Finally: a full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, easily the movie I am most looking forward to seeing this summer. Dunkirk was one of my favorite films of the past few years, I've done quite a bit of reading about the Manhattan Project over the years, and I stu … | Continue reading
Last month I posted a link to a story about a woman who discovered she was one of the world's top Candy Crush players. Since progress was tied to game score rather than PvP results, Rhoden kept getting pop-ups for milestones such as passing the quarterfinals, and then entering th … | Continue reading
For eight years, Keith Loutit captured hundreds of thousands of images of Singapore, combining the pulsing energy, the new buildings reaching for the sky, and the busy shipyard of one of Asia's most iconic and futuristic cities into this 5-minute timelapse video. When we pass by … | Continue reading
Expanding on his previous thoughts on the relationship between AI and capitalism — "I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism" — Ted Chiang offers a useful metaphor for how to think about AI: as a management-consulting firm like McKi … | Continue reading
Roxane Gay, writing in the NY Times about the recent killings and assaults of people who had the bad luck to run into self-appointed executioners (gift link). There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. … | Continue reading
Stutterer by Benjamin Cleary won the 2016 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film and is now available to view online for free courtesy of the New Yorker. It's a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood (Matthew Needham). Greenwood stutters, to the ext … | Continue reading
Eternal Spring is a short timelapse film by Christopher Dormoy featuring beautiful shots of melting snow and ice. Watching this, it is difficult not to think of the climate crisis, which is of course the whole point. Ice is a beautiful element I love to work with in my video proj … | Continue reading
Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful, complex, and useful software program that millions of people know how to use, at least a little bit. For those who are experts, there are now esports competitions in Microsoft Excel that pit the best spreadsheet jockeys against each other … | Continue reading
In this video in their ongoing series on the climate crisis and how to fix it, Vox looks at the pros and cons of solar geoengineering (aka using artificial means to reflect sunlight in order to cool the Earth). The climate change crisis has become so dire that we're being forced … | Continue reading
Loving scrolling through this collection of sci-fi movie logos from Reagan Ray. As is the case with most of my logo posts, it's been fun to pick up on the trends. There's the trick where they remove the segments from the top half of the letters like Blade Runner, or the embossed … | Continue reading
Ok, here's the first trailer for second part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune. Time to get hyped! It comes out on November 3 — we have until then to decide what "Timothée Chalamet rides the worm" is a euphemism for. Tags: Denis Villeneuve · Dune · movies · trailers · video | Continue reading
The three images above were created by long-exposure photography of the flight paths of drones with onboard bright lights. The first image is from Jadikan's new series, Phénomènes (Instagram), in which he uses fireworks to create brightly-lit cylindrical forms. The second one is … | Continue reading
A Japanese TV show took three expert fencers and pitted them against 50 amateurs. I honestly didn't think this would be that interesting and expected the Musketeers to easily get taken out right away or, if they survived more than 30 seconds, to handily finish off the rest of the … | Continue reading
In a pair of collections on Behance, Hungarian designer and artist Miklós Kiss showcases his skill with ligatures and swirling serifs: Type Beast and Type Beast 2.0 I love typography. I love letters. I love to make ligatures and find connections between letters. These are not log … | Continue reading
For his second Iconic Sans video, David Friedman tells us about an itinerant filmmaker who travelled the country from the 30s to the 50s making the same movie over and over again with different casts of local children. Why would somebody remake a movie hundreds of times? Was he o … | Continue reading
This is a sweet video profile of La Dinastia, one of the last old-school, family-run places in NYC where you can find Chino-Latino cuisine. From Lisa Chiu at ThoughtCo, a brief history of Asian-Latin food blends: Cuban-Chinese Cuisine is the traditional fusing of Cuban and Chines … | Continue reading
No matter which side you come down on in the debate about using AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to create digital art, this video of an experienced digital artist explaining how he uses AI in his workflow is worth a watch. I thought this comment was particularly int … | Continue reading
The paintings in David Ambarzumjan's Brushstrokes in Time series bring together large, rough brushstrokes with intricate landscapes — it's a stimulating combination. A popular one too: all of his prints are currently sold out but there's some new ones coming soon. You can also ch … | Continue reading
The robots are coming for trainspotters. A piece of software called Trainbot can watch a piece of train track, detect passing trains, and then stitch together panoramic images of the full-length trains. The software for running your own trainbot is available on Github and "should … | Continue reading
It's a no-brainer: what if you handed over a visually rich sci-fi universe with slightly campy origins to a quirky auteur with an overwhelming aesthetic, just to see what you'd get? This short trailer imagines Wes Anderson at the helm of his very own Star Wars movie, complete wit … | Continue reading
Leave it to the Auralnauts to take The Mandalorian's solemn catchphrase "This is the way", back it with a pulsing beat, and turn it into the banger of the summer. Ok, maybe not. But in the process, they counted 222 uses of the phrase over the three seasons of the show (and also d … | Continue reading
Seven minutes of color film footage of Berlin in 1945, right after the end of World War II. Lots of bombed out buildings, soldiers, bicycles, rebuilding, and people going about their daily business. Be sure to watch all the way to the end...there's an incredible aerial shot of t … | Continue reading
From 1898, an album of ornamental granite tile patterns available from Threlkeld Granite Co. Ltd. The company was located in the Lake District of northwest England and the quarry they operated is now a mining museum — you can read about the history of the company on their website … | Continue reading
In a video from The Royal Society, Adam Rutherford shares five data visualizations that have changed the world, including Florence Nightingale's Crimean War mortality charts, John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks, W.E.B. Du Bois' data portraits of Black Americans, eugenicist Henry … | Continue reading
