Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description:

In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on lockdown in 2020 turns to it as he tries to push the boundaries of perception.

It’s got a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and some good reviews on Letterboxd, including this one from film reviewer David Ehrlich:

me before seeing this movie: that is a big tree.

me after seeing this movie: that is a giant, hormonal, unbearably horned up 900-year-old virgin that understands loneliness on a level that most humans could never even begin to imagine.

The trailer and description put me in mind of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

The setlist for the show:

There There
2+2=5
15 Step
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Exit Music (For a Film)
Kid A
Dollars & Cents
Videotape
No Surprises
Paranoid Android
The Gloaming
The National Anthem
Climbing Up The Walls
Nude
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
The Bends
Myxomatosis
How To Disappear Completely

You And Whose Army?
Pyramid Song
Like Spinning Plates
Fake Plastic Trees
Bodysnatchers
Lucky
Idioteque
Karma Police

House of Cards
Everything In Its Right Place

Even the band loved it:

The lore surrounding this show is well-documented: It was among the longest live sets the band has ever played, both by duration (two hours and twenty minutes) and number of songs (29). It featured early, alternate arrangements of six unreleased tracks that would go on to anchor ‘In Rainbows’ the following year. Thom Yorke said it was “his favourite gig for years and years and years.” Jonny Greenwood called it “the best festival experience I’ve ever had in America.”

I’ve mentioned this before but my favorite show was also Radiohead, in Oxford in 2001. It rained and they played Creep for the first time in three years; the crowd exploded.

During the pandemic, the band uploaded a number of full-length videos of their live shows to YouTube. Enjoy.

YouTuber Rob Martinez travelled to Columbus, Ohio to tell the story of what he calls the best sandwich shop in America, Wario’s Beef and Pork. Here’s part of the transcript of owner Stephan Madias talking about the restaurant:

For the longest time, especially the first two years, I was very protective of how the bread was sliced and I would not let anybody cut bread. It’s about the experience. I think about me eating the sandwich. Think about the things that happen when you get a big sandwich. You take that first bite into it. I want you to be able to, like, move this thing around. Take bites from the top, the bottom, the front, the back. And it’s held.

We’re very particular, and it’s part of the reason why we don’t have the bakery cut the bread is cuz we want to sort through our things. Yes, we have volume. Yes, we have speed, but [my employees] all have the integrity that we started when we only sold five sandwiches an hour when the shop first started. That’s part of being committed to the fundamentals and being consistent.

The devil’s in the details, man. You got to take the extra minute to do it. Some people like it. Some people complain about it.

As a fellow sandwich overthinker, I love the ethos and the process. And man, those sandwiches do look amazing — tomato butter, homemade whiz for the cheese steaks, a chicken caesar sandwich, what is not to like?

A few years ago, in a forest just outside of Oslo, 1000 trees were planted. In 2114, after a century of growth, the trees will be cut down and made into paper for an anthology of books. Meet the Future Library, an artwork by Katie Paterson.

Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the one hundred year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future.

The first three writers to contribute texts are Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Icelandic novelist Sjón. Atwood said of her participation:

How strange it is to think of my own voice — silent by then for a long time — suddenly being awakened, after a hundred years. What is the first thing that voice will say, as a not-yet-embodied hand draws it out of its container and opens it to the first page?

See also the John Malkovich movie that no one will see for 100 years. The Future Library also has something in common with the (possibly apocryphal) story of the grove of oak trees specifically planted to replace the massive ceiling beams in the dining hall at Oxford hundreds of years in the future. Stewart Brand told the story in the TV adaptation of How Buildings Learn.

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

Update: Karl Ove Knausgaard has become the 6th contributor to the library. (via @tedgioia)

O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics:

‘Cause when love is gone
There’s always justice
And when justice is gone
There’s always force
And when force is gone
There’s always Mom
Hi, Mom

So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
In your automatic arms
Your electronic arms
In your arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
Your petrochemical arms
Your military arms
In your electronic arms
Ah, ah, ah, ah

60 Minutes did a profile of Anderson a few years ago and she explained the meaning of the song (to her):

This is a song about how basically technology cannot save you. It’s about a lot of things: justice, safety, power.

As a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, this kind of music wasn’t available to me, so I only actually heard this for the first time fairly recently. So I thought I’d post it in case you hadn’t really heard it either — that and the message & meaning it carries is relevant these days.

I also liked this rendition of it, slowed down and reverbed. There are also several O Superman remixes on Soundcloud of varying quality.

The Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the finalists for the 2026 competition and, well, these awards never miss. You can almost hear the background music for some of these…

Last week, the NY Times dropped a list of The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century, as picked by a panel of “more than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV”. The rankings have already been dissected online six ways from Sunday, but the link got lost in my forest of browser tabs and so here it is, a bit late but still interesting.

Here are some of my personal favorites from the list and arrowed opinions on whether some should be higher or lower on the list: Halt and Catch Fire (↑), Reservation Dogs (↑), Shogun (↑↑↑), The Great British Bake Off, Planet Earth, Downton Abbey (↓), The Good Place (↑), Normal People, Schitt’s Creek, Andor (↑↑), Severance (↓), Band of Brothers (↑), Deadwood (↑), The Crown (↓), Chernobyl (↑), The Americans (↑), Six Feet Under (↓), Girls (↓), Arrested Development, The Office (US), 30 Rock, Game of Thrones, Fleabag (↑), Succession, Mad Men, The Wire (↑), and Breaking Bad (↓).

