MoreRSS

site iconJason KottkeModify

Founded in 1998, one of the 50 most powerful blogs in the world in 2008 named by The Guardian.
Please copy the RSS to your reader, or quickly subscribe to:

Inoreader Feedly Follow Feedbin Local Reader

Rss preview of Blog of Jason Kottke

Kottke Wrapped 2025

2026-01-01 00:53:37

Kottke Wrapped 2025

Spotify really started something, didn’t they? Everyone has a “Wrapped” this year; I even got an email one from the cruise line on which I took a trip this summer. Like, “Congratulations! You went on {1} cruise for {7} days!” — and then nothing else. Two stats. So I thought for an end-of year thing here on KDO, I would write a post with a title like “Kottke Wrapped 2025” and then say, “haha, just kidding, I’ll see you jokers next year”. Fun gag.

But then I started thinking about it, running some SQL queries, and looking at my stats and decided to do a Kottke Wrapped for real. (All stats as of today.)

262. That’s the number of distinct days someone (me or a guest editor) published at least one post to KDO in 2025. How does that compare to past years? In 2024, we blogged on 267 days. 2023: 275 days. 2022, I went of sabbatical for 7 months but still managed 129 days. From 2007-2021, the average is around 275 days. In 2004, the year before I started working on KDO full-time, I posted on 344 days! (The average American work-year in ~250 days — maybe I should take more time off?)

2142. The number of KDO posts for 2025. That’s 8.2 posts/day on days that we posted.

1084. The number of members who either commented on (964 ppl) or faved (513 ppl) a KDO post this year. All told, we left 4474 faves and 4983 on posts in 2025. Compared to the number of total members, that is an absurdly high participation rate. Thank you so much for taking part!

845. That’s the number of distinct tags used for entries this year. The list of most-used tags included movies, art, astronomy,music, design, science, books, remix, politics, photography, sports, travel, lists, and Japan. That’s a pretty good encapsulation of my (and hopefully your) general interests.

4.9%. The amount by which KDO membership numbers increased from Jan 1. At one point in the year, membership numbers were up almost 10% (!) but that came back down steadily as the year went on. I only made a couple of membership calls during the year — most of the time I was just heads down on site work. I know this has been a tough year for a lot of folks out there and I really appreciate the support. If you’d like to help support this paywall-less site (a rarer and rarer thing as 2025 comes to a close), you can sign up for a membership for as little as $3/mo. ✌️

And now a bunch of links to the most popular posts of the year according to three different metrics: visits, comments, and faves. Some random thoughts to follow.

The Most Visited Posts in 2025

  1. JD Vance Chastised by Vermont Snow Reporter
  2. Questlove’s Fantastic Video Mix of 50 Years of SNL Music
  3. 80 of the Most Iconic Guitar Intros
  4. The Official Map of the Star Wars Galaxy
  5. All the Dogs Explained
  6. Football Stadium Turned Community Garden
  7. The World’s Largest Data Center Rises in Texas
  8. The 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide
  9. Extinction Burst Explains MAGA Voters’ Racist Anger
  10. I Want No One Else to Succeed
  11. Meet the Aphantasics: Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
  12. TV Garden: stream television channels from all over the world for free…
  13. USPS Announces Goodnight Moon Stamps
  14. Hard Things Are Supposed to Be Hard
  15. The Design of the New Swiss Passport
  16. WWII Vet Crushes a Tesla With a Sherman Tank
  17. Six Films Better Than the Books They’re Based On
  18. Weird Al Yankovic Covers Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine
  19. Real Photos That Look Fake
  20. Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina
  21. Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max.
  22. Can I Lick It? Yes You Can
  23. A Comprehensive Guide to Yellow Stripey Things
  24. The Prayer of Saint Francis
  25. 87% Of Loud Crashing Noises Are Nothing, Report Top Experts From Other Room.

