Hand-Picked Links — January 24, 2025
Welcome to this week’s somewhat more sober than usual hand-picked links. Let’s take a quick look at the status of the fires on the West Coast before moving on to lighter fare.
Los Angeles Fires
Multiple fires continue to burn in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. Many in the Cotton Bureau community have been affected including our friends Hrishikesh Hirway and Joshua Malina from The West Wing Weekly and Ben Golliver from the Greatest of All Talk podcast. Both shows have announced products to raise money for disaster relief in their city.
The West Wing Weekly
The brand new “Untied Sates of America” windbreaker and tee celebrates the cast of The West Wing sharing a moment in front of the unfortunately decorated Marine One helicopter.
The limited edition jacket is available in a formidable black on black, while the shirt is available in any color you want (as long as that color is black). Sales of all Untied States of America items include a donation from TWWW to the American Red Cross as well as an additional $2 per sale directly from Cotton Bureau.
Greatest of All Talk
Andrew Sharp and Ben Golliver have a reminder for you. It’s cool to care. And they’re inviting you to be a part of the team. All Greatest of All Talk proceeds from this tee will go toward relief efforts for the Palisades, Eaton and other Los Angeles-area wildfires. Cotton Bureau will be adding to those contributions with an extra $2 per item for any “It’s Cool to Care” shirt purchased in January.
Stimulation Clicker
The perfect end-of-the-week distraction, try Neal Agarwal’s latest internet project, Stimulation Clicker. Part satire, part actually a lot of fun clicker, Neal’s game is short enough to beat quickly (maybe an hour total?) and deep enough that you might just have to go back and play again to make sure you get all 35 achievements (✋ guilty).
P.S. I checked in with Neal last week, and 100% of the game is human-made. The podcast script, the voice actors, the [redacted] YouTube videos… all real.
Christian Selig’s Custom Keyboard
Prefer to watch a relaxing video instead? Check out this nifty custom keyboard, made from scratch by friend of Cotton Bureau Christian Selig.
You might know Christian from his work on the beloved Reddit client Apollo (murdered by the jerks at Reddit), the YouTube app Juno for Apple Vision Pro (murdered by the jerks at YouTube), or his current project Pixel Pals (still alive and well, thankfully).
Brand New Conference Identity 2024
We’re suckers for good branding here, particularly branding that is not just well-designed and well-executed but, more importantly, well-conceived. The Brand New conference design for 2024 checks all of those boxes. Plus, it gets the traditionally exhaustive Brand New breakdown.
Check out the incredible, outrageous amount of working that went into this year’s conference. Full marks for Armin and Bryony. Tremendous.
TimeCapsule
ElevationLab, maker of many thoughtful products to improve your life, recently released a smart solution to a problem many of us have: replacing AirTag batteries far too often, or, worse, not realizing the battery is dead until you really need to find the thing it was supposed to be tracking.
The TimeCapsule is a rugged, extremely long-lasting superstructure that can power your AirTags for (at least) 10 years on a single charge. Only $40 for a four pack. Not bad for peace of mind.
Thanks for reading, as usual. We hope you found it worth your while. Don’t forget to follow @cottonbureau.com on Bluesky to avoid 50 years of bad luck.