In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas, free to watch on YouTube. You can watch a longer compilation of (I believe) all of the episodes here. Aardman even produced a new episode this year, in the form of [more]

“The embrace of the unitary executive theory by both the president and the [Supreme Court] has given us the worst of all worlds: an ultrapowerful presidency without an actual president at the helm.”

On reading Proust vs experiencing the world intermediated by screens (even when you’re not on one). “Your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

If you want to see the future of clean energy, you have to go to China. They have flying 2-seater taxis, lunch delivery drones, robots that can swap your empty EV battery in 3 minutes, bullet trains, driverless taxis, etc. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Inkblot Books via the Public Domain Review. These pre-date use of the inkblot in the Rorschach test. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Computer History Museum: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. Thomas said, “We developed it originally for our own personal use … it was a lot a fun to do.” Gradually the program, called “Display”, became more sophisticated [more]

Apple TV’s press page has stories this month announcing release dates and first looks for a bunch of shows: Imperfect Women (a “psychological thriller”), Beat the Reaper (“dreamed”), a still-untitled Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spinoff, Widow’s Bay (“blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy”), season 2 of the Idris Elba thriller Hijack, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series from David E. Kelley starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and Nick Offerman (good cast!). [more]

Alexander Smith and Claire Cardona, NBC News: Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday with the suspect. “I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Flori [more]

Yesterday I wrote: For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco. DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than identity fonts. They’d sooner re-engineer their products’ deepest technical building blocks than change typefaces. I suspect that’s rare among tech companies.” I wish I’d thought to mention that yesterday. I’ll add that I suspect Sa [more]

“The Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In Juli Clover’s aforelinked rundown of what’s new across the whole system in iOS 26.2, I misunderstood this item regarding the Passwords app: In the Settings section of the Passwords app, there’s an option to manage websites where passwords are not saved when signing in. This new setting is about managing sites that you have previously excluded from having a password entry saved. (In the Settings app, go to Apps → Passwords and then tap “Show Excluded Websites”.) What I was hoping this was abou [more]

Besides the word of the year

Using thousands of photos taken by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmor and Don Pettit earlier this year from the International Space Station, Seán Doran made this incredible timelapse called Light Fantastic. 21,837 images across 18 time-lapse sequences photographed by NASA astronauts Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore on January 1st, 4th, 5th and February 1st of 2025 are repaired, remastered and retimed to create 3x real time video footage. A method called frame interpolation is used to calculate the extra v [more]

Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate builds during beta testing. I suspect Apple had hoped to release them earlier. I know it seemed weird back at WWDC when Apple announced that they were re-numbering all their OS versions to start with 26. But now that the cha [more]

A report from one of the competitors in a parallel parking championship. “You’ve got to get uncomfortably close. Those bumpers are called bumpers for a reason.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Savory Rice Krispies treats? “Savory chicken fat and fried onions push Rice Krispies Treats into gloriously salty-sweet territory.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Apple, on its Apple Ads site: Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search. To help give advertisers more opportunities to drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will introduce additional ads across search queries. You don’t need to change your campaign in order to be eligible for any new positions. Your ad will run in either the existing position — at the top of search results — or further do [more]

In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted for 9 days. A rockslide triggered a 200m-high tsunami that sloshed back & forth in a fjord every 90 seconds, slamming into the fjord’s walls “like a beating heart”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters: TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government ban, a significant step toward ending years of uncertainty. The craziest aspect of this whole saga is that TikTok has been operating illegally since Trump took office. Not some sort of nitpicking technicality. The whole point of [more]

PLUS: What I got right (and wrong) about 2025

Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond”, for Design Observer back in 2004: ITC Garamond was designed in 1975 by Tony Stan for the International Typeface Corporation. Okay, let’s stop right there. I’ll admit it: the single phrase “designed in 1975 by Tony Stan” conjures up a entire world for me, a world of leisure suits, harvest gold refrigerators, and “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention on the eight-track. A world where font designers were called “Tony” instead of “Tobias” or “Zuzana.” Is that [more]

Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal: Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Modisett, the firm’s vice president of design, looked to the past. He plowed through graphic-design books and tomes of logos featuring obscure examples like Hungarian oil companies from the ’80s. But he kept coming back to a slender [more]

