An elevator! a cursed language! and harmonitrees!
9th October 2023
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Hello!
Last week's telescope video performed far better than I expected: it's lovely to see that there's still an audience for something more long-form. It'll be a while before I'm able to make something on that scale again, though! Which brings me to this week's much shorter and punchier video: I finally visited the weird, curved German elevator. Germany, you can stop emailing me about it.
Last week's telescope video performed far better than I expected: it's lovely to see that there's still an audience for something more long-form. It'll be a while before I'm able to make something on that scale again, though! Which brings me to this week's much shorter and punchier video: I finally visited the weird, curved German elevator. Germany, you can stop emailing me about it.
It's been a good week for other folks on YouTube, too!
- If you only click on one link in this week's email, make it this one: animator and artist Erik Wernquist's One Revolution Per Minute, a short film of scenes from an almost-abandoned spacecraft. It is stunning, a combination of visual artistry and music with a couple of images that made me gasp. It's utterly unrealistic, of course, and the artist knows it: you can read about the thought process behind the piece on his web site. But realism isn't the point: this is six minutes of achingly beautiful images that made me think, sure, it's impossible, but what if...?
- Cleo Abram talks about why maps of the ocean floor are so poor, and why mapping it is so difficult: the ocean is deeper than you think. (Deep, very deep, very deep, very deep.)
- Linguistics channel Agma Schwa is running the "cursed conlang circus", a big collaborative project where lots of linguistics channels try to come up with the worst constructed languages possible. Now, I don't normally like conlangs: with apologies to the folks who enjoy them, my brain's always just interpreted them as a bit of a waste of time. But! Some of these charmed me. The standout for me from this is "Douleur", which is a twenty-minute long series of increasingly exasperating linguistics jokes at the expense of... well, that would spoil the punchline. However bad you think a language could get, this is worse. Or how about a language
made of rocks?
Away from the world of video this week, I've found:
- One Revolution Per Minute reminded me of Seedship, a simple, short text-based game that puts you in the role of a space probe seeking out a new life for humanity, balancing
risks against rewards. The standout here for me is the storytelling: behind the scenes, of course, it's all just prewritten text and random dice rolls, but the result feels like much more than the sum of its parts, particularly because there are so many potential incidents and results. Worth a play.
- How the Killers made Mr Brightside, a song that — thanks to now counting streaming rather than purchases — is still in the British charts after 20 years.
- A great bit of historical research: using the British Newspaper Archive to work out how Second World War blackouts affected crime rates in the UK.
And finally: harmonitrees!
All the
best,
— Tom
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