Kottke.org
Reviews
- Life after death? Pick a door, then wander a crowd of 1,500 people and what each believes about an afterlife
- InkBoy A Game Boy emulator that plays at about 30 fps on a 1.54-inch e-paper screen
- Weball Roll any web page up into a Katamari ball
- Lighthouses of the World Every charted light on a night globe, flashing on its real cycle
- iNCYNC Up to six recordings of Terry Riley's In C at once, 1968 to 2026, each with a rate slider to line up the pulse
- Jimbōchō Tokyo's used-book district, where more than 170 shops share a few blocks
- Canyon Groove Real canyon terrain played like a record's groove
- Nabila Nareswari's Nerikomi Cups The pattern goes all the way through the clay — sliced, never painted
- Juan Pablo Culasso A blind field recordist who identifies birds by ear, and built a birding trail for people who cannot see them
- Walking Men Worldwide Every city's pedestrian signal, collected by strangers and hung at human scale
- Hon no Mori-go A retired Seto Inland Sea ferry, rebuilt by Tadao Ando into a free floating library
- Using the Railway Network as a Flatbed Scanner A conveyor-belt inspection camera out a train window, and the accelerometer maths that makes the picture readable
- Usenet-Rewind A working search box in front of the conversations the web was built on top of
- The Tube Computer 920 triodes on a brick wall, and it warms the room
- Gimme A colour type family that has been under construction since 2020, with every style built from a different toy
- I just chose words carefully A Super Metroid guide from the dial-up years, fully justified in monospace by rewriting every line until it fit
- How Blackwing Pencils Are Made California cedar goes to Japan and comes back a pencil, in Blackwing's first film of its own process
- A Golden Corona Eclipse Two filters stood between the corona and the camera, and only one of them was smoke
- The Listening Museum 36 keyboards you can hear by typing on the one you already have
- Datatype A font that draws the chart for you
- Frozen Polygon Waves Baltic Sea ice cracked into a mosaic, still moving with the swell beneath it
- The Moist Towelette Online Museum A decades-old shrine to vintage moist-towelette packaging, still adding to the shelves
- Cursor Camp Neal.fun's playground for browser cursors
Finds
- Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten An 1882 Nishi-Izu workshop that still smokes bonito over an open fire in a deep pit
- The Best Monopoly Strategy, Tested on 300 Million Games Eight classic strategies played 312,898,560 times against each other
- Life after death? Pick a door, then wander a crowd of 1,500 people and what each believes about an afterlife
- Hyperland Douglas Adams' 1990 BBC film imagining the web, with Tom Baker as your software agent
- InkBoy A Game Boy emulator that plays at about 30 fps on a 1.54-inch e-paper screen
- Towers of Babble A word game where every word you spell becomes a tower
- Adam Fuhrer's chromatic aberrations Generative art where the colour channels drift apart
- Mundo Mendo, Book Two A year of a website, printed as a numbered, signed pocket book
- Fishdraw A single JavaScript file that draws endless strange fish
- Tiny Little Office An office suite where the link is the document
- All the Percent Every percentage spoken on Star Trek: TNG, in one supercut
- Crossword Clues Where It's Clear the Puzzle's Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-wise Tyler Gooch on the clues a stuck puzzle-maker writes
- Every US Electrical Outlet Explained Practical Engineering on the 35-plus outlet types hiding behind "two-prong"
- Weball Roll any web page up into a Katamari ball
- Assignment America The Blondin family's 1996 nine-month road-trip website, still online as published
- Chasing a plane across the moon A photographer's ten-year attempt to film a jet crossing the lunar disc, and why he walked away
- Control Panels Nearly 3,000 photos of knobs, toggles, and blinky-blinks
- Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026 Finalists This year's shortlist of animals caught mid-punchline
- Mapsnap A century-old Sanborn insurance map, snapped onto today's street grid
- Lobster is Lobster A word game where you guess the language
- Lighthouses of the World Every charted light on a night globe, flashing on its real cycle
- Craig Mod's Walks Every long walk he's taken, mapped, logged and linked to what came of it
- Songs in the Key of Life — The Anniversary EP Four vault tracks, released the same minute the 1976 sessions wrapped
- Catfishing Guess the Wikipedia article from nothing but its list of categories
- iNCYNC Layer up to six of 99 recordings of Terry Riley's In C on top of each other, tempo-synced
- Jimbōchō Tokyo's used-book district, 100+ stores deep, mapped through four favorites
- City Scans Handheld-scanner textures of city surfaces, from Tokyo to LA to Paris
- Trace A daily numbers puzzle where you build a 4-step recipe to turn one list into another
- Devils Tower in Infrared Zac Henderson's black-and-white studies of the butte
- Museum of Time-Based Art A catalogue of every artwork that uses time as its material
- Solitaire Alone Together Windows 98 Solitaire, played alongside everyone else online
- Canyon Groove Real canyon terrain played like a record's groove
