Matt Alldian

“My strip,” Watterson once said, “is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships.” Well, ditto for my relationship with the boy Calvin and his tiger Hobbes. Those adventures of a weirdo from another planet and his homicidal psycho jungle cat, their magical world in which the days are just packed with deranged mutant killer monster snow goons, that place where scientific progress goes “boink” and there’s treasure everywhere — they belong to their readers.

Matthew Morgan's gorgeous essay on Bill Watterson's fight for control over Calvin and Hobbes and his principles. I just learned about Nevin Martell's book "Looking for Calvin and Hobbes" and will be reading it soon.

Nearly 5,000 episodes across 90 series — from Zoo Quest in 1954 to Secret Garden in 2026. Search by animal, habitat, location, natural phenomenon, or theme to find exactly the episode you’re looking for.

Searchable archive of nearly 5,000 David Attenborough TV episodes via kottke.org

There are an incredible number of people who desire to connect with the land and learn how they can work with the plants in their region. There are already many online resources and books available to begin foraging but I believe the best way to begin foraging is by learning from a knowledgeable forager in your area. Many local foragers are out there, but they can be hard to find, especially for people who have just awakened to this possibility.

FindaForager.com database connects people with local foragers across US and Canada.

A dictionary asks: what is this color called? A pigment compendium asks: what is it made of? This catalogue asks both, and also: who paid for it, in money or in poison? Who painted with it before they knew what it was doing to them? When was it banned, and which sweeter substitute replaced it on the shelf?

Storied Colors - history and context for named colors.

Words of Type brings together the terms used in typography, illustrated and explained in multiple languages.

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This is the first version of the encyclopedia. It includes 200 terms covering multiple categories, such as type design anatomy, digital and analog typography, historical, technological and conceptual terms, as well as terms specific to certain scripts.

The fantastic, illustrated Words of Type encyclopedia,

Mesh networking over the airwaves presents a very unique opportunity for our societies. We could build a resilient, peer-to-peer network that coexists with the internet, enabling connectivity in currently underserved regions and increasing our personal sovereignty online by maintaining a functional backup to the internet for our most critical needs.

It's also just a freeing feeling to be able to send a message to someone else relying only on devices that you and people in your network own outright, instead of renting the capability to do so from your local ISP or Elon Musk's Starlink.

Jonah is getting into mesh networks... so am I!

Geist Pixel is a bitmap-inspired typeface built on the same foundations as Geist Sans and Geist Mono, reinterpreted through a strict pixel grid. It's precise, intentional, and unapologetically digital.

Vercel recently introduced the Geist Pixel addition to their Geist font family, and I love it. via unsung

One is that, given that the attractiveness of owning vs. renting can vary depending on the person and the state of the housing market, making a broader array of rental options available for people is a positive thing. I remember years ago when I was trying to find a large (3+ bedroom) place to rent, and how difficult it was to find rentals that size in the area I was looking in. Giving people more ways to purchase housing is good, the same way it’s good for people to have the option to buy or lease a new car.

Second, it’s clear that many folks strongly believe that large-scale corporate ownership of rental housing (which would include BTR communities) is something that can have negative effects on the housing market. But I think it’s more useful to think of the popularity of rental housing as something that’s a product of the housing market: it’s a natural consequence of housing getting increasingly unaffordable thanks to high interest rates and skyrocketing housing prices. Shutting down BTR is a poor way to address that problem; what we need to do is build more housing and develop construction methods that let us construct buildings more cheaply.

A fantastic writeup by Construction Physics on the birth of build-to-rent housing, it's growth, and current controversy.

Some of my projects - spanning tools, toys, and AI experiments.

Sam and Samuel sit down with our Art Director, Atalanta, a sculptor by training, and talk all things sculpture. They discuss how art education has become de-skilled, how sculpture has always been the best art form for mass production and the surprising places the tradition has been kept alive.

Works in Progress on why America lacks sculptors for mass statue revival.

“To choose Inuit wayfinding,” the ethnographers conclude, “becomes increasingly heroic in the face of wayfinding that depends on an advanced technological system.”

It may be a losing battle to demand that basic acts of competence require heroism. But I still think it’s worth noticing what assumptions that Silicon Valley steam engine metaphor is trying to force us to accept.

Tim Requarth's essay on AI as steam engine, instead of a bicycle.

Most people believe that their personal learning goals will be obvious and easily remembered. But in practice, people often fail to achieve learning goals not for lack of desire to achieve them, but because the goals themselves are underspecified.

Because of this, when we encounter real obstacles in our lives, we often lack concrete plans that cue us how to work toward our goals when things get hard. This pattern can undermine learning progress and sap our motivation.

Learning Goal Claude Code skill uses psychology-backed goal-setting to maintain learning while coding with AI - by Dr. Cat Hicks.