“an interesting linguistics find! so I’m reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing ‘hp’ in the context of ‘not being at full hp’ ‘applying your full hp to a task’ etc.” But it’s not hit/health points…
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The Flipbook of the Rings
For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
It’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t include the audio or music from the movie, but I bet you could mute the sound on this and simultaneously play the actual movie for the sound. Here’s an earlier sneak peek at some of the scenes:
This artist wrote about their participation in the project; they contributed 108 drawings that amounted to roughly 10 seconds of animation (and took 30-40 hours to do):
The first clip I claimed was a pretty iconic scene from the beginning of the movie. I chose to render it in pencil as it’s night time and I felt black and white would be more dramatic. As I worked through the frames, I did worry that the subtle variances in shading would make the clip look disjointed, but I think it adds a cool movement to the scene. There is that rough, quirky imperfection to hand drawing. You can see the final result with comparison below (digitized and compiled by Andy).
Here’s a clip of that scene:
I can’t wait to see the finished product — I hope they’re able to release it online.
An archive of Omni magazine (1978-1995), courtesy of the Internet Archive. “Omni was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science, parapsychology, and short works of science fiction and fantasy.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listRailpass simulates a train ride in your browser window using real video footage. Choose from trains from around the world or add some weather to the mix. Sound on for the best ride.
This Is What It’s Like to Spend Your Life in Prison. “None of us want to be defined solely by the person we were in our youth, or by the worst thing we ever did. The men serving life without parole feel the same way.”
The Winners of the 2026 International Pano Awards
The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic shared some of his favorites and I shared some of mine above. Starting at the top, photos by Xuecheng Liu, Shimon Perlstein, Tomás Sánchez Ruiz, Preeti & Prashant Chacko, and Daniel Viñé Garcia.
P.S. In case you were wondering about the aspect ratio of panoramic images: according to the submission rules, the image’s longest side needs to be at least twice the length as the shortest side.
“Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet.”
The title of this video is The Fastest Downhill Run Ever. I don’t know if that is true, but oh my god does it look dangerous to go this fast on a mountain bike through the streets of Genoa. (It looks slightly less nuts in the non-POV, but not by much.)
Meet Prometheus, a Gift Link Search Engine
Sometime in the past few years, media sites like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Atlantic, Defector, Talking Points Memo, and the NY Times started offering a way for subscribers to share paywalled articles with friends and followers. These are commonly referred to as gift links.
Thousands of gift links are shared on websites and social media daily. Some helpful aggregated feeds and hashtags are available, but finding specific information can be difficult. Whenever possible here on KDO, I link to paywalled articles with gift links. To help in that endeavor, I’ve built a gift link discovery tool called Prometheus.
Prometheus collects gift links to paywalled news articles shared by subscribers — from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. Links are gathered from Bluesky, Mastodon, and the web throughout the day, and you can search by keyword & URL and filter by publication.
Right now, Prometheus is only available to active kottke.org members while I’m testing and refining it — it’s definitely a beta tool rn. If you’re a member, check it out and let me know if you’ve got any feedback or notice any rough edges.
An informed public is the foundation of a healthy society — and while paywalls aren’t the only challenge here, they also aren’t helping. Big thanks to everyone sharing their gift links online and to these media companies for enabling their subscribers to share their journalism with others.
“A SpudCell can grow, copy its DNA, divide in two, and start its cell cycle all over again. But this cell is made by people, created from lifeless ingredients.” Um, what?
Bastardica is “a foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and/or squish them.” E.g. Nervous Sans: “Arial is stacked five times, pseudo-randomly twitching out of line.” I quite like Impacter.
How did life on Earth arise? Three of the biggest inflection points were ~4 billion years ago when life first emerged, ~2 billion years ago when eukaryotic cells appeared, and ~580 million years ago when life got big.
NYC’s Fastest Bike Messenger (1985)
For CBS News in 1985, Charles Kuralt profiled bike messenger David Leopold.
I don’t go slow. I don’t stop for red lights. I go against traffic. I disobey every traffic law there is.
Great street footage of NYC from 40 years ago. You might think that Leopold ended up as a stain on the pavement. In 2010, CBS News did a follow-up on him:
See also Leopold on David Letterman from 1985.
