I love me a good speedrunning video, so I’m interested in seeing Running with Speed, a new feature-length documentary about people who strive to finish video games as fast as they can. You can find the movie on Amazon, Apple TV, and other such places. (thx, rex) Tags: movies R … | Continue reading
At the height of the Roman empire, over 250,000 miles of roadway criss-crossed present-day Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. These roads were built using a variety of techniques, but many of them were built as shown in these two short videos: First, a wide area would b … | Continue reading
I know I’ve posted this before, but with the new Avatar movie out in theaters, it’s a good time to revisit the SNL sketch where Ryan Gosling is driven mad by the typeface choice for the movie’s logo. I had forgotten about the title card at the end. Perfection. Tags: Avatar de … | Continue reading
It’s here, it’s here! David Erhlich’s annual 25 best films of the year video for 2022 is here. Every year around this time, I get a little down about the movies. There’s nothing to seeeeee… And then I watch Erhlich’s 17-minute love letter to cinema and I want to see ever-ry-thing … | Continue reading
I am not entirely sure I liked Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (nor am I sure I disliked it), but I’m 100% positive that the grocery store dance scene that plays while the end credits roll was my favorite part of the film. The scene is set to a new LCD Sou … | Continue reading
Many of you liked the slinky on the treadmill video. This slow-motion video of Alan Rickman drinking tea isn’t quite as compelling, but it’s not bad either. Wait for the drop around 1:22 before judging. The original video without the dramatic sound is here. (More info.) Tags:A … | Continue reading
The results of the 4th annual Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition have been announced and you can take a look at the top 100 images right here. I’ve included a few of my favorites above from photographers Minghui Yuan, Alex Pansier, Andy Sands, and Szűcs Boldizsár. (thx … | Continue reading
As part of the company’s effort to get more adults building with bricks, LEGO has released an 1810-piece set based on Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. Here’s the only problem: it’s sold out online (and on Amazon as well). Perhaps you can find one at your local toy store? If … | Continue reading
When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out in 2018, it had a very different look than most other animated feature-length films. Since the release of Toy Story in the mid-90s, digitally animated films made by the large studios had taken their cues from Pixar. “The Pixar Look” … | Continue reading
It feels weird to admit this, even to myself, but maybe I love movie poster design even more than I love book cover design. After running across Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s list of his favorite movie posters of 2022 (via his newsletter), I found some more best-of lists — Mubi, Indie … | Continue reading
Jon Lefkovitz has created a video montage of moments from movies and TV where characters “do or say the same thing at the same time”. As you might imagine, it’s a little bit mesmerizing. This reminded me of Synchronized Basketball. Tags: Jon Lefkovitz mesmerizing movies TV … | Continue reading
As a former mini-golf champion, I am completely charmed by Alphaputt, an mini golf iOS game where the courses are shaped like letters of the alphabet. You can play through the alphabet or play a customized course by typing out a word (come on, that’s pretty cool). (via coloss … | Continue reading
After her guide dog runs off after a thief who takes her bag, a girl navigates a world guided by her powerful senses of touch, hearing, and smell. Super charming and inventive. From the YouTube comments: For those who don’t know, blind people will clap their hands and listen for … | Continue reading
Back in August, David Zipper wrote an interesting piece for Slate arguing that urban areas should embrace smaller personal transportation options, like the golf cart. Learnard said that most residents still commute by car, but that the carts have replaced automobiles for many sho … | Continue reading
This YouTube channel has been going for seven years and 150 episodes now but I just recently ran across it via Open Culture: You Suck at Cooking. The emphasis here is on being dryly funny while cooking but the actual techniques are solid as well. If you follow their advice — well … | Continue reading
The annual BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition put on by the California Academy of Sciences has announced the winners of the 2022 competition. As usual, I have selected a few of my favorites and included them above; photos by Karine Aigner, Jens Cullmann, Jose Grandi … | Continue reading
Hey folks. One of the things I realized coming back here after my time away is that I’m not super happy with how the site works & looks. It could be *waaay* better. The last time I fully redesigned the site was back in 2016 and it’s showing its age. But redesigning the whole sheb … | Continue reading
This is delightful: a group of five friends who grew up on a predominantly Italian block of Union St. in Brooklyn reminisce about their childhood and the neighborhood in this animated video. Imagine a whole block where 75-80% of the kids spoke Italian. We all lived there. A lot o … | Continue reading
Hulu and the NY Times are teaming up to bring Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project to television. In keeping with the original project, the series seeks to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very c … | Continue reading
Last month, the US Postal Service revealed some stamps that are due to be released in 2023. Alongside a stamp honoring John Lewis and some cool microphotography stamps are a series of four stamps featuring the Art of the Skateboard. Antonio Alcalá designed the stamps, which feat … | Continue reading
In talking about an upcoming game (more on that in a bit), Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss the process they used in designing the levels for the original Super Mario Bros. Much of the design work happened on graph paper.1 Back in the day, we had to create … | Continue reading
Ted Gioia is one of the best music writers and critics around but has proved an astute cultural (and even business!) critic as well. In a piece for his excellent The Honest Broker newsletter, Gioia writes about the recent turnaround of Barnes & Noble, which he attributes to the c … | Continue reading
I woke up this morning and, for some reason, needed Sarah “Smac” McCreanor’s hydraulic press interpretive dances to be the first thing you saw on this site in 2023. I’ve watched these on Instagram many times before (see the whole set here) but I think it’s worth stopping to appre … | Continue reading
On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew within 6,118 miles of the surface of Mars, capturing images as it passed over the planet. The image data was transmitted back to scientists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quickly render a photograph from it. They determi … | Continue reading
