Links I’d share in private #20

Welcome to another edition of Links I’d share in private, a (bi-)weekly blog post about all the things and content I come across the Internet during my intense web binging, worthy of being shared to you all (instead of in all of my private group chats 🤣).

A missing backalley cat making me sad these days

For the past two years, I’ve been caring for a stray cat in my back alley—a big orange tomcat I’ve affectionately named BébéRoux. Though he never allowed me to touch him, we developed a routine. Every day, without fail, he would wait patiently by my door for his meal. His consistency was remarkable, braving even the harshest winter nights. Gradually, I found myself growing deeply attached to this resilient feline.

I had always harbored a dream of welcoming him into my home, of integrating him into my existing feline family. However, the past month has brought unexpected and troubling changes. His visits have become increasingly rare, and his appearance has deteriorated alarmingly. Patches of missing fur on his lower back and extensive bruising suggested he was battling a severe illness.

Our last encounter was particularly poignant. When I offered him food, he did something unprecedented—he meowed at me, a sound I’d never heard from him before. More startlingly, he attempted to enter my house, a behavior completely out of character. In that moment, I hesitated. Despite his obvious distress, I wasn’t prepared to bring him inside. I let him go.

Eight days have passed since then. He hasn’t appeared on my cameras or come to eat in the backyard. A suffocating worry has consumed me. What if he’s seriously ill? What if… I can’t bear to complete the thought. I’m haunted by regret, tormented by the possibility that I might have missed my chance to help him when he needed me most. If I see him again, I promise myself, I won’t hesitate. I’ll bring him inside and take him straight to the vet.

In contrast to my emotional turmoil, these past few days have been relatively quiet. I’ve found myself revisiting my old notebooks from a university course, on Age of Dictators (1918-1945). As I’ve reexamined my notes and articles, a chilling pattern has emerged. The sociopolitical landscape of the past decade bears an unsettling resemblance to the historical period I studied. It’s frightening how history seems to operate like a cyclical wheel, persistently repeating its most ominous patterns. The parallels between our current era and the rise of fascism in the early 20th century are not just academic observations—they’re a stark, living reality that sends shivers down my spine.

Now on with the Links I’d share in private part!

Keywords: This week’s Links I’d share in private touches on various topics, including:

This writing is made possible by those of you who pay to subscribe – thank you! – through my Buy me a coffee or through the Payment button in the sidebar/footer, and you all make it possible to survive in this crazy economy. Really, THANK YOU! And if you haven’t subscribed yet, a minimal 2$ per month can help me a lot. Or a one-time donation, your choice! It will help me feed fancy food to my cats! My cats thank you in advance for their worship…humm, the attention you are giving them with your money. Real whores those cats, I swear! 😹 That being said, you can also do one-time donations, it doesn’t need to be a monthly payment. Any amount will help me in my quest to be able to live from my writings!

Please feel free to follow me on my social medias’ presences to stay up-to-date with my writings and witty commentary on anything the world throws to our faces! See my sidebar for a link to all my social medias accounts.

