A bizarre escalator, and tickets to tour a laboratory!

• Collateral and the Death of Neon is a fascinating video essay from about streetlighting in film, from "Watching the Aerial". I knew about how streetlights had changed over time, but not about how that affected cinematography. I don't know enough about movies to have an opinion on the essay's conclusion (would those films really be remembered less fondly if the lighting was different?) — but I do think this is a great, well-produced lesson about history and filmmaking.
   
• Weezer cover Toto's "Africa", with Weird Al turning up on accordion.
   
• "Itsuka Japan" visits a strange, retro amusement park, with a one-of-a-kind, very shaky seated-belt-escalator and a pedal-powered cycle monorail. I really enjoy Itsuka's calm, simple style: rather than an excited voiceover or excited on-screen graphics, there's just raw video and the ambient sound of the location. The story is told in subtitles, translated (I assume automatically!) into more than a hundred languages. It's lovely.
   

• Matt Round, a genius web-stuff creator I've known for years, has previously made many things including a daily Tetris-alike minigame and a British seaside simulator. He's now got a new game: he's learned how to do 3D in the browser to make... well, look, it's a game about throwing a dog waste bag in the trash, in the style of Wii Sports. And somehow it's charming! Perhaps that's due to the incredible amount of attention to detail that's gone into it, with lots of unnecessary-but-fun things added in. (My score was a mediocre 8 throws.) But here's what I love about Matt's games: the code is just... there. If you look at the web page's source code, you can find all the code that runs the game in plain text. It's not some weird, incomprehensible, minified, React-based rubbish: Matt codes like the web used to be coded, the same way I still do. It's not open source (which is fine! I don't generally open source stuff either!), and you might need to run it through a beautifier to add the indentation back and make it readable, but if you do: well, anyone can learn from this, the same way I learned from clicking "View Source" 25 years ago. 
   
• The UK's National Physical Laboratory is hosting an Open Day on 24th May, and tickets are available here. I visited an Open Day there many years ago, and also filmed there a couple of times when I was doing weekly videos — if you're able to get to Teddington, in west London, that day, it's worth the £3-to-charity ticket price to have a look around their labs!
   
• I never got to film at Canada's Maple Syrup Reserve: they didn't need, or want, the publicity. But in case you didn't know: not only does the Maple Syrup Reserve exist, but it's currently at a 16-year low. (Which is, I guess, exactly what it's designed for.)
   
• I guess AI can write songs now. Of course, it's not perfect. The lyrics are very "ChatGPT", by which I mean they generally sound like an educational rap from the '90s. The song structure doesn't always make sense. And in general, the songs have the same uncanny not-quite-there effect as the current state-of-the-art image and video generation tools. But they're not bad. They're not nonsense. Sometimes they're catchy. And it's only going to get better from here.
   

And finally: if you'd like the quickest way to join the people who are still posting their daily-puzzle achievements on social media, my friend Matt Gray has made Randle.

All the best,

— Tom