? Happy Day-After-Halloween, everyone! ?
Welcome to the latest edition of our Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting spooooky and entertaining haaaaunting links. Brew a fresh cup cauldron of coffee potion, find a comfortable place coffin, and relax.
(Okay, I'll stop now. I'm a day late anyways :\)
☕️?: Somehow, it only feels appropriate to kick off this week's link list with this personal attack of a video:
The attacks just keep coming:
✍️: Over at our sister site The Sweet Setup, we've been putting up some really great stuff. This week featured articles on...
- Building a daily writing habit.
- Our ✌️“first impressions”✌️ of the iPhone 12 Pro (I use air-quotes because the thing reads more like an actual review than just some impressions; I mean look at those photos ?).
- We held a whole mini-masterclass on using Ulysses as the center of one's writing workflow.
- And finally, we've published the first major update in three years of our review of the best GTD app.
??: You may or may not remember back in February 2017 when I linked to a chef's visit to the Bordier butter factory in Brittany, France.
Well, now I'm here to link you to this video from 6 months ago, wherein Claudia Romeo of Insider, as part of her “Regional Eats” series, got to meet artisan butter maker Jean-Yves Bordier himself and learn how his factory uses 19th century hand techniques to give its butter such a unique and luxurious texture (not to mention an interesting series of flavor profiles, like seaweed-infused butter??).
As delicious as the butter looks, Bordier is the real star of this interview. What a delightful guy, I want him to be my grandpa.
???: Here's something interesting that I've always kind of known in the back of my mind but never put words to: A study has found that people often overestimate walking distances in places without “Walk Appeal”.
Software developer and urbanist Andrew Price summed it up best on Twitter:
You can walk 10,000 steps in a superstore or shopping mall without noticing, but parking a car more than one block away in a car-scaled environment is burdensome.
— Andrew Price (@AndrewAPrice) October 20, 2020
That one block walk can feel more exhausting than 4 hours of shopping. pic.twitter.com/zaDYPTdXxn
That explains why I can walk around Disney World all day long and not be bothered by it in the slightest, but trying to make my way through some dreary urban hell feels like a chore of the highest order.
This sort of thing is exactly why urban design is so, so important. My travels across the US these past five years have shown me how pitiful our cities can be when it comes to any non-car mode of transportation. Our entire infrastructure was built around the car, regrettably. I wish it weren't so.
?: Speaking of urban design, marvel at the 45-year (!) process — sped up to a mere three minutes in that 3D model animation — that it took for 14th- and 15th-century builders to construct the still-standing Charles Bridge in Prague:
The video's description points to a page (I'm linking the Google-translated version for English readers) that goes much more in-depth about what you just watched.
Just an astounding level of architectural work. Imagine watching the beginnings of this bridge being built as a child and only seeing it finally completed as you reached what might've been considered "old age" at the time. I'll be thinking about this all day.
?: You know, a lot of people out there who are trying to “build a brand” or whatever have a case of mixed-up priorities. They're focused more on trying to increase their numbers, or getting more people to buy what they're selling (whether they really want it or not), or any number of other selfish things.
But that's the wrong way of looking at it, as Seth Godin explains:
I transcribed the most important bit, starting from the 35-second mark:
So traditional marketers, if you went to business school or whatever, would talk about “differentiation.” They talk about, “How do I cut through the clutter and the noise?”
That's selfish. That says, “I've worked hard, how do I get people to me?”
Let's throw that out and say... that person you seek to serve, they have a problem, and the problem is, there's too much noise. The problem is, they don't know what to pick. The problem is, they've got a kid, they want to educate in music but they're not sure how.
Can I offer them a service to help them see what their choices are? Now it's generous.
[…]
[Jumping ahead to the 2-minute mark] If I talk to you and I realize it's not what you're looking for, I will eagerly send you to that other teacher. Because I am here to help you get what you want, not to persuade you that you are wrong.
Preach!
?: For those of you who, like me, are always on the lookout for great new wallpapers for your devices, Jean-Marc Denis — product design manager for the Facebook Messenger app — continually puts up new wallpapers on his Gumroad page.
One of his more recent works looks fantastic on the gold iPhone 12 Pro:
Got a new phone and I wanted a less busy wallpaper, you can get it here if you want https://t.co/m6Id360Zad pic.twitter.com/jiqFDeDSyo
— Jean-Marc Denis (@jmdenisme) October 30, 2020
?: Ever since Bon Appétit's YouTube channel went up in flames — and the company apparently learned nothing from the ordeal — I've been enjoying Sohla El-Waylly's new “Stump Sohla” show on Andrew Rea's Babish Culinary Universe channel (formerly Binging With Babish).
This episode is my favorite so far. The things she's able to create with only a bunch of bodega snacks is unbelievable.
Neat Stuff We've Published Recently
- The all new base-model 2020 iPad (8th gen) combines tremendous capability with unmatched ease of use and versatility.
- ...and Logitech's Slim Folio is still the keyboard case we recommend for it.
- Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming is an engrossing and impeccably researched examination of the brutal 18-century military conflict between the underdog Continental Army (of the pre-USA Thirteen Colonies) and the formidable might of the British Empire.
- With the retro-styled Oregon Trail handheld game, you can now bring one of the most successful computer games of all time wherever you go.
- Give your AeroPress coffee maker and its accoutrement a place to rest when you're not using them with this bamboo organizer/stand.
- Yama Glass' cold brew coffee tower is the most 19th-century-science-experiment way of making cold brew at home.
- These sweater-knit memory foam women's slippers are almost like wearing winter sweaters on your feet.
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.