A shark! Sneaky t-shirts! And I promise it's not a rickroll.
24th October 2022
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than two years old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello!
In this week's video: the government approves of this shark now. (Or at least, most of a shark. That's embedded in a roof. In suburban Oxford.)
In this week's video: the government approves of this shark now. (Or at least, most of a shark. That's embedded in a roof. In suburban Oxford.)
And, as every week, there's a new episode of Lateral available on all audio podcast platforms! You can
subscribe in your favourite podcast player over at lateralcast.com. This week, Brady Haran, Mary Spender and Eric Johnson figure out questions about a creative fire, bloodless hitmen, and partly-useless products!
(Alas, it turns out that putting full episodes of Lateral on YouTube is a recipe for disaster in terms of audience and algorithms. It's a shame! But if you'd like a taster of the show before subscribing, there are still highlights going up on YouTube, like the sneaky t-shirts of 1988.)
Right! What else have I found in the world of video this week?
- "The Story Of" continues to be an absolutely brilliant series on music history from Vice, and this deep-dive into the history of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up is well worth your time. Interviews with Astley, with producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman — all three of them! — along with the person whose one idea gave the song new fame. I realise that, based on my previous form, many readers will assume the above link is just a regular ol' rickroll: I promise it isn't.
- There are innumerable takedowns of Saudi Arabia's ridiculous "The Line" available, short and long: but I liked Dami Lee's video running through all the many problems: she's an actual licensed architect and covers everything in just
the right amount of detail.
- I remember watching Wes Borg's "Every OS Sucks" around 2001, when it first came out — it was an early video (and, earlier, an MP3) that was shared around well before YouTube. And I've found myself a bit nostalgic for Web 1.0 recently: the pre-Windows XP times of heavy CRT monitors, Internet Explorer, banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. "My phone doesn't take a week to boot it / my TV doesn't crash when I mute it." How times change.
Other interesting links I've found this week:
- An interview with a museum security expert: how do you protect great art, while still letting the public view it?
- If you use the Edge browser, Microsoft is automatically AI-upscaling some web images. I don't think this is a good idea: while I do hold that you have a right to do whatever you want to the 1s and 0s that arrive on your device, I'm not sure that "inventing details without telling the user" is a
good thing for a browser to do.
- "I Hear The Blues A-Killin'" is a four-part (well, sixteen-page) comic crossing over Frasier and Columbo. The dialogue is written as if it came out of both shows, which is
not easy, and the little details are perfect — even down to the typography. Well worth reading.
- "In England and Wales, courts consider computers, as a matter of law, to have been working correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary." An astonishing legal summary.
And finally: Alex Falcone has
nothing to hide. It just keeps going.
All the best,
— Tom
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