For years now, the people have wanted only one thing: for Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried detective Benoit Blanc to feature in a Muppet movie (with Craig as the only human). Earlier this year, Netflix picked up the streaming rights for Sesame Street. That partnership has borne some unexpected fruit: Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery. In the video, detective Beignet Blanc arrives to investigate who ate Cookie Monster’s triple berry pie. I have arrived to this Street of Sesame on a sun [more]

Prepare to lose a few hours to these: Andy Baio’s top 10 free browser games of 2025. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Just dropped: Lane 8’s Winter 2025 Mixtape. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Gift Card Database (GCDB) has a guide to spotting tampered gift cards: Whilst it may seem unusual, you should tear open this version of Apple gift card before you purchase it so that you can inspect the redemption code. Look for missing or scratched off characters (it may be as subtle as changing an L to look like an I). If you’re satisfied that the redemption code is legible and undamaged, you can purchase the gift card by scanning the barcode on the other side. If staff question your decision [more]

Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesalers, setting prices, tracking inventory, and generating a profit. The newsroom’s journalists could chat with Claudius in Slack and in a short time, they had converted the machine to communism and it started giving away anything and everything, including a PS5, wine, and a live fish. From Joanna Stern’s WSJ article (gift link, but it may [more]

“Docs said I’d never walk, but I ran a marathon.” Logan Knowles was born with cerebral palsy. This fall, he ran & completed the NYC marathon, his body fighting him the whole way. What a story. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Making your own amaro at home. “…so long as the plants are edible and the flavors appeal, a variety of contrasting and complementary elements will ultimately result in something complex and intriguing.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Entirely Too Many Thoughts About Wake Up Dead Man. An excellent, long & close read of Wake Up Dead Man, particularly its focus on “religion, faith, and grace”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Earlier this week, Vanity Fair published a two-part story about the Trump regime’s “inner circle”, including extensive interviews with his chief of staff, who was openly critical of the people that she works with, from Trump on down. The story caused a stir and so did the photos that accompanied the piece, taken by Christopher Anderson. The Washington Post interviewed Anderson about the photos. The interview is interesting throughout but Anderson’s answer to the final question is…I don’t even kn [more]

A group of journalism students was able to track probable Russian spy drones launched from cargo ships to surveil European military bases. They even flew a drone of their own over one of the cargo ships: “we droned back”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Also: Bari Weiss!

We’re getting down to the wire for gifts to be shipped in time for Xmas. Take a look at the 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide if you still need to shop for your fam & friends.

You will recall the Apple Account fiasco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose entire iCloud account and library of iTunes and App Store media purchases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seemingly after he attempted to redeem a tampered $500 Apple Gift Card that he purchased from a major retailer. I wrote about it, as did Michael Tsai, Nick Heer, Malcom Owen at AppleInsider, and Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register. Buttfield-Addison has updated his post a few times, including a note that E [more]

“On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925.” Includes Betty Boop, Blondie & Dagwood, and works by William Faulkner, Agatha Christie, and the Marx Brothers. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Wes Fenlon, writing for PC Gamer: Did Windows 3.1 really ship with a garish color scheme that was dared into being? That was a story I needed to hear, so I went digging for the credits of the Microsoft employees who worked on the user interface back then and found my way to Virginia Howlett, who joined Microsoft in 1985 as the company’s first interface designer, and worked there up through the launch of Windows 95. Howlett: I have been mystified about why that particular theme causes so much com [more]

Arthur Ganson is a kinetic sculptor who builds “Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes”. One of his works is called Machine with Concrete, which demonstrates the magic of gear ratios According to a piece in Make, the input shaft spins at 200 rpm, which is reduced by gearing down to 1 revolution every 2 trillion years by the time you reach the gear on the end…which is so slow that even embedding the final gear in concrete doesn’t make any difference to the machine’s operation. (via interc [more]

Chef Saves 78-Year-Old Man’s Life After He Stopped Showing Up for His Daily Dinners at Local Restaurant. “Mr. Hicks don’t miss no days. I knew, then, something was wrong.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

[Trailer] The Muppet Show is returning! It’s a one-time event, hosted by Sabrina Carpenter, to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary. “It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Nature magazine has chosen its favorite science images of the year. I’ve featured a few of these on the site already — Skydiving the Sun, red sprites in the New Zealand sky — so I picked a couple of other favorites to share: The first was taken by Francisco Negroni of the Villarrica volcano in Chile (check out his site for more amazing photos of volcanos & lightning). The second is by 13-year-old Grayson Bell of two green frogs fighting; Bell named his photo “Baptism of the Unwilling Convert”. [more]

