Kottke.org Posts and Links for Sep 26, 2024
Hi, Jason here. This newsletter is a digest of posts and links from kottke.org, published every Tuesday and Friday. It's not absolutely everything from the site, but it's durn close. Unsubscribing is easy if you'd like to get off this ride. As always, you can read kottke.org on the web, via RSS, on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and in several other ways. Ok, onto the links!
"As of late September 2024, residential households in the U.S. are eligible for another order of 4 free at-home [Covid] tests from USPS." Order here! [special.usps.com]
Old photos of basketball games and boxing matches often have a pleasing hazy blue background that modern photos lack. "The blue haze that adds such a wonderful ambience to the arena is caused by cigarette smoke." [petapixel.com]
I appreciate this no-nonsense flight safety video from Emirates. All the jokey entertaining ones are corny and have grown tiresome. [youtube.com]
In the late 19th century, hotels started building fully outfitted darkrooms for travelling photographers to develop their plates. [schneidan.com]
Kodak and the Invention of Popular Photography. "It's about what happens when a powerful technology, originally only understood by a select few, can suddenly fit in your hand." [kottke.org]
Fun little word game: Alphaguess. "Guess the word of the day. Each guess reveals where the word sits alphabetically." (Today's puzzle took me 16 guesses...is that good?) [alphaguess.com]
The Pudding has collected satellite imagery of all 59,507 outdoor basketball courts in the United States. [pudding.cool]
Adam DiCarlo takes photos of commuters (mostly bikers) as they exit the Williamsburg Bridge bike path on the Manhattan side and posts them to his Instagram account. [kottke.org]
Dark Matter Could Be Hiding Out as Atom-Sized Black Holes. "Black holes the size of an atom that contain the mass of an asteroid may fly through the inner solar system about once a decade"...and we can theoretically detect them through planetary wobble. [scientificamerican.com]
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a lengthy profile of the writer on the eve of the publication of The Message, his book about "three resonant sites of conflict", including Palestine. [nymag.com]
A pair of vintage cookbooks w/ recipes from famous artists & writers (Warhol, Duchamp, Keats, Dali, etc.) [kottke.org]
Frozen food delivery service Schwan's will shutter in November. Founded in 1952 (and now called Yelloh 🙄), the company cited "economic & market headwinds". When I was a kid in rural WI, a visit from "the Schwan's man" was an *event*, let me tell you. [mprnews.org]
"Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago," but polling is now the centerpiece of American politics, with "the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip". Why do we pay so much attention to this bullshit? [prospect.org]
Listen to a performance of a recently discovered piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the 1760s (when he was a teen). [kottke.org]
"The state should not give itself the right to kill human beings — especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion." [aclu.org]
American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We're the Protagonists. "American suburbs are full of ugly, empty, liminal spaces: spaces you are not meant to linger in or enjoy. They're the creepy hallways of the built environment..." [strongtowns.org]
Ian Scott tracked down the full "What were the skies like when you were young?" sample from The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. You can listen to it on the Internet Archive or on Soundcloud. [polpo.org]
Substack still sucks (but Platformer doesn't). "I'm proud that when Platformer was asked to actually live its values — to stand up for the idea that basic content moderation is good and necessary — we did." [kottke.org]
The NY Times is beta testing a sports version of their popular Connections game. [nytimes.com]
Ross Anderson on The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball. "It allows a small group of perfect strangers with little in common besides basketball to experience a flow state — a brief, but intense, form of group transcendence." Super interesting sociology. [theatlantic.com 🎁]
Tipping Point is a three-part podcast on The Limits to Growth, a 1970s book that predicted the collapse of civilization by ~2050 (based on early systems dynamics modeling done at MIT) and how it was ignored & discredited. [tippingpoint-podcast.com]
Foliage season is ramping up here in New England — here's this year's foliage prediction map for the US. [smokymountains.com]
A nearly complete online archive of Radio Shack catalogs from 1939-2011. If this is your sort of thing, prepare to lose hours paging through these today. [kottke.org]
Don't ever hand your phone to the cops. "Handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data." [theverge.com]
"Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat." JFC. [404media.co]
Out today: Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo. I'm actually gonna grab this from the local bookstore today while I'm out and about. [amazon.com]
Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. [kottke.org]
The International Space Station is scheduled to reach the end of its functional life by 2030 — and will then be destroyed. "After 30 years of dutiful service, our home among the stars will be ripped apart by the atmosphere." [sciencefocus.com]
Video of a master blacksmith forging a knife with 320 layers of steel. "Pound it flat, fold it over. Pound it flat, fold it over." [kottke.org]
How to Decarbonize Your Life. "Trying to zero out your personal carbon footprint...is a fool's errand. What you can do, however, is maximize the degree to which you're building a new, post-fossil-fuel world." [heatmap.news]
London's Design Museum is hosting a big retrospective of Wes Anderson's work beginning in late 2025. [kottke.org]
Reader survey: "Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case." There is a 0% chance of me shopping at a store with these locked product cages. [retailbrew.com]
Gorgeous Lego animation of Caleb Holonko doing a 360 drop on a mountain bike. [instagram.com]
"Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television." [kottke.org]
Exactly Why Are Friendship Breakups So Brutal? "So much about friendship goes unspoken. It's what makes the good ones, frankly, kind of magical: There's no formal agreement tying you two together except the fact that you like each other." [thecut.com]
Online street maps and satellite views of China don't align because the Chinese government mandates the use of a "confidentiality algorithm" that adds random offsets ranging from 50-500 meters to latitudes & longitudes. [medium.com]
Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake. "The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households." [theatlantic.com 🎁]
The Joyful Utility of Yeeting Pufflings Off Cliffs. "Many residents of Vestmannaeyjar spend a few weeks in August and September collecting wayward pufflings that have crashed into town after mistaking human lights for the moon." [kottke.org]
👀 👋 🎉
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