As 2022 recedes into the rearview mirror, I took some time to go back over my media diet posts to pick out some books, movies, TV shows, and experiences from the past year that were especially wonderful. Enjoy. Everything Everywhere All at Once. I’ve seen this a few times now and … | Continue reading
In just 7 minutes, Vox takes a visual look back at the biggest events of 2022, including Ukraine, inflation, Musk/Twitter, tech layoffs, Serena retires, TikTok, the World Cup, the pandemic continues, the climate crisis intensifies, mass shootings, no more Roe, Iranian protests, t … | Continue reading
Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s annual list (here is 2022’s), I kept a list of interesting things I learned this year. There are supposed to be 52 things but I took much of the year off so you’ll have to manage with only 36. Enjoy! For the first time in history in 2020, the weight of … | Continue reading
I ran across this video this morning on Instagram and I haven’t stopped laughing about it, so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s an improv by Ross Bryant from a show called Game Changer in which he makes up a commercial for a new McDonald’s product: the Macbeth sandwich. It’s … | Continue reading
Paul Fairie has compiled a list of contenders for the best headline of 2022. They include: ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ writer guilty of murdering her husband Started Out as a Fish. How Did It End Up Like This? Monkey that was flushed down toilet, fed cocaine now has a boyfriend … | Continue reading
Since I’m probably not alone in wanting to hang onto the magic of the World Cup a little longer, here are the top 15 goals of the tournament, featuring the likes of Messi (twice!), Rashford, Mbappe, and of course Richarlison’s incredible effort against Serbia. See also this other … | Continue reading
The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are always a good time and 2022’s competition is no exception. You can peruse the winners and the finalists here. My favorites above are by (from top to bottom) Miroslav Srb, Jennifer Hadley, John Chaney, and Jagdeep Rajput, whose pho … | Continue reading
As part of a British reality TV series in the late 2000s, two sets of 11-to-12-year-old children, one group of 10 boys and another group of 10 girls, were left by themselves in a house for 5 days. They had food, bedding, games, paint, toys, bikes, furniture, etc. They had each ta … | Continue reading
You’ve heard of Weird Twitter but now there’s Weird Ocean. This square mile of water in the Lembeh Strait has some of the strangest and most unique marine life on the planet. Includes an appearance by the always delightful cuttlefish. (via @colossal) Tags:video | Continue reading
As a companion to his short film LeafPresser, Brett Foxwell’s simpler and (in my opinion) more effective The Book of Leaves is a stop motion video of 2400 different leaves arranged so that each leaf blends subtly into the next slightly different leaf. While collecting leaves, I c … | Continue reading
After seeing an abstract US map where the borders between the states were preserved but the shapes of the individual states were not, Tom Comerford was inspired to design what he calls The Topologist’s Map of the World. I describe this a a topologist’s map because topology is a b … | Continue reading
I liked Yung Pueblo’s list of life lessons from 2022 that he’s bringing into the new year. Pueblo’s bestselling Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future came out back in October. P.S. Uhhh, why doesn’t Pueblo (aka Diego Perez) have a Wikipedia … | Continue reading
In this very entertaining and informative video essay, Adam Kovacs details why Elon Musk’s futuristic transportation ideas like the Hyperloop and Boring Loop are not serious solutions to real transportation challenges. Kovacs calls them prime examples of “gadgetbahn”, which he de … | Continue reading
From Behind the Masterpiece, a whirlwind summary of evolution of Western art movements, from prehistoric art to the Renaissance to Romanticism to Impressionism to Cubism and beyond. 23 minutes seems like the sweet spot for this kind of thing: any shorter and there wouldn’t be tim … | Continue reading
I read (and loved) Middlemarch this summer and was delighted to find this surprisingly modern usage of the concept of trash-talk about halfway through the book (boldface mine): But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate’s introduction he was helped by what we mortals rashly call good … | Continue reading
This is video of a live show by Daft Punk recorded at LA’s Mayan Theater on December 17, 1997; they’re playing mostly tracks off of Homework, which was released earlier that year. Note that this was before they started wearing the robot outfits for all of their appearances, so it … | Continue reading
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library contains around 3800 watercolor paintings, lithographs, and drawings of different apple varieties, most of which you will not find at the typical American grocery store. They also have another 3500 images of other … | Continue reading
A short animated film about photographer David Godlis, who documented the glory days of CBGB, ground zero for the punk & new wave scene in the late 1970s. Between 1976 and 1980, young Manhattan photographer David Godlis documented the nightly goings-on at the Bowery’s legendary C … | Continue reading
The first maps of the world were created without satellite imagery but with the compass, mathematics and geometry, reports from explorers, and a healthy dose of imagination & creativity. Jeremy Shuback briskly runs us through a history of early world maps, from perhaps the first … | Continue reading
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus (Kindle), Christopher Nolan’s newest film follows theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he leads the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic weapon during World War II. If this film is just 50% slow … | Continue reading
The book cover is one of my all-time favorite design objects and a big part of the reason I love going to bookstores is to visually feast on new covers. I don’t keep an explicit list of my favorites from those trips, but there are definitely those that stick in my mind, covers th … | Continue reading
For 40 years, the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has invited people to come up with the worst possible opening sentences to really bad novels. From the results of the 2022 contest, here’s this year’s grand prize winner: I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour … | Continue reading
Public transit consultant Jarrett Walker: Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole. Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everyw … | Continue reading
I posted this earlier today to the newsletter and thought I’d publish it here too. -jason Hey folks. I’ve been back at work on kottke.org for a couple of weeks now and just wanted to give you a little update on where I’m at. In a brief reentry post, I promised a “massive forthcom … | Continue reading