Astronomy Picture of the Day for Dec 12: a red fox beneath a swirling aurora. “In a Finnish myth, when an arctic fox runs so fast that its bushy tail brushes the mountains, flaming sparks are cast into the heavens creating the northern lights.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

We're back, baby

The Devil You Know is an 8-part podcast series from the CBC and Sarah Marshall (host of You’re Wrong About…) about the Satanic Panic. “These thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In a recent bombshell piece for the New Yorker (archive), Rachel Aviv explored the personal journals of the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. What she found was shocking: he had fabricated and embellished some of his most well-known work — like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks himself referred to his “lies” and “falsification” in journal entries. But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to [more]

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025. “Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Planning to Visit the US? Take It From This American Citizen – Don’t. “If I were a tourist, though, I’d pick a less totalitarian place to travel.”

Matt Webb reports on going to algoraves. “There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The US is retaliating against the EU after it fined X — and now some of Europe's biggest companies are caught in the crossfire

Ragú Unveils Sensory Deprivation Marinara Tank. “The detoxifying marinara is slowly simmered to the exact temperature of the user’s body, allowing the mind to drift freely into a meditative gravy state, just like Nonna used to make.”

The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about. Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset [more]

Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — the outsized influence of the first two gives the impression that he’s made many more. Over the past 20 years, Spielberg has favored more realistic fare (Lincoln, Munich, The Fabelmans) but this summer he’s back with an alien movie, Disclosure Day, based on an original story no less. Very excite [more]

Seven Voting Laws Every Blue State Should Enact Right Now. “1. Enact a statutory right to vote for every eligible citizen. This may surprise you, but there is no general federal constitutional right to vote.”

The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want. “Sinners is a threat to a business model built only on regurgitation, on endless return trips to Jurassic World, on more Toy Stories and feature-length toy commercials.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

If we were all Japanese pond frogs, we’d have nothing to fear from murder hornets. “When I watched the recorded videos in slow motion, the frogs were clearly stung multiple times yet showed no apparent injury or mortality.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

It would be the next step in the degradation of culture to serve commercial ends

Hmm, I really don’t know about this one: an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a sort of Ice Age-ish comedy adventure? One commenter on YouTube says, “This movie is 100% gonna end with a random dance party scene with the pigs and humans dancing to something like Uptown Funk” and another suggests that “this is like a bad Family Guy joke from 2007 escaped into the real world”. From a review in IGN: Gone are the specific allusions to the Russian Revolution and the stinging critiq [more]

I dare say this post from Adrian Roselli — first published in 2015 and updated 16 times (and counting) since — is the definitive debunking of the pseudoscience claims regarding deliberately ugly fonts being somehow beneficial to readers with dyslexia.  ★

Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim is to preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating an accessible resource for understanding illustration history. Glorious collection of mid-century illustrations and graphic design. Also a good follow on Instagram. (Via Dan Cederholm.)  ★

“The Trump administration’s vision for the United States is one of a white Christian nation. And the path to accomplish it is through the exclusion and removal of all who do not fit that vision — in other words, through ethnic cleansing.”

Tim Nudd, writing at Ad Age a few weeks ago (paywalled, alas): As we mentioned in roundup yesterday, Finneas (aka, Finneas O’Connell) has developed a new sonic logo for Apple TV, the streaming service previously known as Apple TV+. However, the rebrand, created with Apple agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab, goes beyond the audio mnemonics to include a striking new visual look as well. The visual branding centers on layers of shifting colored light, a metaphor for the range of genres and emotions that Ap [more]

A roundup of the words/phrases of the year for 2025, including “rage bait”, “vibe coding”, “Mar-a-Lago face”, “chaos”, “performative male”, and “Kavanaugh stop”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Born Poor (PBS/Frontline) is a documentary filmed across 14 years about three kids in the US as they grow into young adults while “dealing with an economy where they face more obstacles than opportunities”. Free to watch online (probably US-only, so fire up your VPN if you live elsewhere). From an accompanying article: More than a decade ago, the Emmy-nominated documentary Poor Kids portrayed poverty in America as it’s rarely seen: through the eyes of children. Now, those kids — Brittany, Johnny [more]

Finalist is an iOS planner rooted in paper. Originally an index card system, it grew into a love letter to paper planners. You know the kind, leather folders with colored tabs and translucent dividers. Unlike those old binders, Finalist fills itself with your calendars, reminders and weather forecast. Minimalist? Maybe not, but it’s become a UI playground designed to inspire, and looks great on iPad and Mac too. Like the gorgeous new Year Planner for roughing in plans with the Highlighter (“inte [more]

A fresh investigation reveals the scope of Meta's problem in China. Will a pending court case force the company to crack down — or destroy Section 230?

