Speaking of DJ Shadow, his 2-hour Essential Mix that aired in early July is really hitting the spot right now.

Good god, The Complete Kubrick from Criterion.

Collected here for the first time are Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, all restored in 4K, with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes, restored and remastered; over twenty-five hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials; and deluxe packaging illustrated with rare photographs, artwork, and documents annotated by Kubrick himself, all housed in a singular box inspired by the director’s legendary archive.

Altogether it’s 30 discs, $480 if you pre-order, and it’ll be out in mid-October.

P.S. While it’s not a fancypants box set, the KDO tag page for Stanley Kubrick functions pretty well as “DVD extras” — and it’s free. (via df)

Apple raised their prices on their laptops, iMacs, and iPads today due to the high cost of memory (driven by AI demand). The Macbook Neo’s price went up $100 with most other machines getting a $200-500 bump.

But those prices have yet to take effect at Amazon, where Apple computers are still cheaper than the old prices. Macbook Neo for $590, MacBook Air M5 for $1150, and the M4 iMac for $1150. You can check other models (MacBook Pros, etc.) and their pricing here. Not sure when RAM costs are going to come down…these might be the lowest prices you see on Apple machines for quite awhile.

Update: looks like the Amazon prices have gone up. Oh well.

Fulfilling the purpose for which it was built almost 2000 years ago, football fans packed the Roman Theatre of Amman to watch the Jordan v Algeria World Cup match. I don’t know whether Roman rulers, builders, and architects envisioned their works would remain standing & useful millennia after their construction, but longevity is certainly not a priority these days.

Here’s a video of Jordan fans watching their opener vs Austria in the theater:

Update: I’ve learned something today: a theater and an amphitheater are two different things. I’ve corrected my post. (thx, francesca)

The scene is part of a film done by Jorgen Leth called 66 Scenes from America.

Leth had his assistant buy some burgers and directly advised him to buy some in halfway neutral packaging as Leth was afraid that Warhol might reject some brands (Warhol always had an obsession with some of his favorite brands).

So Andy Warhol finally did arrive at the studio, of course along with his bodyguards, and when he saw the selection of burgers the assistant had brought he asked “Where is the McDonald’s?” and Leth — slightly in panic — was immediately like “I thought you would maybe not like to identify…” and Warhol answered “no that is the most beautiful”. Leth offered to let his assistant quickly run to McDonald’s but Warhol refused like “No, never mind, I will take the Burger King.”

(via bon appetit)

This is one of those videos that you start watching and then can’t really stop until you’ve finished. Cow Trip tells the story of an effort to save a baby cow by driving it (and another baby cow rescue) in a not-huge SUV 600 miles from Vermont to a sanctuary in Maryland.

A calf in Vermont hits the lottery when a farmer decides to save him. But someone has to drive the baby cow 600 miles to his new home. A freshly retired doctor and his filmmaker daughter volunteer for the job, but nothing goes as planned. What emerges is an unlikely story of a community of people who will do anything to give one calf a real home.

I think maybe this needs to be a children’s book?

When trying to explain what room tone is to someone unfamiliar with the concept, I reach for an architectural metaphor. If words are the bricks of a scene, then surely room tone is the mortar that binds them together. It gives sonic coherence to an edited piece built from different takes within the same location.

Asking a cast and crew to observe a moment of silence is an acknowledgment that room tone cannot be faked. You cannot substitute it with a recording from another production, and you cannot generate it using artificial intelligence. It is something you capture at a specific time and place that has not occurred before and will not occur again. This is our attempt at freezing such fleeting moments — and welcoming those to come.

And then at the end of each year, they cut the room tone recordings into a compilation video; here’s 2025’s video:

As well as 2024’s and 2023’s:

I find these videos equal parts charming and meditative. As movies & TV become ever-more fast-paced and our attention bent to black rectangular pocket casinos, it’s increasingly rare to witness people sitting still with only their thoughts to occupy them. We see Humans Frantically Doing everywhere these days, but these room tone videos are a good reminder that Humans Just Being is an essential part of life as well.

Amazon is doing their Prime Day sale again this summer and for those with Prime memberships, it’s a chance to upgrade some tech items at rarely seen prices. Here are a few items I’ve got my eye on:

• The AirPods Pro 3 are still my daily headphones; I really do love them so much. They’re $180 right now, which I think is the lowest price they’ve been.
• Apple’s AirPods Max 2 headphones are on sale for a ridiculous $400 (27% off)…the lowest price ever.
• I do not have the latest Kindle Paperwhite, but I just now bought one for $125 (22% off). After a long period of foundering, I’ve gotten back into reading again and want an upgrade over the four-year-old Kindle I’m currently using.
• I don’t have one of these and reviews have been mixed (some ppl love them and some are lukewarm on them), but the pocket-sized X4 E-Book Reader is on sale for $55 (20% off). It’s so small you can attach it to the back of your phone.
• My finger is hovered over the “add to cart” button on the 15-inch M5 MacBook Air ($1150, 20% off). I have the 15-inch M4 Air and absolutely love it…but I wouldn’t mind something a little beefier for some of the programming stuff I’ve been doing lately.
• While not exactly “tech”, it is technology: the KitchenAid 5.5 quart stand mixer is 40% off ($300).

