Dominos! LEDs! and the best dance-game performance I've ever seen.

• In 2022, I talked about how the world's longest rail tunnel, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, is kept safe. In August 2023, despite all those security checks, a freight train derailed — and while there were no injuries, the damage was extensive. Swiss broadcaster SRF has produced a comprehensive documentary about the investigation and repair works so far. It's in German, but the subtitles are excellent and switching on YouTube's auto-translation option makes those subtitles entirely understandable in English. It's a bit odd for me to see another presenter standing in the exact same places I did, in very different circumstances! (Thanks to Christian for sending this over.)
   
• Incredible sentence to lead a video with: "following my LED industrial piercing". Incredibe follow-up sentence: "LEDs so small that inhaling them is a very real danger". Mitxela uses a pick-and-place machine, clever design, and incredibly steady hands to create an incredibly-small LED matrix earring.
   
• A brilliant five-minute lightning talk, perfectly rehearsed and produced: visiting a road for every day of the year, from Rua 1° de Janeiro in Portugal, to Via XXXI Dicembre in Italy. (Thankfully, not in order.) Not only is it a really fun project, but it's a masterclass in saying only what's necessary to tell the story. I'm sure plenty of professional YouTube folks could make ten hour-long vlogs out of a road trip like this: indeed, that would be the only way to make a project like this part of a going concern. But I can't help feeling that some things are just better when they're a fast five-minute talk like this. (Thanks to Mikey for this link.)
   
• Prompted by a message from a viewer (thanks Keeyan), I finally got around to sitting down and watching Simon Clark's video "The Century We Saved Earth". Histories of the future are one of my favourite genres, but it's a style that's very difficult to execute well. (Side note: one of the best I've read is Adrian Hon's History of the Future in 100 Objects.) Simon's video is clever, detailed, plausible, engaging, and with just enough jokes and optimism to make it an easy watch.
   

• Domino Fit is a really pleasing game: five short puzzles every day that work a bit like a more-complex Picross. This creates the same feeling in my head as a Sudoku: solving one tricky part can unlock a series of small victories, until everything suddenly fits together at the end. My only complaint is the domino-setting noise, which just sounds unpleasant to me.
   
• An interesting set of short, first-person narratives, built from interviews with control room operators across Britain. The road network; the electricity grid; the coastguard; these are the people who keep the country running.
   
• An unexpected side effect of King Charles III taking the throne: the stylised crown that sits atop every page on the UK government's web site needs to be updated.
   

One more order of business: yes, I'm sorry, last week I claimed I was correcting a broken link in the previous newsletter, but it was actually a Rickroll. I've got no other excuse apart from "I thought it was funny". Here's the actual link to Madeon talking about how he made Pop Culture, and — thanks to this newsletter's link tracking — here are some basic stats on how many people got rickrolled over time.

And finally: CTL17 wins a Dance Dance Revolution freestyle competition... while simultaneously the playing on violin. Astonishing. (Thanks to Purr for sending this in!)

All the best,

— Tom