The Most Commented-On Posts in 2025

  1. A Programming Note
  2. How Are You?
  3. “What is the best album released by a music act at least 15 years after its debut album?”
  4. I’m Heading to Japan. What Should I Do?
  5. Are You Looking for Work? Are You Looking to Fill a Position?
  6. Six Films Better Than the Books They’re Based On.
  7. My Recent Media Diet, the Resistance Edition
  8. Wind It Back
  9. Can You Recommend a Good Bookmark Manager?
  10. What’s All the Fuss About Pluribus?
  11. Some KDO Updates: We’ve Got Ourselves a Stew
  12. What are the five things that are essential in your kitchen?
  13. In Praise of Comfort Films
  14. Glass Onion
  15. The End of College Life?
  16. How Much Do I Really Need to Know?
  17. This One Goes to 27
  18. Biking Is Therapy
  19. iOS 26 / Liquid Glass is terrible.
  20. I disagree with Quentin Tarantino on what his best film is.
  21. A Quick Anniversary Note
  22. There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy
  23. You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill.
  24. Instances of haptic nostalgia (“the poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing”).
  25. Trump Ejects Zelenskyy From White House

The Most Faved Posts in 2025 (from May 18)

  1. This Is Your Captain Speaking…
  2. Some Recent Tweaks (and Post Faving!)
  3. A Bright Light Has Gone Out
  4. Every Tree Can Be a Buddha
  5. Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina
  6. I Want No One Else to Succeed
  7. There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy
  8. Slow Start to the Week
  9. Pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews is running against Lindsey Graham…
  10. The Underscore Music Player
  11. Walking the Earth
  12. I Am An AI Hater.
  13. The Kottke.org Rolodex
  14. Q: “Want to Feel Old?” A: “Yes.”
  15. Refusing to Choose Is a Choice
  16. Taking the Day
  17. What Makes for a Healthy Society?
  18. Proof of life! I’m writing a longer post about my time in Kōyasan, but in the meantime…
  19. Some KDO Updates: We’ve Got Ourselves a Stew
  20. The 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide
  21. Biking Is Therapy
  22. What Are You Thankful For?
  23. For They Shall Inherit
  24. Owls in Towels
  25. When In Rome

It’s interesting to look at the differences between these three lists. (Major caveat: the faved posts are all from the second half of the year because that feature didn’t launch until May.)

In general, the most visited posts are due to outside traffic, not regular readers; i.e. it got linked from Google News or Reddit or Morning Brew and blew up a little.

I feel like the most commented & faved posts are a bit more representative of what makes a “good” kottke.org post, whatever that means. But I also think that a number of my favorite posts, the s-tier stuff, didn’t make any of these lists — not that I can think of any of them right now. 😂

Largely though, kottke.org isn’t a “popular post” blog — it’s a “several small things a day” kind of site. It’s about the day-after-day accretion, the steadiness, the rhythm. I’m not trying to make a few chart-topping hits here — it’s much more about hitting a baseline of quality each day, building a bit more on the previous day, days, weeks, months, years, decades. (Yes, decades…gotta flex a litte here. 🤷‍♂️)

Ok, that’s all I have for now. I hope you have a healthy and safe start to 2026. I’ll see you in a few days. 🎉👋

Note: I used the awesome Space Type Generator to make the header graphic. Here are a few of the alternatives I considered:

Kottke Wrapped 2025

Kottke Wrapped 2025

Kottke Wrapped 2025

Kottke Wrapped 2025

Tags: kottke.org

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Nancy Friedman: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Seventy-one percent of...

2026-01-01 00:15:36

Nancy Friedman: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Seventy-one percent of people in Iceland are Costco members” and “In Sweden, the largest size of Hellmann’s mayonnaise — 600 grams — is called “American size”.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Kent Hendricks: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Birders in the...

