Clams! Pylons! Mashups!

• Hank Green talks about a "math test" that changed how he saw the internet. He makes an excellent point in under four minutes.
   
• Scott Manley has restored footage an important bit of space history: a floppy disk being ejected in zero gravity.
   
• This isn't strictly just a YouTube video, but while this supercut of all the zooming shots from 600 hours of police helicopter footage is bewildering and unpleasant to watch, the context around it is still interesting.
   
• Silvering Up is a fascinating 1997 BBC documentary about pylon painters, and I have so many thoughts about it that, for the first time in this newsletter, you're getting nested bullet points.
  
  • This was how the UK was in my childhood, and everything in this documentary looks and feels so, so different to now. The casual smoking everywhere. Guesthouses and small B&Bs, rather than the out-of-town big-chain business hotels that'd be used now. The lack of safety equipment. Megabowl! 
  • Blimey, that's such a difficult job. Seriously, the lack of safety equipment — but also the remarks about how it used to be much worse, and how it all just seems normal to them.
  • How much of the on-the-ground stuff is staged? This was fashionable for television documentaries in the 90s; normal people asked to reenact their everyday lives always seems awkward, and it adds a veneer of unreality to the whole thing.
  • The comments include a note from the camera operator, talking about how it was to work on there. YouTube comments used to be a regular comedy punching bag a few years ago, but new filters and machine-learning systems mean that they're sometimes quite insightful now.
  • I'm always a bit worried about the ethics of linking to reuploaded old TV like this. For a few reasons:
    • Copyright is something that helps me earn a living, and this definitely violates that
    • The people in this documentary likely agreed for it to be shown once or twice, and never expected it to be still in circulation 25 years later. Are they okay with it? Should it matter if they are?
    • If I give it a lot of exposure, will one of the rightsholders notice and take it down, thus removing all those comments and metadata?

• The icy village where you must remove your appendix sounds like one of my video titles. Since I'm not going to Antarctica any time soon, this article will have to suffice!
   
• Behind TikTok’s boom: A legion of traumatised, $10-a-day content moderators. (The content warning on the article is not kidding.)
   
• With the caveat that you need a decent computer to see it properly: a full 3D scan of the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza. This is essentially Street View, but for the inside of one of the Wonders of the World.

And finally: there's a TIkTok genre that I'm calling "short mashups". Mashups have changed a lot over the years — from the early bootlegs that just put rap instrumentals over other music, which were so passé by 2002 that they were already being mocked (strong language, slurs) to the incredible, pitch-shifting, painstaking mashups of folks like Neil Cicierega and DJ Cummerbund that took over in the mid-2010s.

These days, on TikTok, people just need to combine two tracks just long enough to get the joke across: minimum viable mashup, then straight on to the next gag. Jacob Sutherland is one of the stars of this, and I'd recommend you start here.

All the best,

— Tom