Links and Notes - January 19th 2026

Time to signal

I wrote a blog post today discussing the idea of formally measuring how long it takes one to reach a strong signal when consuming media from different mediums. I find it to be a great way to quantify just how much time gets wasted scrolling around on social media vs reading from dedicated slow media mediums (newsletters, paid publications, RSS, etc). Think that number would be a great one to find out for most people.

Pretty chuffed about sending out a full blog post so soon after coding up my plugin using Gemini.

Plugin updates

Speaking of plugins, I had a bug in it where if I wiki linked to a header in a markdown file where the header was also a link (eg: [some file#some heading](an actual url)) the display text would break and instead the entire wiki link would get published.

For context, I've designed the plugin so that if I use wiki links to link back to another post I've published (remember, all my posts live in Obsidian and are published and updated from Obsidian only), the plugin will automatically resolve the url and anchor link and generate the final link using the []() markdown format that gets pushed to Ghost.

Since the behaviour was breaking in a specific case, I just popped over to Jules, explained the issue and then went back to managing some other stuff around the house. I looked at its work this morning (it was probably done in a few minutes but I maintain the importance of having boundaries). Popped the main.js file into Obsidian and tadaaa. It worked.

Magical stuff.

On the animation of 100 Dalmatians

I have a confession to make. I've only ever watched snippets of the original 100 Dalmatians movie by Disney. In all my years, I've never realized what a landmark moment it was to the animators there. Animation Obsessive's newsletter from today does a beautiful job of putting together the narrative of how the movie represented almost a rebellion from the sides of the animators. Read the entire thing. It doesn't just tell the story. It unearths delightful tidbits like this cartoon, Rooty Toot Toot.

By the mid-century, though, Disney’s visual ideas were old-fashioned. Graphic artists like the UPA crew updated animation in the ‘40s and ‘50s. The new wave “embraced the fact that cartoons were, in fact, a visual composition of lines and shapes drawn upon and seen in two dimensions,” according to the book _Cartoon Modern

Fresh approaches to color, shape and line filled UPA gems like Rooty Toot Toot_ (1951). A few Disney artists tried to modernize, too, as far as they could. And Ken Anderson was one of them. His art direction for One Hundred and One Dalmatians was his biggest coup — achieved, kind of, under his boss’s nose.

Honestly, Animation Obsessive continues to be one of the best newsletters out there. Period.

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Posted on January 19 2026 by Adnan Issadeen