- Katamari Object Library Every object from Katamari Damacy as a 3D model you can spin and download
- Cars, New York City, 1974–1976 Parked cars photographed at night on Kodachrome 25, one to a frame, in a city that no longer exists
- Nabila Nareswari's Nerikomi Cups The pattern goes all the way through the clay — sliced, never painted
- The History of Concrete John Wilson builds a documentary about concrete on a Hallmark movie's skeleton
- Juan Pablo Culasso A blind field recordist who identifies birds by ear, and built a birding trail for people who cannot see them
- Updated Jane Austen Titles The whole shelf, retitled in the dialect of right now
- Walking Men Worldwide Every city's pedestrian signal, collected by strangers and hung at human scale
- Hon no Mori-go A retired Seto Inland Sea ferry, rebuilt by Tadao Ando into a free floating library
- Using the Railway Network as a Flatbed Scanner An industrial scanner reads the passing world one pixel-line at a time
- Szilveszter Makó's Surreal Portraits Every shoot returns to the same motif: a box that confines, frames, or crowns the subject
- Genius Design Details: Pips and Nubs Three small bumps that do more work than they look like
- Usenet-Rewind A real search box in front of 45 years of Usenet
- Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You Forty-two chapters on one unnamed FBI agent, filling the Guggenheim's spiral
- The Tube Computer 920 triodes on a brick wall, and it warms the room
- Tycho — Transformation (Burning Man Sunrise 2026) One hour fifty-one, with the sunrise marked between tracks 22 and 23
- Busman's Holiday A graphic designer's second act, in pencils, on South Broadway
- The NTS Guide to Jazz in Murakami Novels Two hours and seventeen minutes of the records his characters put on
- I just chose words carefully A 17,000-word Super Metroid guide, fully justified in monospace by rewriting every line
- Gimme A type family where every letter is built from a different childhood toy
- Bayeux Go! An endless runner stitched into the actual Bayeux Tapestry
- Spaceships Asteroids, inverted: you play the rocks, not the ship
- The 101 Plays Itself A live LA freeway camera, rescored as generative music
- Vintage Eastern European Matchbox Labels (1950–1980s) A Glasgow designer's 4,000-photo Flickr archive of matchbox label art
- How Blackwing Pencils Are Made A pencil's 5,000-mile route from Kofu graphite to Stockton ferrule
- Industry Standard Tools The one product everybody in a trade already owns
- Defrag98 The Windows 98 defragmenter, blocks and all
- The Tiny Awards 2026 A small handmade trophy for the small, handmade web
- Dolly Parton and Kermit Sing 'Everyday People' 1987, the fifth episode of Dolly, one frog
- Pigeons Navigate With Their Livers Superparamagnetic macrophages, and a compass nobody was looking for
- Meat proxy A word for the person who only forwards it
- Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? Every stream on Earth is holding to the same exponent
- 97 Copies of an Unreleased Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt Saved from a gold-recovery furnace, graded thirty years later
- Cookbooking: A Fan's Guide A history of the cookbook as an object, not as dinner
- Dashboard Touch Thirty dollars of parts, and your old Mac gets a fingerprint button
- A Golden Corona Eclipse A nine-degree sun and wildfire smoke turned the corona gold, and left one thing pink
- Ozu in Color Every Frame a Painting returns to explain how Ozu learned colour
- How Does an Enigma Machine Work? A 3D teardown that follows one keypress through the whole rotor path
- Mollie the Hamster's Strava A hamster wheel wired to auto-upload its runs to Strava
- Supersonic Trebuchet A medieval siege engine producing a very small sonic boom
- The Hopkins Observatory Eclipse Viewers Two centuries of the cheap paper thing people held up at the sun
- The Met's Copyist Program Set up an easel in the galleries and paint the painting
- Rocky's Musical Language Building an alien tongue out of notes, then asking linguists if it holds
- Why Did We Wait So Long for the Bicycle? Clockmakers in the 1300s, watches by the 1500s, no bicycle until the 1800s
- The Campaign for North Africa 1,500 hours, ten players, and a rule about boiling pasta
- Tron: Legacy (Recording Sessions) 67 tracks of a score being built, assembled by someone who cared
- SDL Sopwith A 1984 trade-show demo that got away from its author
- Artemis II: A Visual Masterpiece Eight minutes of NASA's own Artemis II footage, scored
- The Z Suites The Legend of Zelda's scores, reworked as modern jazz
- Why Some People Mow a Lawn Better Than Others 49 squares, 14,589 different ways, and people found all 12 perfect ones
- Past Catalog Archive Radio catalogs from 1929, scanned and free to download
- Reading Maps Every journey in fiction, drawn on the real world
- The Phone in Your Hand Fourteen layers deep, read on the object it describes
- BoxSquad Its limbs are draggable, and so are its borders
- The Listening Museum 36 keyboards you can hear without owning one
- Translator of Original 'Minions' Epic Poem Slams Film Adaptation The Onion invents a Minions epic poem and a translator with opinions about the film — and the actual translator of the Odyssey answered.
