Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen. [This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2016.] Tags: Bill Wurtz · Jap…

I've been upgrading a ton of Datasette plugins recently for compatibility with the Datasette 1.0a20 release from last week - 35 so far. A lot of the work is very repetitive so I've been outsourci…

Mattias Krantz bought an octopus from the fish market and taught it how to play piano. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The trailer for Train Dreams, a film adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson. “In select theaters November 7 and on Netflix November 21.” 💬 Join the di…

Jamelle Bouie: “I’m gonna make a case to you that no matter what you’ve heard about the filibuster, you should want the filibuster to be sent to the ash bin of history.”…

Jessica Guo: “If there’s something out there that calls to you, I hope you listen. Give yourself permission to do the thing.” Guo just finished hiking both the the Continental Divide Tr…

Here’s the trailer for The Age of Audio, a feature-length documentary about the invention and popularization of podcasting, from Adam Curry to Ronald Young Jr. I ran across this movie vi…

Fonts based on the type generated by the Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer (1980). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

For a More Creative Brain, Travel. “New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind.”…

“China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, analysis reveals, adding evidence to the hope that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to hit its target…

I’ve been drawing comfort from the way established artists will typically vanish for a while and suddenly re-appear with a fully-formed new body o…

Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025, ★★★★ Among other things, I remain very appreciative of Lanthimos’s rare appetite for adventurous typography. Tagged: November 2025, film diary,…

High Horse: The Black Cowboy is a three-part documentary about the culture of Black cowboys & cowgirls and their erasure from the history of the western United States. From executive produ…

Netflix asks partners to consider the following guiding principles before leveraging GenAI in any creative workflow:  The outputs do not replicate or substantially recreate identifiable charact…

Going to Art Galleries Can Improve Wellbeing. “Enjoying original works of art in a gallery can relieve stress, reduce the risk of heart disease and boost your immune system, according to th…

A zoomable, fully searchable archive of every single page of every single issue of BYTE magazine from 1975-1998. “I hope seeing everything in single, searchable place offers a unique perspe…

Notes on Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay Notes on American Fascism, which was dismissed at the time but now seems prescient.…

A two-hour version of the music played in the Wellness Center in Severance. “Please try to enjoy each listening session equally.” See also Severance: Music To Refine To. ✅ Added to m…

A Journey to Vietnam to Uncover the Origins of Phở. “If you want to find the origins, you must go to Nam Ðịnh province and a village called Vân Cù.” �…

From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brookly…

If you’re looking for a typeface with Radio Shack logo vibes, try Megazoid. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“I’m trying to take a moment and see things from his perspective,” I comment to another parent as a teacher takes my son aside for a walk because he was running around instead of “dancing”…

Coulou’s vinyl cafe (no. 2). “Even though we’re traveling from jazz to funk to middle eastern and Indonesian 70s disco then hip hop, then folk and even more genres, to me this felt like…

“I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t,” says George Monbiot. “His [recent climate] essay reads like nothing so much as a peac…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts Gieo Text is the debut release of type designer Linh Nguyễn’s fledgling ÁccentiaType foundry. What began during her MA in Type Design is now published as a fresh…

Pelican on a Bike - Raytracer Edition beetle_b ran this prompt against a bunch of recent LLMs: Write a POV-Ray file that shows a pelican riding on a bicycle. This turns out to be a harder chal…

Added to the film diary:Bones and AllLuca Guadagnino, 2022, ★★★TÁRTodd Field, 2022, ★★★★½The Blue GardeniaFritz Lang, 1953, ★★★Added to the music library:IconoclastsAnna von H…

OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini, which they describe as "a more compact and cost-efficient version of GPT-5-Codex". It's currently only available via their…

The big advantage of MCP over OpenAPI is that it is very clear about auth. [...] Maybe an agent could read the docs and write code to auth. But we don't actually want that, because it implies the…

Mastodon 4.5 This new release of Mastodon adds two of my most desired features! The first is support for quote posts. This had already become an unofficial feature in the client apps I was using…

What Mamdani Learned from His Mother’s Films. “How the ethics of the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair echo in her son’s politics.”…

A beautifully shot HD video of machines manufacturing springs and other wire gizmos. I love how all the tools take turns and work together to make the widgets. Imagine the chatter amongst t…

“A trio of photographers in New Zealand have captured images of ‘red sprites’, or red lightning, one of the rarest light phenomena in the world, in which luminous crimson flashes appear…

“Members of the Danish National Chamber Orchestra playing Tango Jalousie while eating the worlds hottest chili peppers” (ghost peppers, Carolina Reapers). This is what elite professionali…

I Visited Every Country in the World Without Flying. Here Are Eight Things I Learned. “What you want and what you need are not the same thing.” 💬 Join the…

Bionic and the Wires connects sensors to plants and fungi to help them play music. The attached sensors measure bio-electrical fluctuations in the mushroom. The fluctuations are converted…

New exhibition at the British Library in London: Secret Maps. “Some of the maps on display reveal hidden landscapes, offering insight into places long forgotten or erased from official hist…

I have AiDHD It has never been easier to build an MVP and in turn, it has never been harder to keep focus. When new features always feel like they're just a prompt away, feature creep feels like…

Royal Family is a daily game where you have to position six chess pieces on a board so that none of the pieces attack each other and there’s only a single piece in each marked zone.…

My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers. Most programming languages are similar enough to existing languages that y…

TIL: “Key man risk refers to the potential threat a company faces when a crucial employee, often a key executive or expert, is no longer available.” I think KDO has key person risk, altho…

Hello, Compadres. Here's issue #57 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🐸 For their 70th anniversary, The Jim Henson Company is auctioning off hundred…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts You’d think that by 2025 I would be sick of anything addressing the “future” by now. Having lived through the 60s through 90s visionary predictions of a pessimi…

Using Codex CLI with gpt-oss:120b on an NVIDIA DGX Spark via Tailscale Inspired by a YouTube comment I wrote up how I run OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent against the gpt-oss:120b model running i…

Game design is simple, actually Game design legend Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and many more) provides a deeply informative and delightfully illustrated "twelve-step program f…

You should write an agent Thomas Ptacek on the Fly blog: Agents are the most surprising programming experience I’ve had in my career. Not because I’m awed by the magnitude of their powers �…

Cole Escola (Oh, Mary!) is writing the screenplay for a Miss Piggy movie. Jennifer Lawrence & Emma Stone are producing. (Crossing my fingers for a Pigs in Space scene…)…

My trepidation extends to complex literature searches. I use LLMs as secondary librarians when I’m doing research. They reliably find primary sources (articles, papers, etc.) that I miss in my…

Kimi K2 Thinking Chinese AI lab Moonshot's Kimi K2 established itself as one of the largest open weight models - 1 trillion parameters - back in July. They've now released the Thinking version,…

Speaking of Daft Punk, did you know they released some new music recently? Ok well, that’s not quiiiite true, but in late September, Epic launched the Daft Punk Experience in Fortnite and I…