TO READ

• Folklore is philosophy: there are a lot of lessons to learn in old folklores and tales. You can understand some pretty important life philosophies when reading those folk tales. Which is more interesting than reading about yet another Western white man philosopher’s thoughts on life. Folktales, like philosophy, provoke deep reflection by challenging societal norms and personal values, fostering a richer understanding of human experience. This article presents this take on folktales, and made me wish to read some of them again. Folklore originated and developed orally. It has long flourished beyond the elite, largely male, literate classes. Anyone with a story to tell and a friend, child or grandchild to listen, can originate a folktale. At the risk of stating the obvious, the ‘folk’ are the heart of folklore. Women, in particular, have historically been folklore’s primary originators and preservers. In From the Beast to the Blonde (1995), the historian Marina Warner writes that ‘the predominant pattern reveals older women of a lower status handing on the material to younger people’.
• Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: this old-school internet website made me laughed. We’ve all been there: listing to our friends the ridiculous reasons we had an argument with our partners/spouses. This page made me smile and relate a lot to some of the situations described in the text. And since it is written by an author that I found funny, it made me want to read his books.
• Information Foraging: A Theory of How People Navigate on the Web: As an ex-web developer who coded interfaces for users visiting websites and web apps, I was always curious about the user experience behind the code I wrote. And having wrote code for digital medias, I was always curious to know how our users thought and processed the information on our websites. This article explains “information foraging theory,” which models how people seek and consume information online, likening it to animals foraging for food. Users follow “information scent” cues to decide where to click and evaluate content. Designers can improve user experience by optimizing content presentation, ensuring clear navigation, and providing strong cues to reduce the effort needed for users to find relevant information. Information foraging is the fundamental theory of how people navigate on the web to satisfy an information need. It essentially says that, when users have a certain information goal, they assess the information that they can extract from any candidate source of information relative to the cost involved in extracting that information and choose one or several candidate sources so that they maximize the ratio
• SHAC Undergraduate Students Journal of History: stumbled upon this yearly collection of undergraduate works from students at my old alma mater, Concordia University. Reading their essays made me dream of going back to school to finish my undergraduate degree…maybe?
• 22 Lessons on Life, Love, and Choosing What Matters Most: because it’s always fun to read what others’ bits of useful Life knowledge are.
• Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry Crowd – The new and vicious areligious fundamentalism seeping across the Internet: The article criticizes modern internet culture by comparing it to Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”, arguing that online communities often label people as inherently “Good” or “Bad,” leaving no room for nuance, personal growth, or context. I’m a fan of callouts. But in these circles, calling out someone becomes a zero-sum game that gets played for social credit. Every person they take down adds to their protective layers of being perceived as Good. Morality is no longer the primary motivation; posturing is.
• Walking as Inactivity: I used to do lonnnnnggggggg walks across my city, decades ago. After the birth of my kid, I kinda stopped walking, lacking the time and motivation to do so. To just stroll around town, walking slowly, observing everything and everywhere. I was know among my group of friends as the one to go walk with if you wanted good long walk with tons of interesting discussions about Life and everything. This article reminded me of what I used to do as a hobby, and I kinda miss walking around. I just should. Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious. You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.
• Can Underconsumption Be Aspirational?: First appearing in mid-July 2024, underconsumption pushes back on influencer ad campaigns by spotlighting a lifestyle where using what you already own is the aspiration. It’s not about asceticism, nor is it a retreat out of society like #cottagecore. It’s a reminder that most people don’t buy luxury shampoo in bulk. It normalizes, well, what “normal” lives still look like.
• How to Do a Low Buy Year: Define Spending Categories & Rules: I’ve been cleaning up my finance in the last year, getting rid of superficial and useless spending as well as cleaning up my debt. One of my goals for 2025 is to really spend less, only on the minimal stuff needed for living. This article gives some good tips on how to achieve this goal.
• Based on this interactive map, Montreal is a pretty decent 15-minutes City! I’m quite happy about it. Based on the concept of 15-minutes walking cities, you can view any city across the world on this map, and view if it is easily walkable – or not!
• A little late, but we are still fall: 99 Ways To Slow Down For Fall. The Good Trade has put together a list of 99 ways to start slowing down and embracing the shift of the season. It is also a very valid list for Winter/the start of the Holidays season!
• Unplugging Is Not The Solution You Want: And I kinda agree with it! The article argues that unplugging from technology isn’t a sustainable or inclusive solution to the challenges of modern tech use. Instead, it advocates for acceptance, mindful adaptation, and building resilience to live in harmony with technology’s impacts while fostering digital literacy and human connection. It challenges binary thinking about tech use, emphasizing empowerment and responsibility over avoidance.

TO SEE

• A ‘Jewellery Box’ Transformation Of A 1970s Studio Apartment: I’ve been bingeing Tiny Houses content for the last few months, and been dreaming of small living & decor for my future. This tiny apartment with wood and light tones is simply wonderful, and an inspiration for my own decor.

• Astronomy Photographer of the Year: another photo competition, this time on Space, the ultimate frontier!

• Living the Skye Life: one of my favorite YouTube channels. From the description on YT: “Hello! We are Willie, Sarah and pups Jack Spaniels & Nori. Join us on our biggest adventure yet – moving from suburban Fife to a tiny cottage on the Isle of Skye!” A really feel-good channel, following the adventures in Scotland of a duo of artists living their best lives in their old cottage with their dogs. I’ve been following them for more than a year, and I really love to tune in each week to learn what they have done in terms of house’s updates, artistic endeavors, and farming shenanigans.

TO FOLLOW

• Timur Zagirov: ohhhhh, his Instagram account is beautiful! Original art with wooden blocks recreating popular artwork.

TO HEAR

• This playlist has interesting world music, from African beats to banjo folks to Indian inspired songs

• Forget Emotions, Love is the Prize : an all-female tour de force through soul, gospel, disco and R&B

RECIPES

• Vegan Chicken and Dumplings: you can probably add meat instead of its vegan version.

DESIGN

• Onge.org: the web design and animations behind this website is simply awesome in its simplicity. Ascii-styled art, a nice little web experimentation, and lots of animation. Well worth the time to check this website.
• The Doodle Library: if you need simple doodles in your designs, this library in Figma may be of interest to you

CYBERSECURITY & INFOSEC

• Bellingcat’s Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit: ohhhhhhh, I’ve completely missed the release of that toolkit! Damn! I love the Bellingcat community, and I’ve been on their Discord for the last 3 years. I’ve learned a lot on OSINT techniques, and the release of this toolkit with tons of documentation on how to use it is simply amazing. Hours of fun to investigate!
  

WEB & TECH

• A Single Div: I’m a sucker for good CSS. I believe that you can achieve great things in web development with HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript only. So when I came across this website with TONS of good CSS examples, I just knew I had to look at it. And I am loving it! Tons of visually stunning CSS coding pieces, animated div, and interesting coding tricks for any developer that loves CSS.
• Tools and Techniques to Create Accessible Accordion Components: useful info on how to create accessible accordions on websites.
• Accessible colours palettes: another useful Figma file for your webdesign needs in accessible colors palettes
• Dark mode & accessibility myth: maybe dark mode does not automatically means it’s accessible. This article takes on the principle that dark mode is automatically accessibility measure for people who needs it.
• Free Public APIs: a collection of 350+ free public APIs for all of your coding needs!