Welcome to this week’s edition of our Friday Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
Photo: Shawn Blanc
Initial Thoughts on Some Research and Notes Apps »
I always appreciate when Shawn Blanc (our editor-in-chief here at T&T) geeks out about apps. Case in point:
I’ve been writing for a living since 2011 and despite my greatest fears, I’ve never had a shortage of ideas. For nearly a decade all of my ideas and notes have been kept in Simplenote. But for the past year or so I’ve been wanting a system that is just a little bit more complex than what I’m currently using.
I’m in a similar mental place when it comes to notetaking apps. I’ve been using Simplenote on iOS for quite a while now, but occasionally I find it helpful to sit and think about why I still use certain apps and if I’d benefit from making a switch. Bear is the only one I’ve tested that seems promising, but I need to play with it a lot more before I decide whether or not it’s worth moving all my notes over.
+ Another recent post by Shawn worth reading: “Purposeful Mentorship”, which has a quote I love: A dear friend of mine once said: “You’re not truly my friend until you’ve corrected me.”
Photo: Chinh Le Duc
Language Alters Our Experience of Time »
Warning: Article contains immediate spoilers for Arrival, the 2016 film starring Amy Adams.
Lancaster University professor Panos Athanasopoulos wrote an interesting piece for The Conversation about the ways various languages deal with the concept of time:
Time is fascinating because it is very abstract. We cannot touch or see it but we organise our whole lives around it. The really cool thing about time is the way we actually experience it is in some ways up to our imagination and our language. Because time is so abstract, the only way to talk about it is by using the terminology from another, more concrete domain of experience, namely that of space.
[…]
Those that are bilingual in Spanish (a future-in-front language like English) tend to make forward moving gestures, whereas those with little or no knowledge of Spanish gesture backwards (consistent with the Aymara future-is-behind pattern), when talking about the future. Mandarin Chinese employs a vertical time axis alongside a horizontal one. The word xià (down) is used to talk about future events, so when referring to “next week” a Mandarin Chinese speaker would literally say “down week”. The word shàng (up) is used to talk about the past – so “last week” becomes “up one week”. This affects the way observers perceive the spatial unfolding of the ageing process.
Orange Crispy Chicken Sandwich Recipe »
Thanks to a recent post on r/GifRecipes, I discovered this crispy orange chicken sandwich recipe by Tastemade that I’ve definitely gotta try. (The chicken alone tickles the part of my brain that gets cravings for Panda Express.)
+ Another great gif’d recipe I found on that subreddit the other day: Chewy chocolate chip cookies.
Photo: Kito Fujio
Photo: Kito Fujio
Photos of Japanese Playground Equipment at Night »
Johnny Strategy of Spoon & Tomago shares a series of otherworldly photos by Kito Fujio capturing the nighttime weirdness of playground equipment found around Japan:
The sculptural, cement-molded play equipment is often modeled after animals that children would be familiar with. But they also take on the form of robots, abstract geometric forms and sometimes even household appliances. Fujio’s process is not entirely clear, but it appears he visits the parks at night and lights up the equipment from the inside, but also from the outside, which often creates an ominous feel to the harmless equipment.
Gareth Branwyn’s Weekly Tips for Makers »
Here’s a neat tip that was recently shared by Kevin Kelly via the Recomendo newsletter:
Every week Gareth Branwyn gathers the best workshop and maker tips he finds online and posts them on the “Tip” section of the Make website. There’s always a couple of good ones. Like last week: use the search term “grandfather’s” when searching Craigslist for bargains such as old tools, lumber, and other materials generated when someone clears out grandfather’s stuff.
From that same search method Kevin mentioned:
This reminds me of a similar tip I used years ago to get some amazing deals on eBay: search on misspellings of your search terms. Those listening get far less traffic due to the spelling error.
Photo: Wonjun Jeong
Photo: Wonjun Jeong
Conversations in the Sky »
Brit Seaton of Īgnant shared a neat photographic project by Wonjun Jeong called “Conversation” where he projected images of peoples’ faces onto cloth thrown into the air:
The project is conceptually rooted in the thoughts of French Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his theories of ‘the Other’. Levinas considered this to be an unknowable entity–a visage, completely dissimilar to oneself and impossible to bring into comparison. In ‘Conversation’, Wonjun Jeong visually interprets this idea, projecting the image of a face onto a cloth thrown aimlessly into the air of dawn and dusk skies. Cast onto unsubstantial lightweight material, the projection emerges as the Other. It is this materialisation of the visage that signifies a conversation with the Other, gesturing the emergence of a passage to “transcend from the enclosed inner self to the outer world.” Capturing the performative element of ‘Conversation’ through photography not only preserves an ephemeral moment, it signifies the meeting of two worlds and finding oneself in the process.
Bustin »
Let’s finish this week’s linkage with something that’s been stuck in my head all week: Neil Cicierega’s hilarious and somehow-catchier-than-the-original remix of the Ghostbusters song.
♫ Bustin, bustin, bustin, bustin, bustin… ♫
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.