Links I’d share in private #22

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 🤣).

Christmas is over, yeah!

The holidays have been quiet for me this year, as I wasn’t particularly in a festive mood. Still, I enjoyed my traditional Christmas Eve supper at my daughter’s godparents’ house – the food was delicious and the atmosphere relaxed. Christmas morning brought a lovely brunch at my place with my daughter, her step-brother, and her father. It was just the right amount of Christmas celebrations for me, and I was content to retreat into my cocoon afterwards.

Now we’re in those peaceful “in-between” days, where I’m happily binge-watching TV shows, reading extensively, and indulging in good food while nestled with my cats. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh, vacation bliss!

As is our tradition now, I’ll be hosting New Year’s Eve supper with my friends – always a fun gathering with my tribe of Macaques. I haven’t started contemplating my 2025 resolutions yet, but I know these thoughts will percolate in my mind over the next few days until I’m ready to write them down. Whether I’ll share them on my blog or keep them private remains to be seen… though a little accountability never hurts!

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: bird watching, future uncertainty, life’s frailty, teenagers and digital media, TikTok influence & 2024 U.S. elections, government surveillance, simple joys of life, mid-range fashion disappearance, Ballet Beautiful controversy, Project 2025, ancient cephalopod civilization, photography, 3D tattoos, mathematical art, architectural photography, HorrorCore music, 2020s music playlist, trippy electro beats, recipes, Barbican estate aesthetics, free fonts, ethical web principles, animated icons, internet history, movie recommendations, CSS animations, React visualizations.

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

• There Is No Show More Beautiful Than This: a nice tale of bird watching and life contemplation. Every autumn, hundreds of thousands of tiny Vaux’s swifts migrate from their nesting grounds as far north as British Columbia to their overwintering homes in Mexico and South America. Stopping over each year in a schoolhouse chimney in Portland, Oregon, the birds offer a moment of joy amid uncertainty.
• How To Take Things One Day At A Time (When You Can’t Imagine The Future): as we are coming to a close for the year 2024, tons of folks are planning their New Year’s Resolutions for 2025. I’m not a fan of that, and this text is pretty much stating my thoughts on not planning our future and our life. I’m loving it. “I’ve always had a difficult time envisioning the future, never sure what I wanted to be when I “grew up” — even after, by all standards, I grew up.”
• Letter from home: a beautiful ode to the frailty of life, and passing through some negative emotions after getting a cancer diagnosis
• Hit Pause Media Literacy Curriculum: if you have a teenager around you, you’ll want to have talks on digital medias, disinformation, and digital literacy. This website has tons of resources to help you spark those conversations with your teen.
• The TikTok electorate: as we are coming into elections season in 2025 here in Canada, let’s take some time to dissect the Trump electoral win of the 2024 American elections with this text on the impacts of social medias, and especially TikTok, on the electoral results. “I don’t think that Trump won “because of” TikTok in any new sense beyond the now-obvious fact that social media is a necessary condition to his success. But I suspect that social media, as it transforms and matures, shapes voters in ways it will take a long time to pick up on. Who is the “TikTok electorate”? How do its users relate to the world, and how does that shape their politics?”
• The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance: if you want to protect your online digital activities from BigTech companies siphonning your data for their algorithms and ads systems, the Wired has come up with a complete guide to help you fight Big Tech. Also, if you are part of a minority group that can be targeted by the far right/fascist policies maybe coming in place with the next American administration, you’ll want to know how to protect yourself. That means now is the time for anyone in an at-risk group, those who communicate with them—or even those who want to normalize privacy and create cover for more vulnerable people—to think about how they can upgrade their data security and surveillance resistance ahead of a second Trump administration.
• The mates who have met for a pint every Thursday for 56 years: I too want to have a group I meet every week at the pub for decades!
• 101 Simple Joys of Life We Must Not Forget
• Fashion Is Losing the Middle Ground – In–between brands are disappearing. And with them, an entire perspective on style: on the loss of middle-range brands and fashion lines, and being stuck between fast (and cheap) fashion, or luxury brands.
• Turning Pointe: “When the progressive A-list clientele of the fashionable workout Ballet Beautiful learned that its founder was married to an architect of Project 2025, many felt shocked and even betrayed” No shit! I would be enraged, learning that the husband of a friend is an architect of Project 2025!
• 🐙 Neolithic octopuses and the Silurian hypothesis: an interesting theory where cephalopods (or octopus) could have been a potential civilization millions of years ago on Earth. Interesting read!

TO SEE

• Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Another photo competition that has amazing pictures for 2024. I really love nature and wild animals pictures.

• Natural Landscape Photography Awards: This one has superb landscape photographs for your viewing.

• 2024 Photomicrography Competition that one is a little different: microscopic photography at its best! Another photo competition to follow.

TO FOLLOW

• gullytattoo: ok, the tattoos created by Daniel Gulliver are just out of this world! Beautiful 3D effects on your skin I love it a lot!

• hamidnaderiyeganeh: this instagram account is crazy! For each picture, the author writes mathematical functions and equations reproducing the image. Now, I don’t have the skills to decipher the math, but I find it intriguing!
• Geometry Club: another beautiful Instagram account that mixes corners of buildings intersecting with the sky, giving a nice pyramid effect. I love it!

TO HEAR

• I’ve discovered HorrorCore, and I’m loving it! I know, it’s December/ the Holidays, I should be more in a Christmas music mood, but what can I say? I’m a Fall & Halloween person through and through!

• 1oo songs that define this decade so far: quite interesting so far for my ears, I’m loving a lot of the songs on this playlist. I think it gives a good view of the 2020s in terms of music styles, and I’m sharing it with you all. Very eclectic and diverse!

• Or if you’re more in a mood for trippy electro music, here’s another playlist for you

RECIPES

• Lazy Girl Glow Soup
• Roasted Cauliflower Chickpea Potato Bowl
• that one made me laugh: Vegan Ceasar Salad

DESIGN

• How Tom Morris spends a cosy Christmas in London’s iconic Barbican estate: there is too much brown and kaki as colors in this place, but I love the style of it!
• B612: a free font that is beautiful and readable

WEB & TECH

• Ethical Web Principles: The W3C released its draft document of principles for a fair and ethical web for all, and I’m loving it. But will it really take off?
• beautifully crafted animated icons: very useful for my web projects!
• A little bit of Internet History: delve into the Paypal Mafia wikipedia page
• Mood2Movie: you’re in a mood for a movie, but don’t know what to watch? This website gives you suggestions of movies to watch depending on the vibes you’re feeling at the moment. Really useful.
• CSS scroll-driven animations? Fuck yes! ANd you can find demos here
• Popover API: This API lets you implement tooltips and popovers with pure CSS and JavaScript, no framework necessary!
• View Transition API: allows to animate between HTML documents. Does not work on Firefox right now, but works well in Chrome browser
• And if you’re stuck having to code with React: React, Visualized is a site with a bunch of visualizations to explain React concepts