One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”: Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage. Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, [more]

Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001: Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world. Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for [more]

Back on November 28, I bought a new cap from New Era’s web store. They offered a discount of some sort if I gave them a phone number and permitted them to send me marketing messages. That got me curious about what they’d do with my number, and it was a 50-some-dollar cap, so I took the discount and gave them my Google Voice number. That was 17 days ago. They sent me 19 SMS marketing messages since then, before I’d seen enough today and called it quits on this experiment. (Or called “STOP”, perha [more]

Todd Spangler, reporting last week for Variety: As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems. [...] According to the letter, which Variety has reviewed, Disney al [more]

Read to the end for a good comic

America Is an Unserious Country Filled With Unserious People. “We’ll tolerate this just like we tolerate everything else. Because this is who we are, collectively, as a country.”

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

John Keilman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): The company that makes Roomba robotic vacuums declared bankruptcy Sunday but said its devices will continue to function normally while the company restructures. Massachusetts-based iRobot has struggled financially for years, beset by foreign competition that made cheaper and, in the opinion of some buyers, technologically superior autonomous vacuums. When a proposed sale to Amazon.com fell through in 2024 because of regulatory conc [more]

Roundup 12/15/2025

Alan Sepinwall wrote a lovely remembrance of Rob Reiner and his career. “A legend. No doubt about it.” Reiner and his wife Michele Singer were found dead at their home in LA yesterday. Which Reiner movie are we watching tonight? 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

My thanks to Jaho Coffee Roaster for sponsoring last week at DF. Great coffee changes the day. Since 2005, Jaho’s family-owned roastery has taken the slow and careful approach, sourcing small-lot coffees, roasting in small batches and shipping every bag fresh. Award-winning coffee delivered to your home or office, shipped fresh nationwide. Jaho was kind enough to send me a few bags of their beans, and I can vouch that they roast excellent coffee — the kind of tasty beans where, when I finish my [more]

Deadline: The bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner have been found in their Brentwood home, sources confirmed to Deadline. It appears the acclaimed director and his wife were slain by knife wounds. The LAPD are on the scene, but have not issued an official confirmation yet. A press conference is expected to take place tonight. People: Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, multiple sources confirm to People. So it goes.  ★

Marcus Mendes, 9to5Mac: Now, on the same day that F1 The Movie debuted at the top of Apple TV’s movie rankings, the company confirmed that Pluribus has reached another, even more impressive milestone: it is the most watched show in the service’s history. Busy day. [...] Apple doesn’t share viewership numbers, so it is hard to quantify what exactly this means. However, considering that Apple TV has had quite a few hit shows, including Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show, Slow Horses, and, more [more]

From the LucasFonts account, in a comment on Hacker News: Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman — a typeface older than the current president — presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appear [more]

Peter Kafka, writing at Business Insider: And last: It’s possible that Middle Eastern countries are investing in an American media conglomerate solely for a financial return, and would have zero interest in the content that conglomerate makes and distributes. But that’s an assertion that many folks would have a hard time taking at face value. And while lots of American companies have sought Middle Eastern funding for years, there was a pause after 2018, following the murder and dismemberment of [more]

This is very funny, but also a good indication of just how far away these things are from actual intelligence. First, a reasonable human being would never get caught in a loop like this. Second, only humans can not only recognize what’s going on here, but also see the humor in it.  ★

Paris Buttfield-Addison: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. [...] I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ [more]

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how man [more]

Six-minute segment from Amazon’s AWS re:Invent keynote last week: Payam Mirrashidi, VP, Cloud Systems & Platforms, Apple, explains how AWS Graviton helps improve developer velocity at scale. Hear Swift’s journey from the premier programming language for the Apple ecosystem to adoption by millions of developers around the world building apps for everything from devices to data centers. (Graviton is AWS’s ARM-in-the-cloud initiative.) Nothing earth-shaking in this brief presentation, but it’s not [more]

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost. “How modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of small, satisfying tasks and moments that keep us grounded and human.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

How does lake ice do this? Incredible! (Mirror Lake, New Hampshire) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

