Sometime in the past few years, media sites like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Atlantic, Defector, Talking Points Memo, and the NY Times started offering a way for subscribers to share paywalled articles with friends and followers. These are commonly referred to as gift links.

Thousands of gift links are shared on websites and social media daily. Some helpful aggregated feeds and hashtags are available, but finding specific information can be difficult. 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.

Prometheus collects gift links to paywalled news articles shared by subscribers — from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. Links are gathered from Bluesky, Mastodon, and the web throughout the day, and you can search by keyword & URL and filter by publication.

Right now, Prometheus is only available to active kottke.org members while I’m testing and refining it — it’s definitely a beta tool rn. If you’re a member, check it out and let me know if you’ve got any feedback or notice any rough edges.

An informed public is the foundation of a healthy society — and while paywalls aren’t the only challenge here, they also aren’t helping. Big thanks to everyone sharing their gift links online and to these media companies for enabling their subscribers to share their journalism with others.

Tags: journalism · kottke.org · Prometheus (search)

“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?

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.

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.

For CBS News in 1985, Charles Kuralt profiled 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.

Great street footage of NYC from 40 years ago. You might think that Leopold ended up as a stain on the pavement. In 2010, CBS News did a follow-up on him:

See also Leopold on David Letterman from 1985.

Tags: Charles Kuralt · cycling · NYC · video

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.”

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.”

Link Loop is basically a 2D version of Portal. Looks fun!

Ambient Earth is a 7.5-hour, real-time, 4K, remastered video of the orbital view from the International Space Station. Seán Doran took almost 49,000 images from 27 time-lapse sequences captured from the ISS by astronaut Butch Wilmore, repaired, remastered, and interpolated them into this incredible video.

Perspective is lost when the world speeds by. The scale and beauty of our home planet is truly appreciated when observed on an epic 7.5 hour journey from The International Space Station. This ambitious 4k compilation, crafted through months of meticulous restoration, invites you to slow down and experience Earth in real time just as astronauts do.

The video is accompanied by ambient audio recorded on the station by Chris Hadfield. This would be great for a screensaver, but after poking around for a bit, it doesn’t seem like there’s a good way to set a YT video as a screensaver on MacOS (without downloading it or having it be a livestream).

Tags: Earth · iss · Sean Doran · space · video

“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.”

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…”

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”.

Gregory Wieber does these engaging, info-rich videos on tech history — I posted his HyperCard Changed Everything video back in the spring. For one of his latest videos, Wieber goes through a short history of Christopher Alexander’s landmark book, A Pattern Language (Bookshop), which anyone interested in building anything should at least have paged through once in their life,¹ and how his work inspired not only object oriented programming and the invention of wikis, but also SimCity and The Sims.

1. The Timeless Way of Building is shorter, less dense, and perhaps a better introduction to Alexander’s ideas about patterns. ↩

Tags: Gregory Wieber · simcity · The Sims · video games · Will Wright

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.”

“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.”

Perfect Play ran over 300 million games of Monopoly to determine the best strategy and the most common mistakes players make.

I turned eight classic Monopoly strategies into computer players and made them play 312,898,560 games against each other. At a table of four, the best one won 43% of its games. The worst one won 3%.

The gap doesn’t come from one clever trick. It comes from four common mistakes: being picky about what you buy, saving your cash, stopping at three houses, and refusing to trade. Then I let the computer tune every habit at once, to see how far a carefully tuned player can go and which color set is really worth fighting for.

P.S. I don’t actually play Monopoly anymore — it is the world’s most maddening game (along with Sorry) and I childishly refer to it as “Monotony” — and an aside about 3 minutes into the video is why: “roughly one game in six never ends”. Exactly! And you want me to haggle? For fun? No thank you. I imagine there are folks whose idea of a good time is visiting used car dealerships for funsies when they don’t need a car, but I am not one of them.

See also How to Win at Monopoly and Piss Off Your Friends.

Tags: games · Monopoly · video

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.”

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.

This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period.

How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s hardest food — is made in Nishi-Izu, Japan. Inside Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten, a workshop founded in 1882, 5th-generation craftsman Yasuhisa Serizawa still uses the 200-year-old “tebiyama” hand-fired smoke-drying method that only a few workshops in Japan preserve. Watch fresh bonito being filleted and boiled for 90 minutes, smoke-dried more than 10 times over a hand-tended wood fire, repaired with bonito paste, fermented with koji mold and sun-dried for months — over half a year until the fish becomes as hard as wood and shines like a jewel. From fresh catch to katsuobushi.

Check out Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten’s website for more info; here’s what they say about the tebiyama drying/smoking method (Google translation):

This method of making dried bonito flakes has been used in the Tago district of West Izu for a long time, and its history is said to date back about 300 years (to the Edo period). It involves digging a vertical hole about 2 meters deep, burning firewood (raw wood from Izu: oak, sawtooth oak, cherry, etc.) from the bottom of the hole, and smoking and drying the dried bonito flakes with the high temperature of an open flame. This method is called the Tebiyama-shiki smoking method. It is the oldest existing smoking method, and only a few bonito flake manufacturers in the country continue to use this method to make dried bonito flakes, so it is said to be a legendary method. The Tebiyama-shiki smoking method is said to produce dried bonito flakes with a rich flavor because the surface of the bonito is smoked all at once with the high temperature of an open flame, locking in the umami.

(thx, caroline)

Tags: fish · food · how to · Japan · video

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.”