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…

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.

Tags: Adam Fuhrer · art

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.”

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)

Tags: dance · video

The trailer for Blade Runner 2099, a new limited series premiering in late November and starring Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer.

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.

Tags: Diego Poncelet · skateboarding · video

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.”

Good headline: Nine Inch Snails.

A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)

Tags: cycling · video

Is the camera shutter noise the last skeuomorphic element left in iOS?

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.

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.

Tags: birds · nature · science · sound · video

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”

Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!

I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think these are universal (e.g. people who live in rural areas likely prioritize other needs) or even necessarily the most important considerations (climate, sunlight, crime, schools), but they resonated with me.

1. Your 10-minute radius matters more than almost anything else about where you live: Think about what you can get to in ten minutes without making it a whole thing. I can get coffee, get groceries, go to a park, and go to a friend’s place.

This is the biggest thing that was missing for me living in rural VT for the past 10 years. My 10-minute radius required a car to access and even then was not teeming with options. My 10-minute radius here in Tokyo is, obviously, bonkers. It makes me so happy. A photo I took inside my 10-minute area a couple of weeks ago:

2. More space can give you a smaller life: This one I’ll actually argue about. Idk why we’re obsessed with getting more sq footage, but sometimes the bigger house means you spend way more time inside it. House, car, work, car, house. Meanwhile, someone in a tiny apartment might walk downstairs, grab coffee, run into someone they know, walk to dinner, stop at the park. Technically they have less space. Butttttt their actual life might be way bigger.

One of the things living in NYC taught me was how to treat the city as an extension of your home. I’m not sure people who live in rural and suburban areas think that way about the relationship between their homes and locations.

3. The best neighborhood amenity might literally just be other people outside. […] You don’t even need to talk to any of them. Just seeing other people out living their lives makes you feel like you’re part of something.

Yep. I have been so missing this in my life. My first few days here in Tokyo, I was craving being in huge crowds of humanity so much that I spent a lot of time in ultra-busy areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya.

4. Moving somewhere new will change you, just probably not in the way you think: trust me, I still tend to do this. I think that a new city can solve all my problems. But it will not. You’re still going to be you.

Haha, yeeeeep. Even a month into my travels, I have been disappointed to learn that my bad habits are still with me. Would really like to speak to the manager about that one…

5. Where your friends live should influence where you live way more than we admit: I don’t even feel the need to explain this one. Relationships are the most important thing you’ll do in your life. Go live near people that light you up

Even though it’s halfway across the world from where I’ve been living for the past 50+ years, I’ve seen more friends here in Japan in the past month than in the past 3 months in VT. It’s not going to be like that everywhere I go and I’m not near the most important folks in my life here, but it’s nice to have it while I’m here.

Tags: cities · travel

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.

Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.

From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him — under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself — to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Tags: Caitlin Flanagan · fireworks

It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”