 2012 British TV series written by Downton Abbey's Julian Fellowes. It also doubles as a demonstration of the increasing capabilities and aspirations of … | Continue reading
archives.design is a labor of love site run by Valery Marier where she collects graphic design related materials that are available to freely borrow, stream, or download from the Internet Archive. I've only scratched the surface in poking around, but so far I've found Olivetti br … | Continue reading
Greta Gerwig takes us on a whirlwind tour through 33 films that influenced the Barbie movie, visually, thematically, and in terms of plot/content. The influences include The Wizard of Oz, Rear Window, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Singin' in the Rain, The Godfather, Oklahoma!, 2001, a … | Continue reading
Jia Tolentino writing for the New Yorker on What to Do with Climate Emotions: Climate anxiety differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy — anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one's hands — because the goal is not to resolv … | Continue reading
The Internet Archive is an international treasure, a trove of human creative output spanning decades and even centuries — a modern library of Alexandria. Among the collection is more than 6000 downloadable PDFs of Lego instruction manuals for projects ranging from old school sets … | Continue reading
In this video from Architectural Digest, architect Michael Wyetzner runs us through why American diners look the way they do. Early diners took their cues from trains: So let's take a look at a typical American diner. So the outside has a shape that's reminiscent of a train. In f … | Continue reading
Barbenheimer poster by Sean Longmore. Perfect, 10/10, no notes. Tags: Barbie · design · movies · Oppenheimer · remix · Sean Longmore | Continue reading
The Friar's Club was founded in 1904 and, like other private social clubs of the era, their membership was male-only. Women could visit as guests but only after 4pm and the club didn't admit its first woman as a member until Liza Minnelli in 1987. One of the club's biggest tradit … | Continue reading
This is great: The Cut asked 100 people to scream as loud as they could in front of a camera. For some, it was cathartic while others found it uncomfortable. Some folks didn't know how to scream which I don't entirely understand? This video reminded me a lot of Ten Meter Tower, o … | Continue reading
If you were left hungry by the food in season two of The Bear, Binging With Babish has got you covered. In this video, he recreates the potato chip omelette that Sydney makes in the second-to-last episode of the season. And then, he makes an adjacent dish, José Andrés's tortilla … | Continue reading
For the last few years, Amazon has spent a couple of summer days putting a bunch of their most popular items on sale for their Prime members. This year, Prime Day runs from July 11-12 and includes a number of things that I can personally recommend (or are currently coveting). Kee … | Continue reading
A new eruption started yesterday in the general area of Iceland's Fagradalsfjall volcano and drone pilot Isak Finnbogason was there to capture some footage. The shot of the lava flow beginning at the 1:00 mark is absolutely stunning. This short video is an excerpt from a longer l … | Continue reading
There's a small moment in second-to-last episode of the season two of The Bear (extremely mild spoilers) that I liked even though you blink and you'll miss it. One of the new chefs is tentatively salting some steaks and Sydney says "I need you to salt that like a sidewalk". Cut t … | Continue reading
Hey folks. I'm sure you've read about the heavy rains and the flooding in the Northeast, particularly in New York and Vermont. My town here in central VT did not flood last night (though some area fields may have) and appears to be out of danger but other places around me were no … | Continue reading
In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?" As you might expect, th … | Continue reading
Well, this looks good: Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby star as Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte in Ridley Scott's forthcoming film about the French dictator. The film will be out in theaters on November 22 and on Apple+ sometime after that. Tags: movies · Napoleon · Napoleon B … | Continue reading
Craig Mod recently finished a 16-day tour of jazz kissas in northern Japan. Jazz kissas are bar/cafes where one goes to listen to jazz, mostly on records and not live. Mod loosely defies them thusly: Mostly defined as: Mid-20th century "listening cafes" for jazz music. But there … | Continue reading
In a piece from January, Cory Doctorow outlined the enshittification lifecycle of online platforms: Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business c … | Continue reading
I just finished reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (so good!) and while doing a little customary post-read research on it, I discovered that Butler wrote a sequel in 1998 called Parable of the Talents and, uh... (from Wikipedia): The novel is set against the backdrop o … | Continue reading
This is a poster for the 2023 International Book Arsenal Festival which recently took place in Kyiv, Ukraine. The poster was designed by Art Studio Agrafka from an illustration they originally did for the cover of Linkiesta Magazine. A book festival. During a war. In a city under … | Continue reading
Not going to bury the lede here: this is a straight-up masterpiece and maybe the best thing I've seen all week. Hidari is a stop-motion animation of an inventive fight sequence between a lone warrior/craftsman and a boss & his minions. The vibe of the animation is at once halting … | Continue reading
"it's what everyone wants in the year 2023: 8000 words on david foster wallace" ⬅️ That's how Patricia Lockwood shared her piece about the complicated legacy of David Foster Wallace on Bluesky. Turns out, it is what we want; this piece is brilliant. But it's also unexplainable, s … | Continue reading
Yesterday I posted about the 2023 Drone Photo Awards and one of my favorite shots was of a playground/park in Poland. My curious pal Neven tracked down more information about the park and, well, it's so cool and cute! Here's part of the description from the park's creators, SL … | Continue reading
Oh boy. I thought the teaser trailer was good, but the full trailer for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon just dropped and I am. So. Excited. To. SEE. THIS! At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest peopl … | Continue reading