There are many excellent shows that didn’t make the list — the one that immediately pops into my mind is My Brilliant Friend. As for stuff that’s on there that perhaps could be replaced with something more worthy, I’ll hold my tongue. I do think the inclusion of some of the more recent shows on the list will not age well when this is looked back on in, say, 10 years.

From the Control Rooms group on Flickr. 🤩 So many little details in all of these photos to pore over.

See also Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green, The User Experience Design of Lego Interface Panels, Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center (c. 1966), and Lots and Lots of Control Panels.

In this video, Patrick Hicks tells the story of the development of the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail and how Prince (you know, the genius musical artist) was one of the first people in the world to play the very first version of the game.

The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the history class that Rawitsch was student teaching. While developing the game, Heinemann & Dillenberger tested it out with some kids at the high school at which they were student teaching…and one of those kids was Prince Rogers Nelson.

Paul would later say that he heard about Prince before he even met him. One of the other teachers told him, “There’s this kid here who basically is running his own business. He’s this amazing musician who plays all these instruments and writes his own songs.” And then later, Paul realized that that was Prince.

But listen to Hicks tell the whole thing…it’s a good story. And if you want to hear a lot more of the story, here’s Gaming Historian’s feature-length documentary (the Prince anecdote is at ~24:00).

You can play the familar 1980s version of the The Oregon Trail online.

From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such. The screenshots above are static but the lights on the real map move: each lighthouse sweeps out its actual arc and the reach of the beams is true to scale. I recorded a short video of how it looks on the site:

Each lighthouse has a unique light characteristic so that ships can tell them apart:

In any of these designs an observer, rather than seeing a continuous weak light, sees a brighter light during short time intervals. These instants of bright light are arranged to create a light characteristic or pattern specific to a lighthouse. For example, the Scheveningen Lighthouse flashes are alternately 2.5 and 7.5 seconds. Some lights have sectors of a particular color (usually formed by colored panes in the lantern) to distinguish safe water areas from dangerous shoals. Modern lighthouses often have unique reflectors or racon transponders so the radar signature of the light is also unique.

See also A Blinking Map of the World’s Lighthouses. And mapped.earth has more cool visualizations of the Earth (rainfall, wind, lightning, pollution, etc.)

I love watching Gordon Ramsay make scrambled eggs. I first saw this video years ago and, possibly because I am an idiot, have yet to attempt these eggs at home. You and me, eggs, next weekend.

P.S. Jean-Georges Vongerichten makes scrambled eggs in a very similar way. Not quite soft-scrambled…Serious Eats calls them fancy French spoonable eggs.

P.P.S. Anyone have a square Japanese omelette pan I can borrow?

P.P.P.S. In Jiro Dreams of Sushi (now on Netflix!), an apprentice talks about making tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette) over 200 times before Jiro declared it good enough to serve in his restaurant.

That apprentice, Daisuke Nakazawa, is now the head chef at Sushi Nakazawa, one of the five NYC restaurants that currently has a four-star rating from the NY Times (along with the aforementioned Jean-Georges and not along with Per Se, which recently got dunce capped down to 2 stars by populist hero Pete Wells).

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.

The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.

I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film.

Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the closest to my own personal tastes as I’ve ever found. So today, I want to talk about how director Joe Wright created some of the best extended tracking shots, ones, long takes, that I’ve ever seen.

A lovely contemplative short video featuring Toshiyuki Ueno of the Japanese fashion brand Visvim talking about craftsmanship.

We want to make things that people will get attached to and will use for a long time. And that’s at the core of our creating process. It’s simple and not that complicated.

He continues:

I think about how people grow attached to things over time as they use them, and how those things add to its allure over time.

“Those things” is a little ambiguous without the context of the video…he means the wear that develops from use and how people grow attached to those “imperfections”. See also wabi-sabi.

From the early 1970s until his death in 2021, Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul painted water droplets. From one of the galleries representing his work:

The waterdrop was the starting point for a singular and iconic body of work, which stands at the confluence of lyrical abstraction, Pop art and Chinese calligraphy. This simple and limpid œuvre subtly fuses Taoist wisdom, modern conceptual irony and the tragedy of war.

You can view more of Kim’s work at Colossal and InspirationGrid.

I was looking at the list today, and thought I’d share some of the items with you:

• Reposting social posts (in comment threads) for members
• Do a podcast
• Publish posts to Instagram. (How?)
• Implement site-wide search
• Make newsletter daily?
• Write a book based on kottke.org
• Sell Blue Line Air Express t-shirts
• Build a Substack competitor
• Make a gift link search engine

Some of these are partly finished or would take very little to implement if I wanted. Some will never happen. Weirdly, some of the projects and site tweaks I most want to make aren’t even on my list. They live only in my head and I mull them over in the shower or while walking until they’re “done” enough to start working on. I guess maybe ideas don’t go on the list unless they’re not that urgent or interesting.

Do you have to-do lists for your creative projects? Care to share an item or two with the group?

1. Insofar as KDO has a roadmap, which is somewhere between “not at all” and “a general direction into the murky haze of a possible future”. I play things by ear a lot. ↩

The outpouring of support from the community was such that they overshot the initial goal of 11,000 squares, meant to represent the roughly 11,000 Minnesotan immigrants that were kidnapped by ICE between the beginning of Trump’s second term and the end of Operation Metro Surge. In total, more than 150 people have contributed to the effort. The finished quilt is approximately nine feet wide by 33 feet long.

Owen states, “We weren’t considering what happens when you ask Minnesotans for a favor, so the quilt here today actually contains 12,500 squares. Which is amazing. Unfortunately, it is reflective of what has been happening here over the past several months. Since March, ICE has abducted more than 900 Minnesotans and counting.”

This is extremely Minnesotan (complimentary).