Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #298

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Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

  • LiarTown Postcards – Tumblr. “Warning, this has a bunch of Not Suitable For Work stuff in it. I don’t even know where to begin. This is what happens when a subversive jester is really, really good at Photoshop. From View-Master discs that never existed, to fake record albums and childrens’ books, there’s something here to offend everyone. Also, it’s amazing. It has been a long time since something literally made me laugh out loud, and gasp in shock, this much.” (Alistair for Hugh).
  • Painter of light: my awkward adventures in virtual reality art – The Verge. “I’ve been spending a bunch of time digging into VR lately. The HTC Vive, which just shipped, is astonishingly good. From the Valve-authored demo in the Portal universe, to dozens of other applications, it’s perfect, and convincing. But perhaps the first true VR app is this one, which lets you paint in 3D. We don’t realize how much we take 2D for granted until we walk behind our drawing and realize it has depth. This is the future, explained.” (Alistair for Mitch).
  • Random couscous snaps into beautiful patterns – Steve Mould – YouTube. “Couscous + a giant metal square + a violin bow + math/physics = I love science.” (Hugh for Alistair).
  • Sinking In Alberta 1923 – 1959 – Mashable. “Some truly fantastic pictures from the mountains of Alberta, and skiers of, in the days of black and white film.” (Hugh for Mitch).
  • Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story – Wait But Why. “One of the standout TED talks this year was Tim Urban from Wait But Why. It was all about procrastination and creativity (mostly about procrastination). It was insightful, it was funny, it was painful, and he presented it all in a well-packaged way. This is not easy to do. He made is look casual, when – in reality – he probably beat himself up over it for months. Well, in typical Wait But Why fashion, here he is dissecting the experience (and just how hard it was). It’s a brilliant lesson for anyone who has to stand up in front of an audience and give a presentation… which, is most of us!” (Mitch for Alistair). 
  • Snapchat Video Traffic Has Caught Up With Facebook – Fortune. “We toss around the word ‘billions’ now like it’s normal. It’s not. Whether you’re talking about money, users or even views. A billion is a lot of numbers! This is one of those moments that should stop us all – dead in our tracks. And yet, news like this comes across our radar, we ‘like’ it on Facebook and just move on. Snapchat‘s video traffic is now at 8 billion daily video views. That’s more than five times where it was a year ago. That’s now at par with Facebook. Remember when Snapchat said ’no’ to being acquired by Facebook for $3 billion back in 2013? Imagine if that deal had gone through. These numbers are just staggering.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.