I am a sucker for aerial photography, so I had a lot of fun looking through all the winners and runners-up of the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. As usual, I picked out a few favorites and included them above. From top to bottom, photos by: Sebastian Piórek (a very tidy Polish playgroun … | Continue reading
Illustrator Kevan Atteberry created the Clippy character that was introduced in Microsoft Office 97. There was a ton of backlash when the character was introduced, but as time has passed, many people have begun to think fondly of him. He's a guy that just wants to help, and he's … | Continue reading
Astrophotographer Cari Letelier caught this amazing shot of the aurora borealis over the Goðafoss waterfall in Iceland. We live in a truly magical world — if science fiction authors made something like this up, you wouldn't believe it'd ever be real. You can check out more of Let … | Continue reading
Precise. Symmetric. Stylized. Controlled (often bright) color palette. Slow-motion. Lateral tracking. These are all hallmarks of Wes Anderson's films. But as this short video from Luís Azevedo shows, there are plenty of imperfect moments in his movies as well. Anderson is a canny … | Continue reading
Photographs have always been an imperfect reproduction of real life — see the story of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother or Ansel Adams' extensive dark room work — but the seemingly boundless alterations offered by current & future AI editing tools will allow almost anyone to turn … | Continue reading
Greek photographer Anthimos Ntagkas stalks the streets in search of visual coincidences to capture and put on his Instagram account. My Modern Met talked to Ntagkas about his process: Nowadays, I don't choose the place, but I make every location work for me. I combine people with … | Continue reading
So, ever since I'd heard that Bill Murray had to drop out of filming Asteroid City, I've wondered which role he'd meant to play. After seeing the movie, I thought it was either the grandfather (played by Tom Hanks) or the hotel manager (Steve Carell) and it was Carell's role: Mur … | Continue reading
Elie Mystal writing for the Nation on the Supreme Court's recent decision that declared affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional. But the death of affirmative action was not achieved merely through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While conservatives on th … | Continue reading
From TasteAtlas, a listing of the 150 Most Legendary Restaurants in the World & Their Iconic Dishes. These aren't necessarily the best restaurants on Earth, but places that have "withstood the test of time, eschewing trendy gimmicks in favor of traditional, high-quality cuisine". … | Continue reading
The National Audubon Society has announced the winners of the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards. I've highlighted a few of my favorites above (from top to bottom, photos by Sandra Rothenberg, Kieran Barlow, and Nathan Arnold). Oh, and don't miss the pair of videos from Steven Chu.. … | Continue reading
From Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a piece on the still-radical teachings of Fred Rogers, who emphasized the "love thy neighbor" part of the Bible rather than the twisted "persecute the other" version that has taken hold in so-called Christian communities in America over the past few d … | Continue reading
The Verge has published a list of the 40 best nonfiction books about "tech" (which relates to the industry centered around Silicon Valley & the internet and not technology in general). I was pleased to see Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire … | Continue reading
The Chickening is a surreal visual remix of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining done by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force. It mostly defies description, so just watch the first minute or so (after which you won't be able to resist the rest of it). The short film is playing at this year's Sun … | Continue reading
The other day I posted about how contemporary filmmakers, Wes Anderson in particular, use miniatures in their films. The model/prop maker featured, Simon Weisse, has worked with Anderson on several films, including his latest, Asteroid City. Weisse has been posting behind-the-sce … | Continue reading
From the Library of Congress, footage of the first gay pride march in NYC in 1970. The march, called the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, was held on June 28 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. From Gothamist: The Christopher Street Gay Libera … | Continue reading
Love these absurdist portraits of over-luxuriated nobles in the style of Rococo and Baroque European painters by Volker Hermes. You cna check out more of his work on Instagram. (via colossal) Tags: art · remix · Volker Hermes | Continue reading
When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called Th … | Continue reading
Meet the members of the Wellington Family, foods related in spirit and structure to Beef Wellington: pigs in a blanket, Hot Pockets, corn dogs, and Pop Tarts. See also The Cube Rule of Food, which suggests that the Wellington Family actually belongs to the larger Calzone Clan but … | Continue reading
From XKCD, some notes on the design of the alphabet. I actually hadn't noticed the spacing of the vowels before. See also The Evolution of the Alphabet. Tags: alphabet · design · Randall Munroe · XKCD | Continue reading
My pal Clive Thompson, who is in the midst of a two-part bicycle ride across the United States and is writing a book on micromobility, thinks local, state, and federal governments should start offering substantial subsidies for e-bikes in order to help reduce car usage, decrease … | Continue reading
Yuri Suzuki's The Ambient Machine is a device for creating atmosphere, playing ambient sounds. The machine has 32 toggle switches on it; each switch actives a different sound (waves, running water, birds, wind, white noise) that you can blend to create your perfect aural backdrop … | Continue reading
In 1990, the US government sent $20,000 and a formal letter of apology to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II. Morgan Ome, whose grandfather was imprisoned and got a check, looks at the effect this had on those who … | Continue reading
Vox talks to prop & model maker Simon Weisse, who made miniatures for Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, about the perhaps surprising popularity of miniatures in contemporary filmmaking, when the technique works and when it doesn't (e.g. when unscalable elements like rain or fire/expl … | Continue reading