Loudness! words! and a very fast sushi belt!

4th September 2023

Heads up! This newsletter is more than a year 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 Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed.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, it's a return to the green-screen explainer videos of old for one last hurrah! For a long time, I've wanted to talk about why adverts are so loud but the script always eluded me. I think I've finally cracked it, so it was time to team up again with animator Will Marler, and get this video sorted. It also provided an excuse for the best advert read I've ever done.

And Lateral continues, of course! The team from Let's Learn Everything return, with questions about condiment condition, reverse roaming and strobing satellites.

I've found a lot of other good videos this week! Partly that's because it's been a quiet week and I've actually had a bit of time to catch up with things like that.

First up: Will, who animated this week's video, has a half-hour explainer on etymology over on his channel, Learn With Will! I know how long it took to put together the eight-minute video for my channel: I can't imagine the effort that went into making this work.
A few people suggested I should film the Cody Dock rolling bridge, but I could never figure out the story to tell. Good news: Matt Parker got there, and told a great story about the maths of the bridge! There's no formal "divvying-up" of stories like this between YouTube creators, but this feels like the right person for the job.
I did not expect to find someone melting every soap from Whole Foods together to be fascinating, but Safi Nygaard manages it!
A Japanese channel called Fermata Studio makes ridiculous simulations of impossible journeys, using either timelapses or CG. Flying from Osaka to Tokyo at Mach 16! A 1000km/h train passing by! A bungee elevator! But perhaps best of all: a 45km/h sushi conveyor belt.

Other interesting links I've found this week:

Thanks to everyone who sent me a link to The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge, you're all entirely right, it is exactly the kind of fascinating infrastructure-nerd archive dive that I love.
Wordward Draw (desktop only) is a little Chain Letters-type game that appears simple but actually requires some serious thought. I initially thought it was maybe a 10 or 20-minute diversion, but no: if you actually want to complete this, it'll take a long while. Or some code. You can probably just cheat with some code. (Thanks to Egon for sending this over.)
"Social media is dead", says this article, and I can't help but agree. Or rather, the weird aberration of public-by-default social media that Twitter brought along is dead, and I think that might be a good thing. The most insightful thing here is a simple phrase: a change from "social media to social media".

That felt like a good newsletter this week. I should take more time off, although I guess that's something I'll get next year. Next week, though: it's the return of the Language Files.

And finally: Dutch bicycle showband!

All the best,

— Tom

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