“Eating the right foods in the proper quantities, 16th-century Britons believed, balanced mind and soul. So in Shakespeare’s plays, roasts, ales, and pies are not props, but clues to characters’ souls, moods, and motivations.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I guess this is as good an explanation of contemporary culture as anything. Hungover from a world that told us we could be anything, we decided to be DJs. We don’t create our own music. We curate playlists, recirculating songs that will make people think we’re cool. And we do this through the labels we wear, the books we read, the people we hang out with, and the opinions we parrot. The DJ figure, ruled by the same logic, is just another celebration of self. (via @youtubesilike.bsky.social) Ta [more]

The Flow State podcast recently celebrated their 300th episode with a 2h41m mix of instrumental music sourced from a group of “musicians, curators, label heads, music fans”. They even let me pick a song. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Read to the end for a very happy sheep

Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek): Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the bottom of the letters, could improve the reading rate and accuracy for young children with dyslexia. According to the developers of the font, which is open-source and free of charge, the “heaviness” of the letters prevented them from turning upsid [more]

I first posted about Nick Veasey’s work back in 2005 and thought it was worth another look. Veasey uses x-ray photography to get inside views of familiar objects, sometimes on a large scale. And here’s a peek behind-the-scenes at his process, which includes, critically, a “bespoke concrete chamber” to keep the radiation at bay. See also Bone Music: Forbidden Soviet Records Made From Used X-Ray Films. Tags: Nick Veasey · photography · x-rays 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Small follow-up point re: my post this week on iMessage’s delivery architecture being built atop the Apple Push Notification service: APNs can only relay messages up to 4 or 16 KB in size, depending on the iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an attachment such as a photo is included, the attachment is encrypted using AES in CTR mode with a randomly generated 256-bit key and uploaded to iCloud. The AES key for the attachment, its Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and an [more]

Oilwell is a (fake) wellness app “to help you embrace climate chaos” that includes features like “Drowning Mindfully”, “Lo-Fi Beats to Frack To”, and “12 Hour Wildfire Relaxation”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

OpenAI: In ChatGPT, GPT‑5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro will begin rolling out today, starting with paid plans. In the API, they are available now to all developers. Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model. 5.1 was released just one month ago, but 5.2 delivers a slew of measurable improvements across the board. [more]

I just updated the 2025 Kottke Gift Guide with some new suggestions, including inflatable tube men (for your front yard; your neighbors will love!), some of the year’s best cookbooks, ramen kits from Japan, and some low- of no-spend gifts.

Civicus monitors the health of civic societies and their freedoms around the world. In their annual assessment on civic freedoms for 2025, they downgraded the United States from “narrowed” to “obstructed”. The CIVICUS Monitor has downgraded the United States of America’s civic space rating, reflecting a sharp deterioration of fundamental freedoms in the country. The People Power Under Attack report now rates the USA as “Obstructed” following a year of sweeping executive actions, restrictive laws [more]

The latest edition of our biweekly conversation

Post-Japan Depression. “People feel it after coming home from a trip that feels magical, safe, clean, punctual, aesthetic, peaceful… and suddenly — boom — back to reality.” (Not sure if this person is kidding but yep! 💯🎯) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A decade years in, what started as a sci-fi lab is now focused on engagement and growth. What does that mean for building AI safely?

What is happening? Orcas started wearing dead salmon as hats again and chimps are once again putting grass in their ears. “We were even more shocked that they were doing their own spin on this by also inserting the grass and sticks in a different orifice.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are probably my favorite big brand candy (perhaps only bested by Reese’s Pieces), so it was a real treat (groan) to see how the company makes them cups. But did you know Reese’s purposely over-roasts their peanuts just enough to bring out a bold nutty flavor? The extra heat is what gives their peanut butter its signature granular texture and taste fans can’t get enough of it. And funnily enough, this technique was first discovered by accident, thanks to a faulty overhe [more]

MacKenzie Scott announces that she’s donated almost $7.2 billion of her personal fortune to organizations worldwide this year. That brings her total giving up to more than $26 billion. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A streaming services savings tip from the Nomadico newsletter that I was not aware of: I’m going to add Apple TV at home after watching only part of Severance on a United flight, but I’ll likely subscribe in Mexico where it’s 28% cheaper than the USA. You can play this arbitrage game with most of the streaming services — I once got HBO on sale for $5 a month. In Mexico you can get the highest tier of Netflix for the price of the middle tier stateside, a 39% monthly savings (with a better studio [more]

Eight Million Ways to Happiness: Wisdom for Inspiration and Healing from the Heart of Japan. “Hiroko awakens readers to the idea of a traditional spiritual flexibility that seamlessly coexists with the modern secular world…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Liam Neeson Narrates Anti-Vax, Pro-RFK Documentary. In the narration, he calls the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines “dangerous experiments”.

