Hi |FNAME|,

Last issue of 2021! What a year. Not going to get too into it, but suffice to say I have feelings.

In other news, we just launched Try What's Good! It's a fun little end-of-year project. The Product Hunt page (linked below) has some of my reasoning for it. I hope you enjoy playing around with it, and maybe even find some good things to try.

Many thanks to those of you who sent "Moonlander cats" last month — your felines are gorgeous! We're going to make a fun little album on the site featuring them all (and we're still accepting submissions).

This month's question: Do you happen to know a board game designer or publisher? If so, I'd love an introduction — ez@zsa.io.

Thank you for reading, and happy new year!

All the best,
Erez

A review site, without the reviews

Just the good stuff

Last year around this time, we launched the Habit Stick. This year, we wanted to make another fun little project. Check it out on Product Hunt, and if you like it (and what we do in general), please upvote so more people can find ZSA. :) Thank you!

Featured User Interview

Becca Resnik

Technical Translator

This month we got to interview Becca Resnik, a former engineer who runs her own technical translation service. She showed us her relegended keyboard and her portable setup. She's also an amateur circus performer and a martial artist (Brazilian Jiu-jitsu). Fantastic photos.

"…I'm kind of known within my circle as doing or having done a little bit of everything!"

Layout of the month

Layout of the month: AQT's Layout for General Use

You'll find my layout to be pretty close to what came stock, since I don't have a deep dedication to any one program, but I'm always looking into new ways of expressing myself, so some things may change over time.

Correction: Our October issue featured this layout from David Brownman, but it was mistakenly attributed to a different author. Sorry about that, David, and thank you for sharing your layout tour!

Layout of the month: AQT's Layout for General Use

Things we liked

Dream →

Funky AI-generated art

I asked Dream (available for web, iOS, Android) to make me a picture of a "a cat with flowers for eyes on a pink cloud". It did not disappoint.

Pagat →

Card game rules

Going strong since 1995, this bastion of 90's Web design is a comprehensive index of many types of card games. The descriptions are sometimes too succinct, but you can use it to discover new games to explore. Bezique, anyone?

Townscaper →

Build a city in your browser

The full experience is available on Steam and elsewhere (mobile too), but this demo works beautifully in the browser. More of an art project/experience than a game: Click around, build a city in 3D. So satisfying.

BookBub →

Amazing deals on bestselling ebooks

If, like me, you're an avid reader who enjoys hunting for Kindle deals, BookBub is for you. It also supports Kobo and other stores. You can define genres you're into, and also follow specific authors. You then get emails when relevant Kindle books go on sale. It's easy to control the frequency of the emails, and they have a similar service for audiobooks, too.

Marginalia Search →

Quirky, inefficient, search

Harkens to the days long before Google. This is a search engine with 0% AI and no sophisticated language parsing. "Cow" and "cows" are completely different. You search by trying to guess text that'll appear on the target page. One of my results was a page written entirely in Comic Sans. It's great.