#Kurt Kohlstedt

[rainbowfic]

Standing on a forty-foot-high platform at the New York Crystal Palace, he gestured to an assistant to cut a support rope to simulate a snapped elevator cable. Otis fell just a few inches before his automatic brake kicked in and brought the platform to a halt, eliciting cheers from the audience. While Otis didn’t dream up the idea of a vertical lift system, he made it safer and showed off its safety in style.

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt

[crabs-but-better]

9 ppl to get to know better

tagged by @howldean ‼️🫶

list 3 ships you like: the ones i’ve been into the most lately would be forthur (h2g2), hilson (house md) and valvert (les mis). destiel forever tho 💪

first ship ever: this is difficult because I’m not sure where shipping starts, yknow? like there were definitely relationships that i liked from a young age, but that was before I knew about the concept of shipping, so idk if it counts. the first ship i ever participated in fandom or read fanfic for was edwin (fmab), so i’ll call that my first ship.

last song you heard: where is my mind by pixies cus i have to learn the guitar part for this band thing i’m doing

favorite childhood book: JUNIE B JONES 💯 I WAS OBSESSED. OWNED THE WHOLE COLLECTION

currently reading: ‘The 99% Invisible City’ by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt for pleasure (city design!! based career) and ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston for school (but for pleasure too cus it’s a rlly good book, highly recommend).

currently watching: i started Northern Exposure w my dad recently. i’m also doing a house rewatch.

currently consuming: just had a bowl of cereal 👍

currently craving: the tender embrace of a lover (or a really good fish fry)

tagging: @mister-finally-found-himself @incidentalblr @youre-only-gay-once @angel-of-fallen-dreams @discourseposter @pisshandkerchief @shcherbatskya @anglerflsh @crowli-wan (nine people is a lot so i tagged some mutuals even if we’ve never talked 🫶 sorry) (+anyone else who wants to do it is welcome to! just tag me in the response :)

[kithpendragon]

About this blog

Pronouns: they/them

Visit my side blog, @kithcrafts, to see my hoby related stuff. Currently I mostly paint miniatures (I'm trying to do about one per week), and I'll occasionally post art photography or linocut prints as I feel inspired.

Currently Reading:

Active:

Tin Soldier and Soldier On [link] by @nokingsonlyfooles

Just Stab me Now by Jill Bearup

99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

On deck:

Engineering in Plain Sight by Grady Hillhouse

ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Live by Judith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau

Color and Light - A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith

What Feasts at Night by @tkingfisher

Join me for some Science:

[protoslacker]

Karen Blaha - Flickr: Daffodils and serpentine wall

A friend online posted the question about crinkle crankle walls: How could it be that these walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall? I'm pretty sure he knew the answer when he posted, and probably figured folks would enjoy finding out more about sinusoidal walls.

I enjoyed this short article at My Modern Met, These Wavy Brick Walls Found Across England Use Fewer Bricks Than Straight Walls. There's a great link to a post by John Cook about the calculus of these walls. The article also mentions the walls were often constructed in order to grow fruit against them. Here's an article by Kurt Kohlstedt, Fruit Walls: Before Greenhouses, Walled Gardens Created Urban Micro-Climates.

[kithpendragon]

If you define "book" and "reading" both as broadly as you should...

Active:

Tin Soldier and Soldier On [link] by @nokingsonlyfooles

Paladin's Faith by @tkingfisher

99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

The Magnus Archives [link] by Jonathan Sims

On deck:

Engineering in Plain Sight by Grady Hillhouse

ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Live by Judith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau

Color and Light - A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith

Just Stab me Now by Jill Bearup

What Feasts at Night by @tkingfisher

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[nstaaf-book]

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

[bigtickhk]

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt https://amzn.to/3iM73sq

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/99piorg/status/1006712655170527234

The now-iconic 1970 World Cup soccer ball was designed to show up on black-and-white televisions. It was named after the 1962 Telstar (“television” + “star") satellite that transmitted the first live global TV signals through space. https://t.co/1RV2mU1b0Y

— 99 Percent Invisible (@99piorg)

June 13, 2018

[bookclub4m]

Episode 158 - Audiobook Fiction

This episode we’re talking about Audiobook Fiction! We discuss narrators vs casts, sound effects, music, adaptations, footnotes, and more! Plus: How do you picture the hosts in your mind when you listen to us?