This video by Ian Lauer is an excellent accessible explanation of the basics of astrophotography as he runs through the process of how he captures a long-exposure image of the Andromeda galaxy. This picture is still black and white — and no, the galaxy is not devoid of color. There’s actually color in there, and we’ll get to color in a second. But first, let’s look at what happens when I zoom in on this image. You can see there’s some graininess in this image, which we call noise. And we hate it [more]

Before anyone starts patting the Trump administration on its back for one good typographic decision, take a gander at the hard-to-believe-this-is-real new signage at (and alas, on) the White House. This is the sort of signage that typically spells “Business Center” across from the check-in desk at a Courtyard Marriott. The Biden State Department replacing Times New Roman with Calibri was a typographic misdemeanor. Festooning the White House with signage set in gold-plated Shelley Script ought to [more]

The fifth of five rules in Matthew Butterick’s “Typography in Ten Minutes”: And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts already loaded on your computer (known as system fonts) and the free fonts that inundate the internet. Instead, buy a professional font (like those found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one. If tha [more]

I’m a big believer in reading original source material. For example, when Apple provided me, alongside only a handful of other outlets, with a statement regarding their decision to delay the “more personalized Siri” back in March, I ran the full statement, verbatim. I added my own commentary, but I wanted to let Apple’s own statement speak for itself first. It drives me nuts when news sites in possession of a statement or original document do not make the full original text available, even if on [more]

Read to the end for a very good menu

Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, reporting for The New York Times: While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork. In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio [more]

How social networks lost the argument. PLUS: All worked up over Nvidia's H200

From Apple’s iMessage Security Overview: Apple iMessage is a messaging service for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Relying on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), iMessage lets users send texts and attachments like photos, contacts, locations, links, and emoji. Messages sync across all devices, enabling seamless conversations. Apple doesn’t store message content or attachments, which are all secured with end-to-end encryption so that no one but the sender and receive [more]

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, back in 2009: The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. A related adage I heard, and internalized, recently: “We’re not thinking creatures who feel; we’re feeling creatures who think.” (Via Jason Kottke.)  ★

Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi, and Alex Mierjeski, reporting for ProPublica: For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence. President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action. But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show. In 1993, Tr [more]

Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link, also in News+): “Just tried calling you about new bid we have submitted,” Ellison texted Zaslav. “I heard you on all your concerns and believe we have addressed them in our new proposal. Please give me a call back when you can to discuss in detail.” He didn’t hear back. Sensing trouble, Ellison followed up, saying Paramount had offered a package that covered all the issues Warner had raised, includi [more]

The Guardian: There on a plinth, with “Donald J Trump” emblazoned on it in capital letters, was the uncoveted trophy: a golden globe resting on five golden hands big enough to compensate any tiny-handed recipient feeling sore about the Nobel peace prize. But wait, there was more. “There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go,” added Infantino, knowing that with Trump there is no such thing as too much. Glowing oranger than usual under the stage lights, Trum [more]

Donald Trump, on his blog: The only reason Marjorie “Traitor” Brown (Green turns Brown under stress!) went BAD is that she was JILTED by the President of the United States (Certainly not the first time she has been jilted!). Too much work, not enough time, and her ideas are, NOW, really BAD — She sort of reminds me of a Rotten Apple! Marjorie is not AMERICA FIRST or MAGA, because nobody could have changed her views so fast, and her new views are those of a very dumb person. That was proven last [more]

By banning an ad account on a flimsy pretext, X demonstrated the exact behavior that led the European Union to fine it. PLUS: The state AI law moratorium is back, and the Paramount-Netflix fight

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Read to the end for the only place you should go when your wife becomes a sex addict and starts cheating on you with everybody

Roundup 12/08/2025

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times, “Meta Weighs Cuts to Its Metaverse Unit” (gift link): Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter. The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10 to 30 percent of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are sti [more]

Apple, today: “Announcing the 2025 App Store Awards”: This year’s winners represent the best-in-class apps and games we returned to again and again. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. I did not enjoy all of them as much as Apple did. Tiimo iPhone app of the year Tiimo bills itself as an “AI Planner & To-do” app that is designed with accommodations for people with ADHD and other neurodivergences. Subscription plans cost $12/month ($144/year) or $54/year ($4.50/month). It does not offer a na [more]

Some notes on A.I. writing

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for November 2025

Five years after the Oversight Board's creation, few are satisfied with the result. Can it be saved?