These two ads for the NY Times are really effective at communicating the breadth of the paper's offerings and also how everything, from sneakers to climate change to gravity, is connected to everything else. Here's more info from It's Nice That. Tags: advertising · NY Times · … | Continue reading
Knit Grotesk is a typeface based on Futura that's designed specifically for hand knitting. It comes in three different weights and two styles: dots and stripes. Its designer, Rüdiger Schlömer, is also the author of a book called Typographic Knitting: From Pixel to Pattern: Learn … | Continue reading
I'm not going to make a habit of posting AI generated video and photography here (mainly because most of it is not that interesting) but Pepperoni Hug Spot is just too perfect a name for a pizza place to pass up. And it's got Too Many Cooks vibes. Tags: artificial intelligence · … | Continue reading
I'm totally charmed by this collection of Japanese company buildings from Spoon & Tamago that are shaped like things related to what they sell. For instance, here's a chocolate factory that looks like a big chocolate bar: You'll have to click through to see the rest, which inclu … | Continue reading
This video from Paul Dinning features kestrels hunting in Cornwall. I will never tire of watching raptors hovering in the wind, their wings & bodies making dozens of micro-adjustments a second so that they can keep their heads perfectly still and focused on searching for prey on … | Continue reading
So you've seen how an 18th century sailing battleship was built. But that was for a vessel 227 feet long that could carry around 850 people. This timelapse video shows the construction of a much larger ship: a modern-day, 1,100-foot-long cruise ship that houses 6,600 passengers. … | Continue reading
Emily Wilson's eagerly-awaited translation of Homer's Iliad will be out on September 26 and is finally available for pre-order! I loved her version of The Odyssey (I read it to my kids and we all got a lot out of it). Wilson posts a lot about her process on Twitter but hasn't sai … | Continue reading
If you, like me, are currently reading David Grann's new book The Wager and are having trouble visualizing exactly what British Royal Navy ships of that era look like and how they work, you might want to watch this video. The 3D fly-through model ship in this video, HMS Victory, … | Continue reading
Josh Gluckstein makes these remarkably detailed sculptures of animals out of cardboard and paper. Inspired by my extensive travels and volunteering through Asia, Africa and South America, I have sought to capture the presence of some of the most majestic animals I have seen by cr … | Continue reading
Over on Twitter, @smllwrlds is publishing a new tiny illustrated sci-fi story every day of 2023. (via linkmachinego) Tags: design | Continue reading
In a video for the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor Simon Smith shows us how Renaissance sculptor Donatello might have approached carving a piece from marble, which Smith calls "the Emperor of all stones". It's all about trapping shadows. Carving is all about having deep cuts … | Continue reading
My post last week about The 13 Levels of Complexity of Drumming got me interested in Larnell Lewis, but I also started going back through Wired's Levels series to check out some of the ones I'd missed. First up is DJ Shortkut explaining the 15 levels of turntable scratching. DJin … | Continue reading
MTV used to show music videos. Bravo was home to opera and jazz programming. The Learning Channel focused on educational programming. The History Channel aired shows about history. Discovery: nature shows. A&E: fine arts and educational content. Now they all air a lot of reality … | Continue reading
Charles Brooks takes photographs of the insides of musical instruments like pianos, clarinets, violins, and organs and makes them look like massive building interiors, enormous tunnels, and other megastructures. So damn cool. Some of the instruments he photographs are decades and … | Continue reading
During the course of my online travels, I see a lot of cool and interesting things, but this one really stopped me in my tracks. David Popa uses natural pigments to draw large format portraits on fractured sheets of ice and then photographs them from above. Wow, wow, wow. From a … | Continue reading
In his animated short film Five Cents, which was inspired by his student debt struggles, Aaron Hughes deftly (but gently) skewers modern consumerism, as his film’s character navigates a series of escalating purchases with a little found money. (via the kid should see this) Tags: … | Continue reading
These are lovely: voxel rooms of Malaysian hawker stalls and other shops by Shin Oh. She started making them after quitting her job due to anxiety and depression: At that point in my life, I lost passion and interest in everything, I was feeling worthless, I felt like there was n … | Continue reading
Wow, I’d never seen these before today! For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Wes Anderson created three promo spots, each one a staged re-creation of a nominated movie in the style of the Hollywood-inspired plays in Rushmore (Serpico & the Vietnam War one). All three shorts (Armageddon … | Continue reading
Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos are back with another installment of Every Frame a Painting. In this one, they examine the evolution of Looney Tunes animation master Chuck Jones and how his approach and style changed as his career progressed. I love Looney Tunes. In my mind, Duck Amu … | Continue reading
Internet artist evbuilds creates these chunky pixelized abstract images in Microsoft Excel. Excel is one of those rare pieces of software that is terrifically useful at what it’s designed to do but also powerful enough where you can make it do things that perhaps it really should … | Continue reading
Hahaha you thought I was kidding about this being a Larnell Lewis fan site today, but I’ve got one more video for you. This is a live recording of a song by the jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy and — hold on, before you wander off having heard that collection of words, let me prefac … | Continue reading
Ok sorry everyone but kottke.org is a Larnell Lewis fan blog today. This morning, I featured a video of Lewis, a Grammy-winning musician and music professor, explaining the 13 levels of complexity of drumming. In response, a pair of readers sent me this video, in which Lewis hear … | Continue reading
What I like about the still image above, along with the rest of the images in a project called In Anxious Anticipation by Aaron Tilley & Kyle Bean, is that it makes a noise. It’s so cool how your brain sees what’s about to happen and then you hear eggs smashing on a hard surface … | Continue reading
I love Wired’s video series on the levels of complexity of various activities, and they got someone really good to show us about drumming. Larnell Lewis is a Grammy Award-winning musician and a professor of music at Humber College in Toronto and his tour of the 13 levels of drumm … | Continue reading