- Let’s kickstart 2026 with two brilliant essays from Anil Dash. How the Hell Are You Supposed to Have A Career in Tech in 2026? and How Markdown Took Over the World should both be required reading for every high school sophomore in America.
- In April of 2010 a diver found a nearly seven inch Megalodon tooth.
- I missed this bit of good news from last year: Vatican City Is Now Powered By Solar
- How to Turn Toilet Paper Rolls Into DIY Boxes – via cassidoo
A massive 535-pound bluefin tuna sold for a record $3.2 million at the first auction of 2026 at Tokyo’s Toyosu fish market.- Spend a few minutes watching these interviews with dads outside Taylor Swift concerts. – via paulscheer.com
- Netflix released the Stranger Things series finale in 600+ theaters over New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, generating north of $25M in concession revenue. (That’s more than Avatar: Fire and Ash earned in actual ticket sales over the same stretch ($23.7M).) – via The Dailies
- And finally, a handful of wonderful links from Laura Olin that I keep meaning to share:
Posts tagged “web design”
- The death of Brigitte Bardot, 1960s sex symbol turned militant animal rights activist, means there are now only three people mentioned in the 1989 Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire who are still alive: Chubby Checker, Bob Dylan, and… Bernie Goetz. – via Simon Kuestenmacher
- There’s really no way to explain to anyone under the age of about forty what a big deal MTV was when it launched. It’s not at all surprising — I haven’t watched in at least twenty years — but it’s still a bit sad to learn they’re shutting down all music-only channels as of December 31.
- Also nostalgic: The HTML Elements Time Forgot
- Prepare to waste some time playing the Top 10 Free Browser Games of 2025.
- Rome just unveiled two new subway stops that transform its metro into a museum experience. – via Ciao Bella
- Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a runaway supermassive black hole ten million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at 2.2 million miles per hour.
- I had no idea there was a sequel to one of my favorite SNL sketches.
- “That first post-game sacrifice only aired online, but the explosion was immediate.”
- A new study suggests moderate fitness appears to act like an insurance policy against alcohol’s long-term negative health effects. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- It’s hard to believe that Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens, primarily because his first two were so incredible. Disclosure Day, coming in 2026, will be his fifth.
- “If you want a job in the moisturizer industry, the best advice I can give is to apply daily.” – via Cassidy Williams
- Not securing domain names before announcing something idiotic has been a perpetual epic failure of the current administration.
- Take a moment this holiday season to indulge in the Southern University sousaphones playing the Veggie Tales theme in the Superdome parking lot.
- Actor Michael Sheen purchased and then forgave $1.3 million of his neighbors’ debts.
- This first-person account from a high school kicker of what it’s like to miss a game-tying PAT is riveting.
- There are no words to convey how excited I am about the return of The Muppet Show, even if it’s just a one-off. See also: Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery
- Yes, There’s a Parallel Parking Championship – via Jason
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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken
If you’ve been extremely online (and building things on the web) since the middle of the 1990s, you will enjoy reading this Christoffer Artmann essay: 30 Years of <br> Tags
- After much cajoling, last night our son finally convinced us to watch Interstellar (2014, Matthew McConaughey) and I loved it. Brilliant film.
- I feel like this archive of fictional companies is missing a few thousand references from The Simpsons alone, but it’s a good start.
- Fahlo is a wonderful service that (for a nominal fee) allows you to track an animal in the wild. I can confirm that kids love this app.
- The full story of Fedora Man is in the running for the best thing on the Internet this year.
- Ugh: The rise of deepfake cyberbullying poses a growing problem for schools.
- The serial killer epidemic in 1970–80s US may have been caused by lead fumes from cars and factories, and solved by environmental regulations. – via Tom Whitwell
- Take a minute to recall The 2017 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog – via Lauren
- Friendly reminder: The mass deportation of undocumented people was one of Hitler’s largest coercive policies before the war.
- Just in time for Christmas! “This lightproof, soundproof vat filled with our signature vine-ripened, zesty sauce marks the beginning of an exciting new era in tomato-based relaxation.
