A useful monorail, and a Rude Trip.

• Quint builds a fully automatic knife-throwing machine, an idea that sounds less ridiculous in the voice of someone who's clearly on the shortlist for "coolest dad ever".
   
• From a few years ago: Tony Hawk lands his last 900. I didn't expect a skateboarding video to be quite so emotional. (Some strong language.)
   
• David Hilowitz, synthesiser expert, builds an analog synth from 1979. With its gentle background music and top-down camera op, I found this somehow calming. (Thanks to Neil for sending this over.)

• The National Algorithm, a story about designing camouflage, takes a long while to reach its punchline. But it's a hell of a punchline and it's worth the time to get there. 
   
• Ronald McDonald's corporate brand guidelines, from 1975, is an insight into nearly 50-year-old corporate design; a style so parodied by horror writers and satirists that it's difficult to remember that this is the real thing, genuine and earnest — that is, earnest in its attempt to get children to eat junk food. Ronald McDonald is, apparently, "all the good things that come to mind when thinking of clowns."
   
• Days Since Incident is a safety clock for the planet, an interesting way of visualising data.
   
• The Mafia of the Acting World: it turns out that not only are there specific background actors for crowd noise in Hollywood movies, but they're organised, and they get paid residuals long-term.

And finally, you know how America has "red states" and "blue states"? Turns out those colour assignments aren't just arbitrary, they're arbitrary and only started in 2000. I feel like that's something I should have known.

Anyway: I'm happy to report that a couple of extremely busy weeks of filming have worked, and I'm now taking a few days to catch up, edit, and get my brain back in order. I'm getting excited about some upcoming projects; it feels good to, hopefully, be launching new stuff within the next few weeks.

All the best,

— Tom