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.
7 Ways to Stop Your Podcast Sounding Like Crap »
Shahid Kamal Ahmad of the Remaster podcast on Relay.fm offers some good tips:
Drink water before you start. Don’t gulp, sip! Make sure whatever you’re drinking is not cold. Your larynx has muscles. Before you have a tough workout, do you cool down, or do you warm up? Well then!
[...]
If you’re really serious, do a stripped down version of a singer’s warm up. You don’t have to sing scales, but you want your voice to be at its best. Hydration and warm up will help.
Photo: ImagineChina
Breathtaking Aerial Photos of Tulip Blossoms in Central China »
Yuan Can of People's Daily Online shares seven extraordinary aerial photos taken on March 31st, 2016 of tulip blossoms in Zhumadian (central China's Henan province).
A Look Into How Disney and Pixar Bring Life to Their Characters »
Jessica Swarts of Inverse examines how the little details in character animations make all the difference:
Disney and Pixar, in particular, excel at bringing to life colorful casts of animals and objects that not only portray a wide variety of emotion through facial expression, but also through body language. While there are plenty of animated talking animals that are essentially humans with ears and tails, the truly stand-out animals are characters that don’t just transpose a human’s movements on to the object, but extend the natural movements of the object to create that understandable personality.
[...]
Walt Disney himself even once said that “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real.”
Photo: Damien Kieken
Max Temkin's 2016 Indie Soapbox Talk »
I enjoyed this transcript of a recent talk by the founder of Cards Against Humanity:
You don’t win an election by convincing the most undecided voters. You win by getting the most people to vote for you. [...]
That makes this an incredibly exciting time for independent art and games, because we’re all able to talk to our +3s [diehard fans] for free, and get thousands of dollars of publicity out of a tweet. But the least successful indie developer in this room is doing a lot better than Twitter — Twitter has lost $2 billion since launching in 2006. Something’s got to give.
So of course this moment won’t last for long, capitalism abhors a vacuum. I don’t want this talk to be a downer, but I do want to just take my five minutes to appreciate how good things are for those of us in this room, right now.
Illustration: Zoe Olson
How the iPad Pro Changed My Illustrating Career »
15-year-old Zoe Olson wrote an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook about the illustration magic she discovered in the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil:
Before getting my hands on the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, I didn’t even know that I wanted to be a professional artist! Real paints were too messy and frustrating, and a Wacom Cintiq was too bulky and expensive for a career in art to be worth it to me. The iPad Pro has eliminated all excuses. It is the best of both worlds.
She even got a response from Tim for this piece! So cool.
Best of luck in your illustration career, Zoe. You've got a bright future ahead.
Animation/Graphic: ISVR
Everything You Should Know About Sound »
Tim Urban of Wait But Why:
I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high and low pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eight of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle.
I love how pumped he gets about learning things. Everyone should be so fascinated by the world.
Photo: Dave and Les Jacobs / Getty
Your Healthy Lifestyle Won't Necessarily Make You Healthier »
Sandro Galea, WIRED:
The idea that lifestyle modification can lead to a better, more illness-free existence is a seductive one. It seems to offer a way of taking real ownership of your health. It implies that, with the right knowledge, you can predict which maladies you stand the greatest chance of facing. This makes prevention seem simple: If you can see the train coming, in order to preserve life and limb, you need only step off the tracks. This is not, however, how disease actually works.
The takeaway: Environmental factors seem to overpower personal decisions. In other words, you should of course keep trying to live healthy (or start doing so), but know that it's not a miracle fix-all.
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