Doornails! palindromes! and try to find a cat.
11th March 2024
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Hello!
And in particular, hello to those in North America who will be receiving this newsletter one hour "earlier" than usual: the
clocks went forward for you, but European ones won't until the end of the month. Back when I used to make weekly videos, and posted them from wherever I happened to be, the time change always used to be a concern for me — did I get the DST conversion right this time? Fortunately, that's not something I have to worry about as much right now.
Which is partly because it's now been ten weeks since I posted a video! And after ten weeks I can announce: absolutely zero plans to post anything new, at least for a while. Sabbatical is a joy, even if I am starting to itch to work on a few new ideas.
So instead, what else is going on around the
internet?
This week on Lateral: our regular guests, Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper and Tom Lum from 'Let's Learn Everything', face questions about cycling coercion, hoovering hacks and disproportionate drinks!
And on YouTube:
- Epic Spaceman is an incredible channel. Start with a visualisation of four million stars, pulled into a black hole, scaled down to fit over New York. Except it's not just a visualisation! This is 3D animation, made by one person,
starring that same person, at a human scale, using motion capture and face capture. There are so many "animation and voiceover" science-explainer channels, some high-effort and many, many low-effort — and these days, there are even more AI-slop zero-effort channels, just started by trying to make a quick buck. This channel is the highest of high-effort, and I also found this behind-the-scenes Q&A fascinating. (Thanks to Linus for sending this over.)
- Why "dead as a doornail"? This video is less than two minutes long, visually interesting,
and answers a question I never thought to ask.
- A palindromic video! Michael Tan performs a musical duet, with himself, in one continuous take. This took a couple of attempts to wrap my head around. (Thanks Chethan for the
suggestion.)
Away from the world of video:
- My friend V Buckenham has launched "downpour",
a lovely little phone app that lets people make and share interactive story games in just a couple of minutes. Games like "Where's Madeleine?", which will take you about two minutes to play and which involves simply trying to find a very good cat.
- You'd think that, in the year 2024, leap days wouldn't have much of an effect on the world. But no: here's a list of 2024 leap day bugs, including failing petrol stations in New Zealand, grocery stores in Sweden, street lights in Paris.
- New daily puzzle game! Squeezy involves fitting (or, rather, squeezing) letters into words, and it's a good combination of difficulty and reward — even if the words you're looking for can sometimes be a touch too obscure.
- From 2013: the location of every photo taken from the ISS, more than one million of them, all plotted and arranged into interesting maps and charts.
And finally: Tenacious D cover "Baby One More Time".
All the best,
— Tom
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