The Library Is Closed. Feel Free to Come In. “In communities where workspaces are scarce, libraries are welcoming visitors outside of staffed hours. All they need is a library card.”
Tiny People in a Big World is like a birdwatching guide, but for people-watching. “I made this campaign to produce a book that will help you notice and appreciate the tiny people who pass through your big world.”
Ambient Earth
Ambient Earth is a 7.5-hour, real-time, 4K, remastered video of the orbital view from the International Space Station. Seán Doran took almost 49,000 images from 27 time-lapse sequences captured from the ISS by astronaut Butch Wilmore, repaired, remastered, and interpolated them into this incredible video.
Perspective is lost when the world speeds by. The scale and beauty of our home planet is truly appreciated when observed on an epic 7.5 hour journey from The International Space Station. This ambitious 4k compilation, crafted through months of meticulous restoration, invites you to slow down and experience Earth in real time just as astronauts do.
The video is accompanied by ambient audio recorded on the station by Chris Hadfield. This would be great for a screensaver, but after poking around for a bit, it doesn’t seem like there’s a good way to set a YT video as a screensaver on MacOS (without downloading it or having it be a livestream).
“Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth.”
Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. “The reward from moving just because you want to is hard to defend logically. Some people will think you are crazy…”
I remember this 90s TV commercial for 93.7 The Edge, a Minnesota alternative radio station, very well. It features very non-alternative old people reciting lyrics like “bow down before the one you serve” and “Winona’s got herself a big brown beaver”.
Why Do Some Places Just Feel Right?
Gregory Wieber does these engaging, info-rich videos on tech history — I posted his HyperCard Changed Everything video back in the spring. For one of his latest videos, Wieber goes through a short history of Christopher Alexander’s landmark book, A Pattern Language (Bookshop), which anyone interested in building anything should at least have paged through once in their life,1 and how his work inspired not only object oriented programming and the invention of wikis, but also SimCity and The Sims.
The Timeless Way of Building is shorter, less dense, and perhaps a better introduction to Alexander’s ideas about patterns. ↩
New book from James Gleick about the history of the telephone. “It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, the late-night DJ, and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, of business, of friendship, of love.”
“Astronomers for the first time have identified a green star, documenting a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf that became a ghostly shade of chartreuse after ingesting rocky debris from planets that once had orbited it.”
The Best Monopoly Strategy, Tested on 300 Million Games
Perfect Play ran over 300 million games of Monopoly to determine the best strategy and the most common mistakes players make.
I turned eight classic Monopoly strategies into computer players and made them play 312,898,560 games against each other. At a table of four, the best one won 43% of its games. The worst one won 3%.
The gap doesn’t come from one clever trick. It comes from four common mistakes: being picky about what you buy, saving your cash, stopping at three houses, and refusing to trade. Then I let the computer tune every habit at once, to see how far a carefully tuned player can go and which color set is really worth fighting for.
P.S. I don’t actually play Monopoly anymore — it is the world’s most maddening game (along with Sorry) and I childishly refer to it as “Monotony” — and an aside about 3 minutes into the video is why: “roughly one game in six never ends”. Exactly! And you want me to haggle? For fun? No thank you. I imagine there are folks whose idea of a good time is visiting used car dealerships for funsies when they don’t need a car, but I am not one of them.
Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First. “It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.”
Using an LLM’s “superhuman ability to parse through galactic quantities of data”, a very amateur astronomer has found a possible exoplanet candidate. MIT is going to point their satellite at the candidate planet to collect more data soon.
How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period.
How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s hardest food — is made in Nishi-Izu, Japan. Inside Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten, a workshop founded in 1882, 5th-generation craftsman Yasuhisa Serizawa still uses the 200-year-old “tebiyama” hand-fired smoke-drying method that only a few workshops in Japan preserve. Watch fresh bonito being filleted and boiled for 90 minutes, smoke-dried more than 10 times over a hand-tended wood fire, repaired with bonito paste, fermented with koji mold and sun-dried for months — over half a year until the fish becomes as hard as wood and shines like a jewel. From fresh catch to katsuobushi.