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jam Edwards

Things We Read (or tried to…)

Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, narrated by a full cast

Coasting Trade by Robin McGrath, narrated by Robert Joy, Rick Boland, and Anita Best 

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, narrated by Tanya Eby

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, narrated by Nancy Wu

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, narrated by Hillary Huber

Other Media We Mentioned

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Tertiary to Hexagonal Phases (Wikipedia)

The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama) (Wikipedia)

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

Welcome to Nightvale (podcast)

Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes #1 by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

99% Invisible (podcast)

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Control (video game)

Control || Talking Simulator

Nimona by N.D. Stevenson

Nimona by N.D. Stevenson, narrated by Rebecca Soler, Jonathan Davis, and Marc Thompson

The Stanley Parable (Wikipedia) (it’s not quite as narrated as Matthew and Jam implied)

Official website

Gadsby (novel) by Ernest Vincent Wright (Wikipedia)

“does not include any words that contain the letter E”

A Void by Georges Perec (Wikipedia)

“entirely without using the letter e”

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

My Brain is Different: Histoires of ADHD and Other Developmental Disorders by MONNZUSU

Project X: Challengers - Seven Eleven by Tadashi Ikuta and Namoi Kimura

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, narrated by Ray Porter

The Sandman (audiobook version)

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, narrated by Marin Ireland

 House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Links, Articles, and Things

Episode 133 - Flash Fiction

Episode 108 - Visual Novels

Serre - Kinda bilingual anglos play French-language Visual Novel

Episode 027 - Non-Fiction Audiobooks

Audie Awards

Turns Out Not Everyone Can Picture Things In Their Mind And Sorry, What?

Lowly Worm (Wikipedia)

Let's Play (Wikipedia)

Oulipo (Wikipedia)

24-hour comic

Episode 047b - Terrible Stories by Matthew (you have been warned)

Episode 142 - Sequels and 2022: The Year of Book Two

ISO 8601 (Wikipedia) (date standard)

June Is #audiomonth: Narrator Trading Cards Giveaway

Two-Fisted Library Stories (Twitter bot) 

Digital Accessible Information System (Wikipedia)

20 Fiction Audiobooks written & read by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors and Narrators

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen, narrated by Catherine Ho

Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley, narrated by Isabella Star LaBlanc

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, narrated by the author

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson, narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, narrated by Emily Woo Zeller

The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe, Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Sheree Renée Thomas; narrated by Janelle Monae and Bahni Turpin

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley, narrated by Joniece Abbott-Pratt

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, narrated by Nancy Wu

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, narrated by Robin Miles

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi, narrated by Adepero Oduye

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka, narrated by Traci Kato-Kiriyama

The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote narrated by the author, Christian Nagler, Fantasia Painter, Drew Woodson, Phillip Cash Cash and Keevin Hesuse

Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma, narrated by Soneela Nankani, Sunil Malhotra and Vikas Adam

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, narrated by Cherise Boothe

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto, narrated by Risa Mei

The Strangers by Katherena Vermette, narrated by Michaela Washburn

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, narrated by the author

Zone One by Colson Whitehead, narrated by Beresford Bennett

The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson, narrated by Kyla Garcia

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, narrated by Joel de la Fuente

Give us feedback!

Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!

Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, September 20th when we’ll be discussing the winner of our “we all read the same book” poll and discussing Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart!

Then on Tuesday, October 4th we’ll be talking about the genre of Fictional Biographies!

[vfdinthewild]

“Many Japanese manhold covers have other less visible features designed with safety and quality of life in mind.”

-from The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars, pg. 110

[rainbowfic]

A Swedish television station even held a contest to write the best song to help people remember the imminent switch [from driving on the left to driving on the right]. The winner, “Håll Dej Till Höger, Svensson” (“Stick to the Right, Svensson”) by the Telstars, involved a bit of a double entendre. In Swedish, “keeping to the right” is shorthand for being faithful to your spouse while “going left” means having an affair.

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt

[demi-shoggoth]

2021 Reading Log, pt 23

111. Extreme Medicine by Kevin Fong, MD. Given the cover depicting a mountaineer and the subtitle referring to “exploration”, I thought that this book was going to be about medicine related to the age of exploration and the extremes of conditions on Earth. It’s not, really, except when it sometimes is. “Exploration” is used as a metaphor for experimental therapies here, except when it does actually refer to people at the limits of human experience, like free diving and space travel. The book is kind of less than the sum of its parts—although individual chapters are well written, the muddled theme and lack of focus hurt the book.

112. Crocodiles of the World by Colin Stevenson. Adding to Lizards of the World in the theme of “older herpetologists being cranky about taxonomic revision”; a fair bit of page count is spent grousing about the trend towards taxonomic splitting and the uncertain position of the tomistoma. About the first third of the book is a general overview of crocodile evolution, anatomy and behavior, and then the remainder is species accounts. Since there are relatively few species of crocodiles, it can actually spend some time with each species. The book is very pretty, although some of the photos are reproduced at a small enough size it’s hard to make out details.

113. Super Fly by Jonathan Halcombe. I welcome this (small) influx of books about flies for general audiences. As Halcombe says, with their numbers and ecological diversity, flies are “god’s favorites” (there’s some smack talk in the book between dipterists and coleopterists, which is hilarious). The book is divided into three blocks of chapters—a how and why of flies, a section on varying fly ecologies, and a social history of the interactions between flies and people. Halcombe wrote What A Fish Knows, and is clearly most interested in animal cognition, which leads to my biggest problem in the book. At the beginning, he equivocates on whether or not he thinks flies have a form of consciousness, and then spends the rest of the book clearly believing that that is the case. Don’t play coy with your readers, my dude! If you’re going to make a big claim, stick to it!

