Things went wrong, and I found a tale from the Hindenberg.

26th July 2021

Heads up! This newsletter is more than two years old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.

Hello!

This week's video went wrong. No other way to say it! It's been a long time since I've had a video that went this wrong, so please enjoy "I tried to film a volcano and it was a complete disaster". I've recovered now, thankfully. (I believe the kids would add "Storytime" as a tag.)

And if you'd like to see what the volcano's doing right now (it's probably not much), you should be able to view several live cameras on the mbl.is channel!

So let's run through some more successful YouTube videos that I've found this week:

AlphaPhoenix talks about air-tight vs vacuum-tight, and the gasket that no air can pass. It's a great example of someone who's thoroughly qualified in their subject, explaining an interesting subject really well.
A fascinating bit of history: the 1980s Royal Military Police instruction video that was shown to first-time travellers going along the autobahn corridor from West Germany to West Berlin. Remember to return the Soviet officer's salute.
Ghost Town Living is the channel of a man called Brent, who bought an entire ghost town in California called Cerro Gordo and is now 16 months into living there and rebuilding it.

And from the rest of the internet, you might enjoy reading:

Ra by Sam Hughes, quoted in this week's video. It's a great science fiction novel, originally serialised and now free to read online (although I'm sure Sam would be happy if you also bought a copy). Without wanting to give too much away, it's not quite the story that it initially appears to be.
A story about a story: in 2017, an essay called "Cat Person" stormed the internet. While fictional, a lot of the details in it were pulled, without permission, from someone else's life. This raises deep questions about the ethics of writing not-quite-fiction, about unreliable narrators, and about the duty-of-care that writers have (or, possibly, don't have).
And finally, Across the Atlantic on the Hindenberg is a brief but fascinating first-person account written in 1992 by a passenger who took the airship from Europe to America in 60 hours! "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks."

Right. Let's hope next week's video is a bit more successful! Thanks, as ever, for reading and helping me get around the Algorithms.

All the best,

— Tom

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