Check out Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten’s website for more info; here’s what they say about the tebiyama drying/smoking method (Google translation):
This method of making dried bonito flakes has been used in the Tago district of West Izu for a long time, and its history is said to date back about 300 years (to the Edo period). It involves digging a vertical hole about 2 meters deep, burning firewood (raw wood from Izu: oak, sawtooth oak, cherry, etc.) from the bottom of the hole, and smoking and drying the dried bonito flakes with the high temperature of an open flame. This method is called the Tebiyama-shiki smoking method. It is the oldest existing smoking method, and only a few bonito flake manufacturers in the country continue to use this method to make dried bonito flakes, so it is said to be a legendary method. The Tebiyama-shiki smoking method is said to produce dried bonito flakes with a rich flavor because the surface of the bonito is smoked all at once with the high temperature of an open flame, locking in the umami.
(thx, caroline)
Brewster Kahle argues against news sites blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their sites. “Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data.”
NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds and interviewed Panic’s Cabel Sasser about how they decided to refund their Playdate-buying customers for the tariffs surcharge they paid.
Do you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes.
A Tiny 24 FPS E-Ink Game Boy Emulator
This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen.
If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game. This guy wrote his own display driver that got the refresh rate up to 30 times per second. From the transcript of the video explaining how e-paper works and how he hacked the display to make it play games:
Unlike conventional displays like LCD or OLED, ePaper stores its image physically using charged black and white pigment particles. By changing the electric field, the display moves the pigments towards or away from the surface, which in the end gives us black- or white-looking pixel. And usually a sequence of several electrical pulses called a waveform is needed to move the pigment back and forth, before finally driving it towards the new image. This helps produce a clean result without leaving too much of the previous image behind. But this takes a lot of time.
The project is open source — you can get the plans and code on GitHub. This engineer was inspired by Wenting Zhang’s e-paper Game Boy emulator:
Zhang has also made a color e-ink display that runs at 60 fps. Very cool. (via yanko design)
A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exhibition at the Met. I hope I make it to NYC to see this before it closes in January.
Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and tower defense games. “Nouns make buildings and other parts of speech make modifiers that you can add to a building to improve its stats.”
Hyperland, a Prescient 1990 TV Show by Douglas Adams
I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent interactive agent that promises to “do your every slightest bidding, to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial”.
Circumventing the limitations of ‘linear’ broadcast TV, the 50-minute programme imagines a new world in which an AI software ‘agent’ - brought to life here by Doctor Who favourite Tom Baker - helps the user (played by Adams) to find and access material of interest in a global world of hyperlinked information - text, images, audio and video.
Pop-up ‘micons’ (moving icons) conveniently link to interviews with leading technologists of the era (among them Ted Nelson, Robert Winter, Robert Abel, Kristina Hooper, Fabrice Forin and Steve Gano).
Some of this stuff has dated badly - few visions of the future get everything right! - but the programme is nevertheless of considerable historical importance.
Incredibly, at about the time Hyperland was being broadcast, a young CERN computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee was beavering away on URLs and HTTP, the foundations of what would become the World Wide Web.
Even Adams, who foresaw so much, didn’t anticipate the impact the Web - and the Internet that conveys its data globally - would have on civilisation. Needless to say, the enticing infoworld envisaged in Hyperland was a public-service one of education, art, literature (including nods to Adams’ own works!) and entertainment. There’s no advertising, hacking, cybercrime, information theft, social-media addicts, unaccountable corporate domination or drug-like dependence on the smartphones that Adams himself predicted.
And Tom Baker’s enthusiastic agent isn’t forever popping up to try and sell you something…
The YouTube version above is missing a segment, but you can watch (and download) the whole program on the Internet Archive, a project that fits the vision of the future imagined by techno-utopians like Adams.
I’m imagining what 16-year-old Jason would have made of this (or HyperCard or hypertext had he had any clue that they existed until 4-5 years later) — his brain probably would have exploded.
Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours, recorded live at SF’s Castro Theatre. This one’s going straight into the earholes. Soundcloud, YouTube, and elsewhere.
Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from Building the Creature? “These are serious concerns. And I think we should all stop. Me, especially. Can anyone make me stop doing the thing I want to do? Apparently not.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Consequence of Donald Trump
Writing for Vanity Fair (archive link), Ta-Nehisi Coates says that Donald Trump is the most visionary politician of his era.
Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, and Trump met his in the wake of a black presidency and a conservative movement doggedly and patiently pursuing a decades-long counterrevolution. The marriage of Trump’s charisma to a fundamentalist right wing has been bountiful: three Supreme Court justices in four years, the subsequent destruction of national abortion rights, the banishment of affirmative action, the hollowing of the Voting Rights Act.
And the genie may not go back in the bottle:
But some things can’t be unseen. The example that Trump has set, the scope of what is possible should one embrace the dark powers of the White House, will not dissipate. It turns out that you can deploy secret police onto American streets. You can deport immigrants in defiance of the courts. You can have the Justice Department badger your enemies. And you can become very rich while doing it. And some of the most powerful sectors in America, those who most loudly extol their own love of country, will stand around and watch you do it. Asked why he was making deals during his second term, Trump gave a succinct and chillingly accurate summation: “I found out that nobody cared.” And to the extent that there is a genius to Trump, it is in his apprehension of this reality—so very few people who matter care. When you’re president, they let you do it.
Coates recently discussed this piece on Vanity Fair’s podcast.
Charles Harley on Subway Takes: “I don’t think Black people should have to pay for ancestry.com. Why do I have to pay you to figure out where you stole me from?”
Illustrator and writer Luis Mendo’s second book is out. “The only website that once a year becomes a book.” I have Book One and it’s lovely…
Chromatic Inkscapes
I love these digital illustrations by Adam Fuhrer; he calls them chromatic aberrations. It was difficult to narrow them down to the few favorites above. I posted about Fuhrer’s pen plotted art a couple of years ago…I like the direction he’s taking this.
Margaret Atwood in 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book. “It’s very hard to control what young people get their hands on, especially if they’re told something is too old for them, or too evil, or too immoral.”
Roooobot. Huuuuuman.
This woman does some amazing things with a series of white rings — lots of precision optical illusions.
It’s mesmerizing watching people moving like machines — an interesting psychological thing. Like Avantgardey, which if you haven’t heard of them (just because they show up all the time on my Instagram doesn’t mean that happens for everyone), you should check them out:
(via @sevlu)
The trailer for Blade Runner 2099, a new limited series premiering in late November and starring Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer.
Going 94 MPH on a Skateboard (New World Record)
Diego Poncelet recently set a new world record for the fastest speed on a skateboard. The old record was 146.7 km/h (91.2 mph) and he hit 151.8 km/h (94.3 mph). There are a couple of parts you can skip, but watching most of the video is worth it because you see the process and can compare how truly insanely fast he is moving during the final run — I found myself holding my breath for the last minute or so.
Also, I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.
I just found the first time I posted about speed skateboarding on KDO: this post from 2008. Less aerodynamic, more gonzo, and the cameraman is also on a skateboard going equally fast.
I played (not) solitaire for more hands than I would care to admit. “A multiplayer game where the multiplayer was about companionship, empathy, and comfort, instead of competition or even interaction.”
Beautiful Seamless Ride
A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)
Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.
How Hunting Owls Use Sound to “See” Under the Snow
The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter.
The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of scampering feet is inaudible to us. But not to him. With the help of a special acoustic camera equipped with 60 highly sensitive microphones, we can see what the owl is hearing.
The footage in this video is amazing — and so is the owl’s sense of hearing. A YouTube commenter says “Cat software in Bird hardware. Bad news for the Rodents.” You can watch a short video on the science behind owl hunting techniques and watch the whole episode this is from about how animals use sound (but only in Canada, it seems…VPN works fine tho).
The only problem with this video is that now I want two hours of just closeup footage of the owl’s face and it flying directly towards the camera. Those eyes! And its mid-flight loaf-of-white-bread-shaped body! I would also like the owl to be my friend.
BTW, this clip is from a show called The Nature of Things, which is a CBC nature series that’s been going since 1960. A good thing to have on your radar if you’re looking for well-produced science & nature programs.
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