Welcome to this week’s edition of our 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.
🌲😌: Ever wished you could just get away from it all? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell got to see first-hand what that’s like when he sat alone in a forest for 24 hours doing absolutely nothing. This beautifully written piece really resonated with me, and I’m not alone: “There’s something so elemental about the idea of just ‘being’. Not ‘doing’ or ‘recording’ or ‘having an experience’ – I would love to try it.”
📒: You already know of Wikipedia. Maybe you also know of Wiktionary and Wikiquote. But did you know Wikimedia is also home to a free online cookbook with recipes from around the world? They’ve got all kinds of useful stuff in here, like info on common ingredients, a section of recipes listed by expense (which could admittedly use some work but is still promising), recipes for special diets, and much more.
I swear, Wikimedia is a gift to the world. What an invaluable resource they’ve created. (Of course, you have to remember going in that the info is user-submitted and edited, so take everything you read there…er, with a grain of salt.)
🎭: If you’ve ever needed reasons not to pursue fame, Tim Ferriss has you covered. I had no idea that the threat of kidnapping alone was so prevalent:
It’s common practice for organized crime to have an arrangement to buy flight manifests from airport employees. This means that the potential kidnappers, much like a Michelin three-star restaurant, will Google every name associated with every seat to figure out exactly who is who. If you appear to make an attractive target, they will then go to the airport an hour before you land, find the driver with your name on a sign, and pay or threaten them to leave. They then replace your driver with their own driver, who now holds the sign and waits for you.
Holy cow! This is probably the biggest takeaway though:
If I’ve learned anything, it is this: fame will not fix your problems.
Instead, fame is likely to magnify all of your insecurities and exaggerate all of your fears. It’s like picking up a fire extinguisher for your pain that ends up being a canister of gasoline.
👀: Love the color schemes and geometric forms of these paper airships by French artists Zim & Zou. They’ve got loads more photos of the exhibition on their own site.
🗺: Andrei Kashcha created a cool way to render every single road within any city at once, often to beautiful result. It works by fetching free data from OpenStreetMap and rendering the roads with WebGL. Pretty fun to play with.
🗣: As part of the ever-excellent “Earworm” series for Vox, Estelle Caswell got a behind-the-scenes look at how an opera at the Met is made, primarily from the perspective of countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.
🎨: Artist David Ambarzumjan has a brilliant series of paintings called “Brushstrokes in Time” where he paints an entire scene in full before going over it with a huge brush stroke that he then paints as a painting-within-a-painting. Sounds even more stressful than Bob Ross making big last-minute changes to his paintings, but you can’t argue with the results.
Neat Stuff We’ve Published Recently
- Brod & Taylor’s folding bread proofer + slow cooker is an almost excessively useful addition to your kitchen.
- Every kitchen should have a heavy mortar and pestle on hand.
- We’ve got another new course for you over at The Sweet Setup, this time on mastering mind maps.
- You can finally build your own LEGO ISS to put on display.
- An inflatable travel pillow inspired by massage chairs? Yes please.
- Fujifilm’s upcoming X100V digital camera looks to be their most Leica-esque yet. (In the best way.)
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.