- Every Frame Is a Goodbye is a lovely little essay on photography – via my dad
- I am relieved to report that Happy Gilmore 2 was fantastic. I was worried it might be terrible, but it was a masterpiece sequel and loaded with incredible cameos and great jokes.
- A Friendly Introduction to SVG and a Priority Compass – both via the always brilliant cassidoo
- Someone has put together a compilation of awesome video game maps. – via hiro.report
- Here’s a handy hack to keep squirrels out of your garden.
- “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” I’ve seen that attributed to William Butler Yeats, but Quote Investigator can’t verify it.
- Related: Stop living this way. Make the smallest bit of effort. Be your own person. Research. Take pride in the words you repeat, and … attribute them accurately.
- We truly owe Thomas Jefferson mad, mad props for wonderfully irreverent things like the Season 27 premiere of South Park.
- I’ve been using Markdown for around twenty years now and still often forget what’s what. I love a good cheat sheet.
- Just Give Me Some Normal Damn Dinosaurs
- Mysterious Antimatter Physics Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider
- Military leaders aghast as Meta founder Zuckerberg crashes classified Oval Office meeting
- FEMA response to deadly Texas floods delayed and deficient with Noem in charge
- In the new documentary Secret Mall Apartment, a group of artists recount how they turned a hidden nook in a Providence shopping center into a living space for four years. – via my dad
- If you’re ever in Los Angeles, check out The Nicolosi Estate. The long-abandoned 8700-square-foot, 4-bedroom, 5-bath home is encircled by an amazing 300-foot-long serpentine swimming pool, complete with rock bridges and grotto-style hot tubs, which is visible from the road. The estate was commissioned by Johnny Weissmuller, who won five gold Olympic medals in swimming (and a bronze in water polo!) and portrayed Tarzan in a dozen films from 1932 to 1948.
- Apple is losing a billion dollars per year on Apple TV+ and that’s just fine. – via @TrungTPhan
- I cannot tell you how many times I’ve used these CSS drop-shadow snippets.
- Technofossils: How humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes, and chicken bones. – via kottke
This Is Exhausting:
- “Under the previous administration, we looked like fools. Not anymore.” – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, shortly before accidentally texting war plans to a journalist.
- A federal judge temporarily blocked the Environmental Protection Agency‘s attempt to recoup $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants, dealing the latest judicial setback for [the current administration]’s attempt to assert unilateral control over spending.
- There Is No Method to [the President]’s Madness. He’s Simply Insane.
- The corporation behind Roundup herbicide has paid out nearly $11 billion in lawsuits. Now it’s backing an EPA rule that would stop the bleeding.
- An Austin attorney is suing the Department of Education after seeing her student loan payments skyrocket.
- A Coast Guard Commander Miscarried. She Nearly Died After Being Denied Care.
- You can now play the classic 1982 Atari 2600 game Pitfall! in your browser.
- I’ve been using FontAwesome in web projects since late 2012 and they are still the best.
- Scaling Our Rate Limits to Prepare for a Billion Active Certificates – Let’s Encrypt protects a vast portion of the Web by providing TLS certificates to over 550 million websites. They currently issue over 340,000 certificates per hour.
- The parents of a 22-yo Wisconsin man who died after an asthma attack have filed a lawsuit against Walgreens and UnitedHealth Group after they said the price for his medication suddenly rose from $66 to $539.
- Just dropping this here for no particular reason: Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, Revised Edition
- Aides to [the man] charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
- “The impotence [of the left] is as staggering as the abdication is sickening. But the current message from elected Democrats is loud and clear: You’re on your own. And the message from the … administration is even clearer: You’re next.” – via Marisa Kabas
Apparently federal employees are using Milton’s red stapler from Office Space as a symbol of resistance, which is awesome on so many levels.- An outbreak of tuberculosis in the Kansas City area has grown into one of the largest ever recorded in the United States, with dozens of active cases of the infectious disease reported, according to health officials. (Be alarmed.)
- Newly-appointed U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed a memorandum which directs the NHTSA to immediately initiate, “a rulemaking to rescind or replace all existing CAFE standards.” I just can’t get over the fact that this guy got his start on MTV’s Real World: Boston.