114. The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt. You know the expression “a book you can’t put down”? This was a book I couldn’t pick up. The actual act of reading it was pleasant enough, but my attention kept wandering and I kept finding other things to do. The makeup of the book is short essays on topics of urban design—why are manhole covers round, the arms races between skyscrapers, the development of and resistance to hostile architecture. I think this book would be better in chunks, reading an article or two at a time, instead of powering through it as I did. One thing I actively disliked, as opposed to being generally neutral to positive on, was the art. It’s done in a messy line style that makes it difficult to know what it is I’m supposed to be looking for. I had to Google what a “mansard roof” was, for example, because I couldn’t tell from the illustration.

115. Ants: Workers of the World. Photography by Eduard Florin Niga, text by Eleanor Spicer Rice. The photography credit is first of a reason. This is an art book of ants, macrophotographs of their bodies and head capsules, close enough to see ever little hair and dent in their carapace. There is some information on the species depicted, but a few paragraphs worth per genus. It is a gorgeous book, but very short. An enjoyable coffee table book, but I’m glad I got it from a library, because I’m not likely to re-read it.

[citymaus]

“BART is feeling the pinch from fare evaders, which cost the agency an estimated $15 to $25 million annually. The agency responded by launching a fare inspection program last year and is designing taller gates around BART stations. The double-tall fare gates are designed so people can’t vault over them.

BART’s new double-tall fare gates at Richmond station feature two sets of mechanical wedges that cinch together after BART riders pass through them. New gates will soon will be piloted at other stations, and are part of BART’s multi-million dollar effort to clamp down on fare evaders.

BART also designed these wedges to stay shut with more pressure to prevent them from being forced open by fare cheats.”

corbett otoole, a wheelchair and BART user. 

“BART is currently under fire for its pilot project aimed at preventing fare evaders from jumping through turnstiles with newly-installed modifications to gates at the Richmond and Fruitvale stations. The retrofitted gates, officially presented to BART's board of directors as 'Double-Decker' and 'Pop-Up' modifications, have been derided as 'skull-crushers' and 'inverted guillotine' gates by riders on Twitter.

"I haven't seen anything that even comes close to the overt hostility of these inverted guillotine prototypes," says Kurt Kohlstedt, digital director and producer for the architecture and design podcast 99% Invisible. "Usually they try to hide it better! I've encountered a lot of hostile design, but this one really takes the cake."

In a viral tweet over the weekend, BART riders expressed their concerns over a recent fare-evasion modification pilot gate spotted at Fruitvale station. Many were quick to point out how the preventative effort is a disturbing example of anti-poor, anti-homeless and ableist design. Others called the prototypes an extreme example of hostile architecture.”

at fruitvale station, the “blades” pop up from the pie slice gates. 

read more: kqed, 23.07.19. sfexaminer, 12.06.19. 

[sergiosantos]

Books read in 2022

All the books I read in 2022, with a ⭐️ next to my favourites. You can also check my lists for 2020 and 2021.

Fiction

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin ⭐ The Last of the Masters - Philip K. Dick The Carpet Makers - Andreas Eschbach ⭐ Death's End - Liu Cixin The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis - José Saramago Seeing - José Saramago La Diagonale Alekhine - Arthur Larrue The Man Who Planted Trees - Jean Giono The Castle - Franz Kafka The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️ The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem

Non-fiction

Blockchain Chicken Farm - Xiaowei Wang ⭐ On Anarchism - Noam Chomsky A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide - Cyd Harrell The Anarchist Handbook - Michael Malice Nea Kavala, Nea Kavala - Frederico Martinho The DisCO Elements Selected Writings - Mikhail Bakunin Bobby Fischer goes to War - David Edmonds & John Eidinow Play Winning Chess - Yasser Seirawan Kraftwerk - Uwe Schütte On Tennis - David Foster Wallace Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher Judgment of Paris - George M. Taber Voices from the Valley - Moira Weigel & Ben Tarnoff Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? - Linda Nochlin Soft City - David Sim The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto Che Guevara Rebel Ideas - Matthew Syed Wine and War - Don Kladstrup Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman ⭐ The One-Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka Movement - Thalia Verkade ⭐ The Permaculture City - Toby Hemenway The Race Against the Stasi - Herbie Sykes The 99% Invisible City - Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars The Captive Mind - Czesław Miłosz Consider the Oyster - M. F. K. Fisher The Kronstadt Uprising - Ida Mett Post-scarcity Anarchism - Murray Bookchin

[franklinsense]

War, Famine, Pestilence, and Design

When Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt were promoting The 99% Invisible City in late 2020, one question came up over and over again in conversations and interviews about our built environment: in what ways will the COVID pandemic change cities long term? Realistically, it’s hard to answer a question a from Pocket https://ift.tt/2VCMMjf via IFTTT