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.
📸🏆: This week we open with two (count ’em TWO!) sets of photography awards winners:
- 🙈 The 2020 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards — Some truly hilarious stuff in here.
- 🪐 And the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2020 (sponsored by Insight Investment for some reason?) — As spectacular an array of images as you’d expect.
🧠: Jason Kottke assembled some Twitter threads by @absurdistwords about how we need to rethink the language we use about slavery. Certainly shines a light on something I hadn’t thought deeply enough about until now.
+ On a somewhat related note: Comedian and artist “lincnotfound” did a Twitter thread of his own where he painted funny portraits of US presidents before and after being called out as slaveowners.
🤯: While I’m linking to Twitter stuff, Cabel Sasser of Panic recently shared an extremely clever little UI mockup tip involving using SF Symbols and SF Fonts to create quick placeholder glyphs.
🛠: Christian Heilmann of Microsoft argues that “tools should not only be for experts, they should turn us into them.” It’s mostly about web developer stuff, but he presents an interesting idea here that could apply to design apps and probably a lot of other things.
⚡️🧪: Chemistry lesson of the day: Did you know that mixing super glue and baking soda quickly creates a kind of cement-y substance that can be used to hold things together, fill cracks/holes, etc? I didn’t!
📱: Friend of the site Matthew Cassinelli recently released the iOS 14 edition of his massive (and free!) Siri Shortcuts Catalog:
This is a public resource designed to help people get started with Siri Shortcuts and the Shortcuts app.
It’s made up of the Shortcuts Library, a collection of over 300 shortcuts grouped into folders, and the Action Directory, a documentation of 300 of the actions in the Shortcuts app used to build shortcuts.
He’s also launched a membership with a number of benefits for subscribers browsing the catalog, such as bonus info, custom sorting, prerelease material, and more.
💨🔥: After picking up a set of huge 19th-century bellows, the guys at Townsends were able to hand-create their own historical-style bellows for blacksmithing purposes:
All the little engineering details are fascinating, I hadn’t realized bellows were so complex inside!
🎷👀: Paravel lead designer Reagan Ray collected a bunch of gorgeous lettering examples from notable jazz musicians’ albums, the sum of which creates a fantastic gallery of timeless graphic design that wouldn’t at all look out of place today.
🎹: This series of performances of four of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus by Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel is positively sublime. Every single note is perfect and played with evident passion. I don’t have better words to describe it, you’ll just have to set aside half an hour and enjoy.
🕺🕺🕺: Okay, one more Twitter thing and we’ll close out for the week. I came across an account called “dynamite choreography but its other songs” that takes the same video of K-pop boy band BTS dancing and dubs other songs over it.
This is the first one I saw and it’s a gem:
— dynamite choreography but its other songs (@btsdynamitedanc) September 11, 2020
Neat Stuff We’ve Published Recently
- Coming in February, Quests of Yore: Barley’s Edition is a DnD-style adventure game based on the one from Disney/Pixar’s film, Onward.
- De Gaulle by Julian Jackson is a magnificent single-volume biography the manages to capture the monumental life of former French president Charles de Gaulle.
- Rest your hard-working feet in these plush memory foam slippers, even if you only have to step outside for a moment.
- Figure out what you’re doing (probably) in 2021 with Adam J. Kurtz’s offbeat, optimistic planner.
- Opti-Free’s “PureMoist” contact lens solution provides hydration throughout the day for maximum eye comfort, plus it cleans and disinfects your silicone hydrogel and soft (hydrophilic) lenses between uses.
- Jellycat makes cute, super soft stuffed animals with plenty of quirky personality.
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.