I can’t remember where I heard about this, but judging by the trailer, Hope by Korean director Na Hong-jin looks pretty good.

For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive).

I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t totally surprising; by this point, I hadn’t cried for more than three years.

I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.

I started taking an SSRI a few years ago with the goal of giving me enough space to approach life’s challenges without feeling completely overwhelmed (by anxiety, by depression). The medication didn’t “fix” me…it just kept the train from derailing all the time (sometimes over the smallest things) and gave me the freedom to work through things on my own and with my therapist.¹

I was lucky to land on a good med/dose combo on my second try — the first pill I tried made me feel jittery and more anxious than I already was. But my current med does come with a couple of side effects. My sex drive is lower than it was (although that could also be age), which is not altogether unpleasant — a quieter mind in charge of things instead of a libido. The other side effect is that I don’t cry anymore, at least not as easily.

Crying is something I took up after my kids were born. Not often, but once every few weeks maybe. I cried when things got hard and for awhile, things were hard a lot of time: pandemic, parenting insecurity, divorce, living somewhere that really didn’t suit me, and always always the website & the discomfort of being an odd sort of “public figure”. Watching any movie with parents and kids (esp. dads and sons) got me — heck, even some Marvel movies got me. In sessions with my therapist, I cried when we’d hit a particularly tender vein of pain. As Gould says, the crying was cathartic and felt necessary — I always felt better and clearer afterwards.

But that’s mostly stopped since I’ve been on my meds. I still get sad, although less so, but I don’t cry. Movies don’t really get me going anymore. When my kids are struggling (in school, with friends), that gets me the closest. I miss that release — I feel a little pent-up sometimes. But I wouldn’t trade crying again for how I felt in the Before Times. I’m ok not having access to crying — at least for now.

1. I don’t usually talk about this sort of thing on the site and I don’t quite know why I’m talking about it now — Gould’s openness makes it easier maybe. And it may help someone else to hear about my experience? ↩

Tags: Emily Gould · Jason Kottke · medicine · parenting · therapy

Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately teach other chimps (often their offspring) to use them for ant dipping, algae fishing, and termite fishing.

This maddening little web toy on vole.wtf challenges visitors to draw a perfect circle and judges them on how well they do. After dozens of tries with a mouse, I could only manage 92.9% perfection (which looks more like 80% tbh).

Then I tried it on a touchscreen and got much closer: 95.2%. Several more tries with an Apple Pencil bumped it up to 97.7%, after which I retired so as not to waste the entire rest of my afternoon on this.

And of course, here’s the classic video of Alexander Overwijk drawing a perfect freehand circle on the blackboard in about a second.

I love everything about this video — the way he swings his arm to warm up, his drying-the-blackboard flapping motion, and the ease of his perfection. 100.0%. (via sam potts)

[This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2019.]

Tags: Alexander Overwijk · timeless posts · video

Some advice on giving good advice. “Not every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.”

I love these black & white photos of Devils Tower by Zac Henderson.

A butte of a rare kind of volcanic rock that formed a mile underground 50 million years ago, Devil’s Tower is visible now thanks to erosion of sedimentary rock. The tower features the world’s largest known example of columnar jointing. Its massive stone columns, as much as 10 feet in diameter, formed as magma cooled and contracted, creating great stress that the rock alleviated through fracturing. The columns come in 5, 6, and 7 sided varieties.

These photographs were captured over the course of 3 days with the ultimate goal of capturing the full moon streaking behind the tower. The black and white images in this series were captured late in the day while waiting for the moon to rise. These photographs were captured in 830nm infrared and helped create intense contrast between direct sunlight and shaded regions of the image. The resulting set of photographs are a study of afternoon light and shadow on the surface of the tower.

If you ever get the chance to see Devils Tower in person, I recommend it. (via colossal)

Tags: Devils Tower · photography · Zac Henderson

TIL they can do wing replacements on injured butterflies…just take a look at this repair video.

Engaging read on how the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? was made. “To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion.”

The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever. “It didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.”

Just a short note to say that because of some internet scammer shithousery, I had to bulk-unsubscribe a bunch of email addresses from the KDO Newsletter subscriber rolls. If you subscribed to the newsletter back in Dec 2025 and don’t get the next issue (which I’m sending out a few hours after posting this), you might need to sign up again. Sorry for the inconvenience — my email account got flagged and I needed to rectify this pronto. 🙏

For the rest of yous: you’re doing great, stay the course. If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter and you like reading things in your inbox for some reason, you can subscribe as well. The newsletter goes out twice a week and includes links to everything I post here. Thanks.

Tags: kottke.org

A thoughtful review of Nolan’s The Odyssey, comparing it to the original Planet of the Apes movies. “I was very influenced by seeing The Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. We had the Statue of Liberty half destroyed. That idea of a fallen monument.”

I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one, he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects.

Like Manet, she’s dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she’s exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric. And she’s experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles.

But Cassat isn’t just adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She’s putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened up by perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet’s methods with a meticulous observation of posture, gesture, expression, and activity.

Tags: art · art school · Evan Puschak · Mary Cassatt · video

3D models for every single object in Katamari Damacy, all 1680 of them. You can download models and animated gifs of each one.

Ross Anderson on NASA’s recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which may “be able to deliver the first direct images of distant planets in visible light” as well as measure the effects of dark energy.

Canyon Groove. What if the grooves on a record were shaped like actual canyons? What would that sound like? “The floor sets the key. The shape of the walls sets the mood. The width sets how long one pass takes, and the depth sets the echo.”

So that companies can use them to make accessories like cases and bands, Apple maintains a collection of downloadable dimensional drawings and tech specifications for many of their products, including the iPhone, AirPods, Watch, and iPad. They are beautiful.

I love their corner & edge measurements…you can see how fiddly Apple is with their curves. Curiously, the only Mac listed is the Macbook Neo. I guess that’s the only one that needs accessorizing?

Also, I presume if you’ve got a 3D printer, you could use these to make your own very precise accessories?

Tags: Apple · design

What’s your “origin” video game? “I’m talking about the game that flipped that little switch in your brain and made you into a life-long gamer.” Mine is Lode Runner. Reflexes + puzzles + constraints + make-your-own levels = hooked for life. You?

TIL Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was written in part to help save the cathedral from demolition.

“The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big AI needs to follow all current laws—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t. When Big AI breaks those laws, they must face pros­e­cu­tion and penal­ties—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t.”

Ed Sheeran tried to stay neutral on a moving train. “If [celebrities] remain neutral (silent), they won’t offend anyone and they will, hopefully, appeal to everyone. They use the facade of neutrality as shelter, as a place to take refuge.”