2026-03-07 05:54:14
Can’t stop, won’t stop. On the heels of the refreshed Rolodex from earlier in the week, I’ve pushed another “Just Enough Social” feature to the site: members bios & profile pics. Here’s what that looks like:
Members can find a link to their profile by 1) clicking on your name in the menu in the upper righthand corner of the site (or under the hamburger menu on mobile); 2) clicking on the “edit profile” link by your name at the bottom of any post with active comments; or 3) clicking on your name or profile pic in any comment thread. You can change your username, provide a short bio (300 character limit, up to 2 URLs), and upload a profile pic (jpg, png, webp). Check the community guidelines for more advice/info.
The idea with this feature is to provide a lightweight way for KDO members to get to know who they’re conversing with in the comments without having to share that information with the entire internet (in the form of a full-blown social media profile). As a member, you’re in control of what you share in your bio and selecting a profile pic. So here’s how it works right now (i.e. who can see what and where):
This level of detail about something that’s existed on the internet since the dawn of time (message board profiles, essentially) might seem tedious, but I’m being clear and straightforward about how this works because I want people to feel comfortable connecting with each other here as much or little as each person wants. Many of you will probably share things like your personal website, job, hobbies, or social media accounts in your bios. Put your Signal handle or email address in there if you want. Gregarious types: put your phone number in your profile if you feel comfortable with that (not recommending that tbh). Or you can be super private or deliberately vague — on KDO, no one knows you’re a dog. Ditto for the profile pic: anything from your headshot to a pet photo of your pet to a Mark Rothko abstract goes — totally up to you.
The comments, the Rolodex, and now member profiles all operate under the same principle: Just Enough Social. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are too overwhelming and stand-alone blogs (like KDO circa 2 years ago) don’t offer much in the way of community. I’m vectoring toward the lightweight Baby Bear option of getting readers talking with each other in the easiest possible way & exploring the larger web community that KDO is a part of. There’s more work to do, but I’m happy with the direction it’s going.
One last thing before I go. I hope this goes without saying with this fine crew but I will say it anyway: if you are going to reach out to someone using the info in their KDO profile/bio, do not be a dick. Someone putting their website address or email in their bio is not an invitation for inappropriate behavior or taking a disagreement outside the bounds of the community guidelines. Enough said about that, I hope.
Ok, I’ll let you go freshen up your profile if you’d like. Lemme know if you have any feedback, questions, concerns, or even attaboys.
Tags: kottke.org
2026-03-07 03:39:10
Lots of great defecation physics here: “66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It’s a…small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog’s, at 10 milliliters.”
2026-03-07 02:48:42
The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?”
2026-03-07 02:00:22
SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”.
2026-03-07 01:00:00
Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen after glad-handing some patrons and proceeded to tear into the quality of the food:
Once in the kitchen, the colonel walked over to a vat full of frying chicken pieces and announced, ‘That’s much too black. It should be golden brown. You’re frying for 12 minutes — that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?”
When Mr. Singleton explained that he first mixed boiling water into the instant powdered potatoes, the colonel interrupted. “And then you have wallpaper paste,” he said. “Next suppose you add some of this brown gravy stuff and then you have sludge.” “There’s no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes,” he said after tasting some. “And this cole slaw. This cole slaw! They just won’t listen to me. It should he chopped, not shredded, and it should be made with Miracle Whip. Anything else turns gray. And there should be nothing in it but cabbage. No carrots!”
Sanders sold his company to an investment group in 1964, which took the company public two years later and eventually sold to a company called Heublein. After selling, Sanders officially still worked for the company as an advisor but grew more and more dissatisfied with it, as evidenced by the story above. When the company HQ moved to Tennessee, the Colonel was quoted as saying:
This ain’t no goddam Tennessee Fried Chicken, no matter what some slick, silk-suited son-of-a-bitch says.
And he got sued by a KFC franchisee after he commented:
My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I’ve seen my mother make it.
To the “wallpaper paste” they add some sludge and sell it for 65 or 75 cents a pint. There’s no nutrition in it and the ought not to be allowed to sell it.
And another thing. That new crispy chicken is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.
Colonel Sanders: serving up chicken and sick burns with equal spiciness. (via @mccanner)
[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2016.]
Tags: food · Harland Sanders · KFC · Mimi Sheraton · restaurants · timeless posts