kottke.org

Harry Kane is this year’s men’s winner of the Ballon d’Or. 100% the right choice — he had the best season of anyone. Like, almost ever. [theguardian.com]

A poignant short documentary about a mother who only knows her son is alive by the new graffiti tags he leaves around town. Eventually, she started tagging back… [nytimes.com]

From Charles Mann, a quick history of porcelain, which is basically what his pricey induction stovetop is made from. (Fun fact: I went to grad school for ceramic engineering before dropping out after a semester to teach myself web design.) [worksinprogress.co]

Between these two digital collections of Russian and East European Posters, there are almost 6500 items spanning 101 years (1904-2004). [kottke.org]

How Tree Rings Challenged the Myth of American Wilderness. “When one revisits colonial accounts of North America, one finds a striking amount of evidence that Native Americans set fire to the landscape.” [newyorker.com]

NASA’s Perseverance Sets Off-World Record for Total Distance Driven. It recently hit 28.1 miles, which is quite a distance for a vehicle whose top speed is 0.1 mph . [kottke.org]

Simon Willison: “Battle Drones is heavily vibe coded — I’ve reviewed almost none of the code, and it’s built in a language (TypeScript) that I’ve hardly used myself.” There’s a French steampunk version too. [simonwillison.net]

This exhibition of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) by Utagawa Hiroshige at the Tokyo National Museum was great. Awesome to see these prints in person. [tnm.jp]

London's Natural History Museum has announced the winners of the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a competition that has been going since 1965. [kottke.org]

How to Install an App on Your Commodore 64. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94.” [anildash.com]

The Tiny Computers app lets you play with old computers on the iPhone Duo. Ten machines included: “Macintosh, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, Windows 95, ThinkPad, iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerBook G4 and Windows XP.” XP even crashes sometimes. Love this. [youtube.com]

The One Question I Can’t Stand at Restaurants. “The idea of a restaurant I’d never been to using a dossier on me to decide, say, where I should sit, what I was likely to order, even whether I should be given a reservation at all, gave me chills.” [theatlantic.com]

“US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago — outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes.” [theguardian.com]

Hello! Today will be a bit slow on the site, so I’m gonna do an open thread. Let me know what’s been going on in your world lately! Also: “How many individual french fries do you think you've seen/eaten in your life?" [kottke.org]

“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… [allthingslinguistic.com]

The Flipbook of the Rings. More than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of the first The Lord of the Rings movie. All 3 hours. Over 120,000 scenes drawn by hand. Watch the first 11 minutes here. [kottke.org]

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.” [archive.org]

Railpass 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. [train.samismith.com]

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.” [youtube.com]

 The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards  were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. [kottke.org]

“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.” [404media.co]

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.) (via @brandstichting.com) [youtube.com]

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. “An informed public is the foundation of a healthy society..." [kottke.org]

“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? [nytimes.com]

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. [bastardica.mitpit.com]

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. [nytimes.com]

NYC’s Fastest Bike Messenger (1985). A Charles Kuralt CBS News segment on 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." [kottke.org]

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.” [reasonstobecheerful.world]

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.” [kickstarter.com]

Link Loop is basically a 2D version of Portal. Looks fun! [playlinkloop.com]

 Ambient Earth  is a 7.5-hour, real-time, 4K, remastered video of the orbital view from the International Space Station. The video "invites you to slow down and experience Earth in real time just as astronauts do." [kottke.org]

“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.” [arstechnica.com]

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…” [theatlantic.com]

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”. [youtube.com]

How Christoper Alexander’s landmark book A Pattern Language inspired The Sims (and object oriented programming and the invention of Wikipedia). [kottke.org]

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.” [bookshop.org]

“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.” [reuters.com]

The Best Monopoly Strategy, Tested on 300 Million Games. The most common mistakes: “being picky about what you buy, saving your cash, stopping at three houses, and refusing to trade”. [kottke.org]

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.” [theonion.com]

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. [gizmodo.com]

How katsuobushi (Japanese dried bonito) is made in Japan. They smoke and dry it for months “until the fish becomes as hard as wood and shines like a jewel”. [kottke.org]

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.” [theatlantic.com]

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. [npr.org]

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. [pudding.cool]

This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen. He wrote his own display driver to push the refresh rate beyond the normal 2-3 times per second. [kottke.org]

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. [youtube.com]

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.” [franklantz.substack.com]

Hyperland was a prescient 1990 BBC show created by Douglas Adams starring Doctor Who’s Tom Baker as an interactive AI agent who offers to do Adams' "every slightest bidding, to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf…" [kottke.org]

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. [youtube.com]

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.” [mcsweeneys.net]