- The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
- Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.- My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
- Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
- Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
- What are Progressive Web Apps?
- “Homicides continued to decline in major U.S. cities — by more than 40% in some communities — during the first nine months of the year.” – via @crookedmedia
- How Marcus Smart’s support for cancer patients transformed children’s hospitals – via @theathletichq
- Please spare ninety seconds of your busy day today to watch Miss Piggy roasting Martha Stewart. – via @kottke
- What’s the roundest human-made object ever made? – via @thebadastronomer
- “Building beats talking. It beats being a full-time employee. It beats being well dressed or well spoken or well known. It beats being popular.” – via @ociubotaru
- “If you’re a parent, you know you don’t need a scientific study or some neuroscientist to confirm what you know from experience. There’s a part of you that didn’t exist until you had kids.” – via @dailydad, a fantastic newsletter
- I’m vehemently opposed to styling browser scrollbars, but I like the other nine items in this list of 10 CSS Tricks for UI developers – via @nnnirajn
- It’s effectively impossible to manage uploaded photos on Amazon Alexa devices using the iOS app because if you’ve uploaded more than about two dozen photos, the screen refreshes back to the top any time you scroll down more than a few pages. I posted about this on Twitter a few years ago, and I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed it.
- The complete lack of urgency from players and coaches, in the NFL and college, when down by two or more scores in Q4, makes me question whether any of these guys have ever played Madden. – via me
- The November 17th Bills–Chiefs matchup wasn’t just the game of the week, it was the most-watched NFL regular-season game of 2024 and the most-watched non-holiday game since 2007. – via @theathletichq
- If you’re bored with the standard New York Times puzzles — or looking for more ways to avoid thinking about the impending collapse of society — Alphaguess and Wordiply are two other fun word games. Worldle is a fun geography game and Framed is a fun movie game. Or see if you can beat my streak of 19 at WikiTrivia. There’s also a sports version of Connections.
- Being a “safe space for both sides” means you’re not a safe space for one side. – via @lingeringperception
- Art Garfunkel describes tearful reunion with Paul Simon: “I cried when he told me how much I had hurt him.” – via @timcarmody
- “I know that you have what it takes to start healing.” – via Coach Bennett’s Newsletter
- “It’s 91 degrees in November… no idea why I’m saving for retirement. At no point did Mad Max check his 401k.” – via @rpgregory87
- The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece – via @mariapopova
- This lovely Martha Wainwright track (from the absolutely fantastic Big Little Lies soundtrack) might resonate with some of you lately.
- See also: “The point of winning was not to make themselves happy, it was to make everyone else miserable.” – via @duckswithpants
- These 10 CSS Code Snippets Every UI Developer Should Know and 10 Bootstrap Tricks Every UI Developer Should Know are both handy. – via Niraj Narkhede
I wish I could think of something uplifting or witty to say by now, but I don’t. I’m sure that day will come soon, but today I’m just … tired. Hopefully these links will brighten your day a little.
- Meet Armando Villarreal, the man behind college football’s coolest helmets. – via @theathletichq
- Choose your decade and channel-surf the past on virtual TV sets. – via Laura Olin, who has a fantastic newsletter
- Allegedly, you can now scrub your personal information from Google searches. Here’s how to do it.
- JSON Crack is a free, open-source data visualization app capable of transforming JSON (and several other structured formats) into interactive graphs. – via @sung.kim.mw
- “1500+ free HTML templates for websites, landing pages, blogs, portfolios, ecommerce and admin dashboards” – via @devluc
- Great news for people who love bad news: This year won’t just be the hottest on record — it could be the first to surpass the 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold laid out in the Paris climate accord. – via @scientific_american
“Vanity Fair hits it on the nail.” via @deirdre.assenza- Related: “Unfriendly reminder that good people don’t support rapists.” – via @iamayortrightkay
- Apropos of nothing: It’s nearly impossible to be a depressed ball of rage-filled anxiety while listening to Clair de lune. – via @gatordavid
- Please tell me Taylor is working on a “The White House” version of “The Black Dog”. And if she’s not, maybe Weird Al can get on it. I hope it’s shitty / in the White House… – via @gatordavid