That Time Kottke Was on Halt and Catch Fire

October 8, 2017 9:39 PM

Now, I don’t know if you know this about me or not, but I love the web. (Oh, you could tell? I let that slip at some point?) And I am so very nostalgic for the early days of the web in the 90s — the Mosaic days, the Altavista days, the Bobaweb days, the Entropy8 days, the Suck days, the CSotD days, the alt.culture.days, the 0sil8 days, the Yahoo on the akebono server at Stanford days.
posted by cgc373 (20 comments total)

Very very cool . Happy for Jason.
posted by davidmsc at 9:52 PM on October 8, 2017

I'm pretty sure a link on Kottke is where I found Metafilter in the first place. He's been my calm, interesting guidepost to the best bits of the internet since I was fifteen, around half my life.

Get that good stuff, Jason. Lord knows you deserve it.
posted by pseudonymph at 10:15 PM on October 8, 2017 [7 favorites]

0sil8 is my Halflife 3, but Jason knows this already.
posted by holgate at 10:50 PM on October 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Ahem, Metafilter's own Jason Kottke. (Albeit long since inactive.)

Jason plays a very interesting role in Internet culture. I suspect no one under 30 has any idea who he is. Anyone over 40 of the Internet culture knows and respects him. He's widely watched by journalists for coolhunting purposes. My own tiny rivers project got a lot of pick up thanks mostly to being featured on kottke.org: all the way to the print edition of Reader's Digest, if you'd believe it.

I love his enthusiasm for getting to do this fun thing.
posted by Nelson at 1:21 AM on October 9, 2017 [12 favorites]

Jason is one of the coolest guys on the web.

I don't watch that program(I just couldn't get into it), but I will tune in to see his cameo.
posted by james33 at 3:42 AM on October 9, 2017

Kottke.org has been on my rss feed since forever but it's really been stale for a while. It's rare that I see something on there that I haven't already seen on multiple other sites.
posted by octothorpe at 4:49 AM on October 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

Jason plays a very interesting role in Internet culture. I suspect no one under 30 has any idea who he is. Anyone over 40 of the Internet culture knows and respects him.

Well I am 34 and have been reading kottke as long as I've been here (~15 years) so I guess I am part of the Lost Decade of Jasonites, tales of which are only whispers in the darkened taverns of the intertubes.

Really though, very cool for him and his site is still a daily read for me - solid, enthusiastic, interesting, sometimes emotionally impactful and gripping when he decides to engage on a particular issue. He's a mensch and I wish him the best.
posted by lazaruslong at 5:31 AM on October 9, 2017 [6 favorites]

Kottke.org has been on my rss feed since forever but it's really been stale for a while. It's rare that I see something on there that I haven't already seen on multiple other sites.

I noticed the same thing, and he must have some bad code in his RSS feed as I can not unsubscribe. TT-RSS simply will not delete that feed. I'm going to have log into mySQL if I really want to delete it. Instead I took it as a sign that Kottke.org should be in my RSS feedreader forever.
posted by COD at 6:21 AM on October 9, 2017

In the spirit of nostalgia and by less than popular demand, return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past comes a 154 comment megathread on The best blog there is, period! A must read for the digerati and the newbie alike.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:06 AM on October 9, 2017 [4 favorites]

Man I don't know what's wrong with me but I've disliked Jason Kottke since ... like ... ever. The first time I can remember seeing one of his sites it looked like the second screenshot on this page so that'd be 1996ish, I guess.

I have absolutely no idea why I don't like him. Maybe he said one single thing once twenty years ago that I didn't like and I'm really good at holding a grudge? Maybe one of my friends idolized him too much and I was being contrary? Like I said, I have no idea. All I know is when I see the word 'kottke' I find my instant reaction is "ugh" and I've never even explored that until this post.

So if you all think this guy has been the bee's knees for two decades now maybe I should, y'know, check his stuff out sometime and try to dismiss whatever past grudge has kept me ignoring him for basically half of my entire life.
posted by komara at 7:19 AM on October 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

> the Suck days

*sigh* Polly Esther, Terry Colon, Filler... There was a time I used to look forward to Wednesday.
posted by giraffeneckbattle at 7:32 AM on October 9, 2017 [4 favorites]

I have absolutely no idea why I don't like him.

Possibly the general air of smug self-satisfaction that the "A-list bloggers" outgassed, whether they meant to or not.
posted by thelonius at 7:55 AM on October 9, 2017 [10 favorites]

octobersurprise: "In the spirit of nostalgia and by less than popular demand, return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past comes a 154 comment megathread on The best blog there is, period! A must read for the digerati and the newbie alike."

Huh. I had no idea that Kottke was such a thing in the early days of Metafilter. Also the bar for a post on the blue was pretty low back then.
posted by octothorpe at 8:26 AM on October 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

I’m 28 and I’ve known who Kottke is since I was probably 9 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by gucci mane at 8:51 AM on October 9, 2017

I worked with Jason in 2000 and 2001 when he was still in Minneapolis. He was a really good co-worker - productive, responsive, cared a lot about what he was doing and fun to talk to in the break room about all kinds of stuff. If I didn't learn about MetaFilter from him, it was from someone he linked to. There was never an "air of smug self-satisfaction" about him, at least in person.

There are a ton of things I first heard about from Jason, some but not all through his website. TiVo, SXSW, Blogger, I don't even know what else.

I remember a couple of us at the company rolling our eyes together at his expressed goal to someday make a living as a blogger. The notion, at that time, that being a blogger was something anybody would ever pay you for was just crazy. Guess he showed us.
posted by nickmark at 9:29 AM on October 9, 2017 [6 favorites]

Possibly the general air of smug self-satisfaction that the "A-list bloggers" outgassed, whether they meant to or not.

No way. I've been reading Kottke daily since the late nineties and he has never seemed anything but smart, decent, genuine and humble.
posted by davebush at 11:40 AM on October 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

There was never an "air of smug self-satisfaction" about him, at least in person.
I'm sure he's a lovely man.

No way. I've been reading Kottke daily since the late nineties and he has never seemed anything but smart, decent, genuine and humble.
It's probably me. Or backlash to the adulation that you can see in the old thread linked above.
posted by thelonius at 11:43 AM on October 9, 2017

At this point, Kottke is the only blog I still regularly visit without being linked from elsewhere. (Also, an under 30.)
posted by waninggibbon at 12:09 PM on October 9, 2017

I've met Kottke in person and he was kind and humble. I, a complete nobody with a blog, also told him he was wrong on the Internet once sometime in 2004, and he updated his post to quote my correction and said "my ass has been fact checked and it’s a little sore."

So he's all right in my book. And I still read his site from time to time, although now it's more of an amusing diversion than an essential lifeline to vital news due to the growth of the Web and career changes on my part.

Also, I grew up in the 70s and he looks more like someone from the 70s than anyone I actually saw in the 70s.
posted by mmoncur at 3:47 PM on October 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

Jason Kottke's Bacon number is 2: Jason was in Halt and Catch Fire with Toby Huss, who plays John Bosworth; Huss was in the movie R.I.P.D. with Kevin Bacon. Congratulations, Jason!
posted by willF at 5:55 PM on October 9, 2017 [4 favorites]