Have you ever seen an image that leaves you questioning reality? For instance, many pictures depict our surroundings in a way that makes the familiar feel unreal. Some may reflect on history, while others challenge how we see the world and deepen our appreciation of it. Alexande…
The Tell, a very long read about Thomas Goldstein (SCOTUSblog founder, high-powered lawyer, poker player) who once played a legendary game at the Bellagio where he bet wildly, didn’t even look at his cards for long stretches of time, and won big.
“Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements, or to be eaten by scavenging animals.” (CW: there are some potentially upsetting photos on that page.)
In wasted dollars Our species began to get civilized when it invented clothing: the original privacy tech. But that was in the natural world. In the digital one, we are still naked, and privacy is just a promise you get from "consent" (cookie notice) agreements and settings. It'…
Craig Mod made a cool mini-site cataloging all of the long walks he’s taken since 2009, with maps and GPS tracks and links to essays/books/media that resulted from them.
Macro photographers will certainly be rejoined. Venus Optic has truly pushed the third-party lens market with the launch of the Laowa ACRIS 35mm f2.8 1X AF Macro APO, the world's first full-frame autofocus 35mm lens that can produce a 1:1 magnification ratio. The latter has been…
Today, the 5 Boro Foto Fest is announcing our list of photographers and vendors who will be selling prints, zines, books, etc. to art lovers and collectors on October 25th, 2026 at Culture Lab LIC in NYC. The organizers checked that none of the work was made involving the use of…
Lomography is known for creating some fantastic cameras and lenses for portrait photography. The Joseph Petzval Métamorphose 35mm f1.8 is one such offering that helps to grow the company's portfolio of optics that offer great bokeh. As part of their signature, dreamy bokeh, the…
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 simp…
Manchester City guilty over Premier League charges after £900m of ‘sham’ contracts. The “financial doping” scheme allowed the club’s owners to pump large sums of money into the team without appearing to exceed the league’s spending limits.
If you're the type of photographer who cares a lot about post-production, then 14-Bit RAW is something that you probably always use. 14-bit RAW images hold a lot more information in them than 12-bit RAW images. But does it really matter? A lot of information on the web is all ab…
AI shit gets so weird. For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I a…
Real hard forks Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.” I subscribed to Casey and Kevin��…
Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”
Not very long ago, increasing ISO beyond even 2500 on your DSLR felt like giving up something precious, like a part of your reputation, in return for getting a shot. Yup, I've felt this way many times when having to embrace horrible grain at the cost of capturing a moment felt l…
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 lyri…
The death of web development education. “The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).”
Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be. “Many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.” Simmons’ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.
I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project ideas,…
The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris. “Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish.”
On commodified, automated intelligence. “If any of these things shake out and we make it out of the near-future, the best you can hope for is a universal basic income, pegged to a meaningful percentage of existing compute.” (God that’s bleak.)
Over the past six months, dozens of people pitched in to create the MN Stolen Neighbors Quilt, which is made of 12,500 squares, each one representing an immigrant abducted in Minnesota by the Trump regime’s secret police (ICE + CBP). The quilt was recently unveiled at the MN S…
The Polaroid Mod is a camera that I think is really fun in addition to being pretty advanced. I'm not sure how sustainable it is though. For sure, it brought everyone I took photos of quite a bit of visible joy. But in today's world, it's impossible for photographers to spell th…
Sony has had a wonderful year so far. The company launched some great cameras, including the high-resolution king, the a7R VI, recently. While the company has not spoken about what the next launch will be about, a few reports are pointing out that it will be the successor to the…
In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits her 2015 piece on marriage. “Toward the end, I felt as if the best versions of ourselves had married and the worst versions of ourselves were getting divorced.”
Modern cameras are so good that auto ISO control is something that isn't even worth fussing over as long as you set the right parameters. This is especially the case with cameras that don't have the highest megapixel counts and have been around since the year 2020. If anything t…