Link DrrrrrrrrrrrOP!

I have a problem with links. I collect too many of them and don’t post them. Think of the Hoarders TV show, but instead of a house full of shit, I have a folder full of links. So here comes a purge. Some of the things that have caught my eye over the past several months:

Valley Uprising is the much-anticipated documentary from Sender Films about the epic history of climbing in Yosemite National Park and the counterculture roots of outdoor sports.”

Coastermatic“Your instagrams in stone, coasters.” Christmas gift ideas. People always need coasters.

Sound City Project“By using a combination of a panoramic view with high quality 3D sound recorded using a custom “soundhead” prototype, you can select places on a map and give yourself a better idea of what it’s like to actually be there.” If you’re the type of person who likes ambient sound while they work, this site is great. A tumblr about beautiful maps

Neil Gaiman (YouTube): You Learn By Finishing Things Michael Mark Cohen

Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We’ve All Been Waiting ForI am a white, middle class male professor at a big, public university, and every year I get up in front of a hundred and fifty to two hundred undergraduates in a class on the history of race in America and I ask them to shout white racial slurs at me. The results are usually disappointing.

On Mindfulness and Quality“Think of a tool you’re fond of. What is it that brings about the feelings of endearment? Does it perform a function exceptionally well? Does the quality of the build make the task more enjoyable? Does it feel solid?”

Jason Fried at Basecamp explains how, when designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup.

Aeon: We prize originality, yet humans are natural-born copycats and only good imitators survive. Is it time to celebrate the rip-off? They’re being provocative and snarky by using the term ‘rip-off’. Not new news. Everything is a remix, remember?

Jason Santa Maria: Correspondence with an Ex-Designer“This month I want to share a letter I received from ex-designer, now sheep farmer, Ruth, in reply to my post from a few months back where I wondered what comes next after being a designer. Ruth kindly shared where her life led, and what the other side might look like. I was moved by what she wrote, not only because of her direct experience, but just to hear that I wasn’t alone with my own fears about exhuastion and nourishment.”

Huds and Guis was created to form a collection of the most beautiful and innovative examples of HUD (Heads-Up Display) and GUI (Graphical User Interface) design.”

Ben Thompson: How Apple Creates Leverage, and the Future of Apple Pay — “This reading of Apple’s partnership abilities, though, mistakenly rests on the assumption that business deals grow out of personal affinity. The truth is that while personal likability may help on the margins, the controlling force in Apple’s negotiations is cold hard business logic. Thus, in order to understand why Apple has been so successful in previous partnerships – and, looking forward, to better estimate the chances of Apple Pay becoming widespread – it is essential to understand how the company acquires and uses leverage.”

Dustin Curtis thinks Amazon is an echo chamber“They make a product, they market the product on Amazon.com, they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next product.”

Portishead’s “Dummy” at 20. Sheesh. I’m old, but what a great fucking album. Techcrunch is launching a new show called

“Built In Brooklyn” all about startups from that borough.

A calculator that shows you how long it will take you to save one million dollars. (via Lifehacker)

An awesome, letterpressed, linear calendar I bought by The Made Shop (I might steal the format for my own calendar)

“a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents” — The world’s first homepage. (via BGR)