Regarding the Apple stuff on the list, it’s helpful to keep in mind that Tim Cook recently said in an interview that Apple is going to be raising their prices “to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips”. It’s unclear when this will happen, but it makes all the current Apple deals look even better.

Never seen a plane do that before…well, aside from tiny model planes. What an incredible power-to-weight ratio that plane must have. You can seriously land these things anywhere, almost like a helicopter. Wanna go fly fishing? Just set it down on the banks of a stream:

Or on a gravel bar in a river:

These planes are referred to as STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft; here’s some detail on how they work. (via @alper)

Update: Is this the shortest takeoff in history?

Six feet. Six. (via @mikebee)

I appreciate what 2K/DENMARK’s Klaus Krogh says about their ambitions when he and his wife started the company:

When I started this company together with my wife, I said we got to become a very very small company. Why? Because we are going to put so much effort into each and every assignment that nobody’s going to pay for it. So we are not going to grow any. Now almost 40 years later, we have the very best customers. We have customers in 43 countries. We do typesetting in Chinese and Japanese. Why? Well, because we take care. We do our very best every time.

Architect and urban & computational designer Abhinav Bhardwaj made this great set of slides comparing urban design in the US and Europe, peppered with pithy observations like:

• European space is shaped on purpose: American open space is what’s left over.
• Small blocks make more corners, more routes, more street life.
• A fine grid offers hundreds of routes; the tree offers one way out.

(thx, meg)

Lalas enjoyed a solid playing career, but he’s obviously not in the same league as Henry, widely considered the greatest footballer in Premier League history. This vast gulf in on-field pedigree has become more awkward as the tournament has progressed, with Lalas retreating into a meek silence whenever Henry reveals his depth of footballing experience. In a conversation where his co-panelist is casually reminiscing about his days playing alongside Messi or exchanging shirts with Ronaldo Nazário at the World Cup, what exactly is Lalas going to talk about — coming on as a second-half substitute for Earnie Stewart in a friendly against Scotland in 1998? Helping the Kansas City Wizards finish last in the 1999 MLS Western Conference? Did Lalas enjoy an elite playing career? No. But does he do the background reading that could compensate for his relative lack of standing in a conversation with titans like Henry and Zlatan? Also no. But is he charming or funny or charismatic or otherwise magnetic on screen? Eh, no.

Savage. Here’s Henry and Zlatan kicking the ball around in the studio and pointedly not letting Lalas have a go:

As the World Cup gets underway here in the Americas, here’s a look back at a football battle for the ages: Germany vs. Greece in The Philosophers’ Football Match. Germany’s lineup included Nietzsche , Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Marx while the likes of Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, and Archimedes took the field for Greece.

Hegel is arguing that reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant — via the categorical imperative — is holding that ontologically, it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.

(thx, meg)

Twice in the Earth’s history, massive ranges of supermountains have formed on ancient continents.

Studies like these point to something we do know for sure: from the highest peaks to the smallest cells, geology and biology are deeply intertwined. And while it’s often said that we are stardust — built from elements forged in the hearts of dying stars — in a sense, we also might be supermountain dust.

They were perhaps as tall or taller than Everest but their distinguishing feature was their massive breadth — we’re talking ranges 5000 miles long, three to four times the length of the Himalayas — just a unbelievable volume of earth. And their formation may have “fueled two of the biggest evolutionary boom times in our planet’s history”.

That’s a lot of rock to erode — and, according to the researchers, that’s why these enormous mountains are so important.

As both mountains eroded away, they would have dumped tremendous amounts of nutrients like iron and phosphorus into the sea through the water cycle, the researchers said. These nutrients could have significantly sped up biological cycles in the ocean, driving evolution to greater complexity. In addition to this nutrient spillover, the eroding mountains may have also released oxygen into the atmosphere, making Earth even more hospitable to complex life.

I also learned about the Boring Billion from this video, a billion-year period of relative “tectonic stability, climatic stasis and slow biological evolution” nestled in-between the two supermountain eras.

Art director Antonio Alcalá, one of four art directors employed by the USPS, talks a little bit about the history behind US postage stamps and how they are designed and produced.

This is kind of fantastic: Ribbie lets you watch actual MLB baseball games “rendered pitch by pitch in a cozy 8-bit view while they happen”.

Ribbie is a simple way to keep a live baseball game nearby. It shows the score, the bases, the count, and a tiny pixel field that moves with the real game.

I built it because I wanted something between a stats tab and a full broadcast. Something you can leave open while you work, cook, or do whatever else, then glance over and know what is happening.

There are a few different views you can use. The image above is the fullscreen view. Here’s the fullscreen game chooser view and the room view of the game.

I love this. Nice use of Silkscreen too. 😊