Read to the end for the Graveyard Gliders

A new study offers evidence for what we’ve long suspected: rage bait is distorting our politics. PLUS: The David Sacks discourse, and Claude Opus 4.5 debuts

Read to the end for a 15-pound cabbage

Roundup 12/01/2025

Two key recipes to being popular

28 or so things we want for the holidays this year

Why music labels are folding in their cases against AI startups

Maybe your grandma doesn’t need that Alexa smart speaker

What is the role of tech journalism in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame?

Read to the end for a good Thanksgiving reminder

Read to the end for Max

His new push for a state moratorium on AI regulation has the right talking like effective altruists. PLUS: the EU backtracks on AI and privacy, and Grok loves Elon

Is there something wrong with political journalism?

Read to the end for the Estonian National Opera’s car park barriers

How one experiment defined the social networking market better than the government did. PLUS: Gemini 3 arrives

Roundup 11/18/2025

The state says ranking algorithms aren't protected by the First Amendment — and judges are starting to agree. PLUS: An OpenAI-powered toy breaks bad, and Jeff Bezos has a new AI company

Steve Bannon, Jeffrey Epstein, Bubba, and the end of democracy

New Read Max subscriber benefit: Personalized stuff search

Guaranteed income in the A.I. age

Read to the end for a nice evergreen post

After King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard left Spotify in protest earlier this year, something strange took their place

Read to the end for some beautiful famous last words

Roundup 11/11/2025

The bloc's leaders seem increasingly convinced AI regulations are harming its competitiveness. Are they right? PLUS: Another wave of ChatGPT lawsuits

Read to the end for the soap ghost

Read to the end for "vessel alert"

Why is Kalshi tweeting like UnusualWhales?

Charisma, cringe, and Marjorie Taylor Greene

Read to the end for a good post

Read to the end for some good Vin Diesel content

Roundup 11/03/2025

Notes on a new wave of the Techlash

Read to the end for birthday hog

Read to the end for a beautiful Barnes and Noble experience

Roundup 10/26/2025

Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society

Read Max x Unpopular Front 1

9 books to consider for the rest of the year

We need to stop falling for anti-regulation hysteria if we’re to get control of digital harms

The thin iPhone is teeing up a foldable phone likely to come next year

After 9 months on Substack, Disconnect is back on Ghost. Paris explains why the migration was necessary.

Conceding to Trump’s demands only guarantees new threats. It’s time to reject the US and its tech companies.

Grab your copy of Road to Nowhere

Wildfire responses in Canada stifled by misinformation, particularly on on Facebook

Western automakers are doomed if they keep trying to hide behind tariff walls

Canada’s AI agenda ignores potential harms in the hope of short-term economic gain

The company is deceptively raising prices on existing customers to fund its AI spending

I’m in the process of dropping US tech services. Here’s how I did it, and options you should consider.

Dependence on US tech giants must end if the country is serious about digital sovereignty

Long ago, I was in the studio audience of a local PDX TV kids show called Ramblin’ Rod. “Local kids show” is a format that is completely lost to time, which is pretty wild, because it was such a thing. Think Krusty the Clown — kids sitting in a studio, a goofball host, time filled with […]

Welcome to 2025. The vibes are a little heavy, so, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things I can control — and yes, that includes remembering to share things that delight me like the latest #new snacks and cereals I find at the grocery store!! Yeah. It’s an age-old, very-odd Cabel tradition. This time, […]

This summer, a new video game came out that changed the way we think about comedy in games, becoming an instant smash hit in the process. That’s right, I’m talking about Thank Goodness You’re Here! from Coal Supper. Ok, yeah, sure, I work for Panic and we published the game, so I was contractually required […]

In January, I was invited to GDC, the Game Developers Conference, to give a talk about Playdate. That talk — “The Playdate Story: What Was it Like to Make Handheld Video Game System Hardware?” — has been made available free for all to view. Now, it’s been 10 years since my last talk at XOXO here […]

Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially […]