A short history of Lego instructions from 1955 to the present. “Prior to [1955] the only ‘guidance’ for products containing plastic bricks were drawings on the packaging to serve as inspiration for consumers.”
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Satellite images of sand dunes migrating in Egypt. They move about 13 meters a year.
USPS Announces Mythical Creatures Stamps for 2027
The US Postal Service recently released a partial list of the stamps it’s putting out in 2027. One of the sets is Mythical Creatures, featuring five cryptids.1
The legend of Mothman has endured for more than six decades, but of the creatures encountered on these stamps, this flying, man-sized, red-eyed being emerged the most recently. The cryptid was first reported in West Virginia in 1966. Several nights after a gravedigger reported a winged, human-sized creature swooping above, two couples on a midnight drive in the rural outskirts of Point Pleasant reported being chased from overhead at great speed as they fled back to town. Newspapers dubbed the creature “Mothman.” After a year of eerie sightings was followed by a local tragedy, some interpreted the appearances as harbingers of disaster. In the years since, a lighter side of Mothman has been embraced by festival attendees, many in “spooky-cute” costumes that evoke this increasingly popular cryptid.
Unlike most of the creatures on these stamps, the Jackalope has been spotted by a great many Americans. It has multiplied rapidly, especially in the West, since first appearing in the 1930s in Douglas, Wyoming. This antlered rabbit was the creation of two young brothers studying taxidermy by mail who, in a moment of inspiration after a hunting trip, crafted the hoax. When the masterful mashup was displayed at a local inn, the Jackalope quickly sprang into regional folklore. Today, Jackalopes are found in gift shops in the Great Plains and Western states — on postcards, stickers, and T-shirts, and as plush toys and mounted specimens. The fanciful hybrid endlessly inspires the imaginations of those who encounter it, and who add to its lore with their own stories, songs, and artworks.
The Squonk hides away in northern Pennsylvania’s dense hemlock forests, so distressed by its own appearance that it cries constantly. This piglike animal, wrinkled, blemished, and self-conscious, was first described in print in a 1910 collection of lumberjack folklore, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. The book — recounting tales often spun and re-spun by the fireside in remote logging encampments of the 19th and early 20th centuries — relates an episode of a Squonk captured in a bag: As the hunter carried his prey, its weeping faded and the sack grew lighter. Investigation revealed that the Squonk had melted into “nothing but tears and bubbles.” In recent years, the melancholy character has been revived as a darling mascot of introverts and anyone else who relates to the Squonk’s social anxiety.
Sasquatch captures the American imagination like no other cryptid. Nobody, though, has captured Bigfoot, as this large hairy hominid is commonly called, nor even retrieved a confirmed strand of hair from its notoriously stinky, shaggy fur. In the Pacific Northwest, ancient Indigenous tales of mysterious, hairy humanoids encouraged caution in the wild and mindful custodianship of forest habitat. By the late 20th century, reported sightings of Sasquatch and similar regional creatures had taken hold and spanned the nation. In fact, tales of huge bipeds are told worldwide, almost anywhere shadowy terrain could conceivably conceal such elusive beings. Hoaxes abound, including blurry films and casts of outsized human-like footprints, but the most notable impression Sasquatch makes is its lasting mark on American popular culture. Even if our most famous mythical creature is nowhere to be found, Sasquatch is everywhere.
Champ, as the Lake Champlain monster is affectionately known, is said to dwell within the nation’s sixth largest lake, which defines more than 100 miles of the New York–Vermont border. A glacial lake reaching 400 feet deep and 14 miles wide is bound to contain mysteries — over the last few centuries, hundreds have claimed to see the serpentine organism. Cryptozoologists have tried to determine what it could be: perhaps a descendant of an aquatic, dinosaur-era reptile or whale, as found in fossils? Skeptics point to more mundane possibilities: sturgeon and other large fish that inhabit the lake, swimming deer, waves, mirages, and tree trunks riding currents. While a living specimen has proven elusive, Champ is ever-present as a beloved mascot of the region, celebrated in business logos, and in festivals and museum exhibits.
The stamps feature the artwork of tattoo artist Nat Power and will be available next year.
The 2027 stamp lineup also includes a set of unicorn stamps. So many fantastical animals! ↩
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listHow to Build a Police State. “Bukele didn’t declare a dictatorship on day one. He built toward it incrementally, each step framed in the language of anti-corruption, public safety or efficiency.”
How Much Wealth Does It Take to be Safe in the United States?
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi’s new book is about wealth inequality in America. Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (Amazon) follows ten people with ten different incomes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10% and everything in-between:
For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed them all, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. She researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, inheritances, and so much more to understand the systems that keep people stuck. But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?
This looks great — Chalabi’s work is always worth a look. Shades of Studs Terkel and What Do People Do All Day crossed with Barbara Ehrenreich. Chalabi did a recent interview with It’s Nice That about the book.
Part of the message of the book is that class doesn’t show up enough in our intersectional identities, and that that’s fundamentally dishonest. I would hope that people read the book and then get much more fluent and comfortable with describing their current wealth and income, as well as the one that they grew up in. I think that’s kind of ambitious, but you never know.
Ten Lives is out today in the US.
Great title for an article about London’s invasive parakeet population: The Pollycrisis. “Do we want tens of thousands of Himalayan parrots squabbling all over our cities?”
100 Big Unanswered Scientific Questions
The NY Times recently asked 100 scientists from across dozens of disciplines: “What is a big unanswered question in your field?” Here are some of their questions that caught my eye:
4. When and where did the cognitive capacities that made language, mathematics and complex societies possible first emerge?
9. Why does full writing — complete sentences that can make sense to readers out of context — appear so late in human history?
37. Why are humans the only species with a chin?
40. What is dark matter?
48. Do organisms use quantum effects, such as entanglement and superposition?
54. Will we ever decipher Linear A, Cypro-Minoan and other important ancient scripts?
61. What would be the global impact of a supervolcanic eruption in modern times?
70. Blue whales are the biggest animals ever to exist on Earth. Where are their babies born?
81. Chemical reactions have had a speed limit, described more than a century ago. Can we learn to surpass it?
93. Can environmental sustainability be achieved under capitalism?
Another banger from neal.fun: Battle Draw. Sort of an open world tower defense “game”?
Crimson Star
Watch the Sun’s atmosphere pulse and flow in extreme UV. Images are from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and “conformed, repaired, graded, blended, rescaled & retimed” by Seán Doran, whose video work is always incredible.
It would be great to see this in IMAX or some other large screen format, like in the observatory on the ship in Sunshine.
The most intense shoe salesman you’ll ever meet, a CBS News report by Charles Kuralt from 1983 about a “champion” shoe salesman.
The Welcome Rain Falling From the Sky
I love Taiwanese artist Kuang-Yu Tsui’s 1997 conceptual art piece The Welcome Rain Falling From the Sky but I couldn’t really tell you what it means. Something about the way people are bombarded with advertisements for consumer goods? I also couldn’t help but think of the iOS game co-created by Neven Mrgan, The Incident.
Award-winning photographer Stephen Voss is making a book about the world’s largest data-center hub in Northern Virginia. “Forests have disappeared. Empty fields have become enormous buildings.”
Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made. “The phone in your pocket is several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the computers used for the Apollo mission. One AirPod could easily calculate a path to the moon.”
A YouTuber discovered that most videos contain inaudible background audio that can be geolocated by using airplane flight data. Incredible. I wonder how long the NSA has known about this though…
Winners of the 2026 Photomicrography Competition
Ok, I’m gonna use the word gobsmacking here because I think it’s completely appropriate. This image of an inkjet printer laying down ink on a piece of paper is gobsmacking.
Like what?! You can check out photographer Ole Bielfeldt’s behind-the-scenes process on Instagram; he built a whole custom rig to capture this composite image.
The biggest challenge was speed and lighting.
The printhead, in the printer, moves at a very high speed over the paper. Simultaneously, the ink droplets get injected at around 20 m/s. So to capture the ink droplets mid air and get my lens close enough, this required me to build a custom setup where, instead of the printhead moving over the paper, the paper moved below the printhead. This allowed me to keep the nozzles in focus while printing.
As the max shutter speed of 1/8000s on my camera is way too slow, I used a high speed flash setup. Here the flash acts as the effective shutter, freezing the droplets mid air. I then used focus stacking to capture the depth of the scene.
Bielfeldt’s took the top spot in the Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition. The top 20 images are all quite something…here are a couple more of my favorites, from Justin Theodore Benttinen and Dr. Francisco Lázaro-Diéguez.
(via curious about everything)
Dark Forestry. “What defense against this onslaught of talking machines? Craft, and ‘the nobility of a day’s work’, once-proud heraldry against inconsiderate design and careless release cycles, are threadbare banners in winter winds.”
The Divorce Tapes (gift link). “The only music she listens to is heavy metal from 1986. It’s the year she still lives in. She wanted me to tell this story.” This is a tough read. (CW: rape, family trauma)
They found a chunk of Mars in the Sahara Desert. A recent reveals that a rock found a few years ago in Mali is more than 4.1 billion years old and “has a mix of igneous minerals that tells a story about how [Mars’] crust formed”.
The Match Archive
The Match Archive is creating “the first research-grade, digital archive cataloging American matchbooks as primary sources for graphic design, commercial culture, and social history”. They haven’t launched a website yet (they’re working on it), but they’ve been sharing some of their collection on their Instagram account.
I love the art on the matches themselves…you don’t see that much anymore.
See also Vintage Eastern European Matchbox Labels (1950-1980s) and Matchbook Diaries of New York City.
An analysis of 59 studies (including a 24-year Danish study of 1.2 million children) found that the tiny amounts of aluminum in vaccines are not linked to “increased risk of asthma, autism, or autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes”. Of course!
