I rode in a truck, and considered stealing giraffes.

25th October 2021

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Hello!

In this week's video, a simple question with a hopeful answer: what if trucks worked like electric trains?

This week, I've been thinking a lot about music, music videos, and performance:

Some of Olivia Rodrigo's new music videos have subtitles in a dozen languages. They seem to be proper translations, too, at least as far as I can tell: the Dutch subtitles of Traitor translate "Now you bring her around / just to shut me down" as "Nu ben me je mat haar / om mij te pesten" — that's an idiomatic translation, no auto-translator I know of would phrase it that way. It looks like someone's paid for proper translations and subtitles, just for YouTube music videos, which is not something I've seen before. I wonder if it's a music exec believing it'll give an algorithmic boost? Or is it just an attempt at international appeal?
I'm late to this, but Santan Dave's performance of Black, live at the BRIT awards in 2020, is absolutely stunning. The projection-mapped visuals, while incredibly produced, are almost too distracting: the words and the delivery are something very special on their own.
It's been almost ten years since the London 2012 opening ceremony: this is the first act, the Industrial Revolution, shot through a hidden POV camera from one of the dancers, with audio from the performers' in-ear headset. It's fascinating, and the sort of thing I'm glad was preserved.
And DJ Cummerbund's WarMCA mashup is an astonishing bit of remix art: just when you think it's running out of steam, another song arrives, and it somehow still works perfectly. Mashups have come a long way.

Elsewhere on the internet, and away from the world of music:

Supply chain problems mean that paintmakers are running out of the colour blue.
Is stealing a giraffe from the zoo okay? Only if it's a really cool giraffe. AI researchers try to solve for morality, it goes about as well as you'd expect.
And finally, a motorist received a fine after automated license-plate recognition misread a woman's t-shirt. It's probably a crime in the UK to deliberately print t-shirts with someone else's license plate (Computer Misuse Act 1990, section 3 means that your intent matters), but it's a fun thought experiment.

Thanks for being part of this: a few months into newsletter-writing, I'm finding it really pleasant to be able to send out links in a longer-form, less performative way. Hopefully it's worth it for you too!

All the best,

— Tom

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