A new podcast! Two simulators! And a lot of stories.

• It's the first episode of Lateral! Available as video on YouTube here, or on all podcast platforms via lateralcast.com.
   
• On the old channel: this 1970s tank simulator drives through a tiny world.
   
• And over on Plus — purely by coincidence, another simulator. I'm not a pilot. Can I land a 737?

The Tech Dif team have also been filming stuff this weekend, hopefully for a December release! And I've also been filming an appearance on a show that'll be on British television over Christmas — contracts mean that I can't say which one yet, but it's been a lovely team to work with.

(In hindsight, running this many projects at the same time might have been a mistake.)

• Stories from a private investigator who accidentally found a bizarre job: crashing funerals and speaking for the dead. (It's part of the publicity tour plugging his book, but it's difficult to hold that against him.)
   
• ProjectAir builds a colossal rubber-band plane which is, happily, big enough to hold a small onboard camera.
   
• Blacksmith Alec Steele visits a steel factory. This video does assume a bit of knowledge of the steelmaking process, but even if you don't have that, Alec's enthusiasm — and the scale of what he's filming — still make this worth a watch.

• "The cultural memory of the UK" is a dive into the BBC Archive, and how it's being digitised and made available to researchers and to the world. (Copyright will frustrate most of the archive being public for a long time, but at least it's a work in progress.)
   
• The curious case of Norway's demon wall is quite a story: "a tale of scandal, fraud, and possible madness" where an art conservator destroyed the original work and replaced it with intricate, demonic designs.
   
• An investigation into how families in refugee camps are begging on TikTok is bleak in both the big picture and the individual elements, from how big a cut gets taken, to TikTok's solution being "cut them off with no replacement".
   
• Argos catalogues are fascinating historical ephemera. If you're British and over the age of 25, there's a fair chance you interacted with what Bill Bailey called the "book of dreams" at some point: here are many of those catalogues, scanned and preserved.

And finally: a Twitter account covering the world's most aggravating edge cases. It's like my old Computerphile videos, but about every subject, and a lot faster. (You might want to start with the Self-Driving Car Edge Case Special.)
 

All the best,

— Tom