“Are sperm counts declining? Are microplastics and pesticides affecting male fertility? Does a low sperm count mean you’ll struggle to have children? Howtown investigates the science behind male infertility…”
We Have Star Wars at Home
This is cool: Evan Puschak looks at the rush of cheapo knockoff space operas that came out in the wake of Star Wars, a once-in-a-generation film that refashioned the entire movie business. Even the names are kooky: Starcrash, War of the Planets, Battle of the Stars, The Humanoid, Message From Space, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Man Who Saved the World, Star Odyssey, and The Beast in Space — although tbh, Star Wars is a goofy name as well. Some of the movies even had lightsabers and anxious robots.
Puschak highlights Star Wars’ unique combination of realistic depictions of space with special effects (a la 2001) and an adventure story with colorful characters. He quotes Julie Turnock’s book, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, in making the case that Lucas and other filmmakers of his generation were using special effects to up the sensorial ante for moviegoers — I dug the full passage out of the book’s introduction:
Certainly what was so exhilarating to many about these films was not simply the experience of a new kind of realism. Perhaps even more important was the intensified density of effects in films of the era, which many at the time understood as a thrillingly new and vividly somatic technologized experience. This book aims to recover the excitement that not just ticket-buyers but also many academics, critics, and journalists felt upon experiencing the special effects-heavy films of the 1970s, in particular Star Wars and Close Encounters, and further grant historical dimension and context to that experience. It may be surprising for many to realize that in the 1970s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were considered among the most interesting, ambitious, and exciting filmmakers of the era, alongside more canonized American filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. What critics praised most often about Lucas and Spielberg as filmmakers was their grasp of specifically cinematic visual dynamics that lent their films both greater visceral and sensual engagement and an extra layer of expressive and intellectual potential. While many critics have (often rightly) condemned the aggressive, pummeling blockbuster style that has arisen in the wake of the two successes of 1977, it is incumbent upon scholars to recover the creative process that made them so stimulating and exhilarating to the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert, and other prominent critics of the era, as well as so popular with audiences. A renewed interest in special effects technology by influential auteurist filmmakers certainly made this historical development possible. However, even more strongly, auteurist filmmakers went to the considerable and painstaking effort to promote and develop complex special effects technology, precisely in order to realize aesthetic filmmaking goals they designed to rouse and provoke the sensorium. They called this approach variously “visual storytelling,’ “visceral engagement,’ or “graphic dynamics.”
Moreover, so-called New Hollywood filmmakers in the 1970s reinterpreted the role of cinematic aesthetics to suggest a purposeful relation between sensual and intellectual impact. In other words, filmmakers sought to stimulate the senses. This was not to numb the viewer but to activate him or her — not unlike the notion of drug-induced mind expansion. Intensified color schemes, beams of light, fast-moving objects, and quick editing first penetrate the body and then engage the mind with the films’ ideas about technology, kineticism, power structures, liberty, etc.
I am firmly in the camp of those who enjoy filmmakers that engage the senses like this — among contemporary filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve come to mind as continuing the legacy of Lucas et al. in this way.
From filmmaker Kevin B. Lee, a story about seeing Platoon as a child in 1986. What age-inappropriate movies did you see as a kid?
A call for more “mindful underparenting” from psychologist Darby Saxbe. “If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.” 💯
KDO Search Now Available to Everyone
Ok, after a week of testing, I’ve opened up KDO search to everyone. You can read more about it in my post from last week:
For now, the search only looks at posts from 2014 to the present. You can search by keyword, describe what you remember (“the guy who walks in Japan”), or paste a link to find posts that link to it. Search is fuzzy-ish but it’s not an AI bot or anything like that so if you ramble on with a 25-word query, it’s probably not going to work that well. You can sort by best match or newest, search all posts or just Quick Links or main posts, and filter by time (past month, past 3 months, etc.)
Launching that member preview was a little deflating tbh — “no plan survives first contact with the user”. It was clear that search was not as good as I wanted it to be — even I started noticing it despite my excitement. I spent quite a bit of time last weekend trying to tune the search and it’s much improved. I’ve been using it quite a bit this week and am loving it. There’s so much good stuff in the archives (and I can say that because if it’s more than 3-4 years old, I don’t even remember writing it! 🤷♂️) and this does a great job of surfacing that stuff.
Speaking of surfacing more posts from the archive, one of the coolest things about the way the search works is that you get a “more like this post” capability more or less for free. If you open recent posts like the video of three humpback whales breaching, the composite photo of 14,000 satellite trails, this Ted Chiang interview, or even an older post like Sesame Street puppeteers on how they play their characters and click on the “Related posts” tab below the post, you should see links 1-5 posts that you may want to read next.
Like the search, it’s not perfect and not every post will have related links, but I keep turning up good posts I’d completely forgotten about. Anyway, related posts are available for everyone on post-2014 posts. Post post post post. Poooooost. Ok, getting punchy. Have a good weekend everyone.
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