Steamed Hams but It’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film. The classic Simpsons bit but it’s live-action and a My Dinner with Andre parody. So many more where that came from. [youtube.com]

A collection of generative design tools that are really fun to play around with. I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these. [kottke.org]

Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Why not two? Or five? Or eight? Turns out that three is sort of a Goldilocks sweet spot for blade count due to physics, engineering, and aesthetic reasons. [thekidshouldseethis.com]

Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. “An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients.” [bbc.com]

Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. [kottke.org]

Historian Thomas Zimmer has left academia, Substack, and the US; now he’s launching his new career as an indie writer with a newsletter about “the ongoing struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America”. Recommended! [steady.page]

Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine. “Cesium-137 did not exist on this planet until we exploded the first atomic bomb.” The technique was used to test the legitimacy of some wines said to belong to Thomas Jefferson. (via @soundclamp.bsky.social) [kitchensisters.org]

Is the New York Times finally getting real about Trump? “In the last 10 days or so, several Times articles have been considerably more straightforward – and honest – about the way Trump lies and spreads division.” (via @jayrosen.bsky.social) [presswatchers.org]

“Everyone says the maximum height for a drinking straw is 10.33m, but it’s not. I found out by making the tallest possible siphon.” Another typically fascinating science video by Steve Mould. [kottke.org]

In Jimmy Kimmel’s words: What the late-night host said upon his return from suspension. “I was not happy when they pulled me off the air.” [apnews.com]

McSweeney’s didn’t even need to lampoon Trump’s comments about vaccines, autism, & Tylenol…they just printed them verbatim and it reads like the most unhinged parody. “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace.” [mcsweeneys.net]

An excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s new book Will There Ever Be Another You. “But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.” [lithub.com]

The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. [kottke.org]

A tantalizing peek into the massive 90,000-item archive left behind by David Bowie. (via @jennileder.bsky.social) [nytimes.com]

New Howtown! “This intersection of nuclear history, atmospheric science, and conservation biology demonstrates how Cold War nuclear fallout became a forensic tool for fighting elephant poaching and wildlife trafficking.” [kottke.org]

Conservative White Christians Will Worship Anyone But Jesus. “Seeing White Evangelicals build idols out of people whose lives and public work are the antithesis of Jesus is something we’ve grown accustomed to.” [johnpavlovitz.substack.com]

Didn’t think I was interested in a profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but Sam Anderson can write. “It is a smile that makes you feel as if the sun is setting over an undiscovered tropical beach on which 10,000 baby sea turtles are about to hatch.” [nytimes.com]

I’m very excited to be heading to Japan for the first time next month. I’ll be there from mid-October for 3-4 weeks. What should I do/see and where should I go? [kottke.org]

The 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years, including Extra Yarn, School’s First Day of School, Julián Is a Mermaid, and Don’t Trust Fish. [slate.com]

The trailer for Little, Big, and Far, a film about the stars, love, private lives, fascism, and hope. [kottke.org]

This morning’s music selection while working: this 1h23m mix by German DJ/producer Parra for Cuva. [soundcloud.com]

Some advice: “finishing creative projects is a skill in and of itself. if you want to be able to finish large, complex projects, you have to _practice finishing things_. which usually means doing smaller projects.” [bsky.app]

Disney dropped the trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu today, a feature-length film that will debut in theaters in May 2026. (Oh, and Jimmy Kimmel returns to the air tomorrow night.) [kottke.org]

Super Mario Bros. Remastered is an open source, fan-created, remastered version of the original Super Mario Bros. The game includes new levels, custom modes and characters, a custom level editor, and more. [kottke.org]

Lāhainā Noon (aka zero shadow day) occurs twice a year in the tropics when the sun is directly overhead and vertical objects (like flagpoles) cast no shadows. [en.m.wikipedia.org]

Amazing mashup of Call Me Maybe with NIN’s Head Like a Hole. So so good. [kottke.org]

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.” [mcsweeneys.net]

I’m usually pretty go-with-the-flow as far as OS updates go, but iOS 26 / Liquid Glass is terrible: incoherent, ugly, and difficult to use. Obviously a massive design effort, but they missed the mark IMO. [apple.com]

Physics of Fluids journal article: ‘Phase behavior of Cacio e Pepe sauce’. The authors found the dish entered the “Mozzarella Phase” when starch concentrations (relative to cheese) dropped below 1%, “corresponding to an unpleasant and separated sauce”. [pubs.aip.org]

Matt Webb: “Gin & tonic was invented by the East India Company to keep its colonising army safe [from malaria] in India. Bet the covid vaccine would have been more popular if it got you drunk.” [interconnected.org]

The Flatiron Building, painted photography, 1880s Snapchat, baseball-by-telegraph, and authenticity. [kottke.org]

Inside the Top Secret Virgil Abloh Archive. For the first time, a look into the fashion collection of the late Off-White and Louis Vuitton creative director. [gq.com]

“AI developers haven’t figured out a way to train their models not to scheme. That’s because such training could actually teach the model how to scheme even better to avoid being detected.” (The same is true for children.) [techcrunch.com]

Damn Interesting celebrates its 20th birthday. “In 2005, YouTube, reddit, and Facebook were all still wet and screaming infants.” [damninteresting.com]

Gear Brands With a Lifetime Warranty like Darn Tough Vermont, Osprey, Orvis, Patagonia, and Timbuk2. [cheapestdestinationsblog.com]

Crying Glacier, the sounds of a melting Earth. “We wanted to document this landscape to give us an idea of what it sounds like inside a glacier. There is also the sadness because you know that all these sounds are disappearing right now.” [kottke.org]

A 1965 television interview with a 107-year-old Irish farmer (born in 1858) on all the changes he’s seen during his life. Q: “What would you say was the biggest change?” A: “Well, machinery.” [openculture.com]

My patience has run out for the certain sort of media person who is Addicted to Takes and has lost all sense of truth, morality, and humanity.

The defining experience of fascism is “getting yelled at by dumbasses”. [hamiltonnolan.com]

The 2025 Audubon Photography Awards Emphasize Epic and Endangered Migrations. I love the shot of the acorn woodpecker. [thisiscolossal.com]

How the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Survived the Death Camps. “I have been gripped by a need to understand more not only about the women in the Auschwitz orchestra…but also what hearing music in this inferno meant to the other prisoners.” [lithub.com]

Video of the whole The Wizard of Oz, with the scenes sorted alphabetically by dialogue. [kottke.org]

Gina Trapani writes about taking a sabbatical. “Take afternoon naps. Bigger things like foster a box of 6 kittens, do a 10-day silent retreat, quit coffee, start lifting, train for a triathlon, take vacations to explore…” [notetoself.studio]

But not Vermont because the state's overwhelmingly "progressive" voters re-elected a Republican governor *four times* since 2016.

This sounds like a cool project: Pocket Fiche is a pocket-sized microscope that comes with a ultra-high resolution, nano-fabricated image. “Think of Pocket Fiche as the Earth bound version of the Voyager golden record.” [kickstarter.com]

Some unusual rocks observed by NASA’s Perseverance rover “could be the clearest signs of life ever found” on Mars. [bbc.com]

“The day-to-day posting has not been consistently sparking joy recently but digging into the guts of the site & making improvements has provided me with the heads-down, flowy focus that I need to stay emotionally and intellectually afloat these days.” [kottke.org]

Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up. [vox.com]

Man pulls off daring scuba heist of Disney paddleboat restaurant, netting $10K-$20K before successfully escaping into the water from whence he came. [jalopnik.com]

The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas. “The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture [is] that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling.” [techdirt.com]