2025-12-31 23:16:34

Kent Hendricks: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Birders in the United States spend $107 billion per year, including $93B on binoculars, feeders, cameras, and other equipment; and $14B on travel. That’s more than the GDP of New Hampshire.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Old Windows 3.x Games on the Internet Archive

2025-12-31 05:49:49

a bunch of screenshots of old Win3.x games

Yesterday I linked to a Windows 3.x NYT crossword puzzle app from 1992 that you can play directly on the Internet Archive. I was a Windows user back in the day (my conversion to Apple didn’t happen until the early 00s) and so of course I had to see what other Win3.x games they had in their collection and re-discovered a couple of old favorites:

  • The Incredible Machine. I loved this game…it was an early physics puzzler where you had to build contraptions to accomplish certain goals (like getting a ball into a hoop) with a limited selection of materials. (I just played for 20 minutes and I still love it.)
  • Tripeaks. I’d forgotten about this solitaire variant.
  • Freecell. This isn’t the official Microsoft version, but it’s close enough. I played Freecell much more than solitaire or Tripeaks.
  • Pipe Dream. I actually had this one on Nintendo, I think. Or maybe my neighbor did? Another fun little puzzler.
  • Minesweeper. Everyone’s played this at some point.
  • Tetris. Ditto. Although I played mostly on my Game Boy.
  • Klotski. Ok this one was the biggest nostalgia bomb of all. The name sounded familiar so I clicked on it and wow, I played so much of this one and had completely forgotten all about it until I played the demo. Wow wow wow.
  • Doom. Of course.

Ok, that’s enough, I need to get back to work!

Tags: video games · Windows

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

A wildlife photographer “discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints preserved in the vertical...

2025-12-31 04:48:07

A wildlife photographer “discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints preserved in the vertical face of a mountainside” in the Italian Alps dating back 200M years. “This is now really one of the most important places for Triassic dinosaur footprints.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Listen to the Cassandras

2025-12-31 03:55:25

Toby Buckle for the New Republic: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming — But Were Ignored and Maligned.

This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right — and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.

But not enough people did, and many attacked them — even as events proved them right, again and again. As late as February 2025, respected legal commentator Noah Feldman was casually asserting our constitutional system was “working fine” and Jon Stewart was scolding people who used the word “fascist,” claiming all they had done “over the last ten years is cry wolf.”

I’m glad Buckle wrote about this…it’s infuriating. Who were the folks attempting to sound the alarm?

The first thing to say about fascism’s Cassandras is they’re usually women. Not all women are Cassandras (most aren’t), but most Cassandras are women. My sense is that Black Americans, of either gender, are likelier than whites to be Cassandras, and trans and nonbinary people are heavily overrepresented within the group.

I was posting about Trump’s authoritarianism in the months before the 2016 election1 because I felt it was pretty easy to spot but mostly because I was listening to the sorts of people that Buckle interviews in his piece: predominately Black, many women, many LGBTQ+ folks. And what were they saying? Jamelle Bouie, then a columnist at Slate, stated it plainly in Nov 2015: Donald Trump Is a Fascist. Buckle again:

What were they afraid of? Authoritarianism, political violence, racism, sexism, corruption, as well as threats to bodily autonomy and LGBT rights, were the common themes. Everyone mentioned at least one of those, and the vast majority mentioned multiple. “All the implications that I knew the election would have that have all come true, essentially,” as Emily, a 38-year-old white female writer in Chicago, put it. Cassandras are defined by seeing in MAGA not just policies they disagreed with but a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our politics and culture. “It just felt to me like we were the Weimar Republic; the lying press, the way he was weaponizing American people … the othering of people — Hispanics, they’re rapists, and all of that,” said Sonia, a 52-year-old white woman who works in marketing in Los Angeles.

The anti-alarmists — Buckle lists several of them: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Bret Stephens, Corey Robin, Jon Stewart, David Brooks, William Watson, John Harris, Simon Jenkins, Zachary Karabell, Josh Barro, and Noah Feldman — scolded and derided the Cassandras. Going forward, we should be skeptical of giving them and others like them our attention when they pooh pooh people fighting against obvious racism, fascism, and kleptocracy; dismiss these dangers as mere partisan differences, culture wars, wokeism, or rhetoric; and argue for what amounts to meeting the nazis halfway.

  1. Here’s a post from July 2016 explicitly comparing him to Hitler, which I’m sure I got scolding emails about. And I know I’ve lost quite a few readers over the years because of my “obsession” with Trump.

Tags: 2025 Coup · Donald Trump · fascism · Jamelle Bouie · politics · Toby Buckle