- European Country Names Explained One of them means land of the rabbits
- Datatype A font that draws the chart for you
- The Next Euro Banknotes Ten shortlisted designs, and the ECB is asking
- A Matter of Form A single point multiplies into a full geometric ballet, set to Schubert
- Frozen Polygon Waves Baltic Sea ice cracked into a mosaic, still moving with the swell beneath it
- How The Clapper Became a Viral Sensation 70 minutes on a switch that barely worked and sold anyway
- A History of Menus is a Menu of History What America's oldest surviving restaurant menus reveal about class, gender, and technology
- Publius All 85 Federalist Papers, presented one by one as they first ran in 1787-88
- Making Merrie Giant wearable wicker costumes for an invented mummers' tradition
- Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map An interactive map predicting how dense Earth's underground fungal networks are, anywhere on land
- The Computers of Jurassic Park Every screen in the movie, identified
- noclip Fly through classic game levels in your browser
- Uncovered Judge a book by its first page, blind
- Amble One An open-air electric buggy with no doors, roof, or screens
- The Moist Towelette Online Museum A decades-old shrine to vintage moist-towelette packaging, still adding to the shelves
- Clipart Studio A digital cutting mat for making magazine collage art
- Hand-Drawn Game Guides Meticulous hand-drawn maps for classic NES games
- Venetian Bridge Fights in Art Venice's ritual bridge fistfights, the guerre dei pugni, captured in 17th- and 18th-century art
- International Aerial Photographer of the Year The 2026 winners: top 101 drone and helicopter shots across nature, sport, and architecture
- Shortverse A browsable catalog of ~25,800 short films, though not every title is free to stream
- Stacks Classic HyperCard stacks running natively on a modern Mac
- Venetian Bridge Brawls in 17th- and 18th-Century Art Period paintings of Venice's organized, staged bridge-fighting contests
- VoiceDot A globe where every dot is a stranger's recorded voice story
- MapTap A daily GeoGuessr-style game played by tapping a 3D globe
- Inventing ELIZA The first chatbot's rediscovered 1966 source code, back in print
- The Wound Man A medieval diagram of a man suffering every injury at once
- AI Compass A quiz that pinpoints how you actually feel about AI
- Christian Marclay's The Clock A 24-hour montage film that tells real time, screening at LACMA
- Lifts in Film A curated archive of elevator scenes across movies and TV
- Saya Irie's Eraser Shaving Sculptures Images erased, then recomposed from their own shavings
- Attenborough at 100 Searchable database of nearly 5,000 Attenborough episodes
- How the Heck Do Solar Panels Work? Interactive explainer from photons through the full energy chain
- Leonardotheka 3,500 pages of Leonardo's manuscripts reunited digitally
- Ribbie Live MLB games rendered in real-time 8-bit pixel art
- Fuel Efficiency of Launching Enemies into the Sun A physics analysis of disposing of objects via the Sun versus interstellar space
- Infinite Jeffs Infinite Jest with every word replaced by 'Jeff'
- Merriam-Webster's Backward Index 315,000 dictionary entries typed in reverse for suffix lookup
- OK Computer as N64 Soundfonts Radiohead's OK Computer remade with sounds from classic N64 games
- Art But Make It Sports Pairs famous artworks with sports photography that mirror the composition
- Cucumbers Were Once Called 'Cowcumbers' An archaic English name for cucumbers, still used in some 18th-century texts
- Marbles Squared A puzzle game playable on web, Game Boy, ZX Spectrum, and Palm Pilot
- Desktop Tower Defense Paul Preece's 2007 Flash-era classic revived for the modern web
- What Would J.R.R. Tolkien Think of Palantir? A video essay on a defense contractor named after Tolkien's corrupt magical objects
- Mesmerizing 4K Video of Cat-5 Typhoon Sinlaku Remastered satellite footage of a 2008 super-typhoon
- US Regional Map by Reddit Vote What 'the Midwest' means, settled by crowdsourced poll
- Nibmeisters The artisans who reshape fountain-pen nibs to your hand
- Pocket Forests Miyawaki-method micro-forests grow to canopy in years, not decades
- Wowsabout! PBS Kids special on awe — sequoias, butterfly migrations, a hedgehog and a piglet
- 55-Minute Boards of Canada B-Sides Mix Rare and unreleased material from the Scottish electronic duo, in one continuous session
- Every Frame a Painting — The Visual Comedy of Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos return after years away with a new video essay
- xkcd #2394 — Contiguous 41 States A US map with seven states quietly missing — your job is to spot which
- Cursor Camp Neal.fun's playground for browser cursors
- Jenny Volvovski's Unsolicited Book Covers A working designer redesigns her own library, one book at a time
- Unruly Play Archive of 169 unconventional games for unconventional places