Lifts, ridiculous baking, and flaming cheese!

• Proper Engineering is a new channel to me: this video about the new lift (actually, three connected lifts!) in the redeveloped Battersea Power Station was well worth the time. No CG recreations here: there's a home-made, properly-moving model to demonstrate how it all works. There's a lot of time and effort gone into this, and it shows.
   
• The first video on my YouTube channel, many years ago, was an attempt to cook breakfast using a household iron. So if you want to see how far the medium has come: The Icing Artist attempts to bake cakes in many kitchen appliances, including a dishwasher and a toaster. (Should've tried a kettle, though.)
   
• People Make Games investigates "the murder game revolution that has gripped China": Jubensha is a combination of those old dinner-party murder-mystery games, Nordic LARP, and escape rooms. The culture around the game is fascinating. This video is so good: it goes to a few places that I really didn't expect, and it feels like there isn't a word wasted. PMG keep putting out really great videos.
   

• One of the things I love about travelling is finding out how different cultures interpret each others' food. I discovered brunost ("brown cheese") when I was in Norway; it's a caramelised cheese, like a combination of dulce de leche and very mild cheddar, and it's almost impossible to get outside Norway. Except: South Korea has fallen in love with brunost! They've started doing bizarre-to-Norway things like grating it on top of ice cream. I reckon there's a solid chance this will get exported to the rest of the world via Korea, and the UK's many bubble waffle shops will offer brunost as a topping soon. (Bonus link: brunost burns so well that a cheese fire shut down a tunnel for days.)
   
• Inside the New York Times' big bet on games (thanks to Aelly for sending this over): a Vanity Fair profile on the team behind the NYT Crossword, Wordle, Connections, and all the other games that so many folks check daily. It's worth noting that British crosswords differ from American ones: Cracking the Cryptic has an excellent introduction to the trickier (and, I'd say, better!) British style.
   
• The Hong Kong Monetary Authority used to sell souvenir paperweights filled with shredded banknotes that had been taken out of circulation. I say "used to", because someone figured out that computer vision is now good enough that it might be possible to put shredded banknotes back together in a bizarre sort-of heist. Or at least, that's what you see at first impression: reading the paper, the author wasn't actually able to do it, he just figured that it was theoretically possible... but also that those paperweights contained far less money than they were meant to.
   

And finally: How To Be A Blackbird is a charming interactive poem by Holly Gramazio; It's from 2015, so it's not mobile-optimised, but if you're on a desktop, it's a good way to spend a calm fifteen minutes.

All the best,

— Tom