Cool Link: ASCII Animations Library

A library of ASCII art, but animated! You can browse a ton of scenes and data built with ASCII characters of your choice and even generate your own.

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About Cool Links

Cool links are a collection of interesting things I find around the web. They can range from fun dumb websites to deep thought-provoking essays, or more commonly something in between. The feed here updates frequently, and I compile everything into a blog post on the last day of each month.

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Matt shared a Cool Link

A library of ASCII art, but animated! You can browse a ton of scenes and data built with ASCII characters of your choice and even generate your own.

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Matt shared a Cool Link

This complements the previous link I shared nicely: most developers don’t properly use the platform, but why? This goes into possible reasons without being judgemental, and to me they make a lot of sense. When I first started going all-in into front-end development I’ve been a part of all of those cases, I guess. In a way, writing less code and relying on the platform are signs of development experience (or battle scars).

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Matt shared a Cool Link

Jim gives his notes on an amazing talk by Alexander Petros, and the topic is super relevant for any web dev.

It goes into how many of us, when modernizing our tech stack just for the sake of modernizing it, end up with objectively worse results than we’d have if we stuck to the tried and true.

HTML’s ideological goal is to make websites good for their users. React’s ideological goal is serving Facebook, which mostly wants to serve you ads. Both have completely different priorities.

(I’m linking to Jim’s notes instead of the talk directly because Jim makes great points too! But you should definitely watch the talk if the subject interests you)

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Matt posted a Quick Review

The Wailing

2016, Na Hong-jin

Reviewed on Oct 10, 2026

Didn't like it

Decent

I like it

Loved it!

There is so much in this movie that is great, and it’s a rare horror movie where the second half is better than the first. The scenes with supernatural elements were superb to watch and the horror is really there.

Too bad the tonal whiplash in some of its scenes, where it goes super silly and almost slapstick, didn’t go well with me. And since none of the characters bear any semblance of likability, I didn’t really care what happened to them in the end (though I was all in for the mystery).

Movie

Matt published a Blog Post

Why S

Angry meme face looking at Safari's opaque URL bar and saying "Why can't you be transparent?"

Why Safari's URL Bar goes opaque and how to fix it

6 min read

A fix for an issue that shouldn't even exist — but a fix nonetheless.

Front-End

Read

Matt shared a Cool Link

This is absolutely incredible! Pick any website you want and control a stick figure while you destroy absolutely everything on it. A good way of getting revenge on the bad websites that have failed you in the past.

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Matt posted a Quick Review

Dead Poets Society

1989, Peter Weir

Reviewed on Oct 04, 2026

Didn't like it

Decent

I like it

Loved it!

Classics are classics for a reason, right? Such a beautiful movie! And feels really good to watch, too. The scenes just flow with such levity and you don’t even feel the time pass.

Movie

Matt shared a Cool Link

Last month I shared that the State of Devs survey was going on, and now the results are out! I always love this type of surveys and the results are really interesting, even if somewhat expected. Lots of uncertainty in the industry, you might be able to guess why.

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Matt posted a Quick Review

Of Mice and Men

1937, John Steinbeck

Reviewed on Sep 30, 2026

Didn't like it

Decent

I like it

Loved it!

A short and easy to read book that actually has a surprising amount of depth. While it took a while for me to get invested in it, once I did it really left a mark.

Book

Matt posted a Quick Review

Disclosure Day

2026, Steven Spielberg

Reviewed on Sep 28, 2026

Didn't like it

Decent

I like it

Loved it!

An absolute nothing burger of a film. An ET movie in 2026 ought to try to do something new or different, but this one does nothing. It takes itself so seriously that it just feels silly. It’s even sillier how many shots there are of people reacting to how serious the things happening in the movie are, as if the movie is trying really hard to make you care, too. I didn’t.

Movie

Matt shared a Cool Link

Great video! It goes into how AI as a tool affects our way of thinking, how damaging that can be for learning, and how to leverage it in a way that could be positive while still giving us ownership of what we build.

I’ve seen this video circulating before but never gave it a chance due to it coming from a brand (JetBrains), but I’m glad I decided to give it a watch now.

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Matt shared a Cool Link

Fantastic talk from a UX designer about why desktop UX seems stagnated and what can be done to move it forward. The prototypes he presents around the 30-minute mark are amazing and make me really excited to try something similar in the future.

He does bring up a fair point, though: no innovation is gonna come from Windows or Mac.

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Matt shared a Cool Link

With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as caring about the quality of output (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is more important than ever. Caring about what you ship will always have real-world value to ~~visitors/consumers/users~~ real people.

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Matt shared a Cool Link

Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn’t read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day’s main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we’re all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.

It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t feel like this. Maybe we don’t find them because they don’t frequent the same digital places we do. Maybe that’s the secret.

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Matt posted a Quick Review

Splatoon Raiders

2026, Nintendo

Reviewed on Sep 24, 2026

Didn't like it

Decent

I like it

Loved it!

This is an absolute masterpiece. From the very beginning of the game it bombards you with style and personality, and the moment you take control of your character is the moment you fall in love with it. It is satisfying, rewarding, challenging and absolutely chaotic, but it does such an incredible job at introducing its mechanics incrementally that you never feel overwhelmed at all, even if all the things happening on the screen are quite absurd.

It’s a rare game that makes me wish there were more of it, not less. It doesn’t overstay its welcome but provides enough joy to make me want to keep playing it for much longer.

Game

Cool Link: ASCII Animations Library

About Cool Links

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